Author: leeduigon(patty)

I have lived in Metuchen, NJ, all my life. I have been married to my wife Patricia since 1977. I am a former newspaper editor and reporter. I was also the owner-operator of my own small business for several years. I wrote various novels and short stories published during 1980s and 1990s. I am a long-time student of judo and Japanese swordsmanship (kenjutsu). I also play chess, basketball, and military and sports simulations.

We Need More Diversity!!!

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Emergency! The New Jersey State Legislature is not diverse enough! There are too many white men in it! Alert social justice watchers just noticed that this week.

Would you believe it? In all the legislature, you won’t find a single drag queen, or a homeless person, or a black lesbian who’s here illegally, not even one 12-year-old, and no one who even claims to be from another planet!

(Leftids are never satisfied. This legislature just gave them the assisted suicide law that they’ve been clamoring for, for ages–but it’s never enough.)

But has anybody noticed that our state’s auto mechanics aren’t diverse enough, either?

I’m part French, part German, with a little Scotch-Irish thrown in. You’d think I could find at least one Franco-German mechanic to service my car, wouldn’t you? But no! I have to entrust it to persons who are not Franco-German! Who may even be Italian–descendants of those villains from Rome who enslaved my ancestors a mere 2,000 years ago… and I still haven’t been paid any reparations for that.

Who can describe the trauma one suffers by having to go through any kind of interaction with persons who are ethnically or culturally different from oneself? That’s not diversity! [Takes two-minute time-out for a tantrum] Diversity’s when everybody’s just like you! Exactly like you!

I learned it in college.

Dear Firefox: Shut Up!

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Firefox has taken it upon itself to preach the pap of Far Left Crazy, and I must say I resent it. Every time I want to search for something on line, the action passes through a Firefox page which offers informative trendy mostly stupid articles. Usually it’s some kind of Climbit Change hysteria, but yesterday they hit a new low. And of course whoever runs this show for Firefox, they assume that all their users are as depraved and wacked-out as they are. You will never see a conservative item on the Firefox search page. They’re gonna lead us out of the wilderness… and into the loony bin.

Yesterday they were celebrating some 37-year-old man’s delusional “transition” into “a woman.” (Sorry, the quotation marks are strictly necessary.) I guess because it’s “Pride Month,” when you show pride in things you ought to be ashamed of. Anyway, this yop seems to have decided he’s really a “woman” after repeated readings and viewings–why do I assume he can read?–of The Hand-made’s Tail, which he took real serious-like.

Why must we be nagged and browbeaten with this ****? Why are people pushing it? Hello? Hello out there? Anybody? Uh, you do know this is wrong, don’t you–this ridiculous idea that a man can “become a woman”? I mean, you can’t all be that crazy, right? You do know that none of this is true–right?

And yet if I lived in Britain, home of the Magna Carta, I’d be on my way to jail for writing this. Not only is it wrong: it’s required. You tow the party line on this stuff, bro, or you can kiss yourself goodbye.

How did this happen? Why have we surrendered to it? Currently in the West, sodomy is virtually sacred. Woe unto anyone who questions it!

This was accomplished in less than a single human lifetime by a micro-minority who worked at it tirelessly, fanatically. Now they hold the bullhorn; now they dictate to normal people, now they set the rules.

Why did we let it happen?

Probably because we only wanted to live in peace, go about the peaceable business of our lives without boiling our brains in politics. Probably because decent people always get taken advantage of.

This stuff really has to stop.

‘Those Who Can’t Do…?’ (2012)

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Does this look like success to you?

This commercial used to be on the radio a lot. It was for a parenting system devised by some shrink who’d made a total shambles of her own venture into child-rearing.

Those Who Can’t Do…?

Like, this is on a par with the Hillary Clinton Charm School. Why would you ever want child-raising tips from somebody whose own kid says he hates her and slams the door in her face? Did you ever do that to your mother?

Boy, is our culture in trouble…

‘Make Me a Channel of Your Peace’

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I’d never heard this hymn before last night, Make Me a Channel of Your Peace. The choir from the Dragon School, Oxford, sang it to win a school choir competition.

If you’re new here, we love to take hymn requests (and we haven’t been getting many of them lately!). If you’ve got a favorite hymn you’d like to share, just leave a comment anywhere on the blog and we’ll do the rest.

Klepto Hamster

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Gee, this has all the makings of a Youtube challenge–see who can stuff the most toilet paper into his or her cheeks. The winner gets to be **Famous**! Or have they done that one already?

Here is a hamster stealing toilet paper and stuffing it into his cheeks; but the hamster has a really good reason for it. You can probably guess what it is. No, it has nothing to do with showing up the other pets as peasants and poltroons.

This, he said, is what it means to be a hamster.

Big Tech to Face Antitrust Action?

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The sun is shining for a change, and I’m getting set to go to Keyport and bring us home a seafood dinner from the Keyport Fishery. Hooray! But first, some nooze.

The stocks of the big four “Big Tech” companies–Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon–took a hit today when it was revealed that the House Judiciary Committee may launch an antitrust probe into their “anticompetitive practices” (https://apnews.com/44b759e73472440ca60d782e44faa572)–especially their privacy policies. The European Union has already hit Google with “billions of dollars in fines.”

So the stocks took a licking. Probably a bigger licking than any fines that might be imposed.

Nothing has been said yet about the social media giants’ censorship practices, which are “anticompetitive” politically–silencing conservatives, while giving Far Left Crazy the run of the house. Democrats will try to protect them from any action that might rein in the viewpoint censorship: Democrats are all for viewpoint censorship, as long as it’s only conservative views that get stifled. We’ll have to wait and see what develops.

Reforming the social media from a one-way street into a true free market of ideas and dialogue will be a big job. But it has to start somewhere, and this seems as good a place as any. And there’s always the chance that Big Tech might clean up their act before the government does it for them.

Generally we conservatives don’t like to resort to government to get things done. But the social media have become a major feature of the political landscape, and its owners are abusing their position. Public utilities are privately owned, too–and they’re not allowed to do just anything they please. Yeah, Google, we’re talkin’ to you.

And you’d be well-advised to listen.

Lee the Liquidator

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People are always not asking me what it’s like to be a liquidator, a business I pursued for several years. “Easy Liquidators,” that was me.

You’d be amazed by how much surplus product there is, of all kinds–nothing wrong with it, but for some reason a company got stuck with it and just can’t move it. So there it sits in the warehouse, taking up space and reminding everybody there that business decisions sometimes turn out badly.

Sometimes it’s just poor timing. There is a time for selling Star Wars action figures, and a time to stop buying them because you can’t sell any more. Get the timing wrong, and presto! Four truckloads of Star Wars action figures.

Liquidators seek out this unwanted merchandise and find buyers for it. Okay, the buyer pays just pennies on the dollar; but by then the seller is more than happy just to get rid of it. If a deal is made, the liquidator gets a percentage.

Every now and then, I’d score. The very first day I tried it, I found a stockpile of assorted figurines at a warehouse right in my home town and a buyer just several miles down the road–and a $500 paycheck for me. I had a great time with Star Wars Cookies from Canada and Disney “Bug’s Life” books–made a year’s pay on each of those deals. Not that my year’s pay was all that large.

But mostly my deals were either small or not happening. The silver lining was that everybody always sent me samples, which had many different uses–as Christmas presents, stuff for my own use, items for Patty to sell at flea markets.

I met some good people who taught me a lot about the liquidating business, and about business in general–so I know, by observing the principle in action, “no profit, no business.” Socialists are hopelessly wrong about that. Indeed, unless you can grow your profits beyond a certain percentage–beyond 50%, usually–you’re just treading water. Working your butt off to get nowhere.

And I met a couple bums and shysters, too.

I don’t do it anymore because all I ever wanted to be was a writer and besides, I wasn’t all that good at liquidating. But oh–those quality cigars! Twenty-five boxes of free samples. Neither the seller nor the buyer–I had an eager buyer–nor I knew you needed a special license to move tobacco products. So I was stuck with hundreds of high-quality cigars that I hadn’t had to pay for and that Mr. Ramos didn’t want back. Months and months of pleasure!

It kind of made up for the trunkful of hospital johnny-coats that I couldn’t sell to anyone.

A Relic of Awfulness

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I feel whimsical this morning. I’m convinced God gives us that so that we don’t burn out. A good laugh is part of God’s stuff, too.

I don’t know why this antique ridiculous commercial popped into my head today. Vintage 1979, it was for Revlon’s “Charlie” fragrance–I have no idea who gets to name perfumes, or how they go about it–complete with supermodel Shelly Hack and her 64 teeth and Mel Torme roped into singing the jingle.

Lyrics of enduring, persevering brainlessness: “Kinda young, kinda now… Kinda free, kinda wow…” It takes a special talent to write such drivel.

Mel Torme was one of the leading singers of his era and also a championship-caliber quick-draw expert. Interesting man! Great raconteur, too. They were going to do a feature on him for Sixty Minutes once, he says, but dropped it once they’d found out he had no history of scandal, adultery, alcoholism, or drug addiction. “I was too dull,” he admits.

A Very Musical Household

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This is what you get when Daddy and Mommy are musicians–a musical household.

Well, at any rate you get a dancing toddler and a dog who plays the piano and sings, insofar as a dog can do such things. Betcha J.S. Bach had this in his house! Anyway, we saw it last night and I knew I’d have to share it with you all.

‘Where Do the Nutty Professors Come From?’ (2016)

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Do you ever wonder why it seems that colleges and looniversities are staffed by kooks and wackos–and then realize that’s because they’re staffed by kooks and wackos? How are they able to find so many nuts?

Where Do the Nutty Professors Come From?

I have been told by a most authoritative source: they seek them out. That’s right–they want highly disturbed individuals to do the teaching. Why? With that I can’t help you.

It really has gotten to the point that the colleges and looniversities constitute a threat to the survival of our republic. They must be defunded. Now.