Daily Blues & Views

Seems like hardly a day goes by when I'm not realizing that something I really like is gone.  It can be as local as that new bakery that opened a few miles from home...the one with the marionberry scones like no other, to a product like soap or a brand of cracker.  Stuff disappears.  They don't make it anymore.  I can see if it's a product that's not selling, but I can't help but feel that someone or something is messing with various goods and services that many folks have come to depend on. I once wrote a letter to a shampoo manufacturer because they changed the aroma, viscosity, and color of their product.  To no avail.  Seems like it's happening more and more. Now I realize that this is minor stuff that hardly threatens the existence of civilization as we know it.  I know it's only mildly irritating in the long run.  Other products that I will grow to love will soon be replaced or disappear, no doubt. That's why I'm going to flip this diatri...

I hate the term.  Every time I hear it it takes me back to the first time I heard it used.  Connotation, I guess that would be called.  Like a specific smell that becomes associated with an emotion or an event, the term "roll out" or more specifically "rolling out," sticks in my craw. Products are rolled out, Presidential appointees and programs are rolled out, and the latest edition of something...anything... is now "rolled out." Literally, the image conjures something on wheels.  A curtain opens and Voila! Here it is, our new improved version of something that needed to be rebooted. On wheels. Oh that meeting...here's the story. I was once summoned to an English Department meeting where a newly appointed district administrator was going to be introduced and then inform a group of veteran teachers that the curriculum they wrote, created, and lovingly taught and improved for decades was to be scrapped in favor of some new anthology where all the...

Mrs. White was Black,      I, white, loved blues, She taught me to put rhythm in my prose,      A dab of Charlie Parker shortened some sentences; smoothed some edges,      Mrs. White spoke every syllable, Nobody said "particular" they way she did,      Her voice was smooth as a Louis Armstrong solo, She always called him Louis. Sometimes we spent extra minutes talking about Billie, or Jean Toomer, or the Big Bands she saw at the World's Fair Jimmie Lunceford was her favorite,      I love how she said Lunceford, Not ferd but f o r d.  Lunce f o r d, Mrs. White never lost her sense of humor,      She understood why black actors played the parts they did, She saw the power that came from their pain. We talked about images in the mind... Amos 'N Andy...the TV version      The massive talent of Tim Moore (Kingfish) was something she placed in front of her st...