Quick! Who's Your Best Friend?

Quick! Who's your best friend?

 Scout and Gemma have no trouble answering. True, they are the only two cats in our household, but I'm still happy they have bonded. 

The only other pet in the household is Pixie, who has no interest in them. Pixie's best friend is Alison. Pixie basically ignores the cats unless they seem to compete for Alison's attention. Then he turns into a lunging Snarllagaphalious. Pixie has no teeth, and doesn't realize her threats are ... toothless.

Alison has no trouble identifying her best friend. She has reestablished her connection to her childhood friend, Cheryl. They share friend groups and hobbies, and they see each other several times a week.

It made me wonder, though. Who is my best friend?

So I asked Alison, "Quick! Who is my best friend?"

Her answer was swift and direct - "Me."

That is true. She has been my best friend for over thirty years now. Our 30th wedding anniversary will be this November 9th.

But- thinking beyond the scope of marriage and loving spouse, who is my best friend?

I have none. And haven't for quite a while.

Most of my friendships come from the moment, within specific environments or events. I was friendly with work associates, but little that extended past work. I am friendly to many of my fellow parishioners at church, but nothing that extends much past church events.

I have made many friends while in community productions. But only rarely have any of those friendships extended beyond the production's closing.

And now, I rarely do plays anymore. I have found a disconnect due to age. I am usually the oldest person in the cast, sometimes as much as 20 years older than the next-oldest cast member. Doing fewer plays also means I am not as tightly bonded with many of the more frequent performers. Many of them also come from the same church.

I have no close friends from high school, college, or other places I lived. They have all faded away.

I did have a best friend through high school. We went to separate colleges and did not reunite until after college, when he had moved to Atlanta and was preparing to be a pastor in the United Methodist Church, studying theology at Emory University. I came down to visit him and soon moved myself, marrying his girlfriend's best friend. 

We drifted apart when he moved back to Michigan to pastor a church there. For the last three decades, I have lost contact with him.

I'm not writing any of this for sympathy. As it goes - "Don't Cry for Me, Argentina!"* Most of this is rooted in my own personality. I am an introvert who craves some contact but is also often content with my own life, hobbies, and interests. I certainly steer away from social events that would leave me anxious and paralyzed.

Although not necessarily best friends, I have had as many female friends as male friends. I like group activities that are mixed - that have both sexes in them, such as the plays, some church activities, and the library Thriller Book Club. The conversations in these groups are more blended. All-male groups tend to talk about college football, golf, and right-wing politics, much more than I can stomach listening to. All-female groups broach in-depth topics like childbirth, appearances, sharper gossip, and complaints about men. Yes, those are broad stereotypes - they're not always true.

Since I don't truly have a best friend (outside of family), I have to be careful not to overestimate how close I am to people or overshare. Nobody is that interested in micro-comments about my health, my politics, or my attitudes about things like tattoos and piercings. Sometimes, when you share your thoughts with someone you don't know well, you may say something that doesn't match their experience. My thoughts on suicide and suicide attempts may run counter to other people, especially if I don't know their background or their own experiences.

But I digress too much. I love my readers, but they are not my best friends either. Social media can trick us that way.

Still, it does help me to write my thoughts, and I appreciate all who have read them, new and long-time readers, both.

Until nest time.

T. M. Strait

AOC '28

*Speaking of Madonna, she is only roughly three years younger than me. She was in a high school in a nearby town, one I had a speech contest in when she was a freshman. Can you imagine me in a friendship with Madonna? There's a twisted road not taken!

We're nominated for 'Parents of the Year' - Rose Aldridge Column #6

 I'm going to have to do this one slightly differently. My sources are Blackshear Times columns found at the library. Sometimes, the columns are on the crease of the paper, and you can't flatten the volume enough to see all the words. So, for this one, I'm going to need to retype the first column of print. I'm going to have to intuit some of the missing words, so if I get it wrong, it's clearly my fault.

We're Nominated for Parents of the Year

    Johnny and I should be getting our nominations for the "Parents of the Year" award any day now, thanks to our actions at the time of the accident.

    What accident? For the one that put Alison's arm in a cast, up past her elbow, of course.

    The one that happened because she didn't tie her shoelace, which got caught in her bike pedal and landed her on the pavement.

    Yes, we're sure winners for the award, because of our cool-headed control over the whole situation.

    How much more cool-headed can you be than we were- we didn't believe anything was wrong with her until she started crying in the middle of the night.

    So, as a result, her arm wasn't set until the next day.

And now, we return to normal transmission - 

Well, Alison was not alone. I received a similar injury around the same age as Alison, maybe a little younger; a kid pushed me out of our garage window. This may have been all of a whopping three feet off the ground, but I instinctively braced myself with my arm. This turned out to be a very bad plan.

I was outside, screaming in pain. My parents, both inside the house, just thought, "Well, there's Tom, screaming his head off over nothing again!"  That is, until my Dad happened to glance outside and see my arm dangling at the point halfway between my wrist and elbow.

My broken arm was not as easy to dismiss as Alison's, so I did get taken to the hospital fairly quickly. So, Alison and I can bond over our childhood broken arms.

If you think that's an interesting coincidence, wait until you hear about our son, Benjamin! 

2026 Fall TV Endurance Champs

  I used to extensively preview the Fall TV schedule, with a separate blog post for each day of the week.

Those days are gone.

TV is way too diffuse now. With streaming services and new shows being introduced year-round, it's hard to organize a real preview.

So, this year, I want to note which broadcast TV shows are endurance winners - those TV shows that have been on the air for the most seasons.

Breaking down by category:

SPORTS

1) Monday Night Football            37 Seasons

Reality Competitions

1) Survivor                                       51 Seasons

2) The Amazing Race                      39 Seasons

3) Dancing With the Stars              35 Seasons

Many of the shows benefit from presenting more than one season per year. Our household favorite has been The Amazing Race. Over the years, Alison and I have gone from "maybe we should enter" to "well, we couldn't do that challenge" to "maybe we could just go along and help host Phil with the craft table."

News/True Crime

  1) 60 Minutes                            59 Seasons

  2) 20/20                                      50 Seasons

  3) 48 Hours                               40 Seasons

This category includes true crime because these shows USED to be investigative journalism, but they are now focusing more and more on lurid true-crime stories. The last holdout was 60 Minutes, which recently had to bow to the Fascist-In-Chief and their MAGA-friendly corporate overlords. Investigative journalism is a fundamental part of true democracy and freedom, and it is hard to see it disappearing.

2026 Update: The takeover of 60 Minutes by far-right extremists renders it useless as having any reliable investigative journalism content. It's hard to justify calling it Season 59 this year, since it no longer exists in any recognizable form.

Animated

1) The Simpsons                         38 Seasons

2) Family Guy                            24 Seasons

3) Bob's Burgers                        17 Seasons

Animated programs can show a lot of endurance, as the "actors" don't age, nor demand phat new contracts.

It may be the harbinger of things to come, as we may soon see "AI actors."

Bob's Burgers and The Family Guy are not on the Fall Schedule, but are not canceled, and will have new seasons in the Winter. Because of that, I am keeping them on the list.

Scripted

1) Law & Order: SVU                           28 Seasons

2) Law & Order                                     26 Seasons

3) NCIS                                                   24 Seasons

4) Grey's Anatomy                                 23 Seasons

5) Chicago Fire                                       15 Seasons

It's interesting that Law& Order: SVU has more seasons than the mothership that spawned it, Law & Order. That's in part because it was returned in what is one of the most popular ways to preserve scripted television - the theme night. An entire evening centered on related shows. The Chicago Wednesday night and the Law & Order Thursday are current prime examples. There have also been nights centered around NCIS and 9-1-1. The truly unique shows are getting smaller and smaller space.

The structure of these shows allows them to survive cast changes, as the shows are centered on themes rather than personalities. Special shoutout to Mariska Hargitay for being in all 602 episodes of Law & Order: SVU.

I don't watch any of these shows. We did watch the original CSI program set in Las Vegas, but it, alas, is now gone.

At one time, maybe back in the 90s, I watched some episodes of Law & Order. But they were hard to keep straight. I'd have one on for about a minute, and Alison would say, "Tom, you've already seen that one"

We do watch Ghosts (Season 6), Matlock (Season 3), and The Rookie (Season 9), all of which do not premiere until 2027. We have watched Elsbeth (Season 4), but I'm not sure we'll continue. She knows who did it far too early, and saps some of the fun out of it. We watch some of the reality competitions.

The CW is omitted because it has fallen into obscurity and has not reported much yet. Penn & Teller: Fool Us may soon start their 13th season.

The CW, in general, is completely off my radar since they stopped the Arrowverse/DC superhero shows.

In general, the decline of scripted shows on broadcast TV continues. Only 34% of primetime hours are now scripted (including animated shows). Last year was 46%. That may not mean a whole lot to most of you, but as part of Generation Late Boomer (now called Generation Jones), I miss that wonderful plethora of primetime scripted shows, everything from the absurdity of My Mother the Car, to the wonders of Star Trek: from the sharp social comedies like All in the Family, to the weirdness of The Addams Family; from the jiggling detectives of Charlie's Angels, to the place with the highest murder rate in the world, Cabot Cove of Murder She Wrote.

Oh, well. I'll look forward to the next episode of Lanterns on HBO Max (or whatever it's called now).

It's the Time of Year for "Beach Fever" - Rose Aldridge Column #5

 

I made a special trip to the library to retake the columns using the library's scanning feature instead of my phone camera.  Well, I failed to do that - at least, I can't find the file anymore.  But don't give up on me.  I'm still working on it.

To the best of my memory, Alison and I did not take a beach trip with Rose.  Most trips centered on antique shopping or on seeing Benjamin (during college and professional years).

My own experiences with beaches were similar to Rose's.  The first time I went to a Florida beach was at 17, when we took our last family trip (before college years) to see the then-new Disney World, followed by a trip to Daytona Beach. I sorely disappointed my mother and sister by buying a bunch of comics, and then reading them in the motel room while they went on the beach. I didn't see the problem.  They had fun.  I had fun. What's the big deal?

Most of my subsequent appearances on any beach were with the purpose of making sure my children didn't drown. In that effort, I was successful.

One Science Crisis After Another!

 

There are a lot of different kinds of science fiction. It represents a broad playground for the human imagination and a wide range of structures and plotlines.

One of the most often used frames, particularly in hard SF, is the framing of one scientific crisis after another. A seemingly insurmountable problem faces the protagonists, and they must use quick scientific ingenuity to resolve it. Only to find that after that crisis is solved, they are soon faced by another one!

The book, Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, and the subsequent movie use this to great effect. Every time it looks like science teacher Ryland Grace and his alien friend have figured out a solution to deliver a much-needed microbe to save both their planets, something new and unanticipated will pop up to throw them off course. But together they solve each problem that comes up.

Another example of this is the 1966 film, Fantastic Voyage. I recently watched this as part of the 100 Best Science Fiction Movies of the 20th Century series I have been blogging*. It's not in the same league as Project Hail Mary (especially in terms of compelling characters and deeper emotional resonance). A team is miniaturized and sent into a man's body to eliminate a tumor that is affecting the man's ability to remember vital information. More far-fetched than Project Hail Mary, it nevertheless faces one unexpected problem after another. They are also under time pressure - 60 minutes and they start enlarging again.

One Science Crisis After Another!

What if we were faced with these in real life?

The record of our ability to handle it is mixed, at best.

We really should not have enough food to feed the many billions of people on the planet. But thanks to the Green Revolution of the mid-twentieth century, we were able to feed far more people than we otherwise would have.

The ozone layer in our atmosphere was developing holes. It was in danger of disappearing, but through international efforts, we were able to reduce the emissions of ozone-depleting chemicals, and the problem has been checked and reversed.

Through the efforts of Dr. Fauci and many others, we were able to develop a vaccine to greatly reduce COVID-19's harm in record time.

But science can't solve everything.

It can't solve how incredibly stupid some of us are.

Many science-based efforts to reduce COVID-19 were rejected by a stubborn and ignorant populace, particularly here in the USA. There were many, many, many unnecessary deaths because people refused to mask up, socially distance, or take the vaccine.

The biggest example is our reaction to global warming/climate change. Climate scientists know many ways we can mitigate the greatest harms caused by man-made climate change. But the most important nation on Earth has leaders who refuse to acknowledge this. Instead, they are galloping in the opposite direction.

Many in this country are more disturbed when the price of gas rises a dime than when the use of fossil fuels accelerates global temperature rise.

Scientists can come up with all the solutions in the world, but they mean nothing if we choose to ignore them.

Imagine if MAGA had been in charge of Project Hail Mary, or the micronauts inside a man's body. There would have been no solar system-saving microbe brought back, and that man's body in Fantastic Voyage would have just exploded.

Our one sience crisis after another is TRUMPed by our one MAGA crisis after another.

Our best minds are being silenced by our worst minds.

Until next time,

T. M. Strait

AOC '28

*please see my blog series Top 100 Sci-Fi Movies of the 20th Century. labeled Top 100 SciFi. Fantastic Voyage is No. 42. I am currently stuck on No. 40 - the 1966 movie Fahrenheit 451. I'm having a lot of trouble accessing it. It's like it just burned up or something.

Opening Doors

 

I can't figure it out.

I can't see where we're going.

Every door I try to open only leads to more misery.

There is a way through this maze.  I swear it.  But they are like the eye of the needle, and no one let go of enough greed to allow them to pass.

Every citizen should be able to vote, but we only make it harder.

We should be able to mitigate and reverse climate change, but instead, we only go through the doors that accelerate it.

We should be able to increase our life expectancy, but instead we shrink it by rejecting science - vaccines, food inspections, universal healthcare -those paths they want closed.

I try and try to open the doors to a more beautiful existence, to bring the Kingdom of God closer to Earth, but I can't get them open.  They require more strength than just my own.

Help me open the right doors.

Please.

While we still have enough light to see.

Young Again for at Least One Weekend! Rose Aldridge Column #4

 

Again, I apologize to those without enlarging rays.  I'm continuing to work on solutions.

13 hours in Disney World would be enough to wear anyone out.

After taking Benjamin to Disney World, Universal, and SeaWorld (all different trips), Alison and I decided to swear off amusement parks.

But when Doug called and wanted us to go to California and accompany my one-and-only grandchild to Disneyland.  It took only milliseconds for us to disavow our avowal.

My favorite memory of Disney World did not occur at the park.  When Benjamin was five or so, we went to Orlando and were ready to go to the park on Monday.  Only a hurricane came through, and the park decided not to open on Monday. 

We did not know what to do with our planned day at Disney World.  We found an open flea market, and Benjamin found a Pokémon board game.  It was fun and easy to play.  It began a lifelong passion for collectible card games, board games, and role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons.

And to think, none of that might have happened had Disney World been open that day.