When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth 2

More reminiscences of a garrulous geezer.  

Not breakfast at my house, then or now. Image by Jo Justino from Pixabay

Letters of eclectic commentary featuring the wit and wisdom of a garrulous geezer and {Dana}, a persistent hallucination and charming literary device.

  

                     ABOUT                                              GLOSSARY 

"Whenever I think of the past it brings back so many memories." 

                                                                                     -Steven Wright 

Dear Gentlereaders, 

Beginning with this column, I'm no longer committed to publishing a new missive every Saturday but I will be publishing a new, lengthier, column approximately every two weeks. Please stay tuned. 

Fear not, I remain committed to writing these letters/columns, and many of my millions of gentlereaders have expressed a desire for longer letters anyway.

{I doubt any of our gentlereaders are living in fear of a lack of letters on your part.}    

Welcome back boys, girls, and others. In our last episode, Dana asked me what was so cool about being a child of working-class parents with lots of kids and little money back in my day when the Baby Boom exploded. 

Answer: Dumb luck and good timing.

I, and my fellow Boomers, didn't come along till after the Great Depression had been overcome and the Second World War won, two back-to-back globe-spanning crises that killed off multiple millions and laid waste to no shortage of other countries. 

If you were lucky enough to be a kid, particularly before about 1965 — when things got weird and our current era began  — you benefited from the traditional American zeitgeist, an economic boom, and the birth of modern technology. 

You hit a trifecta without even making a bet. 

Of course, life was hard for most and terrible for many as it always has been and always will be. I/We need to proceed carefully. Nostalgia and our unreliable memories often generate a golden glow; sucky circumstances can morph into fond remembrances with the passage of time.   

Big BUT, that's not going to keep me from posting a paean to my childhood, specifically to my life prior to reaching the age of reason. 

{The Age of Reason? Just how old are you?}

When I was a kid attending a traditional Catholic grade school, much of second grade focused on preparing us for our First Holy Communion as it was assumed that we had more or less reached the age of reason. This is (according to the newadvent.org Catholic encyclopedia), "The name given to that period of human life at which persons are deemed to begin to be morally responsible."

On a related note, if you were a Roman Catholic kid "back in the day," particularly if you attended Catholic school but no longer consider yourself a Roman Catholic, the website quoted above can update you on how much things have changed over the years. Quite interesting.

{Fascinating. When do we get to the cool stuff?}

This is cool stuff, Dana. Any traditions that are actually cultural RBFDs with long histories behind them (as opposed to say kindergarten commencement ceremonies) provide firm foundations to stand on. Just as importantly, if you decide to reject a given tradition, it provides something real to rebel against. 

Being a rebel without a cause, or a clue, isn't romantic, it's merely embracing teenage angst as a lifestyle.  

Once upon a time in a country called the United States of America, there was a rough but widespread consensus. Although our country had/has its sins and flaws — having been created by H. sapiens, a notoriously flawed species — it was a product of something called Western Civilization which has roots that reach back thousands of years.

Thousands of years of having to get out of bed in the morning and do what you had to do to keep you and yours fed, clothed, sheltered, and as safe as possible given your circumstances at the time, resulted in some hard-learned lessons. 

Please be sure to take note of the italicized phrase circumstances at the time.

The traditional family, and some version/notion of a higher power — be it God, or at least ideals to strive for even once you're wise enough to realize you'll never quite reach them but are wise enough to keep trying anyway — worked/works rather well. 

A Judeo-Christian spiritual tradition provided/provides a moral/ethical framework that worked/works well even for those who were/are "culturally" Christian or Jewish (GRIN). 

{Your love of the slash can be/often is very annoying.} 

Caveat: Much sin has been committed in the name of religion, and of course, other religious/spiritual traditions can thrive in a Western country if its adherents are willing to live and let live, and like a civilized gentleperson, avoid stepping on the toes of others...as much as possible. 

{Fascinating. When do we get to the cool stuff?}

I also must point out that the current epidemic of "illegitimate" parenting (there are no illegitimate children) will not be cured by attempting to turn back time. It just ain't gonna happen. While we shouldn't neglect explaining to the kids the why and how of the nuclear family and other traditions with proven track records, as always, life happens while you're making other plans.   

We need to look reality in the eye, not fear change, and try to come up with real-world solutions that work in today's real world. I have a few ideas, but ideas are like butt...wrinkles, everybody has some, and I confess I have no world-changing revelations to offer.  

When I was a kid Wokies and Critical Theory(ies) were already loose in the world but hadn't reached critical mass. 

If a visitor from the future had arrived in a time machine and tried to convince people that in the relatively near future, the Woke Mind virus had escaped the lab (the universities) and had become a pandemic, they wouldn't believe it. 

But a time machine? Why not? Disneyland opened in '55 and included Tomorrowland where you could catch a virtual rocket to the moon; the future was so bright we were all wearing shades. In 1962, in the middle of the Space Race, JFK challenged the nation to put a man person on the moon by the end of the decade, why not? So we did.

{Who were we racing?}

Not a who, a what, the U.S.S.R., and Marxism, an ideology responsible for more deaths than all the other -ologies put together. We won, but certain diehards are hanging on in certain places Marxism being a reliable cover story for blood and power-thirsty thugs. 

And in the meantime, some frustrated intellectuals, pissed off because most of the proletariat preferred joining the bourgeoise to violent revolution, created Critical Theory since the Deplorables were/are too damn dumb to realize that everything wrong with their lives is the result of adhering to the traditional mores of Western Civilization...and caucasian, male, H. sapiens of course. 

Wokies of the world, unite!

{Fascinating, when do we get to the cool stuff?}    

Sorry, you know how I get...

In my semi-humble opinion, having enough choices, but not an excessive amount of choices, choices made without the mediation of computer/smartphone screens is why I think my analog childhood was cool.

The cultural Rules&Regs that existed at the time didn't all make sense, and some needed to be altered or even radically changed (the term Jim Crow immediately springs to mind). Still, a rough consensus is required if a household, or a country, is to run relatively smoothly and a kid can be a kid for a few minutes before being dragged to his/her/their first drag queen story hour. 

Burning down the house, or country, and starting from scratch because you believe that changing human nature, ASAP, ain't a big deal, is simply not a defensible position for any rational grownup to maintain and it's why we're in the fix we're in. 

Too many choices + too few restrictions - a sense of history = our current national mental health crisis. 

When I was a kid, other than window screens to take the edge off of the lack of air conditioning, the only video screen in our house was the one on our black-and-white TV. It came with an antenna with aluminum foil signal boosters but often stopped providing content after The Tonight Show was over. 

Music, books, video, etc used an analog format that by definition suffered from all sorts of limitations. This forced my fellow Boomers and me to spend an inordinate amount of time together in meatspace as cyberspace didn't exist yet.   

Fortunately, there were a lot of us and although almost everyone I knew had a mum and a dad — believe it or not, divorce was not something that was taken lightly, and single parents were relatively rare — we were left to our own devices for hours on end. 

For example, a lot of baseball (still the national pastime at the time) was played at/on "The Field" in my inner city neighborhood. It was just that, a field, in which well-worn paths connected the bases and a home run was a fly ball hitting the wall of the building that bordered the opposite end of The Field from home plate. 

The Field also featured an abandoned car for playing in and on. The top half of the field, which sloped down from the Boulevard of the Allies mentioned in our last episode, was more or less grass-covered and was used for all sorts of things, and there was no schedule. 

Somehow, this was accomplished without the benefit of adult supervision, and to the best of my knowledge no one was killed. Although injuries were commonplace, this was considered normal, life happens.  

Luckily, fleets of battered, rusty white vans manned by pedophiles roaming the roads in search of victims were not yet a thing. Being sent to a corner store several blocks from your house with a note (please give Mark a pack of unfiltered Kools and a loaf...) and some cash at a relatively tender age was not only reasonably safe (there were protocols in place for dealing with local ne'er-do-wells) it could be fun. 

"Hey, Mum, can I get a..."

No! and come straight home.

All the way there I'd be carefully scanning the environment for lost change. A penny could buy a penny pretzel stick, or gumball from a colorful machine that might also award you a prize. If you stumbled across the rare and elusive glass, quart soda pop bottle you could turn it in at the store for 5¢ and get five pieces of penny candy, or a full-sized candy bar, or a pack of baseball cards, or...

Everyone knew, knew of, or could easily find out who you were, or who your parents were, so you had to think twice about getting up to no good, or about disrespecting any adults you might encounter lest they turn up at your house to discuss things with your parents.

I remember this one time when... never mind. 

I could go on... I could mention more upsides from this period of my life and/or I could mention the downsides of life in the Stone Age. I could confess that I'm a bit of a hypocrite in that given a choice I wouldn't give up the internet, and many other technological advancements. 

I know how lucky I was given the terrible things that didn't happen to me, like not contracting polio for example, having been vaccinated. I believe I mentioned the power of dumb luck and good timing. 

Big BUT, as I apparently never tire of repeating, we Boomers accidentally tossed out the tot with the Jacuzzi water. 

I wish I knew of a way to fix it so that kids nowadays have a chance to be kids for a few minutes, with a full-time mum (or dad) till at least first grade and lots of other kids to play with instead of being parked in daycare, and then preschool (which incidentally, doesn't work). 

Have an OK day, 

Colonel Cranky

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Copyright 2024-Mark Mehlmauer-All rights reserved

  

  

When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth

Image by Jo Justino from Pixabay

Letters of eclectic commentary featuring the wit and wisdom of a garrulous geezer and {Dana}, an auditory hallucination and charming literary device.

  

                     ABOUT                                              GLOSSARY 

"Ward..." (pause) "Don't you think you're being a bit hard on the Beaver?" 

                                                                                  -June Cleaver     

                                                   

Dear Gentlereaders, 

Reminiscences (say that word six times fast) of a garrulous geezer.  

My first memory. It's late August 1953 and I'm a newborn in Mercy Hospital's nursery surrounded by other newborns. I have no sense of myself other than being a point of awareness surrounded by other points of awareness. I remember thinking that the lights were too bright. 

{Somehow I doubt that.}

Me too, Dana, but although vague and fuzzy, the memory persists.

WW2 had ended only eight years previously but as I grew up, from my perspective and that of my peers, the deadliest war in human history had occurred in a far distant past. My old man was in the service but never saw combat. I had uncles who did, but I never heard them talk about it.

We're now aware that many combat veterans came home with PTSD. Being members of the Greatest Generation most just "walked it off" as best they could and set about playing their part in the unprecedented economic boom my fellow Boomers and I grew up taking for granted.

Many Boomers still do, and are oblivious/indifferent to the current economic plight of the many, perhaps most, of the three generations that have followed them

The Korean War ended the month before I was born and although I'm certain I heard about it before I saw the movie that came out in 1970, that's the first time I can remember being really aware of it.

I was very aware of a war that the US had gotten itself entangled in, the one in Vietnam that had been going on long before we got there (officially at least). This was because I was in high school at the time and facing the possibility I might be drafted after graduating.

In fact, the possibility of being killed or crippled in Vietnam — which from what I could tell at the time, and have since confirmed, was a well-meaning, deadly blunder of a war on America's part — crossed my mind quite often.

For the record, the military draft effectively ended in 1971, the year I graduated; I dodged the bullet, so to speak. Roughly 200,000 of "my fellow Americans" did not. According to statista.com 58,220 were killed, and 153,303 were wounded.

My big brother, Eddie then, Ed now, wasn't there (officially at least) in the early sixties.

Lessons (I eventually) learned:

Never underestimate the power of dumb luck.

"You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." -not Leon Trotsky

{I don't think you're allowed to use the word crippled nowadays.}

Obviously you've never heard of the Grumpy Cripple.

I was brought home from Mercy Hospital, which is still there and has roots reaching back to 1843 to my first home (that I have no memory of, on Marion Street) in the Pittsburgh neighborhood we shared, which according to Wikipedia is called Uptown. This neighborhood wasn't, and isn't, up-scale, and has a number of AKAs: da Bluff, Soho, and Boyd's Hill.  

Da (Pittsburghese for the) Bluff is the only name I was aware of as a kid. This was the first of the four houses I lived in within Pittsburgh's city limits by the time I was 16 at which point we moved to the 'burbs. 

The Wikipedia article titled Uptown Pittsburgh (linked to above) contains the following passage, "...a residential community that was once flourishing during the first half of the 20th century." This is not quite accurate. 

{Mistakes in Wikipedia!?!} 

Along with most of Pittsburgh — with some notable exceptions like the Hill District next door to da Bluff which was flourishing in its own way till an urban renewal scheme destroyed it in order to save it from itself — was "flourishing" till the late '70s when the steel industry collapsed and the poop hit the fan.

Nowadays I'm prone to say the excrement hit the air conditioner, or the climate control system. Back then, I didn't personally know of anyone who had an air conditioner, or even a color TV come to think of it. But I don't wish to give a false impression, we didn't live in a ghetto of some sort.  

We had electric fans, and I knew of several people who had their "good" furniture in their "front room" sealed in hot, noisy but effective plastic slipcovers. Some people bought a cheap, tri-colored plastic screen that you could stick on your black and white TV and pretend it was a color TV.    

{Four different houses?}

Ed, Reda (no, that's not a misspelling), and their seven kids had to occasionally engage in some... um...creative geographic/financial maneuvering to keep the family fed, clothed, and sheltered. There had been other houses before I came along.  

My second home, which was literally perched on the edge of da Bluff, was on the Boulevard of the Allies (near Marion Street) and overlooked the Monongahela River.   

{Right. I think your poetic license should be revoked.}

Well, the house is no longer there, in fact, the entire block of homes has been erased and replaced by an expanded Mercy Hospital, but the rest — Boulevard of the Allies, Monongahela River — can be easily verified by a bit-o'-googlin'.

In retrospect, I had a very cool life till we moved across the semi-mighty Monongahela to the Sou'sidah Pittsburgh the summer before third grade. Not that it suddenly turned awful. Things just got a, um, little more real? A prelude to life in the real world?

I had no idea how lucky I was back then but I do now. In my defense, me and mine were subject to periodic outbreaks of Day Late Dollar Short Syndrome which often prevented me from living the life I thought I was entitled to. Yet somehow, I survived with a minimum of psychological damage.  

While I didn't resent my parents for this state of affairs, still don't, I had absolutely no appreciation of how hard they worked to give their kids the best possible life under the circumstances, I took it for granted, completely oblivious to what I now realize they must have gone through.

I have no memory of either one ever pointing out that compared to living through the Great Depression or WW2 we had it made. I thought it was fun when we had fried potatoes and sunny-side-up eggs for dinner the night before payday. I thought that being assigned toaster duty and making piles of toast with a cheap two-slice toaster, out of bread that was more air than bread for egg yolk dipping, was also fun.     

I took it for granted, and didn't really appreciate till decades later, that although at our peak there were nine of us at home my mom kept our extremely humble abodes clean and organized with minimal help from her husband or sons. 

Sorry, mum. While I'm at it, permit me to apologize to my three sisters, who were also expected to do their share of "woman's work."

In my defense again, if there were meetings of a secret society of toxic men, I was never invited, I suspect that for most men, and women, this was just the way things were at the time, the result of multiple millennia of H. sapiens lives happening to them while they were dreaming dreams and making other plans.

Well, I'm exceeding the word limit and...

{Wait-wait-wait! I've got questions, Sparky. First, what's with the warm and fuzzy Illustration up top there? Second, what's with the h at the end of Pittsburgh? Finally, what was so "cool" about being a working-class kid living on da Bluff in the 1950s in a household where there was often not quite enough money?}  

I'll answer the first two questions, but I'm saving the last one for next time, stay tuned.

The watercolor illustration above immediately made me think of my grade school textbooks when I came across it. 

I was lucky enough to be a child at the tail end of an era when it was possible to be a kid in an America that still believed in itself, and believed that kids should be sheltered from the real world as much as possible and for as long as possible.

Details next time, sta...

{Yeah, yeah, stay tuned.} 

Suffice it to say that even as a kid I would've found the pictured parents unrealistic, they're not even smoking. They don't have bags under their eyes, and they remind me of Ward and June Cleaver. But I would've been certain that someone's parents looked like that in the morning, and that someday, me and my beautiful wife would look like that in the morning. 

As for the h, pure serendipity. I remember being taught that while there was more than one Pittsburg in America, the one that I lived in was the only one spelled with an h at the end, which to this day, pleases me for no logically defensible reason. It turns out this is not technically true, but it's my truth, and I'm stickin' with it.     

Speaking of truth, urbanDICTIONARY.com defines my truth, an oft-used phrase nowadays, thusly: "Bullshit, a 'Lie.' Often associated with people who are not telling the truth, when they have no defense to back themselves up. Often the choice of words when a horrible liar is confronted with their own stupidity."

Technically, I couldn't agree more.   

Have an OK day, 

Colonel Cranky

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Copyright 2024 Mark Mehlmauer All rights reserved.      

  

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

 

Image by kalhh from Pixabay

Letters from Flyoverland featuring the wit and wisdom of a garrulous geezer and {Dana}, a persistent hallucination and charming literary device.

                     ABOUT                                              GLOSSARY 

"Time changes everything except something within us which is always surprised by change." -Thomas Hardy 

Dear Gentlereaders,

Yes, some of the "boilerplate" that formerly preceded my greeting is gone.  

"There are five parts of a friendly letter, and one optional part. The five include a heading, greeting, body, closing, and signature. There's also an optional postscript a writer may decide to include." -Sister Mary McGillicuddy

Yes, Virginia, in the distant past H. sapiens had to compose letters on sheets of unformatted paper, sometimes called stationary, and apply a format they had learned in grade school.

{So it's true, you've disinherited the Stickies!}

Nah, but they're all over 18 now and two have moved out so they've all been promoted to gentlereaders. None have left Canada's version of the Deep South yet (Northern Ohio) and our lives remain closely intertwined. Duuude moved to Tennessee to launch his life now that school's finally behind him but returned two minutes later, burned by some extended family members. 

I say finally because to him, as it did to his beloved grandfather, being done with mandatory schooling feels like having completed a prison sentence imposed on an innocent man. 

Fortunately, he's an easy-going, well-adjusted young man who doesn't hold grudges (unlike his beloved grandfather who often does despite his best efforts to the contrary) who plans on trying again once he can afford to do so without "help" from anybody.

Like me, he would prefer to live south of the Mason-Dixon line. Unlike me, he doesn't mind hot and humid weather as much as I do.    

There's a bit of drama in my life right now (some good, some bad), and given that I've recently obtained Cosmic Geezer perspective, I thought it would be a good time to make some changes. Not just in my column, but in other aspects of my life that I won't bore you with. Now that I've been blessed with CGP much has become clear.

And of course, we all gotta do what we need to do to maintain the illusion of control. 

{The illusion of control?}

The subject of a future column, stay tuned. Now, if you're still here, and still awake...

{Wait-wait-wait. What's with the title? What's this got to do with David Bowie?}

Nothing, the title is just clickbait. 

{You're gonna make people mad!}

People who are only interested in reading about Mr. Bowie will flee in short order. People who are interested in reading about Mr. Bowie but who are also naturally intelligent, inquisitive sorts who like to read the work of clever columnists will keep reading, at least for a bit. 

Perhaps I'll pick up a new fan. Hopefully, no one will try and track me down and kill me. I wouldn't mind an attempted cancelation, all publicity is good publicity if you spin it properly. The Information Age is also the All Show Biz all the Time Age. 

{Hmmm... You may be smarter than you look.}      

Good thing, right?

The classics never get old. For those of you reading this via the dead trees format: BA DUM TSSS!

{Hi-LAR-ious. Can we hope for some meat on this sandwich?}

The Wall Street Journal, as my millions of regular readers know, is my personal paper of record. 

Although the news division now is forced to demean itself by drifting slightly leftwards... 

And featuring slightly more in the way of celebrity/fashion/self-help/sensationalist/doom-mongering shtuff that many H. sapiens can't seem to ever get enough of to maintain circulation numbers (or at least I hope that's why they're doing it),

They still also publish the sort of high-quality journalism they're famous for, including stories that are not widely reported on elsewhere but should be.  

For example, the Emperor's minions, lackeys, and sneaky students are stealing our chips.

{Frito Lay products are as popular and widely distributed in China as they are here. Personally, I can't get enough Roasted Fish, why do they need to steal our chips?}

I'm talkin' computer chips, specifically Nvidia AI chips. "Nvidia’s chips are highly coveted for their ability to handle the massive computations needed to train AI systems that are critical to China-U.S. tech rivalry." -Raffaele Huang/WSJ 

{Just a sec', I'll be right back... Hey, I enjoy reading lengthy articles about the technology sector as much as the next guy person. Still, I think you'd be doing your gentlereaders a public service by providing a summary.}

Easy Peasy, here's another quote from the article. 

"The student is part of a barely concealed [widely known, easily accessible] network of buyers, sellers and couriers bypassing the Biden administration’s restrictions aimed at denying China access to Nvidia’s advanced AI chips..."

{Student, what student?}

The article begins by describing how a Chinese student studying in Singapore brought home a half dozen Nvidia AI chips when he flew home to China for a vacation for which he was paid $100 each by a Chinese middlemanperson. 

Depending on the particular chip, they will be resold for roughly 20 to 30k — each. 

"The Commerce Department, which oversees enforcement of the U.S. restrictions, didn’t respond to requests for comment." 

Given that we're fighting Cold War Two, even if The Fedrl Gummit doesn't like to acknowledge it — we shouldn't needlessly risk offending a country that supplies slave labor (and lots of customers) to build us cool sneakers and smartphones — you'd think we'd be all over this. 

{Hey, If you would stop ignoring the artificial intelligence built into your spell checker you would know that you should have written you would think that we would be all over this. You'd and we'd are some pretty ugly lookin' contractions...just sayin'.}

On an unrelated note, I'm officially endorsing Camalla Harris and Pete Buttigieg for president and vice president (respectively) this year. 

Kamala Harris and Pete Buttigieg, vote for them and we'll all win big! I'm on a fixed income so I wrote a slogan in lieu of a donation.

{AI wants you to write instead of in lieu of in lieu of.} 

She's a woman, of a couple of different colors, and he belongs to the LGBT+ club. Between them, that's three (or four, depending on how you count) different historically marginalized minorities. Most importantly, there's no trace of Satan's inadvertent minions, straight white males. 

Being a straight white male myself, this is my way of apologizing for being responsible for everything that's wrong with the world. 

{Pete who?}

Have an OK day, 

Colonel Cranky

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