Krab, with a "K"

I cannot speak for the late Miss Lena Horne, but I can't imagine she would think that this was a good idea.  Oh, no. Oh, Hell no. Baltimore, has a race issue. And for very good reason.  African Americans have been used, abused, been demonized and mistreated in the U.S.   And in Baltimore, they have received the short end of the stick for far, far too long.  I cannot list the indignities, but when things heated up over the murder of Freddie Gray, over two years ago, they boiled over. Add to that the mishandling of the charges against the police officers involved in the Freddie Gray case, and other indignities foisted upon the black community since then and you understand that the tensions are just has high. INTO THIS comes some idiot at the Baltimore Book Festival who booked Rachel Dolezal - the White woman who pretended to be black and ran the Spokane NAACP office - to make an appearance for her new book, In Full Color: Finding my way in a black and white world to appear

I don't know if just me, but for the life of me I think that the word "Frankfurter" is dirty.  "Frank" I get, and I have eaten many of frank -both the processed food and men with that name. It's the "furter" that leaves me feeling dirty.   Maybe because it reminds me furtive. Even back on the farm that grandparents and then aunt and uncle had, where you soon learned that "sweetbreads" were not cinnamon sugar toast, a hot dog was fine, so were franks.  But "frankfurter" was as alien to me as those damned "New England Style Hot Dog Roll." And I have to add that the "New England Style Hot Dog Roll" v "Hot Dog Bun" argument rages in our house.  My husband is from New England.  I am from the "Western Reserve" in Ohio - land owed to Connecticut after the Revolutionary War for service in the fight for Independence.  And in the Western Reserve is a hot dog bun, damn it. But I digress -

So, as I was saying, life in Bawlimore is mostly like Milwaukee, but without the glamour. Sorta like Velveeta - it looks like cheese, but its not.  Anyhow, I found the above headline picture and it made me feel a wee bit nostalgic.  This is how I remember grocery stores from my early childhood.  Mother's dressed to go shopping, looking over the space-age foods that we were lucky enough to afford.  And there, on the top shelf, I spotted the old familiar VELVEETA box of my childhood. I did a search on Google for the old Velveeta boxes from my childhood - the ones like this: Well, this is the box, but in my Ohio childhood, all the writing was in English.  But everything is better in French, right? I mean - "Fromage Fondue Pasteurise" sounds so glamorous, right? There was nothing pissy about the name.  I mean it is VELVEETA in bold block letters that mean this stuff is all business, people. "Take no shit, take no prisoners". And then I started l

So here I am, trapped in Baltimore against my will, because my heart happens to have it bad for one of the nicest people ever who got us transferred here.  Being with him in Baltimore is a helluva lot better than being anywhere else by myself, Disneyland included. Baltimore is NOT like John Water's Baltimore.  John Waters "Baltimore" is a thing seen in a gauzy rear-view mirror.  The women wear their hair in every style except beehives.  People of the opposite sex will still call you "Hon" but its just out of regional laziness. They call this place "Charm City", but in actuality, it is today, in 2017, a sarcastic reality.  There is very little about Baltimore that is charming. Baltimore is dangerous, the kind of dangerous that gets you killed for being on the wrong corner at the wrong time. Baltimore is racist, and that racism cuts through every every race, every hostility. Baltimore is dirty, and not in the fun sense of the word.  For a t