Rant #3,193: It Was a Very Good Year (?)

Good morning!

Get up out of bed!

It is time to begin the day!

I finally had a decent sleep of about eight hours or so, so I can’t complain this morning saying “last night, I didn’t get to sleep at all … no, no.”

It is Friday, August 18, the 230th day of the year, and we have just 135 days left before we kiss 2023 goodbye and move right into 2024.

But to me, it might just actually be 1966 …

Let me explain.

I was nine years old in 1966, as bushy tailed and wide-eyed as anybody of that age was way back when.

My family had been living in our new housing development, Rochdale Village in South Jamaica, Queens, New York, for two years, and quite frankly, the place was the perfect community to grow up and for young families to live in.

The tears to that core hadn’t really turned up yet, and the world appeared to be our oyster.

Right now, back 57 years ago, I was in Rochdale Village Day Camp with all of my friends, and nothing could be more fun.

In 1964 and 1965, I discovered baseball, and once I discovered it, I was hooked for life.

I rooted for the New York Yankees, as my father did, and I knew that I was rooting for the most storied franchise in professional sports even all those years ago.

The problem was that while Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford and many of the other great players that they won so many World Series with were still around in pinstripes, they had seemingly all turned old at the same time, and the 1966 club was terrible.

In 1966, the New York Yankees ended up in last place in the American League, the last time up to the present time that they ended up at the bottom of the standings.

Flash forward to 2023, and yes, the Yankees still have Aaron Judge, Gerrit Cole, and a contingent of fine players, but many of those players have seemingly gotten old at the same time, and the Yankees find themselves hopelessly in last place in the American League East.

As of right now, they are the only team in the division with a losing record.

I can still root for Judge and Cole and Gleybar Torres and Anthony Volpe and the team as a whole, but the reality is that the 2023 team is terrible, and unless things change quickly, they will follow the 1966 team as cellar dwellers.

And let’s be honest about it, rooting for your favorite team when you are nine years old is way different than rooting for your favorite team when you are 66 years of age.

I lived and died with the Yankees when I was a kid of this age, so I mainly suffered with them and the exploits of that era’s Roy White, Mel Stottlemyre, Bobby Murcer and Fritz Peterson, that generation’s “Core Four” of players.

And then there was Jerry Kenney, Steve Whittaker, and Ross Mosschito …

Today, I follow the team, but not with the laser focus that I had way back when, when I really looked up to these guys as my heroes.

Today … eh … let’s move on … the team being in last place simply doesn’t affect me as it did way back when. I have so many other more important problems to deal with, to be honest with you.

But let’s still look at 1966 for a while.

According to a couple of web sites I visited, here are the prices that our parents paid for certain items:

Fresh eggs (1 dozen): $0.60 ($4.82 in today’s dollars)
White bread (1 pound): $0.22 ($1.77 in today’s dollars)
Sliced bacon (1 pound): $0.95 ($7.63 in today’s dollars)
Round steak (1 pound): $1.11 ($8.92 in today’s dollars)
Potatoes (10 pounds): $0.75 ($6.03 in today’s dollars)
Fresh delivered milk (1/2 gallon): $0.56 ($4.50 in today’s dollars)

And gas was 32 cents a gallon, which would be about $3.03 in today’s dollars.

And on my end, I had a full head of hair then, and it used to cost me $1 to get it cut each month.

And for $1, I could get two slices of pizza and a drink—with garlic knots for free—and have 25 cents left over to buy two comic books or five packs of baseball cards.

It was a different world back then, for sure, but when I look at the baseball standings, it just all brings me back to 1966, when I was nine years old and just discovering my world.

It is great to be nine years old once, but somehow, 2023 does not seem like 1966 to me, no way, no how.

Have a great weekend, and this 66 year old old fogey will speak to you again on Monday ... as I party like it's 1966!

Rant #3,192: Mind Games

I finally crashed last night into this morning.

After several nights of having an unsatisfying sleep, I finally went into slumber overtime, and I woke up about an hour later than I normally do.

Not good, because I am on something of a schedule here, which revolves around my mother’s needs.

I couldn’t even shave today like I wanted to do, and before you know it, her attendant is going to be here … and right now, I have no time to do much of anything, because my mother will soon be up and about.

Since she will be up, I have to prepare breakfast for her, and I will have to stay with her for a reasonable time until the attendant arrives—

And then I have to take my son to work, and then, I plan to do my family’s food shopping, so I won’t be back to the house until late morning.

I am kind of used to all of this after months of doing it, but when I wake up an hour late, it makes things even more difficult.

I did not immediately conk out yesterday.

I watched the AEW Wrestling show that they have on TV every Wednesday night, and even though I usually pass out on that show at about 8:30 p.m. or so, last night, I ended up watching the entire show, which is where everything related to sleep—or not sleeping—began.

This particular show was, in my opinion, the best two-hour weekly show that the organization has ever put on TV—there was just so much going on during this show that I simply had to stay up to watch it through.

They are planning for next week’s wrestling show—called “All In”--at Wembley Stadium in England, where they will probably fill the stadium with 80,000 fans, making it one of the largest wrestling shows ever, and certainly akin to WWE’s yearly “Wrestlemania” extravaganza.

The main event pits challenger Adam Cole versus champion MJF—from Plainview, right here on Long Island—for the AEW championship, and there are also a number of other matches that look pretty good, too.

So yesterday’s show was a buildup to that, where they had matches that led to announcements of matches on that England show.

There was blood, guts, a lot of yelling and screaming about nothing … but it just kept me going until the show was over at 10 p.m.

Then I tried to go to sleep, and was pretty much unable to do so.

I guess I was wound up from that show.

It took me about two hours to get to sleep—probably at midnight—and I did wake up several other times from midnight to 7 a.m., when I finally got up—so it was not a restful sleep, but whatever I got from it, and however long it was, I guess you can say that I crashed, sleeping way past when I normally get up.

It is a bit difficult to sleep right now anyway, as not only do I have a lot on my mind, but we have a monitor in the room so we can see how my mother is doing when she sleeps, and while it does allow us to keep tabs on her—she has gotten up and fallen a few times, although she normally gets up, goes to the bathroom, and crawls back into the bed and goes back to sleep—it seems we always have one eye on the monitor, and the other eye closed for sleep.

It is not ideal, but it is our way of life now.

And as for my mother, she really is improving in every way possible.

Her vital signs are excellent, she is moving around more, she is eating more, and the best thing is that she is in absolutely no pain.

She has been examined on about a weekly basis, and no one can believe that a 92 year old is at this level of physical shape, especially based on where she has been over the past several months.

But the dementia that she has is really casting a pall on everything, and right now, it is no better and no worse than it was a few weeks back, so her mind is in something of a holding pattern while her body continues to improve.

But her attitude is just so positive that it leads me to believe that the sky is the limit for her, and we just have to give it time to see where she can go with all of these obstacles in front of her.

Dementia is a cruel disease, and it takes no prisoners at all.

It can affect you or I at any time in our lives … or completely bypass us.

It is sad to see a mind eaten away by this, but if there is one person who can leap over this malady and make this situation as good as it can be, it is my mother.

I am totally convinced of that as I see her get better physically by the day.

Her mind might be Jello, but her tenacity remains, and that makes everything better for all of us.

I just hope that she can continue on her long road to wellness for as long as she wants to do so.

My mother is my main focus right now, and she is doing so much better that it is truly remarkable.

I just wish her mind wasn’t playing games with her, but let’s take it one step at a time.

Rant #3,191: Stayin' Alive

The Bee Gess?

Remember them?

They were the Australian rockers who made a complete change of path in the mid-1970s over to disco with their music on the “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack.

The brother act—Robin, Maurice and Barry—had already logged numerous rock-oriented hits in the 1960s and 1970s, including “Lonely Days” and “New York Mining Disaster 1941.”

They alienated many of their long-time fans by going disco, but they made more fans by putting out songs like “Night Fever” and “Staying’ Alive,” songs which became cornerstones of the disco craze.

They also became ubiquitous on the Hot 100 chart for writing songs for other artists, everyone from one-hot wonder Samantha Sang to Barbra Streisand and Dolly Parton, and of course, their ill-fated brother Andy Gibb.

But when they tried to go back to their rock roots, the effort pretty much failed, alienating both older fans who had been turned off by their disco hits and newer fans who only knew them as a disco act.

They had a few big records into the 1990s—“One” was one of them—but their popularity had waned as the years went on.

Today, Barry Gibb is the only one still standing, as twins Robin and Maurice have both passed on.

Why am I writing about all of this?

In the little time I have to relax—down to next to nothing nowadays—I like to digitize my records, a process which allows me to put analog music into the MP3 format and place them on a thumb drive and play them in the car.

I was doodling around my record collection a few weeks back, and I just came upon my Bee Gees album collection, which is substantial.

I was always a fan of theirs, but like many of their fans who were into their music when they were a rock act, I got completely turned off by their disco era music, so among the 20 or so LPs I have of theirs in my collection, no, “Saturday Night Fever” is not among them.

I had almost forgotten that I had so many of their records—I also have a handful of 45s, too—and I decided to start to digitize them in between everything else I have to do.

I have thus digitized seven of their LPs, from their first American album—aptly named “1st,”—and some of their later collections, including “E·S·P”—an album that was a worldwide hit but got little airplay in the U.S.

And I even digitized one of the multitude of “Greatest Hits” albums that they have put out, plus the album that pushed them closed to a disco sound without going whole hog into it, “Main Course,” featuring “Jive Talking’” and “Nights On Broadway,” the latter of which people forget got a lot of airplay on some of the top rock stations around at the time.

But I am most interested in those early LPs, like “Horizontal,” “Idea” and their aforementioned first LP, because that is where it all started for them in the U.S. and when I first became so interested in their music.

Those early albums—where some people thought they were the Beatles in disguise—are interesting collections, with one or two legitimate hits on each one bookended by a lot of psychedelic meanderings, some good, some sounding like vanity projects.

But I have to say that they sounded like no other band back then, with the three brothers’ voices being very distinctive, including that falsetto sound that no other act had (except Frankie Valli with the Four Seasons).

And listening to these LPs more than 50 years after the fact, you could just tell that they were milking that unique sound for all that it was worth, and they were doing it quite successfully.

I have to say that it adds to the pleasure I am getting in rediscovering these albums that these LPs that I have are in fine shape, with minimal nicks and pops and very little scratching. if any at all.

As a child, Barry Gibb was something of a child prodigy with music and the Bee Gees—originally named after Barry Gibb himself, not “Brothers Gibb” as it was later worked out to stand for—were huge hits in their native Australia at an early age.

They actually put out two LPs prior to having product in America, so even though their first American LP came out in 1967, they had been recording for many years prior to that.

I think the Bee Gees are something of musical chameleons, shifting their shape and their sound to fit into whatever music was popular at the time: first psychedelic rock, then 1970s pop, then disco, and finally back to rock and then to pretty much soft pop.

But they became one of the rock era’s top acts, and even if you dismiss the disco era, they have a fine cadre of songs that I am just rediscovering.

Just something to do when I have the time to relax, which is in between most of my time, where I am busy as can be.

Rant #3,190: Backfire

I had an interesting, frustrating experience yesterday afternoon—

And it proved once again that for some reason, there is a haze above me that continues to linger, and even when I do everything the right way, it seems to come out wrong.

As regular readers of this Rant know, my previous car died in June after nine years and more than 98,000 miles of service.

It was a great car, one that I purchased new after my previous car was destroyed in a horrible accident when a teenager went through a Stop sign and T-boned my car.

Anyway, when my latest car just gave out, I needed transportation quickly, so I settled for a three-year-old used car that had about 22,000 miles on it, and although it has taken me several weeks to get used to it, I am fairly satisfied that I made the right decision to get a used car, because quite frankly, with the interest rate where it is, getting a new car would have been difficult for me financially.

Even the used car is pricey, but not as bad as a new car is.

My payments are spread out over 72 months on this used car, and I made my first payment online, something I generally do not like to do.

I like making payments by writing out checks, because I feel that I am more in control of my pocketbook when I do it this way … and yes, I guess I am a bit old fashioned, too.

So the first payment was made online, and then I received the bill in the mail for the second payment, and I paid that one by writing a check and sending it out on August 1, or weeks before it was actually due.

We received our mail late yesterday, and lo and behold, there was a bill in there from the company which handles my car account—the same bill that I had paid at the beginning of the month.

I called the company, and the recording said that I was in arrears because I had not paid my bill on time.

I finally spoke to someone there and to make a long story short, even though I had sent out payment on the first of the month, as of August 14 they had not received my payment, so my account went into collections.

I argued this point with an associate and then I demanded to speak to a manager, and the sad truth is that they “sort of” put my account into collections because of non-payment—they never received my check in the regular mail.

(“Sort of” is my term … they call it a “Semi-Miranda” or something like that … it means that if I don’t pay up ASAP, my account will fully go into collections.)

I still had time to get out of the “sort of” collections. but I had to make payment right then and there, after I checked with my bank which also said that the check I sent out was never cashed.

I had to put a stop on that check—which they should have charged me for but as of this moment, they haven’t—and then pay the bill ASAP either online or over the phone.

I called the lender back, explaining the situation to them once again, and to make a long story short, I ended up paying the bill over the phone, with a more than $3 surcharge added to the payment.

Yes, I could set up auto-pay, so I don’t have to even think about the bill being paid; I could simply manually pay online each month, but I prefer to pay my bills the old fashioned way by check--

But I guess in this world, that is a prohibitive way of doing things, as was proven by my latest escapade, where the U.S. Postal Service completely failed me.

Let me see what I do when I get the next bill, #3 in the series, which should be coming in about two weeks or so.

But all of this just adds to the agita I already have with everything swirling around me like it is—and again, even when I do things right, these things seem to turn out wrong.

I cannot explain this phenomenon,, but I am under that cloud now, and I simply don’t know how to rectify it.

Any suggestions?

Rant #3,189: My Little Town

Everything happens in Massapequa …

Yes, my adopted hometown—moved here from Queens with my family in July 1971—seems to be the center of everything as life ebbs and flows over the decades.

I brought this up in an earlier Rant last month, where so many things happen in Massapequa and its adjoining Massapequa Park that captures the interest of the nation and often the world.

And there is plenty of good and bad in that—the “Long Island Lolita” ring a bell?—and the past few days have put an apostrophe on that.

We have local, national and international news stories that have happened right here or involve people from right here.

Let’s take the good first.

Massapequa International Little League’s girls’ softball team won its World Series the other day, and this captured the attention of a lot of people, in particular since the media has decided that an out-of-left-field focus on women’s sports is their next path to explore and ram our heads into.

The media over-emphasized our national soccer team for a variety of reasons, but that fell flat as that team failed to capture gold this time around.

And soccer is just a niche sport here, played by a team that was as hard to love as could possibly be, a group that attached politics and anti-America bravado to just about everything they did.

But now, you have a local softball team made up of 12 years olds winning their World Series, and it kind of makes everyone feel good.

Like the Massapequa boys who were successful last year, these are kids playing a kids game not for the money—there is none, of course—but for the fun of it.

And to win the whole enchilada …well, you just know that a parade is in the offing, and it is well deserved.

But on the other side of the coin—not too far away from where that eventual parade will be held--you have a car accident that made headlines not just here, but all over the world, due to the severity of it, shown in the horrible pictures that emerged from the crash site, just about five minutes away from where I live.

An innocent family was out celebrating a job promotion with a jaunt to get ice cream when another car, driven by somebody who was so hopped up on drugs that he was driving more than 150 mph in a 40 mph zone, rammed them in the rear of their car when they were stopped at a light.

Four people have now perished form the impact, at least three of them not knowing what hit them and a fourth passing over the weekend.

The car’s other two occupants are injured to an unsightly degree, and if they survive, they will certainly be hampered for life by these injuries.

The guy that hit them? Well, this moron survived—of course—but was found to have at least cocaine and fentanyl in his body.

The police also found syringes strewn throughout his car, which leads you to believe that he was doing plenty of other stuff beyond what was found in his system.

He also has several other DWIs on this driving record, so this guy has a history of not being much of a choir boy when he gets behind the wheel.

This fool was placed under arrest from his hospital bed, and he faces so many charges that if convicted on all of them, this young man will spend decades in prison.

The images of the family’s mangled car was enough to upset even the most jaded person, as it literally looked like a bomb had been dropped on that car—the reality of which was that that “bomb” was the car being driven by that young doped-up fool.

And an innocent family was pretty much wiped off the face of the earth because this guy needed his kicks and not only got what he needed, but decided to drive when he was higher than the Hubble Telescope.

Totally ridiculous.

And then we have Massapequa’s biggest story, which has already been dubbed the eventual “Trial of the Century” by some, months before it has even convened--The Gilgo Beach Murder, where a Massapequa resident has been charged with the murders of at least three prostitutes and possibly others.

Now it has come out that his wife has cancer and that her medical coverage is running out as her husband sits in jail.

His wife has become the “Sgt, Schultz” of this entire investigation—“I know nu-think”—and you just know that this woman knows plenty more about her husband than she is letting on … maybe not about the murders,, per se, but about her husband’s questionable behavior that might have led up to what he has been charged with doing.

Heck, her kids even have their own separate lawyer, exclusive from their mom’s lawyer. Leading me to believe that what their mother knows hopefully won’t cast a bad light on the kids’ needs going forward.

How could the wife not know anything about her husband’s dalliances?

Seems unfathomable to me, but what do I know?

Maybe love is really blind.

But whatever the case, it all happens in Massapequa and Massapequa Park.

Why?

I don’t know, but it does …

My little town.

Rant #3,188: Machines

It is crazy how things work—or don’t work.

Yesterday, I told you about my old air conditioner, which I felt had sprouted its last breath of cold air on Wednesday night into Thursday morning with water cascading out its front end.

I personally was ready to go out and buy another air conditioner, but I figured I would give it one last try just to make sure that that night’s performance wasn’t just a blip.

So I put it on late yesterday afternoon after I was done with my work, and from 4:30 p.m. to 6:30 a.m. it was on—

And it purred like a kitten.

No drips no drops, just cool air.

I can’t explain it, but it ran last night as if it was 1999.

We might just have a situation like we have with the computer that I am typing out this Rant on.

As regular readers of this blog know all too well about, I have had trouble booting up this computer every morning for many, many months; sometimes it goes right on, other times, I have to take the plug out and try to get it going multiple times for it to come to the home screen.

In fact, today was one its better days, taking me just two times to get it going.

Now our air conditioner might be in the same position.

Maybe it will work to perfection on some days and nights,, maybe on other days and nights it will perform like it did the other night.

It is hard to tell, but I can live with that, just like I have with the computer for these past many months.

Both are eventually going to go to the electronics graveyard, but I will milk these things until they do.

And what about my family’s pool, the center of my total summer consternation a year ago, when the water was reminiscent of pea soup no matter what we did to it to make it clear and swimmable?

It has been great this year.

Changing over to salt water—and employing a whole new mechanism to handle the changeover from chlorine--we have gone into the pool numerous times, and the pea soup of last season has been replaced by cool, crisp and clear water—

Up until the other day.

Doing my weekly pool maintenance, I poured some algaecide into the pool this past Sunday, and for whatever reason, what we got the very next day was something that resembled a Mr. Bubble bubble bath.

It was soap-y all over, and my wife actually tried to remove as much of the bubbly mass as she could.

So today, after not having to bother with the pool pretty much at all during the length of the summer, I have to bring in a water sample to the pool store to test if the pool is still swimmable.

I know that they are going to prescribe more chemicals to be thrown into the pool, but the season is just about over—we have the pool scheduled to be closed down in about a month—so if I do put any more chemicals into it, it will hopefully be a slight amount.

It just doesn’t pay at this point to go whole hog on this, not with maybe a week or two more of possible swimming, based on other years’ experience.

So maybe the filter is befuddled, maybe some other electronic mechanism on the pool is not working—who knows?

Machines … when they work well, they make life so much better, but when they don’t work and give you problems, they are such a massive headache that you wish you didn’t have to rely on them as much as you do.

This whole thing is best said in a mid-1960s song by the British Invasion rock group Manfred Mann.

They had a number of worldwide hits in the mid to late 1960s—“The Might Quinn” and “Do Wah Diddy” among them--but the song I am referring to wasn’t one of them—although I think it is one of their best songs, and fits the theme of this blog entry perfectly.

It is a song called “Machines,” and with lyrics supplied by AZ Lyrics.com, I think you just might agree:

“Machines, machines
They keep right on movin'
Machines, machines
They keep right on movin'

But I am weak
I want to go on home
Too tired to speak
But they won't let me alone, yeah

Machines, machines
They keep right on going'
Machines, machines
They keep right on going'

I've got to find
A place to rest my head
Machine, he smiles at me and says
"I'm gonna be your bed, yeah"
Oh, yeah

Machines, machines
We made them to serve us
Machines, machines
We built them to serve us

But 'til the day
I'm buried in my grave
Yes, right until that day, I know
I'll always be your slave
A slave, a slave, a slave

To the machines, machines
They keep right on winning
Machines, machines
They keep right on winning”

You can listen to the song at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQNC2Qx9S9g

I think I will leave it at that.

Have a great weekend, and I will speak to you again on Monday.

“Clank … drip … bang … smash … pea soup … bubble bath …

Stop!!!!!

Rant #3,187: This Just Doesn't Seem To Be My Day

A short column today … too much going on today to go into much detail, but what is going on is only peripherally related to my mother, so if there is a silver lining in this rain cloud, that is it.

With everything happening here—which I am not going to go into specifics about right now—one thing that kept my wife and I up last night was our window air conditioner, which after more than 35 years of service—yes, 35 years!—appears to have finally died on us.

It has struggled the last year or two, so we knew the time would eventually come where we needed a new unit.

The last two years or so, it has cooled down our bedroom as best as it could, but it really never made the room cold, it simply removed the heat from the room. It made it comfortable enough to be in and sleep in, but it did not continue to have the capacity make the room cold, just habitable.

That was preceded by a bird—or perhaps another animal, like a squirrel—somehow either crashing into it or getting caught in it a few years ago. I was in the room when it happened, and to hear the poor animal trying to extricate itself from the machinations of the unit was downright disheartening, to say the least, but it did not help the air conditioner either.

Then last night, at about 2 a.m. in the morning my wife woke up and put on the light, and as I opened up one eye and then the next one, she told me that something was dripping in the room, or at least she heard the sound of something dripping.

Honestly, I did not hear anything, as I was pretty much still in my sleep mode, but when I finally cleared my head, I also started to hear the “ker-plunk” of dripping, and lo and behold, something was dripping—

And it was coming from the air conditioner inside our room.

I shut the unit off, took off the cover, and lo and behold, a thick sheet of ice had coalesced right inside the unit, and rather than the water going outside the unit as it is supposed to, it was doing the reverse, dripping water from the melting ice inside, all over an old backpack that just happened to be resting under it.

I got a towel, put it underneath the unit to catch any more drips, opened the window, and we both tried to go back to sleep, only partially successful in that regard.

I woke up two hours later with one of the worst allergy attacks I have had in recent memory—blowing my nose incessantly for at least 10 minutes with such ferocity that I had to go into the bathroom to do so, lest I wake up my wife with all the noise—and then I finally was able to go back to sleep when my body got back to some sense of normalcy.

I woke up at 6 a.m., and I immediately checked the towel--and it was as dry as when I took it out of the linen closet to put it there, meaning that no other water had come out of the unit.

I will check the air conditioner today to see if that was nothing more than an aberration, but I have a sneaking suspicion that we are going to need a new unit, and the faster it is installed the better.

I have terrible allergies … my allergies have been on high this entire wretchedly hot summer, and I think the uptick in the use of the air conditioner during this ultra-hot summer did major, irreparable damage to it.

Look, I can’t complain about the use we got out of this unit, I first bought it during my first marriage when we lived in a neighboring town, and since it was such a good unit at the time, I took it with me when my parents built up their house to accommodate my family—and it has worked throughout my second marriage.

At more than 35 years—and much like my old car which gave me nine years and nearly 100,000 miles—how can I complain about an air conditioner that gave my family that many years of service?

I can’t, so I won’t.

In fact, I hope we can still use this air condoner after all.

And it is a Sanyo, of all brands … does that brand even exist anymore?

To top everything off, the cherry on the cake was this morning, my belt literally tore itself into tatters, so I am without a belt.

My new electric razor wasn’t cutting my whiskers today, either, taking me twice as long to shave as it should have.

Maybe that gizmo is next on the hit parade.

And heck, this is not as short a Rant as I thought it would be.

All I can say and ask is “What’s next?”--

And I hope that I don’t get a reply.