Rumblings that Tracfone might be going away from “pay as you go” to a monthly billing cycle, really got me to thinking. I don’t want another monthly bill. I don’t want to be a drone on a phone. I don’t want to be a zombie. I carry a Tracfone essentially to use if my car breaks down. Its for emergencies.

So it started me thinking, “What happened to pay phones?” They were more than a place for Superman to change his clothes. You knew there was going to be one in a mall, near a gas station, at a rest area, inside the K-Mart. When you started driving your parents made sure you had a dime (.15 cents or a quarter depending when you started driving) in case you needed to call home.

More than one teenage girl had the change in her shoe as a option of last resort on a bad date. The phone company of course would say, “Well everybody got cell phones so it was no longer cost effective to have pay phones!” I don’t think so. I think they did away with them to give a nudge for everyone to get cell phones.

I didn’t have a cell phone until 2010. But pay phones had disappeared long before that. In Basic Training there was always a bank of pay phones outside the barracks. You could generally depend on there being a drive-up one near the street at a strip mall. I think I saw pay phones disappear at .35 cents. Maybe .50 cents, I’m not sure.

I know the government wanted them, they can track you. They used this lame excuse about, “Well we have to know where you’re at in case you call 911. Uh huh. Just like they made Detroit put GPS in cars about 20 years ago. “For our own good”.

So now everybody’s got to have a cell phone. I don’t. I can be alone with myself. I don’t have to be electronically entertained. Yeah when they took them out of convenience stores, I knew something was up. They were the last holdout.

I remember the break up of Ma Bell (Northwestern Bell in Iowa) in about 1984. Reagan said it was to breakup a monopoly. Its the only monopoly government has broken up in over a hundred years. I can think of about a dozen they need to breakup, and never will. Its all BS.

So now we’ve thrust another bill onto people, and have bred a generation of zombies. I know the warning bells went off in 1984, just didn’t know why.

The Clear Lake kite festival makes for a fun Saturday. People and dog watching is half the fun. The afternoon experience was our first. The temperatures were a little better but the crowds were horrific! Which is what leaves me scratching my head after seeing these off and on for 10 years. Clear Lake and Mason City are sister cities (Clear Lake being the hot sister that everyone wants to date) nestled in in the far north outskirts of central Iowa.

This event I believe draws around 10,000 people to their town in the dead of February. You’d think they might make some accommodations to the thousands of people coming to spend the day and their dollars! Not Clear Lake. In fact they go out of their way to make it a headache. Lake Front Drive ends up where pedestrians are crossing the street to get on the lake. People being the oblivious so-and-so’s they are make a continuous stream across the street so cars never get to take their turn! You end up with traffic unnecessarily backed up half a mile!

Put a cop out there for 2 hours at the busiest time and get rid of the traffic snarl up! This ain’t tough. You have 1 public restroom in the park for the entire downtown. You have another city one literally across the street that’s closed! “Well that’s the way we’ve always done it!” Well change! You’re funneling 10,000 people through 1 restroom! Right off the lakefront in their main street that consists of vacant buildings and shops that don’t open for the biggest Saturday of the winter?! I just don’t get it. I’m old enough to remember when businesses wanted to make money.

One winter there was 6 inches of new snow that morning and the businesses on main street didn’t even shovel their walks! Generally small town Iowa is the best.

“This show was originally a summer replacement series in 1977 and was an unexpected hit. Hoping that it would still be popular, CBS decided to make it a spring replacement series. When it started again in January 1978 it was up against Laverne and Shirley, then the #1 show in the country. The show was canceled two months later.”

“Born in California, Robert Shields literally ran away from home and joined the circus as a young boy. He studied mime in Paris and, eventually, became a street mime performer in San Francisco. He met Lorene Yarnell Jansson and formed the “Shields and Yarnell” mime duo. They played stages, worldwide, and appeared in TV and film productions. After their divorce, he formed a jewelry design company in Arizona.”

“Gained early experience by performing as a robot in a department-store window, complete with a fake power cord extending from his leg. Passers-by never knew for sure if he was human, or really a robot, and the store never let on; his performance was too good for business. His wedding to Lorene Yarnell Jansson was performed in mime.” – IMDB

[Don’t ask me why, the 70’s was a weird decade.]

When I was a kid if something caused me to think ‘male singer’ of the traditional variety, the picture that popped into my head was of Robert Goulet. He was a singer / actor (he was so famous he even did a Love Boat). Plus he was able to give off this vibe of a really likable guy. Not consumed with vanity because of his impeccable looks and talent. His acting career was much more extensive than I realized, and his bio way too short. But he’s the first guy (2 others down below) that I started this game of ‘what if?‘ What if they had tried songs that were normally “outside their lane”? What if Robert Goulet had sang Donna Summer’s ‘Love to Love You Baby‘? How might that have turned out? With that classic baritone of his? How might his soulful rendition of Love to Love You Baby have turned out?

I love to love you, baby
I love to love you, baby

When you’re laying so close to me
There’s no place I’d rather you be than with me, me, uh

I love to love you, baby
I love to love you, baby
I love to love you, baby

Do it to me again and again
You put me in such an awful spin, in a spin, in, uh

Oh, love to love you, baby
Oh, love to love you, baby

Or what if Perry Como at a point in the 70’s with a lagging career had tried a jumpstart with, ‘I Love the Nightlife, I Like to Boogie’?

I got to boogie on the disco ’round, oh yea.
Oh, I love the night life
I got to boogie on the disco ’round, oh yea.
Please don’t talk about love tonight.
Your sweet talking won’t make it right.
Love and lies just bring me down
When you’ve got women all over town.
You can love them all and when you’re through

Or Pat Boone doing a stirring rendition of ‘Tutti Frutti’?

Wop bop a loo bop a lop bam boom

Tutti frutti, oh rootie
Tutti frutti, oh rootie
Tutti frutti, oh rootie
Tutti frutti, oh rootie
Tutti frutti, oh rootie
A wop bop a loo bop a lop ba ba

I got a gal, named Sue, she knows just what to do
I got a gal, named Sue, she knows just what to do
She rock to the East, she rock to the West
But she’s the gal that I love best

[Pat Boone actually did do a version of Tutti Frutti]

1969: Tom Seaver and the Mets. Joe Namath and the Jets. Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali. Jerry West and the Lakers. Neil Armstrong on the moon. We hadn’t lost Vietnam yet. ’69 Boss Mustang. ’69 Vette. We still made things. We had damn near paid off the national debt in 1968. Joni Mitchell and Neil Young at Woodstock (probably).

Now those two want to force Spotify to take Joe Rogan off the air. Now the “freedom generation” wants to shut people up who don’t think right. How times change in 53 years. A country that held such promise has degenerated into a seething cauldron of cancel culture.

Joe Rogan’s crime was when he caught the COVID was to take treatments (they would have preferred he died). Treatments that these freedom pioneers didn’t want him to take. Treatments that Big Pharma didn’t want him to take. Treatments that Project Veritas showed our government has known since April of 2020 work.

They don’t want to let the “arena of ideas” determine whether or not Joe Rogan stays on the air or not. They want to force him off. Now Peter Frampton has joined the fray. These “do your own thing” hippies don’t want to let the marketplace determine Joe’s fate, they want to give it a nudge. They want to drop an anvil on the scales of justice.

I laugh at this as it highlights their hypocrisy. They spout the phrase ‘misinformation’ like an oil gusher. Problem is though if you stop and think about it, the wisdom of the crowd will decide if Joe is a crackpot or not. If he’s a nut or not. Their side has been the one found to be lying at every step along the way.

Joe Rogan averages 11 million listeners per episode. A crackpot spewing “misinformation” wouldn’t get that. Its like on social media, if you try and fudge the facts or state an untruth, somebody is going to call you out. They will either know better or they will have researched it.

When you have thousands of people looking at you (or in Joe’s case millions), people will know if you’re spewing garbage. They don’t need two hippies to tell them. (Joe Rogan breaks silence after Neil Young controversy)

This was one of those posts that’s just rather disjointed. In my head it made sense. In 1969 America was at its zenith. In a year or two it would start start its inexorable decline, but it hadn’t yet. As a nation we were almost 200 years old at that point. While freedom, hope and opportunity seemed it would forever be on the horizon, by where we are now, its clear it wasn’t. In ’69 we faced the world head on, in ’22 we cower in our COVID bunkers. In 2022 we try to silence anyone who ventures outside the box.

Who doesn’t like Christopher Walken? I liked him in the James Bond film ‘A View To A Kill‘. Real life has a way of bursting bubbles though. Lana Wood bursts a bubble in her book: Little Sister: My Investigation into the Mysterious Death of Natalie Wood. There were 3 men on a yacht 40 years ago the night Natalie Wood died: the boats captain, Dennis Davern, Robert Wagner, and Christopher Walken. They know how Natalie died. They’re not telling. The sad fact of the matter is, despite cutesy Christopher having a stellar career the past 40 years, it also makes him an accessory. If not to a crime, at least to a cover-up. Its one of those cases where no one stood up to be the adult in the room.

What a great story she had, a tremendous shame she died at just 33 years old. Like so many stars of that era, her parents divorced when she was 8. Her mom moved the family out to Los Angeles. A tomboy, she was spotted at age 12 playing baseball in the street with a group of boys by a movie director! Made one movie, went back to regular life until in her late teens.

Became a mega-star in the ’30s. Married Clark Gable (the ‘king of Hollywood’). When WW II (the big one) started, she immediately dropped everything to become the #1 war bond sales lady. Was taking a return flight back to LA from Vegas, a night flight, when they crashed into the side of a mountain. Her mom who also died on the flight, had had a premonition about the crash. They’d tossed a coin to see if they’d go on the flight and Carole won.

What’s sad is I couldn’t tell you a movie that she made. I couldn’t have told you what she looked like. It was only a ‘this day in history’ (January 16) post that brought her to mind. Being a boomer I’d heard her name, but that’s about it. One thing I’ll say about the photos below is that classic Hollywood of the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, knew how to photograph women. Maybe a lot of that is just me in that I really like B&W. I notice at the State Fair photo exhibit most people skim over the B&W’s to peruse the color photos.

What’s interesting about classic beauties like Carole, is that if you could take her out of those photos, and plop her into today she’d look just as great. Her hair, makeup, clothes, everything about her is timeless beauty. Just 20 years before these photos she was the 12 yr old playing baseball in the street.

I liked Sidney Poitier and I liked his movies. A lot of people did, he was big time. He was so rare, so perfect, I’d heard him referenced as the “magic negro!” (its okay you could say that in the 60’s) He died yesterday at the age of 94. In his late teens when he auditioned in New York for an acting job they hated his thick Bahamian accent so bad they told him to go get a job washing dishes! Which shows his determination as he soon developed the perfect diction he was known for.

Quite a guy, born poor, worked hard, made it. He’d said it was a culture shock when he moved from Cat Island to Miami when he was 15 (1942) to experience the racism he did. Which continued to have great irony later in Hollywood, as during that period Hollywood was a very racist place too. He was it. He said the pressure to ‘represent’ his people was immense. There’s something on his bio page on IMDB about wanting to do acting work and conduct his life in a way that would make his father proud.

He took a lot of crap from people who wanted him to be the Malcolm X of the film world. And you know it occurred to me that by being the class act he was and avoiding scandal, he did as much or more than could be expected from about anyone. In just his second movie (No Way Out – 1950) he teamed with another of my favorite actors Richard Widmark. He later (1967 was a huge year for him) had his blockbusters, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, To Sir With Love, In the Heat of the Night. But my favorite was Lilies of the Field.

I realized just now I think a lot of that was so much of the film just focused on Sidney. You had the 10 or so nuns and a few townspeople, but a lot of it was just the camera focusing in on Sidney. He would have been 35 or 36 when it was filmed. It was made from a novel written just that year. And a busy if little known director named Ralph Nelson. For a budget of $240,000!

Its funny how that works sometimes. Actor, director, story, supporting cast, location, all coming together for one magical moment in time. Just a small little story that works. Everybody was still young and hungry. Good stuff.

An interesting one column article was in the American Rifleman that came out today: “Canadian Confiscation Day Looming“. It turns out the dipshit in charge of Canada (Justin Trudeau) came out with an “assault weapon ban” all on his own authority? They evidently call their ‘executive orders’ “Orders-In-Council” (its some kind of stupid Canadian thing).

The amnesty deadline to turn in your semi-automatic rifles is April 30, 2022, then they start kicking down doors. I know when California did this in the 90’s a guy here in Iowa started holding his friend’s AR-15 that lived in California, so they “wouldn’t take it”. Well they did, they forced you to give it up.

The article then goes on to say the same scheme pretty much went off without a hitch in New Zealand (unmentioned was the success they also had in Australia). You’ll hear an American go, “They’ll never get my gun!” To which I think, “Wanna bet?” They’ll pick us off one by one. What amazes me about Canada’s confiscation, it seems to rest solely on Trudeau’s “authority”.

[The news of Canada’s gun confiscation is starting to make regular news, Red State has an article on it. This is serious business. In Australia they took the guns probably close to 20 years ago, now with the latest COVID tyranny they are running roughshod over the populace. A nation giving up its guns never ends well. Modern society is far enough removed, and we’ve been so conditioned that “government is our friend”, that I’m convinced we don’t clearly understand the repercussions. I say that because since I don’t have a good grasp, and I care about this stuff, I can guarantee they don’t. I started off this post on a lighthearted not, “Ha, ha, look at Canada.” When I realized, this could be us real soon. Especially with the Brandon administration and Democrats in charge.]

Gun Control Fail: Canadian Gun Owners Not Turning in Their Recently Banned Guns

This time of year TCM has their “In Memoriam” or “TCM Remembers” segment between movies where they show who died over the past year from the entertainment industry. One of my favorites popped up that surprised me, William Smith. I knew him from the TV western Laredo, Any Which Way You Can and Red Dawn. IMDB had him down as being most famous for Rich Man Poor Man and Conan the Barbarian, and for being in the final season of Hawaii Five-0.

He did a ton of things I was never aware of. He struck me as a ‘guys guy’. His IMDB page is just filled with athletic achievements. I won’t begin to try and cover them all. His pugilistic skills were for real: 31-1 as an amateur boxer. Which helps explain why in the Clint Eastwood film Any Which Way You Can the fight scenes were very believable. Plus he could grunt like nobodies business. I respect a good grunter.

It was interesting reading his bio page about his interactions with Neville Brand on Laredo. Another publication had it as Neville not liking Bill. Bill was very educated, very fit, very good looking, all things Neville wasn’t. Maybe there was some jealousy or resentment there. It looks like Bill was working hard to the end. He scrambled for work his whole life. A TV episode of Batman for example.

He did a lot of other episodic TV: Knight Rider, BJ and the Bear, Dukes of Hazzard, Murder She Wrote. Who knows how Hollywood makes the delineation between A-List actors and ‘B’. Bill probably leaned more towards the latter. He held many jobs and did a lot of very different things over the course of his life. Like I say onscreen he was a very likable guy, who knows what he was like in real life?

One of the tidbits I picked up from his own website was that he liked to write poetry. I put one of his poems below the pictures. Something beyond Hollywood’s mental capacity that I thought should have happened, was a TV series with Bill, Denny Miller, Clint Walker, Fess Parker, playing ranchers? Detectives? Who knows. They all had their moments, but they seemed underutilized to me.

I know a thousand faces that don’t know me
I have seen ’em all, sad and gay, caged and free
Blue, moist eyes crying and yearning for love
Brazen, black ones glaring coldly above
Selfish, evil souls have rehearsed before me
Revealing their greedy plots to me only
So many times I’ve tried to reach out
To aide and soothe those riddled with doubt
There were those who thought they had it all
Sad, puny wretches with hearts so small
And then those poor bastards who were driven
Hoping that their sins would be forgiven
They’d cry and weep ’bout their lonely past
Swearing that their lives were pure and chaste
Yet only to themselves do they lie
And only by themselves will they die
But when out of rage they shatter me
My crumbling pieces shall set me free
Never more will I mirror their sniveling frailty
For my shards mean not seven years, but eternity

[Ode to a Mirror – William Smith]