Demo

When violating Rule 1, make sure you aim at yourself when “proving” that the gun’s chamber is empty:

A Mesa man was arrested on suspicion of second-degree murder after shooting his girlfriend in the neck while demonstrating his gun-safety skills, police said.  Barraza “attempted to prove the weapon was safe the way he carried it (by maintaining an empty chamber in the cylinder of the revolver),” court documents state. “He then pulled the hammer back and pulled the trigger.”

When I first saw the story I misread it to mean “A Mensa man…”  Of course, alcohol was involved in the incident.

Filed under: common stupidity

Decorum

… is defined by Miriam Webster as propriety and good taste in conduct and appearance.  I belong to a different age and am lost in this 21st Century.  Let’s say there’s the webmaster of a well-known (in Chicago) website like chicago-scene.com wandering about and taking photos of the crowd, and the dude gets to me and my date.  Would I straighten my posture, look somewhat serious with maybe a bit of a smirk or raised eyebrow to tell the viewer “yup, she’s with me, not you, ain’t I something”?

What would Frank Sinatra or Johnny Carson, even Hugh Hefner or today’s king of poon, John Mayer, do?  After all, I’m posing with a Young Urban Professional certified member of the Lincoln Park Trixie Society.  Maybe a bit mannish looking, but in today’s gay-preferred society that might work in a certain gender bender to be popular sort of way.  I know my friends will see it when I e-mail it to them, or if they see it on FaceBook.  Hell, maybe the boss even looks at this stuff.  I have a split second to make that good impression.  What do I do?

This guy has other ideas:

No Way to Pose

Filed under: common stupidity

Toots

If you say the name Toots Shor, you’d be lucky if one out of a hundred people knows about whom you’re talking.  The only way I knew about him was that his name kept popping up when I’d read about Sinatra, or DiMaggio, or 1950′s sports legends, and then I finally read a feature about him in Esquire.  The guy had the most amazing, rambunctious bar and restaurant in New York City in the middle of the 20th century, a time when celebrities stayed in SRO hotels and took the train to and fro.  Both of these facts added up to their having a good deal of “down time” during which to down one or a dozen cocktails at Toot’s bar.  Chicago had the Pump Room, and other cities had their spots where the swells all hung out, but nothing like Toot’s.  NYC was still the de facto capital of the country:  the center of sports, entertainment, and much of politics.  Here is an article about a documentary of the whole experience:

The film has many amusing, and some very sad, snippets.  Ranging from Toots drinking and racing contestants with Jackie Gleason to Ernest Hemingway—who was sitting with Toots and Joe DiMaggio at a Heavyweight title fight, being asked if he was anyone famous.  Papa pointed at Joltin Joe and said, sure I’m his Doctor.  Whitey Ford says Toot’s Place took five years off his career.  Gifford muses on the difference between athletes in his day and now. Whitey Ford wonders how ARod can make more in two weeks than Mickey Mantle made in a lifetime.  And some of the great old New York sportswriters question the massive gulf that exists between society and its sports stars.  One old sportswriter, who used to drink and talk with Yogi, Mick, and Whitey, wonders what do you say over a beer to a man making 160 million dollars?  A player who is often an egotistical star, always surrounded by an adoring posse, agitated agents, and armed bodyguards—its like talking to a man from another planet.  And on the other hand, have fans become so obsessed with sports that they are unable to control themselves around their “heroes?”  Sometimes it seems like a societal sickness.

There’s a cigar shop just south of Chicago which has a princes to paupers clientele who engage in the lively art of conversation, who can say anything as long as they can stand having their stances pillaged, and have to be able to defend why they just said that.  You can go in for ten minutes and stay for three hours, and be that much smarter for the experience.  Go get and re-watch the movie Barbershop to see what I’m getting at.

I once entertained the idea of starting a coffee shop here in Mayberry at a time before anyone else tried to start one (2000), if only I could cultivate a clientèle that considered it their tree house, so to speak.  Alcohol just makes people ignorant and less able to speak intelligently, so a bar was out.  A cigar shop was blatant duplication.  But a coffee house, well, there’s a place that already is considered somewhere where people can exchange ideas in a sober, brainy  atmosphere where you better be at your top.  And there’s no cliques, no favorites, and everyone from the mayor to the parish priest to the state senator to the town flotsam to Joe the Plumber can come in and bring their bellyache, and no one in reply can say “F you;” they must say “F your point for reasons A, B, and C, but on D and E, well, you might have a point.”  You make it personal and I throw you out, you throw a mug or a punch and I throw you out.  But you lay out your case like a Henry Rollins and I might think you’re an idiot, but you did the grunt work for your thought, so welcome, and by the way, “F your point for reasons A, B, and C.”  Tap gloves, come out verbally swinging, then shake and be good sportsmen when you’re done.  Operating a coffee house is only a little bit about selling coffee, the bulk is making a unique place people want to come to and stay long enough to spend enough to pay the bills and make a profit.  But one must know when a business plan becomes a Walter Mitty fantasy, so I forgot about it.  We’ve had coffee shops opened by idiots who think all you do is throw the doors open and people naturally wander to get in out of the rain and presto it makes itself.  But now I wish I made a go of it; nah, I wish I had the “disposable money” I did then with the connections I have now.  Then I was new to town, now I’m on personal hello with a third of the people.

Filed under: observations

Working the Picket Line

I’ve always been a union supporter, and in spite of current abuses I see the need for them in the bare sense of the term – the organization that forces due process upon a business, and can bargain for safer working conditions and better pay.  But when the union people are too lazy to man their own picket lines, to where they’d rather outsource their beef to non-union workers earning minimum wage, that’s where they jump the shark.  There’s more irony here than in a battleship:

So instead, the union hires unemployed people at the minimum wage—$8.25 an hour—to walk picket lines. Mr. Raye says he’s grateful for the work, even though he’s not sure why he’s doing it.  “It is bizarre,” says Lynne Baker, a school spokeswoman, about the union’s hiring of nonunion picketers.  Inside, Juan Flores, Can-Am’s foreman, said his nonunionized workers are paid fairly. Of the protesters, he said, “I don’t blame them—they need the money, but they look like they are drunk or something.”

Filed under: common stupidity, liberal games

Twenty First Century Man

I came home from work and immediately took a four hour nap.  After a bit of blog surfing, I got a yen for hot dogs for dinner, so I needed to go to the grocery store.  I thought that for once, I’d do what all the cool kids do nowadays, and go in the clothes I rolled out of bed wearing (stained, holey, worn-out cycling logo tee that began its second evening of humid weather sleep, knee length shorts), and flip flops (my actual shower shoes).

I did blend in, but couldn’t overcome the feeling of nakedness, though I was better clothed that fifty percent of my surrounding folk.  I don’t fit in.  I’m too much of a fussywig.  I’ll go back to the twentieth century and actually change from house clothes to going out wear again.

Filed under: at least someone's having fun, observations