Sing a Depression song

Potatoes are cheaper, tomatoes are cheaper, now’s the time to fall in love..
She can cook your eggs and bacon and live on what you’re makin’”
Unfortunately potatoes, and especially tomatoes, aren’t cheaper, they’re dear, Dear.
I suppose you can still find a million dollar baby in a 5 and 10cent store—if you can find a 5 and 10 cent store.
You can still whistle while you work if you can find any work.
Brother can you spare a dime…for Starbucks? Well, at least FDR is on the dime.
More likely you can sing: “No more money in the bank,..no more kids for us to spank..
What to do about it..let’s turn out the lights and go to sleep”.
Just be wide awake come Nov. 6 2012.

Red Wings and Giants forever

David Brooks writes about trying to become a Washington Nationals fan, but to no avail. He is permanently committed to the NY Mets even though he lives in DC. He says rightly that team loyalty begins with youthful enchantment. That explains how I became a Detroit Red Wings fan even when I lived in soggy Vancouver and didn’t know where Detroit was other than somewhere south of Saskatoon. It might have been the all red uniforms, the Stanley Cups, Lindsey, Abel and Howe or just the team photo on my barber’s wall. By the time I lived in Detroit 20 years later I was running though the snow with my wife Peggy to games at the old Olympia. And speaking of Dame Peggy she is a diehard NY/SF Giants fan probably inspired by one bright shining day in 1955 as she sat in the Polo Grounds and watched Willie Mays pull in fly balls in that massive outfield. She has been in every home park the Giants have played in including Seals Stadium (where she caught a foul ball hit by Hobie Landrith), windy Candlestick, and cozy AT&T park. Teams choose us through some mystical process of identification. Root for the Dodgers? Forget it. Cheer on the Canadiens? Jamais! Till death (or relocation) do us part.

Rush Limbaugh: A failure with a following

The man has 20 million listeners so his voice is heard far and wide. He is primarily a bombastic oaf but then, that might be the profile of his constituents. He went way over the line last week when he slandered a poised young lady who dared to testify before Congress on the Health Bill. He has since apologized (probably under sponsor pressure) in a trite, mealy-mouthed statement saying,, ‘My choice of words was not the best”.
Of course he can’t call back “slut” and “prostitute”. Well, let’s not mince words. Only a coward would hit a woman. That makes you a coward Rush. He has been divorced three times which tells me that, maybe the only thing well-endowed on him is his voice.. His rhetoric is so impoverished that no one can feel enlightened or motivated to do better or have any emotion other than smug bigotry. So he is just so much hot air over the airwaves. I’d like to get him in the locker room with my old hockey coach. He would get a drubbing from a guy who knew how to choose very choice words, finishing with his ultimate insult, “Rush, you’re a pig of a man!”

At last, a financially sound casino

Las Vegas has had its troubles since the Crash and that includes the casinos on the Strip. They’re carrying tons of debt and struggling to narrow their losses but things are about to change for the better. The first German-themed casino resort is in the works. It’s to be called Schloss Vegas and will be in the grand tradition of the City. It will have a sexy show: the Deutsche Doodle Dandy Revue. There will be a Non-comedy room where The Great Himmelfarb will do tricks with memory. The casino floor will have hundreds of slot machines including Wheel of Misfortune and U Bet Your U Boat. What can go wrong? The money’s there. The theme is new and inviting and the buffet features food you can feast on, Greeks, Italians, Spanish, French (I mean their food,) . The slogan says it all: Immer Essen! (Always eating). Today Vegas, Tomorrow the ..oops, Tomorrow The Opening.

Computers are making people easier to use.

The Internet is too much with us. It is crowding out the real world, It was bad enough when TV took all our spare time, now Facebook, Google, Twitter, Bing etc have captured what’s left of us. It started with cell phones years ago when I heard people talking to themselves in restaurants and city streets. Now it is a population with their heads lowered to the screens in their hands.
This is the updated social type first labeled in The Lonely Crowd by David Riesman in 1950 as the “other directed”. These were modern middle class people who abandoned traditional inner-directed motives to focus on how others were living, what they consumed, what they did with their time, what their views were, culminating in a personality that was willing to accommodate others to gain approval. So here we are, autonomy has been compromised. Privacy has vanished. Reality and nature have been digitalized.
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by a sight so touching in its majesty..Hey look, free WiFi!
She was a phantom of delight when first she gleamed up on my sight…Who? What? Where? Facebook?
My heart leaps when I behold a rainbow in the sky.. Look at this YouTube, a horse on roller skates!
What’s that water spout in Yellowstone called? How should I know, Google it. Under what name? Try Old Geezer.
(William Wordsworth contributed to this piece.)

Advertising brave enough to be great

The Super Bowl commercial for Chrysler called ‘Half-time in America’ starring Clint Eastwood, resurrects the art of copy and artful production into a historic message. I congratulate Wieden & Kennedy for avoiding the sophomoric, egotistical, pointless special effects that make up the incompetent nonsense called the Super Bowl commercial. This message continues in the tradition of a print ad of 100 years ago called “The Penalty of Leadership” for Cadillac, considered iconic by ad men who know their history. Actually I applaud all things Detroit since I worked there for over 4 years. I can’t claim to have ever done anything great but I always tried. GM wanted a hard hitting driver safety ad so I did one called ‘ Onward Christian Drivers’. After much review the finished ad said; ‘Drive safely” I’m proud of doing the first James Bond commercial and the best read ad by men in England. I never had $30 million plus to do “Half-time” but the money was well spent.

Meeeting Margaret Thatcher

I have a picture of Baroness Thatcher listening to me. We met at a small cocktail party at the RAF Club in Piccadilly about ten years ago. She was very cordial and, of course, quite intense. We didn’t talk politics, but rather about the Eagle Squadron, the Yanks who flew in the RAF during the Battle of Britain. I had a good friend who was one of the Eagles and was the only American at El Alamein, a decisive battle in the desert in August 1942, “the end of the beginning” in Churchill’s famous phrase. I told her that my daughter wrote for The Guardian (oops, a Lefty newspaper). She asked what her name was, and when I answered “Alison Powell”, she said approvingly, “a most English name”. She also spoke of Ronald Reagan, saying quite sadly, “the last time I saw Ronnie he didn’t recognize me”. And now we have Meryl Streep in “The Iron Lady” as the aging Thatcher in her twilight years also in late stage dementia. Of course, in flashbacks she is still vital, attractive, Britain’s first female Prime Minister, ten years in office and every inch the leader. I lived in London during the blackouts,, the garbage piled high on every street and it was chaos. She was the leader they needed. I found myself agreeing with everything she said in the film: Don’t let the mindless mob of miners destroy society, teach the tinpot Argentine fascists not to trifle with the English Lion, keep Britain out of the disastrous Euro zone. “Grocer’s daughter”, one of her “spineless pygmys” mumbles under his breath while orchestrating her ouster. Well, I was a grocer’s son myself, spending my earliest years behind my father’s grocery store. I found myself in agreement with her, which is saying a lot from a citizen of The People’s Republic of Berkeley. History has already placed her in the pantheon of great leaders. I do, too.