THE FRIDAY FUNNIES

Vladimir and Donald have been dominating the news this week.

Gentle Readers, let's see if we can ignore them for a bit and put a little joy in our lives.

After all it's a great day to be out of one's cage.  

Heh, heh, a little play on words there for Oscar weekend.

All right, let us take a look in Catalyst's Closet and see what we can find.

There's nothing like a muddy puppy to bring a smile to your faces, right?

Now let's KEEP it there during a riotously rockin' and ribald weekend!

And always remember to keep laughing.

Here, kitty-kitty . . .

TBT - AND THEN I WROTE . . .

What good is a blog if the author can't brag a little, right?

Okay, I have dropped pieces of my many, many years in this blog before but let's put them all in order.

I was born and raised in Stanley, a tiny town in North Dakota not far from the Canadian border.

Me and my dad

Even as a wee tot I struggled manfully to survive the deadly climate I was forced to live in.

Me and my big brother

Rushing on ahead, when I was in my early teens I discovered electricity and then ham radio, which helped me through those long wintry days and nights.

I moved on to college, where I was known as a diligent scholar.

That was also where I first worked for a commercial radio station, KEYJ in Jamestown and met a fellow I worked with and maintained a friendship of more than half a century with, Dan Brannan or, as I've always called him, Danny Bananas.

Even back then Danny didn't know enough to come in out of the rain

Beginning my "real" life in the outer world I landed a job at KCJB Radio in Minot, where I was known as the rock and roll disc jockey Bruce on the Loose.

That lasted a little while until I got fired and ended up with a t.v. job in Aberdeen, South Dakota . . at KXAB-TV.

Covering the birth of the Fischer Quintuplets

Then it was back to North Dakota and a job in both radio and television at KFYR in Bismarck.

I had a mentor, Bob MacLeod

And later I mentored, in turn, Bob Barclay

I learned to interview newsmakers live on television . . .

Newly elected Congressman Tom Kleppe and I

. . . and how to film politicians while walking backwards in front of them . . .

. . . I got a handshake with Chet Huntley, back when he was doing the Huntley-Brinkley report.

(I also met his partner, Brinkley, and I have such a story about him but I can't tell it here!!!)

. . . and I met the legendary and lithe UPI man, Ed Stattmann . . .

. . . and a pal I later followed to Indianapolis (and Ed followed us both), Orly Knutson who retired after 50 years as a radio announcer.

The Happy Norwegian at the Indy 500 during practice around 1969

During a 3-year stint at WIBC and WNAP in Indianapolis, I met a couple of young tyros, Tom Cochrun and Chris Connor.

Cris, as you can probably tell from this picture, was the dj;

Tom and I, in our ties and striped shirts, were the newsmen

Those ties were kept around our necks by the news director, the late Fred Heckman.

Then, before you know it, it was off to Phoenix with a new wife, the storied and fabled SWMBO.

There I landed a job with KTAR-TV, which later became KPNX-TV.

Weekends spent writing and producing newscasts were gruelling

But I got to have some fun with some big stories.

A "stand-up" in front of the U.S. Capitol with Baseball Steve

Giving reporter Ron Talley the benefit of my vast experience during the Sandra Day O'Connor Supreme Court nomination hearings

Wally Athey, Talley, Linda Alvarez and I feeding a story from Washington home to Phoenix

And I worked with some great people there.

Bill Redeker, later of ABC News

Diane Kalas, veteran of the radio wars in Pittsburgh, Boston and San Francisco

Jerry Foster, Bill Denney, Kent Dana, not long after "crossing the street"

Lin Sue Cooney and Mark Curtis

Lew Ruggiero, Baseball Steve Torbeck, Karl Kindberg & I

I even made enough money to be able to afford a month-long tour of Europe with SWMBO in 1985.

Well, shut my mouth!

We came back from Europe and a couple of months later I walked out of Channel 12, due to a variety of reasons.

A couple of years later, we moved to Mexico, where we were met by some welcoming gringo expatriates.

Brent Bogdonavich & Terry Taylor (no relation)

We met a lot more people down there.

The ones still alive are still our friends.

We also celebrated our 20th anniversary with many of them.

We spent a little more than four years living in the land of palm trees and eternal springtime sunshine in the Guadalajara area before moving to Austin, Texas.

Less than two years there was enough and it was back to Arizona.

Judy worked in a used bookstore for a couple of years and then we built our own, Bookends in Prescott Valley.

It survived 7 years before we gave it up.

I still had a couple of years to go to retirement so I went back to radio, working as the news director at KYCA in Prescott.

One of my compadres there was big Jeff Demand.

Finally in 2006, I cashed in my chips for good and have been (mostly) enjoying retirement ever since.

That's the short version.

One of these days let me tell you about . . . .

ITZA VINTER VUNDERLAND, SVEN!

"Away to the window I flew like a flash,

Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash,

The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow

Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below,"

-- A Visit from St. Nicholas

by Clement Clarke Moore

Central Arizona highlands, February 28, 2018:

MARCHING TOWARD OBLIVION

I hit a new low in my weight loss game this morning.

Down 15 pounds since early February.

For those concerned about my health I should add that the reduction in my size has slowed considerably in recent days.

I had been concerned about a quite low blood pressure, however, and had wondered several days ago if I should cut down on my blood pressure medication.

I gave my cardiologist's office a couple of weeks of readings this morning and heard from them this afternoon.

Yes, cut the Carvedilol in half, came the advice and see how it's going in another week.

I had already slightly increased another med I take for blood thinning and the reading had begun to tick back up as of this morning.

So, you think it's easy losing weight, do you?

When you're being treated for as many malfunctions of the body as I am, it's more of a balancing act than you might think.

Ah, yes, I know.

I've reached the age where we sit around talking about all of our aches and pains and maledictions of the body.

Like all the other old men I figure I've earned it so just sit there and listen!

I know who cares about me anyway!

ARIZONA SNOW

Yes, it does snow in Arizona occasionally.

Not often or much where I live.

Though I do remember the day I opened our bookstore to the public back in 1996.

We had been preparing for it for weeks since the space we rented had only bare concrete floors and, at first, no electricity.

With the great help of SWMBO's son Scott we built it from the floor up.

But the night before it was scheduled to open we had a huge snowstorm that dumped half a foot or so of snow on the area.

SWMBO didn't want me to venture out the next day as we lived in Prescott then, about half a dozen miles from where the store was located and she was afraid I'd have an accident or get stuck.

But I went anyway.

We only had a handful of customers that first day and took in around 30 dollars.

But later on it became a going concern, at least for about 7 years.

That was one of the last large snowstorms that I remember in our area of Arizona.

(And I always have to remind readers that we are not in Phoenix, we're about 80 miles north of there at an elevation of about 5 thousand feet.)

So we do get snow, once in awhile.

This was yesterday and even people like me, who grew up in North Dakota only about 50 miles from Canada, have to get out and snap a few pictures.

I took this one of my neighbor's house across the street and gave it to him to either post on his refrigerator or send to his relatives back East.

And yes that is a tent to the left behind that pickup.

I joked with him that if his wife had thrown him out he could sleep on our sofa.

But he said he had put it up yesterday and planned to try it out by sleeping in it last night.

(I never said everyone who lives here is totally sane!)