A Site for Shore Eyes

Let’s forget the Grinch and talk about times before Christmas started offending certain twits.

Okay, maybe it was the wrong reason for liking Christmas, but it was the longest school holiday, and, if we counted weekends, we usually were off for about three weeks, until just after New Year’s.

Three weeks seemed like forever, at least on the first day, but then the time started dwindling. My older brother, Larry, and I lived in a unique environment where relatives were in the house most of the time, and I think we looked forward to becoming adults so we could fool around at home whenever we wanted. Little did we (or maybe I should say “I”) acknowledge that we would undoubtedly have to go to work every day, and we wouldn’t get those long vacations for Christmas unless we became teachers, I suppose.

Anyway, our mother was a stay-at-home mom, which was pretty normal during those days. Our paternal grandmother ran a rooming house (our house) during the summer, and spent most of her time in the kitchen during the winter. When she wasn’t sewing something or baking cookies, pies, or cakes, or making supper, she was canning vegetables for “the hard times during the winter,” as she always said. One of the things she canned was watermelon rinds, and it seemed pretty normal to not throw the rinds in the trash, because she wanted to can them. I never tried them, but I think they were probably pickled, or something.

Our Aunt Minnie also hung around the house and I don’t remember her ever having a real job, although she was pretty much the chambermaid and laundress for the rooming house during the summer. She also did much of the grocery shopping, although our grandmother sometimes walked to Taylor’s Market, pulling her two-wheeled shopping cart behind her.

Our Uncle Charles featured himself as a writer, and he was, but he quit a couple of real jobs to pursue freelance writing. He lived on a pittance, largely supported by others in the house, but that’s another story not worth telling.

Uncle Jack, Minnie’s husband, usually had a job, either bar tending or, in later years, as a general worker and painter on Fun Pier.

After our grandmother died, Wally, a handyman, moved in, and he did some remodeling of the interior, not all of which I liked.

So it’s easy to see why it seemed to me that if I were in school I was probably missing out on whatever happened to be going on at home. Christmas vacation gave us time to live that experience, and, while many other kids had mothers at home I doubt that many had a small mob milling about constantly.

Our Aunt Minnie took us each year on the train to Philadelphia to do Christmas shopping, and we got to watch the window displays and the model train layouts. Wanamaker’s had a monorail, called the “Glitter Bug,” that ran around the perimeter of the toy department. Those days are gone. Strangely enough, though, our trip to Philly usually involved skipping school. I guess Christmas vacation was too late to be ordering things back then. We’d also get to see Santa and tell him what we wanted, but it was hard to understand how every department store could feature Santa at the same time.

Near City Hall, at Broad and Market Streets, shoppers bustled here and there, and street vendors sold everything from hot dogs to roasted chestnuts. Don’t ask me why, but I remember buying not only chestnuts to roast at home, but tangerines. Back then we always visited Wanamaker’s, Gimbels, Strawbridge and Clothier, and Lit Brothers. These are now giants of the past, and most have been bought out by other chains, and renamed. Macy’s seems to be a popular name now. Remember, Gimbels started the Gimbel’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in Philadelphia, and it was four years later that Macy’s started their own parade in New York City.

Larry and I got involved in putting up our train set, something I mentioned before, and it never seemed to be quite finished. We helped trim the tree – or trees, because each side of the house had its own, and I remember a few occasions when we went on excursions in the woods to find a suitable tree. The only times we had a spruce tree were when we bought the tree from someplace that was selling them. A tree taken from the wild was usually a cedar tree, I believe, although some of our other relatives sought out pine trees, but I think the branches are too sparse to make them worthy of consideration.

Our Christmas holidays were great, and we had some good times with our friends in the neighborhood, although we only had the last week of vacation to play with whatever we found under the tree. At some point we’d go to a party to see Santa and would be given a mesh stocking with various nuts, candy canes, hard candy, and an orange, for some reason.

I don’t know when Larry stopped believing in Santa, but then again, I don’t know when I stopped believing. One year, however, rather early in the night, we looked out our front window and saw Santa Claus climbing the steps of Ricky Svard’s house across the street, a sack slung over his shoulder. That removed all doubt, and we decided it was a good time to head for bed, and that’s probably the earliest we ever turned in on Christmas Eve!

Neither of us ever got a stocking full of coal, although we were threatened with that possible fate more than once. Actually, our Christmases were all great back then, but that was before the time of the Grinch and the ACLU.

A man goes to the counter in city hall and asks to see the mayor.

The clerk tells him, “The mayor is a part-timer. I’m the municipal clerk, so perhaps I can help you.”

“Yes,” he says, “well, I’d like to file a complaint to have the Christmas display removed from in front of the building.”

“Well, that would be impossible, because Christmas is on December 25th, so you’ll have to wait until then. We can’t very well have a Christmas display until Christmas, can we?”

“But you do!” he shouts, banging his fist on the counter. “There’s a little stable-like thing with wise men and the baby Jesus. On the other side of the building you have Santa and his reindeer. Both of those look like Christmas displays to me!”

“So what if they do? Why would that bother you? Why would you lose any sleep over such a trivial thing?”

“It’s not a trivial thing!” he shouts again. “It violates the separation of church and state! And I’m not losing any sleep over it, but I can’t permit something to go on that’s unconstitutional!”

“Okay, let me write a few things down,” she says, getting a legal pad and pen. “Now, what church is involved in this that I don’t know about?”

“Uh. . . it’s not a specific church, that I know of. It’s just a general thing.”

“Well, you’ll have to provide me with the name of a church,” she explains, “otherwise you have no grounds for complaining. You said it violates the separation of church and state, yet there is no church, and this is not a state office. I fail to see how either could be violated.”

“Well, it says right there in the Constitution of the United States that there has to be a separation between church and state! I think church means any church and state means any government office!”

“And where does it say that?” she asks, going to a file cabinet and pulling out a copy of the United States Constitution. She comes back to the counter and lays the document out. “Okay, let’s see – here’s the First Amendment. It says, ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free practice thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people to peaceably assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.’ Well, I don’t see anything about separation of church and state, do you?”

He raises his voice again. “You just read it to me! Are you a moron, or what?”

“I don’t like being insulted,” she replies calmly, “but I read it word-for-word, and you heard me. You’re welcome to read it yourself. Now, has Congress made a law respecting an establishment of religion that I haven’t yet heard about? They usually pass these things on to us, even at the municipal level, mainly so we don’t violate any terms of federal law. It does seem to me, however, that you’re interested in prohibiting the free practice of religion, but that’s something even Congress is not permitted to do. I’m not sure what you don’t understand about the First Amendment, which gives us freedom of religion, rather than freedom from religion. And you still haven’t told me what church is secretly involved in this.”

“You just don’t know how to interpret what’s written!” he says. “I think it’s spelled out very clearly!”

“It is spelled out very clearly,” she says. “Now, are you from the ACLU? They’re in the business of attempting to secularize this country to make it more fit for communism, which the organization has supported since its inception. Are you a communist? Are you an atheist? Did you even believe in Santa Claus when you were a kid?”

“Well, of course I believed in Santa Claus when I was a kid, but I don’t now. And I don’t believe in that silly birth story and the star that brought the wise men to the manger. Dr. Seuss could have told a better one than that!”

“No one says you have to believe anything, but that story has been repeated and carried on for over 2,000 years. I doubt that anything by Dr. Seuss will last that long! Anyway, what you do is your business, and what we do should be our business. We get positive responses from the citizens of this community. I don’t know what your problem is. None of us seeks out your house and tries to decorate it against your will. If you want to live a joyless life, that’s your prerogative.”

“I see I’m not going to get anywhere with you,” he says, sounding disgusted. “I’ll just have to pursue legal options.”

“Yes, do that, Mr. Grinch. Have you ever watched the Grinch who stole Christmas? I think that’s where some of you people first got your maligned ideas. Christmas used to be a time of good tidings and joy, but people of your ilk have tried to ruin it for everyone. Nobody likes a sourpuss!”

He turned and headed for the door, and the clerk shouted, “Merry Christmas!”

They just don’t get it in Washington. Now the House, led by Republicans, wants to extend the payroll tax cut and extend unemployment benefits in return for approval of constructing the pipeline from Alaska.

So, what’s wrong with this? For starters, it’s not really a tax cut – it’s a cut in the FICA withholding tax, which will result in underfunding Social Security, which is already underfunded. Another problem is that, as the government hands out more and more unemployment benefits, it discourages people from looking for jobs.

Anyone who has ever collected unemployment benefits knows how it works. First you have to go down to the unemployment office and apply for benefits, and then there’s a waiting period before you get your first check. If you go to work, you must report it, and the benefits will probably stop. This discourages people who are out of a job from taking a temporary job, because they would have to go through the process again if the job ended. Also, why would someone work a temporary job for a pittance when the unemployment benefits pay more without having to work?

In theory, the unemployed individual is required to seek employment and provide proof to the unemployment office. What this really means is finding job openings and emailing a resume for each job. It’s not necessary to actually go on any interviews. If a job is not within the scope of your stated experience, you are not required to take it, anyway. For example, if you’re a heavy equipment operator and the local supermarket has an opening for a checker, you’re not obligated to even apply for the job.

The feds are leading us down a never-ending path toward socialism, and probably communism. About 48% of the population is now on the public dole, so why would these people want anything different? They’ll just keep voting in the same old tired politicians who are in it for themselves.

Congress keeps talking about budget cuts. What they mean is budget increases, because their definition of a cut is that they increase an item in the budget by less than what they had originally proposed. Thus, if a certain department was slated for a 12% increase but was only given an 8% increase, these elected people in Congress think they have “cut” spending. It’s impossible to cut spending by providing an increase of any amount. If they allot the same amount as last year for a department, that’s neither an increase nor a cut, but if they allocate less than the amount a department was given the year before, that’s a budget cut. Until they stop attempting to pull the wool over our eyes by calling increases “cuts,” the country will never do a thing about reducing its debt or deficit.

We have a president, boys and girls, who is an avowed Marxist and has been since his formative years. He believes in nothing else, and employs tactics taken from the late Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals,” which Alinsky devoted to Lucifer. His goal is to transform this country into a communist state, the type of government which has failed every place it has been tried, but that doesn’t stop this head strong moron. He has stated that he will “go around Congress” to get his agenda in place, and he has teams on his staff who do nothing but write new executive orders.

This guy still blames Bush for creating the mess we’re in, ignoring actual history that shows that the Democrats were largely responsible for everything bad. He says he’s spent three years “cleaning up the mess,” something only a dedicated narcissist could lay claim to. Every step of the way he has made the economic outlook worse, by infusing more and more money into failed stimulus programs, increasing the debt by trillions already.

This administration is setting records for issuing job-killing regulations, and major companies say they’re not going to do any major hiring until this guy is out of office. By then it may be too late. Obamacare, much touted by the Dems, has already started driving up health insurance costs, which came as no surprise to most thinking individuals. It would be impossible to lower costs by forcing insurance companies to cover preexisting conditions with no waiting period and by forcing them to keep a “child” on its parents insurance until the age of 26.

But this bill wasn’t really about health care, and anyone who bothers to read the more than 2,000 pages would understand that. It’s all about putting into place the framework for a socialist-style government, where the government takes from the producers and distributes to the non-producers. There’s a reason this has never worked anywhere in the world. People have no drive or initiative to work hard when the government takes what you’ve earned and gives it away to those who earned nothing.

This never sinks in on this guy, because he was brought up to believe socialism and communism were more fair than capitalism. Both of his parents, as well as his mentor during his adolescence, subscribed to the communist theory. He sat in church for 20 years and listened to a pastor who hated America, white people, and Jews. He said he never heard those sermons. He teamed up with Bill Ayers, a radical who bombed government buildings back in the 60s, but the MSM never blinked an eye.

Just the other day, in one of his many, many, tiresome speeches read from a teleprompter, he said that American capitalism has never worked. Actually, there’s much proof that it not only worked, but made the U.S. the greatest country on Earth, and now we have a president who’s attempting to destroy the freedoms we’ve enjoyed for so long.

Will the Congress ever bother to get off its rear and attempt to remove this clown from office? If not, we’re in for a very, very, bleak future. Ask any Russian who fled to this country.

I don’t consider myself a religious fanatic, but I’m getting just a little tired of these atheists complaining about Nativity displays. Why do these displays bother them so much? Of course, I was raised in a time quite different from that of today.

One big difference is that most people loved our country, and loved our traditions, including Christmas and Easter. Kwanzaa hadn’t been invented (1966) and Muslims pretty much stayed in the Middle
East, where they belonged. Hey, that’s where their culture exists.

I’m tired of every sniveling idiot who finds something to be offended by, and I’m tired of renaming Christian holidays and adding Muslim holidays at schools. Everyone screams about the non-existent separation of church and state except when it comes to Islam or atheism, and yes, atheism is a religion, although it’s a religion without God.

Christmas was always a time to look forward to, both for children and adults, and the Christmas spirit generally resulted in good tidings among friends, family, and co-workers. Now we have atheists, the ACLU, and other fringe groups griping about the 90% of the population who want to celebrate Christmas. If they’re not griping about that, they’ll find something else, such as, the Pledge of Allegiance. If they don’t want to recite the Pledge, then they should be deported for not owing allegiance to the country. The sooner they get out, the better!

I can find a lot of things that don’t sit well with me, and we can start with all the smut that’s on TV. Not only that, but every TV show tends to promote homosexuality as if it’s something wholesome and good, and anyone who disagrees with that lifestyle is labeled a homophobe. Well, guess what? I don’t like Brussels sprouts, either, but that doesn’t mean I have a phobia about them. The show, “Modern Family,” promotes homosexuality, so I guess I just prefer an old-fashioned heterosexual family – you know, the type that can actually produce children and benefit society.

I’m tired of the constant attacks on Christianity, with the ACLU trying to remove the Ten Commandments from every courthouse in the country and with people breaking into a sweat every time they see a cross somewhere. We eliminated Bible reading in school because some now dead sniveling kid and his loopy mother felt offended, and look where it’s gotten us!

Imagine if Catholics had demanded that airports provide holy water founts throughout, so they would be able to properly bless themselves. That will never happen, but they added foot baths for Muslims, who make up a fairly small percentage of the American population.

Kids spend every day in day care without upbringing by a real parent, and no one seems to respect authority anymore. Parents aren’t allowed to discipline their children, lest Social Services come in and whisk them away because a kid got a spanking.

I also get tired of, and am offended by, the many liberal/progressive mantras they shove down our throats, from the global warming hoax to the rich people need to pay their fair share. They spew this drivel constantly, and when confronted with facts, they kill the messenger, insisting that conservatives ignore science and that the middle class is being unfairly taxed, even though 48% of the population pays no income taxes at all. The top 1% pay about 38% of all income taxes, and our communist-in-chief thinks that isn’t enough. In my mind, a “fair share” means everyone pays the exact same percentage of income. A progressive tax, which punishes success and rewards failure, just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

It’s unfortunate that many schools, especially colleges, teach global warming/climate change as fact, rather than the flawed theory that it is. Most documentaries about geography mention global warming or climate change as if it were a settled fact. It matters little that the data has been manipulated to attempt to make a case for warming.

They also teach evolution as fact, when the real fact is that it’s just a theory and the so-called missing link hasn’t been found due to the simple reason that it doesn’t exist. No monkey ever turned into a human being, and no grasshopper ever became a bird. All species have evolved within the species to adapt to the environment, otherwise we’d still look like cavemen. By teaching evolution as fact, many professors have turned many of their students away from the teachings of their various religions. I attempted to explain this to two of my nieces who were in college, but I’m not a professor, so apparently I don’t know enough to speak intelligently about the subject.

Elephants have shown a very rare rapid form of evolution, due to so many of them being killed by poachers for their tusks. Did they turn into lions, so they could more easily kill the poachers? No, but now a certain percentage of elephants don’t grow tusks. They accomplished in about 50 years or so what would normally take thousands of years, but I suppose they sensed a need for urgency.

While I’m complaining, I need to mention those pop-up ads, which are becoming ever more annoying and invasive. Some of them pop up and cover the entire screen while I’m attempting to read something. What moron would ever think that I would order ANYTHING from a company that forced its ad on me? Well, Obama comes to mind, because he’s the main person I think of when I think of a moron.

My site uses no pop-up ads, which sounds good, but nobody ever orders anything, so maybe it’s not so good. Still, I see no reason to annoy people more than I do with my blog posts.

Back when we were kids in the 1950s we wondered if we would ever see the day when people actually had two-way wrist radios, like the one Dick Tracy used for calling back to police headquarters. We never envisioned anything as remotely farfetched as cell phones. Even after cell phones started becoming commonplace among the common folk we never figured we’d be able to connect to the internet with those phones. Actually, most of us then, during the late 80s and early 90s, had never even been on the internet.

We led simpler lives while growing up during the 50s and 60s, and most of us wondered what Disney’s Wonderful World of Color would look like if we actually had color TVs.

The first time I watched something on color television was when a friend of our father’s asked us over to watch a rerun of the Eagles – Packers championship game, and we thought it interesting that the Eagles were wearing Green. I think we thought the Green Bay Packers should be the greenies.

Around 1965 or so, our grandfather splurged and bought a color TV. They showed only a few shows in color back then, and Hazel happened to be one of them, so family members watched it just because it was in color. Depending on the scene, most of the characters looked either like green martians, or tourists who had spent too much time on the beach. Attempts by one of us to adjust the colors would cause our grandfather to turn as red as the characters on the screen, while shouting to leave it alone.

I don’t know what it was with adults back then, but I got a similar reaction from our uncle whenever I attempted to level the pool table in the basement. It just bothered me that after a break, half of the balls would migrate toward the northwest corner pocket.

But getting back to cell phones and 2-way wrist radios, I can say that it would have been hard to imagine actually having either back then. We used to go skating at the Rec Center on Fridays and usually, someone’s parent was supposed to pick us up but would be a bit late for one reason or another. That left us standing out front, and if ten minutes or so passed, the Recreation Director would turn out the lights when he left. We felt very lonely then and would have given anything to have a cell phone. Of course, there were a lot more pay phone then, but they weren’t everywhere, and dimes were hard to come by.

Like many teenagers of the day, after I got my driver’s license I made a habit of buying “a dollar’s worth of regular,” being that gas cost between 21 and 29 cents in those days. So I ran out of gas on more than one occasion, and it would have been nice if I could have just called one of my parents and had them bring me some gas. I even ran out of gas in a VW Beetle that was averaging about 32 mpg!

Now we think nothing of having a cell phone. Even driving to the store without a phone brings terror to the imagination. What if the car breaks down? How would I call for roadside assistance?

I like when people say that back then we made do with what we had. Duh! What else could we do? Isn’t that what every generation does? But now we have a lot more, and much of it is for the better, but not all of it. Almost everything is much more convenient these days, but that’s not always good.

For example, it’s getting increasingly harder to hide. The old excuse that you weren’t at home to answer the phone doesn’t fly anymore. On the other hand, you can always say you forgot to take your phone with you, but cell phones tell you who and when someone called, so it’s a bit hard to ignore the call forever.

A number of young people, as well as some old codgers, seem to now hone in on what they call “upscale” restaurants, with upscale meaning pricey. These establishments specialize in serving small portions of fancy food, usually decorated with strange-looking items that may or may not be edible. Of course, edible is in the eye of the beholder, and what’s edible in one locale may not be so much in other areas.

My cousin, who just became my age after more than a month of waiting to catch up, is one of those who seems to be enamored by the concept of upscale joints. Her daughter used to work for a restaurant chain, so my cousin now knows that a number of restaurants are owned by a company named Darden, and some of those restaurants can be classified as upscale. You would also know this if anyone had ever given you a gift card for one of their establishments, because it tells you that the card is good at any and all of them.

The last time I went to one of these so-called upscale places was when my niece gave us a gift certificate for one of them, so we met her there. I ordered a twelve-dollar hamburger made with Kobe steak, and, along with the incredibly tasty bun, was one of the best burgers I’ve ever sampled! Ha ha! Only kidding. It was just a hamburger, although it was somewhat larger than the ones served by the fast food chains.

Back to the cousin, though. We took her with us to the Olive Garden, being that she had caught up with me in age, and she engaged in conversation with the waiter about the Darden chain and which of their restaurants were considered upscale. The final analysis established that The Capital Grille, Bahama Breeze, and Seasons 52 were indeed, upscale, but that the Olive Garden, Red Lobster, and Longhorn Steakhouse were established for the peasantry of the world, of which I am part.

Her daughter now works for The Cheesecake Factory, and her son is with a place called Bin 100, both of which can be classified as upscale, I suppose. Yes, it’s possible to buy a fifty-dollar cheesecake to go with your twelve-dollar hamburger.

Now I’m not totally inexperienced when it comes to fine cuisine. I’ve eaten Alaskan king crab wrapped in bacon and lettuce at the Hong Kong Hilton, as well as some skewered stuff they called monkey meat, cooked over hibachis on the sidewalks in Olongapo City in the Philippines. I’m not sure if it was actually monkey meat – it could have been something farm-raised, such as dog or cat, but the skewered meat tasted really good after a few San Miguels. I also had a rather tasty dish of meat with some type of greens in Taiwan, which they jokingly (maybe) told me was water buffalo. Like, who cares? I just know I’ve tried to find it here, but the closest I’ve come were either steak kew or char chow ding, neither of which were as good.

Recently I’ve had a craving for Vietnamese food, much of which is served with nuoc mam, or a fish sauce, which is made by fermenting fish and draining off the oil, then adding a few things to make it less offensive. We found a very authentic Vietnamese restaurant, as well as an authentic Chinese restaurant, where the fish is very fresh, meaning they keep them swimming around in some aquariums. Yes, you can order jellyfish or snails! It’s usually rather simple to figure out how authentic a Chinese restaurant is by perusing its menu. If it includes dishes made with animal body parts and organs you would never consider eating, rest assured it’s the real deal!

I also watch some cooking shows, mainly Diners, Drive-ins and Dives, AKA Triple D, for some epicurean inspiration. These are the types of places closest to my heart, where they serve real food at reasonable prices. How much more upscale can you get than pulled pork lathered in barbecue sauce? If it’s cooked over wood or charcoal it has to be good!

I do peritoneal dialysis at home, and one of the goals is to take off most of the fluids I accumulate during the day, so I have to weigh myself every morning, to monitor any weight gain. I guess that makes me more of a “downscale” person, but that’s who I am, I suppose.

The Wildwood High School football team won a grand total of one game this year, quite an improvement over last year. No, I haven’t attended any games, but I think it’s obvious that most of the fault lies with the coaching, or lack thereof. The only thing that impresses me is that the school has actually fielded a team for a number of years now, after chickening out completely for awhile. No, the student players didn’t chicken out – it was the former coach, who thought the players might get hurt. Somebody should have reminded him that this is football, not a tiddly winks team.

I was sort of on the football team way back when. I say sort of, because I never played in a varsity game, not because I didn’t want to, though. A good many of my problems were caused by a former gym teacher and assistant coach, Mr. Marshall. I’m not sure why he had it in for me, but suffice it to say that I liked him probably less than he hated me.

He hardly limited his evil ways to me, but I seemed to be a pet project, at least as long as I was a member of the football team.

His primary means of teaching gym was to supply us with six balls comprised of volley balls and soccer balls, and to tell us to play “Bombardment.” This relieved him of having to actually do anything.

Half the class took up residence on one half of the gym and the other half opposed them. The game was essentially dodge ball, using six balls. If you were hit by a ball you were out, but if you caught the ball the thrower was out. When every player was eliminated from one side, the players on the other side were the winners. At this point, Marshall took extreme pleasure in having the winners throw the balls at the losers. Sometimes he had them run around the perimeter of the court, with the winners standing inside and throwing the balls at them. He always said to not hit anyone in the head, but when someone got beaned, he always laughed about it, which encouraged more bean balls.

On some days he had the losers get down on their hands and knees, against the wall, while the winners threw the balls at their rears. He always thought this was a riot, especially if someone ignored the established line and got up very close before letting fly.

Mr. Marshall was a rather shallow individual, and, during football practice, he pitted me, a 140-pound halfback, against the number one fullback in South Jersey. It was a tackling drill, and I really nailed the other guy. The thanks I got was for Marshall to shout to the other guy, “Do you see who’s tackling you?” He never minded humiliating me in front of the team.

On another occasion we performed a drill where two guys opposed each other while straddling a bleacher plank placed on the ground. This wasn’t a contest, but a drill meant to improve skills, primarily those of the linemen, of which I wasn’t one. I came up against a much bigger guy who was a lineman and he proceeded to push me off the board, as expected. Marshall made me run a lap, a full half-mile, because I lost. He didn’t do that for anyone else. When I came in winded, he put me at the front of the line and put me up against the same lineman. I suppose he thought it was funny.

None of this was as sadistic as the day I hurt my thigh near the end of practice. I couldn’t stand up, and nobody offered to help me. Practice ended and the team headed back to the school, a few blocks away. I couldn’t keep up, because I could hardly walk, and it took me some time to hobble back to the school. When I finally reached the school, Marshall opened the door, looked out and saw me and pulled the door shut, locking it. I had to go around to the other side and wait for the first team member to come out so I could get in. Of course, some of the other members thought it was hilarious that I was just getting back from practice.

I missed a couple of weeks of practice while undergoing treatment at the doctor’s office. Finally, the doctor told me I could return to practice. Apparently nobody really missed me, and I’m not sure they even knew I was gone, so a week or two later I quit the team. I used the entire episode to justify hopping the fence rather than paying to get into the remaining games.

Unfortunately, back then I was a rather meek individual, so I kept quiet about the whole thing. Now that I’m more worldly, I know that if the same thing had happened now, this idiot would have lost his job.

During my senior year we had a new gym teacher who actually taught phys ed. No one ever told us what became of Marshall back then, but if he was fired for harassing someone else I’m sure it was well deserved.

I became fascinated with monarch butterflies back in the early 90′s, while working in Arkansas. Many of them flew right through the back yard of the office where I worked. I decided to at least learn a little bit more about them, and I did. A couple of things I noticed about them were that sometimes they would extend their wings and let a thermal take them spirally upward before starting a straight glide path, and that sometimes they would divert their flight path to come over and hover in front of me for a few seconds. This latter action was probably inquisitive, but I like to think they just like people.

I read an article in the regional paper about monarchs and their migration stops in Cape May Point. They weight just half a gram, yet “scientists” are busy attaching tags to the wings of those they capture. A half a gram, by the way, is about 0.0176 ounces, or less than two-hundredths of an ounce. Okay, these tags are small stickers with insignificant weight to humans, but here’s a half-gram creature flying over 2,000 miles to a valley in the Andes, and some of them have to contend with a tag on their wings? These scientists are attempting to figure out their routes, even though their routes have been figured out already. I always wondered how some people can manage to find jobs where they don’t actually have to do anything of real value, and survive on grant money. “Hey, I know what I’ll do for a living! I’ll call myself a scientist and go catch and tag butterflies.” I suppose these are the same individuals who make a living part of the year by counting the number of horseshoe crabs that crawl up on the beach.

Another group busies itself (or maybe it’s the same group) with putting up new stands for ospreys and tagging the young ones in the nest. Does an osprey, or any other bird for that matter, really need an irritating band around its leg for life? Why are people still studying things we already know pretty much everything about?

The article in the paper states the butterflies on the move may be five generations removed from the ones that left Mexico earlier in the year. It further states that their parents, grandparents, and great grandparents didn’t migrate.

Being that I learned about monarchs, let’s examine those two statements. The ones that left Mexico (the same ones that migrated from the north) stop along the way, lay eggs, and die. The new ones (the first generation) continue the journey, and arriving at the locations of their ancestors, lay eggs and die. The next (second) generation, also lays eggs. They, as the others, die after two to eight weeks. The next group (the third generation), produces the eggs that become the fourth generation. The fourth generation migrates to Mexico and lives for six to eight months before starting another journey toward the north, and the cycle starts over. It seems to me that, because there are a total of four generations, they are only four generations removed from the ones that left Mexico. While it’s true that their parents and grandparents didn’t migrate, their great grandparents did, although it was northward, and for only part of the journey.

When I refer to Mexico, it’s because that’s the migration point of those east of the Rocky Mountains. Monarchs west of the Rockies migrate to areas around Pacific Grove, and Santa Cruz, California. The ones in Mexico hibernate in oyamel fir trees, whereas the California monarchs hibernate in eucalyptus trees.

The article further states that the long-distance migration may be due to habitat loss, pesticides, agricultural practices, and other changes brought on by humans. Balderdash! They migrate to get out of the cold weather and to hibernate during the winter. They come back north because the larval food plants do not grow in their wintering sites. While some of those other factors may have detrimental effects on the butterflies, they have nothing to do with why they migrate.

One of these monarch specialists the reporter interviewed says she does a 5-mile loop on the shoreline several times a day, clicking a clicker for each monarch she sees and writing down conditions such as time temperature, wind direction, sunlight, and wind speed. Perhaps she wears a beanie with a propellor on top to measure wind speed. She probably employs the wet finger approach to wind direction, but I’m just guessing. The shoreline runs more than five miles, so why pick a 5-mile loop, rather than a longer one? A better question would be, why doesn’t this lady get a real job? Probably because not many places would pay her to count butterflies.

She (or they) say the biggest flight was in 1999, when they counted 328.56 monarchs per hour. This poses the question: What does 0.56 of a butterfly look like, and how do you measure it? If you’re using a clicker, how do you do a 0.56 click? Also, who is doing the counting? Do they pool their resources, and if so, how does someone determine that a monarch hasn’t been counted twice, or even a dozen times? I mean, once you’ve seen one, you’ve pretty much seen them all.

These people put about 5,000 tags on the wings of these creatures each year, but only 97 have been recovered. Well. . . I guess that’s another little cottage industry – searching for tagged butterflies. Sign me up if the pay is good. Will I get free transportation to wherever it is they look for dead monarchs? Even if I find one, what will it tell anyone that isn’t already known? Maybe that it fed on lactose-free milkweed?

I guess one place you could look for tagged monarchs is at truck stops, because it’s sometimes difficult for a small flying insect to successfully play Frogger. Maybe they could figure out how many don’t make it across I-40, I-20, and I-10. It’s interesting that they somehow know the route from anyplace in the north to a mountain valley in Mexico, even though they’ve never been there, yet they don’t seem to have anything programmed within to alert them about vehicles. The monarch is poisonous if ingested by birds or other critters, and its bright colors serve as a warning. That works for living things, but the semi-rigs really don’t care.

So maybe I’m a bit cynical when I read about individuals who watch and catch butterflies and somehow manage to get paid for doing so, but exactly whom are they helping? The butterflies? You? Me? Society? The environment? How about none of the above.

I have to run because I’m working on an important project. I’m applying for some grant money to study the flora and fauna on various golf courses.

A couple of grammar gems I recently saw were, “You’re parking in the wrong tree,” and, “They should find a soot able oak tree to hang him from.”

Perhaps they took their cues from a guy I once worked with, who, incidentally, wasn’t Yogi Berra. He came out with, “We are beating a dead wall,” and, “You are narrow-headed, as well as immature.”

An Atlantic County jeweler advertises on TV and he wants you to sell him your “scrap gold,” whatever that is. He suggests you might need money and the ad flashes two signs on the screen. One reads, “Your hired,” and the other reads, “Your fired.”

It seems that many people still have trouble figuring out when to use its and when to use it’s. Contrary to popular belief, just because it’s has an apostrophe does not make it possessive. It’s a contraction for it is. Its shows possession.

Others still appear confused about there, their, and they’re. Again, an apostrophe doesn’t make they’re possessive. It means they are. Their is possessive and there is just there. Where? There.

The local paper reprinted a post-game interview with Michael Vick. The paper says he said, “I don’t get the 15-yard flags like everybody else does and I don’t know why.” I watched the interview on the news and he actually said, “I don’t get the 15-yard flags like everybody else do and I don’t know why.” It’s not up to journalists to correct improper grammar, and this should have been done in one of several ways. The first would be, “I don’t get the 15-yard flags like everybody else do [sic] and I don’t know why.” Another would be to paraphrase the person’s quote by saying something such as, “Vick said he didn’t know why others get 15-yard flags and he doesn’t.” Anyway. . .

“Dolphin Tale” got fairly good reviews, and I thought about seeing it, although I rarely go to movies these days. Miss Daisy’s chauffeur dashed any plans I may have had by saying that Tea Party people just want to get that black man out of the White House. What a laugh! Oh yeah, we can’t wait for this guy to vacate the premises, but not because he’s partly black, but because he has spent almost three years with economic policies too bizarre for most sane people to imagine. These same people strongly back Herman Cain, who is considerably more black and considerably more intelligent than Obama. No, Cain didn’t go to Yale or Harvard, where they push people through, but he got a master’s degree in computer sciences from Purdue. I’ll take that any day over a Yale or Harvard grad.

Switching subjects, it’s nice to see that Homeland Security is doing its job. Chain-link fences are being erected along the marshes on the north side of the Beesley’s Point Bridge on the Garden State Parkway. Okay, so my first question is who would want to take out that bridge? The only group of terrorists I can think of who would want to do that would be the Delaware River & Bay Authority (DRBA). Taking out the bridge would increase ridership on the Cape May to Lewes Ferry, which has never made money since its inception.

Of course, instead of taking the ferry, one could detour down the causeway to Ocean City and come back out on 34th street.

On the other hand, if terrorists blew up the Route 9 bridge first they would save the taxpayers a lot of money.

But here’s the thing about this, or perhaps I should say things. Number one is that it’s quite simple to cut through a chain-link fence, no matter how high it is, or how much concertina wire is atop the structure. Number two is that, if I’m going to blow up a bridge, why would I take a boat, beach it in the marshes, then slog across the marsh to the road and walk up the bridge, hoping that no one in the hundreds of cars going by would pay notice? Nope. I would just take the boat over to the bridge columns, which is the best way to take out a bridge anyway. Do they plan on putting chain-link fences around the bridge columns, too?

Yes, I suppose terrorists want to take us all out, eventually, if they have their way, but I don’t think the Beesley’s Point bridge ranks high on their list. I mean, do they really care all that much about stopping the flow of beachgoers to the shore? Wouldn’t they have bigger fish to fry, such as the bridges into Philadelphia or to Delaware? And why take out any bridges? It’s not like the bridge over the River Kwai, where the idea was to stop the flow of troops and ammunition, or something like that. Take out the Philly bridges if they want, but we have cheesesteaks in South Jersey, so it’s not that big a deal. And we’ll still have the duck boats.

What’s scary is that someone in government, someone who is being paid with your tax dollars, and possibly a whole group of these geniuses, would sit around and come up with such a ridiculous plan. Hello! Did someone need a fencing contract, sort of like the deal with stripping a bunch of trees from part of the Parkway, making it unsightly?

The premise for taking down the trees was that they could fall on the road. Okay. Trees sometimes do fall on roads. Sometimes airplanes fall out of the sky, too, and sometimes deer run across the road, although I’ll never figure out why they do it where the signs are. Since the time they took down the trees, I’ve observed the trees along the Parkway south of where they were taken down. Hundreds, if not thousands, could conceivably fall on the road.

In all my years of driving, I only saw it happen once, while driving home down in Georgia. I was doing about 55, on a windy day, and a rotten pine tree fell across the road right in front of me. Without enough time to hit the brakes, I was fortunate that the tree was nice enough to break into a number of pieces, and I maneuvered safely through them.

Meantime, I feel much better knowing that I don’t have to worry about muskrat trappers blowing up an insignificant bridge.

We experienced our first chilly weekend of the post-summer season here, with temperatures in the 60s, with the air quite dank. Idaho faced record low temperatures, another thing that won’t get much mainstream press. Remember, because of climate change, we only have record warm temperatures, unless the GLOWARMS decide that cooler temperatures are a result of global warming, which they have already said. I think they got it from the song, “Oh, Susannah!”

The global warming alarmists took another hit when Dr. Ivar Giaever, a 1973 winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, resigned from the American Physical Society (APS), because of their stance that global warming is occurring. He said that in about 150 years, the global temperature has only increased about 0.8 degrees Kelvin, which means that the temperature has been amazingly stable and that the both human health and happiness have increased over this “warming” period. Don’t expect to see this anywhere in the mainstream media.

In the meantime, scientists say that The Times Atlas of the World, published by HarperCollins, exaggerated Greenland’s ice loss. The Atlas suggested that the Greenland ice sheet has lost 300,000 square kilometers in the past 12 years, at a rate of about 1.5 percent per year. Scientists say the maps are ridiculously off base relative to the reality. They say it is at least ten times as fast as reality and could be as much as twenty, or even fifty, times as fast.

Autumn officially starts on September 23, but the weather doesn’t seem to care.

The Wildwood football team won its first game in three years, a 22-game stretch, as reported in the paper. They beat Clayton, the same team they beat three years ago. I suppose both Wildwood and Clayton look forward to playing each other every year now. It’s unfortunate that a once-proud football program has degraded to a level that a team had to withdraw from its conference because it was no longer capable of playing most of its old rivals.

During my high school days the team only won all of its games one year, and I had nothing to do with that. I also had nothing to do with later teams losing some games. All I ever got out of being on the team was a lot of hard work at practice and getting to watch the games for free from the sidelines. All of my great touchdown runs existed only in my mind. If only the coach had given me a chance, you know. . .

It’s interesting that so many things have changed during the past 40 or 50 years. In modern sports and modern medicine, they urge athletes to stay well hydrated, meaning drink a lot of fluids. We weren’t allowed any water during practice, and during games they wanted players to bite on a sponge and spit out the water. It’s a wonder that no one died from dehydration. I can’t remember any other time when I was as thirsty as after practice. One team member who came from a more well-to-do family would buy a quart of some type of drink and gulp it down while walking home. He never offered me any.

In this day and age I sometimes wonder what modern adults are thinking. We now have the so-called LGBT “community,” meaning, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender, formerly transsexual. I’m not sure why they separate women and call them lesbians, but for what it’s worth, these people aren’t gay by any stretch of the imagination; they’re simply perverts. Of course, calling them that means that I’m a homophobe, in their minds, but I simply find their lifestyles an abomination. It seems to matter little that they have died off in astounding numbers due to AIDS, which doesn’t seem to slow them down one bit. They figure someone will come up with a cure, I suppose, and that’s probable, based on the amount of money taxpayers are forced to pay for research. The 1.7% of the population who make up this part of society are relentless in attempting to impose their agenda on everyone. That’s obvious simply by watching the average TV show, especially sitcoms. “Modern Family,” I see, won a bunch of Emmy Awards; no surprise there.

I long for the old-fashioned family, not the modern family as the Hollywood elites like to define it. Modern music offends me, as it should many other sane people. Eminem and Lady Gaga (her name should be Lady Gag) vomit their always filthy lyrics, and rappers attack whites and police in their so-called excuses for music.

Back in the 50s, Bill Haley’s “Rock around the Clock” unofficially set off the rock and roll explosion, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing at the time. Other popular music still abounded and pleasant songs by Patti Page, Doris Day, Perry Como, Pat Boone, and many others filled a nice easy-listening gap. Even most rock and roll songs of the era weren’t considered offensive by most people, although my father never let me hear the end of my stupidity in buying “Get a Job,” by the Silhouettes.

Now we have a president who wants to make the “rich” pay their fair share. I’m not sure what he thinks their fair share should be, but it’s really not up to him anyway. Let’s start with millionaires. Those making more than one million already pay taxes at a rate of about 29 percent, whereas those earning between $50,000 and $75,000 pay at a rate of about 15 percent. The millionaires pay about 20% of all income taxes. The top 1% of wage earners, those above roughly $300,000 in income, pay 38% of the total income taxes, however, they represent only 20% of all income.

As I’ve said before, this guy in the White House either doesn’t understand a lick about economics, or he is intent on destroying the country. I’ll take either answer, but one thing is certain; he’s intent on demonizing Republicans and conservatives, and to a degree, it’s working. I read letters to the editor every day about the nasty Republicans and how they are trying to ruin the president’s agenda, and that it’s all Bush’s fault. Those lines get old.

Then they clamor for higher taxes on the oil companies. What are these geniuses thinking? If I’m an oil company and I have to pay more in taxes, or if tax breaks are taken away, what happens to the price of gasoline? Do these people even have the capacity to reason?

Oh, and Government Motors is giving its employees $5,000 bonuses, as well as about $4,000 in profit sharing. All of this while they owe billions, which no one will ever see, to the taxpayers. Obama, in his infinite wisdom, pushed the company’s bond holders aside and gave preference to the unions.

Nixon maybe wasn’t great, but he wasn’t a crook, as he said. This empty suit with his radical, anti-American, communist friends, and Alinsky-like Chicago politics, truly is.