GONE

https://rockingwithdannie.blogspot.com/2024/08/gone.html

Sounds and sights  that won’t be heard again:

    A biplane passing  overhead–so low you can see the pilot. He’d wave at  the watchers below.

    A coal-burning locomotive blowing its whistle at a crossing and little children, with  their heads out car  windows, making the blow your  horn  motion.

The “ogglifng” sound of the horn of an old Model T Ford,

The eight, twelve and five  o’clock whistle of Weathreford’s oil mill

The smokie  flavor of food baked  in a  wood-burning stove’s oven.

  Also gone but hopefully, somewhere near-by:

The call of a Whippoorwill

 Hoot owl or screech owl’s lonely hoot

Painted Bunting

   

These  birds do not like populated areas so  when people  move in, the birds  move  out to the  near-by  county.

Where will  they go  next as businesses and apartments follow?  New  homes are  filling scenic  areas.  Housing developments a taking farm land. No  farms, no  food, especially the fresh unadulterated

 vegetables  from the truck  farmer.

So what do we do?  Limit expansion?

Thoubling thoueghts  a dreary day–all because of a random thought about missing the night-time call of a whippoorwill. It doesn’t   take much to  set me   off!

Dannie

A. Senior Citizen

https://rockingwithdannie.blogspot.aseniorcitizen/2024/8/tpl

While looking through a collection   of old blogs,  I found this. Replace  the 

word 'bank’ with the name of  any business  we deal  with daily; add a heavily accented voice and  we  can  share  her reaction to today’s world.

A  SENIOR'S LETTER TO HER BANK

inn

  Shown below is an actual letter that was sent to a bank by an 86 year old woman. The bank manager thought it amusing enough to have it published in the New York Times. 

 Dear Sir: 

I am writing to thank you for bouncing my check with which I endeavored to pay my plumber last month.  By my calculations, three nanoseconds must have elapsed between his presenting the check and the arrival in my account of the funds needed to honor it.  I refer, of course, to the automatic monthly deposit of my entire pension, an arrangement which, I admit, has been in place for only eight years. You are to be commended for seizing that brief window of opportunity, and also for debiting my account $30 by way of penalty for the inconvenience caused to your bank. My thankfulness springs from the manner in which this incident has caused me to rethink my errant financial ways.  I noticed that whereas I personally answer your telephone calls and letters, when I try to contact you, I am confronted by the impersonal, overcharging, pre-recorded, faceless entity which your bank has become. 

 From now on, I, like you, choose only to deal with a flesh-and-blood person. My mortgage and loan repayments will therefore and hereafter no longer be automatic, but will arrive at your bank, by check, addressed personally and confidentially to an employee at your bank whom you must nominate. 

 Be aware that it is an offense under the Postal Act for any other person to open such an envelope. Please find attached an Application Contact which I require your chosen employee to complete. I am sorry it runs to eight pages, but in order that I know as much about him or her as your bank knows about me, there is no alternative. Please note that all copies of his or her medical history must be countersigned by a Notary Public, and the mandatory details of his/her financial situation (income, debts, assets and liabilities) must be  accompanied by documented proof. In due course, at MY convenience, I will issue your employee with a PIN number which he/she must quote in dealings with me. I regret that it cannot be shorter than 28 digits but, again, I have modeled it on the number of button presses required of me to access my account balance on your phone bank service. As they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. 

  

Let me level the playing field even further.   When you call me, press buttons as follows: 

IMMEDIATELY AFTER DIALING, PRESS THE STAR (*) BUTTON FOR ENGLISH 

 #1. To make an appointment to see me 

#2. To query a missing payment. 

#3. To trans fer the call to my living room in case I am there. 

   

 #4 To transfer the call to my bedroom in case I am sleeping 

#5. To transfer the call to my toilet in case I am attending to nature. 

 #6.. To transfer the call to my mobile phone if I am not at home 

#7. To leave a message on my computer, a password to access my computer is required. Password will be communicated to you at a later date to that Authorized Contact mentioned earlier. 

 #8. To return to the main menu and to listen to options 1 through 7.  

 #9. To make a general complaint or inquiry. The contact will then be put on hold, pending the attention of my automated answering service.

 #10. This is a second reminder to press* for English. While this may, on occasion, involve a lengthy wait, uplifting music will play for the duration of the call. 

 Regrettably, but again following your example, I must also levy an establishment fee to cover the setting up of this new arrangement 

  Your Humble Client 

(Remember: This was written by an  86 year old woman -'YA JUST GOTTA LOVE? US  SENIORS" !!!!! )

And remember: Don't make old people mad. We don't like being old in the first place, so it doesn't take much to set us off. 

Dannie

 

Expressions Our Grandparents Used https://rockingwithdannie.blogspot.com/2024/07/expressions-our-grandparents-used.html

 . "Waking up on the wrong side of tthe bed”........

refers to some who woke-up in a bad humor.  Goes back to a Roman superstition that positive forces await on the bed’  right side and  bad  energy on the left.

"Can't hold a candle”.......... .

Often useed  to compare one person’s work with another’s.  Gones back to the  17th century and refers to an  apprentice being so  incmpetent he couldn’t even  hold a  candle  for his master.

  Baeking up the wrong tree.............

having the wrong idea or accusing the wrong person. Goes back to tar 1800s when huntingg  with 

packs of dogs  was a popular sport.

Cold feet...........

a term used fur losing interest or backing out of a deal.

Rule of thumb.........

refers to careless  builders compared to those who use a square and rule for careul construction. Earliest record of  the term’s use is by  a Scottish preacher in describing the lack of  diligence of some of his church members.

It's comin' a toad-strangler...........

raining really hard

Bury the hatchet”........

When  the chiefs of two Native Americans   tribes  decided  to settle their differences and live in peace, each buried a hatchet in the ground..

Have you lost your marbles?..........

you’re acting peculat

I love you a bushel and a peck and a hug around the neck ..............

It'll all come out in the wash.........

Everything will work out.

Does that picture look cattywampus to you?............

Is it crooked?

Last time I saw you, you were knee-high to a grasshopper............

meaning you’ve really grown.

  I'm as nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full o' rockin’ chairs............. 

no explanation needed

Dannie

The FBI ’s Begining

https./rockingwithdannie.blogspot.com2024/7/the FBIsbeginingtpl 

In 1900, William McKinley, our 25th President,   faced  several  serious problems... Anarchists, who wanted to bring down the government, and increasing crime. In his second term he was assassinated by  an Anarchist  and his  Vice-president, Theodore Roosevelt, former Governor of New York, became President.

 Rosevelt was a strong believer in laws and their enforcement.  He appointed  Charles  Bonaparte, a man of  like beliefs,  as  US Attorney  General.  Bonaparte soon .discovered he had very few men to carry-out  the investigations  his job required. He solved  the problem by “borrowing” well -trained, men from the Secret Service.  This was  very  expensive, and  these   men made their reports to  their boss, leaving  Bonaparte  in the dark.

When Congress  decided there was no law  authorizing this expenditure  they canceled the funds  After a long and  complicated session with Congress an agreement  was reached, and funds were made available for the Attorney General to form an  investigative force  of his own.

The  year was 1908. and considered the year the fledgling FBI was born in the form of the Bureau of  Investigation. It operated under. this name (((or BOI),  for a number of years then changed to the Federal   Bureau of Investigation–the FBI.

From a  beginning work force of about forty, it has grown  to 35,000 including over 10,000 special agents and others with special knowledge and talents.

 

An Old Table

https:/rockingwithdannieblogspot.com/2024/7/Anoldtablehtml

republishing

Looking back, life in the pre-WW2 days seems incredibly primitive, but pleasant in many ways. 
One picture-memory often pops up when I think

 of those days. After our evening meal, usually eaten by lamp-light, one of the lamps was taken into the living room. One was left in the kitchen to light the dish washing. There were a lot of dark shadowy rooms in those days.
 With the lamp set in place on what was called a library table, Dad took his usual place in his old wooden rocker, and rolled his second cigarette of the day. 


Today, I see that the old table with its lamp, was the heart of our daily lives. It held a battery radio, the bible, a stack 

After years of utilitarian use and abuse

of  Saturday Evening Posts, the latest newspaper, and an ink bottle. There was also a dictionary, an encyclopedia, a handbook on caring for common farm animal diseases, and a Texas almanac. Those were our information sources. It was more productive to just ask Mother. 
It was there we wrote letters in those archaic days before cell phones or Facebook. I studied there; Mother read or worked out crochet patterns from pictures in magazines, we read the weekly Saturday Evening Post (5¢ per copy, cheaper by subscription), and kept up with the news of the world from a bi-weekly newspaper, The Semi-weekly Farm News. 

In addition to its mixture of international and homey local news, advertisements and market reports, a full page of popular songs of the 20s and 30s was a regular feature. My favorite of these songs was The Strawberry Roan. I was just a kid, remember, and if you Google it, you may understand why.
 Today, I wonder if this song-page was meant to bring a bit of fun into the readers’  lives. There was no money to squander on entertainment in those hardscrabble days.
The general opinion was that Ex-President Hoover was to blamed for everything that had caused our plight. 
On the other hand, President Roosevelt was blamed for taking the wrong approach toward setting the nation on the path of recovery. Furthermore, he was messing with our rights, and the Supreme Court overturned eight of FDR’s recovery acts as unconstitutional. 

It was a time of great change and many  new laws—and the beginning of big government. My parents, two independent individuals, had many heated discussions about the direction FDR's administration was taking the country. Then, only two decades after the end of WW1, war again erupted in Europe, and reports of Nazi Germany's take-overs began to fill the news. Serious news for most adults, and scary reading for a kid.

So the news, even if was several days old, was very important, and was viewed as a condensed, but accurate, report of what was happening in our nation and the world­­—until war was declared and censoring became necessary to protect both our military and national secrets.              
This bit of tampering with our freedom of speech caused no protesting demonstrations. Movie newsreels showing dozens of burning warships and fighter planes plunging into the sea, were reason enough to live by the slogan, “Loose lips, sink ships.
 The Semi-weekly Farm News continued to provided the news for rural Texans until 1941, when it merged with the Dallas Morning News in its 99^th year. Naturally the cost of upgrading our subscription  to the Dallas Morning News was a sharp increase over that of the old Semi-weekly, and it didn't take Dad long to decide that the Dallas Morning News had little to offer someone making a living by  following a plow.
A copy of its final issue’s front page featured an item about the  $17,000,000,000 budget president Roosevelt was drafting that included $10 billion for the armament program. Other items on the front page included forty-five aliens being registered; Mrs. Roosevelt's view on the value of work camps for youth, several columns concerning the war with Germany, and a  mishmash of insignificant items. With that issue, it was gone.                                                                                                                                                                                                                
 So were twenty-seven years of peace, for the war was worsening, and while our leaders argued the pros and cons of joining the fight against the Nazi Regime, Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor ended all discussion, and we were officially at war the next day.
 We won the war—the nation emerged from the depression, and we began to have a bit of money in our pockets. Entrepreneurs met the challenge of helping us dispose of it. Newspapers had sale sections larger than that long ago Semi-weekly Farm News. 
Encyclopedia salesmen knocked on our doors. Newspapers had morning and evening editions. Competition and ingenuity expanded our news sources to bigger and better radios, then television. From there it was only a short jump to computers, cell phones, ebooks and Kindles....all bringing wider and faster news coverage, and instant access to any subject you choose.
Today's news coverage extends far beyond the daily news. There are  talk shows, news analysts, news magazines, and instant reporting of note-worthy events from around the world. In addition, a little device small enough to carry in a pocket, brings news to our side twenty-four a day—if its battery is charged. 
 This morning I turned on the TV and was instantly watching the chaos in Brussels. Never mind that I couldn't remember what county Brussels was in—that's what Google is for. Compared to the static-filled newscasts of the 40s, today's media is really quite awesome. And unfortunately, it's become a tool in the hands of those whose goal is to shape our opinions.  
So what is true and what is not? According to news reports—which may or may not be true—people no longer trust the media. Truth and politeness have taken a dive in favor of lies and gutter language. Comments are taken out of context. Insignificant remarks become tabloid headlines.
All this at a time when the truth is terribly important as we face what may be the most important election of our lives.
When millions of dollars are being spent by special interest groups on advertisements filled with untruths and inflammatory statements, all calculated to sway the vote, we have the makings of a pot of trouble. 
We see the results as protesters block streets and highways, and disrupt rallies— and in the angry tirades on Facebook. 

    So what does this rant have to do with an old library table?

Nothing and everything. Today's lack of trust in the media brought a flash-back to those long ago days when we sat by that old table listening to to our only source of up-to the-minute news time—a memory of a time when our freedom of speech didn’t extend to flag burnings and shouted obscenities, or demonstrations that shut down highways and speaking events.
  
So perhaps memories of the old table, its kerosene lamp, and the newscasts of 75-80 years ago, are relevant to what is happening today. A then and now comparison measures both our progress and our failures.

At any rate, the old table found a new life—at least part of it did. Its sturdy panel end legs now support a handcrafted harvest style dining table made by one of my sons-in-law. He even salvaged the table's drawer. 
Need I say that I'm happy it's again useful and part of a beautiful heirloom? 

Dannie Woodard
April 4, 2016