My Daily Dose

I remember, not that long ago, when I visited my family doctor I was only taking one baby aspirin a day. Now, I take a shot glass full in the morning and several at Noon and another mouthful at bedtime. It remains a mystery how each pill I swallow knows where to go and what to do when it gets there but so far the batch hasn't killed me.

Remembering Marilyn Monroe — Whoopie!

You gotta love those whose skirts are longer than their capes. Just remembering Marilyn Monroe and her famous, "Whoops!" photo.

A Pretty House in Brookville, Ohio

The house that we live in was in style when we purchased it brand new back in 1962. The more modern styles are located in another subdivision. The way it was can be seen in this post. Here

Peony

Peony in white with hints of yellow. This is, to me, a lovely flower. I bought a pink one at the same time and planted it but there is no comparison between the two of them. I like this one the best.

Apple Blossom Time

Apple Blossom Time here in my spot in Ohio. I have a two dwarf apple trees and should be able to eat both Hulu and Gala apples when the fruit gets ripe. I also have a sour cherry tree that has blossomed and should be more than enough to make a cherry pie.

Flower Seeds

Flowers
©By Abraham Lincoln

My mother planted the idea of putting seeds in the ground for a bountiful harvest in the fall. I could always think of dozens of other things I would rather do than plant seeds. Sometimes she started seeds in cups or trays in the house and then we planted the small growing plants in the garden when temperatures had warmed the ground. I didn't mind it as much as I disliked harvesting these peas or green beans.

I loved to eat green peas right out of the pod while we picked them growing in our garden. Mom scolded me for eating them but they are delicious. I cannot think of anything that tastes worse than peas in a can picked off the store shelf or canned peas stored under the bed, wrapped in old newspapers for insulation. A pea just doesn't taste good when it is canned but frozen peas taste like they were just picked this morning. I even like frozen sweet corn much better than sweet corn in a tin can.

Canning does something to the taste of vegetables but things like peaches and pears seem to taste even better out of the can. Except I have to confess that I love to pick up dropped pears so ripe that the honeybees are sipping the juices. To me they are just flat-out delicious and I can understand why the bees go after them — I do too.

This all brings up flowers. Mother planted more vegetable seed than flower seeds. We had a few flowers that always came up on their own and that is about the only flowers we ever had. Mother would not tolerate a rose bush because she didn't like getting her dress, hose or apron snagged on them.

We all loved rhubarb and ate it one stalk after another in spite of earnest warnings from mom that we would get the "runs" if we ate too much of it. I liked rhubarb pie a lot and with a piece of rhubarb pie in a cereal bowl and some fresh milk poured on it — that is about the best food you ever tasted. It is right up there next to strawberry shortcake. And I am not talking about those pitiful, round, cakes made especially for strawberries that are sold in grocery stores.

You need a crisp, rich, crumbly type of bread or cookie about the size of a dinner plate that is made with butter, flour, and sugar. Pull off a chunk of that and douse it with a spoonful of strawberries and add milk or cream. That beats rhubarb pie and then some.

I look for “Flower Seeds” when I go to stores and have usually found assorted vegetable seed packs mixed up with the flower seeds. I have slapped my hand if it reaches for vegetable seeds because I don’t really want to deal with planting vegetables and then having to take care of them all summer.

I do like ripe tomatoes picked off the vine and would eat them all if I could but I don’t want to make a pig of myself.

About my Corvair

Corvair
I remember being in the teacher’s lounge over in Greene County at their vocational school (This was about fifty years ago). Three or four people were there and we had been talking about the weather outside.

Two of the people were academics and the others were vocational teachers. I was describing to them how bad the roads were, and some of my driving experiences. I had driven to the school that morning from Brookville on I-70 and SR-235. Cars and trucks were on and off the roads but more were off than on because “ice” covered the roads. I brought up how, when I was working at NCR, I had noticed the patches of ice on the sidewalks and in the parking lot simply had disappeared during the day while I was inside building Thirty — Research and Development.

More than once, we drove to and from Dayton on roads that were solid sheets of ice. I told them about buying one of the first Corvairs sold in Darke County and how I loved that car. I could walk out of our tiny house in Gordon and find my Corvair covered with a foot of snow, and ice on the windshield was under that. All I had to do was get in the car and turn on that wonderful, gasoline-fired, heater and watch the snow and ice vanish. That heater roared like a jet engine and the snow would begin to melt and slide off the windows within seconds. That heater was a blessing for me and made that car very special.

My Corvair, said to be unsafe at any speed by Ralph Nader, had an engine in the rear and that was fine for plowing through snow as it put the engine weight over the rear drive wheels. When I got to I-70, however,  and had to go over I-70 on one of the bridges leading to it, as on SR 49, the rear end of my Corvair would break loose on the ice and slide towards the inside guard rail. That made some of my passengers scream. To go over I-70, with the car’s rear end bumping along the curb, on the inside of the road, and the front end pointing up the incline toward heaven, was more than one middle-aged bladder could tolerate.

She would never ride in the front seat again. I don’t know if it was her accident or if she didn’t want to be there and face those crazy curves again. The lounge residents had listened and then each had said a few words and went on to some other subject of more interest. One word that they said was one I had never heard before and I asked what it meant. I was told it meant how ice evaporates or disappears. It was a very descriptive word and one I had never heard.

Over the years since then I have tried to remember what that word is. I have not remembered it and still don’t know what it was. When I asked them if they recalled what word they had used to describe ice disappearing on sidewalks, parking lots or the sides of buildings, they all offered words that I know about and am familiar with but “that one word” had vanished like the ice it was used to describe. This, then, is a search among the readers of this column to find that missing word. Words like evaporate, vaporize, disappear, gasify, aerify, vanish and atomize are not it.

If you think you know what the word is, please make note of it in your comment.

© Abraham Lincoln

Pat's Walking Stick

We went walking and Patty looked for a stick to use as a kind of cane. Also, she thought she could use it to defend herself if she was attacked by wild creatures. As it turned out there were no really wild animals where we went so she was able to sit down, smile and relax.

This walking stick is just the right length

My walking stick helps me when I get up

Gordon Country School

The front row shows four boys. On the left is my lifetime best friend, Dwight Ressler, then me, Abe Lincoln, and next is George Mowry and the kid with hands on both legs in Gene Ary. I believe this photograph was taken by Janice Sensenbaugh who walked home at Noon that day and picked up her camera and took this picture—that's the only reason she is not shown in the picture. There are 22 kids in this picture and my 1944 school picture only shows 23 but Janice had already moved on to high school at Arcanum and in the back row, second from the right end is Delores Flory who had gone on to high school in Verona.

This was a photograph taken by a traveling photographer who took the picture and then brought back prints to give students who had paid to get a copy. I think the cost was around $2.00 but in those days, my mother had to scrimp and save to come up with an extra couple of dollars for the picture.

Most kids have photographs taken of themselves at school. Back in the day, before traveling photographers visited schools for the purpose of taking student pictures, for yearbooks and nice 8x10s to hang on the walls at home, a rich kid would come to school armed with a Hawkeye Brownie or some such marvel and snap pictures. This is one of the latter and it shows a casual side of picture taking seldom seen in 8x10s hanging on walls. An "official" school photo is shown below.

Bath Times

We washed off using a basin, called a “wash pan,” that was filled with water from the teakettle on the stove. The wash pan was set in the kitchen sink and we used a wash cloth (everyone used the same one) and lye soap to wash our face, hands, under arms and our private parts.

When we took a bath we used a round galvanized bath tub placed in the center of the kitchen floor for our bath. Water was taken out of the water tank on the kitchen stove and that was mixed with cold water for our bath.

Kids went first and moms washed their hair before they were allowed to get out of the tub. We didn’t get to play around in the bath water. It was much too crowded and it was setting in the middle of the kitchen floor and nobody wanted to splash water on the floor.

Dads got in the tub and took their bath and used the same water the kids just got out of. If the water had cooled off mom would add more hot water from the tea kettle. My mother would wash my father’s hair when he was finished bathing.

Moms were always last to use the bath tub and water. By the time she got it the water had turned a dirty gray color with lots of soap scum on top. Mom would scoop the scum off before she got in and took her bath. She always ended her bath by washing her hair.

When we were all finished mom and dad took the bath tub outside and dumped the contents on the ground. Then the tub was rinsed out and hung back on the nail in the kitchen. It would be used soon enough for the next wash day.

Grigori Efimovich Rasputin and Pheromones

Pheromones
© By Abraham Lincoln

As we all knew, our nasal cavities or used for a lot of things but smelling trace amounts of pheromones that females emit when looking for a male, might be something you missed in third grade. If you are a girl you have the same Vemeronasal Organ in your nose and its function is to stimulate the Limbic Region of the brain—the emotion seat that is responsible for our ordinary emotions as well as sexual attractions. If you take a bath or shower every day, or, if you douse yourself with perfumes, your emission rates will be somewhere between sewage gas and the perfume counter at Macys.

Remember Grigori Efimovich Rasputin—the Siberian monk who was constantly fielding fair ladies and some gentlemen of the court?  His debauchery gave rise to a new castle wing filled with royal bastards. He smelled so bad that ordinary people turned and walked the other way when he was seen on the streets. Yet, his pheromones were stout and promised the ladies and a gentleman or two, a treat they seldom passed up.

You can skip bathing like your forefathers who notched a stick each time they fell in the creek. Getting wet in the rain was tolerable but taking a bath in a tub made people sick. The pope, decreed that since too many nuns were getting pregnant bathing in the bath water the priests just left, that bathing was banned for life.

After you reach age 75 or thereabouts, your smeller is turned off and for good reason. Old people, like us, look around and raise their noses and smell, repeatedly, but the pheromone odors are gone. Old folks do not get excited when old people limp by or shuffle past in house slippers—their pheromones no longer work. But when a young lady in a bikini walks past an old man, he gets a twinkle in his eye – unless he has Alzheimers.

Writing and Drawing

I love to draw and I love to write. I got into writing so deep that I came out on the Front Page of the Wall Street Journal, back in 1978, as the only scribe still practicing his ABC's with a turkey quill. Jerry Leiber, who was our postmaster then, bragged about me and my accomplishments to the point that I tried to sneak in and out of the post office to avoid having to tell my story for the upteenth time.

I had to invent things just to write about something that made sense to me. I went through the ecology thing and that was about as fruitful as a gnat intimidating an elephant, so I began to go after the greed that made America what it is today. That greed was endorsed and managed by the US Government and the hired generals who had subdued the South. Phil Sheridan was given orders to exterminate every Indian alive and he nearly succeeded because he went after the Indian Walmart — the American Bison, or buffalo. From a horizon to horizon covered with buffalo to the last 500 or so that avoided slaughter sheltered in Canada—the way of life as it was and still is existing on a plot of land called a Reservation.  I don't want to get started on this but this started me to put drawing and writing together.

Drinking the Bathwater

I like these pictures. Young starlings learning about baths and drinking water. They come here and gets used to meeting distant cousins and foreigners and some this like better than others. They are, like young people, indifferent to differences, tolerant of others and on the lookout for a wandering honeybee stopping to sip some water from the edge—that is like finding the nut in an Almond Joy candy bar.

There is photography and there is taking pictures with a camera. I think we tend to forget what the camera is for and just point and shoot—some of our modern cameras are even called Point and Shoot cameras. The camera is a tool to be used to freeze an instant of our history. What Junior looked like a second ago or what the fledgling starlings looked like back in 2008 when I snapped this picture.

Our First Apple Computer

I paid a lot of money for this, our first computer, and thought I had made a mistake. There were few programs and we ended up using it to print out our product catalog (no pictures, just words) that we mailed to customers from around the world. The big floppy disk drives were the thing and added an enormous extra amount of storage (all phones have 10 times the amount we had when we had this computer). I tried to keep it forever but ended up selling it for next to nothing to a friend who wanted to use it like a timer to turn machines on and off.

Tiger

Seems like a long time ago when this picture was taken because Tiger has been gone so long that I have to remind myself what he looked like. This is Tiger, me and Patty, back in the day.

My Television Shows

My Television Experiences began in November 1995 when I was commissioned by an investment company, and Parker Pen Ltd, to write 3 books for a television series that I was to 'star' in. I had to produce a script for thirteen (13) one-half hour shows. I wrote the books, in four weeks, and did the television script; and all of the demonstration segments; and hosted the series from the PBS station in West Palm Beach, Florida. The actual filming lasted five (5) days.

This was my first experience doing a television series. In spite of the freezing studio temperatures and the daylight to dark shooting schedules, I managed to pull it off with only one hitch. That was solved within minutes and the shooting continued. I need to say that a television show can be shot without turning the cameras off or without stopping. It seldom happens that way but it is done. My taping was done that way.

Once I began talking and 'acting' I never stopped until the floor manager was on his hands and knees in front of me with cue cards, showing the seconds left to the end. So, essentially, you start talking and never stop until the show ends. The one hitch that I mentioned happened when I suddenly lost track of everything in my mind. I had no idea what I was to say or do next. I lost it.

I had been told, if this happens, to stop and freeze. When the director upstairs saw me freeze she  told the cameramen to stop taping (it takes a few seconds). After lunch, she simply put me back on the set and rolled her tape (which I never saw) back to the last sentence I had actually finished before I froze up. Then I began talking from that point on and the segment was completed. I have watch the tape many times would never know anything was amiss.

It had taken me about 20 years to become a household name publishing newsletters, books and magazines. The television shows were seen all over the world on Public Television Stations and on The Learning Channel, and I was suddenly even more famous than I had been before.

Actual photo taken from television show monitor of my painting an initial 'A' The company who hired me also put me up in a kind of mansion in Del Ray Beach and the house was filled with artwork of all sorts by famous artists — from Rembrandt to Picasso.

Slavery in America

The old slave auction house in Atlanta, Georgia. It is hard for me to believe that slavery was as common in the United States as a chicken coup and a pig's pen in the backyards across America.
Modern Slavery in America.
 

Only a few people on Earth are free. If you are reading this — you are not one of them. Our constitution is modeled after the Iroquois Confederacy of Nations. Those people were free and our founding fathers had ideas on keeping all Americans free but the 'government of the people, for the people and by the people' is no longer the government in power.

We live in the 'Age of Lunatics'—a corporate slave system. This age is run by corporations eager to bankroll mankind's future on credit. Credit results in 'slavery' to their system of things, and we lose our freedoms—life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—to be free to do as we please.

The corporate system that owns this government keeps us as slaves. We work to spend the money we make. After we spend it then we spend our future income using credit cards—the way the system is supposed to work. And it works.

As slaves, we must pay for any service we already paid for in taxes. The system, managed by people we elect or the courts appoint (i.e. Bush), makes laws that tax us to pay for everything it creates. We pay for it. We paid for our social welfare; and the system borrowed it, and used the money for its wars, and deposited an "i.o.u." where the cash was.

We are slaves as much as our ancestors were slaves. We are like that time of plantations, when owning slaves was the corporate thing to do, and people were bought and sold for their lifetime of labor.

Our combined slave labor makes our creditor's healthy, wealthy and wise. For us, the slaves, we have no days of wine and roses. We can't afford them. You could afford them if you were permitted to keep your wages. Alas, the wages of this sin—not paying taxes is: 'death in the pen.'

We are 'adjusted' to believe that happiness comes in the things we buy—via advertising. We are permitted to choose our occupations; and the schools that will teach us to be obedient servants and abide by the laws of the land. We can go live where we choose and flourish anywhere. But we can't get away from or escape from this system of 'freedom' that has us bound, for life, to corporate America.

There are some individuals who have beat the system and the system is supporting them with all their needs for as long as they live. A relative family, whose life is supported by the state and has been for half a century—everything they need is supplied—from gas to the car that uses it; and from their dental care to the grocery store bags of food they eat each week; they have been supported through extensive hospital surgeries; and housed in nursing homes until recovery was complete. And, it didn't cost them a dime. Nothing. Zero. When they pass, their funeral expenses will be covered.

The system has made many others free: some are convicted killers, and mobsters; and capitalists, like Kenneth Lay and his Enron misadventures, and they are free to enjoy the luxury of lifetime care—free but held in chains.

This is the system we support. We are slaves to it. We don't seem to know, or care about the future if it is longer than tomorrow. We are no longer a nation modeled along the lines of the Iroquois Confederacy of Nations. We are a system of slavery.

Read the text of H.Con.Res. 331 as passed by the Senate and House in 1988.
http://www.senate.gov/reference/resources/pdf/hconres331.pdf