It's April 1 with no shortage of significant news

We definitely must be concerned (youtube image)

So it's April 1, a day which through most of my life has been associated with pulling pranks. But today we have very little of that tradition, probably because we have gotten so serious. Or litigious. That wipes things out pretty quickly. 

I remember a well-known prank pulled on a local gentleman with initials K.K. at a local diner. Something about a huge winning lottery ticket. Which was fake of course. He picked up the tab for his buddies that day, so giddy was he. The prankster was among the buddies. 

The target of the prank ended up not exactly humor-filled, the story goes. 

So, the media backs off these days in reminding us of the tradition. I remember the Martin twins, Sharon and Sheila, coming into the Met Lounge on the eve of April Fool's Day with noisemakers to usher in the day of foolery. No better sense of humor could one find. But to repeat: people are more serious today.

 

News gets close to home

The passing trains through Morris do not seem as routine now. We have had this rash of derailments. We should be whistling past the graveyard some. The incident in East Palestine OH was the first eye-opener. Then we heard of more of same. We might have thought, "oh, this is the sort of thing that happens 'someplace else.' " 

The "someplace else" thinking probably happened as the Catholic priest scandal unraveled. "Oh, that's out in Boston." I can illustrate: We had our local Catholic priest come in to the paper office and vent anger at a syndicated cartoon we published. Yes the cartoon came across as an indictment of the Catholic Church. Eventually we got the movie "Spotlight," lest you have any doubt. 

So the local priest with hand-wringing histrionics said the cartoon misled the locals because surely this problem would not happen here. Let's not mistake our bucolic setting for Boston. We're different here, right? Not so. Eventually a misbehaving priest was discovered here and he had to be whisked away. He was delicately spirited away, our law enforcement people said to us, "for his own safety." 

And now we can make a parallel observation of how catastrophic train derailments are not confined to the eastern U.S. Why should they be? We awoke on Thursday to the news of a derailment by Raymond. A friend who has family connections there assured me by email that "everyone was safe." Nice to hear that, naturally, but what about long-term environmental consequences? I seriously doubt we are out of the woods on that. 

My God, what if this had happened right in or around our Morris? Doesn't it cross your mind that the consequences would be catastrophic for property values? And how would you feel if you were impacted this way? Would you suddenly start waving your arms and wondering why government could not have had more regulations in place? But we had a hardcore "conservative" president for four years for whom regulations were anathema. 

Trump said "I had nothing to do with that," if you even care to pay attention to his comments anymore, from this man who had such a hard time controlling his sexual urges. Given that he wanted to be president, couldn't he have just found contentment with his wife Melania instead of going after porn stars and Playboy models, and then paying them? 

It's "Alice Through the Looking Glass" in that I would expect true conservatives to be revulsed by this man. My late uncle the Glenwood banker, he of the Goldwater cigars in 1964 - he showed them to us - would be revulsed almost to the point of fainting. "What kind of world have we entered," he might ask. He was not even fond of George W. Bush based on the proclivity for foreign military intervention. Conservatives should have universally rejected that. 

But conservatives have been floundering so hopelessly of late, trying to find their real voice. So many have gravitated to Trump for reasons they probably don't even understand. It's like people in the church choir following their director - they have chosen to follow certain voices from conservative media. The people leading conservative media are probably not following their own heart or their own soul. They have merely "tested the waters" and found certain buttons that they couldn't resist pushing. 

For a while this meant supporting the Iraq invasion and roundly condemning anyone who doubted it. The war skeptics were chided with insulting language - you know the words. But then, as Trump fumbled along trying to be president, he happened upon this novel idea that maybe foreign military intervention really sucks. And lo and behold, his vast following did a 180 and decided "war is bad." 

Laura Ingraham of Fox News came forward and said she was "retracting" her support for the Iraq war (invasion). Laura, you can't do that. 

You readers probably don't remember, but Laura and Tucker Carlson both had dead ends with previous gigs in cable news. For sure you don't remember Ingraham's show called "Watch It!" Carlson has struck me as a phony from Day 1, a guy who just likes saying whatever it takes to get an audience. 

(Trump said he had "nothing to do" with more lax regulations, but of course he would not be the one doing this, it would be an appointee. And now Janet Yellen says the Trump administration "decimated" financial oversight. But he's on your side with the green M&Ms I suppose.) 

 

Daniels gave Trump a hard-on (the scottish sun)

No surprise here

So it's April 1, 2023, and what's the big news? You can open your laptop in the morning, cup of coffee beside you, and know for sure how the headlines are going to scream at you. What hath God wrought! 

The media assaults us with the frenzied histrionics around Trump, a guy who cut his teeth as an entertainer on TV. He would have gone nowhere without that grounding. Instead he cornered a certain fixed-in-stone base of people who call themselves conservative, and then the other Republican candidates of whom there were 16, divided the remaining primary votes which ushered Trump into the nomination. 

We have all been spellbound since, as if it's like this "siren song" in "The Odyssey." I've given up waiting for us all to extricate ourselves. It's a siren song. 

How to tell your kids, about how Trump got in trouble with Stephanie Clifford (Stormy Daniels) or Karen McDougal? We are starting to hear more about the latter now, Karen. So men might salivate looking at photos of the two, preferably photos from when they were in their "prime" with sexiness. So let's objectify women a little more. That is supposed to be a terrible thing to do. 

McDougal gave Trump a hard-on too

Most of us have looked down on "porn" for most of our lives. But so many of us want to shrug about Trump wanting to shop around for the best sex possible, in his mind, and what better place to look than in porn? 

"Porn Hub" has really become pretty mainstream. So mainstream it has been parodied on "The Onion" humor site. "Are these really certified stepmothers?" 

In my childhood, this would be mind-boggling. My late uncle and his wife might be turning over in their graves. They are buried at the "Williams" family plot at Glenwood Lutheran Cemetery. You'll see a big master slab with "Williams" on it. Makes me proud. 

The big news as of Friday is that Trump is indicted. Why the big deal? Do any of you really think it's going to be hard proving legal wrongdoing? The hammer is set to come down on other cases as well, like with this Jack Smith in charge. Boy, you wouldn't want to cross that guy. 

We cannot risk having Trump become president again, for any number of reasons. After all the help we've given to Ukraine, Trump would cause a 100 percent turnabout and then we'd be on Russia's side. Trump has such a convivial relationship with Putin. Can we allow this? What if Russia continues its military adventurism right into Europe? Eventually we'd have no choice but to react like we reacted to Nazi Germany. History repeats itself. Or it at least rhymes. 

Let's pray against that, and also against more episodes of catastrophic train derailments. It's April 1, the old "April Fool's Day," with outside weather looking like anything but that date on the calendar. The Martin twins might not be so giddy ushering in April this year. Oh but you can't keep those two down.

Happy to wind down this post with a little levity. 

We heard thunder on Friday. Today (Saturday), the snowplows seem slow in getting out, at least out in my neck of the woods. But snow is supposed to melt fast in April, right?

 

Back in the swing

My medical-induced hiatus from writing has been followed by a period of time where I am perhaps posting on my sites too often. I think this is because we have all been "cooped up" due to the weather, and it'd be nice to shake things up with a nice walk out to the bike trails. Let my mind escape a little. Sharon will probably be out there before the change in weather.

I share Sharon's zest for being outside. And my God, how big is the gap going to get between winter and spring high school sports seasons? Mercy! If we had an inflatable cover for the Big Cat playing field, that would solve soooo much.

Sharon has joked about her "evil twin sister." That be Sheila. I hope to see the eldest Martin girl Edith back in Morris this summer for the MHS Class of 1973 50th reunion. We graduated when Richard Nixon was president.

- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com