Time After Time

Once again, it’s time for the semi-annual brouhaha over changing the clocks! OK, it was time two weekends ago. But now one half of Congress, who never passes up an opportunity to pander (especially if they don’t have to federally fund it) has passed a bill to make Daylight Savings Time permanent.

Whether it passes in the House is another story and they seem to be having doubts. That’s an amusing turnabout… The Senate is supposed to be the sober body of deliberation, keeping the knee-jerk House in check.

Perhaps they'll remember in the 1970s when Congress did this same thing as a 2-year experiment, and the public hated it so much they repealed it before the term was up. It seemed people didn’t like sending their kids to school in the dark for such a long time.

If this does pass and become law, how long do you think it will be until it becomes grist for political attack ads?

“The Democrats want your kids to go to school in the dark so they can be killed! Which is better than them getting there safely and learning CRT!”

Personally, I don’t care what they do about the time. I can’t believe everyone gets so worked up over something they’ve experienced every goddamned year of their lives. We’ve been doing a time change for more than 100 years. It’s just something we do to try to keep our daily lives in the shrinking “sweet spot” of winter daylight. It’s not perfect but it’s hardly unbearable.

I really only feel for those who have to get up and go to work on that Sunday morning after the “Spring Forward.”

That used to be me, back in my retail days. And do you know what? I got up and went the hell to work. It’s no different than if I were to have gone out to a party or concert on Saturday night and got in late. You just do what you have to do.

I’m sick of all the pissing and moaning about it. Just STFU and change your clocks. It’s not like you’re working on a road crew. It’s just not that big of a deal. It’s an hour.

So if they make permanent Daylight Savings Time, or permanent Standard Time, or leave it alone, I just don’t give a shit. Either way, it will get light, it will get dark, and we still have to get up and go to work. Sometimes it will be light out when we go out or come home, sometimes not.

It’s a sign of a truly spoiled society when we’d rather change 100 years of rules regarding time rather than spend 5 minutes resetting our clocks twice a year.

We Have Clearance Clarence

Gosh, if only I could come up with paragraphs about guys named Roger and Victor, I’d have the world’s greatest set of sub-headings in a single blog post.

Alas, this is merely about Justice Clarence Thomas falling ill. I read that he would not be there for today’s scheduled hearings but he would still participate in the decisioning.

This doesn’t surprise me in the least. I guarantee he already knows how he’s voting on whatever case it is. From listening to recent court arguments, it seems like the justices are more interested in drawing out arguments that support decisions they want to make than calling balls and strikes as they’re thrown.

Hearing of his hospitalization immediately made me leap to “what if?” As in “What if he goes the way of Scalia?”

Man, that would trigger a knockdown drag-out in Congress, not only for his replacement but Souter’s as well. Republicans like their three-justice advantage. Bringing it back to 1 + Roberts would not sit well. I’d expect them to do everything in their power to prolong and delay the search and approval processes, no matter who is nominated. All they have to do is run out the year, which they can do without even trying hard, and then should they win the Senate back, kill another two years until they recapture the presidency. I’m not even exaggerating. Mitch McConnell was on record six years ago as saying he’d bottle up any Clinton nominee for her entire term.

Unless, of course, President Biden were to nominate someone to their liking, in which case, what’s the point of even winning the presidency? We’ve seen who they like and they’re reprehensible. The fact that they allowed the Texas abortion law to stand means they will stop at nothing, even disassembling decades of settled law, just to ensure states have the right to end abortions. I’m not just talking about abortion law, but laws about who has standing to sue whom. They just opened it up for literally anyone to sue anybody over anything, regardless of involvement. If they don’t shut that down, just watch how it plays out down the road.

More Bullshit

This was a headline from my Yahoo News page. I didn’t even read the article, nor will I link to it. It’s just too easy to debunk. Ahem…

Yes, the US doesn’t “Seem Prepared” to you, Fox “News,” because they do not want their response to a Russian nuclear attack to be made public. Why would they want the Russians to know any details of what they would do? Why give up the element of surprise? Why let them prepare for a hit on any single place?

I guarantee there are detailed plans, if not cast in stone, then being actively developed. It would be criminally negligent not to do so and this isn’t a negligent administration. There is a whole team of generals and military analysts that work on this shit regularly. I’m sure it’s all hands on deck there, what with this sociopathic tyrant and his nuclear arsenal on high alert. They’re just not clearing it through Carlson and Hannity, like the Former Guy.

More Stuff

I touched on this two weeks ago, about all the stuff one collects over a lifetime and the difficulty in figuring out what to do with it once the collector is no more. And it going through my Dad’s stuff, we’ve found some really odd things. Nothing bad, it just makes me wonder what it was that made him keep various items.

Dad used to have this wooden humidor to preserve his cigars. Then after he gave them up, it turned into a kind of treasure box, one where he’d store various meaningful odds and ends. My brother brought it back from Florida a few weeks back so we could look through it together and the contents were fascinating.

He had a selection of pictures in there that I found interesting. Most of them, I’d never seen before. But it wasn’t that they were remarkable in any way. I was puzzled by why he kept them there, rather than with the hundreds of other photos in the house.

One was a shot from a party I had for my work-friends at the record store. Just a pic of several of them dancing with two of my best friends. Another was a shot of random people sitting out by our yard swing. Half the people had their back to the camera, no one was looking, and I couldn’t tell who some of the people were. And there was a shot of Dad sitting on the porch with one of my closest friends. That one I understood, because my buddy died in 2001. He and my folks were very close.

He also had a picture of my brother dressed up for Halloween, when he was in middle school. My brother said, “Maybe not so crazy about Dad keeping this one.” He was dressed up as a woman, with lipstick, one of my mom’s dresses, and a couple balloons stuffed down the front. I’d love to run it here, but I couldn’t do that to him. (Besides, it’s his birthday today. Happy birthday, Brotha!)

Also in the box, we found a lot of ticket stubs for various concerts and sporting events. He had one set of tickets wrapped up in a printed itinerary from when he and my brother went on a “Cathedrals of Baseball tour.”

He had a newspaper obituary for Jessica Savitch, who was a network news anchor. Dad always liked her.

And then there were these:

My brother said the Truman one was worth about $100. I guess Dad was always politically active and once again, demonstrated that this apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

I remember back when I was in, like, 2^nd grade, after seeing placards for Richard Nixon tacked up to a bunch of phone poles along my way to school, I came home and announced that I was rooting for Nixon in the 1968 election. “NO, you are NOT,” Dad replied. 

I don’t remember what he gave me for a reason. I was 6, for Pete’s sake, and I only wanted to root for Nixon because he had an X in his name. I’m sure it wasn’t his foreign policy positions or opinions on labor relations.  He probably just told me that he was a bad man. 

But I do remember a year later when I asked him what the difference was between Republicans and Democrats. Dad told me, “Republicans want the rich to get richer and Democrats want the poor to get richer.” Let me tell you, I never saw anything in the following 50-odd years that ever contradicted that statement.

The one thing among his junk box collection that puzzled me the most was this:

A half a pack of gum? Seriously? This has to have been from the mid-1970s, judging from the packaging. And I remember chewing this brand of gum a LOT because it was the one kind we were allowed to have. Personally, I used to chew the grape flavor. I always carried some with me to school, so I could give some to a girl I was sweet on. But soon others noticed that I always had gum and consequently always asked me for some. I could never say no, so I usually obliged. I swear I spent my whole allowance on Bazooka sugarless. Eventually, in high school, I switched to Grape Bubble Yum and you could smell me coming down the hall 30 seconds before I got there.

But I wonder if he even knew it was there. I mean, why not just chew it, maybe back in the early 80s? And if it was too old to chew, why keep it? Did it belong to someone special? Was there a story to go with it? So many questions.

It’s to the point that if I had 5 minutes with him right now, before I could even ask him about his favorite moments in life, or biggest regrets, I’d have to know, “Why the hell did you keep a half pack of gum for almost 50 years?”

That will be one of my life’s eternal questions.

Happy Belated

A retroactive Happy St. Paddy's day to you all. Please enjoy this as much as I did. I just wish I would have seen it sooner. And admit it, everything goes better with Samuel L. Jackson.