THE MOCK TURTLE'S SONG

                                      Will you, won't you, will you, won't you, will you join the dance?

This is the Mock Turtle as imagined by an artist called Snugglestab.  `

MOCK - Adjective

Not authentic or real, but without the intention to deceive.

"a mock-Georgian red brick house"

synonyms:

imitation, artificial, man-made, manufactured, simulated, synthetic, ersatz, plastic, so-called, fake, false, faux, reproduction, replica, facsimile, dummy, model, toy, make-believe, sham, spurious, bogus, counterfeit, fraudulent, forged, pseudo, pretended

Will you, won’t you – will he, nil he. Willy-nilly, our mock POTUS makes decrees and, soon after that, changes his (alleged) mind. He’s waffled on most of the issues that confront us today: Deportation raids, retaliation attacks on Iran, back and forth with threats of tariffs for Chines goods, staying in NATO, and add in topics like Russia, Syria, and Obama care.

It appears that as soon as he “runs his mouth” on an issue, saner advisers around him bring him back to reality. He called off retaliation against Iran’s downing of a drone, because he was told 150 people would die. Well, more than that would have died if the conflict had escalated.

I hate to say this, but I do agree with the Chinese Defense Ministry spokesman who said "No strategy should go against the times. The trend of the world is mighty and overwhelming. Those who follow it will prosper while those who resist will perish. Peace, development and win-win cooperation are the trends of our times. Any strategy that is closed and exclusive, which is against the general trends, is doomed to failure." He also argued that "no strategy should harm the well-being of people all over the world" or "underscore the confrontation side of relations," calling for greater international dialogue and less unilateral behavior.

I like that “any strategy… which is against the general trends.” Immediately, global warming comes to mind. He never waffles on his stance on that topic. Maybe he can’t – he’s got too many cronies in industries that contribute to the world pollution.

Well, enough about the POTUS. I do go on and on about him, but he just goes against my grain. I’d just like to shake him silly – willy-nilly.

           

The Curmudgeon has spoken.

EDUCATION IS THE KEY

There’s a reparations bill in the offing, but I read that even if it clears the House, it has little chance of passing in the Republican-controlled Senate. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said he did not favor reparations “for something that happened 150 years ago, for whom none of us currently living are responsible.”

The idea comes up every so often: we should make reparations to the descendants of slaves. The idea comes up because descendants of the whites of European lineage feel that something should be done to ease that little bit of residual humiliation and regret we might carry because of what our ancestors did.

Geeeeze Loueeeze, you don’t just pay people off and then say to yourself, as the silly phrase goes, “I seen my duty and I done it.”  What? And then we’ll all feel better?  And at what generation of those descendants should we stop the reparations?

What the politicos need to do is put the money where it will benefit everyone in the country: put it into education. We desperately need to raise the educational standards for everyone, because, as an often misattributed saying goes, “an educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.”  Most of all, we must enhance the educational opportunities for the black students who need assistance.

I don’t recommend giving a blank check to every black student. No, the student must truly need the assistance, and must qualify and be accepted for whatever type of higher education they want to pursue.  The nation will first loan them the funds for their schooling. Once they graduate and receive their qualification certificate, license, or degree, the loan will be written off.  That would be the basic premise of the law – the rest is in the details, and we all know the devil is in the detail.

We’ll see what happens.

A CHICKEN WITH ITS HEAD CUT OFF

If I have to have a picture of a chicken with its head cut off, I'll go for for this colorful one by Barbara Ann Gomez. I do wonder what the inspiration was for her to draw it.

September is a big month for foodie celebrations. There are more celebrations than there are days of the month From Pickles to Popsicles, from Guacamole to Linguini, September is a feast.

We’ve been planning ahead at the community magazine, and we’ll celebrate with several food-related articles, plus a compendium of food memories from some of our staff members.  One gal wrote about not wanting to eat chicken after she saw her grandmother cut the head off one, and saw what was to be her Sunday dinner running around. Another writer’s mother also killed chickens, but she hung them up by their legs on a line. Then she cut the head off. Easier to drain the blood, of course.

Getting a picture of those events in my mind’s eye, I remembered that I too know firsthand what it looks like to see a chicken running around with its head cut off.

When I was around 10, maybe younger, living in a development on suburban Long Island, one of our neighbors bought a mess of baby chicks. There must have been several dozen. They kept them up in their attic, and I remember going up there to see the cute, fuzzy things. This was, as I recall, a lovely but strange family. There were, I think, four or five kids. They really should have been living in a rural area, not in small house on a morsel of an acre, and I remember the house as, shall we say, not being as nice, neat, and clean as where I lived.

Well, the fuzzy chicks, grew. The dad built a coop out in the backyard. The neighbors on each side mustn't have been too happy about it, but...  I know there were complaints about the dirt and smells, but the adults had to deal with that. I thought the chickens were great. One time, it must have been time for a family meal, and I remember the dad killing a few by running their necks under the blades of an upturned reel lawn mower. And then chickens really did run around with their heads cut off. 

Of course, I must have told my mother. What she did about it, what the other mothers did about it, (there were several of us kids there) I don’t know. I know I never saw that again. But once was enough for me to remember. This New York City-born kid still thinks it was cool.

FRIDAY FLOP

Here it is Friday, at almost 8:00 p.m., and I absolutely forgot that it is a Friday, my usual posting day. I must a that nothing earth shattering has happened here this past week. I've just been busy, busy with articles coming in thick and fast for August and later issues of the community magazine. I've written several of my own in the last few days, and I'm really ready for a lazy, rainy weekend.

I just saw this  in the evening report from the Washington Post about a POTUS Tweet: “For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon — We did that 50 years ago,” Trump wrote. “They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!”  [Oh, really?]

And so, dear friends, good night. It's almost past my bedtime.