I'll just entertain myself

I started listening to him about 45 years ago! ****, it doesn't feel that long ago.

I remember when he started. Was his first hit Is Anybody Goin to San Antone? My memory is a bit fogged.

Yeah, I had to look it up...this is the first one I remember


"I Can't Believe That You've Stopped Loving Me"

I think Kiss an Angel is my favorite by Charley Pride.

Yep...

Compartmentalising is necessary in life. In mine, anyway. Always had to do that even before I knew what it was. My topic just now is John Wayne, but it could as well be hundreds of celebrities and nonentities, who could qualify as well. John Wayne's politics and racist comments are facts I have known since at least the early 60s. Perhaps sooner. Had we been acquaintances we would have argued and fought incessantly. Not physically. He was a big dude. I saw him speak once in California. The impression was, his was the biggest head I had ever seen. The whole crowd stood up and kept the rest of him hidden for the duration. I love many of his films dearly, no matter what. I refuse to give that up. Here are some of his films I still watch from time to time:
The Shootist
The Three Godfathers
Stagecoach
Hondo
The Sons of Katie Elder
Liberty Valence
Rio Bravo
Comancheros
THe Searchers
The Quiet Man
Red River
Sands of Iwo Jima

Didn't like
Green Berets
High and the Mighty
several others

In 1958 I started my record collection with two albums by Harry Belafonte - Belafonte and Belafonte sings of the Caribbean - and the Jerry Lee Lewis singles, Great Balls of Fire/You Win Again and Whole Lot of Shakin/It'll Be Me. I eventually had a huge collection and only lost a few along the way. The greatest loss was when my first wife loaned a bunch to someone she barely knew. Eventually the 45s were whittled down to just enough to stuff a large drawer. Several years back I whittled down the albums by sorting out the ones incidentally collected or that I had fallen out of love with. Still, it's a lot of records. I could never appreciate cassettes and barely could tolerate CDs, though I collected a bunch. These days I mostly save them and just play youtubes.

I honor our fallen soldiers in my way. They didn't make the decisions that caused them to don a uniform and take up war weapons. They did so because their country asked them to. I have concluded after much thought that nearly every war could have been avoided and the current conflicts could be ended now, but for the corruption of politicians. Our troops, mostly young men, never had the choice to become as old as I have become. I don't have any alcohol, so I lift my morning coffee to those men and women.

Just returned from the veteran's cemetery to put flowers on my father-in-law's grave. As we worked on the display a man with flags gave us one. Looks pretty good. My nearest blood relatives are buried in Corpus Christi. That's too much driving for me anymore.

Joseph Douglass, Director of the Department of Music at Howard University and his Grandfather Frederick Douglass.

I took this off Facebook

Maskwasis Boysis is with Jackie Houle.
tetDeccfhogemmucSber m31p,o 2nso0reufll1d4url ·
This is a photo of my late father at the Erminskin residential school in Maskwacis, Alberta Canada in the mid 1940s.
I wanted to share his story with you to help educate others and bring awareness to a part of our history that was swept under the rug by the Canadian government for well over a century. He told me that he had never told anyone about his residential school experience and that this was the only time he would tell his story because he never wanted to relive the horror's he experienced as a child.. As he was recounting his more traumatic experiences he couldn't stop crying and sometimes he would get so angry he would yell out cursing those priest's and nuns for what they did, so we had to take regular breaks and most of the time as he was telling his story his hands would shake uncontrollably.
Here goes:
At the age of four he was taken from his family home in Maskwacis at gun point by the rcmp. They came with govt papers telling them that all "Indian" children had to attend the residential school. He said the whole trip there he cried along side a whole wagon full of native children from his community. (some were in childrens handcuffs) He spent 10years of his childhood from the age of 4 to 14 being sexually abused by both priests & nuns (children would go to sleep at night crying themselves to sleep because they would be plucked out of bed ever night to be sexually & physically abused), they had their hair cut off & would be physically abused if they spoke the Cree language. Some kids left & were never heard from again. (Roughly 6000 native children died in residential schools from disease, beatings, firing squads, malnutrition, electrocution, newborns born of rape by the priests raping the little native girls who were thrown into the furnace and those who either froze to death or died of starvation while attempting to run home to their loved one's.
It left him sexually confused and mentally scarred with identity crisis, shame, self hatred, loss of language & culture, suicidal thoughts, substance abuse, anger issues and basically all of the isms in the dictionary that led him to doing time in jail when he would try stand up for himself or others against injustices like racism, inequality, oppression, etc. (It literally ruined his life and so many other native survivor's who suffered simular abuses and in doing so extended negative cycles of abuse, disfunction and traumas throughout our communities that will affect us for generations to come.)
The residential schools took the children from the land to disconnect people from their culture in order to take the land from the children. The genocide is ongoing, we still see the constant removal of indigenous children from their ancestral lineages. One of the worst and most powerful things on this earth is the look in a mother's eyes and the pain she experiences when she has that which she loves most in this world taken away from her. It leaves mental scars/trauma we can never forget, it destroys lives, it destroys families, it is a form of cultural genocide and it happens WAY TOO MUCH in our communities.. We need to recognize this as a form of oppression and as a calculated effort by our colonizers to create dysfunction within our communities to maintain control of the land and exploitation of natural resources.
If anyone thinks that native people are marginalized today, 60-70 years ago white folks treated natives infinitely worse and strong native men like my late father had to stand up against such injustices, yet they would be blamed for something white folks initiated, instigated and perpetuated.
Our ancestors have endured so much injustice (from invasion, genocide, attempted extermination, racism, colonialism, forced assimulation, abuses of all kinds, hatred, made outcasts on our own lands, looked down upon by people of other races, etc) since 1492 at the hands of our invaders & WE ARE STILL HERE!
He used to tell me a lot of the negative things he went thru in his life but he never let them beat him & he made sure his children were not exposed to such things. Thank you dad wherever you are for all that you did & for being strong for so long. The harm done to survivors, their children, families, communities, and future generations is IMMEASURABLE.
I pray for him & all survivors of these residential schools so they may find comfort, justice, healing & those 6000+ children who perished in the residential school system are in a better place.
Hai hai.

For a few days the discovery of children’s bodies in a Canadian residential school was the headline on World News on the BBC website.

It truly is shocking.

Yes, I've been seeing those.

It's a bright and coffee morning; the rain that fell in torrents when it seemed we would be forever inundated vanished with the beneficence of dear old Sol and a shifting current with the wind (for it is in east Texas the action's set to begin). I drink, then prepare the trash bag in a can to go forth to pick up the week's trash; wielding my pick-up tool like a knight with his mace; set to go forward. If I fall and fail to return, know that my quest was answered with the dallying forth.

It was a light day for trash. Plus, the new daycare on the corner has adopted a long swath of what I've been caring for.

Just saw this online. I somehow never looked at it this way.
“This little piggy went to market” does not mean that the pig goes shopping

I found several scenes from "Whitenail" on Youtube, now I have to track down the movie and watch the whole thing. Uncle Monty was deliciously bizarre.

Richard Griffiths is very good.

I plnted three tomato plants, all ready to bein bering> I like the indeterminate species as they produce until frost and Mrs F always has some excuse to erve up some fried greenies. Three long rain days have passed and weve got a sunny honest 70 degrees (F). Guess Ill pick some strawberries.

My weekly trash pick-up is down significantly for a second week. My wife nailed it when she pointed out that inside dining has returned. Much of the pick-up was from fast food, and now they mostly drop that stuff in the store's can before leaving. Yesterday even we went inside a Whataburger and sat down. Ready or not, for the time being, the pandemic has been declared non existant around here.