More random thoughts

As the saying goes, De gustibus non est disputandum unless you prefer De gustibus non disputandum est. Latin purists do. Do what? you ask. Why, prefer to see the verbs placed at the end of Latin sentences, of course.

The phrase is usually translated into English as "There is no accounting for taste" or sometimes "There is no disputing about taste"; either version is acceptable.

it's true. My dad liked liverwurst, licorice, chicken gizzards, horseradish, Hamm's beer ("from the land of sky blue waters"), and Chesterfield cigarettes. My wife (the lovely Ellie) likes beets, oysters, and pimiento cheese sandwiches. I don't like anything mentioned in this paragraph so far except my dad and my wife.

Enough of that.

From the very early days of commercial television in America back in the late 1940s and early 1950s, certain black-and-white images are stuck in my mind:

• Tuesday nights with Uncle Miltie (comedian Milton Berle) and guys in Texaco service station uniforms singing:
  
  You can trust your car
  To the man who wears the star,
  The big red Texaco star!


• Saturday nights watching Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, Howard Morris, and Marguerite Piazza on Your Show Of Shows


• Friday evenings watching Mama with Robin Morgan ("my little sister Dagmar"), Dick Van Patten ("my big brother Nels"), Judson Laird ("and of course, Papa"). and the wonderful Peggy Wood ("but most of all when I think back to those days so long ago, most of all, I remember Mama") speaking Norwegian-accented Englsh two whole decades before she was the Mother Abbess in an Austrian convent solving a problem like Maria by tellng her to climb every mountain, ford every stream, and sending her to be the new nanny for the Von Trapp children


• The grandfather of all late-night shows Broadway Open Hpuse with comedian Jerry Lester and a very tall, very curvaceous, very dumb blonde also named Dagmar


• Afternoon children's shows like Howdy Doody starring Buffalo Bob Smith and Clarabell the Clown; Pinkie Lee starring, who else?, Pinkie Lee; and Soupy Sales starring Soupy, his big dogs White Fang and Black Tooth, and an occasional cream pie


• Game shows like The Name's The Same with Robert Q. Lewis and Beat The Clock with Bud Collier, who had been the voice of Superman on the radio.

As you can see, in times like these, by which I mean a week in which America was subjected to several highly coordinated simultaneous protest demonstrations that shut down bridge traffic in several cities by groups claiming to be "pro-Gaza" or "pro-Palestine" but which are actually pro-Hamas, a terrorist organization funded by the Iranians, I try to maintain a modicum of sanity by retreating into good times of long-past decades that have, let's face it, gone with the wind and are never coming back.

I highly recommend that you do the same, either that or put your fingers into your ears and sing "La-La-La-La, La-La-La-La" until the men in white coats come for us.