The Wine Commonsewer

Hippo Birdees Two Ewes

Good Morning Gentle Readers,

Uncle Will fires up a whole pile of fat candles today.

Send in your birthdays, Outlook lost yours. Don't get me started on that.....

As Ever,

TWC

Happy Birthday Pop

Good Morning Gentle Readers,

When TWC was just a kid, dad drove a Diamond T truck for Knudsen Dairy Products.

Most mornings, at zero-dark-thirty, he sat down with a bowl of hot Cream of Wheat before leaving the house. Later, he'd drop in at a hole-in-the-wall joint for a couple of donuts, still hot from the grease fryer, pairing that with a quart of half and half for a mid-morning snack (Knudsen, of course, The Very Best).

Dad was burly, schlepping hardwood and steel milk cases around like they were nothing (plastic was at least 15 years off). Last time I saw him, I noticed he still had a couple stashed in the back of the garage.

Coolest thing ever was that Dad delivered those little five cent cartons of milk that our elementary school pre-heated to lukewarm before serving at lunch. Sometimes I'd see his truck backed up to the service doors of the cafeteria......

Look Dick! Look Jane! See that truck? That's my dad.

Talk about status. Boy Howdy, ain't nobody prouder than a first grader showing off Dad's important job.

As Ever,

TWC

A Good Hearted Woman

Good Morning Gentle Readers,

Exactly three years to the day after America got its first look at the Stones on the Ed Sullivan Show, two little preemie twin girls were born at St Jude Hospital.

The on-deck baby, Mrs TWC, was an unexpected surprise. Wait! There's two of them. Both did incubator time but Lisa's incarceration was much longer.

Odds are, had they arrived a few generations earlier neither would have survived. Primitive as medical science was in the Summer of Love, it was light-years ahead of the pre-antibiotic world preceding the Big War.

Identical twins are rare. Lisa and Laura are an even rarer happenstance called Mirror Image identical twins. The mirror image is caused by a late split in the egg that results in certain obvious differences like Laura being left handed while Lisa is right handed.

There are other not-so-obvious differences as well. For instance, Laura is married to Will and has four kids rather than two. Will missed that one high school bio class that conservatives usually gripe about so I had a talk with him and explained why that kept happening. I used color crayons and blocks and I guess they're done now [that joke just never gets old].

While fraternal (non-identical) twins tend to run in families, identical twins are random. And that every-other-generation thing is nothing but urban myth that morphed out of somebody's observation that non-identical twins run in families. Why? Because there is a familial link where the women tend to ovulate more than one egg.

One frequent question that Lisa and Laura heard as kids was: how do you tell yourselves apart? That still amuses me.

I'd put something romantic up here but I sort of promised I wouldn't embarrass her in public. I'll leave it at this: The mother of my children is sweet and lovely and she puts up with me. She's got big, brown puppy-dog eyes too.

Happy birthday Babe. You too, Laura Bean.

As Ever,

The Wine Commonsewer

Send me your birthdays! Outlook ate them all.

Eleven Years Old Going On Mouthy Teen Ager Hippo Birdies To Uncle Miltie

Good Morning Gentle Readers,

It took about three weeks for an entire decade to pass. Worse, now it's been eleven years since Jake struggled into this world doing a fair impersonation of a blue boy. I marveled as life giving oxygen turned him from blue to pink like a test strip.

Jacob Michael shares this special day with Milton Friedman and Harry Potter's birth mother.

Saw some snarky post somewhere in the blogosphere about how Deathly Hallows pushed 75 pages of chit chat into 200 pages and, boy howdy, does she need an editor (or what?), and, yawn, boooooring. I was thinking yeah, Babe, maybe J K Rowling should have hired YOU as her editor and banked another billion. But who knew?

My son Jake is gregarious and outgoing. Big smile and about as shy as a Mack Truck. He does have that stubborn streak going on, like the proverbial hard-headed Dutchman. Comes by it honestly enough though, the TWC's ARE Dutch. He's THE guy who's going to the guillotine screaming Down with the king.

Jake learning to surf at Surf City (Huntington Beach) a few weeks ago

On another note, TWC was grateful for the opportunity to share Cinco de Mayo in Los Cabos with Milton Friedman especially given that he passed away less than a year later.

I've said this before and I'll likely say it again; of Milton Friedman's extensive body of work, his 1980 book, Free to Choose, is perhaps the most important. Not because it dazzles the annointed, but because in simple, everyday language, it quickly conceptualizes (in layman's terms) what it means to be free.

Every day Americans deal with a plethora of governing agencies, which many of us take for granted. Most of us have also heard the phrase well, that is the price of freedom. This, of course, is a grievous lie. It isn't the price of freedom at all. It is the price that free individuals pay so that others may control their lives. In that context comes the success of Uncle Miltie's book. He relates the case for freedom by examining and contrasting the various roles of institutions and agencies in American society and their effect on our individual choices and the paths our lives take on a daily basis.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY SON, May you always be free to choose and may you always choose wisely. Pretty sure I couldn't have done better even if given a couple of hours weeks at Kid's Are Us.

Jake, the fat Chrysler Vee-8, Muffin, & a preggers Mrs TWC
circa 1998 at Topock Gorge on the Colorado River in Arizona

A few other photos of Jake can be found here.

As Always,

TWC

Have A Martooni & A Smile

Gentle Readers,

Contributer NoStar puts another wrinkle on his birthday cake today and TWC wants to remind him that cake is for wussies.

As Ever,

TWC

13 Days Past June & It's Friday

Good Morning Gentle Readers,

It's Friday the 13th but TWC ain't much for conspiracy theories or superstition. Hey, I even own a black cat with a bent up tail.

IN OTHER NEWS

Antonia the Hit Babe puts another candle on her birthday cake. Had a great time at her wedding. Italian weddings are always fun and hers was no exception. Lots of swarthy New Jersey looking guys named Tony but the wine flowed and we all danced like Fat Clemenza.

Lady Bird Johnson apparently died yesterday. I wouldn't know this because I avoid TV like the plague but Mark Kilmer mentioned it on his blog.

Lady Bird Johnson pushed for the Highway Beautification Act way back when I was a vagrant yoot. She was appalled by the clutter of ugly signs on Route 66 I guess. Today there is a certain nostalgia for Roadside Americana, which, like the nearly nine-year-long poker game that took place in the dirt floored basement of the Birdcage Theater, is gone. Forever.

It's a mixed bag I suppose, after all, it's not like all those signs resided on private property. Some did, but many signs were erected on publicly owned right-of-way.

I'm thinking that in the same way that the roll of time antiquated the brass spittoon out of existence, the interstate highway system may have seen to the ultimate demise of roadside enticements to exotic places like The Rattlesnake Ranch near Shamrock Texas and the Jack Rabbit Trading Post, without the meddlesome help of LBJ's wife.  I mean, when was the last time you saw a Burma Shave sign? At the Smithsonian don't count.

BTW, I won't tell you what we decided those initials (LBJ) stood for when we were naughty kids with no respect for the POTUS. 

Mrs TWC is off filming some local education commentary for CNN's LA/So Cal  TV market. No word on when it might air.

Don't let my cat cross your path. Other TWC Friday the 13th stuff here.

As Ever,

TWC

Two Guns Arizona Route 66 Bridge photo appears courtesy of The Road Wanderer

Hippo Birdees Two Ewes

And In Other News it's Mo's day today. That girl always liked purple.

That was her bicentennial mug.

Been a long strange trip, eh girl?

As Ever,

TWC

Encore? Well, okay. Bet you still chuckle as the dog runs off with the drummer's leg.

The thought usually comes from the mouths of sweet young waitresses, er, ah, servers, who weren't but a gleam in daddy's eye when Jerry punched the clock for the last time, but TWC has been told a few times about a resemblance to Jerry Garcia. I'm thinking; Wait. Jerry's dead. What, exactly, are you saying here? I've Just a Touch of Gray, and I've not quite assumed room temperature. Never sure if I should be flattered or not.

Happy Birthday Pop

Good Morning Gentle Readers,

And In Other News

It is also my pop's birthday. He's not quite as old as the Hills.

Dad was about 31 when this was taken.

As Always,

TWC

St Joseph Day

Gentle Readers,

It's St Joseph Day and the swallows came back to Capistrano. So did the traffic.

And in other news....

Some time guest blogger at TWC, The Kosmik Kid, turns, well, he puts another wrinkle on his birthday cake.

As Ever,

TWC

My Baby's Knockin', The Governator, Sally, & Warren

Good Morning Gentle Readers,

TWC is off to the Big City today for a series of meetings. Normally, the prospect of excape from the shackles of death that surround my oak desk puts a little spring in my step. But today, I'm tired. Too tired. Heard my baby callin' and too tired to let her in kind of tired. Been a long two weeks without rain, weekends, or much in the way of breaks. Except for American Idol. And you better shut up while that's on, too. Otherwise Mrs TWC is liable to cane you. Don't matter that it's Tivo'd and you can just run it back, you still just better shut up.

So Warren Beatty's at the Golden Globes, picking up his Cecil B DeMille award. He's a popular guy with that crowd. They're eating it up, smiling, elbows, nodding........

Truth is, I haven’t made a lot of movies, In fact, I think somebody said about me that every single movie that I made from the beginning was a comeback. So, something like this really is enough to make a guy go out and make another movie.

Apparently he can't understand why other old timers like Jack Nicholson and Dustin Hoffman can't just take it a little easier. And then this gem.....

I don’t know why they can’t just do what I ask them to do. I asked Arnold (Schwarzenegger) to become a Democrat and he did what I said.

Rimshot. Warren's here all week.

Ironic. The other day some of my friends over at Reason were talking about Schwarzengroper being libertarian-leaning. Must be because he's okay with Gay Marriage and cigars, because there ain't nothing else there.

He just proposed a universal health care scheme that woulda made Hillary blush, he recently saddled us with another 50 billion in bond debt, and his spending is setting records.

My friend Shikha's piece on Arnold's health care scheme is here. 

And in other news, Sal puts another candle on her cake. When she was a little kid she looked just like this:

Hippo Birdees, Two Ewes.

As Ever,

TWC

UPDATE: For those of you who found Too Tired to be too subtle: