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  • Driving In Saint Louis…

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    Marantz Cabinet Hi-Fi - Circa 1966I can remember, as a kid, sitting betwixt a pair of wood cabinets that housed a Marantz Hi-Fi – for all you age challenged folks out there, that’s a stereo.

    There weren’t any MP3’s back then. Hell, there weren’t even any MP1’s.

    The closest thing we had was an LP, since L obviously comes before M. We did have some MP’s, but they were Military Police and you only managed to get music out of them if they happened to be in the United States Army Chorus. The LP, however, was from whence sound and music emanated. BTW, the picture above is of the actual Marantz  stereo of which I speak. I managed to find it in the corner of a black & white Polaroid taken in our living room Christmas morning 1967, hence the mess and boxes sitting about.

    At any rate, these richly stylish hunks of audio furniture… Well, they were richly stylish in their day – that being the early through late 60’s – contained 4 things:

    1. Amplifier
    2. Speakers
    3. Tuner
    4. Turntable

    33 1/3 Long Play (LP) phonograph album - Vinyl...That’s it. Nothing more. And, in my youth that turntable got quite the workout. Another bit of nostalgia here for you young’ns – A turntable was a spinny thing with an arm that contained a stylus. Back then we called it a needle. Anyway, it would zip round and round while the needle would elicit sound from grooves that had been pressed into flat disks. Those flat disks were the aforementioned LP’s.

    But, back to sitting between those cabinets… Besides listening to Sinatra, Elvis (Presley, not Costello), Trini Lopez, Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, Jan and Dean… Well, I could go on and on, but let me jump ahead to the “besides”… In addition to those many musical wonders, there were also the comedy albums. Most notably, Bill Cosby. As kids, listening to Bill Cosby comedy records was one of those guilty pleasures because while he certainly wasn’t foul mouthed by any stretch of the imagination, he did in fact say “Hell.”

    I know. Pretty innocuous, eh? But, when I was growing up, “H E double hockey sticks” was a “bad word.” That’s probably why I cuss so much now. I wasn’t allowed to do so when I was a kid. But, I digress…

    One of the classic bits from Bill Cosby back in that day was titled “Driving in San Francisco.” Primarily he went on about the hills and the world’s most crooked street. But, he also poked fun at morons getting behind the wheel as well.

    And that, my friends, is a large part of my reason for this particular blog entry. Now that the nostalgia portion is over, I would like to move on to something I deem fairly important.

    How to properly make a legal right turn

    How to properly make a legal left turn

    The above were both taken from the Missouri DOR Driver’s Test Study Booklet. Study these two rules in detail. Learn them. Commit them to memory. Keep them with you at all times, and OBEY them.

    Do not make me tell you again…

    And do NOT get me started on driving in school zones – including the friggin’ school parking lot people. Those particular infractions will just get you thumped in the head. Just ask the guy who is still trying to get a dent  that is shaped exactly like my hand out of the hood of his car. Maybe he will pay attention from here on out…

    If you need further instruction on the rules and regulations for safely and legally operating a motor vehicle, you can download the entire booklet here:

    http://dor.mo.gov/mvdl/drivers/dlguide/dlguide.pdf

    That is all.

    More to come…

    Murv

  • When Good Sayings Go Bad Ver. 1.0…

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    I’m calling this Version 1.0 because I have a sneaking suspicion that as my brainpan continues to leak, I am going to remember something else that fits this title and will need to use it again.

    You know how it is… The leakage simply can’t be rushed any more than it can be contained. Believe me, I’ve tried. All the earplugs and cotton balls in the world won’t stop it. I’ve avoided having the little Dutch boy stick his fingers in my ears for the obvious reason – that being I don’t want any paint in my ear canal, of course… And, yeah, E K offered to plug my ears for me, but something told me I might not survive whatever she had in mind, so I declined. The point here being, the leak trickles on and what drips from the old brainpan doesn’t always happen in chronological order.

    So, on with this little ditty…

    Now, I want to point out that no matter what you read here, I am not in any way purporting, nor am I denying, the existence of “God”. Be it, ummm, he… uhhh… She?… I think we’ll stick with it… Be it the “one true God” as some would have you believe, or one out of an entire pantheon. My particular religious beliefs are my own, and yours are yours. In the interest of avoiding overt ridiculousity we should keep it that way.

    God speaks

    However, there are  sayings that many of us use in our everyday lives that invoke this “God”, whoever he, she, or it may be. (BTW, if you ask Evil Kat she will tell you that God is in not only a she, but that She is She… However, she prefers to be addressed as “Oh High Exalted Queen Bitch of the Entire F*cking Universe”… Except in informal situations when you can just call her Mistress. She says “God” as a moniker is simply too passe.)

    So, anyway, there are all these various sayings that invoke God, one of which is a bit of an exclamation I heard people use when I was growing up in the Southern U.S. –

    “You don’t have the sense that God gave a goose!”

    Fortunately, I don’t recall anyone saying this directly to me, but I definitely remember hearing it spouted at other folks who, in all honesty, didn’t have the common sense of a rock, so it wasn’t exactly a slanderous statement by any stretch of the imagination.

    GOOSE But, be that as it may, this very saying is what spawned the IBGG Local 747.

    At this point I suspect you are wondering just what the hell the IBGG Local 747 is. Well, obviously it is a union. To my knowledge there have only been 3 members in the past 25 years – moi being one of them. None of us have ever paid union dues, but by the same token the union has never done anything for us either, so I guess we’re even.

    BUT MURV! WHAT THE HELL IS THE IBGG?

    Chill out. You don’t have to yell at me. Sheesh…

    You see, to make a long story even more complex…

    Well, no… I won’t do that. Let me see if I can simplify it instead… You see, I had this acquaintance who had a tendency to get tongue tied with every single sentence he spoke. Unless he was yelling at someone, but that’s a different story. Anyway, whenever he got frustrated and was trying to NOT yell, his tongue became so entwined in his eye teeth that he would go blind and you never knew what was going to come out of his mouth. One day such an instance occurred when he was trying to explain something extremely simply to someone, and said someone just wasn’t getting it. All of a sudden, we’ll call him Gary because that’s his name, shook his head, looked at this person with disgust and spouted –

    “Dammit. You don’t have the sense to give God a goose, do ya?”

    I dunno. It was pretty damn funny at the time. Maybe you just had to be there. At any rate, the IBGGInternational Brotherhood of Goose Givers – was born. Our motto was, of course, “Go give God a goose.”

    You are perfectly welcome to take that however you want.

    VODKA Since I have God’s ear on a regular basis these days, I asked E K recently if she would like a goose. She slapped me, of course. Hard enough to rattle my brainpan and incite more leakage in fact. After she was through being a vengeful Goddess, she told me she could go for a Grey Goose and Tonic. I wasn’t surprised by this as she usually enjoys a drink or two after handing out a severe beating.

    So… That’s all for now. I have to limp into the kitchen and mix a drink so I can go give God… Umm, I mean “Oh High Exalted Queen Bitch of the Entire F*cking Universe” a goose.

    And as we know I’m all thumbs…

    I wonder if this would be a good time to pay my union dues and look into their insurance options?

    More to come…

    Murv