From the archives (May 18, 2021): Nostalgia ain't all it's cracked up to be

From 1965 until 1975, a sitcom called Till Death Us Do Part ran on British television. Its success inspired similar shows in several other countries, including All in the Family in the United States from 1971 to 1979. All in the Family starred Carroll O'Connor and Jean Stapleton in the roles of Archie Bunker and Edith Bunker, respectively, and every episode began with the two of them sitting at their piano, singing this song:

Boy, the way Glenn Miller played
Songs that made The Hit Parade,
Guys like us, we had it made,
Those were the days!

And you knew where you were then,
Girls were girls and men were men.
Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.

Didn't need no welfare state,
Everybody pulled his wei.ght.
Gee, our old LaSalle ran great,
Those were the days!

It has now been more than 50 years since Archie and Edith began singing that song. The wonderful days they longed for and missed so much included the years of the Stock Market Crash, the Great Depression, and World War II.

The days many people today seem to long for include the Korean Conflict, the VietNam War, the urban riots during the Civil Rights movement, the AIDS scare. One can almost envision a few years down the road that millennials will be looking back with fondness on good old days like September 11, 2001.

Time plays tricks on people. Many human beings seem to remember only the good and forget the bad, while others do just the opposite, emphasizing the bad and ignoring the good. It is my opinion that both groups are unrealistic in their approaches to living. I will leave it to others to help both groups work out their mental health problems.

I, of course, have the answer. For a dose of real nostalgia, the good kind, let us return to the days of yesteryear (that's a phrase from The Lone Ranger radio program if you didn't know) and go back to the school playground, as we did in this post from 2014, which you should now read, including the comments, before continuing..

Now that I think about it, grade-school recess wasn't always such fun either. I distinctly remember Sidney Usleton sneaking up on me every day during recess in the second grade and choking me from behind. This lasted until I mentioned it at home, at which time my Dad showed me a little jujitsu move he had learned in the Navy that sent Sidney Usleton packing. He never bothered me again. I think our teacher, Miss Elizabeh Nash (younger sister of Miss Erma, the principal) was oblivious to the whole situation.

Do you have good memories or bad memories from grade school?

Nostalgia ain't all it's cracked up to be

From 1965 until 1975, a sitcom called Till Death Us Do Part ran on British television. Its success inspired similar shows in several other countries, including All in the Family in the United States from 1971 to 1979. All in the Family starred Carroll O'Connor and Jean Stapleton in the roles of Archie Bunker and Edith Bunker, respectively, and every episode began with the two of them sitting at their piano, singing this song:

Boy, the way Glenn Miller played
Songs that made The Hit Parade,
Guys like us, we had it made,
Those were the days!

And you knew where you were then,
Girls were girls and men were men.
Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.

Didn't need no welfare state,
Everybody pulled his wei.ght.
Gee, our old LaSalle ran great,
Those were the days!

It has now been more than 50 years since Archie and Edith began singing that song. The wonderful days they longed for and missed so much included the years of the Stock Market Crash, the Great Depression, and World War II.

The days many people today seem to long for include the Korean Conflict, the VietNam War, the urban riots during the Civil Rights movement, the AIDS scare. One can almost envision a few years down the road that millennials will be looking back with fondness on good old days like September 11, 2001.

Time plays tricks on people. Many human beings seem to remember only the good and forget the bad, while others do just the opposite, emphasizing the bad and ignoring the good. It is my opinion that both groups are unrealistic in their approaches to living. I will leave it to others to help both groups work out their mental health problems.

I, of course, have the answer. For a dose of real nostalgia, the good kind, let us return to the days of yesteryear (that's a phrase from The Lone Ranger radio program if you didn't know) and go back to the school playground, as we did in this post from 2014, which you should now read, including the comments, before continuing..

Now that I think about it, grade-school recess wasn't always such fun either. I distinctly remember Sidney Usleton sneaking up on me every day during recess in the second grade and choking me from behind. This lasted until I mentioned it at home, at which time my Dad showed me a little jujitsu move he had learned in the Navy that sent Sidney Usleton packing. He never bothered me again. I think our teacher, Miss Elizabeh Nash (younger sister of Miss Erma, the principal) was oblivious to the whole situation.

Do you have good memories or bad memories from grade school?

What we have here is a fail-yah to communicate.

[start semi-rant mode]

We have just come through the American election of 2010.

The liberals think the conservatives don’t get the message. The conservatives think the liberals don’t get the message. The president thinks the American people don’t get the message. The American people think the president doesn’t get the message. The Democrats think the Republicans don’t get the message. The Republicans think the Democrats don’t get the message. The Libertarians and Tea Party members think no one else gets the message. Everyone thinks he or she is right. It’s the other person, obviously, who is wrong.

Clearly, in the words of Strother Martin in the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke, what we have here is a fail-yah to communicate.

President Obama now says (in an interview aired on November 7, 2010, on the CBS-TV program 60 Minutes) that he doesn’t plan to change his agenda but will attempt to communicate better because people failed to understand his message. My own opinion is that people now understand his message very clearly. Perhaps they didn’t two years ago, but now they do, based not on what he has said but on what he has done. And a very clear majority of the American voting public have firmly rejected it (except in a few apparently very liberal places where people like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and Barbara Boxer and Barney Frank managed, astoundingly, to get themselves re-elected). The president, however, seems to care more about what people in other countries think than what the majority of Americans think. We are expected to follow like sheep and accept whatever he has decided is best for us.

I have an announcement, folks: The American system doesn’t work that way. In fact, it works just the other way; he is supposed to do what the American voters want. In what used to be America (that is, according to the U.S. Constitution), the people were in charge. Abraham Lincoln probably phrased it best as “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” (and just so you know, Abraham Lincoln was not a Democrat; he was the first Republican president.) But right now President Obama does not appear very Abraham Lincolnesque. Instead, he seems to be Strother Martin and the rest of us have become Paul Newman.

Denial, my friends, is not a river in Egypt.

[end semi-rant mode]

If you are a U.S. citizen, whether you agree or disagree with me, I’d love to hear from you. But for this one post, if you are not a U.S. citizen, please follow Archie Bunker’s advice to his wife, Edith, and stifle yourself.

However, if you want to move here and become a citizen of the United States and vote in our elections, I say, in the words of Edith Bunker herself: “I welcome you with open arms.”

Six of these seven have something in common

If you can’t identify them all, they are (or were):

Jean Stapleton (20th-century American actress in her role as Edith Bunker on All In The Family)
Louis Armstrong (20th-century American musician)
Dolly Parton (20th-century American singer/songwriter/performer)
Edgar Allan Poe (19th-century American author)
Al Joyner (20th-century American Olympian athlete)
Janis Joplin (20th-century American singer/songwriter/performer)
Robert E. Lee (19th-century American military leader)

Which one doesn’t have what the other six have (or had)?

For purposes of this quiz, Olympic medals, Emmys, Oscars, Grammys, Tonys, and the ability to play the trumpet don’t count.

Here is a big hint: The contest ends at midnight tonight. Look for the answer tomorrow!