Beau Again, Talking About Author James Patterson

Well, howdy there internet people. If you’ve been following me here for awhile, you may know I love the YouTube videos of Beau of the Fifth Column, and I occasionally repost some of them here. This is one that deeply resonates within me.

I’m a white man, born and raised in the southern US in the 1950s. I’m a rare bird who has understood my white male privilege since I was a kid. Black people were not allowed to live in my town back then, and they were not allowed to attend our school until about 1966, I think. I was always the smartest kid in my class, but if my skin had been black, I would have grown up nearly illiterate here.

James Patterson is a 75-year-old white US man who has been

Uvalde and the Utterly Disgraceful Police Initial Response

I’m a U.S. citizen, born & raised, living again in the Gun Belt. If you’ve been living under a rock (and I wouldn’t blame you!), you may not be aware that yet another school mass shooting occurred here on Tuesday. (It’s a really sad commentary that if someone here mentions a recent mass shooting, the appropriate response is “Which one?”.)

Today, the answer is Uvalde, Texas. I’ll presume you’ve read the heartrending account, but I want to note another account – that of police officers establishing a perimeter,

Is Plastic Recycling a Myth?

Like many humans today, I buy and consume lots of stuff that comes in plastic containers: drinks (mostly unhealthy), whole roasted chickens from the deli section of my local grocery, the occasional drink mug to replace the one that cracked….

Some Grounded Reactions to the Leaked U.S. Supreme Court Opinion

I am utterly devastated by what my country’s highest court is doing here. It is a travesty of justice, of humanity, for SO many reasons I won’t go into here. Well, not yet anyway. But y’all might want to take a look at some (I hope ALL) of these takes on the leaked decision by the U.S. Supreme Court assholes.

That One Devastating Song!

Do you have a song that devastates you every time you hear it, but you just can’t NOT listen to whenever you hear it? A song that brings back up all the turmoil – good and bad – from your past? Most of you do, I suspect. I do, of course. Nope, no further context.

Cusps

Cusps

Cornered happily in the walk-in closet at home, 8th grade, lights off. The First Kiss!
The news, his girlfriend was pregnant, but not by him!
Tussling with her over the flatware after the family had gone to bed. The New Kiss!
The plastic soda straw, fashioned into a crude ring, I slipped onto her dancing finger,
and her, not missing a beat, removing her very real ring and slipping it onto me!
Initiating that New First Kiss, drunk on white wine, not knowing how she felt. She felt!
Seeing she had packed her résumé into her bag as she left for a trip. She did not return.
The first reading of her first message from OkCupid!

The Annual Spaghetti Harvest

I saw a facebook post earlier tonight pointing to this video, which brings back a couple memories from when I was about 10-11 years old. (I LOATHE facebook, but I LOVE some of its denizens!) I’ll tell you more after you watch. (Oh, PLEASE watch!)

As a kid, I just loved watching my local TV station on Sunday afternoons while the rest of my family did, well, whatever they were doing. On Sundays,

“The Intruder” (1962), a film by Roger Corman, starring William Shatner

I have mentioned that I have returned to live in the house I grew up in, often haunted by its past – my past. Most of Missouri is typically midwestern in values, but in my area, in the far southeast corner, it’s more like living in the deep U.S. south. I gave y’all a taste of what it was like here in 1939 in this blog.

Now I’m writing about another fine example from 1962, when Roger Corman, producer of hit after hit low-budget films at the time, came to town (Well, a couple towns over, about 5 to 25 miles east of me) to make a new film, one that was WAY different than anything he’d ever done. And he brought the soon-to-be Captain Kirk with him to star in the film.

Alexa Channels HAL

Earlier tonight, I saw a news headline that read something like “Alexa is going to space”, but I ignored it, kinda. I have Amazon’s Alexa on a nearby device, so I casually said “Alexa, open the pod bay doors.” She nailed it! (If you don’t remember the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey”, you won’t get it. Sorry.)

(Useless?) One-Word Prompts!

Jentacular? Deipnosophist? The list goes on.

Most of my dozen or so readers here know I’m in blog (and other) cahoots with Judy/Remi