Halloween Politics - A Scary Video

Hey, All,

Yet more flaming liberal politics in this video. Give it a glance, if you're not offended by anti-Trump stuff. (If you are, er, ah, wait until the next posting, which will be much nicer.)

Here it is on liberalresistance.net:

https://www.liberalresistance.net/video-happy-halloween-or-not/

And here it is in person:

Video: The Triumph of Death...er, tRump

Another little video that I had on LRnet. it's a bit less complicated than the others in that it is mostly just moving pictures and music...no Voice Over.

However, I did "perform" the version of Dies irae on garageband. So, i guess that's something :-)

More seriously, this piece is a response to Trump's decision to pull out of Syria and leave the Kurds to die. Not, I fear, one of our finer moments as a nation.

Suddenlink

I woke up this morning to discover that I had no Internet service. At first, I thought it was simply a local outage, but then I phoned my provider -- Suddenlink -- and learned that I had been terminated for not paying my bill.

The kicker? To the best of my recollection, I never received a recent bill. I had signed up to go paperless and, before, had been getting it regularly via email. But, not this time. Maybe it went into my spam folder or something, but I haven’t seen it there as yet. 

Also, I had not received any notice from Suddenlink that my service was going to be shut down--even though the company has my phone number and text info on file.  If they had texted me a “friendly reminder” I’d have paid up quickly enough. But...they didn’t.

I then paid my bill via the phone and set up automatic payments so that this won’t happen in future. But I had to pay a late fee along with my regular bill, and I really felt that was a bit unfair. How could I be charged a late fee on a bill I never actually got?

So, I called up Suddenlink’s help line...and got put into a lengthy queue. I put my name and number for a call back, and then attempted to use the company’s chat function on its webpage. That, too, required a wait, but I hung in there until I got a company rep on the line, someone named “Michael.” I had just started explaining my problem to Michael when the chat function froze. It didn’t work then, and it is still not working as of the moment (10:45 am).

I then got a phone call back from the customer service help desk. I explained my problem as best I could and said I would like to remove the late fees. A rather hostile individual informed me that I had had plenty of time to check my bill before the due date and so it was all my fault, and there was no way the fees were coming off.

At this point, I was genuinely angry. The late fee had been annoying, but to be basically dismissed by customer service in this fashion was quite a bit worse. Indeed, it is inexcusable.

I suppose I will never see my late fee again, but I do think I’m owed an apology. I wonder if I will ever get it. If I ever do, I will let you know. But, it is rather unlikely, I suppose. Which is sad, because up to then I had been quite satisfied with my Suddenlink service. Now, I discover that it wasn’t nearly the company I thought it was.

Ah, the joys of life in the post-industrial economy. 

A book of mysterious things...

Another video experiment. I did this partly to see if I could format a video for Instagram's new video feature.

View this post on Instagram

Another video experiment. This is the first time I have ever done a 9x16 (i.e., cellphone specific) video. The music, once again, is by the fabulously talented Kevin MacLeod. Here is the Creative Commons notice: Music from https://filmmusic.io "Stay The Course" by Kevin MacLeod (https://incompetech.com) License: CC BY (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) Please check out my Amazon page, https://www.amazon.com/author/mtucker57

A post shared by Michael Tucker (@michael.j.tucker1) on Aug 15, 2019 at 10:25am PDT

No Shingles, Thank You

Spent much of yesterday sick as the proverbial canine. The reason? Because on Tuesday I went and got not one but two vaccinations -- for the flu, and more importantly, for Shingles. I had been meaning to get the latter for some time. I’m a prime candidate for that ghastly disease because I had chickenpox as an adult. Apparently, that means there is a strong, strong likelihood that I would get shingles sometime after middle age.

And I wasn’t planning on getting shingles...not if I could help it, anyway. It’s incredibly painful, can be a bit disfiguring (at least in the short term), and there is no known cure. And that’s just if you get garden variety. A friend of mine, a writer I’ve worked with, got it in her eyes. Feel free to shudder at that thought. I certainly did.

So, I got the vaccine. The problem is that I’ve got a strong immune system (apparently) and whenever I get a vaccine the old body swings into overdrive. It interprets the serum (as it should) as an attack and responds accordingly--i.e., it generates the antibodies which will give you immunity later on. The trouble being that may make you may feel sick in the short run. You may feel fever, aches, queasy stomach, and all the other things that are designed to make life impossible for viruses...and, sort of by accident, miserable for you.

Ergo, I spent pretty much all day yesterday flat on my back and feeling, to quote the immortal P.G. Wodehouse, like something rejected by the pure food committee. 

It wasn’t fun to say the least...but I knew the alternative was to court something a whole lot worse. Better to suffer a little today than much more more next week.

In other words, I was doing something mature.

Don’t you just hate it when that happens?

Video Note To Conservatives: Dump Trump Now!

Another video I did for LiberalResistance.net. This one ran on Friday.

Actually, I really believe this. Conservatives had made real progress in America, and, at least in places like American Conservative Magazine, had explored some interesting new spaces in the ideology.

But, Trump could take them down...hard.

If the Right wants to weather what's coming, it needs to find a way to disassociate itself from him, and do so gracefully but firmly.

Anyway, take a look and see what you think.

More Bill Rabbit

Hello, Everyone,

You’ll recall that I’ve been posting about a small collection of art that I inherited from my late parents, and which Judith Estrada Garcia was kind to place in her gallery in Taylor, Texas: https://estradagarciagallery.org/

I promised I would post images of the works as they became available. Here’s the second piece by the late Bill Rabbit, who was rather a big name in Southwestern art. You can see his Wikipedia entry here:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Rabbit

This piece is When Shadows Fall and will be shown at Judith’s gallery in the near future. Before then, though, she’ll be displaying it online.

Oh, and please check out Bill Rabbit’s daughter’s work as well. Traci Rabbit has a webpage here:  https://billandtracirabbit.com/

Bill Rabbit's Art

So you’ll recall that I posted recently about art that I had inherited from my parents (when they retired, they ran a gallery in Albuquerque, NM). We were originally keeping it all in storage, but then Judith Estrada Garcia was so kind as to place the pieces in her gallery in Taylor, Texas: https://estradagarciagallery.org/

But, anyway, I thought I’d start posting examples of the art my parents collected. As you'd expect, they were very much into Southwestern themes and subjects.

Here, for example, is the late Bill Rabbit’s “Cave Of The White Shaman.” You can see more about Mr. Rabbit on Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Rabbit

His equally talented daughter, Traci Rabbit, maintains a family web page here: https://billandtracirabbit.com/

This piece, Cave, will be shown at Judith’s gallery in the near future. Before then, though, she’ll be displaying it online.

Video: Death Is A Democrat

And here's some vicious Liberal propaganda ☺

This is from today's LiberalResistance.net.