Day ? of the Hollywood (yawn) actors strike

No artificial intelligence used at the Werkes!
Nothing artificial, no intelligence — ever!

How are you weathering the Hollywood actors and writers strike? Over in Pyongyang, our indentured North Korean proof readers walked off the job in sympathy, whereupon they were promptly terminated and returned to the gulag.

Otherwise, Blaska Policy Werkes carries on as before. Like the late Father Mike Burke would say at St. Maria Goretti church, we’ll get through this. The b&w Philco at Stately Blaska Manor has not gone to test pattern yet, so can’t be much of a strike. (Why can’t Jim Acosta walk off the set?) When we were kids back in the mid-1950s, we’d lay on the carpet in front of the box waiting for something to come on in the morning. The monaural speaker emitted a sound we called “Coos” until the primitive cathode ray tube illuminated Howdy and Buffalo Bob. We lived in a low definition world back then.

So we’re not sweating a Hollywood strike. (Though we’re available to do voice-overs.) Haven’t caught up on all the Soprano episodes anyway. Don’t mind watching Lady From Shanghai a third time on TCM. (Maybe this time we’ll figure it out.) Kevin, Pops, and Richard Trethewey still have some Colonial-era houses in New England that haven’t been restored since the shag carpeting was laid down in 1971 over the virgin wide-plank pine floors.

There are books not read (and miles to go before I do). One bookmark cleaves the middle of The Blazing World; a new history of revolutionary England 1603-1689. A rip-roaring read! That’s where our Founders got their ideas about liberty — yes from 18th Century thinkers Locke, Rousseau, Adam Smith, and the like. Which they, in turn, absorbed from the revolution against feckless Charles One (OFF WITH HIS HEAD!) and the concept of absolutism in the 17th Century. John Milton was arguing for freedom of the press; Roger Williams for freedom of religion (thinking big) before he started Rhode Island (thinking small). To combat executive over-reach, Parliament employed impeachment, which originated in the Commons and was tried in the upper house. Relevant to our imperiled democracy today One Might Say!

Anyway, we are bombarded by too much media for good health or sound minds. People! There are gardens to grow in Wisconsin’s too-brief sum-sum-summertime! Need to thin the beets. Pole beans getting ready. To our latest project, a naturalized butterfly garden, adding Joe Pye Weed, Pow Wow white Echinacea, and orange Asclepias tuberosa (butterfly weed). They reside in holes punched into over-sized brown paper leaf bags which were laid down to suffocate the super-invasive bellflower.

There's a whole world out there, people!

Why sit in a darkened theater when you can take an aimless two-day motorcycle ride northwest from Madison through Wisconsin’s coulee country — LaFarge and Wildcat Mountain and onto the Mississippi River Road. Maybe turn south on the Iowa side, if we’re feeling wild and crazy enough. Who knows? Stop for pie at a Main Street greasy spoon. Bunk overnight at a No Tell Motel. Just be alone with my thoughts (alarming though they may be) on William Least Heat Moon’s blue highways — the thrum of the Harley D Softail Slim between my legs, a little Canadian smoke in the face, and some Neil Young & Crazy Horse in each ear. Wash it down with some Potosi in Potosi.

Maybe hook up with biker chicks! (Just kidding, Lisa!)

Blaska’s Bottom Line: The head gardener finds it a hard sell to work up sympathy for the poor (we make a point to buy grapes during the periodical grape boycotts) much less heed a job action by overpaid Hollywood actors and millionaire athletes. Saving our thimbleful of empathy for Asa Hutchinson. He’s having trouble getting enough donors to make the August 23 Republican presidential debate. Seems like a decent fellow, send him a buck and wish him luck! ASA for America!

For whom or what are you saving YOUR sympathy?