BRING BACK THAT MAGIC FINGER

I am reprising a post from January 2013. I’ve got someone special here with us this weekend, so I prepared this posting in advance.

I'm sometimes very glad that we’ve not got the power to read each other’s minds. Surely I wouldn’t be thinking this way if we did have the power, but there are so many times that I want to shout at people, tell them off, tell them what I think of their conduct or attitudes. Not nice, not nice, I know. 

I am invariably polite. You’ll rarely hear me say, for instance “I like that dress,” or “I like that haircut.” What I’ll say will be something like “What a dress!” or “That haircut is you!” There’s a subtle difference there, and there’s no point in antagonizing some poor being who’s probably trying her best. I do try my own best, and it may not suit everyone else.

There’s a lovely saying, attributed to Elsie de Wolfe: “Be pretty if you can, be witty if you must, but be gracious if it kills you.” Sometimes I’ve had to be gracious until my teeth hurt!

I knew a gal once, a friend of a friend, and she and I got talking about people we have no use for. She said she wished she had a magic finger that she could point, just like a kid uses his forefinger and points it like a gun, and just cock the thumb trigger, and ‘poof’, they’d be gone. I’ve been mulling over the idea ever since we had that conversation.*

I suppose it’s good we don’t have this ability. It’s a simplistic solution - and just think of the possible ramifications - but don’t you too sometimes wish you had a magic finger like that? (other than that finger?) 

But then, I wonder who might use that magic finger on me? I’d better watch my p’s and q’s.

*And in these years since the 2016 elections, I too often wish I had that magic finger for real.

THE ONCE AND FUTURE EDITOR

I had to go to my yearbook to pull out this bit of masthead from The Viking View

I’ve been the editor of our community magazine for several months now. (You can view the latest issues of the magazine here.) The other day it dawned on me that I’d been an editor once before in my life. What a hoot! I was sports editor of my high school newspaper, The Viking View. We could find no guy who wanted to do the job that year, so I volunteered. I did have to change the name of the editor’s column from “The Locker Room” to “Grandstand Seat.” I really enjoyed that year, especially because I was allowed to travel on the team bus for away games. I also remembered that I was a stringer for the New York Times, and I earned a mere pittance from calling in the results of the games.

Editing the copy is much the same job: correction grammar, usage, and punctuation. We must still check the content and rewrite for clarity and the overall feel of the article. And spelling too – Spellcheck doesn’t catch everything.

Putting together the final product is quite a bit different these days. Then it was rearranging the printed copy and pasting up dummy sheets. The Publications Room was usually a mess, as recall. Today it’s all done electronically. The final proof process is much the same though, corrections made right on the printout, and, frustrating as it may be to find errors that get through, I really enjoy the job.

While I was scanning things from the yearbook, I copied my senior picture.
That's me at age seventeen.
The blurb under the picture said my goal would be medical
research - that was then.
I finally went into banking and computers, a far stretch from the medical field.

STORM TRACKER

Here it is Friday again. And rain again. It is April, of course, so we should expect the showers to bring all those flowers. Rain is predicted for this afternoon and for another two days, into Monday morning. That's fine for me, because I've got the magazine's May issue in the proof process. It's definitely an indoor job. 

Seeing as how it's a weekday, and weekdays mean lots of almost useless new hours on the TV, there's sure to be a storm tracker out on the roads in and around Charlotte.

Would someone please explain to me the need for the local TV news programs to have a storm tracker when it rains? Or even during a major hurricane? It would seem to me that this would be as useful as using chopsticks to eat ice cream. Watching someone riding around in a van and reporting in on the rain, and often the lack thereof, is just plain useless.

Some TV stations go to great lengths to get out there in the storm.

If you are at home, you don’t usually need to know what’s happening on the main roads. If you’re on the road in your car, I hope you don’t have a TV. If you’ve got the TV station playing on your iPhone, you’re stupid. Turn it off and pay attention to the driving.

I do remember when you could depend on the weather report coming in at about twenty minutes past the hour. One report, nice and neat, and not too much time spent with forgettable information like degree days or moonrise and moonset. Today there are at least two weather reports on per half-hour segment.

I do realize that the local stations have to fill in with something. There isn’t all that much news out there, and what there is is usually a lot of criminal activity that we don’t need to know about. TMI. TMUI – Too Much Useless Information.

The curmudgeon has spoken.

PURPLE PIECE

This lovely purple piece by the American artist Jeff Koons popped up this week on one of the general interest websites I visit. Red is the favorite color of my adulthood, but, as a child, purple was always my favorite, and my eye is always drawn to that color.

The Koons piece is currently display at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford. I reminded me of the pictures I’ve seen of the Venus of Willendorf, and indeed, the author of the not very flattering article in The Guardian did mention that ancient statue.

The Venus of Willendorf

I’ve always smiled when I saw pictures of that Venus and others like her – they remind me of me. Though our proportions are bountifully bulbous, they can truthfully be called classical.

Though current standards would have us be sylphlike, and health-wise it would be wiser for us to be more slender, we women of substance can smile and accept ourselves. We can say “I’m all right.”

Women en large