Make AMERICA This Blog Great Again!

One of the MAJOR goals in my life is to persuade you readers to get more involved with this blog by making comments.

I know that there are a lot of you faithful readers that are here every day, who only feel like reading, and that's okay.

On the other hand, I also know that some of you guys are very excellent comment makers, who think you are WAY too busy to comment, and you probably ARE too busy, so that's also okay.

In addition, some of you out there (and you know who you are) are afraid to comment, due to Russian collusion, conspiracy stuff that keeps us from sharing our innermost feelings that the Ruuskies could use against us...and that's just weird!

Come on, gang! Ignore what I said before! Ya can't let your fears, your helter skelter lifestyle, or dare I say it, laziness (like I'm guilty of) prevent you from adding a new dimension to this blog by commenting your heads off!

Just think about how your brilliant, funny, or even profound comments can raise the classiness of this blog 1000%! 

ALL of you folks are light years above me in intelligence! 

light year

Dictionary result for light year

/ˈlīt ˈˌyi(ə)r/

noun

plural noun: light years

1. ASTRONOMY

   a unit of astronomical distance equivalent to the distance that light travels in one year, which is 9.4607 × 10¹² km (nearly 6 trillion miles).

A comment from you is like the frosting on a birthday cake, the butter on a piece of toast, the top hat on Abe Lincoln, the whiskers on a kitten, that pretty blue color on a 57 Chevy, and anything that transforms something plain to something exceptional!! 

"I can't think of anything to comment on, Danny," you say with deep apprehension. 

Here are some things to choose from, my friends...

1. Comment on why you hate to comment.

2. Comment on the stinking cold weather...unless you live in a pleasant climate area...then brag about how nice it is where you live.

3. Comment about your pet. Everybody loves that!

4. Comment about what you had for breakfast.... especially if it was something out of the ordinary, like cold spaghetti and rocky road ice cream.

5. Do NOT comment on anything political, unless it's gonna make a difference. Hee hee!

6. Comment about your kids and grandkids! That's what a family does...and aren't we ALL family?

Anyway, if you are sincerely opposed to making a comment, no worries...we all have our phobias. 

Conversely, if you are kinda gregarious, and wish to brighten the world with your stimulating, captivating worms WORDS, go on ahead and contribute your comments, in the comments section below.

I KNOW you can do it!!!

Action Movies Disappoint Me Anymore


I've been doing good at avoiding the "news" this past week or so.

I feel much better, not so frustrated, or angry, or constantly irritated. 

I've been substituting ACTION MOVIES for the news, but the action movies of today are far more FAKE than the action movies I grew up watching. 

Computer Generated Images, and other things, have made the new action movies much too unbelievable for my critical brain to accept.

Way back when, James Bond would do stuff that was reasonably doable. I know it was a stunt man actually doing it, but it was something SOMEBODY could really do.

Buster Keaton Stunts...No CGI!

With CGI, the hero is doing something that NOBODY could do in a million years in real life!

You need to watch the clip below to understand my point.















Did you watch it? I hope so, because the rest of this won't make sense unless you do. 

Let's analyze this impossible scene for a few seconds.

Vin Diesel crashes the car through the windows with enough force to propel him to the next building, with out hitting any obstacles, desks, filing cabinets, steel girders, people or nuttin' honey! He flies to the next building where he, once again,  never encounters any obstacles, desks, filing cabinets, steel girders, people, concrete reinforcement or nuttin' to stop his momentum! Then, on to the next building, where...at this point, I've already lost any measure of believability, they jump out of the speeding car without a scratch!

Seriously?

They are asking too much for us to believe this crappola, like in the action movie gun fights. 

The numerous bad guys (usually a dozen or more) have super automatic machine guns that fire a thousand bullets a second, while Keanu Reeves or Tom Cruise only have a pistol! The bad guys keep consistently missing, while the good guys are picking off the bad guys one by one, or (even more unbelievable) sneaking up on them and using martial arts skills to rip their throats out, or worse!

Another thing that always bugs me are the hanging scenes. I don't mean like in the old western movies, where they are hanging a rustler, but hanging from a cliff, or a helicopter, or hot air balloon rope, often with one hand! 

Most of us, especially the hefty ones like me, would NOT be able to hang from someone's hand or a rope for more that .05 seconds before we dropped, unceremoniously, to our certain demise! 

In the movies people hang from a rope with one hand, for 10 minutes, while a helicopter is flying at 100 miles an hour!

Really? 

Picture our hero, whomever he may be, gets into a fight with ten guys. Instead of the ten guys rushing him all at once, they take him on one by one, to give him a chance to kick their tuckuses! Or is that tuckii?

While Daniel Craig is busy with the bad guy in front of him, why don't the others knock him on the head from behind? I know, sometimes that does happen, but not often enough!

Of course, it's the CGI "magic" that disturbs me the most! How THEY make trains fly over a deep chasm where the trestle has been blown up! That train would drop like an anvil in real life!

I can understand how AMAZING things can happen in a Syfy movie, or even a comedy, but it takes the interest away for me when the movie makers try to make us believe the impossible can happen, when we know it really can't.

What's up with that? The movie folks must think we are dumb! 

I guess we are! We keep watching this stuff! 

I know, I do! 

How To Feel Warm On A Record Cold Day...Using Your Imagination

We did not have air conditioning when I grew up in the unbearable, sweltering heat of St. Louis. You know what I'm talking about if you've ever been down there for a Cardinals baseball game. 

Trying to sleep was a challenge, with HOT air blowing from a window fan like a blast furnace! 
(The blast furnace is the first step in the steel making process. its role is to convert raw iron ore which is a mixture of iron ore and oxygen. The blast furnace melts the ore and it purifies the ore into a liquid metal.)

The intense hotness would cause copious amounts of sweat, to such a degree that the sheets could be wrung out like a wet dishrag in the morning! 

The humidity was the REAL culprit! 

Let's say you were all dressed up to go to church, or teen town, you get into your non-air conditioned car, drive half a mile, and your clothing is soaking wet by the time you get there! I never looked perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but walking in with sweaty clothes was just plain nasty looking!

My mom and dad would tell a story of how they would go sleep in Lafayette Park, in St. Louis, along with many of their neighbors, on the REALLY hot nights, to get away from the oven-like heat from the brick and concrete of the housing projects where they lived. 

When on rare occasions we went out for ice cream cones, we had to lick quicker than a hound dog on a Thanksgiving plate, to make sure the ice cream did not melt on to the Velvet Freeze parking lot!

The asphalt streets liquefied like molten lava, and would ruin a pair of P.F. Flyers if you dared to walk on the black stickiness of darkness!

Think about those days in that blistering hot summer, when your lawn had burned up, you had to use one of those misting fans that you squirt on your face to survive the outdoor concert, and the hot rocks burned your tootsies as you walked down to the St. Francis River, in the Missouri Ozarks, as the temps drop to 20 below zero tomorrow!

Maybe you'll feel warmer.

Probably not.

Have You Found Your Treasure 

Like Nick and Jon?

So, I'm watching the movie "National Treasure" last night, starring Nicolas Cage and Jon Voight, where they are searching for an enormous treasure!

After searching for this treasure their entire lives, they find it!!

Just In Case You Haven't Seen National Treasure Yet.

It is not gold and jewels, or even greenback dollars...

The "treasure" is made up of old relics ( like me), namely suits of armor, dusty scrolls, statues, artifacts and such. Yes it was all worth 10 billion dollars (that Nick and Jon only got a tiny percent of), but not what I think of when it comes to treasure.

Which brings us to the point of today's blog...

I know that saying one MAN'S  junk is sexist, but that's how the traditional saying goes, unless you say one man's TRASH is another man's treasure, which may be better, because of the alliteration thingy, but still sexist.

As a young lad, I would go over to some unnamed friends house who had, let's say, a stamp collection.

He or she absolutely LOVED that stamp collection, as if it were the most magnificent treasure ever, uh, collected in the history of the known world!

To me, it was kinda boring, but I acted like it was REALLY FANTASTIC, not to hurt anyone's feelings. 

I used to be nice like that. 

Now, I have an autographed photo of Stan Musial, and even though I know that many thousands of folks have an autographed photo of Stan Musial (Stan was always happy to give anybody an autograph), it is one of my most treasured items.

See there! It says, "To Dan!" 

Of course, millions of people around the world do not even know that Stan Musial was one of the greatest baseball players that ever lived, and don't really care. So my precious treasure would be worthless to them.

Back to the point, if there IS a point. 

Ben and Patrick Gates (AKA Nicolas Cage and Jon Voight), were completely happy with the "treasure" they found, where, on the other hand, I would have rather found silver and gold...

...than a bunch of dusty museum pieces that I would NEVER go see, even though my 1% of 10 billion dollars (100 million dollars) would give me the opportunity to jet around the world to see them. 

http://xy2.org/2018/11/15/the-5-best-museums-in-the-world/

I believe I have a point now! 

If we can be happy with our "treasures" that we love, albeit a rock collection, beer can collection, vintage automobiles, or whatever, even though others may not view them as treasures, we will never need to go out searching for happiness, wealth, fame, or any of that stuff that most people think will satisfy their desires. 

I think that most of us will agree that God and family are our most treasured things, but apart from that, tell us the "treasure" in your life that brings you happiness, even though others may not view it as a treasure at all.

Don't be afraid to share in the comments section, folks! We would LOVE to hear from you!!!