Spiders Need Love Too!

Lost amid the howls of outrage or joy over the election was a sad little story circulated by the Associated Press: “Tarantulas Looking For Love In California.”

Seems the mating season for the poor maligned tarantulas is now in full bloom. But, as usual, the male does all the blooming and wooing. While female tarantulas typically stay inside eating bonbons and watching “The View,” lovesick male tarantulas hike up to four miles through hostile terrain in search of a willing mate. Once he locates a lady tarantula's burrow, he does a little tap dance on the web strands outside her spider condo. That's a lot easier than dragging a bottle of Pinot Griego and a box of Whitman's Samplers to her in a harness.  Besides, I bet even lady spiders appreciate a good dancer.

So there's our eight-legged Baryshnikov dancing his heart out at the entrance of her underground grotto. If she's in the mood she might emerge to see if he has game. Then again she might not. Love is a crapshoot, even for spiders.

But at least lady tarantulas don't make a meal out of their lovers and have a cigarette after sex like Black Widows do. Okay, I made up the part about the cigarette. Spiders are too sensible to smoke. Besides, girl tarantulas already live longer than boy tarantulas, just like girl humans live longer than boy humans. Yup, it's true. Female tarantulas live up to 25 years while male tarantulas tend to croak after seven or eight years – probably from frustration or getting clobbered with a shovel by someone who never read Charlotte's Web. 

Now I know there are a lot of people who wish California would take its tarantulas and snap off at the San Andreas Fault and float away on the Japanese Current. There is even an organized movement to make California's secession from America a ballot issue. A group calling itself the Yes California Independence Campaign, or CalExit for short, told the Associated Press it plans to circulate petitions to get its secession plan on the 2018 ballot.

Such thinking is downright silly. Look, even if California became an island nation it would still have the sixth largest economy in the world. California has heaps of agriculture, industry, petroleum, and an abundance of low wage labor. Just ask anyone between Oregon and the Mexican border who eats burritos, loves lettuce, drives a car, has a computer, or been awakened by a leaf blower on a Saturday morning.

The upshot is America needs California more than California needs America. What's more, an independent California could wad the panties of conservative economists by slapping yuuge tariffs on its exports, like burritos, computers, petroleum and leaf blowers.

Anyway California is waaay too fragmented by social and political diversity to be a unified force for anything. Special interest pleaders would try to split an independent California into even smaller nation states.  That way isolationist groups with names like First Amendment First! would decriminalize rioting and looting and establish Criminacalia. The sex industry would push for a Calipornia, the vintners lobby will want to Make America Grape Again starting with Napafornia, and of course People For The Ethical Treatment Of Animals would want their own empire, Calizooia, where even a heartbroken tarantula could hold public office.  

And why not? A skunk has already been elected president.

--oOo--

Send comments, compliments, critiques and hate mail to tomatomike@aol.com

The anti-California sentiment died with Emmett Watson.  [Seattle is] an all inclusive city now.  So please take us with you. If California breaks off into the ocean I hope it plans on taking Oregon and Washington state with it.  We could build a wall to keep the Trump voters out while making those who voted for Trump pay for it .

P.S. When it is my turn to be reincarnated, I am so coming back as a girl tarantula! – Tammy

The late Emmett Watson was a Seattle newspaper columnist who resented the influx of immigrants from California.  His obituary in the the Seattle Post Intelligencer stated:  "He delighted and debunked with a broad and bodacious pen, but is perhaps remembered by his creation and periodic crusades aimed at emigre Californians, New Yorkers, and the rest of us who he felt were overloading lifeboat Seattle.  His campaign motto was Keep The Bastards Out."  -- MB  

Reminds me of something I just read about killing the spider who'd thought he was your roomie, and that you're never more than 6 feet away from a spider at any moment of your life – Lynda

And it's watching you with all 12 eyes. -- MB

I waited until this morning to read your spider/California piece. I should have read it earlier.  It was great. I will reread it after my coffee, but, as far as I can tell, it'll be just as enjoyable later as it was now. – Beaty

Thank you muchly.  -- MB

I will never forget the time I caught a tarantula when I lived on the hill.  Robert Hall, class of 1959, was a great friend at the time.  He came to visit.  I had the tarantula in a jar.  HE darn near went backwards over the couch and out the window when I presented it to him.  I still laugh at the vision.  Mother was not impressed and sent my newest pal to spider heaven. – Carol

Carol was a neighbor of mine on that same hill.  Her mother didn't like me any more than she liked the doomed tarantula. -- MB

I remember that damned leaf blower.  If my head hadn't been blowing apart, I think I might have gone and wrapped it around his neck. -- Shannon

Poor Shannon. She'd moved to the allergy capital of the known universe before escaping to a less pollen and pesticide polluted area. -- MB

Thanks Mike  I always enjoy your writing and wonderful sense of humor,  My dad would have loved your latest offering too. – Peggy

Peggy's late father was a handsome man with an elegant presence who kept a sharp mental edge in his 90s. A former vaudevillian, he shared the stage with the top acts of his day, including the Marx Brothers. Unfailingly courteous, he personified the word gentleman. I was lucky to have met him. MB.

Marvelous,  as always – Julisari

Merry Christmas Mike.  – FACS

Thanks Mike! – Bob G.

I chuckled out loud at this one.  Your delivery is very funny.  I happen to like most all creatures, including most spiders, and speaking of skunks, I had a (of course descented) pet one named Sweet Pea for a while.  Excellent pet - ate cat food, used a cat box, loved riding on my shoulder and curling up in my lap, and made no noise whatsoever.  Picture that with a long-haired blonde hippie girl and you've got a conversation starter.

As for California being separate...sigh...I am not a bit surprised.  If there is a thought in the world of doing something that hasn't already been done, someone will suggest it and even push it without regard to how incredibly stupid an idea it might be.  However, I would get another chuckle at any names you picked out were it to happen.  Lots of fun could be had by locals and news people especially.Keep 'em coming, Mike.  I always enjoy what you write. -- Zoey

I briefly had a skunk for a pet myself. A baby one. It had been abandoned when I found it crying under a parked car in a hillside neighborhood. I brought it home, and in typical teenage fashion, dumped it on my parents to care for so I could go surfing.  It got sick after a few days. My mom it took it to a vet.The vet said it was too little and too weak to survive, which is probably why its mama abandoned it, and euthanized the little critter.  My mom laid into me when she got home. "Don't you ever bring home a pet we'll lose our hearts to only to have it put to sleep!"  MB

Under Joyce Maynard's Influence

Last Wednesday The Lady Karen and I motored to La Jolla where author Joyce Maynard was giving a reading at a Warwick's book emporium.  She is on tour to promote her novel entitled Under The Influence.  

I bought two copies of the book because (a) I wanted The Lady Karen and I both to have one, and (b) that was the only way Warwick's would guarantee reserved seating. Good thing I did. The storefront bookstore was filled to capacity with maybe 150 souls in folding chairs, although a contingent of teenage boys sulked in the back row and left early on.  Perhaps they'd been lashed into attending by their English teacher, or mistakenly thought the book was about bong hits and might contain some useful tips.

I haven't read the book yet.  According to a review by John Wilkens in the November 27th edition of the San Diego Union-Tribune:  "...the title means different things. The main character in the book. Helen, is a recovering alcoholic whose drinking ended her marriage and cost her custody of her 7-year-old son. She meets a wealthy couple who take her under their wing, exerting influence of a different kind that raises questions about the meaning of friendship."

Now then, I have a powerful aversion to chick lit and I'm against everything authors like Shirley MacLaine are for, but Joyce Maynard's work is neither chick lit nor festooned with New Age bliss ninny crystals in print.  Her prose is economical, clear, and free of diabetes inducing sentiment.

See, I first read her stuff in the early 1970s when she was an 18-year-old Yale dropout whose initial literary effort was an opinion piece in the New York Times, entited Looking Back, -- An 18-year-old Looks Back At Life.  

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/09/13/specials/maynard-mag.html

Her style was far beyond her years.  It resonated with the authority of the inner voice my mind's ear hears when I read something, whether it's an essay by Montaigne or the Yellow Pages. I also heard Joyce Maynard's actual voice when she contributed to CBS Radio's "Spectrum" series when I was working for a CBS affiliate in Northern California.

Her Times essay evolved into a series of them in book form.  She also began a correspondence with J.D. Salinger, which also evolved into a May-December relationship between a teenaged acolyte and a 53-year-old recluse of a master.  I sometimes wonder if her Salinger connection was a boon or an albatross.

I didn't have the nerve to ask her that when she was autographing books following her talk at Warwick's.  I imagine she's tired of being asked Salinger questions. Anyway her work is just dandy on its own. "Salinger?  Salinger?  She don' need no stinkin' Salinger."

-oOo-

Comments, critiques and hate mail may be addressed to tomatomike@aol.com.

Thank you, Tomato Mike.  And thank you, Karen.  I loved my trip to your beautiful city.  -- Joyce
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Might have to get a copy of this book.  If she does have a similar style to Salinger, she's got to be good I think.  I haven't sat down to read a novel in quite a while, and the last one I read was a reread of To Kill a Mockingbird.  Seems I don't make time, but perhaps when I am unable to even amble around I'll do that, though I imagine myself writing short stories and poetry a lot more often then, or writing that book about my life I keep saying I will.  I've thought of the way I'd lay it out, and of clever chapter headings, and how many people will rush to deny something they read in it...heh...maybe I ought to write it and just leave it for possible publication after I'm out of the reach of upset individuals, sitting on a cloud with Jesus surveying the fallout.  Truth is sometimes kind of messy.  Hm.  Maybe I ought to just write the good stuff, though there may be some of that which would also bring denials amid the string of events I've hammered out in my life, and which stepped in my wiggly path. 

At any rate, thanks for the piece, good as always, and keep sending.  I look forward to every one. Be well – Zozo

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I, too, will purchase the book. Thanks for the review and min-bio. Nice to see you back on the Times – Beaty

America First

"From now on, it's going to be America first. OK? America first. We're going to put ourselves first."   --   Donald J. Trump, 12/1/2016.

Apparently Mr. Trump does not realize that there were two America First political movements, one in 1944, the other an actual political party in 2002. Both failed.

The party's first incarnation was dominated by rural southern conservatives with Bible Belt backgrounds who later formed something called the Christian National Crusade which later morphed into America First. America Firsters believed in public prayer, no forieign commitments, limiting the size of the federal government and making the flag a religious icon. The latter actually happened in 1954 when President Eisenhower approved adding the words "under God' to the Pledge Of Allegiance.

The America First poster boy in the 1930s was Charles A. Lindbergh until he came under a cloud for publicly expressing admiration for Hermann Goering, the head of Hitler's Luftwaffe and second in command.  World War Two brought a temporary halt to that movement, as well as civil rights for over 100,000 American and American residents with Japanese surnames who were  imprisoned, or "relocated"  away from the west coast  for the duration of the war.  Well, the Pearl Harbor attack was very much on America's collective mind at the time.  Anti-Japanese propaganda saturated the newspapers, newsreels and radio.  Television had been invented in 1922, but was still a novelty in 1941 with few sets and fewer stations.  During the war television manufacturers were redirected by the government to develop radar and other electronic goodies.

I know, I know; I digress a lot.  It's a character flaw.  So, back to the relocation of Japanese-Americans:  One of its champions was a former Oakland prosecutor, state attorney general, governor, and eventually the Chief Justice of the United States Surpreme Court.  A fella named Earl Warren.  Surprised?  Well, he was a Republican.  But it was also the Warren court that desegregated schools with its ruling on  Brown vs.The Topeka Board of Education in 1954. That move, and pure cussedness, caused another America First offshoot and Tea Party predecessor, the John Birch Society, to try really really hard to get Chief Justice Warren impeached.  Didn't work.

The second significant advent of an America First spinoff occurred in 2002. There were several insignificant ones prior to that, you can Google them, when conservatives preached re-instituting  school prayer, reducing the size of the federal government, no foreign commitments that did not benefit corporations, making the flag a religious icon, with an added proviso of banning federal funding for Planned Parenthood as a pro-life measure. Yet only three percent of Planned Parenthood's efforts are devoted to performing abortions. Most of its efforts are in providing information about sexually transmitted diseases and how to avoid unplanned – and unwanted – pregnancies, especially among young women whose parents got huffy about sex education in schools, and the wives of migrant farm workers whose spiritual leader is an elderly male celibate in a white skirt.

Anyway, the 2002 version drafted former Nixon operative Pat Buchanan as its presidential candidate. They advocated school prayer, reducing the size of the federal government, getting out of the UN, eliminating NAFTA, making the flag a religious icon, banning federal funding for abortion clinics and having the National Guard patrol the Mexican border.

The most prominent difference between the former and the present America First people is that the former ones don't wear red caps inscribed Make America Great Again. My view is that those caps should be replaced by tinfoil hats favored by people who think space aliens are trying to probe their alleged minds.

-oOo-

Send comments and/or hate mail to tomatomike@aol.com.

Saw your piece on Making America Great Again. For what it's worth,  my late mother-in-law, and her family, were interned during WWII. Her brother was a member of the 442nd.  -- Brat.
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The 442nd Regimental Combat Team  is an infantry regiment of the United States Army, part of the Army Reserve. The regiment was a fighting unit composed almost entirely of American soldiers of Japanese ancestry who fought in World War II. Most of the families of mainland Japanese Americans were confined tointernment camps in the United States interior. Beginning in 1944, the regiment fought primarily in Europe during World War II,[2] in particular Italy, southern France, and Germany.

The 442nd Regiment was the most decorated unit for its size and length of service in the history of American warfare.[3] The 4,000 men who initially made up the unit in April 1943 had to be replaced nearly 2.5 times. In total, about 14,000 men served, earning 9,486Purple Hearts. The unit was awarded eight Presidential Unit Citations (five earned in one month).[4]:201 Twenty-one of its members were awarded Medals of Honor.[2] Its motto was "Go for Broke"  -- Wikipedia.