Aunt Agnes on the Taliban exchange

I asked what Aunt Agnes thought of the Taliban exchange for Bowie Bergdahl.

Aunt Agnes: Well I needed to take another Demerol to get to sleep last night I'm so mad about this Taliban business. Here you have a traitor, Bowie Bergdahl or something like it. He got high on drugs, walked off his base and decided to seek out trouble in Afghanistan. Well I guess he thought those Taliban would hand him a medal but instead those old Taliban arrested that man. Served him right. For my money he made his bed and should have stayed right where he was and let the fleas have at him. 

But no, our president turns around and frees five terrorists from Guantanamo and in exchange we get that flea bitten patriot. Now Obama thought he was going to be a hero. Parades all over the place, good publicity but it backfired on him. Now everybody is mad at him. Well one good thing, we won't have to feed and clothe those prisoners anymore. They are off our hands now.

I'm sure in a few weeks Bowie, his parents who look like they never went home from Woodstock, and maybe a few of the Taliban will turn up on the Today show. I can see it now. Koda and Bowie like old friends. Not a barber in the house.

Editor's note: It's nice to hear from dear old Agnes again.

Old t shirts

Last week I got a phone call from the Lupus Foundation. They didn't want money. They wanted me to put out a bag of old clothes for them to pick up. Sounded easy at the time but it forced me to choose among my most prized belongings. My old t shirts.

After throwing in some old pajama tops I never wear and some socks with holes in them I came to the t shirt containers. I have two large storage containers I got at KMart a few years ago and there they were. In forty years of buying and being given t shirts as presents, surely I had a few hundred I could give away. 

It turned out to be not as easy as it sounds. Matt Nokes in a Detroit Tigers outfit almost made it to the Lupus bag but I thought "One day it might be valuable". Perhaps he will do something noteworthy in a few years and I can sell my t shirt for hundreds of dollars. All of the trips I've made over the years were represented in the loot. Tokyo, Nova Scotia, Scotland. My title Data t shirts from when I lived in Denver stayed. A t shirt saying "President Bill Clinton salutes the can-do spirit of East Texas" stayed but Bodacious barbecue from Austin got tossed. I almost tossed my Weird New Jersey t shirt but it too stayed put. 

A Bud lite t shirt from the eighties got tossed. So did a bright orange t shirt from the Butterfly Festival from a few years back. I was always afraid to wear something that loud. Still a lot of my old t shirts got saved. A good session in the machine and they'll be good as new. And I promised myself to put some forgotten shirts in the rotation for the summer.

Louie CK

As most of the TV seasons are coming to an end, Louie C K is just starting up. Last week he had a show that got a lot of attention,  It was the show that asked why middle aged guys with beer guts never ask out overweight women. I dunno. Maybe we're afraid they'll say yes.

With most of TV aimed at hip young (or at least young) people it's nice to see a show aimed at middle aged men with beer guts. He sort of represents an every man. He has the whiny, annoying daughters, the crummy apartment, the out of style pants.

Of course we really don't all have the life of Louie C K's that is portrayed on the show. He does have a cushy job. How easy it must be to go to a nightclub every night, tell a few jokes, and have earned enough money to live in Manhattan. He also gets to hang out with celebrities like Sarah Silverman and stay up late, go to bars, play cards, and have enough money to eat out for breakfast.

Still it's refreshing to see someone who's not young, or pretty, schlepping around sort of like a normal person. You can pop open a can of beer while watching the show with the feeling Louie is doing the same thing after the show.

Mother's day gifts

As we get older our mothers start dying on us and we feel a bit of remorse when we realize that we don't even have to send a card or buy flowers at the supermarket on Sunday morning. People who buy flowers at the Shop-rite on Sunday morning are what my mother used to classify as "last minute Joe's". It's like you couldn't deal with Mother's Day until the last possible minute and then you combine it with buying dog food and hot dogs for work.

I remember when my father bought my mother a washing machine for Mother's Day. Mother was actually quite thrilled to have something she could actually use, would make her life easier, and wouldn't give her hay fever. Last week I helped a friend buy a refrigerator and it reminded me of when Mothers got refrigerators and stoves on the second Sunday in May. Sears had prices on the machines that were higher than what they had on their website but they matched the price. A lesson to be learned. At any rate, for the mothers out there, Happy Mother's Day!

Tea taste test

Idle hands being the devil's workshop, yesterday during coffee break I noticed I had two different kinds of tea bags. I had Shop Rite as well as Lipton. I never noted any real difference between them but always assumed the Lipton was a tiny bit better since it was the name brand. Yesterday I did a taste test. I microwaved two cups filled with water and the two tea bags. I sampled the two teas. 

The results? I could not tell them apart.  The tea bags looked the same. The amount of tea in the two bags seemed to be the same. The flavor seemed to be the same to me.  The color was about the same. Perhaps next time I'll try a more exotic (and expensive) tea. 

Leggings

One of the questions besetting modern man is the question of leggings. Who should were leggings? When are leggings appropriate? Recently a school banned leggings. People throughout the world are debating the issue of leggings. In Britain, there is a movement afoot to sell leggings to men. I would show the pictures but this is a family blog. Probably the safe way to deal with leggings is to wear shorts over them. Leggings and only leggings? I suppose in the right settings. Casual Fridays? Perhaps in banks and insurance companies but I would avoid them at wakes.

Deep in the heart of Texas

I spent the Easter weekend visiting kinfolk in Texas. We got in the Buick van, equipped with two child seats, and plenty of other seats for the grownups and dogs, and we were off. We traveled about two hundred miles, passing farms and cattle ranches throughout Texas. The signs are different in Texas. In addition to the religious slogans I passed a store with the name "Condoms to go". Never remember seeing one of those back east.

In Texas they aren't afraid of fracking. They have it in public parks in Dallas and even below the runways at DFW. Oil derricks pumping oil are a common sight in the parking lots of shopping malls. Yep.

The highlight of the trip was a visit to the Tyler Rose festival museum. Here we learned the history of the Tyler Rose Festival, especially the crowning of the queen and got to see dresses with trains that extend about one hundred feet. I guess they do things big in Texas.

The food was good. Nothing like barbecue with pinto beans and cornbread. Still it's nice to be back where they know how to make a decent pizza and don't say y'all every two minutes.