Barbara Booey! Barbara Booey!

Thinking about houses today.  As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it.”  And as his buddy Thoreau said, "Hey Ralphie boy!  Let me have some money to build myself a house!"

And there you have it.  You have to live somewhere, but how you get there is determined by a lot of factors.

Up in Spartansburg, PA, a house needed to be moved.  Details are unclear from the article I read, but if you go there, you get to see a video.  If someone ever riddles you, "How many Amish men does it take to move a house?" you can just tell them, "80."  Look at the video.  In a society that disdains power tools, bulldozers, tractors, overhead cranes, and electronic devices that would bring the voice of Bill O'Reilly into the home, these men just pick up the doggone house and move it.

And you think your job is tough!

Meanwhile, down in Tennessee, landlady Oprah Winfrey is moving to evict a woman from one of the approximately 3700 houses the "talk show titan" owns around the globe.  Oprah's father, Vernon, was married to one Barbara Winfrey for more than ten years, and Oprah gave him a house in Nashville for the happy couple to occupy. This Barbara became Oprah's stepmother the minute she and Vernon said "I do," and someone seems to have told her that such status conferred upon her the right to call the house her home.

"This house is not your home," Oprah should have said.  "Even when there's no one sitting there."

The marriage got all messy, with Vernon filing for divorce, citing inappropriate marital conduct, and Barbara claiming that he regularly consorted with prostitutes, including one named "One Tooth."

That's just edentulous.

But the deal is, Barbara said she wanted to keep living in the nice house in Music City USA and Oprah, the owner of that house and many more, said she can't, and the judge sided with Oprah on Monday and gave Barbara 60 days to hit the road.

This is certainly one for the courts and the judges and the late-night comics. I would side with Oprah, but she got mad at me when she worked at channel 13 here so I have to recuse myself.