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One Sexy Video | Paradise By The Dashboard Lights

I fell down the Meat Loaf YouTube rabbit hole.

Oh… I remember why.  I made a comment to someone (DFR), “as Meat Loaf once famously said, ‘two out of three ain’t bad.'” This lead me to look up the song on YouTube: Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad I can’t hardly listen to this song without a tear or two coming to my eyes. But then again I have way too many ghosts of past relationships rattling around my psychic, soul, or however you want to express it.

More Than I Thought

Which made me wonder if Meat Loaf was still with us. No. He died in 2022 at 74, probably of complications of COVID.  To show my ignorance, I always thought of Meat Loaf as a one album wonder, Bat Out of Hell and a one film wonder, Rocky Horror Picture Show.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  He had a long career, both as a musician and as an actor of both film and theater.  He sold millions and millions of albums world wide.  His Bat Out of Hell alone sold 43 million, was certified platinum 14x, and spent almost a record of 522 weeks on the charts.

Paradise By The Dashboard Lights

I have listened to this song an unknowable number of times. It was and is a staple of rock radio.  However, I have never seen the video of him singing this classic with Ellen Foley, who is from St. Louis.  The video is more than a little sexy without being vulgar. The song by itself is just about a perfect encapsulation of the drama that is the relationship between men and women.  What is the conventional  wisdom? Women give sex to get love, men give love to get sex. As one my siblings commonly says, “true dat!”

The Video

And so it goes.

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Word of the Day -Gainsay

  • Verb: Gainsay (gainsaid, gainsaying, gainsays)
    1. to declare to be untrue or invalid (intransitive verb)
    2. contradict, oppose
    3. gainsayer is the noun
  • Synonyms:
    1.  deny
    2. refute
    3. reject
    4. contradict
    5. disavow
    6. disclaim
    7. negate
    8. repudiate
    9. disallow
    10. disown
    11. disaffirm
    12. disconfirm
    13. disprove
    14. rebut
    15. challenge
  • Usage:
    1. “The sons of the Achaeans shouted applause at the words of Diomed, and presently Nestor rose to speak. “Son of Tydeus,” said he, “in war your prowess is beyond question, and in council you excel all who are of your own years; no one of the Achaeans can make light of what you say nor gainsay it, but you have not yet come to the end of the whole matter.”
  • Encountered:
    1.  While listening to Samuel Butler’s prose translation of The Iliad

To see more Words of the Day, visit this link: Words of the Day

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Rev. Joe’s Random Thought #5,488

yeah I know you did not ask!

You should so be blessed – well cursed at times actually – with a mind such as mine, making all these weird connections between my rumored neurons. Just be thankful that I do not share all of my random thoughts.

To state the obvious, crazy people are hard to deal with.  That is one of the many reasons we call them crazy. Frequently, one of the most difficult things to tolerate is that they suck all the oxygen from a room, they hog all the bandwidth, leaving room for only their drama. Even when they are not there physically.

Just saying.

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A Chalky Merry Christmas

Our neighborhood is a web of cul-de-sac streets with only one entry into it.  Our particular street has one street coming off of it, is about two blocks long and ends in a cul-de-sac. There are five or six houses around this cul-de-sac that are infested with a swarm of rug rats.  Most of them are elementary school age, a few younger, with a sprinkling of teenagers.  What is cool is that these kids tend to play in the street like we did back in the “good old days.” They are riding bikes, scooters, various new fangled riding contraptions that I am clueless as to their names.  Street hockey and soccer are big in this neighborhood. They seem to stay very busy entertaining themselves and each other, all the while running into and out of each other’s houses.

I was walking Princess Lily aka Tater Tot aka The Wee Dog Christmas Eve evening, and she chose Continue reading “A Chalky Merry Christmas”

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Señora in St. Charles

I had forgotten I had taken this picture of Señora in St. Charles a few years ago.  Obviously it was Christmas time. We were with a group of folks in the historic downtown district of this city sitting on the Missouri River, visiting the various quaint shops that are nestled in among restaurants, bars and monuments and references to Lewis and Clark.

Ain’t she purrrr-ttteeee?

Y’all come back now… hear!

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Hispanic Christmas Tradition – Caganers

I was working online with one of my Spanish teachers, a Venezuelan woman who has fled her country with her husband to Buenos Aires.  We were reviewing and discussing an article that listed various Christmas traditions from around the Hispanic world.

There is a tradition from the Catalonia region of Spain that we glossed over as neither of us really wanted to discuss it.  The tradition struck both of us as a little gross.  The traditional there is to place a defecating – pooping if you will – figurine discreetly?? in one corner of the Christmas Nativity scene that folks commonly put out this time of year.  Typically, this figurine has always been of a peasant in the traditional dress of the region.  And like most of these things it is supposed to bring good luck.

It has since morphed so frequently the figurines are of famous people from around the globe.  This has grown into a big international souvenir business, with the majority of the online sales going to the United States.

Fast Forward

Talking about synchronicity… Looking at the news online this morning there was an article from The Guardian: Christmas caganer figurines of Catalonia Just a warning if your are sensitive to such things, there is a bit of a yuk factor associated with the pictures in the article, but on the whole it was an interesting read, at least for me as I had touched on the subject just a couple days before. It was also amusing to see which public figures they chose to depict.

If you are curious, look up the Spanish verb cagar (the noun caganer is derived from the verb) in an online translator.  When I was young it was a word that was not used in polite company.

Oh we humans… I wonder how far we really are from the bonobos.

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My Turn Signal Conundrum       

I am a big fan of myself and others using turn indicators, turn signals if you will.  At the minimum it is just common courtesy.  It is also, many times, a manner of safety. Using and acknowledging turn signals keeps traffic flowing in a safe and sane manner.

However, I am utterly convinced that this device, usually a lever that controls the signalling lights, is missing or broken in many vehicles.  I even wonder sometimes if they are still installing them in new vehicles.  Perhaps no one has bothered to educate the drivers of these vehicles on how they function. I remember the salesman taking 20 minutes to explain how the touch screen worked on the last new car we bought. For my money they could be throwing in the turn indicator functionality as a public service.

To give you an idea of how old I am, I actually Continue reading “My Turn Signal Conundrum       “

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Spanish Tutor Cracked Me Up

You are going to need just a wee bit of background to appreciate this… or not.

There is a stereotype involving Latino mothers – especially Mexican mothers – involving their ability to do accurate long distance child correction using a well launched chancla, chancla being the Spanish word for flip-flop. Practically every Latino I have spoken to more than casually has a chancla story. If you doubt the stereotype, just type chancla into the YouTube search box and you will have a wide selection to choose from.  One of my favorites can be found at this link: Hispanic moms don’t miss with that chancla or the video at the bottom of this post.

I’ve been working with a Mexican young man, Saúl, via Skype for Continue reading “Spanish Tutor Cracked Me Up”

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Bill Maher On Current Middle East Crisis

I used to be a bit of a Bill Maher fan, but not so for the last several years.  I now find him to be a self-righteous pendejo, and thus hard to watch.  However, the video below was embedded in an article  that appeared in the online version of the St. Louis Jewish Light: ‘Where do you think Israel is going?’ Bill Maher quips in viral eight-minute clip.

Maher makes a lot a sense to me in his segment.  At some point you just have to move on.  Of course, it took me a few years to stop lamenting about some of the fallout from my divorce, but you just do it. Sometimes you just need to let go.

Given that this is Bill Maher, the language is reasonably clean.

If you want a good quick review of the current history of Israel and The Occupied Territories, I discussed a recently published book by Daniel Skotach at this link: Can We Talk About Israel?

And is almost always the case, there are two sides to the story, if not more.  I discussed a 2005 Arabic language movie about the recruitment of two young West Bankers to be suicide bombers here: Paradise Now | Revisited

While not Jewish myself, my wife is, so much of this strikes close to home. Especially so as our October trip to Israel – a lifetime dream of my spouse – was cancelled abruptly.

And so it goes in this absurdity we call life.