Blog #5

Wow!  Blog #5!  It’s really awe inspiring to have you as my loyal readers.  It’s like I am the Master and you are the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.  Wait, that’s immigrants.  Well, what difference does it make?  If you can understand English, read on.  I don’t believe all this immigrant nonsense anyway.  They say California is overrun with Hispanic immigrants.  I’m not buying it.  I think it’s the street signs that make everybody talk with an accent.  My middle daughter lives in the Berkeley area, and to get from her house to the nearest McDonald’s I had to drive down Cerrito to Solano to San Pablo.  By the time I got to McDonald’s I was talking like Speedy Gonzalez.  “Cerrito solano san pablo.  Àndale àndale epa epa!”  They gave me some very strange looks – and a Diet Coke, so I must have said it right.

I have two grandchildren in California, a boy and a girl, both adorable and both with flaming red hair.  I have three grandchildren in St. Louis, but I can’t always tell you what hair color they have.  Yesterday one boy had blue hair, another had green and the girl had purple.  It’s cute and I know it’s what all the kids are doing, but when they stand together they look like a box of Fruit Loops.

I have eight grandchildren in all, and they each seem to have their own special name for me.  They call me, Poppy, Pop, Pops, Popcorn, Popsadoodle, Papa and my youngest, when she sees me on Facetime, just says, “Turn him off!”  Well, they can call me anything they want; I love it.  But there is one thing I hate being called.  It was bad enough when I got to my 50s and 60s and the young men would hold the door for me and say, “After you, Sir.”  Sir!  But now it’s worse.  I now have men in their 50s and 60s holding that same door and saying, “After you, young man.”  They think I’m so old that it’s clever to call me “young man”.  It’s like calling a really tall person “Shorty” or a really fat man “Slim”.  I’d rather they called me Pops.

My crack technical staff (my daughter Abby) has arranged for you to receive the blog by email each Thursday morning if you have subscribed.  If you haven’t already, subscribe where it says “follow by email”.  Comments are a problem.  It’s easy to comment if you’re reading on a computer; not so easy if you’re on a smart phone.  Forget about it and comment to me directly.  If you have something nice to say, email me at: mfox1746@gmail.com

If it’s something unkind, send it to gosuckalemon.ouch.

But hey, if you do like these blogs, please forward them to your friends, neighbors, children, grandchildren, cousins, sisters-in-law, lawyers, accountants and dentists.  Well, maybe not the dentists.  If you liked it, maybe they would too.  Don’t be selfish.  Share.  I try to make you smile every week, so make me smile by sending it on.

I have medical issues, of course, and last week I had a CT scan.  They used to call it a CAT scan, but somewhere the “A” got lost or erased or sent to Siberia, and now it’s just CT.  Does that make sense?  CAT is one syllable.  CT is two.  We seemed to have lengthened the word by losing a letter.  In any case, my North Carolina son-in-law, David, is a fancy kind of radiologist and he wanted to see the CT films, so I went to the hospital to grab a copy.  I was directed to a door, above which was a sign that read “Film Library”.  The door was a half-door kind of thing with the top half open, and, upon seeing me, a kid in a white coat came up and said, “Yes, young man, can I help you?”  I hated him already, and I said, “Can I have a copy of Gone with the Wind?”  Well it said “Film Library”, and I thought that was kind of funny.  He did not smile, giggle or smirk.  Nothing!  You see, I made my mistake in thinking this teen-ager had ever heard of Gone with the Wind.  I should have said Power Rangers.

I have told you that I don’t watch TV, but at dinner the nightly news is on and that’s ok.  Did you ever notice that the commercials on the nightly news are all about drugs?  Here’s a typical one I heard last night:

Do you have a tingling sensation in your head?  Ask your doctor about Ding-Dong, a new anti-tingling formula that can reduce the tingling sensation and make your life wonderful again.  Do not take Ding-Dong if you are pregnant, over four-foot-nine or have ever seen a movie by Martin Scorsese.  Side effects of Ding-Dong include death, dismemberment, hemorrhoids, mumps, suicidal thoughts, swelling to the size of a Ritz Carlton, strange cravings for kale, iron deficiency anemia and, of course, constipation.

Let me translate all that for you:

Do you have a pain in your head?

Don’t suffer – take Ding-Dong instead

A few of our pills

Will cure all your ills

You won’t be in pain – you’ll be dead.

But who cares about the side effects? I think my head is tingling.  If everybody else has it, I probably do too.  I was all set to call my doctor until I turned on the radio the next morning and heard an ad by the law firm of Fritz and Fratz:

Have you or a loved one taken Ding-Dong and experienced bananas growing out of your ears?  You may be entitled to substantial compensation.  Call Fritz and Fratz right now.  We’ll sue the bastards and give you up to 5% of the total award.

Bananas?  They never told me about bananas.

We got a Kohl’s thing in the mail – 30% off plus a $10 off coupon on any purchase of $25 made today and another $5 off coupon just for coming in this week.  So we can go in today, buy a $65 item marked down to $36, take off the 30% and apply both coupons and get it all down to $10.  Is this a great country or what?  In my math class at the jail, I shouldn’t be teaching fractions; I should be teaching the inmates something really practical like “How to Shop at Kohl’s”.  Then when I’m done, they can teach me a class called (ok, boys and girls, let’s all say it together now) “How to Shoplift at Kohl’s”.  That was mean – I admit it.  I’m ashamed of myself and I’m sending myself to my room.  Don’t worry; I’ll be out in time for next week’s blog

Stay well.

See you next week.

Michael