Turn to Shepard Smith for the really important stuff

This really got me laughing this morning. I'm watching CNBC around 730am CT and on comes Shepard Smith touting his big news show later in the day, one that of course, you should not miss. 

CNBC claims that "The News with Shepard Smith is CNBC’s nightly newscast providing deep, non-partisan coverage and perspective on the day’s most important stories." 

Hmmm. So what are today's most important stories, according to SS? 1) The cause of Tiger Woods' February 23rd car accident 2) The nationwide shortage of ketchup packets. 

Not so sure I'm agreeing with your perspective on April 7th 2021, Mr. Shepard. 

TV movies i cant stop watching

No matter how many times ive seen these weekend reruns, they always stop me from flipping channels any further....

Shawshank Redemption
Christmas Vacation
Coal Miner's Daughter
Back to the Future I, II or III
Men in Black I
RoboCop
Groundhog Day
Independence Day
Paul Blart Mall Cop

Star Wars - The Emperor Lives

Forget what you saw in the movies. The emperor lives and is plotting a return to power. Here he is, taking a nap and sitting across from me on a flight from Minneapolis to Atlanta last week.

I guess being an evil dark lord is tiring.

In the dog days of Spring

It finally got into the 80's here a couple of weeks ago, warm by Minnesota standards. Despite the fact that the AC was broken, we had a great weekend with the whole family together and Uncle Kevin. What made the weekend great was that we didn't overdo it on activities. Mainly just hung out with one another

 We went to the drive-in one night, and out to dinner another. But a lot of it was just being at home, watching the rare Cardinals game on TV in Twins territory, the girls doing some sort of craft, board games and card games, Sunday morning at church, and the like.

No single thing stood out, just a series of very nice moments together.

When I was a young parent and wondered what it would be like when the kids were grown and visit, I think it is a weekend just like this that I would have had in mind. 

Texas finally gets rain and I get a night at the Ramada Inn

How I got here is not a long story, but I'll skip it. It's 9pm on November 15th and probably one of the last sticky nights of the fall. I'm standing in the lobby of the Ramada Inn West, about a mile from the Houston airport. I have just concluded a two hour fight with United Airlines over who is to blame over my missed connection. I finally convince them that the weather is their fault and they book me on a Delta flight early the next morning.

Here at the Ramada they have turned off the air conditioning in the lobby way too soon. Thunderstorms rolled in and I am one of thousands of travelers stuck somewhere they did not intend to be. Most of those around me are upset and tired, which seems to put a governor on my own temper and help me make it through the rest of the evening.

I am in line for an hour trying to get a hotel key. The lady in front of me, Karen, is from Louisville. She's here helping a son through cancer treatments. He's going to be ok but her flight home was cancelled. She tells me most of the people in line are from the cancelled Louisville flight. Like me she has a son in St. Louis. So we talk Cardinals, the World Series, Ramada Inns, Cancer, and colleges. The son with cancer lives in Chicago near the DePaul campus, which creates another round of things to talk about. Karen does not have a reservation. I suggest she call Ramada reservations while she is standing in line. I give her the number and take notes for her while she talks to the voice on the phone. She thinks I'm being helpful be really I don't want to give her my room if they run out, since I am confirmed and she is a mom with a kid with cancer, I know that's what I'll do. She gets a reservation just before they run out. The hour goes by in about an hour, but fortunately does not seem like three hours. One by one people get room keys. One by one they come back with stories of rooms that are already occupied or keys that don't work.

After finally getting my key, I head to a restaurant recommended by the hotel staff, the 7-11 next door. A burritto, pack of cheese crackers, and a bottle of blue Gatorade 2 later i'm in my hotel room. Surfing channels with my finger since the TV remote is broken. Doesnt matter since only two cable channels are working, ESPN and the Animal Channel. I choose sports and fall soundly asleep.

Woman

A few months ago I found myself watching a dance scene from one of the teenage beach movies of the 60's. The Frankie and Annette genre. The girls in the bikinis all had one thing in common. Today they would be considered fat. They had hips, a tummy, and legs that looked like they were meant to transport this healthy torso around for many years. They would not make it on a beach movie today, or any episode of the old "Baywatch".

So, this post has been brewing in the brain for a while and finally composed as I sit and watch my daughter and wife take in the latest episode of "Project Runway".

Before anorexia became a trait of beauty, there were women on television and in the movies.


Maureen O'Hara


Real, normal, female humans. Not fat, not skinny, somewhere inbetween, give or take.




Donna Reed



When I was a kid and mad at my parents I wanted a mom like Donna Reed and a dad like Fred McMurray. Perfect folk who never got mad at their kids, never spanked them, never sent them to their room. I digress.






Ann Rutherford

These women were beautiful but not unbelievably so. Not perfect. Look at them a while and you'll find something you don't like. A nose too big, lips too thin, crooked smile... you know, humans. Healthy, tough, well fed. Like our grandmothers or great grandmothers these were the type that, if they had to.... could survive wartime or famine or pestilence. At least they look like they could. Or make it a few days without food. Carry a weapon, hoe a field, raise a roof. Illness hits and they've got the constitution to fight off the normal physical calamites and assure that the family survives.
Elizabeth Montgomery

When God created the first woman, I know she probably didn't look like Elizabeth Montgomery.







Woman

But, perhaps something like this Somali woman. In any event all of these are closer to what a woman looks like than the sacks of bones stumbling down Project Runway.

One year

This blog started a year ago with a brief tribute to one of my earliest known ancestors. Originally intended as a commentary on my development as a barbecue chef, but I quickly realized there is only so much you can write about how you prepare one cut of meat. Go to any food website and you'll see what I mean.


Coincidentally, last night I went with my daughters to see "Julie and Julia", a movie inspired by the lives of Julia Child and a blogger, Julie, who wrote about a year of cooking her way through "Mastering the Art of French Cooking". If I judged movies by whether they kept me from falling asleep, this one would rate an A. But I don't.


My blog was inspired by the efforts of my brother and oldest daughter. After reading every entry on each blog I was overwhelmed by how much they wrote and the quality of their postings. But, here I am, a year later with a nice little collection of my own, the closest Ive ever come to some sort of diary.

The movie was preceded by dinner at Fasika, a restaurant I should go to more often. Simply one of the very best restaurants in the Twin Cities and a place that makes me happy just to walk through the doors. There are few restaurants that have this effect on me, or anyone for that matter I suppose. But if I had to name a few that just the thought of brings good memories the list would include Gene and Georgetti in Chicago, Fasika and Edina Grille in the Twin Cities, The Dry Dock in Mullins, SC, Hunan Peking in Ballwin, Missouri, and any Cracker Barrell.

Our original plan was to go to a ball game afterwards, but rain got in the way and we took in a movie. A great evening. No drama, no arguments, no tension. Just one of those perfect evenings that you can only imagine when you're changing a diaper, putting out a backseat fist fight between siblings, or helping with the struggles of fourth grade math.

Overshadowed

In college, this was on my dorm room wall, though I was never one to hang pictures like this. More likely it was something about stopping a war, fighting the system, rock and roll, bringing down Nixon (long after he had fallen), or a political candidate who had caught my attention. Years later this is the only famous woman I can remember honoring with a spot on my wall.

There was something about her at that age and this picture. Perfect hair, teeth, eyes, everything. Even the name, Farrah Fawcett. Not before or since have I known a Farrah. It must have been hard to be a teenage girl in the 70's knowing you had to compete with this image and with the magical name that rolled off the tongue so easily.

Over the years whenever dinner conversation turned to movies or famous people, this poster was always mentioned when her name came up. There was Charlie's Angels and the poster. She continued to act into the eighties and nineties, but despite great performances, such as in "The Apostle", it always came back to the poster and "Angels". In a way very similar to the Betty Grable picture of WWII, this was the image of her burned into our minds. I can not name anything Betty Grable ever did or said or any movie she was in, but I know she showed off those legs for the troops in that famous picture of the 40's.

Farrah was overshadowed this week by the funeral of the guy who was not Billie Jean's lover. It happens often. Denied that final spotlight. Perhaps it is fitting. Her passing was more common, more normal. The painful agony of a long illness. We've all had loved ones go through it. Her death was the type most adults can relate to and pray they do not experience themselves. His was a little out of the ordinary.

When I think about college, I always think of my dorm room. Accounting textbooks, ragged jeans, coffee urn, overflowing ashtrays, can of tennis balls, Uriah Heep and Pink Floyd albums, a few quarters for laundry..... and that smile.

Peggy Noonan on Hyman Roth

One of my favourite articles, that I have shared with many friends and colleagues, by Peggy Noonan. Posting here mainly so i'll always have it handy

Most of the important things you will ever say or hear in your life are composed of simple, good, sturdy words. "I love you." "It's over." "It's a boy." "We're going to win." "He's dead." These are the words of big events. Because they are big you speak with utter and unconscious concentration as you communicate them. You unconsciously edit out the extraneous, the unneeded. When soldiers take a bullet they don't say, "I have been shot," they say, "I'm hit." Good hard simple words with good hard clear meanings are good things to use when you speak. They are like pickets in a fence, slim and unimpressive on their own but sturdy and effective when strung together.

Stop here and go out and rent The Godfather, Part II. In the middle of that movie, you will find a speech that is one of the most famous of our time, and that a lot of people keep parts of in their heads. (If I were making a compendium of great speeches of the latter half of the twentieth century I would include it.)It is the speech spoken by the actor Lee Strasberg, who played the part of Hyman Roth, a character inspired by the old gangster Meyer Lansky. Here is Lee Strasberg's great speech, given as Hyman Roth stood, weak and furious, before cold-eyed Michael Corleone:

"There was this kid I grew up with. He was younger than me, sort of looked up to me, you know. We did our first work together, worked our way out of the street.Things were good, we made the most of it. In Prohibition we ran molasses into Canada, made a fortune -- your father too. As much as anyone I loved him and trusted him.Later on he had an idea: to build a city out of a desert stopover for GIs on the way to the coast. That kid's name was Moe Green. And the city he invented was Las Vegas. This was a great man, a man of vision and guts. And there isn't even a plaque or a signpost or a statue of him in that town. Someone put a bullet through his eye. No one knows who gave the order. When I heard it, I wasn't angry. I knew Moe, I knew he was headstrong, talking loud, saying stupid things. So when he turned up dead, I let it go. And I said to myself, this is the business we've chosen. I didn't ask who gave the order because it had nothing to do with business. You have two million in a bag in your room. I'm going in to take a nap. When I wake, if the money's on the table I'll know I have a partner. If it isn't I'll know I don't."

When Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola wrote those words they thought they were writing dialogue, a theatrical speech of a major character. But... they were writing a great speech. It is simple, unadorned, direct, declarative. There isn't anything in it that is "eloquent," and yet taken as a whole it is deeply eloquent: It tells you something big in an unforgettable way. There is in it no obvious, signaled rhythm, and yet if you read it aloud you will find in it the beautiful, unconscious rhythm of concentrated human speech. There are no phrases that seem to attempt to conjure up pictures, and yet when you hear it you imagine a Moe Green and see the dusty nothingness of early Las Vegas.It is simplicity that gives the speech its power. Each word means something and each seems to inevitably follow the word that precedes it and summon the word that follows. And so a kind of propulsion is created: It moves forward, and with good speed.One of the great things about this speech is that as you hear it you realize that for the first time you're hearing what Hyman Roth really thinks. The plain and unadorned quality of his words signals this. And we pick the signal up because we have gained a sense in our lives that true things are usually said straight and plain and direct. - Peggy Noonan