While many others are losing their common sense, tolerance, and humanity,

trolling, suing, and physically attacking strangers in public, I continue to support peace, reason, and diversity.

We know that nobody is perfect, but that is no excuse for dumping others to satisfy our egos, jealousy, and what Golding called “the Beast within”.

Screwball Central has major consciousness, thinking, and Big Picture problems. There is a movement afoot to deconstruct and tear down everything including the benefits that Western civilization has given us. To reduce everything to the lowest, dumbest common denominator which Vonnegut wrote about, presciently, in “Harrison Bergeron” and Birkerts in The Gutenberg Elegies.

There is also a strong desire to move back to the ‘master-race’ colonial era and eliminate all civil rights, particularly among women and non-whites. In short, a return to injustice, inequality, and public racism.

The Western moral compass is in great jeopardy and will be utterly and irrevocably smashed if Trump is irrationally re-elected, eluding justice and finishing the job of destroying the U.S., the West, global economy, and enabling the other dictators and crazies of the world from taking over.

The world, as we knew it, changed forever with Covid, but all we value and hold sacred and necessary for survival and success will come to an end if Trump gets in.

That he would control the nuclear button should terrify everyone on the planet yet again. He is the crazy madman of Edwin Brock’s “Five Ways to Kill a Man”.

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A sign of public places decline

are the many men spitting shamelessly in public, ignoring former no-spitting city ordinances. Like so many other courtesy signs fallen by the wayside.

I’d have to add, though, that professional athletes and media have vetted spitting on camera and the public takes its cues from its highly-overpaid professional athletes.

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Wordsworth: “We feel that we are greater than we know.”

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Looking FW to those quiet spring-summer-fall Sunday mornings

at my daughter’s place in Ellerslie.

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Easter, 2024

Skye celebrating rebirth, renewal, hope, and spring.

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The Wonderful 1981 British TV Series “Brideshead Revisited”

Brideshead Revisited, a 1981 British period series which adapts Evelyn Waugh's novel of the same name. The series spans the 1920s to the early 1940s and stars Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews.

that made Jeremy Irons–right–a star. (Here, with Anthony Andrews–left–as Sebastian in his best-ever role)

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“They say, Charly,

Charly (1968) - IMDb

true love is letting go.”

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Buddy Knox, 1957

Rockabilly star put down Manitoba roots – Winnipeg Free Press

I will never forget my 17-year-old aunt bringing this album home when she lived with us for a few years before getting married. I got to play the hits from it, “Party Doll” and “Hula Love” (songs on YouTube), which Buddy wrote. Buddy was originally from Texas, toured many years after and, strangely enough, settled in the small Manitoba town of Dominion City near the North Dakota border.

Lyrics for “Hula Love”

On the isle of Filalilla out Hawaii way
A hula maiden gay strolled by a moonlit bay
There come a to court her over the water
From a savage Zingazulu land
A Bolo chieftain grand sang her this lay

And he sang
Hulu Hawaii hula
Smile on your zing gang a zula
Moon shine above
On their sweet jungle love
For you my bolo is swinging
For you my love song I’m singing
Come be my Hula Hula love

But the chieftain from the peaceful Filalilla land
Would not give him her hand
Her lover took his stand
Through the rattle of the battle
As she heard his sweet voice calm and true
They fled in his canoe over water blue

And he sang
Hulu Hawaii hula
Smile on your zing gang a zula
Moon shine above
On your sweet jungle love
For you my bolo is swinging
For you my love song I’m singing
Come be my Hula Hula love

………………………….

Despite the relative innocence and romance of the lyric, it would likely be considered politically incorrect “Brave New World”.

But, I mostly recall the tricky mouthful of lyrics that Buddy sang a la Dr. Seuss rhyming books and “The Auctioneer” classic song.

 

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Like clockwork, whenever someone peeled an orange in the kitchen…

as you started to peel it, the molecules began to spread outward and instantly you heard what sounded like a head alerted on a bed upstairs, four feet hitting the floor, and a mad dash down the ten-step stairway, and suddenly, there would be a black female miniature poodle on the kitchen floor beside one, looking up with very intense eyes and tongue anxiously wiping across her mouth.

(Hasn’t happened for 18 years, but I remember this as clearly as those many times peeling oranges with a sensitive-nosed dog in the house.)

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In the closet of a mailroom on the Wednesday before Easter/spring break,

the three of them crammed in, emptying their mail slots.

One of the men said to her, “I’d like to take you to lunch tomorrow.”

She turned instantly to the second man and said, smiling, “Why don’t you come, too?”

“Three’s a crowd,” the second man replied.

“Ah, come on, it’ll be fun.”

“I don’t think that was the original plan.”

And so he bowed out.

After the long weekend on Tuesday morning, there was excitement among staff at school that the lunch couple was suddenly engaged.

(The kind of thing that happened at work more than once that I can recall in my 30 year teaching career.)

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