In Memoriam: Charles H. Lewis, Jr.

My Uncle Charlie just died. I think he was born in 1916. He was my grandmother's older brother and I have many fond memories of him. When I was 10 I wrote a report about the P-40F airplane that he flew in WWII. I was so fascinated by those planes, which lead to a short but intense obsession with WWII aircraft. Someone in Baton Rouge has a vintage airplane that they fly over our neighborhood occasionally and when I see it I stop and watch it go over and say, "Oh look, it's a P-47 Thunderbolt." He mailed me a book and wrote me a letter about all his experiences. That was way back in the day before e-mail.

He was a raconteur, a bon vivant and he loved life, something he had in common with my grandmother. He loved tomatoes. He loved martinis. That's how I remember him. He retired early in life and lived on a golf course, long before that was the cool thing to do. A long good life with a great family and great health, that's the way to do it. With all the business in my personal and work life I didn't think I was going to get around to planting my tomato plants this year, but now I think I will.

Free the Freeze!

Once upon a time when I was a single man I would often wake myself up to Al Green's "Let's Stay Together". Obviously, the words were in no way related to my then relationship status, but it sounded good and it made you happy and got you going. Then I fell in love and got engaged and married.

It's so easy loving you

At some point in our marriage I informed the wife that perhaps as a way to help us wake up in the morning we should listen to and/or "do " "The Freeze". In case you don't know, "The Freeze" is a song made popular by the visually impaired, Country-Western crossover sensation, Ronnie Milsap.

The song is accompanied by a line dance. It is very popular at proms, graduation parties, festivals, street dances and weddings. Please do not confuse "The Freeze" with Clarence Carter's "Strokin'" which is another very popular line dance/song which is usually performed by underage girls and their mothers at high school dances. Apparently, "Strokin'" is about the fornications of elderly black folks.

Okay, so hopefully you're all familar with Ronnie Milsap's version of "The Freeze" and like I was saying the wife and I half jokingly/half seriously suggest to one another from time to time that we should perform and/or listen to "The Freeze" at moments of stress or at times when you have trouble waking up, like when the time changes. Well, we just had a time change and the wife got up way earlier than I did and as I struggled to get wake up I could sort of make out some noise from our bathroom, If you don't want me to... as my body and ears finally awoke I realized she had fulfilled our dream of having "The Freeze" choregraphed to a particular moment in our life. However, I noticed that the familiar strain, Don’t tease me... Try to please me didn't sound quite as it should. Once I was fully awake, the wife reminded me that we had previously attempted to find the Ronnie Milsap version of this song and discovered that it could not be found due to the fact that apparently a bit of rift existed between Mr. Milsap and the person who owned the rights to the song. Because of this dispute it is very difficult, if not impossible to find the Milsap version therefore, she had a knock-off version downloaded to her i-pod.

A bit more research revealed that song's writer is one certain Warren Storm a native of Abbeville Louisiana and the purported godfather of the "Pop Swamp" genre.

Here's what we have to do: we have to do, we have to find Mr. Storm and petition him to release the Ronnie Milsap version of "The Freeze". I am proposing a daring and bold iniative which we will refer to as "Free The Freeze!" We need all the help we can get. First, we need several cases of Miller Lite. Line dancers love two things, one is "The Freeze" and the other is Miller Lite. If we can get enough line dancers full of enough Miller Lite I think we can raise substanial funds. With the funds we can establish a website, http://www.freethefreeze.com/ With a website we can pretty much do anything and by anything I mean that we can potentially antagonize the obviously litigous Mr. Storm. Who's with me?

If you are unfamilar with the song, the lyrics are found at the link below and are of course attributed to Ronnie Milsap.

http://www.lyricsandsongs.com/song/92408.html

post script: the author has made no attempts to verfiy that an actual disptue exists between Mr. Storm and Mr. Milsap, nor can the author explain why this song is apparently available to every single DJ in the State of Louisiana, but cannot be found on i-tunes.

You Heard It Here First

I told you Hillary Clinton wasn't out by any means. Just like that one-eyed Russian on Lost (where the hell is he, anyway? On the boat???Ben's inside man? ) she came back from improbable odds. The thing with the Clintons is that they will manufacture the rules so as to fit their dilema. "Sex with that woman? Absolutely not." "Oh, that didn't work, well then this isn't about my lying, it's about the right-wing conspiracy!" "This campaign isn't about change and the nation's economy, absolutely not, it's about all the foregin experience I racked up being the wife of someone who has foreign experience." She will move and manipulate and blow whichever way the wind blows to get elected. She will govern similarly and I have a theory that may not be so bad. I'll explain it later.

My beef right now is about this lack of foreign experience argument with Obama. Hello? Ever heard of Governor Bill Clinton from Arkansas? Ever heard of John F. Kennedy? Have you ever read the book, "Thirteen Days" or seen the movie of the same name. Kennedy saved the world from nuclear annihlation. All the generals and advisors were pushing for a strike on Cuba or an invasion during the '62 Cuban Missile crisis. Kennedy with little or no foreign expereince had a gut feeling that wasn't the appropriate strategy and began the embargo that worked. It took guts to stand up to the genereals and a certain "wiser than my age" temprement to not start a full blown war.

Hey I just looked up "Thirteen Days" and saw that Roger Donaldson directed it. I just read a glowing review of his new film "The Bank Job". My man Peter Travers at Rolling Stone really liked it.

The other point I'd like to make is the Hillary Clinton is incredibly formidable opponent and Obama has gone toe to toe with her. The guy has guts and brains and vision. Get us to the brink of a war and bring in some trusted national security advisors and he will make a damn good decision. He's no dummy. It has taken a very special person to overcome his odds and get this far. It's really sort of despicable that she would try to paint him in this light, but he's steely he's going to punch back. And there, that's him, that's why he's a great candidate and could be a great president--he can be eloquent and almost prophetic, but he can also take care of himself.

I was delighted by a NPR story I heard yesterday on my way home from work. NPR interviewed two literary reviewers, one from the Washinton Post and the other one from I can't remember where. They reviewed the books of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain. They both agreed that Obama's first book that he wrote prior to being a politician was very good--that he was a great writer with some real skills. They were also very fond of McCain and said that his writings were a very good reflection of who he was. Clinton, well they both agreed her work was not very good and was in fact, boring. Very standard and conventional writing by a political candidate.

Tonight I made sausage cornbread for the second time and it's really good. Really good.

No pictures. What's up with that?

Link!

Here's the ink to the SNL cartoon. I like to think of Obama being like this. Does anyone else get nauseated from looking at my blog? It's something to do with the font and the color. Maybe it's just me.

http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/video/index.shtml#mea=224714

SNL, Facebook, Redbox and Me

I really wanted to include a link to Youtube featuring last night's Robert Smigel cartoon on Saturday Night Live. It was a very insightful piece depicting Barack Obama's dodging of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Jackson and Sharpton are depicted as buffons and Obama as being sort of sharp and in charge. Has anyone else made the argument/comment about Obama's candidacy esmaculating the political careers of Jackson and Sharpton? Oh yeah, me. So, it's me and Robert Smigel. So the only Youtube version of said cartoon is one that has been edited or rather "added to" so that someone, presumably a Clinton supporter has added an intro that likens the cartoon to Nazi propganda. Well, I didn't want to link all that crap here. I wanted it in the pure. If you didn't see it go find it. It's so keen and precise and well, funny.

I'm still grappling with Facebook. Is it really relevant to some old guy like me? I have lots of friends. I have lots of friends phone number and e-mail addresses. Do I really need a hatching egg? Does anyone really care when I graduated from college?

Last night I rented a movie from the "Redbox" at Albertson's. This is a cool red box where you scroll through an onscreen display, find a movie, swipe your credit card and then the same red box spits it out. Total costs for one night's rental? $1. That's right, $1, plus tax. It's sort of like a DVD ATM. Anyway, our inagural movie was "Gone Baby Gone" the directoral debut of Ben Affleck featuring his kid brother Casey Affleck. It was not really a chick flick, if you know what I mean. Child kidnapping, drug use, ghettos of Boston. The wife wasn't too wild about it. Okay, so it wasn't the feel good movie of the year, but the Affleck kid did a good job and I think the direction was good. The very last scene was really dynamite, it really made you think. You always got to be thinking. Always. And if you're reading this, you're not.

www.redbox.com

So yeah, I was pretty happy with the way the Oscar's turned out. I really liked "No Country" and really thought Javier Bardem was a knockout. Although it certainly appears that Casey Affleck was really good in the Jesse James movie and he was certainly good in "Gone Baby Gone." The Jesse James movie is in the red box. I might have to get it out, but after last nights depressinginly sad foray I suspect we'll have to let the wife choose our next selection and it will be something involving a wedding, an older sister, and a soundtrack featuring Abba.

Please pray for my lawn. We inherited a lush beautiful lawn when we bought our house. however we also inherited a dysfunctional sprinkler system, which lead to overwatering, which lead to brown spot disease, which lead to me applying the brown spot disease medicine improperly, which lead to even more brown (as in dead) grass and then the winter came and now the weeds grwoing up in all the old dead grass are insane. Today, I pulled weeds out the lawn in an incredibly focused and detailed fashion the likes of which Betty and Green Rives would have recognized. I then applied some Bonus-S and watered it in. Then I had to go across the street to the city-Parish servitude that runs opposite my house and behind several houses, the backs of which face my house. None of these people are into yard maintenace. So, I went over there with a swing blade and hacked away at the sticky weed that had grown several feet high. Then I picked up trash. Then I hacked at a Lugstrum that enrcoaches upon the Stop sign. Last weekend I took some windex and paper towels and cleaned the stop sign because it had grown so covered in algae that you couldn't read it. I have written my council person about all this. How many more times do I have to do it before I become a lunatic writing letters to the editor and sending the power company polaroids of burned out street lights? I guess it could be worse. We could have neighbors like at the old house who never brought in their garbage cans so I started doing it for them and would put them on their front porch. I'm not a whacko. I don't care what color you paint your house or what you affix to the outside of it, or if you do drugs or have strange men spend the night, but cut your damn grass and bring in your trash cans. I'm pretty easy going. Oh and quit speeding down my street like a maniac. Oh and clean out your goddamned culvert so that the water doesn't back up all into the street. And of course, no loud music.

The spell check appears to be inoperable again for some reason and of course I'm not re-reading this so read at your own risk. Oh, I guess that should be at the front.