What dad's are for

 Both of them will remember this day for the rest of their lives.

Politics

 

How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics,
Yet here's a traveled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has both read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms.

~ W. B. Yeats

I wish I was a baby boomer!

Not that I wish I was an oldster, but that...hmm...I wish I had been born 35 years earlier than I was and had enjoyed the life my parents did.  Truly, the early baby boomers were a blessed generation and enjoyed a wonderful era, at least until the the stupid Viet Nam War and all the rest of that crap ruined everything.  Why couldn't you just leave things alone and let America mind its own business and just be that wonderful thing, a country for ordinary people to enjoy their lives?  Okay jobs that paid well, dumb novels, dopey movies and TV shows and goofy music.  What's wrong with that?  Why couldn't we have just had that? 

What we lost -- glorious frivolity and enthusiastic fun (not to mention a father-figure of a president who warned us):

 

>

School...

 

 

 

Me to a T!

 

I really love the way Suzuki gets her teeth into this tune.  I listened to Doris Day's version, as well as a couple of others, and they were utterly forgettable.  Day sounded like she was bored.

Anyway, yeah, I'm a girly girl, at least when I can be.  The world being what it is, though, mostly you have to be neutral in all aspects of your public personality and appearance.  I don't really have a problem with that.  It's the insistent, extroverted narcissists  imposing themselves on us normies that cause so many of the problems these days.

Of course, a song like this couldn't be composed or performed today.  I don't think it would even occur to anyone to do so, and, of course, should they do so, their career would almost certainly be over.  So this song is a relic of a vanished era, and I suppose my attitudes about myself, which I picked up from my mother and other female relatives -- boomers! -- is also a relic of a vanished era.  Alas! Alackaday!

Winter blues

 “I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.”
~ Daniel Keyes 

 “I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow.”
~ Edgar Allan Poe 

 “I went to bed and woke in the middle of the night thinking I heard someone cry, thinking I myself was weeping, and I felt my face and it was dry.
Then I looked at the window and thought: Why, yes, it's just the rain, the rain, always the rain, and turned over, sadder still, and fumbled about for my dripping sleep and tried to slip it back on.”
~ Ray Bradbury

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape -- the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter.  Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.
~ Andrew Wyeth

Let it snow!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oh, carrier!

The epic of the aircraft carrier in 45 seconds.

 

Old Year ~ New Year

The Old Year's gone away
To nothingness and night:
We cannot find him all the day
Nor hear him in the night:
He left no footstep, mark or place
In either shade or sun:
The last year he'd a neighbor's face,
In this he's known by none.

All nothing everywhere:
Mists we on mornings see
Have more of substance when they're here
And more of form than he.
He was a friend by every fire,
In every cot and hall --
A guest to every heart's desire,
And now he's nought at all.

Old papers thrown away,
Old garments cast aside,
The talk of yesterday,
All things identified;
But times once torn away
No voices can recall:
The eve of New Year's Day
Left the Old Year lost to all.
  John Clare

 

New year, new decade...new ~ ?

 

 

 

 

 

What do these things have to do with the new year?  If you can guess that you win the first booby prize of the decade.  Game?

I wish I could shimmy like my sister Kate.

All the boys are going wild over Katie's dancing style!