Sale-A-Bration

 For a while, there was a festival in the mountain town of Nederland, just up the canyon from where I grew up called "Frozen Dead Guy Days." It continues its celebration of "life" in the slightly larger tourist haven a little further up the road in Estes Park. This three day fiesta centers around the story of Grandpa Bredo, whose frozen remains were shipped to the United States from Norway back in 1989 to a cryogenics firm in Oakland, California. Eventually Grandpa was moved to Nederland, Colorado where he was cared for by locals. As much as a frozen dead guy needs care. It was in 2023 when the still very stiff Mister Bredo was moved to the old ice house at the Stanley Hotel, the inspiration for the Stephen King best seller, The Shining. 

So?

It was Grandpa Bredo to whom my thoughts began to wander as I approached Presidents Day. Most of these guys are dead. As far as I know, few if any of them were kept on ice. And yes, perhaps more to the point, these were all guys. Hopefully it won't be too long before this epithet needs some sort of inclusionary reworking, however it should be pointed out that I am one of those people who routinely refers to a group of people of various genders as "guys." 

Sue me.

But after years of celebrating the Best of the Best, Washington and Lincoln, it was decided in 1971 that we should acknowledge the dozens of guys who had held the office with the inclusion of such luminaries as William Henry Harrison, who only managed thirty-some days in the Oval Office before succumbing to pneumonia. If you're keeping score at home, he was the ninth in a series of chief executives of the United States, but even his stubborn insistence to brave the elements at his inauguration without a coat still doesn't qualify him as "frozen." Joe Biden loved him some ice cream, but his choice of dessert does not qualify him, especially since most reports suggest that he is still alive. 

Reaching Out

 This May my son will celebrate his twenty-ninth birthday. I expect that his mother and I will have something to to with that mark in his book. He will be three hundred forty-eight months old, so we may have to add a few pages to his baby book. 

Or not.

Over the past decade we have spent less time together on those actual dates of his entrée into this sphere. He has a life of his own, after all. 

But why twenty-nine, and why months ahead of the actual nativity? 

Glad you asked. I was out running around the city streets where so much of those earlier years prior to his twenties were spent. A mile or two to the east where he went to preschool. Up the hill to elementary school. Down the street to middle school. Over another hill across town to high school.  By the time he was in high school he graduated from taking the bus to driving his own car. On a line, those institutions could be visited in six miles. Returning to my running brain, I noted a vanity license plate on the back of a shiny black SUV. EKKA20. A birthday gift, perhaps. A prize for completing undergrad studies early. 

We helped our son buy his first car. Since then, he has bought, traded and swapped titles for any number of vehicles via his own wiles and automotive knowledge. I can say without fear of reprisal that I had nothing to do with those. Swapping cars with a neighbor for a weekend makes me nervous. My son has learned to negotiate and navigate the Department of Motor Vehicles, an entity I consciously avoid. 

So as our little boy rounds out his first three decades, I wonder what is left for me to give him. On trips to Target his mother and I still send him pictures of Hot Wheels and Nerf guns that we think he might like. He takes this all in with good humor and aplomb, as he charts his own course into the adult world that includes things like health insurance and appliances that just stop working. It is his parents who are now calling him for help. We try to make it sound better for us by reminding him to eat more vegetables or wear a raincoat. 

He's got this, but every so often the phone rings and my son will ask me for the tiniest bit of advice. I try not to spend too much time going on and on about how glad I am he called to ask me about whatever minor inconvenience has him stuck. I am the boy's father, after all. Why shouldn't I be impressed with the job his mother and I did getting him this far? 

Even if we didn't get him that Black SUV. With vanity plates. 

Glimmer

 My very thoughtful older brother sent me an article from what is now his, and what was once my, local newspaper. It came to them via a Professor of Philosophy at California State University, Fresno named Andrew Fiala. It suggested that the worst outcome of the "Trump Era" might be pervasive cynicism. 

Ladies and gentlemen, I stand metaphorically here today to suggest to you that this may be exactly right. 

As a lifelong cynic, I have always attempted to keep my underbelly slightly soft in the event of an actual need for human connection. I will say that potential weakness in my otherwise impermeable scoffing attitude has become smaller over the decade. I have been worn down with the seemingly exponential expansion of suffering among those who don't happen to have the same last name as the convicted felon and winner of the “undisputed champion of beautiful clean coal" award for the (checks notes) first time ever. 

Not that I was never capable of a high degree of snark before 2016, but there was always that secret wish to be proven wrong melted into my candy coating. I truly enjoyed the Obama presidency, coming as it did as a palate and spirit cleansing sorbet after the Bush years. And yes, when I cast my ballot for Kamala Harris in 2024, I truly believed that we were on our way to electing our first woman president and flushing all the rot connected to the MAGAts down the drain. 

Whoops. 

Since that last election, I have learned to expect disappointment from elected officials, courts and companies as Project 2025 has been taken as a literal handbook for tearing up the Constitution. Watching all of this, I find it difficult to come up with a different response that one hundred percent Grade A cynicism. 

Which is where I need to remind myself, and you dear reader, to remember that there still is an up out there. It is very difficult to find, but the protesters on the streets of frigid Minneapolis risked life and limb to kick ICE out of their city. 

And they prevailed. 

Each new voice from the right that begins to break ties with this broken shell of a dictator is a glimmer of hope. Each red baseball hat burned in rage and disappointment from the snake oil they were sold is a turn back toward reality. 

My older brother is not one to send out a lot of links and memes, so when he sends me something, I listen. 

I hope you do too. 

Who Watches The Watchmen?

 Apologies for anyone out there who was inconvenienced by last week's closure of the El Paso Airport. 

It might have been that alien forces had returned to nearby Area 51 to retrieve fallen comrades lost in the Secret War against Altar VII. You remember when there was all that fuss and hubbub? Not then. The time when there was all that fuss and hubbub that no one heard about?

Right. 

That was the one. 

Anyway, it seems that the Customs and Border Protection goons were in charge of the protection of our airspace and it seems as though they may have gone a little overboard on the protection part. What they assumed was Altar VII spacecraft approaching our planet from billions of miles away turned out to be four Mylar balloons. To their everlasting credit, they did so with "lasers" with weaponry recently cleared by Pete "War Pig" Hegseth during a late-night tequila binge. It could be that in his altered state, Pete may have gotten the gun before the horse, or however that old saw goes. 

Citizens of Earth! You no longer need to live in fear of an alien invasion from Altar VII or debris from some kid's birthday party. The goons can take care of that. Meanwhile if you're scared of drones being sent by Mexican Drug Cartels to mess with the airspace in and around El Paso, you're probably going to have to wait until that actually happens to see if the "lasers" are as effective on drones as they are on party balloons. 

Also, you might want to keep an eye out for any of the masked goons patrolling the streets of several U.S. cities. They might just be packing heat. Like ray gun heat. 

Sleep tight, America. 

End Of List

 I don't like kale

I don't like bananas

But I love you

I don't like fascism

I don't like oligarchy

But I love you

I don't like waiting in line

I don't like mornings

But I love you

I don't like soccer

I don't like figure skating

But I love you

I don't like four-way stops

I don't like metering lights

But I love you

I don't like poodles

I don't like hairless cats

But I love you

I don't like maps

I don't like lists

But I love you

End of list

Staring Into The Sun

 Made it to the other side. 

No more football to distract us to the mission at hand.

Wait. 

You say we need to delve more deeply into the "controversy" surrounding the halftime show? 

Puh-leeeze. 

As a football fan in good standing, having run my school's fantasy football league for more than five years and the guy who made "a deal" with Comcast to get NFL Redzone pouring into his house every fall, I figure I owe it to everyone else to tell you what the halftime show is for: 

Potty break.

Oh, I understand that the organizers of this particular extravaganza went out of their way to provide viewers with something they could be watching on MTV, if it existed anymore. I appreciate the demographic study that went into bringing Bad Bunny to the nation's TV screen. And I applaud Mister Bunny on his showmanship. I do wonder just a bit about how this episodic montage appeared from the seats in Levi Stadium, but that's not the point.

The point is for thirteen minutes, the ax we all felt the need to grind was about the most streamed artist on this planet was given a showcase for his music and brought along some special guest stars. And he had the temerity to sing in a language other than English.

A side note here: Rolling Stones' front-man Mick Jagger has allegedly been singing in English for several decades now, and when his band played the Super Bowl XL in 2006 I didn't catch a word. And, if I may point out still further, Mick and his crew are not U.S. citizens. 

Bad Bunny is.

But for those thirteen minutes, the singing, and dancing and fireworks made me forget about the Trumpstein Files.

Almost. I felt no compulsion to peek in on the "alternative" halftime show, just like I didn't switch to the Puppy Bowl. I was there for the spectacle. 

And the potty break. 

Whimsical

 Would you buy a used space shuttle from this man? 

The world's only paper trillionaire has decided to scale back his plans from colonizing Mars to building a city on the moon. 

In my head, I started picturing Space X employees working the phones and knocking on doors, not unlike Glengarry Glen Ross, trying to sell investors on how great this change will be for them, even though the moon is much closer and already has a certain amount of debris left there by previous landings that will need to be cleaned up before the tennis courts go in. That's a difference of thirty-five to one hundred forty-five million miles, depending where the moon is in its orbit around the earth. And, as previously mentioned, the moon is kind of played out. 

More than fifty years ago Apollo missions landed humans on the moon's surface where they picked up rocks, drove around in a moon buggy and played a little golf. That last bit might be enough to get the Mar A Lago crowd excited, but I'm not sold. 

As I have mentioned here previously, I am immediately suspicious of any vehicle Elongated Mush is selling for fear that they might explode. Add to that the lack of oxygen during the trip and once you get there there won't be any atmosphere so you'll be subject to whatever price Mister Mush decides to charge you. And hitchhiking back to earth seems like a stretch. 

It was just six years ago when everyone's favorite nearly-human insisted that he would have human beings landing on Mars right about this time. Since then, he's been "busy." Getting his pal the convicted felon into the White House so he would be encouraged to take a chainsaw to parts of the government that he wanted to mine for data as well as giving up interest on saving the planet with electric cars in favor of building robots so he would have someone to talk to. 

And again, who is to say that once the first space cabins have been pieced together near Mar A Luna that Mister Mush would decide that he was really more interested in making a perpetual motion machine, leaving the colonists stranded on the moon. Just like all those Cybertruck owners who decided to take their new vehicle to a car wash.