Guns prohibition

My childhood and neighborhood grocery store.

I'm in Fort Worth tonight to go to a Ranger's ballgame with Emily and family and Katy and family tomorrow for father's day.   I had a few minutes before the sun was going down, and so before going to my motel I drove to my old childhood neighborhood and saw the home I lived in from the middle of the 4th grade all the way through highschool.   And then my kids mom and I lived in this house when she got pregnant with our first daughter Jami.

3108 Meadowbrook Drive.  It wasn't airconditioned and at the time had three huge trees in the front yard.

 

 

Then about six blocks away was the shopping center where we we grocery shopping at the "super" market.  Piggly Wiggly.  I thought it was soooooooooo big.

 

This is it today.  It's a Scrubs Store and probably not more than 100 feet wide.  I thought it was huge as a kid.  But it was probably only about 3,000 square feet.   More or less, the size of the produce department now in a major supermarket.  I don't remember much except all grocery stores . . .all . . .you came in the front door and went right.  And the produce was always along the first wall and the bread was opposite the produce.   And the meat counter was at the back.   And then through the store were 3 or 4 isles that had everything a grocery store was supposed to have.  Food and cleaning stuff.  Period.   And then when you got the front there would be "maybe" three or four checkout lanes.  With paper bags only and a "sacker" who would bag the groceries and actually carry them out to the car for you.   Mother might give him a dime tip.  Might.   And everything was paid for with cash or a personal check.  No credit cards.   Up until I was in the 6th grade, most grocery stores had blank checks at the front from the neighborhood bank and maybe one or two downtown banks.  And you could just write you account number down and make your own check.   And then, at the end, they gave you your S&H Green Stamps for one stamp per 10 cents.  And we'd go home and paste the stamps in a book and when we had a dozen or more books we'd go to the Green Stamp store and buy something like a new toaster! Or a set of knives! Or?   Candy bars were all a nickel.   Sodas a nickel.    And a whole grocery buggy full of food and meat and stuff might be a whopping $40.00 or $50.00.  It was enough that'd we'd come home and my dad would start moaning about going to the poor house someday to live.   Banquet TV dinners were always the big sale item.  And we bought a lot of them.   5 for $1.00.    A feast and we could all eat what we wanted for dinner.   A Saturday night treat was making a pan of Jiffy Pop on the stove and shaking it while it popped and blew up into a big foil bubble and then cut it open and pour into a bowl and all of us watch Lawrence Welk, and then Sing Along with Mitch.    I'd stay up late on Saturdays and watch Wrestling that came on after the news and then a scary B movie like "The Tree Zombies" or "The Invaders from Mars".

 

 

 

 

I took this shot to show that it wasn't much deeper than it was wide.  And I remember when you came in you brought all your empty soda bottles with you, and it was an honor system.  If you were getting a dozen more colas or 7-ups or whatevers, you just brought that many bottles in and set them on the floor inside the front door and then got what you wanted to take home and told the checker that you'd put the bottles down when you came in.  They trust you to tell the truth.   If you didn't bring your own bottles you had to pay 3 cents extra per drink.   That meant the 6 ounce cokes would be 8 cents instead of 5 cents.   There weren't bottles bigger than 6 ounce until I was in the 7th grade and then they came out with "King Size" which was a taller bottle and had 10 ounces in it.  When I was in the 9th grade they started having some cans but you had to open them with a beer can opener.

 

 

It wasn't until I was 25 years old that I ever even saw what would equate to what we now call a supermarket.  And that was the year that Skaggs Alberston's came to town and had everything in the world you'd want to buy and 20 double isles of stuff.  Wow!

 



Vincent van Gogh. A fired missionary. A painter to express God

a disgraced and fired missionary . . . .

the world lost so much. 

 

For they could not love you
But still your love was true
And when no hope was left inside
On that starry, starry night
You took your life as lovers often do
But I could have told you Vincent
This world was never meant for one as
beautiful as you

Van Gogh's religious zeal grew until he felt he had found his true vocation. To support his effort to become a pastor, his family sent him to Amsterdam to study theology in May 1877, where he stayed with his uncle Jan van Gogh, a naval vice admiral.    Vincent prepared for the entrance exam with his uncle Johannes Stricker, a respected theologian who published the first "Life of Jesus" in the Netherlands. Van Gogh failed the exam, and left his uncle Jan's house in July 1878. He then undertook, but failed, a three-month course at the Vlaamsche Opleidingsschool, a Protestant missionary school in Laeken, near Brussels.

In January 1879, he took a temporary post as a missionary in the village of Petit Wasmes in the coal-mining district of Borinage in Belgium at Charbonnage de Marcasse. Taking Christianity to what he saw as its logical conclusion, Van Gogh lived like those he preached to, sleeping on straw in a small hut at the back of the baker's house where he was staying. The baker's wife reported hearing Van Gogh sobbing at night in the hut. His choice of squalid living conditions did not endear him to the appalled church authorities, who dismissed him for "undermining the dignity of the priesthood." He then walked to Brussels,  returned briefly to the village of Cuesmes in the Borinage, but gave in to pressure from his parents to return home to Etten.  He stayed there until around March the following year, a cause of increasing concern and frustration for his parents. There was particular conflict between Vincent and his father; Theodorus made inquiries about having his son committed to the lunatic asylum at Geel.

He returned to Cuesmes where he lodged until October with a miner named Charles Decrucq.  Increasingly interested in the people and scenes around him, Van Gogh recorded his time there in his drawings and followed Theo's suggestion that he should take up art in earnest. He traveled to Brussels that autumn intending to follow Theo's recommendation to study with the prominent Dutch artist Willem Roelofs, who persuaded him, in spite of his aversion to formal schools of art, to attend the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, where he registered on 15 November 1880. At the Académie, he studied anatomy and the standard rules of modelings and perspective about which he said, "...you have to know just to be able to draw the least thing."    Van Gogh aspired to become an artist in God's service, stating: "...to try to understand the real significance of what the great artists, the serious masters, tell us in their masterpieces, that leads to God; one man wrote or told it in a book; another in a picture."

Starry, starry night
Paint your palette blue and gray
Look out on a summer's day
With eyes that know the darkness in my soul
Shadows on the hills
Sketch the trees and the daffodils
Catch the breeze and the winter chills
In colors on the snowy linen land

Now I understand
What you tried to say to me
How you suffered for your sanity
How you tried to set them free
They did not listen, They did not know how
Perhaps they'll listen now

Starry, starry night
Flaming flowers that brightly blaze
Swirling clouds in violet haze
Reflect in Vincent's eyes of china blue
Colors changing hue
Morning fields of amber grain
Weathered faces lined in pain
Are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand

For they could not love you
But still your love was true
And when no hope was left inside
On that starry, starry night
You took your life as lovers often do
But I could have told you Vincent
This world was never meant for one as
beautiful as you

Starry, starry night
Portraits hung in empty halls
Frame less heads on nameless walls
With eyes that watch the world and can't forget
Like the strangers that you've met
The ragged men in ragged clothes
The silver thorn of bloody rose
Lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow
Now I think I know
What you tried to say to me
How you suffered for your sanity
How you tried to set them free
They did not listen they're not listening still
Perhaps they never will

The Decline of the Baby Boomers and the rise of Deflation

I recently listened to an interested book by Harry Dent on why he believes the next ten years and possibly twenty, have in store for America a rapid increase in deflation, rather than the hyper-inflation that most would assume would come from the Federal Reserve rapid expansion of the money base.

Demographics and the decline of the largest purchasing block the world has ever seen are about to lead us down a long term decline that has been seen in Japan for the past twenty years.

My friend asked me for information from the book to explain the decline and I found an execellent summary of the theory on the internet in a speech by the author.    It's easier to read here than listening to 8 hours of CD's.

The Decline of the Boomers and Deflation of the United States Economy