Mom’s grave marker

It seems like yesterday, and a long time ago, that Mom died.


As I have mentioned, my mother is buried at Salisbury National Cemetery in Salisbury, North Carolina; the place has an interesting history. My father had died in August 2000, and it was a great stress for the family to figure out the logistics. But when my mom died three years ago today, the situation was considerably easier; since Dad was cremated, Mom was likewise.

What I did not know is that they don’t just take my father’s marker and add my mom’s information. Instead, they made a new marker altogether, with my dad’s data on one side, and my mom’s on the other.

My sister Marcia, who lives in North Carolina, went to Salisbury on Veterans Day 2013 and took this picture. Since I haven’t actually been to NC since my mother’s funeral, this is the first time I’ve “seen” the headstone.

Mom’s mother was named Gertrude, and she wasn’t too fond of it, though she was not one to complain too much. Her first cousins knew her as Gertie, but all the time I could remember, she preferred Trudy.

My sister Leslie sang Wind Beneath My Wings at my father’s funeral, dedicated to my mother, and reprised it at mom’s funeral.

It seems like yesterday, and a long time ago, that Mom died. I suppose that is irrational, but there it is.

Don’t sell tickets to your 55-inch TV Super Bowl party

Michael Powell admits that he wasn’t terribly outraged by seeing a woman’s breast for 9/16ths of a second,

All you football freaks: the National Football League can be rather fussy about your Super Bowl party. From Now I Know:

Unless you’re a sponsor of the NFL or the Super Bowl, you may want to pass on using the words “Super Bowl.” The NFL and its lawyers don’t take kindly to such commercial use, seeing it as a violation of their copyrights or trademarks… many advertisers simply don’t use the term “Super Bowl.”Typically, the euphemism of choice is the “Big Game,” a term which adequately describes the Super Bowl without likely running afoul of intellectual property law.

But if you’re showing the Super Bowl on your TV to anything but a select group of friends, you may want to make sure the Big Game isn’t too big. That is, if the television is larger than 55 inches — that’s about 1.4 meters… the NFL may not take too kindly to what you’re doing.

Dan Lewis goes on to describe the Indiana church that got jammed up by the NFL in 2007. This reminded me that MY church had an extra-large screen when we had a Super Bowl party in 2004.

I liked Janet Jackson, especially in her Control/Rhythm Nation days, back in the 1980s. Still, fortunately, or unfortunately, I was out of the room for much of the halftime festivities, including Janet with Justin Timberlake, so I missed, on what was more like thrice the diameter of the forbidden size, Janet’s “wardrobe malfunction” that garnered over a half million complaints to the FCC.

Strange too that the TV reporters spoke either not at all about it or in terms so cryptic, I had no idea what had happened until the next day.

Michael Powell, son of former Secretary of State Colin Powell, was the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission at the time of “Nipplegate…” Today, Powell admits that he wasn’t terribly outraged by seeing a woman’s breast for 9/16ths of a second, but at the time he had to play the part.

There was a fine that matched in dollars the number of complaints, but it was later voided in the courts. Wow, that was a decade ago?

In any case, I’ll watch the game today, but I’ll record it too, just in case something… interesting happens.

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