HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!

October is the Time for Oakland

Visiting Oakland Cemetery seems to be always interesting and a happenings   I think in October more people come which brings out a parade of period costumes and music.

Margaret Mitchell is buried at Oakland.

So is Franklin Garrett.  Franklin was the official historian of Atlanta.  Once while doing  genealogy research I had a question about troop movement of one of my relatives involved in the Battle of Atlanta during the Civil War in 1864.  I called the Atlanta Historical Society and asked my question to the lady that answered the phone. She connected me to “somebody who will know”, Franklin Garrett.  I asked him my question and he said to hold, he would look it up.  A few minutes later he came back and told me what I needed to know, but the answer created another question, which I immediately asked.  Franklin, again, said hold on, he would go look up.  Which he did and returned a few minutes later, breathing a little louder, and told me the answer, which triggered another question.  When I asked him that question, he asked could I please combine my questions, he was having to climb two flights of stairs each time.

The Sleeping Lion guards the Confederate Soldier section of the Oakland.

See the white statue?  Did you see him move?  I bet if you tickled him under his arms he would giggle.  Yep, he’s alive!

The below picture is one I took aiming the lens inside a crypt to get the stained glass.  Did I also get an apparition doing cart-wheels?

Look!  Stone Mountain!

Look!  Atlanta buildings!

I think I see the Polaris – I thought you couldn’t see it now because of the buildings around it are taller.

Look!  Buildings on the 285!

Look!  There’s…….

And so went my verbal contribution on the 18^th floor of the 100 Building  of Galleria Parkway during a business meeting today.

Bats on a Full Moon

Since bats are blind a full moon shouldn't matter

The Lynching

click to make it easier to look at the details.

This is from HELP Magazine, #1, Georgia corn-fed, the late Jack Davis

Super Patriot

click on to enlarge

No Average is the Average

Here is an obscure fact that was in UNCLE JOHN’S BATHROOM READER: : Average year 46 million foreigners visit the U.S.A.

I doubt if there are near that many visitors in these Trump years.  They key word above is “Average”.  With Trump at the helm there is no “average”.

SUNDAY FUNNIES!! MAD'S version of SMILING JACK

Trump Found a Scapegoat!

Trump is blaming the bomb mailer for Republican possible bad showing at this mid-term election.  I’m glad he found a scapegoat.  Of course it couldn’t be him or the Republicans’ itching to cut entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare to offset the huge bonuses they just gave companies and the super-rich.

What's The Difference in Trrump and a Transgender Soldier?

Happy National Frankenstein Day!

(last Friday of October)

Throwback Thursday, Registering to Vote

Throwback to Thursday, Registering to Vote.

The election ads season is here.  Of course election means voting. 

But before one votes one has to register, so here we go.

When I turned 18 I went to the Old Cobb County Courthouse to register to vote.     I went to the voters registration office at the Old Courthouse.  In the hallway was a drinking fountain with a WHITE ONLY sign.  Near it was a WHITE MEN restroom and a WHITE LADIES restroom  The “COLORED” restroom and water fountain was in the basement somewhere.

In the Voter Registration Office I told the kindly elderly gentleman there I wanted to register to vote and he gave me the form to fill out, which I did.  Then he told me you had to be able to pass the literacy test to qualify to vote.  He handed me a sheet of paper and told me to read aloud what was on lit.  It was Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

I started:  “Four Scores and Seven Years Ago…”

He said, “You passed.”

I said I had just started.

He said that I correctly pronounced the key word, I did not say “Foe” instead of Four and gave me a knowingly smile.

The polite jovial old man went on to say if the pronunciation requirement was strictly enforced, “no telling who “THEY” would vote for.”

I knew that was just wrong.  But I did not dare say so because I have a slight well-hidden-most-the-time speech impediment and he might have had me read the rest of The Gettysburg Address.

I bet the old fart was spinning in his grave  January 20, 2009.

Better the Manners, Better the Business

We saw yesterday on a makeshift fence at the area they are bulldozing the old Mountain View School and putting in a upscale shopping center that they will have a MOD Pizza and a Jim and Nicks BBQ.  We like them both.

Speaking of Jim and Nick’s BBQ, we were near the one on South Cobb Drive today.  We had lunch there.  It appears the management must have just given the staff a lesson in mandatory good manners.  We had not had both our feet in door yet when the receptionist complemented Anna’s hair.

Our waitress could not be nicer to us. She seemed personally concerned how we liked our food,   And she kept the little hot cheese biscuit coming.  

Those tasty little biscuits are tasty.  But they are also full of calories.  As soon as we finished one little basket she replaced it with another basket of piping hot biscuits or rolls, whatever they are.

I wondered how do we turn them down without being rude?

I got it!   Turn the basket over and maybe that would quietly and politely say, “Thanks, but no thanks!”

Ga Produce

Hurricane Michael just about destroyed Georgia’s pecan crop for this year and some years to come.   The destroyed trees will be replaced and then they will have to grow.

It reminded me of a postal carrier assigned to the Federal Annex  Postal Facility in Atlanta.  After work hours he would go home about 50 miles south of Atlanta and work his and his sister’s farm.  He had plenty of pecan trees.  Many times, we saw him on Spring Street behind the Federal with sacks of pecans with a large basket full of more sacked pecans.  Other times he would be hawking fresh tomatoes or other produce.

I remember he always had on his carrier uniform with a pith helmet except when he retired.

It seemed like he lost a limb,  probably a leg.   But it didn’t hold him down from selling his produce.  Then he would be holding his product up has people left the Federal Annex with him hobbling around keeping balance and squawking out what he had for a good price , freshly picked for that day.

Rest in Peace Alicia

Alicia Clotfelter Willoughby (1943-2018).

Marietta High School sweet heart died yesterday losing her long time battle with COPD.   It seems that she was an apple in everyone's  eyes.

Today in the early afternoon I was twiddling my thumbs wondering what I should say on my blog today. Politics? No. History? No? Memories? No. Comic books? Nah! Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader? Nix. Myself? Hmmm, maybe. Local eatery? No. Marietta? Wore that one out too. Genealogy? No not today, I am repeating myself too much….

Then the doorbell ranged.

I looked at Anna. Anna looked at the door. Willow looked at me 

Usually when the doorbell rings it is an unsolicited sales call, like TV cable, or trees to be cut down. I was going to give them a piece of my mind.

I stormed to the door and flung it opened ready for a battle. It was my old friend Lee Moss. Co-student, co-Big Apple carryout/sacker, co -Swabby at NAS ATLANTA.

Lee had a gift. It is picture of my Daddy and his co-workers at the Marietta Police Force. I would recognized that broken nose anywhere.

Lee and Diane (her Daddy's is in the line up too) drove across Cobb County to get this to me. They went to a lot of trouble.

Thank you Lee  and Diane!

Another picture of policemen Jesse Cooper and Ed Hunter

SUNDAY FUNNIES!! Kurtzman Fumetti

HELP Magazine got buy on a shoestring budget.  It built a name for itself and started using a comic book format of photo panels.  The French have been doing it a long time.  And new budding stars would be in these photo comic book style stories carried Fumetti for peanuts, just to get their name out there.  Here is Orsen Wells.

Bell Reunion, Marietta, Ga, 2011

This video was taken slightly over seven years ago.  Too many  in it have went on to a higher level of the Hereafter.  It is interesting to see old friends.

Where's The Music?

Yesterday I was on my  late in-laws property when suddenly I was attacked by a well organized pack of aggressive bees.  They stung me on my cheek and the back of my neck.  One was landed on my glasses and was trying to crawl around to the meat and I jerked my glasses off.  I did a lot of swatting and dancing.

Then I wised up and ran.   A few of them were close behind me.  Finally, they gave up and faded away.

Then panting I realized I left my glasses on the ground and one work glove.  So, I returned to get my stuff and I heard buzzing up near my ears and thought I felt one land on my cap.  Again I went into my dance of hopping and swatting, and this time slapping my cap on my hips.

The second time I did not get stung.

The house is in a hilly area.  There is a road in sight below them and houses on a hill above them.   If anybody from a distance saw me they might have asked, “What kind of weird dance is that old man doing?  And where’s his radio?”

Tch tch

Got a Date, Mustn't Be Late!

This morning driving home from the Aquatic Center we saw a truck recklessly whipped out in traffic and flew down the road zig zagging passing cars and quickly went out of sight.

I forgot to mention, his/her truck has several big dents on it.

Throwback Thursday, Coloring Books For Felons

Throwback Thursday,  Killers, Thugs, and Coloring Books

Copied and pasted from my chicken-fat.com blog Aug 2009

When I first got out of the Navy I went to work for the Atlanta News Agency. The Atlanta News kept most of north Georgia supplied in magazines.

I was a route man. I went into convenience stores, drug stores, or and other stores that sold magazines and took a quick inventory of the magazines that they had on hand. When I turned in my inventories an office staff would quickly go over it and determine what to send each store on their next delivery.

Sometimes they would supply us with books to unload on the stores. They usually were not magazines but books to push off on the people that sold our magazines.

Once they gave me several boxes of coloring books. I think there were almost a thousand coloring books I had to try to sell to some poor store. I quickly found no one wanted the coloring books..  The managers said in so many words, “Don’t come back with them!” 

After talking to other route men I think the idea was to sell them the books knowing full well they would return them for credit in a week or two. In the meantime, in house inventory was performed… and guess what? You don’t have to pay taxes on books and magazine that are not in the building.

So where was I going to unload almost 1,000 coloring books? Nobody wanted them.

The Federal Pen at the end of the Boulevard in Atlanta was on my route. That was my next stop.

Ahah! I wrote out a bill for the number of coloring books and backed up to their loading dock and took them out of the truck. I had the guard sign for it, I gave him his copy of the bill and went on my way, smirking on the long driveway to get the heck out of there.

As far as I know the coloring books were a hit, none were returned.

A couple of years later Anna and I went to an art show at the Federal Pen. Some of the art was fantastic. They didn’t sign their names, they signed their number. The prices were reasonable, so we bought three canvases. 

Who knows, I may have had a hand inspiring them.

Mitch Blaming the Needy Needs

From Yahoo News



Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's (R-Ky.) "single biggest regret of my time in Congress," he told Bloomberg News on Tuesday, is "our failure to address the entitlement issue." McConnell said that the mushrooming federal deficit, which the Treasury Department just said grew to $779 billion last fiscal year — 77 percent higher than when McConnell became majority leader in 2015 — is "very disturbing," but he blamed Medicare and Social Security spending, not the $1.5 trillion tax cut he steered through last year.

Sleazy Donald?

Henry Miller Spends the Night With Lawrence Durrell

On PBS lately we have been watching THE DURRELLS ON CORFU series on Master Theater on PBS.  Corfu is an Greek Island (I think)  The Durrells is a fatherless family with a mother, two sons in their early 20s, a teenage girl, and a son about preteen age.  They are British.   I’m not sure why, but they spend their summers on Corfu island getting in one light humor situation after another.

On the episode his this weekend the oldest son Larry accompanied his mother to London because of a death in the extended family. 

Larry is a published writer and have developed  pen-pal relationships with other writers   Several of his writer friends are living together in London.  Larry decided to look them up and end up spending a few days with them and also his mother a couple of days.  They lived a very artistic bohemian life style... walking around nude.

One of the resident writers was Henry Miller.  I thought “THE Henry Miller?”

Then I remember a book I read many years ago that was correspondence and letters between Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller.

I Google The Durrells and found the series  is from Lawrence Duirrell’s memoirs  of the times his family lived on Corfu Island. 

Wikipedia told about each of his siblings.  In the series his youngest brothers Gerald Burrell is compulsive about collecting wild birds, insects, and any other kind of animal on the island.  Wikipedia said when he grew up he became a world-famous naturist.

So this sit-come (more or less) is based on writings of a real family pre-WWII and the mingling of influential writers of the time.   What about that?

Chalkober Fest 2018,

These photographs of the art at the Chaltober Fest doesn't cover much of he fest at all.  It is just a samplling.

Our grandson Benjamin

Our son Rocky holding his son Benjamin

Our neighbor Roy L.