Lazarus's News & Word Bits

Classmate and Attorney Barry Lazarus has sent in both "good humor" for you to ponder as we think about our distant past, as well as some sobering information.  The News & Bits that impress him he hopes will impress you also.

Item #8: (Sent in December, 2020)

Pandemic Medical Testing

Urine Test for Old Men

My urologist’s office called the other day and explained that my scheduled appointment would now be done over the phone due to the coronavirus.  

One hour before the scheduled teleconference, I was instructed (via email) to administer my own urine test.  This was to avoid those lab tests and costly co-pays that your doctors tell you to get at their health clinic’s labs, and because they're shutdown too.

Directions for determining your urologically-related health condition:

Simply go outside and pee on the front lawn.  Then look carefully:

            If ants gather around your urine:  YOU LIKELY HAVE DIABETES.

            If you pee on your feet:  YOU PROBABLY HAVE A PROSTATE PROBLEM.

            If it smells like a barbecue:  YOU COULD HAVE HIGH CHOLESTEROL.

            If your wrist hurts when you shake it:  MOST LIKELY OSTEOARTHRITIS.

            If you return to your house with your penis outside of your pants:

                        YOU HAVE COME DOWN WITH ALZHEIMER'S.

 

Item #7: (Sent in December, 2020)

Could this happen to you out there in the community,

instead of occurring at one of our Class Reunions?

Item #6: (Sent in July, 2020)

A FASCINATING PIECE OF HISTORY

 
Very interesting piece about the surrender of the Japanese, ending WWII. I bet most people didn't know this. Of course, we were only 5 years old when this happened! I wish that there was an account of who ordered this and who drafted and approved this surrender plan. Who says that Americans do not have a sense of history and culture?

Why did the US choose a US Navy Iowa-class battleship as the location for Japan's surrender in World War 2 even though they were in Tokyo Bay and could have used a building on land? Pure symbolism. Nothing says "you're utterly defeated" than having to board the enemy's massive battleship in the waters of your own capital city. A naval vessel is considered sovereign territory for the purposes of accepting a surrender. You just don't get that if you borrow a ceremonial space from the host country. In addition, the Navy originally wanted the USS South Dakota to be the surrender site. It was President Truman who changed it to USS Missouri, Missouri being Truman's home state.

The Japanese delegation had to travel across water to the Missouri, which sat at the center of a huge US fleet. It's a bit like those movie scenes where someone enters a big-wig's office, and the big-wig sits silhouetted at the end of a long room, behind a massive desk. The appellant has to walk all the way to that desk along a featureless space, feeling small, exposed, vulnerable and comparatively worthless before the mogul enthroned in dramatic lighting before him. By the time he gets there the great speech he had prepared is reduced to a muttered sentence or two. In addition, the USS Missouri flew the flag of Commodore Perry's 19th century gun-boat diplomacy mission that opened the closeted Edo-era Japan to the world and forced upon them the Meiji restoration which ended the rule of the samurai class. The symbolism here is pretty clear - "this is how we want you to be, and remember what happens to countries that defy us." It was particularly humiliating for a proud country like Japan, and that was entirely the point. 

The symbolism of the ceremony was even greater than that. The ship was anchored at the precise latitude/longitude recorded in Perry's log during his 1845 visit, symbolizing the purpose of both visits to open Japan to the West. Perry's original flag was also present, having been flown all the way from the Naval Academy for the ceremony. When the Japanese delegation came aboard, they were forced to use an accommodation way (stairs) situated just forward of turret #1. The freeboard (distance between the ship's deck and the water line) there makes the climb about twice as long as if it had been set up farther aft, where the freeboard of the ship is less.

NOTE: This was even more of an issue for the Japanese surrender party as the senior member, Foreign Affairs Minister Shigemitsu, was crippled by an assassination attempt in 1932, losing his right leg in the process. The #1 and #2 turrets had been traversed about 20 degrees to starboard. The ostensible reason for this was to get the turret overhangs out of the way to create more room for the ceremony on the starboard veranda deck, but in fact this would have only required traversing turret #2 had it been the real reason. In reality, the turret position also put the gun barrels directly over the heads of the Japanese. They were literally standing “under the gun.”

The honour guard of US sailors (side boys) were all hand-picked to be over six feet tall, a further intimidation of the short-statured Japanese. The surrender documents themselves, one copy for the Allies and one for the Japanese contained identical English-language texts, but the Allied copy was bound in good quality leather, while the Japanese copy was bound with light canvas whose stitching looked like it had been done by a drunken tailor using kite string. After the signing ceremony, the Japanese delegation was not invited for tea and cookies; they were shuffled off the ship as an Allied air armada of over 400 aircraft flew overhead as a final reminder that American forces still had the ability to continue fighting should the Japanese have second thoughts on surrender.

And now you know the rest of the story ...

 

Item #5: (Sent in May, 2020)

Thought you'd enjoy this!  It's one you want your Children and Grandchildren to read. They won't believe this happened, but it DID.

Harry & Bess Truman

Harry Truman was a different kind of President. He probably made as many, or more important decisions regarding our nation's history as any of the other 42 Presidents preceding him. However, a measure of his greatness may rest on what he did after he left the White House.

The only asset he had when he died was the house he lived in, which was in Independence Missouri. His wife had inherited the house from her mother and father and other than their years in the White House, they lived their entire lives there.

When he retired from office in 1952 his income was a U.S. Army pension reported to have been $13,507.72 a year. Congress, noting that he was paying for his stamps and personally licking them, granted him an 'allowance' and, later, a retroactive pension of $25,000 per year.

After President Eisenhower was inaugurated, Harry and Bess drove home to Missouri by themselves. There was no Secret Service following them.

 When offered corporate positions at large salaries, he declined, stating, "You don't want me. You want the office of the President, and that doesn't belong to me. It belongs to the American people and it's not for sale."

Even later, on May 6, 1971, when Congress was preparing to award him the Medal of Honor on his 87th birthday, he refused to accept it, writing, "I don't consider that I have done anything which should be the reason for any award, Congressional or otherwise."

As president he paid for all of his own travel expenses and food.

Modern politicians have found a new level of success in cashing in on the Presidency, resulting in untold wealth. Today, many in Congress also have found a way to become quite wealthy while enjoying the fruits of their offices. Political offices are now for sale.

Good old Harry Truman was correct when he observed, "My choices in life were either to be a piano player in a whore house or a politician. And to tell the truth, there's hardly any difference!

I say dig him up and clone him!

IN GOD WE TRUST...GOD BLESS AMERICA

 

Item #4: (Sent in August, 2019)

Quite Descriptive – Nailed it!

A truck loaded with thousands of copies of Roget's Thesaurus crashed yesterday losing its entire load. Witnesses were stunned, startled, aghast, taken aback, stupefied, confused, shocked, rattled, paralyzed, dazed, bewildered, mixed up, surprised, awed, dumbfounded, nonplussed, flabbergasted, astounded, amazed, confounded, astonished, overwhelmed, horrified, numbed, speechless, and perplexed.

When insults had class

"He had delusions of adequacy
-Walter Kerr


"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire."
- Winston Churchill


"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure."
-Clarence Darrow


"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."
-William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)


"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it."
-Moses Hadas


"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it."
-Mark Twain

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends."
-Oscar Wilde

"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend, if you have one."
-George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill

"Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second... if there is one."
-Winston Churchill, in response

"I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here."
-Stephen Bishop


"He is a self-made man and worships his creator."
-John Bright

"I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial. -Irvin S. Cobb

"He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others."
-Samuel Johnson

"He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up."
- Paul Keating

"In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily."
-Charles, Count Talleyrand

"He loves nature in spite of what it did to him."
-Forrest Tucker


"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?"
-Mark Twain


"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork."
-Mae West


"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go."
-Oscar Wilde


"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts... for support rather than illumination."
-Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

"He has Van Gogh's ear for music."
-Billy Wilder


"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But I'm afraid this wasn't it."

-Groucho Marx

Remember When ... Poor ? Everyone was poor during WW 2 and prior to 1950.

I grew up with this old horrific life style of inconveniences and some how survived.  This message comes from my old buddy who was my next door neighbor in St. Louis Park pre-teen mostly the late 1940s.

 

'Hey Dad' asked one of my kids asked the other day, 'What was your favorite fast food when you were growing up? ''We didn't have fast food when I was growing up,' I informed him. 'All the food was slow.'

'C'mon, seriously. Where did you eat ?'

'It was a place called 'at home,'' I explained. 'Grandma cooked every day and when Grandpa got home from work, we sat down together at the dining room table, and if I didn't like what she put on my plate I was allowed to sit there until I did like it.'

By this time, the kid was laughing so hard I was afraid he was going to suffer serious internal damage, so I didn't tell him the part about how I had to have permission to leave the table. But here are some other things I would have told him about my childhood if I figured his system could have handled it:

Some parents NEVER owned their own house, wore Levis, set foot on a golf course, traveled out of the country or had a credit card. In their later years they had something called a revolving charge card. The card was good only at Sears Roebuck. Or maybe it was Sears AND Roebuck. Either way, there is no Roebuck anymore. Maybe he died.

My parents never drove me to soccer practice. This was mostly because we never had heard of soccer. I had a bicycle that weighed probably 50 pounds, and only had one speed, (slow). We didn't have a television in our house until I was 11, but my grandparents had one before that. It was, of course, black and white, but they bought a piece of colored plastic to cover the screen. The top third was blue, like the sky, and the bottom third was green, like grass. The middle third was red. It was perfect for programs that had scenes of fire trucks riding across someone's lawn on a sunny day. Some people had a lens taped to the front of the TV to make the picture look larger.

I was 13 before I tasted my first pizza, it was called 'pizza pie.' When I bit into it, I burned the roof of my mouth and the cheese slid off, swung down, plastered itself against my chin and burned that, too. It's still the best pizza I ever had.

We didn't have a car until I was 15. Before that, the only car in our family was my grandfather's Ford. He called it a 'machine.'

I never had a telephone in my room. The only phone in the house was in the living room and it was on a party line. Before you could dial, you had to listen and make sure some people you didn't know weren't already using the line.

Pizzas were not delivered to our home. But milk was.

All newspapers were delivered by boys and all boys delivered newspapers. I delivered a newspaper, six days a week. It cost 7 cents a paper, of which I got to keep 2 cents. I had to get up at 4 AM every morning.. On Saturday, I had to collect the 42 cents from my customers. My favorite customers were the ones who gave me 50 cents and told me to keep the change. My least favorite customers were the ones who seemed to never be home on collection day.

Movie stars kissed with their mouths shut. At least, they did in the movies. Touching someone else's tongue with yours was called French kissing and they didn't do that in movies. I don't know what they did in French movies. French movies were dirty and we weren't allowed to see them.

If you grew up in a generation before there was fast food, you may want to share some of these memories with your children or grandchildren.. Just don't blame me if they bust a gut laughing.

Growing up isn't what it used to be, is it?


MEMORIES from a friend:

My Dad is cleaning out my grandmother's house (she died in December) and he brought me an old Royal Crown Cola bottle. In the bottle top was a stopper with a bunch of holes in it. I knew immediately what it was, but my daughter had no idea. She thought they had tried to make it a salt shaker or something. I knew it as the bottle that sat on the end of the ironing board to 'sprinkle' clothes with because we didn't have steam irons. Man, I am old.

How many do you remember?

Head lights dimmer switches on the floor.
Ignition switches on the dashboard.
Heaters mounted on the inside of the fire wall.
Real ice boxes
Pant leg clips for bicycles without chain guards.
Soldering irons you heat on a gas burner.
Using hand signals for cars without turn signals.

Older Than Dirt Quiz:

Count all the ones that you remember, NOT the ones you were told about! Your ratings at the bottom.


1. Blackjack chewing gum
2. Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water
3. Candy cigarettes
4. Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles
5. Coffee shops or diners with table side jukeboxes
6 Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers
7. Party lines
8. Newsreels before the movie
9. P.F. Flyers
10. Butch wax
11. Telephone numbers with a word prefix (OLive-6933)
12. Peashooters
13. Howdy Doody
14. 45 RPM records
15. S&H Green Stamps
16 Hi-fi's
17. Metal ice trays with lever

18. Mimeograph paper
19 Blue flashbulb
20. Packards
21. Roller skate keys
22. Cork popguns
23. Drive-ins
24. Studebakers
25. Wash tub wringers

If you remembered 0-5 = You're still young
If you remembered 6-10 = You are getting older
If you remembered 11-15 = Don't tell your age,
If you remembered 16-25 = You're older than dirt!


I might be older than dirt but those memories are the best part of my life.

Don't forget to pass this along!!
Especially to all your really
OLD friends...


'Senility Prayer'...God grant me..
The senility to forget the people I never liked;
The good fortune to run into the ones that I do,
And the eyesight to tell the difference.'


Have a great week !!!!!!

 

Item #3: (Sent in the spring of 2018)

A little history, most people will never know, of the war that raged in the time of our relative youth.

 Interesting Veterans Statistics off the Vietnam Memorial Wall.

  

There are 58,267 names now listed on that polished black wall, including those added in 2010.

  

The names are arranged in the order in which they were taken from us by date and within each date the names are alphabetized. It is hard to believe it is 57 years since the first casualty.

  

The first known casualty was Richard B. Fitzgibbon, of North Weymouth, Mass. Listed by the U.S. Department of Defense as having been killed on June 8, 1956. His name is listed on the Wall with that of his son, Marine Corps Lance Cpl. Richard B. Fitzgibbon III, who was killed on Sept. 7, 1965.

 

 There are three sets of fathers and sons on the Wall.

  

39,996 on the Wall were just 22 or younger.

 

 8,283 were just 19 years old.

  

The largest age group, 33,103 were 18 years old.

  

12 soldiers on the Wall were 17 years old.

  

5 soldiers on the Wall were 16 years old.

  

One soldier, PFC Dan Bullock was 15 years old.

  

997 soldiers were killed on their first day in Vietnam ..

 

 1,448 soldiers were killed on their last day in Vietnam.

 31 sets of brothers are on the Wall.

  

Thirty-one sets of parents lost two of their sons.

  

54 soldiers attended Thomas Edison High School in Philadelphia. I wonder why so many from one school.

  

8 Women are on the Wall, Nursing the wounded.

  

244 soldiers were awarded the Medal of Honor during the Vietnam War; 153 of them are on the Wall.

  

Beallsville, Ohio with a population of 475 lost 6 of her sons.

West Virginia had the highest casualty rate per capita in the nation. There are 711 West Virginians on the Wall.

  

The Marines of Morenci - They led some of the scrappiest high school football and basketball teams that the little Arizona copper town of Morenci (pop. 5,058) had ever known and cheered. They enjoyed roaring beer busts. In quieter moments, they rode horses along the Coronado Trail, stalked deer in the Apache National Forest. And in the patriotic camaraderie typical of Morenci's mining families, the nine graduates of Morenci High enlisted as a group in the Marine Corps. Their service began on Independence Day, 1966. Only 3 returned home.

 

The Buddies of Midvale - LeRoy Tafoya, Jimmy Martinez, Tom Gonzales were all boyhood friends and lived on three consecutive streets in Midvale, Utah on Fifth, Sixth and Seventh avenues. They lived only a few yards apart. They played ball at the adjacent sandlot ball field. And they all went to Vietnam. In a span of 16 dark days in late 1967, all three would be killed. LeRoy was killed on Wednesday, Nov. 22, the fourth anniversary of John F. Kennedy's assassination. Jimmy died less than 24 hours later on Thanksgiving Day. Tom was shot dead assaulting the enemy on Dec. 7, Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day.

  

The most casualty deaths for a single day was on January 31, 1968 ~ 245 deaths.

The most casualty deaths for a single month was May 1968 - 2,415 casualties were incurred.

  

For most Americans who read this they will only see the numbers that the Vietnam War created. To those of us who survived the war, and to the families of those who did not, we see the faces, we feel the pain that these numbers created. We are, until we too pass away, haunted with these numbers, because they were our friends, fathers, husbands, wives, sons and daughters. There are no noble wars, just noble warriors.

 

This is a reminder for those who served during this time, a few of whom may have come from our Class of 1958, and those who care to remember the war in our time. 

Item #2: (Sent in the fall of 2016)

Would you believe the email spell checker did not recognize the word murgatroyd?


 

Lost Words from our childhood:


 

Words gone as fast as the buggy whip! Sad really! The other day a not so elderly (65) lady said something to her son about driving a Jalopy and he looked at her quizzically and said what the heck is a Jalopy? OMG (new) phrase!  He never heard of the word jalopy!!  She knew she was old but not that old...


 

Well, I hope you are Hunky Dory after you read this and chuckle...

by Richard Lederer


 

About a month ago, I illuminated some old expressions that have become obsolete because of the inexorable march of technology. These phrases included "Don't touch that dial," "Carbon copy," "You sound like a broken record" and "Hung out to dry."

Back in the olden days we had a lot of Moxie. We'd put on our best bib and tucker to straighten up and fly right.

Heavens to Betsy!  Gee whillikers!  Jumping Jehoshaphat!   Holy moly!

We were in like Flynn and living the life of Riley, and even a regular guy couldn't accuse us of being a knucklehead, a nincompoop or a pill. Not for all the tea in China!

Back in the olden days, life used to be swell, but when's the last time anything was swell?

Swell has gone the way of beehives, pageboys and the D.A.; of spats, knickers, fedoras, poodle skirts, saddle shoes and pedal pushers.

Oh, my aching back. Kilroy was here, but he isn't anymore.

We wake up from what surely has been just a short nap, and before we can say, well I'll be a monkey's uncle!, or, This is a fine kettle of fish!  We discover that the words we grew up with,- the words that seemed omnipresent as oxygen have vanished with scarcely a notice from our tongues and our pens and our keyboards.

Poof, go the words of our youth, the words we've left behind. We blink, and they're gone. Where have all those phrases gone?

Long gone: Pshaw, The milkman did it.

Hey! It's your nickel.

Don't forget to pull the chain.   Knee high to a grasshopper.

Well, Fiddlesticks!   Going like sixty.   I'll see you in the funny papers.

Don't take any wooden nickles

Heavens  to  Murgatroyd!    

 

It turns out there are more of these lost words and expressions than Carter has liver pills.

This can be disturbing stuff !


 

We of a certain age have been blessed to live in changeful times.

For a child each new word is like a shiny toy, a toy that has no age.


 

We at the other end of the chronological arc have the advantage of remembering there are words that once did not exist and there were words that once strutted their hour upon the earthly stage and now are heard no more,except in our collective memory. It's one of the greatest advantages of aging. 

See ya later, alligator!

 

Item #1: (Barry's Aphorisms of 2013)

 

First: Definition of APHORISM:

     1: a concise statement of a principle, or

2: a terse formulation of a truth or sentiment: an adage
 
APHORISMS OF THE YEAR
 
It's not whether you win or lose,
 but how you place the blame.
  
We have enough "youth"
How about a fountain of "smart"
The original point and click interface 
was a Smith & Wesson.
 
A Fool and his money
can throw one heck of a party
 
When blondes have more fun, do they know it?
 
Five days a week my body is a temple.
The other two it's an amusement park.
 
LEARN FROM YOUR PARENTS' MISTAKES:
USE BIRTH CONTROL
 
Money isn't everything,
but it sure keeps the kids in touch
.
 
Don't Drink and Drive!!
You might hit a bump and spill something.
 
If at first you don't succeed
skydiving is not for you.
 
Reality is only an illusion
that occurs due to a lack of alcohol.
 
We are born naked, wet and hungry.
Then things get worse.
 
Red meat is not bad for you: 
Fuzzy green meat is bad for you.
 
Ninety-nine percent of all lawyers
give the rest a bad name
.
 
Xerox and Wurlitzer will merge
to produce reproductive organs.
 
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS NO MATCH FOR NATURAL STUPIDITY.
 
The latest survey shows that
three out of four people make
up 75% of the population.
 
"You know why a banana is like a politician?"
"He comes in and first he is green,
then he turns yellow
and then he's rotten."
 
"I think Congressmen should wear uniforms,
you know, like NASCAR drivers, so we could
identify their corporate sponsors."
 
The reason Politicians try so
hard to get re-elected is that they
would 'hate' to have to make a living

under the laws they've passed.

 



agape