Rock of ages.

You know, you don't have to hit Social Security age to realize you just don't bounce back the way you used to. A couple of weeks ago I was putting down some nice store-bought rocks around the front-yard bushes to make the place look nicer, hoping to entire a buyer for the house. I had already distributed mulch and dug up weeds, and so far all was well. 

Then the irony. 

Because while it's called egg rock, it was I that broke.

Well, not broken eggactly (har!). I lifted properly, showed good form, but then I turned in a funny way, and my body took a funny turn. It was one of those muscle pulls that you feel as it happens, and it happens that I felt it. 

It didn't seem that bad at first, but it was pretty painful. When I was a strapping young lad (well, not that strapping) I could bounce back in a couple of days from this kind of thing. But it took me most of a week to stop groaning every time I bent over or stood up. Worse, my ability to twist to the right was severely impacted -- there, the pain was so bad it was almost impossible to force myself to do it. You never know how often you make a particular motion until it hurts every time you do it. 

I'm glad to have recovered now, and the place does look a bit better with the new rocks. 

All this got me thinking about getting older, and thus about an elderly friend of mine who retired to The Villages in Florida. If you are not familiar with that particular patch of real estate, it is a community for people 55 and up about 20 miles south of Ocala, Florida. In the year 2000 it had about eight thousand people, but now almost EIGHTY THOUSAND people live there. 

My friend tells me that on Friday nights the widow women still doll themselves up and go to the bars (people get around by trolley and golf cart, I hear). A couple of years ago the place was labeled "The STD Capital of America," although that turned out to be a myth. However, I'm willing to bet there's a lot of shenanigans afoot all the same. It may be a foot that needs podiatric care, but afoot all the same. 

My question is: Why is there no reality show about The Villages? It's a natural! And it would appeal to the people who still use cable for most of their TV watching -- that is, the 55+ folks. 

I think it would be huge. People would get caught up in the drama. Who's sleeping with whom? Whose kids are visiting and likely to cause trouble? Which guys are doing drunk wheelchair races in the middle of the night? Which black widow is looking to land a rich dude with one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel? 

It'd be a regular Polident Place. The Old and the Restless. Medicare Hospital. All My Great Grandchildren. Dwindling Days of Our Lives. Insert your own jokes in the comments. 

I can only assume that the governing body of the tri-county Villages frowns on such coverage. Well, more's the pity. Not that I'd watch the show -- at least, not until I'm riding a wheelchair myself. Which, if I keep fooling around with these sacks of rocks, could happen sooner than I think. 

A cock-and-bull story.

 

Stranger than fiction.

Well, following the conclusion of the novella Bob the Mage last week, I'd hoped to keep Fiction Friday! going by offering you a new short story today. Sadly, paying work has interfered with all the fun again. Damn you, mortgage, you slave driver!

In any event, listening to the news yesterday reminded me that truth is stranger than fiction, for the obvious reason that we expect our fiction to be realistic, and sometimes reality is not. Reality doesn't play by your rules! It's unreal!

Just yesterday there were several things in the news that seemed to defy reasonable expectations, such as:

Madonna turned 60.

Now, you can take this as proof that Billy Joel was right, but let's face it, thirty-odd years ago people would have expected some awful disease or overdose to take out Madonna, if not the director of one of her movies, but here she is. Heck, people who thought she might still be having birthdays at this point would have just assumed that it wouldn't make the news at this point. (I don't want to sound mean, but Toni Basil turned 70 on September 22, 2013, and it didn't make headlines.)

Speaking of headlines, we have: Newspapers versus Trump.

As libertarian mag Reason put it,  "Newspapers team up to tell Trump they aren't colluding against him." Apparently the president not likely newspapers is akin to him sending storm troopers to burn them down. Wait until they find out that Trump HATES "Garfield"!

Roundup in Cheerios.

Traces of glyphosate, the weed killing chemical found in popular weed killer Roundup, were found in some popular General Mills cereals, including Cheerios. Which is not a popular additive in cereal. However, isn't it fitting somehow that a product like Roundup could turn up in a famously round cereal?

You know, for kids!

In other food news, thieves in Georgia made off with $100,000 worth of ramen noodles, which by my back-of-the-envelope calculation is enough for 6,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 meals, give or take a few.

Of course the sad news of the day was the passing of Aretha Franklin. I had a lot of admiration for her voice and her style, although I can't say I'm a fan of soul music the way many white people were pretending to be yesterday. I don't mean that no white person can be a fan of soul, not at all, but I'm just way too square. I'm so white that the most interesting part of the phrase "sriracha mayonnaise" to me is "mayonnaise." I'm just hopeless.

Anyway, I loved her in The Blues Brothers but not in Blues Brothers 2000, because you couldn't love anyone in Blues Brothers 2000. Her hardscrabble character from the first movie is inexplicably selling luxury cars in the second because -- why? Because it's obvious that Dan Ackroyd and John Landis were the only guys in America who didn't get the first movie, even less so than ol' snowmen like me. Anyway, it's certainly not Franklin's fault, and I'm sorry to see her go.

Finally, and this is not news from yesterday but I only heard it so it was news to me: A woman in Inverness, Scotland, rescued an injured bumble bee and nursed it back to health, and now they are inseparable. And if that does not have you singing "Eric the Half a Bee," I'm not sure if we can be friends anymore.

So, with facts like these, who needs fiction?

Change: Not always good.

A big giant reality show.

I'm becoming increasingly perplexed about the mission statements of cable TV stations. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about them, but I suppose any amount of time could lead one to perplexity.

I'm old enough to remember when TLC stood for The Learning Channel. It really was; there was an absolutely outstanding series in the 90's called The Learning Channel's Great Books, most episodes narrated by Donald Sutherland. In one-hour episodes you could learn about the books' story and the characters (in the case of fiction), the topic and development (for nonfiction), the author, the history, the impact, and the importance of a great world classic. Can you see TLC running that today? The network that does shows about enormously fat people, little tiny people, hugely tall people, gigantic families.... I won't call it the freak show network, as I have respect for the individuals on these shows, but it appears that to TLC it is their mission statement: Freaks On Parade.

But really, all the channels now are sliding this way. They all want a show where you have a family or a business full of oddballs so they can show us their hilarious or touching interactions. Fine---but it leads to shows that don't seem to make sense for the channel on which they appear.

Animal Planet has shows about tree house builders and pool builders. What's that have to do with animals? The tree houses aren't for squirrels. Tanked at least features fish, along with the goofballs who run the business.

Much as I love the Duck Dynasty high jinks on A&E, the Robertsons are not Arts and they are supposedly reality, not Entertainment. Bravo was supposed to be a high-class culture channel once upon a time, not a Real Housewives channel. Not sure how much Discovery is going on with Discovery's Naked and Afraid---the title probably tells you all you need to discover. I guess the car restoration shows on History are historical, but it's a far cry from the all-documentary channel it once was.

Basically I see all these channels slowly tending to put the same kind of shows on, and as they become less attached to their original raison d'etre, the channels will morph into one single channel called Reality. And then you might as well turn off the TV and go outside.

Fred vs. reality.

Reality TV took a blow this week with news that American Idol is on its way out.

Because I never got into that show or Survivor, I could say I never was into reality TV, but that's a lie. If you are watching a pack of tattooed idiots with a lot of compensation issues cooking competitively on television, rest assured that Fred is watching it too. 

But personally, I'm not reality show material, as we've examined before. I have enough trouble dealing with reality.

However, what I've learned watching reality TV competitions is the self-puffery that helps contestants get through the various rounds. So I'm going to start talking that way to anyone who will listen. I may have some compensation issues myself.

"I'm here to win. I'm going to win it all. I'm bringing my A game. I didn't come here to lose. One person can win---and that's me. I'm going all the way. Only one thing can stop me from winning, and that's losing.

"They won't even see me coming. I'm taking them down. No one can stop me. I'm a force to be reckoned with.

"No one gave me anything. I had to earn everything. No one believed in me. My mother didn't believe in me. My father called me names, like burua ergelak. I don't even know what that is.

"It was tough, growing up Basque in my neighborhood. The other kids always picked on me. As if I was ass-Basquewards. But I showed them. I'm here in reality. And where are they? Somewhere else in reality. That's right.

"I'm unstoppable. I'm coming at ya. I won't be eliminated. I won't be voted off the island. I won't be sent home. Unless it's bedtime. Then I'm going home. Because I want to go to bed. At bedtime.

"The others will be busy with their own problems, then look up and see me winning. While they're losing. That's right. I'm a winner. They're the losers. They'll be chopped. I'll be the last man standing. They won't be the last man standing. Because some of them are women. Maybe there'll be a last woman standing, but I'll still be standing. And then I'll take her down. And be the last person standing."

It suddenly occurs to me that talking like a reality show contestant could get you arrested. Maybe I ought to stick to skulking, pouting, and blogging.