After KOLR 10 Investigates uncovered Republic City Administrator David Cameron received several 5-figure salary raises in recent years, city council approved a more conservative pay bump during his most recent review.
Cameron’s impressive raises included an almost $60,000 raise in 2021, which pushed his salary over $262,000 last year. But now for the first time in three years, his merit raise will come in under $10,000.
Cameron’s previous combined raises more than doubled his salary between 2018 and 2023. Taxpayers we interviewed for the original story in May were mostly shocked to learn how much he’s making.
I would say so. I would be, too.
If I recall the last city administrator in Republic ended up going somewhere bigger (Casinoport?) which illustrates that, unlike elected officials, city administrators might not represent the communities in which they’re employed–not elected. They could easily represent instead their guild (government experts) and themselves moreso than the small towns who need “expert” help.
On Thursday night and Friday, I fought vainly that old ennui. You know, the telos versus deontos: Is what I am doing good for something? Or is it good in itself? If so, why am I not going anywhere and not feeling good about being present in the moment much like I have been present in similar moments for the last fifteen years? Pragmatism versus stoicism/Buddhist mindfulness, if you would. And thinking whichever one I was supposed to be doing, I was doing it wrong anyway.
So on Saturday, I headed over to the Hobby Lobby looking for some wire and some camouflage scrapbook paper. I mentioned last year that I wanted to put my father-in-laws waterfowl calls into a shadow box, and in between then and this summer I did. I used camouflage scrapbook paper instead of fabric, and I used fishing line to tie the calls to the shadow box back. Why? Because the shadow box my mother-in-law had built for us used fishing line, which is unobtrusive, in it. But the fishing line knots, inexpertly applied by yours truly, came loose, and the calls partially fell inside the box.
So I thought I’d do with with wire this time. So I headed to Hobby Lobby for more paper and some wire. And Christmas decorations were in full bloom in the Hobby Lobby. So, on a whim, I bought a little resin Santa Claus for $3.50 and stuck him on the mantel in the living room to see if/when anyone notices.
I told my youngest we would be putting up the Christmas tree in a couple of weeks, and he protested, saying we normally don’t decorate until Thanksgiving. I pointed out that is in two weeks, regardless of whether the daily high temperatures are 75 degrees right now. And I mentioned to my beautiful wife that the local radio station that goes to Christmas music has done so for the last two months of the year.
Putting that little Santa on the mantel made me feel a little better, probably more so than the amusement of wondering if/when they will discover it (no one has so far, although everyone walks through the room several times a day) than the Christmas spirit. But it could have been worse: On the way to Hobby Lobby, I passed someone giving away free Australian Shepherd puppies. Now they would have noticed that (and I was tempted, because what eliminate ennui like a puppy?).
At any rate, it’s not like we have put up a small Christmas tree like after our Christmas-themed trunk for Trunk or Treat in 2021 or when I started playing Christmas records in October 2020. So I’m still not that guy. But I am getting closer. Also, I found a Christmas record that was misfiled in the Nogglestead LP library (where the Christmas records are the only ones kept together and sort of organized, apparently only mostly), so it’s on the desk by the record player. So the odds of it finding its way to the turntable in the next couple of days are pretty high.
UPDATE: It was less than ten minutes before I started listening to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir’s The Holly and the Ivy, the aforementioned formerly misfiled Christmas record. My beautiful wife, passing through, commented on it. But she has still not seen the Santa.
This is the second volume of this collection that I’ve watched this month (the first was Volume 6). I’m clearly not watching them in order–well, it will become obvious when I finish the next volume and its number is not higher than 19–but this set of DVDs does not really have the episodes in any order, either, skipping through the seasons–and seemingly focusing on later seasons.
This disc contains:
“A Most Unusual Camera” wherein a couple of two-bit thieves knock over an antique store only to come up with cheap knock-offs, but they do discover something–a camera that takes photos a few minutes into the future. They figure out a way to monetize it–take it to the horse racing track and take a picture of the winner board before the race is run. They make a pile of money, but end up getting–their just desserts? In a totally tacked on twist.
“The Jungle”, wherein a project engineer who has been to Africa to scope out a hydroelectric project finds that his wife has become very superstitious, and they fear the magick of the shamans in a tribe opposed to the project. After a night at a bar, he has to walk home after car trouble and finds New York City turning into a jungle around him.
“The 7th Is Made Up Of Phantoms” wherein a National Guard tank crew finds itself on the path to the Battle of Little Bighorn with past events occurring to them in the present–or have they gone back to the past? This one ends with them cocking their modern weapons and charging down a hill into the battle. Which seems like a tactically poor decision. I mean, they abandon the tank and then do not use cover or concealment to approach but run down the hill close together. Maybe they taught things differently in the National Guard in the 1960s.
“Uncle Simon”, where a shrewish niece takes care of her wealthy but abusive uncle but is prohibited from entering his lab. When she accidentally kills him, she discovers that the will says she must take care of her uncle’s creation: a robot that comes more and more to resemble her uncle in its abusive behavior toward her.
So it’s a little better than Volume 6 in that it’s not both formulaic and sharing very similar topics, but by the end of the original series, Serling’s well must have been running dry and the stories were but a single quick DUN DUN DUH! at the end away from things you’d have seen on other programs in other genres.
I guess that’s the real story arc of most open-ended television series: they start out with imagination and promise, and after a couple of seasons the grind of producing a weekly show and probably network penny-pinching leads to weakened episodes and related viewer disappointment, ratings drops, and cancellation. I guess with modern television, they have a story arc to carry through a series, but the related knock is that they pad that story arc out with insignifica to fill a whole season.
At any rate, these programs are 60 years old at this point and can still hold my interest, although they don’t necessarily inspire me to speculative fiction as much as reading about them did.
Prominent, long-time Springfield leaders have formed a political action committee to support candidates in upcoming school board and city council races that are required by state law to be nonpartisan.
The launch of United Springfield was announced Monday, a day before potential candidates were eligible to pick up packets to run for school board.
Organizers of the new fundraising PAC said its creation is a direct response to a dramatic increase in the participation of partisan and “dark money” groups — that opt not to disclose donor names — in local elections.
Springfield would all be united if only the proles followed the instructions given to them by the elites!
I picked this book up off of the free book cart at church. Although I check the cart every week, or at least when my beautiful wife needs to be at church early because she’s singing, playing trumpet, or ringing bells (which might only be five out of every six weeks), I do generally wait a week or two before grabbing a free book because I do have other things to read here.
This is a coffee table book that covers seven days in the beginning of April and documents various activities going on throughout the world at churches of the LCMS, its schools, and its missions. The church, from its then-new headquarters in the St. Louis area (I drove by it many times back in the day, which is right after it opened, although I, a new driver exploring the St. Louis area for the first time, did not know that), the church called (well, not called called) for members of various congregations to take photos and submit them, and then the editors up at Concordia Publishing (in the same then-new building) selected photos from every day of the week.
So, that’s it, basically. You get churches and services on Sunday, school kids, missionaries doing their things, the little old ladies of the church doing their crafts and outreach, and the people at LCMS HQ hard at work. You’ve got some photos of church members in their professional lives, and you’ve got what seems to be an overrepresentation of church members working to get the services on the radio or to record the services on video, but I guess those distribution channels would have been pretty novel in 1996. Well, except radio–church services on the radio and television predate this book, but maybe this offered a behind the scenes look? Or maybe it was new to Lutherans then.
I admit that, with some photography books, I only glance at the photos and spend most of my time reading the captions. Such with this book: the photos themselves were fairly pedestrian, although I could not help notice that most of the fashions would have as easily been at home in 1983 as 1996. Nary a bit of flannel here. But, for the most part, the engines of any church are people in their thirties, but more likely their forties and beyond. And these people would have fixed their fashion and how they thought they should look in the 1980s. The young people tend to be in their best or, even in casual clothes, in rather timeless casual wear. The people who would chase fashion would be in their late teens and twenties, the ones looking to define themselves in how they look, and they’re pretty thin in churches now as perhaps then. Not that we’ve had a “look” aside from maybe haircuts and makeup trends this century. Or maybe I am too old to know the subtle differences that youth see.
Given that this picture book showed up on our church’s rack, of course I looked for members or names from the church that I recognized, but I did not find any I knew. I also looked for churches that I have visited, which is not a large number, but we do tend to go to a local LCMS church when possible when we’re vacationing, so I’ve been to LCMS churches in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Arkansas. I only have sort of visited one of the churches down the road from here a ways–my sons played basketball at its school, but I’ve not attended service there. One of its youth in 1996 has the same last name as the current principal of the school, to whom we have sent some money from time to time when possible.
I did, however, spot a confirmand named Kaepernick from Turlock, California, and I looked it up: It is, in fact, the former football player’s older sister from his adopted family. I also learned that not only was that former football player likely raised in the LCMS, but that he was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Geez.
At any rate, an interesting artifact, probably more interesting if you attend an LCMS church. Especially if you did so in 1996.
Now this book will not go on my read shelves immediately. It has been routed to my beautiful wife for her review, and from thence it shall likely go to my mother-in-law for review. And heaven knows if or when I will see it again.
This is a comedy special by Ron White. You know, that other guy from the Blue Collar Comedy Tours from the turn of the century. No, the “Here’s your sign” guy is Bill Engvall (whose book Just a Guy: Notes from a Blue Collar Life I listened to in 2019). Of course, the big two are Jeff Foxworthy and Larry the Cable Guy. I get the sense Ron White is really the forgotten man in the bunch.
And, to be honest, that rating probably matches the reality. I have enjoyed Jeff Foxworthy for decades; I’ve seen a Larry the Cable Guy comedy special or two; and I enjoyed the couple of Blue Collar Comedy tour specials I’ve seen. But that’s probably despite White, not because of him.
You know, I get it: Comedy shows are going to have their off-color moments. Gallagher had a couple moments. Charlie Berens, the Manitowoc Minute guy, whom I saw earlier this month, even Charlie Berens had a moment or two that made my poor wife cringe because she was at a comedy show with her children, and she was afraid she would have to explain a joke or maybe she was afraid she would not now that her boys go to public school.
But Ron White’s show, or this one perhaps, did not offer many topical insights into the foibles of human nature that did not involve being drunk, having sex (especially receiving oral sex), or drugs. One party situation or sexual situation after another, and finis!
Not my bag, baby.
I do have to wonder if comedy has followed a similar arc to pop music: that it increasingly has to cater to an audience who comes out to the clubs, and those are the party people and not the, you know, adults. Or maybe there are diminishing adults in the world to entertain.
Singer Diamante has a new single coming out, entitled “1987”, and the cover looks like this:
I don’t want to go all Lileks on it, but the typeface and dress looks more 1977 than 1987. I guess she could be forgiven as she was not even born yet.
In related Diamante news, when I bought her second CD American Dream from her Web site, it came with a three-quarter sleeve shirt with Diamante on it. I hadn’t worn it as I’m not really a fan of the three-quarter sleeves. Last week, though, I put it on, and as I did, I wondered if my beautiful wife would comment. She did. I defended myself by saying I wear a t-shirt with Miles Davis’ face on it all the time. Apparently, having another attractive woman’s face on my torso is different.
This book is a sequel to Hey, Cowboy, Want To Get Lucky?, and the joke’s on me. When I bought this book in 2015, I bought them both. And they quite likely might have been together on the hallway to-read shelves until we had to move those bookshelves into my office. So they were not together when I picked this book up during the month or so my to-read bookshelves have been (mostly) in my office, or I would have looked closer and picked up the first one first. Ooops.
At any rate, this is a modern(ish) cowboy book, a modern Western. Lick and Al tend cattle in Idaho/Nevada, making a lonely living in a small trailer miles from anyone else. One day, while they’re out on the range, they spot someone walking–it’s an attractive woman who has just emerged from a small plane crash. It turns out that she has taken $500,000 from the man she’d been living with, to whom she pretended to be married to appease his wealthy parents and to hide from a possible drug trafficking charge in her past. Her “husband,” who runs a casino, has partnered with a Las Vegas animal trainer who runs an exotic animal sanctuary to allow the richest of the rich to hunt endangered species at the sanctuary–and the $500,000 represents the deposits the “husband” has gotten from participants, part of which is owed to the partner. So he sends henchmen to find his “wife” and bring her–and the money–back.
That’s the plot. It’s a bit of a chase as the bad guys find where the woman is, and the cowboys have to get her to safety, and then when she’s safe (spoiler: she’s not safe for long), the goal becomes to stop the hunt from taking place or to minimize the damage. Which they might (they do) with the help of a posse of retired rodeo riders.
So it’s an amusing book. Better than The Adventures of Slim & Howdy which probably falls into the same modern genre of comic contemporary cowboy stories.
I enjoyed Black’s columns in the Republic Monitor back in the day (it being the first of my adopted hometown newspapers). I enjoyed Croutons on a Cow Pie, a collection of verse and silliness, when I read it in 2019. And I’ll probably enjoy the book that precedes this one when I get around to it.
Last night, the Lutheran Student Center hosted a trivia night fundraiser at one of the rival Lutheran churches in Springfield. One of the hostesses called it the “Second Annual” but that is not exactly true. It is the second year in a row after a hiatus, but the LSC has held trivia nights before at the LSC on the Missouri State University campus before. I know because the North Side Mindflayers won like three in a row.
But it does illustrate a bit of the mindset and myopia of trivia nights hosted by the college students and millenials. The world starts and ends with popular culture from the time when they were born. The questions they compile lean heavily on movies and television of the 21st century as well as slant toward younger topics like children’s books and Disney. Maybe they just stopped reading after that, and if they need questions from literature, it’s recent children’s books or things assigned in high school.
With this in mind, I figured the odds of a Taylor Swift category were very, very high indeed. I mean, c’mon, man, biggest pop star on the planet and “dating” the star tight end of the Kansas City Chiefs, for whom people in this area cheer. So high as to be approaching 100%.
So I spent yesterday afternoon taking notes from her Wikipedia entry and studying the order of her albums, her hits, her few acting appearances, and some of her conflicts and controversies, although the anchor woman of got a list of previous boyfriends and the songs written about them for study.
So we got to the venue and I took one last look at my three pages of notes and crumpled them up and threw them away before the game began.
And the Taylor Swift category was: “Taylor Swift lyric or verse from the Book of Lamentations?”
Aw, hell, I didn’t know I was going to have to listen to the music, too.
So I guess I should have spent the afternoon reading my Bible instead.
As it turns out, we ended up tied for third after the table full of school teachers and the table with the church pastor on it (who I believe went ten for ten on the Book of Lamentations category). Which is out of seven.
It’s weird: I think I’m losing a step in the trivia game as we’ve not done so well with the couple of church trivia nights we’ve been to in the last couple of years, including this “second annual” event. But when I play along with Jeopardy! on rare occasions when I see it or when one of my co-workers asks a trivia question, presumably from a Jeopardy! list, I am pretty quick with the response. I really do think that there’s a real divide between these general trivia games which go back into the 20th century and beyond and the games put together here locally.
That’s what I tell myself in consolation, anyway.
And if anyone accidentally creates a Billy Joel category, I will be set. Although “old” music questions that they ask tend to come from or be about songs in rotation on the greatest hits of the 80s, 90s, and today radio stations. So like the literature questions, they’re pretty basic if you’re, erm, out of college.
I mentioned a while back that my father and I both enjoyed the music of Billy Joel. I’ve also mentioned on occasion that my boys, especially my youngest, listens to a basic playlist of 70s and 80s music that includes not only selections from the Guardians of the Galaxy movie soundtracks but also a number of Billy Joel songs from The Stranger through An Innocent Man. To be honest, I don’t know where or why he picked them up, as I only have “I Go To Extremes” on the gym playlist, and it and “We Didn’t Start The Fire” from their extra work during the school closures come from Storm Front.
At any rate, in the early 1990s, during my college years, I picked up videocassette versions of Billy Joel’s Video Album Volume 1 and Video Album Volume 2 which contained music videos from Cold Spring Harbor to The Bridge. Most of the older stuff is concert/performance videos, some shot in black and white (“Los Angelenos” and “Everybody Loves You Now”, for example). And I watched them over and over in my college years as was my wont. My father joined me on occasion and mentioned that he liked Billy Joel best when he was sneering, such as “Big Shot”, but he also like the harmonies in “For the Longest Time”.
So I dug the two videocassettes out–I think I have the Storm Front videos somewhere else–and I put one on the other night. I put volume 2 in first, not on purpose but because of the luck of the draw in the darkness, and it starts with “You’re Only Human (Second Wind)”:
“You’re Only Human (Second Wind)” and “While The Night Is Still Young” (which appears on the other videocassette) are from the greatest hits albums. I also have the former on a single, which skipped (hence it took me a long time to sing it correctly).
Not much tugs at my cynical heartstrings, gentle reader, but hearing my youngest son sing along with Billy Joel songs my father–whom my children know only through stories–enjoyed, well, that’s one of them.
You know, I have not listened to much Billy Joel these days as the music in my library has been ripped from cassettes and is disordered by the songs on the greatest hits album not appearing as part of the original albums–but I’ll have to make a point of it. Billy Joel wrote music that speaks to young men and then grows along with them, so one–I mean I–can appreciate the perspectives in them and can remember appreciating them from a younger perspective as well.
When my boys were young, they delighted in new sheets or new pajamas (sometimes just long underwear that they wore for pajamas) with cartoon characters on them, and they liked new novelty shirts. So I would buy them on occasion to give them a little joy and me a little joy in their joy. Brian J., did you spoil your children? In some simple ways, perhaps, but one of my love languages is gift giving, so those around me must fight against being spoiled on their own.
One year, when they were, what, two and four? Three and five? I bought them a matching set of novelty Halloween shirts from Walmart. They loved having the same shirts and dressing themselves alike, and they loved their Halloween shirts. So it became an annual thing for a couple years (they’ll remember it as all the time). The youngest, who chooses his favorite shirts and wears them almost daily even into his high school years, would wear those Halloween shirts all year round and into the next school year.
When I saw the shirts displayed this year at Walmart, well, I:
I bought them in the men’s section now, two larges. One for my high school senior and one for my sophomore. It could be the last time the oldest spends Halloween at Nogglestead.
I have put them in their rooms amidst their laundry without fanfare. We will see if they find them and wear them or if they’re lost in the maelstrom of teen boys’ rooms forever.
I shall probably do something like this with grandchildren some day if the boys extend our line.
Or, you never can tell. I might do this again next year.
Yesterday, I mentioned the current mayor of Willard is in a bit of a kerfluffle as competing power blocs fight over the composition of unelected power blocs.
Definitely sounds like embezzlement embezzlement and not the worst reading of, erm, optimistic use of a corporate expense account, which is sometimes cast as shrieking EMBEZZLEMENT! THEFT! when the alleged thief is on the wrong side.
We’ve been seeing a lot of contention in southwest Missouri between elected officials and the permanently hired “city administrators” who actually run things. Two come to mind:
I’ve seen similar infighting in some of the smaller communities covered by my weekly arrival of my adopted hometown newspapers.
Why so much fighting over the city administrator?
Because people are starting to realize that these unelected officials can strongly influence policy and are only indirectly responsible to the citizens, and they will outlast changes in the electoral direction of the city/town/county or the will of the voters. And their career paths will take them to larger cities so their loyalty is to their betterment, their blending in with the wills of larger employers (larger cities) and not to the constituencies where they currently work.
Not all of them, but some of them.
Smarter men than we are set a framework for a system of government that limited this sort of thing, but cleverer men than we are have found ways around it.
The head of the General Services Administration, the government agency that helps to manage and support federal agencies, spent most of her time working remotely from Missouri during the year after she ordered employees back to their offices, according to a letter from the agency to Congress.
GSA Administrator Robin Carnahan, an appointee of President Joe Biden, spent 121 weekdays in Missouri and 64 weekdays in Washington from March 2022 through March 2023, GSA Associate Administrator Gianelle E. Rivera informed House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, R-Ky., in a letter on March 31, Axios reported after obtaining the letter Friday.
As you might recollect, gentle reader, I disagreed with Robin Carnahan when she was the Missouri Secretary of State about a decade ago, a little after her father was elected to the United States Senate after he died and her mother was appointed in his stead. Meanwhile, her brother was serving in the House of Representatives from my district.
It’s good to see she’s stayed in the family business. Although, to be honest, I should be a little pleased that she’s working from Missouri and not living the high life in D.C. Although with current crime levels, I’m avoiding cities larger than Springfield myself these days, and I’m a little cautious going to Springfield.
Although after seeing this headline yesterday, I had planned to buy some beef for dinner, but then I remembered that my beautiful wife had mentioned a hankering for pork chops earlier in the week. So I brought home pork chops to grill instead of steaks. But not because a headline steered me away. Because I love to please my wife. And we traditionally have steaks on Fridays.
My current employer has a forum for posting pictures of pets, and I frequently contribute as we have kittens who are still in the doing cute stuff phase.
I have to be very careful about posting photos of the cats on my bookshelves, though, since my library has some titles which are, erm, a little spicy.
For example, I have a photo of Nico looking at either the swords or the Summa Theologiae which I was going to post, but I did not as I looked closer and found The Clitoral Truth on the top shelf. I bought it from a book club probably twenty years ago and tried reading it; the number of paper markers in it indicates I disagreed with a lot of it. Although it bills itself thusly:
The clitoris has been dismissed, undervalued, unexplored, and misunderstood for hundreds of years, but the truth is out there, and internationally celebrated sex educator Rebecca Chalker has found it. In The Clitoral Truth, Chalker offers the only mainstream, in-depth exploration devoted solely to women’s genital anatomy and sexual response. Women readers everywhere–be they straight, gay, or bisexual–will learn about the countless sexual sensations and discover how to enhance their sexual responses in a more concrete way than ever before. Enhanced with personal accounts, comprehensive illustrations, and a thorough appendix of female sexuality resources, this book helps women and their partners understand and expand their sexual potential and work toward becoming independent sexual beings.
It read, from what I recall, more like a feminism or woman’s studies textbook. Given that it now has a marked 2nd Edition, it probably is a textbook at some universities.
So I took a picture yesterday of Nico looking at the games on the wall, cropped it, and posted it without looking too closely at it because The Clitoral Truth is on the end of the other bookshelves, and as we’re finishing up some work at Nogglestead, most of the To-Read shelves are in my office currently. Not only are the books double stacked on the bookshelves, but the bookshelves are currently double-stacked–I have the bookshelves from the hallway outside my office in my office, standing in front of the office bookshelves. So The Clitoral Truth is behind another bookshelf on the other end of the bookshelves.
But I should have looked closer.
If you click it to see it larger, which I hope nobody at the office does, you can see on the top shelf Sexual Revolution which looks to be another textbook from the Modern University which I bought in 2010 but has languished, probably in the back rank, on the bookshelves in the hall for that long.
It’s not that I’ve put the more spicy titles on the top shelves to keep them away from the children. When they first could read and started looking at my bookshelves, I took some of the more, erm, concrete titles off of the bookshelves entirely, but I left the textbookish titles, including Philosophy and Sex (mentioned by name in The Courtship of Barbara Holt) on the shelves.
When we moved the books and bookshelves into my office, the disorder of the books got rearranged, and Sexual Revolution apparently got put on the top shelf. And inadvertently into official corporate communications.
If anyone needs me, I’ll be explaining this to HR and using the words “Sociology textbook.” A lot.
Gentle reader, my journey with eyeglasses began early. When I was five years old, I had eye surgery to correct a lazy eye (my kindergarten teacher visited me in the hospital!). I was issued eyeglasses shortly thereafter, and my parents (I had two in those days, gentle reader, a halycon era I can scarcely recall except that my kindergarten teacher visited me in the hospital, and a boy in the next bed had action figures that you could take apart and reassemble differently, and he let me play with them a bit) had me wear an athletic strap to keep them on my head. And after a while, the strap was painfully tight, so I took off the glasses for good.
Well, not so good. When I got to sixth grade, my teacher, Mrs. Pickering (who had no cause to visit me in a hospital, but I remember her name just the same) brought up during parent-teacher conferences that I was a smart boy, but I was bombing all my vocabulary quizzes. Turns out that she wrote the vocabulary words on the board for us to fill in the blanks on the quizzes, and so I could not see them. So I got a pair of glasses again, big 80s glasses, and we soon moved to the trailer park where I would be a nerd at the bottom of the social ladder. I didn’t have a regular eye doctor, much like I didn’t have a regular any sort of doctor or dentist at the time. The young optometrist I saw my freshman year determined that I needed bifocals. As I started high school. Extra nerd on that scrawny little me of 1980-something. Thick, thick glasses to correct raging astigmatism.
My sainted mother sprung for gas permeable contact lenses for me sometime in my sophomore year, so I wore them through the rest of high school and through college and into the start of my working life and then into my career. But sometime around the turn of the century, I got tired of them and went back to glasses.
In 200…6? I got LASIK surgery because, if civilization collapsed (it’s been on my mind a while), I didn’t want to be one set of eyeglasses from crawling around like Velma or looking at the Nogglestead library like Burgess Meredith at the end of the Twilight Zone episode “Time Enough At Last”:
I was a bit disappointed with the result. LASIK only corrected my vision to where my glasses did. Which is normal vision. I had wanted to have eyes like a hawk, but I just had eyes like me without eight to ten ounces of plastic on my nose.
Fast forward a couple of decades years, and I started to wonder about my vision. In church, the face of the pastor is not quite clear to me, but I do sit in the back row, chief of sinners that I be. And I sometimes cannot pick out small text on signs as I’m driving by. So I went to the local LASIK outfit to see about a touch-up which I understand one needs after a couple of years.
The LASIK guy said that with a, erm, distinguished gentleman like me, the eyes are not as adaptable or good candidates for additional work, so he wrote me a prescription for eyeglasses to help with my distance vision. I took it to a shop across from the mall and paid too much to order a set of glasses that I thought looked good on me but are not the prevailing style. Only later did I realize that the eyeglass frames matched the style that my brother has worn for years–so when it came to picking something out, I picked out something that looked familiar.
I waited a couple of days for my sets of glasses to arrive–I got a pair of sunglasses, too. When they did, I popped them on, looked at the sign across the street, and….
That’s it?
The larger signs were just a touch sharper, but I couldn’t see anything with the glasses that I could without.
That was a year or so back, and every once and again, I think I should try them again. This weekend, we went to see Charlie Berens at a local theatre, and we sat in the back (cheapest of the sinners that I be). The comedian did not look as sharp as he does on YouTube, fourteen inches away. So I got them out again on Sunday and brought them to church. I did some A/B testing, or “1 or 2″ testing, by putting on the glasses and then taking them off to see how much earlier I could read street signs or to see how much clearer the pastor was when I had them on, and….
Not much. A little, but not worth the hassle of the logistics of putting the glasses on for driving or shows or church and making sure I have a glasses case (with glasses) and…. To be honest, not worth the hit to the vanity of going back from being a distinguished-looking fellow to the 5″ 6” eighty pound nerd. Which, of course, I am not, but I don’t wonder if I would not feel that way again. Also, I don’t want to become dependent on glasses. I don’t know if the science backs this up, but in my previous experience, one’s eyes behind glasses do not tend to hold steady. I always needed new, stronger glasses every eye appointment.
So I’ll put the glasses back in the drawer for another time.
You know, I’ve done something similar with my beautiful wife’s reading glasses. Sometimes, when I’m reading alone and nobody can see me, I will slip on a pair of her reading glasses to see what effect they have on my close vision and…. Not much.
Well, they do magnify the text, but if I hold my book at regular reading distance (regular because that’s where the focal point is the best–I do read best at a particular distance–is that normal?), the text is just slightly less sharp, maybe.
But a slight improvement, maybe, is not yet worth the cost.
One day, too soon, I will turn that corner. And I will suddenly need bifocals again. But it doesn’t seem to be today.
Old movies had Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn or Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr or Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman. The (early) 21st century had this film bring together two attractive and popular stars–Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie–for what they might have hoped would be similar chemistry. I guess it kind of worked–this film broke up Brad Pitt’s first marriage and led to his relationship and eventual marriage to Jolie (which also ended in ongoing acrimony).
Pitt plays John Smith, an assassin for a government agency of some sort, who has a cover of a construction engineer who has to travel to various projects. Jolie plays an assassin for a different agency whom he marries after meeting her in Bogotá after one of them–or both, or neither–has done a job (the flashback is ambiguous). Five or six years into their marriage, they’ve settled into a routine that has led them to counseling (the counseling bit is a frame story that begins and ends the movie). They’re both tasked by their agencies to take out a prisoner during some sort of exchange, and each approaches the job in their own way. Mrs. Smith has a tech trap set up, and Mr. Smith comes at it from a more hands-on approach. But they interfere with each other’s attempt and vow to eliminate their rival–only to eventually discover it’s the spouse. So they come together to grab the prisoner from a super-secure facility and discover that he’s bait in trying to get the Smiths to kill each other which leads to a shoot-em-up climax and finis!
I guess Pitt and Jolie might have some chemistry here, but it’s not developed as in an old movie. This is an actioner, so it’s a series of set pieces with practical effects and it looks to be some wire work. So it doesn’t look quite as video-gamey as today’s fare but is does employ on some video-gamey camera work. One wonders if what it would look like if made today–probably Mr. Smith would be a punchline and not an equal to his wife, although when they have a long hand-to-hand combat sequence that destroys their house, Mrs. Smith equals her husband already for drama’s sake which is, erm, stylized? Idealized? A physical confrontation like that would only take place in a movie. In real life, it would be a lot shorter and likely less favorably for Mrs. Smith.
At any rate, not a bad film. A product of its time. Which is a bit now, but mostly then.
This is the second volume of this collection that I’ve watched this month (the first was 
I picked this book up off of the free book cart at church. Although I check the cart every week, or at least when my beautiful wife needs to be at church early because she’s singing, playing trumpet, or ringing bells (which might only be five out of every six weeks), I do generally wait a week or two before grabbing a free book because I do have other things to read here.
This is a comedy special by Ron White. You know, that other guy from the Blue Collar Comedy Tours from the turn of the century. No, the “Here’s your sign” guy is Bill Engvall (whose book 
This book is a sequel to Hey, Cowboy, Want To Get Lucky?, and the joke’s on me. When I bought this book 
Old movies had