1916 Not Your Grandfather's Clock

Your grandfather’s clock was too large for the shelf, so it stood 90 years on the floor.  But this clock -- the actual clock in the picture --

is different. It came from Radio Shack about a million years ago.  Instead of a pleasant chime, it has an obnoxious squealing alarm “ring” guaranteed to awaken the entire neighborhood and good to use if you need a defibrillator and there isn’t one handy. It also sets itself.  Sort of. It gets messages in its head. Well, in its antenna.

There was no instruction pamphlet. The various buttons on the side are marked with their main functions: alarm, set, that kind of thing.  But the buttons, pressed in combinations,  have other functions and it’s impossible to remember them.

This particular clock self sets only if it’s sitting near a window and facing east. So with each change to or from standard time, it gets put on the window sill, the “set” button gets pushed.  The clock sets.  And that should be that.

Though it’s in the Eastern time zone, it liked to set for either Pacific or Mountain time.  That means fiddle with the buttons until you hit the right combination and it reverts to Eastern.  This can’t be: the buttons change functions between time changes.  But it sure seems so.

It’s been dropped a few times and this most recent time, something broke and now the battery compartment is held together with duct tape.

How many times has someone said “you still have that awful, ugly thing?”  Or “aren’t you ever going to get rid of that thing?”

Nope.

It is a monument to early technology.  It’s an artifact.  It is a 20th century version of an unearthed third century scroll and as difficult to comprehend.  It’s feral.

It knows when February has 29 days and when it doesn’t.  But it refuses to change with the coming or going of Daylight time unless it’s perched on a window sill and facing east. And when it works, it tells time, date and temperature, evidently with rigid accuracy.

Like the clock in the song “My Grandfather’s Clock,” the expectation was the thing would die when Radio Shack went belly up.  It didn’t.  Maybe that’s because a handful Radio Shacks still exists, though you probably haven’t seen one since the last time you were on a successful fossil hunt. Maybe the clock waiting for me to go.

SHRAPNEL:

--There’s a special election for a vacant congressional seat in western Pennsylvania tomorrow… in the district where the former occupant preached anti abortion while urging “the other woman” to have one. The district is important to trump who has campaigned for the Republican candidate in one of those misshapen districts that almost guarantees a Republican win.  But the Democrat stands a chance and that’s scaring the president.

--The president’s… um... acquaintance, Stormy Daniels, ageing porn star, is on a “Make America Horny Again” tour, thus extending the life of an adult entertainer beyond the normal five years.  We advise caution if you plan to attend.  Wear a surgical mask and after the show discard it in a parking lot wastebasket before re-entering your car.

--The president believes Putin about not spying and that Kim won’t continue nuke tests during and after their meeting. Really? So fake news is being overtaken by fake beliefs.

--American Idol has returned to the small screen and it’s even worse than you remember.  Screaming “singers,” sob stories, the ever-present Ryan “I am Everywhere” Seacrest, and a Blake Shelton wannabe who talks like Kermit the Frog.  The only high point is judge Lionel Richie, who can speak with both warmth and authority to a bunch of no-talent kids and whose smile and intent are genuine.

TODAY’S QUOTE:

-“Does that mean I can write my own prescriptions now?” --Willie Nelson on accepting his honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music. Quoted by Carole King on the MusiCares Award program on AXS TV.

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

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

All sponsored content on this site is parody.

© WJR 2018

Your grandfather’s clock was too large for the shelf, so it stood 90 years on the floor.  But this clock -- the actual clock in the picture --

is different. It came from Radio Shack about a million years ago.  Instead of a pleasant chime, it has an obnoxious squealing alarm “ring” guaranteed to awaken the entire neighborhood and good to use if you need a defibrillator and there isn’t one handy. It also sets itself.  Sort of. It gets messages in its head. Well, in its antenna.

There was no instruction pamphlet. The various buttons on the side are marked with their main functions: alarm, set, that kind of thing.  But the buttons, pressed in combinations,  have other functions and it’s impossible to remember them.

This particular clock self sets only if it’s sitting near a window and facing east. So with each change to or from standard time, it gets put on the window sill, the “set” button gets pushed.  The clock sets.  And that should be that.

Though it’s in the Eastern time zone, it liked to set for either Pacific or Mountain time.  That means fiddle with the buttons until you hit the right combination and it reverts to Eastern.  This can’t be: the buttons change functions between time changes.  But it sure seems so.

It’s been dropped a few times and this most recent time, something broke and now the battery compartment is held together with duct tape.

How many times has someone said “you still have that awful, ugly thing?”  Or “aren’t you ever going to get rid of that thing?”

Nope.

It is a monument to early technology.  It’s an artifact.  It is a 20th century version of an unearthed third century scroll and as difficult to comprehend.  It’s feral.

It knows when February has 29 days and when it doesn’t.  But it refuses to change with the coming or going of Daylight time unless it’s perched on a window sill and facing east. And when it works, it tells time, date and temperature, evidently with rigid accuracy.

Like the clock in the song “My Grandfather’s Clock,” the expectation was the thing would die when Radio Shack went belly up.  It didn’t.  Maybe that’s because a handful Radio Shacks still exists, though you probably haven’t seen one since the last time you were on a successful fossil hunt. Maybe the clock waiting for me to go.

SHRAPNEL:

--There’s a special election for a vacant congressional seat in western Pennsylvania tomorrow… in the district where the former occupant preached anti abortion while urging “the other woman” to have one. The district is important to trump who has campaigned for the Republican candidate in one of those misshapen districts that almost guarantees a Republican win.  But the Democrat stands a chance and that’s scaring the president.

--The president’s… um... acquaintance, Stormy Daniels, ageing porn star, is on a “Make America Horny Again” tour, thus extending the life of an adult entertainer beyond the normal five years.  We advise caution if you plan to attend.  Wear a surgical mask and after the show discard it in a parking lot wastebasket before re-entering your car.

--The president believes Putin about not spying and that Kim won’t continue nuke tests during and after their meeting. Really? So fake news is being overtaken by fake beliefs.

--American Idol has returned to the small screen and it’s even worse than you remember.  Screaming “singers,” sob stories, the ever-present Ryan “I am Everywhere” Seacrest, and a Blake Shelton wannabe who talks like Kermit the Frog.  The only high point is judge Lionel Richie, who can speak with both warmth and authority to a bunch of no-talent kids and whose smile and intent are genuine.

TODAY’S QUOTE:

-“Does that mean I can write my own prescriptions now?” --Willie Nelson on accepting his honorary doctorate from Berklee College of Music. Quoted by Carole King on the MusiCares Award program on AXS TV.

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

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

All sponsored content on this site is parody.

© WJR 2018

1915 Spending Like a Drunken Sailor

Ever hear that before? Sure you have. And now we know that like most cliché-based nonsense there is some actual sense to it.  But it’s not just sailors.  It’s all of us. Well, most of us.

Yes, in the shrinking world of studies of the obvious, in the tightening belt of silly professors who earn degrees by prodigiously quoting relevant works of other silly professors, in the world of a uncaluclated ridiculistics, we now know what Ensign Spencer taught us in the first known shore leave of the year 1345, drunken sailors and others with more drink than sense spend more than those with less.

Here is the figure:  $448 per capita.  We know it’s true because it’s baloney wrapped in arithmetic and presented by the authoritative website no one’s ever heard of, Finder.com. And baloney wrapped in arithmetic must be true.

More shoes, more booze.  

The new figure -- 448 -- is more than twice the amount we drank and spent in the previous year, says the website.

Bigger phones. Ice cream cones.  

The matter doesn’t matter, just the spending.   So, maybe Sears, Penney’s and other failing retail goliaths should offer free adult refreshments at their entrances and set up a cash bar at mid-store where that little taste at the entrance made you remember how much you like Johnny Walker or Jim Beam.

Mandolins and SCUBA fins.

All kind of stuff you decide on the spot you can’t live without, you get to live with. Oh. Did I say “cash bar?” The real smart merchants can accept MobsterCard with the vigorish of 26.78 percent issued by one of those “banks” with no branches no savings or checking accounts and odd names like Synchronous or Commanderly -- you know, the ones that do nothing much but issue credit cards with department store names affixed under license.

Now where are those smart retailers, longing for customers with open wallets? Why, they’re wringing their hands instead of ringing their registers, figuring out what to do next.

This is what to do next.  Take a lesson from the Navy, the Merchant Marine and anyone who has swamped your canoe by crossing it with a speedboat traveling at 49 knots and leaving a wake as high as a jailhouse wall. Drunken sailors aren’t all in the Navy. And the actual Navy doesn’t do things like swamp civilian watercraft on Lake Connawestaki.

Statistical sleight of hand is one of the great secrets of mathematical mystics.  So keep in mind that there were only 2,000 drunken shoppers questioned in this survey and probably some of them lied! (Can you imagine?)  But you probably know that when under the influence, you’re more likely than usual to say “yes” to a proposition you might reject while sober.

So, things like this happen: Sign right here, pal, and this beautifully hand crafted scale model of a 1927 a North Shore Long Island lighthouse can be yours for three easy payments of just $95.99. It’s just like the one John Hay Whitney could see from the upper floors of his Shelter Rock Road estate. (Note, the estate is nowhere near a body of water.)

Or this:

Her: “Are you sure you’re single?”

Him: “Of course Charline, would I lie to you about something like that?”

She: “Charlotte. And I hope the room has a nice view and a good mini bar. Anchors aweigh and rough rolling seas ahead.”

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

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

All sponsored content on this site is parody.

© WJR 2018

1914 The Class of '59

GREAT NECK NY -- About a year from now, the high school class of 1959 is going to hold its 60th anniversary reunion.  The school was and is on New York’s Long Island.  But the shindig will be held in Miami.

Huh?  Well, it’s easier to reach Miami and the parking’s better. Plus half the old duffers live somewhere in Florida for at least part of the year.  They’re the ones driving 38 in a 65 mph zone in the far left lane of a 12 lane highway and then stopping traffic by worming their way into the far- right lane two minutes before getting to their exit.

Apparently, they held several previous reunions that escaped notice. But there are pictures.  It’s a good thing they have captions, because if you haven’t seen someone for 30 or 40 years, you’re unlikely to recognize them, even with your “good” glasses.

It was a big class. So big, they’d split the school into two locations.  The worm lived, as they do when they’re cut.  But since everyone knew everyone in both halves of the worm, we reune as one.

The population is shrinking.  Many of us have died. Too many.  And often, the wrong ones.

The class’ spiffy new website has the complete ‘59 yearbooks online. Nice.  Now we can look back and be reminded what dummies some of us were… who we liked.  Who we didn’t like. Who liked us. Who disliked us.

A high school class is really a bunch of strangers thrown together by accident of geography and probable socio-economic similarity.  Ours certainly was, though some were in higher tax brackets than others.

There’s just so much wondering you can do about what ever happened to your junior prom date or whether Coach Crank finally died of overweight.

Miami in March?  Not a bad change of weather for those who remain in the Northeast or who have moved to the upper midwest.  But the neo-southerners and the neo Californians don’t have that excuse.  Of course, we could all use the experience of driving on those wide Florida highways.  But you can’t get a decent bagel or a decent pastrami on rye in Miami any more.  And you can get a Dominican Cigar with leaf grown from Cuban seeds anywhere on the planet.

Receiving the reunion announcement strikes chords.  But at a certain age, the chords don’t sustain. They quickly decay.  Especially if you’re not wearing your “good” hearing aid.

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

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

All sponsored content on this site is parody.

© WJR 2018

1913 My Little Town

GLOCCA MORRA PA -- If you want to live in the sticks, go right ahead.  I do. It’s not bad. Pleasant scenery, friendly people for the most part. The usual bell curve of smarties and dummies, crazies and sanes.  Kind of like a couple of blocks of Queens only with some low lying mountainettes, cleanish air and “high rise” means eight to 12 floors, tops.

But the boonies also are the cradle of corruption.  They’re a training bike for future members of congress, judges, prosecutors, personal injury lawyers, corporate executives and anyone else who wants to go-big eventually. Not necessarily this town.  But there’s enough boonie to go around.

It’s where country lawyers -- mostly young -- start political careers that eventually can take them on the road to the state capital or the real big time, Washington.  Here’s where they hone their skills. They learn how to take undiscoverable bribes, they learn how to speak in bromides, cliches and jargon.  They learn how to speak convincingly and simultaneously out of both sides of their mouth in “Living Stereo!”

And it’s where they learn the Manly/Womanly art of Plausible Deniability.   

Then they carry these things to big places and start turning them into little places.

Our esteemed president is an exception.  He is the living, breathing motherlode of sleaze and paper empire building.  The fountainhead. He needed no teacher, though daddy helped a bit.  It all came naturally. And he did it in ...Queens of all places, where a high rise really is a high rise, but with no mountains and imperfect.

They are turning the national government into Boise and Boise into Bell, California a gorgeous small chunk of land covering over a sewer of public thievery so grotesque and bizarre that they had to actually fix it.

The ones that get caught commit what’s called in some circles “the Nixon error.” That is… their actions are so brazen and blatant and easy to spot someone had to do something.  In some places, this is called the Madoff error.

So, you may ask, doesn’t this happen in cities too?  Of course. But it’s easier to see out here. The air is clearer.

SHRAPNEL:

--Hooray for Hollywood.  The cheer is because Oscar madness is over for the year. The bad news: the runup to 2019 has already started.

--Finally figured out why those California award shows always run overtime. It’s only 8 or 9 o’clock out there so there are fewer sleepyheads than in the east where it’s between 11 and midnight. Oscar, take a hint from Emmy … start the nonsense in the early morning hours.

--The Dolby Theater (nee Kodak) is a nice clean 3-thousand capacity hall and a good place to hold the Academy Awards.  It’s in a shopping center, adjacent to historic Grauman’s Chinese Theater in a dump of a neighborhood near the Ripley Museum and the world’s worst iHop. Talk about an appropriate locale.

TODAY’S QUOTE:

“He keeps his hands where you can see them. Never says a rude word… and has no penis.”  -- MC Jimmy Kimmel on why the Oscar statue is good for Hollywood in the 21st century.

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

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

All sponsored content on this site is parody.

© WJR 2018

1912 A Schism in the Church

Uh oh, problems in the Church of Guns.  At long last.  And a good sign.  When you cut a worm in two, both halves live.  When an amoeba self replicates, both cells live.  When you cut an organization in half, it’s the beginning of the end.

The Free Enterprise division, now a full and self declared denomination has broken away from the Governmentalists.  There’s trouble in Semiautomatic World.

Dick’s Sporting Goods announced this week it would no longer sell long guns of mass destruction. Their motive sounded public spirited, but in the long gun long run, it’s going to be good for business, according to advocates of corporate responsibility.

Wal-mart, much bigger than Dick’s, has taken a baby step. But at least it’s a step. Its raised the age of consent to buy a gun to 21 from 18.  That won’t do much to change the spread of the Faith, because teens will still hang out in doorways and parking lots. They’ll find adults to do their dirty work just as they do with alcohol.  But it’s something.

Then there are the Governmentalists, technically the Church of The Holy Second.  They’re outraged.  They feel betrayed.  And trump, a sect of his own, seems confused about where to go with this.  The other day he said “something” needs to be done about gun proliferation.  Stand by for the Huckabee briefing in which she says “here’s what he meant…”  And maybe trump will issue his own statement saying, essentially, “I never said that.”

NBC and the Washington Post will promptly locate the quote and the recording of it, play it 20 minutes after the denial and no followers will care. Just the Donald being the Donald.

The National Rifle Association has proposed a peace meeting. If real religions can hold associations of rivals, why not gun worshippers?  These groups are well intentioned, but eventually they start fighting about the shape of the table.

And the NRA has its own problems.  Corporate sponsors are fleeing in the same way they fled when Limbaugh linked medical assistance for birth control to prostitution and when Don Imus slurred up college women’s basketball players.

Both men survived, and the NRA will too. But both survived with diminished capacity.

And so will the guns & ammo makers’ mouthpiece.

SHRAPNEL:

--Republican legislators in Georgia have denied a big tax break promised to Delta Airlines for severing its ties with the NRA. Gee.  Government getting involved in the business decisions of private companies… who knew?

--It didn’t take the NFL long to replace Papa John’s which had severed ties over the way the league handled kneeling players. Pro football’s new BFF is Pizza Hut.  Gee… they could have picked Ray’s Famous or Ray’s Original Famous or Famous Ray’s Original or 100 other joints where the pies are actually real pizza instead of replicas.

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

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

All sponsored content on this site is parody.

© WJR 2018

1911 Details!

At the restaurant, a buffet joint at dinner time, there's a show card on the table. It tells you about the breakfast buffet. It has pictures of all the stuff they offer. And it has a list of all the stuff they offer. And it has the hours the meal is served. And it has the price. Got that? Pictures, list, hours, cost. Pretty clear. Then, in the fine print (there's always fine print, it's a national compulsion invented by lawyers,) it says "ask your server for details. (I hate the word "server," it's so.... servile sounding. What's the matter with "waiter" for men and "waiter" or, perish forbid the political incorrectness of it, "waitress"?)

Anyway, I ask my "server," who is a young college woman obviously majoring in Cheerful, "what details can you give me about the breakfast buffet?"

"Oh," she says, "happy to!" Every sentence she speaks ends in an exclamation point. That act gets old in a hurry.

"We have...." and then she goes on to recite the list of stuff that's on the show card that's sitting on the table, plus the hours and the cost.

"Great, thanks. Why does it say "see your server for details? Is there some detail they've left off the card, some secret little thing that I can only find out by asking you? The nutrition content of each item, for example, or the maximum number of trips to the buffet table we can make and still get the stated price?"

She looks confused, which is hard to do when you're smiling, and says "oh, no sir, none of that! The nutrition content is posted on the wall menu near the register, and there's no limit of trips!"

Okay, no details for which to see my server.

"Would you like to speak with a manager? I can get him for you!"

"No thank you, I was just wondering, since the show card says ask you for details and the presentation seemed pretty detailed to begin with, that you might know something a customer'd consider important when evaluating such things as whether to have the scrambled eggs or the oat meal or both."

She walks away, a smiling exclamation point. I'm sitting there wondering.

Everything has details, and every piece of printed stuff that invites you to buy or try something mentions that they exist but doesn't tell you what they are.

Telephone service has details. Oh, boy does it have details. There, you don't have to ask. They give them to you in writing. And to understand them, you must be well educated in federal law, state law, economics, electronics and maybe clinical psychology. So, no one reads these details.

How many times have you seen or heard "see store for details..." in the last day or two or five?

Probably none. That's not because it hasn't been written at you or spoken at you. It's because you hear it so often, you don't hear it at all anymore.

But it isn't as meaningless as it seems.

It means "Not everything we're telling you about the car or phone or computer we want you to buy or the contest we want you to enter or the membership we want you to apply for, is the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth." It means "there's at least a potential, if not an actual weasel deal going on here and if you don't ask about it we won't tell you. And then when you finally find out about it, we can say 'we asked you to ask for the details and you didn't.'"

I'm Wes Richards. (See store for details, member FDIC, an equal housing lender. No one under 17 admitted without parent or guardian. Title and taxes extra. Wessays is an equal opportunity employer. Union Made. Not Kosher for Passover. Contains peanuts. Take only as directed. While supplies last.)

My opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

All sponsored content on this page is parody

©2018 WJR!

1910 Ms. Gimbel’s Carry Bag

Swattin’ Tommy who is not a coward and isn’t afraid to enter a school with only a LadySmith pistol to face a crazed kid firing non stop with a gun that belongs in the 64th St. Armory not in the hands of a civilian. You know, maybe like the guy in Parkland, Florida.

And at first, S.T. as he’s known to his fellow cops, thought trump had a grand idea when he said teachers should be armed.  But when he thought about it for awhile, he realized there was a flaw and changed his mind.

Here is the flaw he found.  You’re a cop. There’s a maniac on the loose and he has one of those guns that holds 4,000 rounds and when you hold the trigger it keeps firing until the barrel melts and the stock catches fire.  Okay.  You can spot one those pretty fast.  He’s the young looking one with a twisted smirk and big vacant eyes. And he has that gun and is firing it.

But if the teachers were armed and shooting back -- and by mistake shooting at each other, how would S.T. know who was who?  He could shoot a young looking teacher thinking that was the invading kid.

Over at Hunter College on Lexington Avenue they have a history of preparing people to teach school. Once they admitted only girls. Once they did not charge tuition. It’s where a lot of teachers who have since retired got their first glimpses of the real world in the profession of teaching. No one at Hunter College of the City University of New York would respond to the question “are you adding firing range time to your required courses?”  Probably they haven’t. Probably they won’t.

Ms. Gimbel the math teacher may think otherwise.  She carries that giant carry bag.  Surely some weapon of some weight could fit in it without making a public show.  Oh, but then she’d have to leave the thing out in the open where some kid could grab it while she was writing an equation on the chalkboard. In mid-height heels, Ms. Gimbel stands 4’11.5” above ground level.  She admits to weighing 102 pounds.  Not a good match for Moose and Hunk, the 3rd period twins who each weigh twice what she does and stand a head and a half taller.

Ms. Gimbel will not, therefore, put a gun in her carry bag. Taking care of --aiming at -- Moose and Hunk.  That’s Swatin’ Tommy’s job.

SPONSORED CONTENT:

Today’s post is sponsored in part by Arm-a-teach.com.  

Attention all teachers!  Hey, Teach! With trump’s bonus in the works take advantage of our special academic discounts.  Arm-a-teach has the lowest prices on the net.  Whether you need something simple like the George Jones model (“Hotter than a two dollar pistol,”) something a little larger like the Elmer Fudd Duckhunter blunderbuss or some real heavy artillery like the very same AK-15 used by Russian Army peacekeepers in Ukraine, Belarus and Crimea, we can fill your firearm and ammo needs.

And here at Arma, we’re celebrating with a trump Days sale.  Deep discounts for licensed teachers, plus a bonus 5% for private school, charter school and home school teachers.

Check out our website at Arm-a-teach.com or call us toll free at 1844 BUY GUNZ. Easy financing available. We accept all major credit cards.  Your trump bonus will help you buy, and the prices are tax deductible as an item “necessary for work.”

Be the Good Guy with a Gun when the next puppy- beheading, turtle stomping, bird wing breaking retard takes aim at your kids.

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

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

All sponsored content on this site is parody.

© WJR 2018