Kirstie Engaged

Pentatonix member Kirstin Maldonado has gotten engaged to her boyfriend Jeremy Michael. This will surely destroy their relationship. They may as well break up now.

Look at what happened to Kaley Cuoco. She was dating Ryan Sweeting, and they seemed so much in love, when they married on Dec. 31, 2013. That marriage lasted 21 months.

I knew a couple who lived together for seven years. Finally, they decided to tie the knot, and they got married. Two weeks later they broke up and went their separate ways. The incident reminded me of an episode of Star Trek called Amok Time. In it, Mr. Spock said, “After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing after all as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true.”

Good luck, Kirstie.

Starsailor

The song of the day is Tell Me It's Not Over from the 2009 album All the Plans by English band Starsailor.

Ice Cream

A couple of days ago, I was at the grocery store and I bought a tub of ice cream. I love ice cream, but I rarely buy it. By rarely, I mean maybe once a year. This is because I don’t want to weigh 400 pounds, which I seriously might hit if I allowed myself to eat as much ice cream as I’d like to eat.

When I was a kid, one could buy a pasteboard box of ice cream that held a full gallon of the icy goodness. Four quarts. Eight pints. Sixteen cups. I don’t know when that changed, but it did change. In my neck of the woods, one can no longer buy a gallon of ice cream. Today, it is sold in pasteboard tubs containing three quarts. Six pints. Twelve cups.

I admit that ice cream is a hopeless weakness of mine and I usually avoid it the way an ex-addict avoids heroin, and perhaps that biases my observations. But I contend that the new tubs contain four – not twelve – servings of ice cream. In fact, I further contend that those four servings are “girly” servings which equate to only two “manly” servings of ice cream. Oh sure, the container may say “12 servings” on its side, but that’s just marketing hype. If you’re an ice cream addict, you know full well that you’re lucky if a tub of ice cream lasts two days. In fact, it requires a great deal of willpower to make a tub stretch that long.

I bought the 3 quart tub of Cookies ‘n Cream on Sunday and threw the empty tub into the kitchen trash receptacle on Monday. Sayonara, two-serving tub. I foresee the day (which doubtless is fast approaching) when the largest container of ice cream you can buy is a single-serving tub. Sure, it may say “Family Size” on the tub, but we’ll all know that’s a lie.

The Hyland Anomaly

Sarah Hyland, an actress who plays Haley Dunphy on a sitcom titled Modern Family (a good show, IMHO, with good-to-excellent writing and acting) recently recounted on her Twitter account an experience she had. She awoke around 6:30 and saw daylight outside and assumed she had had a wonderful night’s sleep and now it was 6:30 in the morning. But as time passed it dawned (pun intended) on her that it might not be 6:30AM – might, in fact, be 6:30PM on the previous day. And, as it turned out, that is exactly what it was.

It’s disconcerting. I know because the very same thing happened to me, and it happened on the very same day that it happened to Hyland. I awoke, saw the sunshine, and thought, “It’s a beautiful, sunny morning!” I was also feeling just a bit proud of the fact that I had slept all night without having to resort to popping a sleeping pill or drinking alcohol to help me sleep.

Those thoughts didn’t last long. As soon as I walked into the living room, the wrongness of it hit me. The window blinds were open, and they’re never open when I get up in the morning. The “morning light” seemed odd, and though my still-sleepy brain didn’t know exactly why, the oddness assuredly was caused by the sunlight coming from the west instead of the east.

I walked to my computer (why that and not my phone?) and checked the time. PM! Damn it! All the things I thought I had sailed through overnight, like falling asleep so easily, sleeping through the night uninterrupted, waking up on a sunny morning ready for the new day, were all a fiction. None of them happened. Bummer!

When it comes to sleep, there is another kind of bummer that happens to me far more often. I go to bed at a reasonable time – say, 11PM – and fall asleep quickly. I awaken feeling like I’ve been asleep for hours. It’s dark inside and outside, but I’m wide awake feeling like I’ve slept for hours, so I’m sure it is close to the time I should get up. But then I look at the clock beside my bed and my hopes are dashed: it’s 1 AM. Morning is hours away. There’s nothing to do now but get out of bed, pour a drink, and type a blog post.

Sophie B Hawkins

The song of the day is As I Lay Me Down from the 1994 album Whaler by singer-songwriter Sophie B. Hawkins (Sophie Ballantine Hawkins).

Bob Dylan & Johnny Cash

The song of the day is Girl from the North Country from the 1963 album The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan by singer, songwriter, artist, and writer Bob Dylan (Robert Allen Zimmerman). Dylan re-recorded the song as a duet with Johnny Cash (J. R. Cash) in February 1969. That recording became the first track on Nashville Skyline, Dylan's ninth studio album. The song was used in the 2012 film Silver Linings Playbook starring Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence.

Pixie Lott

The song of the day is Lay Me Down from the 2014 album Pixie Lott by English singer, songwriter, and actress Pixie Lott (Victoria Louise Lott).

We Are The Fallen

The song of the day is Without You from the 2010 album Tear the World Down by American-Irish gothic metal band We Are The Fallen with vocals by Irish singer, songwriter, and actress Carly Smithson.

The Trump Anomaly

For years, right wing and far right news media – and I’m thinking of Fox News, Breitbart, The Blaze, The Drudge Report, Worldnetdaily, and the like – have shouted from the rooftops, “The country is on fire! The country is burning down!” They did this to motivate their viewers and readers to vote for candidates favored by those media. For a while it worked. A substantial number of voters bought into the story that the country is on fire. Right wing and far right candidates were sent to Congress. But now, a tipping point has been reached. Rather than voting for another mainstream candidate, those voters have chosen another path. Those voters believe America’s problems are too dire to be put into the hands of another mainstream politician. Those voters have decided that only radical change can solve America’s problems. And Donald Trump is their radical.

Trump is clearly a loose cannon. But that is precisely why his followers love him. He speaks his mind, even when his mind changes 180 degrees from one day to the next. He’s politically-incorrect-on-steroids, which gives his followers permission to also be politically incorrect – as well as racist, xenophobic, and misogynistic. If America is a house on fire, Trump won’t try to put out the fire; Trump will fan the flames. Trump’s followers are convinced that America’s problems are too complex and too entrenched for ordinary solutions. They believe that the only way forward is to burn the house to the ground and build a new house.

Trump is not the man to honor inconvenient treaties nor tread lightly on the world stage. Being responsible hasn’t worked so let’s be irresponsible. Trump will be a man of action; he will build giant walls, use nuclear weapons on our enemies, and throw millions of people out of the country. He’s going to do all these horribly expensive things and more, while simultaneously giving the wealthiest Americans another tax cut and balancing the budget. He’s going to do things that clearly can’t be done – by an “ordinary” politician. But the Trump faithful are convinced that somehow he’ll pull it off. They know what the rest of us cannot fathom: that Trump must destroy America in order to save America.

There is a Chinese curse that goes, “May you live in interesting times.” If Trump is elected, Americans will learn what that means.

Al Stewart

The song of the day is Year of the Cat from the 1976 album Year of the Cat by British singer-songwriter Al Stewart (Alastair Ian Stewart). The cat is the fourth animal symbol in the 12-year cycle of the Vietnamese zodiac, replacing the rabbit in the Chinese zodiac.

Eleni Mandell

The song of the day is He Thinks He's In Love from the 2000 album Thrill by singer-songwriter Eleni Mandell.

Ed Harcourt

The song of the day is This One's For You from the 2004 album Strangers by English singer-songwriter Ed Harcourt (Edward Henry Richard Harcourt-Smith).