Headed to the black market because of shortage

It was my 13-year-old son, altar boy and Boy Scout and all-around good kid, who suggested I go to the black market in my quest.

We will get to that.

It's subtle, but you might have noticed some people are losing their minds right now, some with irrational fears and some with rational concerns about the "novel" coronavirus COVID-19.

My wife, son and I had just returned from a cruise on the Caribbean, and we left from and returned to the port of Fort Lauderdale. If you hadn't heard, Port Everglades has had a some trouble with at least one ship arriving.

Thankfully it was after our cruise ship, so we dodged that bullet.

But I didn't heed what my cousin in England was writing on Facebook, Had I reacted then, we might not be in the pickle we're in at our household.

No toilet paper.

Somewhere over the years, we joined Costco. When we had our son, and started buying a LOT of milk, we compared the cost of a gallon of milk there to the cost of the cheapest gallon of milk nearer to our home. Buying two gallons a week at Costco, we figured would be saving about a buck a week.  Milk savings alone would cover the annual cost of our membership and the slightly longer drive.

"That's thinking smart," we thought.

"You're cheaper off," as Jimmy Breslin wrote during the 1970s stagflation days of his mother-in-law's comparison shopping.

So that's what we did. And we picked up some other things in bulk, saving some money here and there.

Somewhere along the line, we stopped buying the milk there, though it's not like my son has stopped drinking it.

But we settled into the in-store brand of toilet paper, Kirkland.

I don't want to get into the intricacies of toilet paper (it's two-ply). They also sell Scott Tissue, which claims to be single-ply, but I don't think so. I think it is an atom thick. It's not like real toilet paper. It's like a virtual simulation of where toilet paper ought to be in reality. Not good.

At Costco, the Kirkland brand is twice as thick as the Scott brand, but still cheaper.

And as we kind of settled on this as our brand, along the way, I guess I kind of forgot how to shop for toilet paper.

In the Coronavirus Pandemic crisis, those skills are sorely needed.

Costco has been sold out. Two, three weeks ago, we stopped by Costco on our way back from church, as we are wont to do every two or three months, intent on picking up some toilet paper. It was our normal "time," maybe a week or so delayed because of the cruise.

It was not to be, because of COVID-19 and what has been described as buyer "panic."

They even had stories on it, in which psychologists say the "panic-buying" is people trying to assert control in an uncertain world.

As such, it's been described as an almost rational response.

But after going two days in a row without finding it, I broke down and started thinking it was time to become a full-bore 21^st century consumer.

I went online. 

For toilet paper.

I went to Costco.com, but they do not deliver their brand. I obviously didn't want to bulk-buy Scott. This crisis won't be that long.

So I thought.

I then checked on Amazon.com.

Again, not being sure what kind of TP I needed, it was an imperfect search.

I thought I had finally found a brand and style that might work.

Then my son, who was hovering over my shoulder as I did this, pointed out something before I hit the buy button.

Delivery expected anytime between April 7 and April 28.

So the delivery window opened in 21 days, and was 21 days wide.

I don't think I could wait two months for a TP delivery. I am pretty sure at least one of us is going to need TP before then.

So, as I said, my innocent son suggested the black market.

He didn't use those exact words.

"Why don't you try eBay?" he said.

EBay?

Why not?

On a lark, I decided to put in the Costco brand itself for my specific search.

And there it was — eBay is the land of Canaan of Kirkland brand toilet paper, a land flowing with two-ply milk and honey.

So excited was I, I almost hit buy, way too early. The prices were marked up, I saw, but one would expect that.

Now $39 seems a trifle much for something that's been like $17 to $21. But it was fresh off the TP tree, second hand maybe, but not USED.

But I read closer.

Costco sells a big bulk-buy pack, which contains, I think, 10 packs with six rolls each.

It wasn't $39 for that. It was $39 for one six-roll pack.

So that would be more than $6 per roll. I scrolled down, and I kept seeing individual six-roll packs by almost every seller. These sellers had bought packs with 10 six-roll packs, cut the individual packs out, and were reselling. If you get $39 for one, you've bought back your "investment." Sell two and you probably have made enough to pay to "free" ship all these to new unwary buyers. So your third through 10^th packs are  pure two-ply profit, if you can sell them all.

There were many sellers, and that's the way most of them were going about it.

But at least one guy took it a step further. My son and I were laughing the whole time at what we were seeing, but it was a shocked laughter when we got to the guy selling — auctioning actually — individual rolls. The shocked laughter was not at the audacity of that seller.

No, shocked laughter because there had been at least 18 bids — for one roll of toilet paper. The bid was up to $20.

For ONE roll of toilet paper.

"It's a black market," I told my son. "A black market for toilet paper."

Yeah. These people buying up all the toilet paper aren't people reacting to assert some kind of phantom control over a scary situation that affords no control.

They are profiteers. Price gougers.

I thought about filing a price gouging complaint. But I live in South Carolina, while I Costco shop in Charlotte, N.C. I would have to be able to tell whichever Attorney General I talked to that eBay seller "JTootles" was operating out of North Carolina to have a prayer.

EBay might stop it if the seller of the item, Costco, would complain. I got that much by gleaning eBay's complaint policy. Hand sanitizer and items like that were being restricted. But TP? No.

I did an online chat trying to get more than a "We'll look into it," from Costco, but no going.

All I know is that it doesn't say much nice about society.

Screenshots from my online search.

Blast from the Past: Back to the Beach

Buddy Ernandez, then and now, shown above a cemetery for Americans killed at Omaha Beach during the Normandy Invasion, June 6, 1944.

Back to the Beach: Ernandez returning to Normandy one final time

By Stephen Guilfoyle

Thursday, June 4, 2009 at 12:00 am

Buddy Ernandez doesn’t get seasick. This son of Lando takes pride in it, telling a yarn about a deep-sea fishing trip he took once with a jet fighter pilot.

The pilot, who could do fantastic maneuvers and barrel rolls, spent the voyage literally spilling his guts. Buddy just smiled and fished.
Rough or easy, the sea doesn’t bother Buddy. After all, he’s been in rougher, tougher places at sea.
The English Channel, to be precise.
June 6, 1944, actually.
That day, he was with 3rd Platoon, C Company of the 18th Regiment of the U.S. Army’s 1st Infantry Division — “the Big Red One.”
The first wave went in at 6 a.m. The 16th Regiment was in that wave.
If not for a mix-up, Buddy would have been in that outfit, and he is certain he wouldn’t be here, alive today, to tell his story.
The 16th and the rest of the first wave got torn to pieces by German machine guns and cannons raining bullets and shells down all morning. More than 1,500 men were killed in that first wave, Buddy says.
So the call went out. The second wave started going in around 7, hours early. The second wave included the 18th Regiment, which included Buddy.
Buddy boarded his Higgins boat, a landing craft, and headed out over rough waves to his part of the “Longest Day,”
when the Allies captured Normandy, France, starting the offensive that would end World War II in Europe.
Buddy saw things that day he still can’t get out of his mind, blood and guts, real blood and guts, arms and legs, pieces of real men hanging off metal “hedgehogs,” blood in the water, blood on the sand.
Yet for all the horror, next week he’s going back, back to that beach.
Omaha Beach.

“Greatest Generation”

This will be Buddy Ernandez’ third trip back, he says, but “it’s probably the last one.”
Ernandez is one of the greatest generation. He and millions of other young American men fought the Nazis, liberated death camps, fought real evil. Then they came home and built things, cars, planes, homes, creating a booming economic engine. They landed a man on the moon.
But the men who fought World War II are now senior citizens, and they are dying out — some reports put it at 1,000 a day.
Buddy just turned 84. When he first hit the beach, he was younger, much younger – 2009 marks the 65th anniversary of the Normandy invasion.
He was not yet 17, a student at Edgemoor High School, on the day everything changed for his generation. On Dec. 7, 1941, Japan launched a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States entered a war on two fronts, fighting Japan and the Nazis in Germany.
Before that, this Lando boy, this son of the mill village, had few worries. He had a couple of good coon dogs and he loved to hunt, shooting squirrels and other small animals in the hills around Fishing  Creek.
But life changed. It was a frightening time, he says. He remembers reading in the old Charlotte newspapers about six men killed when German U-boats sunk fishing ships off the coast of North Carolina.
He registered for the draft when he turned 18, and he was called up a year later, in 1943.

Training, deploying

Buddy went to Camp Webster in Macon, Ga., for basic training. His drill instructor was tough as nails. When his company reported, the lavatory in the two-story barracks was spotless the first night.
“‘You know who keeps it this clean?’ the sergeant asked us. ‘You do,’” Buddy says, acting the role and pointing his finger.
Buddy tells stories with elaboration. He takes time for details. He gestures, raises his arms for emphasis. He often closes his eyes, as if trying to picture the scene. After a few minutes, he really settles in. He relaxes into his natural Lando accent and the tale comes at its own speed of his time on “O-mee-ha Beach.”
Basic finished after about four months, and everyone was ordered onto a train and sent to Union Station in Washington, D.C.
“A man will meet you at the station and tell you where to go,” they were told.
At the station, he was put on a truck and taken to Fort Meade, Md. He carried his duffel bag to a parade ground. He and thousands of other young men were told to wait until they heard their names.
It took forever. Soldiers played poker and gin rummy, Buddy says, while they waited. There was a lunch break in the middle of the day. At the end of the day, Buddy was the only man left standing on the parade ground.
The lieutenant, a guy “so young, he looked like he had just graduated from Clemson,” was not happy to see Buddy. He questioned Buddy, who said his name was never called.
The lieutenant took Buddy to see a colonel, and the colonel heard both out. The colonel asked Buddy to find his name in the list, and it was there. Then the colonel asked the lieutenant to read the name aloud. He stuttered, yet insisted he had called it out on the field.
“The colonel says, ‘If you can’t say it now, you obviously couldn’t say it then,’” Buddy says. But the train he was to take had left hours before.
Buddy had some spending money in his pocket. He’d sold Butler and Leeds, his coon dogs, to a Rock Hill man who admired the dogs yet promised to sell the dogs back, no questions asked, if Buddy made it back.
The colonel found Buddy a bunk. A week later, another mass of men filled the parade ground. Buddy was put on a train again, sent to Camp Shanks, N.Y, briefly, then put on a boat in a six- to eight-boat convoy to England, to train for the invasion.

The Big Red One

That was how he ended up in the 18th Regiment. He also learned the 16th was the unit he should have been assigned to. Both were in the 1st Infantry, the Big Red One, but the 16th was a week ahead of the 18th while they trained for the invasion. Until D-Day, that is.
The Big Red One was an experienced, busy division. Its men had landed in North Africa, Sicily and Italy. The ones who survived were experienced and tough. Guys like Buddy beefed up platoons that had suffered heavy casualties, but it gave the fresh replacements a chance to work with battle-tested soldiers.
Buddy’s convoy landed at Liverpool, England, and he made his way to a camp near Portsmouth, where they trained for more than a year.
They knew their job and they knew the plan. They were to take the beach, off-load tanks and supplies and fuel. They were to head inland to assist airborne troops who went in June 5 to places like Sainte-Mere-Eglise, Cherbourg.
But when they hit Omaha Beach, everything went bad.

The Longest Day

Only one unit landed at its intended location that day. Nothing else went right, but the few officers who survived were innovative.
The 16th hit the beach first, Buddy says.
“About all of them died,” he said. So the klaxon on their boats called, “All hands on deck, all hands on deck.”
The second wave had to go in early.
He got in his Higgins boat with 30 other soldiers, rode the waves and hit Omaha Beach for the first time in his life.
The men were loaded down with every piece of equipment that could be conceived, but once they landed, Buddy says, soldiers started stripping down to the essentials – ammo and weapons, ammo and weapons.
The beach was almost impossible to pass through — barricaded with concrete, concertina wire, mines.
Buddy remembers how his squads got through. A destroyer, the USS Frank-ford, turned parallel to the beach and shelled the German positions, stopping the deadly fire that was pinning down the men on that part of the beach.
Buddy fought 12 to 14 hours, dodging bullets, firing his Browning Automatic Rifle, stripping ammo off the wounded and the dead, trying to stay alive.
It was night, around 9 p.m., when his fighting stopped, briefly. With a little time to regroup, they headed inland.
“I got one thing that nobody can ever take away,” Buddy says. He was there, on “Bloody Omaha,” the biggest battle ever fought, and he survived.
He was 19 years old.

The war in Europe

Buddy walked every mile, he said, from the beach, with fire fights every day and many nights, 50 miles to battles in Belgium. His last combat action was in Aachen, the first German city conquered in the war.
He helped liberate a work camp. It wasn’t one of the death camps that epitomize the evil of Nazi Germany. But it was also not a pleasant sight. He had to delouse the workers, mostly women and young children.
He then helped drive the displaced Czechs and Slavs back to their homelands in the Balkans.
He became part of the occupation until he got orders to head west. He boarded a boat, the Mexican Victory, which carried him past the white cliffs of Dover and back to the United States.

The Statue of Liberty

On the 15-day sea voyage back, counselors told the men to put the war behind them, to forget the bad and look forward to the good that would come when they got home.
If he saw it on his way over to Europe, he doesn’t say. But he does mention it as part of his return. When the Mexican Victory pulled into New York harbor, Buddy saw the Statue of Liberty. It meant something to him.
The troops took a short hop to a nearby station and Buddy and the soldiers were put on a train, again. This time he got a sleeper cabin in a fancy Pullman car.
He and his fellows were unloaded at Fort Bragg, N.C., and told to stick around if they wanted to serve in the peacetime army, or hit the road. He wanted to get the hell out, so he hit the road, hitching a ride to Charlotte with a guy whose brother showed up in a car.
A bus from Charlotte took him back to Chester County, to the old company store in Lando. His siblings were all babies, so there was no one to meet him. He walked the last bit to his home.
His mother “grabbed him by the neck,” he says. She cried.
“I’m glad to see you home,” she told him. She knew he would be getting out sooner or later, but she didn’t expect him “so soon.”
It was Jan. 17, 1946. He had been away for almost three years.

An American life

He got a job at a printing company, took some classes under the G.I. Bill, but after showing fellow members of the American Legion that he could cook, he talked himself into opening a restaurant. His mother had taught him to cook as a young man and he liked it.
He opened the Columbia Street Grill, a restaurant where the Cyclone now stands. He was leasing the space, but later opened his own restaurant, Buddy’s Drive-In, on the J.A. Cochran Bypass, in the ’60s.
He met Beverly at a Sugar Bowl a few years before and the two got married, had a daughter. They worked hard to build a nice life for themselves. They ran the restaurant for almost 30 years.
They’ve leased half of the drive-in to various Chinese restaurants over the years. But they keep the other half for themselves, keeping it ready and clean. Every Fourth of July, they cook barbecue for sale. Buddy smokes his barbecue and won’t give up his recipe.
So he managed to put a lot of it behind him, as he was advised.
But he can’t keep it all inside.

Peace

Buddy says that any man who has fought in a war knows it has just one lesson. War is terrible. The man who’s been to war doesn’t believe in war. He wants peace.
When World War II ended, the whole world was at peace.
“Didn’t last long, did it?” he says.
Soldiers like him hailed the creation of the United Nations. What a wonderful thing, he says — an organization that would prevent war.
Yet every few years, there’s another war.
“Where the hell is the U.N.?”
His voice carries obvious disgust over the war in Iraq. It shouldn’t have happened, he says.

Heroes

His experience has taught him much. Though the survivors of World War II are lauded as the greatest generation, though the soldiers who fought are hailed as heroes, Buddy says there are no heroes who can talk about Omaha Beach today.
The only heroes are already over there, buried beneath crosses and Stars of David in the fields of France.
He and his wife will visit those fields again next week, with a British survivor of the battle they met and befriended a few years ago. They are riding over on a ferry from England to France, almost the same sea route Buddy took in 1944.
Media reports say President Barack Obama will speak at a ceremony over there. A soldier attached to the State Department in Paris has obtained tickets for the Ernandezes and their friends to the official program on June 6, 2009.

In a word

The counselors years ago told him to forget it, don’t talk about it, but he can’t forget.
He puts the whole experience into one word, using its real meaning.
His eyes close, his arms shake a little as he says it, as if, there in his den, he’s actually already back there, back in ’44, back “crawling over nothing but dead people.”
As if he’s back on the beach.
“It was the most … awesome … thing ever.”

From The News & Reporter of Chester, S.C.

Remembering my old Scoutmaster

Mr. Palazzo (center) at a cabin in which we camped at Camp Bullowa, at which it snowed. Best campout ever.

NOTE: I do not know when this originally ran, and I don't know if this is the way it appeared in print, exactly.

My old digital archives are so out of date I can't open a clean version of my old work.

From the file creation date info, it might have been around July of 2003 when I wrote this. The time fits, because I was in the waning days of my time at The People-Sentinel.

I saw a post from the daughter of my old Scoutmaster today on Facebook. So I thought I would dig this up.

(I thought I had all my latter work saved as a pdf, but nope.)

Anyway, on to Mr. Palazzo.

Originally published in The People-Sentinel around July 31, 2003.)

I don't know why, but I thought the unhappiest thing a wedding invitation might garner was a "Sorry, I am unable to attend" check.

I didn't expect him to come, but I sent the invitation on anyway, just in case. If he couldn't, it would let him know that after so many years, I still remembered him. But the answer for Nick Palazzo came instead in a letter to my father.

I shouldn't call him by his first name. He was my Scoutmaster when I was growing up. I always called him Mr. Palazzo. It's an Italian name, and only one person, a priest at St. Helen's parish in New York, pronounced it correctly when we were growing up – Pah-lots-so.

He was the Scoutmaster of Troop 56, St. Raymond's. He's the guy who watched us. He didn't try to teach us "leadership" like they do in some troops these days. He saw who the natural leaders were and he tried to develop them.

He worked in the city planning office of New York City.

When the terrorists attacks happened on Sept. 11, I thought of Mr. Palazzo, because he had given us, when we moved to South Carolina, something to remember New York City with. They were five books, the city planning documents for all five boroughs of New York. They were so big, square pages bigger than a phonograph record. I mostly looked back on those pages to the book on the Bronx, about Parkchester, where I grew up. But the Manhattan section had a detail plan for something called the World Trade Center, which wasn't complete.

It weighed about 20 pounds, at least.

It was a great gift to give someone leaving the greatest city in the world, in my case under protest. It kept us connected.

He was an usher at the church. He was a father.

When I signed up, even though the Scouts met in the basement of St. Raymond's Elementary School, I never knew how heavily tied into religion the Scouts were. But as a Cub Scout, he got us to get our religious medal, the Parvuli Dei. And he was my instructor when I went through the Boy Scout-level Catholic Scout award – the Ad Altare Dei.

That's Latin, and it means Approaching the altar of God.

It was a big deal, and I still have the cross badge and red white blue and yellow ribbon that I earned by listening, in part, to what Mr. Palazzo taught us.

I must have been 12 when I went for it, and I am 37 now. A quarter of a century has passed, yet I can still remember one night, walking home from an Ad Altare Dei class, at which Mr. Palazzo tried to teach us about Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, which we Catholics call the Beatitudes. It was an odd situation for me, that class. Mr. Palazzo was a "civilian" yet he was teaching us religion. He wasn't a priest or a nun or a school teacher.

But he made the most salient point I've ever been taught.

"Blessed are those who show mercy, for mercy shall be theirs," Jesus said. What did that mean, Mr. Palazzo asked. I was a kid, and of course I didn't know. I thought maybe it meant there was a scorecard up in heaven, and you got points later on, in the afterlife. He knew it wasn't so silly.

So he taught me.

"When you do something for someone else, don't you feel good inside?" he asked. I thought I did.

"Isn't that a mercy?" he asked. Indeed it is. I can hear his voice, I can see him standing next to me, me on the other side of my father and my brother as we walked home.

He was just a good man, a man who told me that sometimes my ability to make people laugh was also a mercy for those people, a mercy that should return to me.

I am on the verge of tears as I write this.

I just wanted the invitation to perhaps thank him for always teaching me, and he never saw it.

He was a large man, though. Late in life, he developed diabetes. He got a sore on his foot that wouldn't heal. He was put in the hospital, and some toes were amputated, then his leg, at the knee. The second amputation caused a blood clot.

On Thursday, I found out all that. His wife Phyllis wrote a letter to my father because she had gotten the wedding invitation.

I found out Thursday Nick Palazzo died. He died back in January, and I just found out Thursday.

I need some mercy, Lord; mercy for Mr. Palazzo, a good, good man who I never thanked.

It doesn't have to come back to me, but right now, I could use some myself.

Edit to add: I think an online obituary I found is his. Lists "Nicholas A Palazzo was born on February 20, 1926. He died on January 24, 2003 at age 76." 

Dad (center) and Mr. Palazzo (right) at the cabin we camped in at Camp Bullowa where it snowed, we had an epic snowball fight and we went out after Bigfoot at night.

Thoughts on The Last Jedi soundtrack

DO I HAVE TO SAY SPOILERS?

I have always been a fan of the great John Williams, and I have pored over every recording of his Star Wars soundtracks. A lot of time, I have found it's the music, not the performances that tell us what we are supposed to feel in movies,and very most particularly with a John Williams score.
Just as a prefatory note, I was thrilled to finally be able to get the soundtrack to The West Wing by the great W.G. "Snuffy" Walden. And I almost, almost wish I hadn't.
It is a fantastic soundtrack, but it is not separately as listenable. Walden's soundtrack sets the scenes so well. But just to kick back and listen, it's not great in that separate way.
Anyway, when I went into the theater the first time, I thought I recognized most of the themes that Williams was basing his music on. And I wasn't sure, but I was thinking that they were just the themes that Williams had created, many of them years ago, without what I consdered the tailoring Williams did for each theme when it is actually used on screen.
For example, Williams wrote a theme, Luke and Leia, for the scenes in the Return of the Jedi where Luke tells Leia she is his sister and he has to face their father.
But on the Special Edition soundtrack, they include first the performance cue that was actually used in the movie, which they named "Brother and Sister" on the album (for lack of a better word these days).
But it sounded like they were using "Luke and Leia" almost straight up in the scenes in which Luke and Leia have a tender but brief reunion. And just now listening to both, I think I am pretty much on target about that.
Also, Williams wrote "Yoda's Theme" for The Empire Strikes Back, but he tailored for the couple of cues where he raises the X-wing out of the swamp and shows Luke what the Force is really about. And he also made it an "action" cue, as Williams described it, for when Luke is attacked briefly by Boba Fett on Cloud City.
But when Yoda's Force ghost shows up in The Last Jedi, the music playing is a very close rendition of just Yoda's Theme.
Also, a piece of music that has never been played on screen before, straight up, but used to inform other cues is Princess Leia's Theme. It appears in The Last Jedi, straight up, when Leia uses the Force for the first time on screen.
It might read like I am saying John Williams was phoning this soundtrack in, but I am just pointing out the very specific choice I think he made. I think he saw the movie bringing those characters back, and he brought back their themes to give the fans who wish nothing to change to have exactly what they wanted.
Because Leia using the Force is a very different Leia than the one Williams wrote that theme for, but the theme absolutely works.
In The Force Awakens, Williams revisited the romantic cues he came up with for Han and Leia's flirtation where they fall in love. And it's obvious the characters are still in love, but that love is different. And Williams used the theme in that movie to inform themes without it being straight up the same.
I don't know what Williams was thinking when he chose to go this route with those themes for those characters. But he came up with some new stuff for this movie, so he quite specifically was not phoning it in.
The Luke and Leia theme blends into the theme you hear in a lot of the commercials, don don don donnon. The music on Canto Bight is thrilling. Williams uses steel drums, like he used so famously in the Cantina Band music, but this is completely different.
On screen, much is made of what appears to be a ship landing in a steaming bay, but it turns out to be a futuristic iron pressing some Imperial uniform. The scene is said to be reminiscent of Terry Gilliam's "Brazil."
John Williams gets in on the "Brazil" act as well. Part of the Canto Bight music is about 20 seconds or so of a theme used in that movie a lot.
I find it interesting that the name of the track for Luke's battle with Kylo Ren is called by Williams, "The Last Jedi."
But there's one theme that Williams changes.
In the liner notes to the original Star Wars soundtrack album from back in 1978, Williams said that he used the "Force theme" for the twin sunset scene, to show Luke's hopes and dreams for the future.
The theme has been played in just about every Star Wars film ever since. Sometimes exactly the same as it was in Star Wars, like at the end of Revenge of the Sith, where it is used in the same setting -- Luke's aunt and uncle watching a twin sunset.
The Force Theme is present a couple of times in the Last Jedi.
At one point, it weaves so sweetly and turns into Rey's Theme that you might think it was the plan from 1977.
But it's played, and played slower and sadder, at the end, when Luke looks at what appears to be a twin sunset, and he dies, fading away into the Force like Yoda did in Return of the Jedi and maybe Ben did in Star Wars. I am pretty sure it's the track called "Peace and Purpose" on the soundtrack.
The soundtrack, I think, begs the question of who The Last Jedi is. It tells us, by title, that from Luke's battle with Kylo Ren, that it's Luke. The movie mostly says it is Rey, but suggests "Broom Boy" from the final scene might be, since he displays Force abilities.
I think the Soundtrack answers the question definitively. The music that plays over the Broom Boy, as he gazes into the stars they way Luke gazed at that twin sunset on Tatooine, is the Force Theme, very similar to the Force Theme from Star Wars. (Maybe it's a little closer to how it was used at the end of Revenge of the Sith, but still. It hearkens back to staring off and dreaming of something better.
That is as pure a Star Wars moment as any.)
There's a lot going on in this soundtrack, but if you've never bought a Star Wars soundtrack, this one just about has it all.

Agents of Shield/Captain Marvel theory

So. If you are into Agents of Shield and Marvel movies, read on.
Otherwise, total geek alert right now. If you are going to make fun, leave now.
We good? OK.
In my slow rewatch of the episodes, in Season 1, Episode Yes Men. Main thrust of the episode is not relevant. But they just got back from the Guest House and saving Skye with the Kree, blood, I guess? Anyway, Phil asks Lady Sif if she's seen any aliens and if any of them are blue, and she rattles off some names, including the Kree, which we all assume the GH alien to be.
And Lady Sif assures the Son of Coul that NONE of them have ever visited the earth. We know this is not true, because Inhumans.
But the Kree experiment that created the Inhumans goes back millennia. So, where does this Kree body come from?
And the thought that popped into my head was, why is Captain Marvel the movie going to be set in the '90s, when up until now, the history of heroes in the Marvel movie universe has been Captain America in World War II, then a whole bunch of failed experiments to try to recreate the super soldier serum which result in the Hulk, AIM, Centipede, Deathlok, Garrett, extremis. But no real other heroes until the Battle of New York. That's what we've been told.
But now, Captain Marvel is going to be fighting Skrulls in the '90s and will have a costume.
And it keeps coming back to me. Where does this dead, sliced-basically-in-half Kree come from?
In the comics, the ancient enemies of the Skrulls are the ... ding ding ding ... Kree.
Nick Fury will be in this movie. Will he get a warning from a Kree about the Skrulls? Will this blue Kree be a good guy, perhaps even a now blue Mar-vell of Kree, who helps save the earth and pass his powers on to Danvers to help save the earth when he gets sliced and diced by a Skrull?
Will a drop of his blood perhaps save Danvers' life, letting Fury know that it would be worth it to keep the Kree body for decades.
Afterward, does Carol Danvers go incognito until they need her again?
Was SHE, at least originally, the Avenger Fury said he kept the body to save?
The downside of this theory is that the movie universe doesn't care all that much about the TV universe.

Edited to add: Clark Gregg is confirmed as being in the Captain Marvel movie.  

Agents of SHIELD is about to end its fifth season with an ending that can serve as a series finale rather than a season finale. And they have heavily name-dropped events from  Avengers Infinity War. So the SHIELD finale is taking place during the mad Titan’s invasion. 

It totally feels like they could GO THERE snd do the thing. 

Also, Jude Law is cast as Mar-vell. I don’t think they would turn him blue. But they did turn Zoe Daldana green and Scarlett Johanssen blond. 

So you never know. 

Blast from the Past AGAIN: On Jackie Robinson Day

I am a serial rehasher of things I have written before, when they seem to somehow become relevant again.
I saw the Jackie Robinson biopic "42" with Dad this weekend. And this seems, again, relevant. 
I'll have TWO more comments at the end. 

 

Dad taught me to be who I am

News Editor

Stephen Guilfoyle

When he was born –

• a man named Franklin Delano Roosevelt was not yet president.

• the greatest epoch of the 20^th Century, World War II, was nine years in the future;

• a small man full of hatred was legally forbidden to speak in Germany, but Adolf Hitler, not yet elected to anything, was gaining influence and backing from powerful industrialists of that country;

• there was a 40-foot deep pit on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 32nd Street, where, 18 months later, would rise the grandest building ever built, the Empire State Building; and

• the New York Yankees were the greatest baseball team ever, with a lineup that included Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.

I’m a mean kid at times and sometimes I make fun of my dad for being old.

But I look back on the world into which he was born and I realize that he has indeed somehow, behind my back, really gotten old.

I’ve never much written about my dad because it’s more fun to make fun of Mom, because her sense of humor is always taxed.

I often wonder why someone like Dad, who always jokes, ended up with Mom, who almost never does.

Dad and I go to movies. That’s what we do. We talk football now.

I am whatever kind of man one might think I am because of what I learn from him.

But I learn not from him telling me what he wants to teach, but from my watching what he

does.

I picked the historical markers, because they all have some significance to either his life or my

view of it.

Roosevelt, well, that’s my joke. “Geez, Dad, you were born before Roosevelt was President.”

And Roosevelt was president for a long time.

The Empire State Building, well, I connect that with Dad because he’s always seemed to

me a New Yorker. He’s settled down fine in South Carolina these past 20 years, but it’s just not his natural place.

If someone were to put him in an alien zoo and were to create his natural habitat, there would have to be canyons made of concrete and glass and subways.

Hitler is not included because Dad was a tyrant. Dad is a gentle man. But Dad took a little trip to Ireland when he was a youth and got stuck there for years because of World War II.

He was raised over there by his aunt.

It shaped him to be a very different sort from his brother and his sister.

I include the Yankees because, despite being born in the Bronx, the Yankees were never his team.

But it is important to note that the greatest team of all time was the Yankees of the ’30s.

When my father was born in 1930, those Yankees were a segregated team, white men only need apply.

One of the most important lessons I learned from my father, and about my father, came unspoken

but etched in deep.

My father’s favorite baseball team was dem Bums, the Brooklyn Dodgers. His favorite player

was Jackie Robinson.

My father loved Jackie Robinson’s ability to make a play out of nothing, score a run after getting

walked to first base.

It taught me all I ever needed to know about race relations and how to judge people. You judge a man by his ability, not by the color of his skin.

What a fabulous teacher he was. I gained a core belief in justice and fair play and fundamental human equality, just because Dad said, “Jackie Robinson was my favorite baseball player.”

So my Dad turned 70 Tuesday.

I wish there were someway to stop it, but I can’t. Instead, I’ll remember again all that he’s taught me. .

And I’ll feel humbled, because I’m not half the man he is, but I’ll feel lucky that I know to keep trying to measure up.

P.S. Dad liked the movie. But he doesn't like it as much as he liked "The Jackie Robinson Story." It's probably because Jackie Robinson played Jackie Robinson. (And Pee Wee Reese played Pee Wee Reese, for that matter.) Thought it was good. But it's no Jackie Robinson.
P.P.S. Dad would absolutely have loved the PBS miniseries on Jackie by Ken Burns. I know I did.

2015 Christmas Letter

Friends and family,
Yes ... the letter at Christmas carries on. Kind of.
Taking a cue from the McClatchy Corporation, which just shuttered the Enquirer-Herald of York/Clover, not because it wasn't making money but because it wasn't making enough, we have decided to go with the times and shutter the print version of our Christmas letter.
The current market forces are such that print has an ever-decreasing shelf life, and we are nothing if not hip and up with the latest trends. So we are introducing our first "Digital-only" Christmas letter.

The Guilfoyles of Fort Mill frankly are looking forward to the end of 2015. It has been a year of ups and downs, but the downs, while outnumbered by ups, have been low, low downs.
On the downside, I am still missing my Dad. Particularly around the holidays, or any week with a “day” in it. He was the bright center of the Guilfoyle family, always one with a joke.
And we are still missing my best furry friend. Harry, my first dog, who died a couple of months after Dad. Annie, our other dog, had become the most surprising gentle girl. She was hyper-competitive with Harry, it turns out, but now she just wants to be around us.
But now Annie is not with us any more.
She was a remarkable dog. She survived eating a whole bar of dark chocolate and getting her stomach pumped one New Year's Eve. She had her side slashed open one time when we visited Spartanburg, though we have no idea on what she caught her skin.
She slowed down a bit after being viciously attacked and bitten by another dog last year. She suffered about eight nasty bites. It was scary, but she has recovered.
But she came down, very suddenly, with a cancer that cost her her appetite at times and made it hard for her to even sleep. We said goodbye right after Thanksgiving.
I remain a copy editor and page designer working in Hickory, N.C., designing newspaper pages (sports right now) since October of 2010.  I am primarily working on the Dothan Eagle.
The people I work with are terrific, but it’s a LONG commute with terrible  hours. My car now has more than 280,000 miles, so that's 30,000 plus since last year.
Patricia remains ensconced in the Diocese of Charlotte, N.C., where she is editor of the Catholic News Herald.
She put together a project for us to work together on, and we went on pilgrimage to Philadelphia when Pope Francis visited the United States in Septmber. We had a really good time but were exhausted after. The days were filled with pilgrimage stuff and covering the pilgrims, but when they came back to the hotel at night to rest up for the next day, we had to post our videos and file our stories.
Patricia said she liked watching me interact with people. It's a side she doesn't get to see often. I just like watching her be her organized self.
It has been a good year for our son, Stephen Christopher. He is now 9 and a third-grader.
We are still with Pack 9 at St. Patrick's Cathedral.
There's a new program for all Cub Scouts and we are a little behind where we were a year ago. We are working on a new Pinewood Derby car with help from Uncle Johnny.
I am Pack 9’s assistant cubmaster, God help the children, and still the interim Tiger Den leader.
Stephen has also taken up Tae Kwan Do. He is already a Green Belt. He got a year's lessons as a present from his Aunt Caca. Thanks, sis.
We know we haven’t been around as much as we could. We are doing well, but our life is just non-stop hectic most days, so that when we get some free time together, we just generally want to do something quick and easy and together. But never doubt our affection.
Have a merry Christmas.
(Email is still the best way to reach me. I check it every day.)
“We love you anyway.”

Stephen, Patricia, Stephen Christopher
sguilfoyle@comporium.net

Dec. 24, 2014

#MissingBud

#MissingHarry

#MissingAnnie