Change for good

Good old classic-style country music was an endless delight in my younger days. Many of the people who wrote the songs, sang them, and picked the guitars that accompanied them were among the most talented people in their fields, there can be no denying.

One of them, a feller who came along in the early 70s, was Dick Feller, who wrote and sang all sorts of songs: novelties, love ballads, any and all. Among them:

The Credit Card Song

Biff, the Friendly Purple Bear

Makin’ The Best Of A Bad Situation

Any Old Wind That Blows

Lord, Mr Ford

The Thing That Kept Me Goin'

East Bound and Down

Some Days Are Diamonds (Some Days Are Stones)

One day several years ago, I was rummaging through my iTunes and I wondered whatever happened to Dick Feller? And so I rummaged through Google, and found that Dick Feller was now Deena Kaye Rose, having undergone surgery to become a trans woman in 2014. She wrote her autobiography, Some Days Are Diamonds, in which she came out publicly as a trans woman and adopted her new name.

Since everyone has the right to their own decisions in the matter, I was happy to read the book. It was sad to find that she had struggled with her identity for many years, even while married and the father of a daughter. I recognize the strength it took to do this. Denying herself womanhood must have been daily torture, and it was nice to read that she no longer had that agony to deal with.

She also mentioned that the song "Some Days Are Diamonds," written years ago and recorded by not only Feller but John Denver as well, revealed her thoughts very well in its final verse:

Now the face that I see in my mirror

More and more is a stranger to me

More and more I can see there's a danger

In becoming what I never thought I'd be.

Imagine looking in the mirror and not recognizing, or appreciating, the reflection therein. And then, imagine a day and age when it was not possible to rectify the situation, and being forced to "live" with it. Deena's transgender journey was the trip to contentment.

It's only words

One of my favorite lines (and there were many!) from the motion picture "Private Benjamin" was when fish-out-of-water Private Judy Benjamin, having joined the US Army for lack of anything better to do with her life, finds herself in basic training with the hilarious Hal Williams as Sgt. Ross, who tells his squad of trainees:

"Beware, there are mine fields out there. Most of them are inert. However, some are ert."

A deep, thorough knowledge of our mother tongue would seem not to be a requirement for army non-coms, but anyway, in coining a new word, Ross makes a valid point that the soldiers might well recall on the mine fields...some mines might not be inert, so be careful!

I bring all this up for no good reason, as always, except that to say "inert" has a cousin-word, that being "inept," and there is a back-formation that allows us to mean the opposite of ineptitude and call someone "ept."  If you want to, that is. "Ept" is in the dictionary, defined as competent or skillful, and no less a wordsmith than the great E. B. White of The New Yorker once wrote:

“I am much obliged..to you for your warm, courteous, and ept treatment of a rather weak, skinny subject.”

E.B. White; Letters of E.B. White; Harper & Row; 1976.

Note: I came across this because I subscribe to the brilliant A.Word.A.Day site, and if you love words, I encourage you to join me there! It would be very ept of you!

https://wordsmith.org/awad/index.html

Roses are red

Roses are red and so are lobsters, but every once in a while one turns up orange. And so it was that the Red Lobster restaurant in the seafood haven of Pueblo, Colorado, had an orange one in their regular shipment of future dinners the other day.

And an experienced employee who has climbed the corporate ladder to dishwasher and Head Biscuit Maker happened to be unpacking some new residents of the lobster tank, and he saw something off-color about this guy. He called in the managers and they decided that, instead of winding up on the plate of a guy wearing a bib with a picture of a lobster on it, the Orange One (nicknamed Crush after the Denver Bronco defense of long ago) deserved to swim in the Downtown Aquarium in Denver. 

“Myself and many of my team are born and raised Denver Broncos fans, so as soon as we saw that orange color, we knew that Crush would be an excellent representation,” said Kendra Kastendieck, the restaurant’s general manager. “And we all want our defensive line to be that good again.” She packed old Crush in with ice packs in one of those styrofoam coolers and took him to his new swimming hole.

After 30 days, Crush will have a veterinarian check him over, and then he'll be in the exhibit with other cold water North Atlantic Ocean species.

I guess I'm the bad guy. I wish Crush well, but I picture myself with a bib on, and him on a plate with a baked potato and some broccoli.

On her own

I can offer four (mine and Peggy's) hearty thumbs up to the miniseries "Under The Bridge" on Netflix. It's about some teenagers in British Columbia who ganged up on one girl who was trying to fit in with the crowd, and I won't say any more. I don't like it when people drop spoilers and then holler "Spoiler Alert!" when it's too late.

We recommend the series and I wish you would take note of how fine an actress Riley Keough is. She plays the writer who comes back to her home town to write about the girl who tried to fit in. It might not mean anything to some people, and it might mean everything to others, but Riley is Elvis's granddaughter, the child of his only offspring, Lisa Marie.

Since her grandfather died in 1977, it might not be such a deal to people born more recently, and that's why she stands on her own, and goes a fine job in the show.

It must be hard to be the child of a famous family. Riley's grandma Priscilla was an actress of sorts ("Dallas" on TV and "Naked Gun" movies), but she did not cause anyone to confuse her with Meryl Streep. Elvis made a couple of dozen movies, all featuring him playing Elvis under different names. 

It seems that Riley went out and just learned to act, and even though when I see her on the TV in our living room I see her grandfather, grandmother and mother in her features, she is out there alone, and that's to her credit.

They had her in stitches

Every town has its official gossip - the official chronicler of all the romances and weddings and divorces and births and foolin' around that goes on. She (face it, it's usually a woman who writes all the gossip. Men KNOW it but never commit it to paper) has friends all over the place who fill her in.

The New York City version of this reporter is Cindy Adams, widow of comic Joey Adams, and she writes a column in the New York POST fishwrap, so her words get out to many more people than, say, a hairdresser in Bugtussle.

Cindy is 94 years of age now, but still getting around well and she's always up for something new...such as finishing high school.

It's not like she quit school to run off and play the south end of a horse in a costume party. She was not allowed to finish because she did not sew her graduation gown!

She said she was "stunned" one day last week to be receiving that diploma "800 years too late."

Cindy was attending Andrew Jackson High School in Cambria Heights in Queens but, “In those days, we had a thing called Home Ec., short for Home Economics. I had a 90-something average, I graduated in three years instead of four but I couldn’t sew the dress.”

It was a requirement for women in the class to sew their grad gown. Cindy could not do that, but her mother took it to a professional tailor. The principal saw this the ruse and said, "She didn’t make this dress. She doesn’t graduate. She doesn’t get a diploma. She can’t go to college.”

So Cindy's friends, including "Judge Judy" Sheindlin, the mayor, the governor, and the president of the American Federation of Teachers all showed up to toss praise her way.

“If you had had that opportunity to graduate, you could have gone onto college,” Governor Kathy Hochul pointed out.

Cindy was born in 1930, so all this took place in the late 1940s, which is not all that long ago, comparatively. Imagine a school district having a stupid rule like this today!

And I wonder if there was a similar requirement for the boys in the class, but I think we know the answer, don't we?

Sunday Rerun: Horrible pay, but you are off on Sundays

 To be quite honest, as I always am, it's not the super piety that annoys me about Chick-fil-A. I mean, their "We're so religious, we're closed on Sunday, but you sinners just go right on over to McDonald's or something" is pretty sad, and their charitable endeavor, the WinShape Foundation, donated millions of dollars to organizations seen by LGBT activists as hostile to LGBT rights.  As a longtime stockholder in the firm of Live & Let Live, this offends me.

And I ate lunch there one day with an old friend who assured me I would love it. In the hour lunch break that we shared, I guess I spent about 10 minutes talking to him. The rest of the time, I had to deal with the hyped-up hostess, who kept bopping over to our table every 37 seconds to see if there was "Any little thing I can do for you all!" 

But I am not so pure of spirit that I would drive past Home Depot if I needed some lag bolts if going all the way over to Lowe's would cost time and gas, even though the Depot supports the reelection campaign of Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.),  who in turn supports the white-supremacist “great replacement” conspiracy theory. 

That reminds me, I might need nuts for those lag bolts.

No, I can overlook a certain amount of corporate politics just because I am not apt to align with any huge profit machine. My objection to CFA is simple: their food disgusts me. Greasy slabs of chicken on a spongy hamburger roll? No thanks. 

So I say, I don't go there, and I don't think they care. But here is another reason to view them with a gimlet eye.

One of their "stores" in North Carolina tried a new way to get their work done. They asked for “volunteers” willing to be paid in crummy chicken sandwiches, rather than money, for working at their drive-through.

“We are looking for volunteers for our new Drive Thru Express!” the outlet in Hendersonville, N.C., put on Facebook the other day (and then they took it down).  “Earn 5 free entrees per shift (1 hr) worked. Message us for details.”

This sort of "volunteer employee" status would appear to conflict with the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), the federal law that says employers have to pay employees for the work they do.  You really wouldn't think such a law would be necessary, but then again...

The CFA in question says this is not a job, so sireee Bob! This is a “volunteer-based opportunity” intended for people who “think it’s a good fit for them,” so that ain't like no job or nothin'.

“We’ve had multiple people sign up and enjoy doing and have done it multiple times,” the store posted. “People who sign up for this chose it voluntarily.”

A spokesperson for Chick-fil-A corporate, down in their Atlanta headquarters, told The Washington Post that the Hendersonville store had “decided to end this program.”

“Most restaurants are individually owned and operated, and it was a program at an individually owned restaurant,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “This was not endorsed by Chick-fil-A, Inc.”

Meanwhile, the manager at the said he had no comment, and suggested that the medic contact the corporation...the same people who said go ask him. 

Jennifer Haigwood, director of communications for the North Carolina Department of Labor, said the FLSA’s requirements regarding private for-profit employers “are clear that there cannot be an employee who provides ‘volunteer’ work for that for-profit employer.”

“Generally, labeling a worker as a ‘volunteer’ will not remove the employer from its FLSA obligation to pay the required wages if that individual performs work that benefits the for-profit entity,” Haigwood said.

The CFA in question once employed Madison Cawthorn, recently unelected for a second term in the US Congress. Now that he will be out of work soon, perhaps volunteering at his old place will help him land a solid job that he can keep for more than two years!

Back home here, I am compiling a list of dream jobs I would like to volunteer for:

• Orioles first-base coach
• Being the "Big Al" elephant-suited mascot at Alabama football games
• Beef taster at Ruth's Chris
• Grand Ole Opry singer
• Circuit Court judge
• Graffiti installer
• Game show host or booth announcer ("It's a lifetime supply of Turtle Wax!")
• Tattoo parlor spell checker
• Maître d' at a fancy steak restaurant where bigshots vying for a table will palm me folded double-sawbucks
• Fortune cookie writer
• Roller coaster tester
• Google Street View driver
• Professional, paid blogger

And that's when I woke up.

 

The Saturday Picture Show, July 20, 2024

 

It would be wonderful to have this sort of national unity again. A ticker-tape celebration for the end of World War I made it look as if it had snowed!

Potato chip aficionados have long recognized that the chip that gets doubled over in the frying process gives us extra dipping power and the ability to deliver more clam dip to our waiting maws. Double the fun!

The late-60s Psychedelic Era meant that celebrities, such as John Lennon and his son Julian, could feel free to drive around in inconspicuous Rolls-Royces like this. Nothing to get hung up on.

Those who celebrate the gift of Free Will, given to us by a God curious to see what we'd do with it, can point to the festival of San Fermín, that week-long annual celebration in the city of Pamplona, Navarre, Spain. The Festival allows people to be up close and personal with nature by running through the streets accompanied by massive bulls...and getting run through by bull horns. My idea? Bring over a couple of American guest grand marshals. How about Shannon Sharpe and Al Gore?

This week's free wallpaper shows another summer day coming to a beautiful close.

This painted turtle is seen leaving a courthouse after testifying as a witness to an assault near his home. Asked by the prosecutor to describe the events as he saw them, he said, "It all happened so fast!"

I 

I like living in a world where a Sikh built a mosque for his Muslim friend who needed a place to pray. 

America in the 1990s was a nation gone insane, as seen here in a courtroom where a married couple, two purported adults, are dividing their Beanie Baby collection.

Men, a good hair stylist can help you avoid the heartache of tonsorial tragedies like these.

Hey! Good news! Someone bought out the old Pizza Hut and they're gonna turn it into a new Pizza Hut!