HAPPY SAINT PATRICK'S DAY

This is a photo taken on Saint Patrick's Day last year.  Our grandson Benjamin knew GREEN was "in".  As it is this year.  Watch it!  I pinch non-compilers. 

Crawdads Singing

Book Report on WHERE THE CRAWDADS SING by Delia Owens   .  Not bad.   It takes place on the shores and swamps of the southern part of North Carolina.  A rather large dysfunctional family slimmed itself down.  The mother left, and the kids left, not to return.  The father came and went at days at a time.  He fished and played poker.  The last time he left for good leaving the youngest member of the family the household, which was a 4-year-old little girl.

The girl learned the nature around her and survived.

When she matured she was known by the townspeople as the “Swamp Woman”.  She did not like to be around humans. Her nick name her father gave her was Tyer, which was the only time for most of her life she needed. Two young men* of the town had eyes for her.  and one of them ended up dead.  Who did it?  The book, halfway through it turned into a murder mystery.

It is a good book.  Any book that makes me weep more than once is  a meaningfully book.

*To be truthful the two young men had similar first names and I got them confused a few times.

Like Sheena?

Insurance Witty Commercials

Have you noticed that the funniest commercials are insurance ones? Really, other commercials immediately get down to business selling their product. All the insurance companies hardly mention their product or how efficient they are, they all want to tickle your funny bone. Like “Jake at State Farm.”

Life Style Changes With Viurs

(art from MAD Magazine by Jack Davis

Coronavirus effecting behavior

This morning Krogers looked like a herd of wild animals hit it.  I don’t think there was a roll of toilet paper for sale left.  I did not check the bathroom stalls.  A lot of the food shelves were also empty with some clerks busy restocking.  I think I got one of the last few cartons of milk..  The orange juice shelves were empty but they apparently did not think of the frozen kind. 

I saw one lady with a face mask interrupted a druggist talking to a customer to ask if her face mask was on correctly.  Later I noticed the same lady was not wearing rubber gloves but did have some germ-killing wet-ones with her that she kept cleaning her hands with when she interacted with the products she was considering.

Speaking of rubber gloves, we wore them while in Krogers, and I was surprised to see we were almost the only customers that wore them.  I did see at least one, maybe two wearing them.   About half the employees were wearing rubber gloves.

I think most importantly, stay way from crowds.  Don’t get close to people, give them their space.

The authorities of the Coronavirus virus are warning people in our age-group are more prone to catch it.  So, at least wear gloves.

SUNDAY FUNNIES!! Harvey's Goon Child

If you read very much of my ramblings you know already my comicbook artist/editor hero is the late Harvey Kurtzman.

Harvey worked free lance for mostly EC.  He dabbled in EC’s science fiction comics and single handed wrote and laid out editor-style scores of EC war comics. He did not do many horror comicsbook stories, he did not like that subject matter.  Then he create MAD comicbook  and that is another story.

Here is a sample of an EC science fiction story he wrote and illustrated scanned from the pages of my hardbound collection of WEIRD FANTASY. The scanning needs improvement, but you get an idea of his pre-MAD work.  Scanning pages in hardbound books is hell.

I think this was originally published in 1950.  Who knows?  Harvey Kurtzman’s story may have inspired Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 SPACE ODESSY. In 1968.

(psst! reminder to click on each image to make them bigger and maybe understandable).

Beware of the Ides of March!

23 Skiddoo!

23 Skidoo! (whatever that means). The Roaring 20s young lady on the right is Beatrice Elizabeth "Bea" Hunter Crain (1903-1971). I heard the reason of Bea's nickname "Bea" is because one of her younger brothers (my father) could not pronounce Beatrice when he was a toddler and the big family decided to go along with what he called her. Bea was the only daughter of nine kids and the only one born outside of Georgia (Hunt County, Texas). Before she married she was a Southern Bell Telephone operator in the days before they had telephone dialing. Instead of dialing you would tell her who you wanted, and as a small town as Marietta was at the time, probably you could tell her the first name only. In 1931, Bea married Robert Spencer Crain (1903-1991), who owned several local businesses. They had five children and took in some of Spencer's orphaned kin and raised them as their own.
Bea was very generous and opened her big house for family wakes, I remember visiting both my Hunter grandparents' bodies (two years apart) in her living room, and hosting big family get-togethers.

The Little Girl That Screamed

We moved into this neighborhood over 40 years ago.  One time I think I counted over 100 houses here. 

About 35 of those years I have exercised running and/or walking year-round on these streets.  I watched families come and go or come and stay and grow old.

Speaking of growing about 18 to 19 years ago a three- generation family moved in.  They had an accent.  They kept to themselves 

When the little girl of the family was about 4 or 5 years old, she would let out blood curdling screams.   She screamed often.  I think her mind was in another dimension.  I think when she was old enough for school she stayed home because she didn’t communicate.

I remember one time I walked by and she was sitting by the curb in the rain screaming.  Her grandfather was speaking to her kindly and softly trying to talk her into coming back inside.

About a year ago I saw her and her brother riding bikes and it seemed she was having a good time with him.

Today, again I was walking by their house and the girl was out in front trying to train a little white dog to walk with her with a lease.  I decided to speak.  I told her it was a cute dog.  She thanked me. 

She has grown since I last been close to her.  She looks about 19 or 20 and dressed to accentuate her feminism.  I told her my dog Willow died in October, 14 years old.

She let out a heart broken, “Oohhhhh” the identical sound I heard many females, young and old expressed when I told them about Willow.

Whatever she had or was cloudy about apparently, she got out from under it.

The way she dressed I wonder if Peer Pressure had anything to do with her change. 

Dr Agan Again

The other day I went to a Dr. Agan for the first time. Yesterday I got an electronic survey for my visit. One of the questions was would I go back to him. If I was the one making up the question I would ask: "Would you go back to Doctor Agan again?" (stick with me, I got a thousand of 'em.

BEWARE OF FRIDAY THE 13TH!!

Benjamin at his Desk at his Grandparents

Reading Minds in the Doctor's Office

Doctor: "How can I keep it brief, Medicare %$@&*?"

Me: "I wonder if he is good for a HANDICAP hangar permit?"

Donald Nero or Fiddler on the Whitehouse Roof?

After our President returned from a visit to the CD in Atlanta, he bragged that the doctors there asked him how did he learn so much knowledge about the Coronavirus.  And he didn’t use the “his uncle is a professor so that is why he is smart.” Even once.

Well, how did he?

Or did he?

Did the doctors when asking him how  come he knew so much about Coronavirus, have a smirk on their faces?

I just wonder that because today’s YAHOO’s headlines mentioned Trump’s ASTONISHING LACK OF VIRUS KNOWLEDGE.

Yesterday We Saw YESTERDAY

Yesterday on Netflix, or some other channel we watched YESTERDAY.  Get it?  Yesterday we watched YESTERDAY!  Stick with me, I got hundreds of 'em.

The best part of movie is you get to hear the best of Beatles songs.  Interesting and profoundly you get to wonder what if the Beatles never existed?

It is like there two parallel universes for some strange reason.  It is about an Indian guy who grew up in the one with the Beatles, and their history and at a blink of an eye he was in the other one that never heard of the Beatles and he sung all the Beatles songs and became very famous in a short time.  The whole time giving the Beatles credit. 

Good movie.

SUNDAY FUNNIES!! Politics

Tis the Season to stab your friend in the back. 

Tis the season to throw your friend under the bus.

Tis the season for politics.

This is from the TRUMP Magazine (no relation) which was edited by Harvey Kurtzman and art by Russ Heath published in about 1959 by PLAYBOY Publishing Company. 

Things haven’t changed.

(click on picture to make it bigger and readable.

Spring Forward One Hour Tonight!

ABSOLUTELY!

The most untruth insincere word in the English language: ABSOLUTELY.

I think when one in charge, or a contractor, promises a deal and ends the promise with ABSOLUTELY it falls through. It appears that saying ABSOLUTELY is equal to crossing one’s fingers when the deal is sealed.  In and out of memory as soon as it is said.

Really! I ABSOLUTELY believe that.

Kurtzman Did Trump

Kurtzman did TRUMP.  Wait!  This is probably a Trump you did not know existed.  It lasted only two issues.  The creator of MAD stayed around for 24 to about 29 issues, then he was fired.  Hugh Hefner, the publisher of PLAYBOY promised to let him do a mag similar to MAD, but with more freedom.  The new know-no limits magazine was named TRUMP. 

It lasted two issues.

TRUMP was classier, funnier, and glossier than MAD.   But the one thing MAD had over TRUMP that it still exists, sort of.

Even though I have the original two TRUMP Magazines they have became in time became wrinkled.  A couple years ago Denis Kitchen, of Kitchen Sink Publishers offered the two TRUMPs reprint in one hardbound volume.  I bought one, flipped through it, knowing every story by heart, put it down.  And it went unopened again yesterday.

I did not know it put this hardbound has, as I said, the original pictures and text, but also a narration by Denis Kitchen of the story and/or a deeper look into Kurtzman and artists mind, during the production of TRUMP.

I’m reading it studying the Kitchen text for details.  For instance the mock American Express ad below:  I did not know  artist Will Elder was drawing the two surprised  guards with the likeness of Harvey Kurtzman in mind.

The Times An't A-Changing

Reported in the news this morning was a well-known chain restaurant, locally,  a white female customer requested a white food server.  The manager accommodated the request.  The manager was fired.

It reminded me of going to a funeral about 20 or so years ago and afterwards the family was having food at the deceased’s house.  When we arrived at the house, we saw about five or six men, each holding a plate with food, eating outside under the trees.

They warned me there was a black man, friend of the departed and his family, was inside eating and mingling.

I thought times had changed.

FRAUD PERSON OF INTEREST

Click on image to make bigger and readable