Mary, please come home

You're 500 miles away. We feel it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwB2A9HHaCU&feature=related

Thank you Mary Travers

http://www.youtube.com/user/slims86

Favorite YouTube videos--Baby Boomers Only

Here's my favorite baby boomer classics on youtube:
first but not best, The Guess Who just a few years ago. Original members, fat but still got it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZVzH5yBFQA

The Association

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3K2AKPmvV8&feature=PlayList&p=57221D0026BEFE51&index=0&playnext=1

The Seekers. What a beautiful girl Judith was

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Ga9Bs4fzSY

And my favorite: Spanky and The Gang. I love Elaine "Spanky" McFarlaine what a beautiful girl with the big voice

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OsfzU_XRas&NR=1

Go, Spanky!

Obama the Dictator

So now Obama-rama wants me and you to snitch on our friends and family if we hear them criticizing his health care plan, or if they blog or email about it.

<---Well that was a tactic this dude used when he took over. What next, peoples start disappearing in the night?

Well I don't want to give King Hussein of D.C. credit for being as swift as Stalin. Only as communistic and maybe more audacious.

I hear he's sending out union thugs to tea parties and town hall meetings to intimidate participants. And he's wanting to change FTC regulations to put conservative radio talk show hosts out of business.

In short, he wants to oppress any opposition in the media. Where else? The downtown coffee shops? In church? In your home?

Well I'm putting this out on my blog and inviting anyone who wants to to snitch on me. Just give them this URL to my blog www.dmac-dmacsblog.blogspot.com.

Well I WANT them to see it.

Tell you what. You do it too. Criticize King Hussein of D.C.'s health plan on your blogspot. Give them something to do. Lets saturate the whole system with it. Get your friends and family, even your enemies, to do the same thing.

Gratitude on the Fourth

Yesterday was the 4th of July, Independence Day. I spent 5 hours volunteering in the kitchen of our local homeless shelter. As a result of me popping off at the mouth in Sunday school when Lynn requested kitchen help on Saturdays (note to self--check mouth).
I went in from 10:00am - 1:00pm and sliced watermelon, potatos for potato salad, pickles and onions. Lynn pretty much runs the kitchen from top to bottom even though it's someone else's job. She's in there 14 hours a day on weekends and that's too much. If she's not in there I won't know what to do next.
There's a large fellow Stan who is a resident, works the kitchen and he's friendly enough but he's not going to tell me what to do next. He just carries on like I'm not there. A black dude, Charles, resides there and does kitchen work but he won't speak to me at all. Another black dude, Terry, is really nice and compliments me but he doesn't stick around.
I dished out food for, I dunno, 50 men for lunch and there was a lot of gratitude there. I've been wanting to do that for a couple years and yesterday I did it.
Came home for awhile and went back in at 5. This time we had about 70 - 80 for dinner and they got chicken, corn on cob, beans, potato salad and bread. We were 20 minutes late but there was no hootinanny from the residents. They get some piddly portions and no complaints. They are allowed seconds though and maybe thirds. And dessert.
A couple of residents volunteer to wash dishes and seem content to do it.
I didn't see any sourpuss attitudes from any of these guys.
The sleeping quarters is adjacent to the kitchen and it's cramped. My church just built a larger wing to the building and 50 more bunks will be added later.
It was an experience. I learned a lot about gratefulness for what little I've got.

Back In The Day

This is one of those "back in my day" stories that tends to send people running the other direction. But now that I'm 50 I tend to drift back in time to simpler days.
I am from a small east Texas town know worldwide for incarcerating and sometimes disposing of our nation's criminals. But that's not what this is about.
Except for that my early years were much like Leave It To Beaver. My mom and dad moved there in 1955 (I think) so he could start a career as minister for the penitentiary system. That was a career that lasted 30 years and took our family to many different units to live in on-site duplexes, one apartment building and one old grey house that I loved and still have my happiest memories. So therefore I grew up in childhood with a state pen in my backyard, frontyard or side yard.
Outside of that, it was just an ordinary small town. There is also a moderately sized university there. I worked on the maintainance department there from 1980 - 1987. More on that later.
Back in the '60s our neighborhood was like what you saw on tv. Full of kids of different ages. After dinner (which for us was always at 5 no matter what) it was time to go outside and fool around. We would do that until nightfall.
When it was time to go in, it was bathtime, some tv and then bed. The fog horns would go off at the penitentiary behind us and I still remember that haunting sound. We lived in a old big grey house just down from the unit with wooden floors and wallpaper. Behind us was the rodeo arena where once a year the unit would throw a prison rodeo that drew thousands from all around. They would sort of camp out all up and down the street and around our house on blankets. Vendors would line the streets selling popcorn, hotdogs, cotton candy and such.
My dad woul walk me the hundred yards to the state pen and take me in so inmate trustees would cut my hair. The only thing I hated about that was they would cut it so short and toss lard all in it at a time when the Beatles were the fashion.
And shopping: In those days my mom would take me shopping on the square, that's where everything was. There was a J C Pennies with wooden floors and when a sale was made the invoice was placed in a wire basket and run for many yards to an old geezer up on the balcony, where he would keep a copy and run the costumer's copy back down the same drag line.
Also was a shoe store, a drugstore and across from those two a coffee shop where my dad would get with the fellers and drink coffee and start trouble. He was good friends with the man who owned the shoestore, I only knew him as 'Rodge' as that's all my dad would ever refer to him, and the drugstore owner, Mr. Goolsby.
All the bustle seemed to be downtown. It was smalltown life in the '60s before WalMart and the like would send everything out to the hightway. I'm glad to have been a part of it.

Robert Mitchum

I'm a big fan of the late actor Robert Mitchum. I wonder why. I guess because nowadays there's no big, real man actors out there. Nowadays all that passes for male stars are wimps and geeks like Brad Spitt Johnny Depp or Hugh Downey (??) and what not.

My dad never liked Mitchum because, according to him, he had a "nothing face". Well that "nothing face" was Mitchum's best asset. It made him into a film noir (google it) type actor. But also it gave him an excuse to have this lah-de-dah image to push to the media, sort of like Dean Martin did.

Mitchum's life in reality was a B movie. His father died when he was 2. He got kicked out of more schools for brawling that I've owned shoes. At 14 he wound up on a chain gang. But he also wrote poetry. He wrote plays for a local theater where he worked as a stagehand. He took to the vagabond life on the road where he met his future wife, then worked at Lockheed where the job stress cause him temporary blindness. He actually did ghostwriting for a traveling astrologer. He was an amateur boxer, where he admits he got good and whipped.

After he got big, he got into singing and recording. His specialty was Calypso music. He recorded numerous albums, and sometimes his own voice was subbed for the pro actors in his movies.

Here is a consorium of his famous quotes. Courtesy of quotelucy.com.

There just isn`t any pleasing some people. The trick is to stop trying.
Sure I was glad to see John Wayne win the Oscar ... I`m always glad to see the fat lady win the Cadillac on TV, too.
I never changed anything, except my socks and my underwear. And I never did anything to glorify myself or improve my lot. I took what came and did the best I could with it.
I`ve still got the same attitude I had when I started. I haven`t changed anything but my underwear.
I kept the same suit for six years - and the same dialog. We just changed the title of the picture and the leading lady.
When asked what he looked for in a script before accepting a job, he said, "Days off."
I started out to be a sex fiend but couldn`t pass the physical.
I`ve survived because I work cheap and don`t take up too much time.
Where are the real artists? Today it`s four-barreled carburettors and that`s it. (1967)
I gave up being serious about making pictures around the time I made a film with Greer Garson and she took a hundred and twenty-five takes to say no.
I never will believe there is such a thing as a great actor. (1948)
People think I have an interesting walk. Hell, I`m just trying to hold my gut in.
I came back from the war and ugly heroes were in.
Asked his opinion of the Vietnam War in 1968: "If they won`t listen to reason over there, just kill `em. Nuke `em all."
When Mitchum, who served time for marijuana possission, was asked what it was like in jail, he replied, "It`s like Palm Springs without the riff-raff."
I have two acting styles: with and without a horse.
You know what the average Robert Mitchum fan is? He`s full of warts and dandruff and he`s probably got a hernia too, but he sees me up there on the screen and he thinks if that bum can make it, I can be president.
Movies bore me; especially my own.
When asked why in his mid-sixties he took on the arduous task of starring in an 18-hour mini-series "The Winds of War" (1983) (mini): "It promised a year of free lunches."
Every two or three years, I knock off for a while. That way I`m always the new girl in the whorehouse
Listen. I got three expressions: looking left, looking right and looking straight ahead. (on his acting talents)