Don’t Pet the Fluffy Cow

05. June 2025 · Write a comment · Categories: Domestic

Wee Jamie, the wonder grandson, has a whole room full of toys – and most of them have not been purchased by an indulgent grandparent, but rather his mother, who revels in thrift stores and invariably emerges from the premises, triumphantly bearing a rather choice item that she got for a relative pittance. Such as the collections of originally high-end Coach or Dooney & Burke handbags which she bought here and there for $5-25 dollars which are valued on EBay for about four times that, or more. Seriously, I think the guy at the local luggage, shoe and handbag repair place wants to follow her into one of these emporiums, just to get a handle on how she manages to spot the good stuff. This is the woman who picked up a pair of earrings out of the 1$ bin of costume jewelry at a booth at the Blanco monthly market and had them turn out to be real emeralds and 18 carat gold.

Anyway, she buys Fisher-Price Little People sets for Wee Jamie, and the one which he currently loves the most – or which he plays with the most often – is the jungle adventure set. There are a number of buttons on it, which elicit a chirpy voice telling the kids about how neato wild animals are, and suggesting short, happy, and helpful encounters with the jungle critters: one suggests that a hippo will helpfully carry you across the river, and the  other that a chimpanzee will share bananas with you if you are hungry. Talk about fantasies … in real-no-kidding jungle wilderness, hippos are horribly dangerous (being large, nearsighted and hostile) and chimpanzees are vicious and murderous primates several times stronger than the average male of our species.

And in fact, bears are not cuddly, friendly creatures either, so WHY do we give children stuffed bears to play with and give them the notion that a thousand-pound brown bear is Christopher Robin’s silly friend Pooh? I know – fantasy, and story-telling, which is all very nice in it’s place, but it would be nice if at some point we got more realistic about wildlife to our offspring generally. Look, it’s not just Australia where all the wildlife is planning to kill humans. The larger mammals in the rest of the world are, especially the big carnivorous ones with lots of claws and sharp teeth. We are tasty and made of meat, and even the larger herbivores can be hazardous to humans, as every park ranger working our popular wilderness parks can attest. The rank stupidity of park visitors who have to be warned against trying to pet the buffalo or park their children close to the wandering bear to get that perfect photo shot has not been exaggerated. There is a reason such people are dubbed “tourons.”

Thus endeth the lessen for today. I wonder if the jungle adventure Little People toy can be reprogrammed to say something like “The hippo is huge, stupid and dangerous – build yourself a canoe” and “The chimpanzee will not share – he’s rip your face off, so pick your own banana.”

Recollections of the Newsmaking Machinery

22. May 2025 · Comments Off on Recollections of the Newsmaking Machinery · Categories: Memoir, Random Book and Media Musings

This blog entry by another author reminded me irresistibly of the period in late 1978 when there was a considerable turnover in the Vatican – in that a long-serving Pope passed away of more or less natural causes, followed by the usual ceremonies, followed again by the lengthy ceremonial ritual of the college of cardinals selecting and installing another pontiff. All these occurrences made for considerable news coverage through our network lead station, FEN-Tokyo, and some inadvertent hilarity on my part, listening to one of their staff announcers (owner of a magnificent resonant speaking voice and the most vacant skull ever recorded in the possession of an AFRTS broadcast specialist) repeatedly mangle the phrase “papal encyclical” in news releases. There was a good reason – several volumes of them, actually – that this broadcaster was famed as “The Ted Baxter of the Far East Network. He was a legend in his time…

Lo and behold, after  weeks of noting all these stories out of the Vatican (it was a very dull period with regard to major news developments in international news, I think) … Pope John Paul I passed away after barely three weeks and change in office. (The shortest Papacy on record, it seems – even counting some of the very earliest in the times of Roman persecution or later corrupt Renaissance shenanigans.) One of my NCO supervisors mused, “I guess the excitement was too much for him,” while my friend Marsh wailed despairingly, “You know what this means?! Another month of Dead Pope!!”

Art With a Capital-A

15. May 2025 · Comments Off on Art With a Capital-A · Categories: Uncategorized

The topic of art came up on a long discussion thread at Sarah Hoyt’s blog the other day, when another commenter posted a YouTube video explaining why the late painter Thomas Kinkade was at once so despised by art world professionals and yet so very popular among people who bought the prints of his paintings. I posted my own opinion, when the thread made a side turn into a discussion of what ordinary people chose to put on their walls to contemplate daily – and that was that Kinkade painted pictures that were popular with the consuming public and that he made a mint at doing so, commercially. This is apparently not the point of art, according to the professional art world. Art with a capital A ought to challenge, mystify, or discombobulate the public, and either the filthy rich or the government ought to pay for it … not the uneducated and unappreciative rubes who merely fork out their tax dollars for public art which looks like bronze or cement turds, an engorged lower colon, a pile of scrap metal or an overweight woman about to throw a performative tantrum in a fast-food establishment.

So – goopy painted landscapes of gardens, thatched cottages, lighthouses by the ocean, pretty churches with light shining out of stained glass windows, and misty cityscapes adorned with little flecks of suspiciously fluorescent paint are just … too crassly contemptable for words in the eyes of critics who think a banana duct-taped to a wall and the  artists unnamed bed are just the ticket to fame and fortune in the official art world. That Thomas Kinkade made a bomb of money appealing to the masses is an unbearable insult to the Capital A-art crowd.

It’s just that most of us really don’t care to play the multi-million-dollar Capital-A-art money-laundering game. We don’t buy something to put on the wall to impress our friends with having spent a bomb on something that we suspect is just part of a scam, anyway. We don’t want to be challenged, or baffled or lectured every time we look at the stuff on our walls: we’d much rather have something pleasant, comforting, or even inspiring to look at. The commenters who participated in that side-thread all had things that they liked on the walls of their personal space: paintings and drawings inherited from artistic family members, things they had done themselves, or purchased from local artists they liked. I have a collection of prints that I bought as an impoverished junior airman in Japan; prints by a mildly renown mid-century artist, Toshi Yoshida. I loved them for the colors, and the traditional look of the scenes that he did: gardens, landscapes, city scenes. All very restful, and to me, aesthetically pleasing. I bought most of them unframed and at a bare-bones price, from a vendor who appeared from Tokyo once a month at the bazaar sponsored by the wives’ clubs. I did splurge and bought two of them framed – views of mountain country, covered in snow, with tree-branches piled in fluffy white, and pale blue shadows reflecting just what a snowy countryside looked like to me. Later, after I had spent a year in Greenland, I brought the unframed ones to a local art-framer that Mom knew, and we picked out individual mats for each and framed them all in museum-quality glass and simple wood frames. I am still not tired of looking at them. Should the house ever catch fire, after Wee Jamie, my daughter and the cats, if I had time enough for rescuing anything else, I would grab my Yoshida prints.

 

The Fun of Primary Historical Sources

09. May 2025 · Comments Off on The Fun of Primary Historical Sources · Categories: Memoir, Old West, Random Book and Media Musings

I am working like a busy little literary beaver on the second of the YA frontier western series, the Kettering Family chronicles. I thought from the first to make the main and viewpoint character always a tween or teen, but making it a series and having the story romp over twenty years of interesting pre-civil war events in the various gold and silver rushes while still maintaining the viewpoint of a teen or tween. The work-around for that challenge means that now each book is planned to focus on the adventures and characters of consecutive Kettering children…

Anyway, the main character in the work in progress is Sally Kettering’s little brother Jon, and the early and curious days of the California gold rush. It appears as if the plot will keep the family in Sacramento. Which will be a nice change for me, as Sacramento is one of the places where I lived in real life. Only for a single year as it turned out – but I did enjoy the heck out of living there, visiting Old Town and the Railway Museum, as well as actually traveling up into the gold rush country – Coloma and Placerville – a couple of times. (To Truckee and Lake Tahoe, as well, if only briefly.) California was a livable, interesting, affordable and relatively sane place to live in once upon a time, so I have those recollections and local specific knowledge to draw upon.

But the other element is – old local histories. I have found a couple on Googlebooks, scanned and collected volumes retrieved from dusty and unfrequented and likely deserted library stacks. The closer in time to events recorded, is all the better for my purposes. Also, the more unfocused and gossipy is even better, for that becomes precious little nuggets, bits and bobs and curious personalities which make for a more authentic read, once carefully worked into my own narrative. I downloaded and read about a dozen 19th century Civil War women’s memoirs for That Fateful Lightning, even though I had a goodly number of professional modern historians’ references. It’s the same with this book – those chatty, rambling, first-hand accounts are pure gold.

Frivolous Expenditures

28. April 2025 · Comments Off on Frivolous Expenditures · Categories: Domestic

The final mortgage payment was made early this month – thirty years and never missed or had a late payment. Yes, the light at the end of the financial tunnel, bright and so very, very restful. And it also meant that late this month I could purchase a couple of nice-to-have items, one of which I had been considering for quite a while – to whit, a Sodastream unit, to make carbonated beverages. I’ve never really liked soft drinks, but I do like plain carbonated water; no sweetener, no flavorings. The bottled kind tends to go flat almost as soon as the bottle is opened. Although the plain unflavored HEB house brand in aluminum cans is acceptable, the cans take up space on the shelf and in the recycle bin. A couple of years ago, we tried out a countertop unit that made carbonated beverages, (A freebie from Amazon Vine) and it was ok, but the CO2 cartridges were expensive and didn’t really last very long at all – so, back to the drawing board. I had heard good things about Sodastream, not the least of it being that they are made in Israel. So, I ordered a Sodastream package from Amazon which came with three one-liter bottles, two CO2 cartridges and two small bottles unsweetened cherry and lime flavors. A couple of days of use and I am pretty happy with it. The CO2 cartridge attached very easily, the bottle of cold water hooks up readily, and you can choose three degrees of bubblization. Now as soon as we go through the last three cases of HEB-brand bubbly water that my daughter bought because there was an offer to buy two, get the third one free – we’ll be Sodastreaming, exclusively.

The other semi-frivolous purchase was a bookshelf… you do know that we have a lot of books? Yeah, I was scrolling down through a friends’ FB page, and encountered a short video ad for a tall, six-level rotating bookshelf, which supposedly could hold 300+ books, while only taking up a small amount of floor space. Well, my attention was grabbed. The house is small, the existing bookshelves overflow as it is, what with the collections for research,  general history,  Texiana,  books for pleasure reading, those copies of books published by the Teeny Publishing Bidness, Wee Jamie’s overflowing collection … and one of the bookshelves so designated was an inexpensive folding number that I bought in Greece which has begun to fall apart. And that corner of the home office was in a horrendous state anyway … So, I found the exact same six-level rotating bookshelf on Amazon and ordered it. Putting it together was a bit tricky; it took the efforts of both of us and a stepstool. While it’s constructed of thick bamboo panels, there are reinforced panels and lots of flat-head screws connecting all shelves and the upright panels. I’ve loaded in all the levels, starting at the bottom and so far, it’s holding up well. The unit only occupies a small footprint, relatively speaking, rotates easily enough, and each of the six levels holds anywhere from 35-25 books. (More, in the case of very skinny volumes, less when it comes to brick-thick doorstoppers like J. Martin Hunter’s Trail-drivers of Texas.) Swapping out the old bookshelf for the tall rotating shelf meant reorganizing the existing shelves, rearranging stuff, throwing away things like owners’ manuals for appliances which had long since worn out and junked, or been given away … and turning up odd items, like some letters from my grandmothers posted to me in the early 1980s, an envelope of photo negatives processed at the AAFEs in Greece, and a Laura Ashley home goods catalog from 1986. No, I’m not a hoarder. I just loved the Laura Ashley English country cottage look. I kept that catalog as a memento and wish that I had also saved out some ‘80s Banana Republic catalogues. I loved the original,  high-quality Banana Republic items, and their catalogs were literate and fun to read…

I am already thinking about another rotating shelf…

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