Doreen Michele

Posts

Be Careful What You Wish For

Rick James dated actress Linda Blair from 1982 to 1984. They met after James read an interview where Blair called him sexy. My recollection is that it was more like "I would hit that." This was back when dead tree publications were the only game in town, before the worldwide web made things even more complicated, when it was somewhat reasonable for her to assume she was having a "private" conversation with the interviewer and Rick James probably wouldn't hear about her comment. So she probably was surprised when he sought her out and pursued her romantically. It probably never crossed her mind that interview remark might have consequences. He was Black, she's White and the Wikipedia article indicates she got pregnant and aborted the baby without discussing it with him and goes on to say: His hit song "Cold Blooded" was about his relationship with Blair. "It was about how Linda could freeze my blood," he wrote in his memoir. Yeah, see,...

Ma'am y'all

It's weird to me anyone would call me Miss because in The Deep South ma'am is used for any woman over age 18 . Southern honorics are a thing.They don't get called honorics in the south but that's de facto what they are. Close family friends are frequently called Aunt or Uncle (plus their first name) by the children and in my family close German friends of my mother's were called Tante plus their first name. It's German for Aunt. In Asian cultures and languages, honorifics are common and this can be a translation challenge. If you have a rude character in Asian fiction who fails to use honorifics, they sometimes translate that as someone with a potty mouth because there's no cultural equivalent in English. There's also Mr. or Mz. (first name). When I worked at Aflac, the last living founder was called Mr. Paul by everyone in the company. It's both respectful and familiar which is an artifact of southern culture not found in most of America. Souther...

Agism

He turned 60 yesterday. Why does he look 700 years older than Trudeau rather that seven-ish? Good luck Canada. I wonder if Trump will even BOTHER to trash talk this dinosaur who looks older than Trump who is roughly 19-ish years older than him... I've been a bad girl today but the above snark (of mine!) has been food for thought: Why do people care so much whether or not one looks good for their age? Some thoughts as the unrecognized medical genius I am: 1. Grey hair suggests a B vitamin deficiency and B vitamins are important to brain function. 2. Grey hair can also suggest you need adrenal support and that can suggest deeper health problems. So I think looking old for your age or young for your age is a little like my hypothesis about beauty being a proxy for other things. Because historically, a lot of cultures valued their elderly as repositories for valuable knowledge and wisdom about how to get shit done in this crazy making world. And yet, looking old for your ...

Fear is the Mind Killer

Article showing a photo of Elvis, "The King", absolutely looking like a king, shaking hands with some ugly loser in a business suit named Nixon. Who is president in 1985? Ronald Reagan The ACTOR? -- Back to the Future The US seems to largely miss the significant impact Reagan's acting career had -- and still has -- on the presidential image. His presidency marked a sea change in how our presidents get depicted in photos and video clips because Reagan was always keenly aware of what was behind him and how that would impact the impression made upon the public. Historically, nobles, celebrities and others in the public eye had a more curated public image than they do today. Trump looks like such an idiot so much of the time because that's no longer true and he obviously doesn't know how to effectively navigate that issue. I imagine his "just plain folks" schtick goes over well in person and then bombs much of the time in the media. I'm twice excepti...

Me and Languages

My mother's mother came from a low level German noble family. Mom was born and mostly raised in Danzig, a very cosmopolitan freistadt (independent city state), except for the years that the family spent in the country during World War II to try to safeguard everyone as best they could. When the war ended, she found herself in the newly created communist East Germany where she was required to take Russian in school, which is why I know a few words of Russian. She left East Germany to return her sister's baby to her , so she was a young illegal immigrant in West Germany when she met my father at a party. She spoke extremely proper High German. His American accent plus the fact that he mostly learned German from farmers, meant she couldn't understand a word he spoke and she asked someone what language he was speaking. My older sister was born in Germany. Her first language was actually German and she translated for my parents while she was a toddler. So I grew up in a bilingua...

The dead have no right to privacy

My mother was born October 19, 1936 in Germany. She died recently on her 88th birthday last fall. She lived through World War II as a child in Germany and she could be difficult to deal with which it was easy to chalk up to her misfortune of having been a child in a war zone and having lived in Nazi Germany. Except I grew up in the German-American-military subculture unique to Columbus, Georgia and I knew other German women who were similar in age to my mother. My mother seemed unusually difficult in some ways even for a German woman of that era in spite of being an uncommonly kind, generous person, far more decent and diplomatic than average. My mother definitely had baggage and she was from a previous era and her beliefs were sometimes "primitive" beliefs even though she was unusually smart and she read a lot. She believed in astrology and she believed in psychic phenomenon and she was always trying to convince people that if she dreamed something was going to happen, it w...