Steve's Live From Las Vegas

The big holiday season is here, and this year it seems even odder than usual. For one thing, of course, there is the very rare convergence of Thanksgiving and Chanukah, which is sort of cool even though I’m not Jewish. I’m not Christian, either, though, but I like Christmas, so I’ll just point out for my Jewish friends that good turkey stuffing contains some bitter herbs, if you get my drift. Talk about a combo made in Yid heaven, huh? But the other unusual thing about Thanksgiving is that it is almost at the very end of November. It’s the 28th, which is only three days from the last of the month. In fact, it can not get any later, because if it tried it would be the fifth Thursday, and that doesn’t work. This has led some to suggest that Thanksgiving be permanently moved to, say, the third Thursday, so that Black Friday could be gotten underway in a more timely fashion. Uh, yeah. What’s Thanksgiving for again? Something about being grateful for what you have? Y’know, a gift given with love is a great gift, even if it isn’t what you first had in mind, and even if you didn’t go out on a frosty Thanksgiving evening to buy it by braving a crowd of determined shoppers. Geez, guys, give it a rest, will you? I live in a 24/7 town, and I would never tell anyone when they could or couldn’t sell anything, but I do wonder if those frantic shoppers have any idea why we have Thanksgiving in the first place. It’s not like we need an excuse to be gluttons, is it?

On Saturday comes the “official” start of the Christmas season, when every small town Santa will be putting on the red suit and schlepping down main street saying hello to the kids. This is an excellent thing, so far as I can tell. I think it’s great to have a season of being generous and forgiving, of parties and presents and of good cheer. The Romans thought so, too, which is why they celebrated Saturnalia over the solstice, in ways not all that different from the way we celebrate Christmas. In fact Jesus’s birthday is in the Spring sometime, but the Mass celebrating that birth was moved to coincide with Saturnalia in order to draw people away from Pagan gods. Like Saturn for example. December 25th was Mitra’s day, Mithra being a sun god that some Romans worshipped. It didn’t hurt Mithra that his day came in the middle of Saturnalia, and it hasn’t hurt Jesus any either. But as to Jesus being the reason we celebrate this time of year, well, no, it isn’t, but nice try. The fact that being generous and forgiving meshes well with “what Jesus would do” is a real bonus, though, I’ll give you that. As far as celebrating Jesus’s birthday goes, there’s no reason for a Christian not to, but one might be aware that everyone, even I, was born. That’s no big deal. Maybe there’s some other holiday you should be more concerned about? Uh, sure, maybe, right?

Personally, I’d prefer that stores start plugging Christmas maybe Thanksgiving week and no earlier. I’d also prefer that people keep in mind that there are a lot of holidays this time of year (even my Pagan friends celebrate Solstice or Yule) and that most of them urge people to be loving, generous and forgiving. Nobody is against you because they don’t call out your special holiday; zero clerks give a Pagan a “good Yule.”  For that matter, I’ve never heard a single “Good Kwanzaa, although my not being black might have something to do with that. This is a great time of year to let go of ourselves to the extent that we accept each other’s foibles and silly religious stories (any one you don’t believe in is silly, isn’t it?) Doing so won’t kill us, but it would make the holidays a lot easier to get through, don’t you think?

Happy Thanksgiving, Happy Chanukah, Merry Christmas, Ho Saturnalia, Good Mithra’s Day, Good Yule, Good Kwanzaa, and last but not least, Happy New Year 2014!

That oughta cover it.

Just saw Thor The Dark World. I know, little slow on this one. Good story, well told. And what I’d call a happy ending.

Something. About the fact that the Speaker of the House just caved. I have friends on Facebook who are truly shocked. (I made a joke to that effect, but it ain’t so.) They post rants such as “You sold out! You are worthless! You will never get re-elected!” I wonder if, when this is over, they plan to go back and try again to win that darned “War of Northern Aggression” too? It’s about the same attitude, and from some of the same people, at least in spirit. Boehner is their whipping boy du jour, and I suppose that’s to be expected. The thing is, he finally showed some spine and stood up for the business loving Republicans who are the closest thing to moderates in the Republican caucus. Just as the folks who fired on Fort Sumpter decided that righteousness would prevail against overwhelming odds, so did the Tea Party Republicans think that their ideological purity would prevail over the forces of Obama’s evil. They say that Obamacare is Communist, which simply demonstrates that they don’t know how Communism works. If Obamacare were a Communist program, the government would simply nationalize all healthcare, doctors, hospitals, clinics, etc., and then not charge any citizen for the use of the (most likely substandard) facilities. Like all of Communism, it sounds good until you start thinking about it. If Obamacare did that, they’d have a point. The truth is, Obamacare makes everybody get insurance, on the theory that insurance is cheapest when everybody is in the pool. Worldwide, private, single-payer insurance yields the lowest cost health care, and that’s the truth. But, Obamacare won anyway, and that’s not my theme here.

My theme is that a less ideologically pure solution was reached in the end. I don’t know what it is with some people, but they can’t seem to accept that nobody gets what they want in a democracy, but over time, we all pretty much get what we need. Being free isn’t, as some seem to believe, the ability to do whatever the heck you want. Being free is getting to choose how you contribute to society. You can contribute however you’re best suited, or however you want, but you do have to contribute. Even to the point of paying (gasp!) taxes. I mean, really, think about it. After our revolution, nobody forced our forefathers to set up a government. They did it voluntarily. Those guys were pretty damned smart, too, so you’d think even an ideologue would realize that maybe, just maybe, they knew something that the ideologue didn’t. But, that’s the problem with ideologues: they believe their own BS.

There are a couple of very pure ideological movements from the first half of the twentieth century that serve to illustrate the problem with a rigid ideology. I refer to the Bolsheviks in Russia, and the National Socialists in Germany. One left wing, the other right wing, both of them devolved into cruel and vicious regimes that ultimately failed. The Bolsheviks praised democracy, until they lost the election. Reasoning that “The people were fooled and made a bad choice” they staged a coup and took over. That’s why for seventy years or so we got to watch the Soviet Union grow, stagnate, and crumble in the light of modern communications. The Nazi party decided that forcible racial purity and conquest were the road to glory. Unfortunately, the rest of the world, including the Soviet Union no less, failed to share their vision, and they went down, as it were, in flames.

Racial purity is a sure path to extinction. So is ideological purity. What Boehner did today may doom his career, although I wouldn’t bet on it. Those business Republicans have a lot of money, after all. What he may have done, and this is still not certain, is saved the Republican Party. If the deal hadn’t gone through in time, then the Grand Old Party would have  been, for practical purposes, through. Those business people would have started a new party, sure as you’re born. The Liberals would still have hated them, and maybe vice-versa, but they’d have found a way to work together. I suspect that a lot of freshman representatives will not get re-elected next year. Partly because they “sold out” their Tea Party base, but more because they alienated a huge chunk of the middle of the American political spectrum. A little compromise may be a mess, but it’s how we’ve always done it. Just ask the boys at Appomatox.

If you read Crusing Part One you’ll think that everything was pretty cool. The food was great, there was entertainment, lovely scenery, Juneau is a fun place to spend a day (two might be pushing it) and overall this is a nice cruise. Well, yeah. So far, I’ll give you that. Other than that Sitka thing. Sitka, you see, was the capital of Russian America. It has a governor’s palace and a reproduced (after it burned down) Orthodox church from pre Alaska Purchase times. The transfer to the US took place in Sitka. It’s crawling with history. I’ll have to go see it sometime. Maybe via ferry? Seaplane? Well, on with the story.

After we reboarded from Juneau, Captain Van der Loo said that the storm had gotten so bad that we couldn’t stop at Ketchikan either. Well, shit! Seriously, we came to see Alaska and we got Juneau? Ketchikan was the third place in order that I really wanted to visit. It’s small, almost as small as Sitka, but still, there are totem poles and rainforest trails and, oh hell! We would, the Captain said, be going behind as many islands as possible, and end up with a full day in Victoria. The full day in Victoria was nice (more later) but Victoria is in Canada, of course, and not Alaska at all. My phone works in Canada, at 89 cents per minute, that is. We were warned that there would be movement of the ship. And there was, some. We wanted to go to the magic show, but ended up crashing at 9 PM (Alaska Daylight Time) due to excessive fatigue from walking all over Juneau. But, hey, we’re on a luxurious cruise ship, right? Lots of stuff to do for entertainment.

Until 11 PM when even the casino closes. The buffet up top, too. We’d been on a cruise before where there was no limit to when you could get a snack, or a drink, or gamble for that matter. And, we’re from Vegas so we sort of expect customer service to be important to the hotel. But, honestly, as a hotel to be stuck in for two days, which we were, it was top notch. One thing we discovered is that we really don’t like cruising, we like visiting places we’ve never seen. A ship is a perfectly good way to get to a place like that, or so we thought. But even the best hotel gets confining if you can’t walk out the door, and by golly, the next day, you couldn’t! Hurricane force winds and twenty foot seas and they had to seal off the promenade deck, so everybody was stuck inside. Here is a link to a You Tube Video of the 20-foot waves, taken from 8 stories above the normal water line.

Here’s a photo, taken from about fifty feet above the water. The seas were about 15 feet at this point:

These whitecaps are about 15 feet highphoto by Steve Fey

We did learn that we’re not cruisers by our nature. Some folks love just being on the ship and enjoying the good food and all, but about that . . .

I mentioned a buffet, up on the Lido deck. It’s okay, but it ain’t the Bellagio, if you get my drift. It’s not that the food is bad, it just isn’t special. And you have to compete for a table, and wait to pick up your food, and all of the drawbacks that even the Bellagio offers. For ordinary food. The main dining room, however, is something else. There you get waited on hand and foot, although sometimes not as quickly as you’d like, and the food truly is top of the line. Some people, as you may imagine, didn’t have to worry about eating that day. Another thing we discovered is that we are not apparently prone to seasickness, as we both enjoyed our meals as per usual. I even had some nice Spanish wine. I did get tired of bouncing off walls like a drunken, er, sailor as it were, and if it had gone on too long then, as my friends were were sailors have told me, I’d have been sick along with everybody else.

If you find yourself getting motion sick, a lot of the secret to minimizing the effect is to not fight it — roll with the ship, so to speak. And watch your step!

After two days bouncing along, where we did see Humpbacks, Porpoises one evening at dinner (where we had a window seat,) which made being cooped up a bit better, we arrived in the morning in Victoria, British Columbia, which is a very nice place to visit. We rented a car for the day so we were even able to stop at a garage sale, where we bought a whole bunch of close-out priced key chain souvenirs for a quarter a pop (the lady took US money, even) and drove around enjoying the island. That’s Vancouver Island, not to be confused with the city of the same name, which is an hour and a half away by ferry.

Something you don't see every day, even in Vegasphoto by Tami Cowden

We saw a lot of interesting things in Victoria. As one of our two stops, it sort of had to provide entertainment. This picture is of something I’d never seen before. Oddly, I see lots of Alaska plates in Vegas, but never a Yukon. (In Juneau I saw only one out of state plate — from Montana.) With that in mind, here are some more pictures of stuff we saw in our day in Canada.

Hey, the fudge was good, okay?photo by Tami Cowden

Whatever This Is, Is in Victoriaphoto by Steve Fey

Now, to be fair, on this trip I did find a Sitka Shop. Take a look:

The Sitka Specialty Shop -- in Victoria, BCphoto by Steve Fey

So, here’s the thing with the crew. We ordered room service breakfast on day 1. Excellent. Day 2, cold. Day 3, they forgot stuff, then brought the whole order, minus the stuff they forgot, then finally brought the stuff, but by that time who cared? They lost some papers we were keeping, apparently thinking they were trash, although they were stacked neatly on top of a DVD player. I think that they were all pretty new. In fact, the employee of the month had only been there six months. Could it be that Holland America doesn’t pay all that well? I report, you decide. So, okay, they can’t do anything about the weather, but gee whiz, cold breakfast? The buffet breakfast was decent (unlike dinner) and the dining room had a great breakfast. We also went to tea one day, and a “Mariner’s Lunch,” for repeat cruisers (turns out Carnival owns them and that counted) one day. Hey, if you cruise a hundred days with them you get a “copper colored” (the Captain’s phrase) medallion. If you live on their ships for a couple years you get a platinum one, not to be confused with the silver one for a lesser collection of cruise days. Ah, lovely. Well, anyway, we made it back to Seattle without incident, paid to have them take our luggage to the airport so we could hang around Seattle a couple more hours, then took a train to the airport and came back to the blessedly dry oasis of Las Vegas.

Heck, one last picture from Seattle. It’s outside the Public Market.

This is just outside of the Public Market in Seattlephoto by Tami Cowden

And that’s about it. But, you may know I’ve always been musically inclined, so I had to put together a song about this trip. No, I didn’t really compose it: it is a parody, but I did write these new words. So, before you go, here’s an earworm for you to enjoy for a while. I know I did!

Now this is a tale of two cruisers who were out to raise some smiles.
They left to visit the frozen north; they’d be gone for quite a while. (Gone for quite a while!)

They’d visit Juneau, Sitka too, then on to Ketchikan, With a stop off in Victoria just to complete the plan.

Their captain was a sailin’ man, the ship was big and sure, Whatever came, there’d be no blame: it’d be a wonderful tour. (Be a wonderful tour!)

Two days at sea and they got to see some glaciers in many a form,
Then the captain said, “Sitka is dead – there’s a big old Northern storm!” (A big old Northern storm!)

Now that was bad, they both were sad, but they still had Ketchikan, But the captain said they’d miss that too as from the storm they ran.

The weather started getting rough, the big ol’ ship was tossed,
And no matter what the crew could do, some lunches soon were lost! (Some lunches soon were lost!)
Spoken: but not our heroes; they just got bruised bouncing off the walls. I mean bulkheads!

Hurricane Winds! Twenty foot seas! Enough to make you cry! And, what the heck? No one on deck, unless you want to fly. (Unless you want to fly!)

Two days at sea that were not to be when they set sail that day. And soon they started wondering if the sea was the place to play!

It made them mad, but they were glad to see Seattle’s isles, ‘Cause they’d have put in anywhere; even Gilligan’s Isle!

Get Your Kicks . . .

The picture below was taken on my travels. But not anywhere near Route 66. It does show the allure of the Mother Road, though, because the upholstery pictured is on a seat, in fact all of the bench seats, in a restaurant called The Hangar, in Juneau, Alaska.

All over the country, if not beyond, people know how to get their kicks!

Get Your Kicks in The Hangar, Juneau Alaska Waterfront!
photo by Steve Fey

Tami and I celebrated our 20th anniversary in Juneau, Alaska last week. We planned a cruise up that way for about eight months, upgraded our room to include a veranda with a nice view. We sailed on the MS Oosterdam, from Rotterdam, with Captain Van der Loo. This post and what follows should I decide to do a part two, is part travelogue, part review, and part confessional. Or revelation of what I learned about myself on this trip. Whichever.

So, let’s start as a travelogue, shall we? We had been to Seattle separately, but never together, so we flew up two days early to spend some time in that city. I’d really enjoyed my first trip, in  1973, and I was hoping that the place was still as nice as I remembered. It is. We have both taken the Seattle Underground Tour so we skipped it, but I recommend it if you’ve never done it. The city is ten feet higher than it used to be. Seems that the city founders decided to build on a tide flat. It reminds me of those guys in Jamestown who built in a swamp. I swear, some people . . . What we did first was go to the Zoo.

(If you click on a picture you can see it full sized. Most are pretty big, so beware if you’re on one of them little smartphone thingies.)

This Guy is at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle
photo by Steve Fey

The bears at the Woodland Park Zoo seemed frickin’ huge to me. This one was into posing for pictures, apparently. He kept coming back for more. His friends stayed in the background.

We also visited the Experience Music Project museum, next to the Space Needle. The building was designed by Frank Gehry, the same guy who did the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Disease in Las Vegas. I’ll say this for him, the guy has a distinct style. The Lou Ruvo looks like scrambled brains (on purpose.) The EMP is supposed to look like smashed guitars. From above (it is next to the Space Needle) it actually sort of does. From the ground it just looks weird. The museum houses permanent exhibits on Jimi Hendrix and Nirvana (who’d have thought?) Also there are exhibits on pop culture, sci-fi, and fantasy. No kidding. We got to see Bert Lahr’s lion suit from The Wizard of Oz, which is made from mangy looking lion pelts. We also saw Data’s uniform from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and a whole lot of other neat stuff. Now, just to give you something to look at, here is the first thing you see when you go in:

A Lot of Instruments Went Into This!
photo by Steve Fey

Neither of us had ever been up the Space Needle, so we went up for dinner. You need reservations, and a lot of money, but the view and the food are both spectacular. The restaurant is a whole lot like the “Top of the World” in Las Vegas in the Stratosphere, but, I hate to admit this, the view is better in Seattle. After dinner, we went out on the observation deck to watch the sunset over Puget Sound. Here is one of several photos that resulted from that visit.

Sunset over Puget Sound 9-14-2013
photo by Tami Cowden

And that was it for Seattle, really. We got tired enough to drop over and sleep for a week. Instead, we took ship the next afternoon amidst Dutch officers and a Filipino crew. As a Las Vegas resident comedian said one evening, “How many Dutch officers does it take to change a light bulb? None! They get a Filipino to change it for them!”  Anyhow, here’s the last we saw of Seattle for a week.

One Last View of Seattle
photo by Steve Fey

More about officers and crew later. For now, the cruise started out really nice. The food was top notch, there’s a spa on board (for a fee) that, as I said at the time, let me lead “a dog’s life.” I mean a real dog’s life, not whatever the expression is supposed to mean. There’s a nice gym where the treadmills face forward. It’s on deck 9, so the view is tremendous. More about that later, also. By the time we returned from dinner, we were between Victoria and Port Angeles and heading for the Pacific Ocean. Hey, we’d been on that ocean before, but never in the far North. Next morning we were out far enough for them to open the casino and everything. Yeah, I know, I’m from Vegas and they had a “casino.” It had some machines and some tables, so it was technically all there. We spent the day loafing, at the spa, reading, whatever. Thing is, I get bored sitting in the same place all the time. But the first day everything was new enough, hey, I didn’t care. And from day 3 on we’d be in port every day. Things would be swell.

On the third day we cruised the Tracy Arm after lunch. It was colder than heck, and the weather? Well, check this video!

Short Tracy Arm Video

See that white stuff whipping by? It wasn’t quite snow, more like heavy sleet. This is not a bad weather day on Tracy Arm, not at all. It’s cold and nasty, but it’s gorgeous! (You thought I was getting to the bad part, huh?) Here are a couple of pictures of stuff we saw up the arm. The glacier is called the Sawyer Glacier, by the way. And believe me, this trip is worth doing, if you get the chance. That blue ice is not a trick of the light. It really is blue!

Tracy Arm
photo by Steve Fey

The Top of Tracy Arm -- Sawyer Glacier
photo by Steve Fey

By dinner time we were on our way to Juneau. And Captain Van der Loo said that due to a nasty Pacific storm, we were going to miss Sitka. Damnation, that’s the old Russian capitol! Oh, well, we still have Ketchikan, so on to Juneau, which is where we woke up the next morning, bright and early.

Juneau is an interesting town. The State Capitol has no dome. In fact, it’s an office building downtown, next to a line of tourist shops. Come to think of it, there are two industries (okay, 3 if you count fishing) and the other two are government and tourism. Of course, from today until May that leaves only one, er two if you have the nerve, and I decided quickly that if I lived there I’d either kill myself or somebody else within six months. Might not matter which. Nice place, don’t get me wrong, but teeny, and gloomy.

But I don’t want to dwell on that aspect of Juneau. It’s a great place to visit, and they have a glacier, too. The famous Mendenhall glacier, which is still there and posing for pictures. It has been retreating 300 feet a year, so if you want to see it, I’d say book your trip now, because it’s worth a visit. Rather than pay cruise prices for a tour, we bought a Van tour that stopped at the glacier, a Catholic shrine with wonderful views, and also Douglas Island, where there’s a good view of the city. I live in a city of 2 million. Juneau has 30,000 residents. But, it’s a city. A Capitol city, in fact. But here, look at some pictures:

One of a gazillion tourist shops in Juneau
photo by Steve Fey

I’m told that the name of this store is pronounced “Hom Rossi.” That’s Russia House, in English. This is one of a great many. Oh, a great many, shops in Juneau catering to tourists. Russia House is right across from where our ship was docked, so it was easy to find. But we found quite a few more. Juneau was especially good for me because it is in the USA, and on the USA phone grid. I had six bars, 4GLTE, and I could use my regular bin of minutes. On the ship calls were $2.49 per minute, and you don’t want to know what they charge for data. Even if you don’t have to ask, you can’t afford it. Juneau gave me a chance to catch up on phone calls, and even post one tweet. Just one. Originally I’d planned to do that in each port, but as we will see, that became impossible. Certainly, at the time we were in Juneau, Sitka was out.

But, I mentioned the Mendenhall glacier. Here is a picture of it:

Mendenhall Glacier, September 18, 2013
photo by Steve Fey

I dated the photo because, as I said earlier, it is receding at a good clip. If you go even next year, you’ll see a different scene. This year, I wouldn’t go. Fall in Juneau is September, plain and simple. If you leave right now, you’ll be there for the first of winter. If you do go, you’ll want to eat. Our van driver recommended The Hangar on the Waterfront, saying that the locals all liked it. And I’ll bet he’s right, because it was, for Alaska, cheap enough, and the food was great. This will sound odd, but I had Jambalaya with fresh Alaskan prawns. It was excellent, and I’m not kidding. The Hangar also features upholstered benches with Route 66 logos all over it. You can look under my “Route 66″ articles to see for yourself. Also they feature Alaskan beers. That’s a brand, besides being, of course, just what they are. I also buy them in Las Vegas sometimes. I prefer the Amber, but hey, they make a variety of styles.

Heck, here is some more of that glacier.

Part of the parkland adjacent to Mendenhall glacier
photo by Steve Fey

Pretty stuff, huh?

Something you should do if you’re in Juneau is take the tramway up Mount Roberts. When we stepped ashore at 8am it was cloudy at the top (you can see all the way up — 1800 feet.) But after lunch, although it was still cloudy, the “undercarriage” (my word) of fog and cloud had gone away, so up we went. At the top are trails you can hike (you can walk up, or down if you’re crazy enough, but I’d take the tram,) gift shops, a restaurant, and some excellent views. Juneau is a popular place with cruise ships. Here, for instance, is a view from Mt. Roberts on the day we visited. My favorite activity on Mt. Roberts was when I bought an aloha shirt, on sale, featuring an Alaska motif. It was made in Cambodia. That about says it all, doesn’t it? I’ve worn it since returning to the desert. I like it.

Ships in Juneau harbor, 9-18-2013
photo by Steve Fey

They get up to 8 ships in a day. The day we were there they had 4 visit. We got there first, so we are from the ship in the lower right-hand corner of the photo, the one docked right across from the shopping district. To the left is another ship docked in a similar berth but a couple of blocks away. Right on the left side is the third one in, docked at a wooden pier and using a portable gangway that looks sort of like one at a lake cabin in Minnesota. The last ship in, to the right and centered, used light boats to shuttle passengers to and from short. I have no idea where four more ships would go, but there’s lots of good deep harbor, and maybe the lightering docks are capacious. That’s right, I said “capacious.” You wanna make something of it?

That’s the first half of our cruise, and the first half of this post. For more, be sure to look for “Cruising Part Two!”

Then you should attend Fiction Writing in the Digital age in Las Vegas on October  11^th and 12^th! The Fiction Writing in the Digital Age conference includes several workshops on how to market your published books. The faculty includes indie and traditionally published authors in addition to agents and editors. Meet fellow writers and learn more about the industry from folks like Morgan St. James, Jo Wilkins, Peter Senftleben and many more. And on Friday evening there is The Atomic Book Signing at Atomic Liquors! Visit nevadawriters.org for more information.

Peggy Richardson will be presenting at the Fiction Writing in the Digital Age conference in Las Vegas on September 11^th and 12^th. Peggy excels at making the unclear clear, bridging the gap between people and technology. She has been involved in publishing more than 200 books, eBooks, and information products, both for herself and for clients. She is known for taking complicated technical language and making it accessible and real. She’s a great asset for anyone thinking of publishing a book in electronic form, and she’s just one of the presenters at the conference! Visit nevadawriters.org for more information.

I don’t rant all that often any more, but seriously, some of the anti immigration stuff I see is just getting tedious. So, here . . .

I had some cousins at Jamestown (named Powell.) My first direct ancestor in America was named William Powell. He was living in Philadelphia in 1749. His son Phillip fought with the Continental Army (with Connecticut for some reason,) so he was at Valley Forge, crossed the Delaware with General Washington, all that. His grandson, or maybe great-grandson, was named Andrew Powell. Andrew was a corporal in the 123rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry during the effort to preserve the Union, which I am happy to report succeeded nicely. Andrew was my great-grandfather. I had other ancestors arrive from foreign lands, of course, the last one in 1888 (I think.) He’s the one my family name comes from.

In case you missed the theme, I have genuine W.A.S.P. credentials. And the current immigrants are delightful, so far as I’m concerned.

Now, since the problem seems to be that some believe that immigrants are late-comers who are threatening our livelihood and way of life, how about those who are bitching about immigrants move to wherever their ancestors moved here from? The new immigrants are, at least, glad to be here!  So says a descendant of the guys who stole the country from the Indians in the first place!

This movie is funnier than all heck. Example: not only is she a cat lady, it isn’t even her cat!