Tex Ritter to John Ritter…Cowboy’s Luck of the Draw

Tex Ritter and John Ritter were father and son, respectively.   Tex Ritter was born Woodward Maurice Ritter.  Hardly a cowboy name.  John Ritter was born John Ritter, a cowboy name, but the son was not the cowboy.   Maurice Ritter changed his name to Tex and the rest was history.  John Ritter stayed on as John, and the rest was also history.

Both were famous in their own right.  Both had successful careers.   Tex Ritter was one of the more famous post-war singing cowboys.  He made a slew of record albums.  He appeared in movies and played on Broadway.  He did concerts around the country and around the world.   He sang at the Grand Ol’ Opry and appeared on television.   He was arguably best known for singing the title song to the Academy Award Winning Film, High Noon.  The song was entitled High Noon (Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling).  The song too won the Academy Award.

Tex’s voice projected soulful masculinity.   He was a voice of the West, at least the West of our fantasies and wishes.   He sung about drinking and poker, romancing, the usual cowboy stuff.  He made you believe it. He was the fifth person to be inducted into the Cowboy Hall of Fame.  He was inducted as well into other Western heritage and performance organizations.   The list is a long one.

John was no slouch either.  He became famous as one of the three leads in the hit series, “Three’s Company.”  He guest starred and appeared on numerous television shows.  He was in films.   He rendered a remarkable performance in Slingblade, which also won an Academy Award.
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Tex was heavyset.  He lived in a different era and appeared to be one not overly concerned about cholestorol or fat content in food.   I don’t know if he smoked, but it is reasonable to think he liked to eat and maybe have a nip or two.

John was more of the contemporary man.  He was concerned about health.   He looked good, kept fit, wasn’t stocky like the old man.   He was a nice guy with a good attitude, and it is reasonable to believe he was never abusive to himself nor to others.

Both father and son have stars on Hollywood Boulevard.  They are the only father-son team to be so honored, especially for different categories.   There was something else they had in common.   Both died of congenital heart defects.   Tex died thirty years before John.   Tex, the stocky guy who didn’t watch his diet, passed away at 68 years of age.   John was only 54 when he died.

So what’s this all mean, besides the fact that we should remember guys who were so talented?   Guys who brought a little something to our lives.  You can live healthy, and you should, but you can still die young.   It seems at times if it is in the cards and a great deal of your mortality is simply in the luck of the draw.  I though of this while watching High Noon for the umpteenth time and thinking of poor John, as well as his father.   I thought about a friend of mine who lived clean and exercised more than any human I know.   She is a relatively young woman.   Yet she is sick and dying.  Her father had the same disease.

I guess you can’t duck the luck of the draw.

Chains of Fools Feed on Each Other With Food to Go

Once upon a time you had independent restaurants that sold good food at modest prices.  You also had lousy, greasy spoons that sold bad food at modest prices.  So, enter the chain restaurant.   There was no gamble there.  You were treated to mediocre food at modest prices.  The video of the rats running all over a KFC /Taco Bell spring to mind as one of those major exceptions.

The wall-to-wall establishment of chain restaurants was kind of the middle of the road between the win-win and lose lose situation.   Restaurant chains could saturate the market with advertisements.   Branding was incredible.   You may not get the greatest of food, but at least it was consistent.   You could go into any Denny’s, Chili’s, House of Pancakes, Applebee’s, Olive Garden and get pretty much the same food as any other branch of the chain.  The menus were prepared from a central office.   Ingredients were the same and hardly varied.

You could go as a couple to any of the restaurant chains.  You could get Chinese Food at P.F. Chang’s or even the Panda Express.   You could get chicken, burgers, whatever, and you always knew that the food was prepared if not the way you wanted, then certainly the way you expected.   No surprises.

So gradually the chain restaurants moved in and the independent restaurants closed down.   Some of the independent restaurants, glorified in highway lore and local nostalgia, should have closed.   The chain restaurants were a blessing, sort of, as kitchen conditions were regulated to certain standards.  Well, sort of.   There are more than a few egregious exceptions.

Now while most of the chain restaurants, with the exception of venues like Ruth’s Chris and Houston’s, are not particularly aesthetic in their ambiance, what with same-same, bright colors and far too often screaming kids, they are still a good places to take a date, run in for a quick bite and run to a movie.   You may have forgotten what you ate ten minutes after eating it, but at least it won’t rumble in your stomach.   That is a major plus in this day and age.   And, if you are planning to have sex later that night, you will entertain less fear of the meal attacking you when you least expect it.

The cheapest viagra pills patients who get the gamma knife surgery done have a lot of scope to live further than six months of time. order viagra This is of course just speculation at this point. So, you can get it staying at home cialis 20mg no prescription easily. Men often measure their self-worth by their ability to stay strong, to protect & take care of their loved ones; so when they struggle at job, lose their job fall into drinking habit. low price cialis So now most of the modestly priced independent restaurants are gone.   The chains often find themselves with little or not competition.   So now they are not only are their advertising campaigns directed toward telling you what superb food they are serving.  Superb and in some cases a whole lot of it.   Great food.  Eat it cheap.  And eat more than you are supposed to.    You would think by the advertising you were treating yourself to fine dining.  No, you are not.

One most wonder if they threshold for fine dining has dropped so low that most chains are serving what constitutes good food.   One most wonder if sheer volume of food supersedes actual quality of food.  Silly me.   There is little to wonder there.

So now I hear commercials where chain restaurants like Chili’s are offering take out food.  They are turning their attentions to the lesser food venues, the fast food and drive-thru eateries.  You can now get the same meal you ate at your table with belief in its consistence if not its culinary delight, and drag it back home.   Forget the movie.  You aren’t going out anyway.  Not in this tough economy. That is why God created Pay-Per-View.

To hear the commercial they are, subtly speaking, in a heated duel with the types of fast food chains that actually serve crappy takeout with absolutely no expectation. Yes, the mid-prized chain restaurants are now challenging their lesser cousins for a piece of the low budget market share.   The battle is on and soon will rage.  It’s a bad economy out there and restaurants are hurting.  Every buck won over to your side is a buck well earned.   Any day I expect to see the brutally honest commercial, “My mediocre food is better than your mediocre food and it only costs a few bucks more.”

This should be an interesting battle for market share.  I am sure other mid-level chains will join in.  Conversely, the strategy is two fold.   They are not only chasing the drive-thru but the diner that used to frequent chic little bistros and storefronts where the food is pricey and avoidable when there is a different paradigm for date night.  Forget the candlelight.  When you are short on money and worried about your job, run down to the shopping plaza and pick up some food.

It is convenient.  As with the drive-thru’s, you can pull up to a Chili’s and just get it to go.  Order it over the phone, and they will give you an exact time when to come and pick it up.  Nice and hot.  In bags that remind you of the dining experience you either worked to avoid or just left behind.   Yum.

Lizzie Borden Killed Her Parents Here. Eat Hearty, But Don’t Feed the Ghosts

The house where Lizzie Borden may have killed her family is now a Bed and Breakfast lodge.   This sturdy wood frame house in sturdy Fall River, Massachusetts hardly looks like a celebrated murder scene, but then so few really do.   That is, until you look at them with the knowing eye.   Otherwise would you know the difference?   Would the people lodged in creepy, haunted houses really see and feel the ghosts if they didn’t know they were inside a creepy, haunted house?

Maybe.  I remember visiting one small town and finding one house particularly, in fact, unmistakeably creepy.  Nobody seemed to know anything about what may have happened there, neither my family nor the neighbors.  Okay.  False hunches.  I was just getting ready to leave.

As luck would have it the current owner of the house pulled up in the driveway.   Without much prodding  her confirmed my suspicions that foul play did indeed occur in that house.  A minister of some religious persuasion, deeply in debt, killed his wife for the insurance money.  He had pushed her down the stairs.  The house over the years was occupied by other people with new and different tragedies, from riches to rags to sagas of drugs and degradation.

But Lizzie Borden was another story.  She was the O.J. Simpson of her time, among the dozens of other celebrity killers.   Ironically, perhaps, Lizzie was not tried for the murder of her parents in California. Nevertheless, she was still acquitted.   She then became part of mythical American macabre.   There is a rhyme about her.  “Lizzie Borden took an ax and gave her mother forty whacks.  And when she saw what she had done, she gave her father 41.”

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As to who actually committed, the murders, as with most of these high profile murder cases, theories abound.  It was everyone from the housekeeper to the towns people who didn’t at all like Andrew Borden.  Some think Lizzie killed him because financial disputes and property divisions.   That would be a motive.  It has certainly been one before.   Others believe Lizzie, the spinster, may have been a little too constrained and embroiled in family dissension.  She may have lashed out to save her sanity and her inheritance.

Today we would find a drug ridden and repressed Lizzie seeking to right the wrongs of an inhospitable environment, an oppressive father and abusive step-mother.  Who knows?  But today what remains of the story, aside fromthe legend itself, is the bed and breakfast and the ghosts who inhabit it along with the 10,000 people who pass through its doors each year.   Ghosts are reported to do what ghosts are best know for.   They poke and prod, open and close the draws, turn the lights on and off, move things around.  In short, they scare the hell out of most of us.   For a population that thinks of Pearl Harbor as ancient history, it is amazing how sex and murder can long endure.

Lizzie Borden died and left $30,000 to the animal shelter.   She left another $500 so that the cemetery could tend to her father’s grave in perpetuity.  Guilt or true love?   It’s hard to say.   Maybe a little of both.   The thing is, given the times, most people were perplexed and a legend was born.  Today, we know the story all too well.   The difference a hundred odd years can make.

At Wal-Mart You Can Shop Till You Drop

By now most of the known world has read in the New York Daily News or elsewhere about the tragedy  at a Long Island Wal-Mart, where an employer died after being trampled by a couple of hundred people.   Apparently, he made the mistake of trying to hold them back and paid the price with his life.   Other people were also injured and there was a controversial report that a pregnant woman miscarried.

If this episode wasn’t so tragic we could find it funny.   There have been numerous comedy scenes in television episodes and feature films, comic strips, even, where overzealous shoppers trample each other in search of the ultimate bargain.   The old comic strip, “Dagwood,” comes to mind.   The artist had regular strips depicting women fighting each other, playing tug-of-war for bargain goods.

But the fact is it is pretty tragic.  It is also very telling.   It is telling on different levels.  On one hand we can view this as a reflection of the  bad economy where the need to save money has driven people to wait outside the doors of a department store for it’s special opening at 5:AM.   Some stores even had special midnight openings.   For a country that goes to bed after the Jay Leno or David Letterman monologue, it says something about the need to find a bargain.

It also says quite a lot about consumerism.   I have to wonder, what are people doing out there at five A.M.?  How much can you really care about buying something that you would stand there like cattle waiting for the doors to open so you could fight you way under fluorescent lighting to get something for your wife and kids, girlfriend, whatever?  What does this really say about us, and the fact we cannot cure that disease, that we are consumer addicts.

Seventy percent of this economy if built on consumerism.  We buy stuff.   We buy a lot of stuff we don’t even need.  We buy stuff to impress our friends.   We buy dumb stuff, and in good economic times we pay a lot of money for overpriced, status seeking stuff that has the requisite branding.   We don’t save; we spend.  We buy.  We don’t buy things that last, most of the time, anyway, we buy instead things that are fashionable.   Things that we buy are built to be obsolete.   We even buy quality cars that were built to last and trade them in because we are bored with them.

We are so obsessed with buy, apparently,we don’t mind elbowing and even trampling a few people to buy more stuff.  Okay, so it’s the holiday.  It is a holiday in the worst economy in perhaps 100 years, and here we are buying.   Hang out Santa Claus and a few pretty lights, and we kick into buying mode like so many Pavlovian Dogs.
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Of course others have a different take on the incident at Wal-Mart.   Some are blaming the greedy retailers for having the temerity to open their doors in the wee hours of the morning.   At least for me it is a wee hour of the morning.   Some are more racist in tone and issue forth deplorable comments that the writers don’t even bother couching in more acceptable, or polite, racist content.   Pretty amazing.

As for the consumerism itself, it would seem a bit obsessive to be buffeted around by crowds at pre-dawn hours, waiting for a store’s doors to open.  I would think you have to be nuts, but then there were so many standing there, they couldn’t all be crazy.  Just sick.   Sick with what, I’m not sure.   And if not sick, not real logical.

The fact when the stores are stuck with unsold merchandise, say three weeks from now, they will practically be giving it away.   You can waltz in, make a better deal, and walk out without fear of getting trampled.  Or if you are really smart you can wait until after the holiday when they may be paying you to take this stuff out of the store.   You could buy on line and save gas and sanity, life and limb.  Or you can be really, really smart and be more discriminating and not get so caught up in shopping it becomes a major distraction.

Whatever you do for the holidays, this is certainly not the way to do it.  If you are that bored with your life, and your life is that stale that mobbing the front of a store, in cold weather yet, seems like a good idea, perhaps you should seriously consider ceasing to populate the earth any further.   We really don’t need more people, and we certainly don’t need more shoppers.

You may see the light.  Or the only lights that may penetrate the huddled masses are the twinkly lights of Holiday Season.   I would say Christmas, but it really has little to do anymore with the birth of Christ, Winter Solstice or whatever else you celebrate.   It is about you and how much you can shop.   It is about shopping, and not really so much about the giving.   You shop till you drop.  Or kill someone.

No matter how you see this, there is one thing you definitely won’t see standing in the middle of a department store, either at 5 A.M. or any other time where getting frazzled and frustrated is considered part of the experience.   Definitely one thing you won’t see.   Me.

Beware! Female Sex Addicts Are Lurking Among Us

There is a vintage Steven Sills song.  It is called “Love the One You’re With.”  That seemed like wise words in earlier days when not only the more responsible among us but even the young had less concerns.   Today there are many things to fear, from food additives to terrorists.   You can catch every kind of disease, including some we never heard of.   So it’s hard sometimes just to have sex with someone you like, yet alone love the one you’re with.

Nevertheless, sex addiction is on the rise.  Or so they say, whoever “they” are.  I always suspect the “they’s” in this case are the ones promoting a new fear and making money from it by exploiting the susceptible.  Hey, if you can sell drugs for “Restless Leg Syndrome,” you can hold therapy sessions to cure people from wanting too much sex.   I know people who it seems the notion of sex never seems to cross their minds anymore.  Either they have given up or gotten realistic.  Or don’t know the difference.   It’s hard to say.  But I digress.

Back to the rising tide of sex addiction.    Turns out women are sex addicts as well as men.  There’s a revelation for you.   Not quite the Rapture, but nevertheless I’ll give you time to absorb it.  Women chasing around in search of wanton, mindless sex.    Whew!  How could they?

What’s more, the number of  female sex addicts is rising.  Whether the figures are on the increase or more women want this sort of attention is hard to say.    Perhaps by surrendering yourself to therapy as the great wanton hussy, you can achieve recognition for being sexual.     Or you can meet some cute guys with the same ideas.  I don’t know   But, yes, according to a recent article in the London Times women can be prone to sex addiction right along with men.

According to the article, thirty percent of the people being treated for sex addiction are female.   Not exactly a fifty-fifty proposition but notable just the same.  One woman talks about her longest romantic relationship lasting all of three months.  Other women talk about the need for intimacy, to be accepted, to be perceived as attractive.   Some talk about the romance and fantasy, the thrill of the hunt.  You know, what we typically call men stuff.

A noted writer, Susan Cheever, just wrote a book about her own sex addiction.   The book is called,  Desire: Where Sex Meets Addiction, for those who are interested.  Cheever’s father was iconic author John Cheever who it appears struggled with his own sexual behavior.   So then the question arises–is sexual addiction much like drug addiction or alcoholism?  Is it something that is passed down from one generation to another?

One must wonder if addictive personality is passed through the genes.   Sometimes it will manifest itself in the similar practices of one’s parents.   Sometimes the children will find a new channel and take their addictive personality down a new road of dependency.  Or they pair them up–alcoholism, drug and sex addiction– the Dependency Combo.  A Deli Special sandwich.    Hold the pickle.  This is all conjecture, but it seems to bear out in most cases.

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A woman has needs.  A man had needs.   A man can fulfill these needs, as Lenny Bruce once wrote, by screwing wet sand.   Anything that has intercourse with wet sand is not someone easily reasoned with.  They have an urge and they respond.  Esteem issues may enter into it.  But then again, that would give men more credit for their sexual consciousness than may ever be necessary.  Or realistic.

Women on the other hand think about it differently.   Most women.   But then there are women who are just horny as hell and just want hot sex, a shower and the time to move on down the line.   It is safe to say that they have dated.   They didn’t like what they found.   They were looking for romance and found eels in suits and jeans instead.   Or they found love and were bitterly disappointed.

Whatever their story, now they want to get their rocks off.   Perhaps it is vindication.  It may be affirmation of their good looks.   It may be a snatch at the gold ring of fantasy.   You read enough romance novels and you got to at least once try to put it into practice.   In any event, for one reason or another, there are women in this world who have decided they would rather have sex with anyone than sit and home eating ice cream and watching romantic movies that remind them of what  they are missing in life.

There are women out there who just don’t care.   They don’t want intimacy.  They want sex.  They want to get off not buy into someone else’s fantasy.   These are the type of women we love to disparage.   Some of us wish to disparage.  Others wonder where are they and what are they doing on this Saturday night?  Do you have their number?

I guess the main thing about addiction is not whether it is in control.  Addiction by its name means you are out of control.   The main thing about addiction is whether or not you are doing harm to others.   Are you busting any bubbles, wrecking families, whatever?   Then you may want to take a look at what you are doing.

Some will protest and claim the addicts are doing harm to themselves.  Yes they are.   They sure are.  Let’s face it addictive behavior hardly promotes a positive life force.   It is fair to say the spirit is wanting.   But then there are other things that may be worse.   Life in a vacuum comes to mind.  Life searching for the perfect mate to find anything but that.   Life wondering who you are and what you want.

So if you see a woman who is a confessed sex addict, she may be confessing not out of some twelve step surrender, but out of self-awareness.   Don’t try to intervene.  Don’t try to help her.  Just ask for her number.  It would probably do the both of you some good.