Hello 'Pussy' it's Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle and Pippi Longstocking:
You dipped in and out of the small dining room off the
Oval Office on Thursday to monitor a television as James B. Comey, the
ousted F.B.I. director, told a tortured tale — and to insist to your
huddled legal team, “I was right.”
Many
Democrats and some legal analysts predicted big trouble for you after Mr. Comey’s blow-by-blow description to the Senate
Intelligence Committee of your efforts to steer the investigation
of your former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, behavior
they think amounted to obstruction of justice.
Betty MacDonald fan club fans,
I'm reading ' The Kettles' Million Dollar Egg ' and enjoy it very much.
It's really very witty!
Ma and Pa Kettle were comic characters who first appeared in the novel The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald. She based them on farming neighbors in Washington state, U.S.A.
In 1996 Betty MacDonald's Family had been interviewed by journalist Wolfgang Hampel who is the author of The Kettles' Million Dollar Egg.
Betty MacDonald's youngest sister Alison Bard knew the real 'Kettles' very well and told the most interesting stories about Betty's exciting experiences with them.
The Kettles' Million Dollar Egg and the interview are as funny as a Ma and Pa Kettle Movie.
This interview has been published on CD/DVD by Betty MacDonald Fan Club in 2009.
Ma and Pa Kettle became the featured characters in a series of popular, light comedic movies in the 1940s and 1950s. The movies revolved around the absurd misadventures of the Kettle clan.
Pa (Franklin Kettle) (played by Percy Kilbride) is a gentle, slow-speaking, slow-thinking and lazy man. His only talents appear to be avoiding work and winning contests. Ma (Phoebe Kettle) (played by Marjorie Main) is larger, raucous, more ambitious and smarter than Pa, but not by much, and can easily be fooled. She is content with her role as mother to a small army of children on their ramshackle farm. At the end of the first film in the series, Pa Kettle wins a modern home that the family moves into. As the series continued, various reasons were devised to have the family relocate to the "old place", sometimes for extended periods of time.
Much of the humor comes from the preposterous situations the Kettles find themselves in, such as Pa being mistaken for a wealthy industrialist or being jailed after he accidentally causes race horses to eat feed laced with concrete. The Kettles first appeared in supporting roles in The Egg and I, starring Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert. After that they starred in a series of their own movies. Main was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1948 for her role in The Egg and I. Main and Kilbride also appeared together in the 1948 Universal film Feudin', Fussin' And A-Fightin'.
The movie also starred Donald O'Connor and Joe Besser. Many have mistaken this movie to be a Kettle film. Main played Maribel Matthews and Kilbride played Billy Caswell. Kilbride retired after making Ma and Pa Kettle at Waikiki. The Pa Kettle character did not appear in The Kettles in the Ozarks. Arthur Hunnicutt played Pa's brother Sedgewick Kettle in that movie and in The Kettles on Old MacDonald's Farm, the last Kettle movie, Parker Fennelly played Pa Kettle.
Take care,
Olof
you can join
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Vita Magica Betty MacDonald event with Wolfgang Hampel, Thomas Bödigheimer and Friedrich von Hoheneichen
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Wolfgang Hampel - Wikipedia ( English )
Wolfgang Hampel - Wikipedia ( English ) - The Egg and I
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Wolfgang Hampel - LinkFang ( German ) Wolfgang Hampel - Academic ( German )
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‘I Was Right’: As Trump Watches Comey on TV, Anxiety Yields to Relief
WASHINGTON
— President Trump dipped in and out of the small dining room off the
Oval Office on Thursday to monitor a television as James B. Comey, the
ousted F.B.I. director, told a tortured tale — and to insist to his
huddled legal team, “I was right.”
Many
Democrats and some legal analysts predicted big trouble for the
president after Mr. Comey’s blow-by-blow description to the Senate
Intelligence Committee of Mr. Trump’s efforts to steer the investigation
of his former national security adviser, Michael T. Flynn, behavior
they think amounted to obstruction of justice.
But
Mr. Trump and many of his aides believe that Mr. Comey’s unexpected
admission that he leaked details of private Oval Office discussions to
the news media, along with questions he raised about the conduct of
Loretta Lynch, President Barack Obama’s second attorney general, has
given them fresh ammunition for a political counterattack that Mr. Trump
badly wants to wage.
“We
know how to fight better than anybody, and we never, ever give up — we
are winners — and we are going to fight,” Mr. Trump told a conference of
conservative evangelicals after he left the West Wing for a brief
public appearance, just as Mr. Comey was wrapping up his nearly three
hours of testimony.
Mr.
Trump’s default defiance masked a deep anxiety and anger, described by
people close to him in recent days, that are anything but typical for
even the most disruptive of presidents. But that eventually gave way to a
sense of relief, however temporary, as Mr. Comey confirmed the
president’s insistence that Mr. Comey had repeatedly told him that he
was not personally under investigation in the inquiry into Russian
election interference.
In
all, Mr. Trump watched only about 45 minutes of Mr. Comey’s testimony,
the people close to the president said. Much of that time was spent
under the eye of his take-charge personal lawyer, Marc E. Kasowitz, and
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, one of the cabinet members he trusts most.
This
was by design, with the president’s tacit consent. His aides packed the
day with meetings and speechwriting sessions, including a 90-minute
sit-down focusing on North Korea, Qatar and the terrorist attacks in
Iran with the national security adviser, H. R. McMaster; Secretary of
State Rex W. Tillerson; and Mr. Mattis.
The idea: Keep Mr. Trump occupied, even-keeled and away from Twitter.
Mr.
Trump, according to two people in his orbit, was preoccupied,
uncharacteristically impassive but in generally decent spirits. Most of
his aides studiously avoided the topic of the hearing, under instruction
from Mr. Kasowitz, who is trying to close the circle of decision-making
on the matter and stem a tide of leaks.
Mr.
Trump’s aides were also acutely conscious of treading lightly to avoid
agitating the president, who has been in a sour and combative mood all
week, according to two people close to the president.
The
president was uncharacteristically disciplined, leaving for his speech
at the Faith and Freedom Coalition event sharply at noon, even while Mr.
Comey’s hearing had 30 more minutes to go. Mr. Trump breezed out of the
Oval Office without any expression of interest in lingering.
There
was pleasure among White House aides with how Republican senators — who
largely avoided taking on the president — performed in the hearing. The
president, who is prone to murmuring while watching television, said at
least once that he had been right about the Hillary Clinton email
investigation — Mr. Comey said he had been uncomfortable when Ms. Lynch
asked him to refer to the criminal inquiry as a “matter” — as well as
that Mr. Comey was a self-promoter.
His
top advisers, especially his chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, were
worried that the president would defy Mr. Kasowitz and take to Twitter
to vent his pique with Mr. Comey, who he believes is on a personal
mission to destroy his presidency. West Wing staff members expressed
relief when the president’s Twitter feed remained quiet even after Mr.
Comey accused him of telling “lies, plain and simple,” in an effort to
smear his reputation and that of the bureau.
The
relief, they fear, might be short-lived. Aides were bracing for some
kind of Twitter eruption on Thursday night or early Friday. Aides
expected the president to either watch the full hearing later in the day
on TiVo, or — potentially worse — simply skip to coverage on Fox News
or CNN, where Mr. Comey’s most damaging comments were playing on a loop.
The
mood in the West Wing, which has taken on an increasingly apprehensive
edge as the Russia investigation has intensified, was especially tense
on Thursday as Mr. Comey spoke, despite a claim by a Trump spokeswoman,
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, in an off-camera briefing at midday that “it’s a
regular Thursday at the White House.”
Staff
members gathered around TV sets and winced at Mr. Comey’s statements,
but shifted immediately when Mr. Comey, to their surprise, revealed that
he had fed a memo to The New York Times through an intermediary to
prompt the appointment of a special counsel.
Mr.
Trump’s team was equally surprised, and encouraged, when Mr. Comey
questioned Ms. Lynch’s actions in the investigation into Mrs. Clinton’s
use of a private email server. Ms. Lynch asked him to call it a “matter”
to protect Mrs. Clinton, a fellow Democrat, Mr. Comey suggested.
But
the sugar highs of Mr. Trump’s early days in office have subsided, and
there was no high-fiving or expressions of relief. Staff members,
especially in the beleaguered White House press office, have become
suspicious that leakers might relay their comments to reporters, and Mr.
Kasowitz has met with many top staff members to advise them against
discussing issues facing the president, even relatively innocuous ones,
telling one aide, “Leave everything to me.”
For
their part, many of Mr. Trump’s aides were less than impressed by the
public performance of Mr. Kasowitz, a lawyer based in New York who has
earned the president’s respect and, for the moment, his situational
obedience. A hastily drafted initial statement to the news media
contained typos — “president” was misspelled — and he delivered it in a
harried monotone, staring down at his text, to reporters gathered at the
National Press Club.
Gradually,
however, the concerns of any single news cycle are giving way to
longer-term worries about the course of the investigation, and several
West Wing aides have expressed concern about the possibility of being
blindsided by new revelations.
Several
current and former Trump aides said they were especially concerned
about Mr. Kasowitz’s unqualified assertion that the president had “never
told Mr. Comey, ‘I need loyalty, I expect loyalty,’” as Mr. Comey said
on Thursday.
“I
can’t believe they are worried about public opinion on a day like this,
when Comey set so many perjury traps for them,” said Jennifer Palmieri,
a veteran Democratic operative who served as Mrs. Clinton’s
communications director during the 2016 campaign.
“Communications
and news cycles don’t matter — they don’t know what is going to hit
them,” added Ms. Palmieri, who served in the White House during
President Bill Clinton’s impeachment. “They are still telling the
president what he wants to hear, and that’s extraordinarily dangerous.”
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