I've learned to be polite when someone addresses addiction with some version of, "Why don't you just..." Why, I barely even roll my eyes when I come across a guy who has discovered the easy way to overcome everything from smoking to avoirdupois and will happily tell sufferers the secret for only $20. Too many hours spent in too many rooms with too many addicts makes me doubt there is an easy way out for most of them. What is it with personifying chemical substances? Nicotine isn't sentient; it doesn't play a confidence game and no one falls to a nicotine con. One of my long-ago sponsees referred to her drug of choice as "Satan," and she meant that literally. Other folks refer to substances as "cunning" or as "lying in wait." Irritated me 27 years ago. Irritates me now. However, since this is the "random and useless thoughts" page instead of the "things that annoy me" page, I won't go any further down that path.
it’s the Todestrieb…women have a less ambivalent relationship with existence. Women are more morbid than men, though which is interesting. I think that men tend to yearn for destruction and women for death—the former is like a negation of the equation and the latter is like an antithesis. I’m on my fifth beer though.
Walmart has 2,300,000 employees, and the revenue per employee ratio is $265,777. Walmart peak revenue was $611.3B in 2022. Walmart annual revenue for 2021 was 572.8B, 2.43% growth from 2020. The first-ever ad for Wal-Mart, 1962
In 88, I was getting $5 cartons of cigarettes on post. They are likely the most heavily taxed product currently.
Gene Autry reputedly hated the song Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer and did it only because he was paid to. He didn't ever expect it to be a hit. I agree with him. I am not religious but the religious stuff is mostly the stuff I find tolerable. I find the uber commercial xmas music that started coming out in the mid 20th century to be incessant and banal. Irving Berlin's Sleigh Ride was fun to play.
My Dad was a big fan of Mario Lanza's and seeing my Dad sitting listening to "O Holy Night" - completely immersed in it - his face expressing every note - is a special Christmas memory of mine.
My toddler: Santa is scary Me: Santa’s kind, why do you think he’s scary? Toddler: He sees you when you’re sleeping
Apropos of nothing, I recalled a scene long ago when a car with three or guys in it, me among them, were following a car with three or four girls in it, friends, all of us in our late teens. We were driving through the countryside and suddenly the girls near windows rolled them down and began pumping their fists in the air. Why? Because Helen Reddy's song, "I Am Woman" had come on the airwaves of the car radio station we were all listening to. What intrigues me most about that -- besides the fact that Ms. Reddy's song seemed so revolutionary -- is that we were all listening to the same AM radio station, because that's how we got our music in cars. Nowadays (said the old geezer) with all the sources of media and music, the odds of two different cars listening to the same song are very slight. Even within each car people could well be listening to their own earphones. Just a subtle indicator of how things have changed -- and, I might suggest, have been lost, perhaps not for the best. Another social link weakened.
As I read The Thin Man this weekend, I heard Nick & Nora's dialog as Dick Powell and Myrna Loy. Similarly, in The Maltese Falcon, I kept hearing Sam Spade's lines in Bogie's voice, and Joel Cain's lines in Peter Lorre's voice. I may have watched a few too many movies.
Way to date yourself. That was like bragging about your 8 track. The AM bands aren't even included in some radios currently.
Well, yeah, that's kind of the whole point of the post. AM radio, cranking down car windows, and so on. Let me tell you about the time several of us drove across country with only two tapes for our 8-track, one of which was the Guess Who, and I forget the other.
I thought Bradley Nowell of Sublime was 27, too, but apparently not. Also, in googling, I discovered that Anton Yelchin, the kid who played Chekov in the Star Trek reboot, died in 2016 at 27 after being pinned against a stone wall at his house by a Jeep Cherokee with a defective shifter that didn't always honor "Parked." WTF? That's crazy.
