Today’s entire front page is about the two mass shootings over the past three days, one in Southern California, and the other one fifty miles from my house. We can continue to believe that it won’t affect any of us, that mass shootings happen to other people. It’s getting to the point where we can no longer fool ourselves into believing that.
Then it got worse. I opened the front section of the paper and read that two teens, in my hometown of Des Moines, Iowa, were shot and killed yesterday while attending an alternative educational program (school). California has mass shootings, Iowa has mass shootings. Everywhere in the U.S. has mass shootings.
Blah, blah, blah. This post could turn into more negative facts and statistics, but I don’t want to do that. I want to tell about what else is in today’s paper, which keeps the bad stuff at bay, at least for a little while. Nominations for the Razzies (Purple Raspberry Awards) came out yesterday, an antidote to the Oscar nominations. The awards are for the worst of the worst. Tom Hanks got nominated twice, once for Elvis and again for Pinocchio. Not that Pinocchio, the other one. The animated one is quite charming.
M&M’s were also in today’s paper. They have been discussed by Tucker Carlson on Fox. He thinks changing the female shoes on two of the M&M’s to lower heels has made them androgynous. He called the new purple M&M fat. While Mars Wrigley wanted to make the animated candies more inclusive, Carlson has called them woke and therefore un-American.
The definition of woke is someone having empathy toward others not like themselves. Florida’s DeSantis has called his state “where woke goes to die.” That’s like saying that Florida has no empathy. But maybe we already knew that. Isn’t he the one who sent 50 Venezuelan immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard with promises of work and housing? Or was that Kemp from Texas? I get those two mixed up. One of them also sent busloads of immigrants to Kamala Harris’s house in D.C. in the dead of winter.
I have my day planned out, Costco with son, walk the dogs, get ready for chorus, go to chorus. I might go to the bank to get my sis’s rings so Mom can give them away to relatives. Last time I tried the bank was closed, shaving an hour off each end of its work day – bankers’ hours. It’s been so long since I went to the deposit box, I hope I have the right key.
The rains have stopped for now, but not before it took down my neighbors’ hill. They cleared all vegetation from their hill a few years back and have been tarping it every winter. This year, the rains won and the hill came down with nothing there to hold it together. Even the weeds could’ve saved that hill. But weeds are ugly, I guess.
I could do yardwork, but that will stuff me up for singing. I’ll wait a day for that. Hike on Thursday. Dancing on Sunday, if I can get anyone to go with me. It’s the Forty-niner game at the same time.
Priorities, people. Mine is always dancing.
FIRST DATE, WORST DATE EVER! 