This is the time of year when they start showing Christmas movies on TV. By the time Christmas gets here we’re all fizzled out. Our eyeballs start looking like test patterns, which by the way, you never see on TV anymore. I blame it on the Hallmark Channel; they keep bringing out new movies. We have to watch them to see if they’ve put a new twist to it. Of course they didn’t. It was the late 1960s when I first watched a movie called It’s a Wonderful Life on my little black and white TV at the apartment. It was an obscure film at that time. It was probably shown on just a few stations in the country. Over the years it’s become one of the most popular Christmas movies of all time. It became public domain and every TV station in the country was showing it several times during the holiday. Now I think they’re back to showing it just once. In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash — recognized the title of this book? It’s what the movie A Christmas Story was based on. They also call it, "The B-B gun story." They dated the movie as taking place in 1940 even though they used a 1946 fire truck in it. At least that’s what they tell me. There were a few other things that weren’t quite factual. The father, played by Darren McGavin, is my favorite character in the movie because he cussed out his Oldsmobile for freezing up. I’ve done that with a couple of Oldsmobiles we’ve had only for different reasons. The only Oldsmobile we bought brand new was a 1977 Delta 88, and it was a great car until the paint started flaking off. That’s when I started cussing. Olds did help pay for a new paint job. My grandfather was an Oldsmobile man, and ever since I’ve known him he bought Oldsmobiles. I never heard him cuss his cars out once. My father owned nothing but clunkers; and as far as I know, none of them were Oldsmobiles. Did he swear at his cars? I don’t know, but I must have got it somewhere. * * * We bought a new TV recently. It wasn’t our idea; we were satisfied with our old one (you get comfortable with things) but the trouble was it kept shutting off on us. Our new one is a long squatty thing with a LCD screen. No more picture tube. I thought our new one would be more in tune with today’s screen format. Wrong! We still get a letter box picture half the time. The other day the picture was the same proportion as our screen only smaller. We had a black border on all four sides. My question is, what the hell for? If I wanted a little picture, I would have bought a little TV! Fill the screen with a picture; that’s all I ask. * * * The Detroit Lions were blacked out again, so I went upstairs and brought my little TV down. I hooked it up to our non-directional antenna on the roof that looks like a flying saucer to those who made up a batch of eggnog earlier and added more than enough spirits to it. The reception reminded me of the old days, but the Lions didn’t. They (without fail) lost the game. I’m one step closer to being the new head coach. What have they got to lose? Remember, I’ll get one million dollars for every win and nothing for a loss. * * * If the economy keeps going to hell most of us will have two new words in our vocabulary. Bartering and trading. We’ll have to start raising chickens in a lean-to out behind the shed. We’ll feed them old stale peanuts or free range them. Maybe a little garbage once in a while if there is such a thing. The City doesn’t even have to know about it. The neighbors won’t turn us in because they’ll be doing the same thing. We can barter our labor, or we can trade our eggs downtown like they did in the old days. One thing about it, if we trade our eggs at the party store all anyone will get is high cholesterol; but the stuff they trade in return will knock you right on your butt. Happy Thanksgiving, folks. Until the next time . . .
I finally figured it out. Who does Vice President-elect Joe Biden remind me of? A dummy — of course. I don’t mean to say he’s a dummy because time will tell the story on him. I’m talking about Jeff Dunham’s ventriloquist dummy, Walter. If you look at Walter you’ll see the same face and the same mannerisms except Walter hasn’t had any hair plugs as yet. I’ll pass on the hair plugs. * * * I haven’t received a call yet from William Clay Ford, owner of the Detroit Lions. I’m expecting it any day now. In the meantime, while I’m waiting I’m doing two things. I’m rooting against the Dallas Cowboys because we have their number one draft pick. And I’m rooting against the Lions so that they will get the first pick in the draft. If we do end up with the first pick, the odds are we’ll get a very good football player. That will make my job as the new head coach a lot easier. 1-15 isn’t going to impress anybody anymore than 1-16. It’s a lost season and a very unimpressive season to be sure. We had the number three pick in 1989 and drafted Barry Sanders. We could have drafted Tony Mandrich out of Michigan State which would have been a huge mistake. We have the Green Bay Packers to thank for that. They took him with the second pick. * * * I think a lot of us thought the economy was bad, but all of a sudden it’s gotten a lot worse. Our financial institutions and auto companies are standing in line in Washington waiting for a handout. That is if they haven’t already gotten one. Otherwise they’re telling us the bogeyman is going to pay all of us a visit. They’ve got the employees and retirees of all the domestic auto parts suppliers and auto companies sweating it out. What is it we’re going to lose next? That’s what they’re asking themselves and rightfully so. Concessions haven’t been the answer because they can’t possibly cut deep enough. We’ve seen that with Federal-Mogul. If an employee cannot afford the products they produce, then all is lost anyway. What we didn’t learn from the 1967 and 1973 oil embargoes we’re learning now. Yes, there were two embargoes. There’s an old saying that goes, "Book smart and common sense stupid." I think that explains the problem. With the knowledge of the embargoes our auto companies still went ahead and built gas guzzlers, and we bought them. The pickup trucks of today are half-again the size of the pickups thirty years ago. It’s time for us to learn. There are pros and cons to bailing out the Big Three. Some people believe bankruptcy would force the auto industry into cutting back to a point where they’re stable again. Others fear that government money will only allow the Big Three to do business the same old way. I wouldn’t want to be the one who makes the wrong decision on the bailout, but I’ll venture a guess. My guess is the best thing we can do for auto companies and suppliers is find a way to reduce their health care costs. In other words stop talking about it, and do something. I would go in that direction first before I gave the auto companies a blank check. * * * The turkey hot-line is about to get busy. People will call in and ask what they should do to fix their Thanksgiving dinner. One question that’s always asked is how long should they thaw their frozen bird and what’s the safest way. We’ll be putting our frozen turkey in the refrigerator in the garage on Saturday which will give it five days to thaw. Any remaining ice in the turkey is then thawed by putting it into a pan of cold water and changing the water as often as needed. For those of you who call in on Thanksgiving about thawing your turkey, forget it and order out. I’ve had days when a burger or pizza sounded good. Until the next time . . .
An Apple tree has apples, a cherry tree has cherries, a Peach tree has peaches, and a Walnut tree has walnuts. So why does an Oak tree have acorns? Just wondering. * * * The deer hunting gun season starts this weekend. It brings back memories of many of my less than successful hunts. One of the hunting stories I heard that made me feel better about myself as a deer hunter involved a co-worker who was deer hunting one day, and the barrel fell off his shotgun. I never had that happen to me; but it seems like the rest of the things that could possibly go wrong, did go wrong. I had the biggest deer I ever saw come out right where I was sitting a minute before at the Motz’s woods. The only trouble was I was down at the corner of the woods walking back when I saw it. Nobody ever accused me of being a Private York with a shotgun, but I did empty the gun in the deer’s direction. The big buck ran across the road, stopped and looked back as if to say, "What the hell was that all about?" He had just met ol’ bauer — the hunter. * * * I liken our current economic situation to a mother who worries so much about her children’s health that she doesn’t take care herself. We as a country are stretched so thin all over the world doing who knows what, and we have to change that. So what should we do? We need to pull back to our shores and right the ship before venturing out again on one of those costly crusades. I don’t think we’ve even paid for the Vietnam War yet, and we’ve had two more Wars in Iraq since then -- not to mention the skirmishes we’ve gotten into. I think we ought to have at least a fifty-year moratorium on wars. Especially those that aren’t that necessary. It’s time. No more following the Japanese into Korea. No more following the French into Vietnam (French Indochina.) No more following the British, Russians, and the French into the Middle East (Ottoman Empire.) And no more following the Russians into Afghanistan. * * * Isn’t it amazing how many prescription pills we take as we get older? I recently acquired a few more of them; but because one was pulled off the market, I got to reading those pamphlets the pharmacy sends home that tells a person what it is they’re taking and what it might do to them. Dry cough, liver damage, bleeding, and a bunch of other unwanted things. All of a sudden I think I’d feel better without these pills. Then I got to wondering why these pills are so expensive, other than the fact that the drug companies are trying to keep up with the oil companies and make unimaginable profits. One of my pills contains corn starch, lactose, magnesium stearate, pregelatinized starch, sodium bicarbonate powder, and red ferric oxide. I call all of this filler. Sounds like Strawberry Jell-O, doesn’t it? * * * As we get closer to Christmas (yes, I’m aware it’s really a long ways off) we get more and more ads in our newspaper. Now it seems like the paper contains 2/3 ads and 1/3 news. I think all this stuff is neat, but it’s not from my generation. Just get me a Lionel train. I can’t figure those video games out anyway. * * * I come from a place called Geezerville, but I’m not so old that I don’t enjoy what I call good pop music. The latest song that caught my ear is Human. It’s by a group called The Killers. They appeared on Saturday Night Live not too long ago. They’ve been catching flak about a particular word in the song. The lyrics go: Are we human? Or are we dancer? I guess they have a problem with the words we and dancer. One’s plural and one’s singular. The critics wanted dancers. Me, I have Jean to try and make my writings look like proper English; and for that I’m lucky. Meanwhile I’ll keep on enjoying the song. Are we human? Or are we dancer? Until the next time . . .
To quote President Gerald R. Ford in 1974, "Our long national nightmare is over." It has nothing to do with Richard M. Nixon this time around; it’s the presidential election…it’s finally over! Just think about it. No more phone calls (at least not from Mike Rodgers), no more junk mail, no more cluttering our TVs and radios with political ads. At least not for a while. Congratulations to President-elect Barack Obama although the election isn’t official until the Electoral College votes. Why do they call it a college anyway? People have already been talking about moving to Canada if he gets elected. They’re not going to physically move there. It’s just a place in their minds they escape to when things get the best of them. I don’t think they’re going to have to close the Canadian border. It’s a lot like that episode of Twilight Zone where life was getting James Daley’s character down and he sought escape in a 1880s town called Willoughby. It was a very peaceful place. For me it’s a place called Northern Canada. * * * Halloween has changed in our neighborhood over the years. Years ago the neighborhood was filled with young kids, including ours; and we knew most, if not all of them. As they grew up and moved out, there was a long period of time when we had very few trick or treaters. As the other neighbors move out, their houses were purchased by a younger crowd with plenty of kids at that trick or treating age. Now we have to learn new names and faces all over again. I’ve put on makeup like this in the past, but nowadays it doesn’t seem to bother the kids that much. I guess they’ve been over-exposed to Freddy Kruger. Had I done it again this year some kid would be sure to say, "Hey look, Mr. Bauer had a face lift!" * * * The rallying cry coming out of the Detroit Lions is, "Believe in Now!" I think I’d rather hear, "Another one Bites the Dust!" That’s the one they used when they were actually beating somebody. Maybe they could use that, "Win one for the Gipper," idea too; but quite honestly, I don’t think we have a George Gipp on the team. I am both entertained and confused by the Lions. They are the only winless team left in the NFL. There’s no other team quite as bad. So where do we go from here? Let’s look into scouting a bit. The last I knew the Lions belong to the same scouting combine (Blesto) as teams who win. The breakdown happens somewhere between getting the information from Blesto and the guys working for the Lions who decide whom to draft. We’ve got to change some personnel there. If you guessed I’m talking about firing somebody, you’re right! The Lions have a long history of drafting flunkies. Years ago a glaring example of that was Chuck Long. He’s that blond-haired quarterback out of Iowa that was going to lead the team to the promised land. After they drafted him they decided he didn’t have any arm strength. Shouldn’t they have known that before they drafted him? Contrary to what his last name suggests, Chuck couldn’t throw long nor did he last long. A few years later they drafted Andre Ware, and he couldn’t complete a pass in his own living room. He’s now working at his true calling…he’s a TV broadcast announcer. There have been a ton of them through the years. We drafted Drew Stanton out of Michigan State with our number two pick, and what has he done? They’re saying that Mike Martz screwed with his passing mechanics so much that Drew can’t throw a spiral anymore. Hell, I can throw a spiral. They won’t play him for fear he’ll embarrass himself and the team. Oh brother. And this year they drafted Gosder Cherilus to play left tackle. Apparently he doesn’t know what he’s doing either because they keep benching him. As for Charles Rodgers…I don’t even want to talk about him. Until the next time . . .
