Tucker’s Floor Work

The big black and white rescue will begin with a mellow leg rub and segue into gentle back strokes. Gentle purring is arising. Now some soft scratching on his forehead and the back of his neck, followed by his left ear, and now his right ear. Notice the head tilt is exactly the angle needed to provide access and issue approval.

Nicely done. Now he’s sitting and progressing to chest and neck scratching. His purr has gone deeper and more uptempo. His eyes are closed…judges always look for that as a signal of trust and contentment. Look at that marvelous neck extension! Oh, well done. You know that he’s done this before. He’s one of the best.

Now he’s executing a floor flop, followed by a floor roll and full leg stretches. Look how adeptly he extends his legs, paws and claws and then moves into an inverted back arch. His fluffy tail is straight as an arrow. He is really in the zone today.

And now, it looks like…yes, he’s exposing his furry white belly for some belly loving. And he’s putting his paws up. Look at his display of beautiful shiny white fur and the trust and tranquility in his green eyes. Oh, my, and he’s kneading the air with his front paws in a slow, cyclical motion.

Now he’s signaling that he’s done, rising to stretch and wash. Bravo! What a star. Let’s turn to the judges and see how many treats they rate this Sunday morning performance.

Judges?

November 27, 2016 0

Today’s Theme Music

This is it in America. Finally, a world-shaking significant event has taken place:

Thanksgiving…has arrived.

Others will scoff. I scoff at the scoffers. Go ahead and scoff back at me scoffing at you for scoffing. You want a scoff off?

Let’s scoff.

But Thanksgiving happens every year, doubters say.

Oh, you doubters, I scoff. Yes, Thanksgiving happens every year, which is a large part of its importance. It’s one of the big holiday anchors in America, the others being Christmas, the Super Bowl, and the Academy Awards. Their annual occurrence don’t make them any less special and amazing anew every year. Thanksgiving is especially important for America because the holiday season that commences on the Black Friday the day after T-Day is economically critical for America’s commerce and pop-culture. The only thing not going on sale in this period is healthcare. I’m sure they’ll get around to it. Without Thanksgiving and Black Friday, they wouldn’t be Christmas, and then that damn music that’s been playing in stores since early October would go and on and on, like that damn pink Energizer bunny.

So you need a theme song that will carry you as you sit down with relatives and play twenty questions to catch up, confront a spread of food and gorge on dessert, or rush out the door to shop. Something to hum to yourself to gird your courage for these gritty, daunting moments.

I give you the theme to ‘Dragnet’.

November 24, 2016 2

Today’s Theme Music

Having beer with friends last night and talking, we reminisced about music and humor, so today is more about humor surrounding music. We came up with three of our favorites.

First, More Cowbell, from SNL, with Christopher Walken. The song they’re playing is Blue Oyster Cult’s ‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’, a hit for BOC back in 1976. Oddly, I associate Blue Oyster Cult more with ‘Godzilla’, but whatever.

Next, of course, was the moment in ‘This Is Spinal Tap’ (1984) when Marty Dibergi (Rob Reiner) is interviewing Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest). Nigel is Spinal Tap’s lead guitarist, and he’s taking us through his instruments when he explains why his amp is special.

Last is just the classic rock issue of fans calling out, “Play ‘Freebird’.” ‘Freebird’ is by Lynyrd Skynyrd, so here we go.

November 16, 2016 0

Happy Monday, Writers

You may not have noticed but Monday has struck. Here we are, the first Monday of this week, probably the only one planned for this week, for all I know. I believe that might be true.

Here in ‘Merica, we’re planning hard for the Next Big Holiday. That’s right, Christmas! Woo-hoo! Between now and then, we’ll also celebrate Black Friday. YOU CAN GET YOUR BLACK FRIDAY PRICES NOW if you’re a smart shopper. But I’ll bet many smart shoppers are holding back, nodding (perhaps mentally), concluding, “They say these are Black Friday prices, but I’ll bet the prices will be lower on Black Friday. I’ll bet that if they’re offering these great deals this early, they’ll have a better deal on Friday. So I’ll wait.” Cuz they know the deal. They didn’t just start shoppin’ yesterday, ya know. They got their first credit card when they were five years old. Came in the mail, unsolicited, like.

To help pass time until Black Friday and Christmas, we’ll be celebrating Thanksgiving, in which a week’s worth of calories are consumed in one day. Many try to eat it all in one sitting, perhaps preparing themselves for the new Fox Reality Show, ‘How Much Can You Eat?’

Eat, as they’re calling it in the biz shorthand, pitch people agin one another in a celebration of food and eating. Each show focuses on one culture’s food, holiday meal or special occasion. We start with fifty-three contestants for this weekly extravaganza. We’ll include side-dishes about the contestants and what eating means to them and why they like to eat, along with fave dish recipes. Domino’s has signed up as a maj sponsor. Domino’s, where, “We love pizza so much, we’ve added salads.”

That’s all fer now. I’m gonna chug my ten shot mocha – “It’s decadent!” — and start writing like a fiend. Happy Monday, everyone!

Happy Monday!

November 14, 2016 4

The Way

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I like what you’re doing with your hands. You really know how to use your fingers. That’s it…that’s it. Scratch my ears. Now do my chin. Oh, yes, oh, yes…don’t stop. You really know how to make me purr.”

November 11, 2016 0

Today’s Theme Music

‘Sesame Street’ began broadcasting on this date in 1969. Most Americans know its songs, characters and presentations. Either they were a child experiencing it, or a family member or baby-sitter enduring it, from big sibling to grandparents. I learned them as a big brother. Little sister’s favorite was Ernie singing ‘Rubber Ducky’. So….

November 10, 2016 2

This Old House

I do not think I like this house

Nor would I like it were I a mouse

I do not think I like its color

I cannot stand to sit in its parlor

I cannot stand the way it’s shaped

To me, its ideas are not fully baked

The rooms are dark, and they are cold

They make me feel so very old

The walls seem like they’re paper thin

And they seem like they’re always closing in

The halls provide so much wasted space

And the kitchen is an inhospitable place

The floorboards creak and the carpets are foul

With tones that might have come from a baby’s bowels

The windows are dirty and the air is full of dust

I think I’ll move, yes, I must!

November 3, 2016 2

The Cat in the Bush

Evening was drawing down on Half Moon Bay. Swirling and descending night fog crept in from the ocean. Some dim light remained from sunset and I’d opened our front door to step out and smell the night. The ocean’s fragrance was strong and fresh and beautifully mingled with the scents from Half Moon Bay’s damp vegetation and soil, a pleasing libation for the nose. Cars were heard on Highway 92 less than a quarter mile off but cars heard on 92 almost all hours of day and night. People liked our small town. It benefited from being located on the Pacific Coast Highway between Santa Cruz to the south, Pacifica and San Francisco to the north, and the Pacific Ocean owning the west. Our beaches presented precious beach access.

Noises drew my attention to the right. I wasn’t wearing my glasses but saw well enough to spot a small animal dart between bushes. It looked like a young dark colored cat.

I love animals but cats manifest a hypnotic power over me. My wife likes to claim that I’ve never met a cat that wasn’t hungry. Naturally, this was my first thought. I wanted to see the animal to determine who it was, that it was physically okay, and that it wasn’t hungry. Well, I also just wanted to visit with it. So I went after it, moving slowly but quickly in a crouch and softly calling, “Here, kitty, kitty.”

The animal rushed from one bush to another. I followed, closing the gap to it. Then, it did a weird thing, shaking the entire bush. Perplexed, I lowered myself and moved closer to see. It shook the bush again. I realized, in my half blind state, that it was stamping its legs. That’s odd, I thought. I’ve never seen a cat do that before….

Because this wasn’t a cat.

Skunk.

Carefully, I backed away.

Very…very…carefully.

Once a few feet from the bush, I ran back to the house on my tiptoes, gingerly closed the front door and locked it. You know, in case the skunk came after me.

And then I laughed.

Yeah, I know how lucky I am. I’m a little more careful when approaching unknown animals in the dusk, without my glasses.

You never know what it might be.

October 12, 2016 2

A Bullshit Free Day

I’d like to declare a national day free of bullshit. We can call it National No Bullshit Day. NNBD. Although bullshit is spelled as one word, some call it as BS, or more colloquially, B.S.. So we could do NNBSD. Naturally, I like my idea better. We can have shirts and tee shirts, and raise money, or some other bullshit.

You know BS when you hear it and you call it by your expression. Mularky. Bull. Bullshit. B.S. Garbage. Crap.

We were used to it in the military. Bullshit inundated us, which, if you think about it, which I try not to do, is actually a lot of B.S. We had our bullshit meters. Hearing something that we knew as bullshit, we’d say, in a sort of laconic way, “That just pegged my bullshit meter.” That statement meant that the needle went all the way to the right. Another expression used was, “That buried the needle on my bullshit meter.” Buried the needle was an old expression referencing tachometers and opening throttles to the point where the needles entered the red zone or went as far as it could. Of course, the ultimate bullshit expression was, “My bullshit meter just broke.”

Most bullshit meters used to go to ten. Mine, of course, went to eleven. It was the Spinal Tap Special. (rim shot)

I suppose, in this precise digital age, that bullshit meters are way more accurate. They’re probably on a scale of one to a thousand, enabling the ability to assign a more accurate bullshit value to a given statement, action or news. There are probably apps that can be downloaded and installed on your smart phones, iPhones, iPads and tablets. Being sixty, I don’t need a bullshit meter, and will tell you, with a sniff, “I don’t need a meter to tell me when something’s bullshit. I’ve experienced enough bullshit to know bullshit when bullshit is around.”

But many naive and gullibles do not recognize bullshit. They believe you can get something for nothing. I, of course, believe that’s bullshit. Of course, the problem with bullshit is, once it’s in your system, you can’t get it out, debilitating your immunity to bullshit. You soon can’t even detect it.

Still, there times when my bullshit meter gets broke. For example, when a car manufacturer, like Ford, declares they’ve completely re-invented a car, I think, that’s bullshit.

When they announced literally no longer means literally, I shook my head and said, “What bullshit.”

When I see the price of my quad shot mocha is five dollars, I think, that’s outrageous bullshit, even though it’s not, really. Bullshit often depends upon your frame of reference. I have some years behind me so my frame of reference has gotten pretty damn big. First, I would tell you, “Nobody sold mochas when I was a kid. We didn’t have a Starbucks or coffee house on every corner. Coffee houses were part of the beat generation. Only artists and poets went there, not people.”

And then I will tell you, “I remember when a cup of coffee cost less than a dollar.” Someone with a bigger frame of reference will naturally top that and declare, “I remember when it cost ten cents a cup,” and another will say, “I remember when it was free.” I’m not sure if coffee was ever free, so that moves my old bullshit meter needle a little bit, but that’s okay, because they’re old, and it’s honest bullshit.

The Internet doesn’t help. I mean, come on, there is so much bullshit on it that it seems possible that the bullshit will take it down. Which would be a pretty good news lead: “In today’s top story, bullshit broke the worldwide web. More coming up, after this word from your sponsors.” Which is bullshit in its own right, to need to wait to hear about this important news until you’ve heard someone try to sell you something.

I may be showing my age there.

You’d think some tech company could design an application that not only detects bullshit but blocks it, just as intrusion detection and prevention software works. Then, as you’re downloading a page, a little popup arrives on your screen and says, “Warning. Bullshit was detected and blocked.”

We could even assign the bullshit levels of threat: faint, mild, average, serious, dangerous, and OMGWTF infuriating.

I dream of a time when television commercials could contain the disclaimer, “This commercial contains no bullshit,” and you can sit back and listen and know, you’re not hearing any bullshit. Because if they were spreading bullshit when they made the commercial, some great Bullshit God would zap them with a laser and declare in a thunderous voice, “No bullshit allowed. Not on my watch.”

But, yes, that’s a fantasy. For now, I’ll dream of a bullshit free day, or even just, like an hour when I don’t read something and say to the cats, “Can you believe this bullshit?”

I don’t think it’s going to be until after November 8th.

October 12, 2016 2

Today’s Theme Music

We’re split on so many issues these days. It’s always been so, I think – remember slavery? Our history is full of repression, divisions, social rifts and strife. The establishment remains entrenched and opaque. Callow politicians and business leaders too often lie to us to promote private agendas, and those agendas are usually about taking care of themselves to the detriment of our nation and its citizens. It’s difficult to read the news and not become frustrated and depressed.

In memory of our history and all that’s going on now and forever, I offer something a little lighter that demonstrates a small sliver of some of the differences that have always existed. Webizens, here is ‘Uneasy Rider’ by Charlie Daniels, 1973.