Tom H

Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson

2012-02-01T22:02:00.004-07:00

"Tell me daddy, when I get old, will I be as hoary, inflexible and unpleasant as you have become?" I don't think I ever articulated any such question to my own father, but a guy we thought was our friend asked me essentially that very thing last evening as we sat on the couch playing music that ranged from Oasis to Mr Acker Bilk. This person is 42 going on 14 and a half. He is obsessed with comic book heroes, science fiction fantasy, pie-in-the-sky perpetual motion machines and older men. I guess I should be flattered that someone younger finds me less than repulsive; or at least so I had deluded myself until that query landed in the room with a thud.
Leaving aside the fundamental flaws in his expectations that men old enough to be his dad should find comic book heroes, science fiction fantasy and pie-in-the-sky perpetual motion machines worthy of serious interest; the idea that old people are set in their ways while younger ones strike out on new pathways does have some gravitas. But he is just now discovering this? What set his wheels in motion I think was a recent disagreement he had with some other older guy about leisure activity and interests. The other sexagenarian seemed reluctant to engage in a meaningful talk about comic book heroes, science fiction--- you get the picture-- and Fil became worried that no old people ever seem to find this stuff fascinating. We should all become very afraid should such concepts ever be taken seriously by anyone with a job at a newspaper, magazine, wire service, website or TV network. The age of any such person not grounded in reality would be of superfluous interest.
It is far more profoundly frightening that people of any age would embrace any of these mean, ignorant, pompous, racist republicans who would seek to unseat our current president. One of them or one of their friends or aspirants or hangers-on killed a kitty and scrawled LIBERAL across his battered torso then left it on the front porch of a candidate for Congress in Arkansas who dared run on the Democratic ticket. Another one stated on TV that all liberals should leave the country at once. Another stated that the plight of the very poor is of no interest to him. I resent being in the same prevailing demographic that finds itself taken over by these tea-party boobs, but there is nothing I can do about the inexorable slide toward old age that is overtaking me. What all people of all ages should guard against is backward thinking and fear of progress. I categorically deny being given to such shortcomings.
Do young people think they will always be young? Do they think oldness is some sort of place you might move to but don't have to unless you run out of facebook friends? I laughed out loud when Fil asked if he had nothing to look forward to but oldness. I keep telling myself that enduring the inexorable slide toward mortality beats an express ticket to the end of the line. But if the current President is unseated by any of these vile reptilian lying charlatans, I shall lose all desire to continue wasting energy, food, water and air to stay here and watch it all go down the drain. If the young people of the country fail to mobilize and vote; if their inaction results in the biggest reversal of enlightenment since the War Between the States; if an oligarchy of the super-rich (who are mostly over 50) does wrest control of the dialog, there won't be any new ideas transmitted or thought or adopted by anyone for anyone. At which point it will be better to assume the demeanor of walking dead until I really do die.
September Song as performed by Frank Sinatra on a 1967 record is what got me thinking about this tonight as I sat in the dark pondering the meaning of: "and the days dwindle down to a precious few. . ."

Sing Along With Serge

2011-12-29T22:19:00.003-07:00

My sister always insists on taking credit for my one year in the West High School Concert Choir so I shall get that out of the way right now. Thank you, Rosemarie Higgins Gentry Lau Higgins for urging me to audition way back in 1969. Our father always pretended--for comic effect I believe--to have no musical talent or tone sensitivity, yet at least three of us seven offspring have a distinct ability to carry a tune and support our tone. Rosemarie's gift is the greatest of these and the most developed. So it was grand that she joined me at what was called the absolutely last and final reunion of all choirs from all classes of our now closed-down high school. This took place on 23 December (a week ago now) at Central Methodist Church in Phoenix.
The main attraction at these has been the presence of Serge L. Huff who taught the choir classes from 1954 to 1981 at West Phoenix High School. His age is discreetly kept secret but he has to be 80 if he is a day. One guy in the impromptu bass section had graduated in 1956; he sat next to some guys who hailed from 1981. The records show that some ninety people registered to sing this year with at least as many present to give moral support and applause at the end. Did I mention this was not a mere gathering to reminisce but a full-on rehearsal and concert in the church for at least a hundred souls? It was.
Back in 1970, I thought I was a pretty good tenor even though I never had any formal training or lessons. In fact I am not even a dilettante as the karaoke library on my computer attests. Still I sang my heart out as we ripped through cold readings of some Christmas warhorses and some unfamiliar but haunting and evocative numbers. The most moving of these was a Norma Luboff arrangement of Still Still Still which had an easy tenor part that I did sort of nail.
Our performance in the church sanctuary was one goose-bump moment after another for me who had not done any such group singing in 41 years. The majority of those present for this had never stopped doing it for very long; they are in church or community choirs where sight reading and following the conductor's subtle cues are second nature. Am I saying they did not have goose-bump moments? You will have to ask them. The person who deserves the most credit and praise is Serge Huff himself, though, for having the ability to reach out to "the kids" and convey his respect and admiration and gratitude for our collective ability to give voice to the marks on a page. He does this without trying, without artifice, without any ulterior motive. His desire is to create a living cloud of music for a roomful of listeners. He does it with his baton and his eyes and his silently moving mouth parts. And his heart is in there somewhere too.
The mutual admiration society that has formed over these generations--and I include the children and grandchildren of those on hand--had a profound effect on me for at least a few hours. My own cold heart warmed a bit as I felt the power of our mutual affection for each other. It was not about believing in a christmas miracle or a church-mandated belief system. It was not about the abject blind faith of the Hallelujah chorus. It was the human analog to wolves howling in unison at the moon, or birds chirping in an aviary, or whales moaning their unfathomable choruses. It moved me. We moved each other. And then we got in our cars and drove away from each other maybe for the last time.

Woof Woof

2011-12-28T23:23:00.002-07:00

Even though I had not yet finished reading The Art Of Racing In The Rain today when I recommended it to a friend, I knew it was going to be emotionally difficult to complete it. This evening in the dark of my quiet room, I cried like an infant as I closed it. Carl brought it home from the library a few days ago and he would read it while I watched football or played records. He would not say much about it; no intimation as to whether it was good or dumb or breezy or maudlin. At the end, he announced he had finished it. That was all. It was my discovery to make with no preconceptions or colorations.
I will resist the temptation to rave about it; maybe you will find it dumb or maudlin. I did not. The guy who wrote it is named Garth Stein but I have resisted the temptation to google him or the book or to try and dig into it on wikipedia. The thing stands on its own at least for now and I am feeling myself react to it viscerally and with more emotion than I knew I could feel. I think it best I give you the chance to do the same and then we can talk about it later some more.

One Percent

2011-12-05T23:12:00.003-07:00

Lately I have been harboring hatred for the super-rich with all the Occupy Wall Street action (or inaction as it has usually been) focusing attention on how bad it is for the other 99 percent of the population. And yet I recently found myself pal-ing around with one of my friends who while not in the uppermost one percent is certainly living like he is in the top ten percent. To wit, the 2004 Ferrari 360 Spider his business bought recently. It will soon go to a new owner since these cars are not exactly easy to master and a sudden and unforeseen breakup of his business and personal relationship with the partner is forcing its surrender to someone far away. When I found out that the car was a short-timer in its Tucson garage, I shamelessly begged to at least be photographed with it as no other brush with such a car would ever be likely again in my lifetime.
Well, not only did George take some static images, he offered me a cockpit seat for what was probably a six or eight mile run in the waning minutes of sunlight on a blustery and prematurely cold sunday afternoon in the desert southeast of town.
What does it feel like to drive a Ferrari? A red modern day computer controlled emission legal Italian iconic sports car worth more than my house?
It is quieter inside than I thought it would be.
It rides smoother than I expected.
It has a thumpy, low-fi sound system.
It rattles and squeaks around the top and windows.
The legroom is not sufficient for me at 6'2."
The leather stitching on the doors and dash is irregular and obviously done by a human.
The turn signal sounds like a baby bird crying for its mother to spit up into its gaping maw.
The engine howls all the time even when it is not being revved up. There is no roar or scream or burble; just a leashed sense of being held back as it idles at a red light. There is no clutch pedal or direct control over engagement. When the light turns green, you push the accelerator to run the RPMs up to about 3000 at which point the clutch automatically starts s-l-o-w-l-y releasing. Once launched, the car will just wind up to 8500 if you want before bumping itself to 2d. Top gear is number 6 shown with a little yellow number in between the tach and speedo. 8500 in 6th would be at least 150 mph I figure. I left it in auto mode so I would not get the paddles mixed up. These batwing flappers protrude from either side of the steering wheel; one says up and one says down. Getting them confused in my brain at 6000 RPM would not be good for the car or my relationship with my friend George so I let the computer do its transmission management thing. The sense of the engine power being a few inches behind your shoulders ramming you into the wind changes the entire dynamic. Yes you are controlling the power; but you are really just a little rag doll in the rottweiler's mouth.
Does it feel good? Well, yes it does. Would it make me ashamed if I had the money to spend on such a thing and did so? After a while yes. But in the beginning and for what would be an all too short but porn-movie fantasy honeymoon, the respect this thing commands because of its unabashed unapologetic unnecessary snottiness obviates its many faults.
For the rest of what will be the waning years of human technical exploration and exploitation of fossil fuel for personal transport, a device such as this will have been the pinnacle. Nothing before it or after it achieves what it does. Human greed has ruined the planet probably irrevocably. Many Ferrari owners of the world might be among those guilty for that crime. I do not consider my friends to be evil or greedy or ruinous people. They made the money to buy this car from selling a promise of romance and sexual stimulation on the internet to people who choose voluntarily to authorize charges on their credit cards for those services. Until that is criminalized, I guess they are entitled to enjoy the superlative things life in the fast lane offers. Thank you to my friends George and Mario for their unselfishness and their crassness and their ballsiness.

Dan Fogelberg? Gay.

2011-11-29T22:50:00.004-07:00

A renewed acquaintance with a vinyl record can take you back, WAY back, to times in your life when you played it a lot and "got really into it" so much so that you neglected to grow up and mature and get serious. This is happening to me right now as I crack open an unplayed, factory-sealed LP of Captured Angel recorded in 1975 by Dan Fogelberg. It came into our store buried in a pile of dusty moldy records that will end up on the shelves for a couple dollars each. This one still had its price tag from 1980-something: $5.99 at Sound Warehouse.
When this thing was made, he was 24, I was 23. He was from Illinois, I am from Indiana. His father was a teacher. My father was a teacher. He was one of the most gifted and prolific musicians of his time. I . . .well, I can play records on my fancy stereo. As I was going through a time of self-doubt and self-examination and self-recrimination, Dan Fogelberg songs touched many nerves and sometimes brought tears to my eyes. OK this is ridiculous: a grown man bawling his eyes out listening to some other grown man wail about his lost love or his own self-doubts. But it was a part of my past and now here he is again singing from the speakers thirty-some years on and evoking the same feelings. Call this a maudlin, wallowing exercise in self-everything; I plead guilty.
I looked up some biographical information about him: three marriages, no children. Died of prostate cancer in 2007. He wore his emotions on his sleeve through a slew of record albums and song cycles. He admitted in interviews he had not been successful in relationships. The vast majority of his songs are about failed ones; he claims the ideas came from hearing about other people's failures. The human mind has a scary ability to project its own foibles and distortions onto the lives of others; weird how all my friends seem to suffer from the same narcissistic histrionic tendencies that I do. . . A gay person who is cursed with feeling all his emotions so keenly should not immerse himself in music performed from the heart by a man who feels his emotions so keenly and gives voice to them so powerfully. Yet I do so all the time and now find myself wondering if Dan Fogelberg might ever have been aware how gay his outlook was. Nothing in any published interview suggests any such thing, but my mapping projector will be focused like a laser on the five disks of his I now have--looking for clues that he was a kindred spirit. Now THAT is REALLY ridiculous when I hear myself say it out loud. But how many straight-arrow male singer-songwriter-performers have left so many heart-wrenching songs about sad love affairs in their catalog as Dan Fogelberg did?

Ignore It And It Will Go Away

2011-11-28T22:18:00.003-07:00

The analysis media (which is not the same as the news media) again today put forth the disquieting but inescapable notion that a racial animus exists in the country; the result of which could be the ruin of us all. I might suggest we all examine ourselves and see what can be done about this before it is too late. It is not the first time we have heard this postulated by the more shrill among us: Arianna Huffington, Elizabeth Warren, Robert Reich, Alec Baldwin. . .but today it came up again on the Diane Rehm Show from WAMU in DC. Nobody on the panel was a firebrand or rabble-rouser; unless Fairfax county think tanks and MSNBC have hardened suddenly. It was from there that today's panel was drawn.
One person today, I think it was Michelle Bernard, stated her belief that this undercurrent of hatred for the president due to his ethnicity is coloring the debate on all things political. All the people who have lined up against him are united in their unspoken but deep negativity. They claim to be champions of states' rights or limited government or supply-side economics or all of that claptrap. But they nurture a sickness of their own souls that they would never admit to. The destiny of the republic hangs in the balance according to the panel; though Diane herself seemed reluctant to take that view. She does a superb job of letting her guests and the callers produce the show on the air under her subtle and polite control.
Later today after all this had played out, the news of Barney Frank's retirement from Congress broke. One reason he gave is that his district has been gerry-mandered out from under him by a redistricting commission made up of black- and gay-hating republicans. OK, the last part I am inserting but the first part is straight from his mouth. When it reaches this point, when the tea party-ers and luddites have gained this much control of the agenda and outcomes, it might be suggested we just fold up and go home. Occupy Wall Street will be doing just that literally as they succumb to the storm troopers on city payrolls everywhere who freely beat and gas them on TV to silent indifference on the part of viewers. A once-in-a-generation opportunity has been squandered by an unwashed horde of iPad-ers and Smart-Phoners whose faces were buried too deeply in their glass screens to see the forest being hacked to pieces all around them. That is my tortured attempt to say metaphorically that OWS could not see the trees or the forest or the forest for the trees. They were too busy trying to not look too scary or too militant or too agenda-driven or ever-so-slightly organized. The result was they knocked themselves to the ground with their inaction and lack of purpose. And the white-hooded cross-burners can savor another victory they won without so much as flicking their BICs.
Ignoring bigotry, fascism, exploitation of the working class by the ruling class, concentration of wealth, and the naked exercise of raw power to enforce this code of cruelty on shrinking numbers of thinking people will not result in a reversal of this retrograde movement. It will only allow it to get worse. It will institutionalize the erosion of civil rights. It will ingrain fear and loathing. It will make things even more "right" than they have already become. My mother's wishful thinking as expressed in her well-meaning words of encouragement to me when I came home from school bullied by mean kids did not work then and they do not work in today's climate where the temperature continues to rise with every discharge of a pepper-spray can.

The Whiteness of Wonder Bread

2011-10-25T22:20:00.002-07:00

Pat Buchanan is making the media rounds hawking his new book which purports to make the case that America is committing sociological suicide. If I understand his position correctly, it sounds like he wants to return to the 1950s world of Father Knows Best, Perry Mason, Bonanza and Peter Gunn where "diversity" was just entering the lexicon but only in reference to buying General Motors, Kraft Foods and RCA stock instead of only IBM. He blames the decline of the big bad good old USA on an embrace of gay rights, women's rights, abortion, free thinking and probably integration too that all began in those awful 1960s. He almost had me converted in some tiny ways to his logic until his defense of abuses by Catholic clergy took the train off the rails. But we are not here to discuss the peripheral and tangential.
One point he harped on constantly was English language usage. He is taking a hard line against immigration, and defending his take-no-prisoners stance by claiming that previous generations were assimilated into the melting pot with minimal resistance. This latest group though is demanding multi-cultural tolerance by white Americans (who were here first), according to Pat, and this is going to divide the country into brown and white mainly along the southwest border where I happen to live. I am a bit ashamed to admit that I am getting totally sick and tired of hearing all spanish names trilled, enhanced and purposely latino-ized by local radio and TV newspeople. I am tired of hearing spanish guitar music punctuating advertising about latino events and mexican restaurants. I am only here because I am stuck here; the economic freedom to move about the country and make a new life for myself is gone. It has been taken from just about everyone over the age of 30, everyone who has a mortgage on a house, and everyone who has no portable health care. I strike out on all three so here I sit helplessly observing the haboob of humanity sweeping up from the south with no guns in the house to fend them off. Just my two dogs; one of whom is actually part coyote so a lot of help she will be if push comes to shove.
If Pat Buchanan is correct that the USA will be a third world country by 2025, that would mean that the majority of the now-middle class will become part of a super-huge lower class. Even a majority of the now-upper class will also lose their status leaving a mathematically tiny ruling elite of super rich to buy whatever protection they need against the rest of us who will fight amongst ourselves for the last scraps of gasoline, electricity, water, landfill space, oxygen and an illusion of security in our homes and on our persons. Now isn't that a great reason to make more babies?
Pat was all over the map on the radio show I heard this morning, but one point he made was especially chilling. It had to do with Russia. Under the previous fascist totalitarian regime, the country was held together by fear and force. Once the constrictions were released, the place descended into chaos. The Chechens, the Georgians, the Lithuanians, the Latvians, the Uzbeks. . .and on and on. . .asserted their ethnicity and killed each other in movie theaters, schools, subway stations and anywhere the mob gained strength over the facade of law enforcement. If he is predicting the same fate will befall us here, then yes he is correct in saying we have already started committing national suicide.
I have no idea how all this ties up into a giant all-encompassing theory of how to fix what is wholly wrong with the entire gestalt of the slow-dance meltdown of the self-delusion known as regulated capitalism. But I will try. If only the European debt crisis could be seen for what it truly is and renamed something like "the collapse of propped-up bankrupt burned out banks and governments who have no where to turn when they can no longer lean on each other," some serious solutions might come to light. The system we saddled ourselves with as the 20th century dawned had its golden age for a couple of generations. Thank you to my grandparents and Andy Rooney for what you accomplished. But now there is no substantive wealth or tangible assets left to protect, promulgate or build on. All that is left to protect is paper wealth of corporations and banks. Real people making real objects and making real wages are now just quaint anachronistic fictional concepts. When this sobering fact is realized fully by all the people affected so adversely by it, the only means of preventing mass murder of the masses by the masses will be an iron hand of worldwide nationalization of resources and markets on a scale of socialized everything the like of which has never been contemplated let alone implemented overnight. Is it possible that the far right secretly knows this? That they see our current president as a guy who also knows it but has a secret plan to build a newer world order that will preserve some human dignity for the everymans of the planet? A plan that will prevent them from cementing their hold on economic power? Is that why they hate him so much? Is that why Pat Buchanan has no whole grain bread in his kitchen?
The immigration and naturalization battle is a smokescreen puppet show designed to conceal the true nature of the unavoidable and looming conflict: the rich control freaks against the rest of humanity.

When Is Not Good Enough Not Good Enough?

2011-09-14T21:09:00.002-07:00

The Carterization of our current President is probably going to just get worse until his irrelevancy overtakes what is left of his promise. One has to wonder exactly when Jimmy accepted that he would be returning to peanut farming and elder statesmanship sooner than later; was it before or after he realized he was causing the malaise? If Obama ever comes to accept that he might be the source of a widespread lack of confidence in the future, would he have the courage and selflessness to not run for the second term?
If you look at the effectiveness of FDR, Truman, Johnson and Clinton--probably in descending order--it could be said that their swagger and guts prevailed whenever their intellectualism proved inadequate. Carter had nothing to fall back on when his brainiac mind got in the way of taking action. If the raid to kill Bin Laden had ended up with crashed war machines as did the abortion Carter ordered to try and get back the Iranian hostages, there is no doubt Obama's tailspin would be in progress already. My point is that these two smart guys have not enough fire in their bellies to really fight back effectively. We should have seen this coming during the election but the glitz and the novelty of it all hid the truth. I can only hope Mr President sees how his own character flaws are steering the mood of the electorate into a depressed state of mind and finances in time to reverse the dive.
I don't mean to be unkind; the characteristics that propelled him to this pedestal are admirable and possessed by precious few mortals. But they are not ones that he can now draw upon to take us to the next level. What he needs he does not seem to have. Will he find it? Will he grow a set? Will he realize while there is till time that he must change and adapt? Or will he resign himself to elder statesmanship practiced from Hawaii as the youngest failed ex-President in modern times? Of all the places to lick your wounds and write your memoirs. . . At least he and the girls will be in paradise while the rest of us head for oblivion led by some tea party pinhead.

How Disapponited Should We Be?

2011-09-06T21:19:00.002-07:00

The Good For Nothing One Hundred and Twelfth Congress continues to earn its place at the bottom of history and drags the Forty Fourth President down with them. The first part of that is OK unless you consider the total amount of their salaries and that of their staff members. Upon doing that math, you will either blanche or turn red--is there a word for turning red?--depending on whether you are a person given to resignation or a person given to violence.
The second part is not OK unless you are a racist turd like Mitch McConnell or Jim DeMint. White southerners still find pleasure in lynching black people for sport; only now they use giant hopped up pickup trucks as shown on tonight's CBS Evening News With Scott Pelley. McConnell and DeMint are different only in that they use TV cameras and microphones to transmit hate speech that undermines the President's credibility and renders him impotent and powerless. No matter how he tries to brush off the rotten tomatoes, raw eggs and general filth hurled at him from the right, our POTUS comes off like a schoolyard brainiac who everyone loves to deride if not hate for his insight that diminishes all inferior beings by its very being. Whether he can manage to get free of these snapping rusty traps and bolt from the pack to once again inspire and engage remains to be seen. If he does not, and a reptile like Perry or Romney takes over the free world seventeen months from now, we who care about humanity reaching the star trek future might all do well to form our own terrorist group to plan a nuclear annihilation of the eastern seaboard of our doomed country. The sooner it is reduced to ashes, the sooner a complete rebuild from a clean sheet of paper can begin.
The real tragedy of the events of ten years ago which are about to be paraded before us again on television for the umpteenth time as a propaganda ploy to prop up the twisted history left by GWB 43 is that the crazed arabs missed their best targets. The World Trade Center was just a big ugly building designed to make money for Donald Trump wannabes. The fact it housed secret CIA offices made it a target of some peripheral interest. Its loss should be a footnote in history by now instead of the enshrined event of grossly exaggerated proportions it has become thanks to the relentless PR machine that is New York City Incorporated. If the Shenksville airliner had made it back to hit the Capitol or the White House, we would have had something to REALLY celebrate at this time of the falling leaves. The people who were in charge then and who left all these poison stink bombs lying about like so many shrapnel mines would have been wiped off the earth and we might have had a fighting chance to take back control of our own destiny. Instead we have all been fitted with electronic choking anti-bark collars so they can tighten their grip on free thought, a green agenda and any chances for peace. More endless wars, more diversion of shrinking resources and more fear-mongering hate: all of it controlled by media and networking so advanced in its ability to secretly manipulate that it does not even know the extent to which it is being manipulated. Much less how to reverse the drop down the slippery slope.
It is so disappointing to see what we have become. When we had so much hope and promise, to end up like this is disappointment on a cataclysmic scale. Those stupid hi-jackers should have spent six more months in school and practicing. Had they waited a bit longer to make sure nothing went wrong, I for one would have much more to celebrate on whatever the anniversary of their attack might have been. Now there is a computer simulation I would find an intriguing exercise in what-might-have-been.

Don't Wet Your Lips So Close to the Microphone

2011-08-13T22:10:00.002-07:00

Today I was invited onto Jake Feinberg's Radio Show on KJLL 1330 AM here in Tucson. We talked for about a half hour on analog vs digital music and other such topics as they relate to my job at Stereo Hospital. If you go to the URL you can listen to it. The first guy who spoke into a radio microphone almost burned his mouth off. The microphone was so hot it needed water cooling. But in December of 1906, he did what no one else had ever done: he went on the air live. When I did that today, my oral tissue was in no danger. But I felt a rush just like Carl Fessenden did on that day one hundred five years ago. Thank you for listening.

http://thomashjr.podbean.com

MAS*H Music

2011-07-05T22:31:00.002-07:00

Not very many people can sing the words to the music that opened the most popular TV show of the 1970s and 80s; that is probably a not so-freudian slip of the mental blocks since the theme of the song is even darker than the show. If I remind you that the chorus goes something like: "suicide is painless, it brings a lot of changes, and I can take or leave it if I try. . ." you will probably stop reading this and email me to call my local hotline. Please relax. I have no intention of leaving this realm on purpose.
Over this past weekend, I dragged myself over the southern end of the Sierra mountains and into Palm Springs, California for a rendezvous with a friend who lives in Seattle. He likes to go there in the dead heat of the summer to work on his tan. He checks himself in to what is euphemistically called a gay resort for a couple of weeks in a vain hope of finding a husband. After four tries in five years, he has come up frustrated, angry, dejected and on occasion, borderline suicidal at least on the phone with me within a few days of concluding one of these quixotic quests. I have never felt the need to stage an intervention or call the police or anything so dramatic. His moods wax and wane like anyone's do. So far he is holding on to life for all its slings and arrows.
Gliding past the eastern shore of the putrid and unused Salton Sea on my drive home, I picked up KCRW out of Santa Monica on the car radio well enough to hear most of a radio documentary produced by a unit of American Public Media or Public Radio International or some such entity. It was about suicide and if you do a google search for it, you can find it and stream it on your computer. It started out discussing the Verthe effect wherein the reporting of a dramatic or prominent suicide can cause more suicides to take place within a short time. Various experts debated the veracity of this notion for a while, then the emphasis shifted to Hungary where the rate of suicide is double that here in the US. You are probably wondering why I did not switch to another station or put in a CD. It was because of the compelling nature of the inquiry which at one point asked itself if the very broadcast of the show could cause more suicides as the Verthe effect had first done over two hundred years ago. It also asked the listener to consider if suicide is ever rational. Schopenhauer's name came up, and then an economist stated this simple equation: When the terror of living outweighs the terror of dying, suicide becomes rational.
I am not sure how the accuracy of some of the so-called facts presented could be confirmed, but one struck me in particular: a third to a half of all persons who kill themselves make the decision to do so in FIVE SECONDS OR LESS. The idea of an elaborate plan with all details worked out in advance is not necessarily mythology but it would seem the exception and not the rule. Around the time this revelation was coming through the ether, I was traveling on a two lane two way farm road in rural southeast California. On either side of the pavement were fields of fruit and vegetables over which swooped and chattered red-wing blackbirds. The speed limit was 65 and one could count the other vehicles encountered in ten minutes on one hand. The sun was shining through a heavy humid haze, and I noticed a huge semi coming toward me on the other side of the road. As it approached and our closing combined speed exceeded 125 miles per hour, I flashed on the utter simplicity and swiftness of ending it all by pointing this Kia rental car squarely at the grille of the Peterbilt. It whizzed by and I caught my breath. Within a minute, another one approached and the same thoughts came to me only this time I raced through the aftermath of enterprise rental car trying to charge American Express for the full value of a 2011 Kia Forte with 27 thousand miles on it. Or what would be left of it.
Mercifully, the show came to a conclusion and I could only shake my head in wonder at how tenuous, meaningless and fragile life is. Those are the very reasons to preserve and value it of course, but there was no mention of that in the script. Once the underwriter credits had been reeled off, the host of the next hour's music show opened his microphone and wondered aloud why anyone would put a show like that on the air over the July Fourth Weekend. As his muttering faded out, he brought up the slider for the turntable up to full: Bobby McFerrin slopping his way through Don't Worry Be Happy. I would strongly suggest that if you made it to the end of this essay, you now find that song and play it for yourself. For the better part of three miles of lonely rural highway, I cried my eyes out for my own dear life as it came over the air. May you do the same.

Sam the Chow

2011-06-13T12:32:00.003-07:00

"You gotta go get this dog." My mother was calling from her house on the other side of Mingus Mountain on a sunny saturday in the fall of 1996. We were living in Prescott in those days; our dog Ginger was a bit of a cantankerous long haired spaniel-mix who was a pretty good watchdog on our semi-rural property. She was not afraid to charge a javelina on the front porch, so bringing another dog into the pack was not anything we might be doing on a whim.
"But, Mom, we already have Ginger and. . .well, we don't really need more animals."
"Yes but the people are moving; we had stopped at their yard sale and if nobody takes this dog, he is going to the pound and you know what will happen then. . ."
We got the address which was about 2o miles away and packed Ginger into the Jeep Wagoneer Limited. We thought it best to see how they would get along before committing ourselves. Down a dirt road to a hard-scrabble mobile home we bounced, from which bolted a couple of big dobermans or shepherds all teeth and snarl as we pulled in. This can't be right I said to Carl but about that time, a furry red chow ambled out from behind a car and just stood surveying the scene silently. The human owner appeared and once the bad boys had been rounded up we were introduced to Sam. His ears were straight up, his nose in the wind, his shoulders square and that signature Chow tail curved over his back vibrating with the slightest quiver of welcome. As we disembarked and walked toward him with our hands out, his ears dropped back, his tail loosened up into a giant wag-fest, and he smiled. He came right to us and we crouched down to his face. That big black tongue with a tiny pink cleft at the tip fell out of his black jowly mouth and we shared our first kiss. He had been picked out of a box of free puppies off the back of a pickup truck in Mayer, Arizona a few months before. And it was pretty obvious why.
The young man in his 30-s confirmed my mom's story but added that they were giving up on Arizona. Too hard to make a living, he said, with a lot of disappointment. He was packing up his family and the other dogs for the return voyage to western Pennsylvania where he was assured of finding work again as a bowling alley pin-setting mechanic. But there was no room in the caravan for Sam, the latest arrival. Last in, first out is one method of inventory control I guess.
The big test would be Ginger's tolerance for this young buck (though he had been neutered already) which everyone passed with not so much as a curled lip. We told the owner we would have to think about it and get back to him. He said they would be pulling out in a week, and the clock started. When we got home, the phone machine was flashing. My mother's anxious voice crackled through off the tape: "Well?? Did you go get him yet? Call me right away. Love You, Mom"
A few days went by and we phoned the guy to see if anyone else had adopted Sam.
"I was hoping you guys would call back. A few other people came by but we held him back because you three seemed like the best home for him. Please come and get him; we are leaving tomorrow." Within hours, he was ours and re-named Fred to which he began answering within a couple of days.
Over the next fourteen and a half years, he became our son, our brother, our pack-mate and our guardian. He suffered the addition of the giant and gangly Barney and the rambunctious and playful Pebbles to the group, but never lost his commanding presence and never really acquired any sense of humor about anything. Play-squeaky toys were beneath him and unworthy of any attention. But a cat meow-ing in the yard or a big blackbird sipping from the edge of the pool sent him into full patrol mode in a heartbeat. Fred was all business, and he was always given the wide berth he deserved.
For most of his prime years, he was the Brad Pitt of dogs. He had perfect proportions, great hair, piercing eyes and that take-me-or-leave-me attitude of confidence that exuded from every hair; attractive individuals can cast that spell on the rest of us without even trying. But underneath, he was a soft furry lover boy. He slept with us for a dozen years; only recently giving up on leaping to the bed in a single bound.
His twice daily trips to the dry wash at the end of our alley had become an ordeal over the last few months. Canine Aleve did seem to give him new vigor, but it was just an illusory and transitory sense of artificial energy. The other two dogs would literally be running circles around him as he became content to vicariously but detachedly go through the motions of looking for birds, lizards or other humans walking their dogs.
Friday evening, he had to be carried back to our house from the excursion. Saturday he could barely get to the edge of the patio much less out the gate. All through saturday night he barely slept; crying out every few minutes with a plaintive and distressed howl that the other two showed zero reaction to. They correctly perceived that he was not alerting us to an intruder; he was in pain and other dogs do not seem to have any programming to deal with that. I moved the futon mattress to his side on the bedroom floor and slept there within reach of him until dawn awoke me. He was quiet for the first time in several hours; breathing heavily and not exactly steadily. I began to wish he would just stop and let himself go. And then I would hate that thought and the tears would start. The picture above was taken sometime that evening by Carl.
Sunday he did get down the hallway on his own but the struggle was taxing. His hips had a fraction of the strength he needed to support his 50 pounds; his big shoulders doing all the work but falling short. He dropped to his side on the kitchen floor where he stayed until evening when we hefted him to our bed so we could console him and comfort him as his cries became more tortured and frequent.
This morning, we phoned the doctor and arranged to have him there at 11 o'clock. We had gotten him onto a makeshift litter consisting of an old beach towel and into the back of Carl's Jeep. He had now lost the ability to raise his head or neck, but his eyes were bright and darting to and fro as he tried to process what was happening. In the old days, a chance to get in the car and stick his head out the window was a fun treat, but this drive was not to be like that.
The veterinarian came into the room and petted him with one hand; the syringe safely capped in her other hand. I crouched to the edge of the metal table, and rested my chin an inch from his dry nose. He had me fixed in an inquiring stare as the drug entered his system. Carl's arm was touching mine as he stroked that cute little cowlick he had always had running up his forehead. It took several minutes for his breathing to slow. I asked the doctor if she would have told us if we were making a mistake; she swiftly answered that indeed she would have and that indeed this was not a mistake but the only sane and fair thing to do.
The stalwart fireplug that had owned Badger Mountain and Pantano Wash and Anklam Wash did not want to let go easily; the doctor had to prepare a second half-dose which did its job in less than a minute. My hand was on his chest when I felt his heart stop.
They will keep the towel which absorbed Fred's final bladder purge, and return it to us washed along with his ashes next Tuesday.
I have to get back to work now, and focus on the rest of my life. If that pin-setting mechanic in Pennsylvania is reading this, I say thank you for introducing us to the finest human being that ever walked on all fours and could wag his tail.

How Many L-s in Unraveling?

2011-06-01T22:18:00.002-07:00

It probably does not matter whether canceled has two L-s or one L because that is what has happened to the Revolution that was supposed to fix this. There will be no repair of this broken Twenty First Century of the Common Era. In case you have your head in the sand or you are hoping against hope that the portfolio of retirement investments you are resting on does not prove to be yet another Ponzi scheme, capitalism is finished. It has utterly failed to accomplish anything but hasten the demise of the civilization it wants to take credit for creating. The system on which our entire facade of prosperity has been built is collapsing. It was never meant to hold up this much greed, ignorance and short-sightedness. Whatever slim chance for an overhaul existed, it has been reduced to a negative imaginary number by the people who run Fox News and paid for Boehner and McConnell's campaigns among many others. They will have their way with us and it will consist mainly of a dictatorship over the proletariat by the elite ruling class.
What little intelligent dialog there was about what it would really take to turn the world around has been cut off. That is because the ugly truth cuts deep and hurts painfully. Nobody wants to accept that, within a generation, we are at risk of a descent into another medieval Dark Ages of our own making.
Air America was silenced when it tried to ask the hard questions and demand real answers. NPR has stopped trying for fear of offending its wolves-in-sheeps'-clothing benefactors. And the Main Stream Media are run by people who make NPR's benefactors look like Mandela and Ghandi. Print is vanishing so fast it might as well be using disappearing ink for the few eyeballs it can still deliver to its advertisers. If you don't already know how bad it really is, you never will. Please don't try and tell me that the ephemeral, vacuous, hackable internet is our savior. It is our undoing even if I use it to stay in touch with my friends and family. In truth it helps no one except the airlines and travel industry to keep its reservations arranged. Any other benefits are imaginary and trumped up by capitalists eager to profit from electrons darting about. Nor do the so-called, self-praising social media who take credit for toppling Middle Eastern tyrants deserve any good grace. Spreading rumor, gossip, innuendo, lies and sensationalism is not enlightening. It is not journalism. The sacred and revered and unregulated internet is in fact directly responsible for thousands of bloody deaths and injuries just in the last few months and many more will follow.
The real revolution that is sorely needed will not take place. It will be supplanted by a two dimensional skype-version of itself that will be unreal, unhelpful, undemocratic and unjust.
Why am I always frowning? This is why.

Just Some Ranting and Venting

2011-05-25T22:36:00.003-07:00

What else is a personal blog really for anyway if you can't just spill your guts?
Number One: These images of prisoners kept in phone booth-sized boxes in a gymnasium, and piled on top of one another in bunks just so the prison guard union in California can get six figure pensions when they retire to their mountain or beach retreats make me want to see the legislators who voted in these mean-spirited "three strikes" laws mowed down at their desks in Sacramento by a two-fisted Schwarzenegger-like commando wielding automatic weapons.
Number Two: Gabrielle Giffords needs to quit her job and fire her staff. She can't lead, she can barely follow doctor's orders so she must get out of the way. For her to continue drawing her annual pay of $174,000 and have the taxpayers financing her million dollars worth of care and rehab while the half a million people in her district have no voice in their government --please don't make me count kyl and mccain as actual human voices-- is wrong. Someone in the Democratic Party stated recently that since the Republicans were in power, the temporary incapacitation of a minor member of the minority party was insignificant. OK, if she is insignificant --and I am truly sorry that she is-- then send her away and let's start over.
Number Three: The ads on TV for iPhones and SmartPhones and Blackberries and iPads and all these flat glass pancake micro-miniaturized un-fixable spy machines are insulting and rude. Apparently, if I don't have one, then I just don't have any value. Ad agencies have done this kind of thing ever since electronic mass media were invented. But the relentless assault of these insidious appeals to insecurity and inadequacy are a new low even for Madison Avenue.
Number Four: The glut of reality TV shows and talent showcases and challenge contests have taken the medium so far into a cesspool of pedantic vapidity that Joni Mitchell's warning in a song she wrote 25 years ago about the three stimulants of the exhausted masses is now just a quaint childish rhyme. Artifice, Brutality and Innocence can apparently be combined into endlessly varied combinations and spewed over the air so cheaply that all the networks are clearing their schedules of thoughtful, clever, compelling fiction and amusement to make way for this claptrap. Please don't ask me if I watch any of the Dancing, Singing, Posturing, Racing, Maneuvering or otherwise contrived spontaneity that has knocked "&#*! my dad says" off the air.
Number Five: Israel's right to exist in the first place --or should I say their failure to possess a right to exist in the first place-- is and always will be the elephant in the room which no one will talk about. It needs to be talked about. The rude, pompous, self-entitled Bebe Netanyahu who struts about on the world stage like we all still owe him a way bigger country than we already gave him after what Hitler did to those poor people needs to be taken down a peg. Shooting him will solve nothing. Previous assassinations of Sadat and other jewish leaders changed none of the material facts. The other elephant in the room is that until the US and its dutiful sycophantic followers forsake and condemn the terrorism and meanness that Israel visits on its neighbors in the name of preserving its own "security," the threat of muslim attacks on the US will remain real and yes: JUSTIFIED. Until we grasp that simple fact and act accordingly, we are in danger and it is our own fault.
Number Six: Piling on the corpse of Osama Bin Laden by David Letterman, for one, is unseemly and jingoistic. But he was not alone. Rejoicing was rampant. Michael Moore was one of the few tiny voices saying wait a minute; this is not an appropriate cause for celebration. You got to hand it to Barack: he stated we should not spike the football in the endzone. But this was drowned out by all sorts of flag-waving ground zero reminders from where else? New York City like it has some god-given pre-eminent right to exist. See number five above. What is really unfortunate about the attacks visited on lower Manhattan that day nine years and eight months ago is that the targets were improperly selected. Had the headquarters of the big brokerage houses and the NYSE itself had been wiped out, there might have been a chance for some real progress. Knocking down two big glass skyscrapers had plenty of symbolic appeal, but all it really accomplished was strengthening the FBI police state. If any would-be successors to the late Al Quada leader are reading this, please do the world a big favor next time and wipe Wall Street from the face of the earth.
Number Seven: NPR is just no longer worth paying any attention to. Everyday it is a new list of young tongue-tied interns trying to sound earnest and important as they plod through stories that begin with a huge swooshing sound: some days it is the powerful wind from a storm everybody already saw on TV the night before. Other days it is the engine noise from Air Force One landing at a foreign port of call where the G8 summit's agenda is explained in details that would bore the VP of the World Bank to drink. It might be a clickety clack noise about how great it is to ride a bicycle to work instead of driving your car. It might be a fluttery noise of pages ruffling to introduce a giant commercial for a memoir by one of their reporters who has seen it all from the aftermath of 9/11 to the command posts of the Air Force Drones deep in the mountains of Nevada. It is self serving garbage heaped up on expensive china by prissy waiters who expect a huge tip just for pretending to flatter the patrons.
I wish I felt better after all this but I am still about as disgusted as when I started. Thank you for bearing with me.

Blithely Ignorant of Being Evil Incarnate

2011-03-21T22:16:00.005-07:00

Texas is not so much a place as a disease. Of the mind mostly. . .the minds of its inhabitants I mean. These people have a storied history of taking what they want from Mexicans, Indians, Blacks, the environment, the impoverished, the impaired and the thoughtful few they occasionally find in their midst. I know some of these Texans personally, and their ability to leave wakes of destruction without even sensing so much as a ripple in their conscience continues to dumbfound me.
Take my stepmother, please. To jail, if at all possible. She illegally got control of my father's trust, then plundered it to the tune of a quarter million dollars. The vast majority was squandered on propping up the white trash lifestyle of her son (from previous failed marriage) who on a good day is a steroid- and drug-crazed redneck. He lives in Texas. She is from Texas. She went to Texas A & M. Some of the money from a series of secret refinancing binges on a house that did not belong to her paid for expensive trips abroad too, though there is little evidence her Texas values were modified or brought more in line with anything resembling enlightenment as a result.
She did all this in the last nine years since my dad died of lung cancer, and she now is threatening me with some kind of unspecified defamation lawsuit if I speak about this to anyone. She is completely stonewalling the beneficiaries of the now-empty trust who have the nerve to ask what happened to the assets and why we will never see any of them despite my father's written wishes to preserve them in same duly recorded Trust. She is threatening legal action and mounting an extortion campaign against her former daughter in law over all this as well, even though the daughter in law is not a party to the breach of trust.
All of this drama which could easily have been inspired by an old "Dallas" script is now playing out just like the insipid TV show did. A civil war inside our family is threatening to erupt as the self-described would-be matriarch closes the heavy panel-ed doors of her study to the keep out the cold light of day. Here she will count her money and plot her next Machiavellian moves as the gnashing of teeth and body blows outside grow eventually faint as no one is left standing. Fade to black, music swell. Roll credits.
And just like a true Texan, the wicked witch of Harlingen feels no remorse or culpability whatsoever. The only part of this which might be slightly amusing if it were all not so patently offensive and unlawful is that she blames that Great Decider, that Supreme Arbiter of Morality, that Favorite Son of Crawford Tee-Ex: G. W. Bush himself for her unfortunate and undeserved fate. According to my step-mother, her racking up of so much unsecured debt on a piece of property that it sank under the weight of her selfishness is the fault of the former POTUS. Somehow he is to blame for her callous disregard for the terms of her dead husband's trust, for her cover-up of her plunder and her voluntary decision to stop making the mortgage payments so as to unburden herself for more trips to Africa and Europe. If nothing else, this does prove the old adage that there is no honor among thieves. And since both of these criminals are from Texas, then they can just go ahead and kick cow shit all over each other until they drop dead for all I care anymore.
Now if anyone reading this takes issue with anything said here, they are invited to post a comment which I promise to publish.
I do reserve the right to rebut any comment and have the last word since it is my blog.
Any person wishing to start their own blog about this is welcome to do so and put a link to it on here.
The characters, events and situations in this blogoplay are fictitious. Any similarity to actual events or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

Abject Failure

2011-03-09T22:22:00.002-07:00

How National Public Radio could have fallen to this level of incompetence, irrelevance and ignominy in just a few months might be a mystery. But in light of the fact their departed chief executive officer had never been a chief executive officer of anything so big and public and electrostatically and electromagnetically attractive of ill will as NPR is, there is no wonder this lumbering leviathan of bureaucratic inertia has foundered on the rocks. Any ability it ever had to bob and weave and dodge left it long ago. Now it is a doddering fussbudget capable only of public handwringing and second-guessing of itself. Its own ombudsman could do nothing more than bemoan the mess made of the Juan Williams departure a few months ago. The same dolt went on one of NPR's staple shows this morning to . . .uh, bemoan the mess made of the Schillings' departures.
What no one seems to be worried about and what I think is the biggest elephant in the room is how and why the truly scary people in all this are not being called to task. I refer to Mr O'Keefe, the self-styled sultan of subterfuge who entraps and ensnares well-meaning do-gooders for public humiliation and pillorying. He went after ACORN and Planned Parenthood and now one of the few institutions who actually do try to use their giant radio voice in a responsible manner. The cowards on the NPR board who ran for the exits when this tabloid travesty was trotted out as a legitimate critic of NPR's even-handedness are the most spineless invertebrates who ever went before a microphone to defend their gelatinousness. One of them cried crocodile tears of faux shame today on their air as he all but heaped praise on the gonzo guerilla goofballs who drew NPR's fundraising mananger into a deadly trap. The proper thing for David Edwards to have done might have involved an old military tradition encapsulated by the phrase: "I got your back." Instead, the chairman of the NPR board shoved the knives in hard and twisted them to make his point: he is afraid of republicans and will eat his own to save his sorry scrawny ass.
My own NPR "member" station is also afraid of republicans; so much so that it holds its nose and fawns all over our local right wing nut job elected officials at every opportunity. Any news items that fail to put them in the best possible light never see the open side of a microphone. God forbid they might lose part of their funding stream; or would they just increase the drumbeat at pledge time? There is little doubt the weak-minded but well-heeled in our city would cough up more money to maintain the symbolic but soporific charade that calls itself arizona public media. I am not among them.
As the final ironic twist on all this, it was barely visible on the radar screens of the blogosphere today that Clear Channel admitted they hire actors to call in to their own screaming right wing talk shows to fan the flames of hate and ignorance. They did this without telling Rush and Sean and Glenn about it; they did this with a straight face and the typical arrogance thrown around by these types of blowhards who think they have a divine right to re-order the world into a non-union, private health care, trickle-down, wall-street-driven gilded age amerika.
Once again, anything can happen and nothing can be said.

Anything Can Happen, and Nothing Can Be Said. Again.

2011-02-23T23:04:00.004-07:00

This anti-government-labor-union conundrum in Wisconsin is bringing out the worst in mostly one side: the republicans of course. I would not expect to find myself rooting for bureaucrats, but they are mostly poor saps who could not make it in the real rough and tumble world of predatory capitalism. So I guess they deserve some protection from their mostly sick and twisted bosses who make careers out of tormenting their subordinates.
Here is what I wish for: that this Walker whack job who is locking them out and lying to the media and his fellow cheese-heads about the secret motives he is concealing ends up in the crosshairs of . . .I forgot: poor choice of words now after the Giffords shooting. But actually I am not sorry. When these evil and duplicitous politicians throw their weight around, somebody should just take them out. I include in this group the terminally ignorant and now terminated Mr Cox who was an Indiana state prosecutor until today. He tweeted that the riot police in Wisconsin should be mowing down the protesters in the Madison Capitol building with live ammunition from their guns. You have to wonder when a story like this appears if you heard it correctly: how can an educated and civilized person whose job is to seek justice on behalf of the people of the state where my birth certificate was issued hold such a view? Since no one else has asked, I will: If this is how Walker and Cox would respond to a serious and reasonable request for redress of grievances, would they support retention of Mubarak and Qaddafi as backed up by guns fired on Egyptians and Libyans by Egyptians and Libyans? These "public servants" are advocating fascism right here in the USA in 2011. We only fought two world wars to stop the spread of fascism in Europe and Asia in the last century. I submit those wars and several others prove that placing daisies in bayonet-ed rifle barrels has little deterrent effect on a fascist.
Obama and Ms Clinton are in a really hard spot with all these Arab-world uprisings. When they come out swinging in defense of the protesters, they are advocating anarchy. How do you think Napolitano would react if a mob of a couple million shut down DC for two weeks demanding a regime change? We find ourselves once again on the other side of the looking glass where no anchor points make sense and where no logic can be rigorously applied which does not take us on a roller coaster ride along a mobius strip. It makes it hard to accept the so-called "support of democracy" as voiced by our national leaders when the governor of Wisconsin and a state attorney for Indiana would just as soon shoot a half million of the american middle class who are asking for the right to be represented.
I could sit here for another two hours trying to re-work this so it makes sense. But that is a futile enterprise. I would just suggest that if the government of any state fires on its unarmed citizens, then some other citizens are likely to arm themselves and start shooting back. According to our own President and Secretary of State, that defines "democracy" in action. If you think that would constitute a step forward for the republic. . .well, I can't say what I believe any more.

Hitting Home

2011-01-10T22:22:00.003-07:00

When these tragic violent events happen in some second tier city a thousand miles across the country, I pause for a moment and wonder what kind of place could produce a person who thinks a public mass shooting will solve his problems. Now I know. My own town has hatched one and he is now all over the TV and internet leering in his prison garb in a defiant and crazed pose. To hear your own city mentioned in the same sentence with the words "mass killing" sends a chill up my neck as I wonder what thoughtful people a thousand miles away must wonder about Tucson, Arizona.
Up to now, we were maybe on a good day the epicenter of the immigration debate on some editor's list of places to send a reporter trying to make sense out of something so complicated and emotional. Instead, we suddenly become a destination on boarding passes held by people who will spend 72 hours here soaking up sun and clear air while they feed generalities back to their office for regurgitation on the web and TV. None of it means very much. It is all designed to deflect the serious spotlight from shining onto the real problem. But that does not matter anyway either since the spotlight has no batteries. I refer of course to the idea of gun control.
I just do not have the time or inclination to burden the reader with a lot of even handed carefully worded constitutional considerations when the blood has not yet been scoured from the floor of a safeway my brother shops in all the time. The guns just have to be taken away unless we are prepared for more and more of this kind of thing. All the hand-wringing by law enforcement, pundits, and Congress comes off a bit hollow in light of the failure of our government to come to grips with this ugly violent anti-culture their inaction has created. It is not like they have not had help though. The biggest box office draw of the last week is a gun-blasting western where conflict is resolved with bullets. A steady diet of this kind of material over the last 90 years of movies and TV has brought us to this abyss. Our own politicians speak in shooting metaphors when describing how to win elections; then feign innocence when caught in the act. You can't have it both ways if you want to give everybody freedom to express their ideas and then pretend that people like Jared Loughner are just isolated whack jobs who never watch TV or use their computers, much less act on the material they see.
Unless the USA wants to keep sinking into the quicksand of a grass-roots civil war one shopping center or school campus at a time, it has to join the other civilized countries in stopping gun ownership, stopping gun violence and stopping government-executed execution. Otherwise we are just going to continue hating each other more and more until we have all shot each other.

Every Day, The Paperboy Brings More

2010-12-20T22:48:00.002-07:00

I wonder how many of the "tens of millions" across North America--that's the number predicted by the wire services--who will be transfixed by the Lunar Eclipse tonight will also have listened to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon immediately before or during the celestial event? I am a member of the intersecting area on that Venn Diagram, I am proud to say.
My black vinyl analog long playing disk pressed by Capitol almost forty years ago still has all this powerful music in its grooves. Despite having been passed under a diamond needle several hundred times, it evokes dark and ominous feelings with its pounding drums, throbbing bass, screeching guitars and ponderous organ. Oh and there are those thoughtful words and haunting voices too that transport the listener to a place far away from this mortal coil.
The impact of this record can not be diminished or dismissed. Instead of just hanging on in quiet desperation as the English are wont to do, the Messrs Gilmour, Wright, Mason and Waters went into the Abbey Road recording studio with their collaborator Alan Parsons to give voice to some of their concerns about the human condition. It is certainly true that a novel of great ideas or deep themes might be considered more valuable or worthwhile than a rock and roll album. A hundred years from today, will Pink Floyd or Philip Roth be higher on the chart of historical significance? Maybe it does not really matter what future sociological analysts will say about this period in Western culture. The fact is that forty five million copies of Dark Side have been sold to date which means that if each person who owns it has listened to it say, 150 times in the 30+ years they have owned it, the music has made over six billion impressions which is the current entire population of the planet. That is not a meaningless or irrelevant statistic. It is a profound observation about what we are longing for, what we are missing, and what we are still looking up in the sky at night and wondering about.
On this longest night of the year, when the Moon is blanked out by the Earth for an hour or so, we might take some time to ponder what our forebears were thinking 372 years ago when the same alignment took place. Were they as concerned about their well being, their sanity, their value, their place in the cosmos as Pink Floyd was? Or as I am after hearing their work again tonight?
The Lunatic Is In My Head.

Least Objectionable Programming Alternative

2010-11-30T11:53:00.004-07:00

Maybe I should be worried about myself for selecting the Hallmark Hall of Fame for viewing the other night. This was not a case of idle channel surfing and landing on something randomly. I made a point to find it and watch it after seeing several incomprehensible promos for it over a few preceding days. If John Corbett and Sam Elliott had not been the major players, I might not have cared that much. No they did not play father and son; the plot casting people do seem to have been paying more attention than those who put a pudgy blond kid in a Hallmark commercial opposite a bony brunette pretending to be his mother. John was the father of a girl being treated for cancer while Sam was a concerned and thoughtful neighbor. It had been shot in Nova Scotia during what must have been the only sunny warm clear twenty four days on the summer calendar by the same crew who did some Tom Selleck New England sheriff movies last year for CBS. There is a New England and maritime provinces look which lends an air of serenity and calm to a production. No one should ever try to make a gritty drug dealer crime drama set in Montpelier; it just would not fly.
It is probably not news to you that TV demographic analysis has completely corrupted the medium. OK, further corrupted it. As many casual followers of the ratings game are aware, the advertising moguls care little about old viewers. They want people under 50 and will kill for people under 35. These are the mentally malleable who embrace new products for a month and then cast them aside for a newer product. You might think a Hallmark card would appeal to this group: it is the ultimate in a disposable consumable that must be constantly re-purchased and is constantly being re-invented by its maker. But Hallmark seems to have given up on this huge segment of the population in favor of us old folk who still mail stuff to each other through the US Postal Service.
The venerable Kansas City firm took to TV in 1951 with the first made-for-TV movie called Amahl and Night Visitors. (If such a show were to appear on a TV Guide schedule today, millions would tune in hoping to see the FBI execute a successful sting on innocent foreigners with black hair and black eyes and good tans who make the mistake of gathering for coffee late at night while suspiciously using their prepaid cell phones.) Three years later, they spent big money to produce the first color program ever transmitted over the air. And now a half century later, they have settled on a formulaic rehashing of a safe, non-threatening, non-controversial storyline usually involving a sick child or an old married couple who don't need Viagra or a young couple struggling to make ends meet or some combination thereof. Even if there were a 21st century Paddy Cheyefsky out there pushing the TV envelope, he would never make it to this iteration of Hallmark Hall of Fame. But we take what we can get in this age of Tosh.zero, South Park, CSI-Anytown, Law&Order, and SWAT team deification shows.
During my last remaining days at this website job, I am being subjected to yet more age discrimination in the form of derision and insults about being too old and too suspicious of web tom-foolery for the taste of the owner. He was expressing dismay for the cranky members of the web-o-sphere who have the nerve to question his manipulative and secretive practices. Like the makers of cell phones, book-pads, 3DTV, hybrid cars and tight-fitting pants, he has no use for discriminating thinkers that might have some remaining sensitivity. I believe I am actually proud to not fit that mold, even if I am a tiny bit disappointed to admit I am looking forward to the next Hallmark Hall of Fame in January.

You Can Go Back To Being Ashamed, Michelle

2010-11-02T21:47:00.002-07:00

The First Lady of the United States only got two good years of pride in this over-rated excuse for a world power. As you might recall, she got in trouble with the rabid right before she even was the First Lady for expressing the idea that up to the time her husband had won the nomination, she had not really found much reason to feel good about her country. Like Barack's ascension to office was some kind of good thing. Well now we know how her enemies (and his) fight back and get their revenge. They manipulate an ignorant electorate with every means at a scoundrel's disposal into ordering a giant sea change. Perhaps inspired by the engineers who make the Chicago River flow upstream, the Boehners and McConnells of Limbaughs and Becks of this world flushed their excretory rhetoric onto the airwaves in such unprecedented quantities of scatalogical lies that the tiny minority of thinking people were buried alive. You know it's bad when you actually wanted Charlie Crist to win against two dangerous and evil twits in Florida. But he did not win. The Tea Party is now going to be slapping the rest of us who were pouting too much over the shortcomings of the health care law with its wet and stinky bag of jingoistic trickle-down white supremacy and laughing all the way back to what will be their newly unregulated bank.
I am going to see you, Ms Obama, and raise you. My entire pot: I now sincerely hope the United States is destroyed by another terrorist attack. I don't care where it comes from. Al Queda, another Tim McVeigh, a Black Swan; it matters not. I might even go back to church and pray that on 11 September of 2011 that the finishing blow is delivered to Wall Street and Washington simultaneously. A country populated with this many stupid people does not deserve to draw water, food, electricity and oil out of the ecosphere any longer.
Maybe I am projecting my own death wish onto a nation, as there is no salvaging my so-called life at this late date. My good days are behind me. My health is flagging. My hearing is noisy. My old dog is so crippled he cannot get up off the floor. My husband is going on dialysis and disability. I can't get a decent job to literally save my life. While much of this is my own fault, and yes we have once again heard on the national airwaves from candidates running for office (did any of them win?) that all of us who have HIV deserve to die, the rich and powerful did carry an onus of guilt. Then there was a spark of hope. There was a point of light. There was a promise that we would become better. Those who perpetrated the giant fraud of phony wealth were going to the woodshed. But since Karl Rove does not have the testicular fortitude to hire Dick Cheney to come out of retirement and pull the trigger to take out the president personally, he did the only other thing he knows how to do: reprise his role as political Giupetto. The masterful orchestration through no less an institution than the supreme court would be admirable if it had not been so reprehensibly wrong. A culture that suffers people like him and Palin and Bachmann and the entire Bush crew, let alone puts them in powerful positions, is not a culture at all. It is not even a circus. It is an inside-out asylum where those who need to be in strait jackets are tasering those who dare to think higher thoughts of justice, equality, fairness and truth. That is why when I have burned through my meager IRA and am ready to just lay down and die, I might send my final few dollars to some hothead in Yemen to buy an unassuming cabin cruiser so he can load it down with enough plutonium to take out eastern Virginia and southern Maryland as it sails unsuspected up the Potomac. The clock is ticking Abdul Muhammed al Nasser Kalawi or whoever you are seething in your dusty windy tent a half world away: 314 days until that tenth anniversary when you will avenge the day that TRULY will live in infamy: November Second, Two Thousand Ten.

Holy Microphone Batman

2010-10-22T13:04:00.003-07:00

This Juan Williams thing has me in battle mode. Again. He lost his job on NPR for saying Muslims in Muslim garb on a commercial airplane make him nervous. They make me nervous too, just like any fanatic for any religious cause makes me nervous. Jews, Christians, Buddhist: any of them professing faith to an extreme degree is a nutjob by definition no matter what language his holy book is written in. Yet Mr Williams is not allowed to have this opinion or express it on TV, even though many thoughtful people inside academia and out respect him for his observational powers and articulate way of expressing himself. To make it all the worse, we now have the added piling on spectacle of Palin, Huckabee, Gingrich, deMint and a dozen other right wing wackos clamoring for NPR to be cut off at the knees and lose its whole million dollars of federal subsidy. They are not demanding this because they support the views or even the independence of Williams; they are doing it to make hay.
NPR has lots of things wrong with it, and the super PC paranoia on display right now is high on the list. I do hate them, and they should be cut off at the knees. Not because a gaggle of sheathed Arabs who live here and make a lot of money here in the country they attacked made NPR cave. Not because FOX News now has bragging rights and Williams on their payroll so he can bash the nabobs at will. It is because NPR is so smug in its self-righteousness. They hung Williams out to dry; and while he did land on his feet, he could just as likely have ended up a broken man with no career left. The sooner somebody can beat them back and unplug their transmitters until they learn how to properly use their voice, the better.
Now if this had happened to Nina Totenberg, I might be singing a different tune. Getting her permanently off the air would be a godsend to everyone with a radio and a set of ears. But I digress: a principle is a principle no matter who is being bullied about.

Time Is Like A River

2010-10-13T08:37:00.002-07:00

Mister Spock's line from a great original Star Trek comes to mind as I reflect on my High School class's 40th reunion which took place last weekend. The universe in general and our individual lives in particular might be seen as a giant clockworks with the added complexity of variable gear ratios, switchable levers and escapements, plus multiple spring drives that can be engaged and disengaged unpredictably. Like a grand analog computer, if you will, that sends each of us in different directions but not in an entirely random or haphazard way; its actions make sense if you can step back far enough to see the patterns.
Where the 150 or so of us who came to the event have ended up over time was a big part of the story; as it is with any reunion. "So what did you end up doing?" was the often repeated opening line. Many of the answers were predictable and expected while a few were surprising and bizarre. The common thread running through the assemblage of souls was our launch date. But the trajectories were different, the propellants dissimilar and the wind shears complex. No wonder some settled into a stable orbit while others crashed and burned and a few headed out like Voyager 2.
I fall somewhere between options one and two. I am not in a stable orbit by any definition. It is elliptical, irregular, unstable and erratic. It is one step above the category of space junk on a good day. On a bad day, it is like a burned out casing fallen off a spent second stage: tumbling, pock-marked, brittle and worthless.
At the close of the reunion dinner, I did manage to fire some attitude control jets and transmit some telemetry. It was in the form of my original salutorian speech I gave on the night of 5 June 1970 to a couple thousand parents, siblings, teachers and friends. Three of us auditioned for the coveted but forgotten role of graduation speaker. The speech teacher declined to choose and put all of on the program. I went last so as to bask in the big applause for all that I might conclude was really for me: the best. I still had the original hand-typed master I had taken to the podium in our windswept football stadium, and I took it with me to the microphone in the great hall of the American Italian Club of Sunnyslope Arizona forty years, four months and four days after the only other time the words had been spoken.
For about four minutes, I did own the room. I had practiced some gestures and felt confident about my one shot at renewed fame and respect from my oldest friends. Not all of the couple hundred stood to applaud me at the end, but several tables did rise to voice their approval. The most gratifying compliment--and there were SO-O-O many--(cue David Letterman eye rolling in self deprecating self mockery) came from the star running back of the football team. He went into the military soon after graduation and eventually made his way in the world as a financial manipulator of money in Germany and the US. He lives in Germany now with his German wife and dual-citizenship sons. He and I had only one class together the entire four years: Physical Education and yes we did see each other naked several hundred times. He stated to me a few days later in a private message via the reunion website that most of us had probably not heard any of what I had said the first time. He went on to say that hearing it all again, and reflecting on the points it made about communication and accommodation had been the high point of the reunion for him. Well thank you Richard Fry. Some who know me will see that as sarcasm. It is not. His virtual handshake is genuine, and it means everything to me.
The river of time took him far to a languid, balmy, serene and diffusely lit pool where his comfort is well-earned. It took me--. . .well, I don't know yet. Rapids, rocks, snapping turtles and waterfalls have already damaged my toy boat severely. There are times I feel like breaking the oars over my head and tossing the pieces into the roiling chilly water. Then diving in and giving up my last breath as the freezing effects still my heart.
But then I wonder who if anyone will want to hold a 50th; and if anyone will want to hear my speech again.

But Siriusly Folks

2010-09-23T10:53:00.002-07:00

It amazes me how yet another big lie continues to be told and accepted: that satellite radio is an advancement over earth-hugging low band radio. Over the last few months, I have tried to find a station on the SIRIUS band that can uplift, distract, or otherwise entertain me like old-time radio might during the indescribably dismal and depressing workday I drag myself through. It is a futile hope.
Number one: the fidelity is NOT CD-quality. It is much lower.
Number two: the library is not large. One hears the same songs over and over.
Number three: It is not all music all the time, there are now humans talking in between.
This last point is the most important because it proves that the designers of satellite radio made a huge mistake in the beginning and at least they now realize it. What people so desperately want and crave is connection to each other. Even if it is through a plastic box full of wires and chips, some human contact is better than none. You thought we had the internet for that? Well, that falls under the-more-you-get-the-more-you-want file. For the internet is not providing real human contact but digital surrogacy for it only delayed by time and distorted by coding errors. The reduced level of satisfaction seems to trigger ever-more frenetic attempts to raise the yield. But like Sisyphus, we never get to the top.
How do I know this? From sitting in front of this screen all day everyday scanning and editing the desperate and pathetic profiles of lonely people trying to connect with total strangers ON THE INTERNET. The attractiveness quotients of these people are all over the map. Fat, thin, short, tall, ugly, handsome, old, young, smart, stupid. . .it's all here in bizarre combinations sometimes. You wonder how some could ever find anyone to like them, and you wonder how some could ever really like anybody else. Some are full of anger, some are innocently posing with their puppy or their kitty cat. Some are scowling, some are smirking astride the hood of their sleek new sports car. Some are posing on a beach at sunset, some in a cornfield. They are in every state of dress and undress; we will have to save that for another time and forum. Some are obviously comfortable in front of what passes for cameras these days, others look awkward and self conscious. Some wax eloquently about their attributes, others cannot correctly spell words like definitely or probably, let alone string a sentence together let alone a paragraph that makes any sense.
What all these people have in common is need. An empty, craven, vulnerable and sometimes yes even naked need to be wanted and accepted. The problem for me right now is that, like a borderline empath, I am being sucked in by this and dragged down by it. So I dial up the WATERCOLORS channel: a stream of saxophone-driven, reverb-enhanced ear syrup flowing endlessly from across the room occasionally punctuated by a sultry woman describing the set we just heard. Does she feel better when the ON-AIR light winks off? Did those fifteen seconds of connection with unseen thousands give her some validation that she matters? Does she have a profile on a social networking site?

The Nothingness of Nihilism

2010-09-14T09:37:00.003-07:00

If this does not prove what a dilettante and pseudo intellectual poseur I am, nothing will. To even dream I could condense a century of the deepest thoughts of the greatest intellectuals of the modern and post modern age into a blog entry is a new depth of hubris even for me. But I am desperate to express the unhappiness that is darkening my mind in hope I can be liberated from it.
A crude, modern-day expression of the frustration eloquently expressed by Nietzche, Schopenhauer, Sartre, et al is the spreading rash of murders and suicides in the workplace by people who have lost their jobs. We should take it as a wake-up call that our society's inability to give meaning to existence is now permanent and irreversible. The government is powerless and impotent to alter the inevitable downward spiral as the death throes of capitalism are glossed over, ignored, spun and otherwise denied by those causing it, observing it and being victimized by it. The few who see how desperate and intractable the problems are find no way out, and take a violent exit path. Can we really blame them?
I commend Steven Slater, the flight attendant who found a really creative and non-dangerous way to make his final statement. Having had quite enough of the class structure that has been institutionalized by the airline industry so effectively that it has bred an entire generation of nouveau riche whose false sense of entitlement came into direct conflict with that man's eroding self esteem in the cramped aisle of that airplane last month, he lashed out in classy, controlled but unmistakably strong fashion. Had he flung open the exit door while everyone was still aloft, he would have been posthumously branded a "terrorist;" but this way he is just psychologically unfit for employment. Eventually he might become a terrorist in the true sense of the word now that his livelihood has been taken away, but his employer and the media can rest assured for the time being that their pillorying of him was sufficient punishment.
One possible macro-remedy for these micro-bursts of attention-getting behavior might be to wipe lots of people from the face of the earth for their collective contribution to negative progress of our species. The number of individuals who just do not get it and never will and who continue to draw breath and consume non-renewable resources is increasing faster than our ability to contain, train, educate and enlighten them. Take China for example, please. This guy who calls himself Morrissey and sang for The Smiths stated last week that China was a country of sub-humans as evidenced by the way they treat animals. No legal protection exists there for anything but Pandas and that is only because they have become cash bears for the exploding economy that desperately seeks any revenue it can from whatever shameless purpose and methodology that can be devised. Demands for apology and retraction were loud but ignored by Mr Morrissey, so we salute him for standing ground.
Too bad he does not personally control a nuclear arsenal. Maybe if those who did would use it to commit some genocide we could make some advancement. A little voice here or 15 minutes in the spotlight there does not sway the course. Until somebody can position a big lever in a truly strategic fulcrum and give it a mighty shove, we are on a wrong path at high speed. These little firecrackers are not going to get anybody's attention for very long or be any kind of final solution.
I wish I could say I feel better now, but I feel nothing at all any more.

Disgrace? What Disgrace?

2010-05-02T14:33:00.003-07:00

Homeland Secretary Janet Napolitano is sweeping aside calls for her ouster following reports the Times Square SUV incident was staged by US government operatives. The former governor of Arizona and one-time US Attorney observed that local government teams all over the country stage mock disaster drills to test the effectiveness of their first responders. She went on to say through a spokeswoman that there are many good reasons to use federal resources to determine how well city, state, county and port authority law enforcement might cooperate in a sudden disaster such as a car bomb. The fact no one was injured, and that no property was damaged was at first hailed as "lucky" by her office and New York law enforcement. But this may have been the intention all along.
What had originally been portrayed as a botched and "amateurish" job by the DHS boss is now known to have been planned and executed by so-called "black ops" personnel whose identities are secret but whose employer of record is in fact the federal government of the United States. Secret emails and cell phone texts flashing among those carrying out the complex task were picked up and cracked by hackers in the New York area. News organizations doubted the authenticity of the claims when first presented to them by a NYU student who is being held in a secret location for questioning by federal authorities on possible charges of intercepting government communications. But when a New York Times reporter showed the evidence to a source inside the Department of Homeland Security, the story broke wide open.
Right wing pundits are criticizing the President for cracking jokes at the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner--with Jay Leno on hand to assist--while the crisis was unfolding in Manhattan. But the White House is standing by Napolitano and deflecting all questions to her office about the incident which it says was not brought to the attention of the President in advance. Former Vice President Dick Cheney issued a statement calling for Napolitano to resign immediately after "making a mockery of a system President Bush and I worked hard to put in place to keep America safe from ruthless terrorists who are everywhere waiting to strike."

Remembering Jack Kerouac

2010-04-26T16:15:00.004-07:00

It was said that he bought rolls of butcher paper cut to go through a typewriter so he would not have to stop writing and change sheets of conventional typing paper. The continuous stretch of manuscript for On The Road was delivered that way to the publisher or so goes the folklore.
I feel a bit like using a virtual e-roll of butcher paper to pour out all that is inside me following a four day motor trip from Phoenix, AZ to Sweetgrass, MT and back. But you don't have time or inclination to read such a thing. And some of my innermost thoughts and feelings about the trip are best kept private. So here are some of the things I want to say about it for publication.
Utah is too beautiful a state to have been taken over and ruined by the theocracy that is the mormon church. Idaho has suffered too at the hands of people who feel the natural resources of these great big places are theirs for the taking and exploitation. Yet some deer and antelope still play and reproduce in enough numbers to stay ahead of the road-kill and hunting effects. The natural which is to say the non-human world is resilient and strong, so maybe when the people have run their course and are gone, the animals and plants and sun and wind and snow and rain will resume their work in a way that is un-screwed-up by us.
The purpose of the trip was to ferry an old Cadillac convertible from its garage in Gilbert, Arizona to its new owner in Calgary, Alberta. Rather than pay a professional hauler a couple of thousand dollars for the transport, the buyer elected to cover the fuel and lodging and food for the seller to bring it up in person using his truck and trailer. I went along to ride shotgun. Lacking the class A license needed to pilot a rig of this weight and configuration, I was barely what could be called window dressing. I had laughingly proposed tongue in cheek to my friend Dan last week that I would enjoy the adventure of accompanying him even though I could not help with any driving. When he offered me a seat, I took it.
Two days up and two days back with three motel nights in between shared with a guy who had been a total stranger a week before might seem an exercise in folly fraught with risk. But none of the things a normal person might fear took place. The positive benefits are coming on strong and fast; so much so I might have to put off any more talk of that for now. After it sorts itself out, it will be easier to handle for everyone. Including me I hope.
My friend generously agreed to go 80 miles out of our way so I could visit my niece Clarissa. She is in her early 20s and manages a clothing store. He posed with her for the picture seen here. They had never met.
This world is a cold and cruel place where you might expect we humans would go out of our way to offer warm solace to each other whenever possible. But I am constantly amazed and dismayed and bewildered whenever I hear an example of how horrible we can be to each other. And then on the other other hand, I am momentarily comforted to have an experience that restores my faith in what we can be to each other sometimes when we don't even try.

The Rest of the Quote Is the Best Part

2010-04-15T22:48:00.003-07:00

Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice. We all should know that Barry Goldwater said that out loud at the 1964 Convention where he was put up against Lyndon Johnson by the Republicans. But there was a "but" to that first part that is all but forgotten. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue would be the qualifier. And in the two months since I last spoke out on here, there has been way too much moderation in the face of way too much IN-justice. The lies that were told by the right and the medical insurance lobby to paint the president and democrats into a corner make LBJ's TV ads from that campaign of 46 years ago seem as dispassionately truthful as dry astronaut-speak from the shuttle to Houston control. And why do liberals and democrats roll over and play dead? Why is it important to be civil and bipartisan and polite to liars and scoundrels and thieves? The only effective approach is to shout them down, call them out and punch them if necessary to shut them up. Because if you turn the other cheek, you will find it flapping loose and bleeding like the other three already are when fighting anyone taking a self serving extreme position.
I learned this first hand tonight in my own living room. Every group has an alpha female who thinks she can run the entire convent and rectory with her iron fist. Yvonne Merrill who lives five blocks away is our own ruthless mother superior who has appointed herself empress of the brichta neighborhood association but please don't call it a homeowner's association. She took it on herself to have a think tank know-it-all show up at my front door tonight with her dog and pony show on a powerpoint. The goal is to herd the sheep into the pen for shearing then slaughtering though not necessarily in that order. We are all supposed to dutifully allow twelve feet of our yards to be appropriated by the association and given over to the city for pedestrian friendly flower pots, barriers, rocks, trees and other impediments to cars. Yes they are blatantly trying to hurt the car people in favor of the walking people. From May to September that would be all two of them who are insane enough to brave 135 degree asphalt to stroll three blocks then turn around and go home feeling refreshed and rejuvenated.
The person who presented the propaganda was taken aback when I challenged her manipulation of the facts and blatant appeals to irrational fears. These shows are intended for the dimmest bulbs and we had several in attendance. I don't say that to be cruel; many are old and hard of hearing and nearly blind. They are hardly what one would call avid pedestrians or power walkers. If only someone could invent the Power Walker for the most impaired of them; but that was not on the table. These people do not want to make waves. They want to live their remaining days in peace and quiet. And they are polite and not given to saying: "Hey wait a minute" under any circumstances. I have never been polite. I have become an asshole in the face of so much injustice and lies and thievery that I just will not let it go without a fight. If people hate me, too bad. I hate them back and I don't care anymore about the consequences.

They Call Him Mister Pitts

2010-02-14T22:23:00.002-07:00

An article by this smart and keen observer of the national political and social scene was in our local newspaper today, and it made me realize anew how valuable that medium has always been. Mister Pitts is Leonard J Pitts Jr whose Miami Herald column made it out here to Arizona, and we are the better for it. Surfing the internet takes less brainpower than surfing two foot waves in the Gulf of California does, but reading through a newspaper to see what is really going on in the world is a discriminating and thoughtful process. When you find something truly worthwhile in a paper, it improves your mind. Letting the internet pages ripple down your TV screen as they jerk and skip and flicker is not an active process that challenges your brain. The people behind the data are unknown, unaccountable and unrepentant as they secretly manipulate and distort. At least the guy who is making the editorial decisions in the paper signs his name somewhere in the thing with an address and a phone number.
The content of Mr Pitts' article is more important than my tired indictment of the digital media, so let me get to that. He decries the trend back toward ignorance, narrow-mindedness, intellectual dishonesty brought about by the tea party crowd and that Palin woman. He challenges the country to rise up and send her and her ilk packing back into the woods from whence they came, and take their crib notes and "gotcha" style of debating the serious issues which confront us with them. He expresses some hope that there is hope. But I part company with him there. I am dismally doubtful that enough awareness exists in the electorate to stem the tide of stupidity disguised as smugness. The right wing is mad and vengeful and they are wasting no time on niceties as they pull off the gloves and attack the president and the democrats and the thinking left with the pretend-governor of Alaska as their puppet. How Mr Pitts can be so calm and cool and articulate about this threatening danger in print is mystifying to me. There is no anger or fire; just calculated and barbed stinging in the eye of the beast. Good for him; had I not read his article this evening before sitting down to make a blog entry, I might have delivered some hate-filled vitriol and anger and fire that has been smoldering inside me for some weeks now as I watch the flames envelop and overwhelm the zeppelin in slow motion. As Herbert Morrison, the WLS radio reporter lamented on 6 May 1937: "Oh, the humanity of it all. . ."

The Mantel is Not Level

2010-01-25T22:46:00.002-07:00

Gosh I hope I spelled that right. The only dictionary at hand is a british one that spells color with a U so I will just have to go with my own organic biochemical memory on whether my title reference is in fact to a fireplace or a Coleman lantern or a sometimes figurative kind of cape worn about the shoulders. It is intended to be about the fireplace kind.
The President and Congress barely got a year under their belts before the knives guns and grenades were unsheathed by the right and even the middle then brought to bear on everything and everybody with a brain. It began with "YOU LIE" shouted out by some cretin from South Carolina in the House Chamber a few months back. The President and his left leaning backers had been sucker punched and have lain there ever since sort of floundering about with blood and saliva all over the mat. Now the Massachusetts thing has come along and delivered a police baton to the butthole while the crowd either catcalls or turns away in silence.
The pendulum is supposed to swing; not bounce off the stop. The idea is to come over here and do some productive, progressive and forward-thinking stuff for a while. See how well it works, fine tune it, tweak it then step back and assess the results. But no, the right was so afraid they might not be able to hold onto their coveted stash of millions taken from the middle class and poor under cover of bush that they attacked via lobbyists and surrogates planted in the media. The result was a stolen election in the Kennedy's front yard celebrated with insufferable hubris and hyperbole for which the left has no counter. And the clock resumes its heavily weighted tick TOCK tick TOCK tick TOCK that makes this country sound so off balance and backward to anyone still paying attention.
I might not even watch the State of the Union. It will be a whitewash with some pulpit pounding theatrical oration but little else. The only good thing that could happen might be Al Franken yelling out: "YOU CAVED!" Now that would be a turning point that will ensure somebody's clock gets cleaned and regulated properly.

Trying to Understand a Black Thing

2009-12-18T21:43:00.003-07:00

You would think I might have learned by now that asking a black person how they feel about various stereotypes assigned them by white people is not a way to win friends. Especially black ones. But I have already tried this several times with no good or conclusive results. So now I will merely think out loud and hope some black people read this and weigh in. Politely of course as I am not wanting to say anything negative or offensive.
We recently made friends with a 45 year old African American man named John. He is a big guy, almost football player type of material with solid construction. He talks like a black person, he has the affectations of a black person, he displays many other conventional attributes ascribed to black people in modern America. I say none of this to inflame or anger. I say it because it is inescapable. To deny these things is unrealistic. It has already been proven in several sociological and psychological studies that telephone customer service people can or at least think they can distinguish black from white callers whom they cannot see or verify the race of. And pretty accurately. And when we are conversing or goofing around with John, there is no mistaking that he is different from us white guys. If you could somehow transcribe our conversations and interactions over a few hours' time, and then hire a white actor to play John and black ones to portray my husband and me (who are white) to read the lines, the results would play like a cheap frat house B-movie done for laughs and spit-takes. There is no way anyone can say that the races are interchangeable, equal, color-blind or whatever euphemism you might call up.
The black culture--not the black genome so much--is different than the white one and it is deeply ingrained and almost immutable. Michael Steele and Juan Williams might do a pretty good job of pretending to be snooty white republicans with disdain and contempt for the lower classes oozing from every pore. But I bet that when you get them alone and knock a couple of drinks down with them, you find the whiteface wears off fast. And again, I say that with candor and frankness; not anger or condescension. I wish I could tell my friend John what looseness, fluidity, roundness, accessibility and utter lack of up-tight-ness his presence has brought to our household. But I shall do nothing of the kind as it would embarrass him or anger him or otherwise hurt our friendship.
Having a black or half black president has thrown all this into focus again. We sort of tried to deal with all this in the 1970s with Shaft movies and Barry White music as our collective consciousness tried to develop some collective soul. I think we succeeded for a while. Until Reagan ruined it. He ruined a lot of things we now know but setting back our ability to get along and play along and break down our inter-racial barriers is only obvious now in the Obama era of strained, feigned, and otherwise un-addressed feelings towards each other. What we have become and are continuing to devolve into is unattractive and unpromising. Or is that a white man's opinion not shared by black men about themselves? I might be able to ask John that question without opening a real can of worms.

Horse of a Different Metaphor

2009-11-13T21:54:00.002-07:00

It is said there are few or even no new ideas in Hollywood movies and I submit further evidence of that axiom. We watched EQUUS last night on the MGM HD Movie Channel; this is the one from 1977 with Richard Burton and Peter Firth. (When a recent Broadway revival hit the stage with the kid from Harry Potter playing naked to the crowd, the only buzz had to do with his equipment rather than the story and theme. Too bad.) It struck me as I watched it unfold that a recent hit film had borrowed heavily from it albeit in a diluted form. I speak of GOOD WILL HUNTING, the Matt Damon vehicle of maybe ten years ago where he played a troubled youth who was guided by a psychiatrist or psychologist toward "normal" behavior. You would probably prefer I don't rehash both movies here but I ask that if you have seen both of them to consider that the Ben Affleck character could be seen to represent the horse and/or rider figure in EQUUS. Matt and Robin are pretty obvious as stand-ins for Peter and Richard.
There were lots of overt gay references and even jokes in GWH while EQUUS chose to not even speak the word if I recall correctly. Making the viewer think for himself is a great concept; too bad it has not really caught on. I am not finding fault with GOOD WILL HUNTING; just observing that if it is a dumbed down version of a truly provocative and deep movie that came twenty years before, it still deserves some credit for what it accomplished. One thing I will say for GWH, no animals were harmed in the course of its production.

Mike Sacks Keith

2009-10-26T22:35:00.005-07:00

Maybe sportscasters do make the best political observers. Tonight on ESPN, Mike Tirico who generally remains aloof and impartial while letting the two color guys vent their spleens, tiptoed in to the pool and made a little tiny wavelet. As the Washington Redskins were self destructing on a national stage again, he observed that the pace of their approach on a 3d and goal with about five minutes remaining did not reflect the urgency of the matter at hand. One of the color guys said: "Not only that, they need to hurry it up." I don't think he was trying to be funny. He actually is an idiot.
Washignton would have had to score three times and the play clock was down to :02 before they finally snapped it. The Eagles quickly recovered the sudden fumble by the QB to which Mike said something like: "And there you have it; the reason the Redskins are who they have become."
On the radio last month, it was observed that no one knows what song the Nationals play when they score or win. The reason given was that they never score or win. NPR being what it is and from whence it comes, NPR criticized the criticism and played the entire song with all kinds of excuses for why the Nationals should be given more credit. All of this makes me think that both these teams are reflecting the confusion and disarry their home city is in. I can't really say much about the baseball team as I don't care one whit about baseball in general much less the joke that the Nationals are. I only know a little bit more about football including the notion that you can't have four people making split-second decisions about how to play a dynamic rough and tumble game on a big grass field with 20 huge strong angry men playing to a drunken crowd of twenty thousand people. Yet the owner, coach, coordinator and quarterback of this team cannot agree on who is in charge and who has responsibility.
Does this sound familiar? Just substitute Obama, Pelosi, Reid, Emmanuel or any number of other beltway figures' names into the football metaphor and that is why health care repair is dying. It is why the government is paralyzed and has been for a long time. It is why we need MSNBC and ESPN to get all the so-called smart mouth brainiacs in the White House out on a gridiron beamed to their networks live. Suit them up in pads and cups, and pit them against the blue dogs and the dumb asses with no headsets, no coded wristbands, no laminated cheat sheets and no second guessing from above. Obama is the QB for the public option, single payer, kill-the-insurance-CEO team. Kyl or McConnell can helm the other squad but who will referee? Because you know McCain will do a lot of clipping, horse-collaring, face-masking and generally dirty tricks. How about Harry and Louise? Or Hillary or Bill? God knows they have made careers pandering to every side imaginable on every issue that comes before them. No matter, because for once, we would get an honest contest and a fair fight with the clock ticking. Instead of this handwringing and posturing and fumbling and knee-dropping.
Are the Redskins copying the politicians or vice versa? Either way, some head-butting is in order and I would pay to watch some serious republican blood spilled. It might sway the crowd, it might put Boehner in the hospital, and it might show the Washington Redskins how to get it done.

Calgon Take Me Away

2009-10-21T21:42:00.003-07:00

When I was little and could steal away to watch daytime TV, my favorite ad was for those bath beads. A glamorous woman would relax in her bubble bath as the noises of her household faded into silence and soft music swelled up. Maybe I should try a bubble bath but I doubt seriously it would make me feel less bad. I know; you wonder how or why anyone could sustain so much negativity for so long. This blog has been going on for years now with the same dark overtones. And just when you thought it could not get any worse, I am here to prove you wrong.
There was a death in our family a couple of weeks ago and it really upset me. Mainly because it was self inflicted. The person was not a blood relative but he was the brother of someone who had married one of my blood relatives. As a veterinarian for decades, he had doubtless put many animals to death as an act of mercy. He himself had been suffering from cancer so. . . While I do not know or need to know any details of the act itself, the notion that a person has or at least takes the right of self determination upon himself is a serious responsibility. And though the anguish such an act causes for the surviving and bewildered family members is deep, it is not for them or anyone else to decide whether it was the right thing to do. Why is it OK to inflict death by chemistry on an ailing dog, but not on an ailing person? In the end, I respect his decision as not an act of cowardice or weakness. But as an act of precisely what I cannot say right now.
The planet is going down down down by the day. The ability of the worldwide capitalist machine to deliver goods and services has been irrevocably damaged by its own greed and hunger and thirst for wealth. No replacement system is available off the shelf. Efforts to impose equality and fairness are met with derision and ridicule. The hope and optimism we all felt last winter is giving way to despair upon learning the sad truth that all idols have feet of clay. Since nothing is going to get better and everything is going to get worse, what is the point of staying to watch an inevitably tragic conclusion?
The thought in my brain which is hardest to get rid of right now centers around anarchy. I can't shake the idea that a willful destructive effort against the big institutions delivered randomly in the style of TERRORISM will be the only solution. I told a customer service person at my bank the other day I would go to church and pray to god that a 9.0 earthquake would level san francisco and kill everyone working in the wells fargo tower. This because they are raising everyone's credit card interest rate by 40%. I think while I am at it, I will pray that Iran gets the bomb and tests it on Wall Street. Do you think I am a monster? Do you think I am the only person quietly walking around secretly wishing for the end of days? Do you think no one is working on a way to make such things happen? The human population must be decimated if the planet has a prayer of making it through another century. Earth was here first; its plants and animals and seasons and machinations predate our human presence here and now look at what we have wrought. If we can't fix what we have broken, we need to stop being since we can't stop breaking things. A person who leaves by choice might be making his own small contribution to that end. But there would be a greater net gain in the middle term if cataclysmic forces were brought to bear on the real culprits. At least we would give the next generation a fighting chance instead of a life sentence to gulag with population SEVEN BILLION.
Just so there is no misunderstanding, I am actually saying that I really hope something huge and terrible happens to the banks, government, pharma, media, china and most of all MICROSOFT because going on living and watching the slow inexorable slide into hell for the working classes is going to feel very much worse than a bubble bath. If I or people I know or are related to die in the violence, too bad. Let's not kid ourselves: all life today is very cheap and none of it matters any more. There is something bigger at stake than my pathetic little world of vacuum tubes and old cars and whatever makes up your pathetic little world too. Sweep it all away and start anew.

The Bully in the Room

2009-09-11T16:49:00.004-07:00

There will be two topics today which I am still trying to find a way to connect together. As this takes shape, maybe I will succeed.
Number one is nine eleven. I hate the whole concept of "remembering" the thing and all this New York sympathy schlock with volunteers reading the names. I know; someone reading this who is a friend or relative will reveal that they "lost someone" in the collapse or crash. And I will be shunned and hated for being insensitive. Which I don't care about because I am already hateful and insensitive anyway. Survivors of WW2 or Vietnam soldiers who died deserve respect and consideration, but I don't think many of them went around wearing their loss on their sleeve. Oh wait; those were wars and the so-called "attack on america" was in peacetime. Which in turn was cited as reason for us to kill civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan in a sort of wartime. Or at least a civil war time in those countries. If there ever was some trail of logic there, it is so hopelessly twisted as to become illogical. So just spare us all this memorializing especially eight years hence when there is still just a hole in the ground where all the evidence of what really happened is gone and buried and burned. No two people in NYC can agree on how many millions of public money should be spent on whatever the "thing" is supposed to look like so the scar just sits there oozing mud and pollution. If those people who are entrusted with carrying out some wish for a proper tribute are so ill-equipped for the task, then the rest of us should be spared the crying towel and hand-wringing. If the event were truly worthy of commemoration, why has nobody come up with a way to commemorate it? By reverse logic, I believe I have just proved that commemoration of nine eleven is unnecessary and worthless.
By way of strained tie-in to the second part, I submit the case of Van Jones. This is the incredibly handsome guy who the far right crucified and the President hung out to dry over a nine eleven truth website. Mr Jones signed a petition asking for full disclosure of secret government files that might reveal hidden ugly facts about complicity or even causation of the nine eleven attacks. He did this before he became a White House staff person but no one knew this it seems till now when someone with google skills dug up some moldy material of dubious relevance to anything. So the right wins another one; a journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. Every little thing they can find to discredit the President is to be exploited and emblazoned on TV. After a while, the dimly aware electorate will form a nebulous but negative opinion about the President as a result of this chip chip chipping away at the foundation.
The plant in the audience at Congress the other night which at first went off like one of those south american stink flowers has now become another brick out of that wall. By huddling to fine tune the wording in one of the bills, the Democrats have validated this boorishness and played right into the hands of the Becks and Rushes. A year from now, no one will recall the incident itself but the malaise descending over the presidency will become as concrete as the cone of silence. If only it were to be so transparent but I fear it will be more like a lead balloon.
The anemic non-response by POTUS to the shout-out spoke volumes about his lack of chutzpah. Those who have cited his over-reliance on the teleprompter now have more ammunition. Not that he could really have responded in kind or marched down there to throttle this twit by the throat; but some kind of stand-up defense or counter would have galvanized the left and center in a way no town halls or TV gabfests could begin to. The only satisfaction any of us got was Nancy glowering and seething as well she should have. He could have said something like: "Do you speak for the entire republican caucus? If not, your colleagues need to say so right now. I am waiting. If you do, the American people now see how badly the process has been hi-jacked and subverted. I am actually grateful for the revelation." I am not a politician much less the president. But I came up with something not half bad. Why didn't he? Because he is timid and afraid of being "uppity." Yes the charged race word in all its ugliness. If he were to stand up and smite the oppressive white master, he would prove to the world how dangerous and sub-human all blacks really are. So he Uncle Tom-s his way through the briar patch and we all sit here holding our breath and fearing for the next Fort Sumter attack. It is coming; make no mistake. The South may not rise again from the same geographic map, but the right is going to have its revenge on all things northern, black, smart, progressive, liberal and fair if they have to drag the whole country into the swamp with it. Whatever the President has to do to thwart them, the time is growing short and the enemy is gathering strength with every skirmish they win.

The Best, All-Purpose, All-Round, Metaphorical Device Known

2009-08-17T21:09:00.010-07:00

If you held a Mobius Strip up to a Looking Glass, or took one through it, would it behave the same way? If the last twelve months of our governmental and political machinations were projected onto such a construct, would things make any less sense than they do right now?
I have reached a point where I too want the President to fail but not for the same reason and not in the same manner that the far right extremists do. He has to learn a hard lesson about being too nice and too naive and too compromising. If the only way to do is to fall flat on his face or on his ass, so be it. The blue dogs and the McConnell-Armey-Coburn-Gingrich-Palin crowd mounted a blind sided attack on him that was financed by the health insurance and pharma establishment. (It is much cheaper in the long run to bribe the Congress than it is to suffer the losses a derailing of the gravy train might have been.) The smart and savvy Obama we voted for would have seen it coming or at least ducked or maybe punched back. He is 0 for 3 and that is a strike out in baseball.
Some pundits have not given up and some are even optimistic a scenario can be salvaged from this that puts a public option health care plan in place. But I am resigned to the idea that millions more will go broke trying to stay alive or just give up and die. At least one left wing pundit suggested this was the Obama plan all along; to get elected by promising to try while knowing full well the outcome would be like this. I am not that cynical. Yet.

Revisionism Revisited

2009-07-07T21:55:00.003-07:00

Many have drawn a parallel between the week's events surrounding Michael Jackson's demise and the passing of Elvis Presley. I can see some faint shadows of overlap for a few reasons. Number one is the black-become-white metamorphosis which Elvis executed so effortlessly and seamlessly and quietly. The difference is he did it before he burst on the scene rather than after. And in reverse direction. I wish we could say Jackson's changes had been so well-conceived, well-carried out and well-received. That is assuming Jackson's pursuit had merit in the first place which it did not. Elvis drew from the musical outlaw repertoire of black performers, made it his own and ran with it. In doing so, he was the first and biggest crossover act in music history. To say he integrated black and white onto the dance floor might be a bit much; but with some help from Dick Clark and American Bandstand, the youth of the time did begin to look past race and accept each other more I think. How could anyone fault Elvis--or Dick Clark--for that?
How many of these same good things can be said about Jackson? Well, the times were quite different. Blacks had taken over Detroit studios and were putting out the Barry Gordy sound on millions of platters bought by listeners of both colors. White artists had broken away from the quaint Elvis sound in favor of Brit pop; thanks to Beatlemania. The two camps had managed to de-integrate and re-segregate the music business; perhaps unwittingly but still effectively. Into this fray burst the Jackson Five which as a child act could pass for acceptability to Ed Sullivan's white audience, but deep down they were of course black people albeit with an edge-less quality to their brand of soul. A country torn apart by Vietnam and race riots could handle a cute black kid with an Afro who sang white material.
As Michael grew up, he began to hone an edge to his act. Maybe he did believe that a hipper Gen-X legion of fans who emerged from the turbulence could embrace his blackness without giving any thought to the concept of race at all. Smart move. They did just that as the machine was now being driven by Quincy Jones and MTV at redline speed and selling billions of dollars worth of music. Up to this point, he had been doing some good for music and race relations both.
Why Jackson went wrong, how he went wrong and why no one helped him back to the right path are all moot points now. They became moot long ago as his perversions and delusions and confusion about his self identity played out in court and the media. Any hope of a looming "comeback" would be as credible as one attempted by someone who thought the time was ripe for a modern version of Amos 'n Andy. Who would pay huge money to see a pasty caricature of a mannequin with no heart or soul left in him?
I think the saddest part of these last few days is the racial divide which is again so evident. The grieving energy expended by white people was a fraction of that depicted in the media at least by black fans. Nearly 3/4 of black people felt the amount of coverage was proper while about the same percentage of whites felt it was excessive. If Brooke Shields had not gone before the cameras (with a much better tan than she usually displays) today, I submit the event might have been completely un-integrated. Oh wait: Jackson's white "children" were present so do they count? But wait: they don't have any of his DNA so are they "his?"
Number two on my list of similarities has to do with medicine as practiced so badly and so ineffectively by the medical profession who does a great deal of harm despite their lofty and broken promise. To blame the victim for getting addicted to pills is missing the mark. The companies making these compounds, the government that approves them, the doctors who push them and the insurance companies that keep the whole machine greased and spinning are the villains. The people they suck in and chew up and spit out are pitiable. And because Michael Jackson and Elvis Presley both got ground up in those blades, I feel sorry for them both. I just wish Michael could have built on Elvis' sociological ground breaking rather than turning it on its head. He would have left a much better legacy.

Cheering Then Booing Then Cheering Then. . .

2009-06-15T22:13:00.003-07:00

I have not written in a while because I have had something to do. It makes me wonder how many blogs are put out there because the blogger has nothing else to do. A casual perusal of the blogosphere would produce a rather obvious conclusion.
What I am doing is starting a vacuum tube equipment repair business. I have always fixed mine and other people's old TVs and radios as a hobby so I am going to try and dig my way out of this employment dustbowl the government has dumped us all in by making some money from my enterprising brainpower. Yes I do blame the government because part of what we charge them with is providing a sound basic structure on which a somewhat free economy can thrive and grow. They failed to do that in the beginning so in the end it is their fault.
I also have not written because I did not want to criticize the new prez even though I am becoming disgusted. He deserves all these good marks for being smart and progressive and hip, true enough. His wife has a vegetable garden on the museum grounds for the first time since World War Two days. She had a live jazz ensemble perform at the White House today for the first time in anyone's memory. There are lots of things to like about these people. Today he went before the AMA and told them what they did not want to hear. They boo-ed him. But then they are rich doctors making trillions off the anguish of sick frightened people so how much sensitivity can you expect from them?
Bill Maher of HBO made a good point on Keith Olbermann's show tonight. He uses his studio audiences as his political barometer. He says that in the beginning when he expressed hope for the future under the new leadership, the audiences cheered. Then when the new leadership started morphing into a mean-spirited copy of the old leadership and Bill complained out loud, the audiences boo-ed him in disagreement and blind support of their hero. Now when he rages against the machine that is stalling on ending war, stalling on Gitmo, stalling on gay rights, stalling on CIA reforms, stalling on every major promise made to get the left wing on board during the campaign, the audience cheers. So the fickle crowd has swung to and fro and to again but for different reasons.
Look at what Kennedy promised in the way of what was then liberal thinking. Then look at what he actually did in Cuba and Vietnam. And what he did not do for civil rights for African Americans. The difference between the promise and the reality is seldom mentioned in light of what ultimately happened to him. And it is unlikely that the man in the street in 1963 was fully aware of how disappointing the new leadership was proving to be. Today, the man on the street is plugged in to the instant web-o-sphere and disappointment can turn to rage overnight as seen in Iran over the last few days. I will stop there and let all this sink in as the ramifications and parallels are too chilling to expand upon. If ever there was a place I did not want to go there to, this would be it.

Do YOU Want to Swim in This Gene Pool?

2009-04-27T22:24:00.003-07:00

For all his apparent skills in assessing and manipulating--, uh. . .the entire world, our President is a little out of step right here at home in the backwaters of the ignorant pond in which wade what used to be called the silent majority. Though I guess we need a new name now for the generation that succeeded the dim bulbs who re-elected Nixon since that original group seems to have produced offspring of equally challenged mental capacity. The question is whether he will float with the backflowing current or power up the pumps and flush the filth.
The latest issue that separates the know-somethings from the know-nothings is whether to torture our enemies or not. The Know-Somethings who should include the President and Eric Holder and Nancy Pelosi (and probably do) are quite right in their belief that torture is wrong no matter what information it produces from anyone about anything. The know-nothings that include Newt and Mitch and Sean and Rush (and why is this list longer than the other one?) are pressing forward with their ignorant and jingoistic drumbeat that torture saves american lives so therefore is OK. For all the nonsense that now passes for analysis on NPR, there are occasional unintended lapses that produce fleeting moments of vision on their air. The other day, they had a guy with a British accent who works for some think tank observing that other countries have suffered far worse proportional attacks on their own soil than the USA did on 11 September. But you don't see those other countries taking high handed (or would that be low handed?) measures to beat the so-called truth out of unfortunate captives to head off another attack. Here is a guy who can cut to the core and boy I wish he could bottle that and inject it into the mass bloodstream. But it's too late. The testosterone and adrenaline have been so pressurized by the titilating details of waterboarding and genito-electrical stimulation and dog biting and face-punching by big bruiser military macho men with stars and bars patches on their shoulders that the average clod out there scared of foreclosure is telling the president to "move forward instead of looking backward."
It has been a couple of weeks since I saw any poll numbers but as recently as the first of this month, a majority of citizens advocated torture as a means to extract information from "suspected terrorists." This is consistent with the high percentage of people who advocate murder by the state but call it "capital" punishment. These same people are buying up all the bullets and guns they possibly can in places like Texas and Florida so they can be armed and ready to resist whatever threat they think the government represents as it tries to keep order and calm amidst the widening chaos. There is a twisted sense of Twilight Zone irony in there somewhere; I should have that worked out in my next posting. For now though, I will try to get back to my main point. All this garbage about "looking forward" is code for "we reserve the right to bust mooslim ay-rab heads to protect the red white and blue."
The president and the Congress do have lots of stuff to deal with; like how to de-fuse the stink bomb the previous administration set off last fall that was calculated to produce the economic collapse which is hurting so many in the middle and lower classes. But that job does not take up every hour of every day. The hard work has been done; the groundwork laid and yes there is some tuning and tweaking and monitoring to be done. But there are thousands of smart lawyers and investigators and journalists reporting to work every day with time on their hands to dig up the ugly and illegal truth about the last eight years. If Pat Leahy and Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi and Obama himself can keep sight of Santayana's warning, they will be able to measure their forward progress by how meticulously they examine the past records of old emails and memos and phone transcripts. For if the crimes of the past are not exposed and recognized for the transgressions they were, we are doomed to play out the same bad scripts with unhappier endings.
The President needs to educate and enlighten and lead; not follow and cower and buckle. Whether he will yield to the ignorance and let bygones be forgotten and swept under the rug, or forcefully make a case for moving to the next level of social conscience and awareness and honesty will be the first real test of his character.

Radio Head

2009-03-26T22:49:00.002-07:00

The ad I posted on my local craigslist to earn money by repairing old TVs and radios and phonographs has not panned out like I hoped. One guy asked me if he should buy this late model DLP HDTV that was semi-broken for cheap money; and then maybe I could fix it. Another person wanted me to align his late model transistor FM tuner even though it did not need that. Someone else is bringing me his late model transistor amp that smoked when he turned it on after it sat for five years in an attic. You get the idea. But the most bizarre has been Paul who owns a CB sales and service shop on the grounds of a sprawling truck stop at the edge of town. He called to ask if I would be interested in fixing broken CB radios for his mainly trucker clientele.
Rather than hold out for what I really wanted, I went out there a couple days ago and was greeted by a burly, blocky, hypertensive middle aged man who has owned the operation for a dozen years or so. The tech repair area which is situated like the kitchen at Denny's in that it looks out over the selling floor through a bunker-like slot is littered with torn apart CB radios that are covered in a film of road grime. Some of them don't transmit; some don't receive; some do neither but nearly all have been upgraded with echo and talkback demanded by this demanding group of men who pound their rigs across the country day and night nonstop. When these compact black boxes with sharply protruding chromed non-safety knobs are working well, they keep these guys chatting and joking and trading barbs with each other for maybe ten miles ahead or behind them at most. A few have extra added booster circuits to throw the range much farther; this being totally disallowed at least on paper by the FCC but totally ignored in practice. After two and a half days trying to fix these battered and burned up archaic anachronisms, I am close to giving up. It seems Paul is trying to replace his long-time repair guy who is moving away but wants to keep fixing stuff long distance. Cliff who is moving away wants Paul to ship the broken ones to Ohio from Arizona for repair then await return by UPS or FedEx. Paul does not want to do this being the fairly smart guy he is; but he is having a hard time finding a crack repair guy who can intuitively scope out a defect and correct it in a matter of minutes on site. I never let on I had any such level of skill; but I did promise at Paul's urging to "give it a try." He has been very decent to me and paid me for a couple of small jobs I did on easy repairs. But his hope that I am the successor to Mister Wizard is ending in disappointment.
The enlightenment for me has been a confirmation of my worst suspicions about this segment of our country's socio-political strata that constitutes this milieu. They are not bad people but they are extremely ignorant and narrow-minded. There was a time I would have called them bad BECAUSE they are ignorant and narrow-minded. I am trying to get past that. If I say so myself, I have done a pretty fair job of that while working at the CB shop. Just to give an example; Paul let loose with a slam against Nancy Pelosi for suggesting the next generation of 50 million offspring of the current generation would have a hard burden paying back big deficits. He ridiculed her for pulling a number like that out of the air when the entire US population was "only like ten million." When I told him it was more like 300 million, he looked at me like I was an FCC examiner who had just walked in the front door with a handheld RF signal strength meter to take some readings. He has a side bet with a friend that our current President will be killed before July 20 2009. If Obama lives past that, Paul has to cough up $100 to somebody in his circle of Limbaugh-listening louts. Most of the political talk that starts up with customers has to do with the "wrong direction" things are rapidly going now that "he" is in office. Paul is making an effort not to offend me as he can guess where my sentiments lie. But there is no way I can function well and fit in to this scene.
I must also mention the son Justin who is 30 going on about 19. He comes shuffling in and around 1 PM every day and immediately is hit with text and cell calls from his ex-wife and new girlfriend. He is apparently in high demand. He is kind of cute but the genetic programming is already at work. By the time those 50 million are paying all that debt service, Justin is going to be burly and blocky and trying to hold his gut in like dad has been for a few years now. By then, he will be as bitter and disgusted as the old man and probably no less dangerous. Will there still be citizens' band radio then? I would have guessed all that had dried up and blown away as cellphones took over. But no: these radios still serve a purpose similar to that of guns. They give a man some reach and some clout and some projection of his bigger self. I suspect that if the gov't ever tried to close down CB, they will have a helluva fight on their hands. And so for the foreseeable future, the big rigs will still ride that beam and keep their culture alive on the sky waves that skip off the ionosphere when the sun goes down. That assumes Paul can find the crack transistor-swapper he is looking so hard for. I am truly disappointed that it will not be me.

The Smell of Self Praise

2009-02-22T22:44:00.003-07:00

The Oscar show ended with a whimper tonight after banging its own drum for four hours. And I regret to say I sat through most of it hoping it would find a higher road. Instead, the Academy (as it likes to call itself in desperate hope of imparting some actual meaning to what it does) took the safe, slow, flat and muddy path through the slums of a third world country. At the end of the night, the movie business managed to look even more transparently self serving than it does all the rest of the year. Anointing a mindless fairy tale that glamorizes television, drug violence and caste distinction with a gold plated plaster mold that has no genitalia (even though he is naked) renders the AMPAS utterly irrelevant and out of touch. Again.
The only good thing that happened was Sean Penn being just a bit self effacing and graciously acknowledging Mickey Rourke in his acceptance speech. Mr Penn also used the bully pulpit he held for about 90 seconds to get in some digs at the anti-gay hate-mongering right wing. Bravo to him for seizing the moment and giving some lip back to the self-righteous fascists who are denying same-sex couples what should be their equal rights. Another great moment was Sophia Loren posing with her hand on her hip and daring anyone to suggest she has aged at all let alone gracefully. She carried the evening even though she spoke for less than sixty seconds.
It has nothing to do with the movie awards, but I wish to comment on the last few days in national politics and the theater is has provided. Theater of the Absurd that is. It seems some of the Republican governors are openly stating they don't like the stimulus package because of the strings attached. Funny how they did not complain when the previous administration put far more stringent and onerous oh-by-the-ways on No Child Left Behind just to name one heavy handed program that cost money rather than provided it. Once again the intellectual dishonesty of the right wing shows it has no bottom. But the worst offender in the category of If-we-can't win,-at-least-inflict-maximum-damage is this fathead senator from the deep south. Shelby I think is now saying our president is not a citizen and so he is illegally in the White House. Some newspaper in Philadelphia is saying this and worse, calling Obama a Marxist and Communist and dismantler of all things sacred especially capitalism. The governor of Florida, a republican aptly named Crist, has allowed that there is only one national leader on the scene and his name is Obama and he is running the executive branch of the government. So here we do have a rare moment of intellectual honesty from a quarter not known for it and I applaud Mr Crist. Though I do not worship him. The sooner our capitalist model is exposed for what it is and the damage it has done, the sooner it can be systematically gutted and replaced with a more fair and balanced method of allocating dwindling resources. And anybody who does not see that as a step forward is an idiot. Who probably thinks Slum Dog Millionaire is a great movie.

Still Waiting For the Bounce

2009-01-31T20:08:00.002-07:00

By now, there should have been a positive uplift effect from the new President. But all this "breath of fresh air" stuff is turning out to be just cosmetic and superficial. If it were not for those most evil villains the Republicans, there might have been some substance to the "new direction" promises. McConnell and Kyl and most of the entire Texas crowd have positioned themselves as the spoilers and are relishing their Limbaugh-fanned obstructionism. The sooner Obama goes public with some scathing name-calling and tar and feathering, the better chance he will have of success. All this cocktail partying and super bowl partying and reaching out in bipartisan fashion nonsense is a waste of time in the face of this mean-spirited grandstanding. The main reason we are in this fix is this sort of Rove-ian behavior; the sooner they are called on it out in the open the better. One tiny voice from the shadows can faintly be heard from some GOP governors. They are telling the right wing of the Congress to abandon this tactic and get on board. I applaud them even if their motives are less than honorable.
Now the other big question on my mind is the Blogojevich thing. How can there be no outcry when a federal prosecutor taps somebody's home phone then goes public with a lot of incendiary half-truths? This governor was booby-trapped, way-laid and blindsided by an ambitious and unscrupulous asshole whose naked power-grabbing and spotlight-hogging is positively McCarthy-esque. Not that the governor is any saint. But politics is a game of gamesmanship and he knows how to play or at least he thought he did. To be tripped up in this fashion with his due process rights out the window is cause for alarm. The Guantanamo effect is now spreading to domestic government operations where anything is fair and legal if it means nabbing a criminal.
Some politicos had wondered out loud last fall whether an Obama White House might give back some of the rights taken away by the previous junta. It would seem the answer is a quiet but resolute "no." The same people who had posed the then-rhetorical question mostly answered it speculatively by suggesting that no president will surrender power no matter how ill-gotten it might be. All the warm and fuzzy shirtsleeves and fist-bumping notwithstanding; this smooth-talking, wide-smiling master of the shrewd foul-drawing sneak-around covets his ability to wield great power silently, swiftly and coldly. The ex-governor of Illinois has been the sacrificial lamb whose blood is being splashed on the doorpost for all to see.
But back to my original point on the economic situation and its repair job. This systemic and chronic economic sickness is much bigger than a stimulus package can fix. Capitalism is bankrupt in every sense of the word. It cannot sustain itself as a system. I am fairly jubilant to hear the concept itself being brought into question for its lack of viability for the first time since Kruschev. It is high time and long overdue for serious self examination as we survey the wreckage around us. A full century ago, the other Roosevelt got on the correct side of history and yanked the choker chains on the mad dogs we now call the robber barons. A little skirmish called World War One and an inconveniently timed stroke inside Woodrow Wilson's brain served to undo much of that good work. The result was the Coolidge depression that the other Roosevelt pulled us out of by the skin of our teeth against a serious and earnest attempt to take the country Communist. I am not suggesting we revisit Marxism as alternative. . .or maybe I am. Strange how the far right branded Obama a Marxist last summer in a pre-emptive strike. They must have seen this coming and must have known in their black hearts how wrong all this has been. Rather than own up to it and get on the right side of history, they dig in trench-style to lob mortars and nerve-gas on the only politician with the guts to sort of vaguely suggest another FDR sea-change. If this country has to go Marxist, and it has to decimate the population in a civil war to do it, I say bring it on and the sooner the better. Death to the capitalists and robber barons and aristocratic upper class.

The Arbitrariness of It All

2008-12-31T22:57:00.002-07:00

In a few hours, the least populated time zone in the continental US will go berserk for a minute or so as the Earth reaches the same relative position compared with the sun that it was 365 and one fourth days ago. Or maybe one second earlier. Or later. They are adding a second to make up for an accumulated error in the atom clocks. Whoever "they" are. There is no significance whatsoever to any of this and it never ceases to amaze me how much people make over the "new year." We will probably all be asleep when the changeover happens at our house. Our dogs will become frightened when the guns and firecrackers start going off and they will jump in bed with us and whimper and lick our faces. There are worse ways to be awoken that to have your puppies asking you to comfort them.
The most significant thing that happened today was the alignment of Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and the Moon. I guess the Sun comes in there too since it had just set. An observer on the moon would have seen the Sun and the Earth plus Mercury and Jupiter and Venus I guess but we will never be able to prove that. My point is that these recurring curiosities of celestial positionings are remarkable only from certain vantage points and even then. . .they are fleeting and ephemeral and soon forgotten. Sort of like humanity and its pathetic endeavors that seemed to consume our consciousness for the period we now call 2008. Nothing important happened last year other than our stupid election that consumed billions of dollars and took attention away from things that needed it a lot more. The outcome was less bad than it might have been. That is all I can manage to say about it.
The only good thing I personally have to show for myself was the creation of a vacuum tube amplifier from scratch. Using a circuit from a magazine article, I figured out all the engineering of the chassis. I gathered all the specific parts which my business associate paid for, and put them all together and turned it on. It worked and makes beautiful music. Now we are going to try and sell it for more than the pieces cost him; and if we succeed we will make more and sell them. Of all the things I have tried to do, failed to do, succeeded in doing, or dreamed about doing-- this one has turned out the best of all at least looking back over a long time. If you had told me 365 and one fourth days and one second ago that I would be sitting here listening to an aria on a tube amplifier I built at my kitchen table and that I conceived in my own brain, I would have said that was not likely to occur in this universe. But something came into alignment cosmically and electronically, so thank you to the invisible hands that set me spinning on this mortal coil for a little while. And gave me the energy and vision I needed to do something good this year.

Bailing Wire and Duct Tape

2008-12-15T23:45:00.002-07:00

I would like to apologize for ranting so loudly here the last couple of times. First of all if any of you, my friends, reading this have relatives engaged in digital pursuits, I am not going to hurt any of them and you should be righteously proud of their achievements. I do not wish to take anything away from what they have done or do for a living. I don't really run in the circles of Bill Gates and am unlikely to have my way with him. Although my cousin in Kentucky is said to be on first name basis with him and Belinda. I am totally sorry for my rude remarks.
This sort of brings me around to the shoe episode. Nobody has had the nerve to say out loud that it's too bad the war criminal who pretends to be our president was not struck between the eyes with a steel toe wing tip on world wide TV. It would be a tiny first step on the road to his just punishment for killing a half a million people for no reason. The reporter who ballisticized his footwear did a brave and bold and powerful thing and I salute him and I wish I had the opportunity myself to have done such a deed.
On the subject of behaving badly and mean spiritedly, I must confess I am not half the man I pretend to be. At least regarding backing into people's cars on purpose. I did no such thing to Wendell's BMW though I claimed as much in the previous installment. It's William Shatner's fault. I just finished his breezy autobiobook called Up Till Now which he had help with of course. But that's OK. He is a busy guy who probably has trouble putting a sentence together if it is not written for him to memorize and speak before a camera and microphone. Several times in this book, Shatner will make a bold admission about a dastardly or brazen act he committed. About the time the reader can exclaim OH MY GOD, he recants with a GOTCHA! The timing is hard to master on the written page but he and the ghost writer nail it every time. You reach a point where when he makes an outrageous admission, you are waiting for the take-back but then it does not always come. Anyway, get the book and read it if you have nothing to do for a couple of evenings. If only I had been born a generation before in a Toronto Jewish neighborhood and had a stage mother to push me into acting, I might have been William Shatner or at least had what he has today. GOTCHA! I am an idiot and a dilettante and at least I sort of know it.
My digital memory hard drive is fixed. Thanks to my friends George and Mario who coached me via email on how to proceed. A $25 box enclosure to re-house the external drive cured the trouble. This was news to me but maybe you already know that inside these external HDDs there is a small interface card to translate the ethernet commands from your computer to parallel pulses that spin the motor and skate the heads to and fro over the whirling platters. This stupid little card with some tiny chips on it can fail early and often and unexpectedly. In my case, it did not send self destruct signals to the motors and heads so I escaped. This time. If I had not been able to simply drive across town to the computer repair depot to buy this ready-made pre-packaged solution, I would still be sitting by the side of the digital road with my hood up and the smoke roiling out and a dejected look on my face after searching my trunk in vain for something, anything to make a patchwork fix to make it to Winslow.

A Real Hick

2008-12-13T22:09:00.003-07:00

Over the last few months, my husband Carl participated in a photo contest about How I Live With HIV. Two of his images won first prize but they were ultimately un-selected from being displayed by the overseers of the contest. Our local AIDS service organization called SAAF ended up firing two of its long-time employees who just happen to be gay and HIV Poz over the artistic freedom issues that blew up in everybody's face. To save his own face, the director of SAAF summoned me to his office the other day to explain to me why things happen. It was mostly an insulting lecture from him so I posted the following entry on our Yahoo HIV Poz group.

"I spent 75 minutes on Thursday at the Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation with Wendell Hicks listening to him posture and defend what has gone on over the photo contest. He refused to discuss why two HIV Poz people were removed from the payroll citing the time honored and politically safe concept of it being an internal matter. I told him that until it can be demonstrated to me that my confidentiality had indeed been breached, which was the published reason for the firings, SAAF has no credibility in the community. He prevaricated and stammered and deflected and dissembled and squirmed his way around the topics at hand; mostly just bragging about his expertise, background and education in that cutting edge crucible of progressive and dynamic endeavor: HR. It seems that the director of SAAF got his job not for being a health care or public policy or medical or psychological or sociological expert but a human resources uh,. . person. In one of several ironic twists, he claimed to be on top of the HR issues in one breath and in the next admit he did not know what was in the Wellspring photo contest contract. Later, he said that confidentiality breaches are defensible grounds for termination due to rules about funding, then he immediately dis-ed and minimized me for assuming my confidentiality was important when it really had nothing to do with the dismissals. When a person who does not understand the concept of intellectual honesty is confronted with such a character flaw, he usually resorts to this type of shell game that mainly just made me dizzy.
His ignorance about the photo contest contract was astounding; I was not even in the contest and I knew more about the so-called agreement than he did. He first tried to claim that his Development people had nothing whatsoever to do with photo management and selection, but on cross examination had to admit that they worked hand in glove with the "Festival People" as he kept calling them to determine what pictures were child-appropriate regardless of the Wellspring prize rankings. He claimed not to know that Development is specifically cited in the agreement as having control over the Wellspring images. At the end of it all, there was nothing to show for it beyond his limp handshake and hollow assurances that "I would never want to do anything personnel-wise that would disturb my sleep." Direct quote.
Pieces of the wrecked lives of two caring, intelligent, principled men who have worked tirelessly on behalf of our welfare is swiftly fading in Wendell's rearview mirror as he speeds forward to the next fundraiser. But the only way I can sleep at night is to cut myself off from SAAF and deny them the funding they so desperately seek by claiming me as a dependent. I would rather end up in the gutter than take any more so-called help from people like Wendell Hicks.
How do the rest of you feel? --Signed Thomas Higgins"

There is a post script to this. When I wrote the original account and used the rear view mirror metaphor, I was not aware that Wendell Hicks pulls down a big enough salary squishing out people's lives to afford a BMW 540 sedan which is about a 80 thousand dollar ride the last time I checked. He pulled up in it last night to a private Christmas party I was attending, and I just about wanted to walk over and punch his sanctimonious self-righteous lights out. Instead, I "accidentally" backed my 5000 pound 1963 Imperial land yacht into his bumper just enough to crack the plastic when I left. Not a mark was made on the giant Imperial.

HATE HATE HATE

2008-12-13T19:11:00.003-07:00

I hate every digital design engineer who ever lived. I hate Bill Gates. I hate DirecTV. I hate Samsung and Maxtor and JVC. Given the opportunity I would kill with my bare hands any of the people who ushered in this so-called digital age. Nothing works, nothing lasts, nothing can be diagnosed or fixed. Nothing is worth even dismantling if it fails, and it will fail very early in its life with no warning and leave no recourse. The products I mentioned at the beginning are just the ones that failed in my house today; there are dozens of others that have already failed that I threw in the garbage long ago and my house is filled with dozens more that tomorrow or next week or next month will fail with no warning and no recourse. If you make your living in the digital domain, drop dead. I am now adding to my list of people I hate all digital promoters, afficionados, workers and devotees. The list before now was mainly republicans, police, gov't bureaucrats, human resource employees, financial speculators and doctors.
I am so filled with hate right now for all these horrible people who have ruined the world and hurt me personally that I could explode with my blood and fluids all over the keyboard and monitor. The resulting short circuits would in turn damage the computer irreparably and there we are full circle. A tiny bit of justice. I went outside just before supper to take a sledge hammer to a stupid little toy product made by Samsung that pretended to be a DVD recorder. It might have made ten DVDs in its two year life span but it destroyed several times that of blank disks with a range of indecipherable digital code errors displayed on the screen from which there is no recovery. There is no comprehension or assistance or analysis or reversal or any of the normal avenues a reasonable person would expect to have available when the little brain inside this silly box locks up. You just throw away the thing you spent two hours making and start over. At the end of those two hours, you might be successful. But you won't know until you try and when you fail, Samsung laughs at you.
Earlier today, the external hard drive that promotes itself as the backup device to trust in the event your main computer fails, failed. Over a thousand digital pictures of my friends, my house, my cars, my dogs, my husband, my family and sunsets and lakes and mountains and lightning are gone. I might be able to get some of them back if I go in to best buy and pay them $90 to try and extract them. Failing that, I can send it to San Diego and pay $400 to have the drive platters removed and put into a new control case. Maxtor and Seagate are digital terrorists and they deserve to die for putting people in this spot with their bad machines.
If you have any Maxtor or JVC or Samsung or DirecTV boxes in your house, destroy them before they destroy you. And if you ever meet somebody at a party who works for any of these companies or their competitors, smash them in the face with your fist or any nearby solid object. I know that is what I will do the next time I encounter any of these people who have killed the machine age and brought us to the brink of madness in the digital age.

2008-11-14T17:16:00.003-07:00

Old Testament vs New Testament

2008-11-11T22:24:00.002-07:00

My secret agenda is to have my blog turn into a book and it is going to be monumentally difficult to keep this entry from turning into a gigabyte. So if it sounds cryptic or disjointed as we go along here, that is the internal editor switching to meat cleaver mode.
I just finished Ron Suskind's The Way of the World. I had started Talib's The Black Swan and had made reference to it in a recent entry. But I set it aside in favor of the Suskind book and I am the better for it. If any of you are reading Swan, put it away and find Way of the World. You will thank me later.
The most profound thing I was taught as a Catholic grade school boy was that the Old Testament took a dim, dark, cynical view of the world and the New Testament took the optimistic, good-hearted, Beatitudes view. Or at least that is the most profound thing I remember about what the bible means to our religious culture; pardon the paradoxical misnomer. For all his pretenses at enlightenment, Mr Talib is stuck in the BC era with its flaming bushes and locust plagues re-cast in modern airplane attacks on tall buildings. The Black Swan would have us believe the best thing a smart guy can do is hedge his bets and make a killing while there is still such a thing as viable western currency to amass, hoard and spend. Suskind has looked at the same set of modern historical facts and come to a diametrically opposite conclusion. The Way of the World makes the most compelling case I have ever seen to turn the other cheek and apply the Golden Rule or Categorical Imperative; call it what you will. Having said this, I must immediately back pedal a bit to praise Suskind for his detailed and damning prosecution of POTUS and his war crimes. Yet he spends little time on the details of punishment or the meting out of justice. Instead, he accentuates the positive and eliminates the negative; ignoring mister in-between. The take-away headline is that despite or maybe because of the staggering level of malevolence that has pervaded the US policies of the last eight years in particular, good behavior still counts for something. People who turn from the dark side toward the light can in fact make a difference. The moral high ground gained by winning the hearts and minds of a would-be enemy will be our only hope. The truly scary fact is that two genies are out of their bottles: islamic fundamentalism and nuclear weaponry. If the two get together, it will not be a sitcom but a disaster movie. The last one. I now am convinced after reading Way of the World that any effort to prevent the end of days must not come from the more intensified CIA-oval office memo-guantanamo torture mentality but from the Peace Corps and the Foreign Exchange Student program to name a couple.
If I don't stop now, I won't get any sleep tonight and you will never come back to see what else I might have to say in the future. So get the Way of the World at your local library and slog through its 400 pages and enlighten yourself. I am a better person now than I was a week ago when I closed the Black Swan halfway through in disgust.

Our Collective Soul

2008-11-05T09:46:00.004-07:00

If you never watched any of the modern versions of Star Trek on TV, the rest of this won't mean much. But if you know what the Borg is or are, then you will maybe agree with my assertion that Obama fashioned an interconnected mentality that won him this job. He used the internet of course, but also cell phones and TV in ways that other candidates could have done but had not yet done. He wove it all together and sat back to watch the program run. It is sort of like the old punch card computers. You wrote your Fortran commands on a series of paper cards with holes in them. You loaded them in the drawer and set the spring clamp and pressed the load button. The cards were sucked in and the beams were scanned and the results ratchet-ed out of the printer a few minutes or even hours later depending on the other students' programs already in progress. Or to use an older analog analogy, you cut your gears and you calibrate your dials and you engage the drive and you listen for that smooth hum. As a cultural, societal, political and media machinist, Obama is the all-time high Nobel winner if they had a Nobel prize for engineering. Whether this talent will serve him well as President is unknown, but I would say it is likely.
It is important to also give credit to another societal engineering force that did its job a while back and now is now mostly hands off and invisible: MTV. It was Donny Fowler, one of the analysts on HDNet last night with Dan Rather, who suggested the idea that Music Videos widened the mental vistas for the current Generation X and even Y voters way beyond those of the Baby Boomers. The intermingling of black and white and now brown music and musicians into a swirling mix of beats and energy and images may not have been intended as a push forward but it certainly had that secondary effect. The result is that nobody under the age of 35 even cares whether a person is of a different race or not. In some weird way, Michael Jackson's transmogrification might have pushed that envelope outward by a couple million votes. But in a completely passive and offhand way.
One last Star Trek metaphor bears mention here. The Vulcan Science Academy has stated that time travel is an impossible construct. When confronted with Captain Archer's personal tale of temporal transport, the Vulcan science office T'Pol cautioned that "wanting a thing to be so does not make it so." It is meant as a preemptive strike to dump advance rain on any parade. Is it just possible however that the collective desire to purge the government of this pox and disease and stench was so great that we made it so by sheer force of our collective will? The news that spontaneous demonstrations erupted outside the white house gates at midnight last night serves to reinforce the idea that the Borg hive awoke on command from its implanted transceivers and issued the ominous warning to the right wing: Resistance is Futile.

Wilson Won the Battle, Bradley Won the War

2008-11-04T23:09:00.004-07:00

I switched constantly from HDNet to MSNBC to CBS and even CNN but never heard Tom Bradley's name mentioned or the dreaded "effect" named for his defeat in California a couple decades ago. Though I must salute Chuck Todd the NBC Political Director for coming near the notion when he observed that the Vietnam generation and the baby boomer generation are done. They had their big chance and they won't get any more of them. And Donny Fowler on HDNet as much as said the same thing only with a drawl: that nobody under 35 even cares about the Bradley effect or the uterus effect or any of those tired old ideas that Dan Rather kept wanting to talk about with the panel.
When John Kennedy said that the torch has been passed to a new generation, he was of course dead on. Unfortunately. He never got to run with it. Now we have this man born two generations after Kennedy into a profoundly different world (but I am not sure into a more progressive America) saying pretty much the same thing. With any luck, he will most assuredly run with it like the Kenyan he is. Don't they win most of the marathons they enter?
I had been in an anxious funk for the last 72 hours as the AP wire was incessantly bumping McCain's numbers ever upward and gleefully reporting any down-ticks for Obama. And yes there were plenty of thoughtful pundits fearful of the Bradley effect which I had to explain on the phone tonight to someone who should have known what it was. White people who tell a pollster they are voting for the black candidate only to chicken out in the booth could have done so in big enough numbers to derail this train. The sigh of relief in my mind and the stirrings of jubilation in my heart overlapped as the scales tipped around 8:45 MST I think it was.
Tom Bradley is dead. Jesse Jackson is a spectator. McCain is a washed up martinet. Palin is a shrill footnote. Obama grabbed the torch and the tank and the lighter and the reflector from all who went before and he has made them his own to fashion a real beacon with. May he succeed.

A Real Mister Smarty Pants

2008-10-21T22:30:00.003-07:00

On PBS' evening nose-in-the-air show tonight were a few worthwhile minutes with a guy named Nassim Nicholas Taleb. He is a person of vaguely Mediterranean lineage with millions of dollars in the bank courtesy of a lucky break on Wall Street several years back, and who espouses a variety of outrageous yet plausible positions about the mess the world is in. Paul Solman who is among the sharper tacks in the drawer of TV economic experts sat transfixed as Mr Taleb painted a black image of unpredictably dangerous times ahead. His expert character witness on set with Paul was the French mathematician who came up with fractal chaos theory; this man seemed more along for the ride or window dressing as Mr Taleb needs no one to cheer lead for him or lend him credibility. His website is www.fooledbyrandomness.com and I will say it looks like quite the amateurish mess thrown together by someone who gives not the slightest whit how the so-called sophisticates might scorn its lack of style. But I believe there are truths permeating and underlying the noise he makes. He has been on lots of TV shows even though he recommends against watching TV. If no one watched, he would sell far fewer books so his intellectual honesty is partly in jeopardy. But like I said, there is truth under the noise and the next book on my reading list is his Black Swan title about the Impact of the Highly Improbable.
Maybe thirty years ago I read a pulp economic science fiction thing called the Crash of 79 which did not prove to be prescient in the least. It nonetheless made a huge impression on me at the time but now I realize I was suffering from that human foible the Vulcans have gotten past: Wishing a thing to be so does not make it so. I think there is a dark and unpleasant aspect of thinking people which makes them want to see bad things happen. It is far beyond schadenfreude; it is more cataclysmic and macro than that and I think it is part of the lemming or school-of-fish programming that lurks deep in our sub-brains. Proceeding from the observation that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, I submit that phylogeny guides and shapes or maybe even limits our higher thought processes in ways we refuse to admit.
I am writing this late at night when my brain has started misfiring in preparation for dreamland and REM, so it is impossible to flesh all this out right now for me much less for you. But it's OK; find Taleb for yourself and learn from him what you will. We can talk later about it at our book club meeting.

Stoking the Fire Before the Chat

2008-09-29T22:33:00.004-07:00

Biden's slip was pretty funny: how Roosevelt went on television to calm the people when the stock market crashed. If only Palin had uttered it. But we overlook Joe's hip shooting because his heart is in the right place. Hers is lodged somewhere among her kidneys and her colon and a ruptured bile duct. It is obviously saturated with the surrounding materials.
There is a striking difference between that situation in 1933 and the one we are in now. In our time, the government is milking this. They created it. They are fueling it. They are orchestrating it. Back then the country was blindsided and the government sat on its hands for four years trying to justify its inaction until Roosevelt got in and went on the radio to calm and encourage. He then took action to directly help the people; not the tycoons. This president goes on TV to foretell the panic before there even is one. And his rescue plan is a mirror image of what worked so well three generations ago. Mirror: as in backwards.
What possible motivation could W have for doing this? The same one he might have used to plan, stage and execute the attacks of seven years ago. To scare the people into submission. Ram through a new round of oppressive laws and nazi crackdowns. But this time, we go to the next level: suspend the election. Most of the conspiracy theorists figured he would attack Iran a couple of weeks before voting and use that as his excuse. But instead, he pulls a trick rabbit out of his ass that nobody saw coming. I gotta hand it to him; although it had to be that Paulson snake who really hatched something this sinister and complex. Either way, it's a win-win situation.
If the bailout does get passed, the guy who has every indication of being the clear winner will get saddled with an anvil around his ankles. None of his programs will get funded and he will be hounded and vilified and lose in 2012. And this will be made all the worse when the incumbent democrats in congress are strung up in trees in 2010 thanks to whatever is left in the bag of dirty tricks. Barack might win this battle but he will lose the war. And these people likely do not take prisoners. If they do, they torture them.
If the bailout does not get passed, the depression hits with a bang and POTUS invokes the maximum executive privilege to stay in power to ensure tranquility and imprison rioters. Karl and Berto and Harriet all come back to DC to help herd the new outlaws into prison ships bound for Gitmo; Nancy and Harry and Barney and Chris rail and snipe and whine but they are spinning their bald tires on ice. This democracy is about to be served the government it truly deserves for having been so ignorant, so hypnotized, so selfish and so damn dumb for the last generation and a half. If I had any grandchildren, I could tell them I was alive when it was a great country. But I don't have any. And it is better that way.

Not Rated for a Full Flap Spin

2008-08-29T13:26:00.003-07:00

After McCain's people watched the show last night from Mile High Stadium, they did the closest thing to forfeiting the election. If only such a mercifully quick end to this 18 month nightmare could take place. Instead we must endure the charade of the RNC parading this ex-mayor of a rural town of nine thousand misfits as fit to be a heartbeat from leader of the free world. They will pretend she is a great choice and a handful of people will believe it. These would be the same ones who think America Does Got Talent as displayed on the Jerry Springer train wreck NBC bookended coverage of the DNC with. You have to congratulate Obama's people who built a little White House back porch for him to come out from and chat with us, then go back in with all the kids, wife and Joe and Jill. Like the election is just a formality to validate what we all know can and must happen. The subliminal effect was masterfully crafted but missed by everyone I heard on MSNBC who could not see past the classic greco-roman motif.
If the McCain-ers try to pass off this woman as comparable to Dan Quayle, and just as worthy of serious respect as he was, it will only prove we have stepped completely through the looking glass and into a twisted parallel universe of fun-house mirror distortion. You watch, it won't take them 48 hours to draw the comparison like it's a good thing. The scariest thing about that tack is that Bush-Quayle did actually win. Or were they just secretly testing their electronic vote rigging before anybody had even thought it were possible? We will never know, and we must be very afraid because electronic manipulation of computer voting is the only method by which Barack would appear to lose against this cartoon team of Yosemite Sam and Betty Boop.
What must happen instead is that this woman I cannot even bring myself to characterize as earnest go down in history alongside William Miller. He was the Congressman tapped to run with Barry Goldwater. They join a string of unknowns who are unwittingly strapped into the copilot seat of the doomed test plane that has water in its fuel, bird nests in its intakes, rust on its control cables and a narcissistic psychopath for a captain. Maybe the fifth crash in McCain's logbook will finally silence him forever.

Sound Ideas

2008-08-24T22:18:00.002-07:00

I warned you I might talk about vacuum tubes occasionally, and we are overdue. Plus the fact my friend Colin wants to build an amplifier from scratch using tubes, and many possible ideas are swimming in our heads like the synchronized Olympians. Only not synchronized at all. Imagine a class of special ed kids with attention deficit disorder being herded into a pool and given a choreography routine to perform. Colin and I are right there, and dragging our other friends into the water. To help sort my thoughts, I am logging them here on the web.
In a room with a musical instrument or a singer, the amount of air is constant. The music is heard not because the amount of air in the room and reaching your ear is increased or decreased. Rather, the pressure of that air changes rapidly in waves of varying intensity and frequency. In the realm of electricity which is the medium we have used for about eighty years to duplicate music artificially, pressure is represented by voltage and amount by amperage. So the first device men made to assist in this pursuit was the vacuum tube which operates best and primarily in the realm of voltage though it can be made to control and manage current or amperage. The tube flourished and matured for exactly one human generation, about thirty years. Then its offspring, the transistor came along; operating almost entirely in the current or amperage realm though it can be applied in the voltage realm. In a computer, the only issue is a one or a zero. You don't care how big or how nuanced the one or the zero is; it just has to be what it is. A batch of electrons is either on the transistor junction pin or it isn't in your computer. Operating this way, the computer works quite well several billion times a second with only five volts of pressure. Now do you consider your computer to be a high fidelity music machine? It might be a convenient way to manage and manipulate music. But it can not make anything like beautiful music. And it never will in its current state of development.
The reason the vacuum tube is not going to go away is that a certain percentage of the population is more sensitive to stimulus than the average person. Some people drive sporty cars because they feel more control and feedback from the car and the conditions. Some people watch HDTV because they get more emotional bang out of a show or event as a result of the increased visual details. And some people want the clearest, most real music they can get in their home without paying $50 to hear a single performance across town at an inconvenient point on the calendar. To achieve that, they must use equipment with tubes. Because the tiny pressure wave the microphone picked up in the studio must be made very much bigger to pressurize air in the living room, an amplifier is needed. To boost the tiny pressure wave accurately with current manipulation is foolish and wrong headed and fruitless. To boost a tiny pressure wave accurately with a voltage sensitive and voltage controlling device is inherently sensible and rational. The big pressure wave coming out of a tube is going to be closer to the original sound wave than a big current blob coming out of a transistor is to that same real sound. It can't help but be.
One issue Colin and I are debating is whether to use tubes that operate in the current realm like fake transistors or tubes that are skewed more to the voltage realm. The problem is the speaker itself has evolved into a high current device when it should have been developed and perfected as a voltage pressure device. Until it gets reinvented, we must use an adapting transformer to convert the amplified pressure wave to a varying current stream at the last possible point in the chain. I say that is acceptable while others disagree. What is your view?
Why anyone even bothers to continue defending transistors for audio as audibly superior to tubes is mystifying. The only good thing about solid state is the reduced carbon footprint they make. I invite comments about that issue as well.

Scarred For Life, And Well-Deserved

2008-08-24T10:36:00.002-07:00

Notice how there is not even a whisper about somebody taking a shot at mcCain? Only Barack is assumed to be a target. I have not quite figured that out but it is creepy that ABC news highlighted Obama's misstatement when he introduced Biden as "the next president. . .uh, vice president of the united states" yesterday in Illinois. Maybe because the assumption is mcCain will drop dead of natural causes before anybody can penetrate the phalanx of body-built gorillas that surround him. We can only hope. He is a scurrilous, whining, martinet of an apologist for long failed policies. But the MSM has succeeded in managing his lighting oh so well with rising poll numbers to prove their success. He never met a lie he could not finesse into an attack on the person calling him on it. And he has gotten more mileage out of having his airplane shot out from under him than Dick Rutan got from his solar powered gossamer that circumnavigated the planet. The latest was today on Face the Nation; Katie Couric asked him for a rational explanation for his ignorance of the number of multimillion dollar homes he has. His defense of the indefensible included a rambling sermon on the little woman's daddy who managed to corner the beer market in the post war boom that brought young thirsty men to the parched desert. Yeah, that sure takes a lot of brain power. But I digress. Or he digressed in somehow trying to link his days as a POW to justifying Cindy's immense wealth. I am just following his digression. Don't blame me. And it's OK he dumped his first working class wife to take up with this plastic witch. Katie did not have to ask about that; the Reverend doofus from Orange County threw him that softball last week. Anyhow, the answer he gave cut no mustard; though the fog in which he shrouds all statements does seem to appeal to the foggy headed in the electorate. Barack is being criticized, like Kerry before him, for being too analytical, too professorial, too nuanced and just plain too smart. The US being populated with so many dumb people, it is little wonder that winners of political contests are tending to be those who pretend to be dumb. Or who really are.
A friend who appears to be smart stated he does not want a Black person in the White House. I guess it is a color scheme thing. Or a racist thing. Either way, it spells doom for what should be a historic candidacy. I will say again that I think mcCain will win because he is a shameless and dishonest cur, and Obama is too smart and too dark for the dumb white masses to accept.
Socrates and Hamilton pretty much had it nailed when they warned against letting working class boobs call the shots. This country is living proof their fears were valid, and it is going down the drain with a big flush set for 4 November 2008.

Now If They Played Naked, I Might Watch

2008-08-06T21:38:00.002-07:00

Please don't pay any attention to China or NBC for the next couple of weeks. They are going to be insufferably smug and pompous as this idiotic quadrennial spectacle plays out again and all too soon. It seems like only two years ago we had to put up with this claptrap. Oh wait, we did have to put up with it two years ago for the winter olympics. It's all a blur; I can't remember where it was or who was thrown out for drugs or who disputed the findings or who the tear-jerking hero was supposed to be who choked out big time in the early going. I do remember the jingo-ism and the maudlin emotionalism and the generally stomach-turning aspects of it. But this one is going to be even worse if such a thing is possible. The host country is a gang of thugs, assholes and fascists; and no it is not being held here but in that far eastern country where most of our hard currency is now stockpiled. Thank you Wal Mart, K Mart, Target and Costco.
It is really hard not to be a racist in this world and time where social darwinism is being writ large across the board. Everyone wants their culture to be the best; everyone thinks their culture IS the best. But unless you are carrying a Danish driver's license, you need to be ashamed of your flag and your government and your jungle minded behavior. And it is really hard to point fingers at the Chinese for being the most repugnant people on the planet when the civil wars in Africa and the petty sniping and killing of Palestinians by Israelis and vice versa and of course the ongoing train wreck caused by our stupid POTUS person in what was a perfectly decent country (as dictatorships go) shine as examples of crimes against humanity that go unpunished.
I have known lots of good decent Chinese people; most of them second generation US citizens born to parents who fled the strife and war of the early 20th century that left their feudal nation a dark and dangerous place to think any independent thoughts. But I don't really know any of this current crop other than what is portrayed on TV. And try as the US media might to paint a rosy and complimentary picture of this horde of voracious and rude and ornery and selfish people, the characterization is anything but flattering. I don't like the way they are taking over commerce or polluting the air and water or coveting oil or making way too many babies or-- wait: the USA has done all that already. How ironic that our rude behavior is now being modeled back to us by a country four times the size of ours and who is sitting down at the banquet table to carve up the last of earth's resources in accordance with its gluttonous appetite. I hope we are very pleased with ourselves for creating this monster who is going to have us for lunch. After they let us win a few medals to show off on TV for the home crowd.

Another Reason to Laugh or Cry

2008-07-22T21:06:00.003-07:00

The Park Service went one step closer today toward designating the first nuclear reactor as a national landmark which would have the effect of preserving it for posterity. This giant concrete affair with pipes and valves and control rods had one purpose: to make fuel for the killer bomb. The idea of the peaceful atom came much later; after a hundred thousand civilians were incinerated in an instant (actually two instants a few days apart) thanks to the efforts of secret science. Now there is no point in discussing whether the bomb should have been fashioned or whether it should have been used the way it was in the summer of 1945. The two main reasons to leave it be are number one it's over and number two it seemed like a perfectly good idea at the time.
The idea of rangers giving tours like it is the Grand Canyon or Hoover Dam, though, is in macabre bad taste of a new lowest order. The Democratic Senator from Washington which is home to the most polluted contaminated nuclear real estate in the western hemisphere praised the finding by the Republican Cabinet person charged with such matters. He is a Idaho anti-conservationist tree-cutter who has never met an environmentalist he would rather not throw in front of bulldozer. Talk about strange bedfellows; it really just proves that politicians of both stripes have no convictions or ethics or morals or standards and should all be shot. Anarchy would be better than continuing to let them ruin the country's economy, culture, civil liberties and stewardship of resources the way they are doing.
The Hanford Reactor is better off being leveled or sealed in a dome of impenetrable concrete. It is not a place to revere or hold hallow or in any way commemorate other than to mark it as a low point in the subversion of science to war-making. The people elected to represent the state it sits in apparently find money more important than character or honesty or doing what is right. Now if Congress, the Supreme Court and the Executive Leadership could all be herded into the hottest part of it and entombed, I would pay to go watch them dissolve into radioactive gelatin on closed circuit TV monitors.

Nine Score and Two Years Ago

2008-07-04T21:15:00.002-07:00

"Thomas Jefferson lives today." Those words were not true when John Adams spoke them in wishful good faith on the 4th of July in 1826. But media communications being what they were then, how could he have known that Jefferson had preceded Adams in death by just hours that same day? The modern trend toward hagiography being what it is, should anyone be surprised that NPR of all entities pretended to put the death of Jesse Helms into historical context by pointing out the coincidence regarding the deaths of two real actual statesmen on the national holiday back in 1826? And since they did so before his cold blood had turned to ice, I stomp on Helms' dead body to bury his memory with the contempt it deserves. And I do it today while the rockets red glare is scaring the hell out my dogs this Independence Evening.
The comparison being drawn is an insult to the memory of those founding fathers on a Babel-ian scale. Helms and Reagan lowered the bar of fair discourse and rational engagement over ideas and values to the gutter, the sewer, the septic tank that now stinks up the entire political process. Helms does not deserve a funeral or an observation or any fraction of the adulation that is already being bestowed on him by the media he so hated. He created a sub-human sub-culture that has brought us Rush and the ditto-heads not to mention W and the Rovians and Dick-heads. The crucifixion of open minded progressive thought and the individuals who think such thoughts was invented, trademarked, patented and marketed by Helms and his minions. The hate mongering he preached against gay people, sick people, pacifists, scholars, atheists and progressive dreamers has now become the norm. The shift to the right which cannot be reversed anytime soon was started by him and locked in place by the current POTUS and his lying cheating dishonest disingenuous band of mental midgets so don't tell me Helms was a statesman. Don't tell me he is to be respected for his convictions. Don't tell me he is to be mourned. The fact he got as far as he did and got the ear of the electorate is the only thing to be mourned and cursed.
I once read that conservatives assume the worst about humanity in the aggregate, and that the institutions of power must act accordingly to consolidate their own lock on power lest the teeming masses become truly revolting as is their wont. Liberals are thought to believe in man's inherent good nature and that minimal steering of the ship of state is needed to make forward progress. Somewhere that all went completely down the drain; a topic I have tried to shed light on in past blogs but with mostly muddle-headed vagueness. But Helms' legacy does give credence to the part about generally assuming the worst about people. He most certainly was an elitist of self-righteously biblical proportions. The very idea that conservative think tank dwellers know better than the rest of us what is a proper course for the republic, and the politicians who read their books and implement their ideas are to be thanked and revered and re-elected to provide the trickle-down special effects for all to marvel at has endured courtesy of Helms and Reagan and the Bushies. We who don't agree are aliens, vermin, snobs, tree-huggers, faggots and of course liberals. Helms turned that label into a cuss word, and I curse him for that. I call on the deity he so knee-jerk worshiped: God Damn You Jesse Helms to Everlasting Hell for proving that there indeed were enough stupid ignorant people in North Carolina to have given you the pulpit from which to sow your seeds of poison hatred across the land.

Happy Birthday Not

2008-07-03T09:59:00.002-07:00

The flag-waving, fire-working, gun-shooting night of self-congratulatory revelry will mark nothing of progress since the last time we arbitrarily marked this position on our trip around our star. If some of you think the new Tom has somehow let go of all the negativity, read on. I did tell my therapist I no longer wish for the destruction of all humanity in a cataclysmic slate-wiping, but that does not change the fact our stupid country led by this stupid ape-like tyrant has nothing to celebrate. We are a blight on civilization, and a selective surgical cataclysmic strike on the middle of the North American continent from beyond or within would be in the best interest of the planet as a whole. It won't happen unless a terrorist finds a way to sail a motorboat up the potomac with a neutron bomb on board; an event I would not celebrate with fireworks or guns or flags but just a sigh of relief. I know, I know: fight your battles at the ballot box. Well, uh. . .don't look now but:
This election cycle is spinning in a little circle like clowns on tricycles in the circus. Is Barack wearing his lapel pin today or not? Is McCain's temper in check today or did he flash at a reporter? They are both scrambling to own the middle-ground lest anyone mistake either one for having any strength of conviction whatsoever. I predict right now that unless one of them takes a powder unwittingly or otherwise, McCain will win and the end will truly be at hand. The current POTUS will either attack Iran or symbolically withdraw a token division from Iraq (or both) in October and Barack will hem and haw his way to oblivion. A wave of expatriates will try unsuccessfully to reach Canada, and the national depression that most of us don't even know we have will descend like a wet blanket. The rich will get richer, the poor will turn on each other and the rest of us will just become more hateful and angry. About this time next year, the new POTUS will prop himself up in front of the cameras to remind us how he suffered in military prison and how we should all be so thankful he made it out alive and wave the flag and shoot some fireworks and drink some of his wife's beer and watch some TV.
That would be digital-only TV which thanks to McCain's tough-guy tactics in Congress, we will be stuck with forever. I hate him for lots of things, but taking away analog TV as we have known it since Roosevelt is a capital offense. All the antique and collectible TVs that my friends and I own will go to permanent snow on all channels a month after he swears on that Bible, and thank you very much mister president. He did this to make his friends rich; like the blood money from all that beer his wife has poured down the gullets of the lower middle class is not enough legacy for him.
I am still mad as hell at the world and especially the governments that are turning Earth into Venus just to protect the giant multinational Wall Street powers that finance their elections and re-elections over and over. I told a friend who has often spoken of killing himself that the only reason to keep on living is to see the next Star Trek movie or read Michael Chabon's new book or to finish that new sculpture he started. I stand by that; an individual suicide by an invisible anonymous grunt of a person is not painless and is not a solution. Too bad the people that really need to die keep on living. Like the Congress and the Executive Branch and the Supreme Court and Wall Street tycoons and Bill Gates and the short list of truly blood sucking parasites whose names fill the airwaves constantly as if they actually amounted to anything. If the bad people could go away, and let the good people take control, I would not have a blog. And my friend would not be lying in bed too depressed to get up and play with his cat and work on his antique TV collection.

Give It Back to the Indians?

2008-06-12T23:11:00.002-07:00

Fat Chance of that happening anytime soon. I refer to Palm Springs, California from where I have just returned home to Tucson. I spent a few days vegetating by the pool at the vacation rental house my friend pays over $500 a week to stay in. While there, I leafed through a coffee table book entitled Palm Springs Confidential written by an Australian visitor, Howard Johns. Parts of it read like a watered down Hollywood Babylon while other sections easily cleared the Chamber of Commerce literary screening committee. Few of the current locals probably know much less care that an Indian tribe was there first, or that they scratched out a living on the eastern slopes of the Jacinto peak that rises like a science fiction earthquake monolith just west of the current city. Like most other Native Americans, the original dwellers were mostly displaced by white settlers. Though they continue to have a last laugh in the form of lease payments they collect from bargain hunting bottom feeders. It seems that desperate, shrewd and unscrupulous real estate agents (is there another variety?) still manage to convince some newcomers it is a smart move to buy Indian leased real estate even though it is not really real estate being purchased. As long as another sucker climbs off the stage coach or falls off the turnip truck, Palm Springs will keep flourishing. And for those who know the drill and how to prevent a wallet-ectomy from happening right under their own hip, the rewards are simple and base: Guiltless sun, fun and anonymity. While you are lowering your blood pressure in a hotel, resort or time share condo in the shadow of the mountain, flip through Mr Johns' tome and vicariously slip into something so comfortable you won't want to put your regular clothes back on at all. Ever.

The Nominees Are. . .

2008-05-05T14:03:00.002-07:00

TW3: Anybody out there remember that acronym? NBC bravely put a show on the air about 40 years ago that lasted a month or so. That Was The Week That Was was the unwieldy title, so critics shortened it to TW3. It was political, topical, biting, satirical, smart, funny and risky. All the things that some TV shows wish they were now but are not. I only mention this because this has been the week that was in our house. Nothing biting, satirical, political, funny or smart I am sad to say. But decidedly newsworthy in my opinion. The question in my mind is which of the following occurrences would take the prize and be the lead segment on TW3 if it had to go on the air tonight at 9, 8 Central?
1) My mother in law dies in a Chicago hospital after the family gathers on short notice to decide whether to prolong her life on a ventilator. Led by my husband Carl and his sister Barbara, the others vote to honor the mother's stated wishes and let her go in peace. He returned home sunday noon to resume his life as a grown up without his mom to guide him any longer. She was 78; he is 58. So it will be OK, I think.
2) Carl had studiously, meticulously, carefully, punctually and methodically applied for special ed teaching positions in Washington state. They had phoned the house and conducted an interview a couple of weeks ago, then they contacted his principal here. But the call to bring him up there for the in-person interview did not come. In Friday's email was a thanks but no thanks form letter saying they went with someone else.
3) My employer summoned me to the main HR office where I was presented a take it or leave it resignation letter wherein I surrender all future rights to bring any actions against them for any and all illegal, improper, deceitful or otherwise underhanded stunts they have pulled on me and other employees over the last three years. In exchange for this, they promise to let me apply for unemployment without challenge, and give me three days pay. And I have to promise never ever to tell anybody how they extorted this from me.
4) A female horse is entered into the Kentucky Derby where she comes in second against nineteen stallions, then collapses with her leg bones sticking through her flesh. The veterinarians kill her where she lay in the backstretch just beyond turn two. But NBC TV and the corporate sponsor Yum Yum foods who bring us Kentucky Fried Chicken among other delectable and nutritious fare run and re-run and re-re-run the yawner of a race where the favorite won and his rich owners and trainers jump up and down in jubilation as they mentally count their seven figure winnings.
Now I admit that number four is not a personal trial for us as we do not own any expensive race horses; nor have we ever bet more than about ten dollars on horse racing. But as an event that produced an emotional response, it is a major contender.
If the votes are for number three, I shall be posting more of the details of the travesty in a soon to be released blog entry. And then I will sit back to see if the liar and crook who runs HR is reading it and hauls me into court for "disclosing" the secret terms he concocted to bash me with. His name is Donald D Baumhart, JD and he runs Human Resources for El Rio Health Center Inc where the main order of business is to provide a place for pregnant illegal aliens to drop their fetuses and collect US benefits in perpetuity for the little monkeys. It's probably better I am no longer on the payroll. Sooner or later I would have called the border patrol on them and brought untold bad publicity and god knows what unspeakable anarchistic violence to our quiet pueblo.
Thank you for your votes and comments and attention.

Natural Analgesics

2008-04-23T13:17:00.002-07:00

I have not written in a while due to infirmities that have knocked me over. And this will be mercifully short as I have not yet recovered. In fact, I sit here with a metal tumbler wedged between the upright part of my office chair and a knotted up spot just left of my T4 vertebra. It is the only way to stop the back pain. Chiropractor did nothing to help. PCP at first prescribed a drug I was allergic to until the pharmacist noticed it. Now taking flexerall, I stumble aimlessly about in a drug-induced holiday from reality. I will give evolution credit for trying though. As this came upon me, my endocrine system responded by flooding my bloodstream with all mannner of endorphins or other naturally occurring medicines in effort to keep me on straight and narrow path. OK, well maybe narrow path.
My brother's physical therapist told him that the aging process is cruel to those of us who have led sedentary lives. The back and shoulder muscles begin to atrophy with non-use, and then when we do try to use them for their stated purpose, they rebel by causing pain. His solution has been to do a series of easy exercises courtesy of the therapist. I could not learn them over the phone but will do so soon. In Person.
But my real purpose here today is not to praise me but to bury Hillary. Like many other liberal democrats, I find her an acceptable alternative to more war, more trickle-down and more nazi tactics that would flow from the pen of McCain. But her 9.2% margin in pennsylvania was not the double-digit bump she wanted, and we will now all be shoved through a meat grinder for more attacks, more gotcha and less illumination. Until she goes away. Meanwhile, we must also endure the spectacle of Barack's inexperience continuing to bite him in the butt. The latest wince-inducing faux pas happened in San Fransisco when he dismissed rural bumpkins of the keystone state as crying in their gun barrels and drugging themselves with the opiate of choice for people of no means: religion. Hearing the reaction to this, and hearing Barack's failed spin-doctoring to put it right, I went back and looked up Carter's so-called "malaise" speech even though he never uttered that word anywhere in it. While he never insulted anyone over their espousal of weapons or bibles, he might as well have beaten us all up with his words as did Barack. In both cases, there was a pointed accusation hurled from an Olympian mountaintop onto the teeming masses below. In both cases, the accusers were oblivious to the ramifications of their elitist pronouncements. In Carter's case, there were to be much bigger blunders ahead on the rocky road to the Reagan Revolution such that the malaise-mongering was quickly eclipsed and forgotten. But in Barack's case, I fear we have not heard the last of those scratchy and muffled out-takes he would doubtless like to take back. The McCain machine will use this against him should he prevail in Denver, and it won't be in a fair way. Instead, it could be the undoing of a promising but untried politician who has found out the hard way that the truth hurts. And it usually hurts the person who tells it the most.

Star Trek Is Called Science Fiction For A Reason

2008-03-27T11:58:00.007-07:00

As Barry Goldwater might have snarled to a homeless beggar: "If you had any initiative, you would go out and inherit a department store." No, I have not reached that level of callousness yet in my new job as a homeless outreach coordinator. But I am being pushed or pulled away from what I thought was my socio-political center by contact with this disadvantaged population. The cold unfeeling system so lauded by the republicans and increasingly accepted by democrats has wrought unimaginable suffering that is a mile wide and an inch deep. And those who would try to clean up the mess are hopelessly outgunned.
The knee jerk reactionaries used to sarcastically ask if anyone critical of the US might prefer to live in Russia where there is no meat and no nice cars and no heat. Everybody knows the level of human suffering in what I shall call the Second World was brutally depraved. No one could question that. But the promise that we had done such a better job and were so superior to everyone else in the First and Third worlds rings ever more hollow and false as we slide inexorably toward oblivion. I no longer believe any of this can be fixed by any application of any policy by any candidate of any party. So there is never going to be warp drive or transporters or the elimination of poverty and need.
The efforts of all these various non-profit groups and public health clinics like the one I work for owe their survival to billions of federal dollars and privately-raised donations earmarked to serve the under-served. But do they really help? After a month in this job on the front line, I can state an emphatically negative "no." What used to be the universally-recognized metaphor of re-arranging deck chairs on Titanic is growing a bit hoary for me. Help me come up with a new one. How about fastening seat belts on Discovery or Challenger? Sending a case of Bandaids or Tylenol to Darfur? Or Baghdad? The only homeless Americans getting any help are the most aggressive, most obnoxious, most manipulative and most overbearing. They literally shove their way to the head of the line. The weaker ones get stabbed, or hit-and-runned over, or they just decompose behind a dumpster in the summer heat of this southwest desert city. Either way, the plight of these people is one that has no place in a world that claims to advanced or civilized. We either have the will to apply the dwindling resources of the planet to making everybody somewhat better. Or we are trapped by our selfishness that drives us to keep hoarding and enriching the top two percent and to hell with the rest. It plays out in microcosm here; from the mansions secluded in the foothills to the alleys behind condemned former brothels. The redistribution of wealth is getting more stratified and extreme in the land that was supposed to be the last great hope for equality and democracy and all that bull. The experiment has been a success for the experimenters and a disaster for the guinea pigs. The hopeful ideals of the 1960s embodied by the Kennedys were literally shot down. Into the vacuum rushed Reagan who sealed the pact with the devil known by his other name: trickle down economics. The tentacles are now so deeply into the fabric of our country's psyche that we no longer know how far gone we are. As this pendulum of cruelty and avarice and insensitivity gathers momentum, its knife edge blade descends lower and faster to slice deeper and wider. Can our rag-tag team of a nurse practitioner, a pharmacy student in training, my laptop computer and me--dispensing from a rickety file cabinet semi-stocked with OTC drugs and ointments--change the world? No. Is it better for our efforts? No. Is the ship taking on water and sinking? Yes.

I Have Never Really Been A Cat Person

2008-03-21T21:16:00.004-07:00

I had to let go of something dear to me today and it makes me quite sad. Around seventeen years ago, I climbed in to the driver's seat of a V12 Jaguar coupe for the first time in my life and promptly bought it for myself. Since that day in Philadelphia at a Volvo dealer, I put over 80,000 miles on that cobalt blue machine. I could have driven it around the entire world at least three times for all those clicks on the odometer. And yes I was proud of myself for being a Jaguar owner. Even if I had picked it up for a fraction of its original price after the original owner had dumped it in a panic over an oil leak. I belonged to the club for a while, but the overwhelming percentage of doctors and lawyers and CEOs among the ranks was too intimidating so I dropped out. Instead, I was content to bathe in a gradually dimming glow of admiration from family and friends. Time was, I could pull up in a parking lot, climb out of it, and have total strangers compliment the car and by extension, me. Those days are gone forever now; and truth to tell, the admiring looks had become fewer and farther between. Is that because I or the car had become too long in the tooth for anyone to give us a second look?
What really has me so down is the realization that I have sunk to a point in my life both financially and spiritually that I don't have what it takes any more. I don't have the money, or the energy, or the dexterity, or the resourcefulness necessary to keep something so complicated and fragile intact. I know what you are saying: it's only a car and you need to get over it. But the men who built that car--and yes I admit to a gender bias when conjuring up images of the assembly plant and design studios at the now defunct Coventry works--infused it with their vision. Their testosterone. Their adrenaline. Their smarts. And their taste. Owning that thing conveyed a measure of those great qualities onto me. If I ever buy a silver accord or white camry, please shoot me as it will be proof that I have lost all brains, glands and taste and am as good as dead anyway.
I partook of the feast of excess that was embodied in the XJ-S, and I apologize to no one. I have had it taken from me by circumstance and misfortune. I am the poorer for it and I shall not recover easily from this loss. I suggest to you dear reader that if you ever feel compelled to indulge yourself in a magnificent obsession, do so. Relish it and satiate yourself with it. Because one day you will lose it and it will hurt you deeply.

Give Me About 35 Seconds to Get Warmed Up

2008-03-05T12:34:00.003-07:00

I promised this would occasionally be about vacuum tubes and it has not been for a while so here you go. Graduating from high school in 1970, I was personal witness to the transition to solid state consumer electronics that was just about completed by that year. My friend Raymond and I would argue into the wee hours as to the relative merits of the old tubes versus the new transistors. He would give me his castoff old tube amplifiers as he made the jump to transistors. I still use the Ampex preamp he himself had gotten for free and passed on to me forty years ago. If he were alive today, I daresay we would still be arguing about what sounds best.
Raymond had the most brilliant mind of anyone I knew. He held a patent on a loudspeaker design that since went fallow and is likely lost forever. He was first generation Chinese American; working in the family grocery store in a lower middle class part of town. He and his brother shared the duties of stocking and ordering and some actual customer contact at the register though his mom mainly was the checkout girl. Her demeanor with me was anything but cordial until her final years when she softened considerably. She believed that white americans would eventually corrupt her children with their hedonistic, undisciplined ways. Jack, the father, was more accepting of the relentless crumbling of their old cultural ways.
Raymond' greatest accomplishment from our high school days was the construction of a 25" Heathkit Color TV in Mediterranean cabinetry. It worked perfectly on the first energization, and lasted for another 25 years at least. For those who do not understand the concept, it was merely that a person could learn a lot about electronics by making their own useful stereo or TV or test oscilloscope or ham radio set from a box of parts. The written instructions were first rate as was the quality of the parts supplied by Heathkit. The TV Raymond built was probably the most complex such kit ever offered to the public. Today's legal climate would not permit such exposure to liability, and it is our loss.
Last night, I watched primary election returns on a 19" Heathkit color TV in contemporary walnut cabinetry. I won it on eBay last month as a non-working "project" from a collector in california who had too many other more interesting projects to complete. While this is not the same model Raymond built, and I most certainly did not build it myself, it is a working tribute to my friend and his legacy in my life. I ended up working in TV broadcast as an engineer for 20 years, because Raymond encouraged me to do something I really liked instead of becoming an accountant like our friend Steve did. Steve is a lot richer than Raymond and me put together. But I have a working 42 year old TV full of hot vacuum tubes with thousands of volts coursing through them. And I know that Raymond would be pleased.

Totally Wrong and/or Totally Stupid

2008-02-13T10:21:00.002-07:00

Without commentary and in no particular order, I submit this ever-expanding list of egregious affronts to logic, intelligence and appropriateness as perpetrated by government, media, business and institutions that should know better.
Number One: Amphitheater School District teacher in Tucson, Arizona has been ordered by administrators to stop using black ink on white paper because it is "too harsh" for student's eyes. These are not visually impaired or visually compromised students; just high school students. The directive is to use blue ink.
Number Two: General Motors tries to "buy out" its entire hourly wage earning work force.
Number Three: US military will start executing Guantanamo prisoners at Guantanamo because it is outside the reach of US courts and review by any civilian authority.
Number Four: Association of Motion Picture and Television Producers cave to writer demands after three month standoff just in time for Oscar TV show.
Number Five: Mexican American community slams Hillary for insensitively firing her half-mexican campaign manager after Hillary loses primaries in a dozen states.
Please add your own favorite examples through the comments link. Thank you.

That Most Ultra Extreme Event

2008-02-04T13:15:00.000-07:00

NEWS FLASH: The highest rated Super Bowl in History was played yesterday as confirmed by Nielsen: ninety seven million people in the USA alone. Yet several people I know claimed to have had no interest in it. At least they stated as much leading up to it. Now today as sports pundits wax philosophically, the viewers who chose a re-re-run of Meet the Fockers should be kicking themselves. Watching a highlight reel or even an instant replay is not the same thing as seeing a real event in real time. About eight of my friends and my husband and our dogs and I can say we were riveted to my HDTV as the giant-killing Giants snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. And the seditiously cheating Patriots unwillingly but unmistakably handed it to them. We saw it live, we jumped, we yelled, we scared the dogs, we instantly became part of an explosion of human anticipatory potential energy that turned kinetic in a flash frame of television time. The final 39 seconds of the game following the New York touchdown pass was just anti-climactic post coital come down that we desperately needed.

The part of this many of you will not like was actually suggested to me by my super-bowl-eschewing sister. She observed that the homoerotic element is what draws the players to the game itself and the viewers to the players. Of course no one will admit this, and god forbid and rue the day any of these men-gods would actually declare their love for the maleness of their endeavors or for their fellow males themselves. Being a man who finds men especially interesting, I hear a resonance in her ideas. And like 50 million or so self described hetero straight men in America, I shall enter a period of mourning until the football season resumes late next August albeit for slightly different reasons.
Like it or not, it is the men who have the power. It is the sperm that swim; the ovum sits there waiting. The life force to push, go, move, fight, shove, scrap, assert and then regroup and do it all again lives in the man. I am not saying this makes us better than women. I am saying it makes us wilder and more fun. Watching strong young men engage in a metaphorically sexual passion play has universal appeal. To anyone with a beating heart. I could feel mine last night from deep inside me thanks to the NFL and FOX TV.

Play, Rewind, Repeat

2008-01-07T22:38:00.000-07:00

If you have any doubts about your own sanity, do not watch this movie called Memento. If you have a tenuous hold on what is laughingly called reality, do not watch this movie called Memento. If you feel sometimes like your own life is a blur over which you have less and less control, do not watch this movie called Memento.
You may not even know that you are at risk until after you have watched it and absorbed it. By then it will be too late. I know these things because right now I am trying to come back to the real world as I think I know it to be. Having just watched this movie called Memento.
The main person in the story is Leonard who we are led to believe is a former insurance investigator. He thinks--we think--he once investigated a man whose short term memory loss was such that he gave his own wife a lethal amount of insulin. Without remembering or knowing what he had done. But there is this disturbing notion that maybe Leonard's own wife did not die a random violent death at the hands of inept drug dealing house invaders. Maybe Leonard gave her insulin but does not remember.
I think I say things to people that are OK or smart or insightful. But they hate me. They think I am evil and twisted and "vitriolic" to quote my boss. I go through life believing I am clever enough to be an insurance fraud investigator or a detective or a spy or an author or a movie director. I write stuff down that I think will provide an interesting record of my journey through life. I drive around in my Jaguar. Though I think about death and am conscious of unspeakable violence going on around me--sometimes only a few blocks away from me--I smile wanly at some strangers but am a hair's breadth from throttling others with my bare hands.
The happy and stupid part of my brain functions on the strength of little polaroid pictures I carry around in my pocket. Or at least file away on my hard drive. Most of them are happy pictures; unlike the ones in Memento. The daily times and places I must be somewhere are scrawled not so much on my chest or thigh like in Memento but all over my house and in my brief case and in my wallet and . . .I forget where I put them. In the movie, the pictures are mostly bad; of bad events or bad people with warnings hastily noted on the back or in margins. In the movie, the body ink is mostly bad; entreaties to get revenge or to remind the wearer of some past evil. At least I can be a tiny bit reassured that my pictures are happy and my notes benign. Or is that belief another delusion?
Watch this movie called Memento. Then ask yourself how sure you are that everything you do and see and experience is exactly what you think it is. Or something far worse.

Me and My Buddy Daniel Schorr

2007-12-31T13:23:00.000-07:00

Somewhere on Yahoo's home page today are the words and verses to Auld Lang Syne. It would do you good to read them and take it to heart. The message I got is that the warmth we might find in our human connections to each other is what makes it worth taking another trip around the sun. That's as close as I can come to saying Happy New Year without gagging. Here's the rest of my commentary for today, the last twenty four hours of two thousand and seven.
The 91 year old sage of CBS, CNN and NPR was in front of live microphone again today admitting he is not always right on the mark with his commentaries. So I went back to see what I had said on here a year ago. Mine was more of prediction and it was way off.
The ex-boss of Iraq had just been hanged from a gallows during a particularly obscure point in the news cycle so as not to call any attention to the war criminality of it all as perpetrated by this the most criminal of modern governments. I predicted that there would be dire consequences from the Islam extreme fringe in the form of blowback or payback. Wrong. At least so far, there has been virtually no response. But there is still time, at least on the drawn out, numerologically revenge-driven calendar used in the Islam world.
Maybe the asteroid headed for Mars will glance off the red planet and crash here. At which time the right wing religious christian zealots can again say we all had it coming due to homo hedonism and giving Congress to the democrats. An added benefit will be the hard hit on those evil Islamist plotters due to the massive dust storms in their corner of the doomed world resulting from the cosmological accidental collision. At which time Homeland Security can claim the high ground and say the camel jockeys are getting what they deserve. Thus many birds are killed with one stone and the human population is decimated and we get a pass for a fresh start on a clean slate. We can only hope.
If you think that is my prediction and you intend to hold me to it this time next year: well, good luck. It is definitely not my prediction of record because I subscribe to that superb Vulcan aphorism: Wanting a thing to be so does not make it so. In all likelihood, the republicans will rig another election and continue the war and bankrupt the country and exhaust the oil supply and suppress dissent and enrich the military establishment. Just like now, no different.
I will go out on one limb though: this time next year, Daniel Schorr will not be talking in front of a microphone. He will retire before 31 December 2008 for one reason or another and it will be too bad for thoughtful listeners to the radio. May I be wrong about that too.

American Gladiator

2007-12-14T15:23:00.001-07:00

What is it about sports? Part homoerotic pornography, part vicious bloody fighting, all vicarious. Yet nearly universal in its TV appeal if not actual stadium seating appeal. One statistic floating around on the web puts annual sports spending in the US at $96 billion to attend or watch athletic contests. How much health insurance or just plain health care for the middle and lower classes could that buy? Probably most of it. But don't try to circulate a petition to siphon away sports money in, uh-- a sports bar. The latest bad news that dozens of the richest baseball players are not just naturally gifted mesomorphs with superior eye-hand coordination but in fact are chemically pumped up supermen is turning out to be a big yawner of a news story. I think that is because the truly average and sub-average men who are mainly the ones routinely emptying their wallets for sports entertainment will brook no opposition to their precious pastimes. And why is that?
There was a time when America flirted with civilization. Capital punishment was being taken off the table by state governments. Boxing was on the way out thanks to coverage of its long term effects on the brains of people like Muhammed Ali for one. But now the government demands and gets the freedom to torture prisoners at will, and bare knuckle cage fighting is all over TV. This retrograde movement of the so-called culture is scarcely even noticed by the media pundits; much less government. We dare not derail a $96 billion train just because some people are pushing the envelope a little to put up some extra points. Isn't that what competition is all about?
How much would so called civilized industrialized people pay to watch another person violently die? Come on, let's be honest about the underlying truth here. To keep the drama palpable and walk the audience ever closer to the brink, the owners of these teams must be able to tap an inexhaustible supply of specimens less human and more animal to increase the brute factor. There is a reptilian part of us that hates, distrusts and would kill a perceived threatening enemy in a heartbeat. Few of us ever get that chance so we get relief by watching paid professionals pretend to beat each other to death at least metaphorically. Every person that buys a ticket to a physical sports contest, or pays his cable-satellite company a premium for a sports channel is feeding this beast. If we stop feeding it, will it starve to death or will it find a different and truly deadly way to survive? I shudder to think of the consequences. Imagine the treatment of any person who might suggest a curtailment of sports activity in the interest of, say, reducing global warming. All the gas and electricity burned up playing and attending pointless contests could light the darkest corners of the world on the darkest nights of the year for months on end. Instead, we have the National Broadcasting Company bringing back a pointless throwback of a show featuring padded brickbats to fill the airwaves emptied by the writer's strike. Should we thank them for finding a new way to tap off the plasma before it reaches critical heat and pressure? I fear this chapter of human history will be summarized by future historians as the era where the only question that mattered anymore was: Kill or be killed?

MetaNet

2007-12-13T15:11:00.000-07:00

In doing only the tiniest bit of research necessary to achieve the nominal level thereof, I came across assessments about our current POTUS from a guy who is a pretty good judge of white house occupants. I will digress from my self-appointed task to suggest further reading of John Dean's book from almost four years ago wherein he suggests the current POTUS is a more dangerous person than the one who flew away early on his helicopter after pronouncing his capital V for victory one last time for the TV cameras. An analogous cancer on this presidency like the one that eventually brought down Nixon has yet to be diagnosed on W. But then, there is no analogous medical team or hospital or medical insurance or any entity who A) cares and B) can do anything to kill it. There are plenty of entities characterized by A or B but not both A and B. So the alarm bells clang in a forest of trees occupied by hordes of sheep but no hearing humans.
Finally to the meat of my meta point: the internet has become a cancer on itself. The sheer volume of verbiage dished out from the keyboards of americans who think they are expert bloggers let alone the output of so called legitimate journalists far exceeds everything written up to the time just before e-writing burst on our consciousness. Is the writing better? Certainly not. Is it a step forward in the evolution of civilization? Doubtful. Could we get along without blogging and endless analysis by people with few new ideas? Absolutely. But the genie is out of the bottle and the train has left the station and there is no turning back.
One reason I got in trouble with so many last summer was that I tried to economize on the words. Instead of rambling on and dancing around the head of a pin for paragraphs at a time, I minced no words and stated my conclusions abruptly. In retrospect, I see this was my undoing. Even internet junkies, or maybe especially internet junkies, seem to relish elongated expository digressions. The promulgation of all this internet etiquette where plain speaking is grounds for immedidate and irrevocable ostracism is causing upward push on the word count.
The internet is becoming a self perpetuating, bottomless, electronic shampoo bottle. I am not sure if they still say Lather Rinse Repeat, but shampoo bottles of yesteryear were cleverly programmed to ensure purchase after purchase in compressed succession. If one takes the order literally, he will never stop shampooing until the bottle exhausts itself and is replaced.
If only the internet could be exhausted and crushed by its own ability to devour itself. To that end, I humbly submit the foregoing as evidence the internet is out of control. My hope is that by doing my part to overfeed the beast, I will hasten the inevitable rupture of the beast's gut. The spewing of poisonous digestive acids will be a blessed purging that will distill human letters back down to its valuable core. Then we can return to true analysis and maybe find true wisdom again. And this might actually bring down the government which would be the best thing to happen in 220 years.
Meantime, I came across some unexpected material about another topic I want to talk about. . .

Division Over Labor

2007-11-20T14:27:00.000-07:00

These trade union strikes bring out the worst in everybody on all sides, don't you think? Being as the whole phenomenon is really only three generations old, it's no wonder there is no consensus yet on what is right and what isn't. The country and indeed world capitalism as a whole have gone through several stages of development in that time. No sooner do we all figure out where we stand on labor versus management, the ground has shifted under us yet again. I would hope that no sane person would feel it was OK for Henry Ford or Alfred Sloan to hire thugs to beat up his own employees in hopes of keeping sweatshop conditions in place. Yet those same people would be in a panic if their local firemen or policemen or teachers stayed home to get a fair shake from their bosses; so much so that most city charters outlaw striking by "essential" service workers.
Now we have Hollywood writers shutting down the entire entertainment industry over future internet revenue sharing. The most curious thing about it all to me is the us against them line that gets drawn every which way but straight as the strike draws out. Take Ellen de Generes for instance. Please. As a member of the writer's guild, she should be holding out for better terms with her sisters and brothers in solidarity. But she is also contracturally obligated to her syndicator to provide fresh material on schedule. So she goes on the air doing material she at least pretends to make up herself (as a writer) in violation of the strike terms. This has pleased no one. David Letterman had said he would pay his writers out of his own pocket--which he should have been doing all along-- to give him good stuff. But is he agreeing to pay them future internet royalties under the old rules or the proposed ones the writer's are clamoring for? Nobody knows and I bet very few viewers care.
The icing on this fallen cake is the latest lament from the out of work tradesmen that goes something like: "Without us, there would be no movies." The various techno types possessed of a range of skills from muscle to geekness in all its various photographic, sound, editing, lighting and set building personae are now asking for an end to the strike. They can't put food on the table when they don't punch their clocks. Their position is that the writers are getting rich enough typing words on pages even with the old deal. And without camera guys, lighting guys, and boom guys, it remains just words on paper.
When I worked in TV stations, I heard--and said--the same stuff. The sales staff strutted around claiming they provided the paychecks because they sold ad time. But when we engineers suggested the transmitter would be a dark hulking pile of copper tubing without the electronically savvy support staff, we were ridiculed and shouted down. It's true the TV engineers were paid well; right behind the salesmen and top anchor stars. Without us there would have been no ad time to sell. Without hollywood crews, no movies could be made from any script good or bad. But without scripts, there is nothing for the crew to shoot. So we end up at square one again and again.
Until all the wealth is fairly divided, the injustices promoted by capitalism and which form the very foundations of its stranglehold on our psyches will go on unchecked. On the other hand--and how many hands does this make?--the writers may have shot themselves in the foot long ago. Those early compacts between studios and scribes all but gave away the store. Because moviemaking was more a technical enterprise than book publishing or even stage dramatization, the studios wanted and got ownership and control over the reels in the can including the words spoken thereon. The royalties they get from selling and reselling and streaming those fabrications goes among other places to the big pension funds that pay out money to retired or disabled technicians. So the snake is devouring itself with the web being a mutated appendage with both head and tail.
If a movie is good because the story is good, pay the writers more. If the movie is good because the special effects are good, pay the tradesmen more. If a movie is good because of both, pay everyone more. If a clip from a movie or TV show run on the web gets people to visit the site and spend money on other stuff or have their IDs mined for future commercial exploitation, pay the writers more. There you go; end of labor dispute.

Apologize to the Apologists, Or Else!

2007-11-16T15:41:00.000-07:00

My boss caught me reading The Nation in my office the other day, and asked: "What is the state of the nation these days anyway?" I replied it was moving to the right. He asked if I thought it were temporary and I replied I thought it was more of a sea change. We comiserated for a moment then moved on. The latest evidence I find has to do with these second rate products that are everywhere up down and across the spectrum. From flimsy houses to disabled new cars to lead painted toys to poison dog food, nothing is being put together very well by anyone. China has no monopoly on garbage products; they merely expanded the horizons and shamelessly went where every capitalist has wanted to go all along but had been held back by regulations. Now that government attention has been diverted to wiretapping, torture, warmongering, oil-grabbing, prison-building and revenue stream enhancement for these ventures there is no time or energy left to keep manufacturers, distributors and purveyors of goods honest. The results are stores, malls, catalogs and of course websites full of junk whose shortcomings are legion but concealed by ever more dressed up marketing ploys and outright lies.
My boss had come to me seeking technical advice on purchase of a new TV for our lobby where patients wait to see the doctors who do most of the heavy lifting around here. The least we can do for them is to provide them high definition images of The Price Is Right or Oprah or The View while they cool their heels. The patients, not the doctors. My job was to find the best deal at the best price for him to go buy on the company credit card. The only restriction was it had to come from Costco. He could not have known that I have had a running battle with my consumer-crazed friends who worship at the Kirkland altar. I was recently talked into spending $87 in a Costco on a dog bed, tuna, orange juice, muffins, blue jeans, dog bones and pizza. What we all must keep in mind about Costco is how much we are saving by shopping there. Never mind that the pants don't fit right, the dog hates the smell of the bed, the pizzas are too big to go in my freezer and the dog bones cause flatulence. It's OK though because I saved almost $10!! Extrapolate this to the cutting edge world of HDTV, and you can imagine how disappointing the Vizio VX37L is as it sits in the corner of our waiting room. The picture is smeary, the sound is tinny, the tuner is weak and the features are non-existent. I spent half a morning on a ladder getting the antenna elevated into our ceiling crawl space such that we could sort of get some of our local stations when I should have been doing my real job coordinating research studies. Then the real fun began.
I emailed Vizio support to complain about the lack of a digital tuning strength meter which all normal HDTVs have to facilitate installation. They laughed in my face so I went on the two big HD web forums to warn prosepctive buyers. You would think I had stood up at the NRA convention to suggest Dick Cheney surrender his hunting rifle. The snotty, rude and vitriolic comments I got from dim bulbs defending Costco and Vizio would have caused a spike in my blood pressure had I not stepped back to consider the bible. "Forgive them, they know not what they do" is served up somewhere in those hallowed pages to support the turn the other cheek philosophy. Look how far that got John Kerry or even Michael Dukakis. But fighting back at idiots just stimulates their lizard brains even more so I canceled my membership in the HD forums. It is easier sometimes to climb back up to the top of the mountain and turn toward the sky and sea for serenity and solace. The babble from the hordes of fools below soon fades into a noise I can tune out by orienting my antenna on the fly.

Wind in the Rigging

2007-11-06T11:21:00.000-07:00

Gay men have more fun than the rest of the population; it's almost criminal. Oh wait: in several states I guess it really is a misdemeanor. But not California if last weekend's Gay Pride Festival in Palm Springs is any indication. Two thirds of the temporarily swollen population would have been behind bars (and loving it?) if the religious right had gotten its way. They bellowed through their bullhorns prior to the start of the parade until the cops silenced them. Proclaiming the wages of sin to be a pact with the devil or some such blather, they were all but ignored by the thousands who had gathered to celebrate our decadence. And practice it. My husband and I were among them; having driven six hours across the desert to attend and worship at the altar of pleasure where many have been sacrificed to HIV among other pitfalls. Those bitter ironies are multiple and rampant; they could fill books so I will leave that aside for now.
My point today is that all this fun in bed playing with our private parts comes at a price. A virtual, intangible one that gay men laugh at with the use of three letters: N S A. "No Strings Attached" is the latest pre-emptive warning used on internet hookup sites to screen out those who would complicate the negotiations with, well-- negotiations. The person I see for counseling had given me homework in this very subject area last week, and what better lab than the leather bars of Palm Springs to conduct research? The assignment was to think about how intimacy gets mixed up with NSA sex play and how or if they can or should be kept separate. Good thing I did not have that open ended essay question on the tip of my tongue as my opening cruise line. Buffed out bare chested boys can grasp the concepts, but would much prefer not to. Like clotting agents in blood though, tiny threads do form imperceptibly between gay men who play with each other. The sex police and brimstone crowd would have the world believe we do this with abandon and care not about how we emotionally affect each other. But that is not the case. I speak from experience, and I know that my male gay friends end up with tangled strings; try as they might to avoid them.
Hetero men who start feeling like a puppet with multiple attachments yanked by multiple partners handle this in a variety of ways that range from the socially tolerated to the capitally criminal. Drinking, drug use, infidelity, wife-beating, poker playing and jewelry come to mind as obvious coping tools used by the conflicted segment of the straight population to untangle the feelings. We homos just move on to someone else and constantly recycle, renew, replace and reinvent our love lives. But there is deep programming we can't ignore. Cavemen who settled down in the end made more babies who lived than the ones who promiscuously roved far and wide. It's that simple, and their genes dominate in all men gay or straight. The little spark of responsibility and ethics and fairness and respect toward the person who lets you connect flesh with him cannot be extinguished with any external force. To deny this basic truth is to deny your humanity. It's not that gay guys have no rules or no morals or no feelings. It is just that they are more fluid, more loose, and more selfish. Does that make us inhuman or animals or criminals? I hope not. We just need to be aware of the strings that bind us and arrive at the ideal tension that lets us live, love, laugh and yes cry as events warrant; the internet hookup rules notwithstanding.

Oldies Radio as a DSM Diagnostic Tool

2007-10-26T14:10:00.000-07:00

The mere fact so many millions feel better listening to music from past decades should tell us a lot about ourselves. And the nostalgic yearning for cars of those days is almost palpable if you are lucky enough to drive one on a public street amidst the plastic suppository bubbles that skitter about as if they were true automobiles worthy of the name. What does this mean? I believe it is connected to the earliest presidential primary launch ever seen. The overwhelming sense of dread and negativity brought about by the endless war and the evisceration of the middle and lower classes by predatory capitalism and laissez faire non-government is taking a subliminal, subconscious toll on people with cerebra. Without knowing why, we look for hope. We long for comfort. We miss the warmth; ironic metaphor in light of the impending climate disaster, no?
At this very moment, as I record these thoughts, I hear Frank Sinatra from around 1957 crooning on my AM vacuum tube radio. Co-workers who visit my office invariably remark about the oiled walnut case, the cloth gold-weave covering the speaker, and the smooth sound floating through the room. I am crazy enough to channel finite financial resources to acquiring and maintaining such devices. But the latest problem with being a person like this is manifesting itself on: where else? an internet forum. As bizarre a novelty as a working 1959 Philco Predicta TV is in the digital age, mine sits next to a 40 inch HDTV that I do enjoy watching. And while there is some free HD wafting off the mountaintop nearby, I choose to buy additional content from DirecTV. Of late they are tantalizing the rabid following cultivated over the last few years with the promise of new capacity, more channels, better pictures and slightly higher prices. Trouble is they fail to mention the price re-structure when you call up to ask about the upgrade. And when you catch them on it, they get super hostile and truly predatory. I pushed back and called their bluff on the phone last night and sort of won a pyrrhic victory for a time in the form of a "good customer retention discount." I related all this on two HDTV forums whose very existence proves that modern humans have way too much leisure time on their hands when they should be strenuously hunting, gathering, fighting and propagating to exhaustion. You would think I had begun actively promoting Hillary choose Ellen deGeneres as a running mate with a promise of the first gay white house wedding to take place on 21 January 2009. The nutjobs came out of the woodwork calling me names and suggesting I go back to my basement to watch my predicta and stop complaining about DirecTV since they are providing such a useful service to humanity. The suggestion was I should be grateful there is a DirecTV at all to improve my otherwise dismal, backward and pathetic life. I have been all but banished for daring to warn others to get the whole story up front before commiting to long term expensive packages of what really are ephemeral electronic waves for ever higher prices. I won't need much more courage to cancel the pay service completely and watch free TV on the nights there is a good show. The other nights I would leave it off and play a Les Elgart LP while reading a paper bound book.
In this increasingly insane society, a sane man will appear increasingly insane the farther into the looking glass we all march.

Feeling Serrated?

2007-10-10T13:29:00.000-07:00

Being as our neurons probably fire in an infinitely variable fashion as they convey information to and from our brains, I submit that all sensory apparatus in all terrestrial life perceives the sights, sounds, smells and touches it experiences on a gauge that has L at one end and H at the other with a line in between. But as the new digital millenia lurches forward a stairstep at a time, the technology we are embracing is literally slicing into our sanity. How else to explain the inexplicable slide toward freneticism, madness, anxiety and mayhem that shows up on the newswires hourly? One friend stated that as the solar system flies through the galaxy which in turn is flying along through the universe, it encounters various energy and particle fields we are unequipped to notice or measure cognitively at our primitive level of scientific awareness. These fields affect our behavior, he believes, in macro ways that send nations into turmoil and cultures askew.
But how about a simpler more down to earth hypothesis? That the slicing up of sight and sound in particular into digital bits that we try in vain to perceive as continuously variable is driving us mad? Like fingernails on a blackboard, or a balloon toy squeaking, the non-smooth nature of nearly everything we now hear and see artificially cuts through our sub-consciousness like a worn out flourescent fixture that flickers in our peripheral vision. Think about the sea: I daresay it is a human universal that standing on the shore watching the ebb and flow has a calming effect on the most wound up among us. Try as it might, science could never digitize the wave mechanics of the ocean or its mishmash of rushing, swishing, noises mixed with random wind gusts. And if our senses are tuned to resonate at those primal frequencies, what merit is there in spending so much of our finite resources to re-invent all the technology that worked pretty well in the first half century of the electronic age and make it less analagous to the original sights and sounds? If we are calibrated electrochemically to react in analog fashion to analog stimulus, we cannot possibly be calibrated to react normally to digital stimulus.
Take the CD for instance. Please. In the rarefied alien world of CD audio pre-processing, there is this pesky phenomenon called dithering. The tiniest nuances of analog music picked by the studio microphone cannot be nailed down to one digital value or another. So the digital system changes its mind forty thousand times a second leaving a trail of digital trash on the disk which ends up spitting out of your speakers like machine gun bullets. How relaxing can that possibly be when you come home from a tense day at work hoping that Dave Brubeck or Mozart or Enya will soothe you? It can't. It will make you even tenser. And don't try turning on the TV. Digital images, especially High Definition ones, come at you in packeted bursts of interpolated compressed stairsteps subject to freezing, posterizing, pixelating and instantaneous and unpredictable dropout. Call your best friend on the cell phone to hear his soothing reassurances? Even worse. The tiny chip in the phone crudely oscillates in the audio range in vague response to a compressed bitstream that conveys maybe ten percent of the analog energy vibrating off his vocal cords. It's a relief to hang up from a cell call, isn't it? Tell the truth.
If we were trying to find a way to hurt our ears and eyes with harsh grating painful scraping and grinding, we could not have done a better job than the CD DVD iPod SACD HDDVD 720p 1080i cabal has thus far. Whether the goal is mass hypnosis or mass hysteria or mass insanity, it is being achieved 16 bits at a time, three point five megapixels at a time, two gigabytes at a time from cradle to grave. No longer does a newborn hear the rise and decay of its mother's heartbeat, but the beep beep beep of the electronic digital monitor as it enters this cold and threatening world.

Men Boys Price Toys Truncated Cliche Here

2007-10-02T10:05:00.000-07:00

I still say that there is funny stuff on TV. This CBS Monday night show about a married couple, an engaged couple and a single guy all playing off each other's sexual and relationship insecurities rings pretty true. Last night, David Spade who has made quite a TV career anyway from playing these characters who behave badly but talk smartly for laughs was in classic form. He is wining and dining Heather Locklear who is in process of dumping her husband who we never see. Spade is confident his charms and beguiling manner will make up for his lack of stature and general studliness. The audience and Heather are laughing at him, not with him as he tries to suggest the husband might not be well endowed. Heather launches into vivid innuendo (only on TV can such a thing exist) as to the magnificence of the husband's equipment despite Spade's instant disappointment and vain efforts to change the subject. The writers went way beyond the old three's a charm mathematical limit on how many jokes to build on a single premise; maybe six or seven and they got away with it.
No sooner does the scene end than my phone rings. It is my hi fi buddy John with breathless news about his new old turntable. He had paid several hundred dollars for an exotic 17 year old European cult classic that did not turn. OK, a high priced turntable that is great except for not turning. I know: big disconnect in logic. He brought it to my house fresh from the garage sale to see if I could fix it. Immediately on the spot in the middle of my sunday brunch time that is. We popped off the bottom and found a complex maze of chips, transistors, capacitors, resistors, regulators and a general maze of multi hundred dollar parts all amounting to huge overkill for the simple task of spinning a record under a needle. In over my head, I stated there were no immediate options. I told John I would start with the big capacitors since they are cheap and easy to get at, but it would be a crap shoot finding the bad part. Should I take it to my backup tech guru Brian and let him try? Yes John I think you should do that. Brian charges John money to fix stuff; I do it for free. Thus the impromptu sunday visit to my house first.
On the phone last night, John is gushing about the Linn turntable. Brian has fixed it by clipping out the trio of big capacitors and replacing them. He charged John $50 to do this while-u-wait. The parts cost about two dollars each. Now it works great and Brian is a genius. I mean this dude is awesome. He just stuck his test probes on there and saw all these spikes and bad voltages and went for those caps. I never saw anyting like it. The guy is just unbelievable. What a great friend Brian is. You gotta meet this guy. Dude, he has a gift for this stuff like nobody I ever saw. A total genius. Well, Tom, you are smart too in your own way, but Brian: my god, unbelievable.
OK, enough already. I got the point John. Brian's is bigger than mine; wonderful. I hope you will be very happy with him. The only difference between David Spade and me was that he got paid $200,000 for making fun of himself in public and I did not. And I was not even in public. Just in my own home with my own well assembled and well functioning stereo system which I keep fully operational with no help from John or Brian or anyone for that matter. The show is called Rules of Engagement, CBS, Monday 9:30 eastern and pacific; 8:30 central and mountain.

UNCF and Dan Quayle

2007-09-14T14:44:00.001-07:00

A mind is a terrible thing to lose. Or waste. The people who came up with the original and the spoonerism were both right and somewhat clairvoyant in presaging what is emerging as an unsettling development in HIV care. I speak of the vague symptoms being brought to doctors' attention by their Poz patients. Lack of focus, memory loss, dizziness, minor motor losses, anger, confusion: any of this sound familiar? All of these things come with age or at least might come with advancing years. In a 75 year old person, such complaints draw a yawn from the doctor and a reassuring pat on the shoulder from him. But in a 45 year old HIV patient on a variety of toxic drugs whose effects on the central nervous system are known to exist, the medical profession shrugs its shoulders and suggests "further study." Out of one side of their mouths, the HIV experts claim the symptoms are due to the virus itself which sets up shop behind the blood brain barrier. Out of the other side, they suggest patients be switched to the subset of anti-HIV meds that have the unique chemical signature to penetrate it. If there is another side left, it is admitting that patients taking the penetrating drug are having just as much as trouble cognitively as the ones taking non-penetrating ones.
If I were confident that I were still in possession of all my faculties, I might be able to follow all the logic in this. But I am as certain as I am sitting here typing one mistake after another that must be back-spaced and corrected sometimes three and four times over that these conflicting bits of misinformation from the people peddling this stuff cannot be possessed of any intellectual honesty. There is no way to accept at face value anything the HIV science establishment tells us because it is so inconsistent within its own Escher-like structure as to be utterly unsustaining on any level.
The worst part of anhedonia is that you don't care about the fact that you don't care about anything anymore. I have had two people in the last week tell me they were ready to lay down and die. For the life of me-- and listen to who is using that cliche in this context-- I could think of no way to talk them out of it. Sure I tried to cheer them up by pointing out that a new Star Trek film is being shot right now for release next summer. You simply MUST stick around for THAT I whined half heartedly. But when you are staying alive by pouring toxic drugs down your throat several times a day at a cost of a grand a month, and the 95% of the world that has no personal frame of reference to HIV would just as soon pack you off to Gitmo for a high temp cremation lest you contaminate anyone else, you can't generate a lot of enthusiasm for much of anything. Including taking the final step. It's easier to plop down on the couch and listen to a record or read a magazine than to end your own life. And there really is a new Star Trek movie in the pipeline; I don't think that is a cognitive misfire in my memory bank.

Frankly My Dear

2007-09-12T14:42:00.000-07:00

I don't give a damn about nine eleven. Even though a poll released yesterday found it was the "most important event" in most American people's lives. This just proves how out of step I am with the mainstream. And grateful to be so. Nine eleven for the rest of the civilized world is two days before the anniversary marking the end of World War One. Only here in the back assward USA do the two words conjure up the double edged sword of danger and safety to be schizophrenically fused for endless browbeating of the mentally challenged by the morally bankrupt. Hang up and dial nine one one. Last time I tried dialing my phone with the receiver hung up, the call did not go through.
The day might come when the true facts are learned about how complicit our own government was in orchestrating something that would later make people exclaim: "It was like in a movie." Funny how apt the metaphor is. But we alive when it happened will all be dead and Dubya's legacy will rival Hoover's in its Nero-esque detachment from reality as a basis for ridicule. And it won't matter then; just as nobody cares now the extent to which FDR "let" Pearl Harbor happen. Or made it happen. The fact that planes were made to look like bombs on TV was not a historical random glitch, but an elaborate marionette performance staged for the benefit of its producers. As such, it has no credibility as a legitimate surprise that turned the course of history. An example of that would be the errant assassination of the obscure Archduke that did start World War One. Instead, it's more like a submarine lurking in the depths and firing a secret weapon to rain down on the unsuspecting; then to steal away and hide or be scuttled. OK my metaphors are now hopelessly crossed and mixed and jumbled. But this handwringing and self pity and crying and flag waving is nauseating for its maudlin soap opera lack of sincerity. That is the point. And so is the number of US soldiers killed in Iraq which now exceeds 3700 and is a third more than the toll that day in September 2001. If anyone thinks that has been a fair price to pay, and that there has been a "dividend" accruing to our good will in the world at large as a result, they should seek a refund on their lobotomy as it took out a little too much tissue.
We don't have the energy or focus to rationally discuss the murder of Tillman or the half million dead Iraqui civilians or the destruction of the oldest civilization on record for the crimes they truly are. We can't begin to understand the inability of the majority party in Congress to mobilize and respond and defrock and take back what is ours. We do know that we have become death, and that we are all responsible for not preventing it or ending it. Do not ask me to ever observe a moment of silence to mark when "the towers fell." I scoff at the masses who dutifully swallow the opiates distilled by the government and MSM for wholesale distribution. I spit mine out and grind it into the dirt.

Thermionic Emission

2007-09-07T10:19:00.000-07:00

A previous entry from June about a paralyzed athlete did generate some favorable response, so today's blog will take a similar path in hopes of keeping a new momentum going.
There is irony in the fact I belong to an internet group called Audio Asylum where the members are called Inmates. We ask each other questions about our stereo stuff and get answers back sometimes within minutes. How the US can have the highest productivity of any country on Earth while people are using their work computers to chit chat about their hobbies is a mystery for another day. Anyhow, one day I got a self-introductory note from a man named Lloyd who lives a few miles away in my town. He had seen a question I had posed about an exotic turntable and took the bold step of sending me a private message which in the bizarre world of internet protocol is sometimes frowned upon. It was good that he did violate the sacred rules because we have become audiophile buddies in just a week's time. No I do not mean virtual pen pals but actual in-person friends. He has been to my house and heard my system and I have been to his house and heard his. Now that is a benefit of the internet to the civilized world.
Rather than describe in great detail his stratospherically esoteric setup, I wish to focus on the man himself. To call him an inspiration would be to use a tired cliche and to diminish his accomplishments. Like the man from Florida who had fallen out of a tree that was the subject of a previous entry, Lloyd is saddled with a truckload of lemons delivered to him by cruel fate. Like the former tree surgeon who made a conscious decision to not vegetate and become embittered and dark after his accident, this MIT-trained architect has elected to stay in the game. His fatalistic acceptance of multiple medical problems including HIV and spinal deterioration and liver failure has been a source of energy rather than a drain on it. How that can be I cannot say. But here at the HIV clinic where I work, we treat two kinds of patients basically. One group feels violated, entitled, embattled, put-upon, victimized and oddly privileged. They keep us all in business with their constant requests and demands for every service imaginable at the lowest or non-existent fees they can get away with. The other group is where Lloyd the architect chooses to dwell. On some days, there is pain. Other days, loss of cognitive focus. Other days, digestive distress. Still other days, a roller coaster ride of all three. Working from his elaborate computer array humming in his home office, the man who was architect to the stars (Coppola and Douglas to name two) plugs away these days designing acoustically perfect listening rooms for successful hairdressers who want their stratospherically esoteric sound systems to achieve their full potential. Rather than wear his infirmities on his sleeve, he hunkers down to let the clouds pass over then resumes work. In the background might be Leonard Bernstein or Pink Floyd or Willie Nelson or Les Brown in hauntingly clear detail. The sound hangs in the room behind the flat transparent panel speakers; the dull orange glow of the vacuum tube amplifier imparting its own visual warmth to the scene. Lloyd admits all this is an extravagance "from when I had money." No apology is needed, my friend; you do yourself a great service by choosing, assembling, maintaining and enjoying the most advanced electronic sound playback equipment in existence to make your days and nights better than they might be otherwise.
Many people in the high end audio world use their systems the way penile-challenged blowhards use their Corvettes or Vipers. But most are seeking a holy grail of suspended disbelief. It's a worthy goal for lots of reasons; not the least of which in Lloyd's case being that it gives him a good reason to get up in the morning and stay up late into the night to find out if that new set of Russian military spec tubes really do brighten up the treble any. When an obsession becomes a disease that sucks the life out of your life, it's bad. When an obsession distracts you from a disease that is trying to suck the life out of you, it's good. Thank you Lloyd for showing me the right way to obsess healthy. May the Force within you be induced in me through a great invisible transformer.

Not Exactly By Popular Demand

2007-09-06T15:18:00.000-07:00

All those who believe in Telekinesis, raise my hand.
May that set a new tone for this blog which towards the end of its previous incarnation had begun to take itself way too seriously. From now on, every effort will be made to avoid belaboring the outrageous, immoral, reprehensible, despicable and repugnant events that occur hourly around the globe and are beamed instantly to our screens. You can find them for yourself and draw your own conclusions. Instead, each entry is hoped to contain some reason for having gotten out of bed this morning. A reason that might have escaped your notice but that once on your radar will bring a ray of hope and sunshine into . . .OK, this can be taken too far. Sorry.
The promise is to not belabor; it is not to completely ignore. That was just changed in a backspacing edit frenzy. To wit: today POTUS and POC joined hands to pronounce that money is more important than reversing global warming. The Presidents of the US and China have assured the world that nothing can or should stop the unfettered flow of poisonous toys across the sea for sale at Wal Mart where prices are falling all over themselves. No level of pollution is too high; no concentration of CO2 is too intense and no toxic chemical is too dangerous to keep the world safe for (or would that be from?) capitalism.
But no that is not the truly big news today and it is not why we are here: it is to repeat the bulletin that the new iPod is overpriced and overrated according to Yahoo's consumer guru. It costs too much for what it does not do and how badly it does what it does do. What a refreshing and rare tiny point of truth hiding in the haystack of pro-consumption fanfare that otherwise floods the media constantly.
Another cause for rejoicing is the continuing meltdown of the republicans and their hypocritical double standards on sexual misbehavior. Jerry Seinfeld was quoted to the effect that with all this bathroom humor they are providing, there is no need for professional comedians. Late word is that a congressman from North Carolina will be sucked down into the triple murder investigation swirling around last month's bloodbath in Florida. That's the one the MSM can't touch for all its thorns despite its intoxicating sweetness. A gay ex-Marine is the prime suspect; he was running a gay escort service for beltway elite including Patrick McHenry who collects a couple hundred grand a year for pretending to represent rural North Carolinians. With any luck, Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham will be implicated too.
This is going to be fun, watching the mighty fall and catcalling at them during their flailing descent. Splat.
For those who kept inquiring about the return of this blog, and offering encouragement and good reviews of past installments, thank you. For those who danced on my literary grave, none of your future comments will be approved. You will have to get your own blog.

The Last Word

2007-08-02T16:25:00.000-07:00

Since this is after all My Blog, I cannot and will not let the latest direct attack on me go unchallenged. I had made it my rule that the only comments I would not publish would be spam or sales pitches from automated phishers, and I had to stick by that.
But a comment posted to my previous entry (defining insanity) from an anonymous person is too much and I must give up. They or He or She or It accuses me of having no self esteem. Well, I wonder how that can be when I have the fortitude to stand up here and sign my name and show you my picture and tell you what I think of the world? It is has been so easy for you all to sit on the sidelines and call me dangerous and evil and sick and twisted and negative and hyper-critical and an embarrassment to my family. But where are your blogs? What do you any of you have to say about the state of this world that is spinning toward self-induced oblivion? Where is your courage to stand up and flip off the charging lion as he bares his teeth to devour the mouse? I may lack many things but self esteem is not one of them. I am the biggest smart aleck I know. I have the sharpest tongue of anyone I know. I do not miss very much, thank you, and I am pretty proud of the brain god gave me. I use it and I am glad that it still works well enough at my age to help me see everything that goes on around me. If I had any more self esteem I would get my own show or run for office. I am already insufferable; how much more do you people want from me?
What is the point of writing about pretty sunsets or playful puppies or God's Plan for Our Salvation? When I call such stuff claptrap, it is not to say that good things are inherently bad. Happy fluffy smiley stuff is fine; it is just worthless to the future of civilization. Calling attention to good things so as to celebrate them is being done by the MSM and countless institutions with vested interests and I don't care. They don't need my help to further their agenda. I don't ask them to go away; I ask you to think about the other side of the coin they don't want you to see.
But none of this matters any more since very few of you seem to get it. The relentless drumbeat from most people who know me "for real" as the person behind Tom H to cease and desist and rejoin the human race is now deafening. So once this has sat here long enough for you to all digest, I shall take the whole thing down. I wish I could say it has been fun, but the bizarre and completely unexpected reactionary reactions have outweighed all the good that came of this. If my attackers have done anything, they have steeled me to find more and smarter and sharper ways to flaunt my ego and my intelligence and yes my self esteem to get the message out that humanity is not a gift to this earth but a bane and a plague that will be the undoing of humanity itself UNLESS we see the mistakes and work to change them.
The goal was never to make you feel better after reading this. It was to make me feel better for writing it. Apparently, it worked way too well. I hope everyone is happy with the outcome. I know I am not. Watch this space; it will soon vanish.

In Insane Society, A Sane Man Appears Insane

2007-07-31T15:17:00.000-07:00

At the instant you hit the "send" or "publish" button, do you ever have a twinge of regret when the realization hits that there is no taking it back? Last week when I railed against the leaders of the Phoenix City Hall for nurturing a climate of siege, crime, SWAT teams and car chasing that in turn set the stage for a senseless and fatal display of bad airmanship to rain down on the city, I took some heat. Specifically for referring to police as pigs. I regret that now. It was insulting to the porcine mammals who provide bacon, ham, hot dogs, pigs feet, pigs ears and pork chops, and I am sorry. They, the four footed animals, deserve more respect.
I really was going to take it back at least part way until I saw what the government was doing to the guy who had "led" the cops on their merry chase. They now want to charge him with the deaths of the TV people. This is about as logical as the government in southern Indiana trying to prosecute the people who "stole" from a slot machine at an indian casino. You missed that one? The machine had just been put in service but not programmed correctly. Each single dollar coin or token that dropped in was recorded as ten dollars' credit to the player it seems. After a few hours of operation like this, the thing was caught red-handed giving too much money to the patrons. It was a patron who reported it; but now she is facing charges of theft from the casino. All the other people who played the thing and did not report it are being tracked down and arrested and charged. I am not making this up and I am not going to insult your intelligence by boiling down the illogic of these two situations for clear comprehension. If you are not outraged on the face of it by the deteriorating tendency of people in power to treat responsibility as a fluid concept subject to repackaging and restructuring and fabrication and evaporation, then the words I use are going to be too big for you to understand anyway. Hot off the wires at this writing is the "censure" of the general who covered up the Pat Tillman murder in Afghanistan. No court martial, no demotion, no admission of anything but bad judgment. Army rangers assassinated one of their own on orders from higher up but nobody is guilty of anything but bad judgment? If the truth will set you free, the web of lies will be the death of us all.
Because I call attention to these crimes against logic, I am being called everything from insane to imbalanced to dangerous to certifiable. But I am not a steroid-cranked gorilla racing around the city with guns blazing and tires screeching in pursuit of a private citizen. I am not the ignorant inarticulate boor signing the papers to send young men and women across the sea to die in a civil war with no meaning and no future. I am not a pill-popping blowhard bellowing into a live microphone telling bad lies about good people to twist elections and polls around backwards to further bigotry and hate. People are calling me crazy when I live a quiet life with a job and husband and a home and a computer. Something is upside down here.
My self appointed task here is to ask you remaining thinking people to consider the effects of these bad things being done by evil powerful people. Do you yell at your TV? Come on, admit it. I would be worried if you did not. The more I blog, the less I scream at the box that can't hear me. It makes more sense to target the message onto here or better yet, to call the mayor's office and tell him he is a spineless sniveling newt for pretending to feel sorry for the helicopter victims when their blood is on his hands. I know it did me a lot of good to tell him so. At the very least, start your own blog and rage against my machine if you want, but don't ask me to stop talking. The main reason we are sliding down the slope is that everyone has become either afraid or disillusioned or both. If you don't want to be part of the solution, fine. But I am not the problem just because I shine light into corners where true ugliness hides.

New Meaning to Breaking News

2007-07-27T14:46:00.000-07:00

I promised only a couple of hours ago to just talk about my puppies and my vinyl records and my mother but the news out of Phoenix just now is too significant to ignore. It's bad enough the pigs with guns chase red light runners at top speed through more red lights and end up running over babies in strollers on the sidewalk. All the more reason to pin medals on cop killers. But I digress. Our modern technology now provides for sending cameras and TV transmitters aloft to beam live images of these spectacles to us by people who call themselves broadcast journalists. Four of them died today as titanium and jet fuel and human tissue plummeted in free fall onto a tranquil city park after they flew into each other. I feel sorry for the families they leave behind. To have their lives snuffed out for something so senseless is down there on the unbelievable meter next to Pat Tillman being shot between the eyes by Dick Cheney's personal hit man in Afghanistan.
The really bad people here are Mayor Phil Gordon and his head pig Jack Harris that promote this recklessness. They were quick to go on TV feigning sympathy but quickly distancing themselves from any responsibility. Right behind them are the station managers and news directors. At one time a butthole named Phil Alvidres was a producer at a station I worked at in Phoenix. His boss was a guy named Bill Miller; they both ended up at one of the stations whose $3 million toy is now a smoldering erector set. With dead bodies inside. If either of them has their dirty fingerprints directly on this, they deserve to rot in hell. Will they fall on their swords and resign? No. Will they dial back the insane chase for that one tenth of a rating point over the competition? No. And even if they have long since retired, they established the war room mentality that now prevails and they are guilty as accessories before the fact.
If you have a TV, make yourself stop watching local news and write the station a letter telling them of your decision. I know I said in a previous post that there is no point in railing against the machine, but I have written thoughtful letters to TV managers and gotten thoughtful answers back. Can you make them ground their choppers? Probably not. If the pigs in your town chase down and kill people BEFORE they are found guilty of anything whatsoever, write a letter to your mayor and call him on it. Will he laugh in your face? Probably. Will he send a pig to your house to shoot you? Probably. But at least you will get on TV.

Sea Change

2007-07-27T11:05:00.001-07:00

"Our economy is large." NPR played the actual tape this morning of POTUS making that observation; one which for him is deep and mystically sage-like almost. He was responding to the latest dip in GDP that proves mainly that in hot summer weather, people sit at home and don't do stuff. At least here in the desert southwest. My first instinct was to pump adrenaline and scream at the radio. But it fizzled until now when I have these reactions.
What people should be worried about, they are not. What they should not be worried about, they are. I thought my mission here should be to address that reversal but I increasingly lack faith in my ability to do so effectively. POTUS' crimes should be bringing him and his toad-like AG down in disgrace. But there is no traction outside Pat Leahy's office. The latest directive against all persons in the US who might thwart the executive branch's prosecution of its unholy war should be front page news causing outrage and acrimony. But the story can barely earn hits on youtube. My first clue that my path might be misguided was seeking out stories about Knut the Polar Bear and his pet human Thomas Doerflein to make myself feel warm and fuzzy all over. The real news is so bad, so unsettling, so hopeless, so unrelenting and so emotionally insurmountable that only a masochist would keep reading, keep seeking, keep linking and clicking until he finds "the truth." And when he does, he will feel much worse for his quest. In the interest of saving my own sanity from a meltdown, I might shift the focus a bit to the warm and fuzzy since the undeniable appetite for it shown by the world at large could be a sign worth taking to heart.
If you have a dog or cat, snuggle up to it and pet it a lot.
If you have a human, take it out for a nice steak dinner.
If you can see a pretty sunset from your house, go outside and watch it for a while.
If you have a favorite old record, get it out and play it.
If you have not talked to your mom in a while, call her.
If you are mad at the world, and you think that being mad at it will fix it, you are wrong. Being mad at the world and yelling at it might fix one little piece but it might also make it worse. If you have a sure fire way of destroying the entire human population so evolution can start over, please do implement it forthwith. Since I don't have one, I am probably going to stop thinking about a mini-implementation of anything that would add to the staggering burden of human suffering we already inflict on each other. A coup attempt in Washington DC would trigger our own civil war that would make the Iraqi one we started look like a schoolyard brawl. So I hereby rescind previous suggestions I advocate any such thing. Hating and sniping and scowling and snarling do not bring about change. I might secretly still hate and stew but I see such energy as increasingly counterproductive and internally harmful.
If I change back in a week, don't be surprised. But a journey of a thousand miles begins with a rambling blog.

My Hero George

2007-07-20T14:41:00.000-07:00

That business about the power of positive thinking and accomplishing anything you set your mind to does not hold up in life. It looks good in Reader's Digest or on a fortune cookie, but contains no actual potable water. Maybe it did once upon a time but not for a 55 year old white guy with a BA in obsolete TV broadcasting trying to re-invent himself for about the fifth time in ten years. For both of you still following along and breathlessly wondering how my trip to the Great Northwest paid off, the answer is it did not. The old lady matriarch of the WIRB just did not like me at some gut level. I could feel it while she was sitting there sizing me up. Or maybe it was one of the other two guys in the room: her head lawyer and the banker. But the little zinging darts were coming more from her according to my radar, and there was not a thing I could have done about it before during or after the fact. Some of you had suggested during the earring discussions that I might not want to work for a place that would reject me over a piercing in my earlobe. Though I pooh-poohed the foundation and logic of that view, it might be the only one I can use to get past this. In a subliminal way, I probably cannot help but convey that I am basically a smart aleck maverick loose cannon trying to pretend I am not in a world where people like me are hated, feared, shunned and sometimes shot on sight. We sure as hell are not winning elections and we are not producing successful TV shows or movies or bestselling books. Sure there are some alternative musicians and writers. But I will never count myself among them, and to pretend this blog will eventually lead to national recognition for me as a skewering pundit in the great tradition of H L Mencken or Fred Allen is folly.
Consider George Plimpton: the Ivy League educated author who did everything from play football to act in movies. He was a dilettante who pretended he could do anything he set his mind to. He did do these things pretty well, and people respected him for it. At least I did. How arrogant I am to consider myself an heir to his legacy; that I can pretend to be a Research Coordinator or a Disability Examiner or a Math Teacher or a TV Director or a Blogger and be getting away with it. This defeat takes the wind out of that sail. Whatever else I have pretended to be, Expedited Reviewer was an over-reach that has taught me a lesson.

Your Tax Dollars At Work: Killling Mental Patients

2007-07-18T13:25:00.000-07:00

A couple of days ago, the Capitol Pigs in Denver ripped open the chest and head of a sick man with their bullets. The murderer is on a paid publicly financed vacation and his name is now being blocked all over the web even though it had been floated out the first day. Governor Ritter is tickled pink over how good a shot his boy is. From twenty feet away. The dead Mr Snyder who had rented a tuxedo for this occasion was photographed sprawled on the floor with another pig standing over him putting on his rubber gloves lest any insanity germs get on him. Instead of having an intelligent conversation about gun control, the MSM is focusing on how fast the most expensive metal detectors Colorado Government can buy might be installed to block people with large belt buckles or concealed piercings from actually entering any of their public buildings. The police are your enemy. They will kill you on sight sooner than have an actual dialog with you. They are to be hated and feared. When I see one in the grocery store, I put both hands in the air until they are out of sight. They are not amused.
Then a little ways up the Continental Divide, Mr Munis was found dead of what the Wyoming pigs are calling a suicide. How hard it is for a person to point a rifle at his chest and get the discharge to do fatal damage will not be discussed by the MSM. Instead, the now dead Army-trained sniper will be convicted on TV of killing his wife while she sang a country song in a bar. Even if he did shoot his wife, it only proves that your Federal tax dollars are being used to mold monstrous dangerous killing machines to be sacrificed in foreign wars and then come home to find no treatment or care for the raging rage inside them. Maybe the high altitude brings out the worst in people. On both sides of the law and order equation. Or is it more of > than a =?
In just a couple of months, there have been three cases of violent death by guns splashed on the news. But no talk of how republicans might be a tiny bit responsible for consistently rolling back money for mental health diagnosis and treatment. And none about the mutual fellatious relations they have with the National Rifle Association which prevent meaningful legislative action on gun control. We have two choices: A) take the guns away from everyone and start believing the pigs will be less likely to murder citizens on sight or B:) let everyone amass all the killing hardware they can for a decimating revolution that would cleanse the bureaucracy of, well-- our so-called leaders and their henchmen. The former is unrealistic and naive. The latter is to tempt anarchy and death and disruption with lasting consequences on a scale unprecedented in modern times.
Rather than further contemplate all this, I am going to turn up the volume on the AM Nostalgia station that just signed on in our town. The Frank Sinatra and Rosemary Clooney and Ed Ames and Dean Martin past is a much more comfortable place to dwell. Every fifty five minutes though, I have to shut it off when the news headlines come on.

North By Alaska

2007-07-14T14:04:00.001-07:00

Airlines that is. They do a nice job; trying to be informal like Southwest but not totally pulling it off. My only gripe with them is the aggressive hard sell on their credit card mileage program. Every flight has heavier brow beating than the one before.
The point of today's installment is to tell of my interview with the biggest and oldest Institutional Review Board in the country where I would like to get a job. If I do, it means moving to Olympia, Washington. There are far worse places to try and put down roots than the home of the eponymous beer that is now brewed by Miller under contract with Pabst who bought the name. This place should be an hour south of the Seattle Space Needle but is more like two and a half hours by freeway. Try as I might to inqure about alternate routes, no one had a better plan so I wasted huge amounts of fuel and time creeping from exit to exit as millions of cars poured onto the entrance ramps to go somewhere far less important than my destinations. OK, they probably think that about me and I guess that is the trouble.
I would like to be an expedited reviewer for this place; and if so engaged, I would mainly scrutinze ads placed by drug companies designed to get live humans into their research trials. Naturally the drug companies would be grossly overstating the benefits of the trial and remaining all but mum on the possible risks in their proposed ads. That's where the IRB steps in and says wait a minute. To get the job, I must qualify as an actual board member with voting rights. To do that, I must past muster with the founder of the firm. I with met her and her chief lawyer and her finance officer for forty minutes in what can best be described as a microscopic dissection process performed with a generous dose of charm designed to substitute for anesthetic. It mostly worked; I just hope they are not reading this now.
I was also under the magnifying glass of the head of their HR and their head Doctor. The former reminded me of our Arizona governor who is a former US attorney and now self appointed champion of children's rights and education. The doctor could have been a Mormon bishop or elder in a parallel universe; his effortless and disarming Art Linkletter demeanor seems to come naturally to him. I am more worried about the impression I made (or did not make) on the Founder and Chairman and Banker who probably had not ever entertained a grown man with an earring in their upstairs boardroom suite.
As some of you might know, I struggled mightily in the abstract in the days leading up to my departure about whether to remove the piercing in my left earlobe that has been in place for over a year. Some of you offered that I would not or should not want to work at a place where a man cannot sport jewelry. Others pointed out that my anxiety over its presence would overshadow and preoccupy such that I would fail to give good answers. In the end, I opted to yank it. But as it turned out, that was easier said than done. I do not know how to remove it; and all efforts to separate the ring from the little locking ball were fruitless. In a valiant effort to deflect attention, I spent big money on a top drawer french cuff shirt and cufflinks to put on the total Ritz. A few minutes into the interview, I was told I met the nominal elements of the dress code. But did I? You can tell when people are dissecting your appearance; their eyes wander as if they were thinking while looking at the gap in my teeth: "Doesn't he have a good dental plan?" In a last ditch second valiant effort to overcome any unstated objectons they might have had, I told the HR lady at the conclusion that I had every intention of removing my ear hardware before our meetings but could not. I told her I would have it surgically extracted if necessary as a condition of employment and she managed a slight chuckle. But she did not say it was OK to leave it in.
Over the next two weeks, I imagine they will all be talking about the guy from Arizona and what to make of him. The HR lady asked me how the meeting witht the big bosses went; I had to say I was not all that confident. My hope is she can talk me up to them or at least suggest I am worthy of employment in the event that has any sway. For I am certain the signs were good on the HR side and that I have allies in that camp.
My friend Keith who always puts me up and takes me around when I am in the great Northwest took his mom for a "procedure" to collect tissue from her to see if she has cancer. This happened the day after my interview, but she too has a waiting period before learning the outcome. Her parting words to me were to the effect the Lord has two prayers to answer this week: one from me and one from her. Or at least one about me even if I don't generate one. I agreed with her on that; and offered that in the end, the die is cast and our control over these situations is minimal. If god is reading my blog, I might hope that he has figured out how important it is to me that I do some good in the world beyond what I have done thus far; and that I would like to do it on the payroll of the Western IRB. I also hope that he can grant Keith's mom many more good years to lavish love and pride on her son. And if between the two of us, Dee and I only get one wish: I defer to hers in a heartbeat.

Burn The Flag

2007-07-05T16:34:00.000-07:00

The jingoistic, xenophobic national masturbation party has come and gone and boy am I relieved. This could be the first year in a half dozen I managed to not be in front of a TV set to hear POTUS prattle and preen about how great it is to be an american and how important it is to fight terrorism and how brave our soldiers are and how proud he is to be in charge. If my timing had been worse and I had ended up on the receiving end of his twaddling lecture, I might have broken my favorite toy which is my High Definition TeleVision receiver box. Instead this means I can keep using it to watch fictional lawyer shows and travelogues and old Hollywood films in crisp detail and widescreen panorama.
On the way home from a dinner party last night where not one word about the Birth of a Nation or the Declaration of Independence was uttered, we passed thousands of peasants planted in their lawn chairs in the dusty empty lots that dot my town. Their gaze was fixed on the horizon as tons of chordite and sulfur and phosphorus and various bits of would-be star stuff was squandered and vaporized for their amusement. I could not help thinking: is this the first time any of these people have seen fireworks? What is the big deal? I am not sure I would walk out into my front yard to spend more than 90 seconds watching them; much less get in the car and fight the cops with their pylons and barricades partitioning off the city to permit them unfettered donut shop access while we go miles out of our way just to get home. How pathetic has it gotten when fireworks will get people out of their houses but nothing else will? The mass lemming mentality is getting more entrenched, more widespread, less thoughtful and more predictable all the time. No one questions anything; everyone shuffles in lockstep; the canaries in the mines are all dead and trampled or roasted and eaten. The celebrations surrounding the Fourth of July in the USA prove year in and year out that this country is inhabited mainly by boors, fools and mental midgets. If you think this country actually has done anything lately to be proud of, stick a roman candle up your butt and light it.

Enquirer Headline: POTUS SCREWS FLOTUS

2007-06-26T14:11:00.000-07:00

The question arises what means POTUS? Many on Huffington Post refuse to speak the unspeakable name of the person who has been committing crimes against humanity since 20 January 2001 in the name of promoting democracy and fighting terrorism. So they use this acronym for President Of The United States. I like it because it has a vaguely insulting ring to it that befits his moronic behavior. Now if he is POTUS, can you figure out who FLOTUS is?

Pen Versus Sword? No Contest

2007-06-26T09:15:00.000-07:00

Not only am I not speaking to god right now, but my mother is not speaking to me. She read these entries and then decided with help from my stepfather that I am anti-semitic and anti-mexican and just too negative for further human contact. I told my friend this and he said: "OK, let me get this straight: your own mother is not speaking to you because of what you wrote in a blog?" Yeah, that's about right. And no, I did not say anything rude about her or my stepfather; I have just mercilessly and repeatedly attacked the government and the establishment and the various goliaths that practice social darwinism on the grandest scale. Lots of people do that in their blogs.
I just read another guy's blog on here ( immmorallogic.blogspot.com ) and he is even angrier than I am about the state of the world and the depths of depraved immorality and inhumanity practiced by POTUS and Dick and ignored by Nancy and Harry. I wonder if his mother or any family member is shunning him because they think it's so bad to be so mad. I guess the polarization and extremism has gotten pretty bad when a boy and his mom go to opposite corners to avoid putting a Rosie-Elisabeth show on for the rest of the family. Still, I think everyone should have the right to their opinion even if it is strong. Like I said in a previous entry about Goldwater's extremism, there is nothing virtuous about being moderate when the world is being torn apart all around you by bad people who lie about their motives and pretend to be good when they are not. When really bad people get control and do really bad things, they need to be taken out. They need to be stopped with whatever means are necessary. Sitting by and wringing hands is not a productive way of making that happen. If Rosie had stood up on live TV and shoved Elisabeth backward in her chair or just knocked her over, I would have stood up in my living room and applauded. Talk is cheap and it's going nowhere. All it's doing is making mothers reject their young.
Did you see that news item about those fifty high school kids who slipped a protest letter to POTUS yesterday when they were supposed to be dutifully posing for his photo op and getting a handshake for being straight-A good doo-bees? I wonder if their moms cut off their internet privileges and took their car keys away and grounded them until they show some respect and straighten up and fly right.
Hating the whole world is not what I am here to promote. Fixing what is broken and getting rid of the bad people who break stuff is what I am here to promote. It is too late for this generation to make the world "a beautiful place," but it is not too late to slow down the destruction and at least set the right course.
The best thing I took from immorallogic was his notion of becoming part of his environs and integrating himself into the best parts of wherever he has been planted. He writes from Kansas City, MO of the trees and serenity and grass and general Midwestern cornfield cornpone claptrap. But he has a point. I am from Indiana myself, and that place has a lot of good points too. If we extrapolate the concept globally, then yes we are stuck with our home planet and we have to like it on some level lest we go insane. I like this world. I want to live in it. I want to like living in it. I want as many good people as possible to like their lives. When bad people get in the way of that, I will call them on it. On here. In person. Anywhere and anytime it needs to happen. My next installment will be about the Alaska high school banner the Supreme Court weighed in on. Now there are some really bad people that need to be taken out.

Stick Your Face Into This Horn and Scream, Mr President

2007-06-14T09:17:00.000-07:00

FDR was not the first talking President. Just because he was the first Oval Officer to turn electronic media to his advantage does not mean previous Presidents had no big or great ideas. Take for example his relative, Theodore. Few Americans know that he did at least three important things: 1) He slowed the exploitation of the working class by the robber baron class. 2) He asserted the right of the federal government to manage resources on a huge scale. 3) He got the US into the worldwide Imperialism business to stay. You should care about all these things and lay awake at night contemplating their import.
But what does it have to do with the current immigration fight? The Republicans are dug in favoring the business interests and now administer every metaphorical sexual favor imaginable (and some unimaginable) to the supremely powerful, secret, multinational and interconnected super-corporations that send its top people through the revolving doors of Washington think tanks, lobby groups and Cabinet posts. The Democrats pretend to be no part of this; even though many of them are in it up to their pubic bones in contradictory and self serving rhetoric trying to cover all the bases at once. One way or another, the de facto status quo is firmly locked in place for the moment.
With an election approaching, we should be checking all the current candidates on exactly how they will lead us to immigration Utopia. And history must be our guide. In antebellum times, the Irish who had fled a homeland crop failure had to fight their way uphill to acceptance; often facing rough treatment at the hands of their own distant relatives who had already gotten here earlier and staked their claim to riches and power. No one took their side. With the war of northern aggression in the rear view mirror, rich train barons brought in Chinese slaves to build track. The idea of human rights or civil rights or just plain decency was anathema to these wealthy owners. Again, no one spoke up on the workers' behalf. Eventually the strong survived and the weak perished, and Oriental assimilation into the US west coast big cities gradually occurred; a replay of the eventual Irish outcome from the East Coast. Then on Teddy's watch, the slavic east Europeans were secretly invited in the side door so the emerging packaged food, electrification and worthless widget industries could have an inexhaustible supply of utterly expendable human labor. But for the first time, an outcry from the press and the arts forced the government to act. It was one of those Nexus events and President Roosevelt stepped up to the plate and swung his big stick.
Have we learned anything at all from these three events that took place across a half century beginning a century and a half ago? If we are at another Nexus point, is there a power hitter in the bullpen or the dugout or even the clubhouse right now? The current crop of candidates from both sides are mainly channeling the likes of Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland, Harrison, and McKinley when what we need is another Teddy. Or Franklin. I would settle for a Harry. But I fear the only way we can save ourselves from a rerun of those dark times when the rich got filthy rich and the poor just kept making babies and dying violent deaths is for a third party candidate to emerge and take the moral high ground.
The current immigration fight is not about brown versus white. It is about rich exploiting poor and reaping the profits. It is about the cost of lettuce and corn and apples and everything that grows and is eaten. It is about the price of a fast food burger and the dry cleaning bill. It is about the middle class climbing to the next rung on the backs of those underneath. Social Darwinism has not gone away; it is back with a vengeance on steroids and packing serious heat. And nobody from either party is showing any signs of leadership to tell it like it is or do anything of lasting value to fix it. This really is a much bigger Nexus point if you fold in Global Warming, Globalization, over-population, Big Oil, Iraq, terrorism, Guantanamo, out-sourcing and the entire giant interconnected octupus of wrong headed evildoing that get worse by the hour. Gee, when I go back and read that last part, it sounds like nothing short of the Second Coming is going to work. And may God save us from the can of worms that would open. If there is a political solution rather than a divine one, we need it right now.

New Shoes, No Feet

2007-06-06T11:00:00.000-07:00

Depression era readers will recognize the title above as referring to a maudlin metaphor of that time. I shall spare the younger set from a re-dredging here. Instead I shall relate a short tale from this past weekend at the Hyatt Hotel in Arlington, Virginia where I stayed courtesy of the US Government. A couple hundred of us coordinators, plus nurses, doctors and patients gathered to hear about the end of SMART which was supposed to be a seven year study of whether intermittent treatment with HIV drugs was a good idea or not. SMART is an acronym for what the National Institute of Health designed as the biggest investigation of its kind ever launched. It crashed less than halfway along when it became obvious that the people who went off their medicine were dying faster than the ones who stayed on it constantly.
But that is not my story today. My point is that you don't know what you got till it's gone. A chance encounter with a man in a wheelchair recalibrated my gyroscope and I would like you to follow along. He was a guest at the same hotel and had come from Florida to ride his special hand-pedaled cycle in a race for impaired people. During a qualifying heat, a structural part failed and he was lucky not to have been run over by other competitors. He was limping home early to try and have the thing fixed in time for the next run. I learned all this when I offered him my umbrella. Four hours later, we were in his room learning plenty more about each other. Before you think the worst, I will tell you that this is a PG-13 story.
Keane is a strapping, handsome 43 year old man with a good tan, a buzzcut and green eyes that bore into you. He has no feeling or control of anything below T-10 where a centimeter of his spinal cord was destroyed. His one-man business trimming trees in Lake Placid, Florida had been humming right along until a bad day eight years ago when his safety line failed and he dropped 35 feet onto a carport roof. From his wheelchair, he put himself through dental tech school and was set to get off disability when he learned too late that his new job would cost him all the support the government was providing him. The new job would not provide the major medical care he needs to continue living the pretend-life he is stuck with so he passed on that fork in the road. Life as a couch potato feeling sorry for himself added 70 pounds in all the wrong places; so three years ago, this man took up fitness training and hand-bike-wheelchair racing. He now weighs 160 in all the right places, and can press 235 pounds. The wheels alone on this 27 speed bike cost two grand apiece, and I don't doubt Keane can outrun many a foot-pedaled bike racer while flipping his thumbs to gear change as his big hands are pounding those titanium pedals round and round.
He told me his marriage is falling apart; that his wife "does not get it" regarding the driving force this man found inside himself and that now gives meaning to his life. Like an amateur therapist nodding silently and drawing out what the patient wants to share, I learned that penile implants are not what they are cracked up to be. No I did not ask for or receive a hands on demonstration; I took his word on the subject. I also did not witness the catheterization procedure which must be done every two hours every day to keep his kidneys from exploding. I could not shake the feeling that he might have been happy to demonstrate if asked. We parted with a bear hug that sent a jolt of energy into me. His encircling grip around my shoulders lasted five seconds; but six hours later, I lay awake and alone in my dark hotel room wondering how or if Keane draws energy from other people be they male or female. He seemed so hungry to receive his own human energy jolt of acceptance during our ten minute visit. I could not find a way to cross the gay-straight, impaired-intact, stranger-danger barriers that we barely chipped a couple pieces off of. Maybe he got something back from me in that moment of contact. But my head was already spinning with conflicted feelings of sympathy, admiration, lust and sorrow that could not have come through in any positive mix. If you are out there, Keane West, know that you knocked me over and rocked my world without moving a muscle below T-10.

3:2 Pulldown

2007-05-31T11:22:00.000-07:00

Joining my collection of unwanted and obsolete electronic toys is now my husband's sister's Betamax VCR complete with tapes; most of which are off air recordings of WWF Wrestling or forgettable sitcoms. But ho, what's this? A professional transfer of the family home 8mm films complete with background music added as if by a deaf and blind person. The net multimedia effect was somewhere between inane and surreal so we muted the sound. The silent chronicle of what were mainly Carl's high school days sparked memories for him both bitter and sweet. And even though I did not personally experience these things or anything like them, the effect on me today is palpable and staggering.
Their lives started out serenely and comfortably enough in the outer suburbs of Chicago. The first reels show go-cart rides, pinochle parties, Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas morning under the tree, the dog and cat playing and the kids ape-ing for the camera prompted by the parents off screen. Eventually the scene shifts to rural Wisconsin where the father had transplanted everyone to fulfill his dream of being a gentleman farmer. The grandparents are seen like dazed foreigners; wondering what parallel universe they had been beamed into. Or maybe wondering what their daughter and son were thinking when they adopted this Green Acres persona. In fact the time frame is a few years before Eddie and Eva moved to Hooterville; and there was less here to laugh about.
Carl's dad had a tile and construction business, then later a bar and grille. The emphasis was not on the grille. By the time Carl went away to college, and he was the first and only member of his family to earn a degree, his parents' lives had descended into the hell that untempered consumption of alcohol generally brings. His mom finally broke away from the abuse and infidelity; the dad married again but soon died. I had heard some of this second hand from Carl's relatives, but never so much as saw an image of his dad until last night's unspooling. There were moments of fun here: bottle feeding the pet deer they had adopted and who lived in the house, awkward attempts to ride the three wheel bicycle-and-a-half Carl had fashioned and the painstaking behind the scenes festooning of the Miss Potato Harvest Parade float. We laughed the hardest at the halloween costumes from 1963: Carl's two little brothers had enveloped themselves in silver-painted cardboard boxes to look like robots while Carl had donned a cocktail dress. He describes it now as a turning point in everyone's lives.
It is probably a mercifully fortunate happenstance that the transfer engineer put the reels in a random order so it was not a steady inexorable decline but rather a disjointed series of flashbacks and flashforwards that we witnessed. The inescapable conclusion for me is that it is a wonder we all made it out of our past lives in one piece both physically and mentally. As we continue to endure the slings and arrows hurled at us by this world that becomes angrier and more dangerous by the hour; the yearning for two toned cars with fins and pushbutton drive, for card parties, for pony rides, for pine trees cut fresh from the woods, for haylofts, for our grandma and grandpa, for our toys and for our parents' unconditional love and sacrifice grows stronger too. Never mind the derailments left on the cutting room floor. Despite the sad aspects of the father's problems, the proof is on the screen that these kids were loved and that they were and are resilient. I am very lucky to be spending my life with the firstborn of them. And I am very lucky to have a reel of my own films that depict my siblings and me as loved and cared for. I am still trying to decide if seeing that lost time flicker back to life for a couple of hours was the best or the worst thing I have subjected myself to in years.

Living In The Past

2007-05-25T11:05:00.000-07:00

If you are not old enough to know who Barry Goldwater was, you can skip this one. If you are but don't care anything about him, I ask you to re-think that position. Here is what he said one time that got him "swift-boated" before there was a name for the tactic.
"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."
The first part was used by President Johnson to paint Goldwater as a nuclear bomb dropping nutjob. The second part was considered superfluous and is seldom heard. Goldwater lost the presidential election in a humiliating defeat and sort of semi-retired to his mansion in Northeast Phoenix until he died twenty some years later. When I was working at Audio Specialists on Camelback Road twenty years ago, he would come in to buy new tubes for his MacIntosh amplifiers or a new stylus for his Empire turntable.
I am reminded of both parts of his pithy take after my friend at work Tom came in to rant about extremists on both sides. He defended moderation as a virtue after Rosie O'Donnell and Elisabeth Hasselbeck went to their respective corners on live network TV again this week and hissed at each other on split screen. No one was left looking too attractive which on any TV show is antithetical. I too found myself polarizing my hull plating again (imagine that) over my husband's descent from grace after a government bureaucrat twisted the already twisted facts to ensure Carl lost his teaching license for good. Three days after Carl's hearing, the little martinet himself was found out to have no moral character when his myspace page broke open on national wires and his trolling for youth was exposed. This Dennis Seavers person recruited from Big Brothers too, so he could swing youth over to the "dark side of debauchery and lawlessness." When confronted, he got all defiant and snotty saying the rest of us had no sense of humor and had "misintepreted" what he called a joke. Our state governor caved, our attorney general caved and our legislature caved. No one will take responsibility so Seavers and his shriveled up coot of a co-hort, Mr LeHew will continue destroying good people's lives with impugnity and immunity it would seem. I told him I spit, expectorate and vomit on him as vermin. He laughed at me, so I am figuring out a way to kill him.
How anyone could attack me for being too extreme I can't fathom. How anyone could advocate moderation in reacting to Seavers is equally incomprehensible. If Goldwater were alive today and could see how deified a position the so-called "moderates" are put in, while the so-called "extremists" are demonized and hung out to dry, he might have some salty observations we could learn from. I am just trying to keep his spirit alive.

Volatility, Lability, Liability

2007-05-18T20:26:00.000-07:00

The man I characterized of Mixed Character a few days ago on the occasion of the accident in front of my house was just here to drop off money. He wants to help me in paying the vet bills incurred by my dog going under the wheels of his car. Like most places in this country at least, our town has no law to prosecute the driver of a car that strikes an animal. The owner of the animal is always responsible no matter what. I made a big show of confronting the guy on that emotionally charged morning, and later FAXed him copies of the giant vet bills we paid to get our dog put back together. Instead of having me arrested or telling me what to do with myself, he brought me two hundred dollars and promised to make another payment from his next paycheck. I told him I was sorry for being such an ass. And I really am sorry. One day, somebody is going to punch me or shoot me or otherwise make me pay a big price for not being a proper Vulcan. Ron Barbea is an honorable gentleman of even temperament and I could learn a lot from him. Even if he did run over my dog.
I just had to make an installment on the Vulcan mortgage to the Imperial Car Club. We had more bad news today on another front and I shot from the hip without even pointing away from my foot first. My husband lost his appeal to a state government body that issues clearances to teachers. He had the clearance for a long time and has taught for twenty years; then the rules were changed out from under him and he had to go for a good cause exemption hearing. I blame the government for taking a sharp right turn and pronounced my hatred of all things republican, christian, right wing and "red stated" to of all things the Imperial Car Club Mailing List. It was a sort of Seinfeld moment when I realized I had hit the wrong button but too late. I tried posting a retraction but too late. The moderators must be republicans with no sense of fair play or forgiveness so no more help from fellow owners of Imperials in fixing mine or buying pieces for it. Just as well. With Carl's job prospects sinking fast, I should divest myself of these foolish hobbies anyway.
If I had any of this to do over again, would I? By the time I post again, I might have an answer if I have not been thrown in jail for shooting the governor of our state.

One Tough Broad

2007-05-17T13:45:00.000-07:00

Our mongrel adolescent dog, Pebbles, was literally run over by a car on our residential street yesterday morning. By way of offering visualization, I describe her as a buff colored, coarse haired coyote-looking shepherd mix of fierce intelligence, curiosity and spunk packing about 48 pounds of solid meat on her wiry frame. She bears the tread marks on her shoulder to prove how close a brush with death she had. Yet today she is hobbling around the house, trying to bark at the usual disturbances, trying to eat and drink, blissfully unaware of how lucky she is. I on the other hand am shuffling about zombie-like as I struggle to push out of my mind the violent sounds I heard from over our fence yesterday morning as she came under the front wheel of a dodge stratus. The person pretending to have been in control of the car expressed some remorse and contrition, but took pains to say he was not going to admit any guilt. This was during a phone call several hours later where I informed him I would FAX to his office the current itemized charges from the emergency vet office. They are now at $1100 and some change.
And before you interrupt to ask why she was not under the control of us, her master humans; I cannot answer that right now. As is the usual practice, my husband was doing the dog walking yesterday which is how they prefer it since he is far more lax with them than I. If this is the price to be paid for letting them have a long leash and maximum rabbit chasing fun, I submit it was way too high. But that is a talk I need to have with him in private and not on here as dirty laundry.
I do unabashedly and unmercifully attack the driver, one Ron Barbea who is employed as a "Solid Waste Disposal Officer" for one of our local indian tribal governments, as a person of mixed character. He did stop and provide his business card; but then the car has a tribal plate on it and would be easily traced with probably major consequences or at least complexities should I choose to pursue that avenue. Which I won't. The speed limit on our street is 25. You can count on one hand the number of cars out of 50 going by that remain under that velocity. He stated on the phone he sometimes has trouble seeing objects in the peripheral field due to the heavy tint on his car windows. When pressed, he stated the windows were up and the AC on at 7:30 AM when the temperature was 72 degrees. Once he said he did not see them (three dogs and a human totaling 370 pounds and occupying the approximate volume of a small car) while another time he said he could not stop in time. Which is it? The vividly clear tape loop in my brain has no skidding tires on it. Just the whoosh and the thump and the screaming. If he was on a cell phone with the blackout windows up and the AC on going 35, it is a bit academic isn't it since the laws of physics do not yield for best wishes?
Lots of real writers who do this for a living have penned tear jerking stories about witnessing a horrific split second of injury or death to a "higher" mammal or even a person. I can't and won't try to do that here. I need to get it out of my system though, that we have made for ourselves a violent dangerous fast expensive careless callous and thoughtless world where nobody outside my immediate family and close friends really cares about Pebbles or Carl or me or even Mr Barbea. If Pebbles wants to pick herself up and dust herself off and get back in the race, she should have a song written for her. I am just about ready to step in front of the nearest bus so I never have to go through anything like this as long as I live. And nobody would ever write a song about that.

Do I Have To Draw You A Picture?

2007-05-14T16:31:00.000-07:00

The Searchers from 1956 ran on the HD Movie Channel this weekend. In it, John Wayne speaks the words above to one of the characters whose vision of the problem at hand is less than clear. I don't know if it marked the first time anyone had used this sarcastic metaphor on the screen, but I am going to start using it here. For those readers who wonder what in hell I am talking about and give up before discerning my point, I now will offer early disclosure. This one is about being too political and intense for your own good.
I have a sort of new friend who was introduced to me by someone I don't know very well either. The one who did the introducing who we can call Chris is good buddies with someone I know well and who is sort of a right wing Republican. The new third party who we can call John shares my interest in old and esoteric Hi Fi equipment. The idea is for me to help him fix up stuff he buys cheap so he can sell it for more money. Eventually, he might give me something nice as a thank you present. I usually apply some litmus papers early on to feel new people out and he passed with flying colors, literally. But then on Friday evening around our supper table, I set off what turned out to be a stink bomb. In discussing my brother's job at an ad agency in Phoenix, I stated that it was a nice place except for the fact they had Focus on the Family as a client. I described them as a "right wing hate mongering group that spends a fortune attacking homosexuals and liberals." The room fell silent. Do I have to draw you a picture? It is safe to say I had just attacked my new friends as gay bashing neo-cons. Bad enough John was there; his fiance was also present for the unveiling. When I later saw the prosletizing bumper sticker advertising her church in the back window of her car, I began to wonder how accurate any of our perceptions of other people can ever be. They seemed like nice, smart, educated, open-minded people. And maybe they are. What I don't know is how a person can be Christian and not be Christian Right. The polarization of America is so strong and getting stronger such that I do not even feel remorse for this. If these new friends run screaming from our realm after only barely entering it, so much the better is how I now look at it. Is it good to cut myself off from the other half of the population? A tiny part of me says no. But the biggest part still wonders how any thinking person can place anne coulter books on their shelf. Especially when the shelf is shared with Mark Levinson, Citation, Krell, Thorens, or similar relics of a time when Dirksen and Percy and Rocky were not the attack dogs but voices of the opposition.

Location Location Location

2007-05-10T14:22:00.000-07:00

When you get right down to it, what is the difference between a cold or a sore throat or a "social disease?" You can get a cold from tongue wrestling with somebody who already has a cold. Can you get one from fellating a person? I bet you can. Can you give that same cold to another person by fellating that person? Can somebody else who fellates that person get the same cold? Where would he be getting it from exactly? So by strict definition, a cold is a "social disease." But nobody would use it as proof you are a pagan fornicator. I lay awake at night pondering these things but I can't really divulge why. But I would like to ask the surgeon general how he decides which diseases should confer varying levels of shameful dark miasma onto the person that becomes an unwitting colony medium. Using the common cold paradigm in reverse, apply it to chlamydia for instance. It can live in your throat, your urethera, your butt or your vagina. It can go from any of those places on you to any of somebody else's other ones. No I am not going to suggest toilet seats in public bathrooms as an innocent transmission vehicle. But I am asking that we stop backtracking the bread crumbs to figure out who has put what where with who in the last two to four weeks so the sex police can go down the list of your contacts and out you as a creepy crawly walking vermin colony. If you have never had one of these follow up conversations that flow from a health department alert, I can tell you it will not be the high point of your relationship with a former friend. Why can't we all each be responsible for our own throats, our own noses, our discharges from all orifices, our excreta, our secreta, our uretheras, our mucus membranes and all the other parts of us that define us and our friends and our sex mates as animals too? Germ exchange has been going on for a time scale of literally cosmic proportions. It got us to where we are now for better or worse. Does it really make any difference what hole the germ came out of and which one it went in? Does it make a difference if that germ parked for a while on a glass or a countertop or a hand or a nose or a lip or a tongue or a butt or a foreskin? Get a test, get the pills, get the shot, get over it. But don't get me started on unprotected sex.

SETI Begins at Home

2007-04-27T14:34:00.000-07:00

Upon discovery of the second non-fictional Class M planet only 20 light years distant, you would expect the world's RF antennae and receivers to be focused thereon and set to maximum gain and filtering modes. But no, we find the MSM has devoted most of its attention to school kids musing about four headed green monsters and no-fee-paid clips of Star Trek designed less to inform and more to exploit. The big justification used by the gov't to cut funding to Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence seekers has been that the universe is too big and we don't know where to look. That excuse has now been blasted by a disruptor, but is anyone digging beyond the superficial to at least the core question? It eluded me if it happened at all. I would also like to know what the published protocols are should the unfathomable happen. Would the most significant discovery in history be processed, massaged, approved and expunged by Karl and Dick and Condi and Steven before being parsed out to the Vatican for final imprimatur? Has it already happened but is being kept from us? Fourteen years ago, I was watching the inauguration ceremonies "live" with hope for the new Democratic-controlled future. Minutes before the oath is given, there is a meeting between the outgoing and incoming. When Clinton emerged from the secret office near Blair House after getting a "final word of encouragement" from Bushie the dad, he bore a look of ashen catatonia. What if he were told the darkest truth there is; that some of the tabloid trash about aliens controlling our fate from deep underground in New Mexico is true and that the entire world government system is a grand marionette show? He looked for all the world like he had just gotten the word and was reeling. I don't know if the current monkey man pretending to be in charge exhibited any such expression six years ago on the 20th of January. I know I did not watch it "live," and the reruns later did not include that magic moment. But I would wager it either bounced off his rubber cranium like any complex idea would, or he already knew thanks to the well worn inside track he and his family have worked to their advantage and to our peril. I tend toward the former in light of the recent display of political, social, racial and rhythmical accumen he and Laura put on for the cameras at the Malaria conference. If you have not seen the dancing with the Natives clip, find it but prop something soft under your jaw first. If it drops onto something too hard you will need dental work.
If the antennae on the "C planet" as they now call it are pointed back at us, they are doubtless in a standby babysitting mode pending a miraculous awakening from our long slumber. God help all of us if they happened to do their millenial check as the MSM were dutifully looping the executive dance steps onto their megawatt monster transmitters. Any true civilization seeing it would either pull the plug or swing their dish to the opposite corner of the galaxy.
This planet may not be worth what it would now take to save it from itself. Unless some untapped vein of terrestrial intelligence is quickly found from within, this particular episode of StarGate SG One is turning into a total shark jumper for the viewers on the "C planet."