I Love It When Psychiatrists Talk Dirty

Dr. Sanity puts a certain Venezuelan strongman on the couch for gentle probing under the headine: "Chavez: A Case of Castration Anxiety?" She writes,

It is striking, though, how Chavez perfectly embodies some of Freud's early concepts relating to paranoia and castration anxiety. He would make a good case discussion.

Comments

Pepe's on the River, Written in "Texas Blood"

I recently read the book "Texas Blood" by Del Rio native Roger Hodge. While Hodge is an excellent and even exhaustive researcher, the book works better as a collection of essays than a coherent whole. I found myself skipping chunks of it (a chapter on Cormac McCarthy) and moving on to parts that held my attention and brought back a lot of good memories.

Hodge devotes considerable time to the Border Patrol and technology issues. As I'm a native of Mission, Texas, three miles from the Rio Grande, one passage especially caught my attention, about the well known landmark Pepe's on the River Restaurant, known to me in the 1960s as Pepe's Boat Ramp. This resonated with me because I grew up knowing the man behind the local landmark: Jose "Pepe" de la Fuente and his family—his wife Irene and my mother Shirley worked together for decades as secretaries at the Mission insurance agency of Conway, Dooley & Martin and our families were very close. We spent many …

Dept. of Most Unfortunate Timing

Far be it from me to waste a few minutes of prime page-flipping time at the dentist's office. On Saturday before my semi-annual checkup I perused the November issue of Travel+Leisure. The cover article, titled, "Best of Paris," is in some places unintentionally amusing in light of the current youthful hijinks in France.

Writer Natasha Fraser-Cavassoni starts with an overview of the political potential of prime minister Dominique de Villepin and interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, then writes, "They're just part of the general excitement and optimism of Paris these days." (Both men figure prominently in the excitement of Paris, although the optimism is suddenly subdued.)

Soon, Fraser-Cavassoni uncorks THE best line in the entire issue, "Suddenly, the City of Light is smoldering again."

Let me repeat, just to make sure you don't mis-read it: "Suddenly, the City of Light is smoldering again."

Elsewhere, the article discusses the Hôtel du Pe…

Loathsome Marketing, First in a Series

As a demographic unit, I'm a tasty morsel for financial marketers. Born in the center of the baby boom (1957), white collar, single, urban, nicely cash-flowed, investment oriented, and educated, I'm a "good catch," as somebody recently said in another context.

So the American Express spin-off, Ameriprise Financial, had people like me in mind for its new advertising campaign now being flogged on TV and Metro-North trains. These ads tout Ameriprise's financial planning for a generation as "unique" as mine. You may have seen the ads with a VW hippie van morphing into something more modern. Train ads show 15 or so iconic images of the 1960s and 1970s carefully balanced between the social categories we referred to at Mission High School in Texas as the "dopers" and the "ropers."

So, you'll see peace symbols and Cub Scouts, long-haired hippie freaks and cheerleaders, groovy types and squares, images that make me want to tune in to VH1 …

mission2moscow

Search This Blog