Has-beens, never-wases and what happens when you're 50

Apparently when you’re 50, your heart suddenly shrinks by 20%. That’s the age when it becomes immediately apparent who has been a good steward of their body and who has not. It has nothing to do with how dazzling your eyes were at age 20 or a square jaw or cutesy nose. Around that age, its like when the tide goes out and you suddenly see who’s wearing a bathing suit.
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I often wonder about people who are on the far outer fringes of celebrity. On the one hand, pitching Time-Life CDs or doing commercial voice-over work probably beats having a real job. Don’t believe it when they tell you otherwise. Vanna White was interviewed (yes, I regret reading it and still remembering) and amongst her aimless nothing-to-say ramblings, mentioned that everyone thought that it was so easy to have her job. But apparently, turning letters is such a tough gig. I mean, you have to know which letters to turn (you turn the ones that light up, Vanna).

Same with cartoonists. They come in with expectations that it will be easy, but then it turns into a 9-5 job just to do the art. I just don’t see it. Spend the extra time on the joke, you guys. No one cares if Dagwood has five perfectly straight hairs up the side of his head or only three, or if Blandie is inexplicably shocked that her husband discusses his creepy food fetish again.

I seem to have run off track a bit. You have to think that most of these people thought at one time that they were going to be the next Al Pacino or Meryl Streep and are instead locked in a studio recording multiple takes about the 2010 Ford Fusion. A success story from that genre, Barry Manilow got his start pitching commercial jingles. Worse, from the tacky to the uber-tacky, he sings those same jingles at his concerts even to this day.

But then there’s the post-glamor letdown. Flo & Eddie from the 60’s band The Turtles had their own radio show on K-Rock. Guaranteed you’d hear their “Happy Together” hit at the start and close of their show as if to say “We were famous once. Now we’re doing a radio show and not even during drive time.”
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Michelle Obama was an adult before she was proud of her country for the first time. But I read about the annual reunion of the Hatfields and the McCoys in the newspaper. After five or six generations of shooting at each other and three generations of indifference, the decedents have various theories but can’t pinpoint the exact nature of the original conflict. They all get together for a picnic each summer and interact. That’s why I’m proud of America. The Serbs, the Croats, the Shiites, the Sunnis, the Kurds, et al, they can’t put the rifles down and eat at the same table.
I also saw a clip of the reunion at Gettysburg. 75 years after that historical battle, the surviving members met at the wall where the fiercest fighting took place. Instead of a violent clash, they shook hands. They were also 95 years old, but you understand the gesture.
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The politicos engage in chronic game-theory strategy. They know that someone from one of the two parties will win almost every election. So you don’t have to do anything worthy, you just have to demonstrate that the competition is unworthy. “Brie-eating, merlot sipping liberal! Go back to France!” “This is Wisconsin brie and California wine – and it’s PINOT NOIR, you ignoramus!!” Public interest is left out of the bickering entirely. So I understand the desirability of the Tea Party trying to be the long-sought-after answer to many of our country's complaints. In practice, however, most of the candidates that they endorse are right wing Republican. Libertarians have long since espoused the Tea Party platform, but without success. I voted Libertarian for the '84 elections, by the way. It was an absentee ballot in the biggest landslide in history. I hope that I put a smile on the Lib candidate by doubling his vote count.

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Pelosi is extremely consistent in her views. Boxer a little less so, but still mostly consistent. However, they’re consistently extremist liberal. I don’t want extremists of either variety in office. You can argue that left wing extremists balance out the right wing extremists, but like I just said, I don’t want ANY extremists in office. I feel like the spam guy on Monty Python. “But I don’t like spam.” “You can have the spam, spam, eggs & spam. That hasn’t got much spam in it.” “But I don’t want ANY spam!” “I’ll eat your spam, I LOVE it!” Then some Vikings come in singing some wacky spam song.
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Not to change the subject, but I’m going to change the subject.

I saw the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage. Not enough Raquel Welch in tights, other than that, a good movie for the time. Amazing how they could shrink a submarine to microscopic proportions, yet had a non-digital display on their clocks. I’d be willing to suspend my disbelief if only they showed more of the young Ms. Welch in spandex.

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I was listening to the John Tesh radio show (not on purpose). He was showing how cool he was by talking about the texting acronyms. No, John, “WTF” does not stand for “Why the face?”