Posted: November 8, 2021 by datechguy in Uncategorized
One of the causalities of the COVID business was Pintastic NE the annual NE Pinball festival which I have attended and covered each year that it took place.
With the return of something resembling normally (despite the best efforts of the federal and some state bureaucracies) Pintastic NE has returned.
Because of the uncertainty of what the COVID situation would be Pintastic choose to remain it their previous location at the Sturbridge Host Hotel additionally to insure enough lead time instead of scheduling the show for the week before the 4th of July the show was moved to the week before Thanksgiving.
But delayed or not the show is on which means from November 18 through the 21st those who live within or book a hotel room within driving distance of Sturbridge MA will get a chance to enjoy days of pinball on 100;s of machines at a very good price.
Almost as good is the chance to get away from the political and cultural insanity and simply have fun.
Pintastic’s web site is here. You can get more info, buy passes and see the list of games, oh and one note. There will likely be more than the games listed as this would not include games brought by various vendors..
SHREVEPORT – I was on the road last week and so missed posting here. We travelled to Fredericksburg, Texas, the Hill Country, which has been a bucket list trip for my husband for several years. It’s only about a seven-hour drive from where we live, so we took the opportunity last week to go.
It was a wonderful trip, but we are exhausted! We had three days to cram in as much as we possibly could; Monday and Friday were driving days. We had to be back home Saturday for other obligations.
Tuesday was a highlight for me: we went to Luckenbach, Texas (if you know, you know.). My husband calls Luckenbach “the Grand Old Opry of Outlaw Country Music,” and I guess it is. The song made it famous, but the musicians made history and if you’ve never read about Hondo Crouch, do yourself a favor and “meet” this man. If only we all move through this life with the grace, love, and humor of Hondo, we would all be so much better off.
Hondo’s daughter, Becky, has written one book about her father and now has another called Luckenbach, The Center of the Universe, which I bought on my trip there and it’s one of those laugh out loud books that you want to read aloud to someone. Hysterical.
Anyway, the trip to Luckenbach was a sort of pilgrimage for me and was a highlight.
The other super cool thing we did was visit the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg. I have read a lot of books and memoirs of the Pacific War and so I was excited about this outing; however, that being said, I can not express how exhausted I was at the end of our visit! I’m one of those people who wants to see it all, read it all, touch all the interactive stuff, watch all the videos, at a museum. You just can’t do it, here. I really needed two days to see this museum the way it should be done. We started in the Nimitz Gallery and learned so much about Chester Nimitz – what a fascinating man! Then we moved on into the timeline of the War, then the various exhibits for each stage. We got to 1943 and had to stop for lunch.
After lunch, my brain was like a sponge that had soaked up all it could hold. Nothing was sinking in. We finished, and man, the finish was fabulous! There is a video display of a submerged airplane while a video takes you through the treaties of surrender and the celebrations. You never forget the price of war.
The exhibits in this museum are awesome and it is so well done. There are exhibits outside as well and most impressive is the Japanese Garden of Peace which was a gift from the people of Japan. It is beautiful and impressive. There is a specially trained gardener to maintain the space.
We did several other things like tour the Texas Ranger Heritage Center in Fredericksburg (not to be confused with the Texas Ranger Museum in Waco), which was cool, and we visited Fort Martin Scott, an Army frontier post.
The landscape in the Hill Country is beautiful and has proven itself perfect for vineyards and so now there are at least forty wineries in the immediate area. Not being a wine-girl myself, we stuck to the German restaurants and breweries, but groups of people go there just to get on trollies and visit the wineries.
It was a fun trip and now I’m trying to get back into my routines, pack up the Halloween decorations, and think about the holiday season ahead.
fyi those people on the side and in the back are getting confession
The Mass part 1
the Sermon from the mass part 2 of 5 from the mass part 1 of two of the sermon
Fr. Leonard celebrates Mass and completes his sermon 3 of 5 of the mass 2 of 2 of his sermon. I made it a point to keep the sermon separate for those who wished to watch it or listen to it independent of the Mass.
Fr. Leonard mass at St. Bernard part 4 of 5
fyi for those not familiar with daily Catholic mass It’s normally a bit shorter. This one is longer because with a visiting priest the sermon is naturally longer plus the number of people attending and receiving communion is much larger than for most daily masses which at St. Bernard’s usually runs about 20 min or 25 tops.
part 5 of 5
Following the mass was the healing service here is part 1
and here is the final part, as before the larger crowd meant for a longer service.
This week Fr. Leonard put up his video of his visit. It was an 8 minute video that had stuff from all his events including three in Medford that I could not attend.
My final post next weekend will include the events from his final day in Massachusetts including mass, the Cenacle for priest onboard ship in Boston Harbor and interviews with Fr. and his assistant Gus on the bus as we took them to the airport to go home.
The one great comet of my lifetime was the Hale-Bopp Comet of 1997. But its spectacular night time display was overshadowed by the mass suicide of the 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult. Because they believed that here was a spaceship traveling behind the comet they took some barbiturates, drank some vodka, and put hoods over their heads so they could reunite with one of the founders of the cult, who they believed was a passenger on that craft.
They had faith, or something akin to it, in their beliefs.
On a lesser and of course non-deadly scale is the cult-like beliefs Democrats, and their media allies, have in themselves and their policies.
There are exceptions here and there, James Carville being a notable Dem who has decried the liberals’ wokeness, but after the victory of Republican Glenn Youngkin over Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia gubernatorial race and the GOP near-miss in New Jersey, leftists are doubling down on failure, despite clear evidence that their policies are unpopular.
Just like cult members.
Let’s start with Critical Race Theory. I was one of many conservatives who switched the channel over to MSNBC to see how the left was responding to last week’s election coverage. Commentator after commentator said, like the sheep in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, that CRT was not being taught in Virginia schools or anywhere else for that matter. I laughed particularly hard when former Obama HUD secretary Julian Castro said so on a program that Brian Williams, no stranger to fiction, hosted. Castro is a lawyer and while probably in a lie-but-avoid-perjury mode he fixed his mind on a mental crumb–that no one anywhere in pre-college classrooms is teaching the arcane original Critical Race Theory texts from the 1970s–the Dead Sea Scrolls of leftist bigotry. What is being taught in some schools is that American society is inherently white, meaning racist, and that white people, even children, are oppressors.
For instance, shortly before Election Day a mother said she was told by her six-year-old daughter in a Loudon County, Virginia classroom that she was “born evil” because she is white. Not surprisingly CRT is hated by most parents–and not just white parents.
I don’t want to dig too far into semantics but the meanings of words and phrases evolve. Critical Race Theory now means dividing people into those oppressor and oppressed camps and that our society is rigged and incurably racist. Well there is one antidote–leftist indoctrination in schools, or so liberals believe.
Yes there are white supremacists. There are far fewer of them than when I was a child and those remaining should be shunned.
Oh, MSNBC talking heads I have a message for you: CRT is not a “racist dog whistle.”
Now let’s move on to infrastructure. Many left-wing experts, that is, people who know a lot of things about stuff that isn’t true, made the ludicrous claim that if Joe Biden’s Build Back Better infrastructure bill had been signed into law before Election Day McAuliffe would have won. I’ll try to be brief on this whopper of a fallacy but for starters, infrastructure was not a major issue in the Virginia governor’s race. Also, as Barack Obama learned, enacting infrastructure legislation doesn’t make thousands of building projects “shovel ready.” Part of Build Back Better was signed into law on Saturday–I’m not breathing the smell of hot asphalt today. But it will be many months before BBB construction projects commence and even longer before they are completed. Okay, the food and beverage improvements on Amtrak, part of the infrastructure bill, could be available soon.
Do you remember Obama’s not-so-shovel-ready stimulus bill from 2009? Only about $100 billion of the $800 billion bill actually was spent on infrastructure.
On the other hand, inflation is a problem in America for the first time in decades. There is a growing belief among voters that government is getting too big too fast. And the Democrats have been the party of Big Government since the presidency of Joe Biden’s idol, Franklin D. Roosevelt. As for the current president, he was elected because he passed himself off as a moderate, or perhaps as an old school liberal–but certainly not as Bernie Sanders.
There is a deeper problem for Democrats, particularly among hard-left members such as the members of The Squad. As I mentioned earlier Dems have a cultist faith in their policies. I encounter left-wingers regularly here in the inner-suburbs of Chicago. On those rare instances I engage in a political conversation with them, I am usually told, “Well, you just aren’t properly educated on the issues. You listen to too much talk radio and watch too much Fox News–you are indoctrinated.” But unlike them, I am regularly confronted by the other side. For instance, I sat for hours in a hospital waiting room last month. First I endured former Bill Clinton staffer George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America and then the leftists on The View, although I was in for a minor treat as Joyce Behar was not on the couch that day. And overall mainstream entertainment media is drenched with covert and overt liberal bias. Take a look at late night comedy shows, excluding of course Fox News’ Gutfeld! And as I mentioned earlier, I dabble with watching MSNBC–and CNN.
So yes, I am educated and I am exposed to multiple political views.
In the post-mortems among Democrats, again with a few exceptions, there was no call from them to moderate their policies and to address what went wrong on Election Day last week. It’s still full steam ahead.
I’ve mentioned this quote many times before but too many people still haven’t seen it “The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant,” Ronald Reagan said, “but that they know so much that isn’t so.”
You can’t reason with most leftists.
And there was no spaceship hiding behind the Hale-Bopp Comet.
Oh, no one is always right. Yep, not even conservatives.
The last words I’ll leave to Dr. Martin Luther King.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
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