Clear and a bit cold this early Tuesday morning on California’s north coast — decent compared to what’s brewing across the US mid-section as a spring weather-blow-out approaches from the west carrying a bit of everything: This storm will be notable for its broad geographic reach and multiple hazards, ranging from blizzard conditions with heavy snow and powerful winds, to severe thunderstorms containing large hail, damaging winds, and potentially tornadoes.
Other than that, what’s to worry?

Meanwhile, beyond North Korea and a 4-year-old boy accidentally shooting to death a law-enforcement guy’s wife and a not-at-all surprising study that revealed women prefer well-endowed men, yesterday two old women died, both widely-known and both a study in false dreams.

(Illustration: Pablo Picasso’s ‘The Two Saltimbanques‘ found here).

There’s a lot to be said of our culture/pop media that throws so much shit out onto the airwaves, the reality of how people really are becomes confused/entangled with what the public perceives based on the promotion, and who’s doing the promoting.
In both politics and entertainment, we the consumer live for the fiction — how people are in real time is not all that exciting and not all that entertaining.

Yesterday morning, I heard about the death of the UK’s Margaret Thatcher, former prime minister and one of the giant movers-and-shakers in the last part of the 20th Century. She’s also be paired with Ronald Reagan in defining what the world needs now, and it wasn’t love.
The world started its nasty slant to the right in 1978 with the rise of Pope John Paul II, and the drift to ugly hasn’t really slowed down, both the pope, Thatcher and Reagan has pushed the planet to the pure brink of chaos, and maybe even closer to an end.

Thatcher being dead doesn’t change what she did while alive — she caused a lot of bad shit and not speaking ill of a very-public deceased person makes a lying legacy come alive. Hindsight is mostly 20/20 and most right-wing nutjobs feel toward Maggie how they felt toward Ronnie. Saints, both.
Glenn Greenwald at the Guardian spells out the horror:

Whatever else may be true of her, Thatcher engaged in incredibly consequential acts that affected millions of people around the world.
She played a key role not only in bringing about the first Gulf War but also using her influence to publicly advocate for the 2003 attack on Iraq.
She denounced Nelson Mandela and his ANC as “terrorists”, something even David Cameron ultimately admitted was wrong.
She was a steadfast friend to brutal tyrants such as Augusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein and Indonesian dictator General Suharto (“One of our very best and most valuable friends”).
And as my Guardian colleague Seumas Milne detailed last year, “across Britain Thatcher is still hated for the damage she inflicted – and for her political legacy of rampant inequality and greed, privatisation and social breakdown.”

The world got a little bit more shitty when Thatcher arrived on the scene, followed almost-immediately by Saint Ronnie, and it’s been downhill ever since.

And yesterday afternoon, after I’d gotten home from work and surfed the InterWebs for news, there was the announcement of the death of Annette Funicello, one of the original TV pioneers in culture and for me personally, my first crush on a female.
Sometime circa 1956-57, my family acquired out first TV set and from that black-and-white gobbly-gunk came ‘Howdy Doody’ and Walt Disney’s the ‘Mickey Mouse Club,’ both shows dumb as stumps.

I went ape-crazy over Funicello, wanted to marry here and even fantasized about she visiting my elementary school to a great fanfare of my fellows — but as warped as a young imagination could be in phoney innocent time, the whole sheebang was a dream wrapped inside a nightmare.
The love died pretty quickly. Funicello really didn’t have much real talent — she could sing, act in a wooden, throat-gushing way, but was never a force at all in entertainment.
All those Beach movies she made with Frankie Avalon sucked — I liked him way-more than her. At least he was dumb-funny, and could really sing, but she was an ice queen.