April 16, 2012
April 14, 2012
April 13, 2012
Government entitlements: The Pentagon gets them but we don’t?
It seems that all we ever hear coming out of Washington these days are statements such as, “The only way America can pay off its debts is to cut Social Security,” always followed quickly by, “For our own good, we have to eliminate MediCare!”
And these vociferous demands for cuts to entitlements for America’s senior citizens always come in tandem with heart-rending cries of “Single-payer healthcare is Socialism,” and “Government must cut all pork from women’s healthcare and the Veterans Administration,” and “Unemployment benefits are government entitlements and government entitlements are WRONG!”
Cutting government entitlements to Americans appears to be the brave new order of the day in Washington DC right now.
Everyone in Congress and the White House and the Supreme Court seems to be obsessively intent on cutting back on all “Big Government” entitlements.
Except….
No one ever mentions cutting back on Pentagon entitlements. And the subject of entitlements for weapons manufacturers is never even brought up. Bank-bailout entitlements are sacred and can’t be touched. The Federal Reserve is Big Government but no one in Washington is trying to drown the Fed in a bathtub. The filthy-rich are given entitlements in the form of huge tax breaks and concessions and the nuclear-waste-creation industry gets entitlements up the yazoo. Big Pharma, possibly the world’s largest source of illegal drugs http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/13438, is supported by all kinds of government entitlements. And what about all the entitlements that agribusiness receives? And the so-called health insurance industry that never insures anyone’s good health but their own?
They get their entitlements bigtime but we don’t get ours? Where is the outrage in that?
And do we ever hear any hue and cry at all when oil companies receive government entitlements, subsidies and tax breaks? And what about Citizens United? How come they are entitled but we are not? What?
Are America’s middle class, homeowners, children, college students and the working poor — America’s 99% — all just supposed to sit down and shut up while they get no government entitlements or even any pitifully small bread-crumbs of benefits thrown their way like chicken-scratch? And then we’re supposed to feel all ashamed and guilty that we even get these small handfuls of crumbs?
Apparently yes.
You and me are not allowed to band together, pool our tax money and provide ourselves with any kind of mutual benefits at all. That would be Socialism!
Yet mega-corporations, war-mongers, stock-market cheats and advocates of a police state can and do band together — and are given buckets full and bank vaults full and wire transfers full of entitlement money like there was no tomorrow.
The Pentagon gets trillions of dollars in entitlements. Wall Street profiteers go to sleep at night on soft pillows filled with Socialism-for-the-wealthy entitlements provided to them by our tax money at work — and by Draconian cuts to OUR entitlements.
Homeland Security, FEMA, the War on Drugs and all those huge corporate-run for-profit prisons also get big bucks — even while our local police departments and fire departments have to sell tickets to strangers over the phone because their entitlements have been cut — and our public schools have to hold bake sales to pay for their books.
Have I missed anything here? Have I left anything out? Any other examples of “entitlement” hypocrisy that you can think of offhand? I just bet that there are.
Comments Off
April 11, 2012
April 10, 2012
Ye Olde Scribe PRESENTS…
“While we will suspend our campaign effective today, we are not done fighting.”
Rickie (NOT Ricardo) Insanitorium.
Scribe says…
“This is like…”
“‘Hands up. You’re money or your life!’”
“‘OK, here you go, here’s all my money.’”
“As robber turns to leave: a lot richer.”
“‘At least you didn’t rob me.’”
Comments Off
April 9, 2012
Florida Prosecutor in Trayvon Martin Murder Trying to Run Out the Clock
Florida’s Republican a-hole Medicare-fraud Gov. Rick Scott appointed Angela Corey as a ‘special prosecutor’ to determine if charges should be brought in the Trayvon Martin murder. Corey then announced she would send the evidence to a grand jury, until today. It must have dawned on Corey that there is now enough public evidence to bring several charges against Trayvon’s shooter George Zimmerman, including homicide in the first degree, so she backed off. No grand jury, but her ‘investigation’ will continue, which likely means she’s trying to run out the clock until mainstream media attention dwindles and then will decide not to arrest and prosecute Zimmerman. Why would Corey do this? First, Republicans have an interest — the deep pockets of the NRA — in protecting ‘Stand Your Ground’ laws — a charge and conviction in the Trayvon Martin case might lead to a public demand for eliminating or changing those laws. Next, the state prosecutor who refused to charge Zimmerman around the time of Trayvon’s killing, even though the lead detective wanted manslaughter charges, and the Sanford Police’s conveniently ‘sloppy’ record of racism in the handling of the shooting deaths of black people, might spark federal investigations which would lead into the offices of prominent Republicans who have been condoning and covering up this kind of institutional racism for years and Corey can’t have that. Third, the Republicans would take a hit from their own crapshit crazy base if it seemed they were ‘caving’ on this issue — the GOP base doesn’t think Zimmerman did anything wrong by killing one of ‘them,’ and are furiously defending him. That means many might stay home from the polls next November or, worse, support a third party if Corey indicts Zimmerman. The question is: Are we going to let Florida get away with this rank injustice? If Corey can’t use the evidence already released to the public to arrest Zimmerman, let’s demand a prosecutor who isn’t so cozy with the governor and the GOP to conduct the investigation.
Special prosecutor will not use grand jury in Trayvon Martin investigation
CNN.com
April 9, 2012State Attorney Angela Corey, appointed as a special prosecutor in the February shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, has decided against sending the case to a grand jury, her office said Monday.
“The decision should not be considered a factor in the final determination of the case,” Corey’s office said in a statement.
Comments Off
April 8, 2012
April 6, 2012
Starving by accident: Are Americans actually eating real food?
I’ve been thinking a lot about food lately. No, scratch that. I’m ALWAYS thinking about food. So the other day I wandered over to eat at Picoso, a family-run Mexican restaurant in north Berkeley that makes the world’s best guacamole. And while walking home past the world-famous Chez Panisse restaurant, I spotted a huge crowd of people standing around out in front.
“What’s happening here?” I asked one of the people in line.
“Michael Pollan and Maira Kalman are doing a book-signing event — and there is also free food.” Well, one of the major creeds that I live by is, “Never turn down free food” — so I bought a copy of Pollan’s and Kalman’s illustrated “Food Rules,” had it signed by the authors, went on a tour of Chez Pannise’s extensive stainless-steel kitchens and then sampled hors d’oeuvres that had been prepared using Pollan’s 83 rules about food. http://www.berkeleyside.com/2011/11/02/michael-pollan-new-food-rules-but-no-need-to-be-neurotic/
And I also ran into Alice Waters herself. “I usually celebrate my birthdays at Chez Panisse,” I told her, “because it gives me something to look forward to each year besides just getting old — but this year my birthday falls on a Sunday and you guys will be closed. And it’s my 70th birthday too! So what should I do?”
“Perhaps you could celebrate it here on either the day before or the day after?” Waters replied.
“Or you could try Aziza, a Moroccan restaurant over in San Francisco,” added Pollan. Then other people recommended trying Camino, Dona Tomas, Pizzialol, Quince, Cotogna and Commis. But it just wouldn’t be the same — not going to Chez Panisse on my big Seven-Zero. So we worked out a compromise. I’d have my dinner celebration at Chez Panisse the night before, eat very slowly, and then celebrate turning 70 at the exact stroke of midnight — even if it meant sitting out on the restaurant’s front steps after they closed. Perfect.
PS: Here are some of Pollan’s 83 really helpful food rules:
2. Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food [and nothing highly processed or containing unpronounceable chemicals either].
5. Avoid foods that have sugar or some form of sweetener listed in the top three ingredients.
11. Avoid foods that are advertized on television [this rule should also apply to restaurants too. Thank goodness Chez Panisse doesn't advertize on TV].
40. Make water [not soda] your beverage of choice. Do what animals do when they’re thirsty.
42. “The whiter the bread the sooner you’ll be dead.”
45. Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.
56. Eat when you are hungry, not when you’re bored.
82. Cook! Cooking just might be the single most important thing you can do for your dietary health.
Pollan then summarized his book in just seven words: “Eat [real] food, not too much, mostly plants.”
Which brings me to the “main course” of this article: Why food is so important to us: WITHOUT FOOD WE WOULD STARVE. So bear that in mind the next time you read about how Monsanto or Archer Daniels Midland or Congress is screwing with our food supply again.
Christopher Cook, author of “Diet for a Dead Planet,” states that, “It is no longer news that a few powerful corporations have literally occupied the vast majority of human sustenance. The situation is perilous…. This corporate occupation of our food isn’t just unfair and wrong; it’s impractical and destructive. It’s ruining farmers, the land and our future food supply.” http://www.democraticunderground.com/101616552
Yes, large for-profit-only corporations are endangering the food supply in places where people are barely subsisting and we’re always seeing photos of starving babies from there. However, here in America these same corporations are highly endangering you and me as well. Why? Because Americans just THINK that they are eating real food — when much of our food merely consists of the three Cs: Cardboard, chemicals and crap.
Americans may think that we are nourishing ourselves when we eat corporate junk-food but the reality is that all too many of us are dying young from heart disease or cancer or obesity or diabetes; that our thinking has become fuzzy due to lack of nutrients; and, even worse, we are always hungry even though we keep stuffing our faces with imitation “real” food.
A photo from Peter Wenzel’s book, “Hungry Planet,” shows a typical American family sitting around a kitchen table with all the food they will eat in a week — and there’s hardly even one real fruit or vegetable among all of that stuff! http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/state-of-the-arts/content_images/HungryPlanet-USA.jpg
PPS: For a month now, I’ve been eating by the food rules of Dr. Terry Wahls’ famous “nine-cup” diet http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxIowaCity-Dr-Terry-Wahls-Min — which consists of having every meal include one cup of colorful fruits or vegetables, one cup of deep greens and one cup of either cruciferous vegetables, onions, mushies, garlic and/or leeks. Eat nine cups of this stuff per day plus some salmon and grass-fed meat thrown in and see what happens.
“You get a long list of nutrients from [unprocessed] food that you don’t get from any other source,” stated Dr. Wahls, who cured herself of advanced MS on this diet. And, surprisingly, it appears to be making me feel healthier too — plus I’m actually starting to cook. Me? A chef? Who would have thought.
Comments Off
Do Kerouac fans overlook Berkeley?
People’s Park
Legendary Berekely cafe
Do the Beatnik fans going to San Francisco overlook Berkeley?
After the New Downtown Berkeley Launch Event was concluded on Tuesday, April 3, 2012, a reporter from KGO radio in San Francisco was walking on Adeline Street with John Caner, the Executive Director of the Downtown Berkeley Association (DBA), when one of the homeless people in front of John’s Ice Cream challenged her to talk to him and get both sides of the story. She declined the invitation to get a balanced picture of the situation and scampered quickly to her Mercedes Benz and drove off informing him that she had all the information she needed.
In the current issue of the East Bay Express (April 4 – 10, 2012) on page 12 of the hardcopy edition, reporter Robert Gammon recaps the skepticism that Joe Debro faced when he criticized the deal which was utilized to bring the Oakland Raiders back to Oakland from their temporary rebel encampment in the Los Angeles area. Debro was vastly outnumbered by sports fans, journalists and politicians who heartily endorsed the efforts to lure the absent rascals back to the Bay Area.
Debro’s objections seem more credible now that the city is in financial crisis mode and the football team might need to be reminded of the particulars of a loan that was instrumental in getting them to (like the prodigal son) return home because it is Debro’s continued position that no payments on the loan have been made and none are scheduled to be made. If families can live paycheck to paycheck, can’t a $53.9 million dollar loan be forgotten if a team is living from season to season?
Time magazine’s Reagan era White House correspondent, Doug Brew, advised reporters to take the time to listen to what people were trying to tell them and not prejudge the quality of their information based on their appearances or apparent financial status. How (you might ask) could the World’s Laziest Journalist possibly be the recipient of advice from such a highly qualified source for opinions on the art of Journalism? We were coworkers on the staff of the weekly Santa Monica Independent Journal Newspapers in the Los Angeles area. That brings up the question: “How well did you get to know him?” When he was welcomed into this columnist’s humble abode in Marina del Rey, Brew expostulated: “My God, Bob, this is a hovel!”
Could KGO’s gal reporter have possibly missed a good Berkeley sidebar story in her haste to get . . . some place else?
On Tuesday afternoon, we were informed by some of the folks in People’s Park that (irony alert!) the beloved guy known as “hate man” had been issued a stay-a-way order from the public park that he calls “home.”
The ten years that Mark Hawthorne (AKA Hate man) worked for the Metro Section of the New York Times were also known as “the Sixties” and we would pay good money to hear him tell his stories and just maybe get some advice on how to produce quality journalism. Hawthorne’s suggestions would probably be just as good as those provided by the fellow who worked for Time magazine.
If UCB’s school of Journalism can’t get hate man to teach there, perhaps they could get Hawthorne to do one guest lecture per semester? Hate man prefers to be outdoors and it is not unprecedented for some UCB classes to be held outside (like perhaps at People’s Park?).
How is that fair and balance act working out for Rupert Murdoch? Maybe if we learned how to do Journalism Fox style, we could wind up driving a Mercedes Benz? Don’t they always put their best sly digs in the form of a question?
Is it true that Rupert Murdoch is trying to buy a major league baseball team and get the town fathers in Foxboro Massachusetts to build a stadium to serve as home for such an enterprise? Could they call such a stadium “The Hen House”?
Could anyone convince the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors to build a brand new football stadium on county owned land in Marina del Rey and let a football team move in for little or no rent? Isn’t Los Angeles the biggest metropolitan area without a major football team? Shouldn’t the board be happy to build a stadium and make loans that can then sit abandoned? Where are the Brookly Dodgers Football team playing these days?
Whatever happened to the pro football teams that used to play in the Los Angeles area?
Is there a C&W song titled “You’ve got a cash register heart”? If not; why not?
Isn’t the University of California Berkeley renovating their football stadium? Aren’t college football games always played on Saturdays and aren’t pro football games always played on Sundays?
If the Berkeley Downtown Business Association really wants to bring shoppers and travelers to their town, why don’t they float a bond issue, take over management of the UCB football stadium and give the Raiders a better deal than a loan that doesn’t have to be paid back? They could pay the Raiders gigantic bonus to move a few miles north and become the Berkeley Raiders!
If Monterey can be world famous as the town where one writer (John Steinbeck) use to live and if Key West Florida can hold an annual Hemingway Days series of events because just one writer used to live in their community, then why don’t book readers from all over the world flock to Berkeley where Ursula K. LeGuinn was born, and Philip K. Dick, Alan Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac used to live?
Since the Mediterraneum was open when Dick, Ginsberg, and Kerouac all lived in Berkeley, isn’t it natural to wonder if they ever had a brief chat there?
Charles Dickens, when he came to the United States to visit, made a particular point of going to visit Lowell Massachusetts because of its literary heritage because a famous magazine had been published there. That was years before Jack Kerouac’s father brought his family to that town. Isn’t the Berkeley Barb mentioned repeatedly in “Smoking Typewriters,” which is about the history of underground newspapers in the USA?
Last fall, when the high school finalists in the freedom of speech essay contest read their winning entries didn’t it get coverage on the TV networks by holding the event on the Mario Savio steps at the Sproul Plaza area of UCB?
Doesn’t the guy who runs the Daily Kos website for liberal online commentary live in Berkeley?
Is there a DBA suggestion box for ways to bring attention to Berkeley?
If the Journalism students at UCB were to produce a TV show all about Berkeley every day, wouldn’t it be quite likely that in this era of “low cost is no cost” broadcasting if they offered such a product to a cable TV company gratis, they would take it and offer it to viewers all over the world? (Fox seems to be ubiquitous in Australia. Lottsa sports.) Wouldn’t that be a career boost for the participating students and wouldn’t that win the DBA seal of approval?
Doesn’t Kalgoorlie, in Western Australia, lure visitors from all over the world with just one word? Gold! How far from Berkeley is Sutter’s Mill?
[Note: It was a challenge to find a way to illustrate this column. We used material from an abandoned photo project titled “On the road with a copy of ‘On the Road.’” Since Berkeley is specifically mentioned in “The Dharma Bums,” that might have been a better choice, but the photo editor had to go with what was available.]
National columnists’ Day is rapidly approaching and the World’s Laziest Journalist intends to write a column for the occasion about a fellow who was born in Berkeley (about a hundred years ago) and became one of the Bay Area’s top contenders for the right to call himself “Mr. San Francisco.” UCB has the Hearst School of Journalism and that particular Berkeley rascal was personally fired by William Randolph Hearst . . . twice. That notorious columnist might provide the basis for one installment of the aforementioned hypothetical student TV show “Berkeley Tonight” (or whatever).
Didn’t the Sixties officially start (in Berkeley) when Mario Savio said: “There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can’t take part. You can’t even passively take part. And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.” [Can you believe that that quote is not in Bartlett’s?]
Now the disk jockey will play Janice Joplin’s “Oh, dear Lord,” Ry Cooder’s “Crazy ‘Bout an Automobile (Every Woman I Know),” and Woody Gutheris’s “Go For a Ride in the Car, car.” Speaking of cars, we have to celebrate this weekend by watching “Rebel without a Cause” one more time. Have a “See the USA in your Chevrolet” type week.
Comments Off
“Howl” again?
Daniel Macchiarini holds a manuscript copy of The History of The Place
“Howl” was read from this balcony which is now a storage area for a boutique on Grant St. in San Francisco.
[WARNING: This column has been found to contain trace elements of irony.]
The corporatization of the Internets has meant that unique voices must be marginalized into extinction because of the “there is no I in the word ‘team’” philosophy that has become mandatory for all Americans now that corporations are persons. Any individual who thinks he has the same rights and freedoms as a corporation (for example British Petroleum) has a lesson in the meaning of equality in contemporary American culture to learn.
Leaving workers feeling like they are beat when they lose their home to a bank via foreclosure may not be a new phenomenon. Their howls of protest may hearken back to some previous more poetic rebellions.
Back in the Sixties, Playboy magazine published a cartoon (by Shel Silverstein?) showing a line of hippies stretching back to the horizon all carrying the same sign which urged: “Protest the rising tide of conformity!” The Sixties are over and the Establishment has won. Good patriotic Americans must become vigilant and ever alert to help immediately stifle any possible examples of nonconformity.
It took some time but Nixon and California Governor Reagan have been vindicated and American Presidents are no longer shackled if Walter Cronkite is not enthusiastic about the potential of victory in the latest American military venture.
When the Republican National Convention starts in Tampa, and the town is swamped with hippies protesting the War in Vietnam (or whatever) we wonder if the mayor will urge patriotic citizens to circle the venue with a wall of human shields (as the Liberals wanted to do to protect Saddam Hussein) and urge them to stand their ground and not let the protesters get near the entrance, let alone onto the convention floor.
The fact that conservative talk radio has become almost all pervasive in the talk radio area may mean the death knell for the Beat Generation. The progressive radio station in the San Francisco area has started carrying Glen Beck during the morning commute drive time and has pushed Mike Malloy’s three hour shows into the 1 a.m. to 3 a.m. time slot. During the day you will hear ads from a web site that offers to help listeners make the right choice about which guns to buy.
After writing a suggestion pointing out the opportunity for a fund raising effort to help Americans who have lost their homes in foreclosure, we noticed recently that a web based effort titled Home Aid will be conducted this fall.
The Democratic candidates want to focus attention on the economy and fair taxation for the Presidential election. The Republicans traditionally prefer to use issues less complex than the allocation of tax benefits and restrictions on services offered by banks, hence they prefer to select other issues that are easier for the less educated to understand, such as racial prejudice. While President Obama is busy giving speeches urging changes that would mean millionaires pay the same rate of taxes as their secretaries do, news broadcasts were headlining a Florida shooting.
Could it possibly be that the compassionate, Christian conservatives’ prayers have been answered? Would the Republicans reap any political benefit from delaying a trial for George Zimmerman until October? Would American voters let a racially motivated murder have an effect on their ballot choices? Will conservative pundits be disingenuous about admitting that concentrating news coverage on such a trial might be a variation of the Willie Horton effect? Will the final verdict be as controversial as the acquittal of OJ? Will future political historians assert that the Zimmerman trial had an effect on the Presidential Election?
Will conservatives use the George Zimmerman case to establish a reverse version of jury nullification and call it jury validation of the stand your ground laws? We should know the answer to that question by Election Day.
Some liberals tend to think that if they don’t mention the possibility of such a coordinated Republican strategy, then it won’t happen. We tend to think of the “let’s not talk about that” philosophy as being an integral part of the conservative game plan and so we bring up some uncomfortable parallels as a way of providing spoiler information so that the Democratic Party officials can make plans to counter such a gambit, rather than playing along and ignoring the elephant (GOP symbol alert!) in the room.
Is it naïve to think that America’s Free Press will go along to get along and deliberately shape or avoid news coverage that might favor one party over the other?
The Huffington Post French Edition ran a story last week about an accident at the Penly nuclear plant in France. We did a Google New Search and learned that Bloomsberg was reporting that the fires had been extinguished. Did you happen to see any reports on that bit of news anywhere else in American owned and controlled media?
If you have not become informed about this story is that because of the dumbing down of American Journalism or is it because the corporations that promote the use of nuclear power have the right to be free from any pesky protests that might be inspired by such irrelevant information? Don’t the rights of those persons (corporations) trump your puny personal rights to criticize how they run their businesses? Keep your hands off our nuclear reactors!
After learning that Jack Kerouac’s first book length manuscript has just been published with the title “The Sea is my brother,” we decided to go on the Internets and look up the location for the Beatnik bar that was named “The Place.” We tried putting the words in quotes and adding the words Beatnik and Kerouac. The results produced an avalanche of irrelevant links.
On Saturday, April 7, 2012, we decided that it would be easier to hop on an AC Transit bus and go to San Francisco and get that bit of information. We peeked in Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s guide book “The Beats in San Francisco,” while we were in City Lights Bookstore but failed to note that our goal was within walking distance.
By Wednesday, April 11, 2012, we had consulted the Google maps online and returned to the North Beach area of San Francisco to take some photos of the site where The Place used to be. We learned that the business next door down, Macchirini’s Designs has been owned and operated by the same family since before the Beat writers arrived in the area.
Daniel Macchirini was delighted to hear that the new book, “jubilee hitchhiker,” by William Hjortsberg corroborates the information in an obscure book that tells the history of “The Place” and that the poem Howl was read in public at The Place before it supposedly debuted at a poetry reading at the 6 Gallery. Macchirini showed us his copy of the copyrighted manuscript for the history of the famed Beat bar called “The Place.”
[Note: since this columnist did not have photo pass access to the President’s speeches this week, nor did he have a chance to take any news photos of legal proceedings in Stanford Florida, the photo editor will have to use some photos from the North Beach Beatnik area of San Francisco, taken on Wednesday, as illustrations for this column. Doesn’t the current philosophy of the Internets hold that any image with a tenuous link to the content is better than no photo at all?]
The R & D Department at the Amalgamated Conspiracy Theory Factory is working around the clock to come up with a plausible explanation for how the JEB team will deliver the nomination to their chosen one despite the unexpected departure of Rick Santorum from the list of active candidates earlier this week and the rapidly disappearing opportunity for a deadlocked National Republican Convention.
Isn’t thinking that JEB could still be handed the nomination just as absurd as thinking that a President could usurp the Congressional power to declare war and lead the USA into a war with Iraq just to settle an old score that was part of an International family feud?
What’s the worst that could happen? Won’t the well informed voters use the electronic voting machines with no means of verifying the results to prevent any possible political disaster if by some miracle JEB becomes the Republican nominee?
Didn’t Jack Kerouac say that if he had been registered to vote, he would have voted for Eisenhower in 1956? Didn’t Kerouac support the troops in Vietnam? Didn’t Kerouac prefer William F. Buckley Jr.’s political views and denounce his friend Alan Ginsberg for being pro-Commie? Here is a hypothetical question: Would Kerouac vote for JEB?
Is America becoming immune to the need for analyzing? Was part of this week’s entertainment news about the selection of an actor who is over forty to play a musician who died when he was 28?
In 1938, Mao Tse-tung said: “Our Principle is that the Party commands the gun, and the gun must never be allowed to command the Party.” He was not a Republican, that’s for sure.
Now the disk jockey will play Chuck Barry’s “Wee Wee Hours” (It’s on the flip side of “Maybellene”), Pat Boone’s “Ain’t that a Shame,” and Elvis’ “I’m Left, You’re Right, She’s Gone.” We have to go write a column for April 18, which will be National Columnists’ Day. Have a “real cool, daddy-o” type week.