{"id":10485,"date":"2012-08-03T12:27:13","date_gmt":"2012-08-03T19:27:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=10485"},"modified":"2012-08-03T12:27:13","modified_gmt":"2012-08-03T19:27:13","slug":"tgif-bag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=10485","title":{"rendered":"TGIF Bag"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"God, have I been neglecting the blog lately! \u00a0Of course if I don’t blog every day I feel neglectful … that Puritan streak of mine is a mile wide.<\/p>\n

No theme today; just a bag full of miscellaneous thoughts.<\/p>\n

One of my sisters is mad at me for picking on Missouri. \u00a0Well, I pick on Arizona too. \u00a0And Tennessee, and pretty much all the red states.<\/p>\n

There are Chik-Fil-A franchises in almost every state, and I’m told many of them had long lines of customers on Chik-Fil-A Appreciation Day<\/a>. \u00a0People seem to think Mike Huckabee a likable character; I think he’s a bigoted asshole. \u00a0Ditto all the other commentators and hosts on Fox News, who did their best to fan homophobic flames. \u00a0As someone on a more widely-read blog than mine<\/a> said yesterday (I’m paraphrasing): if Mike Huckabee and Fox News had been around to whip up the mob back in 1960, there’d have been long lines at every Woolworth lunch counter too.<\/p>\n

Last year, when Arizona passed its “show us your papers” law, right wingers around the country pledged to support my racial-profilin’ state by spending their vacation dollars here. \u00a0Naturally only a few actually showed up, and they left pretty quick once they realized white Anglo-Saxons are a minority here — kinda like Sarah Palin dropping out of Hawaii Pacific University, where “the presence of so many Asians and Pacific Islanders made her uncomfortable<\/a>.” I would have said our visitors “left pretty quick when they saw the place is full of Mexicans,” but someone would have taken that the wrong way. \u00a0Probably my sister! \u00a0Probably all of my sisters! \u00a0Probably you too! \u00a0What I mean is that over half of Arizona’s population is of Latino heritage, and a bunch of them speak Spanish. \u00a0And all these Arizonans … with very few exceptions … are American citizens. \u00a0I hope they’re all planning to vote this November, now that they know what the white Anglo-Saxons in the Arizona state legislature and governor’s mansion think of them.<\/p>\n

Who else can I alienate this morning? \u00a0How about old people? \u00a0Yeah, why the hell not? \u00a0Last night the air museum held an appreciation dinner for the volunteers, and Donna and I decided to go. \u00a0Driving down, I warned her it would be an older crowd. \u00a0 She reminded me that we’re old too. \u00a0I said, “No, really old.” \u00a0Driving home afterward, Donna said something to me I haven’t heard in 46 years of married life: “You were right.” \u00a0You’d think I would have slept the sleep of the righteous after that, but I tossed and turned all night. \u00a0She’ll make me pay for that, I know.<\/p>\n

Donna hired the IT guy who works on the gun shop’s computers to come over yesterday and help us get our combination of Macs and PCs networked. \u00a0I hadn’t been able to crack the code on my own and was getting frustrated. \u00a0Why was it so hard to do? \u00a0A big part of the problem, it turned out, was the circa<\/em>-1997 Windows XP operating system on Donna’s desktop and laptop, which doesn’t want to work with the new operating system (Sea Lion? \u00a0Walrus? \u00a0Periwinkle?)\u00a0on my iMac. \u00a0It took all morning — and left us both with pounding headaches — but he was able to jerry-rig a complicated work-around and now our mismatched computers talk grudgingly to one another. \u00a0He also helped me figure out what we need to do to strengthen our home wifi signal and set up streaming video on the family room TV, so in spite of the pain it was a productive morning. \u00a0Hey, there’s always aspirin.<\/p>\n

Speaking of aspirin, I’m seeing ads now explaining that aspirin is for pain and headaches, not just for preventing heart attacks. \u00a0Aspirin, if I remember correctly, was the original wonder drug, first touted for pain and headache relief. \u00a0It was the advertising industry that taught the public aspirin was for something else (probably so that they could market their Tylenols and Aleves), and now they’re trying to re-educate us.<\/p>\n

Wrapping up, here’s the first sentence of a email message I didn’t finish reading:<\/p>\n

Hi, Paul!<\/p>\n

July is about to go the way of the “dinosaur”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

God, have I been neglecting the blog lately! \u00a0Of course if I don’t blog every day I feel neglectful … that Puritan streak of mine is a mile wide. No theme today; just a bag full of miscellaneous thoughts. One of my sisters is mad at me for picking on Missouri. \u00a0Well, I pick on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[250,10,2,21],"tags":[907,903,906,68,904,495,905,902,908],"class_list":["post-10485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-wars","category-current-events","category-personal","category-words","tag-aspirin","tag-chik-fil-a","tag-computers","tag-fox-news","tag-mike-huckabee","tag-missouri","tag-old-people","tag-red-states","tag-superfluous-quotation-marks"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10485"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10485\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10497,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10485\/revisions\/10497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}