Greetings from San Francisco, CA. I’m out here in advance of this weekend’s Woodsist Festival in Big Sur.
Luck has the Mets visiting the baseball Giants this week, so I came a few days early.
Tonight’s it’s Harvey vs. The Freak.
I ended up with a seat on Tuesday’s 6 AM non-stop out of Kennedy. The ride was bumpy. There were no severe drops or jolts but the turbulence was enough to spill plenty of drinks during the breakfast service. The Boeing 757-200 that completed the coast-to-coast journey in five hours and thirty minutes has a wide wingspan and nicely absorbs airborne potholes. Better than a 737, for example. While there may be the same tossing about on the 757 vs. the smaller models, there’s an on-board feeling of sounder footing on the 7-5.
Since I’ve not posted here in a while, I should catch up on a few items of old business.
I went back to the Midwest last week to celebrate my Mom’s 70th birthday. I don’t think she’d mind me revealing her precise age. Her four grand-children helped blow out candles on the cake served at her day-of birthday party in Glen Ellyn, IL. Not that she needed any help. She has plenty of breath left in her.
During the singing of Happy Birthday, my nephew Sam incorporated the phrase “cha-cha-cha” into the lyrics. It works somehow. My Mom thinks it’s funny. It kinda reminds me of how fans at Shea would add the low-toned “uuuh” into the “Let’s Go Mets” chant.
The day before my Mom’s party, I met my folks up in Wisconsin for a night at their escape-from-reality getaway in Oxford, WI. We had dinner at a rural supper club surrounded by farmland. I had the broiled walleye, a salad and a couple of Miller High Lifes. It was all delicious. A large female deer darted in front of our car after dinner. My Dad was ready for the surprise.
Before boarding a flight earlier that day out of Newark, I bought the three major New York newspapers at a newsstand at the airport. Each of the papers had prominent front-page photos of Colorado shooting suspect James Holmes. As I prepared to pay for the papers, the clerk remarked that images of the orange-haired young man with bulging eyes were all around her. “He’s everywhere. He’s everywhere you look,” she said.
“It looks like he hasn’t slept since the shootings,” she said.
“It appears to me that he might be medicated,” I responded.
“Medicated?” asked the clerk rhetorically to set up her summation on the subject.
“Yeah. He’s gonna get medicated all right!” While cackling loudly, the clerk simulated the administration of a lethal injection into her left arm using her right hand to form the shape of a hypodermic needle.
I walked away and later wondered when and if this country’s political leaders will ever wake up and stop the legal, easy sale of firearms manufactured to massacre and maim large numbers of humans in a short time frame.
It should be so easy to learn from these repeat tragedies yet the two candidates running for president are more worried about electoral votes. Both believe gun enthusiasts and the political factions that are aligned with them are more important than simple, sane limits on weapons that belong nowhere but a battlefield, if that.
A Times editorial dated 7-24-12 bemoaned the apparent lost opportunity by this country’s next President to speak common sense on the subject. “When he was campaigning for office in 2008, Barack Obama vowed to reinstate the assault weapons ban that had expired in 2004. That would have prohibited the AR-15 rifle used in the Colorado shooting along with the 100-round magazine attached to it. But as president, Mr Obama has made no attempt to do so. Mitt Romney banned assault weapons as governor of Massachusetts and undoubtedly saved many lives, but now he opposes all gun control measures.”
–TSR Radio returns with a thirty-minute program airing this Friday at 9 AM in the west, 12 PM in the east. I’ll discuss the trip so far. You can tune in live on the web or listen later to the archived recording.