The Daily Dose/June 1, 2019
By Gaylon Kent
America’s Funniest Guy

Leading Off
Term limits are rearing their ugly head again, as this issue tends to do when elections approach. Several states have term limits on governors and legislators, and their governments are as screwed up as they’ve ever been. Federally, only the president of the United States is subject to term limits, two full terms, which was enacted after the country collectively wet their pants after FDR was elected to four terms.

We don’t approve of term limits: they are merely a way of us voters passing off our responsibility as concerned citizens. The best form of term limits are regular elections and we have those here in America. Every two years the entire US House and roughly one-third of the US Senate are elected and every four years we elect a president.

Friends, if we don’t like our government we only have to look in the mirror: we elected everyone there. We can’t blame incumbents or lobbyists or the media because none of them fill out our ballot for us. We fill out our ballot for us and we keep electing partisan, fractured, and incompetent government so that’s what we keep getting. Every two years we dutifully ship back to Washington the same people who got us in this mess in the first place.

You cannot argue with the following statement:

Neither major party will do anything to square this country away.

If the status quo were going to do something, anything, good for our country they would have done so by now. You know it, I know it and you know what? – they know it too. Their only interest is in the continued consolidation of wealth and power. That’s it. We deserve better than that. America cannot survive perpetual war and mindless debt with impunity: if we don’t do something soon America will collapse, perhaps before this half-century is out, tossed aside the scrap heap of history with the Roman Empire and the Soviet Union.

Let’s not wait until the last minute to act, let’s take action now. Election Day 2020 is in 520 days and the time has come for you and me – we the people – to show ourselves and the world that the status quo is not going to cut it anymore, that American voters are demanding better, that we want an America with a bright future. More than anything, we want an America that once again means something to its citizens and the rest of the world.

You and me – we the people – are the very best form of term limits. The country we want starts with you and it starts with me and it starts in 520 days.

Today At The Site
The Diary of a Nobody: Sparrow gives the cat some new canned yummies, and it is a busy day at the Veteran Service Office. Today’s Diary.

You never know with cats, of course…Offhand, I thought she’d probably like them, but it was entirely possible she’d sniff them, turn her head and stare at me as if I’d just offered her a plate of paper clips, meow her disapproval, and go crap on the rug in protest. 

It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life.

The drivel simply does not stop: please click on the button to read The Diary of a Nobody. $5.99 includes all entries, past, present, and future.

On This Date
In 1918 – In World War I, the Battle of Belleau Wood begins just north of Marne River in northern France. Allied troops from the US, France, and Britain – under the command of US Army General John Pershing, fought the German army for the next 26 days, a battle that ultimately resulted in an Allied victory. In commemoration of the Marine Corps determination and valor in this battle, two US Navy ships have carried the name Belleau Wood over the years.

In 1941 – Mel Ott of the New York Giants become the first National League player to hit 400 home runs, hitting a two-run home run in the Giants 3-2 win over the Cincinnati Reds in the first game of a doubleheader. Ott was the fourth player to accomplish the feat, and he retired in 1947 with 511 career home runs, then good for third on the all-time list behind Babe Ruth and Jimmie Foxx. With the two RBIs, Ott also became the eleventh major leaguer to record 1,500 career RBIs. Today, Ott’s 1,860 runs batted in are good for 13th on the all-time list.

In 1974 – The Streak by Ray Stevens – a novelty song about the then-popular craze of running naked in public places – is at #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 for the third and final week. It was Stevens’ fourth and final Top 10 hit and his second and final #1 on the Hot 100. The song also went to #1 in Great Britain, Canada, and New Zealand and was Billboard’s 8th biggest hit of 1974. It also peaked at #3 on Billboard’s country chart. Stevens is a 2019 inductee into the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville.

Quotebook
You have to believe. You have to play brave.
Martin Kaymer
Professional golfer

Answer To The Last Trivia Question
The acts that spent at least nine weeks at #1 on Billboard’s Best Sellers in Stores chart with at least two songs before Percy Faith were Bing Crosby (three songs) and Vaughn  Monroe (two songs)

Today’s Stumper
The Trivia feature will return. – Answer next time!

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The Daily Dose/May 30, 2019
By Gaylon Kent
America’s Funniest Guy

Leading Off
Recently in this space we discussed how we had read some actual US Government legislation. It concerned how some who served in Vietnam are getting the same presumption of Agent Orange exposure that others receive. At its most readable it was confusing and demoralizing, leaving you wanting to bathe with a hairdryer. After reading it, there was no doubt as to why nothing of substance gets done in this country.

We had another example of this sort Wednesday and you should know we make ourselves useful by masquerading as our county’s veteran service officer. I help veterans deal with the VA. Insert your own jokes about me having a generous budget for booze or an open line to the VA crisis center here.   

We were looking for information on getting a vet’s incompetency ruling taken off government databases. The vet has since been ruled competent and the incompetency entry is preventing him from getting his concealed weapons permit renewed by the county.

One number we had rustled up was no help, so we did some research and came up with an outfit called the Office of the Special Assistant to the Secretary for Veteran Service Organizations. That sounded like it has potential, but the listing on the official VA website did not include a phone number of all things, though it did have an address, useful if we wanted to mail them something, but not much use here in the 21st-century…So I called the new White House VA line and asked the nice guy there for the number to this office and a couple of minutes later I had one.

It was out of service. So were three other VA numbers that had a 202 area code I had uncovered. I didn’t know what the deal was. I mean, I know how to make long-distance calls from a landline. Heck, there was a time when we’d do this regularly, back in the old days. Some more research, which we’re pretty good at, yielded the number to VA Secretary’s office. This was out of service, too.   

(Anytime you call a VA number you get a recording advising what to do if you are thinking of suicide. Well, I wasn’t thinking those thoughts, but as I continued to wade through this mess it started to look like an attractive option.)

So, in a burst of inspiration,  I called Washington, DC directory assistance. I asked for the number for the VA Special Assistant to the Secretary for Veteran Service Organizations and based on everything you’ve read here it should not be the biggest surprise that the number was actually for the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The gent who took my call though did have two VA numbers laying around. One was about as useful as the number to a brothel, but the other actually yielded a solution. It occurred to me that an incompetency judgment is actually a fiduciary matter, so I pressed a couple of buttons and was hooked up with a fiduciary office in Salt Lake City. I endured two minutes on hold, and then a gentleman told me the VA informs the FBI of these things as a matter of course. Now, it wasn’t immediately run across the street by messenger, it will take time, but the vet should be packing heat again in a couple of months. 

A whole day’s imbroglio to yield the tidbit that I didn’t actually have to do anything. And this from the outfit that is control of nuclear weapons. How our government gets anything done will always remain a mystery: they can’t even produce working phone numbers. I’m surprised an Apollo mission wasn’t stranded on the moon or sent to Jupiter by mistake. Heck, how a national park gets opened in the morning is now one mankind’s great riddles.

Today At The Site
The Diary of a Nobody: Sparrow has fun dealing with the VA. Today’s Diary.

The only problem was the listing on the VA website did not include a phone number…I am not making that up, it only had an address, marvelous if it’s the 1820s and I want to send a card, but not too useful here at the ass end of the second decade of the 21st-century…

It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life.

The drivel simply does not stop: please click on the button to read The Diary of a Nobody. $5.99 includes all entries, past, present, and future.

On This Date
In 1948 – Vanport, Oregon is washed away when a dike in the Columbia River breaks, putting the entire town underwater. The town had been built in 1942 for workers in nearby shipyards and at its peak had a population of around 40,000, though at the time of the flood the population was about half that. The fact it was a holiday weekend and various natural obstacles delayed the flood’s arrival kept the death toll down to a relatively low 15 though, of course, everyone else was left homeless. Most of the area is now home to Portland International Raceway and a golf course.

In 1894 – Bob Lowe of the Boston Beaneaters – now the Atlanta Braves – becomes the first major leaguer to hit four home runs in a game as the Beaneaters defeat the Cincinnati Reds 20-11 in the second game of a doubleheader. He added a single and his 17 total bases also established a new major league record. The total base record is now held by Shawn Greene with 19, but Lowe’s home run record still stands, equaled on 17 other occasions, most recently by J.D. Martinez, then of the Arizona Diamondbacks, in 2017.

In 1953 – Percy Faith is at #1 on Billboard’s Best Sellers in Stores chart – a predecessor of the Hot 100 – for the third of ten consecutive weeks with The Song From Moulin Rouge (Where is Your Heart). The song is also known as It’s April Again and the vocals on the song were provided by Felicia Sanders. In 1960 Faith would spend nine weeks at #1 with Theme From a Summer Place and while the feat is rather common now, for many years Faith was the few acts to spend at least nine weeks at #1 with two songs.

Quotebook
…by taking so much for the state, you reduce everyone’s ability to create more wealth. Even the bandit in the forest never takes more than two-thirds of the merchant’s caravan…so that there will always be something for him to steal.
Gore Vidal
Creation

Answer To The Last Trivia Question
The Rolling Stones have had eight #1 songs in Great Britain.

Today’s Stumper
Who were the acts before Percy Faith to spend at least nine weeks at #1 on a Billboard pop chart with more than one song? – Answer next time!

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The Daily Dose/May 29, 2019
By Gaylon Kent
America’s Funniest Guy

Leading Off
We don’t do predictions too often – preferring to make fun of people and events utilizing the shield of hindsight – but the prediction we made about President Trump during the 2016 campaign proved to be accurate:

He will be as embarrassing a president as he was a candidate.

Whether he’s meeting with third rate dictators who don’t deserve a second glance or blathering whatever happens to be on the top of his head, this has been proven true. The latest example of President Trump not knowing what he is talking about came this week when he insisted American taxpayers are not paying the tariffs he imposed on Chinese imports and that there will be humans on Mars in the not too distant future. Here are the quotes:

You know, foolishly, some people said that the American taxpayer is paying the tariffs of China. No, no, no — it’s not that way. They’re paying a small percentage.

We’ve already established in this column this is false. Tariffs are paid by those doing the importing, not the country exporting the items. American businesses are paying the tariffs and they will pass the cost on to their customers, which makes it merely another tax on us.

Japan will join our mission to send U.S. astronauts to space. We’ll be going to the moon. We’ll be going to Mars very soon.

No, we won’t. Heck, a middle school student with a modest interest in science knows this is twaddle because we are no closer to putting a man Mars than we are to, well, putting a man on Mars. Maybe, perhaps, if the national will was there and we marshaled every resource, we could have humans on Mars by 2030. Maybe. That’s without too many of the setbacks and deaths that have attended exploration since time immemorial. A more reasonable expectation is that we can have them there by mid-century, presuming America is still around then, which we don’t think is guaranteed. Had America wanted to, we could have used the momentum generated by Apollo and men on Mars in the 1980s. But America took a flier on that, which isn’t too surprising because interest in manned space travel decreased significantly after our first moon landing.

What’s interesting about Trump’s constant falsehoods we don’t think he’s intentionally lying. We think he genuinely believes the Chinese are paying his tariffs and that America and Japan really can go to Mars very soon. In fact, if you gave him the choice of five dates that man first landed on the moon – including July 20, 1969, and last Tuesday – Trump would probably guess wrong.

Our loss. A president should know these things, and America should have the good sense to elect people who do. A hundred years from now, when all new people are looking back on the country that used to be America, they will scratch their heads and wonder why American voters didn’t do something, why they continued to tolerate partisan, fractured, and incompetent government.

And they won’t have an answer.

Today At The Site
The Diary of a Nobody: Sparrow gets a good workout in while The Wife asks him to reset her alarm clock. Today’s Diary.

She has long been in the habit of setting the time on hers ahead 23.45321 minutes and, combined with her scientifically-arrived at formula for setting the alarm time, the alarm was now going off in the middle of the night and she asked if I had suggestions about what time I should set the clock and alarm for.

“What time to you want to wake up???”
“Four o’clock.”
I rubbed my chin with a hand, feigning deep thought. |
“How about I set your clock for the correct time and then set the alarm to 4am???…Would that help?”

It’s Sparrow, an average man passing an average life.

The drivel simply does not stop: please click on the button to read The Diary of a Nobody. $5.99 includes all entries, past, present, and future.

On This Date
In  1953 – Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain, is summited for the first time by Britain’s Sir Edmund Hillary and Nepali/Indian/Sherpa mountaineer Tenzing Norgay. The only picture of one of them from the summit features Norgay, but since Norgay did not know how to use a camera there aren’t any pictures of Hillary on the summit. In one of mankind’s great displays of teamwork, both went to their graves declining to say who reached the summit first.

In 1911 – The first Indianapolis 500 is run. 40 cars started, 26 finished, and the race was won by Ray Harroun, who completed the race in 6 hours and 42 minutes and an average speed of 74.602 mph, which was a bit more than a second faster than runner-up Ralph Mulford. Harroun won $10,000 (about $272,000 in today’s money) for winning, out of a combined purse of $27,550. The winning car, known as the Wasp, is on display at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

In 1971 – The Rolling Stones are at #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 with Brown Sugar. The song spent two weeks at the top and also went to #1 in Canada, Holland, and Switzerland and peaked at #2 in Great Britain. It was the group’s sixth of eight #1s in America.

Quotebook
Marriage, the last refuge of men unable to fend for themselves.
Garrison Keillor
Leaving Home

Answer To The Last Trivia Question
Theme From Dukes of Hazard (Good Ol’ Boys) was Waylon Jennings biggest hit on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at #21 in 1980.

Today’s Stumper
How many #1 songs have the Rolling Stones had in their native Great Britain? – Answer next time!

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