FERRERMAN- AGAIN?

One of my first tasks tending bar, was working the service bar in the kitchen of a very nice steakhouse. It was a good way for a kid who technically wasn't legal to drink alcohol to learn how to make cocktails. It was a good set-up for all as the waitresses could put in food and drink orders in the same area, saving time and a lot of steps in the process. Most restaurants don't have the space for this, but this one had been designed by a very good restaurant man. It was a busy place and I learned speed. There are only two kinds of bartenders: the quick and the dead. I was becoming a top hand.  I was brand new to the business and fascinated by the organized chaos of the kitchen with the waitresses barking out orders to the cooks on the line, the cooks repeating those orders and all this getting done in a timely, tasty, manner. I picked up on what was going down, enough to know that I didn't want to be on either side of that line. It has always bemused me though, that it took...

 There are threats against presidents and other elected officials all the time. Most are easily dismissed when the Secret Service visits the person and they determine the person is unserious or totally incapable of carrying out whatever their threat might have been. It's usually somebody talking shit, with no terrorist or political ties.  But what if they learned of a credible one, with a fit, educated, potential bad actor, with actual intent and desire? Could they keep such a person on a long leash if they might be able to use him for political purposes with no risk of them succeeding?  Crime-fighting includes stealth and undercover agents infiltrating criminal organizations at every level, from the feds on down to your local cops. It even- according to Trump's ridiculous DOJ- might include The Southern Poverty Law Center (a non-profit Civil Rights organization) because they allegedly  used paid informants to infiltrate the Klan and other evil entities to keep an ey...

 Well, fuck me a-runnin'- it really was about expediting Trump's ridiculous ballroom fantasy! Within moments of the *attack*, pundits that had been queued up all evening unleased their posts, all pretty much saying, "THIS is why we need a ballroom!" Seemed a little planned, didn't it? The production values of these assassination attempts  have never been good under Trump. Most people put as much stock in the three as they do his claims to have ended eight wars. This WHCD one seemed really thrown together. It was utter chaos as SS and security scrambled about, seemingly for effect, and diners seemed confused and unaware of what was actually happening. How many thought a waiter dropped plates? All the *action* and gunplay transpired on the floor above. The guests were never in danger. But part of the show is to get the first-class passengers to the safety of the lifeboats of the US Titanic, because people expect that. We all found out how not precious the wives are ...

 I had no intention of watching the White House Correspondents Dinner last night, because those things aren't funny like they used to be. This was going to be the first one Trump ever attended whilst president. That's interesting because he had four opportunities to attend the shenanigans in his first term, but passed because, for a fat guy, he has very thin skin. He does not take teasing very well. He takes umbrage instead and he doesn't do well at that either. We may never know, but since part of his charm is insulting the press corps and journalists, he might have had some real zingers lined up about Kaitlyn Collins that would really put the fourth estate in their place, probably for good. Lard knows the {{{FAKENEWS}}} really needs to be destroyed and that was one of the things he was elected to do that Kamala Harris could not  be bothered to do because she's all political and doesn't golf. And she hasn't been dreaming of a ballroom for 150 years like a man w...

 Trump is going to allow firing squads for executions. Clearly, this is to satiate the bloodlust of his Maga faithful and give his regime the appearance of being all into law & order, but there is more afoot. There always is. Twenty-seven states allow capital punishment, but six of those are under moratoriums and not currently allowed to kill anyone. Does Trump's Kingly edict override all fifty states? Who knows when a republic gives way to a fascist monarchy overnight? It's hard to keep up with the changes when they come via a social media site or Executive Orders.  Personally, my beef with capital punishment is that it is too final. You make legal missteps and put a person in prison for life; you can give that person their life back when new evidence shows they were innocent. If you execute them, you can't. I don't generally have compassion for murderers even though there might be very good reasons to take another's life. These United States are chockful of la...

 I've never been one in life to have 'good enemies'. I've always been stuck with losers who thought they could better themselves by attaching to me like a parasite. This has been the case at both work and play.  I still hear from a person  who glommed onto me years ago on a now-defunct site known as Topix. It was as vitriolic and offensive as I guess Twitter is now, though on a much smaller scale. You couldn't block people there because the owner knew that would have been the kiss of death to his business model as, quite obviously, the only thing keeping the lights on was trolls annoying and fighting with people. It was moderated by trolls. Trolls there would have like twenty/thirty accounts where they would harass each other and other posters and talk to themselves to further their nonsense. It was fun though and I made some lifelong friends there.  I honed my writing skills and learned to take people down, shortly and sweetly. I mean, I always had that in me, but ...

 I finished the last episode of my umpteenth binging of "The Sopranos" last night. It is still the best series that has ever been on television, and probably always will be. It is so good, that even when you know everything that is going to happen, happens, you still enjoy it. Rewatching gives the viewer a chance to study characters closer, understand their arc more, and appreciate the actor's skill at their craft. James Gandolfini was born to play Tony Soprano. He owned the role and did it better than no one else possibly could. Tony was a horrible person. I've heard all my life that actors prefer to play the villain because they can better display their acting chops and really explore the role. Fine. Probably. Daniel Day-Lewis is arguably the greatest actor alive today and he was born to play Bill the Butcher in "Gangs of New York", also a mob boss. Neither actor could step in and play either role, great as they are. That's just the way it goes with ac...

 Oh, sure, that's easy for libs to say. But as soon as Maga attempts to believe all women, the dang libs shoot them down! I'm speaking, of course, about the young, blonde and beautiful, Emily Hart, the Maga influencer that stole the hearts of many Maga men- and probably a few Maga women. Maga believed and evidently bought the bikini photos to prove it. And I guess some nudes too. Emily said all the right things about how awful libs were. She drank beer and liked pickup trucks. She was a paragon of Maga womanhood. And libs destroyed her! The recently late Charlie Kirk asked a few thousand times, "What is a woman?" It was a gotcha question, rhetorical in that the rules are that if you are asked a stupid question like that, you must answer it to the complete satisfaction of the asker, or they automatically win. I don't make the rules.  As it turns out, your average Maga doesn't know what a woman is because they thought Emily Hart was one when she was actually an ...

My first thought when I heard about The Rape Academy was, "How's their football team this year?" Well, that's my first thought about any online school so, please don't be offended.   There is not much new under the sun in the year of our Trump 2026 though, so I didn't doubt it even though the first posts about it said that 62 million men were *enrolled* in this unnatural extension of Trump University and evidently that figure is actually the number of views the site has gotten. That is abhorrent in itself, but it represents a smaller number of fucking weirdos looking at it a whole bunch of times.  I assume this is some *dark web* shit but I don't really know. I'm not going to look it up! What I hear  is that much of it is guys filming and talking about raping their own wives for the entertainment and bragging rights, with other like-minded scumbags. I can only assume there are some procedurals outlined for students as well. That is sickening. It's ...

 So much speculation about Trump likely being senile. Yet we listen to him talk to FOX's Maria Fartaroma and he sounds so almost reasonably lucid and normal. Stupid- but good. If you want a conspiracy about his mental health, try this on for size: They are using the possibility of Alzheimer's to try to cover up the fact that he's a fucking idiot.  People are sympathetic to Alzheimer's. Except for Maga, people aren't generally sympathetic to stupidity. Probably every family in America has an elderly loved one who is steadily losing it mentally. We see that grandma or grandpa is forgetful and getting lost in the past while telling stories and forgetting people's names more than usual. And you know this is beyond the normal cluttered mind of old age. It happens to the best of us.  Well, Trump is certainly not the best of us. I have been pondering this a long time, but in my umpteenth bingeing of "The Sopranos", I started thinking of this more when the epi...

 I am always at least a little suspicious of sex scandals involving politicians or celebrities. You should be too. Fame is a dirty game played with sketchy people on the fringes trying to manipulate those on the pedestals of life, for fun and profit. The legitimacy of accusations should come into question. There should be investigations. There should not  be lynchings, out on the range or on social media.  Congressman Eric Swalwell is a leading democratic candidate to be the next governor of California. That's a pretty serious gig. Timing being everything in life and politics, you do have to question the timing of this woman coming forward and of those that followed her revelation with their own tales of untoward encounters with Swalwell. Why now, when he's leading a governor's race? Why didn't this happen when he was a mere congressman? That's still a pretty big target. Did someone hold onto this info for better timing or was this woman a victim who could no longer...

 Last night I learned I was "Generation Jones". That sounds like black exploitation flick Tarantino might have made, but it's not. It was a YouTube about the 1954- 1965 segment of the post-WWII "baby boom" children and how we really aren't boomers.  I never felt like I was a boomer. In our family of 7 kids, two older sisters are actual boomers, four of us aren't (technically now) and the youngest might be an "X". I don't really know what the demarcations are of the X, Y and Z's. Why did they start so early in the alphabet with double b's and then jump to the end? Did they know Trump was going to destroy the planet? Why start with alliteration and then go straight to the higher Scrabble letters? It doesn't make any sense. But it doesn't make any sense that I am a boomer either. Never felt like one, but stupid kids of one of the three other generations still might say to me, "OK, boomer" if they think I'm too pre...

 I'm often surprised when people recognize me. Several years ago, I was walking downtown, passed a popular restaurant, and about a block and a half later, an exhausted old grade school friend tapped me on the shoulder. "Buns" had been having lunch with his wife and another couple, and in a slit second had recognized me as his old pal, Ferrerman. How did he do that? I hadn't seen him in a couple of decades. I probably had looked right at him in the window, but nothing registered on my end. Later I remembered that Buns and his same wife had seated themselves at the bar in the town I was working, years ago, and greeted me by my name, a trick often used by customers to fake familiarity because the house forced us to wear name tags. Had he not introduced himself, I never would have spotted him. It was a "Cold Case" moment, if you recall that show.  Most recently, I was in a nearby store and saw one of my cousin's kids and his wife, a few feet behind me. I smi...

Saw a meme this morning about how the actress Helen Hunt won the Academy Award for best actress in 1989 and thanked a former teacher of hers for believing in her. In the meme, it was related that the teacher was fired for refusing to fail young Helen and opting instead to tutor her for her dyslexia. Helen gave the then-retail worker the $3million earned for being chosen best actress, and the woman opened up a school to tutor other kids like Helen.  Red flags all over the field for this one. I think the only true thing was that Helen Hunt won best actress that year. (I'm not even sure of that!) It's not true that winning that award comes with a cash prize of any amount. Somebody Snopes'd it, but Snopes is one of those sites that DEMANDS you take your Adblocker out back and kill it before you can read. You can't just pause it and enjoy the ads with the story. Many sites that DEMAND such violence go on to require you to subscribe for a low, low fee to spare you from having...

When it comes to television, I usually don't want to know how the sausage is made. I don't try too hard to figure out whodunnit, because with fiction, that's up to the writer. For example, "DTF St. Louis", a limited series on HBO/MAX. I *think* that Floyd killed himself to provide his wife, Carol, with a comfortable life he absolutely cannot give her due to his debt and curved penis. But isn't that what the writer's want  me to think? Of course it is. They led me down the garden path with that notion just as the insurance payoff also pointed the curved penis at Carol. She stands to profit BIGLY from Floyd's death obviously, and a spouse is always the #1 suspect. And, of course, Clark, who is Floyd's best friend- and Carol's lover, and presumably has a penis as straight as a preacher's dick, might want Carol and the money for his own self. These are all possibilities. It's up to the writers, just like in real life as with Trump murders l...

 I only spend 23 minutes in the laundromat these days thanks to my new policy of hanging my clothes to dry indoors, but 23 minutes was long enough to perform a very necessary act of resistance. On the reading rack, I found a fresh copy of a periodical called, "GUN NEWS". It had been untouched by other human hands. I put it in my back pocket to keep it from falling into impressionable minds. I like to help out wherever I can.  It was chock full of pedantic gun lover bullshit. The headline story was about how Chicago's black mayor, Brandon Johnson, has an armed security force of 150- and YOU DON'T.  Well, I don't know if that figure is accurate, and I don't really care. I do know that this is likely the case with all big city mayors. I also know that the NRA crowd objected to Barack Obama having armed security (the Secret Service) when he was POTUS and  YOU DIDN'T. They really did. I wondered in 2016 if Trump would be the first US president to boldly fiscall...

  Often when I'm watching TV and an attractive actress has delivered a sterling performance, I'll say to no one in particular (because no one in particular is ever here) that "She does a good job for a girl with such a spankable bottom".  Is that sexist or misogynist? I don't think so. I see it as a poignant, ferrer assessment. Here is the inspiration for today's post.  A “DE I Hire”   You might notice that the good doctor is quite attractive, in an approachable, girl-next-door sort of way. But she's sitting down while talking about D.E.I hires so we can't see her bonafides. Just trust me. I know what I'm talking about. The doctor explains quite well that people (republicans) who are against DEI do not know what they are complaining about and they have a funny way of looking at hiring when it comes to women and minorities. Male mopes like Trump, Musk and RFK Jr. are readily perceived as earning their stations in life despite us knowing better. A ma...