by James Strauss |
“Love child, never meant to be. Love child, always second best.” Brother John presaged the lyrics in his deep baritone voice. A different voice introduced John without actually introducing him. Was John really in Na Trang, spinning a platter with the latest Supremes’ song on it?
by James Strauss |
Are we the disappearing apes? Before the turn of the 20th century scientists knew what had happened to Rome and the Romans……..
by James Strauss |
They came before dawn. How they came was impossible to imagine. An entire reinforced Marine company, dug into low scrub with marginal cover, waited for them just where they hit. The company used the Starlight scope. The base of fire predicted to be launched from Hill...
by James Strauss |
The big debate is coming up with Clinton and Trump. At this time the right wing whacked mass media, as right wing as Trump himself and maybe just as suicidal, has Trump leading in all polls or very close.
by James Strauss |
I had heard of the RPG (rocket propelled grenade), the Russian version of America’s recoilless rifle. Basically it was a small rocket fired from a shoulder mount. The rocket body, about two inches in diameter, had a warhead about four inches. Because the weapon...
by James Strauss |
Once again, backed into the open-sided ‘lean-to’ my ‘scout’ team had made for me, I took out my writing materials to send another letter home. It was getting too dark to write so I did the best I could since using the flashlight under a hunched over poncho cover was out of the question in the heat….
by James Strauss |
Welcome back! According to our Facebook Page comments there is a real Chickenman Fan club out there. Radio did a lot to spark the imagination of listeners. Something we may be missing as a culture today? Don’t Touch your Dial Click on Arrows below Introduction...
by James Strauss |
Drudge Report I have been reading the Internet Drudge Report to see what it has up on it these days, in the times of Donald Trump. I could not believe what I was reading! Fox? Nothing. Go to Drudge and be blown from any rationality to a place far far away. Donald...
by James Strauss |
In my series, Thirty Days Has September, the radio program Chickenman was brought to mind. Armed Forces Radio provided our troops, in the Vietnam War, the ‘opportunity” to listen to this inane and entertaining Radio series created by the genius of Dick...
by James Strauss |
I made my way back to the Gunny. The Corpsman lay still, breathing shallowly with a poncho cover wrapped around him. The poncho covers served as our blankets, since they easily separated from the rubber liner. The air mattresses most everyone had, like mine, were...
by James Strauss |
What’s Really Real?
Differential behavior when combined with verbal and written communication. The complexity of trying to arrive at conclusions about other people when limited to talk, or the written word, or even in seething them out in life, all prepared to be seen. What about under the thin layers we lay over the reality of our lives?
by James Strauss |
Steaming Pile of Media Crap just gets bigger! They don’t care. No, they don’t. Not one whit. You think they care, because they really really sound like they care. But they don’t. People you like on television; Brian Williams, Matt Lauer, Anderson...
by James Strauss |
Ham and Lima beans. Nobody wanted them so I took all four boxes. It was preferable to the sliced ‘spam’ I’d had before. The boxes had already been picked through for sugar and fake cream packets. I got a carton of cigarettes. Lucky Strike. I sat back against a big...
by James Strauss |
The radio music transmissions were supposed to stop at night but it was not full dark when my small team of scouts and radio operator went to work setting up shelter halves around them. I was afraid of the radio transmissions giving our position away. I smelled heavy...
by James Strauss |
I WILL NOT! I will not drop friends on Facebook or visitors to my websites because they support Donald Trump or say shitty things about Hillary Clinton. I just won’t do it. Without differences what a helluva boring world it would be and what a pit of dead creativity.
by James Strauss |
It was interesting to listen to so many people interviewed this morning on ABC about why they support Donald Trump. Some are irrational to a great extent, like the woman who’s selling Confederate flags with Trumps name on them, even though Trump has disavowed...
by James Strauss |
And the mass media rush to rid the country of being a country continues. The wealthy owners of these media outlets report on how the big national defense ‘whatever the hell that was’ event where Clinton and Trump spoke, was all about how both of them made...
by James Strauss |
Night didn’t come easily in the Nam. The day had been a blessing compared to my first night. Moving seventeen clicks through muddy rice paddies wearing a fifty-pound pack was its own form of misery, but the brutality of Marine training had kicked in and setting one...
by James Strauss |
There are no more ‘facts’ left to report, not if you read the Drudge Report or watch Fox News. They say whatever they want now, with complete impunity.
by James Strauss |
And they all become the same.
From Facebook, Twitter Instagram, Snapchat and more. They all become all about them and not about you
by James Strauss |
The distancing of technology and what it means for tribalism and the very survival of the human race.
We cannot make it apart. We live among one another, using one another……….
by James Strauss |
THE SECOND DAY SECOND PART Breakfast in the mud pit was ham and lima beans served with canteen cup holders of instant black coffee. I didn’t ask the Gunny why the other men bothered to pull the cream and sugar from incoming C-rations. It didn’t matter. I remained so...
by James Strauss |
The “Goring” of Hillary Clinton. That’s exactly what the republican owned Mainstream Media is doing. They are doing to her, damning by faint praise, exactly what they did to give the nation eight years of George Bush Junior, creating the single...
by James Strauss |
There are people who don’t agree. In fact, that statement “don’t agree” might best describe this United States of America. It’s a nation of don’t agree, a land of different beliefs and a country where argument reigns……..
by James Strauss |
This thing about pain. Not heroin. Not opiates. I mean real pain. The kind of pain that reaches down inside you and the radiates out so you can’t even communicate properly. Yes, that mewling stuff reducing your from a human being to flopping piece of chicken meat……..
by James Strauss |
Hieronymus Six a.m. comes early in Duluth, Minnesota, when February, the coldest month of a cold winter, begins. It was the first and it was a Saturday morning. I lived in a four story home built by some important person many years earlier. There’d been enough time...
by James Strauss |
I could not believe I was flying into my first field experience wearing crummy Korean War utilities. I wished fervently that I’d brought my own from training. At least they would have been green instead of whatever color I now wore. Being colorblind as a Marine...
by James Strauss |
What can we do to feel better about ourselves and about life going on around us, no matter who we are and where we are or what is happening to us? A rare thing to do is thought. Isolated, individual, lonely and very necessary private thought. You can do it anywhere...
by James Strauss |
The blithering drooling and vapid delivery of American television pounds most of us into some sort of lumpy grumpy submission. News bastions from Fox, to CNN and on into MSNBC and the networks bombard us with solid right hooks from Trump and dancing jabs from Clinton until we all feel like either battered survivors
by James Strauss |
I followed the Buck Sergeant down through the dark muddy aisle of the Da Nang Hilton. The aisle was strewn with back packs and other field equipment I could not help running into. My flight bag was tucked under the bunk, for whatever security that might provide.
by James Strauss |
I get tired of it. The constant drone about the human over population of our world and how our actions are bringing it to an end. Has most of the world forgotten about basic math and geometry? Or didn’t most of the world go to school? Most of the world I experience...
by James Strauss |
The door opened. It was a steel door about six inches thick, or so it seemed. It hit with a jarring thud when its heavy flat surface pivoted down and smacked upon the mud. Sunlight shot in like a wave of heat, followed by a wave of real heat, the air-conditioned...
by James Strauss |
What is the Alt-right, anyway? The alternative right wing, once known as neocons but alt-right sounds mysteriously better. They are republicans, the most fearful of all republicans. Republicans have a single commonality about them that extends to the alt-right, as...
by James Strauss |
Back when I had to get up in the morning. Now I get up in the morning because I can’t even remember what it was that I got out of sleeping in.
Back then my brilliant wife was in control of the stereo, a stereo capable of blowing anyone and anything out of our small one story home
by James Strauss |
There will be no getting together. Of all social fears that exist on the planet, for cultural leaders, people getting together is their greatest fear. Today, with the advent of such magnificent electronic media inventions…..
by James Strauss |
The hall outside the St. Norbert Chemistry Department classroom door saw a lot of traffic. The dark, near ebony, wood and solid stone floor that ran the length of the narrow passage exuded age and class. Student’s passing all did so in silence, carrying piles of...
by James Strauss |
Fifth grade at Sacred Heart Academy in Duluth, Minnesota wasn’t much different than other Catholic Elementary Schools of its time, except for its location high atop a hill above one of the coldest developed areas in the United States. Other places in Minnesota might...
by James Strauss |
It’s all about the money. Obamacare. Oh, the idea was great and the law well written, except for one part. That part was the part that made no demands whatever on what insurer’s could charge or increase or anything else financially. Expecting American...
by James Strauss |
They hadn’t told me that I was going to make it yet, when my brother came by to visit on his way home. We’d been hit only two weeks apart. The telegram came to me about his injuries, dropped in by a supply chopper late in the day on a place called Ganoi Island in Vietnam…..
by James Strauss |
It’s all about the money. Obamacare. Oh, the idea was great and the law well written, except for one part. That part was the part that made no demands whatever on what insurer’s could charge or increase or anything else financially…
by James Strauss |
Ajinomoto To be stuck in Hawaii without any money was a horrible thing for any kid, particularly three white Haole kids, coming from a military family and living in a downtown local area on the fringe of downtown Waikiki. Kapuhulu was what the district was called. I...
by James Strauss |
Dateline: Lake Geneva, WI August 20, 2016 The Olympics are tailing down…… I will miss them. I absolutely love the shots, few as they’ve been of the aerial scenes of that city. Rio is stunning in location. I did’t know, before these games, that...
by James Strauss |
The July of 1962, on Oahu, was oppressive in more ways than I, and my friends atop Diamond Head, could count. The Sundays came and went, Sunday being the only day of the week that our parents would let us run off and climb the crater wall above Fort Ruger…….
by James Strauss |
“The cat’s name is Pushkin,” the eight-year-old said. “He’s named after a great Russian who did something a long time ago.” The boy stroked the Russian Blue between his ears, as the cat leaned his head down to pick away at his Fancy Feast…..
by James Strauss |
BACK DIVE…1960 With all of the focus on Olympics 2016 in Rio de Janeiro the past weeks my memory banks are rejuvenated. I reached the pinnacle of one meter diving in 1960, as a graduating sophomore at Thornton Fractional North Township High School in South...
by James Strauss |
I hate Paris. Oh, not the restaurants, the food vendors on the streets or the Louvre. Even the Eiffel Tower and the river are pretty terrific, when it’s not raining or foggy or any of that other French stuff. No, I hate Paris because of how shitty the airport is, how...
by James Strauss |
The 1965 pledge class of the ADG Fraternity at St. Norbert College rejected a young man because of a disagreement the fraternity had regarding a pyramid scheme it was conducting all over the campus. In order to prove his point, that the fraternity was doing something federally illegal….
by James Strauss |
The Russians are there, but it’s like they aren’t at all. They finally got in after a huge doping scandal but then couldn’t qualify for anything because, well, they were no longer on dope….
by James Strauss |
A stroll through Flat Iron Park and the Art in The Park Festival is a great way to spend a warm Sunday in Lake Geneva, home of my newspaper. Lake Geneva WI How are these events received in your...
by James Strauss |
“Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair…….” Publishing a local weekly newspaper offers me the opportunity to write and Opinion/Editorial each week. Most focus on very current events and we all know 2015 and 2016 have provided tons of...
by James Strauss |
How they handle the news. Being in the newspaper business at The Geneva Shore Report I am now much more aware of the ‘slant’ that mass media takes and how it seems to take it all together although, for the most part, I cannot see linkage demanding that….
by James Strauss |
Fun in the sun at Rio de Janeiro? Dateline: Rio de Janeiro, Friday August 8, 2106 The Olympics in Rio is underway, in spite of how miserably the mass media has tried to kill it. From the slums of the downtown Rio area, the foul water and bad food. Russian team...
by James Strauss |
Some short film clips along and near Bellows Beach and Mana Kai, Hawaii. This “vacation ” back to the Islands has been restful….. More later with some action with the small boys! Outrigger Canoeing along the Coast The long paddle home Thanks...
by James Strauss |
Polling numbers seem to be all over the place in this contentious Election 2016 How deep into West Virginia, Alabama and Arizona can the pollsters go to hold up Donald Trump’s numbers?
by James Strauss |
It is entertaining to sit back and watch Paul Ryan twist and squirm under the punishing thumb of Trump. Ryan has to stick to his endorsement of Trump while Trump refuses to endorse him in return….
by James Strauss |
Note that Donald Trump, man who would not go into the military, continues to insult and demean the integrity of those who not only served but also went into harm’s way and were either captured, wounded, or killed, or all three. Donald Trump hates that simple...
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