Column Title: "Fade to Gray: Happy birthday to me"
Appeared in the Saratogian on: December 25, 2021
Word count: 862 words.
Excerpt: On this exact date in 1962, a lovely woman named Jane Gray summoned her husband in their South Troy home and said, "It's time." A little while later the Gray family, which resided at 284 Mann Ave., welcomed their fourth and final child.
Me.
I usually hide from people when my birthday is because I don't want or need any more attention. Beaming into people's homes on the TV news five nights a week for 32 years gets one plenty of that. Kids ask me if it's fun being "famous" and I tell them two things. First, outside of the 518-area code nobody knows who I am. Second, it is often a hassle being someone people recognize because you can't be yourself. By that I mean, on weekends (when I'm not on TV) I enjoy wearing ratty old sweatpants and t-shirts with paint spots on them from some previous house project five years ago.
My wife sees me in these outfits and loses her mind because she knows someone will see me and roll their eyes, saying, "How much does that TV guy make and he's out here in a stained shirt. Oh, the humanity!"
Don't judge me please. Often if I'm wearing a despicable shirt it's because there is an emotional attachment to it. Example- I used to have a blue sweatshirt that said "University at Buffalo" on the front. I purchased it when my oldest son was a freshman at the school. I also wore it when I had two German shepherd puppies with those tiny razor-sharp teeth, so the sleeves have numerous holes in them.
To the casual observer it looks like a torn shirt, but to me it always reminded me of my son and dogs. I got a good seven years out of the shirt before my wife forced me to say goodbye to it.
By now you've done the math and know that I'm 59 years old today. It stinks having a late December birthday and not for the reasons you think. NO, I did not get cheated out of Christmas presents, quite the opposite. Often my parents would team up with Santa and I'd get some expensive gift that was for both Christmas and birthday, something I couldn't have gotten otherwise.
Rating: 0/5 stars
Sincerely,
Richard Nixon
Wanting to sell a never used, never carried Kizer John Gray S.L.T. (Ki4474A1). Brand new, with all original packaging. $150 shipped. Not looking to trade as I'm trying to slim down my collection. Thank you for looking! Specs are as follows:
Blade length: 3.5"
Blade material: S35VN
Blade style: Drop point
Grind: Hollow
Handle: Titanium
Edge Condition: Factory (never used)
Ownership: First
Disassembled: Never
Someone gave me the Feline Philosophy book, but I had never heard of JG.
I’m 40 and already riding the silver fox 👍😂
''But if Hobbes’s language is marvellously clear, his thought is highly deceptive. The figures that appear in his system are not human beings, however abbreviated. They are homunculi invented in order to overcome a problem human beings are unable to solve: reconciling the imperatives of peace with the demands of their passions. Hobbes recognized that pride and the pursuit of glory stand in the way of order. Even so he believed that, impelled by the fear of death, humankind could renounce violent conflict and build a lasting peace.
Experience suggests otherwise. Rather than trying to escape violence, human beings more often become habituated to it. History abounds with long conflicts – the Thirty Years’ War in early seventeenth-century Europe, the Time of Troubles in Russia, twentieth-century guerrilla conflicts – in which continuous slaughter has been accepted as normal. Famously adaptable, the human animal quickly learns to live with violence and soon comes to find satisfaction in it.'' From John Gray's The Soul of the Marionette
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Many wondered why contemporary humans are less violent than our predecessors, why our times are relatively peaceful (at least in the more affluent states) but as great historians of war caution*, this is not an easy question.
It seems that the bigger a state grows the more costly and difficult war becomes but, at the same time, it can afford using and losing more people (if a tribe of 100 was to lose 10 or 20 adults in war/conflicts, it usually meant extinction, with maybe some girls/women taken by the victors - as shown by the recent World Wars, if a modern nation loses 10 or 20% of its population, it can shortly recover).
Our current economy seems to favor peace (despite the huge number of weapons produced and sold).
Another, less obvious, idea is that loosening of sexual norms allowed young men (especially) to use their energies and less belligerent ways (and there is a lot of truth to this, since sexual adventure/recompense was and still is one of the main reasons men went went to war or are violent towards members of their own community).
Frighteningly however, it does not seem that becoming less violent was or is a primarily rational decision. The hope is more and more humans will become habituated to peace.
What do you make of this?
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*I drew insights from and I recommend the following two great books on that topic Azar Gat's *War in Human C
... keep reading on reddit ➡Waiting for my shipment of "Skipper" Gray Beard Oil to come in. Does anybody use this product? A little different carrier in this profile for coarser, dryer beards.
Ingredients:
Jojoba Oil, Castor Oil, Argan Oil, Camellia Seed Oil, Coconut Oil, Olive Oil, Ionic Inland Sea Minerals, Fragrance
Ionic Inland Sea Minerals:
Magnesium, Potassium, Calcium, Selenium, Chromium, Manganese, plus other minerals found in seawater.
Column Title: "Fade to Gray: Gaslighting til the bitter end"
Appeared in the Troy Record on: August 14, 2021
Word count: 853 words.
Excerpt: When I was a little boy, one of the big treats in the summertime was your parents piling everyone into the family station wagon and driving up Route 9 to a place called Gaslight Village.
It was a small amusement park right near Lake George that featured rides and games. The signature piece of the village, however, was an old vaudeville-style opera house where live shows were performed.
Gaslight Village closed in 1989, but if they ever decided to resurrect the place, there's no question Andrew Cuomo should be appointed mayor. Why? Because, even as everyone and I mean everyone abandoned his ship and called for its sinking, Cuomo was "gaslighting" until the bitter end.
Now, some of you might not be familiar with that term, gaslighting. I must admit, when it started being bandied about a few years ago, I myself had to look up the definition. "Gaslighting" is when a person talks to you as if the things you know are real are not. For example, I pick up a rock and deliberately hit you with it. When you protest what I just did, I tell you that you're mistaken and that while I did throw a rock, it was you who ran into it.
A timelier example might be a governor putting his hands on a multitude of women and then telling them either; a) I didn't do it or b) I did do it, but you took my hands being on your body the wrong way. See? He didn't do anything wrong. It's you. You're nuts. That's textbook gaslighting.
I was at the gym on Tuesday morning when the governor decided to quit his job. I was stunned, knowing what he was about to do, he still sent his high-priced lawyer out in front of the cameras first to claim it was all a set-up. What struck me with her, was she said both the highly respected lawyers who investigated Cuomo had an ax to grind. I thought, "Gosh, if that were true, why didn't you tell us about it back in March when the governor begged the attorney general to investigate him, and she announced her team?"
...
*It stinks what happened down there and I blame myself and the rest of the media for playing our small part in it. Heaping praise on a politician because of his slide show during a pandemic, while not pressing him on the book deal and death toll and the rest of it. Yeah, the media helped raise this man on top of that pedestal
... keep reading on reddit ➡Column Title: "Fade to Gray: Defending Joe Biden"
Appeared in the Saratogian on: August 22, 2021
Word count: 841 words.
Excerpt: Not so many weeks ago, a person who doesn't like me or this column wrote an email to my boss at the TV station in an attempt to get me into trouble. He said, "You know he's a republican right? Why is he allowed to do the news?"
Now we can dissect that short message in several ways but let me start with the obvious. I don't belong to any political party and when pressed I will tell you I like people on both sides of the political universe and there are many I can't stand. I also think term limits on every single elected office in our country would solve 90-percent of our problems with elected officials.
I suspect I get labeled as someone who leans right because I believe in God, lower taxes and leaving people alone. Those who paint me as right, conveniently forget that I support free lunches for kids, adore not-for-profits, could care less about who marries who or whether you want to consume so many drugs you put yourself into a permanent stupor. I tend to be socially liberal and fiscally conservative. I suppose that makes me more of a moderate.
I do hate it when people reach out to my boss in an effort to cause me harm, rather than just having the guts to write me directly and tell me to screw off. There is a prominent lawyer in this area who I once wrote something unflattering about and he called me directly and dropped about a dozen F-bombs as he screamed through the phone. I wasn't upset when I hung up. In fact, I kind of respected him more because he felt wronged and told me so, rather than sneak around behind my back and try to get me jammed up with the boss. A tactic that never works by the way.
I mention all of this because I'm about to say something nice about our president Joe Biden. How we handled the end of our engagement in Afghanistan is a bloody mess, but unlike Tucker, Hannity and more than a few hosts on CNN, I'm not prepared to blame it all on Biden. We had twenty years and four presidents preside over this mess, Joe just got caught standing without a chair when the music stopped.
*There's no question we should have evacuated everyone while we still had control of the country and more importantly the roads to the airport. For that I do blame Biden and his intelligence
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