Trump mob update 3/10/21

More Republican voter suppression

The Biden stimulus plan helps people

It helps many more people than Trump’s tax cuts for rich people. Look at the chart in the fourth tweet below.

My first apartment

I moved to Baltimore on January 2, 1976. I didn’t have a job there but I wanted to get away from THEM (AKA my parents). The apartment was only $65 a month which was cheap even then. It was on Eutaw Place in a huge, elegant old building that had been split up into many apartments. Eutaw Place had been one of the finest streets in Baltimore and had a median strip. It had fallen on hard times since its prime at the turn of the century. I knew people in theater who had renovated the floor and got cheap rents in return. Some of them moved out so there was a vacant apartment.

There were good and bad things about the apartment. It had high ceilings and a great bay window. It was also roach-infested. The building was managed by a guy who ran a bar on the Block, which is Baltimore’s strip club district. One of his employees, who lived in the building, murdered a guy by slitting his throat with a bottle during the July 4th weekend. I figure he either didn’t pay or asked for something too freaky.

It was time to move and I was out of there by September.

This is the building.

The view from outside looking south. It looked similar in 1976.

Covers: What Am I Living For

It’s so ironic that this Chuck Willis song was released right before he died. “What Am I Living For” was the B-side of “Hang Up My Rock and Roll Shoes” which I just posted about. It became the more popular of the two songs and appears to have many more covers. Taj Mahal, in three fine 1990s albums kept the memory of records by artists like Fats Domino Chuck Willis and T-Bone Walker alive. I like the Percy Sledge version, too. Sledge is mostly remembered for his first and biggest hit “When a Man Loves a Woman” but he made many other excellent records and was a great singer.

There are country and R&B covers which is true for many songs.

Interviews: A man who said he was pregnant

Everyone should have a job where they deal with the public. I conducted interviews in local government offices from 1976-1981 and I will write several posts about the most unusual ones. Most people were normal, honest and frankly, not memorable. For the really bizarre ones, I always thought it was wrong to laugh at them to their face. It was hard not to laugh if the members of the public laughed. I think I only laughed maybe four or five times total. If I had to laugh (or yawn because I was out late the night before), then it was time to get a form or make a photocopy of a document.

I once interviewed a man who said he was pregnant. He and his friend, who I assume was the “father”, both wore hoop hearings which was radical around 1980. If you saw men wearing earing back then, they just wore a single stud. He was going for psychiatric treatment at a local hospital. He didn’t know why. I knew why.

Late in the interview, he told me he was having labor pains. His friend laughed at that and I did too. ( I could understand that you could feel you were missing out by not being able to have children but nobody told me labor pains were fun!

Gerrymandering update 3/6/21

Republicans are afraid to have more people vote.