blue for the sky, yellow for the sunflowers.

 I never heard of this guy, Mason Clark, before.  I have been watching CNN and they have had a parade of experts one after another,  In general they gibe with what this Mason Clark has to say.  That is a long article and I wonder if you had something special he said that you want to point out.

I remember an interview with Zelenskyy on NPR a few years ago.  After Ukraine was set free from the USSR there was some turmoil and some bad men and Russkie interference.  At one point they had this awful kleptocrat who was building huge palaces all over the country.  Zelenskyy was an actor on a tv show playing a schoolteacher who somehow becomes president of Ukraine.  He did such a good job that he ran against the kleptocrat and won and became the president.  Remember way back to impeachment?  He is the guy who Trump refused to give money to that congress had allotted to fight the Russkie menace unless he smeared Hunter Biden.  Finally somebody blew the whistle and Trump was forced to give him the money.  The whistle blower got shit canned, but when the enlightened dems took over the situation was rectified.

As a sub you do whatever the absent teacher did, and that's how one day I went to a school in Ukraine Village to teach English as a second language for Ukrainians.  They were like fifth graders and had short blonde hair and they looked like little nazis, but their behavior was excellent.  

At this point the Ukrainians are doing better than expected and the Russkies not so well.  It appears to this expert that Putin is not listening to his generals, or maybe they are afraid to disagree with him.  There are some kind of talks to begin today in Belarus, and there is a three mile long convey moving south to Kiev.  I will be tuning in to CNN after I finish this post to watch the experts and the guys on the ground dodging bullets behind the Ukraine resistors.  Hoping for the best.

The best of course would be the Russian bear soundly smacked in its snout.  We would all be saluting those brave Ukrainians, but a lot of them will be dead, as will a lot of Russian soldiers who had no particular animus against the Ukrainians.  So that's not good news.

PS

I wonder if I could get some comment on Sandy Denny and her story.  And I wonder if we can hear from the other dawgs.  it has been like three weeks.  Maybe even just a comment or two?

An Expert Assessment

 I am not an expert, but this guy allegedly is. I was planning to post something about Ukraine this weekend, but I'm still gathering information at this point.  I'm sure that Uncle Ken has been following the situation at least as much as I have, but on the off chance that he hasn't seen this one yet, I am posting a link to it.  

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/putins-baffling-war-strategy/ar-AAUo06M?rt=0&ocid=Win10NewsApp&referrerID=InAppShare

I am surprised that the Ukrainian forces have been able to hold out this long.  I am trying to not get too encouraged by that because I don't want to be disappointed later, but I wish them all the luck in the world.  I am particularly impressed by the degree of civilian mobilization. We haven't seen anything like that in our country in our lifetimes, although I understand they had it during World War II.

If nothing else, the conflict has produced two quotable quotes that will likely go down in history:  "I don't need a ride, I need ammunition." - Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.  and "Putin is a dick head." - Labels placed on empty bottles being distributed by a Ukrainian brewery for the purposes of making Molotov cocktails.  

who knows where the time goes

 Sometimes to kill time I go to fb and just scroll down just to see if there is anything interesting there.  And a couple of weeks ago I came across this image. With that church in the background and that park in the foreground, it looked like it might be a few blocks east of Lake and Ashland, an area I pass through from time to time.  But who were those people?  It turned out that the photo was taken in England and they were the grandparents of Sandy Denny.

Sandy Denny?  Name sounded familiar, or was I thinking of Sandy Dennis, the actress?  No this was somebody else, English folksinger (I wonder if Beagles has ever heard of her), wrote Who Knows Where the Time Goes.  Was a big hit for Judy Collins on one of her early albums.

Back in my late hippy days there was a woman who also tended bar at Chin's who I maybe a had a bit of a crush on.  She was all beer and good times, as we all were, but I remember one time she was kind of pensive and she mentioned that song from the Judy Collins album.

Here is the Sandy Denny version.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkOB57UcYk8  I have the link going into another window so you can listen while you read.

Ah what a sweet sad song.  Near the end, walking the desolate beach one imagines, she says she will not be alone as long as her love is with her, but then who knows how long he will be with her because who knows where the time goes.

So anyway I did some googling and you tubing, and oh my god, where had this woman been all my life?  Beautiful, beautiful music I think.  Ordered a three CD collection of her best songs, have been listening to them over and over again the past few days.

Where had she been all my life?  Well she had been there in England doing folk songs, but I wasn't listening to folk songs at the time.  She knew she was good, she wanted to move on, she wanted to oh, be popular the way Judy Collins was popular.

But you know, she was chubby, and well, not a great beauty.  I always wondered why the girl singers were almost always beautiful.  Do looks and musical ability go hand in hand?  

Made her insecure is what the story was.  She was one of those artists who are really great and know it, but then a turn off the head and they are looking down the abyss, and thinking it's all some kind of illusion and they are nothing at all.  And then comes the booze, the pills, the cocaine.  Drunk and abandoned she fell down some stair and hit her head and was dead after about a week in 1978.

In 1978 I was still tending bar at the House of Chin, still thinking I had it made, a plate of chop suey with every shift, all the beer I could drink as long as I could make change and pour beer, hanging out with my buds while getting paid for it.  I had it made.  Maggie, that was the name of the woman who liked the song, had moved on from Chin's, but when I went to the bar downtown she was almost always there putting down tall screwdrivers.  After a few she would look me straight in the eye and ask me, did I think she was a good person, did I think she was crazy?  I always told her that she was a good person and she was not crazy, though I wasn't sure of that at all.

Sandy Denny died forty-four years ago, all the songs I am listening to now were recorded like fifty years ago.  Who knows where the time goes.

Words Fail Me

I've usually got an opinion about almost everything, but I don't know what to say about this one.  Uncle Ken summed it up better than I could, and so did this guy:

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/putins-attack-on-ukraine-teaches-us-a-vital-history-lesson/ar-AAUg9wO?rt=0&ocid=Win10NewsApp&referrerID=InAppShare

Only the first part is about the Ukraine, down to the subheading "For the love of sentences", then it goes off on another tangent.                                                    

Ukraine

 I didn't think he was going to do it.  I thought there would be some huffing and puffing, and there would be some kind of face saving do se do, and then it would go into endless talks, and you know as long as you are talking you are not fighting, but now the talking is over.  Or maybe not, maybe I don't know, maybe something other than this.

From what I hear the Russian people are not crazy about this war.  The whole world is against it except for China, and I hear Sudan. Ukraine was Russia's breadbasket back in the days of the USSR, but if the Russkies swallow it whole the population will be so hostile that they won't likely get much out of it, and the cost, human and money, of keeping Ukraine under their thumb will be high, and Russia will not get anything out of it, likely things will get much worse.  

I don't know if sanctions do any good, but cancelling that pipeline has got to hurt.  What do they say?  Russia is just a gas station with an army.  Of course that will hurt the German economy too, and certainly the US will take a hit,

And surprisingly compared to that crazy invasion of Iraq, the American people are not all flag waving about this war.  I think it was a big mistake but half the dems backed that Iraqi war, and now the reps mainly want to do finger pointing except that considerable portion of them who are actually with Russia.

And you know it is one thing for me to angrily tap the keys around sunrise and make my sharp point, but what if I was doing that with my rifle sitting on the desk and the sound of cannons from the window?

This is just terrible.

old talk shows and movies

 I used to love those Sunday political talk shows.  Back in the day they were mostly cynical reporters commenting on the news dryly and chuckling at the zany actions of the pols.  There were liberal and conservative commentators, but they weren't democrats or republicans.  They stood outside the parties, righties making fun of the reps and lefties making fun of the dems.  

Then Fox came along and they were yellers from the beginning, boasters and sneerers and an offense to gentlemen everywhere.  Then the Foxies began appearing in the gentlemanly intellectual shows and they continued to yell and interrupt and if you wanted to get a word in you had to act like them.  Now most everybody on those shows does that,  and the righties are card-carrying reps and spouting the party line, and the lefties are card-carrying dems also spouting the party line, and they caterwaul at each other like pols, and there is a lot heat and very little light.  I still watch them out of habit but my mind wanders.

Particularly I remember Sam Donaldson and George Will.  Sam Donaldson was a big guy, shaggy haired, given to waving his arms, always passionate about his point.  George Will was always prim and proper in his bowtie and neatly pressed suit, a dapper tabby to Sam's golden retriever.  

And I bring this all up to set the stage for a long ago Sunday morning and the subject was the mideast, back in the day when you talked about the mideast you meant Israel and the surrounding nations, not the vast sprawl of conflicts that it is today, and the subjects was talks between the two and Sam was waving his arms and and shaking his shaggy head, and was all for talks, as any reasonable person would be, and George had his hands folded in front of him and was looking out at the audience they way he did, like, can you believe how stupid this guy I am talking to is,  but politely, and I might add that that Sam Donaldson for all his waving and shaking was still being polite, because back in the days before Fox, everybody acted like a gentleman.

Anyway at one point Sam made the argument that at least if they were talking they weren't fighting, so didn't he agree that the talks were a good thing, and George looked up at him, the way a cat looks at those big apes with the gargantuan brains and said primly, "No."

It kind of stopped the show.  

Oh George want on later to say something about how there was really nothing to talk about, they were all going to do what they were going to do, so talks were just a sideshow, and on and on, that sort of thing.

I just wanted to tell that story.  But I have say I rather agree that they might as well have some kind of talks.  Putin would never invade while he was right there talking to Biden.  Or would he?

As I said earlier I have been listening to experts all day the past week, and I just don't know.  Normally I like to make fun of things, but thinking of the potential bloodbath I can't manage even a dry chuckle.

But a bloodbath on the streets of Ottawa I am all for it, have been for weeks and wondering, as the sultry blonde with the smoking gun told the hard boiled detective when he knocked on the door in that noir movie, "What took you so long?"  

Latest on Ukraine and Those Canadian Truckers

 I just checked my news app, and it seems that Biden and Putin have agreed to have a meeting about Ukraine if Russia doesn't invade before that.  Having worked for 23 years at Procter & Gamble, it has been my experience that most meetings are boring and unproductive, but in this case, it's probably not a bad idea.  In spite of their shortcomings, meetings are better than shootings any day.  

According to the TV news this evening, the trucker protest in Ottawa has been dispersed.  I don't think any heads were busted, but numerous truckers have been arrested and numerous trucks have been towed away.  I suppose that was the best way to handle it.  It took a while, but it's over now and nobody got hurt.  Maybe Biden and Putin should invite some Canadians to participate in their upcoming meeting.  

happy Friday

I've been meaning to write something about the Russian/Ukraine situation, but I don't know what to say.  It is inspiring to see them standing so bravely in front of their blue and yellow flags, but then you think geez, a lot of them could soon be dead.  And the Russkies too, those poor conscripts, a lot of them could soon be dead.  And if the Russkies win, what would they win?  It would be like Iraq for them, and if the honey-seeking bear's nose gets poked so badly that it runs back into the woods, well that would not be so bad, except a lot of people would still be dead, and the bear would still be out there in the woods.

What is Putin thinking?  There is a parade of experts on CNN, this one thinking Putin is thinking this, those other guys thinking that he is thinking that, and myself I think he does not have any solid plans, he is just poking, prodding, looking to see if there is something to be gotten out of it.  And I don't see what he is likely to get and am thinking he will just do some face-saving do se do, and slink back, but what if he gets pissed off like someone whose key does not fit into the lock so they start kicking the door?  I just don't know.  

And now he is cozying up to the Chinese who are cozying up right back.  Their earlier friendship ended when the Stalin died and the Russkies opened up a bit, which pissed off the Chinese who had liked Stalin just fine but the new guys were too wishy washy and they parted ways. but now that the Russkies have a new Stalin things can be patched up again.

And as of this morning, the Canadians are still not busting heads in Ottawa, what is it with those guys?

Well I don't have much in the tank today, could use some input from the other dawgs.  What about if we talked about where we lived, I in my condo, and Old Dog newly in the senior living, Beagles in the swamp on the edge of America and Boxer over there on the east coast, which to us midwesterners is kind of like England was to the colonies, before, you know, the troubles.

Well, happy Friday.

Where Are Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee When We Need Them?

 "Airlines maintain their own lists of passengers who are barred from traveling but don’t share information with other carriers. Bastian said Delta has 1,900 people on its no-fly list." - from Uncle Ken's link

Granted that those eight Republicans are full of shit.  Nevertheless, I question the need for a national registry.  What's to stop the airlines from sharing their own lists with each other now?

While reading the above-mentioned article, I noticed this other one in the margin:

Democrats are fighting against far-left proposals they once accommodated, as they face dour midterm elections. - The Washington Post

It seems the Republicans are not the only ones dealing with a lunatic fringe.  I and my ilk used to complain about there being little difference between the two major parties, referring to them as "Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee".  Like the old saying goes, "Be careful what you wish for."  Now there seems to be more differences within each party than they used to have between each other.  I never thought I would say this, but the wishy-washing middle is starting to look good to me.

freedom to punch other passengers and flight attendants

 Now I see where the reps are defending those folks that make a fuss on airplanes because they are freedom fighters.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/15/eight-republican-senators-say-they-oppose-no-fly-list-disruptive-passengers-because-it-would-equate-mask-opponents-terrorists/  Just had to post this because, because, For Chrissake that's why.  

Just one last harangue.  Will be back to something more convivial on Friday.

trump nuts

 I knew that Beagles was kidding about the human/computer virus thing, but being the partisan dem that I am I just had to point the finger.  And seeking to bolster my point I googled republicans backing the freedom convoy and this was at the head of my feed: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/michigan-gop-democrat-whitmer-freedom-convoy  I had to disable my adblock and open myself up to the ravages of Fox News to do it,  but I had to show the kind of legislative numbskulls my favorite governor, Gutsy Gretch, was up against.

And you will notice how it has become the freedom convoy.  Back in the day it was my ilk that talked about freedom all the time.  As I recall the forces of the darkness preferred the word liberty.  It had more of a historic (Sons of Liberty), classic style to it.  I was no fan of the tea party, but I have to say they certainly dressed well with their tight pantaloons and their classy tricornered hats.  Compare that to what is currently in fashion.  Oh I don't know what to wear to the bridge club tonight, my sweatshirt with Trump (nicely embossed) machine gunning Nancy Pelosi, or the one with him butt fucking Joe Biden.

Yes one does well wonder what obstructing traffic and honking your horn all damned night long, or impaling cops with American flags (which now goes by the name of legitimate political discourse) has to do with freedom of speech, and for that matter what filling the air waves with screaming ads has to do with it.  The latter being the work of Moscow Mitch who now heads the responsible wing of the republican party.

Well I see that I am off on a harangue again, and I certainly don't mean any of this as a slam on Beagles who has already come out against this shit, but sometimes I get a bit out of hand.

Back to reasonable discussions among reasonable people.  So these truck nuts have been around a long time?  And of course google has an answer.  Truck nuts began appearing in small numbers as custom-made scrotum sacks in the 1980s. The earliest known store-bought truck nuts appeared in the late 1990s but remained limited in number. Oh my goodness, I really need to get out more.  How about putting some marbles in a sandwich bag and calling them Trump nuts?  Okay, I am done now.

All Kidding Aside

You knew I was kidding in my last post, right?  Seriously, though, I agree with Uncle Ken that the Republican Party is in such shambles that it might be better to put it out of its misery and start all over again.  Nevertheless, I'm sure he remembers that all street protests are not staged by Republicans.  The First Amendment guarantees the "right of the people peaceably to assemble", but these protests are anything but peaceable.  The best of them are noisy and disruptive, and the worst of them are dangerous and destructive.  I find it hard to believe that this is what the Founding Fathers had in mind.  Then there's the freedom of speech.  Burning, looting, and obstructing traffic are not speech, they are physical acts.  By what stretch of the imagination can they be called speech?

My wife says that she once saw a set of truck nuts a long time ago, but I have never.  This is yet another example of the wise old saying, "Every time you think you've seen it all, you find out that you ain't seen nothing yet."   

an even better solution

 As practical and as easily implemented as Beagles' plan is, it contains a fatal flaw, particularly in the notion of shutting down the internet for two weeks to a month.  How then will The Beaglestonian be delivered to its vast audience?  And without that forum of reasonable discussion among reasonable people, will not our public be without guidance, lost, confused, strangers in a strange land, on a darkling plain where ignorant armies clash by night?

No, no, such a thing cannot be envisioned.  I have a much simpler and satisfying plan.  As we look across the waving fields of grain we find only one political party that favors this action, and that, of course is the Republican party with Rand and Ted and the Dear Leader singing its praises all day long into the night, and not even stalwart Moscow Mitch making a peep against it, I think we should just eliminate the current day Republican party, send them off somewhere so that they can imbibe of the immigrant experience which seems to obsess them so.

But wait, late yesterday afternoon as I was not watching the superbowl our neighbors to the north began clearing off the Ambassador Bridge, and now apparently the whole thing is over.  Geez, just like that,  No disruption of said superbowl, no convoy headed for DC, no nothing, not even any hot air from Rand or Ted or Dear Leader.  Geez, if just the first time one of those truck nuts parked his truck in the middle of the thoroughfare, the local constabulary had told him, Excuse me, you are not allowed to park there, and then maybe a meaningful glance down at his night stick with all those notches in it, and this whole thing would have been as dust in the wind.

Well then Gentleman, outside of all those Russian troops on the border of Ukraine, we appear to have not much to worry about and we can open those bagfuls of valentines in peace.  And feb, the longest little month in the calendar is half over.

And speaking of reasonable discussion I have to wonder if any of the dawgs have googled truck nuts and if they would like to say anything about it.

 

Protest Fever Explained

 After carefully considering the opinions of my esteemed colleagues, I have decided to revert to my original theory of protest fever, a viral infection that enters the brains of its victims and causes them to run out into the street and make fools of themselves.  Protest fever is unique among viral infections in that you don't need to have personal contact with an infected person, you can catch it off the internet.  What, you never heard of a computer virus?  Until now, computer viruses have been unable to cross the species barrier, but this one can and does.  You know what I think happened?  I'll tell you what I think happened.  I think that certain individuals, I won't mention their names, they know who they are, got together and did a gain of function operation on a computer virus, enabling it to cross the species barrier and infect humans.  I can only guess about their motive, but scientists have been known to invent something just to prove that they can.  They accept no responsibility for misuse of their creation by others, claiming that their mission is pure research.  Of course, this is only a theory, but no other explanation makes sense.

To extinguish the protest fever virus, we need to completely shut down the internet for a couple weeks, 30 days tops.  This will cause hardship for a lot of people, but it's only temporary and is necessary to buy us some time while a vaccine is being developed.  The vaccine will need to be administered to everybody who uses the internet, whether they want it or not.  The way to overcome resistance to the vaccine is to subliminally embed it in an app and make that app go viral all over the internet.  Then everybody who uses the internet will become immunized without either their knowledge or their consent.  They won't complain about it because they won't even know that it's being done to them.  Being a political conservative, I would not normally advocate such extreme measures, but this is not a political issue, it's a public health issue.  Many lives will be saved, and peace will be restored to our streets.  

truck nuts

 When I first read about terrorists, particularly those Russkies, being called nihilists it confused me a bit too, but it just appears to be the way the world is sometimes used.  I'm embarrassed to admit it but there are a lot of similarities between these truck nuts  (Hum I wondered if I was coining a phrase so I googled it and I came across this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truck_nuts  I don't know what to say.) and us children of the sixties.

But here is a difference.  We believed in ending the war, we had a demand.  I doubt if we, or those weak-kneed Canadians, gave in to their demands that the truck nuts would get back in their trucks and drive back to Saskatoon.  They are having the time of their lives, standing up for what they believe in.  Well not really. they are standing up against everything they don't like.  There's a certain kind of person who looks around and doesn't like what they see, and their first reaction is to blame whoever they don't like and go after them.  

And here is where Trump comes in.  When he had that booming economy his handlers told him to get up on that stage and tell the mob about all the good things that are going on, and maybe he'd start out with a few sentences about that, but he quickly got bored and so did the mob so he started bashing his enemies and that got the crowd excited and everybody had a good ol' time.

And just now, over the radio I heard that whiny sneering voice talking about those great American truckers.  

You know there was a GoFundMe page for the truck nuts, but then the GoFundMe people realized that they were nihlists they shut them down and now several republicans are calling for an investigation of GoFundMe, for daring not to aid foreigners who are fomenting a movement to overthrow our government.

Well probably not Canadians who are like 90 percent vaxxed and are suffering from the shut downs and horns all along.  Probably most of them are from their noisy neighbors to the south.  

Ah blah, blah, blah, bust their heads.

Happy weekend Gentlemen.

Nihilists?

"These guys are nihilists, haul them away, and if you gotta bust a few heads doing that, well don't be shy." - Uncle Ken

I thought a nihilist was somebody who doesn't believe in anything, but I looked it up to be sure.  It seems I was oversimplifying, but that's never stopped me before.  On second thought, it might be more accurate to say that a nihilist is somebody who believes in nothing.  Nevertheless, I think your man Occam would have been proud of me.

https://slife.org/nihilism

So, Uncle Ken, by what stretch of semantics do you call those Canadian truckers nihilists?  Did you mean to say "anarchists"?  Either way, I don't think so.  Boxer advanced the theory that they were after better pay and working conditions, which I also doubt.  That's okay, at least it shows that both of you are thinking.  My theory is that they've caught the protest fever from their American colleagues, but it's just a theory.  Maybe the truth will be revealed to us in the fullness of time, or maybe the news cycle will move on to something else and we will never hear of it again.  

I agree with Uncle Ken, though, that some heads need busting.  I understand that the authorities in New Zeeland are taking more of a hardline approach, but the Canadians seem to be just dithering around the issue.  These guys are obstructing traffic, which is illegal in this country.  If it's not illegal in Canada, they ought to make it illegal if they know what's good for them.  If the local police are outnumbered, they should call out the National Guard or the Mounties.  

truckers and squeeze boxes

 Not only are they everywhere, everywhere, they are now knocking on Michigan's door.  Actually Detroit's door, which Beagles has second thoughts about being in the same state as the freehold.  A quarter of the whole trade between the two countries crosses that bridge the ABC guys told me last night.  

The seed may have been the ostensible vaccine mandate at the border, but it has gone way beyond that and is now being funded by guys on chan4 and such.  Canadians are very reasonable people and 90% of their truck drivers are vaxxed, so this is really not about that.  They are not protesting the cost of weeds, whites, and wine, or that their local radio station is playing too much Buck Owens and not enough Merle Haggard, they are Marlon Brandos in The Wild One, who, asked what he was rebelling against, answered, "Whaddaya got?"  

These guys are nihilists, haul them away, and if you gotta bust a few heads doing that, well don't be shy.

Interesting to think of Heartbreak Reservation as being isolated, but that was then and this is now.  Very foresighted of the people of that time to put aside such large areas for recreation.

I think I learned to tell time from my experience with the piano accordion.  I remember being sealed in a room on a hot summer afternoon the dreaded appliance strapped across my small bare chest, and my sentence was one full hour.  There was a clock in my cell and I would be there until that little hand went from one number to another, and that damn thing moved soooo slowly.  Then I learned that if I watched the big hand sweep across the face of the clock one time that would also be an hour.  Time seemed to move faster watching that big hand.

In my memories I am always playing You Are My Sunshine, or more accurately some screechy, lumbering version of it.  You know the choruses of that are quite cheery but the verses tell a heartbreaking story.

More About Spandau

 Like I said, we had no contact with the prisoners, we just guarded the wall around the compound.  I seem to remember there were 16 towers.  It was two hours on and four hours off, just like our regular guard duty back at the barracks.  It was supposed to be for 24 hours at a stretch, but we were always short-handed in Berlin, so it was not unusual to be on guard duty for several days in a row.  I pulled Spandau guard twice during my 30 months in Berlin, once for three days and once for five days.  Our guard house was outside the wall, and they let us go down to the corner curry wurst stand during our four hours off.  That was technically illegal, but so was pulling guard for more than 24 hours.

I don't know if the prisoners were kept in cells or not.  I doubt that they had free run of the place, though, because it was "a 50-acre compound to imprison three lost souls".  The prison was built to hold many more inmates than that, so somebody must have expected the Nuremburg trials to dish out more prison sentences than the seven that they did.  By the time I got there, three of the original seven had completed their ten-year sentences and one of them had died, leaving Speer and Von Schirack whose 20 years were almost done, and Hess who was in for life.  After Speer and Von Schirack were released, they still kept Spandau open for just Hess, almost till the day he died.  

The procedures and policies at Spandau were originally instituted by the four allied powers, The U.S., Britain, France, and Russia.  The way it was set up, nothing could be changed without the consent of all four powers, and the Russians never consented to anything.  That's why they kept that big complex running for so few prisoners, and also why "they locked us in the towers". 

************************************************************************

They're everywhere! They're everywhere!

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/new-zealand-convoy-protesters-vow-to-stay-as-long-as-it-takes/ar-AATDjj6?rt=0&ocid=Win10NewsApp&referrerID=InAppShare

Riffs in a Four Year Old Boxer

There are a lot of people sending truckers money on GoFundMe and similar sites, but those same contributors won't pay more for products, indeed they most often choose the cheapest product, thus the truckers won't receive higher wages nor better conditions.   I'm uncertain main issue is really about them having to prove their vaccination status, which seems like just a matter of showing a paper which they already have to show other papers (license etc) when crossing borders.  I think it's really about compensation for their poor working conditions.  Their job is a tough one so I do hope some of them are able to train to find something else, or else their compensation goes up.  That said it's a free market and there is a lot of competition. These job types are constantly in a state of change, just ask any former machinist after NAFTA or former VCR or TV repairperson.

Saugus indeed is a leafy suburb. Some of the "reservation" names are due to land being set aside to prevent development, as this is part of the Northeast Megatropolis and practically every scrap of land is developed. If you mean Breakheart, though, that name came from the Civil War when soldiers training at the location found it so isolated and desolate that it broke their hearts.  I live more to the south, on Baker Hill overlooking Rumney Marsh (hense my own blog's title.)   I'll snap some pics and talk more about Saugus in a future posting. 

My sister this week snapped for me this picture of Dad's accordion which I remember him always having, so at least we've had it since 1967 or so.  Dad bought it while working but then got laid off thus he could not afford the lessons.    He had a learning book instead but never did learn it. 

I remember being very young and strapping it on to try it.  I was mesmerized by the latches on the case, and worked one of them every day.  Plus I was told not to touch it which of course is a draw of attention to it.  

Eventually I got them both and it opened the case (I must have been super young) and was able to try on the straps. If I arched my back VERY far I could, with all of my little might, get the bottom of it just barely off of the floor.  My older brother thought that was very funny and called my Mom to watch, so after resting I put it on, again to prove to her that I could do it.  Then I unstrapped the clasp to open the bellows but of course the left side was too heavy for me and it bellowed all the way out hitting the floor. I immediately got yelled at for that.  I imagine now that this would have been super cute, today this would be fodder for Reels or TikTok.  

My brother actually took lessons for a half year and learned a song or two.  I was only able to learn a single small blues riff (four chords plus a keyboard progression, about 15 seconds) which I can still play, today (if I had an accordion.) Pretty sure it was lesson 3 or 4 from the practice book. 

Image of similar model, from eBay showing right hand buttons (there are over one hundred.)

It's an challenging instrument in that you have to think of both keyboards independantly and learn to play them both at the same time - melody on the left hand and chord accompaniment on the right, PLUS work the bellows with correct timing at the right spots in a measure otherwise you get a power dropout.  So it's a lot to coordinate.  When you're a wee lad it's quite the mental challenge.  I couldn't even write that well yet with a pencil nor ride a bike, at the time. I remember my attempts at it fondly.  Especially those clasps on the accordion case. 

Here was his learning book: it was this one from Palmer-Hughes:

Sometimes, the dog would howl along.  I eventually (much later) learned a few chords on guitar, and went that way for a while, for fun, joined a singing choir and etc.

Thanks for the memories, and for sharing your image!

the aftermath of war

 I've read these lyrics before, but they are better than I remembered them.  Well done Beagles.  I'd kind of forgotten about that part of your life.  Five prisoners, I'm guessing about ten thousand GI's in Germany, what were the odds?

What exactly were your duties?  Did you stand outside his door like one of the guards in the comic strips?  Did you lead him to breakfast and the garden?  I am sure you never spoke to him, but you must have looked at each other.  How did you feel about it?  On the one hand here is this very bad man, on the other hand he is a man just like you.  He was once part of this terrible machine, but now he is powerless.

V E day was early in May 1945, I was a couple months old.  But it seemed like the war was still going on when I was a small child.  Its shadow went on for years.  There was still talk of ration stamps, victory gardens, little monuments in the neighborhood, my dad and the other men sitting together while the women washed the dishes and the kids played underfoot, smoking cigars and talking about the war.  What had caused Hitler's downfall?  Invading Russia, they all agreed and tapped the ashes into the trays.  That seemed like important information, the wisdom of the elders.  

I remember Albert Speer from some tv show.  I guess the myth of the reluctant Nazi was still extant.  It portrayed a young Albert who just wanted to build big buildings but got sucked into the Nazi machine.  There is a scene where he is pinning on a Nazi armband and looking at himself in the mirror.  Pretty sharp, his smile seems to say.

We all build our own prisons sounds a lot like My friends in the prison they say unto me, How good, how good, it must feel to be free, and I answer them most mysteriously Are the birds still free from the chains of the skyway?

But I don't know about that analogy.  Seems like one thing to build your own prison, but a quite different thing to be in a prison, and if you are in a prison are you not building your own prison in prison, and isn't that twice as bad?  

Well we artists, we are entitled to fudge a little bit to give the workaday man the jolt that he requires to free him from the prison of his 9 to 5 world. I say most mysteriously.

The Song

 Oh, the year was 1966 I climbed that tower again, pulling guard at Spandau in the city of Berlin.   From another century, the buildings looked so old.  A 50-acre compound to imprison three lost souls.  They locked us in the towers, I thought that kind of strange, since none of us had plans to leave, but the rules could not be changed.  I served my tour of duty, it wasn't very hard, but I felt as much a prisoner as that man down in the yard.

Chorus:  We all build our own prisons, it's the same for me and you.  We build them out of deeds we've done and deeds we meant to do.  We all are our own jailers, the keeper of the key, and the only liberator who can set the captive free.

His war was getting over with when I was being born, but the victors write the history books and he'd done something wrong.  And now my war was raging, but I was not in the fray.  I served my time in Germany, half a world away.  He always kept a garden, he kept it by himself.  His other fellow prisoners never gave him any help.  It must have made the time go by as he worked from spring to fall and thought about the girl who waited just outside the wall.

Chorus

The garden was impressive, the part that I could see.  In it were some fruit trees about as old as me.  They said it looked much better a year ago or so, but he was getting out this year, so he'd kind of let it go.  We never saw the other two, they always stayed inside.  For all intents and purposes, they had already died.  But this one had his garden and the girl he hoped see.  For all intents and purposes, he was already free.

Chorus

A plane took off from Tempelhof, which must have been nearby, a 727 climbing sharply through the sky.  The prisoner stopped his gardening and leaned upon his hoe, and I wondered what he thought about as he watched that jet plane go.  Today I still remember him and the way he watched that plane, and I think of him whenever I hear "The Early Morning Rain".  I understand he was released shortly after me, but Albert Speer served 20 years, and I served only three.

Chorus    

no cats were harmed in the writing of this post

 Villa Viejos sounded so gay, well not gay in either of the current meanings of the word, but back about seventy years,  I can see it as the title of some Elvis Presley movie.  But it turns out that it has several meanings https://www.wordsense.eu/viejo/

The boyfriend/girlfriend is the most interesting.  You wonder if the English phrase came from Spanish or if it is the other way around.  Funny, the man in that usage can be any age at all.  

And Old Dog never got around to saying that he owns that piano accordion, but by not saying he doesn't own it, he is clearly indicating that he does.  And there is surely an interesting story therein that we shall have to wait to hear.

My portable typewriter looked like the one in the photo.  Well I think they all looked alike, ranch houses to the cathedrals of the hulking, dignified, viejo, Underwoods of yore.

Before writing this I was posting a description of my latest masterpiece on fb and suddenly blooie, the whole thing was gone.  This has happened to me so many times that I know to do the Ctrl-Z thing, but it is quite annoying.  All these Ctrl, Alt, Esc, and function keys, all kinds of shit can happen with the slip of an errant finger.  I would like to have a word processing program, that just acted like a typewriter (bell optional, I expect I would tire of it or it would begin to sound like it was mocking me).  New Yorker had an article on that subject a couple weeks ago, but they were awfully expensive, and they all had bells and whistles anyway, because tech types can't help but add them nowadays.

I like the idea of bringing typewriters to to Starbucks. a green eyeshade would be a nice accessory.  And how about a bottle of  bourbon and a pack of Luckies.

I have looked into some of those current programming languages for pcs and they don't work that well, and they are not the kind where you can just run with them like Basic and Pascal back in the day, and I don't think many people use them so there is no community.

I searched Spandau, and came up with a posting from December 16, 2017 which references the song, but does not contain the lyrics.  I imagine that the lyrics are in a post from a few days earlier.  Of course knowing the title of the song or some of the lyrics would greatly aid the search.

I have no idea about those Canadian truckers.  It is interesting that they don't seem to have any outside support.  Well these are truckers and maybe hanging at the truck stops south of the border has put screwy ideas into their heads.

Guarding Spandau

 When I was guarding Spandau, we didn't have any contact with the inmates.  I did catch a glimpse of Algert Speer once while he was working in his garden, but we weren't supposed to talk with each other, and we didn't.  I composed as song about it decades later, and I think I posted the lyrics on the Institute once, but I couldn't find it with the "search posts" feature.  Uncle Ken knows how that thing works, so maybe he will find it for us later.  If not, I can post it again because it pretty well sums up the experience.   

The guy mentioned in Old Dog's post was probably what we called a "warder".  That job was staffed by Germans when I was there, but they apparently used allied soldiers in the early days.  Each prisoner had his own warder who was the prisoner's main contact with the outside world.  They were allowed to have visitors only on Christmas and their birthdays, and other than that, they were pretty isolated.  They were not allowed to read newspapers, I'm not sure about TV, radio, or the mail.  We were warned not to give cigarettes to the prisoners and that they would report us if we did.  

I didn't get any souvenirs from Spandau, it's not like they had a gift shop or anything.  The buildings were impressive Gothic looking structures.  I thought at the time that the place would make a good museum someday and was disappointed to hear that it was demolished after Hess died.  

**********************************************************************

What's up with those Canadians?  I haven't heard about Canadians getting this excited about anything since the 19th Century.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ottawa-declares-state-of-emergency-over-canadian-trucker-protests-that-have-blockaded-the-city-for-10-days/ar-AATxLDG?rt=0&ocid=Win10NewsApp&referrerID=InAppShare

Kill the kitty cat

So, Mr. Beagles, did you manage to snag a few souvenirs from your time guarding Spandau Prison like this guy may have?  Got to keep an eye on those Limeys, if you ask me.  https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-60169376

And speaking of your time in Berlin I got to thinking about how I got into photography at the Special Services facilities and I was wondering what the price of a Leica was in the PX.  Nikons and other fine Japanese cameras were almost dirt cheap compared to the prices in the states.

Everything was dirt cheap as I recall, especially the government subsidized vices.  Cigarettes at 15 cents a pack, a fifth of Ron Rico dark rum for a couple of bucks, maybe, and the on-base nightclubs for the youngsters to learn the ways of the low-lifes.  Good times for the future leaders of our country.

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Digging through the Institute's archive I discovered that I came aboard in 2016 and that, finally, I am no longer the "new guy."  That singular distinction now belongs to Beantown's own B-B-Boxer!  Sorry about that, all those Bs...Boston, Boxer, Beantown; can't help hearing Elton John in my head with Bennie and the Jets.  It will pass.

But (b-b-but?) consider this: we all live in locations in or near swamps and marshes.  Surely a coincidence?

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That is a beautiful instrument.  Do you own that?

That's an odd question, but saying it was from my archive could be misleading.  Archives usually consist of written or printed material but some allow the inclusion of objects.  To say it was from my "collection" doesn't work for me because I didn't intend to collect any of the stuff I have.  It's an "accretion" if anything.  Check out this portable typewriter of mine, a much more recent acquisition. 

 

Ribbons are still available, and you can buy a new portable manual typewriter on Amazon for a couple of hundred bucks.  We are living in the age of miracles!  You want data security?  Follow the lead of the KGB, use typewriters and carbon paper.

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I'm getting closer to a name for this place, with none of the Geezer nonsense.  How does Villa Viejo sound?  Slightly exotic, even romantic I'd say, with dreams of faraway places.  There are 74 units in this building with more than 100 residents and I rarely see anybody.  The most people I've seen recently was more than a week ago when a couple of dozen folks were playing bingo.  I showed up to get the fancy Covid-19 test they were offering, the one that takes a couple of days.  No bugs in this Old Dog's bloodstream I'm pleased to report.

Anyhow, I'll have to sniff around to find out how other folks refer to this place without being too much of a busybody.

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Uncle Ken mentioned how he misses the sounds of typewriters, no bells with computers.  But there were add-ons that did just that, providing a healthy "ding" when you hit enter.  I forget if it did more than that, like add an appropriate sound with every keystroke but it was a lot of fun, for a while, anyhow.  I wouldn't want to be in a room with computers all making those sounds.

Here's a social engineering prank for you to consider.  Get a half-dozen or so Boomers with portable typewriters all showing up at the same Starbucks with reams of paper, typing away and carrying on just like in the office spaces of days gone by.  Remember typing pools?  Forget the big shots in the office; those ladies are the ones you want to make friends with.

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I did a lot of programming for fun at home with Basic, and am deeply disappointed that that no longer exists, and indeed there is no programming language to fool with on pc's.  I don't know why.

You lost me on this one or is your Google key broken?  Lots of languages, some I've even heard of, and you can go to the Microsoft site and get a free copy of QBasic.  What's holding you back?

Programming in and of itself never interested me but fiddling with motors, lights, and other control systems is kind of cool.  Robots!  That's the ticket!  I know I have some Arduino boards around here someplace, maybe a GRBL board or two also.  Just got to add it to the pile of crap to deal with, one way or t'other.  That list is getting longer every day.

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I hope my experiment with the click bait subject line worked.  Be assured, no felines were harmed.  Can you spell encyclopedia without humming this tune?  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy2jWJtO3lE

pitchers and catchers

 Four days into feb already, Groundhog Day in the rearview mirror, Valentine's day just ten days away. and right after that, Pitchers and Catchers report.  The boys of Arizona and of Florida, stretching out those winter-stiffened muscles between that big old sun and that sweet green grass.  Hope for all of us.

But not this year.  Oh the sun will be big down south and the grass the brightest shade of emerald, but those stiff muscles will remain stiff.   Because a strike appears imminent.

There do not appear to be any major human rights, just both sides being picky about a bunch of little shit issues.  Of course those little shit issues are about billions of bucks.  But billions of bucks are just pocket change to both sides.

You know what we should do?  Around noon on opening day we should gather around the nearest sandlot, young and old, rich and poor, black and white and inbetween.   We would all bring our gloves, and additionally bats and balls and catchers' mitts, so we would have a full panoply of equipment.  Stand up and sing the national anthem (what the hell) and then play ball.  Play about nine innings, and if the score is tied, we will continue on without putting a guy on second base, until one side wins, or until our mothers call us in for supper.  The ink-stained wretches, noticing at last this phenomenon will flock to the sandlots and want to know who is doping or who is hot dogging it or who is mad at the manager or who is just slacking off, you know, important baseball stuff.  But we shall tell them nothing, not even the score.  We will just say that we are doing this for the fans, and when they point out that we are the fans, well then, we will answer we are doing it for ourselves, and then we will take leave because our moms will be mad if we are late for dinner. 

Boxer it is, Boxer.  Went for a google map spin and Saugus, appears to be the very picture of the leafy suburban paradise, and with hills to boot.  And sandwiched between a couple very large parks.  I wonder about the word Reservation in their names.

Happy Friday everybody.

groundhog day

 Well thank you very much Free Boxer (I have just been winging this,  What is your official Beaglestonian name?) for the fine comment on the puddle girl story.  I have been meaning to add something to it, especially on mornings like this snowy one when there is nothing over the transom for me to gnaw over.

Five inches is what the local news was gasping about like it was the greatest disaster ever to hit the greatest city inna world.  Can't tell now because it is still dark, but it doesn't look too bad.  All the downtown streets appear to be be plowed as they damn well better be if the mayor wants to keep her job.

Peeked at Cheboygan and it appears to be above the snow line, but what of Boston, didn't you just get like thirty inches?  Now that I think about it, all I know for sure is that Free Boxer is in Massachusetts, but then it is such a small state that none of it can be that far from Boston.

We have spent much of last month going through details about Cheboygan.  Old Dog and I live in Chicago, I downtown and Old Dog in the Grand Geezer at Ravenswood Residences (GGRR?) and we both could go on for reams about our respective hoods if asked.

But maybe we could get some information about the environs that Free Boxer roams?