On my way home

May 29, 2015 • 11:22 am

I’m ensconced in Ronald Reagan Airport, better known (in both senses) as Washington National Airport. I noticed on my way in a brass statue of The Gipper standing in front, and it’s simply a travesty to name this airport after such a dreadful President. I hope some day they’ll change the name back again. The good news is that for some unknown reason I got a TSA “Pre-check” status, enabling me to skip the lines and pass through inspection without removing my belt, my computer, my liquids, and even my boots—or having my buttocks groped. I have no idea how the TSA confers this status, which I get sporadically.

At any rate, I spent last night at my sister and brother-in-law’s house, with a fine dinner of fresh strawberry daquiris, grilled chicken, cole slaw (made with my mother’s recipe), potato salad, and a fine 2010 Chateau d’Arche Sauternes for dessert (courtesy of PCC). It was luscious, but needs a few more years.

This morning I was asked to go through my old possessions recovered from my mother’s house after she died, as they want to give what I don’t want to the Salvation Army National Children’s Center, AMVETS, and Purple Heart. I decided to save my childhood copies of the Winnie the Pooh books (bought in England in 1955), letters from old friends, my high school and college yearbooks, and the two precious possessions shown below.

IMG_0609

The vinyl copy of Sergeant Pepper, as many of you know, was responsible for converting me into an atheist (see the story here), and I’ve shown it before. I’m also holding one of my other beloved possessions: my high school letter (“H” is for Heidelberg American High School, a US Army school in Germany), which I got for wrestling. Athletic letters, awarded for being on varsity teams, were a Big Deal back then, automatically elevating you above nerd-dom and reputed to help you get girls (it didn’t prove too useful!). Does anyone remember the Beach Boys’ classic “Be True to Your School” song, which had this verse?

I got a letterman’s sweater
With a letter in front
I got for football and track
I’m proud to wear it now
When I cruise around
The other parts of the town
I got a decal in back.

(The “decal” would be a decal with the name of your high school, affixed to the rear window of your car.)

Sure enough, I had my mom sew that onto a white sweater, which I wore proudly. Eventually the garment became moth-eaten, and I recovered the letter.

I wrestled in the 103-pound class—can you imagine?

The vino (a half bottle: ideal for rich dessert wines like Sauternes):

IMG_0606

 

117 thoughts on “On my way home”

  1. Pretty weird for your stuff to go to the Salvation Army. You can’t get a much more right-wing religious outfit than them!

          3. And I actually have other reasons from my childhood for not being too keen on the Sallies too.

        2. They help whoever comes to them but compel those whom they help to listen to their drivel. I never give them a dime and, when their kettles are staffed by non-members, I tell them exactly why I’m not giving. When retailers compel their employees to staff the kettles, I tell the managers why I’m not giving and also that I prefer shopping in stores that do not support the homophobic right wing Christian fundamentalist gang of bigots. Otherwise, I like them.

    2. My brother-in-law has contacted me to say that he was just referring to the “Salvation Army” generically. In reality, they give the stuff to the National Children’s Center, AMVETS and Purple Heart. I have corrected this in the post above.

      3. I am not a particular fan of the Sallies. However my late brother Jim (much older than me) had a soft spot for them. He had an unplanned swim after the Battle of Leyte Gulf in WW2, after his ship, the USS Gambier Bay, was sunk. After rescue and repatriation to Brisbane, he recollected that the only organization that would provide him with clothing without payment was the Salvation Army. I don’t think that he had much money at that time!
        I don’t know how much this memory was corrupted by the subsequent decades. However I will give them a small donation when they come around tomorrow in memory of Jim.

    3. I have donated to the Salvation Army, who actually do a lot of good work. I could forgive the religious BS which actually does nothing.

      However, in the light of a current euthanasia case, I Googled ‘Care Alliance’ – our local pro-agonising-death creeps – and was saddened to find that the SA was one of the organisations represented in it.

      So I’ll just have to find some other bunch to donate to. Oxfam or Corso, maybe.

      1. An Australian representative of the Salvos said on TV that homosexuals should all be killed because it says so in the Bible. They’re also in trouble for child molesting, as are most religious groups.

  2. Congress was really busy naming things after Reagan a few years ago. I think they wanted to rename 16th Street after him too. Not sure if that went through, since like the airport it would be a long time if ever before people switched to the new name.

    1. I had to research PCC’s comment

      I noticed on my way in a brass statue of The Gipper

      Apparently it refers to a film in which he (Ray-Gun) played some football (prolate) player who … sorry, dozing off, will to live fading.

      1. Yeah, George Gipp, the Notre Dame football player whose apocryphal death-bed wish gave rise to coach Knute Rockne’s BS half-time speech to “win one for the Gipper,” blah, blah, blah…and thence to the cheesy Ronald Reagan movie “Knute Rockne, All-American.”

        It could be worse, Aidan; someone could actually make you watch the other über-schmaltzy Notre Dame football movie “Rudy” — the only saving grace of which is that it works as a wonderful emetic if (in the Pete Townshend phrase) you ever swallow anything evil.

  3. 103! I had a buddy in high school who was 97 lbs soaking wet…..with a backpack of bricks. He was a mean wrestler too!

  4. My wife and I think that TSA PreChek is the best $85 we’ve spent in a long time. We just flew back to Minneapolis from Chicago and got to skip an awful line at Midway.

    1. I get it free sometimes. Last time, from Minneapolis. Maybe because I was flying business class. But I’ve had it at IAD when I was flying cattle class too.

      TSA moves in mysterious ways.

      /@

  6. Thanks for this personal story…you don’t write much about your family (that I recall anyway) so I enjoyed this post. I also have my mother’s cole-slaw recipe (and potato salad recipe) and they are the best- weird coincidence.

    Re. TSA pre-check…supposedly you have to pay $85 and fill out an application. Don’t know why you were granted this status since you obviously didn’t fill out an application.

    And of course one of the best rock albums ever produced, even if it didn’t help convert the young PCC! 🙂

    1. Sometimes they just give you a pre-check on your boarding pass. For a while I got it constantly; now I get it sporadically. I don’t pay and haven’t signed up for the program. It’s lagniappe.

  7. I refuse to call it R@#$%n National Airport…And, as you intimated, it was already named after a president.

  8. I think I still have my ‘L’, for Landstuhl stuck in a box somewhere in our attic space. Germany in the ’70s was a wonderful place to grow up for a young US kid. I played football (US style) on a US AYA team, and played fußball on a German team for the town of Hermersberg.

  9. This de-conversion story is crying out for more details. Was it something in Sgt. Pepper that de-converted you, perhaps something specific (a lyric), or perhaps a general feeling of independence that that album represented, or was it merely a coincidence?

    Atheist musicians want to know!

    2. From the article at the link:

      One of the more colorful scientific de-conversion stories comes from Jerry Coyne, a professor of genetics and evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago. It happened in 1967 when Coyne, then 17, was listening for the first time to the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album while lying on his parents’ couch in Alexandria, Va.

      Suddenly Coyne began to shake and sweat. For reasons he still doesn’t understand, it dawned on him at that moment that there was no God, and he wasn’t going anywhere when he died. His casual Judaism seemed to wash away as the album played on. The crisis lasted about 30 minutes, he says, and when it was over, he had left religion behind for good. He went on to study how new species evolve, and found the Darwinian view of nature perfectly in tune with his abandonment of faith.

      /@

      1. “Suddenly Coyne began to shake and sweat.

        I bet that was the very moment that the Holy Ghost left him and Satan took over.

        1. That’s a well-documented effect of hearing Ringo sing as “Billy Shears.”

      2. Say, this is good for Dr. C to remember… can we imagine how scary it must be for those steeped, brewed and well-baked on religion? Their reaction would be at least 10 times as intense. No wonder they get angry and testy at these events. I suppose if he wants to be more emphatic, he could remember this. If he hasn’t done so already, he could even recount this experience, when met with difficult people.

    3. When Sgt. Pepper was released, I was about a week shy of turning 5 years old and living in Japan, and my parents mostly collected country or easy listening albums. I didn’t really become aware of them until I caught Yellow Submarine on tv circa 1972, and really loved it! For Christmas of 1976, I got my own record player, and in January 1977, at a Navy Exchange, I purchased the first album of my collection — Sgt. Pepper. I didn’t have anything like the same experience as Jerry while listening to the whole album for the first time, but I certainly enjoyed it and within a few months had several more Beatles’ lps in my collection. And it was in reading an interview with the Beatles in one of my dad’s old issues of Playboy, from February 1965 I believe, that I first came across the word agnostic, which is how all four Beatles described their religious feelings at the time.

  10. “Does anyone remember the Beach Boys’ classic ‘Be True to Your School’”?

    I remember all the Beach Boys’ songs; you and I must be the same age. My parents made me attend an all girls Catholic high school, Holy Angels High, so I never felt true to my school.

    Now when I’m riding around on my bicycle I tend to think of the Beach Boys song “The Little Old Lady From Pasadena”

      1. TBB sang it as well, and being a BB’s fan I recall them singing it not Jan and Dean. Wikipedia says about the song that “The Beach Boys, and particularly Brian Wilson, who co-wrote several of Jan & Dean’s biggest surf hits, had supported Jan & Dean in the recording studio to initiate them in the surf music genre”
        So it was presumably influenced by the BB.

        1. Jan & Dean had the hit with LOLfP; the Beach Boys covered it on their “Live in Concert” Album. Brian Wilson and Jan Berry wrote a bunch of tunes together (although LOLfP wasn’t one of them). One of their joint compositions was a hit for both groups (albeit under different titles, with different lyrics) — “Catch a Wave” by The Boys, “Sidewalk Surfin’” by J&D.

      1. A tough little hunk of Jewish gristle beating all comers in (post-)post-War Germany, huh? Good for you!

        (I still have a red ass over that crypto-fascist Avery Brundage keeping the two Jewish sprinters (one of whom was future sportscaster Marty Glickman) from running in the 4×100 meter relays at the 1936 Berlin Olympics to appease Der Führer.)

  12. I too took up wrestling for an athletic pastime (no letter ever earned as I lost most of my matches). It is a great sport, though grossly corrupted by the ridiculous theatrical version that passes as wrestling in the popular version of the sport.

    The exercise of wrestling is totally and utterly exhausting. At UCLA I took my wrestling course and a hot post-exercise shower prior to my Advanced Engineering Mathematics course – where the classroom lights were dimmed for the professors overhead slide presentation. The effect – I fell asleep in almost every lecture. I remember being reawakened on many many occasions by the prof. It goes without saying I got my only D at university in this course. Halcyon days!

  14. My wife, adult daughter and I flew from Boston to Cleveland last Saturday morning, and not only the three of us but also apparently everyone else on our flight and flights out of adjoining gates were treated to precheck status. On the way back on Monday afternoon, my wife got precheck status but my daughter and I had to undergo the full ordeal. We have no idea why.

      1. How do you know all this esoterica? 😀

        For some reason I free associated from this to wondering how TSA would react to guys wearing kilts…

  15. OK, all you USians, I think we agree with PCC’s evaluation of old Prez. Ray-gun.

    Question for you-all: Name your list of the 5 BEST US Presidents, in order of importance.

    My answer:
    1. Washington [1]
    2. Lincoln [2]
    3. FDR [3]
    4. Jefferson [4]
    5. TR [5]

    [1] Conduct of the war of independence, stabilizing figure in the 1780s and 1790s, support for the constitution, refusing to be king, turning the government over to his successor in 1797

    [2] Saved the Union, piloted the country through its greatest crisis since the war of independence, ended slavery, navigated the narrow path between the political extremes on either side

    [3] Piloted the nation through its greatest crises since the Civil War (Great Depression, WWII), the New Deal

    [4] Visionary, Louisiana Purchase, U of Virginia, writer of the Declaration of Ind. and Virginia’s Act of Establishing Religious Freedom, Jefferson Bible, secularist

    [5] Trust-busting, populist, great writer, independent minded, support for civil service (vs. the spoils system), important public agencies such as the FDA

    2. I think my list would be very close to yours, but one difference would be that FDR would be at the bottom. He really was a supercilious prick. If you study his behavior through WWII he doesn’t come off very well. Besides generally behaving like a spoiled rich brat towards all the other allies he caused many serious problems, some leading to fairly serious disasters, that were of no benefit to anyone. And talk about nepotism, wholly shit.

      Deciding to study FDR was a real let down to me. But, yes, he presided over some tumultuous times and does deserve a space on the list.

      1. darelle, do you have a recommendation (or recommendations) for a (or more) biography of FDR?

        I have mostly Churchill’s impressions from reading his (full) history of WWII. And whatever other stuff I’ve absorbed over time from other motley sources. No significant study.

        1. I’d recommend Citizens Of London by Lynne Olson. It is not a biography of FDR, but has a wider focus. This book by no means presents a negative interpretation of FDR. It merely shows him (and others), through documented quotes, memoirs and what not, as the complicated, imperfect person he was. I would rather that he had fully met my heroic expectations. It includes copious sources for anyone who wants to dig further.

          Let me clarify, in light of the ruffled feathers below and lest I be tagged a member of the Reactionary Right, I don’t think FDR was an awful person. I admire much about him. But if people think today’s politicians and politics are some new level of low, they might be surprised.

          1. IMO, most of the Presidents don’t come off very well the more you read about them from genuinely objective historians — i.e., those who aren’t out to either praise them to the skies or skewer them as the worst thing since the plague. For me, as a much younger person, the biggest disappointments were T.R. and Woodrow Wilson, the former for his blatant war-mongering and his mania for trophy hunting; the latter for his racism, which was far greater than that of any other President since Andrew Johnson; then there was his obstinancy, which killed any chance of the U.S. joining the League of Nations, although it’s debatable whether U.S. membership would have really changed much in world history as it unfolded over the next 20 years, leading up to another, far more destructive world war. On the other hand, the more I’ve read about the Lincoln, the more I’ve come to admire him — not because he was perfect in all ways, but because to a greater degree than nearly any other famous politician, was willing to admit to mistakes and learn from them rather than bullheadedly stick by prior, wrongheaded convictions. Also, of all the Presidents I’ve read about, he had the most humanistic outlook.

        1. “The only corner that routinely lodges such criticisms as yours is the old-money Reactionary Right, which considered him “a traitor to his class.””

          In my experience that is not accurate. Though the reactionary right certainly did have a good hate on for FDR. To be clear, I don’t. I mean, shit, I did put him in my top five and stated that he deserved it. But learning more about him I was definitely disappointed. As when you discover that a hero was distinctly less than perfect.

          1. Sorry, darrelle, I didn’t mean to suggest that you were part of the reactionary right — only that that’s where the anti-FDR vitriol has generally come from.

            And you’re correct that FDR had his flaws. (On the other hand Eleanor, the patron saint of human rights and the ADA, was a national blessing undisguised.)

      3. Did FDR behave “like a spoiled rich brat” in the same sense as the oligarchs he opposed, who called him “a traitor to his class”? Were one of the serious problems he caused allies his refusal to support Churchill’s efforts to reconstitute and maintain Great Britain’s (and other European powers’) colonies as they were prior to WW II? Whatever “spoiled brat” pretentions FDR exhibited were definitely minimized by his getting polio, causing him to not merely sympathize but empathize with those of most modest material and health care means. I think the public realized this and took it to heart and responded by electing him four times.

        TR called Thomas Paine “that filthy little atheist.” I can’t imagine that goes over well at this site. Would you say that TR was any less a rich “spoiled brat”? IIRC, he was on the committee picking the presidents to be featured on Mount Rushmore.

        Would you say that TR was a war monger? Re:

        1. “The War Lovers: Roosevelt, Lodge, Hearst, and the Rush to Empire, 1898” by Evan Thomas.

        2. “God’s Arbiters: Americans and The Philippines, 1898-1902 by Susan K. Harris.

        I think he somewhat deserved the headaches he got from his daughter Alice.

          1. Oops. Accidently hit reply.

            To continue . . . You don’t think that people are a bit more complicated than being uniformly good or bad? That is hardly the case.

          2. No, I don’t think that; I certainly don’t see where I said that in my posting.

    3. Unsurprisingly, your top 5 are historical scholars’ top 5. Their order is:

      1. Lincoln
      2. FDR
      3. Washington
      4. Jefferson
      5. TR

      Their 2nd 5 are:

      6. Wilson
      7. Truman
      8. Eisenhower
      9. Jackson
      10. Kennedy

      Their worst 5 are:

      39. Harrison (one month in office!?)
      40. Pierce
      41. Andrew Johnson
      42. Harding
      43. Buchanan

      1. Tanking the economy and blundering into a pair of unwinnable wars — Dubya must be wondering what else a guy’s gotta do to crack the bottom five.

        1. Oh, he’ll be there, in the end. He was a disaster. People think Jimmy Carter was bad: His bumbles pale in comparison to Dubya’s smug, persistent incompetence and malfeasance.

      2. Jackson must have done something quite positive in their eyes, what with his actions leading to the “Trail of Tears.”

        1. That seems to be overlooked…and if one is going to overlook that, then LBJ should be in the 2nd 5, Vietnam being disregarded and all.

          1. Agreed. LBJ is like a character out of a Shakespearian tragedy. If not for this one fatal problem he would have been considered right up neat the top.

          2. The presidents of my youth — Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon — were all Shakespearean in magnitude (the last, an unholy admixture of Iago, Shylock, and Richard III, surrounded by a seemingly bottomless cast of Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns).

            Then, as I came of age, these giants were replaced by B-actors from bad Seventies sitcoms, Ford and Carter, who were, in turn, replaced by an actual Hollywood B-actor whose sycophants occasionally tried to pump him up to Shakespeare-size, the way balloon handlers at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade inflate Disney characters.

            After Reagan, with the two Bushes and Bubba, we were back to B-roll footage, and we’re yet to have enough distance to tell where Barack fits into the scheme. So far, the upcoming crop of 2016 candidates, with the exception of Lady McClinton, is shaping up as small and comical enough to make Carter and Ford seem worthy of Olivier.

          4. Ken:

            “the last, an unholy admixture of Iago, Shylock, and Richard III, surrounded by a seemingly bottomless cast of Rosencrantzes and Guildensterns”

            Frickin’ brilliant! Thanks!

          5. Much like Nixon…pretty much ending the Vietnam War, the EPA, Chinese trade relations, Title IX…it makes me sick to think of it, but Nixon was one of the best presidents of my lifetime.

            b&

          6. I can’t go there with you. Nixon ushered in the Southern Strategy which is playing out to this day. And he managed to keep the war going on and on for years. (To say nothing about traitorously undermining negotiations during the ’68 election cycle.)

            LBJ was trapped by not knowing how to avoid Vietnam. Nixon was a crook. Definitely not one of the best presidents of my lifetime. He was one of the worst, considering the residual damage we’re still suffering.

          7. Our lifetimes likely aren’t synchronized at the beginning…Nixon was actually my first president.

            After him was Ford; Ford’s pardon of Nixon is directly responsible for all the subsequent executive misconduct. Carter is the only one I actually admire. Reagan would have us believe that government is an unnecessary evil that should be drowned in the bathtub. Poppy Bush started both the first real war to conquer foreign oil fields and started the current surveillance state. Clinton wasn’t so terrible, but really pushed hard on the surveillance state. Shrub was a complete and utter disaster…and Obama, as good a game as he talks, in practice, is even worse than Shrub — even more war, even more surveillance, still Gitmo, the most insanely ultra-right guarantee of profiteering not for health care but private insurance…

            …so, yeah. Nixon has one of the most admirable of legislative records of presidents in my lifetime…but that’s not praise for Nixon; it’s a most scathing critique of the utterly contemptible nature of the American Executive for the past few decades.

            b&

          8. As I understood it, Nixon found a way to undermine the end of the Viet Nam War during his campaign for presidency, using back door channels, in order to built his own political platform on ending it. Does anyone else know anything about this?

          9. You may well be right. I’m not aware of anything like that, but I’m no historian.

            …I do know that Reagan sabotaged Carter’s Iranian hostage negotiations, and wouldn’t at all be surprised if he drew inspiration from what you’re accusing Nixon of doing.

            Again, I’m not trying to paint Nixon as any sort of hero. Just that almost all of the presidents since him have been at least as bad and generally far worse….

            b&

          11. If you measure based on numbers dead, Nixon is the clear winner in the worst-president contest. US dead during his years was 21,041 (vs. 2,932 in Iraq). If you count civilians and enemy dead: 650,000 in Iraq (estimated) vs. 1.5+ million in Vietnam during Nixon’s tenure according to Robert McNamara).

            Before your time, Ben, so it may not have the resonance to you that it does for some of the rest of us. Take it from an old-timer, Nixon and Shrub are the close contenders for worst president in most-of-our-lifetimes. There styles were different. Tricky Dick was much smarter than Shrub, I’ll grant you that. He didn’t start the Vietnam war so he can’t be blamed for that. But he prevented it from ending far sooner than it did.

          12. I’ll take your word on the body count numbers.

            But Shrub was also a big fat zero on the legislative front. No, worse than that; he gave us U.S.A.P.A.T.R.I.O.T and No Child’s Behind Left. Nixon at least gave us (or didn’t stand in the way of) the EPA, Title IX, trade with China, and some other things.

            And Shrub also gave us torture memos and extraordinary rendition, and his daddy’s NSA and CIA officers may well have successfully done for him what Nixon’s operators so clumsily failed at in the Watergate Hotel.

            Again, it’s not praise for Nixon…the stuff he did was the least he could have done. But so damned few of those since him even did that much….

            b&

          13. I did say that Tricky Dick and Shrub were in close contention.

            I’d choose to give the win to W at this point but it may be because the awful taste of his presidency is more recent in my mouth.

          14. Nixon will be judged a mixed bag. He did a lot of great things (as my Mom still says, “we thought he was a conservative; but he wasn’t!” [This is derogatory from her.]

            But he was also a criminal and had delusions of grandeur and immunity.

          15. Alas, for the presidents after him, the immunity hasn’t been a delusion. Maybe Nixon was simply ahead of his time?

            Nghak!

            b&

  17. Before you read this please know that I’m not a shill for TSA.
    This might be urban legend, but my understanding about the free TSA PreChek is that TSA has been giving out the random free status as a kind of marketing effort to get people to sign up and pay their $85. I read somewhere recently that the effort has been so successful that they are going to cut back on the free passes. (Who knows? That rumor could also be a marketing effort.) For my wife and I the sign up process was mostly uneventful. You go on line and make an appointment at a nearby TSA office set up for the purpose. In our case we had to go the the airport (MSP). (We had made an appointment at an office closer to our home but got a notice about a week before our appointment that they had closed the office and we needed to reschedule at another location.) For some reason the office is on the secure “air” side of security. We had to go to the Delta special services desk to got a gate pass which allowed us through security without a boarding pass. Kind of a pain, but when we got in the security line we asked why we didn’t have any luggage. When we told them we were there to apply for PreChek they let us jump the line and went out of their way to accommodate us. At the office the process was really easy. The fellow who interviewed us and took our money was very friendly. We now get PreChek status on all our domestic and U.S. originating flights overseas. It’s definitely worth it in our opinion. (By the way, we found out that the airport office is on the air side of security to accommodate fliers with long enough layovers who can simply walk up to the office and apply without an appointment.)

  18. My school offered two letters. The traditional block letter was for sports, but they also had a cursive letter for performing arts: drama, speech, debate, etc.

    2. Did the jock letters used to come by and give the cursive performing-arts letters wedgies?

  19. This morning I was asked to go through my old possessions recovered from my mother’s house after she died …

    When I die my son will have an entire room full of boxes to pick up. Appreciate your mothers.

    1. My mom is a bit OCD about cleanliness and orderliness, which I mostly really appreciate. But, she did get rid of my copious collection of old school GI Joe stuff without mentioning it to me. That stuff is worth a small fortune now!

  20. I guess he TSA got their fill of inappropriate touching for now. Let’s see what happens when PCC flies to be Soviet Socialist Republic of Canuckistan.

    1. Are they confiscating thought-crimes at Canadian Customs now?

      I remember when the only worries at the Canadian border were when leaving with tax-free liquor, 222s, and Cuban cigars.

  21. Thumbs up for the album. Great album. They don’t make albums like that any more, grumble grumble, off my lawn etc…

  22. I didn’t know about the Sgt. Pepper story until now, and I think I should mention that without that knowledge, the reference to it on page xiii of Faith vs. Fact sounded rather weird to me. It reminded me of when Tommy Chong said he played Black Sabbath at 78 speed and saw God.

  23. I wore out my parents’s Sgt. Pepper album growing up. They might still have it somewhere, but I’ve also got CDs of it and the rest of the Beatles albums I wore out….

    b&

  24. I wrestled 103 also. Once after a bout of the flu I made 98!

    I also share your feelings regarding Washington national being named after the worst president of the 20th century.

  25. The vinyl copy of Sergeant Pepper

    And the stereo version. I have the mono version. Not sure which I prefer.

  26. I hope the Professor purchased Sergeant Pepper at the PX in Heidelberg and if so, we thank you for the business.

    Most of my records from that time are more than a little scratchy if they play at all. Would be surprised if you still had a record player or better yet, a turntable, amp and speakers to play the thing.

    1. Dunno about Jerry, but we still have our best stereo set with the large speakers, and most of the LPs we ever had. None of which we ever use anymore. My son likes to play something occasionally–he love the sound from the big speakers.

  28. In 10th grade, I wrestled in the 105 pound weight class, by 12th grade I was in the 129 pound weight class – but I was 6 ft. tall by then too.

  29. “I got a TSA “Pre-check” status, enabling me to skip the lines and pass through inspection without removing my belt, my computer, my liquids, and even my boots—or having my buttocks groped. I have no idea how the TSA confers this status, which I get sporadically.”

    And if they read that, you’ll never get it again. 🙂

    2. What did Reagan do vs. the USSR that Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter didn’t do?

      He was just lucky to be elected when the USSR ran out of gold finally.

      He started the massive deficits in the US Federal budget (take a look at who was at the helm when budget deficits bloomed: It’s false that the GOP is a better fiscal steward. They strip the country to enrich their country club buddies (the 1%) and blame the people at the bottom. And somehow, they’ve gotten away with it.)

      Just look at the figures for income in the USA since 1980. Reagan set out to screw the “less deserving” in the USA — and he succeeded. His work set the stage and momentum for the 1% and the “47%”.

      Actually, it’s worse than that.

      80% of the people in the US have been going downhill since Reagen took office.

  31. I’m not so sure that I follow, but how did listening to a British psychedelic rock album turn you toward atheism? I do not recall any themes in the album promoting it in any of the songs. A Day in the Life? Luck in the Sky with Diamonds?

Comments are closed.