https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tixOyiR8B-8
This is an interview from 1990.
0:00 – He talks about how when he first arrived in Vietnam, he expected to be welcomed as a liberator but the people just ignored him. He also says that the people were strange and had animals and smelled bad.
It’s an apt title to the video. This guy seems to be dropping some knowledge. No PC filter.
He goes on to say that at first he was shocked by the atrocities he saw but then he began to understand why they were happening. He continues that the news reports were all wrong. Nothing they did advanced the war aims. The Vietnamese hated him because he destroyed their villages and whatnot. And he decided that he no longer cared about the war and just wanted to survive long enough to go home.
14:15 – While all of this was going on, his girlfriend decided that she was no longer interested in him. When he got back, he thought that he could patch things up but it wasn’t to be.
Anyway, it ends with him returning to “The East Coast”.
I worked with some guys who were Vietnam veterans. They seemed like old men but they were probably only about 25 years older than me. So about my age now.
I was also thinking about an episode of Alf recently. They did an episode where Alan Hale and Bob Denver were guest stars. It was a Gilligan’s Island thing.
Gilligan’s Island was on like 25 years before Alf was. But at the time, it seemed like Gillian’s Island was some ancient show.
Today, Alf is about 25 years old. The tv show, not the character. I don’t know the character’s age.
Well, I suppose that Alf isn’t particularly contemporary. You don’t think of it as a modern show. That gay crack addict father died a few years ago.
Oh, the kid who played Brian joined the navy in 2003. He was honourably discharged in 2005. What happened? Then it says, “Since retiring from show busines, Hertzberg (Gregory) has decided to take things easy, and live a stress free life.”
This is on fucking Wikipedia. What does that mean? He’s unemployed? And they misspelled “business.” Who wrote that? Probably Mr Hertzberg himself. No mention that he’s Jewish in this article, by the way. Why not? Be proud of your heritage.
I remember watching a World War II documentary where they were interviewing German soldiers. And the guy was giving candid answers. He was asked if he had any beef with the Chosen People and he said no. No problem with them. He knew Jews in his personal life, they were pleasant people, whatever. But the problem was the overrepresentation of Jews in the media, in banking, shit like this. I’m not sure if he mentioned the entertainment industry, perhaps because it wasn’t such a big deal in those days.
I saw another interview with a Russian soldier from World War II and he talked about some castle or stately home of a politician that he took over. This was in Germany. And he was so outraged by the opulence that he started ripping up the fancy sofa with his bayonet.
Where was I going with this? I wrote all of the above two months ago, by the way. This is my emergency article. I forgot to write anything for tomorrow so I had to go with this. Oddly, I talked about Alf. That’s on point. I talked about Alf in a recent article.
Military documentaries…Alf…oh, I was reading an article about “long covid” today. Let me find it.
“Long covid”. This means people who had covid and are still suffering from it long after it should have been over. It seems to be just people who don’t want to work any more. I get it. I’ve had long covid for over twenty years.
I was also looking at the Wikipedia article for that book The Outsiders recently. That book was written by a 16 year old girl in the 1960s. Why did nobody tell me this? I read it in high school, like so many other Americans with unimaginative English teachers. I just thought that it was a shitty book written by some out of touch old man. No. It’s much worse than that. The author was 16 years old.
This explains why the book is fucking terrible. Greasers and sochs…I mean, come on. I’m supposed to identify with this? As a kid in the 1990s?
And then I read That was Then This is Now, which is the sequel and also sucked. Totally new characters. Fuck off. How can a sequel have totally new characters? Just call it a new book.
To be honest, I don’t really remember anything about either book. I probably didn’t even read them. But I was supposed to read them.
One book that I definitely did read was Animal Farm. This was in the 12th grade. “Business” English. Some corpulent woman from New Jersey taught the class. Have I told this story before? Let me check the archives. Maybe we can save everybody some time.
Yeah.
https://gamergrrlsofficial.blogspot.com/2021/08/ender-lilies-is-metroidvania-you-should.html
I also had to read some book…Track of the Beaver or something. It was some Indian shit, I think. He also had a few books that you could borrow to read just “for fun”. I don’t think that anybody did that. But he had Black Like Me on that display, which was always good for some laughs. There were like two black kids in our class. And no Indians. But this guy was woke before it was cool. Trying to be all-inclusive.
And you look at the books that he was assigning, it was all shit from the 1960s. I am the Cheese is another one. They were just books that he read as a kid. It’s kind of selfish when you think about it. And lazy.
When he was reading those books, they were new. They were contemporary. He could possibly relate to them.
So why didn’t he just do some fucking research and find out what the contemporary 1990s young adult novels were and assign those? Maybe this would have instilled a lifelong passion for reading in me.
Instead, we got this hippie bullshit from the 1960s.
It was the same in band. The teacher would make us play songs from the 1960s because this was the stuff that he listened to when he was in school. So that means that we have to play this shit.
And who even goes to a children’s band concert to hear popular music? “I really like 25 or 6 to 4 but I want to hear how a children’s brass band plays it.”
You go to a children’s band concert to hear classical music. Don’t dumb it down for the fucking idiot parents out there.