1758 Ray the Egg Man's Sunny Side Down

Ray the short order cook made the best egg sandwich north of E.57th but they fired him, anyway. One day he comes to work, sick as a dog. Coughs all over the place. Everyone complains. Can’t eat stuff from that cyclone of germs Ray’s transmitting.

He’d called in sick the night before.  Spiro told him he had to come in or be fired.  So he came in.  And they canned him anyway.  But not until he’d finished his shift.

This is what you call a setup. Setups are common enough in the world of small businessmen in the high rent district.  Ray got even.  No one disputed his claim for unemployment comp.  And when his near-pneumonia cleared, he landed quickly because … well, he made the best egg sandwich north of 57th.

A legendary egg guy with a rep.  Tens of thousands of breakfast-at-your-desk breakfasters on the upper east side.  No problem for this guy getting work and above market compensation.

Before he signed on at the new place, he made one thing clear:  “When I call in sick, it’s because I’m too sick to work.”

But Ray also had a dark side.  Something with a teen girl in a stairwell in an apartment house.  “She came on to me,” he once said.

Nah.  She’s a kid. A child.  “No. She came on to me.”

“You’re the grownup. You want to be flipping eggs in The Tombs?”

This was not the worst kind of child abuse.  But it does point to one way “older guys” like Ray get into trouble.  (Older in this case meant 24.)

Egg man, she came on to you because you gave her the two things no one else did: Attention and a sense of protection.  It’s what kids want. They don’t get it from home, they’ll find it somewhere else.  And if she came on to you… which probably she didn’t, it was those needs and not yours she was trying to satisfy.

Ray,  unrequited in his post adolescent stupor, avoided jail time when Concetta spilled the beans to her BFF who spilled the beans to her brother who spilled the beans to her mother who spilled the beans to her father who spilled the beans to a community organizer dressed in medium blue and an L.A. baseball hat and carrying a Louisville Slugger whom he joined one afternoon to have a sitdown with Ray as he got off the bus.

Well, not exactly a sitdown. One of the three had a lie down and two others walked away. And nobody saw nuthin’.

Good thing Ray was still on unemployment comp at the time.  When the labor department asked him why he wasn’t out looking for work, he said he had an excuse.  He was in the hospital for three of the previous four weeks.

SHRAPNEL:

--Some years ago, this space promised there would be no more full-size posts about anything Sandusky.  But it’s tough to keep now that Jerry’s “kid,” 41 year old Jeff has been accused of improper conduct with an underage girl.  But keep it we will.

--Dirty Jeffie has hired a lawyer with a lot of experience in cases like this.  The fella once was a star prosecutor but ran into trouble about the way he handled some victims of domestic abuse.  Suddenly, he was in private practice and no baseball bat or blue gang jacket was involved.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

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© WJR 2017

1757 Party Like it's 1854

2/12/2017

President Lincoln’s 208th birthday. Guy never looked a day over 56. In 1854, he burned his membership card in the Whig Party and joined the fledgling Republicans.  He would not recognize his party today.

But that’ OK.  His party doesn’t recognize him either, except when it feels necessary to remind us of its past or hide its present.

The one trait he shared with today’s iteration? Small government.  But there was no way to visualize it any other way when Abe was elected president in 1860. It was small by definition.

Before Abe, Mary and the kids moved into the White House -- just before -- the Confederate States seceded.  So from Day One, he had a constitutional crisis on his hands, but not one of a president’s own making as we have today.

Lincoln compromised, unheard of among today’s Republicans.  But there was one thing about which he refused:  The United States was one country, not two.

Biographer Carl Sandburg once said the Civil War was fought over one word: “is.”  Previously, he said, you said “the United States are…” something. Today, you say “the United States is.

The Republicans of the 1850s are what we would today call “progressive.”  Black people were people not partial people, not property. A pretty radical idea. And Lincoln had to give a little before he got the mechanism to emancipate.

A Republican who compromised?  Yeah.  Believe it or not.  A Republican who was ambivalent about Christianity and attended church the way you attend weddings -- reluctantly if at all.

Lincoln lived five days into the newly re-united nation. In the years before, he brought new regulation to the finance industry.  And to the railroads. No, he wasn’t perfect. But…

What would Lincoln think about Trump? Or McConnell or Ryan.  What would he think of “Citizens United” or photo ID at the voting booth?  We have no way of knowing.

But we have a pretty good idea.

So Party like it was 1854 when being a Republican meant something decent.

SHRAPNEL:

--New York’s Paper of Record is crowdfunding among its digital subscribers to bring “a new generation of readers” -- school kids -- into the fold, keeping circulation figures up as the older generation degenerates. Shockingly, it did that in the 1940s by selling discount subscriptions at PS150 and other schools.  Most of us took the Trib instead because it had more pictures, a comics page and a weekly current events quiz.

--Protecting our shores from terrorist octogenarians, the safety folks at Myrtle Beach, SC stopped a woman trying to board a flight with her wooden walking cane.  Seems there was a sword hidden in the thing.  Woman says she had no idea the sword was in there.  

Grapeshot:

-Last night’s Grammy presentation had to be the most screwed up awards show in history with problems for Adele, Metallica and others and a show open about mistakes… how apropos.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

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© WJR 2017

1756 Remembering Irwin Corey

World’s Foremost Authority

“Your dad talks funny,” said The Teen to Margie Corey. What year was that again? Maybe 1954 or 55.  “He does,” she replied, “and he gets paid to do that.”

Professor Irwin Corey, “World’s Foremost Authority,” left us this week.  King of doubletalk and the half-liner, (one liners were too long, he said.)

“Without this great land of ours all of us would drown.”

He made a living by standing on a stage or on TV making jokes that we laughed at even when they were too complicated for our ordinary brains.

“When your IQ reaches 28, sell.”

To Margie, he was “dad.” To The Teen he was just another grownup.  But the acquaintanceship that started in the early years continued until not so long ago.

They said he was born in 1914.  He said it might have been 1913, he wasn’t sure. So, 102 or maybe 103 years at the end.  A long life.  Hard to remember back 100 years or so, especially coming from the chaotic orphanage where he and his siblings spent their early years.

That was Brooklyn.  Then it was Great Neck. Then it was the east 30s in Manhattan. Sniffen Court.  

You’ve passed it a hundred times and never noticed it. A secret hideout in Murray Hill.

Margie died in 1997.  That piled on to Irwin like so much else about life. His gut churning beginning, the early death of one of his children may have been what turned him into the angriest man I ever met. And it was that anger at life, at injustice, at the plight of the American worker, the role of our country in world affairs that fueled his humor.  Anger is a great motivator and defense against the world’s miseries.

“Ten years ago we had Johnny Cash, we had Bob Hope and we had Steve Jobs.  Now (2014) we have no cash, no hope and no jobs.”

Cory was

-Blacklisted during the McCarthy years.

-A maker of buttons and member of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. (Guy has to make a living.)

-A Civilian Conservation Corps boxing champion.

Eli Cohen he was in those days.  Irwin Corey came later.  What, Cohen was too Jewish?  He could have changed his name to Darcy van der Cliffe and still leave no doubt about where he came from; what he was.

At a backyard barbecue down the block in maybe 1982 or 83 he told me he was “feeling more than I do now than when I got here.”  He later repeated the line in interviews and on stage.

And no, I don’t know what he meant.

The professor and “World’s Foremost Authority” did not have a college degree.  And he was characteristically confusing about his high school year. Wait. Did he say “year” or years?

East 36th Street and its offshoot, Sniffen Court are quieter now than they have been in ages.  All you hear is traffic noise and footsteps, but not Irwin. Not anymore.

Someone wanted to bronze the wheeled walker he used in those last years.  But the Professor would probably want it go to “some old guy, someone maybe 85 or 90 who can’t afford a new one.”

And remember his words:  “The beauty is in the behind of the holder.”

What?

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

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© WJR 2017

1755 On or Off or Both

Turn on the lights by flipping up a switch. Turn them off using the same switch only flipping it down, right?

Well, mostly right.

But in modern times, we are faced with a complication. Some stuff you have to turn off by turning on the ON switch.

Like your computer. You shut it off by pushing the “Start button,” which is not really a button at all, but a picture that says “Start.” Only after pushing the start button (for something that’s already started, otherwise you wouldn’t be able to see the “Start button,”) can you turn it off.

Then, there are those lights that can be operated from more than one switch – like those that light a staircase, for example.

Turn on by flipping up a switch. Use the stairs, and once at the other end, turn off the light by flipping the second switch to “on.” So, now you have two switches in the on position, but the lights are off. In order to turn the lights back on, you have to flip the nearest switch to “off.” This turns on the light.

Somehow, these switches never go back to the original positions, which is that both of them are “off” and so is the light.

There’s no consistency in the locations of hot and cold water taps, either. This comes from the same general school of engineering. And it’s especially true of those single knob faucets where one device controls both the hot and cold water.

Do you turn it clockwise or counterclockwise for hot? Varies. Even varies among sinks and tubs in the same house. Most are unmarked (putting “C” and “H” on one of those elegant faucets would be so gauche. So, you burn or freeze as the faucet maker or installation plumber decides.

Many cell phones are turned on by pressing and holding the “off” button, which is a real button you can actually push.

Some ATM machines have similar quirks. For example, once you get onto the “withdrawal” screen, they want you to confirm whatever decision you’re making by pushing one of a column of buttons (real buttons, not “Start button” buttons.)

They have arrows leading from words toward the buttons. Invariably, the arrows fall between the location of the actual buttons and you have to figure out whether the machine means the button that’s higher than the arrow or the one that’s lower.

Equally invariable, you pick the wrong one and have to start over.

We are very lucky that these things haven’t become more popular.

Let’s say you’re tooling along the RFK Triboro Bridge, and come to the toll booth. The machine “reads” your “EZ Pass,” and the gate comes down, blocking your way. That wouldn’t work.

Suppose you turned on a stovetop burner and that extinguished the pilot light? THAT wouldn’t work too well, either.

How would you like a telephone that rang all the time except when someone was calling?

Or a blog that required a password to stop reading.

Coming Friday...  Irwin Corey a Kid’s Remembrance.  “Professor” Corey, officially 102 years old, but some say he lied about his age, died Monday.  We met as neighbors in 1952. I have stories.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

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© WJR 2017

1754 More On Trump

1754 More on Trump

As Hurricane Donald continues with high wind and a heavy downpour of bad nominees, bad ideas and bad manners we consider three trains of thought.

I.

Helen, Mike and Nancy

We need reporters like Helen Thomas and Mike Wallace and even (shudder) Nancy Grace.  These are people who know how to ask hard questions, have excellent BS detectors and will ask followup questions after non answers and followup questions to the followup questions when they get a floodtide of lies and evasions.

At one time the scariest words in the life of any politician were “Mike Wallace on line two for you, Senator.”

When Helen Thomas hove to her feet at a Presidential news conference, she turned many a president into a garden slug who spoke in tongues.

And even though Nancy Grace succeeded Martha Stewart and Leona Helmsley and Shakespeare’s Katherina as the most obnoxious woman on small screen or stage, she knows how to shut an opponent up… and down.

No one today fills these vital roles.

II.

Who’s In Charge Here? (Or the Wayward Windbag)

Sometimes it’s hard to tell who runs the show.  Hurricane Donald thinks he does.  Nope.

General Dwight Eisenhower was elected President in 1952.  Before that he was president of Columbia University and before that was supreme allied commander in Europe during World War II. In other words he was the man who led the good guys to victory.

Five star generals and university presidents expect their orders to be carried out.

This leads us to Today’s Quote:

--“Poor Ike.  He’ll say do this and do that and nothing will happen.”  -- Outgoing President Harry Truman on what Eisenhower would find as President when he tries to command the federal bureaucracy.

And that’s what he found.

The government is not a business.  The CEO can’t call a clerk at the DC post office and expect him to jump at the chance to obey an order.  He can’t call the secretary of … well … anything and expect the same. The people in charge of executive branch departments think they’re in charge of their executive branch departments.  

That’s lost on Hurricane Donald.

There are checks and balances.  There are courts.  There are mechanical and logistical considerations in anything anyone in Washington tries to get done.  It applies to everyone from the president’s bagman to the president himself.

Nixon tried to defang the bureaucracy.  He failed.  Johnson tried to work around it. He failed.  And now thanks to dueling lawsuits and dueling federal courts, so has the presidential wayward wind.

Today’s cases of pushback are pretty high profile.  But the postal clerk who answers the phone has more immediate control of events than the White House.

III. To Tell the Truth (Goebbels is Green with Envy)

We have been conditioned like a bunch of lab rats to expect and ignore lies. This started eons ago as the war against the news industry showed the first of its hydra heads in the form of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda and responsible for “the big lie.”  (Say something often enough and people eventually will believe it.)

The work was carried on by such other hydra heads as Confidential Magazine, the house organ of the John Birch Society and other great American literature.

Ultimately, it was the right wing talk shows that pushed mainstream America to hate and mistrust the press.

So now that we all expect lies… that’s what we get.

Grapeshot:

-I survived the Bowling Green massacre by not being there when it didn’t happen.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

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© WJR 2017

1753 Superbowl Sunday

1753 Take Me Out of the Bowl Game

Sunday upcoming is the best travel day of the year. The highways will be empty and all will be quiet.  It also is the best shopping day of the year.  You will have the place to yourself, whatever the place.

Stuporbowl Sunday.

Yes, once again it’s time for Madison Avenue to show the latest stunning commercials about which you’ll remember everything except the name of the advertised product or service.

And it’s time to surround those commercials with the world’s longest hour, all 300 minutes of it.  

It’s Superbowl Sunday, glorification of the lowest of the low i.q. sports.  A choreographed street brawl with a lot of time- outs.  Big men running around a football field the size of a football field occasionally kicking and throwing a blimp-shaped bladder covered in pigskin but mostly just bashing the daylights -- such as there are of them -- out of each other.

 This game is the World Series or World Cup of football.  But, mercifully, it lasts for only that 300 minute hour instead of dragging on for weeks.

At least this year’s halftime show will be headlined by someone with actual talent, Lady Gaga.

Pro Football is different from college football. First, the athletes are better paid. Much better paid.  And not under the table.

With the pros, you can’t bring your own food into the stadium, something that’s tougher to do at college games than it used to be.  

With the pros, injuries are better hidden but more severe.  Young college players are more resilient and recover faster than the creaky oldsters in the NFL.

And by the time a professional gets to the big time, he’s already pre-injured what passes for his brain, his knees and his hips to the point that additional scarring and swelling will settle in and feel right at home.

Superbowling is a fine way to keep undesirables off the street for a Sunday afternoon or evening. And it gives the rest of us a chance to travel at the speed limit.

Shrapnel:

--Professional football has a helmet rule, wear it or you can’t play.  That’s one thing they have in the brain department over many motorcycle riders. Except even the most modern, high tech helmets can’t seem to do much about brain injuries.

--Why does a game that’s supposed to take one hour take between three and four? Because football uses cellphone math.  I.e. with a 20 second call they charge you for one minute, and if the call lasts 1:01 they charge you for two.

Today’s Paraphrase:

-“This is what happens when the occupant of the White House is a five year old with a biscuit in his pocket.” --Norman Lear asked on American Public Radio what he thought of Donald Trump.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@mail.com

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© WJR 2014, 2017

1752 Jimmy Brown the Newsboy

Someone bought Jimmy Brown a hat.

It’s a blue-grassy, gospel-ly song made popular about a million years ago by nonagenarian singer-songwriter Mac Wiseman who learned it from A.P. Carter.

In it, he tells the story of a poor kid from a small town selling newspapers on the corner, working to help keep his family together during hard times. One of those barefoot and hatless in the snow tales that has become part of the Norman Rockwell-esque America that never really existed.

Jimmy’s father “died a drunkard” and the kid is pitching in as kids sometimes did.  Jimmy’s not a reporter. He’s not an editor.  He just hawks the paper… out there in the snow.  With no shoes.  No hat.

But Jimmy knew something that today’s news boys and girls don’t.  News is a business.  And as with many businesses, it has its fair share of incompetents and scammers.

This makes life tough for the real news types.  It makes it tough on you, because whom do you trust?  

And with the onslaught of “news” websites and television networks that have “expert” panels big enough to fill a football stadium, it’s harder than ever.

Further compounding the situation is the current regime’s war on the media.  So, what’s a reader/listener/viewer to do?

The quick and easy answer is go with the experienced hands.  Your local paper probably is more reliable than your local website because traditionally edited papers -- even mediocre ones -- are still mostly run by real journalists.  

In radio and in print, the main question is “what’s the story?” In TV it’s “what’s the video.”  Not that video is unimportant.  But often, especially locally, they’ll build the story around whatever pictures they have and that often means telling the story only indirectly.

If Channel 4 in Washington had to cover the Lincoln Assassination, they’d send a reporter to do a live shot at Ford’s theater which probably would be empty.  What’s the story? President shot, killed.  What’s the video? “I’m standing in front of Ford’s theater which is dark now, but just a few hours ago…”

With national news… or news of a complex subject, the story is little changed. You may think the New York Times and Washington Post are liberal rags.  They aren’t. But even if they were, you can read them with a practiced eye.

There is no reason to watch cable gab fests unless you’re interested in hearing diverse opinions and never knowing whether they’re reality based.

The evening news is good from beginning to midpoint. After that it’s mostly puppies and kittens, “miracle” children and flying saucers.

There’s only one radio network newscast that’s consistently reliable: CBS.  Maybe you can add NPR if you can stay awake through all five minutes.

Websites individually and collectively a chaos stew.  The honest ones will admit to a viewpoint. Forbes, Fortune, the Washington Times, The Nation, Mother Jones and many others are upfront about where they stand.

The Huffington Post, Daily Beast, Yahoo News, Google News are all over the map, take questionable stories from questionable sources and skew in many directions at the same time.

Or you can go to the corner and wait for Jimmy  Brown

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

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© WJR 2017