The Valley Viewpoint

Today I was in a shoe store that sells only shoes, nothing else. A young girl with green hair walked over to me and asked, “What brings you in today? I looked at her and said, “I’m interested in buying a refrigerator.” She didn’t quite know how to respond, had that deer in the headlights look.
I was thinking about old age and decided that old age is when you still have something on the ball, but you are just too tired to bounce it.
When people see a cat’s litter box they always say, “Oh, have you got a cat?” I just say, “No, it’s for company!”
Employment application blanks always ask who is to be called in case of an emergency. I think you should write, “An ambulance.”
The older you get the tougher it is to lose weight because by then your body and your fat have gotten to be really good friends.
The easiest way to find something lost around the house is to buy a replacement.
Have you ever noticed: The Roman Numerals for forty (40) are XL.
The sole purpose of a child’s middle name is so he knows when he’s really in trouble.
Did you ever notice that when you put the 2 words “The” and “IRS” together it spells “Theirs?”
Aging: Eventually you will reach a point when you stop lying about your age and start bragging about it.
Some people try to turn back their “odometers.” Not me. I want people to know why I look this way. I’ve traveled a long way and a lot of the roads were not paved.
Ah! Being young is exciting but being old is comfortable.
Lord, keep your arm around my shoulder and your hand over my mouth.
May you always have:
Love to share,
Cash to spare,
Tires with air,
And friends who care…..

President John F. Kennedy was killed 57 years ago today. 57 years ago. For many people my age, JFK’s assassination and funeral was the first national news story of our lives. I was 5 and just started school. My family, that week was focused on Thanksgiving as well as my sister’s upcoming birthday and then the news of JFK’s death stunned the nation. People, that day, were scrambling to get news. There was no 24 hour streaming news media back then. We huddled around our black and white TV for information. My most vivid memory of watching, on TV, the state funeral was when my Dad pointed to the TV and said “See that horse, Eddie”? “That horse is a son of a bitch”, which brought my mother into the room for an admonishment. Turns out my father had his own experiences with Blackjack when he was stationed with the Old Guard at Fort Myer. The soldier handling Blackjack that day was having a tough time handling the skittish animal and, it was later reported, that the horse actually stepped on the soldiers foot making it very difficult for him to control the animal.
I can remember returning to school after this long week was over and telling Sister Grace Francis, my teacher, that my Dad knew Blackjack and he is a ‘sonofabitch’….

So, pray for the soul of JFK today. Remember a simpler time, when the nation was united in our shared grieve, when we didn’t witness the kind of violence that so many young kids, today, are witness to.
It takes time to bury painful living memories, but it must be done so memory can stand without sorrow. The Kennedy family has learned through many tragic experiences, that once you acknowledge the death, you must let it go and honor the life, for only the body dies. And remember that Blackjack was a “son of a bitch”….

Sad news today. Two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Jim Dwyer, a columnist for three New York City newspapers across a long and acclaimed career, died Thursday. He was 63.
Jim and I went to grammar school together. Our paths also crossed at Fordham. Jim and I, over the past several years, were Facebook friends. Jim’s writing was crisp, clear and always ‘New York’. Over the years, as I blogged and posted on my own page, my day was always made better when Jim ‘liked’ something that I wrote.
Jim also wrote or co-authored 7 books. One of these, “102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers,” was an account of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center from the perspective of the survivors. Jim, graciously agreed to call in to WKIP’s Hudson Valley Live Show when I was filling in for Tom Sipos to discuss this book on the 16th anniversary of the attacks. My interview with Jim is attached.
Jim, thank you for following your heart. Thank you for your insight, humor and for never forgetting that you were a kid from Yorkville.
God speed, Jim

As the new US Supreme Court term begins, I ran across this quote and I thought it worth sharing:‘The first lesson, simple as it is, is that whatever court we are in, whatever we are doing, whether we are in a trial court or an appellate court, at the end of our task some human being is going to be affected. Some human life is going to be changed in some way by what we do, whether we do it as trial judges or whether we do it as appellate judges, as far removed from the trial arena as it is possible to be. And so we had better use every power of our minds and our hearts and our beings to get those rulings right’. (Justice David Souter).

So, a while back my daughter and I got our genetic testing results back. Yes, we bought into the pitch that 23 and Me is all about real science, real data and genetic insights. Besides confirming that Jen is ACTUALLY my daughter, I was surprised that my genetic make up puts me squarely in the Irish, English, Scottish and Eastern European arenas. The real surprise came when I received an email from my daughter who was reviewing my results and she, gleefully, wrote, ‘Dad, you have 42% of Neanderthal DNA’……She was quick to point out that her Neanderthal DNA was only 9%. She attributed this to her being further down the evolutionary chain than I am.(Jen did have better SAT scores than me).

So, my friends, think twice about doing this. You may just be surprised at what you’ll find out…

They are tearing down dozens of statues and facing no consequences whatsoever for vandalizing our public spaces — including memorials to our nation’s greatest heroes. When private citizens try to do the job the government won’t and protect our culture, our history, and our public property from destruction, local officials step in and remove the statues on behalf of the vandals, lest they injure themselves while imitating Iraqis celebrating the fall of Saddam Hussein.These people are not seeking change at the margins. They are demanding a total cultural revolution, and cowardly public officials are giving it to them.The only thing that could make the situation worse at this moment would be handing the White House to a doddering and unprincipled establishment politician beholden to the “cancel culture” mob. Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden would immediately delegate de facto control over the vast justice, civil rights, and regulatory apparatus of the federal government to the loudest voices in his coalition: the woke activist class.At this moment, there is a veritable army of lawyers and bureaucrats who have spent the last three and a half years subsisting on resentment and salivating at the prospect of regaining power. Things are bad enough now, but conditions will become much worse if the “cancel culture” born on social media is augmented with the force of law and given the full attention of Biden appointees imbued with the sweeping powers of the federal bureaucracy.

Now that we’ve had a few months to mourn the loss of our basic liberties, even if our overlords make a symbolic head-fake toward giving them back, one must realize the ramifications of what has happened and what it means going forward.

The key point to understand is that the precedent has been set.

If the state can take away your freedom to assemble or otherwise control your movements or operate your business now, because of coronavirus, then they can do again in the future for something else. For anything else. From here on in, every time the powers that be are spooked by what they see coming at them, like a sudden, catastrophic loss of credibility and relevancy, they know they can just wrap up an emergency in hysteria and shut the world down again, and again, and again.

In the eyes of Big Government progressives and socialists, what has happened over the past few months isn’t an unmitigated disaster with no historical parallel, it’s an opportunity. It’s a chance to condition the populace to accept the tenets of central government control and the equitable reordering of other people’s lives:

Coronavirus today, Global Warming tomorrow. Then Climate Emergency after that. Every crisis will be presented as dwarfing the last one and anybody who disagrees or presents refuting data will be deplatformed as misinformation and dismissed as conspiracy nuts. But each one will move us toward the Holy Grail of progressivism, a government-knows-best technocracy that forces equality on everyone (else).

The New Normal is here to stay

For starters, it means we now live in a centrally planned economy, for reals. Over these last few years, with the unprecedented level of intervention in markets and interest rates, numerous prognosticators have warned that market signalling has been destroyed and we were headed for central planning. This would be a bad thing because every centrally planned economy throughout history has ended in ignominy and failure.

Well, make no mistake. We’re in one now. If the stock market goes down, central banks make them go back up via interest rate cuts and QE. If the bond market wobbles, the Fed starts buying bonds, even junk. Most of all, governments worldwide shut down the entire economy by decree, and only allowed businesses deemed to be “essential” to remain open and operate.

In order for a centrally planned economy to work, though, you need total control over the population and the ability to monitor every aspect of it. So we’ll see the war on cash intensify under the pretence that physical notes spread infections.

We’ll see China-style social credit systems under the guise of immunity passports and contact tracking which are already being discussed in past-tense as fait accompli.

At some point over a few short months the nation state and WHO response to a comparatively lightweight pandemic (in terms of case fatalities without underlying co-morbidity factors) has transitioned from being typically ham fisted and inept into operant conditioning of the masses in order to inculcate them into a state of learned helplessness.

Take everything you thought you believed about self-reliance, industriousness, thrift, personal responsibility, entrepreneurship or pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and flush it down the toilet. It’s all meaningless because now, the only thing that matters is what the government thinks about your business. Should it be permitted to operate? Do you have the green light to collect rent from your tenants on property you own? Or will you have to first comply with some social justice rental quotas, give your tenants an equity stakes in your properties first? That proposal has already been floated for landlords seeking emergency relief. It portends the type of egalitarian initiatives we’ll be inundated with under Democratic Socialism.

This is central planning.

This is flatten the curve.

This is a five year plan, The Great Leap Forward and the New Green Deal.

When the Memorial Day weekend kicks off the ‘official’ start of summer, we all have a wide array of memories that flood through our minds… Some happy, others sad, many funny, a few, memorable and special.I spent my summers on Rockaway Beach, New York. My Aunt Sissy, Aunt Mary and Uncle Jack had bungalows there. Rockaway was the working man’s Riviera. The longest stretch of urban beach in the United States on a peninsula stretching out into the Atlantic.My first time seeing the ocean was from this stretch of sand. My first sense memories of sand between your toes and then in your shoes comes from Rockaway. The smells were wonderful: the salt air, the wooden boardwalk had a certain indefinable smell; the sun tan lotion (usually Coppertone) wafting through the air and the hot dogs grilling at the beach stand; the smell of the bars on a Sunday morning as we walked past them on our way to Mass are burned in my memory.My aunt’s bungalows were always open to anybody. Now, that might mean that you had to sleep on the porch listening to the overhead subway that rattled by, but to me, it was like staying at a resort. My Aunt Mary’s bungelow had an upstairs and a kitchen that was spotless. In all the years that I went there, I can’t recall seeing her at the beach, I just remember her in the kitchen wearing an apron. When my aunt Sissy felt that we were old enough, she’d rustle us out of bed at 7 or so, telling us to go to the beach and she would bring lunch around noon. I remember sitting on the beach at 7AM on many mornings feeling like Robinson Crusoe because there was not another soul in sight! On the beach, old biplanes would fly over head heralding the latest soft drink, radio station or local stores. Then there was the ice cream man. No – not in a truck, but a boy who carried a metal box with dry ice laden with Good Humor bars and orange drinks. “Ice cream and orange drinks heah!” We were in heaven. There was a neighborhood dog named “Pete” who spent his summers being fed by everyone on the beach. When the cops would try to get him, every kid on the beach claimed ownership and begged the police officers not to take ‘their’ dog. The cops never took Pete. After a day on the beach, it was back to either Sissy or Mary’s for dinner. Picture 20 or so people sitting around a table where endless amounts of food were served along with seeing the occasional cousin running into the outdoor shower. Jack’s clam chowder was the best and he always had about 50 gallons of it ready. The more pepper the better! After dinner, we’d usually take a trip to Playland, an old wooden amusement park that you would see in the old time black and white movies today. A rickety wooden rollercoaster called ‘The Atom Smasher‘, tunnel of love, games of chance, the smell of cotton candy was heady and the Nathan’s hot dogs were the best! It was my cousin Jimmy who took me on my first roller coaster ride and then my first ferris wheel ride. When he got to the top of the ferris wheel, he took one of his moccasins off and threw it to the crowd below. He was ‘admonished’ by the ride’s operator! I had my first slice of Sicilian pizza with my cousin Geraldine in Rockaway and I still remember my cousin Donna always taking me into the ocean far so I could tell everybody that I was ‘out past the jetties’. As we all grew up, we traveled to other places for our vacations and the Rockaways became a thing of the past. You never realize how much you miss something until it is gone. What I wouldn’t give to have that one last hot dog or orangeade on the boardwalk or squeeze around Mary or Sissy’s table for some of Jack’s clam chowder.Rockaway Beach is a part of me, it always will be.I hope that this summer brings back memories for you too. Thanks, Sissy, Aunt Mary and Uncle Jack.

Today, I want to write about my family. For those of you who follow my blogs, this is a topic that I’ve written about before. Why now another blog?
I guess what I want to say is that the lessons that I learned being part McLoughlin is that family is family, and family is not determined by marriage certificates, divorce papers, and adoption documents. Families are made in the heart. I don’t care about whose DNA has recombined with whose. When everything goes to hell, the people who stand by you without flinching–they are your family.
I always hear people talk about ‘dysfunctional families.’ It annoys me, because it makes you think that somewhere there’s this magical family where everyone gets along, and no one ever screams things they don’t mean, and there’s never a time when sharp objects should be hidden. Well, I’m sorry, but that family doesn’t exist. And if you find some neighbors that seem to be the grinning model of ‘function,’ trust me – that’s the family that will get arrested for smuggling arms in their SUV between soccer games.
The branches of the Mc Loughlin family tree include editors, nurses, physical therapists, police officers, teachers, lawyers, MBA’s and yes, even a lowly HR Director whose lucky enough to still be here and, from time to time, sits behind the microphones of WKIP radio.
Yes, the Mcloughlin’s have come along way from when our grandfather arrived in 1917.
Even though we may not see each other as often as we should, I know that my membership in this family has given me a strong first world and a strong set of relationships. Becuse of this, I’ll always be able to walk the world because I know where I belong. I will always have some place to come back to.
The best you can really hope for is a family where everyone’s problems, big and small, are solveable by working together and everyone protects each other. Kind of like an orchestra where every instrument is out of tune, in exactly the same way.
So,when you think of your family just remember you’re bound to them by blood which gives you that much more in common than diseases, genetics, hair, and eye color. It’s like they’re part of your blueprint. But even though you’re stuck with them, at the same time, they’re also stuck with you. So that’s why they always get the front rows at christenings and funerals. Because they’re the ones that are there, you know, from the beginning to the end. Like it or not.

Guitars and pens. Ok, so what am I writing about now? Well, both of them are tools. Tools to express thoughts and feelings. I’m fortunate that I own both and use them as best as I can to express what I’m thinking on any given day. The English alphabet has just 26 letters. 26 letters and in the right hands these 26 letters have given the world literature. I once had a Jesuit who told me to make sure to only read the classics because there’s ‘not enough time’ to get through all the entire world of literature. This world has everything in it, and it refuses to leave anything out. I have read like a man on fire my whole life because the genius of English teachers touched me with the dazzling beauty of language.
Because of them I rode with Don Quixote and danced with Anna Karenina at a ball in St. Petersburg and lassoed a steer in “Lonesome Dove” and had nightmares about slavery in “Beloved” and walked the streets of Dublin in “Ulysses” and made up a hundred stories in the Arabian nights and saw my mother killed by a baseball in “A Prayer for Owen Meany.” I’ve laughed out loud reading Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissenting opinions for their sheer brilliance and have been humbled by the blazing intellect of Charles Krauthammer’s editorials. I’ve introduced myself on air when hosting Tom Sipo’s Hudson Valley Live Radio Show on WKIP to many listeners all because I listened to my fabulous English teachers and soaked up every single thing those magnificent men and women had to give and taught me how to use words. I cherish and praise them and thank them for finding me when I was a boy and presenting me with the precious gift of the English language. I’ve been fortunate enough to have found my own voice through my postings here as well as on my Facebook site and behind the microphone at WKIP with the great Tom Sipos, a Hudson Valley, NY treasure.
Find your voice and you’ll find God’s justice.
It’s the same with songs and music. I’ve always thought people would find a lot more pleasure in their routines if they burst into song at significant moments. Music is the great uniter. An incredible force. Something that people who differ on everything and anything else can have in common. Music is the great remember-er of happy times or sad times, of lost loves or just of younger times, especially when one is older and listens, by chance, to a song that invokes an emotion long gone in the mind but lifted to the conscious surface of thought with a knowing smile.
So, guitars, pens and my voice. …..I’m glad I use them to the best of my ability……Thanks for reading.

Time for a quick, New York City snow storm story. Back when I was a kid, in Manhattan, there was one winter storm that allowed us to be out of school. My mother let us out of the house to play. Around 4 or so in the afternoon, I saw my uncle John walking up 83rd street carrying what was the largest snowball my friends and I ever saw. He told me that he made this snowball by rolling it across snow laden cars as he walked from his job on 73 and East End Ave to 83rd between 2nd and 3rd. He said it took him about two hours of continually stopping and packing fresh snow into making this snowball. I can only imagine what other people thought as they watched him carry out this task. I guess all I want to say about this silly story is that, sometimes, the manner of giving is worth more than the gift and on that snowy day, too many years ago to mention, I had a great, giant snowball; friends who wanted one as well and an uncle who took the time to make it and a mother who wouldn’t let me keep it in the refrigerator. Thanks, John.

Today, I had a flashback of an event that I was witness to as a kid growing up in my family’s home in Woodside, Queens. My aunt Sissy, one afternoon, found her brother and my uncle John sawing the legs of his bed in his apartment. “John, what are you doing??”…..My uncle, a very well mannered and quiet guy, looked at his sister and told my aunt to, politely, mind her business and he continued the job of sawing the legs of his bed. Now, this became a big deal…What was John doing? Why was he doing this? When my mom found out what he was doing, she calmly told me, my aunt and everyone else who thought that John had lost his mind that he was doing this for Trixie. Ah hah…it all made sense. You see, Trixie was John’s dog. A dog that joined our family in 1965 and who never left John’s side. Trixie, you see, was having a hard time, as she was getting older, making the leap into John’s bed so he did what what he thought best for his dog; he lowered the bed. That was the first time that I was witness to the love that exists between humans and dogs. Nobody can fully understand the meaning of love unless he’s owned a dog. A dog can show you more honest affection with a flick of their tail than a man can gather through a lifetime of handshakes.

Dogs come into our lives to teach us about love, they depart to teach us about loss. A new dog never replaces an old dog, it merely expands the heart. I’ve been lucky in my life because I have loved many dogs, almost as much as John loved Trixie.

If you have loved many dogs your heart is very big. Thanks, John…..