All posts by Rondi Adamson

Tips for Extroverts

I am an introvert – the only one – from a family of extroverts. In this way only, I can relate to Barron Trump. I am an introvert (I am so extreme in this regard a friend of mine calls me a “Shiite introvert”) and as today is apparently “World Introvert Day” – very odd, indeed – I had a thought I wanted to share with my dear readers. Why are there so many articles with titles like “New Year’s Tips for Introverts” (seriously, have seen several of them this week), or “How Introverts can Improve their Social Interaction” and so forth?

We are not the annoying ones! Extroverts are! We don’t need to improve our social interaction – we avoid it, which is a blessing to all. If only extroverts would do the same.

How about “Tips for Extroverts: Stop Bothering Everyone with your Incessant Talk and Opinions and Ideas, not to mention your Very Presence,” or “Guess what? You are not Witty, Mr./Ms. Extrovert. You are just a Nuisance,” or “Extroverts – for Once in your Damndable Life, just Stay Home and Be Quiet, Because People don’t Actually like your Exuberance!”?

Et cetera.

Trust me, extroverts. No one will miss you at the party. NO ONE. And on that note, I wish you a happy World Introvert Day. May we all celebrate on our own, in our own homes.

Roaring Twenties?

Or perhaps, as a friend of mine says, they are more likely to whine. Millennials and such. Speaking of, the last decade started with this article, which remains 100% true, says this GenXer.

What a decade (yes, I know that technically the decade ends at the end of this year, but shush up, pedants) it has been – my mother gone at nearly 93, my auntie at 90, my uncles at 96 and 95 – not unnatural deaths, of course. Dear God, give me their longevity, and not just that, but their quality of life till the end, their insistence on keeping active and contributing. (One small example – my uncle Paddy worked till the age of 78, and not because he had to.) And there were two unnatural deaths, for lack of a better term. My beloved brother at 63 and one of my closest friends from high school at 49. Make hay, et cetera.

There were many celebrity deaths this year – I never got around to posting about so many of these people who were meaningful to me. Well, I did write about Doris. And Diahann. And a couple of my fave writers. What I didn’t do on this site was mention how much I liked Rip Torn – oddly, my mother and I both had a crush on him. He was quite a handsome devil in his youth, and even into his 60s, but then became rather debauched from alcohol. The great Zeffirelli is gone (obituary in Italian) – he was extraordinary and a friend of another extraordinary Italian, Oriana Fallaci. I believe they both understood how much the West was/is threatened, largely by our own complacency.

Other great figures gone: Herman Wouk; Harold Bloom; Clive James.

And how could I have failed to post about Valerie Harper? My only excuse is that between late August (when she died) and about a week before Christmas, I was extremely busy with work. So all I can say is, Val, we loved you. Thank you. So many clips from which to choose, but I do so adore Rhoda Morgenstern’s comments about makeup, from the 6 minute 15 second mark on here (and yes, young people, that is indeed Marge Simpson as Rhoda’s sister):

And those of us who have struggled with our weight (a constant battle for me) always love this MTM episode:

Rest in peace all, including the decade (again, shush up, pedants).

New Year

Happy New Year from Dean, Frank and the Ding-a-Lings. Which begs the question…were the Ding-a-Lings a different group from the Golddiggers? Did they precede them/morph into them? I remember Dean and the Golddiggers from my childhood, but I have no recollection of these Ding-a-Lings. Ah well – glad to have discovered this, for ’tis delightful:

Merry Christmas

Christmas Card

When the white stars talk together like sisters
And when the winter hills
Raise their grand semblance in the freezing night,
Somewhere one window
Bleeds like the brown eye of an open force.

Hills, stars.
White stars that stand above the eastern stable.

Look down and offer Him
The dim adoring light of your belief
Whose small Heart bleeds with infinite fire.

Shall not this Child
(When we shall hear the bells of His amazing voice)
Conquer the winter of our hateful century? 

And when His Lady Mother leans upon the crib,
Lo, with what rapiers
Those two loves fence and flame their brilliancy! 

Here in this straw lie planned the fires
That will melt all our sufferings:
He is our Lamb, our holocaust! 

And one by one the shepherds, with their snowy feet,
Stamp and shake out their hats upon the stable dirt,
And one by one kneel down to look upon their Life. 

  • Thomas Merton

Inconvenient Murders

This is from Bari Weiss at the New York Times, so those of you who (understandably) despair of the paper might glean some hope from this column.

The theme is that Jew-hatred is surging and yet Jewish victimhood does not command attention or inspire popular outrage. That unless Jews are murdered by neo-Nazis, the one group everyone of conscience recognizes as evil, Jews’ inconvenient murders, their beatings, their discrimination, the singling out of their state for demonization will be explained away.

It is, as I’ve often said, amusing (in a dark, sad way) to listen to leftists pretend they care about Jews. Of course, as Weiss points out, this happens only when Jews are attacked by those on the right. It is somewhat akin to the pretend concern for the Kurds of so many on the left. They never cared about them in 2003, during the invasion of Iraq, but now that Trump has abandoned them, they matter (at least for a few minutes).

Remembrance Day

A day late but always important to mark this date. Please see my other website and enjoy this song, “The D-Day Dodgers.” It is sung to the tune of “Lili Marlene” and refers to the dismissive attitude so many had toward the Allied Forces in Italy. With the “glamour” and headlines of June 6, 1944, they were overlooked, though their sacrifices were every bit as extraordinary, their battles as harsh, their courage as strong. (My uncle, in his letters, refers several times to his friend George Yente/s – or Lente/s – who was sending him letters from the front in Italy.)