Rosenbush Cafe

This new catergory is called The Obsessive Collector in the time honored tradition of “going overboard” when collecting. We’ll start with an overview. Music collectors today have limited choices when searching for format variety. If only interested in Compact discs no problems, however, most everything else is only available at record conventions and antique stores or yard sales.

The vinyl album has joined 8-Tracks, 45 RPMs, sixteen records, Reel-to-Reel, Hi-Fis and Victrolas in the tête-à-tête:

“So this is how dad, grandma and Uncle Lester listened to music.”

Include Henry in that conversation. I have been a collector since about the age of four when I started to learn when something is broken or discarded into a trash receptacle it is gone forever. According to the Law of Conservation of Matter, nothing can be destroyed under natural circumstances, so those three lost 33 and 1/3rds of Peter and the Church Mouse are really subatomic particles swarming around the cosmos.

I collected comic books for about ten years; mainly the more obscure ones like DC Comic’s Metal Men and Metamorphous, The Element man (why hasn’t Hollywood made these into live action summer blockbusters. If Jerry Bruckheimer ever reads this, I’ve got some great ideas!) I was enthralled by Strange Adventures and Adventures to the Unknown comics. I know I watched too many episodes of The Twilight Zone, the Outer Limits, Boris Karloff’s Thriller and Alfred Hitchcock Presents as I was fascinated with the darkness in people and how they were often rewarded with divinely bizarre comeuppances.

There were the usual comics kids liked that I read; Superman, Batman, Justic League of America, Hawkman, The Fantastic Four and Green Lantern.
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I don’t have to tell you that it is hot wherever in the Southeastern United States you find yourself stuck. When in doubt, stop, my journalism professor once said. Maybe more than once, and hey was it him or that fanatical fundamentals or science teacher? Trust me; it came from somewhere “out there!”

I have just arrived from Alabama to the Carolinas to visit my partner, Natalia. How inconvenient it is, you might think, to have your spouse live over three hundred miles away. Possibly for you dear reader who is inclined to sow their oats wilders when Wilma is a-way at the Willie and Wanda’s abode.

For Natalia, I beyond doubt believe it saves lives, starting with mine. My self-named idiom is “a hyper-diaper,” in that I am often too loquacious; change that, always garrulous, to the point I could make a stranger wet themselves. Not from laughing, although I have the aptitude to cause that embarrassment also, but from absolute exhaustion.

Ensnared in my own excesses due to care giving for my ninety- three-year old mother who is in late stages of Alzheimer’s disease. I doubt any sane, rational person never wants their loved ones incapable of remembering the minutia normal minds are cluttered with continuously. It is a relentless disease that brings each start of the day and its middle and end with, frequently in this order:

“Who am I? Where am I? I know you, yeah. You’re Henry, Henry Rosenbush, my son, yeah. Who are you?”

“You just told me I’m your son, Henry.”

“No. I don’t have a son. Yeah. You’re my son, no. Henry, yeah, I’m Henry.”

“Who am I? ”

“You tell me?”

“Frances, Frances Rosenbush. Yeah. And you’re Henry Rosenbush.”

Once we’ve established for a millisecond who and where: “Bring me coffee and coconut cake like my mother used to make.”

WHEW.
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Felines hear constant complaints about the stench that can quickly occur in multi-cat dwellings. Never underestimate cat litter etiquette for we do not enjoy the odor getting absorbed into our fur.

Not healthy, either, as when you hold and snuggle we are shedding microscopic nastiness unto you. At least we get some off us but in the process everyone loses. Why protest when you could just empty and clean the little plastic box? If we could it would be done daily.

Humans take for granted the commode. You can send waste on its merry way to join other crap and we get to look at one another’s excrement. We are not amused. Remember that cat urine smells funky, especially these unaltered youngsters lounging about, trying to attract nearby femmes with their pungent feline ‘mones.

Litter boxes should be cleaned at least as often as your coffee pots. Thanks for your cooperation and attention in resolving this miasma. Everyone wins!

In the apartment rental business there is more risk involved than once was normal for offering affordable housing. In the 1952, when The Henry Apartments became the first rental property near the University of Alabama to rent specifically to college students we were a new concept for Tuscaloosa.

We had frats and beatniks; I ended up with a discarded bongo set until it, too, was passed on through an apartment move but in Hattiesburg, Mississippi fifteen years later, and a textbook on Ornithology before I was ten years old.

We had freaks and hippies; liberals and conservatives; anti-War and Viet Nam-bound ROTC; and gay, straight and lesbian. Tenants have come from the Middle East, Korea, Turkey and Russia, everywhere but Middle Earth and I see tenants from there soon! There have been the studious and the stupid and 4.0s and drop outs and through it all, there have been The Henry Apartments.

Rosebushes as in dad, Bernard, mother Frances, and me, Henry, were the quintessence of renting apartments. Until our first competition in 1971 as I was about to embark on my own college life at the University of Southern Mississippi The Henry Apartments was a sort of “in spot” near campus. Dad handled everything from renting to maintenance and cleaning, something I learned at an early age. Mother handled bookkeeping.

Later this month I will share some profound and profoundly creepy experiences from the fifty four existence of what was once called, 1971, “…rundown slut of an apartment building, but I would not live anywhere else!” High praise from a lowlife! This guy in particular was named J and was from New Jersey. Poor bastard, trapped in the mid-South, The Heart of Dixie, no less, in mid-summer with hair down his black and a thick black beard.

For now, however, a taste. Joe Namath dropped by to visit a tenant in Apartment F (now G) who was a member of the Alabama Crimson Tide Football Team under Paul “Bear” Bryant. It was 1963 and I was ten. He was standing upstairs talking to the guy and when he came downstairs I said, “You’re Joe Namath!” to which he replied, “I sure am, Kid!” Golden moments but in the reel life of movie inspired reality, Joe was a cameo. I never saw him again at THA, although I did manage getting his autograph twice; once as a player for the New York Jets and the other at his co-owned Bachelors III on 15th Street in Tuscaloosa in the mid-70s.

Bear never visited here, as far as I know, but I got his autograph, too, except he scared me stiffless. Nice fellow but in the sixties he was a force with whom not futz with. The record speaks volumes but the Bear spoke mythology.

Coming In May 2009, a look a Charlie Dick from NYC and his “Purple God-dammits!”

Benjamin Franklin was a statesman and diplomat for the newly formed United States and he helped draft, and then signed, the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and was also a delegate to Constitutional Convention in 1787. Franklin was a prolific author and inventor and on June 15, 1752, with his son, conducted the famous experiment involving a kite and key during a thunderstorm, which confirmed Franklin’s theory that lightning is electrical.

We wouldn’t be reading this today without Ben, so think of him kindly and remember to dodge lightning bolts if you’re not keyed properly!

More From A Slow News Day In Germany and the U.K.

Aggressive German Squirrel Attacks Wrong Senior Citizen

According to wire reports from Germany, an aggressive squirrel went on a rampage attacking there people before meeting its fate with a crutch. Reuters reported from Berlin that in the small town of Passau, the squirrel attacked a 70-year-old woman biting into her hand. Running into the streets and screaming the woman was able to shake the squirrel off her hand.

The squirrel then entered a building site and jumped on a construction worker who bravely repelled the beast with a measuring pole. The squirrel met it’s match in a 72-year-old pensioner who killed it with his crutch after being attacked on the arms, hands and thigh while the retiree was tending his garden.

Unnamed experts - I wonder why they did not want to be identified - believe the squirrel was either ill or the attack was linked to mating season. Squirrels in Alabama are not so much aggressive as untrained in looking both ways before crossing streets.

That’s yours

Speaking of mating season, I decided the BBC story concerning a testicle-attacking woman was written so “tongue-in-cheek” that you have to read their version for yourself.

A disclaimer for readers: I suggest males refrain from looking at adult materials for 30 minutes before reading story and an 1 hour afterwards! Women may want to inhale deeply and hold their breath for this story is not for the faint-hearted!

Woman jailed for testicle attack

A woman who ripped off her ex-boyfriend’s testicle with her bare hands has been sent to prison.
Amanda Monti, 24, flew into a rage when Geoffrey Jones, 37, rejected her advances at the end of a house party, Liverpool Crown Court heard.

She pulled off his left testicle and tried to swallow it, before spitting it out. A friend handed it back to Mr Jones saying: “That’s yours.”

Monti admitted wounding and was jailed for two-and-a-half years.

‘Pulled hard’

Sentencing Monti, Judge Charles James said it was “a very serious injury” and that Monti was not acting in self defense.

The court heard that Mr. Jones had ended his long-term but “open relationship” with Monti towards the end of May last year.

The pair remained on good terms and on 30 May she picked him up from a party in Crosby and went back for drinks with friends at Mr. Jones’s house.

An argument ensued and Mr. Jones said there was a struggle between them.

In his statement, Mr. Jones said she grabbed his genitals and “pulled hard”.

He added: “That caused my underpants to come off and I found I was completely naked and in excruciating pain.”

The court heard that a friend saw Monti put Mr Jones’s testicle into her mouth and try to swallow it.

She choked and spat it back into her hand before the friend grabbed it and gave it back to Mr Jones. Doctors were unable to re-attach the organ.

In a letter to the court, Monti said she was sorry for what she had done.

She said: “It was never my intention to cause harm to Geoff and the fact that I have caused him injury will live with me forever. I am in no way a violent person.”

The letter added: “I have challenged myself to explain what has happened but still I just cannot remember. This has caused much anguish to me and will do for the rest of my life.”

And throughout the world, men most likely agreed.