Reading harold_maude's journal

The evening news is on. I couldn't watch. I can't stand the threads that dangle and we are suppose to just listen and wring our hands...or somthing like that.

All the what if's can make a person, well, a little nuts. No safe place to live, or go. No safe this. No safe that. Have you ever taken the time to count the number of bad news stories that are the first thing that slaps you in the face when you watch the news?

I would love to see good things make the news at the top of the hour instead of some last minuet after thought.
It kind of feels like eating bad food and then there is a great desert to top it off and your feeling really lousy by the time it arrives so you can't enjoy it.

Why is it that there is this insane zeroing in on bad stuff?

After pondering this thing, I can only come up with one answer, bad news sells.
Good news doesn't. No one would ever listen to a talk show where there was nothing but good stuff on it. And no one would ever buy into a reality show where nothing bad could happen.

We love misery. According to the entertainment industry who puts this mess together.
We love to see the cronic pain, dismemberment of anything or any body, that's why crime shows are so big. And we definately love to see people play games where there are all kinds of loosers and there is some big winner.
But no one remembers that when the new tale of soap opera live game show, thrills and chills come on.

The people you buy cars from, food from, clothes from, shoes from and anything else from sponsor this stuff.

I think somewhere along the line, when the sterile cookie cutter smiles got thrown out the attitude was we want to see reality....

But how much of it is "real" and how much is staged?
How much is edited out to give it that razors edge of throat cutting feel?

I don't watch the news. It's mostly entertainment. Or at least that's what it's suppose to be.

Walter Cronkite decited to get out of news reporting because he said it was no longer just reporting the news. It had become entertainment.
I tend to agree with him.

I quit watching everything but the weather several years ago.
I can read the news in the paper. That way if I get a few lines into it and I start getting angry I can just set it aside.
News papers are more useful than what comes out of the t.v.
You can line a bird cage with them, wrap messy moldy food in it, clean windows with it, put it on the floor for a new puppy or kitty.
And you can make paper mache with it or use it as a fire starter so you can have a barbq in the great out doors.

You can't do any of thoes things with a bad news cast on t.v. all you can do it turn the chanel or turn it off.
Nothing to show for the time spent watching bad news.

Well so much for the evening news. I think I'm gonna go paint for a while.
Then off to bed, and hopefully tomorrow will be blue skies and sunshine.

And I have to believe that somewhere some good news is happening. At least to one person in the world.

I loved your suggestions for using the newspaper, i.e., lining bird cages, wrapping food, cleaning windows, starting fires...

And what you said about Walter Cronkite:

Walter Cronkite decided to get out of news reporting because he said it was no longer just reporting the news. It had become entertainment.

This would be why I hold to my eccentricity of not owning a TV. It gets in the way of my reading time... and I detest reality shows.

My friend who is an actor, told me that he has just finished a 'tour' Off-Broadway, and he feels a little claustrophobic around his stage mates. Only two does he feel that he can trust. The rest seem to want to pry into his life and find out all of the little details... looking for drama. He says that he feels as if he is in a 'reality TV drama' where everyone is looking to win. Life does tend to imitate art, and vice versa.

On a lighter note, do you listen to NPR? National Public Radio? I'm sure you do... and I do. I love listening to Garrison Keillor's The News from Lake Wobegon. Granted it is 'entertainment', but not the smarmy stuff you see on television. And there is always the History Channel, and PBS.

I used to watch PBS a lot. But then again, that's how I got hooked on Pokemon years ago... I am embarrased to say.

I agree, we live in a very sensationalist atmosphere where anything is a topic of conversation; particularly other people's misery. As I've said before, the good goes largely unnoticed, and the bad gets all the attention. Short attention spans, and negative attention spans abound, and yet...

I think there is still hope for the flowers... and for people that will sniff them. Someone told me that there used to be a program on computers whereby you could send 'scents' along the internet waves. It didn't take. But I wish that I could send you the scent of freesias just blooming right now.

My mind is made up...not like my bed, which is a mess.

I love NPR. Garrison is awesome. Kevin and I have decited that we want to adopt him as our grandpa.
I love the ketchup advisory board stuff.

...and then there is the music...oh that lovely, lovely music.

When we were house sitting in the house with no electricty we had a radio that ran on batteries, and every Saturday we would sit and listen to NPR. I love the Car Guys too.

One of my favorite shows was the one where they had talked to this guy who wanted to put barbed wire around his car to keep his goats off the hood. It was hysterical. His girlfriend had left him because of his goats.

Everything turned out ok though, they worked through the goat problem and ended up getting married.
Turned out that she felt like he was paying more attention to the goats than her.

It was so funny because the reason he had called in the first place was when he took his goats to town he had problems with the goats eating the seats.
And wanted to know if they had any good suggestions on how to fix the problem.

Then as he talked about things, he said that he wanted to put barbed wire around the car because the goats would jump up on the hood.

We both were laughing so hard, I was in tears because I could just picture it. The goats on the car and him trying to pull them off and them just makeing noise at him.

Halloween before last they had this music thing that was pretty funny too. It was some concert. The music was kind of 50's si fi fare, and it would get really strange and then sound like it was going to become music and then get loud and weird, and then sound like it was over and then here would be more of the "music".
It cracked both of us up. And it went on for over an hour. It had both of us rolling on the floor.
I wish we could remember what it was, because we'd love a copy of it.

Another song I want to find is the "Dung Bettle" song. It was on some pbs kids show several years ago. It was a riot. There was this guy dressed up like Jungle Jim singing this song about dung bettles and it was hysterical.

T.V.s make great target practice. I heard about these guys who would go to the local dump to hunt t.v.s.
They would dress like hunters and then go and shoot any t.v. they found in the dump.
*Smiling* I love the immage it set in my head.
I could see a wild kingdom kind of thing going on...
"And now Ed is making his apparoach. He's being careful not to make any noise so that he doesn't alert his prey.
And there they are Bill, a rather large gathering of wild t.v.'s
I've never seen so many t.v.s in the wild Ed."

"Me either Norm. Bill is one hell of a dead eye too. There's gonna be t.v on the table to night for sure!
Oh no! They heard him! Their taking off! Bill is in persute! Shoot um! Shoot um Bill! Don't let um get away! It's been ages since I had a great t.v. dinner!"

"Oh yeah! He took that one down! Oh boy! t.v. on the grill tonight! Gotta remember to stop at the store and pick up some A one. A good t.v. dinner is always better smothered in A-one!

*grinning*

*snorts*
*spews orange juice out of nose*

Oh, oh, oh... my stomach hurts from laughing... your 'T.V. scenario' was just smashingly funny. Let's go hunting for wild T.V.s...

Wild Kingdom Safari Hunt for T.V.s... reminds me of Elmer Fudd saying: Be vewy, vewy, caweful... I'm hunting T.V.s

...as Bugs munches an antenna.

By the way, have you read any of Neil Gaiman's dark fiction?
The back of his book Harlequin Valentine says:

Those who have spent Valentine's Day alone are aware that the cold February holiday can be hard to swallow. Award-winning creators Neil Gaiman (American Gods) and John Bolton (Books of Magic) want you to know that all it takes is a steak knife, a fork, and a bottle of quality ketchup...

I'm sure that you could find the right bottle of quality ketchup while listening to Garrison Keillor's Ketchup Advisory Boards...and if the bottle springs a leak, why then use duct tape.

I had a friend nicknamed 'Duct Tape' once, because his answer for everything was: "Use duct tape!"

As far as the Car Guys, I had my own incident last week. Something was very wrong with my little black car. It wouldn't go. I thought that the transmission was going, or that I had burned out the clutch. I'm not one of those women who believes that there are such things as 'snipe' or 'ice weasels' (a la r_pendragon), nor do I believe there is such a thing as 'lighter fluid' for your headlights... But, when my friends who came by to run a diagnostic on the car said that it needed 'clutch fluid', I was admittedly skeptical. I know not much about cars at all!

Apparently it was the 'clutch fluid', which we picked up at Autozone for about $2.50. A far cry from just the cost of labor if I took it into the garage... as well as whatever else they might charge a woman ignorant of the workings of a car engine.

As a side note: Once, when I was working for an automobile insurance company... An older insured lady called to relate this story to me...she said:

"My husband died a year ago, and left me his baby blue Ford Tempo. I've never driven it, and now it seems to be giving me problems. Yesterday, I went into the garage, and found that a skunk had sprayed the car, and then apparently crawled up into the engine and died in there. It smells really bad, and I was wondering if a claims adjustor could come out and take a look at it." O_o.

Then, several years ago, my parents had a skunk that moved in under the front stoop. It had crawled into a hole in the concrete, and was just hanging out there. For about a month we entered the house through the garage, until we got someone to flush the skunk out. Meanwhile, I was saving up my money for cans of Campbell's tomato soup and bottles of Heinz ketchup in case he sprayed me... since I heard that tomato juice is good for masking skunk spray odor.

Wha-ha-ha-ha! ;P

My mind is made up...not like my bed, which is a mess.

This post was edited by rosyxxx on Dec 16, 2004.

Oh yeah...love that skunk smell. *Grinning*

I know this woman who was really in the dark when it came to cars. A friend of hers had her believing that you had to change the air in the tires every so often or they would blow up.
When she told me I thought I was going to fall off my chair from laughter.

Speaking of t.v.s, we watched fight club the other night and I've seen it several times, and I love what they do to the t.v.s.
And all the fancy cars.
What a statement!

The t.v here is used for the most part to watch movies on.
We got some old black and white horror flicks right before halloween at wally world for a buck a peice.
Some really good cheese. I love the killer shrews.
The devil bat is good too.
At one point you can see this giant paper mache bat fly down a cable and into a window and then the window just closes.
It's goood cheese!

I saw this sculpture made of t.v.s one time. All in this huge pile along with some skinks and plumbing parts.
If I remember right, the person who put it together was trying to convey the idea of waste and how much we produce.

If a t.v. goes dead what do you do with it? A hundred and one uses for a dead box....
food for thought.

Can we change that to...

rosyxxx***   laughs her ass off...

?

...we watched Fight Club the other night and I've seen it several times...

Yeah, I've seen Fight Club about '12' x's... the only other movie that I've watched more than that, was: Groundhog's Day! I love Bill Murray. I felt his pain. Back when I had a T.V., I too, watched it only for videos. I mean, once I moved to my new apartment, I could no longer get PBS or Channel 11, without signing up for cable. The reception in this part of the building is so bad, that even an elaborate system of antennaes (which I had in the apartment before, and which was not 'eye candy'...) would not work.

At that time, after the move, before I gave my T.V. away (on the path to becoming even more eccentric than I already am... but, of course, I no longer have five cats - for the matter, I no longer have any cats, as my 20 pd. male cat lives at my Dad's house now...); I watched movies on the VCR and the DVD... and yes, I gave those items away too...

Back after Joe and I split up, I watched Groundhog's Day EVERYDAY! :/ I was so distraught, broken-up, depressed, anxious, utterly devastated, broken-hearted, and also a confirmed insomniac... that I just left the movie on pretty much all day...

I think I calculated that I watched it a total of 52 times; that is, if you count the fact that I watched a little here and a little there. Over the course of the year from October 2001- September 2002, before I left for Jamaicaland, I watched some portion of it everyday. I kept hoping that one day I would get up and it would be September 10th again, or even, November 3rd. The former was the beginning of the end, while the latter was the end... unless you count the fact that we dragged out the break-up part almost until November 2002.

I know that I am digressing here, but I need to vent and cry a little...

I wanted to be the guy in Groundhog's Day, because I knew that the movie was about him learning how to love. I hoped that I would finally 'get it', and that Joe would give me another chance. But it ain't happenin'. I still pine.

Makes me think of r_pendragon's haiku...

matsu onna ga
watashi no tameni
matteru kana

I am going to be a jerk and say that if you want the translation you should click here -> on this spot .; because, apparently, not too many people understood how exquisitely witty her 'haiku' was... with it's double entendres... as well as the fact, that you might want to read her post, and add a few more of your own lovely haiku. Too. :D

So... moving on. For a period of time before we split up, I used to sit for hours on my day off at his house, where I practically lived, and watch black and white movies and The Food Channel on Cable. I was a regular 'Emeril Lagasse' fan. His television was on constantly even when I didn't watch it... as I've noticed that a lot of people's are...

When we split up, the very same day I came down with Strep and Mono, and was hospitalized for a week, and bedridden for over a month. I have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and therefore it knocked the stuffings out of me. I literally crawled everywhere, even the bathroom. Not asking you to feel sorry for me, because that is done and over with... but, suffice it to say, that after all that time watching T.V. while I was sick, and seeing it constantly on at Joe's place - I was sick and freaking tired of watching T.V.

If a T.V. goes dead what do you do with it?

I'd say... take it out to the target range, and use it for practice. It's a bigger target than a tin can, for someone like me with poor aim. (Just kidding.... :) I have excellent aim; think it is somewhere around 80% in the 'kill zone'.. but that is neither here nor there.)

A hundred and one uses for a dead box...

Hmmm... what kind of 'dead box' did you have in mind? I know I keep mine closed, since I don't really want anyone to be messing with it, other than one person. Just call me 'Florentino Ariza'.

IT WAS INEVITABLE: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.

Having quoted Garcia Marquez, one of my favorite authors... I think I shall now go and read. How very 'serendipitous' to have over 800 books at my disposal. Maybe I can take them with me when I check into the 'cuckoo's nest'; after waiting so long that it has driven me insane.

*sigh* I think I am gonna go shoot some T.V.s after I finish this book. Maybe I'll take some 'pot' shots too... he.. he..
*snorts* (No... wait... I don't do that... just that.) Waiting to exhale. Tee..he. he..

My mind is made up...not like my bed, which is a mess.

This post was edited by rosyxxx on Dec 19, 2004.

To quote myself:

...I wish that I could send you the scent of freesias just blooming right now.

Or what about Japanese Kokeshi dolls with a different 'flower' associated with each month of the year? i.e., Adonis, Plum, Daffodils, Cherry, Iris, Hydrangea, Oxalis, Sunflower, Rose Mallow, Crysanthemum, Maple, and Camellia.

Interestingly enough, the 'rose mallow' is for September...

Check it out -> Japanese Kokeshi dolls

My mind is made up...not like my bed, which is a mess.

This post was edited by rosyxxx on Dec 16, 2004.