Snarky Tom's Rants, Raves and Ruminations

As a child and an adolescent, I had curious interests in the macabre. Vampires, werewolves, witches and all other creepy crawlies. During the Coronavirus lockdown, I have been in a deep binge watch of Dark Shadows, a 1960s Gothic soap opera that used to air on ABC. Besides housewives there was a great following by elementary school children like myself. Aside from the "icky" romance parts, there was the most interesting and fantastic ghosts, vampires and reanimated humans.  Jonathan Frid as Barnabas Collins from Dark Shadows Today, I got to thinking about the subject of Vampires. Who (or What) are they? How did they come to exist?  Blood drinking undead beasts. Hollywood has made films and television programs of vampires for nearly 100 years. The first one was Nosferatu (1922). Many authors have written vampire stories and novels. Bram Stoker, Stephen King, Anne Rice and Stephanie Meyer to name a few. For the most part, each story gave vampires the same traits. They only come...

Every country, county, city and organization has one of these. The these I'm referring to is a flag. Flags date back centuries. They were used mostly to identify an army or a kingdom. Flags were used to signal via semaphore code. Nautical flags were used to communicate with allied forces as well as their own ships or in peacetime, to signal a diver down or an emergency. Social or local organizations each have their own flags to differentiate their organizations from others. I'm no fan of flags of any kind. So, when it comes to the pledge of allegiance or the national anthem, I'm very apathetic. A flag does not make a country. The people do. However, I understand the symbolism and why people get their knickers all in a twist when someone disrespects the flag. And that's good for them. It's also good for those who disrespects the flag because our country's principles were founded. The right to express yourself. To speak out. To speak your mind and to demonstrate p...

I have never been a supporter of PETA or any animal rights groups or movements of any kind. I think most of these people are wackadoo nutcases. However, they sometimes have some very strong valid points of view. Truthfully, I just don't have enough time or care to put forth the effort it takes to be valuable to any movement. I'm just not passionate enough about it (or much of anything for that matter) to get involved. This is about as involved as I will get. With anything. Period. There's this new Documentary on Netflix, "Tiger King" that seems to be the much watch program this month. I have only seen the first episode. When I get a little more free time, I'll watch more. I will reserve my opinion of the show or characters, because they are a bunch of "characters," until I'm all caught up. However, I do have an opinion on their livelihood. I don't like it. No, no, no, no, no, goddammit, no! Not one freaking bit. I don't like fahken zo...

Today, I decided to tackle a real problem...getting people to pull that stick out of their butts. Global warming or climate change, whatever you want to call it, is as real as Donald Trump is President. Yes, both situations are very frightening. However, we can only eliminate the one. Don't re-elect him. But for the other, no dice. That puppy is here to stay and it's going to grow up to be like Beethoven. Not the long dead classical musician, but the giant St. Bernard doggy from those cheesy movies. So, does that mean we should not give a spit. Mmmm...well, I, for one, have bigger fish to fry. I have to concern myself with living and surviving day-to-day life. Here's my belief. Part of it is borrowed/appropriated without permission from far more intelligent scientists than I and part is what I recall from Junior High School Science classes. I was an average student. Let's step into the Twilight Zone. We have a room. Twenty feet by twenty feet by nine feet high. ...

A Pair of Cute Kittens What makes some cats lap cats and others standoffish? I’ve had cats around me most of my life. As a teen, we had a family cat that would sleep at the bottom of my sleeping bag in the family travel-trailer that my parents purchased and parked in the Poconos. I hate the Poconos. All summer long almost every weekend when I wanted to be down the Jersey shore, we were in the Poconos. Of course, we brought the animals, yes, my younger siblings, but also the cat and dog. I mean, if I had to suffer through the family vacations and weekends, they had to too. As with cats, this one was a female, she went into heat one summer day and her constant howling drove my father crazy. So, he let her loose outside. Of course, she came home pregnant. I can tell you the man didn’t understand birth control. After all he sired five children. This cat later that summer gave birth to a litter of six. We gave Mom and five kittens away and kept the male calico. For those who are unfam...

Hate. What is it good for? Absolutely...well, it depends how it's placed. There's so much talk about hate and not hating. But let me clue you in. For some of us, hate is our motivator. Our raison d'être . Don't try to fill me with that tolerance shite. Not everyone is TOLERANT. Not EVERYONE is meant to BE TOLERANT. Some of us THRIVE on INTOLERANCE. I'M NOT TOLERANT. I used to be. But no longer. I'm getting too old for this shite. Prime example. I hate privileged white people. Specifically, whiny little shite bags born with a silver spoon in hand that expects that because they're white they're entitled. I hate poor people...of all races. Most of them are in their situation because they lacked the skill set to be successful, for many of them, they didn't apply themselves to better themselves so they could have a better situation. To quote Dean Wormer from Faber College (Animal House), "Being fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life,...

I don't know if you've been sucked into the craze lately, but I have...sort of. That craze is the World-wide Trivia game, HQ. I started out fairly well. Unfortunately, I have been beaten down like the out of touch dinosaur that I have become. 12 questions. Get them all correct. You win a share of a prize that, at this writing, is $2,500.00. It starts easy for the first two to three questions. Then it becomes more challenging. Mostly, it's trivia questions about pop culture, but some of it has to do with just about every subject under the sun, as the expression goes. My best was to make it to Question 8 before choosing the incorrect answer. You have three choices. So guessing is an option. But guess wrong, and you're out. You can sit and watch the rest of the game if you have nothing better to do or if you want to torture yourself especially if you get the remaining questions correct and you're already eliminated. No soup for you! One of the recent games I got elimin...