"Our whole life is like a play." (Ben Jonson)

....Have you ever thought of going through your closet to see if you could possibly find any clothing where the label indicates that it has been made in the USA? No, I don't suppose you have. Well, you don't have to; I've done it for you. These are the countries that I saw on the labels of my shirts--golf shirts and dress shirts; short sleeves; size XL.

China, Hong Kong, Mexico, Madagascar, Philippines, Indonesia, Korea, Viet Nam, India, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Thailand. Nothing made in the USA, and I only got through about a third of my clothing. Several shirts still left, and then the pants. I don't know if I've got the stomach to go through the pants. It's also too difficult to get at the labels. I don't suspect it would be any different in your clothing closets, so don't bother. When Barack Obama says his stimulus plan will create a million or more jobs, I'm left to wonder where these jobs are going to be. And it's been a very long time since I've heard or read anything about the unions. This doling out jobs to every country you can think of never used to be this way. I remember walking through Woolworth's Five & Ten Cent Store many moons ago and seeing cheap Japanese toys being sold. The thought of having a foreign country manufacture our clothing or cars or radios or anything else was anathema.

....I was going to say cell phones and computers--but never heard of them. Don't know how we got along without them. E-mail? Forget it. Just write a letter, stick it in an envelope and put a 3 cent stamp on it. Telephones? Who had them? Only the swells on the Grand Concourse. Back then the "5 & 10" was our mall. I guess that beats out the dollar stores. But if I understand the system correctly, the companies that have their products produced in another part of the world are raking in the money and sending it to a tax free place in Switzerland or to some other tax loop to avoid paying taxes to our Treasury. But, of course, what do I know. And that's not a question--it has the force of a statement.

.....I remember that we did have a sort of a car back in the 30s. It had two seats in the front and a rumble seat in the back. The motor housing in the front was entirely in chrome and when the sun reflected on it, it shone like a fiery comet. It was called an "Essex." In order to start the motor you had to use a crank to crank it up from the front. It usually took a rather muscular person to get it started after about five cranks. I often wondered why the back was called a "rumble seat." Of course, it was open to the elements and I suppose that's where people rumbled. However, I never witnessed a rumble, except perhaps in "West Side Story.."

.....On a more mundane level, I got a surprise from my publisher yesterday--a royalty check for $46! Who woulda thunk it? Well, my first royalty check was about $25 so I imagine sales are creeping up to the Time's top ten list. I don't know whether or not creeping is slower than crawling. And that's not a statement--it has the force of a question.

......Yesterday, too, I received a call from my Law Firm's doctor and made an appointment with him to examine my back (injured at WalMart). The other wounds that occurred are healing very slowly. Rho has been like a nurse--she is very adept at dressing wounds. Why not? We have tons of bandages, band aids, and anti-biotic creams in our medicine cabinets. Our bathrooms are like a pharmacy. I almost have to injure myself periodically so that our equipment will not go to waste.

"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." (2 Henry IV)

.....My last blog was a week ago, and probably the longest time between blogs since August, 2007. I have a couple of weak excuses, but they will have to do; I haven't felt too motivated since the accident at WalMart; and two, there hasn't been anything happening that I felt passionate enough about that would send me blogward. So, whatever comes out here, today, will probably be just some mundane stuff that may lack interest for readers.

.....A paralegal from the firm of Steinger & Iscoe, P.A. was here the other day asking a million questions about the accident I had at WalMart. While he was here, he took pictures of my leg--which was wrapped up like a fajita--so, I don't know what good that will do for the case. I'm really not a litigious guy, but I have already spent about $80 on doctor bills, and I mean to get that back--at least--from that store. After giving me about a dozen papers to sign, he left saying that I should expect a call from the firm's doctor to examine me. That call came this morning from a chiropractor in Delray whom, I suppose, means to do some rehab on my back which was injured in the incident in some way. So, I will be seeing him next Tuesday. Stay tuned in to this remarkable story.

.....Having very little to do at this point in the summer, I went to the Theatre Arts Class in the clubhouse which meets every Thursday afternoon for two hours to "study" acting. So, yesterday was the second time I went and it was quite fun. I met a few of the people I had performed with in previous shows, and also some that I had never met before. We did some of the same things I had done in my acting classes in college and with Val Chevron in adult ed classes down here in Boca H.S. for two years. It included some "improvs" which activity I am not too fond of, but I participated anyway. The improv given me was that a woman was to ask me the question, "Why don't you keep your promises," or something to that effect. After about three or four minutes of bantering that topic around and listening to others doing improvs, we were given items of prose which each of us was to "sight" read. I still believe that to become a decent actor for the amateur or professional stage, one must be asked to sight read a passage from one of Shakespeare's plays. Well, perhaps I'm prejudiced because I taught Shakespeare for many years and acted out many of his passages and soliloquy's for my students. Of course, when I did this, they were mesmerized and spellbound; of course, I can't prove it. But now, I do wish I'd be asked to do something from Shakespeare in this class I'm in now with fellow residents. During the season after the snowbirds have returned the class puts in a few skits in the ballroom once every Friday, I believe, at which snacks are provided to the audience which usually numbers about at least a hundred or so. I'm not sure if they come for the show or the snacks. It's the economy, you know.

.....Today is a drippy kind of day, a day which reminds me of a favorite tune of mine, "It's a Rainy Night in Georgia," a tune which I always find rather melancholy. One of my most favorite moods just happens to be melancholyism....sort of like a latter day Hamlet.It's odd, but friends always get a charge out of the fact that I very rarely laugh at the punchline of a joke that I hear. It's not that I never laugh at a joke, but only when it's told by a professional. Not too many people that I know are able to tell a joke in a way that will make me laugh--smile, perhaps. But even then I'm fearful that they will see my "partial"; it's bad enough that they can see my cane and my hearing aids.

"Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth." (Genesis)

.....Lately I've been thinking about my collegiate studies in structural, historical, and comparative linguistics, and after a review of those studies I have arrived at a startling hypothesis--the English language is changing right under our nose! Of course, when you hypothesize you must then prove your theory by citing facts through deductive reasoning, as all of you know. At present, I cannot understand some of the English spoken by some of our children nor can I understand all of the English of all of our grandchildren. I can't even understand most of the English of the English. If there is general agreement about this among other American parents and grandparents of my generation; that is, they too find understanding the English of these young people difficult, then my conclusion about the language changing may actually be valid. (The conclusions of this type of reasoning are never true nor false; they are either valid or invalid.) So far, so good.

.....The reason that I cannot understand the aforementioned English is that it is spoken much too rapidly to follow; one word speedily elides into another, and consonants are avoided like the plague. My ears cannot process their speech so quickly. I am geared to a slight pause between words and sentences. .....Eventually--but very gradually--21st Century English will hardly be understood by English speakers in the 22nd or the 23rd Centuries A.D.!

.....Let's look at some other facts about language change and English; Old English, the language of Beowulf, which you all have read, of course, (in translation, of course), was spoken from about the middle of the 5th to the middle of the 12th Century. Then Geoffrey Chaucer came along in 15th C. and wrote "The Canterbury Tales" in what was then "Middle English"--much easier understood than Old English (except by Bill Berger). From 1500 to roughly 1650 we had "Early Modern English", the language of Shakespeare which you all read in high school and loved it. And finally, here we are speaking Modern English from the late 17th C. until now.

....Another reason that I believe the language is changing is the process of "texting"--the choppedupintopieces language that kids and many adults speak and write on their tiny machines. Thus, LOL (Laughing out loud) will become "Lots of love" or "Lots of luck" or "I love you a lot." That's not so strange since many of our words have more than one meaning. I'm not very good at texting; I wouldn't know how to use an I-pod or an E-pod or a Pea Pod if someone bought me one for Fathers' Day--which I hope no one does. Way down the line, I'm certain that much texting like LOL will become part of the spoken language; people will say "Lol" to mean "I love you" and the latter phrase will have disappeared from the English language, and those poor students of the 23rd Century will not be able to understand our books or plays. And, believe me, that's for certain.