Rant #3,196: Sail Away

This Rant is going to be kind of short—

But not kind of sweet.

I am going to take a few days off from the Blog to get my head together.

There has been a lot of things going on in my life lately, much of which I have spoken about here.

But there is a lot of other stuff that I have not mentioned at all here.

I have to get my hands, my head and my consciousness around all of those things, and I figure that today, on my son’s 28th birthday, is the time to start doing so.

So I am going to take some time off from writing this weekday blog, which has been a godsend for me in so many ways.

I just need to put things in the right order … and there is a method to this madness, which I will explain to you when I finally get back to writing again.

I figure that if I can take maybe a week or so off from doing this writing, I will have a clearer head and be able to pick it up again when I am ready to do so.

It should be a seamless transition.

No, there is nothing physically or mentally wrong with me that I am not telling you about.

I simply need to take a deep breath, and when I come back, take in the fresh air (cough, cough), and I will be as good as ever.

It will take just about a week or eight days or maybe even 10 days, but I feel that I have to hit the pause button right now.

I promise you that I will be back … just not tomorrow, or for the rest of the week into next week.

I generally don’t write the blog on the weekend, so I just look at this as an extended weekend off for me, with every day being a Saturday and Sunday related to not having to write any entries.

I guess you can say that I have given myself my own personal holiday to rev up my motors again.

I could go into rerun mode here, which I actually did several years ago during another such period, but this time, I would rather step away entirely, but I promise, it won’t be for that long--

Just enough for me to get refreshed.

So as we move from the end of August into early September, let me put everything on my own personal boat and temporarily sail away into the sunset … .

Rant #3,195: My Favorite Things

It is funny how you go back to old things as you get older.

At age 66, my yen for chocolate milk continues to be strong … and not just during Passover, when I have waxed poetic about my love for Kosher For Passover U-Bet chocolate syrup and what it does when you pour it into a tall glass of milk.

Yes, even during the dog days of summer, I just love my chocolate milk.

And yes, year-round, it has to be made with U Bet syrup; I will accept nothing less.

The other syrups are OK, but when you mix it into the milk, the final product simply isn’t as good as when you mix U-Bet into the milk.

It simply does not have the same rich taste as U-Bet brings to you.

So why settle for something less, when you can get something magical with U-Bet chocolate syrup—and the Passover version is preferred, as I think it has even a richer taste than the usual U-Bet.

But there are times that U-Bet and whatever you are eating with it just don’t go together, and as they say, “Things Go Better With Coke.”

Coca-Cola continues to be my favorite soda of all of them, and again, I think it has to do with the smoothness of the beverage and its adaptability to any food that you are pairing it with.

I drink a lot of milk—always have, always will—but milk simply does not go with most dinner options, so Coke is my choice, and has always been my choice.

When my sister and I were kids, my mother would not have soda in the refrigerator, as she felt that having it there would preclude us from drinking milk, which is obviously a much healthier beverage.

But as I got older, I was already drinking a lot of milk as it was—my doctor told my mother that I would never break a bone because of all the milk I drank, and I haven’t in my 66 years—but I found that drinking milk while eating a steak or a hot dog or a hamburger just wasn’t cutting it anymore.

So the beverage that I just used to have outside of my house finally ventured inside, and the rest is history.

I still drink lots of milk, and while I don’t drink as much soda as I used to do, when it comes to soda, it has to be Coke.

Pepsi is OK as a substitute, but I actually prefer RC Cola if I can’t have Coke. It is nestled somewhere between Pepsi and Coke--not as sweet as Pepsi but not as smooth as Coke—but even though I do drink other sodas, it generally has to be Coke for me.

And then when I have a Coke, what am I eating with it?

Well, even after 66 years, my favorite foods remain hot dogs and hamburgers, even though I eat lots of fish and pasta and better things for me.

Let’s start with hot dogs, frankfurters, wieners, red hots … whatever you want to call them, I have loved this food probably since the first time I ever had one as a kid.

Having a frank on a bun is just so natural, so compact, so perfect that I even hate to have to chow it down because it looks so good, but I do it anyway.

I prefer Hebrew National hot dogs, but Nathan’s, Sabrett, and a whole host of others are fine too.

But there is nothing better than a Hebrew National hot dog on a bun with some mustard and sauerkraut, all washed down with a Coke.

As for hamburgers, I eat plenty of the fast food variety, but there is nothing better than a real hamburger that you either make yourself from raw chop meat or one that you pick up already made from your local supermarket.

Again, like hot dogs, it just looks perfect on a bun, with a little ketchup, maybe some relish, and maybe some onions and even a slice of melted cheese on top.

It looks so good that you really hate to eat it, but you have to have something to chow down with the Coke that you have sitting in front of you, so down it goes.

It is so funny to think that after 66 years of life, I have not changed one bit when it comes to my favorite food and beverages.

I still like the same things, and even though my adult palette is a bit different from my childhood one, my go-to foods and beverages have remained the same since virtually day one.

And did I mention that I have always liked spinach, always liked cream cheese—Temp Tee please—and always liked peanut butter—Skippy if I can get it?

I may have gotten older, balder, and more skeptical as the years have gone by me, but my food choices have pretty much remained what they are for the length of my life, and probably will continue to be that way until I reach the end.

How about you?

Have your food and beverage choices pretty much remained the same for your entire life?

Hot dog!

Rant #3,194: Pleasant Valley Sunday

August 21!

Yes, as my wife and I were talking about yesterday, the summer has gone pretty quickly, at least for us, and before you know it, Labor Day will be here and the summer will, for all intents and purposes, be over.

One of the reasons that the summer has gone by so quickly for us, I do believe, is that we had the backyard pool at our disposal this summer—

As opposed to last summer, when all we had was a giant bathtub of pea soup.

While our water did not stay crystal clear for the entire season, it was good enough the last few times, and we were able to swim in it yesterday, passing a few summer hours away, assisted by the music that we like to listen to, from the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s.

When we are in the pool, we used to listen to a station on the AM dial from Southern New Jersey that for some reason we were able to get in loud and clear, but for whatever reason, we can’t get in to even a listenable level anymore.

So we re-discovered a long-time Long Island station, WHLI, which has changed its musical format seemingly as many times as one changes their underwear.

For years and years, it was a only station in the area that carried Big Band and 1940s music. It was the only place to hear anybody from Glen Miller to Frank Sinatra to Judy Garland and everyone in between.

And then, probably about at least a decade ago, it completely shifted gears, and carried 1950s music, everyone from Elvis and Dion to Bill Haley and Fats Domino.

And now that it can also be listened to on the FM band and streamed, it recently changed its format to as mid-1960s to mid-1970s playlist, which means you now get music from everyone who was popular during that era, from the Beatles and the Dave Clark Five to Petula Clark and Elton John and the Eagles and … .

We were in the water for about two and a half hours yesterday using the music from that era as our own personal swimming soundtrack, and at about 2:30 p.m., we decided that we had had enough, and started to get out of the water for probably the final time this summer.

And as we were getting out of the water, the last song we heard on WHLI was “Pleasant Valley Sunday” by the Monkees—a song written by Carole King—a song that, at least by its title, was an appropriate “adieu” to our summer backyard pool swimming season.

But on this Sunday, the “barrel full of Monkees” continued once we dried off and took our showers and redressed ourselves, as there was a “The Monkees” TV show marathon on Catchy TV.

Once known as Decades, the network has fallen flat, in my opinion, to rerunning the usual suspects of sitcoms, and I rarely watch the channel now, because the news aspect of the station has been entirely removed, with the 1 millionth reruns of “Cheers” and “Taxi” and “I Love Lucy” in its place.

But this particular weekend, I literally stumbled upon the station running “The Monkees” marathon—I had no idea that it was programmed until I turned the channels to find something to watch—but again, the timing of this marathon was newsworthy, but Catchy simply expects you to know this and they won’t tell you about it.

The reason “The Monkees” was binged this past weekend had to do with the fact that 57 years ago, in /august 1966, the world was getting acquainted with Peter, Micky, Mike and Davy through the pre-release-from-the-TV-show of the act’s first single, “Last Train to Clarksville,” which debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 this very month and rose up the charts to No. 1 without a TV series to promote the song for much of its ascent.

The show premiered on September 12, 1966, so having the binge this week pretty much replicated when “The Monkees” came into our consciousness, at least as a musical act.

Anyway, I watched several episodes—shows I have seen hundreds of times since they were new—and you really have to put the show into context of 1966, and not 2023, to really understand and appreciate how completely revolutionary the show was for that time.

Right in the middle of the Vietnam War, here was a show where the “younger generation” completely ruled the roost.

There were no parental authority figures on the show, and “The Monkees” focused entirely on the 20-something boys, with their long hair and “mod” clothes and “groovy” way of communicating.

So notwithstanding the millions upon millions of records that they sold, and keep on selling to this day, the show—which might look trite by 2023 standards—was groundbreaking and revolutionary in a period where the standard sitcom fare was “My Three Sons” and “The Lucy Show,” great sitcoms but shows that followed the standard sitcom format.

I was particularly interested in the two documentary-style shows that were part of the series, “The Monkees In Concert” and “The Monkees in Paris,” episodes which I don’t think I foully understood as a kid but which I have a new appreciation for as an adult.

These two episodes truly were outside the box of what the usual sitcom format was, and still is, and showed the Monkees as what they actually had become, pop phenomenons that were known both nationally and internationally through the show and their music.

On the show, they were simply a struggling garage rock band, but in these two episodes, that theme was pretty much left in the dust, and the foursome were shown to be among the most popular people on the planet at the time, constantly pursued by the same younger generation that they were expressly created for.

Life imitates the Frankenstein Monster if you will, but those two episodes are among the best of the series, so different from the norm—even the normal Monkees episode—that they stand out from that bunch of any sitcom shows before or since.

So it is now Monday, back to the same old, same old, but I have to say that this past weekend was quite nice, with a real “Pleasant Valley Sunday” to cap it all off.

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?