Irritations

I know I am a grumpy old man, but unlike other grumpy old men I am right in my opinions. That makes all the difference in the world.

***Kars for Kids keeps running its free ad on the radio and sometimes on television. The ad is a simple one; a horrible, mind-numbing ear-worm of a jingle about giving your used, abused, crappy old car to their organization as a charitable contribution. Whoever wrote that jingle and/or arranged the music and/or hired those “children of the damned” to sing the jingle should have something horrible happen to them. Go check out that charity on the Internet and I think you will find it isn’t what you think it is.

***Gold and silver: Here’s another commercial that is constantly irritating me – and I’ve written about this idea a few times but it needs repeating. You take a former star actor, in this case William Devane, and have him spout off about how he votes in elections and how America was strong in the past and basically could kick everybody’s ass. He stands on a battleship to spew his company’s products.

He tells us about the rotten paper money that’s out there and tells us that he invests in gold and silver and he also votes. You can buy these precious metals too. Why would the company he’s hawking sell gold and silver to the rest of us saps and take our crummy almost-worthless money when they have two metals far, far more valuable than the money we are sending them for their gold and silver? Does that make sense to you? Why don’t they keep their gold and silver?

Here’s the pitch: “Send my company your rotten money and we will send you precious gold and silver and, yes, my friends, America will still be able to kick everyone else’s ass. You can bank on that!”

***Vice President versus President? I think the nominee of the Democratic Party for Vice President will actually be the person running against President Trump. Biden is a non-issue in this election. Most people that I have spoken to don’t think Biden will finish his term as President if he wins or he will gradually become the invisible man in the White House.

By the way, Biden looks like the actor Jeff Morrow in the movie This Island Earth. Check out a picture of him!

***I hate the car commercials that always tell you about their special prices and their constant great sales events. Their sales always say that they are giving a huge discount from the “manufacturer’s standard retail price.” Has any car ever been sold at the “manufacturer’s standard retail price?” So you get a discount on a make-believe price that has never been charged to a buyer. Isn’t this as fraud?

***Also about car commercials and real drivers: My wife, the Beautiful AP and I were driving on the parkway to go to a supermarket to buy some food. Given the coronavirus, there were very few cars on the road and those that were there, the drivers were speeding like crazy. The Beautiful AP said, “At those speeds there will be accidents even on relatively empty roads.”

On the way home there it was; a huge three-car accident and it looked as if some people were seriously hurt as their cars were mashed.

The car commercials often praise speed. Enough please! Those idiots speeding risk their own lives but also the lives of innocent drivers.

***And speaking of coronavirus, who are the idiots risking their own and everyone else’s lives by going outside in groups without staying a safe distance from other people? They risk other people’s lives too.

And those idiots are similar to the idiots in your classroom who made it difficult for teachers to teach their lessons. Now those same idiots are on the road, not ruining knowledge for everyone in class, but potentially ruining everyone’s lives.

***Speaking of idiots: What’s with these religious fanatics and their ministers and rabbis and imams who insist on holding services with a congregation in their houses of worship (make that houses of potential death) during the coronavirus outbreak? This is not a religious issue and no one is trying to destroy a religion during the coronavirus pandemic; it is a public health issue that affects everyone, including all the millions of people who are not involved in such religions. Your congregants should stay home and out of your churches and temples.

One televangelist claimed to have “blown the wind of God” at the virus and he asserted that with all the Christians in the country praying, the virus has now been defeated.

Israel had to cordon off the town of Bnei Brak because the ultra-orthodox townsfolk of the area refused to obey the mitigation efforts to stop the spread of the virus. They kept holding their services. Of the 200,000 people in the town 75,000 have already tested positive for the coronavirus at this time. Don’t let these people out. They are clearly dangerous to the rest of the citizenry of Israel.

In Pakistan, Muslim clerics refuse to stop massive prayer gatherings and there is real fear that such gatherings could spell doom for controlling the spread of the virus.

Enough of the idiocy; follow the right thing to prevent the virus from attacking countless people. Your religion is safe but the rest of us want to be safe too. Every believer who sanctimoniously struts about after attending these dangerous services is a threat to everyone they cross. Anyone who dies because of them means these holy-folk have committed murder.

PS: The same applies to those fools who partied on the beaches of America during spring break and the ploppies who held coronavirus parties (yes, people did this!). May they dance their way into an ICU that’s out of respirators.

***I now look at some political celebrities and affix a different career and/or character for them.

Donald Trump: the ever-yabbering time-shares salesman.

Mike Pence: the solemn funeral director.

Joe Biden: your strange uncle who sits in the corner at Thanksgiving looking at everyone because he’s forgotten everyone’s name.

Al Sharpton: a flesh-eating zombie.

Bill O’Reilly: your strange uncle who is always interrupting everyone at Thanksgiving to explain why he is right and everyone in that room and on this planet is wrong.

Andrew Cuomo: the toughest kid in the neighborhood.

Dr. Anthony Fauci: the truly deserving King of the Earth.

Dr. Deborah Birx: the truly deserving Queen of Earth

Joe Scarborough: high school senior who thinks he knows women.

Adam Schiff: your strange bug-eyed uncle who sits in the corner at Thanksgiving whispering to himself.

Rand Paul: Dr. No.

Mitch McConnell: the butcher who enjoys slicing bloody meat.

Ruth Bader Ginsberg: the immortal Hobbit.

AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez): one of the three witches in Macbeth.

Ilhan Omar: one of the three witches in Macbeth.

Rashida Tlaib: one of the three witches in Macbeth.

Nancy Pelosi: Lady Macbeth in Macbeth.

Ted Cruz: Macbeth in Macbeth.

Bernie Sanders: King Lear in King Lear.

Sean Hannity: Claudius in Hamlet.

Hillary Clinton: Gertrude in Hamlet.

Melania Trump: Ophelia in Hamlet.

Bill Maher: the jester in King Lear.

John Oliver: Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Birds of a Feather

When I first took up birding in late September of 2016, I figured two things; that the majority of birders would be nuts or so severely neurotic that they could pass for nuts, and second, that the entire group would be composed of progressive leftists and Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders Democrats.

I got those ideas over the years by knowing nothing about birding or birders, and my first talk with a birder on one of my first South Shore Audubon Society birding walks incorrectly confirmed the progressive nature of the birding population.

I opened my conversation with this woman by relating that my recent trip to Cuba disgusted me by the filth, poverty, and unemployment of the country. Even the ships in the harbor were rusty! [Read https://frankscoblete.com/cuba-triumph-revolution/, October 15, 2017)

She listened to me and then said she and her husband were really impressed by the country and the people on their trip to Cuba. That had to be impossible because every other building was a decaying dump and little had been done to fix the crumbling once-great architecture of Havana. I didn’t argue with her because she was fierce in her belief in Castro’s revolution; a true progressive, she probably cut her teeth on the 1960’s love for the Communist movement.

She didn’t have anything negative to say about the revolution’s golden boy, Che Guevara, the official executioner of the regime. He probably lovingly watched the executions of thousands of people — that is, those he wanted executed. I am guessing good old Che was a hero to her as he is to the government of Cuba.

But I was wrong. The birders in our South Shore Audubon Society aren’t anything like a coherent group. Yes, most are of the left but there are plenty of Trump supporters. In New York City and its environs, the leftist Democrats rule by something like two or three to one over Republicans and conservatives. So I found the many rightists in the society surprising.

Now, many of my own opinions are leftist but I do not share the wide-eyed love of communism — a failed, violent philosophy that destroys societies. [Read the Black Book of Communism.] But I do have affection for some of the Trumpian ideas and I respect plenty of the basic conservative principles. I do not, of course, buy into the right-wing evangelism and anti-science nature of the ultra-right.

Aside from the love (or like) of birds, the members of our society are philosophically diverse but they all basically agree on several issues: protection of the environment, protection of our national parks and protection of the habitat of our feathered friends and other animals. Habitat is a key ingredient in the protection of birds.

The rightists and the leftists agree on these principles and that brings everyone together. They are birds of a feather.

[[Read Frank Scoblete’s Confessions of a Wayward Catholic and The Virgin Kiss. Both available from Amazon.com, on Kindle and other electronic media, at Barnes and Noble, and at bookstores.]