Category: Uncategorized

I had a bachelor party at my apartment

I held a bachelor party in my apartment in 1983. We had two guys at work who were getting married. I lived in a loft apartment which was ideal for a party. I even temporarily had a beer kegorator that belonged to people who were renovating their building.

A friend and I planned the party. First, we went to see an old guy who had connections to the Block, where the strip clubs are located in Baltimore. There we were in the lobby of an apartment building (on St. Paul St. for anyone who knows Baltimore) looking at an album of photos of women with their legs spread apart so you could see their crotch.

We settled on a service that would write a poem about the groom and send a lady over to deliver it. She would come in a coat and down to a bikini.

We had about 20 guys at the party.

We ran two porno movies on my new Beta hifi VCR before she arrived. One of my coworkers was knowledgeable about porn and he selected I Like to Watch and 800 Fantasy Lane. He liked women in uniform and was married to a nurse. Two of the guys actually watched the movies like they had plots! They must have been very sheltered.

When the lady showed up, we took her aside to figure out how she was going to do her routine. She had a boombox with a cassette with “Flashdance” and similar songs. The first thing she said was “I don’t drink on the job.” The second thing she said was “Where’s the vodka?’ I got a glass and filled it for her. With hindsight, I don’t blame her if she was concerned about being alone with 20 guys she didn’t know and used a drink to help her.

She was dressed up, recited the poems, danced to the music and got down to the bikini. Later in the evening, she asked for more to drink. I assumed she still had the glass so I brought her the bottle. She drank right from the bottle! She got so drunk, one of the guys had to drive her home in her car.

It was very adolescent. It was like being 12 and having money. It reminded me of the time when I was 12 or 12 and three of us chipped in to buy a copy of Playboy. Each kid only had to pay a quarter.

The next day at work, our female coworkers wanted to know about the party. I just said “Can’t tell you.”

I will write another post with the aftermath.

Covers: Bluebird

“Bluebird” is a Buffalo Springfield song written and sung by Stephen Stills. It was a single in 1967. A much longer version was released years later. There was a blues-style version by Bonnie Raitt on her first album in 1971. She really made it sound like a different song.

Lack of IRS funding and enforcement lets rich people avoid taxes

The IRS doesn’t have enough money to audit many tax returns of wealthy people.

Column: 23,000 households reported income over $10 million last year. The IRS audited seven (yahoo.com)

John Cheever, Raymond Carver, and the liquor store in Iowa City

This site has several posts on the time authors John Cheever and Raymond Carver spent drinking while in residence at the University of Iowa.

LitCity (uiowa.edu)

My favorite lines:

Because Cheever had no car, Carver provided transportation on their twice-weekly booze runs. They liked to arrive at the liquor store just as the clerk was unlocking for the day.

Now that’s alcoholism.

They were both excellent writers. Carver wrote great stories. I haven’t read his poems. Cheever wrote novels and stories. I would start with his stories.

Collections by both are part of the Library of America

Raymond Carver | Library of America (loa.org)

John Cheever | Library of America (loa.org)

More on the filibuster

The Third Man will be on TCM this weekend

The Third Man is one of the greatest film noir movies. It will be on TCM this weekend. It has gloomy Vienna post-war atmosphere, great performances by Orson Welles, Alida Valli and Joseph Cotten, and a theme performed on a zither.

It was covered by the Band

Trump reportedly showed naked pictures at a shiva

Baltimore’s industrial decline

The Sparrows Point Bethlehem Shipyard (discussed in the article linked to in the tweet below) was probably the biggest private employer when I moved to Baltimore in 1976. If you had told me then that it would totally vanish, I would have been shocked. I interviewed many people filing for retirement benefits who worked there. I was making $8,925 a year just out of college and these guys were making about $20,000. That was excellent money for people who frequently didn’t even have a high school education but you could look at them and see they had worked hard. Those kind of good paying manufacturing jobs are mostly gone now which exacerbates income inequality.

Everyone now takes having a birth certificate for granted but many people born before around 1930 didn’t have one. For many people, we had to get Census records. In the 1970s, you had to write the Census Bureau in Pittsburg, Kansas and it took six weeks to get a response. Many of the retirees had been born on rural areas in the south. Their ability to remember exactly where the farm or other home was located was impressive.

I remember one man who said he was born in 1914. We got the 1920 census record. It should have showed he was six. It showed he was 11. Then we had to get the 1910 census record. He was there and he was one which consistent with the 1920 census. Somewhere along the way he had lost five years. I had no doubt that he was 70, not 65, and he was still doing manual labor at Sparrows Point. When I explained this to him, his first concern was if it affected his pension since they had a mandatory retirement age. I didn’t know but didn’t think so since he genuinely didn’t know his real age. A lot of businesses would let the government establish the age of an individual and then adopt our determination.

Muscle and Blood is a fine book about industrial work in the 1970s which I read back then. As I recall, author Rachel Scott had worked for the Baltimore Sun and discussed Sparrows Point in her book.

This is an excellent article. I look forward to reading his book. MacGillis lives here in Baltimore.

Republicans want to repeal the estate tax for rich people

I don’t want to hear any crap from Republicans about the debt when they propose crap like this. Does their white nationalist base think this will help them?