Every day, a hair turns white on my thinning pate...

 

...over this damned election.  Like the cartoon, you think you have made it through the day only to find out that dog has prepared a gourmet dinner, but is still using water from the toilet. 

You have to wonder IF this nightmare we are living is heading toward the proverbial morning after (I mean, there's just got to be a morning after, right?) and yet I refuse to believe that the outcome is going to be good. 

When the husband cut my hair today the pile was white with worry.  If this goes on much further, I'll look like Albert Einstein before sixty. 

As my friend says - "45 is like herpes: You can't get rid of it and it ruins everything by popping up at the worst moments." 

And even if 45 loses, 45 is not going quietly.  And his cult members won't let him go quietly.  

"Just you wait and see," says one of the brainwashed cousins. Said cousin is recovering from COVID, was on a ventilator, no home and back on her three-pack-a-day Parliment "cig" regimen but she's not blaming the guy in the White House or his failed policies.  Nope.  She's blaming the "Chinamen who released it into the U.S."  She is also convinced that the Iranians started all the fires in California.  

"The Ayatollah sent his firebugs to burn up the country.  The only good thing is that this taking care of the Lib-tard filmmakers and stars and pedo perverts." 

Well, she never was the brightest lightbulbs in the box.

"Any of those BLM riots comes to my trailer park and I'll be ready."  How do you tell someone who lives in a double-wide with one room devoted to Elvis Jim Beam liquor decanters that BLM doesn't want her mobile home?  And I don't think that "Hazy Acres" is place where anyone would like to riot as much as they aspire to par-tay with Lynyrd Skinnard. 

"As soon as I get my strength back up I am headed to the shooting range {cough, cough, wheeze, cough}."  

What about Biden? 

"He wants my home too for his socialist friends."

No.  Just no. Again, no one wants your 1972 Wanderlust two-bedroom mobile home with saggy floorboards.   

Anyway, so we are trying to avoid any news on election eve. 

Our plan was to make a comfort food dinner and then watch the final three episodes of Shetland season six.  Well, that isn't going to happen because last night there was NOTHING on TV, so we said we'd watch the fourth episode, and leave the other two for Tuesday. 

Wrong. 

This season's story on human traffickers is so compelling that we decided we had to see episode five, and that lead to the finale and well...

Let's just say Jimmy Perez needs another sweater. 

Back to the election. 

Our sister in law called to ask us if we were going to vote for "Kym Klacik" who is running against Kweisi Mfume for Maryland's 7th Congressional district.   First of all, Mfume is a giant in the pantheon of modern American leadership, so if we lived in that district we would vote for him.  But we don't, so we can't. 

Kim Klacik's credentials? In addition to not living in the district that she wants to represent - which is a huge no-no in my book - there is nothing there.  Yet as a Black Female, she is a darling of the Republican Party, a party that wants to convince itself that it's a big tent party.  But for the most part, she's just an operative.  Strip away the four-inch heels, dresses way to tight for her own circulatory good, and a 5,000 watt smile but there is nothing.   Looking good in a commercial is not a qualifier for a seat in Congress.  Being seen on TV is not a qualification for elected office - that's how we got 45. 

Klacik's goal is adoration, not public service. 

So our goal on Tuesday night may boil down to a game of Scrabble and chicken pot pies for dinner.  Or a Miss Fisher and maybe a Father Brown or two. 

As for election results, in the morning I'll have a cup of coffee before turning on the news.  

And if the news is good, I will drink my second cup of coffee from my "Hilary POTUS" coffee mug. 

He gots the a) Covids, b) Cancer, c) Sugar

 

Cookie would like to know when in the hell it became conversationally OK to insert the "He gots" in the present tense?   Especially when it comes to illness. 

In the old days, it was acceptable to use "Johnny got sick," if it was followed by "but he is much better".

We didn't need the details unless it was contagious, like chickenpox or measles.   Once in the early 70s a kid named Sargent came down with mumps and all hell broke loose.  It wasn't his fault.  And it wasn't a reflection on his parents, but the school took no chances.  Parents were notified and warned what to watch for. Boys in his cub scout den - his mother was den mother - were highly advised to go to the pediatrician where some of us were given shots of something to protect us.   No harm, no foul, but our poor classmate had to suffer out the miserable disease, so we sent cards. 

Now, I hear all sorts of "he gots" and on social media, I am reading "he/she/they gots the [fill in the blank] as if its become part of accepted language: 

"He got the appendicitis."

"She got the cancer."

"Grandpa got the hemorrhoid"

"They both got the sugar."

You really know its bad when "He got the cancers."

Into this comes the one that makes me really insane: "She got the covids."  Not just COVID-19, but evidently ALL OF THE COVIDS. 

And this came from a doctor!

Folks, it's like nails on a chalkboard.  BUT if we must, let us conjugate "gots", shall we?

I GOTS

You GOTS

He/She GOTS

We GOTS

They GOTS

And for our southerners out there:

Y'all Gots - and - 

All y'all GOTS

See how wretched this sounds?

Thirty years ago, this "gots" used to a reactionless nod of the head.  Many of my clients were in S.E. Ohio, so you heard it frequently, but not universally. 

And even back home, I started to hear it, I just thought that people were parroting back what they heard. 

But last year, on a trip back home, my cousin was yelling at her husband when he forgot the five-pound bag of sugar she needed for holiday baking.  He called his friend, Bud, who was at Walmart picking up prescriptions and asked him to pick it up on his way over.  Bud agreed.  

Five minutes later cousin's husband's phone rang again. A brief conversation was had, and the call was over  Then this transpired:

"That was Bud."

"Did you tell Bud that I wanted Domino and not the store brand?"

"I told him. Honey. Bud's got the sugar," in his Illinois monotone.

"Lord have mercy!  Bud's got the sugar? Why would you ask Bud to get sugar if he has the sugar? It's be like tell Twila to pick up flour with the gluten sh's got.  Dear good when?  When did the doctor tell him he has diabetes?  Did he take one of them instant sugar tests at the Walmart?  Poor Diane..."

"Sharon, Bud called to say he bought the sugar.  He's got the Domino sugar, but he doesn't have the sugar."

"Oh."

"Dingaling."

Folks, words have meaning, and things have names.  Like a coaster in a motel, USE THEM.

So if you will y'all excuse me, I'm going get me a cup of "the coffee".

There is merit in backing up the computer, to a point

 

So the COVID-19 house task of the week has been going through a stash of 20+-year-old CD-ROMs that I have kept for way too long. These files were supposed to ease the setting everything else back up.  You know, because "you never know".

Remember when writable CD-ROMs were the in thing?  If you do, you're old like me.  

When I made these, the stuff I saved was really important.  Looking through a dozen CD-ROMs of these I found a total of forty files worth keeping. 

Forty. 

And they were family pictures, scanned at what I thought was great resolution at the time.  Granted - I had an 18" tube monitor that was deeper than the picture was wide.   The computer at the time, an HP with a four gig hard drive running Windows98.  I never imagined then that I was going to be dealing in terabytes of CdV's, Cabinet Cards, Brownie card, created art, etc., and so on.  That computer back then was almost as much computing power as we used at the trade association I worked for! 

The problem that those family pictures are mostly *.gif files, AND each one is about the 300 pixels wide.   Pretty useless. But they have since rescanned at 200% their size, 600dpi, and stored in multiple clouds.

The jewels in all of these were some images I scanned in 2000 that belonged to my cousin Di who passed away in 2019. (I just found out about her death on Monday morning.)  

Things changed in 2004 when I signed my first respectable book contract, but the way I backed stuff up also changed instead of using CD-ROMs, I started using portable drives, so they are my next target.  I have about 20k regional history images for north central Ohio. 

The downside to this is that CD-ROMs are starting to fail after 20 years.  So they would lock up my computer when I run them. The upside is that computers reboot in the blink of an eye.

What I didn't find was anything of monetary value, which would have been great.  

I'll be content with the 4" of cleared CD-ROMs on the shelf.  

And happily, there are no 5.5 floppies that I have to contend with. 

Huzzah.

How are your nerves, and what color is your discharge?

Cookie has no idea what the Viavi Cure was. But these types of traveling doctors were the rage in the late 19th century.  They would distribute forms, gather information and then based on returns, schedule time in various towns, usually in hotels near railroad stations where they would thump, palpitate, feel things on the body that affected you.  Towards the end of the 19th century, with the advent of the portable electric vibrator along, so they could release women's feelings of frustrations and shame. 

Can you imagine that? 

But wait, there is more!  They also sold patent medicines, and syrups to calm the nerves, relieve neuralgia, and otherwise soothe those sick headaches.  When the patients were all seen - off they were to the next town with advice ("If that beast of a husband takes care of his own needs and not yours, see your doctor. And thank you, madam, that will be one dollar for our time, your treatment and the tincture of Lillies White Laudanum...")

Well, right here, dear readers is your own copy of the Viavi Company's very own, official, symptom list for its next visit to a town, city, or rural hickville nearest your abode.  This was found in a treasure of family papers left in a box for nearly 100 years!  Simply fill out the form with your name and will write to you with the date of the first visit and what time the doctor will see you.  Notice that discretely, on the back, is a place to discuss those topics worthy only of whispers and private miseries, lest any creeping eyes spot your application while you are filling it out.  Leave no detail unmentioned, even if its the "vapors".  

Tah, Tah, and I am off to the next metropolis down the road. 

Tell us reader, what are your complaints and maladies?  Coated tongue?  Yellow or greenish-yellow discharges?  Halitosis?  Bromedosis?  Oh, dear lord not the scourge of bromidrosis, we hope!  Tell us it all. 

 

Tell us, what do we have here...

 

This is a tacky postcard from the 1950s - 1960s.  It needs a description and your boss wants you to come up with one that will appear on the back of the card. Put on your thinking caps and tell us, what is going on here?