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As points of shared cultural reference, certain pieces of movie and television soundtrack music have become nearly indispensable to our modern existence. The theme from The Twilight Zone, for instance, is used to indicate the occurrence of a spooky coincidence. Or the theme from Jaws is hummed just as one person sneaks up behind another in a pool. When people sing the familiar themes from famous movies like Psycho or Deliverance, they make an instantly understandable shorthand reference to a specific idea or emotion, without having to speak a single word. The same is true for a snippet of soundtrack from a very obscure 1950s television program called Burlesque. That piece of music by David Rose is to acts of old-fashioned striptease roughly what the theme from Rocky is to early-morning winter jogs. Composed in 1958 and released as a single four years later, the hammy tune called “The Stripper” became a #1 pop hit in the United States on July 7, 1962. Continue Reading read more

The name of Loudon Wainwright’s last album was Older Than My Old Man Now and I bet that title fits many of us Baby Boomers! Yes our fathers worked hard and died young. My Dad was 60 years old when he died of a heart attack in 1984, his younger brother Arthur was only 55! His father was 53 when he died from his third heart attack in 1953!

The reason that I bring this up today is that today is my father’s birthday. Wow, has it really been almost 30 years since he died, I guess it has, Nick and Andrew were just infants when he died and obviously he never got to know Peter or Elizabeth, but I know he would be proud of all four of them! read more

Will and Barb – We’ll Continue Your Fight!

New readers to this blog may look at the top of the right sidebar and question, why are there two Lung Cancer organizations posted with requests for donations. The reason is that back in January of this year my son’s brother-in-law Will Marris, lost his battle with lung cancer he was 30 years old.(Here is a report that ABC News report Nadya Han did on lung cancer featuring Will and Nicole) He was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer about 3 years earlier, just before my son Peter and Will’s sister Melissa were married. Oh, by the way Will was a non-smoker! Both of the organizations on the right sidebar are organizations that sponsor runs throughout the US to raise money for lung cancer research. Lung Cancer kills more people than all the other major cancers combined, and yet it is the least funded of all the cancers. I have participated in both runs and expect participating again this year! read more

While I was at work the other night at Target, I overheard a conversation between a father and daughter. The father said something I don’t think I’ve ever heard before, “Remember, Mommy said, buy lot’s of candy!”  After they left, that phrase kept spinning around in my head like Lewis Black overhearing , “If it wasn’t for that horse, I wouldn’t have spent that year in college!” So I kept trying to figure it out, and some possible explanations came to me: read more

Earring Holder

Last night my daughter, Elizabeth, was working on a craft project (pictured above) and needed the staple gun. She asked me to find it, so I went down to the basement and found the hidden in plain sight among my tools. I remembered that the last time I picked it up, it really didn’t seem to be working right. So while sitting on my yoga mat, I tested it. Like the last time, it did not appear to be working. I tried it again, only this time, I pressed down a little harder. The first time I tried it I was holding it over the rug, the second time it was over my yoga mat, of course the second time’s harder push worked and now my yoga mat is stapled to the floor!! read more

So we have five cats, four of them are male and one is female, One cat, Fenwick, the neurotic, stays away from the rest and lives in one room in the rear of the house. He used to be picked on, and was terrified of the other cats, but now he is happy in his little room. Often he is hard to find as he hides places you would never think he would fit, especially when he knows the vacuüm is coming! Of the other four cats one, Liam, is beloved.One James is semi-beloved. James is the brother of the neurotic Fenwick. The other two are Cow and Gabrielle. Cow, is black and white and the size of a small heifer. Think Kliban cat…… read more

So it’s not often that you get to see two of your children achieve major milestones in their lives in the same month, but that is what we’ve been able to do this month. First, Elizabeth graduated from William and Mary and tonight our son Peter graduates from Rutgers – Camden!! The one good thing about tonight is that we don’t have to drive 8 plus hours to get there, we only have to drive to Camden. The one bad thing about tonight is that we have to drive to Camden. But seriously we could not be more proud of both of their achievements! read more