A rare miss for this blog yesterday. We had lots to do before leaving the Stroock Northern Strategic Direction, and is now normal, the drive home left us exhausted.
And a late post today.
Happy Labor Day, Stroock's Books reader(s), you union lay-abouts, time servers and goldbricks.
The womenfolk are going shopping. We'll be mowing the lawn.
So it seems the Alliance for Deutschland has won a major victory in Saxony. After getting 44.6 percent of the vote, the AfD isn't far right. The AfD is the center. Don't get too excited. The establishment will never let them form a government.
It's 80s week all week here at Stroock's Books in response to Ryan Reynolds horribly ignorant and Canadian take on the decade. We bet he pours syrup on his moose rips, eh?
First let's define the decade's parameters. This blog believes the 80s begin on election night 1980. The 80's end in the summer of 1991. The end date is staked to music. Most people will say, ah, of course,
We've asked online if those of us who remember the 80s are looking back at the decade through rose colored glasses. Everyone who responded said, 'No. Of course not. What kind of ridiculous question is that?' or some such. Still, we recall a lot of angst.
Here's Billy Joel's 80's stanza from We Didn't Start the Fire (1989): 'Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride, heavy metal suicide, Foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz, hypodermics on the shore [Yay, New Jersey!], China's under martial law, rock-and-roller cola wars, I can't take it anymore,' Which is spot-on. The man does not present a happy-go-lucky decade.
Everyone our age starts with the same worry, nuclear war, stoked by movies like War Games and The Day After. Nuclear war was a very common childhood fear, referenced in at least one Simpson's episode. A kid could reasonably look up at the night sky and wonder, are they going to push the button? But a kid could also worry about environmental gloom and doom; global warming, rainforest and ozone layer depletion, overpopulation. The Ethiopian Famine was the biggest international news story of 1984. AIDS was the covid of the time.
The 80s saw plenty of moral panics, Heavy Metal being the most prominent and hilarious issue. Then as now plenty of people and organizations (see for example the Moral Majority) called for censorship. Televangelists (Jimmy Swaggert, Jim and Tammy Faye Baker) were all the rage.
The over make-upped Tammy Faye is an extreme example of the 80's innate tackiness with big hair, shoulder pads and too much makeup for women. Girls used a lot of hair spray. A lot. We dated a few of them in the 80s. Don't touch the hair. Men wore three-piece suits with white collars and slicked back their hair (Gorgon Gekko style). By 1985 the colors turned bright. We complained about 70s fashion in the 80s, but weren't we just as bad in our Hawaiian shirts and jams? Let's not talk about two-toned jeans. By 1988 dayglo was everywhere -pinks and yellows and greens - uck. Every high school was marred by black heavy metal T-shirts; Iron Maiden, Ozzie, Dio, Slayer, etc etc.
And everything had to be cool. In The Wedding Singer, Adam Sandler captured the 80's zeitgeist with his rapping granny bit. Grannys rapped. Kids rapped. Dogs rapped.
DOGE report. The Battle of Dublin-Howth aftermath chapter seems to have come together. The things are where and what they need to be, if a bit abrupt. It's September, World War 1990: Thatcher's War is 73,000 words, and this thing needs to be completed.
This week we'll write the raid on Heath House. We'll need some sort of concluding chapter after that.
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