TIZ THE SEASON TO BE BITCHING…

Villagers as a group are some of the most unthankful and ungrateful people in the world. They have attained a retirement dream that the vast majority of people on the planet today could not reach no matter how many hours, days and years that they worked. Villagers live in luxury and drive expensive cars. They are well off enough to be able to WASTE tens of thousands of dollars on silly tricked out golf carts. They are well off enough to be able to eat the majority of their meals in restaurants. Several years ago the general manager of Villages radio station WVLG told me that the median household income in TV was $99,800! That’s double-plus the median income for the state of Florida. And remember for Villagers, this money isn’t from paychecks. It’s from pensions, investments and Social Security. In short..”they’ve got it made” as the old saying goes. Yet despite all of their wealth and good fortune NOBODY sings the bitching blues any better than the inhabitants of America’s “Friendliest” Hometown.

A couple of recent threads from TV favorite spotlight on Villager idiocy and arrogance..Bitch..er..um..Talk Of The Villages brings this to light. The first item to catch my notice was a thread about the fast-food wonder known as Steak and Shake. In my humble opinion there is no better hamburger joint anywhere than Steak and Shake. I got introduced to this burger emporium decades ago when I was working for a country music radio station in Danville, Illinois. Steak and Shake isn’t in the northeast and I had never heard of them. It was love at first bite! One of the very few pluses I can find about living in the swamp known as Florida is that Steak and Shake operates here. I go when I can, but not as often as I’d like, which is good, because if I went as often as I’d like to I would weigh 600 pounds.

Originally Steak and Shake used to be essentially a drive-in/car-hop service restaurant. Their buildings usually did offer an “eat in” option, but eat-in meant a row of about 6 diner stools. All the other business was conducted at the customer’s driver-side car window. Today at Steak and Shake the car-hop service is long gone. Service is provided at a drive-thru window or inside where the 6 diner stools are still there, but so are sit-down tables and chairs for about 100 people.

The Steak and Shake in TV is located on the western end of Route 466 near TV Walmart store. One of the reasons I don’t go to Steak and Shake as much as I’d like to is that the place is ALWAYS PACKED! Unless you go during very off hours you are going to wait for a table. Traditional lunchtime or dinnertime? No way! The lines are out the door. Don’t be in a rush.

But Villagers are ALWAYS in a rush! Why? Who knows? You have a retirement community of 200,000-plus people and all of them are in a rush all the time. Nowhere is this as prevalent as in a Villages sit-down restaurant. Villagers get their panties all in a big wad if the server doesn’t magically appear the moment after the hostess seats them and takes their drink order and preferably their entire meal order, and then..DAMMIT..the food and drinks had better be there within 2 nanoseconds or else!!

“Or else” usually means openly berating the server and almost always means a demand to see the manager and with it the demand that the struggling server be fired for her incompetence and of course the standard grievance for a comped meal for their “inconvenience”. And they ALWAYS then stiff the server. BS! It’s a scam and the restaurant managers should grow a spine, stand up for their staffs and say so to these spoiled brat Villagers.

The whine of the day on Bitch Of The Villages was the standard Villager whine about the “service” at Steak and Shake. Oh the food was fine but our waitress was SO slow. If you have a tenth of a functioning brain and could watch what’s going on at the time, you will see the servers racing around like ants on a hot griddle. They are carrying trays full of food that I would drop the first time I tried to do it. And for that matter..every other time I tried to do it. They are working their butts off. But it is never, ever, never enough for the Villagers. They are IMPORTANT and they just don’t have time. So snap to it you lowly bitch and get my food over here!! And if you’re REALLY good I’ll leave you a buck’s tip for a $30 food order.

The ancient actor/entertainer Jerry Lewis would have made a top notch Villager. It is well documented how the wait staff in the various Las Vegas hotel restaurants would scatter whenever Jerry Lewis would enter. He was a nasty abusive little turd to servers. Loud, vulgar and unkind. He would openly throw fits if this item or that item didn’t meet his approval. One such story has him bringing a server..an old woman..to tears over something that didn’t please him about the oatmeal she served him. He then continued to complain loudly to those who were dining with him about how this woman should have “known” just how he wanted his oatmeal. As I said..old Jerry would make a top notch Villager. Villagers just plain suck.

The other major complaint of the day was over the fact that one of the nightly performers at the Brownwood Town Square had placed a hat on the stage for tips. Now I had not ever heard of that happening before at any of the squares. It was something truly new.

For the uninitiated..TV supplies FREE..yes..FREE..musical entertainment 7 days a week, 365 days a year at the 3 different town squares of Spanish Springs, Lake Sumter and Brownwood. Each evening between 5 and 9pm you can go and listen to free music. There are some VERY good bands and DJs and there are some who..well..aren’t so great. But..I have always found that the word FREE tends to increase the quality of the offering!

When I go into a sit down restaurant I expect to give a tip and unless I have been totally ignored by the server, I tip well. I wouldn’t want to do the jobs these people do. They work HARD! I also tip the lady who cuts my hair and the bell-hop who brings my bags to my hotel room. But I do have a bit of a problem with going to a place like Subway and when I go to pay for my sandwich there’s a tip bucket out. Or..if I buy an ice cream cone and find a tip jar ready to accept my offering. That doesn’t sit well with me. But of course it is up to me when I encounter a tip jar to decide whether I am going to pass or play.

The performers working at the Village town squares are paid in one fashion or another by TV management. In the case of Lake Sumter and Brownwood the Morse Machine has somehow managed to get Sumter County to pay the tab with real live TAX DOLLARS under its county “Tourism” fund. Whatta racket!! But no matter where the bucks come from the performers are paid for their night’s work. How well? I don’t know. It’s probably not AF of M union scale, but I’m guessing they are not paid peanuts either.

The tip issue is an oddball. I’ve been in places where it is customary to drop some money in the hat if you ask the band or the piano player to play your favorite song. But nobody’s got a gun to your head. And I guess there’s the rub. Once again you’ve got a bunch of Villagers who come to the squares each night in their tricked out golf carts or their Caddy or Lexus or Bentley and pay to drink themselves stupid yet are ready to go into anaphylactic shock that some guitar player has placed his cowboy hat upside down on the stage to accept tips. Nobody’s got a gun to their heads. They can choose to pass or play. But the entire web thread was nothing but a whine about how they are FORCED to tip the band. What? And the standard “we’re not going to put up with this” kinda crap! Whine. Bitch. Whine. Bitch. Whine.

The bitching and whining is a standard part of TV vaunted “Lifestyle”. To be unthankful and ungrateful and to be a self important spoiled brat is practically a requirement for homeownership in TV. It’s disgusting, and it’s disgusting at any time of the year. But we have just entered into a season that’s designed for us to consider all that we have been blessed with and all we have to be thankful for. And that we can be VERY thankful that we have a savior..Jesus Christ..who was born and lived and died so that all men might live and live in harmony and be saved. But in TV there’s no time for that because you see..we are Villagers and our server was 2 seconds too slow in getting us our coffee. THAT is what is important and the server MUST be punished. Tiz the season. What a shame. But shame is something that the Villagers know absolutely NOTHING about.

My Christmas wish for you..my readers..is that even if you live in TV..you will NEVER become a “Villager”.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

BIG DON…BIG BAD DON.

Villagers are always worried that somehow..the great unwashed..otherwise referred to as “those people” will somehow invade their walled white haven and spoil everything. A few years ago it was a serious worry that “those people” from Wildwood would invade “their square” in Brownwood and actually spend some money to help out the economy. About a year ago after Wildwood mayor Ed Wolf told Morse Industries to stick it in their ear over their proposal to buy up a failed developer’s project there was all sorts of worry and whining about how some other developer would come in and allow “those people” to move in and somehow sully the perfect world of TV.

Recently there was a new twist to the standard worry about “those people”. The fact that “those people” might actually become Villagers! How you ask? Let me explain.

A few weeks ago the Wildwood board gave the go-ahead for a development that is 4 miles away from TV. It (thought) it was giving its’ OK to a group called Reader and Partners of Orlando. But..wait for it…SURPRISE!!! Right after the go-ahead Reader & Partners announced that the vast share of the business was being sold to…THE VILLAGES!! Dean Barbarree of the Reader group said that the Morse Machine was not mentioned in the proposal because negotiations with TV was still on-going. Amazing! Somehow the negotiations somehow came to full agreement the second the Wildwood board put their stamp of approval on the project.

This little move managed to keep TV out of any sort of necessary public hearings and given Wildwood mayor Ed Wolf’s opposition to TV doing any more development in his town, it allowed some other face to do the heavy lifting of getting the permits approved.

In fact, according to Barbarree, the ONLY thing Reader & Partners of Orlando is now going to do with the project at all is to build the infrastructure. TV couldn’t get their project honestly, so they did it with trickery. Gee..what a surprise. I’m pretty sure Ed Wolf’s not going to forget that one!

Now the odd part of all of this, is that this “village” which is be called “The Village Of Fenney” is going to be 4 MILES outside Brownwood, with no connecting villages between it and Brownwood. According to published reports those people buying in Fenney will be given all the various access to ALL Villages amenities. Now it is certainly possible that the Morse Machine is thinking that if they get this one started they can buy land and build north eventually connecting Fenney with the rest of TV.

But here comes the rub with the Villagers who are worried about “those people”. Homes in the Village of Fenney will be different than current builds. Some of the housing will be lower cost townhomes and multi-family dwellings. Now bear in mind that this Village is still going to be a 55+ community, no different than any other part of TV. But the “lower cost multi-family buildings” has sent the “those people” goofballs soaring into the stratosphere with their worry about the end of TV as they know it.

In the on-line newspaper VillagesNews.com when the story was reported the “those people” brigade struck fast. The on-line paper allows for instant on-line comments. Apparently none of these Rhodes scholars can write a cogent letter to the editor these days.

The “those people” venom started flowing fast and furious from some guy named Don who wanted us all to know that TV building “affordable” housing was the key to letting in the dregs of society. Affordable in TV is a whole different thing than some sort of welfare project. But Don doesn’t know that. He’s just another babbling boob who can’t stand the thought that somehow his perfect walled white haven just might be invaded by somebody who worked hard and got a chance to retire, but who didn’t have a bank account..and a head..as thick as Big Bad Don’s.

There were of course others who clucked their approval to Don’s idiotic remarks and a few people who found Don’s remarks to be utterly boorish. But for the most part, the remarks were centered around just how to keep “those people” OUT of TV.

The Morse Myth Machine works day and night spinning the tale of just what a wonderful place TV really is and what wonderful people its’ citizens are. Unfortunately every single time they try to make that myth stick…the REAL Villagers..who all sound and act like Don step forward to prove that “America’s Friendliest Hometown” is nothing but that.

A…MYTH.

MAXIMUM SILLINESS…

Back in the early 1990’s there was a radio station in Toronto, Canada which had the call letters CHOG. They billed themselves as AM 640-The Hog. They played what is often referred to as “Head Banger” music. I used to call it chainsaw music because it always sounded to me like somebody had just hooked up a Sears chainsaw to an amplifier and cranked it. There were billboards all over Toronto advertising the radio station.

The billboard was quite simple. It had a picture of what was easily the largest hog I had ever seen staring out of the billboard into the approaching traffic. I’m pretty sure this porker could have won every blue ribbon there was to be had at the Iowa and Nebraska state fairs. He was a champ indeed. Under the pig were two words. MAXIMUM GRUNT. And under that was the station’s slug line AM 640-The Hog.

I thought of that billboard one day on the week prior to Easter as I was sitting in one of the ubiquitous traffic jams that occur in TV during the much maligned “Snowbird Season”. I was thinking that instead of MAXIMUM GRUNT..there ought to be one that just simply said “MAXIMUM SILLINESS”.

Depending on whom you talk to and what yardstick you use, “Snowbird Season” starts anywhere from October to January. In truth what really happens in October is that the “Sunbirds” return. The Sunbirds, in the ridiculous caste system of TV are those people who live in TV most of the year but escape the brutal summer heat during the months of May thru September. These folks tend to have summer places on lakes or rivers up north, and some of the ones with the thicker bank accounts actually have places directly on some Florida beach. They flee the nasty summer heat and come back into the fall.

As I have mentioned before there is a serious caste system here in America’s most screwy hometown. On top of it all are the “Frogs”. People who gladly claim that title because they are here in TV until they croak! Then come the Sunbirds. They are treated with almost as much respect as the Frogs. But then comes the dividing line. It is as stark a line as that infamous curtain in an airliner dividing First Class and Coach. Beyond that dividing line are the Snowbirds who are treated like garbage, and beyond them are the lowest of the low..

the Snowbird RENTERS! The Snowbird renters on TV caste system are just lower than whale shit.

Virtually everything that goes wrong during Snowbird season gets blamed on the Snowbird property owners and the Snowbird renters. They are the unclean/untouchable class of TV.

The odd thing is that almost all of the Snowbirds are full-out property owners. They only come to Florida and TV for 3-5 months out of the year, but they pay full-time property taxes and full-time amenity fees. To keep all the financial balls in the air TV needs these people badly. But they are treated like scum.

True Snowbird season begins in earnest right after Christmas. Many of the Snowbirders stay in their family towns until after Thanksgiving and Christmas and then descend on TV. Come the beginning of February, everybody who’s coming is here and indeed everything in TV is now cranked up to MAXIMUM SILLINESS. The grocery stores are jammed. At night the town squares are packed and there are often fist fights over available chairs! The various and sundry clubs and activities are standing room only. The restaurants? Virtually NONE of these people cook! They invade the restaurants like ants invading a picnic. If you are a local, you are better off to just stay home and eat out after the population thins out. Now to be fair, the vast majority of Villagers don’t cook. They eat out. And if your idea of lunch is between 1130am & 1pm and your idea of dinnertime is falls somewhere between 4pm & 7pm plan on waiting in line. A LONG line.

All of this is maddening enough if you are somebody who isn’t retired and you need to go about your life, but what really makes things unbearable during this time is the traffic. Villagers are well known for running all over the place in their golf carts, and golf carts and REAL traffic don’t mix well. Especially when you are dealing with Villagers who are piloting their golf carts dead drunk at 1pm in the afternoon. Drinking is an Olympic sport in TV and the regulars start tuning up for the day either on the golf course or as the local watering holes open up at 11am.

Now add in all the extra vehicular traffic that comes with the season, and again, if they are Villagers there is a better than 50-50 chance that if the Sheriff stopped them and asked them to “blow up the little balloon”..they’d ring the bell good and hard and be given a chauffeured ride to the county hoosegow’s drunk tank. Driving in and around TV on any given day requires attention and skill and even more when the whole place is cranked up to MAXIMUM SILLINESS.

The other problem is that the area roads such as US-441 and US-301 were designed back when TV was little more than Spanish Springs and its’ surrounding homes. In fact US-301 was a main southern route back before the Interstate system was even an idea on a drawing board. They were never designed to handle the glut of traffic that TV generates during non-Snowbird time, much less when the full compliment of people have arrived. So traffic jams and the bumper-cruncher accidents that go with them can often bring US-441 to a dead halt on a regular basis. There are times if you are looking at 441 from a parking lot it looks much more like the west side of the Baltimore Beltway at 5pm on a weekday, than a secondary US highway. It is a mess.

Maximum Silliness tends to last roughly until Easter. Usually the first people to leave are the Canadians, who have a limited time to be out of their country without putting their national healthcare coverage in jeopardy. Also for the Canadians, depending on how long they stay, and given that they own property in the United States, they can encounter difficulties the US-IRS if they tarry a bit too long here in God’s Little Waiting Room. The rest of the Snowbirds tend to leave shortly after Easter. Often family members come to visit grandpa & grandma or auntie & uncle in TV on their Easter school breaks. This influx really swells the population for a couple of weeks just prior and just following Easter depending on what state you live in and when their Easter school break falls.

By the time May rolls around the Snowbirds have all essentially packed up and headed back to wherever they plant their flag the rest of the year. Such as many who have little summer cottages open them up on Memorial Day weekend and close up on Labor Day weekend. By May things start getting back to “normal”…or whatever passes for normal in this cloud koo-koo land of crazy self absorbed retirees.

But one thing has changed over the last few years…When we first moved into “the bubble” it was very plain when Snowbird season came to an end. There was no question as to when that was. But now, as TV continues to expand and more of the new people choose to be at least Sunbirds if not outright Frogs straight from the get-go, the amount of people who leave seem to be less and less..or maybe they are leaving, but so many more have come in to stay permanently that MAXIMUM SILLINESS may soon become a year round situation.

Oh Dear!!!!!

THE BINGO BUS…

Many years ago in an effort to make extra money I used to drive those big Greyhound-sized charter/tour buses for a local bus company. Living in Upstate New York our trips often took us to New York City for baseball games, shopping, Broadway plays or school trips to the Bronx Zoo. We also went to lots of other places including moving our Army troops around from base to base.

Because the drivers were unionized the trips were essentially handed down on a seniority basis. Each week the dispatcher would put up a list of trips for the week for the drivers to see and then “bid” on whatever trip they might like to take. Being nothing but a part-time driver and very low on the seniority list I pretty much got whatever anybody else didn’t want, although that was rarely a bad deal. And often, trips would come in at the last minute that would have gone to more senior drivers had the trip been booked farther in advance.

There was however, one trip that ran twice each week. It would be on the bid sheet each and every week. And never..ever..never..did ANYONE ever bid on it. It was the dreaded “BINGO” bus. Whenever a trip went unbid it was up to the management to assign an unscheduled driver to run the trip. It was always like drawing the short straw. You NEVER wanted to hear that you had been assigned to the “BINGO” bus.

The Bingo Bus left our Binghamton, New York bus garage every Wednesday and Saturday afternoon at 430pm and headed off to the Ukrainian Church Hall in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The Bingo hall paid for the charter and one of the driver’s jobs was to collect the cost of the run from the bingo hall manager upon your arrival.

The people who religiously rode that bus were the most miserable, nasty, awful people I had ever met..at least until I discovered The Villages and its inhabitants. These people could never be pleased. The bus was too old. The bus was too new. The bus was too hot, the bus was too cold. The bus was too fast, the bus was too slow. It was a never ending litany of complaints, and on top of it all, they were not paying for the ride! The bus was a free trip. Just show up and take a seat until the bus was full. Of course if you want to see somebody who’s REALLY PISSED OFF..just be the unlucky guy who had to tell people that the bus was full! It was wise to make sure your health insurance was paid up in that case! Nothing made these people happy. Win or lose they were ALWAYS just miserable nasty people. Another reason the drivers hated to run this route is that it is customary to give your driver a tip. Back then the general rule was a buck a person. So on a regular charter trip you could expect somewhere between $40-50 extra. It was a nice bonus, and with the Bingo Bus you earned ever penny of it. EXCEPT..if you were lucky you went home with a handful of change. Maybe $7. Lousy tippers…Just like real Villagers!!

The other day as I was reading thru TV favorite showcase for Villager ignorance, arrogance and stupidity..that infamous website..Bitch..er..um..Talk Of The Villages, I was reading one of my favorite sections for stupid statements..the restaurant review section.

Whenever you read TOTV’s restaurant section the far and away top complaint is how (insert restaurant to be cursed here) is SO S-L-O-W in bringing drinks, food, the check or whatever. These places are always SO SLOW. Time after time that is the complaint.

Now I don’t know about you, but when my wife and I head out to a sit-down restaurant, eating is only part of the experience. Because we actually like each other we want to sit down and talk and enjoy each other’s company. Yes, we don’t want to wait for an hour to get our meal, but we don’t have a stop-watch on the server either.

Villagers are a whole different breed. They want to be served NOW!!! They don’t want to talk, they don’t want to spend any downtime. They want their food and most especially their BOOZE right N-O-W!!! Why? Who knows? Here are people who are retired. They have no place to go and no deadlines to meet and yet they are as hyper as a 13 year old after a half-gallon of Mountain Dew and a pound of skittles! And when they don’t get what they want NOW..they are in a full-blown snit and are ready to call for the manager and insist the server be fired, and of course try to scam a full meal comp out of the establishment. It’s sad, and their behavior is just plain disgusting. If you want fast..then pull your $40,000 tricked-out golf cart up to the drive up window at Mickey’s or Burger King and order a damned Whopper.

Today..my wife was home unexpectedly from her teaching job and so we went out to the local Cracker Barrel for some lunch. As we entered the restaurant several couples were converging at the doors at the same time. As we entered, the lady at the back of the line cut a sharp left and went RUNNING for the hostess stand like Peyton Manning trying to get out of a tight squeeze and having found a sliver of daylight to run to. She raced to the stand..and indeed beat us all. She was panting and out of breath..she waved her husband to get UP there with her! She walked in with the hostess with this huge smile of victory on her face. We..who were 2 couples behind were seated less than 30 seconds later. I guess everybody needs an accomplishment to point to.

As we sat down we had a nice lady as our server. She was an older lady and whenever I see this I always wonder if the person is working because they want to or because they have to. Mostly I suspect HAVE TO, and that always makes me sad. In that case we always try to make sure that the server doesn’t have to make extra trips for things we want in an effort to ease her workload. Right across from us I see she is stuck with a group of 8 Villagers, and you just knew that these people ran this sweet old lady ragged. It is the mark of a true Villager to continually send servers back for non-revenue items like extra water, napkins, butter pats and so on. They left shortly after we ordered and I looked after they left. 8 people eating..3 measly bucks on the table. Yep. They were Villagers alright!

As I thought back about the (thankfully) few nights I had to spend driving the Bingo Bus, I wondered where all those people are now. I figure their children are alive and miserable as hell in America’s Nastiest Hometown.

THE HISTORIC SIDE…

Greek philosopher Plato is credited for uttering the old saying “necessity is the mother of invention”. Plato’s words have often come true, and when you get right down to it, it is this phrase that explains the beginning of TV.

Back in the day old Harold Schwartz was making a living selling chunks of real estate by mail. While it was perfectly legal, and there’s no indication that Harold was doing anything “dodgy” as they would say in England, but lots of others were and the Feds decided to step in one day and save the terminally stupid from those unscrupulous sellers who were promising cut-rate prices on ocean front property in Nebraska.

When this happened it left Harold with lots of acres in Florida and no easy way to sell them. Necessity became the mother of invention and Harold created what was then known as “Orange Blossom Gardens” the very first of what was to become TV.

History indicates that Harold had no intention of creating the massive Borg Collective that today is known as the world’s largest retirement community. All he was going to do was build a nice, neat trailer park where elderly retirees from places like Cheyboygan, McCook and Eveleth could escape the cold winters and play a few holes of golf while living a modest lifestyle on their pensions and social security. They got a nice retirement home and Harold got rid of his land and fattened his bank account.

Over time the development grew and when Harold’s anal retentive son Gary arrived on the scene the place began to grow exponentially. Today TV is a massive creation housing some of the most obnoxious, spoiled and self-centered people on the planet and has grown as far away from the original Orange Blossom Gardens as the earth is to Pluto.

When Orange Blossom Gardens was created there was no ponderous list of what you cannot do with YOUR own property. Nobody to tell you that you couldn’t have a lawn ornament or 2 or 10. Nobody to tell you what kind of grass you had to plant, nobody to tell you what color your house HAD to be. It was just a nice, pleasant trailer park for retirees.

Today to live in TV means that you must surrender your “self” at the door and be ready to march in lock-step with your neighbors (or else!) in America’s Friendliest Hometown. You must surrender yourself to the Borg Collective because..resistance is futile. Now for the most part the people who willingly come to TV had surrendered long ago. They are people who value sameness and personal shallowness over everything else. They have truly found their Mecca.

What is interesting about all this is that when Harold came up with the idea of Orange Blossom Gardens the current incarnation of TV was not at all on his mind. Orange Blossom Gardens was for PEOPLE..not Stepford robots. To that end, the original few “villages” are free from all the onerous rules and regulations that make the rest of TV so utterly boring to normal people. It is the ONLY place in TV where free expression is allowed and it is the ONLY place in TV where depending on your situation you do not pay ANY amenity fees!

When TV jumped to the west side of US-441 and the new Borg Collective was under construction Harold Schwartz did something unprecedented. He kept his word to the people who purchased homes from him! He had promised them free golf for life. He also provided a swimming pool or two that came with the purchase of your home. No bonds, no monthly amenity fees, no hidden costs.

When the bonds and amenity fees were put into practice, the original people who bought into the original villages were grandfathered in and to this day pay none of the above. This freedom from fees also applies if the property is transferred to the ORIGINAL owner’s offspring! It was a pretty good deal. Also in the deal was the exemption from all of the Stepford-style “rules to live by” that come with all the rest of the properties in TV. Because of this, those who live in TV but NOT in the original villages refer to them as “The Ghetto”. Now if you happen to be talking to a sales weasel from Properties Of The Villages they will ALWAYS refer to the homes in the original villages as “The Historic Section”.

A little while ago on a pleasant Sunday afternoon my bride and I decided to take out her Mustang, put down the top and enjoy a nice slow, quiet ride thru “The Historic Section” of TV. It turned out to be a very interesting drive.

Originally, all the housing in “THS” were so-called “manufactured” homes. Trailers. At the beginning they were single wide units, later came the double-wides and finally actual “modular” homes that came in on trucks in sections that were assembled on the building site. Since that time a few people have replaced their trailers with standard Villages Villa and Ranch model homes on these sites.

Probably the first thing you notice is that the home lots in THS are NOT the tiny postage-stamp lots that are the norm on the west side of 441. These are decent sized lots with nice lawns. You also immediately notice that people are FREE to decorate their home lots with various ornaments and nice plants and the colors vary. It is the exact opposite of the vanilla, homogenized, BORING layouts of the new sections. As you go by these homes you are left with the idea that REAL people live here. The residents of THS are a far, far cry from their fake, plastic cousins over across the highway.

As you continue your drive around THS you occasionally come across something that sticks out like a sore thumb..new houses that look like the standard-issue Villager homes from the “new” side. You are not mistaken. They are. As time has passed some of the old, very original single-wide trailers have worn out and have needed to be replaced. Over the past couple of years the Morse Machine has stepped in and bought up a number of these lots. After purchasing the lots from the original owners or adult children of the original owners, the Morse Machine tears down the old trailer and slab and replaces it with a new current Villages model home and then sells the home to new owners.

This does two things. It takes a dilapidated home out of the picture which is indeed good for the area, but it also puts in a property where there is now a bond that can be collected and amenity fees can be charged. So the Morse Machine is hardly doing this out of a sense of civic pride, but it is a move to put those homes “back on the books” so to speak.

The new homes stick out like a whore at a nun convention. While the developers have attempted to make them fit in, they don’t and while they look better than a decaying trailer they don’t look like they belong there. If anything the developers should have replaced the old trailers with brand new modular homes. They would have fit the scene better than the newly-built house. But time marches on.

When you get right down to it, THS is the only place in all of Morse-Land that has any heart and originality and has any sort of feel that REAL people actually reside in TV. It is a great breath of fresh air after taking in all of the fake plasticity that you will find in TV on the west side of US-441.

Having grown up in New York State there was a forever divide between what is called “Upstate” NY and “Downstate” which includes New York City, its northern suburbs and Long Island. Over the years there have been many calls for the state to divide because the two areas are so utterly different from each other. It is the same in TV between THS and shall we call it..the “new” side. Better yet..how about we call it “The Real People” side and “The Snotty Rich Kids” side. Yeah. That’s better. Long live “The Ghetto”!!

IT DOES NOT FIT..YOU MUST ADMIT!

I have never made any bones about my complete dislike for Villagers. As a group they are the most spoiled, self-centered and obnoxious people that God ever deposited in America. On the other hand, while I am not in favor of what Gary Morse created, I applaud his genius for his ability to lay out such an amazing site and to anticipate the needs of his created community.

People in TV look at Gary as either saint or the earthly creation of Beelzebub himself. Gary’s father on the other hand, Harold Schwartz, is only spoken about in hushed tones as though he was the second coming of Jesus Christ. If there is anything bad to be said about TV it is ALWAYS said about that filth-foul-foul-filth Gary Morse! By the way..Gary’s original name was Gary Schwartz. After Gary’s mother divorced Harold, she had her children take the name of her second husband. There are all sorts of rumors as to why this happened, but the actual truth has never been told. Or if it has been, it has been couched in rumors to the point that nobody seems to really know.

While TV is either America’s/Friendliest/Nastiest/Most Immoral/Spoiled/Hometown it is above all else a BUSINESS. And a very profitable business it is. Most of the credit to that success was Gary Morse who had the innate ability to digest tons of seemingly minor details and put them all together to make what is now known as TV. While it was the McDonald brothers who invented the now famous McDonald’s restaurant system and began the franchising of restaurants, it was Ray Kroc who took McDonald’s to the stratosphere. The same is true of the father and son team of Harold Schwartz and Gary Morse. What Harold started up, Gary kicked it up notches unknown as Chef Emeril would say.

When you get to running a business the size of the Morse machine, you get to have a lot of leverage with your suppliers. WalMart has such a choke hold on their suppliers that they dare not go against them, lest Wally’s just squeezes them out of business. Likewise McDonalds. How would you like to be the Coca-Cola salesman who handles the McDonalds account and manages to lose them to Pepsi. No. Not good!

When it comes to Morse Industries, they buy what is good for THEM. What they can get the best per-unit deal on. And again, they buy so many appliances, rolls of roofing, kitchen cabinets and doors that they can almost tell the manufacturers what they are willing to pay for them, and the suppliers will go along, because saying no to a giant cash-paying client is just plain bad business.

Recently on that goofball website that is the primary showcase for Villagers’ arrogance and stupidity, there came a complaint..(TOTV is just FULL of complaints) that was for once what might be considered an actual bona-fide concern. In fact, it might want to be showcased or bronzed as possibly the ONLY complaint/concern on TOTV that was ever valid!

It seems a new-home buyer decided that they were not really enamoured with their builder’s grade refrigerator that came with the house. So they went to an appliance dealer and bought a new refrigerator that they thought they would like better.  When the dealer came to deliver the new refrigerator they found to their surprise that the new machine didn’t fit in the allotted hole! You see..the refrigerator..while it LOOKED like a full-size frige..it wasn’t. It was a slightly smaller unit that had likely been bought by the truckload at a deal price. So either the homeowner could just leave the refrigerator that came with the house in its’ place, or…tear up all his cabinetry to get the new full-sized frige to fit in! SURPRISE!! The power of volume buying!!

This is not exactly a one-off problem. When we began looking for homes down here in God’s Little Waiting Room, we were warned by my wife’s aunt to be SURE to bring a full-size dinner plate with us on our home search. Now why exactly would you do that? Because in Plasticville, the main kitchen cabinets are not deep enough to accept a full-size dinner plate!! Yes..that’s right. The cabinets were bought in a non-standard size by the railroad carload, saving bits of pennies on each one. The same kind of stuff that WalMart does. It shaves bits of pennies “in order to serve you better.” What they always mean when you hear THAT phrase is..”We’ve found a new way to screw our customers and save us money in the bargain!!” So truly, if you are looking at homes in TV SOUTH of Lake Sumter you are well advised to bring a full-size dinner plate with you and see if the plate will fit in the kitchen cabinets!!

So when you are heading out to by your dream home in America’s Most Messed Up Hometown..if indeed you are that foolish..be sure to bring a good tape measure, and a full size dinner plate. In the end you’ll be saying..It does not fit you must admit!!!

ON THE HUNT FOR LOOFA SPONGES…

In his book “Leisureville” Andrew Blechman points out the rather interesting swinger scene that takes place in TV. For those less “in the know” Swinging is known more crudely as “Wife Swapping”.  Blechman opens the door on this subject to the annoyance of The Villagers.

Unless you are calling for Andrew Blechman’s demise in the most hideous of ways, even mentioning his name among TV true believers will make them begin to snarl and foam at the mouth like rabid beasts. The book Leisureville pulled back the curtain on what is little more than a modern and non-fictional Peyton Place and they hate him for telling the truth.

Blechman published his book back in 2008, when Lake Sumter Landing had barely been built and Brownwood was nothing but a gleam in Gary Morse’s eye. At the time of the book’s publishing most everything south of Lake Sumter was nothing more than thousands of acres of grazing lands yet to be fouled up by TV construction teams.  So we are treated to a picture of out of control Villagers acting like 7^th and 8^th grade junior high school students who have no parents to answer to and healthy bank accounts with which to indulge themselves.

Since that time, TV has grown exponentially, and all of the bad things about TV have grown with it. Whether Swinging is good or bad, is open to interpretation, but adult children and grand children are not usually thrilled to find out that Mom and Pop and/or Grandma & Grandpa are getting it on with the neighbors.

If you go to the so-called “Lifestyle” websites like SwingLife and Swapper Net, you will find that there is a near inexhaustible roster of available partners who list themselves as being in TV. Other venues for finding someone to have a big Villages fling with are CraigsList and Back Page.

Villagers are inventive creatures and they have now invented their own system with which to find other “Swingers” .  It is the lowly loofa sponge.

It seems that those “in the lifestyle” who reside in TV have taken to attaching loofa sponges to the tops of their golf carts indicating that they are “Swingers”. There are different colored loofas depending on your various preferences, however I have not yet been able to find out what the colors mean.

This important information came from that always interesting website “Talk Of The Villages” and also from another website called “Topix-Lady Lake” which is the township in which some of TV sits.

Once I found out this little bit of colorful information, we loaded up the bus and went on the hunt for the elusive Swinger loofas. We found them to be more elusive than we thought. Now to be fair, we were out hunting in the middle of the day during the week. We would have likely had a better hunt had we gone into the squares in the evening when the gang is gathered to drink, listen to the free bands or DJs and dance.

But we didn’t come up empty. We saw two golf carts adorned with the telling sponges.  Getting a quick look at them I knew right away that I wouldn’t go near ANY of them.

But if you’re driving thru TV, here’s a game that beats count the license plates..Try playing find the loofa!!!

FELONIOUS ASSAULT!

A lot of the nonsense that goes on inside the borders of “America’s Friendliest Hometown” is nothing but a lot of arrogant spoiled brats showing their own selfishness and stupidity. However sometimes, the actions of America’s most spoiled adult children turns downright nasty and ugly.

Until she traded her stethoscope for a professor’s mortarboard my wife spent 20 years as an ER and ICU Nurse. When we first arrived in TV she spent a few months in the ER at The Villages Regional Hospital. TVRH is a place where the inmates run the asylum. Villagers are allowed to abuse doctors, nurses, aides and other hospital personnel with impunity. The hospital administration when faced with a choice of standing up for their employees or giving in to the outrageous demands or inappropriate behavior of the spoiled brats, will throw their employees under the bus each and every time. It is an institution where you can literally have your professional reputation ruined for refusing to get a cup of coffee for a whiny Villager visitor while you are busy saving someone else’s life.

During her tenure at TVRH my wife was regularly cursed at, threatened and treated like garbage. At one point when she was working feverishly to help a Villager in cardiac arrest she was called a “piece of shit nurse” by the patient as she informed him he would be admitted. The reason for the name calling, because my wife didn’t understand that HE had a 7am tee time the next morning and if she was worth her salt she would have gotten him out on time!

Most hospitals will not tolerate this kind of attitude and abuse of their staff from patients. A number of years ago, my wife had a finger broken by an uncooperative patient. The result? The hospital had the local cops on hand at the man’s discharge to arrest him on charges of felony assault on a health care worker. As he was released he was cuffed and stuffed and given a room in the house of many doors. At her previous hospital in Baltimore all of the ER staff from doctors on down were given annual hands-on self defense training by gentlemen who were former commandos with the Israeli Defense Forces. An organization with a world-wide reputation for not taking any guff from anybody!

In many northern and western states it is a felony to assault or otherwise hurt a health care provider while they are giving care. This is not so down in the old Confederacy.

Now lest you think that the majority of people who are out of control in TVRH are old, frightened people suffering from various forms of dementia or Alzheimer’s disease you would be incorrect. The people who raise the most hell there are people aged 50-70 who are in “relatively” good mental health but who act like the arrogant spoiled jerks that Villagers are so well known for being.

This brings us to the interesting story of 50 year old Michelle Ludwig of The Villages. According to the on-line newspaper VillagesNews.com, Mizz Ludwig went to The Villages Regional Hospital’s ER seeking an unspecified treatment. During her treatment Mizz Ludwig allegedly kicked one of the attending nurses in the stomach! Thankfully the attack was witnessed by another nurse which will likely keep the assaulted nurse from getting a load of crap for not kissing up to Villager patients from the hospital’s administration.

Sumter County deputies were called who then promptly cuffed and stuffed Mizz Ludwig and hauled her off to the Sumter County Detention Center, where a judge ordered her held without bond. It seems that earlier in November Mizz Ludwig was involved in a motor vehicle accident. When deputies arrived to investigate the MVA, Mizz Ludwig got into an argument with the attending deputies who were forced to taser her to make her behave. She was arrested at the scene and transported to the Sumter County Detention Center where she was charged with battery on a police officer, resisting a police officer and resisting arrest. Her bond for that incident was set at $10,000 which obviously she was able to make.

Stories like this make the vaunted Morse Myth Machine grind and strip its gears as it messes up the narrative that The Villages is God’s heaven come to earth.

Hopefully the nurse who was hurt will recover from her injuries. It is unfortunate that this happened in Florida and not up north where the angry and spoiled Mizz Ludwig would be facing felony charges and hard time for her alleged actions.

My God bless and protect ALL our nurses!

TIZ THE SEASON TO BE A JERK!

Stories about cold hearted jerks at Christmas are as old as Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”. Each year in our newspapers and on television there’s a story about some creep who tosses some widow out in the snow for not paying her rent and so on.

Now if you are a resident of The Villages, you practically have to sign a paper when you buy your home certifying that you are a jerk or they won’t let you buy in! Like drinking, being a jerk in TV is an Olympic sport.

To be a Villager is to take on the mind-set of a wealthy 7^th or 8^th grader. Only you have no parents or teachers to answer to and you have a full bank account to press your wishes.

One of the places where Villager jerkdom plays out its loudest is in the local restaurants. Villagers treat servers and store clerks like dog shit on their shoe. They are crude, rude and above all..CHEAP! Villagers know..they KNOW..that if they raise any sort of ruckus in a restaurant, they are in for a free meal. They know it and they use it to their advantage. I have never truly understood why the management of the big chain restaurants in TV put up with this. All it would take is for a couple of these managers to grow a spine and stand up for their employees when the Villagers come in and bully them, and it would stop quick. But they do not. Maybe they fear retribution from their landlords at the Morse Machine. But whatever it is, the Villagers know their weakness and they exploit it mercilessly.

My wife spent the majority of her career as an ER Nurse. Recently she transitioned her career to teaching nursing, and is now a professor of nursing at a local college. A great many of her students are single mothers looking to improve their lives and are enrolled in the nursing program. A number of them are also working as restaurant servers, to support their families, and some of them work in the dreaded Villages.

One of her students recently told her an awful story. She works as a server and bar tender in one of the big chain restaurants in TV. Now to begin with, Villagers are notorious for being lousy tippers. Villagers will spend wildly if it is for SHOW. They have no problem with 10 grand for a Rolex to wave under somebody’s nose, a hundred thou for a Mercedes to show off in, or 35 large for a tricked out golf cart. But pay a 20% tip for a meal? Not a chance! For the most part if 2 villagers are eating, the tip will be $2 no matter what the bill comes to. Plus, they will have been rude and unpleasant to the server at ever possible turn.

In this particular case my wife’s student had a table of 8 people and they ate and drank a bill totaling over $600. They were as all Villagers are..difficult to please and rude. At the end after hustling all this food and drink they gave her $20! They took up 3 hours of her time, which essentially equaled $6.66 an hour for her time and service. How sad. And the tale was that the tip was given quite grudgingly.

This happens day in and day out. One day a server at another place where my wife and I were eating told us that if the restaurant gets any complaints about a server from a Villager the server is dismissed! We have always found it amazing how once a server knows that we are not “one of THEM” it is not hard for me to find out information about how they are treated. In fact virtually any server, store clerk..even policeman will tell me how tired they are of the way they are treated by the Villagers.

In the latest story as proudly told on that website for Villager arrogance and stupidity..Talk of The Villages..a couple goes to one of the local chain eateries for a meal. They have their meal, and pay for their dinner. The male signs the check. Somehow, the server forgot to return the man’s credit card. Now instead of calling for the server and asking about the card, the Villagers..being what they are..call for the manager, and accuse the server of STEALING! When called over the server found the card in a pocket in her apron and apologized. Instead of backing up their employee, the manager comped the meal, and the Villager proudly announced that he didn’t leave the little crook one cent as a tip!! While I do not know the ending outcome, I suspect the server is now looking for a new job.

So right at Christmas some young lady is probably looking for a job, and some smug jerk of a Villager is on line telling everybody how he set her straight!

Tiz the season to be a jerk! And what better place to be a jerk than in America’s biggest collection of jerks…The Villages!!

THERE’S NO BUSINESS LIKE SNOW BUSINESS!

I was born and raised in upstate New York so I am used to winter. In fact, I like winter. While I do not go skiing or snowshoeing or snowmobiling, I do like winter. I used to love to plow out my driveway and my neighbors driveways with my tractor and truck.

On the other hand, I do not like Florida. Unfortunately I now live there, and the chance of there being weather in the 30’s much less true winter weather is about as plausible as the thought that Obama will quit hating America one day. Essentially..no chance at all.

Sure a Florida beach can be a great place to spend a couple of weeks when it’s 5 degrees in Owego, NY and there’s 3 feet of snow on the ground, but outside of that, I find Florida to be pretty much useless.

When the Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s holidays roll around on the calendar living in Florida can be downright depressing. There’s no chance that you are going to see snow for Christmas, or even enjoy any sort of seasonable weather. This Christmas day it was 86 with a heat index of 95! Not exactly Kris Kringle weather.

Of course this holiday season while Florida was its usual hot self, the rest of the east coast was way beyond its normal parameters for Christmastime weather. During Christmas week in New York and Pennsylvania people were experiencing 70 degree weather. Wilkes-Barre Pennsylvania television station WNEP was reporting that people were celebrating Christmas on Harvey’s Lake by going boating. Usually this time of year Harvey’s Lake is frozen up or at least colder than Barak Obama’s heart.

The “Global Warming/Climate Change” nutballs are going crazy with the “see I told you so” whining. However, the weather has a much less sinister bend. According to the weather experts at the weekly agricultural newspaper Lancaster Farming, the current spate of unseasonable weather is due to a very strong El Nino weather pattern in the Pacific. It is also expected that the El Nino will collapse as we cross into 2016 and things will return to relatively normal in the near future. In fact as this is being written a great deal of the upper Midwest is experiencing blizzard conditions, and the northeast states are expecting snow and sleet later today and tomorrow.

However all this led me to wondering just how it was that snow became an irreplaceable part of Christmas? Virtually all of Christmas is tied in with snow, yet virtually half of the United States receives little snow, much less in December. Our Christmas songs are all tied into snow. Santa himself arrives in the snow on a sled from the north pole.

Certainly the Christ child for which Christmas is all about, was not born on a snowy night in Rutland, Vermont. He was born in the middle east which wouldn’t know snow from a sneaker. So snow has nothing to do with the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Today’s ever so sophisticated commercial marketing which does its best to destroy any and all of our cherished traditions immediately reverts to sappy snow-laden commercials when it is time to sell the latest techno gizz-whizz to Christmas shoppers. But why?

Whatever it is, those songs, pictures, old movies and stories all bring us back to a simpler time when at one point we’re all happy and polite and the ground around us is white. If we can’t physically experience it, we can at least recall it as Bing Crosby did in his monster hit record White Christmas. Merry Christmas to all!