I (didn't) Love Lucy...

But I do now

                                                Zelda Lopez/Pinterest

This is a weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandkids — the Stickies — eventual selves to advise them and haunt them after they've become grups and/or I'm deleted.   

Warning: This column is rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — Perusal by kids, callowyutes, or grups may result in a debilitating intersectional meltdown.  

About

Glossary 

Erratically Appearing Hallucinatory Guest Star: Dana — A Gentlereader  

"The secret of staying young is to live honestly, eat slowly, and lie about your age." -Lucille Ball

Dear (eventual) Grandstickies and Great-Grandstickies (and Gentlereaders),

I recently watched and thoroughly enjoyed a movie produced by Amazon titled Being the Ricardos. It's about a week in the life of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnez at the height of their groundbreaking (and massive hit) sitcom that ran from 1951 to 1957, I Love Lucy.    

Fun fact: I Love Lucy was the most-watched show in America for four of those six years.

I didn't premier till '53 and I was only four when the original show went off the air, but it continued/continues on in various and sundry iterations. One of those iterations was the seemingly endless repeats of the original show that I was exposed to in the sixties... and the seventies... and the, well, you get the idea.

The repeats are still running, 70 years later, and there's even a "National I Love Lucy Day" that's celebrated on October 15th, the day the first show aired in 1951. I never cared for the show in the past and I don't care for the show now.

In the show's defense, I'm not a fan of physical comedy, but Lucille Ball is an acknowledged master of the genre, so whaddaiknow? 

Although the movie is filmed in the currently ubiquitous Gloomyvision (which is like watching a movie/TV show while wearing yellow sunglasses) it defies several other current conventions.

There's no softcore porn or stylized violence (the Blood & Bouncing Boobies school of filmmaking). 

There's actual character development.

There's an understandable plot that doesn't require you to take notes to follow.

There's snappy/witty (as opposed to comic book level) dialogue. 

There's normal pacing that falls somewhere between 200 mph (for people with radically diminished attention spans due to social media addictions) and slooow, life sucks, the world's about to end, have you ever tried heroin? pacing. 

There's...

{You're a hypocrite. I know for a fact you're a fan of bouncing boobies, and Deadwood, your favorite/best TV show ever made, is full of violence.}

Not stylized violence, not violence for its own sake, as in let's take the family to the Collosium this weekend, Chlamydia, I hear there's a new production of Christians v. Lions in town.

And as to boobies, I've admitted in the past that I suffer from toxic male gaze syndrome — i.e., I'm a normal straight dude — and I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the many awokened, overworked/underpaid actresses willing to get naked when it's "necessary to the story." 

After all, what's more common than watching other people get naked and/or copulating in real life?

{And yet there are comparatively few, um, dangling participles on display in movies and on TV shows. It's almost as if men and women are actually different and everyone knows it... but that can't be right, right?}

Careful, Dana. The next thing you know you'll be saying that women carefully consider dressing however they please just because so many men suffer from testosterone poisoning. Personally, I'm a firm supporter of female empowerment. 

{Absabalutely, but we've wandered completely off the path. You're supposed to be explaining why you've come around to loving Lucy.}  

I do love Lucy, the real Lucy, assuming Amazon's biopic is relatively accurate, and I assume it is since her daughter has gone out of her way to praise and support the movie.

She was a woman unafraid to stand up to the corporate weenies, all of whom were men, in an era when women were supposed to do what they were told, children were delivered by storks and double beds for married couples (with communists hiding under them) was the standard in movies and on TV.

As Wikipedia puts it she went from "...being cast as a chorus girl or in similar roles, with lead roles in B-pictures and supporting roles in A-pictures" to becoming "...the first woman to run a major television studio, Desilu Productions, which produced many popular television series, including Mission: Impossible and Star Trek."

In between, she starred in a television show watched by, on average, 11,000,000 families every week when there were only about 15,000,000 TV sets in America. 

In the interest of balance, speaking of daughters, and lest I be accused of being a glass half full fool — if you're into "slooow, life sucks, the world's about to end, yellow, have you ever tried heroin?" sorts of movies (with non-ending endings), The Lost Daughter is also available on Netflix. 

The critics love it. Awards are inevitable.

Poppa loves you,

Have an OK day

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Music Lovers Beware

The Bezoid never sleeps

This is a weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandkids — the Stickies — eventual selves to advise them and haunt them after they've become grups and/or I'm deleted.   

Warning: This column is rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — Perusal by kids, callowyutes, or grups may result in a debilitating intersectional meltdown.  

About

Glossary 

Erratically Appearing Hallucinatory Guest Star: Dana — A Gentlereader  

"After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music." -Aldous Huxley

Dear (eventual) Grandstickies and Great-Grandstickies (and Gentlereaders),

Music lovers — full-timers, part-timers, and once in a great whilers — are as fragmented as just about anybody trying to survive life on the shores of the ever-rising Information (and choices) Ocean.

Most of you zany young people, that is to say, anyone under the age of 50 or so from my current perspective, and even many of my fellow sexy senior citizens (SSCs) are familiar/comfortable with MP3 music files even though they've only been around for 30 years.  

I suspect that there's no shortage of members of both groups who don't know/don't care that when they're "streaming" or downloading music that they're listening to MP3s, or allegedly slightly better formats that sound roughly the same — awful. 

Audiophiles, on the other hand, who, if they deign to stream at all, will go to a great deal of trouble to download "lossless" (or at least less brutally compressed) music files of one sort or another to get music that's as least as good as listening to a virtual CD — preferably better.    

{Wait-wait-wait. I have an enormous collection of MP3s that I accumulated in the 80s that sound great to me. I love Spotify and...}

To paraphrase/recontextualize a Louis Armstrong quote I bumped into somewhere but can't find, Dana, if you like it it's good music. 

There are SSCs, and younger people, that still listen to, and even purchase, actual CDs (40-year-old technology) in spite of the "jewel cases" they're usually packaged in that are made out of a type of plastic that immediately starts decomposing as soon as one manages (4.3 minutes on average) to claw the shrink wrap off.

There are fringe groups that own and listen to cassette tapes (60-year-old technology) which have made a bit of a comeback of late. I heard about a dude that retired to Elbonia that has a climate-controlled vault bulging with 8-track tapes. 

There's a bunch o' Boomers (and a subgroup of young white males) that only listen to classic rock stations that have been playing the same couple of hundred songs since the late sixties.

{What about vinyl LPs? They've made a big comeback and some people say they sound the best.} 

No, they don't, but far be it from me... 

Anyways, they've made a relatively modest comeback because some people are willing to pay $25 for fresh vinyl, some people enjoy scrounging for old vinyl, and certain people are resistant to change.

{Yeah, most Boomers and...} 

Some members of this group have too much time and/or money on their hands, like this guy.

And finally, we have me, a wild-eyed eccentric and rugged individualist who has turned his back on overpriced Apple products and overly complicated PCs and embraced the inexpensive/uncomplicated Chromebox, the desktop version of the now-famous Chromebook.

{You're my hero.} 

A man who, thanks to appropriate peripheral devices including a decent pair of powered speakers and subwoofer attached to said Chromebox — and subscriptions to certain video streaming services — created a poor man's entertainment center (PMEC)/home office in his chambers that fulfills all his needs with one exception, CD-quality music.   

{Um... You do realize that you can attach a CD player to a Chromebox, book, whatever, right?} 

Yes, but then I'd have to own/maintain CDs, I want to "stream" my music out of the cloud. After all, it's all out there, or at least will be eventually. 

{Um... Amazon Prime members can get CD (and even better) quality audio via something called Amazon music UNLIMITED. $7.95/month gets you access to a library of 75,000,000 (and growing) songs. It's only two bucks more for non-members.}

Indeed, which brings us to the title and subtitle of this column. 

{By the by, who's the Bezoid?}

Jeff (all's fair in love and retail) Bezos. 

For one brief, shining moment I thought l could live out my days without having to complicate my life or my room: the PMEC complete at last. I'm running low on allocated words so permit me to skip to the bottom line. 

CD-level audio via Amazon streaming is not possible for Chromebook/box owners. As to why, well, good luck getting a straight answer on that one.

{Well... buy a cheap PC then and...}

I don't want or need a cheap PC, and here's another fun fact. An inexpensive PC, or an overpriced Apple will get ya CD-level audio (which Amazon calls HD sound). 

But Amazon boasts you can also access Ultra HD sound, better than CD, and you can — if you purchase a hardware add-on or two, which they forget to mention.

{Huh... but I know for a fact it'll give me CD-level sound on my smartphone...}

Sure, but again, the elusive/alleged Ultra is not possible. And, unless you've got expensive headphones and/or the ability to connect your phone to a (not cheap) pair of speakers, you're not gonna notice much of a difference. 

{Oh... well still, there's something to be said for access to all those songs for less than ten bucks a month.}

True dat. Still, it'd be nice if a company that's supposed to be all about customer service always played it straight. 

{Man, you are a crank.} 

Poppa loves you,

Have an OK day

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The DEA

Your tax dollars at work

                                      Image by pasja1000 from Pixabay 

This is: A weekly column consisting of letters to my perspicacious progeny. I write letters to my grandkids — the Stickies — eventual selves to advise them and haunt them after they've become grups and/or I'm deleted.   

Warning: This column is rated SSC — Sexy Seasoned Citizens — Perusal by kids, callowyutes, or grups may result in a debilitating intersectional meltdown.  

About

Glossary 

Erratically Appearing Hallucinatory Guest Star: Dana — A Gentlereader  

"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal" -Richard M. Nixon

Dear (eventual) Grandstickies and Great-Grandstickies (and Gentlereaders),

I thought I was well on my way to becoming an expert on the Mexican drug cartels until I was halfway through the latest season of Narcos: Mexico (Season 3) on Netflix when I found out there isn't going to be a fourth season.

I was hoping that I might be able to make a few bucks by passing myself off as a consultant to the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) and maybe get a small taste of some of their $3 billion (and change) budgeted bucks. 

The current season, historically speaking, ends in the late 1990s because according to one of its co-creators, Carlo Benard, the story of how we arrived at the situation Mexico now finds itself in has prevailed ever since. 

In an article in the Hollywood Reporter, Bernard is quoted as saying that "...stopping at the moment where we had delivered the world that we now live in today made sense, thematically and narratively.”

The "world that we now live in" is a world in which the cartels control as much as 40% of Mexican territory and profits from smuggling people across the border is a "billion-dollar business."

The war on drugs has been raging for 48 years. We pulled out of the Graveyard of Empires (Afghanistan) after only 20 futile years. 

The DEA was created in 1973 by President Richard Nixon by merging some existing government agencies together. Nowadays it employs over 10,000 people, and as mentioned, has an annual budget of over $3,000,000,000.

On their website you can "...report what appears to you as a possible violation of controlled substances laws and regulations." Given that the DEA considers the planet Earth its jurisdiction they must use a helluva algorithm.   

They also have a recently reopened museum you can visit the next time you find yourself in D.C. and are looking for something to visit besides the same old, same old tourist traps like the Lincoln Memorial.  

"After a two-year renovation, the all-new DEA museum is now open." It's free, open Tuesday thru Saturday from 10 to 4, and has its own website. The gift shop isn't open yet but they're working on it. 

{Five days a week from ten to four? You should try to get a job working there.} 

Nah, I'd have to live in the Swamp, Dana. If I were a consultant I'd only have to show up in D.C. once in a while and take a bureaucrat or two out for an overpriced but deductible lunch. 

A current exhibit at the museum features a Harley confiscated from the Hells Angels that demonstrates the importance of asset seizures to the law enforcement community in fighting crime.

From a Wikipedia entry: "In 2014 law enforcement took more property than burglars did from American citizens."

There's another Wikipedia entry about America's first national prohibition of a recreational pharmaceutical, "...a nationwide constitutional ban on the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages from 1920 to 1933." 

In the section that describes the increase of various and sundry crimes across the board caused by the prohibition of alcohol, it mentions that the budget of the Bureau of Prohibition tripled in the course of the 1920s.  

Sound familiar? 

{So what are you trying to say? We should legalize all drugs, even the obviously dangerous and addictive ones?}

Nope. I'm saying we should decriminalize the use of all drugs like they did in Portugal — 20 years ago — where selling drugs is a criminal offense, but using them is an administrative offense. Drugs addicts are considered to be a public health problem, not criminals, and are dealt with accordingly. 

The experiment has been a hooge success.   

{Interesting article... But Mexico would still be a mess, and the cartel's best customers, us, would still be awash in hard drugs.}

Easy-peasy. All we have to do is invade Mexico. 

We can set them free, do something about violent crime rates (particularly femicide), get a much smaller southern border to deal with, and...

{We don't do that sort of thing anymore, we...}

And we can tell China that until they stop exporting precursor chemicals for the manufacture of fentanyl, methamphetamine, and the like to the Western Hemisphere we're going to ban all Chinese imports. 

{We don't do that sort of thing anymore either...and we'd have to start making all sorts of stuff ourselves.} 

Yeah, wouldn't that be awful?

Poppa loves you,

Have an OK day

 

P.S. Although it's legal to smoke marijuana in 36 states if a doctor prescribes it, 18 states have approved "recreational use," and the Apocolypse has yet to commence, the DEA ain't letting up on its effort to eradicate the Devil's weed. 

A weed that can easily be grown by drug lords — or grandma to treat her glaucoma and liven up things at the senior center.

A GAO report estimates that the DEA spent roughly $17,000,000 a year from 2015 to 2018 on its Domestic Cannabis Eradication/Suppression Program (just try to get more recent numbers, I dare you). 

Bottom line? The DEO can't account for how all the money was spent or what the results were. "DEA officials said they are now working to address this issue, but they have not developed a plan with specific actions and time frames for completion."

Scroll down to share this column/access oldies. If you enjoy my work, and no advertising, please consider buying me a coffee via PayPal/credit-debit card.    

Feel free to comment and set me straight on Cranky's Facebook page. I post my latest columns on Saturdays, other things other days. Cranky don't tweet.