Great And Small

She was not my idea.  I think I've said that before.

Our son wanted a dog. Our next-door neighbor at the time was a lonely widow woman who had called the police on the former owners of our house about their dog.  We asked our son if he would like a cat.  He was always a compliant child and he said yes.

My wife and son (who had just turned seven) went to a local cat shelter called Good Mews and found a gray female kitten who had a white chest and white paws. Her brother was with her. His name was Picasso.  Her name was Dali, as in Salvadore Dali. Some cat people are pretentious.

My wife and son got Dali. They brought her home and changed her name to Gracie because she was gray. I think it was a better name than Dali.

The President at the time was Bill Clinton.  We had just learned the name of someone called "Monica".  I think a certain New York Real Estate developer was still married to his second wife, but I'm not too sure. I didn't pay much attention to him at the time.

From that time on, we had a little gray cat in the house.

Like a lot of men, I never really thought too much about cats, one way or another.

We had one cat when  I was growing up. My mom ran over it.

I know this sounds like that toxic masculinity that is supposedly so wrong but I thought cats were sort of feminine. So I thought we would just put up with the cat until we could get a dog like God intended.

Of course, the little gray cat had another idea. While she liked my son, whose pet she was and she liked my wife, as a fellow gal, the stupid cat literally adored me. So much so I have said, "There have been three females that have loved me unconditionally: my mother, my wife, and this stupid cat".

I tried to act like I didn't like her. But my wife caught me cooing at Gracie, "Who loves his Gracie girl? Daddy loves his Gracie girl. I do, I do, I do love my Gracie girl".  It is hard to look macho when you are saying this.

She would always have to sit with me. She would come up, purring, stand on my stomach and place her legs on my shoulders like she was hugging me.  This ritual went on for years.

Like they say, the days drag on but the years fly by.  The seven-year-old was soon in middle school, then high school, and then college. One day, he brought home a tall blonde that was crazy about cats. Then, on another day, he married that blonde and he was out of the house.

It was Lori and me and Gracie makes three.

Gracie scratched our furniture to death.  She would have these killer hairballs, too. Nothing like waking up in the middle of the night and stepping barefoot in a hairball on the way to the bathroom.

But she made it up to me by licking my nose while I'm in a deep sleep to make sure I knew that her plate is empty and she needed some food in it. I would get up, walk downstairs, and put out a plate of Fancy Feast, which is neither fancy or a feast.  Gracie would watch me, walk up to the plate, take a couple of charity licks and walk off.  The clock  usually read 4:30. In the morning. On my day off.

She could be funny. One time, my next-door neighbor (same house, different person) brought over his new puppy to show us. Gracie comes walking around the corner and sees the puppy.  She turned to me and had the most incredulous facial expression. I didn't know cats had facial expressions except for their general condescension. Her expression said, "What the hell is this dog doing in my house?" She turned around and walked out of the room. 

Six years ago, I had a blog post about her kidney disease, which is very common in cats.

The vet prescribed a pill to be given daily. Giving a cat a pill is truly a skill and I'm happy to say my wife mastered it. How my wife did it, I will never know.

As the years past, Gracie basically peed a lot.  However, in the past year and a half, she started missing the litter box on occasion. As you can imagine, it created a big mess.

Then this past April, I went to the bathroom where we kept her litter box. There was blood on the floor. The vet said it was a Urinary Tract Infection and gave her a shot.  She seemed to get better. But then she got worse.

Most of May and June, Gracie was up all night going to the litter box. She was not peeing as much. When she did pee, it landed on the floor, somewhere in the general vicinity of the litter box.

But, she was still eating well, two cans of cat food a day.  Then it was once can a day. Soon, the food on her plate was half-eaten.

This past Tuesday I realized she hadn't eaten in two days. She was up a lot, going to the litter box, trying to make it, but most of the time failing. There was blood  She was walking like she was almost bow-legged.

We decided to take her to the Vet.  We didn't know if it was "the time" or not.

I got out her cat carrier. For 19 of her 21 years, it was the biggest pain to get her into her cat carrier. Most of the time, she would run off and try to hide. It would take weeks to get her into the cat carrier.

I put in on the floor and opened the cage. I said, "Do you want to go see Shelia?" (the front office staffer at the Vet). Gracie strolled in.  Right then I knew it was "the time".

That still didn't make it less painful when the Vet told us we needed to have Gracie put down. Gracie was two months away from being 22 years old. In human years that is 104 years old.

It was quick.  Gracie was given a sedative. She growled when she was given the shot but it was the last time she felt pain.

She was absolutely the sweetest cat I've ever been around. Of course, it was because she was my cat and I was her person. There is no greater love than between the grumpy dad and the pet he didn't want.
 
She was just a little kitten from a shelter. The shelter told us she had feline HIV and probably wouldn't live to 7 years old. She lived three times longer.

She didn't have to worry about predators, cars, or dogs. She had her run of the house and could basically sit anywhere she wanted. She didn't have to hunt for food. She had a house full of humans who would play with her and love on her.  She basically won the cat lottery.

We did too.

It Is Always Something

I remember it quite well. I was in Indianapolis to participate in a pitch meeting to obtain the Burger Chef account when I watched Neil Armstrong take his first step on the moon. All of us in the room which included Pete, Peggy, and Don were amazed by what we just saw.

Wait a second. That didn't happen to me. That happened on Mad Men.  I saw Armstrong on the moon in the den of the original Manis Manor at 460 Holt Road in Marietta, Georgia.  I remember it being very late and I could barely keep my eyes open. I wasn't yet ten years old.

It is even more remarkable now than it was then.  Apollo 11 made it to the moon with 60's technology. The fact they had radio contact still amazes me. There are parts of my house where I can't make a phone call on my smartphone.

But you know what happened.  After several landings on the moon, it became old hat. All they brought back were rocks. Man, they must have been nice rocks with all of the people dying in Vietnam, man.

That part of it was really too bad.  We basically put a man on the moon in about twelve years since Sputnik was launched. That's an unbelievable short period of time to accomplish something so incredible.

Of course, American's agenda-setters (The Washington Post and The New York Times) are allowing us to look back at that time, when Americans came together to achieve a common goal, with pride.

If you believe that, I have some moon rocks to sell you.

WaPo, as everybody is calling it now, ran an article about NASA's race to the moon by noting:

"As NASA worked relentlessly to fulfill John F. Kennedy’s goal of landing a man on the moon by decade’s end, it turned to the nation’s engineers. Many of them were fresh out of school, running the gamut from mechanical to electrical engineers, because that’s mostly what was taught in universities, and almost exclusively to white men."

For some weird reason, NASA turned to the nation's engineers to achieve the goal of landing a man on the moon before Jimi Hendrix took the stage at Woodstock instead of the nation's liberal arts majors. They were male mechanical and electrical engineers. Which means they were really into math.  This was before the time of pocket calculators, too, so we are dealing with men that used slide rulers. (I'm not sure how to use a slide rule. I can barely use a pocket calculator.)

There were the ONs: The Original Nerds. They all have one problem: the color of their skin.

The Post goes to say, "In archival Apollo 11 photos and footage, it’s a "Where’s Waldo?" exercise to spot a woman or person of color."

I have an idea. Let's not play a "Where's Waldo"  exercise to spot a woman or a person of color. 

The New York Times ran an article titled, and I am not making this up, "How The Soviets Won The Space Race For Equality".  They ran it because when everybody thinks about equality, they think about the Soviet Union.

History shows the Soviet Union sent  Valentina Tereshkova into orbit on June 16, 1963, twenty years before America sent Sally Ride into space.  But, and the Times article did not state this, Ride was the first LGBT astronaut into space. Take that Khrushchev! USA! USA! USA!

The Times noted: "Ardent female fans in the U.S.S.R. saw her triumph as a welcome reaffirmation of the Soviet commitment to gender equality, while women outside the Soviet Union took it as proof that there was no limit to what women could achieve".

I'm not an expert, but I would doubt her "ardent female fans" saw her as a "welcome reaffirmation of the Soviet commitment to gender equality" because they didn't think in those terms. They probably thought that she was lucky to get out of a stink hole like The Soviet Union.

The Times article ends "Cosmonaut diversity was key for the Soviet message to the rest of the globe: Under socialism, a person of even the humblest origins could make it all the way up."  As long, of course, a person of humble origins didn't disagree with the state. They would find other places for you besides a rocket ship, comrade.

All of this is part of our New American past-time called "Naw, it wasn't that great".  You hear it all around. Hipsters say The Beatles weren't all that great.  There were other Liverpool bands just as good.  Yeah, Abe Lincoln freed the slaves and saved the union, but have you noticed that wart on his face?

Yeah, the moon landing was great and all that, but did you see that picture of Misson Control? All white men.  They probably smoke and drank too much.  Yes, that was a slide rule in his pocket and yes, he was happy to see you.

We have a generation of clickbait followers where nothing is ever good enough.  Heaven forbid we look back at something with pride.

There's nothing wrong with pointing out facts. Yes, it was mainly white men at Mission Control. But does the color of their skin diminish what they accomplished?

We'll do better next time.

Liz's Big Idea

The news media has apparently decided, without any votes being cast, that there are five (count 'em) five major players for the Democratic Party's nomination for President in 2020.

They are Vice President Joe Biden, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Kamala Harris, Senator Bernie Sanders, and Mayor Pete Buttigieg.  You may notice  Congressman Eric Swalwell is not listed. That is because Congressman Swalwell looked at the facts and realized nobody has ever heard of him that didn't watch the 24-hour news channels 24 hours a day, so he dropped out of the race. Or maybe, it was because of the vicious pounding he took in this blog a couple of weeks ago. Either way, he is out of the race and now there are only 500 Democrats running for their party's nomination.

The Big Five contains two very old men, a gay man of a medium-sized city, someone who wants to relitigate forced school busing, and a person who went out telling people she was a member of an aggrieved minority group when it happened to benefit her career.

That's who I want to focus on today; our buddy, Elizabeth Warren, Senator from Massachusetts.

Like the rest of The Big Five, Elizabeth Warren wants to fight.  She is always saying she is going to fight unlike the party's last nominee, the wallflower called Hillary Clinton.  On her website, Warren says she wants to  "fight to build an America that works for everyone, not just the wealthy and the well-connected".   If you want to join her in this "fight", she has conveniently added boxes showing $10, $25, $50, $100. and other, you know, just to make it easy for you.

Unlike the rest, Warren has decided to talk about her "plans" for the county.  She has "plans" out the wazoo. She has a plan for immigration. Politico says, "Warren calls for eliminating criminal penalties for people 'entering the country without authorization' but would leave in place civil penalties for illegal border crossings."   Translation:  Hey, y'all, just come on in.

But to me, Warren's plan on "student loan debt" really piqued my interest.

If you know anything about college, you know college is expensive for reasons that are not actually very clear.  The kids have to borrow money to go to school.  But there is a catch: you have to pay the money back. I know it sucks kiddos, but that's the way the world goes round. Just wait till you get a job and that stupid boss expects you to work and not look at your Instagram.

Warren, however, has come up with a "plan".  What if, by magic, it turns out the student didn't take out a loan, but rather, was given a gift?  Warren's plan is to cancel student loan debt.

Forbes magazine reports, "The ambitious student loan forgiveness plan would cancel student loan debt for more than 95% of borrowers, and would entirely cancel student loan debt for more than 75% of Americans with student loan debt. Warren believes that her plan would reduce the wealth gap in America and provide an economic stimulus to the middle class to increase home purchases and help start small businesses."  (Just for the record, Warren believed for years that she was a Native American.)

Forbes notes that student loan debt is the second highest category of debt behind mortgages and by 2023, 40% of the student loan borrowers could default on their loans.

Specifically, Warren's plan is this:

• Cancel $50,000 in student loan debt for every person with household income under $100,000.
• Provide substantial debt cancellation for every person with household income between $100,000 and $250,000.
• Not tax as income student loan debt that has been canceled.
• Also, make private student loan debt eligible for cancellation.
• Streamline the student loan debt forgiveness process using data and income information already available to the federal government.    (Forbes, Zach Friedman, 6/17/19)

Question: where will Warren find the money to pay for all of these loans?  Answer:  From the money tree. Her campaign says it will be a 2 percent tax on "Ultra Millionaires".  These are the 75,000 families whose net worth is over $50 million in net worth.  Fortunately for me, I made only $49 million last year, so I would be exempt.

I decided to see what the average voter thinks about this so I did what any well-rounded person would do. I created a highly scientific poll on my Facebook page.  I asked people to vote Yay or Nay on student loan forgiveness.

I had 60 responses. All were Nay.

Granted, most of my Facebook friends fall into the demographic category political scientists refer to as "old farts", but all of the reactions were negative.  The closest anyone came to a Yay was my pal William Joseph Wade III of Bangkok, Thailand  who said,  "Well they forgave banks that made much worse decisions than many of the students who had to borrow money just to find decent jobs." 

Bruce Burns, who was in my second-grade class, probably reflected the general mood of my friends that responded by saying, "HELL no. But one thing we should do is to crack down on schools that encourage students to go $200k in debt for junk degrees like 18th Century Bavarian Hygiene."

For the record, I did remind him that there is a big market for 19th Century Bavarian Hygiene majors.

I would say Warren's plan probably won't go over well in Middle America for the simple reason most Americans think if you borrow money you should pay it back unless something catastrophic happens and you graduate with a history degree from a small state school in the early '80's.  

But what do I know? I spent two years saying Trump would never become President. 

 

I Like Streaming

You may remember that we got rid of our two-ton tube television set and bought a "smart" TV.

We did this for a couple of reasons. "Two Ton Tessie", the old tv set was purchased in 2002. That still seems like yesterday to me, but it was 17 years ago.  The son, who bought a house a couple of months ago, had just graduated elementary school.  We rented DVDs at this place called "Blockbuster". You might have heard about "Blockbuster".  It was there where I got charged a dollar fine for being 30 minutes late returning "Remember The Titans".

Tessie was old, but she still worked well so the cheapskate in me wanted to keep it.  However, smart TVs are relatively inexpensive and we heard about this new service called "streaming".  I'm not sure what it is but it has something to do with  the internet. I think. I was raised in an analog world so it takes me a while to understand the digital universe.

Our son encouraged us to buy a new TV and eventually old tightwad (me) relented and we bought this brand new smart TV.

There are three major streaming services: Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu.

We already had Amazon Prime because my wife likes to order things off of Amazon and the things arrive within a day or two. Sometimes the things arrive within an hour after the order. Sometimes, it is mere minutes. Some people are worried about Amazon, but I say bring on the stuff!

We bought a subscription to Netflix.  We haven't bought into Hulu.  I'm a little miffed by Hulu because their biggest show is "The Handmaid's Tale" which is about a dystopian world where Peggy Olson of "Mad Men" has babies. Okay.

But we have enjoyed our digital entertainment and here are some reviews of some the shows we've seen.

"Stranger Things 3":  We just finished ST3 and it was very, very good.  It is hard to explain ST because a lot of it is kind of "made up" and you can't really write about it unless you want people to type "TLDR"  next to your post. It has good acting. The kids on the show are all likable. It can be very scary. It also has plot holes you can drive a truck through. For example, all of the parents, with the exception of Winona Ryder are AWOL.  I know parents of the '70s and 80's were not as helicopterish as now, but if their 12-year-old, didn't come home at night, they would have started looking.  But, you can't help to like a show where two characters, Max and Lucas, are making fun of Dustin by singing the theme of "Neverending Story" and Dustin flips them off.

"Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story":   Martin Scorsese's pseudo-documentary of Dylan's "Rolling Thunder Revue" in 1975.  I say "pseudo" because a lot of the material is a put on.  Bette Midler's husband appears as the director of the movie. Sharon Stone says she joined the tour. (She didn't.) This harks back to Dylan's beginnings when he told everybody he was a runaway that worked for the circus instead of the truth: a nice Jewish kid from Minnesota.  Still,  Scorsese manages to take "Renaldo and Clara", the four-hour movie Dylan made about the revue, and makes it watchable. ("Renaldo and Clara" is Bob awful.)  It is nice to see when Bob gave a crap.

"The Romanoffs":  My least favorite show I've seen streaming.  If you have ever wondered if Matthew Weiner can do a bad TV show, the answer is yes.  We gave up on it after two viewings.

"Forever":  Take two Saturday Night Live alumni and add a "Parks and Recreation" writer and you should get a fairly funny show.  You should. But you don't with "Forever".

"Dead To Me":  What happens when a weirdo moves in with the widow of the man she ran over? Hilarity ensues.   It's actually not bad. There is just a lot of swearing in this comedy.

"Schitt's Creek":   This is a Canadian version of "Green Acres".  There are times when the show is literally laugh out loud funny.

"Goliath":  Billy Bob Thorton plays a brilliant but down on his luck attorney. Are there other kind? If you like Billy Bob, you will like the first season of this show. Plus, it has Dwight Yoakam as the CEO of a Defense Contractor.  Southern accents abound in this show.  Season two of this show is depressing and gross.

"Bosch":  This is the most underrated show on any type of television.  A detective that doesn't follow the rules.  Where have we seen that before?  It is just a well-made show with a great cast.