Wilson's Rant

Need Some Cheese and Crackers with My Whine

2012-01-02T08:11:00.000-08:00

I was at the Portland airport over the holidays, preparing to fly home. The line through security snaked through 5 or 6 switchbacks. There were 3 TSA agents checking IDs for the entire line, which had to hold at least a couple of hundred people at any given time. A person would clear the ID check and we would all shuffle forward a step. Shuffle, stop; shuffle stop; shuffle stop.

I usually fly out of Columbus, which even though it calls itself an International Airport, is really quite small in comparison to Portland or Sea-Tac. I usually fly into and out of Burbank or Kansas City, where they do things a little differently. So it took me a while to catch on. As we were shuffling and stopping in the long and winding road of that security line, I noticed people walking by our queue and right up to a fourth TSA person checking IDs. Then I noticed the sign that said this was for first class and special club members of the airlines; in other words, they had their own TSA agent and special non-line to get through security. No fuss, no shuffle-stop, just a waltz in the park.

When I saw one overly made-up silicon sister in faux fur, crack tight jeans and thigh high boots with 4 inch spike heels prance by and wriggle right on through with barely a wave of her ID and ticket I lost it. Cheryl tried to shush me and Eric acted like he didn’t know who I was.

Last time I checked, TSA personnel are employees of the federal government. They work for all of the citizens. Our taxes pay for their equipment, their salaries, and everything else about them. So why the hell does the TSA apply special privileges for first class passengers? The TSA is essentially using their power to force those of us who did not buy a first class ticket to do the TSA shuffle step, while rewarding those who do have a first class ticket with special access. It sure sounds like the TSA is trying to help the airlines sell more first class tickets. It’s like creating special parking places in front of government buildings exclusively for Cadillacs (GM you know).

To take that analogy one more step, we can easily imagine that one actually does not have to own the Escalade to use the parking space. In fact, how you got that big fancy car is immaterial; you could be a drug dealer or porn star or borrowed it from a friend. Just like one does not require some special need, pay more in taxes or actually be a VIP to obtain a first class ticket. In the case of the flouncing floozy, it would not be surprising to discover that she doesn’t even have a job or pay taxes, but relies on Daddy, or just as likely Sugar Daddy, to buy the ticket for her.

It seems we have it all backwards again, which is all we can expect anymore for the idiots we have in charge of things. It’s bad enough that the people who are supposed to be preserving our safety won’t use common sense in their screening procedures, such as being extra cautious about checking young, swarthy men who smell of camel for fear of being accused of racial profiling. Oh the horrors of that indignity! So all of us, even the old ladies in wheel chairs and little girls, must go through the greater indignities of luggage searches, body scans, pat downs and, for you complainers, strip searches and body cavity probes just so that our government and the TSA can smugly state that no one has been profiled and by extension prejudiced against. Of course, in this twisted no sense logic, the TSA and the airlines, and apparently the rest of us by acquiescence, have no problem accomplishing the reverse and profiling based on the type of the ticket we carry.

As for all of you who are aghast at the idea of stereotyping and profiling let me just say: Get Over It! Stereotyping works because it’s usually true. Little old ladies and 8 year old girls do not blow up airplanes. Women with artificial breasts who dress in bosom bulging blouses, short skirts and spiky heels to ride an airplane usually do meet the definitional requirements of floozy or bimbo.

If the airlines want to charge passengers more money for a wider seat, free liquor and the ability to board the airplane first, they can do that. But, simply by virtue of holding that ticket should not extend to receiving preferential treatment from our government. When the TSA gives special access to first class ticket holders it makes second class citizens of the rest of us.

The Non-Joy of Ranting

2011-12-19T10:56:00.000-08:00

I won’t say I’m ranted out. Yet, it seems that every time I get revved up about something, I find that a whole bunch of pundits, journalists, editorialists, columnists, talking heads, friends and neighbors are already there, taking one side or the other. It’s depressing. What makes it worse is that my rants are all so obviously on point and correct that I can’t help wondering why these things go on and why they are still around for me to rant about.

For example, voter registration hit my rant button the other day. You know what I would say, right? Lots of folks are already saying it. If I were to rant, it would go something like this.

How can it conceivably disenfranchise any possible voter to be required to show a government issued picture ID? You need one of those things to open a bank account, drive a car, buy a beer and a pack of smokes, get on an airplane, and use your credit card. Does anyone honestly think there are legitimate voters out there who don’t already have a valid ID? If there are, why aren’t they, and all the Democrats and liberals, screaming bloody murder about how these poor abused IDless people are being denied the rights and privileges to which all Americans are entitled. You know the rights and privileges I mean: driving, drinking, flying, charging. That you do not hear anyone screaming about this is because there are no such people.

That leads to the inevitable rant questioning why this anti-ID bullshit is happening in the first place, with the inevitable conclusion that it’s all a cover to prevent the public from keeping the Democrats from cheating at every election they can get their hands on. It’s why the Attorney General of the United States is refusing to even acknowledge a request from the State of Indiana to investigate voter fraud. It’s why some Black Panther brothers were able to force elderly conservative people away from the polls with clubs and threats to prevent them from voting in Philly, and, even after agreeing to plead guilty had the charges dropped by the same Attorney General. It’s why the State of Minnesota could elect a gasbag incompetent like Al Franken. It’s how the State of Washington kept finding ballots in forgotten warehouses until they finally had enough to win the governors election in a recount. In fact, we can sum it all up in one word: ACORN.

We all know what a bunch of lying cheating hose bags the Democrats are when it comes to registering voters and counting the votes. Mayor Daley, the infamous father of the just retired and not quite so infamous Mayor Daley, is famous for a lot of corrupt things, but one of his best was exhorting his Democrat supports to “vote early and vote often.”

While this subject could prove a fine basis for a wonderfully insightful and witty rant, my heart just isn’t in it. We all know what is going on with voter registration fraud and the integrity of the polls.

That is not to say that the Republicans are entirely clean. Perhaps it is only fair to point out that Florida incident where Al Gore accused Bush and the Florida election officials of cheating and thereby winning the election with the conspiracy of the Supreme Court. It was kind of funny though how every hanging chad was a vote for Gore, and none for Bush. Or that thousands of Florida based military personnel , who are overwhelmingly Republican voters, did not get their votes counted because they either did not get there overseas absentee ballots or they got them so late they could not be returned by the cutoff date. Further, did you hear that after a year of investigation and recounting by a bunch of “independent” journalists, it turns out they had to admit that Bush really did win the Florida election?

Republicans also had that embarrassing series of incidents during the 2004 election here in Ohio when the lines at some polls were so long that some voters had to wait an hour or more in line to be able cast their vote. Apparently this was such a hardship and so painful that it caused a lot of Kerry’s supporters to give up their place in line and go home without casting a vote, which is why he lost in Ohio. Just as obviously, it proves how stupid, greedy and vindictive Republicans are because they didn’t have the sense of a turkey to come in out the rain. Instead, they mulishly and ignorantly stood in those long lines, even taking up those places vacated by the Kerry quitters, I mean abused and mistreated supporters. What is the matter with those Republicans? Didn’t they know that an hour in line is far too long to have to wait to vote for your candidate? Heartless imbeciles!

As I think about this voter ID thing I become depressed. It’s all so obviously wrong and stupid and insane, yet we let it keep happening. I really have to ask myself what is wrong with America and all of us citizens that we continue to put up with it. It is all of us honest vote casters who are being disenfranchised for crying out loud!

Then, as I think some more about it, I realize that it’s going to take hard work, guts and a certain amount of stubbornness to stop this nonsense. It is lots harder than standing in line for an hour. Thinking about it that way, my heart just isn’t into it let alone finding any joy in ranting about it.

August Thoughts

2011-08-22T17:18:00.000-07:00

Wilson’s Law of Unintended Consequences

Actions taken with the best of intentions by ignorant people will always have a bad result.

To explain this one we could talk about the results of creating an entitlement culture, results such as those Britain is suffering from her rioting youths. We could point to most of the progressive liberal agenda in America as well. Consider America’s inner city communities. The poverty rates, unemployment rates, single parent family rates, crime rates, drug usage rates, and just about every other bad “rate” you can think of are much, much worse now and the direct result of the War on Poverty begun in the mid ‘60s than they were before that “war” began.

However, rather than get too heavy, here is a simple little tale of what happens when a person thinks she understands something, but doesn’t, and then acts on that understanding with every intention of helping, and doesn’t.

My first wife and I were at a local plywood mill to get her paycheck. As we came out of the office, she noticed clinging to the side of the building a very large moth, at least 4 inches across, perhaps larger. It was one of those moths that could change its color and patterning to match the background. It was already starting to turn a sickly light green that was the building’s wall color. It was a spectacular creature, really.

“Oh, this poor thing isn’t safe here,” she said. Plywood mills are inherently dangerous places for people and she was imputing those dangers to the moth. After all, at least people understand and can mostly protect themselves from racing front end loaders, screaming saw blades, flying wood chips, slamming steel conveyor systems, overhead cranes carrying large heavy objects and the like. This poor moth had made a bad choice for a place to rest.

She scooped it up in her hands and said she intended to take it into town to set it free in a safer place. So we drove into town, and stopped on Main Street to go into the post office. Once out of the car, she flung her hands into the air, releasing the moth, which then flew straight upwards.

Free, free at last! And safe, for the first 10 feet, at which point a large bird swooped in and grabbed that moth in mid-air.

My wife was left staring open mouthed at the spot where a little puffy cloud of feathery moth wing particles hovered briefly and then slowly rained down on her upturned, horrified face.

MSM Follies

I have for a while been ranting, sometimes here, but usually just to myself or the boys at the bar, about the hypocrisy and basic dishonesty of the mainstream media. The bias is blatantly liberal and progressive. Unless, of course, you’re a liberal or progressive, in which case it is, as FOX says, “fair and balanced.”
Seriously, though, you would think even the MSM would start feeling just a wee bit embarrassed about being so obviously two-faced.

Rick Perry recently said that if Bernanke and the Federal Reserve print more money it would be “treacherous,” perhaps even “treasonous” and if he might get treated “pretty ugly” if he came to Texas. Did the MSM ever howl! They are still screaming to high heaven (oops, they don’t believe in that). Yet, Biden recently called the Republicans in Congress “terrorists,” a label that any number of progressive pundits and “journalists” routinely use to describe Tea Party members. Even Obama has exhorted his followers to bring “guns to a knife fight” with his “enemies.”

A lot of people, me included, get upset with the unfairness of it, thinking that the MSM has the power to and does shape opinion far and wide. If it weren't for the extremely liberal press we lament, the whole progressive house of cards would come tumbling down. Lately, however, I have been changing my mind about that.

Delusional is the word that often comes to my mind for those who believe the tripe the MSM is generally serving up as “journalism.” Indeed, I think that many in press themselves are delusional. According to my good old Webster’s ”delusional” (as I just used it) means “a false belief regarding the self or persons or objects outside the self that persist despite the facts and is common in some psychotic states.” (That means state of mind, not California. Or does it?) That whole idea of a delusional press has been tugging at me, suggesting to me that it’s not as bad as I may think.

Does anyone listen to a delusional person besides his therapist? When confronted by a delusional person don’t we quietly back away and try not to make any threatening or sudden moves. Whatever you do, don’t make eye contact!

Is anyone paying attention to the MSM other than those who already are of the same mind, the same thinking, the same delusions? I’m beginning to think not.

Recently I ran across a neat little essay/blog by Walter Russell Mead dated August 16, 2011 in American Interest.com. Mead’s basic premise is that the MSM, far from helping the liberal agenda, actually hurts it. By constantly affirming to liberals that they are always right and the conservatives are always wrong, the MSM lulls liberals into ignoring reality and getting walloped time and again by events and outcomes they don’t understand or didn’t see coming.

Mead has some wonderful turns of phrase. Here is one that I loved.

“To the extent that they think about it — as opposed to simply letting their little lights artlessly shine — liberal journalists seem to think that acting like cheerleaders strengthens their team. It doesn’t."

That’s just about the worst insult one can give to those journalists, the ones who are “letting their little lights artlessly shine…” Ouchy mamma!

Mead starts with a discussion of the coverage and commentary on the recent Wisconsin recall elections proclaimed by most of the MSM as a victory for Democrats because they picked up two Senate seats after all the dust had settled. As Mead points out, the Republicans still hold the majority, the union busting law is still on the books and deemed constitutional, the Governor appears to be as popular as when he was elected, and to achieve this “victory” the Democrats spent scores of millions. He goes on to point to other examples such as Kerry and his war record, Gore and his pretentious elitism, and even Obama with the stimulus and cap and trade. Mead summarizes this way:

“Over and over again in modern American politics, liberals have developed “frames” and strategies for key issues that they think will shift the debate their way. Over and over again the echo chamber of the liberal press resounds with praises of the new approach. And over and over again liberals “unexpectedly” get sucker punched by conservative counter attacks a more critical press would have forecast as both inevitable and deadly.”

Mead finishes with: “Sometimes one wonders: is the liberal press secretly taking the Koch brothers’ money?”

So maybe the blatant hypocrisy of the MSM, their complete willingness to forgive liberals anything, Obama especially, and their refusal to ask any critical questions, investigate or fact check anything progressive is a good thing.

I’m beginning to think so.

More One Offs for July

2011-07-19T16:41:00.000-07:00

Did you know that lithium batteries are considered hazardous cargo requiring special licenses, permits, containers and so on to transport? Yes sir, Federal government regulations say so. These are the same batteries found in every cell phone, iPod, laptop, and just about every other electronic device of which we all carry around one or two everywhere we go.

It’s a wonder people aren’t spontaneously combusting or exploding all over the planet from all that hazardous material we are all packing. Might this also explain what is causing all those whales to beach themselves? Possibly even global warming, er, I mean climate change?

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Did you hear the one about MillerCoors and their license to sell beer in Minnesota?

Here is the direct quote from the Associated Press:

“Miller, Coors and other popular beers may disappear from Minnesota stores and bars within days because brewing giant MillerCoors lacks the proper licenses due to the state's government shutdown.

MillerCoors has 39 "brand label registrations" with the state that expired last month, and the employees who process renewals were laid off when state government shut down July 1 in a budget dispute, Doug Neville, a spokesman for the Department of Public Safety, said Wednesday.

State alcohol enforcement officials who remain on the job recently told officials with Chicago-based MillerCoors LLC that they need to come up with a plan soon for pulling their products he said.”

This is just gorgeous. You couldn’t make up this sort of plot, though Joseph Heller came close in Catch-22.

Cop: Sorry, Miller, but I’m going to have to run you in for not having the proper license.

Miller: Wait. I’ll get a license. Who do I talk to?

Cop: No one. The State doesn’t issue the license you need. Now, up against the wall and spread ‘em.

On a real world and practical sense note, if the budget is so bad, why lay off the license people who bring in revenue but not the cops who enforce the license and shut revenue off? With or without an up to date license, MillerCoors must generate millions in taxes from selling beer in Minnesota. All the license cops are going to do is make the budget thing worse by shutting off all that tax money in closing down the sales while spending tax money by way of their salaries and benefits as they drive around in $4 gallon state vehicles making sure no Miller cans and bottles are on the store shelves.

Do we think government of any sort is better at doing things for us than we are doing them for ourselves?

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They caught a bunch of teachers and principals in Atlanta cheating on the standardized tests to make students score better and the teachers look like they were doing their job. This wasn’t just a one-time deal either as it appears it has been going on for a number of years. And, a bunch isn’t really descriptive enough as the number of teachers may extend into the hundreds and the principals to more than a half dozen. The cheating literally involved the teachers erasing wrong answers and marking in the right ones before turning the tests over to the scorers.

Guess whose fault it is?

Yep, that’s right: George Bush. If he hadn’t come up with that criminally insane program of No Child Left Behind which put impossible goals and standards in place, the teachers wouldn’t have to cheat to be successful. Seriously, I saw this offered in a news article, with top billing, as justification for the teachers’ actions. The problem, you see, is that the standards for learning are too high in comparison to the standards for honesty and integrity. So what do we expect teachers to do when faced with that dilemma?

Recently, the school board gave about 80 teachers and 6 principals the option to resign or be fired. Apparently the option to resign is to allow the victims, er, I mean the teachers, to preserve their reputation. One presumes this is so they will have a better opportunity to get another job without the black mark of being a cheater on their resume. One also supposes the school district will give them a nice letter of recommendation as well. That way they can get another teaching position and be just as successful in their new school.

Given the bullshit the teachers union and liberals in general are able to generate, if I was one of those teachers, I’d make them fire me because you know I could sue for wrongful termination and retire on the judgment once a liberal court got done with it. It beats having to get another teaching job at which I obviously don’t like working hard or honestly, as evidenced by what my students’ real test scores should be.

Wanna See My New Tat?

2011-06-10T10:49:00.000-07:00

It has been far too long since I visited this page. I had every good intention of getting back on track after getting my computer restored after the crash. But, as they say, the road to hell is paved…

What brings me out of my shell, awakens the sleeping giant, got the blood stirring, roused the unwashed, etc, bad metaphor, etc, was the recent trials and tribulations of The Ohio State University football program. I’m a Duck, Duck, Duck, and I am crying no tears over the poor Buckeyes travails. And yet, I am still outraged at the whole affair. Not in the way you think, I’ll bet.

The consensus is that Ohio State’s program, its players and coach are cheaters. They knowingly broke the rules and they must all suffer, quit or be fired, and be damned forever. But what rules did they break? Notwithstanding future developments, and I for one suspect there will be more, the currently known violations are that players sold or traded their autographs and other personal property like jerseys, championship trinkets and rings, and the like for tattoos and other merchandise and possibly money. Yes, they broke NCAA rules that specifically forbid doing those things. Yes, they probably lied about it when caught. Yes, one supposes there should be penalties for these actions.

And what a bunch of no good hypocrites and rotten scoundrels that makes the rest of us.

The NCAA, colleges and universities, Nike, Budweiser, ESPN/CBS/NBC/ABC/FOX, memorabilia manufacturers, stadium vendors, parking lots, hotels, restaurants, and a host of other companies and entities large and small, collectively make billions (with a B) from college football every year. College football is just about as good as a license to print money for many.

The rest of us don’t have a thought about the fact that we send those kids onto a field to play (the lucky ones with a full ride scholarship) for the cost of their tuition and board and perhaps a small stipend. They will to a man be injured at some point and in their later years suffer from the stress and damage incurred in the few short years of their college career. Most will never play professional football; even most of the ones who are college stars will not end up making a living in professional football.

But we have a rule that says a kid cannot sell stuff that belongs to him if it in any way touches on the fact that he plays college football.

How insane is that? How hypocritical? How essentially rotten to that kid?

When the good players are in high school, the colleges start recruiting. They come sniffing around like some sort of weasels looking for something good to eat, promising, cajoling. The kids are told how wonderful they are, how good a player they are and will be, how much we love them, will love them, just come play for us. They show up on campus and the adulation from the press, boosters, coeds, and fans kicks in. Let them actually be successful on the field and before long they are treated like gods. Is it any wonder they start to wonder just what it is they can’t do if they want to do it? Can any of us doubt, if put in that position, that we would begin to understand how it is that everyone is making money off of me except me, and I really want that bitchin’ tattoo, so okay, here’s my old red jersey, and see I even signed it for you. Oh, and the kid is maybe 19 or 20.

Do you remember when the Olympics were restricted to just amateur athletes? Every four years the Russians, East Germans, and all the rest of the communist/socialist countries would send athletes to the games whose only job in their country was to train for and play their sport. Because of the different definitions applied to “socialist” workers than those in the capitalist nations, they were defined as amateurs. Of course it was a big joke; our amateurs really were (for the most part) and we policed it scrupulously. Each succeeding set of games our pimple faced kids and independently wealthy athletes were becoming less and less competitive facing these communist professionals. Finally, in a fit of rare common sense and understanding of the true nature of the situation, it was decided that western professionals could compete, too.

I know some lamented that loss of the sense of the amateur athlete. It was a shame in many ways. However, what most of us think we know about it is sort of wrong. The whole idea of “amateur athlete” was a complete fiction from the get go. It was an artificial construct of the Victorian age created by well to do men who could indulge their Grecian fantasies (there is sport and then there is sport). What distinguishes an amateur from a professional? Well, at the turn of the previous century it wasn’t just whether one got paid to play the game. It also meant, among other things for example, that an amateur should not have a personal private coach, and absolutely could not one have one in the stadium while the athlete was performing. Apparently, an amateur was not only someone who did not get paid to play the game, but also didn’t pay someone else to teach him or train him to get better at it. It just wasn’t the gentlemanly thing to do, eh what?

Why do we persist in this ridiculous notion that our college football players are “amateurs” and should remain so? Are they still amateurs if they get paid to attend the university with a scholarship? Isn’t that the same as trading their game playing for money and other valuable considerations? Why is it okay for a college to buy the services of an athlete this way, but it is not in other ways? Oh, I forgot, with a scholarship he will get an education that he might not otherwise be able to get. I guess that means that just about every college football player is poor and only plays (hires out his body and skills) so he can get an education, and that’s why we set it up this way, out of the goodness of our hearts in order to educate the needy. Please, pull the other one.

But we regulate how many scholarships and for how much each school can give, so that makes it fair and okay, right? Sure it does. It just means there is more competition for the scholarships, which naturally are only given to the best players we can get to come to our school. Let’s face it; we don’t give football scholarships to the neediest players, or to the smartest or the most personable. We give it to the ones we believe will be the best players. Why? So we can win, baby!

All this other nonsense about forbidding money from boosters or trading jerseys for tattoos is really just about controlling the NCAA franchise, which is designed to make money for the members of the NCAA and all the rest of the television, beer, and shoe companies, et al, who know on which side of the bed their golden goose is buttered.

The minute you pay kids, set them up with houses, girls and cars (wait, I think they already have that), is the minute you lose control of your slave. He’s not your slave anymore, he is a free agent. The thing about free agents is they tend to go to work for those who will pay them the most. Heavens, some schools might even try to buy a championship team by spending more than others! What kind of world would that be? No, we are much better off with our clean system where schools attract athletes on the basis of their training facilities, the quality of their coaches, the finest living and eating facilities, the chances of winning a championship and the success rate of its athletes turning professional. And let us not forget how terribly important it is to pick a college football program that also happens to belong to a school with a top ranked Sports Communication bachelors degree. That’s the way to really do amateur athletics right.

I’ll bet you don’t like the slave analogy. Okay, slave is harsh. Indentured servant is perhaps more accurate. No, still not quite right. The gist of both is right, however. Let's face it, the kids aren't under contract. Or are they? Consider, once a kid plays football for one school, and then leaves that school, according to the rules in most cases he cannot play for another school the following year, but must sit out a season. Why?

Well, for one, like a non-compete contract, it provides a powerful incentive not to change schools, for a whole bunch or reasons. For another, many colleges and universities would try to hawk each other’s best players, offering ever increasing inducements to change. It would be a free for all. Yeah, sounds terrible. For the school. So what? Why is that so bad? For the rest of us I mean? For the athletes? Who actually loses in that scenario? Well, the slave owner of course, and … gee, I can’t think. No, wait, I remember. It would inevitably result in somebody paying kids to change schools and that would ruin their amateur status and make them ineligible to play. Yeah, that's it. It's about maintaining the integrity of the game.

It’s time for us to seriously reconsider the paradigm. Everybody associated with college football is getting paid real money except the athlete himself. All the rules are basically set up to protect the NCAA franchise (and its co-conspirators, I mean, business partners). All of these rules really don't have much to do with the spirit of amateurism or this figment of an idea we call the student athlete. It’s all about the money. Period.

The athletes themselves, especially those ones on scholarship, are mostly still better treated and compensated than most other students on campus, but that isn’t really the point. It’s not a competition between the different kinds of student on campus, athlete or not. Do I feel sorry for the OSU football players and their coach? No. Am I defending them for breaking the rules? No. Do I condone it? No. Are they getting what they deserve? I don’t know, but I know I am not happy to see it.

I am ashamed of us, however. We’ve bought into the fantasy of NCAA football and the whole concept of the amateur football student athlete. It’s a mostly imagined concept and a false one. We’ve erected this high sanctimonious structure on top of the shaky foundation of a hypocritical system.

Changing metaphors, it smells rotten and is getting worse.

A Drought in the Desert

2011-03-04T18:07:00.000-08:00

I have been out of touch for a couple of months now. Part of that was the fault of the holidays and the New Year. Part was due to my own laziness, for which I am sure I will suffer some sort of eternal torment. The other part, most recently when I shook off the siren’s call to sloth, was that my computer caught a virus and crashed. It was a very nasty virus and a very nasty crash.

It all started with The Wife’s computer. It crashed. But, it was old, and she doesn’t have a green thumb for things electronic and digital. I examined and researched and applied my vast knowledge and concluded her equipment failed. (My body seems to be doing so more as I age, so why not computers?)

I put her problem down to an electronic one. A device failed, or more likely, a chipset on the motherboard. So I told her, after hours of futile resuscitation, that I could not save the patient and we should just get her a new computer. She had rather wanted a laptop than a desktop anyway, so this was the opportunity.

But “what about my emails?’ and “my documents?” and “my address book?” Not to worry, I said. I will take your hard drive out of this dead machine, hook it up to my live one, and save all those precious things for you.

You know where this is going, right?

Three days later, my computer crashed in exactly the same way as hers. No revival. No miracle of rebirth. No Lazarus Effect.

Her computer was protected by McAfee Anti-Virus. It was up to date and active. Didn’t see a thing. My computer was protected by Norton Anti-Virus software. It was up to date and active. Didn’t see a thing.

My advice to computer users relying on Norton and McAfee for anti-virus protection is that it’s like buying condoms from a depressed, anti-social AIDs carrier who works in a straight pin factory.

About a thousand dollars later, for the wife’s new laptop and my new hard disc, upgrade to Windows 7 and alternative virus protection, I am back on line.

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I have been amused recently by the state of the State affairs in Wisconsin. This is the one where all the Democratic State Senators went on the lam, apparently to Illinois, to avoid allowing a quorum in the State Senate which prevents any budget bills from being voted on. It’s a pretty good technique for thwarting your opponents, I guess.

Now the Democrats in Indiana's Senate have done the same thing. I wouldn't be surprised to discover that Ohio's Senate Democrats turned up missing soon, as well.

Everyone has a take on it, so I don’t want to repeat all the observations already made. But, you know that I have my take, right? Here it is.

This strikes me as so many deserters from the Army. These aren’t folks who ran away in the scary, bomb-filled, bullet-flying heat of battle. These are cowards who ran away from a safe base at home because they would be asked to go overseas to where there was a battle. Who knew the French had taken over the Democratic parties in Wisconsin and Indiana?

How much lower can you go than to run away from the fight, then claim that you are doing the hard thing and standing up for your cause.

Sounds like a pretty weak cause if that’s what it takes to stand up for it.

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I read a piece recently in which a State Senator from my home state of Oregon essentially told some European Eco-Nuts that he didn’t give a rip about their position on “wolves” and basically told them to butt out of the affairs of the State of Oregon.

The Press had fun with it. Mostly, they were mocking the Senator from Grant County. I lived in Grant County for several years. While I found the people to be xenophobic, and not all that fun to be around, I did find the county to be exemplary. All that aside, I’m sure the European agitators were delighted, since it got AP and Reuters to run the story and give them the coverage they wanted.
Still, I was amused.

After all, what is the point?

Mostly, the point was that the Senator was saying don’t waste your time sending me emails and faxes from Greece, because you are not in my constituency.

I love democracy. It is so hard and so simple at the same time.

That’s probably why the Europeans (and Wisconsin and Indiana Democrats) don’t get it.

Cut Me, Mick!

2010-12-10T08:12:00.000-08:00

I am completely fed up with the blathering nonsense about the “Bush Tax Cuts” and the bigger issue the blathering is designed to hide or avoid.

The blathering is about letting the tax rates revert to what they were prior to 2001, before Bush cut them. Let’s at least be honest about this part: Bush didn’t cut anything. He proposed new lower tax rates, and Congress with the support of a bunch of Democrats, who insisted on a 10 year sunset clause, passed a law creating them. Still, for 10 years our rates have been lower than they were before the 2001 law. While we are in this truthful fervor let us also add that if taxes revert to the previous rates that means our tax rates will be higher next year than they are this year.

To hear Democrats and the media talk, extending the current rates to next year is the same as a tax cut. Do people actually believe this shit?

Last time I looked, whenever something gets higher that’s called an increase. So let’s call a spade a spade here and simply declare that if the government does not recommit to the current rates then all of our taxes will increase. It does not matter whether they increase because of government’s commissions or omissions; they still go up. Extending the current rates next year is not “cutting” taxes for anyone; it is simply not increasing them. If I pay taxes at the same rate next year as I paid this year what exactly was cut?

It’s not like there is some magic tax rate that results in the “proper” amount of tax to pay. The original law changing the rates to their current level called for those changes to expire and revert to the rates in effect prior to 2001. However, that does not mean those pre-2001 rates were the “true” or correct” or “sanctified by God” (oops, can’t reference God in these government things, forgot) rate that we must all pay. The rates are entirely within our purview to select through our elected officials. If they choose rates we don’t like, screw ‘em, vote the bitches and bastards out!

Let’s do it one better: I propose that we raise the rates for everyone that does buy into this “tax cut” idiocy. Those of us who don’t accept it will continue to retain the rates we have now.

Do you want to bet how long the buyers-in continue to do so?

But, what about the deficit, we have to do something about that. The only way to reduce the deficit is to raise taxes, right? Are you kidding me?

Is there anyone in America that believes that the minute the government gets its hands on more revenue it is going to use it to pay down the deficit? C’mon, really? I want to talk about this bridge I’ll let you have dirt cheap if you believe any of this crap.

I’ve always felt sorry for brown-eyed people because they are so common and often are discriminated against. Everyone knows blue and green-eyed people have more opportunities in this world. Look at all the movie stars and models and Swedes as proof! I would really like to help all those browned-eyed people escape their commonness by getting them colored contact lenses so they can be just like me (I have greenish eyes). The problem is that I don’t have enough money to pay for all those contacts lenses. So I got to thinking, why don’t I get a loan on the promise that my son and grandchildren will pay it back, because, you know, they are going to have the money when they become adults and won’t a mind a bit helping out. If enough other blue and green-eyed people from around the country did the same thing, we could help all those poor disadvantaged brown-eyed people now.

Stupid idea isn’t it? Except, our local, state and federal governments are as busy as beavers doing exactly this sort of thing. Often as not, the cause of the new entitlement or give away is just about as ridiculous in concept as my brown-eyed people cause.

Even if the feds took every penny of income from the top 5% wealthiest members of the nation it would not be enough pay for all the entitlements and obligations government has created. They could take every dime that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet make as income this year and it wouldn’t make a dent.

That brings me to the last bit of nonsense and outright lying foisted on us. These taxes we are talking about are “income” taxes. The argument is about the percentage rates we will pay on the amount of income we earn, not how much we own or have in wealth.

Let’s say Paris Hilton has a couple hundred million in the bank; She probably does not, but this will work for my point. She owns that 200 million and it is not taxable because it is not income; it is not new money to her, she already had it. Let’s further stipulate that she has good, safe, simple interest being earned on that 200 million; you know, like a super savings account that we could all get if we had 200 mil. Let’s further say she makes 8% interest a year on her 200 mil. All of that interest from her savings account this year is income. How much did she earn? A cool 16 mil.

Letting the current rates expire means that poor Paris Hilton’s rate on her 16 mil would go from 35% to 39.6%. In dollars, her income tax bill will go from 5.6 mil to 6.3 mil (assuming no deductions) leaving her only 9.7 mil to play with. Poor baby! Boy, I guess we showed her that she can’t party every night in a different city in the world and ignore all those less fortunate than her.

In our example, Paris Hilton has a relatively tiny amount of “taxable income” in comparison to her actual wealth. Even worse, most of her income is no doubt sheltered in some way, like in municipal bonds, or a gob of deductions offset big chunks of it. In our example, her 6.3 mil tax payment would probably be more like 2 mil or less once her lawyers and accountants and financial experts got done with it. Even if it is 6.3 mil, it still would not pay the all up expenses for the Prez to go to Ohio for a couple of days to campaign for some lousy tax and spend Democrats.

Someone, tell me again how we are going to solve our deficit problems through raising Paris Hilton’s income tax rates?

All this screaming about how the wealthy should pay their fair share is really a smoke screen designed to keep the conversation away from what it really ought to be about. That is what is really pissing me off. I don’t give a hoot about Paris Hilton’s or Bill Gates’ income taxes. I do care that they are being used to defend an otherwise indefensible position.

The simple fact is that it is not about taxes or the deficit. It is about the spending. If we stop spending, we won’t need to increase taxes. Heck, we might even be able to cut taxes.

Now that I think about, maybe that does sound like a bad idea.

After all, how can we possibly help all those brown-eyed people escape their unbearable situations (or get their votes) if we don’t spend money on them? What about all the fat people? The ugly people? I even know some webbed-toed people. Oh the horrors they all must suffer! The children, think of the children!

How I Met Bob and Joe and Lived to Tell About it

2010-11-23T11:29:00.000-08:00

In a recent blog, I promised to tell about the Navajos that I worked with on the farm the summer I was 16. To recap, my Mother had banished me 500 miles away from home to Idaho for the summer, ostensibly so I could get a job, earn some money, learn to become more self-sufficient, and all that. The reality was that she was deathly afraid I was going to get my girl friend pregnant, or worse, marry her. Which I might very well have done if my girl friend hadn’t broken up with me the week before Mom decided to get me the hell out of Dodge, though Mom didn’t know it. All my friends were going to be gone for the summer, so I went without a fuss.

The farm was some 10-15 miles south of Nampa as the crow flies, maybe 25 miles by car, and in the middle of nowhere. I lived on the farm itself in the labor camp. The labor camp was a cinder block building made up of 6 apartments, as I remember, though it could have been 8; I’m a little fuzzy on some details. It was clean, and just like a regular apartment, and included a provisioned kitchen with appliances and all the dishes, pots and pans that we needed. My college kid would kill for something as nice. The best part was it was free.

I should mention that this particular location had 5000 acres under cultivation. I believe I heard that there was another 5000 at another location, but we never went to that farm or met anyone who worked there. Where I worked was its own mini-community, with entire families living in the labor camp and something going on all the time. I enjoyed every minute of it.

Work primarily consisted of irrigating very large fields with 40 foot long, 4-inch diameter aluminum pipe with a 3 to 4 foot riser and Rainbird type sprinkler head on top. This was in a time before motorized self-propelling irrigation lines. We moved the pipe by hand, one length at a time. Typically, one line was roughly 32 pipes, give or take a few according to the width of the field, and extended about ¼ miles in length. I had a wheat field that was mine and only mine to work. The field was about a mile long and a quarter mile wide. It usually had five lines set at any time. The lines were laid out about 1000 feet apart, and each morning I would move each one from east to west about 120 feet and then do it again in the evening. In this way, I watered every part of the field about once a week or maybe a little more often. When a line came to the west end of the field, my crew boss and I would take a tractor and pipe trailer out, put all the pipe on the trailer and take them back to the east side to start over.

I could move a line in about 30 minutes. I won’t go into all the gory details of moving and setting lines. My typical morning started at 6 am and I moved all my lines in about 3 hours. In the evening, I moved all the lines again, starting at 5 pm. We worked 6 days a week and had Sunday off. I got paid $1.50 per line, which was great money, working out to about $3 an hour. Minimum wage was $1.25, which is what they paid me to do other non-irrigating work during the day. I usually picked up two or three hours of in between work on weekdays. This extra work most often involved moving lines that had hit the end of their field to the other side to restart, but also included hauling in baled hay, maintenance on irrigation ditches, and other odd jobs. Not many of the other boys volunteered to do this extra work but I always did. There was not enough extra work for all of us and my boss preferred me to most everyone else, so it worked out well.

Just to put it in perspective, I made a little less than $20 a day most days. This was 1971 when gas was $0.32 a gallon, smokes were $0.30 a pack, and I could take a girl on date, feed us both a burger, fries and a shake, see a double feature drive in movie with popcorn and a coke, and the gas to go to and from and still spend $5 or less.

Now to the Navajos. These two men, probably in their mid 30s, were from deep in the Navajo Nation. Really deep, at least that was my impression. I have never been to Navajo country, so I’m only going on my impressions and some things I’ve heard here and there. I could be all wet about what I think. I know they did not speak English very well, though we did work it so we could communicate adequately. I tried to learn their names, but I couldn’t pronounce them, couldn’t even begin to think how to spell them, and so could not remember them to save my life. My crew boss had given up years before and simply called them Bob and Joe. That’s what everybody called them. They were perfectly fine with this and answered to those names as if they were their true names. They could almost have been twins, though they were not, and I kept confusing Bob with Joe and vice versa until I didn't know which was which. Worse, they each readily answered to either name and never seemed to take the slightest offense. They smiled a lot and had perfectly straight and gleaming white teeth.

They had been coming to work on this farm for years, according to my crew boss. They would show up each spring about when the irrigating was to begin, and leave to go back to the reservation when it ended in late summer. They had wives, children, in-laws, parents, cousins and others that they supported on the reservation. They made enough money in the summer moving irrigation pipe to support their families for a year. The farmer loved those two guys. They were his best workers. My crew boss said the farmer fretted about whether they would show each year. There was never any communication from them whether they were coming or not. That would have required using a telephone or writing a letter, neither of which were up there on Bob and Joe’s list of things to do, if they could do them. Each year when they showed up the farmer reportedly danced a jig when he saw them, which often as not was the sight of them hiking down the long gravel road to the farm.

How good were they? I moved five lines a day, which wasn’t bad; most of the other boys were moving three or four. The Mexicans were better than I, each moving 8 to 10 lines. They stayed out longer in the morning and evening to do it though. But, even their efforts were puny compared to Bob and Joe. Bob and Joe moved 20 lines each! In other words, where I was responsible for one wheat field one mile long and a quarter mile wide, they were each responsible for four such fields. They would go to their fields at 6 am just like me and come back around 8 pm, just like me. The difference was I would come back for breakfast around 9am and would head back to my field at 5pm. They didn’t come back at all. In fact, they did not stop moving pipe all day, except for lunch and a couple of breaks in the morning and afternoon for a drink of water and some shade. The farmer made sure that someone took them lunch and water every day. (He did not provide me lunch)

Consider that if they worked at my pace it would take them 10 hours to move their morning set and 10 hours to move their afternoon set. Yet, they were moving their lines in about 10 and half-hours all told, not 20. How could they do this? The answer is they ran everywhere. When they picked up a pipe, they did a fast walk with it to the next set. You can’t imagine how incredibly hard and tough that is. That 40 foot aluminum pipe is heavy and awkward to hold, and the ends bounce up and down in time with each step. The faster you go, and they went as fast as anyone could, the bigger the bounce and the more brutal the harmonics. Once they attached the pipe to the next in line, they ran back to get the next one, not jogged, ran.

I mentioned that one of the in between jobs I did with my crew boss was to move lines that had reached the end of the field back to the other side to start over. We did this for Bob and Joe's fields, too. When we were at their fields, I would get to watch them working and it always left me speechless. The only time they stopped running was to turn on the water and watch a few minutes to see if they had a blow out. Then they would take off again. Just consider that once they had laid the last pipe in a line, they ran the ¼ mile from the end of the line to the valve. They were doing a 400 meter run 40 times a day! It is not an exaggeration to say that every day they ran a marathon.

The Energizer Bunny had nothing on these guys.

They had a weakness. They liked beer. Like most Native Americans, they could not tolerate alcohol well. It only took two or three beers to get them drunk as skunks. Usually on Saturday night but sometimes on Sunday morning they would come around knocking to see if someone going into town would give them a ride. In town, you see, there were bars and taverns, and for about 2 bucks each Bob and Joe could get loop-de-looped. If they couldn’t get a ride, they just set off walking and hitchhiked as they went. In those days hitchhiking was a respectable form of transportation. My friends and I got to all sorts of places that way.

I made good friends with Manuel, a Chicano whose family lived locally. He was the other boy that the crew boss could count on to help during midday odd jobs and was a good worker. He had two older brothers who had a house in Nampa. We were welcome to come over and join the party whenever we were in town, but, of course, we were more welcome if we brought along some beer. I am a bit embarrassed to say it, but Manuel and I quickly figured out that we had a ready source of beer right next door. Manuel had an old Chevy pickup that ran about half the time. It took two quarts of oil to get to Nampa and two quarts to get back, and Manuel could have hired on as a navy smoke screen if the truck could float. We soon struck a deal with Bob and Joe. We would take them to town, and we would even bring them back if they were ready to go when we were, and they agreed to buy us beer, with our money, of course. They were very happy with the deal. It simplified their weekend beer drinking considerably.

On at least two occasions we left them at the tavern and then later had to go into the tavern and physically half carry them out to the truck. Nobody in the tavern minded; Bob and Joe paid good money, kept quiet, never caused any trouble and didn’t puke on the floor. They just went incoherent after the third beer or so.

I can remember that after one of those tavern incidents we went to the store for them to buy our beer, but Bob and Joe were so bombed they barely understood what was going on. Finally, in frustration, I led Bob, or Joe, to the beer cooler, grabbed a case, and carried it to the cashier, while helping guide him along. The cashier was a girl not much older than I was. I put the beer on the counter. I took the money out of my pocket and gave it to Bob, or Joe, and then helped him hand it to her. She gave me a “you’ve got to be kidding look” and I just looked at her all dumb and stupid. She shook her head, but rang up the beer, made change and gave it to Bob. I picked up the case and helped him out the door. I let him keep the change. After that, we insisted that Bob and Joe buy the beer first before we took them to the tavern.

I sometimes think I should feel guilty or bad about “taking advantage” of my Native American friends. But, I don’t.

Remember, these guys spent 6 days a week running non-stop 10 to 11 hours a day. It was hot, heavy, tiring work and they did it hour after hour, day after day, so they could make enough money to support themselves and their loved ones during the other 7 or 8 months of the year. So what if they got drunk one day a week? As far as I was concerned they earned every drink. So what if I helped them do it? So what if the arrangement was for them to provide me, a minor, with illegal beer that might get them thrown in jail? Okay, maybe this last question is sort of a big deal. I still don’t feel bad about it, though.

I suppose if I were a liberal pansy ass I would be sitting around now thinking about all the things that could have gone wrong and fretting about the might haves and what ifs. Like how I might have facilitated their alcoholism. I might have helped keep them repressed and stuck on the reservation by taking advantage of their naive innocence. What if they had been thrown in jail for buying me beer? Blah, blah, blah. The fact is, the only thing I facilitated was what they were already doing and were going to do any way, and they did not go to jail for buying me beer. Besides, I really liked those guys and they liked me, so shove it if you don’t like it.

However, there was one time when it did all go wrong and they did go to jail. In this particular case, Manuel and I had nothing to do with it. We were completely innocent, mostly.

In a rare occurrence, the farmer decided that Bob and Joe’s fields needed to take a day off from irrigation. I don’t remember why, but I think he wanted to do some maintenance on the main pump that serviced their section (they were on a different pumping system than me) He gave them Saturday off as well as Sunday.

I had to work on Saturday as usual, as did Manuel. There was this girl at the Dairy Queen in town that I wanted to get to know better, and Manuel had something he wanted to do in town as well. Once we moved our morning line, we hit the showers and then caught a ride to town with one of the farm mechanics. The farm had two mechanics employed full time with their own triple bay shop and a complete inventory of spare parts for everything from the pickups to the combines—like I said, a big farm. We had to be back by 5 pm to move our evening sets, but we figured we could get a ride somehow. Manuel’s truck was busted at this point and non-functioning.

One thing led to another, and before we knew it, we had no ride and an hour and half to go 20 miles or so to get back to the farm. We panicked and started hoofing it down the road, throwing our thumbs out at every car that came along. No luck. We started to despair we weren’t going to make it and wondered aloud if we would be fired or something else even more terrible.

Just about when we had given up all hope, here came a metal flake purple 68 Chevelle SS, with big slicks on the back and loud pipes, weaving down the highway at high speed. It blew past us, and then locked up the brakes and went into a skid. Oh boy! We had a ride! We sprinted up to the passenger side and the door opened up to let us in. Who should we see in the front seats grinning at us from ear to ear? You guessed it, Bob and Joe. They were drunk as skunks and supremely happy with themselves.

Now I have to tell you, as I mentioned in the previous blog, that I really did spend two hours one Sunday trying to teach them both how to drive a tractor. It was both funny and sad. When I would holler that they had to “Steer, for Chrissakes!” as they were going off the track, they would usually panic and turn the wheel in the wrong direction. Let’s not even talk about brakes. They simply could not grasp the concepts of driving. The whole idea of turning the steering wheel to make the tractor go left or right simply seemed to be beyond them. It’s as if they forgot they had to be actively engaged in steering.

I don’t know that forgot is the right word. I think it more likely that they had absolutely no contact with vehicles for most of their lives, and only encountered them later as adults when they left the reservation to work on the farm. They never really internalized that vehicles were machines and not living entities. I’m not sure they even understood the concept of machines. Probably intellectually they did understand about vehicles and machines, but I think their worldview, their whole take on reality, never quite caught hold of the idea. In that worldview, vehicles should know how to do the turning for themselves, just like cows or birds do.

Now, here were Manuel and I staring into the interior of a certifiable muscle car that could go well over 100 mph, operated by two guys who couldn’t figure out how to steer or stop a tractor going 3 miles an hour. Were we seriously contemplating getting into that car? It seemed we either got in and probably went to our doom, or passed and were fired.

We got in. God Help Us!

It was the scariest ride of my life. Period. Manuel and I in the back seat were like so much laundry tossed around in the dryer as the car swerved from lane to lane down the highway. Bob, or Joe, I don’t which was driving, only knew that if you pushed on the right pedal you went forward and if you pushed on the one next to it you stopped. Bob, or Joe, had no concept that it was possible to go forward at a constant speed. It was either full speed ahead or “all stop, full reverse thrusters!” Then there was the problem of steering. Bob, or Joe, knew that the idea was to go in the direction that the yellow stripey lines pointed, but he wasn’t at all aware that if he got going in the right direction, he only had to make very minute turns on the wheel to go in a straight line. Rather, he apparently had figured out that moving the wheel left and right steered the car, so that is what he did, he actively steered the whole time by moving the wheel right and left that resulted in continuous sharp zigs and zags. Imagine a 3 year old behind the wheel and you get the idea.

Fortunately, or unfortunately as the case may be, the car had an automatic transmission. I say fortunately because we did not have the added distraction of clutching and shifting to add to the opportunity for disaster. I say unfortunately because it is likely they could not have driven the car at all if it was a manual transmission and, thus, Manuel and I would not be about to die a horrible, fiery, bodies smeared all over the highway death.

It may have been the longest 20 minutes of my life, mostly because I was trying to imprint each second on my brain, knowing it was my last.

Suddenly Bob, or Joe, slammed on the brakes and the car was skidding sideways to a stop in a huge cloud of dust. I looked out and as the dust cleared saw we were home, the farm, the labor camp, salvation. Against all the odds, we made it and still lived.

Bob, or Joe, opened the passenger door and got out so we could push the seat forward and get out of the car. My legs were shaking, and Manuel, normally a brown sort of fellow, was as white as a sheet. Bob, or Joe, was all smiles and seemed as happy as I had ever seen him. So did the driver, Joe, or Bob. I can remember standing beside the car and suddenly realizing that Bob and Joe were grateful to Manuel and me. Giving us a ride had made them very happy, I guess because they thought they were repaying us in some way for all the transporting to town and back we did for them.

Bob, or Joe, pounded me on the back while smiling hugely with his brilliant white teeth that made the sun look pale. He was clearly nearly overjoyed. I tell you, I really liked those guys.

Then he jumped back in the car and slammed the door. Bob, or Joe, hit the gas and sprayed gravel all over us as they fishtailed down the road, disappearing in a cloud of dust. Hi-Ho Silver, away!

I came back from my field on Monday morning after moving my lines and found the farmer waiting for me. Had I seen Bob and Joe he asked? He had a worried expression on his face.

Oh, oh, I thought. I told him I had seen them on Saturday afternoon.

Really, he asked with interest, where?

Well, here and sort of in town, I replied. He didn’t say anything and just stared at me. Now that I am an old fart and have a teenage son of my own, I realize how it was he knew there was more to the story. His look got to me. I broke down and explained the circumstances.

“Where they hell did they get a car?” he demanded, then apparently realizing that I wouldn’t know had another thought. “Oh, crap! We’re they drunk?”

I could only nod.

The farmer didn’t say another word. He just spun on his heel and the last I saw him he was high stepping double time for the main house.

On Tuesday, there was no word of Bob and Joe.

On Wednesday, still no word.

On Thursday about 3pm the farmer’s big Chrysler pulled up in front of the labor camp. The two back doors opened and out stepped Bob and Joe on either side. They looked worse for wear, with cuts and bruises all over their faces, heads and arms, and Bob, or Joe, had a heavy limp. They both shot me an impish grin, but went straight to their apartment and didn’t come out for the rest of the day.

As it turns out, once the farmer talked to me, he realized what must have happened. While drunk in town somebody offered them the opportunity to buy the Chevelle. It being pretty purple, with dice hanging from the rear view mirror and dingle balls all across the visor, and as soused as they were, how could they refuse? The farmer knew too well they could not drive. He started calling every hospital, sheriff, and city and small town police department he could think of. It took him two days, but he found them in jail in Vale, Oregon, about 75 miles away.

In Vale, their luck ran out. Bob, or Joe, ran the car straight into a big oak tree, totaling it. Frankly, I am surprised they got so far before crashing. The Vale police arrested Bob, or Joe, for drunken driving and probably a host of other charges. The other one, Joe, or Bob, they also arrested, probably for public drunkenness or aiding and abetting, or something like that. That was in truth probably a kindness by the police since he clearly had nowhere to go, no money (they both having spent most of it on the car and beer) and was unable to communicate to the police who they might call to come get him.

The farmer drove to Vale first thing on Thursday morning. He had already arranged to see the DA with whom he was able to make a quick deal. The farmer would tow the car away and take care of it, pay for damages to the fence and tree, and promised that Bob and Joe would never show up in Vale again, driving or otherwise. There was a quick impromptu hearing with the local judge with some fines involved that the farmer also paid. The police release Bob and Joe to his custody, and he brought them home.

Apparently, Bob and Joe also had to promise the farmer that they would not go to town anymore or drink. For the rest of the time I was there, they did not. Manuel and I lost our source of easy beer, which probably wasn’t a bad thing considering. The truth was we only used them to buy us beer 3 or 4 times the whole summer. It's not like we got to town every weekend, and even when we did we usually did not have beer. We never had it on the farm, ever.

The episode with the Chevelle happened in early August. Three weeks later, I left to go back home. My senior year in high school started a week after that.

The day I left, a Sunday, Bob and Joe made a point to come around to shake my hand, give me a big hug, and flash their brilliant smiles at me. I never saw them again. I really liked those guys.

Once in a Blue Moon.

2010-11-21T06:06:00.000-08:00

I sent some of my corresponders an email on this, but thought I would share it here for any who didn't get the email.

Tonight, on Nov. 21, a Blue Moon will occur. Most of you will dispute that, thinking that a Blue Moon is one in which a full moon occurs for the second time within a calendar month and tonight's will be the only full moon of November. You would, in fact, be incorrect. Not wrong that there is only one full moon in November, that is true. You would be wrong because that is not the true test of what a Blue Moon is.

To understand why tonight's moon is a Blue Moon we have to step back in time a bit. In most years there are 12 full moons a year, and 3 for each season. Way back when, Monks and the Catholic church often kept tract of their important dates by the cycle of the moon. Each season had a name for its 3 full moons, such as the early summer moon, the midsummer moon and the late summer moon, and keeping track of these three moons was important for keeping track of other stuff. Occasionally, however, a season had a fourth moon and the old guys who kept the reckoning would be thrown off track. They didn't want to call the third moon the late season moon, since there was still one moon to go which really would be late in the season, so they called the third one a Blue Moon; the second moon remained the midseason moon and the fourth moon became the late season moon. Tonight's full moon is followed by one on, coincidentally, Dec.21, so it is the third of four moons in the fall season. It is, therefore, a Blue Moon.

But wait, some you who are paying attention to the calendar will say. December 21 is the first day of winter, so its full moon is not the last moon of fall, but the first moon of winter. Again, so saying you would be incorrect. Technically, winter starts with the winter solstice, not at 12:01 a.m. of the day of the solstice. The winter solstice occurs this year at 6:38 p.m. EST on December 21. However, the moon turns full at 3:13 a.m. EST, more than 15 hours before the solstice. Indeed, the moon will rise and set before the solstice occurs and thus appears entirely during the last hours of the fall season.

Can I Get an Aye, Men?

2010-11-16T15:40:00.000-08:00

In my youth when I was sixteen, in less than a year apart in two different occurrences, I ran into two prominent politicians, one of them literally. One was a recent Senator and the other a sitting Senator at that time. Their reaction and behavior to me made a big impression. Let me tell you about them.

During my junior year in high school in the fall of 1970, my friend Phil was attending some sort of wrestling clinic or conference or something at a neighboring high school on a Saturday morning. The truth is I don’t remember what he was doing there. What I do remember is that my other friend Mike and I were supposed to meet him there at a certain time and the three of us were going to do something. Again, I don’t remember what “something” was, but it’s a good bet it involved girls in some way, most things did then.

Mike had an old green Chevy that we called the Green Bomb. It was anything but “the bomb” but might have turned into a bomb. Still it got us around. We pulled into the parking lot and waited for Phil to come out. There seemed to be a lot of cars there for a Saturday. We waited, and then waited some more, and no Phil. Finally, we decided that I would go in to see if I could find him.

I hopped out of the car and jogged up to a side door, pulled it open and dashed through the doorway just in time to run squarely into Wayne Morse, recently and now ex-senior Senator for the Great State of Oregon, who was coming the other way. I knocked him right down onto his keester, pin stripe suit and all. He was 70 years old at the time. He was not a big man, quite a bit shorter than I am, but he was spry and energetic. He popped right back to his feet, ran a hand through his disheveled hair, straightened his jacket and tie, and shot me a huge smile.

“That was a pretty good hit you put me on me there, son.” He reached out his hand, grabbed mine and shook it. “I’m Wayne Morse, and I’m glad to meet you."

I mumbled something about being sorry and I didn't see him and....

"No, no," he said, patting me on the forearm. "No damage done. You got me fair and square. I’d love to stay and chat, but I’m late for my next meeting. You take care.”

He was out the door and hurrying down the sidewalk just like that. No drama, no “do you know who I am”, no cursing, no fanfare, and, I noticed, no aides and swarming sycophants. He was just a nice man in a hurry to get to a meeting, but taking a moment to greet a teenager in a warm way even if the kid had just used him for a tackling dummy.

I remember being greatly impressed with that. Senator Morse lost his Senate re-election bid in 1968. Looking back, when I had my run in with him it must have been just days or weeks before the 1970 election and he apparently was at the school doing some campaigning. I remember I felt badly that he lost that one, too.

My other encounter with a Senator was in the following summer. I was working for the summer on a large farm in western Idaho, my Mother having banished me there 500 miles from home because she was afraid I was getting too serious with a girl from another town. I certainly would have gotten into some sort of trouble with the girl if she hadn‘t broken up with me the week before my Mother banished me, though my Mother didn’t know that. That was why I didn’t protest when Mom told me that I was going to stay with my Grandmother in Idaho and get a summer job. Two days after that, my Dad dropped me off at the bus station, and 15 hours later, I got off the bus in Caldwell, Idaho where my Uncle and Grandmother were waiting for me.

I went to work for the summer on a large farm outside Nampa. They had a “labor camp” on the farm, which was really a cinder block building made up of six apartments. They were clean and had all the conveniences. The workers lived in the apartments free. I lived in the end apartment with my crew boss, and I was lucky enough to have my own room. Next to us was an apartment with bunk beds and five or six boys near my age lived there.

I remember two or three families of Mexicans lived in the apartments as well. They were almost certainly illegal immigrants, though nobody worried about that much back then. They were nice folks, and some of the kids could speak passable English.

At the end of the building lived two Indians. These guys were so deep from within the Navajo Reservation they didn’t speak English very well. They couldn’t drive, either. I spent two hours one Sunday trying to teach them to drive a tractor and it was simply useless. But, they could work. Those guys could really go. In my next blog, I will write about them and perhaps some other adventures from that summer.

That was in 1970, and the 4th of July fell on Saturday. Normally we worked six days a week with just Sunday off. However, on Thursday evening I remember the owner of the farm coming to our apartment to speak with the crew boss. Senator Frank Church had invited the farmer and his family to an Independence Day picnic at the Senator’s farm. The Senator asked the farmer to bring some of the “boys” along. The farmer told the crew boss to pick three or four of us and get us cleaned up to attend.

I should explain if you don’t remember that Senator Frank Church by 1970 was one of the most powerful men in Washington, in the country, in fact. He was a senior Senator and Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, along with service in other powerful committees. He played a key role in the Watergate hearings. Later in the 70s, he would be a leading critic of the FBI and CIA and the chief sponsor of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which still has far-reaching implications today.

Around noon on Saturday, three other boys and I loaded into one of the farm pickups and headed off. I was driving, the only one with a valid driver’s license. My crew boss could not attend because of a conflict with his family. I cannot now tell you where Church’s farm was, I simply followed some written directions. At one point one of the other boys asked me to pull over in a little town we were passing through. He and the others went into a store and came out with bottle rockets, firecrackers, and bottles of Coke. They proceeded to drink the Cokes, and then, as I drove, the three of them stood in the back of the pickup and fired bottle rockets from the empty Cokes, aiming them like guns at anything that caught their interest: dogs, cats, kids on bikes, other cars. I was especially frustrated that I had to drive and they were having all the fun.

Why and how we escaped being arrested is a mystery. However, we did eventually make it to the picnic. Our farmer sized us up, decided we looked presentable enough, and told us to go eat and stay out of trouble. I saw him head off to chat with Church, whom I recognized from TV news. Apparently, my farmer was a big contributor or supporter.

Of course, just how long a hormone charged 16 year-old boy is going to stay focused when surrounded by stuffy adults who wanted to talk about politics, business, and this year’s price of spuds is problematical. I had already scoped out the girls, to find most too young, or too old, or too unappealing; the parents of those with possibility carefully guarded their daughters. To their credit, those girls looked even more bored than I was.

Still, it was a situation just crying out for something terrible to happen, and I was just the person to make it so.

From somewhere my teenage brain conjured the brilliant idea to set off some fireworks. I have always been fascinated with blowing things up, a trait inherited from my father, so it’s not entirely my fault. In addition, I was still frustrated that my workmates had been able to have so much fun while I had to drive.

I found a pack of bottle rockets and an empty bottle in the truck. I went out into the cornfield, on the other side of a barn that hid me from the picnickers. At first, I aimed the rockets out over the corn. However, after the first four or five, the excitement wore off. Brilliant idea number two took hold. Next thing you know, I am arcing the rockets over the barn to go off directly above the picnic. This was much more exciting!

After I successfully launched a half dozen or so, I was hunching over the bottle, with a new rocket ready to go, adjusting my aim. At this point, I heard:

“I want you to stop doing that.”

I did one of those slow turns of the head, the kind where you just know you aren’t going to like what you are about to see. Standing over me was none other than Senator Frank—one of the most…oh my God…powerful men in America—Church.

Gulp.

He gave me a patient smile. “Son, you’re frightening the ladies. If you could point those things that way,” and he waved vaguely out to the cornfield, “I would be obliged.”

“Uh, sure thing, sir.”

“That’s just great,” he said. “Thanks for coming to our picnic.”

He smiled a big smile at me again, and then walked away back to his guests.

Today I am frankly a political conservative who has little use for liberal and progressive philosophy or Democrats in general. As I researched while putting together this blog, it occurred to me that I have a hard time agreeing with either Morse or Church. I don’t care for their politics, positions, or what they stood for. They were both liberals and Democrats, and, in many ways, I think they are partly responsible for the mess that liberals have gotten us into now.

Yet, both men were kind and patient with a snot nosed kid when they didn’t have to be. Both treated me with warmth, respect, and I think honest sincerity. Back then, I didn’t know about their politics and didn’t care. All I knew was that they made a huge impression on me, all positive, and I hope I may have learned some their lessons.

I like to think both Senators Morse and Church would be appalled if they could see how many of our politicians and our society are conducting themselves today. I mean those on both sides, Democrat and Republican. We demonize the fellow on the other side and allow that he has no redeemable qualities or worth whatsoever. There is a complete lack of grace, congeniality, tolerance and respect today, qualities that I am convinced that both Church and Morse had. I would like to think the way they dealt with me was emblematic of how they dealt with everyone. I wonder how much better off we all would be if we all were to imitate that.

At least, that’s how I prefer to remember my two Senators. It may be completely delusional, of course, but it’s worth wishing for, right?

Me and Maggie McGee

2010-11-08T17:15:00.001-08:00

In my high school sophomore year, I took a typing class. My typing teacher was an elderly woman named Maggie McGee. She had been teaching in that same small school in Riddle Oregon for about a hundred years, so it seemed. Which was impossible, because she was only in her 70’s at that time. She was a big boned battle-ax of a woman, not fat, but solid and tall, and prone to wearing a hair net and big-heeled and big-toed black shoes that clomped as she walked.

We were all afraid of her. She was a stern taskmaster and put up with no silliness, idleness, tardiness, student conversations unless it was with her, gum chewing, other bad behavior or disrespect. We believed if we displeased her too greatly she was capable and willing to gut us with her large needle pointed scissors that seemed always near to her hand.

In those days, we had no computers or keyboards, and just four electric typewriters in the classroom. The other 20 or so were the manual type. For my younger readers let me describe how a manual typewriter worked. You had to load paper into the carriage by aligning it behind the paten, a rolling pin like cylinder, and then turn the paten so as to pinch the paper in the carriage and roll it up to be behind an ink laden ribbon. You typed a letter by depressing the key sharply enough to cause the arm with the letter engraved on it to swing up to strike the ink ribbon and transfer ink to the paper in the shape of the engraved letter. Making a successful keystroke required that the key be depressed at least an inch and a half. With each keystroke the carriage would shift one letter’s width to the left while at the same time the ribbon would unwind the same distance on one side of the roll and wind that same amount on its other roll. As the carriage reached the right margin, which you set manually with a locking slider on the carriage, it would cause a striker to hit a little bell. Hearing the bell was your cue to reach up with your left hand to pull the return lever to the right, thus sliding the carriage back to the right, also causing the paten to turn one line width and advance the paper by that much. It was possible to type past the margin setting, so the idea was to set it wide enough that you could type a few more characters after hearing the bell ding if you were not at a good place to break the word with a hyphen. Typing in those days was physical effort and you had to get your hands and fingers in shape to do very much of it. Believe it or not, some of my fellow students, boy and girls, could type 100 words or more in a minute on these old manual machines.

Here’s a bit of trivia. Did you know the most common keyboard we use today is called the QWERTY keyboard? It gets its name from the fact that QWERTY are the first six left most letters on the upper letters row of the keyboard. You probably also have wondered why the keyboard uses its odd arrangement of letters; why not arrange them alphabetically? The answer is that the inventors of the keyboard, like the electric typewriter inventors before them, were simply copying the arrangement of letters of the old manual typewriter. All those who learned the touch-typing method, which is what I learned is Mrs. McGee’s class, spent untold hours practicing and developing muscle memories with the original typewriters’ letter arrangements. The electric typewriter vendors, and after them the keyboard makers, didn’t want to make buyers angry by making them learn a new key placement arrangement. You probably are now asking why there was such an odd arrangement to begin with. The answer is, in the original manual typewriters the keys were arranged briefly in an alphabetical order, but the typists got so fast that the keys would collide and bind up, sometimes rather spectacularly. The typewriter folks solved this problem by putting keys for letters that tend in many words to appear next to or near each other into positions that made it hard for the typist to press them at the same time. In other cases, they put them far enough away from each other to slow the typist down just enough to allow the keys to clear in their travel to the paper. Look at the position of the E and the D on a keyboard, for example. These two letters are often next to each other in words. In the touch typing method you use the same finger to type them, this insuring that they can’t collide at the ribbon.

Back to Maggie and football. They are related.

We were practicing for the last game of the year, in late October. The practice field was muddy, as it often is in Oregon in late fall. In those days, we wore one-inch spikes on our shoes to help grip the soft ground. I was on defense against our varsity offense. The coach called a stunt and I shot the gap into the backfield just as they handed off to the halfback. I messed up the tackle, however, and ended up on my back with my arms wrapped around his ankles. He pulled a foot loose and stepped back, with his cleats planting firmly into the helmet bars in front of my face. He pushed off, using my face as a starting block. The bars broke off and his cleats gained purchase and traction on my face.

As soon as he was gone, I rolled over and got to my hands and knees. I knew I was in trouble. I couldn’t see out of my left eye, and frankly the pain was severe. In my right eye I could see the blood as it ran off my nose onto the ground.

Lesson number one: if you are a coach, don’t do what one of our assistant coaches did on that day.

“I see we have our bloody nose for the day,” he announced, somewhat cheerfully.

I know he wasn’t happy that I was hurt, and, even though he didn’t know how badly hurt I was, he was just trying to make light of it in that manly sort of way that men affect.

He came up to me and squatted next to me. “Let me see,” he said. I turned my head to look at him.

“Oh my god,” he gagged, staggered off a dozen feet and vomited.

You can imagine how that filled me with confidence.

Yet, I was calm and not in shock. Which is weird, I know. One of the other assistant coaches gathered me up and took me to the locker room to arrange for medical treatment. On the way, I asked him if he would ask the team to move where they were practicing. As I explained, I had just read in my dad’s science magazine how they were now able to do eyeball replacements, and maybe they could find my left eyeball in the grass and the doctors could put it back in. He gave me a funny look, which I saw out of my right eye, but didn’t say anything.

Arranging for medical treatment consisted of him dumping me on a bench in the locker room and going to the school office to telephone my mom and dad to come get me and take me to the hospital.

As it happened, Maggie McGee was in the office when he came in. She asked him what he was doing there; didn’t he have practice? He told her that I was hurt and he needed to call my parents. She asked where I was, and he replied that I was in the boys’ locker room. Was anyone looking out for me, she inquired. Not at the moment, he responded.

The locker rooms were at the end of building next to the gym. You could get into them by entering doors from the rear parking lot or by going through the gym. I heard her shoes clomping through the gym the minute she entered it. I knew precisely who was coming. We all knew that sound. I heard the first door to the outer room open and more clomping. The inner door to the locker slammed open, and here was Maggie McGee clomping down the four steps in the locker room proper. Naked wrestlers, just off practice, scrambled for cover. A few lightweights dove into lockers, others made it to the two toilet stalls, and the rest slid into the showers. Maggie cared not at all.

She took one look at me, and walked over to the towel stack on the table next to the showers, grabbed two clean towels from it and walked right into the showers. Naked wrestlers cowered and tried to cover up. She simply walked up to the first shower that was running hot water and soaked one of the towels.

She came back to where I was sitting. There she firmly grabbed my jaw to make me hold still, and proceeded to wash the mud and blood from my face. Amazingly, she scrubbed aggressively at my left eye socket. It hurt like hell. I soon realized that the reason I could not see out of it was that the entire area was packed with mud. As soon as I realized my eyeball was still where it should be, I exclaimed in delight, “Hey, I can see!”

“Of course, you silly boy.” Maggie said. “Now hold still.”

Once she had me mostly cleaned up, and had fetched another couple of towels to hold to my still bleeding face, she announced I had to get out of the football gear and into my street clothes. Once we found my locker, she proceeded to help me remove my pads, and uniform, even kneeling down to untie my cleats and pull them off. I sat finally in nothing but my jock strap while she handed me my underwear and then discreetly turned back to my locker to get my other clothes while I slipped the jock off and the underwear on. Normally, I would rather have died than be in that position. Oddly, I didn’t care, and was so grateful for the help that I might as well have been 3 years old again and Maggie my mother.

She helped pull on the t-shirt over my head, get my feet into the legs of my jeans and knelt to help me put on my shoes, much as she had helped take off my cleats. After I was dressed, she led me out the back door to sit on the bench next to the parking lot and wait for my parents. She waited the whole time with me, not saying anything, but just sitting there next to me.

Next stop for me was the hospital, which was located 30 miles away. The doctor had always wanted to be a plastic surgeon, and he was good, so he took his time and made many small sutures to minimize the scars. One laceration ran from the inside corner of my left eye along the lower bone socket for almost two inches. That took about 20 stitches. Another laceration was in my left upper lip. It went clear through and into the gum of my teeth. That took about eight stitches on the outside, another four or five on the inside and another two in my gum. The third laceration was in my right upper lip, almost in my cheek. Again, it went completely though and into the gum. All told, I think it required another 14 or 15 stitches inside and out and in the gum. Two of my upper front teeth were bent back into my mouth. The next day I saw my dentist who pulled them back into position and we hoped like crazy they would heal into place. They did.

One little complication was very uncomfortable. Once I got home around 11 o’clock at night, I wanted nothing more than a shower. I still had dried mud and blood all over me. I could not breathe through my nose because there was so much stuff crammed up my nostrils. I took that shower, and in the course of it, blew my nose strongly. I immediately felt something wrong in my face. I jumped out of the shower and looked in the mirror. I watched my left cheek start to blow up like a balloon. I could feel the pressure that was causing it to inflate.

It turns out that the spike that had gouged down my left eye socket had actually pierced through the bone and cartilage of my nose. In effect it punched a hole into my sinus. The surgeon had missed it, and in sewing such tight and small sutures, had effectively sealed my skin like the seam on an inner tube. When I blew my nose, I created a huge amount of pressure in my sinuses, which reacted by pumping all the fluids in my sinuses out into the layers of my cheek.

I had so much pressure that the next day when we went back to the doctor, he was reluctant to put a needle into my check to drain the fluid for fear that it would explode like a balloon would if you poked it with a pin. You know, rip the cheek in several directions when the pressure released. The remedy was for me to sleep sitting up for almost a week and let the body reabsorb the fluid naturally.

Lesson number two: do not tell the patient that if he lays down the germ ridden snot in his cheek will rush to his brain and he will die a terrible agonizing death. Who could sleep in a chair thinking that once he was out he might lay down without knowing it?

The accident happened on a Thursday. I missed school on Friday. I went back on Monday. I looked like something out of a horror movie, all black sutures and bruises and swollen face. I was a gruesome sight. It looked impressive to me and the other guys, but I discovered that girls were no more disposed to me as a result. It didn’t help me out one little bit in that department if you know what I mean.

Mrs. McGee smiled at me once we were assembled in her class that first Monday. She said to me, “Michael, dear, if typing causes you pain or discomfort, just say so and you can be excused from the exercises, but do try to follow along with the lessons.”

“Yes, Mrs. McGee. I have noticed that even the smallest movements are quite painful.”

“Of course, dear,” she replied. “You just sit quietly and heal.”

I was golden!

How sweet was this deal? I noticed my classmates giving me dirty looks, albeit envious ones, as they typed N, V, P, Q over and over, then did speed exercises.

The other thing about Maggie McGee was she loved Don Ho and his only hit song: Tiny Bubbles. She had a portable record player in the classroom and would play the record over and over and over. It seemed the better her mood, the more she played the song.

Tiny bubbles in the wine
Make me feel happy
Make me feel fine

On Friday of the second week from my accident, Mrs. McGee asked me at the beginning of class how I was feeling. Having gotten my stitches out that week, the bruises being mostly gone and the swelling all but relieved, I realized my good run was probably over. I didn’t want to push it, so I gamely advised that I thought I was back to being able to type and resume my normal activities.

“That’s just wonderful, dear!” she exclaimed. “Because, you know you are two weeks behind, and need to catch up. So, starting next Monday, please present yourself in this classroom at 7 am and we will review and go through all the classes you have missed since your unfortunate accident.” She smiled at me like the Cheshire Cat and then went on with the lesson.

Every morning for the next two weeks, I sat at one of Maggie’s typewriters and did all the lessons I had missed. She was right there with me, smiling and encouraging and threatening to gut me with her scissors if I acted up.

Did I mention that I hate Don Ho?

Amazing But True

2010-11-02T12:56:00.000-07:00

I was at a managers meeting last week and one asked me to tell him the Midget Story. He’s heard it a half dozen times, but for some reason it tickles him no end. That story led to another and another, and there might have been some drinking going on. But the drinking really had nothing to do with the stories, just my desire to tell them. That got me thinking that perhaps I should relate a few of them here.

All but one of the stories is a bit risqué, so you might want exit now if you don’t want to hear about parts of the anatomy and certain particulars related to sex and stuff like that.

To set the stage let me first clarify that I have worked in the personal lines insurance industry for 29 years, 20 years of which have been in the claims side of the business. In claims, you are dealing with people who have had accidents and misfortune, and, inevitably, some of those misfortunes arise from their own peculiar behavior. While their injuries and damages are not funny, especially not to them, how they came to have them can be. On the other hand, their behavior after making the claim can be hilarious and just bizarre.

I shall save the Midget Story for last. To begin, where better than in a hot tub.

Turn The *&%$&# Thing Off!
My company flirted at one time with insuring motels. These were not the Holiday Inn or Best Western sorts of hotels, but more the Norman Bates (Psycho) type motel. One of our illustrious agents managed to write a policy for one fine establishment that rented its rooms by the hour, with closed circuit 24 hour porno movies on the TV and a hot tub in each room. I’m quite sure the agent failed to disclose these particular details to the underwriters.

One evening a guest is in the hot tub with a young woman. He was married, but the young woman was not his wife. As they were messing around in the hot tub, he gets this brilliant idea. He stuck his pecker into the out flow tube that circulated the water back to the pump. One supposes he was showing his girlfriend just how he wanted the thing done.

Well, he learned rather quickly that he did not want his girl friend to emulate the hot tub plumbing. The fit was apparently quite good and the pump powerfully sucked his member into the tube right up to his scrotum and then promptly formed such a vacuum in the pipe that it locked him in.

The pain must have been intense and he could not free himself for the pipe. He screamed at his girlfriend to turn the hot tub off. Unfortunately, the management of the motel had gotten tired of people messing with the controls and screwing them all up (pun intended), so they had put the controls under lock and key. The woman could not turn the thing off. It was hard wired so there was no plug to pull from the outlet. She had to put her clothes on and rush down to the office to get the night manager who had the keys to the controls. This she did, as excruciating minutes went by for our poor hero battling the sucky-sucky thing.

More bad news. Even turned off, the vacuum in the pipe did not abate and continued to hold our fellow fast. A hasty discussion occurred and they decided to call the fire department. After more long minutes, the fire department arrived. One can only imagine the scene as they all trooped in wearing their fire suits, boots and hard hats to perform the rescue. Oh and how they must have fought with all their strength not to bust a gut laughing at the poor fellow. It was rumored that some angry words were exchanged when one fireman innocently suggested that in order to rescue our wounded friend that they should use the Jaws of Life.

The fire department, however, was not equipped or knowledgeable enough to extricate the man. Simply trying to pull him off was likely to rip his poor appendage from his body. They quickly realized this and so put out the call for a plumber. Oh, how bad the pain must have been and seemed destined to continue for an unbearably long time. Plumbers, you see, are not quite as fast in response as the fire department, especially when you are waking them up in the middle of the night.

Eventually the plumber arrived and proceeded to dismantle the plumbing in the hot tub that allowed the vacuum to be broken and the member freed, quite a bit worse for wear. Our comrade was whisked away to the hospital where no doubt he spent a few anxious moments before the doctors announced they would not have to amputate. And then spent a few more when he realized that he was going to have to explain all this to his wife.

When the lawsuit came in, I was able to see it briefly before we sent it off to our commercial division; it made for interesting reading. I was especially taken with the theory of liability. The motel had wronged our friend in that they knew they were renting rooms to people who were there for purposes of having sex. In this knowledge, the motel should have realized that randy young men in the presence of naked women would be inclined to stick their members into anything that might provide them with prurient stimulation, including the outlet pipe of a hot tub, and therefore had a duty to such men to prevent them from hurting themselves in the process. The hotel failed in its duty to protect the poor defendant by not installing a screen over the pipe to physically prevent him from inserting himself into the suction filled tube, and for locking up the controls so they could not quickly be turned off once he had performed said insertion.

One wonders how any self-respecting man could bring himself to proceed with such a suit, but then again, his wife, the fire department, the motel and the plumber all knew and he was already a laughingstock, so he probably figured why not try to make a little cash out of his misfortune. I do not know if he was succesfull in that regard or not.

Lorena Who?
While we are on the subject, sort of, regarding male members and that whole suction thing, another story comes to mind. This one is not humorous, unless you’re somewhat twisted in your sense of humor.

In Oregon, during the time I was working there, and probably still today, every auto policy carried at least $10,000 of no-fault medical coverage that was dictated by statute. The statute provided the terms of coverage, which were generous. Among other things, the auto policy would pay for the medical bills and lost wages for injuries suffered while occupying a vehicle. Note that it did not require that the vehicle be in an accident, only that the injuries arose while the person was occupying the vehicle.

This allowed the courts, in abetting their tort bar brethren, to come up with some interesting definitions of “occupying,” as you might imagine. It got so bad that slipping and falling on an icy street while gripping the door handle of the car was considered occupying the vehicle. In any event, if you got hurt while in a car, the auto policy would pay for the doctor bills and your wage loss.

Going west out of Portland towards Beaverton (yes, that is the real name) is a freeway known as the Sunset Highway. It gets its name from the fact that in the afternoon and evening, you are driving directly into the setting sun. At the right time of day, it can make seeing in front of you very difficult.

One such day, our insured was driving in rush hour traffic westbound into the blinding sun. This is very busy traffic and there were accidents on this road almost daily. So our super intelligent gentleman is paying close attention to the road, right? Well, not exactly. It seems he couldn’t wait to get to Beaverton for his girlfriend was head down in his lap doing that suction thing.

If you watched the movie The World According To Garp, you know what happens next. Our fellow got excited, stopped paying attention to his driving, and at high speed, rear-ended the stopped car in front of him. The girlfriend’s jaw snapped shut, and…she bit it clean off.

The medical payments staff in my office got the pleasure of paying the bills and reading the reports of the injury and subsequent treatment and surgeries. It was a covered loss, both in the insurance and organ sense, and we were on the hook to pay for it because he was occupying the vehicle at the time of the…er…accidental amputation.

It turned out okay in the end. The doctors were able to reattach his member and, as I recall, he regained full use of it with no complications or other loss of, you know, length, function, stamina, etc. The interesting thing was that this happened at least six years before Lorena Bobbit took the carving knife to her abusive hubby. While the rest of the world was surprised to hear how Johnny Bobbit’s pee-pee was saved, we had already paid for the same miracle years before and were not the least bit surprised.

Feminine Wiles
Here are three stories, or rather just the highpoints of the stories about women and their attempts to use their charms to their claim’s advantage.

I was for a couple of years an auto physical damage adjuster, meaning I would write estimates and work with body shops to get cars repaired. One day I was given an assignment to inspect and estimate the damage to a mustang that our insured had backed into in a parking lot. The owner of the car said she could not bring it to our office, and could I inspect it at her house? We did that often so it was no big deal. When I showed up at the house, this attractive, blond, maybe 21 year old woman met me at the door. She flounced out in loose short shorts and a man’s t-shirt with the sleeves cut off and about four sizes too big for her. Did I mention she was not wearing a bra, and that the shorts were really short and really loose and she apparently wasn’t wearing any panties either? She proceeded to lead me all around the car showing me every scratch, ding and blemish. It was a rolling wreck of a car. There were many stops as she showed me everything, not only on the car’s body but her own as well. Believe me; a stripper couldn’t have put on a better show. I had no doubts about what this girl looked like in her birthday suit. So I followed patiently along until she judged the moment right and asked very sweetly how much I was going to pay her. I pointed out that since our insured had backed into her right front fender, I was not going to be able to pay for all the other damages to the hood, front bumper, left side, top, deck lid, rear bumper, torn seats, cracked dash, right door and right quarter panel. Once she realized that her ploy had not enticed me to pay anything more, she immediately crossed her arms over her chest, the show now being most definitely over, and announced that I was a pig and I could just speak to her husband about it. The last I saw of her was her cute butt in those short shorts going through her front door, which she slammed hard behind her.
******************
A fellow I knew in the business, whose name I will not divulge, though I’m sure he is long since retired, had a curious dilemma on one of his claims. He was trying to settle this soft tissue neck injury claim (incorrectly often referred to as a whiplash) with a mid-40’s aged woman. He would call her every couple of weeks to see if she wanted to settle, and she would say she wanted to wait to make sure she was completely healed, and then she would engage him in conversation for 20 minutes or more about topics completely unrelated to the claim. He complained about it to me one day after golf. I commiserated. It was often that people, especially older women and widows, would drag out their claim process because they were lonely and the adjuster was a captive audience. My friend said, however, that his claimant was married, seemed well off and lived in an upscale neighborhood and no doubt belonged to the local club, so she didn’t seem to fit the profile. Later, when we met up at an attorney firm’s Christmas party, he told me about his most recent run-in with his problem claimant. He called as usual and finally she said she was willing to settle. They agreed on a dollar amount, and my friend was going to mail her the check and release. She insisted instead that they do it in person and asked him to come to her house at a certain time the next day. He showed up on time and found a note on the front door saying she was in the back yard and to come around through the side gate. He did so and found her in the hot tub, naked, with a bottle of champagne on ice and two glasses. He immediately apologized, thinking he had gotten the time wrong and excused himself saying he would call her later to reschedule. She interrupted him and said she had been expecting him and he ought to get in the tub right away. He protested that he could not do that. She replied that if he wanted her to sign the release, he would get in the tub, or else she would retain one of her husband’s lawyer friends and sue his insured.

“My goodness,” I said. “What did you do?”

He replied, with a rueful grin, “What do you think I did? I got the damned release.”
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There was a time when I was a bodily injury claim adjuster and had reached the level of experience and expertise that they asked me to help train new adjusters. We had one young trainee, fresh out of college, who I was helping to train. I think she was a Mennonite. She always wore very tasteful suits, with the blouse buttoned up to her throat, the skirt down to mid calf and practical shoes with low heels. She was quite prim and proper, but smart and personable. I liked her. I believe she went on to be a very good adjuster and even a supervisor.

One day I got a new claim for a woman who had been a passenger on a motorcycle that our insured bumped from behind. The report said the bike did not go down; the woman hadn’t been struck and didn’t fall off, and didn’t complain about being hurt at the scene. The insured was strongly questioning how she could be hurt. Nevertheless, it was my job to investigate and take it seriously. I called the allegedly injured woman and she said she could meet me at her house that afternoon. I asked the trainee if she wanted to go with me on the appointment and she did.

We showed up at the house and knocked on the door. The trainee stood behind me and to the side, probably out of sight of the windows and from inside the door. That is the only way I can explain what happened next. The door flew open and the woman I was to meet turned out to be in her mid 20’s or so. She was attractive and had a nice figure. I know that because she was wearing a skimpy little leather vest that was not buttoned and therefore provided hardly any cover for her bare chest. She also had on leather chaps, you know the kind of leggings that cover the front of the legs but not the crotch or backs, and a black leather g-string. That was it, oh, except for the honest to goodness leather dog collar around her throat. She gave me a big smile and stepped back to invite me in, and then turned her back to lead me into the house, thereby letting me see most of the way to China. The expression that came over her face when she got to the living room and turned back around only to see our prim and proper trainee standing beside me was priceless. It turned out to be a considerably uncomfortable interview for the woman, especially as it became clear that being mostly naked wasn’t working on getting her money for her bogus claim and she was having to do it with the church lady sitting right there watching the whole thing.

On the way back to the office, the trainee couldn’t stop giggling. At one point she asked, “Was that really a dog collar?” and then giggled uncontrollably some more. I mentioned that I liked her, right?

Do You Have These in Black?
When I was doing auto physical damage claims in 1983 and 1984 we had a drive in set up. We had two bays with motorized garage doors on either end. An adjuster could inspect and estimate damages on a car every half hour, which made it much more efficient than driving to people’s homes or the body shop to see the car. I was working the drive in one day, when a woman came in without an appointment. She was in her mid-40s or so, attractive and well appointed with expensive looking jewelry, hair carefully styled, wearing an expensive looking wool suit with skirt and jacket, and patent leather high heels. She said she had just been driving up the street when a dog ran out in front of her and, in swerving to avoid it, she ran over a cement island. She said she had heard terrible noises and just knew she had damaged her car. Being insured with us and knowing our office was just a block or so down the street she decided to come right to see if we could help.

We were slow that day so I told her I would be happy to look at her car and had her pull it into the first bay. It was a big brand new Lincoln Town Car. One of our clerks asked her some questions while I prepared to look at her car.

I got out the creeper and put it on the floor by the front bumper. I pulled the inspection light down to the end of its cord and turned it on. Then I lay down on the creeper on my back and pulled myself under the car. I looked carefully for any damage. As I was under the car, I heard the door to the bay open and then the sound of high heels clicking on the cement floor. People often want to be in the bay while we were inspecting their cars, so I thought nothing of it. I could see no damage whatsoever under the front of the car, which seemed odd to me. I grabbed the front of the bumper and pulled myself on the creeper out from under the car.

And found myself looking directly up the woman’s skirt. She was standing in such a way with her legs slightly parted that the view went all the way to Christmas. The light I was holding illuminated the scene clearly, revealing a lovely pink garter and very sheer matching panties. She was a natural brunette.

I mumbled something like an apology and quickly pulled the creeper around the front of the car and to one side and slid back under the car. I could find nothing wrong here either, and, when I slid out from under the car, there she was again and I was looking right up her dress. I quickly pulled the creeper further down the side and slid back under. And, guess what? Well, you get the picture. She followed me all around that damn car and every time I would come out from under it, I got to admire her lingerie.

There wasn’t anything wrong with her car, and she was just so happy to hear it and thanked me profusely. As she drove off, the three clerks burst out laughing. They had watched the show through the bay's windows and realized what was going on. One of them told me that her husband sold shoes for years. He often came home with a new story of some woman in a dress or skirt, often not wearing underwear, who would try on pair after of pair of shoes, the whole time managing with each new pair of shoes to expose everything up her skirt for the salesman to see. My lady had just found a new twist on an old exhibitionist game.

The Midget Story
All of the stories so far have related to sex in some way. This one does not, but it does involve a Lincoln Town Car.

We insured a Lincoln-Mercury dealership in Portland. A new mall opened up across the river in Vancouver. The dealership worked a deal with the mall and placed new cars strategically though out the mall. They went a step further and put salesman on duty to talk to potential customers. The salesman on duty with the Lincoln Town Car was quite surprised to be approached by identical twin adult midgets who wanted to talk to him about the car.

They wanted to see inside it. He opened the driver’s door. Immediately, one of the midgets climbed up into the driver’s seat. He was so short that even sitting on the front edge of seat, his feet did not reach the floor let alone the pedals. The midget stood up on the seat, and grasped the steering wheel in both hands. He proceeded to make vroom-vroom sounds and move the steering wheel back and forth, as he pretended to be driving.

After several minutes of this, his brother wanted to have a turn at pretending to drive the car. The first midget refused to move. The second got angry. Next thing you know, the two midgets are in a fight. The salesman described them as rolling around on the ground, grabbing each other by the hair, throwing punches, kicking, biting, and generally looking like they were trying to kill each other. Finally one of them get loose and managed to climb into the Lincoln and fend off his brother long enough to close and lock the door. The salesman didn’t know if this was the original driving midget or the other one, he had completely lost track of who was who during the fight, they being identical and all.

The one locked out was standing in front of the car screaming bloody and nasty epithets at his brother. The one in the car suddenly discovered that the keys were on the driver’s side visor. He promptly inserted them into the ignition and started the car. He put the gearshift in Drive. Even though he couldn’t reach the pedals, he could drive at idle speed while standing on the seat to see over the dash to steer. This he proceeded to do, chasing his brother through the mall, the brother being unable to run faster than the car was idling.

Even at idle speed, a Lincoln Town Car can do a lot of damage to kiosks, storefronts, sidewalk cafes and more when being driven by a midget who has never driven a car before and is intent only on running his brother down. I have an image of that mall car chase scene from the movie the Blues Brothers, only being done in slow motion. The police finally caught up to the midget in the runaway Lincoln. They had to break the driver’s window to physically remove the rampaging midget from behind the wheel. He had managed to get the car stuck in the corner between two stores, and was trying unsuccessfully to get the car into reverse so he could run over his brother again, having done so once already and leaving him lying with a broken foot behind the car where it was stuck.

Of course, all the stores, restaurants and kiosk owners who had damage sued the car dealership. Everyone knows fratricidal midgets who are in jail have no money. I was able to read the Summons and Complaint briefly before we had to send it off to our commercial division to handle. The theory of liability was that the dealership had been negligent in leaving the keys in such a place that a deranged midget could find them during his attempt to kill his identical twin.

It seems likely that the midget driving the car was the Evil Twin out to kill the Good Twin. Or, maybe the Good Twin was the driver and just snapped because he couldn’t take the Evil Twin’s evilness any more. Or, maybe they were that rare combination of Evil Twin and his brother the Evil Twin. Or, maybe…

Don and the Devil

2010-10-18T16:42:00.000-07:00

I had a stepbrother named Don. He died many years ago, young and missed now. I was thinking about him recently, having just been Chukar hunting with my Dad. His memory sticks in my mind. I don’t want to make of Don something good or bad, something that he was or was not; Don did that for himself, as do we all. Rather, I just want to tell you about him, and maybe, just for a minute, bring him back to life to enjoy his company.

Don was the son of my Dad’s second and current wife. He was a man of opposite contrasts. He was a tall, lanky sort. He was very strong for a man who was so lean. He stood over six feet, and I would be surprised if he broke 175 pounds. He was energetic, yet remarkably lazy at the same time. You would not say he was smart, and he did poorly in school, but he had a sort of sense about things that let him do all that he wanted to do. He was often unemployed but seemed able, whenever he wanted, to get a job. He could be infuriatingly obtuse, coarse, and uninformed, yet he was lovable and good-hearted just the same.

Perhaps the most important and telling thing you could say about Don was the one thing upon which he was a rock, like Peter to the Church—Don liked beer. Don without a beer was a like an ocean without water: unimaginable.

This is not a morality story about the evils of beer. Benjamin Franklin said that beer is proof that God loves us. God surely loved Don.

Let me quit setting the stage about Don and set the other stage, the one where he met the Devil and how Don vanquished him.

Chukar hunting for the Wilson clan for a number of years involved a trek into Lesley Gulch in the extreme southeastern corner of the State of Oregon. Most people in the United States do not realize that 2/3 of the state of Oregon is high desert, consisting mostly of rocks, sagebrush and sparse tracts of seemingly uninhabitable space. Lesley Gulch is a canyon running east and west whose terminus at the end is the Owyhee River Reservoir, a lonely, long narrow body of water backed up for 30 miles or more, winding its way through steep canyons and narrow ways. Its purpose is to provide irrigation water for the farmers further downstream where the land levels out. At the point where Lesley Gulch joins the reservoir, the mountains and ridges are particularly steep and rise up in sheer and long slopes to high rocky ridges on both sides of the river. They are barren ridges, full of rock cliffs, sloping mountain slides, filled with loose shale debris, and cut infrequently by twisty-turny little canyons through which the occasional rain runoff water flows. Of course, being a true desert, the water does not flow that often. Over the millennia, Mother Nature has carved the rocky spine of the hills and ridges into spires and cathedral-like spaces. It is perhaps one of the most beautiful places in the world, as far as I am concerned.

The other thing to know about the place is there may not be an electric wire or working telephone within 40 miles or more in any direction. It is truly remote.

Chukars are a partridge. They are native to the Himalayas and mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Naturists and sportsmen introduced them into the high deserts of the West a hundred years or so ago. They thrive there.

The Chukar is in league with the Devil.

The Chukar is an evil bird. It can run uphill on near vertical slopes faster than a man can run down. They laugh at you in a very loud voice heard for miles. This is usually when they are on top of the mountain and you are laboriously climbing it and about to burst an aortic valve or two. Their call goes “chuck chuck chuck chuck….chukar” in a pitch that drives hunters mad.

The Chukar will wait until you are precariously balanced on one foot on a piece of crumbly rock on the edge of a 100 foot precipice, at which time 10 or so of them will take wing at your feet, sounding like a squadron of P-51s taking off all at once. The shock of the sound of their flight alone is enough to cause you to fall off your perch to a bloody, smashed up mess below. Just in case you are still in hunter mode, and did not fall as they planned, they will fly in such as way as to require you to aim your shotgun over your left shoulder while twisting on your poor abused right ankle and shoot at a vague shadow passing behind you at the speed of sound. As all of this happens, you are praying the recoil of the shotgun does not throw you off your perch to an untimely demise on the rocks below.

All Chukars deserve to die.

We used Dad’s boat to roam up and down the reservoir, pulling into canyons we knew. We would hike up the canyons, and eventually to the tops of the mountains at their end. Chukar hunting naturally involved many hours of climbing steep mountains, filled with a few seconds of terror, followed by hiking back down, lunch and a few beers, all repeated in the afternoon.

I can remember the first time I did this with Don. We all set off, each of us going to the left or right or middle, to give us each our own zone for hunting. Spread out this way, we climbed the ridge, shot at Chukars and missed along the way, and climbed some more. Finally, I had climbed so high that I could look back down to the reservoir and see our boat pulled up on the shore. It looked like a little ant boat. What did I see when I looked back? Little ant Don walking down the last little bit of ridge, eventually to the boat, climbing in and settling down to rest.

Don, you see, had turned back, being very thirsty, after climbing less than a third of the way I had climbed. He had apparently found no comatose or otherwise imbecilic Chukars standing very still on a rock that he could shoot without having to aim. Upon discovering the lack of such easy targets and considering the circumstances, he felt justified in returning to the boat to drink beer. The rest of us climbed until we were ready to puke. We chased those devil Chukars without success until we seriously contemplated calling in an Exorcist. Finally, it being lunchtime, we hiked down off the mountain.

There were four of us and we had put three beers each in the cooler. Don sat in that boat and drank all 12 beers before noon. We got none.

So it would go.

There was this other time when, while travelling up stream in Dad’s boat, a large 22 foot long 7 foot wide river sled, we came upon this measly little Shovel Bill duck. It was swimming in the reservoir just minding its business. As we came motoring along, it dove under the surface. Don became very excited and insisted he had to shoot that poor little duck. Dad obliging slowed down and stopped the boat near the spot where the duck went under. Sure enough, it resurfaced for air, but some 30 yards or so from where it went under. Don blasted away with his shotgun, missed, and the duck dove under again.

Now a shovel duck is not what you would consider a prime waterfowl. They have a shovel-shaped bill, hence their name, so they can scoop mud and yuck from the bottom of the river or swamp and strain out the edible bits. They tend to take on the smell and taste of what they strain and eat, if you know what I mean. Not only that, while they look something like a mallard, with a green head and yellow eyes, they are runty, more like the size of a teal or bufflehead. Still, Don had the proper licenses, waterfowl stamp, and it was duck season, so…

The chase was afoot, or afloat, as the case may be. Don was obsessed. We could not help being entertained. The little duck would pop up, Don would blast, miss, and repeat. It was amusing in a twisted, you had to be there sort of way. Of course, it came to a bad end for the duck. He popped up at the wrong place eventually and Don did not miss. But, Dad was firm. “You shot it, you eat it!”

Later that night, Don cooked the duck over the fire, occasionally basting it by pouring some of his beer over it, and then ate every scrap, declaring it the best he had ever had. I was never sure whether he was talking about the duck or the beer, but I have my suspicions.

Enough of that. To the Devil.

One year we were in our camp early in the morning, with coffee made and the breakfast cooking. It was a small campground at the end of the gulch near the reservoir. Campground is too generous a word, it merely being a space the BLM had graded level, threw some gravel on and put in two outhouses at one end. We liked it just fine, even if there was no running water. We would carry in all the water we needed in five-gallon cans, and when we ran out, we knew of a sweet spring 5 miles up the road where we could replenish.

Those of us in tents were working out the kinks of sleeping on hard ground in the cold desert night. Dad was not so poorly disposed. He had an old, abused, but comfortable Winnebago that none of us would sleep in on account that he snored something fierce (but so did we, so the score is even). A pickup came down the rough dirt road and pulled in next to our camp. Two men got out and asked if we could spare some coffee. It was a neighborly and thoroughly Western desert meeting. The fact that they had driven 25 miles and more than hour from the main road meant they were not just passing by. We were happy to share. They were properly appreciative. We made introductions all around, sipped our coffee and chatted about chucker hunting and the weather and so on.

What the two men were interested in was asking us about any Big Horn Sheep sightings we may have made in our Chukar hunting adventures. There were Big Horn Sheep in the area, and the State of Oregon had recently issued, for the first time in a very long time, perhaps 50 years, a half dozen tags to hunt them. One of our new friends had been successful in receiving a tag in the drawing held among thousands of applicants. His companion was helping him with the hunt. They were nice guys and, encouragingly if somewhat chauvinistically, were locals from Eastern Oregon. The tag owner owned an irrigation supply business in Ontario, Oregon. We would not have been so welcoming to a Los Angeles millionaire.

We chatted and told them what we knew. We did see Big Horns quite often in our hikes, and were able to give them not only a lay of the land, describing how the ridges, canyons and ravines ran, but where we had seen this herd or that.

Did I mention that it is rough, wilderness country?

We departed with them promising to let us know how they did and asking if we minded if they stopped in for supper and some beer if the opportunity arose. We did not mind and were quite happy at the thought. As I said, it is neighborly and friendly.

We thought little of it later that day. We hunted and for once were quite successful. I was semi-unconscious, which is the only way you can explain how I shot four birds that day. Everyone else did well and had at least a couple birds to his credit. We ate well that night; I fried the Chukars we had bagged with a lemon pepper and flour coating. Served with a gallon of cheap red wine and/or beer, they were a big hit.

The next day we did even better. I believe I bagged eight birds all by myself that day. Forget calling in a Priest, I started thinking that I was the Exorcist. The evil birds were finally feeling the wrath of the righteous. Everyone else had a good day, too

At the end of the long day, we finished it off by scouring the shoreline for several miles up and down the reservoir for driftwood for our campfire, which we loaded into the boat and offloaded to the pickup for transport to camp. That night we had plenty of firewood, lots of cold beer and wine, and ate like kings on Chukars grilled over the fire. Replete and intoxicated, we settled onto our stools or camp chairs around the fire and contemplated just how good life could be.

The night came down and was as dark as only the wilderness can be. Except that, when the sky is clear in the high desert, it is not that dark. The Milky Way is so bright in the sky that on a clear night it is almost possible to read a book by the starlight. If you have not seen it, you have no conception of just how much the heavens are on fire.

Still, when you are drunk and sitting looking at a large fire, your night vision is not the best.

Just as we had reached that sleepy state of rosy, warm belly from the alcohol and warm front side from the fire, the Devil came to take us.

The first notice was the dogs started to whimper. Both belly crawled under Dad’s Winnebago and hid. Don, who was sitting opposite me, looked over my shoulder, exclaimed, “What the fuck!”, and then seemed to freeze in place, his eyes the size of a beer can bottom’s diameter. I spun out of my chair and looked into the darkness behind me.

Coming out of the night were two glowing eyes. They shifted from glowing red to an eerie green fire and back. They stared straight into my soul. As bits of starlight and firelight caught the apparition, and my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could make out the Devil’s horns arcing around those eyes. He was walking upright, very tall, more than six and half feet at a guess, and I dared not look down for sure I would see his cloven hooves striking sparks from the ground.

The thought of all those Chukars we had killed that day came over me, and I will admit I wondered if now it was time to pay the Devil his due for killing and eating his minions.

His otherworldly, strangely intoned voice swept over us and echoed through the canyon.

“Have you got a cold beer there?”

I won’t say I was the first to figure it out, but I can attest that Don and the dogs, and I am not sure in which order, were the last.

It was not the devil, but our sheep hunter’s companion. He was carrying the cape and head of a Big Horn Sheep on his shoulders; in fact, the head was resting on top of his head, the easier to carry it. The eyes of the sheep were stuck open and reflected the fire and stars in weird ways.

I have never seen a man drink a beer so fast in my life, not even Don.

As he explained, during his third and slower beer, they had stalked this large sheep for a day and half, before getting a good shot. They were miles and miles from their truck, once they were able to come up to the dead creature. They debated what to do, and agreed that trying to take the sheep back to the truck was not possible. The solution was to pack it down the long canyon to a place where they could get the pickup close. They were sure that one canyon they were looking at culminated in our camp next to the Owyhee. The plan was for the friend to hike the skin and the head to our camp, while the hunter would hike back to the truck and drive around to meet up.

Sure enough, within half an hour the pickup with the hunter pulled into our camp. We offered up more beer.

They explained that they hoped to enlist our help to pack the remainder of the sheep’s carcass out, and if we could not help, at least they would have a base to do it one bit at a time, now that they knew where the canyon ran. Without a second’s hesitation, Don said, “I’ll help you.”

He was deadly serious and would brook no entreaties of, “Are you sure?” and “It’s a very long hike.”

Don said he had never been involved in a sheep hunt, nor seen one taken, and he was determined to have the experience. He meant every word. He might be a lazy Chukar hunter, but when something intrigued or stimulated him, you would best get out of his way because no constraints could hold him back or deter his course.

They agreed to pick up Don around eight the following morning, which they did. We all shared coffee and then wished them luck. There was a third man involved but I do not remember him so well and some of details seem a little fuzzy now. They were fuzzy then, too, owing to my drinking my thanks to God for not letting the Chuckars’ Devil take me.

The rest of us hunted most of the day for Chukars, and as I recall, we did not do so well. We knocked off a little early and were back in camp around 3 pm. It was just in time to see Don coming down the canyon towards camp, pack settled high on his shoulder and high stepping it the whole way. He marched into camp, dropped the pack with half a sheep carcass in it without ceremony on the ground, and grabbed a beer out of the cooler. The beer took two gulps. He tossed the empty and grabbed another. That one took three gulps. The third beer he actually nurtured for a few minutes after settling himself into a camp chair.

Twenty minutes later, the other two packers came into view around the bend a quarter mile up the canyon. Don had beaten them into camp by nearly half an hour.

All were clearly exhausted and near the edge. It turns out the hike was nearly 7 miles, over rough terrain and few trails to follow. Gratefully it was mostly downhill, but the two sheep packs weighed nearly 80 pounds apiece. Their strategy was two men would carry a sheep pack, while the third carried a pack with beer. After 30 minutes or so, the third man with the beer pack would take a sheep pack and pass the lighter beer pack on. After another thirty minutes, the second beer pack man would take a sheep pack and the remaining sheep pack man would take the beer pack. In this way, each man got 30 minutes relative rest carrying the lighter beer pack for each hour of carrying a heavy sheep pack.

Of course, the third man was not without a burden, for these crafty carcass packers had foreseen the need to have plenty of beer along for the hike. They put a case of beer into the third pack at the outset, along with some frozen ice packs to keep it cold. In the beginning, the beer pack was not light. But, during their periodic half hour stops, each had a beer, and the weight in the beer pack went down steadily.

They made commendable progress off the mountain in this way over the hours. Until, at last, they ran out of beer.

One of the packers put it this way:

“It was the most awesome thing I have ever seen. We were worn down, tired, and nearly at the end of our strength. We collapsed on the ground after the last half hour hike when it was time to switch packs. I knew we were still a long way from the camp, but I was just about done. Don had been carrying one of the sheep packs for an hour and it was his turn to trade off and carry the beer. As we sat there, he asked me to pass him a beer. I looked into the beer pack and discovered we did not have any more. We had drunk the last of it on the last stop. We were so tired no one realized I was carrying a pack with just empty cans.”

“What do you mean there’s no more beer,” Don demanded.

“Once he looked in the pack and realized the truth, he said ‘Fuck this! I’m going for a beer!’ He got up still wearing the pack with half the sheep in it and started down the canyon at double quick time. We tried to keep up, but he was just gone.”

As the man explained, “It was like he had the devil in him for a beer.”

I do not know how better to say it.

Don beat the Devil that day, and will be remembered with awe by those sheep hunters for his packing exploits.

Don is gone. We won't talk about how or why that happened. None of us really no the truth, only Don does, where ever he may be.

Vaya con Dios, Amigo.

One Offs

2010-09-28T08:44:00.000-07:00

Reggie Bush’s decision recently to give back his Heisman Trophy prompted me to think that perhaps Obama should give back his Nobel Peace Prize. After all, the Norwegians awarded the prize less than a month into his presidency not on anything he had actually accomplished, but on the hope of his intentions. Since that time, he has accomplished absolutely nothing to cause peace to break out anywhere, and done just about everything to inspire and motivate our enemies. In that light, Reggie seems of the two more honest and deserving to keep his prize.

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Facebook’s founder recently gave a NJ school district $100 million to help improve the education of the children. You know what would have been more effective? He could have given 20,000 kids $5,000 each, based on their financial need, on the stipulation that they use the money to pay for private school tuition.

The 20,000 kids and their parents who took it and used it for that purpose would at least be those motivated to get a decent education. Even better, it would reduce the public school population by that much, allowing the schools the opportunity to lay off their most ineffective teachers and administrators.

Throwing a $100 million at the public school system, no matter what the stipulations and rules for spending it are, is not much better than flushing it down a toilet.

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Historian Victor Hanson recently published an article in the National Review Online in which he described the difference between the peasant mentality of the feudal ages with that of the ancient Greeks. In the peasant mentality, the belief is that there is only so much to go around: wealth, opportunity, that kind of stuff. It says that the economy and society are like a big pie. If one person takes a bigger slice of pie that means others will get a smaller slice and some no slice at all because there is only so much pie to go around.

In contrast, Hanson says “… Western civilization began with a very different, ancient Greek idea of an autonomous citizen, not an indentured serf or subsistence peasant. The small, independent landowner — if he was left to his own talents, and if his success was protected by, and from, government — would create new sources of wealth for everyone. The resulting greater bounty for the poor soon trumped their old jealousy of the better-off.”

Hanson goes on to make the point that Progressives and Liberals think of the economy, society and nation through the lens of the peasant mentality. To their way of thinking, a rich man is only wealthy because many other men are poor. Therefore, they think it is only right and just that they redistribute the rich man’s large slice of pie to others who have smaller ones.

As Hanson points out, Obama leads the way. Hanson wrote, “America is returning to a peasant mentality of a limited good that redistributes wealth rather than creates it. Candidate Obama’s 'spread the wealth' slip to Joe the Plumber simply was upgraded to President Obama’s 'I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.'”

The irony is, as Hanson says, “The more his administration castigates insurers, businesses, and doctors; raises taxes on the upper income brackets; and imposes additional regulations, the more those who create wealth are deciding to sit out, neither hiring nor lending. The result is that traditional self-interested profit-makers are locking up trillions of dollars in unspent cash rather than using it to take risks, since they will likely either lose money due to new red tape or see much of their profit confiscated through higher taxes.”

As he says, “No wonder that in such a climate of fear and suspicion, unemployment remains near 10 percent. Deficits chronically exceed $1 trillion per annum. And now the poverty rate has hit a historic high. We are all getting poorer in hopes that a few won’t get richer.”

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So, Comedian Stephen Colbert testifies to Congress about migrant workers. He worked for a day picking beans to get a feel for their experience and it just about killed him he says. Well, you know, it’s like real work. Real work is hard. What a wuss.

I’ve picked several thousand pounds of beans in my youth, between the ages of 11 and 14. I was able to get out of the picking business when I turned 15, the age at which Oregon allowed youths back then to work for an hourly wage. When I was in high school and two years in college, I worked summers on different farms. On one farm my job was to carry 40 foot long 3 inch diameter aluminum irrigation pipe over my head through the bean fields. To move all the sets of irrigation lines took 2 or 3 hours. We did it twice a day, starting at sunup for the first set, and starting the second set about an hour before sun down. During the middle of the day, I lugged 70-100 pound sacks of beans a hundred yards to the weigh station for middle aged ladies’ who had just picked them — some of those ladies were the mothers of kids I went to school with. When I wasn’t lugging sacks of beans, I was picking up alfalfa bales from the fields, loading them onto trailers and trucks and then unloading and stacking them in barns.
Other jobs on other farms were similar in that they were all hard, muscle aching, hot, dirty work. None of that killed me. I wasn’t paid that much, but they were jobs and I was happy to have them.

Accordingly, I don’t have much respect for Colbert’s nonsense. The greater bit of nonsense is that members of Congress invited him to testify about his one-day “job”. Did they think that made him some sort of expert? Predictably, his testimony was completely in line with a comedy skit, not that you would expect anything different from this self-promoting ass. Even more bothersome is that the Democratic chairperson of the committee and other members of Congress seemed to think this was an appropriate use of their time and our tax dollars. Was this serious Congressional work, or just intended to be an entertaining break from all the hard work they do?

Whatever, it’s a bad joke on the rest of us.

******************************

I am more and more bothered over the last several years about our spoken conversation. You hear it all the time in TV and Radio interviews, as well as in every day conversation. Take a typical interview. It doesn’t matter who is being interviewed, be it a sports star, actor, politician or man on the street. When asked a question, for example, “What do you think the weather will be tomorrow?” the response typically begins, “Yeah, I mean…”

Well, I certainly hope they mean what they say. Seriously, though, the original intent/meaning of the phrase is to explain a statement the speaker believes he may not have made clear or that the listener may not have understood. But, that is not what is going on here. Invariably, the speaker hasn’t said anything yet so there is nothing to explain further.

The phrase “I mean,” is essentially meaningless. It is just noise, perhaps used to get the speaker talking, like priming an old fashioned hand pump. More likely, however, its purpose is to allow his brain time to catch up with his mouth. One hears all sorts of such words and phrases in our speech today. “Yeah, I mean, like you know, it’s so going to be hot tomorrow.”

We The Jury

2010-08-22T12:12:00.000-07:00

I recently received a summons to report to jury duty in Delaware County Ohio for the next four months. The notice sparked some dark and painful memories, and I thought I would relate them here.

In 1987-88, (I think that was the right time) I was a juror in a capital murder case. I lived in Portland Oregon at the time. It was my first and last time as a juror. It was not fun. Frankly, I never want to do anything like that again, and trust me, you don’t either.

I can’t remember any of the names, not the victim, the judge, the attorneys, the accused or any of my fellow jurors. I wrote extensive notes every day of the trial and stowed them away, thinking I would want them some time later in my life. I remember finding them in an old box years ago. I think I threw them away, as near as I can tell. It’s a fuzzy memory, and I can’t find them now. It’s funny that I can see all of the people in my mind, the court, the judge, my fellow jurors, the defendant, the lawyers, even the family members of the victim who came to court every day. However, no names, not even one. Are you sensing something going on here?

You see, we found the accused guilty and we ordered him to die for it.

In Oregon, there are two phases to a capital murder trial. The first is to determine if the defendant is guilty of the crime of which he is accused. All we did in the first phase is determine did he commit the murder, and did the circumstances of murder meet the qualifications of Capital Murder, or perhaps some lesser charge, such as second degree murder or manslaughter. If we said he was not guilty of the crime that would have been it, case closed. We spent more than a month and half as I recall listening to testimony with occasional days off while the court conducted other business or heard motions that we were not supposed to hear, before the judge release us to deliberate our verdict.

The second phase of the trial is to determine, again according to the strict definitions provided by statute, two things: did the circumstances of the crime fit a certain set of criteria or not, and was the defendant likely to be a future danger of society. A yes answer to both questions was required for a sentence of the death penalty. A no answer to either or both of the questions meant the sentence was mandatory life in prison. Those were our two choices. We spent another month or more on that phase with a two-week interval between the two phases.

As I recall I first reported for jury duty on a Monday morning in early December. (Again, I could have the time wrong, but that is what my memory says) They drew my name for the very first jury pool within 30 minutes on that first day. Between jury selection and the two phases of the trial, I wasn’t done with it all until mid-April. We started in early winter and ended in mid spring.

My boss was not amused.

The jury selection process was not what I expected. We started out as a group of about 120 people. They split us into three groups of about 40. One by one, each group went into the courtroom and met the judge, who told us that we were being considered as jurors on a Capital Murder case. Today we were to fill out a questionnaire that we were required by law to complete as fully and honestly as possible. The Prosecution and Defense attorneys could dismiss up to a certain number of us based on our questionnaires. Once we had completed the questionnaire, the clerk excused us for the rest of the day and, in fact, the rest of the week. We were to report to the main jury waiting room on Monday the following week. At that time, either we would go back to the general jury pool if rejected by the Prosecution or Defense, or we would report to the courtroom and proceed with the voir dire process.

The questionnaire was huge. It took three hours or more to complete the form. It was the most detailed thing you can imagine. It wanted me to list all my living relatives’ names down to first cousins, as well as addresses if I knew them. There were the expected questions about my education, employment, hobbies, criminal record, and marital status. They wanted to know odd things, too, like how often did I get drunk and had I ever had a venereal disease. There were questions that didn’t appear to have much to do with a trial or murder, but a psychologist obviously created them to analyze our thinking and personality. We had to fill it out while being under the scrutiny of guards and court clerks.

As you have surmised, when I came back the following Monday, I was told to report to the courtroom. I made it through the questionnaire process and was still in the pool of potential jurors for the trial. Voir dire is the process where the attorneys and even the judge interview the jurors. They did us one at a time, with none of the other jurors in the room. It took all week. They told me that I could go home, but that I should report to the courtroom for my interview on Wednesday morning and be prepared to spend the whole day waiting my turn. On Wednesday, the clerk called me into the courtroom about mid-morning as I recall. They asked all the usual questions you would expect: how did I feel about capital punishment, did I feel differently about black people than white, did I think I could be impartial and that sort of thing.

At one point, the judge told me that if I were on the jury, I would see evidence that included pictures of a nude woman. Did I have a problem looking at such pictures? I said no with a straight face. The Defense attorney chimed in that I would also likely hear offensive language and bad words, and was that a problem for me. That was too much. I chuckled and replied, “Man, I grew up in Riddle, I’ve heard it all.” The judge laughed at that. So did the attorneys. I realized I was screwed at that point. There was no way I was getting out of being on that jury.

And I did not. All the potential jurors reported to the courtroom on the following Monday, and the clerk announced that she would call 14 names (12 jurors and 2 alternates). If our name was called, we were to stay, if not, we could leave and our jury duty service was ended. They called my name. When just the 14 of us were still in the room, the clerk gathered us up and we went in to see the judge. He told us that our service would probably last several months, but he was giving us three weeks or so off over the holidays. He told us to report at 8:30 am on the first Monday after New Year’s Day for the first day of the trial.

I won’t go into the details, other than to say that the defendant, a young black man in his mid-20s, was accused of raping, then strangling a young black woman in her apartment.

As I said, there are two phases to the trial. At the conclusion of the first phase, the guilty or not phase, the judge gave us instructions and sent us to deliberate at just before 11 am. They locked us in the jury room. Seriously, guards stood at both the hallway door and the courtroom door to the jury room. They were there both to keep people out and to keep us in. We were a little shocked that they could summarily extinguish our freedom to move and associate just like that. It was like being in jail.

Once the doors closed and, yes, locked, our first question was whether we needed to elect a jury captain. The judge hadn’t said one way or the other. We debated that for a few minutes and decided we would not for the time being, as long as we could keep things moving along. Someone suggested that perhaps we ought to take a vote, to which someone else said that we ought to look at the evidence a little closer first, including photos and other materials. It’s not that we needed to look at it; we had seen it all before. I think that many of us wanted to look at it again to give the appearance, if only to ourselves, that we were carefully weighing our decision. There was also a certain morbid curiosity and, to be honest, titillation in looking at that poor young naked dead woman lying on her back on her bed. She had been pretty in life.

Finally, around 11:30, another person suggested we ought to vote to get a feel for the lay of the land. We agreed, tore up some paper into ballots, wrote guilty or not guilty on them, and threw them into an unused coffee cup. That took 2 minutes, tops. One of the guys took the ballots out, put them on the table and tallied 12 guilty votes, unanimous on the first try and in just about 30 minutes.

Someone said, “I guess we should call the Bailiff and tell him we have a verdict.”

Someone else said, and it was not me, “Wait. If we are still in here at noon, they will pay for our lunch and have it delivered. “

That was a grand idea, we all agreed, and that is just what we did. We waited it out, got our free lunch, ate it, and when were all done, informed the Bailiff that we had a verdict. By 1:30 pm, we were back in the courtroom and passed the judge the form we had to fill out announcing our verdict. We were all remarkably unemotional and cool about it all. It was just like going to work, no big deal. I think that was so because after a month and half of evidence, none of us had any doubts of his guilt.

That was the easy part. Little did we know just how hard would be the second phase.

I don’t know that I can describe the weight of that decision as it bears down on you. I will try to give you a sense of it, of what it is to find yourself in a position of having to decide to say to a man, “we are going to kill you.” It is not something you prepare for or even think about in realistic terms until you find yourself in the position of having to do it.

It’s not as if the defendant was shooting at me. He never threatened me or anyone I know. I would have no trouble killing someone who threatened me or my family or some other innocent person. I’m not against capital punishment and actually still support it. The hard thing is, the thing that sometimes wakes me up at night, is that what we did, my fellow 11 jurors and me, was more cold blooded than the crime the bad guy committed. Our decision was well reasoned, purposeful, open, supported by facts, logic, and the lawful rules of the great State of Oregon. He committed his act in probably ten minutes of alcohol-induced insanity. We spent months coming to ours. He was going to die for his momentary bad decision and we were going to spend a long time living with our purposeful and carefully thought out one.

This is not some sort of guilt-ridden confession. I am not seeking to cleanse my soul or induce cathartic psychological healing in this rant. I did my duty as the statutes of the State of Oregon required. I do not feel guilty about that. I did not kill that 21 or 22 year old unwed mother of an 18-month-old baby. I did not rape her and strangle her with the telephone cord. I did not leave her naked body lying haphazardly across her bed while her baby was in a crib at the foot of that bed, a baby that was found in that crib next to his dead mother hours later by neighbors who got worried because they heard him crying all morning. I am convinced of the defendant’s guilt still, and he deserved to die for what he did.

How often have you heard people say that we should “line all those”—pick the bad guy du jour—“up against a wall and shoot them.” Whom would we want to do that to today? Al Qaeda? Taliban? Mexican drug lords? Liberals? Conservatives? Often those who say it are quite passionate and really mean it. But, I’ll tell you what: put Osama Bin Laden against a wall, pick any one out of the crowd professing to want him dead, give him a .45, stand him in front of OBL and tell him to let ‘er rip. Many wouldn’t do it, couldn’t do it. The reality of the act hits you in the face like a bucket of cold water, and suddenly it’s personal.

You want to know why some juries are hung, and can’t reach a verdict in capital murder trials? I think one or more of the jurors refuses to agree to convict because they suddenly see themselves holding that pistol and pulling that trigger.

In the sentencing phase, we needed to determine did the rape of the victim constitute one of the crimes during the commission of which a murder qualified for capital punishment. If so, did the defendant commit the murder to facilitate the rape or to hide the evidence of his having done it. The answer to these questions was a big Hell Yes.

In addition, our task was to determine if the defendant posed a continued future threat to society. As I said, we had to say yes to both questions in order to impose the death penalty. The first part, the rape murder connection, was easy. This second part was not easy.

The prosecutor spent a great deal of time showing how the defendant had committed an ever-escalating seriousness of crimes in his young life. The point being that he had culminated that escalation in raping and murdering a woman, so who knew what the next act would be. It was a fair point, but really, I thought it was a little much presenting evidence of how he had stolen a handsaw from a school when he was nine. His mother told, us but not tearfully, (I felt she really was trying to feel all emotional about her son, but it didn’t come off very well) “what a loving son” he was, and how being without a father for most of his life meant he didn’t have any “good role models” on which to pattern his behavior. I suppose the point she was making, and the defense attorney through her, was that we should not sentence her son to death because it was not his fault that he was a bad man. She probably believed that. I know many people do. The concept is that we are what our environment makes us; we can’t help being what we are and are therefore not responsible for what that makes us do. It is the old nature versus nurture argument. It’s a load of horseshit, in my opinion. In this case it only raised the question in my mind that if it wasn’t her son’s fault was it then her fault for the environment she gave him?

We spent a month listening to this sort of thing. To be honest, I think the best argument made by the defense attorney had to do with whether the defendant posed a future danger to society. He argued that if we sentenced the defendant to life in prison he would not be in society, and so could not endanger it, but only possibly his fellow prisoners, and that hardly counted as society. He actually had me thinking on that one. Remember, we were duty bound to follow the letter of the law, but that doesn't mean we were not also asked to interpret the sense of that letter. The point is this argument made a good deal of sense depending on how you defined “society”. His argument was spoiled I think when no one could or would tell us whether the defendant would qualify for parole at some point; we weren’t allowed to hear that. There was also the remote possibility that he would escape from prison. In my own mind, I assumed that because they wouldn’t tell us about parole that meant he could qualify for some sort of release, and thus could be back in society. My fellow jurors also raised this point and it helped persuade us I think. I personally believed that he was a threat to the rest of us, if only because he was too stupid not to stay out of trouble. Darwin wasn’t wrong.

We had a lady on our jury who was smart, college degreed, well spoken, level headed, imperturbable, and very attractive. She was the executive assistant of a CEO of a corporation with headquarters in downtown Portland as I recall. She was like a rock. Most of us would on occasion make macabre jokes or act sophomoric in attempts to break our tension. She was all business and even keel throughout. I much admired her.

When all the evidence and arguments were done, the judge sent us off with our instructions. We found ourselves locked in our tiny jury room again. It was a narrow space maybe 20 feet long by 10 feet wide. It was just wide enough to put a 4-foot wide, 8-foot long table in the center, and fit chairs around the table. At the hallway end of the room, there was a small 5 x 5 foot restroom. Its walls were paper-thin and nobody used it to do their business if they didn’t have to. Everyone in the jury room would hear every grunt, splash and tinkle.

We slowly walked into the room and heard the lock snick behind us as the bailiff closed the door. The mood this second time around was very sober and subdued, all that it had not been in the first phase. We just stood around looking at each other, at the walls, at our feet, but no one said anything or sat down at the table. Sitting was a sort of symbolic act that said its time to make a decision, and I don’t think any of us wanted to do that.

Our rock lady, looking as calm and composed as always moved across the room and went into the restroom. We heard the door close. To my horror, from out of the restroom came the most heart rending, painful sobbing I have ever heard. It wasn’t a wail, so much as a loud moaning with gasping pauses as she tried to get her breath and emotions under control, only to start in again. Our rock had lost it.

It was more than distressing. I thought I was going to vomit.

It took her five minutes or so to get back in control and the sobbing to cease. A few moments later, we could hear the water running. A few moments after that, she came out of the room, looking as composed and in control as always, if a little red and puffy around the eyes. She stepped up to the table, apologized for upsetting us, and then pulled out a chair and sat down. The rest of us stood a moment longer, and then we all sat.

So began our decision to kill a man.

The Miracle of Facebook

2010-07-17T18:02:00.001-07:00

Lately, I am reacquainting with the people of my youth: classmates, mostly. It is the miracle of Facebook.

I have to confess that I have forgotten more names than I can remember. When I get that email that says, “So and so wants to be your friend,” I often have to pause long and think hard. Just who was so and so and do I know him or her? The sad fact is, often as not, I do not remember. I have always been terrible with names. I think I have a microscopic black hole that lives in my brain, at the spot where names of people are supposed to go.

I graduated from high school in 1972. That was 38 years ago. A few years back I attended our 35th class reunion. I had not attended a reunion since our 10th. At the 35th, I once again met Diana Rainwater, nee MacBurnett, arguably one of the prettiest girls in our graduating class, and still one of the prettiest women of her age (you can thank me later Diana if you happen to read this). She kept staring at me as a group of us sat around a table and talked. Finally, she said, “Who are you and what have you done with the Mike Wilson I knew?” She seemed perfectly serious.

Indeed, they voted me the “Most Changed” at the reunion. No one knew who I was until introduced, and then, like Diana, they would wear this look of puzzlement whenever interacting with me. Diana, Myrna, Greg, Tony, Lee, and all the others did not seem all that much changed to me. They were older, of course, and showed all those signs but were still essentially the same identifiable people as when we went to school. Somehow, I am not.

The point here is not that I am transformed. This is not the existentialist rambling from the aged and infirm. The fact is I got fat, gray, and lost the Coke bottle glasses through Lasik surgery. No wonder no one recognizes me.

Rather, the point is that Facebook is a convenient way to get in touch with people you did not intend to be in touch with when it required an ounce more effort.

Pretty harsh words, yes?

Let’s face it, not one of those people who want me to be Facebook friends now ever tried to hook up with me before Facebook. Moreover, while we are being brutally honest, I did not try to hook up with them either. All of those who stayed in the old hometown kept in touch with each other. However, those of us who left and went beyond the vale, (cute pun don’t you think) we were pretty much cut off.

This is not a criticism or a complaint. We have all moved on since high school in one way or another. We have had new friends, spouses, children, in some cases grandchildren. We have known love and hate, success and failure, joy and despair. We did some things of which we are not so proud. We did some other good things that many would not think us capable of doing, either for skill or intelligence or depth of compassion.

We all heard the same speech at graduation that had, as its theme, “this is just the beginning of our lives…”

It was true.

I keep accepting those invitations to “be friends” on Facebook. I do not think they are bad things. I think well of the people who want to become reacquainted with me. I am grateful that they still do.

Frankly, I would not have tried to track down me if I were they. I was not a particularly nice person, as I remember me, way back then. I like to think that, in this category at least, I am the “Most Changed.”

So if Facebook made it just enough easier to reacquaint, and perhaps rehabilitate, then perhaps it is, after all, a “miracle”.

It's Called Art for Crying Out Loud!

2010-07-10T07:14:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I've ranted. The truth is, I'm sort of disgusted with the world, and especially the US, right now. It's simply better for me to shut up than try to make sense of myself. Of course, there are those who say that is impossible at any time. Oh well.

Instead, I propose to go back to poetry for this session. I wrote a little thing I call the Biker's Sonnet. For those of you who have read Shakespeare you will recognize the theme. For those of you who slept through their English classes, I have reprised the original Shakespeare Sonnet below, followed by my version.

Here is Shakespeare's:

Sonnet 130

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

And here's mine:

A Biker’s Sonnet: My Old Lady

My old lady sure ain’t no movie star.
She squints from looking into too much sun.
Her boobs sag over a c-section scar.
A sway backed old horse, she’s almost done.
She’s more miles in wrinkles than most got skin.
What hair she’s got is dyed blondish yuck,
It don’t match her complexion: red as sin.
Tummy? Hell, her whole body needs a tuck.
Finger nailed chalkboard sounds like her voice.
Her breath smells of old cigs and stale skunk beer.
Comes down to sense she won’t make the right choice.
But let me tell you what I love in her:
She’s never a bitch; she’s good in the sack;
She’s Mom to my kids; she rides at my back.

Composition 101

2010-06-11T05:47:00.001-07:00

For those of you who went to college, unless you were some sort of wonder child, you had to take a freshman composition class. It was hell. I never realized there were so many grammar rules, syntax constructions, parts of speech, and punctuation guidelines they never taught me in high school, or maybe they did and I just did not pay attention (but I don’t think they did). Today I still fight the problem that the way I talk should not be the way I write.

Somehow I muddled through, and even ended up teaching English in high school for a few years, before they fired me on a trumped up “reduction in force” scheme. The truth was I made the mistake of taking on the superintendant, otherwise known as Boss Hogg of Grant County, over a contract dispute. The dispute was we had a contract for the district to pay me to coach baseball and he was not paying. My big mistake was to think I ought to be paid, and so I took him on and won. The next year, even after they offered and I signed a tenured contract, I found myself “laid off.”

All things considered, they did me a favor, because I hated teaching. Not only was I not very good at it but I had utter contempt for the people who ran the schools and the fraud they were perpetrating on the trusting public in general. Trust me when I tell you that paying for our public schools is like buying penny stocks; you can invest billions but will only get back pennies in return.

Parents in our society are as much to blame as the many ticks and leaches that are educators and administrators in our public school systems. For too many parents, school is the place they can send their children for up to 12 hours a day (if the kid plays sports) and not have to be bothered by actually raising the child themselves. To be fair, many mothers and fathers both work in jobs and careers; they need to work to support the family at some subsistence level to which they have become accustomed or aspire. They cannot work and at the same time be at home to raise and school their children. On the other hand, it becomes very convenient to put the kid on the bus, or drop him at the front door of the school, and let the teachers and administrators deal with him all day. Raising a child is hard work that lasts 24 hours a day for about 18 years. Far too many parents duck as much of this time as they can by dumping it onto the schools. We have the most expensive childcare system in the world.

Rich folks do it, too, by sending their kids to private and military schools. Somehow, though, they seem to demand and get a better return on their investment in most cases. Not so in public schools. My first father in law was an English teacher for several decades following his stint in WWII. I know he had a poor opinion of most of his fellow teachers and the schools in which he taught. He told me once that smart students learned in spite of everything that schools did to hinder them, while all the others who were not so smart were just grist for the mill.

I must take a second here to be fair and acknowledge that there are a large number of good, caring and effective teachers. It is easy in any school to single out one or two that are clearly incompetent or ineffective or simply gave up. Once you get past plucking these low hanging rotten fruit, however, it becomes much more difficult to say that the majority of the teachers are no good. What make our schools so bad are the way the entire system is set up and the attitudes of the people running them.

Blame, if you must, all of the 20th century education theorists, who could not have done a worse job of getting it all wrong. Also, blame our society to the extent that we want the schools to raise our kids, but we do not really want them to discipline them or even hold them accountable. Who wants to see their precious Johnny told he is a failure, even if Johnny is a lazy drug saturated loser? That is the point: nobody is allowed to admit and treat Johnny for what he really is, so we all pretend that something else is the cause. Naturally, the teachers do not want to have their salaries and performance ratings tied to Johnny’s success on tests. So now, we have this vicious little closed loop going where failure breeds failure that causes yet more failure, but everyone involved is calling it success.

Our school systems are a reflection of a more far spread and insipid problem. We do not want to hold people responsible for their own success or failure. We, and I mean a large portion of our society, don’t like the idea that some people will fail, or have miserable lives, or live in poverty, or be unhappy because they just cannot compete very well. We have begun to think that competition is bad. We do not like the idea that a person fails because he does not have the ability. We do not like the idea that a fellow achieves little or nothing because he does not have the intelligence, cleverness, skill, willingness to work hard or accept responsibility for his own results. Rather, many have started thinking that the fault is competition itself. It is the cause of unhappiness and lack of success. If there were no competition, no one would fail! Progressives and liberals love this idea.

Our geniuses in charge of the education system of this country truly believe that competition is bad. Except for sports, of course. Sport is the only place where our students should compete. Indeed, we substitute all that intellectual competition with athletic endeavors. That is so because, and you will love this part, sports are optional! If you do not want to play sports because you are uncoordinated, unskilled, clumsy, slow, fat, or lazy, then you do not have to do so. The competition of sports is, in other words, completely voluntary. The individual can opt out of sports and so opt out of the competition.

But real life? Hey, nobody can opt out of that. Therefore, we have to make it fair for all, which means we have to eliminate competition in all those things that we cannot opt out of, like going to school and getting grades. Life, you see, is not voluntary, not like sports, right?

Our public schools and our leading educational theorists have been going down this path for decades. I don’t want to beat this horse anymore, lest it die, but you can take my word for it that this is the basic philosophy of our school systems in America today. Just as importantly, it is proving quite convenient for the educators and administrators, too. Why do you think they are so fired up against standards testing and having their appraisals and pay tied to student results? It is not just that they are afraid of what Johnny’s results will do to them. Rather, they do not want to have to compete with each other for their salaries like the rest of us in America do.

Enough.

For the last 8 years or so I have been slowly teaching myself basic computer programming. Frankly, I am a hack, and probably do not have any skill at all. However, I have learned how to write Visual Basic for Applications code for Microsoft Excel, Word and Access. I created and currently administer several large databases that are independent applications in their own right. I’m not saying they would stand up to close scrutiny by real programmers, but they are in use by a couple of hundred people, have saved hundreds of thousands of dollars, provide something that was not available before their creation, eased the work load of many, and function just fine. I am a little proud of them.

The thing about writing programming code is that it will not allow a single error. Get one comma wrong and it will not run. Misspell a single word and it will crash. Substitute a parenthesis for a bracket and it goes into an endless loop and you cannot make it stop short of turning the computer off. Think about that. Every bit of syntax, grammar, spelling and punctuation must be perfect. You cannot make a single error, or it will not work. How many syntax, punctuation, grammar or spelling errors have I committed in this rant so far? If the same sort of software programming standard were applied in my college freshmen composition class, I would have failed. I probably still would.

In programming the first hurdle you have to pass (I have never taken a class, but I bet this is the way it goes) is your code must run and it must produce what it is supposed to produce. In the most basic example, used in all the beginning books I have read, the output should read, “Hello, World!” If it says “Hell Whorl”, you failed. If nothing showed up on the screen, you really blew it!

Once you get to the “Hello, World!” part, then we need to look to see if you got there in the most efficient way possible. This is where I would fail if an expert looked at my code. I am likely to take 12 lines to do something that can be done in three. In terms of CPU cycles, memory usage, and so on, three lines is much better than 12. If it were a football game, my team would lose with the score 27 to 7 in favor of a real programmer. In the real world, CPU cycles and memory usage cost money. Big money. Good programmers, the ones who can write the most efficient code, are highly sought after.

Wow. Amazing how that ugly competition thing just reared its head.

We have all read about those kids who can hack a video game, or the school network system, or their cell phone. They can write amazing software for all sorts of things, some vicious like viruses that shut down the planet and others that are improvements on the originals. My son went to school and was friends with several kids who could do this stuff.

The thing is, they did not gain this knowledge or learn these skills in any class they ever took in public school. Instead, they taught themselves and each other. My first father in law was right: they did this in spite of the school. I wonder how well these kids are going to do in real life. I like their chances.

The Unperfect Game Redux

2010-06-03T04:51:00.000-07:00

As I wrote last night immediately following the game, I was angry. Me and millions of others, too, no doubt.

As history making as the blown call will be, I think I am almost as surprised by the events reported after the game. It appears that the umpire who blew the call was genuinely upset once he saw the replays. He agreed, on the record, that he got it wrong. He even asked permission of the team to talk to the pitcher, Gallaraga, which he did and apologized to him for his mistake.

I don't think I can ever remember a major league umpire admitting a mistake, much less apologizing to the player affected by it.

As I wrote last night, the umpire—his last name is Joyce—will go down in history as the man who stole the perfect game. One hopes that history will also recall that he was a big enough man to admit the error immediately and to appear to the reporters to be distraught about it.

Yankees manager, Joe Girardi, suggested that perhaps the league should look at the play and reverse the call. The effect would be to reinstate the perfect game. His point is that it would not affect the outcome of the game, but would be the right thing to do. It would mean that the 28th and next batter, Trevor Crowe, who grounded out, would lose his official at bat, which I suspect he would be most happy to pretend never happened. However, Jason Donald, who was called safe at first was credited with a hit, and that would be turned into an out; statistically he would be hurt by the reversal since it would lower his batting average as opposed to it being raised by the call.

I’m not sure how I feel about this suggestion. Part of me says the league should do it. Gallaraga earned it and deserves it. Donald should be out and not have credit for a hit he didn't earn. On the other hand, I’m not a big fan of rewriting history. As the saying goes, what is done is done.

No matter what, there are going to be asterisks all over this game.

The Unperfect Game

2010-06-02T18:32:00.000-07:00

This is just a quick post. It relates to my first post on this blog about using instant replay to verify, and in some cases, replace umpires and referees.

Armando Galarraga just pitched a perfect game. 27 up and 27 down. Except that an umpire robbed him of it by calling the 27th batter safe at first when that batter, according to all the replay angles, was clearly out. What a crock of shit!

I watched the game live and saw it all go down in real time. I was a baseball player in my younger years, and even did some umpire work. I know that the speed of the game and even the pop-pop of the play at first can be hard to call. But, this wasn't hard. The ump just blew it. Period.

I don't want to sound like a conspiracy nut, or anything like that. But, as I watched the coaches and players of the Tigers arguing the call, I thought I saw a look on the face of the umpire that said,"I am the law. I am never wrong. You have no right to question me."

Of course, all of America is going to question him. And, anyone who watches the replays will conclude that he flat blew it. He did.

Naturally, many of those who comment will question the umpire's integrity. There will inevitably be questions about his stake in the outcome, or, much worse, his own ego demanding that he break up what would be only the 21st perfect game in the entire history of major league baseball, or a span of more than 100 years. The question many will ask is did he think he was more important than history in the making, and, even if it meant that he had to make a bad call, at least he would get the attention and not some hot shot young pitcher. "Take that youngster! You think you're so all that, well now you know differently."

The worst part of the whole ordeal is that if baseball had a replay system in place, they could have corrected this terrible, back asswards, ego induced call.

Still, I have to feel sorry, a little bit, for the umpire. He is going to go down into baseball history as the ump who blew the perfect game. I thought I heard that he had been doing umpiring in the majors for 20 years. Well, guess what, no one is going to remember him for the 20 years he got the calls right, if he ever did. They are going to remember him as the guy who got the one call that made history wrong.

If the attitude I thought I saw on his face afterward is correct, he deserves all the villification he's going to get. Umpires are like judges. Once you put them above everyone else, and make their calls final, they pretty much better be perfect, or else.

A Letter to My Nephew

2010-06-01T13:24:00.000-07:00

Several years ago my nephew, who was in the Army Reserves, was being deployed to Afghanistan. I couldn't make the trip from Ohio to Oregon to attend his going away party. They asked me if I could write up some memory that he might take with him instead. I did that very thing. I was thinking about it the other day, and thought you might find it entertaining. So here is the "memory" I wrote for my nephew David.

I’m not sure what you write to a man who is about to go off to a foreign land to serve his country in war. I suppose the obvious thing to say is keep your head down and do the right thing. But, what sort of memories can I supply that lends support to this idea? There is one that I still enjoy remembering.

I remember a boy of 11 or so sitting in a boat with his father and uncle (me) as his grandfather steered them down the Owyhee river near Leslie Gulch. We were headed to the next canyon to hunt for chukars, a wild partridge that lives in the desert hills. The boy was clutching his first .22, a Marlin tube magazine semi-automatic rifle, watching the ridges and hillsides carefully for the chance to shoot at something meaningful. At his side was his younger sister nagging him about anything and everything that came to mind, as she was often wont to do.

As the boat came around a bend, would you believe two coyotes appeared on the long, steep sloping mountainside at least a hundred yards or more away. They paused to watch the boat go by.

For some reason, call it the instinct of the wild, suddenly these coyotes must have realized they were looking at a killer on the river. They both turned and ran diagonally upslope in the same direction the boat was traveling, their hind feet coming up past their ears in their haste. Our lad, finally finding something useful and heroic to shoot at, filled the air with lead. As the bullets hit the hillside, dust flew up all around the two galloping creatures. Those little clouds of dust chased those coyotes for a long way up that slope.

He ran out of bullets 18 shots later and could only stare as the two beasts became tiny specks far up the mountain. His grandfather, father and uncle roared great shouts of approval and exclamations of delight at the show. They praised his prowess and the good shooting that surely had put a lifetime of fright into those two wily creatures.

His sister, once all had calmed down, offered how he might actually have hit one of the coyotes had he only aimed a little better.

Personally, I like that he didn’t shoot one of those coyotes, since the story would not be nearly as much fun if he had. On the other hand, that young boy was ready and willing when the chance offered, and I can’t think of a better testimony than that for what he is soon embarking to do in Afghanistan. But, if in this new adventure he should be faced with a similar circumstance, I’m with his sister: aim better.

Uncle Mike

The Opposites of New Orleans

2010-05-28T10:41:00.000-07:00

What is it about Louisiana and New Orleans in particular?

Hurricanes and oil spills enough to throw hundreds of billions down a hole with no result. Massive corruption at all levels. Government failures enough to fill volumes. Vice, poor, one of the most uneducated populaces in the nation and perhaps the most indolent by many standards. What a hole!

Mardi Gras, jazz, food and cooking out of this world, beauty, love of life, culture and party, party, party. What a place to be for fun!

Do we only get the one because of the other? Is the cost of all that makes New Orleans marvelous that which makes it backward and embarrassing?

Is there some sort of karmic balance at work here?

One of the great themes of literature and art is the relationship of light and dark, good and evil, wrong and right. How do we know what is good if we don’t know what is also bad. Can we appreciate light if we never know dark? It seems the basic opposites cannot exist without each other. There is no up if there is no down.

Opposites attract because they give meaning and value to each other. It is no less true in science and the physical laws. There is no one if there is no minus one. Positive electrical current flows to the negative. High pressure moves to low pressure. Indeed, the gas laws are mostly a description of matter interacting with vacuum, arguably the ultimate opposites.

If this existence of opposites is at work in New Orleans, then that should give us pause for apocalyptic reflection.

Consider that when one and minus one do come together, they add up to zero, nothing. When positive current makes it to the negative, the current dies. High pressure will flow to low until they equalize and there is no difference between them; the concepts of high and low have no meaning any longer.

Left alone, should we expect that eventually the opposites that are New Orleans will negate each other, and it will cease to be?

The only way to prevent high pressure from negating low, and vice versa, is to keep injecting energy into the system. Energy tips the balance to one side or the other and the concepts of high and low continue to have meaning and existence.

So aren’t we doing the same thing in New Orleans? So long as the rest of us are willing to pour energy into the place, whether that is tourist dollars, federal relief, or a pass on the rampant criminality and corruption, we keep the balance uneven. But what if we didn’t pour energy into it? Many folks after the Katrina debacle suggested we ought to let the place go back to the ocean. After all, much of the town is below sea level, and only continued energy inputs in the form of levees, dikes and pumps keep the place dry.

If we refused to inject energy into the place anymore what would happen. Would all of its opposites attract each other into balance, until finally it turned into a sort of Omaha, Louisiana?

The Road's Song

2010-05-07T16:56:00.000-07:00

I'm in the mood for a little poetry. This is a little motorcycle poem I wrote a year or so ago. Revisting it, I find that I like it. I wasn't so sure back when I wrote it, but it's grown on me. I hope you enjoy it.

A lonely road is singing to me.
I hear it whispering in breathy air,
A song for my need, to set passion free,
Seducing, telling me to have no care
For home or for kin or all I hold dear.
Her song squirms into me, twisting my soul,
I cannot resist in spite of my fear,
She’s pulling me onto her siren’s shoal.

Abandon all! Ride to her beckoning!
Her call is like hearing a lover’s moan.
I care not the price, or the reckoning,
I ride! I take her! I make her my own!
I follow the sweep of her rounded curves,
Her lines rise and fall in sensuous ways,
The feel of her beneath me tingling nerves
To such joy! I’m soon lost, can’t count the days.

She goes on forever in front of me,
Tireless lover, a giver of bliss.
The engine and I roar in ecstasy,
The road screams right back at the tires’ long kiss.
We are entwined my lover and I,
Writhing this way and that, left and then right,
Up and down, until I think we must try
To soar above earth in climactic flight!

Even the hardest must rest from her song,
No mortal can stand the withering lust,
Can take the passion for only so long,
Not forever ride, else turn into dust.
No, I must stop and take stock of my mind,
Feed my poor body and my soul besides,
Walk on my feet; stand still until I find
Some peace from the road’s all consuming ride.

I no longer hear the road’s siren song
Where once it would not get out of my head.
Will there be a home? I was gone so long.
The way I just left, they must think me dead.
So I wake up and am sick to the bone.
Since my madness began, life’s been a blur.
The road no longer sings; I feel alone.
I turn my bike home in hope of a cure.

The ride home is slow, but as I draw near,
I sense a sweet song just tickling my ear.

Down and Out

2010-05-03T08:45:00.000-07:00

I’ve been down and out the last couple of weeks with a vicious cold. My wife says I’m a big baby, and maybe so. It’s a nasty disease that I just can’t shake. You know the kind. It starts with sneezing, watery eyes, aches and then fever followed by chills and then fever again. Walking up the stairs to bed wears me out. As the sniffles and sneezes receded, it moved into the lungs. I find myself wheezing so loudly it wakes me up and then I cough like a 3-pack a day smoker.

It all started with a quick turnaround trip to LA three weeks ago. Fly on Tuesday morning, meeting all day Wednesday, fly back Thursday. Whenever I make this trip, I get sick within a few days of coming back. I have always suspected that it’s all that time I spend on the airplane, 6 hours or more each way, cooped up with people breathing their germs into the recirculating air. As it turns out, my suspicion is half-right.

I also suffer from a condition in my eyes called blephiritis. My eyelids dry out and, because I blink funny and have a low amount of tears, infection gets into the lids and dead cells pile up in the lower part of my eye. Then the eyes go into tear overdrive, and it looks like I’m constantly weeping. Worse, if feels like I have sand in my eyes all the time. Along with my cold, the blephiritis kicked in, and so I’m suffering from a double whammy.

I went to my OD yesterday, and when he saw me coming in, tears running down my face and red swollen eyelids, he just shook his head and started filling out prescriptions. Would you believe a 5ml bottle of drops cost $97? True. And it is worth every nickel.

I told him my theory of why I get a cold after every trip to LA. He confirmed it, but said the real cause was the low humidity in the air on the plane. He said that the humidity is around 0%, and the air is constantly moving and this has the effect of super drying my eyes, as well as the mucus membranes in the nose and sinuses. He said this mucus is what catches most germs and prevents them from entering the body itself. When the mucus dries up, the germs get in. That’s why I got a cold every time I fly to LA. It’s also what kick started my blephiritis.

There’s a bit of pun in the title of this rant. Orwell wrote a novel called Down and Out in Paris and London. It was something of a fictionalized autobiography about his time as a homeless and destitute young man in those two cities. From it, we have adapted the phrase “down and out” to describe a situation when a person has fallen on hard times or is out of luck. Often you will hear it said that a person is down and out in LA, or down and out in Las Vegas. I guess I am down and out because of LA. Poor pitiable me.

In any event, we might all be down and out in America.

I read an on-line news report the other day about the nine alleged militia members in Michigan. The story was about their bail hearings. This is not their trial, but just their attempt to be released on bail pending a trial, something they give to many people charged with violent crimes all the time. Interestingly, the FBI official who testified was reported in the AP story to have been less than persuasive, not in command of many facts and unable to answer many questions. In fact, U.S. District Judge Victoria Roberts, who was hearing the arguments, said of the FBI official, "I share the frustrations of the defense team ... that she doesn't know anything."

The government has made an accusation that these nine were plotting to kill police officers and government officials. They had not actually hurt anyone; they just talked about it. Apparently, they did this talking in the hearing of an FBI Informant. We all know just how honest, forthright, and reliable FBI informants tend to be, too, don’t we? The government certainly has not proved the charges, let alone even tried them. As we have seen, so far the only official testimony given by the government appears to have been less than convincing.

Because it was an AP web story, readers can post their comments in a blog like section of the story. I must say that nearly all the comments disturbed me greatly. Almost every commentator assumes the nine are guilty. Many sound willing to immediately punish them—you know, let’s just hang them from the first tall tree and save all the trouble of a trial. Repeatedly in the posts were statements like, “lock them up and throw away the key”, “shoot them like the terrorists they are”, “try them then fry them”, and so on. Readers accused them of being everything from racists to conservative Christians to in-bred hillbillies as though calling them names leads to a foregone conclusion about their guilt. It brought to mind the peasant mob with torches and pitchforks on their way to kill Frankenstein’s monster, or the drunken mob of cowboys getting ready to storm the jail to lynch a prisoner inside.

I will bet my next paycheck that nearly every one of these commentators, the ones who are already convinced these nine are guilty and who are making the most provocative negative statements and name calling, are liberals and democrats. Anybody want to take the bet?

Here comes the irony and why we are down an out.

So, we have a bunch of liberals and democrats demanding the heads of nine white militia guys in Michigan on the accusation of some undercover FBI informant that they were plotting to do bad things. Yet, our President is friends with William Ayers, a man who not only plotted to do the exact same things, but also actually did them. Where is the outcry for justice from the same people?

It is not my intent to go off on an anti-left, anti-Obama rant. Others are doing that quite often and vociferously enough. Rather, the sheer magnitude of the hypocrisy is what strikes me so hard. Many on the left are calling these nine Michigan men “terrorists” and demanding they be treated as such. These same folks on the left are adamantly opposed to most of the things that we should be doing against the real terrorists from the Middle East. Apparently it is okay to do these things if the terrorist is a member of some sort of American militia but not if they are a Muslim?

I’m going to stop now before I get too wound up and go back to feeling sorry for myself with my miserable cold.

The Sin of Inconvenience

2010-04-10T08:06:00.000-07:00

It has occurred to me over the last several years that we have come to measure our social interactions with strangers based on whether and how much they inconvenience us. We have come to think that being inconvenienced by another is among the worst of victimizations. One who inconveniences commits a grievous violation against his fellows. Such a one commits the Sin of Inconvenience.

Look at how we react to the guy who sits through half the duration of a green light because he is giving more attention to the conversation on his cell phone. He only drives after we honk long and vigorously at him.

What about the person in line at the cash register who pulls out a checkbook to pay for his groceries? Worse, he does not even start to fill it out until the total is rung up! A checkbook? Who uses one of those these days? Hey, buddy, haven’t you heard about this new contraption called a debit card?

How about the little old lady who wants to pay in cash and insists on giving exact change, and then rifles endlessly through a bottomless purse in search of those two pennies. Lady, just give them an extra dollar and put the change in that giant purse of yours. At the end of a year, you can empty it all out on the floor and find at least $50 in spare change.

By now, you are probably chuckling and thinking to yourself of any number of other examples. You are chuckling because you have been in that grocery store line and had those same thoughts. It is funny now because, in part, you are laughing at yourself for your own hypersensitivity and lack of patience. Yet, you were not laughing at the time these situations occurred. There was nothing funny about how you felt then.

Quick, which is worse?

• Someone who cuts in line at the movie theatre, or
• Someone who cheats on his sales taxes by not declaring his Internet purchases?

Before you answer this question, answer two more:

• Have you paid all of your owed sales taxes?
• Do you cut in line at the movie theatre?

I’ll bet the answer to both of the second set of questions is NO you didn’t declare your internet purchases and NO you don’t cut in line. Which means that your answer to the first set of questions is that the line jumper is worse than the tax cheat.

In your heart of hearts, I will bet you despise the line cutter with a deeper passion than anything you feel for the sales tax evader. After all, there are many forgivable reasons for not paying the State the tax you owe, right? The state will just waste the money anyway. Moreover, why don’t the rich pay more so you do not have to come up with the difference? Maybe you didn’t even know you were supposed to declare your mail order and Internet purchases. Sure, I might even believe that last one; however, I’m not in the market right now for buying any bridges.

Part of the reason the line jumper bothers us so much is the same reason we are bothered by all the other forms of inconvenience. What makes us angry is the line jumper appears to be thinking only of himself without regard to the inconvenience he is causing to the rest of us. The fellow at the stoplight and the lady looking for the pennies have slowed us down for their own personal and probably selfish reasons. With a little care or forethought, they could avoid taking more time for themselves than is needful and thus not take some of our time in the process.

Another reason we dislike “inconveniencers” is that often they seem to think they are more important or deserving than the rest of us. The line jumper is a particularly odious example. We despise him because the act is so personal. When he cuts in front of us, he is placing himself before us in importance. He is taking something he has not earned. He is taking something that belongs to us. He knows he is doing something wrong. He is being purposely rude, greedy, and self absorbed and does not care. It’s like armed robbery. The thief knows he is doing wrong and causing harm in the process, but does it anyway.

I have always loved irony, and there is irony in spades in this whole inconvenience thing. The very thing that makes us so incensed when others are inconsiderate of us is the same thing that makes us so inconsiderate of others ourselves. I think most of us secretly believe that our time is more important than anyone else’s time. So when we take a few extra moments for ourselves, we are not actually inconveniencing anyone, we are simply exercising out right to spend our time as we think fit.

Let me illustrate.

Want to experience road rage first hand, maybe be shot at? Just pick any major city in the US where many of the people get around by car on the freeways. Los Angeles, Indianapolis, Atlanta, most cities will do. Now, while on the freeway, drive the speed limit in the left lane, not a mile per hour faster or slower. You are guaranteed to make dozens if not hundreds of people thoroughly, and possibly in some cases, murderously angry with you. Go ahead. Do it. I dare you.

But what did you really do? Nothing but slow them down just a little. The difference in going 20 miles at 60 mph compared to going 20 miles at 75 mph is four minutes. Four! Yet, some people are literally willing to shoot you over those four minutes. Many of those same folks, who called you vile names while giving you a single fingered salute as they blew by on the right, will spend four minutes watching commercials in the first 15 minutes of their favorite inane reality TV show later that night.

What justifies it to them is their belief that they have the right to choose how to waste their four minutes today, and their further belief that you do not have the right to choose it for them. If they decide not to waste their four minutes by obeying the law, well, that’s their right. Really, the law can be so inconvenient sometimes.

In today’s rush-rush, time sparse world, we begin to think that these little inconveniences add up to significant chunks of our too short day. We do not like giving our time up to others. We especially do not like the thought that our wait was longer so that someone else’s wait could be shorter, or so they could indulge themselves in activities for which we see no benefit.

A friend of mine sums up the whole idea in an odd and somewhat radical way. He says that every person has so much finite time on this earth. If you die young, you have less time. If you live to be 100, you have more time. In the end, we all have a set amount of time that is just our own. So, says my friend, whenever someone wastes his time, he is being partially murdered. To him, that person on the freeway who wasted four minutes of his finite living time has murdered four minutes of his life.

As he told me this, I laughed. How extreme is that I asked myself.

Yet, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that he had a point. That is exactly how we see it, even if we don’t put it in such stark terms. I do have only so much time to live. Whenever someone else forces me to give up my time to something for which I did not want to give it, well, I have lost that time forever and cannot get it back. I might as well be dead for that amount of time.

Well, maybe not.

Let’s look at this inconvenience thing from another perspective for a moment.

I usually work at home. I generally do not answer the home telephone at all. In fact, in my home office the telephone has the ringer turned off. I only use it for outgoing calls that I make. To me, a ringing telephone is an annoying inconvenience.

Do you think me odd in my aversion to the telephone? Let me go out on a limb here and say that most of us secretly dislike the telephone so much that we consider it a major inconvenience in our lives. This seems a strange statement given our national addiction to cell phones.

Don’t believe me? Then tell me, why is Caller ID so popular? Why did we urge Congress to enact the Telemarketing and Consumer Fraud and Abuse Prevention Act, signed into law in 1994 by President Clinton, which created the National Do Not Call Registry and made it a Federal Crime to telemarket to a phone number on that list? Millions have registered their telephone numbers.

The problem with telemarketers is that once they get you on the phone, you cannot get them off without being rude. I think it is hard for most of us knowingly to be rude. It is easy to be rude when you are not thinking about it, but most of us have to work hard at being rude on purpose. I think the reason we don’t like being telemarketed is that it costs us time and energy to deal with them, by either not being rude, and having to listen to the entire sales pitch, or being rude to cut the call short. We spend more energy than we plan on or want to when they call. Of course, there is also all that time they took from us.

My partially murdered friend might quibble that it is all about time, but I think energy and time amount to the same thing for most of us in the end.

Is that all inconvenience is? Is it just about stealing my time or forcing me to expend my energy without my consent? I’m not so sure I like this concept of my life being bits of time and energy that I control and bits that others take from me. Something is just not right with that model of the world.

Let’s go back to the guy on the cell phone that made us sit through most of a green light. That is bad, talking on your cell when you should be driving, right? Not only is he wasting our time, but also the first priority of any driver is to pay attention to the road. Driver inattention hurts and even kills others quite often, and cell phone use is a major cause of that inattention. Of course, we assume it was something unimportant like calling his girlfriend that he just left 5 minutes ago so he can tell her what a great night he had.

What if the call was to tell him that his mother had just died? Could we forgive him for not paying attention to the green light if that were the case? Is that an acceptable waste of our time?

What about the little old lady looking for the pennies? What if she does not have the extra dollar and really needed to find those two pennies because she does not have any more money for the rest of the month because her social security check will not stretch that far? Is our inconvenience more important that her needs?

We can see there are indeed circumstances when others needs outweigh our inconvenience.

There is a real danger in thinking our time as the only important time, and we should never have to give any of it up without our consent. I believe that sort of thinking ultimately leads to a complete breakdown in society. Life has to be about compromise: I will give a little of my time, if you will give a little of yours.

It also has to be about courtesy, which has to cut both ways. I will be courteous to you by trying not to inconvenience you, and you will be courteous to me by understanding that I am also entitled to my own convenience though it may be at the expense of yours.

Compromise is so hard, especially if I am supposed to trust that whenever you inconvenience me it is for a better reason than my own. People are often so untrustworthy. The guy on the cell phone often is just talking to his girlfriend. The lady looking for pennies often is just indulging her own self-centered oddity of behavior.

In one of his Lazarus Long novels—I forget which one it’s been so many years ago that I read it—Robert Heinlein has one of Lazarus’ daughters show up an hour late for an important family meeting. Lazarus wants to know what her excuse is. She says that she was standing in line at the spaceship station to buy a ticket to catch the flight for the meeting, when a man tried to jump the line. What happened, Lazarus inquired. The crowd seized the man, she says, and a local official immediately ordered a trial and empanelled a jury; she was selected as juror. The trial was held right there in the station, the jury listened to the evidence and, after due deliberation, found the wrong doer guilty. Because of the trial, she was obliged to miss her schedule spaceship and take a later flight. What became of the guilty line jumper, Lazarus asked. She replied that the official immediately executed him by shoving him out an airlock into space (or some such fate, as I recall). Quite rightly, Lazarus agrees, as does the rest of the family.

I cannot think of a single excuse for cutting into a line, and neither could Heinlein. Can you?

Cursing and Swearing

2010-04-04T11:55:00.000-07:00

(Some bad words here, don’t read if you get easily offended)

I suspect when most folks read the title of this rant they will assume that I am referring to the use of bad words and profanity. You know what I mean: dirty bodily functions, sexual acts of one form or another, taking the deity’s name in vain, and that sort of thing. There is irony in this, of which it is sometimes difficult for me to get enough. We will have to forego the irony for just a while, however. Patience is thy own reward, as they say, so read on.

I have a difficult time being around people who are incapable of carrying on a conversation without saying fuck in nearly every sentence. They use it as an exclamation, a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb, a preposition, and, sometimes it seems, even as a conjunction.

Oh my, I just had this memory of Sesame Street’s cartoon skit of Conjunction Junction as a clever way to explain how conjunctions join things together. The possibilities for clever repartee nearly overcame me.

Let’s get back to our friends and their limited vocabulary. Have you noticed how they are able to couple various forms of the F-word with many other words—don’t you just love puns sometimes—such as mother, butt, pig and any number of others. In the end, such people seem only capable of conveying a non-pejorative message by context and body language, the stream of profanity being nearly incomprehensible in its dearth of actual meaningful words. For lack of a better term, let’s call these folks the “Effers.”

It is not that I don’t use profanity myself. When I’m out with the guys hunting or fishing, playing golf, drinking and that sort of thing, I like to sprinkle an occasional f-bomb into my language for the added effect it gives. If used sparingly, the f-word can grab the listener’s attention or stress a point, and even express a certain delight in the subject at hand. (Gee, I can’t stop myself). My father occasionally uses cocksucker to express his poor opinion of a person. When he calls someone that, you know that he is having trouble finding any other language to express so succinctly and completely his contempt for the person. He would never refer to a woman with this word, even if he knows for certain that she performs the act regularly and with enthusiasm. I find that I adopted this little language quirk from him—perhaps it is genetic.

However, I try very hard to avoid dropping any of these language bombs when I am in public, around people I don’t know, men that I suspect don’t like hearing these words, and women (even though some of them are the worst Effers). I slip occasionally and use such language around my wife, but rarely, because she always gives me that look when I do. I think it is rude to assume that people don’t mind hearing such language. I think it is beyond rude, bordering on assault, to continuing to talk this way when it is apparent the audience is offended or disturbed by such language.

I’m all for freedom of speech. You have the right to say things that express your views, thoughts and opinions. You can even say things that you know some people would find distasteful or painful to hear. But, if all you want to do is stand in the middle of the room and in a loud voice spew words from your mouth like a toilet backing up just because you can, then you deserve a punch in that mouth to remind you which way the sewer is supposed to flow. One assault begets another, and yes, makes the second wrong right.

We could say that there are two kinds of Effers. The first are those who talk this way because they are simply ignorant and don’t know any better. They grew up in households or neighborhoods where most people around them spoke the same way. In addition, to be honest if less than kind or politically correct, these Effers are usually less intelligent and have difficulty imagining or contemplating that they could communicate in any other way. It simply never occurs to them, whereas a brighter more intelligent person recognizes there is a whole world of people out there who do talk without using these words. Just watch broadcast television for a couple of hours and you will not hear the f-bomb once, which ought to be a clue that it is possible to carry on complete conversations without using such language no matter how mindless the conversations are.

The second kind of Effer is more insidious and contemptible to my mind. These Effers know very well that there is another way to talk, but they don’t care. It is as though they are caught up in the “shock and awe” of their hard hitting, cutting edge, and colorful language. I think a lot of them are truly delighted knowing that they are making people wince, causing discomfort, or raising feelings of disgust in others. They are not so concerned with the message they are trying to convey as they are simply satisfying their own need to be the center of attention. There is a certain spoiled brat psychology at work. Go to a college campus and you will find these Effers everywhere, including some standing at the lectern. Certain movies in recent memory are so laden with Effer’s language it seems that was the whole point of the movie and the story be damned.

In the end, however, I think it is wrong to conclude that Effer’s fall into two kinds, those who don’t know any better and those who do. To my mind, and you can agree or not, they are both just stupid. The one thing that makes us unique, or at least the most advanced life form on Earth, is our ability to communicate detailed information, complex ideas and symbols to each other. Those who eschew meaningful dialog from most of their fellows by choosing to be an Effer are just obnoxious, lazy or ignorant, in a word, stupid.

The language used by the Effers, all those f-words, mf-words, c-words and the rest have lost their meaning. The words have been so over used that hardly anyone actually pictures the sex act when someone says fuck, for example. The only meaning that comes through is the intent to shock when spoken once and to create a sort of numbness when said too many times in succession, similar to a hand plunged into ice water and held there too long.

With that we come, finally, back to the irony.

The title of this rant is Cursing and Swearing. I spent a deal of time talking about the use of bad words in language, the act of people using profanity in their communication. The ironic part of all this is that the two words, forms of curse and swear, only have the meaning of pejorative language—pejorative literally means “to make worse words”—as a secondary, tertiary, or lower meaning.

In most dictionaries, the primary definition of curse is to wish ill on someone, to put a spell of magic on them, or to call God’s wrath to them. You have to get far down the list of meanings to find “execrate in fervent and often profane terms,” and that meaning has more of a religious context than one of simply using bad words.

To swear means even less the act of saying bad words than curse does. Swear primarily means to take or make an oath. We “swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth” thousands of times a day in courthouses all over the country. We also “swear to take this woman” (I can’t stop it) in thousands more weddings every day. In fact, in most dictionaries, swear meaning to use profane language is seventh or eighth down the list in importance.

Except for Effers, it seems to me that when the rest of us curse or swear often our intent is to insult. Yet, the Effers have made those insults mostly meaningless through over use of the words. So let me urge you to become more imaginative or descriptive in your intended insults.

Don’t say, “Fuck you” to the fellow you really want to wound. Instead, say something like “May you conjoin with a pederastic pediculous pustule of pusillanimous parsimony.”

Now that’s cursing.

How's Your Constitution?

2010-03-25T09:33:00.000-07:00

I wanted my blog to be about slightly weightier issues, or rather about my thoughts involving life and the universe more generally, and less about current events. I wanted to avoid that sort of blog that offers entry after entry starting with: “OMG, can you believe what they just did…” or “So and so is an Idiot/Communist/Nazi/Republican/Mean Person…”

In other words, while current events are interesting, they are so, well, current. It is hard to be reasonable and thoughtful in the passions of the immediate when one comments too currently on current events. There is something powerful and persuasive from gaining perspective through time. Therefore, I don’t want to be too current. It's not that I’m powerful or persuasive, but I can hope, right?

However, this time I am going to break my own rule.

I think we reached a milestone this week. President Obama signed the Health Reform bill into law on Monday. I certainly have my thoughts about this farce of legislation and saying that ought to tell you all you need to know about my stance on the subject.

I saw at least two different editorials, by accomplished and sophisticated writers, that talked about the Health Reform Bill in terms of “Civil War.” They meant a civil war in the sense that half the country sees an issue one way, an issue that they think is fundamental to their creed, existence, and life itself, and the other half sees it another way in the same fervent, locked in their beliefs, fundamentalist way. The writers were specifically referring to the idea of a civil war by harkening back to the 1860s when half the nation was willing to maim, kill, butcher, and devour the other half to impose its view of governing America.

This is scary!

We like to think that we are above the issues of the original American Civil War. We all learned in school that it was a war against slavery. It was, they taught us, a battle of good against evil. The North was the champion of good and the South was evil for its desire to own Negro slaves upon which its economy relied. The North could propagate this simplistic and revisionist history because it won the war.

Much greater thinkers and historians than I have told the story. I don’t presume to try to reinterpret the Civil War. Yet, it seems to me that there are so many parallels of that era to events of today that they bear comment.

Put away your Northern propaganda for a moment and consider. The South, regardless of the slavery and other issues, was primarily upset that the Federal government was trying to impose itself on what the Southern states saw as their constitutionally guaranteed sovereignty rights. Essentially, the Constitution forbids the Federal government from doing anything not specifically granted to it, and says the states may do whatever it does not grant specifically to the Feds. In other words, if the Constitution does not specifically give the Federal government authority over something, then the States have that authority if they so wish it and the Federal government may not say otherwise. The essential argument of the South was the Federal government had no authority to tell them whether they could have legalized slavery or not, because the Constitution made no mention of the subject. The South certainly had a very good point, especially considering that many of the framers of the constitution were slave owners themselves.

Some 80 years prior to the Civil War, the original 13 colonies got together and agreed to form a “Union.” They did not agree to give overarching power to a central authority, the Federal government. Far from it. They agreed to bond together, under a limiting agreement (the Constitution), to adopt certain laws in common, some basic economic restraints and taxations, some guaranteed individual rights, and so on. Remember, the States at this time literally thought of themselves as individual STATES, much the same as France, England, and Sweden were states. For lack of a better way of putting it, each of the states considered themselves individual countries in their own right. They considered themselves sovereign, and subject to no other authority except according to the limited agreements they had made in the Constitution. Think of it as a NATO of its time.

The proper way to deal with slavery was by constitutional amendment. That was never going to happen in the current situation in 1860 because it takes three fourths of the states approval, and the Southern bloc represented nearly half of the states and would not vote for such an amendment. What the North was doing, with its majorities in Congress, was requiring that new states could only join the union if they agreed to make slavery illegal in their state. If the union kept accepting only anti-slavery states it would be just a matter of time before the southern bloc represented less than a fourth of the states, and the three fourths needed to adopt the amendment would be reached. Recognizing the inevitability of that outcome, the South said, “We quit.” They wanted out of the union. It has always puzzled me why the North didn’t just say, “Fine, go.” I suppose, Lincoln and the North were not willing to let that happen, not because they wanted to save the slaves, but because they were in control of the economy and wanted to keep on with the good thing. I think just as importantly the nation was embarking on expansion across the whole of the continent and the North perceived that an independent South would be a competitor. It was all about turf. I certainly don’t buy the argument that the North was willing to kill millions in some sort of altruistic desire to preserve the nation.

I could go on for hours and hours, but the point is that when the North won the Civil War, they planted the seeds of our modern day overarching Federal government. We went from a States centric Union to a Federal centric one when Lee signed the surrender at Appomattox. Ever since then, the Federal government has hijacked one States’ right after another. In the twentieth century, the Feds used the Interstate Commerce clause of the Constitution as their principal pry bar to insinuate themselves more and more into the private lives and business of the citizens. It is also the chief justificaiton for Obamacare now. The chief architect of this movement was Franklin Roosevelt; more than any other President he turned us to the idea that the Federal government should be responsible for each individual’s welfare.

I can just hear my left wing friends (of whom I have not many) disagree and howl in righteous indignation (which is funny since they don’t believe in God or religion, but think and act so very religiously). However, I think Washington, Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, and Madison would be horrified at what the nation has become. This was not their vision, nor that of any person who took part in creating this country.

Many have come to think that it is we versus them. By that, they mean the government does not represent them, their ideals, their desires, their philosophy or beliefs. They are beginning to think that the folks running the government think of the rest of us as subjects. We are here to serve their desires, not them to serve ours. Have you heard the titles “King Barak”, “Princess Nancy”, and “Prince Harry”?

More than half the citizens of this country are opposed to Obamacare. I suspect that as many are also opposed to idea of adopting the European nanny state, and with it the increasing intrusiveness into our lives and restrictions of our personal rights. I suspect more than half the people in the country don’t think the government should be taking over and running private companies. That’s what they do in places like Cuba and Venezuela.

I think at least half the country is starting to think very much like the South thought in 1860.

If you ever travelled in the South, and mention is made of the Civil War, you immediately heard a local correct the name and call it the War of Northern Aggression. Perhaps the second civil war, if it comes to that, we will call the War of Left Wing Aggression. That will only happen if the left does not win.

Would You Believe?

2010-03-21T07:34:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite concepts I learned in college came in a class on the Science Fiction novel. The Science Fiction genre uses plausible science and technology as the vehicle for the story, and, in almost all cases, the science and/or technology does not actually exist yet.

Take, for example, Star Trek, a very popular Science Fiction franchise with a number of television series, movies, and books. The main premise of Star Trek is that a future Earth based society goes flying around the galaxy in a star ship having adventures and pondering the meaning of life. The science involves such things as faster than light warp drives, matter teleporters (Beam me up!), phasers, and other cool stuff. Much of the technology or the science behind the story may seem far out there, even though much of it has some basis in current theory.

Some of the things that seemed too weird to be possible we actually do have now 40 years after the original episodes. When Star Trek first aired in the mid 1960’s it had ubiquitous talking computers, for example. In real life at the time, computers were rare, owned only by large companies and the government, filled entire specially cooled rooms, and couldn't say a word. Today we have more computing power in our cell phones than some of the most advanced computers back then. Speaking of cell phones, aren’t they suspiciously like the communicator thing that Kirk would pull out, flip open, and say into, “Scotty, beam me up!” (I think I read somewhere that in all the original episodes, Kirk never uttered those exact words.)

I digress.

The point is, to meaningfully read and enjoy Science Fiction, and Fantasy, too, the reader has to do a thing the professor called “suspension of disbelief.” I think that’s a cool phrase. That which I am reading is generally unbelievable from a reality perspective, so I must tell myself not to disbelieve it so that I can enjoy it. Millions of folks do it every day. I think that’s why millions more don’t like Sci-Fi and Fantasy because they have a hard time convincing themselves to disbelieve.

Suspension of disbelief is a requirement for all fiction really, but more true for Sci-Fi and Fantasy than any other genre. The difference between Sci-Fi and Fantasy by the way is that Sci-Fi deals with the scientifically possible even if sometimes improbable, while Fantasy deals with the magical, which is in many ways the opposite of science. The two genres converge at some point if you accept that magic may be scientifically measurable and reproducible. For example, the Star Trek Transporter (teleporter) is science based—they can really do some interesting things similar to teleportation with quantum states now—while a wizard who casts a spell to move himself to a different continent uses magic. However, they are both the same concept and at some point one could argue that what the wizard does can be learned and reproduced, and is therefore a subject of science.

I digress again.

So what is the difference between “believing” and the “suspension of disbelief”? If you tell yourself not to disbelieve aren’t you really telling yourself to believe?

I don’t think so. I think these are two entirely different concepts.

When I suspend my disbelief, I am making a deal with myself to forget temporarily that my disbelief exists. I am not agreeing to believe that the story, the science or the magic is real. I know they are not. I am just not going to let the fact that these things aren’t real get in the way. If Kirk pulls out a phaser and zaps some alien to a puff of smoke, then by God the evil, slimy, green and lecherous villain had it coming. I still know that the phaser and the alien and even Kirk himself don’t exist, probably never will, but I just won’t let that knowledge get in the way of the story.

Believing, now that is something altogether different.

If you believe Kirk is real, or worse that Luke Skywalker is, you probably have some other serious mental and emotional deficiencies or problems. Believing needs to be reserved for reality-based concepts, logic and reason, and, if you are so inclined, your religion of choice. I believe that 2 + 3 = 5 because there is a logic and system that makes it so, and I can repeat that logic and system whenever I want. I believe the USA is the best nation to have ever existed on this Earth. I can believe that because I can offer arguments laden with abundant evidence that many will accept as reasonable and true. Some might disagree with me and have their own beliefs. Though for you to believe that 2 + 3 <> 5 requires that you be a major nut job or are applying some mathematical system to the numbers other than the one 99.999% of us use.

Where this is going is that belief should have a basis in reality and should be reasonable. That is implicit in the concept of “suspension of disbelief.” We can’t and shouldn’t believe in that which is unreasonable, such as Captain Kirk smoking the alien, and so we have to suspend our reason in order to comprehend and enjoy the bad guy getting his comeuppances.

I briefly mentioned that you should also reserve belief for your religion of choice. I know that many folks would argue that believing in an all-powerful omniscient being or worshiping Jesus, Mohammed, et al, is unreasonable. They would say there is no proof that God exists. I won’t argue the point one way or the other, except to say that one of the things that make the USA so great is that we agree that we can believe and practice whatever religion we want. The deal with religion and belief is that when you get enough people together who share your belief that gives the belief legitimacy and makes it reasonable. In fact, we can believe whatever we want about anything we want, as long as we don’t hurt others or their property in the process.

If you think that there really was a Darth Vader and Princess Leia in a galaxy far, far away a long, long time ago, fine, knock yourself out. Just don’t try to pass a law that says I have to believe it too. Still, it is unhealthy to believe in too many unreasonable things. Living in a fantasy world may make you feel good, but it’s hard to be taken seriously by the adults at the table when you do.

Speaking of fantasy and health, I wonder how many folks really believe that Obama’s current health care reform will save all of us money. How many really believe that the government can make better health decisions for us than we can make for ourselves, or that we should let it? How many believe the government should have access to our personal medical records whenever it wants?

For those of you who really do believe these things, I will find it nearly impossible to suspend my disbelief that you are not a completely whacked out delusional idiot with less than the emotional and intellectual capacity of the 5 year old who still believes in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny. If only we could have gotten you, and the rest of those like you, to go to that galaxy far, far away a long, long time ago.

Oops, I digressed again, but who cares?

South Fork Day

2010-03-14T15:26:00.001-07:00

On a lovely early summer morning in eastern Idaho, a friend and I went fly-fishing. We were intent on getting in on the hot action on the South Fork of the Snake River near the eastern border with Wyoming. Flowing out of the snow packs of the Grand Tetons, the South Fork is big, fast and cold. The report was that large, wily, killer trout were hitting ants floated near the holes that form under the banks.

We parked as close to the river as we could get without trespassing on private property. We carefully assembled our fly rods and selected among several reels, each filled with a different, but specific and, therefore, scientific choice of line designed to float just so high or so low, or sink this much or that. Then we donned our waders and fishing vests, whose pockets we filled with folding cases of flies, snippers, leaders of several weights and lengths, tweezers, floats and other essential gear. Among my hand tied flies, by the world’s foremost experts on Snake River fly-fishing and, therefore, very expensive, I had no fewer than eight varieties of simulated ants.

Just a short tumble down the bank saw us at the water’s edge. We parted; my buddy went upstream and I went down.

After a couple of hours of fruitless casting, I found myself fishing this slow but deep hole that was a backwater eddy of the main current. There was a sort of peninsula of the west bank that extended 300 feet or more downstream, so that the river eddied into this long, wide and very deep pool that was a hundred yards long and some 40 yards across at its widest point near the main flow of the river.

I was down near the end of the peninsula, where the backwater joined the river, and had waded out into the pool. The water was over my bellybutton, just an inch or so from overflowing my chest waders. I was trying to work my way just a little further in because my casts were coming up short of the west bank where it narrowed before joining the main current. I had my eye on a spot in the shade of an overhanging tree. The west bank was a near vertical cut all along the pool at this point and the only way to get close enough to the spot was from the peninsula where I was. I knew trout were hiding in the shadows of that tree, I was sure of it, but I couldn’t seem to get my fly quite close enough.

Then, as my frustration nearly reached the tipping point, and injudicious steps were actually tipping small volumes of water over the top of my waders, it happened.

A double bowed drift boat came oaring downstream and turned into the pool I was fishing. I was pissed, no other word for it. Here I was working this pool, and one of those snooty drift boat guys, who think the river was made just for them, was rowing into my spot. It was just plain rude. It was not the code of the fly-fishing west at all.

But, then it got worse.

The boat came closer and closer, until it reached a point that was just outside my fly-casting range. Now, I would like to say this was 150 feet. But, the truth is, I couldn’t cast a fly accurately more than 35 feet without it slapping the water like a 2 ton stone falling from the sky; so this boat was about 40 feet from me.

And what do I see?

A 20 something stud, with broad shoulders, designer shirt and shorts, expensive looking polarized sun glasses and the most beautiful fly rod. He was standing at one end of the boat, making brilliant, accurate, and softest-landing casts I have every seen. His placement was perfect. His hair glistened in the sunlight as his rod arced back and forth, and the line raced through his fingers before the fly lit softly like a dandelion seed on the water.

He had a cold beer in a cup holder attached to the gunwale beside him. Even at that distance I could see the glistening drops of condensation on the can. He sipped at the beer between casts.

But this is not what really grabbed my attention. Rather, it was the captain of his boat. She was a goddess.

The virginal white of her skimpy bikini was blinding, glaring as it did in the sunlight. Her full head of blond hair tumbled over her tanned shoulders and she practically glowed as I imagined an angel from heaven might glow.The brilliance of her perfect head was outdone only by the gleam of her pearl white teeth as she smiled at something witty the man said.

She rowed the boat by pressing forward with both hands, and then dipping the oars deep into the water, arching her back and shoulders just so, leaning back while triumphantly thrusting her full breasts aft, straining them against the fabric of her bikini top so that the clasps must break, and then pulling back on the oar handles, digging the blades deep in the water, which swirled and foamed as she jerked the oars towards her magnificent chest.

It was a vision like none I had ever seen.

At that moment I knew that I was looking at the single most lucky bastard I had ever seen in my life.

How else explain that he came to have this beautiful young goddess with her amplitude of oiled and barely covered rowing musculature ferry him up and down a pristine wilderness river as he flopped his fly into deep dark pools and drank cold beer the while?

It all seemed designed to prove what a miserable existence I led.

As I stood in that pool of water with occasional ice cold glops of it running over the top of my waders and soaking me to shriveled oblivion, I saw this paragon of manliness lightly toss his fly into the very spot under the over hanging aspen that I had been trying to reach with my own poor miserable casts for the last quarter hour. The tree caused him no problem of snagging, for such does not happen to the Gods when they come among us. No, his fly lit softly like a bit of fluffy down on the water. Seconds later the water boiled. He gave the rod a quick twitch to set the hook, and in 15 minutes of exhilarating and splashy mano-a-pisce combat, he landed what must have been an 8 pound rainbow trout whose side colors flashed in the sun like so many jewels set before a king.

He held the fish up for his goddess to see. She blew him a kiss with a teasing laugh, and I could tell there was a world of promise in that gesture. Then he slowly lowered the fish to the water and released it. The goddess flipped her left oar a few times and turned the boat around, and they headed back for the main current. As they passed by, he gave me a little nod. Moments later the boat was just a speck disappearing downstream.

I was so depressed I worked my back to the bank and trudged the mile and a half to the car. I stopped fishing for the day, not having caught a thing.

I never told my friend about the man in the boat. I didn’t think he would believe me. Still, I sometimes think about that day. Each time I do, I find that I am still filled with one over riding thought about that lucky man in the drift boat. My thought and hope is that the beautiful bikini blonde babe gave that bastard genital warts or something equally incurable and disfiguring.

I mean, that would be fair, wouldn’t it?

Doctors and the Cost of Health Care

2010-03-04T09:32:00.001-08:00

I was listening to talk radio on the way to the gym the other morning. No doubt many of you are surprised to read the pronoun “I” in the same sentence with gym, but it’s true nonetheless.

Anyway, talk radio. This fellow who called in posited as his basic premise that part of the issue with health care reform and why so many people were for it was that doctors make too much money. The host immediately took the caller to task and asked a series of penetrating questions. They ranged from how much is too much, to if we tell the doctor how much he can charge then shouldn’t we also tell the farmer and Dell, and on and on. The host’s point was that the free market and not some government regulatory body should dictate doctor’s fees.

Too bad for the caller, since he was semi-inarticulate and the host had the better of him. For the most part, the host was right on the money, pun intended. Of course, the host completely jumped over the caller’s point that the reason so many people are for Obama’s idea of health reform is that those same people perceive in their own minds that doctors charge too much. It doesn’t matter if they do or not, only whether the rest of us think they do or not.

But, you know, conservative free marketer that I am, I must still take issue with the host’s point and stick up for the hick, who probably really was complaining that doctor’ charge too much. They do.

Gasp! Shudder! What’s that Wilson guy drinking now?

Let’s start with the host’s point. The free market should decide the cost of health care. Great. I’m all for it. Except the free market hasn’t dictated medical pricing for the last hundred years or more. Why not?

Well, there is the big problem of the intervening player in the cost of medical care, our good friends the lawyers and courts. Part of the reason doctor’s charge so much is because their medical malpractice insurance is so expensive. It is so expensive because juries, at the urging of greedy-guts attorneys, and with the connivance of courts and tort friendly laws, all too often render runaway verdicts against the doctor. Don’t get me wrong, doctors who make mistakes should be just as liable as the rest of us are for our mistakes. Let’s also give a nod to reality, however, and agree that far too often, the awards against them are all out of proportion to the wrong they did or the duty they owed. Further, these guys and gals are not all seeing and all-knowing, and they can’t always fix everything that goes wrong with us, or that we do to ourselves. We shouldn’t hold them to some unattainable standard and then take their money away when they don’t meet it. Medical malpractice, either in the form of insurance or verdicts, is a huge driver of the cost of medical care.

On the other hand, let’s give another nod to reality that often those same juries see a very wealthy and arrogant doctor acting like God and they want to take ol’ doc down a few pegs. So part of the problem with the cost of medical malpractice forcing doctors to charge so much is that the doctors charge so much and get rich doing it. I don’t want to say it’s the chicken and egg thing (oops, I just did), but many doctors get wealthy in spite of the plaintiff’s bar.

The doctors will argue, logically and with much justification, that they spend the first 30 or more years of their lives engaged in a brutal educational environment just learning to be doctors while making barely more than subsistence wages. The education of doctors is long, tortuous, competitive in the extreme, and survived by only the brightest and most dedicated. All of this, they say, means that they should be entitled to make a lot of money once they pass successfully through the process. I know if I was a doctor I would feel that way. So would everyone else in this country, save for a few who would be saints in another time and place.

The talk show host’s strong argument related to this point in several ways. Consider Economics 101. The availability of a good relates directly to the cost of the good. Supply of the good in relation to the demand for the good determines how much the seller can charge that a buyer is willing to pay. There aren’t that many doctors because the process for becoming one limits their number. Meanwhile, there is a strong demand for their services. We all want or need a doctor from time to time. When we really need one, cost is usually not a consideration.

So, we should blame the educational system? Maybe we should blame the high standards of knowledge and intelligence we hold our doctors to have? Perhaps, but I’m not buying it.

A study published in 2005 in the Journal of the American Medical Association noted that for that year there were 67,000 medical school students in the US. The number had not changed for 10 years, being 67,000 in 1995.

This is a profession that, albeit with a grueling educational and on the job training program, tends to make most of its practitioners wealthy. In 1994, the average annual salary was regularly reported as $186,000. You will find many asterisks next to doctor salaries, however, if you Google it, and I for one think that is a PR number put out by the AMA to make it look like doctors aren’t really making so much. The qualifiers include whether the doctor works in a salaried position, such as NASA, a private company like a pharmaceutical lab, as a professor, or chucked it all 10 years ago and lives in the jungle healing
Amazonian Indians in exchange for fish out of some wealth inspired guilt complex. Other factors determining a doctor’s pay include whether he/she is the owner or partner in a private practice or clinic, his/her years of experience, specialty (spinal surgeons average salary was 1.32 million by one report I read), and others.

The point is that doctors make a lot of money and most of them get rich by the standards of the rest of us. How is it that out of 300 million people in the US, only 67,000 of them at any given time are in medical school to learn a profession that will make them rich? Shouldn’t people be pounding on the gates to be let in?

In fact they are. I read a statistic, who knows if it is accurate, that only 1 of every 100 who apply to medical school ever gets in. Part of the reason there are so few doctors is that there are so few medical schools and teaching hospitals. It would be reasonable to conclude that a whole lot of folks who could be successful doctors never get the chance. It is not that the entry requirements are so high, it is because the available slots are so few.

The same JAMA article that said there were 67,000 medical students at any given time also referenced that there were 125 LCME (Liaison Committee of Medical Education, a branch of the American Medical Association) accredited medical schools, or an average of 536 students per school. Another number I saw in another source said there were 150 medical schools. Still, that is a surprisingly small number to my way of thinking.

We could build more medical schools and teaching hospitals. If we doubled the number, all by itself that would double the number of doctors in just a few years. More doctors equals more competition equals lower doctor’s fees. Economics 101.

There is no reason to suspect that the quality of medical care would go down in this event, either. I’ll come back to this point in a bit.

The reason we don’t have more doctors is the doctors themselves. Through the American Medical Association and other political affiliations, doctors have artificially restricted their number. One of the easiest ways to do that is restrict the number of medical schools and the number of students. Keep a lid on the number of doctors in the pot at any given time keeps the demand for them high. Indeed, restricting access to their profession is one of the principle agendas of the AMA, despite all their protestations and PR to the contrary.

Others will argue that only a small number of people have the intelligence to become a doctor. Really?

Remember the numbers above, 300 million population and 67,000 medical students at any given time? That’s 0.02%, or 1 medical student for every 5,000 population. The chances of a baby being born autistic in 2005 were 35 in 5,000. For mothers under the age of 30, the chances are 5 in 5,000 that their child will be born with Down’s syndrome. For mothers aged 36, the chances of a Downs birth was almost 17 in 5,000, and that’s after many mothers abort their Downs fetus after being tested for it. Do we really believe that only 1 person in 5,000 is smart enough to go to medical school and be a doctor, yet 5 will be Down’s syndrome babies?

Remember that 1 in 100 accepted to medical school number? You might think that 99 of them just couldn’t cut the mustard. Any number of articles are available that talk about how medical schools are doing various things to increase the diversity of their students. Let’s be honest and simply admit that what we are really talking about is they want to accept more blacks and Hispanics. So, let’s take the high road and say there were all these deserving blacks and Hispanics who before were being denied the opportunity to attend medical school because of their race. So now, in our enlightened society, medical schools are atoning for their evil ways. Atonement, however, judging by the 1995 and 2005 numbers, does not include increasing the available number of medical student slots. No sir, we are only going to put more black kids into medical school by seeing to it that some white kids are not going to get in who would have previously. Are those white kids suddenly less capable or not so smart? No. All it means is that the availability is artificially restricted.

Another thing the AMA has successfully lobbied for is government controls that force up the cost of care. Here is one that caught my eye, and illustrates exactly the point I want to make.

I saw an advertisement on TV for a company that offers stroke screening. They do it by taking an ultra-sound of the major arteries. The theory is that blockage in these arteries are the chief causes of strokes. They look and if they see a blockage then you know to seek treatment to do something about it. Now, this company doesn’t offer any treatment, just the screening. However, they promise that a “board certified” physician will do the screening. The kicker for me was a little text tag at the bottom of the screen that said in effect that in Texas a Texas licensed physician must first refer you before this company could do your screening.

Why would the State of Texas require that a Texas doctor refer you to the screening that is done by a board certified doctor? The obvious answer is the screening doctor doesn’t have a Texas license, and this is one way for Texas to get their licensing fees. Still, what does the State of Texas care? It’s not as if you are going to receive any treatment or prescription drugs. All that’s going to happen is that someone will press an ultra sound wand to various places on your body and take some pictures. Your Texas doctor isn’t going to read these pictures or interpret them. Most of them aren’t trained to do that, not like the “board certified” doctors who are doing the ultrasounds. No, your doctor’s only involvement in this process is to give you permission to get your picture taken, and for that permission he charges you for the referral. See, it’s as if you’re too stupid to figure it out for yourself, so you have to get a doctor to tell you its okay.

Come on. Who’s that stupid? It’s like requiring you to pay your barber for a referral to a store so you can buy some Rogaine.

The truth is the Texas doctors got the State of Texas to enact some laws to protect their cash flow. Do you think that adds to the cost of medical care in Texas? You bet, and it happens in most other states in one way or another.

I can just hear the doctors screaming about protecting us from unscrupulous, fly by night, shysters who are going to sell us arsenic laden snake oil. (Have you ever seen an oily snake? They are quite dry in my experience.) In some cases that is undoubtedly true. But, as my example above illustrates, that is not the only reason, and in cases like this, not any part of the reason.

I like my personal physician. I think he is a square guy. Honest, personable, funny and decent. I have had great experience with just about every doctor I have had. I think we are better off with the system we have in place now, than with some of the others being proposed. Government run health care? Please, 99% of bureaucrats couldn’t stick a stapler up their ass without hiring three government employed experts to tell them how to do it, so how are they supposed to determine whether I need a prostate exam or not?

Nevertheless, come on doctors, you caused a lot of this anxiety about the cost of health care yourselves. All of your self-righteous indignation aside, the rest of us are not stupid, and we can see who are the haves and who are the have-nots. Doctors do make a lot of money, and they do it by holding us hostage to our mortality. For a lot of people, that just tastes bad.

So, do they charge “too much?”

If doctors were a Standard Oil or Microsoft what they do would be called restraint of trade, a violation of the anti-trust laws. But, they do it with the connivance of government, so there’s nothing illegal here. Yet, it does mean they are able in many cases to charge whatever they want and we are compelled to pay it, one way or another. I think when that happens it amounts to “too much.”

Wolves

2010-02-27T16:15:00.000-08:00

Curiosity may kill the cat, but it makes us Man.
How else measure our success, explain how it is we can
Create the things that make us rich, ease our burden, conquer strife,
Cure disease, travel in space, and let poets ponder life?

And that’s precisely why some say we are very wrong.
We are the scourge of our good Earth. The things that make us strong
Destroys nature, extinctions cause, we war on one another.
So vile are we, evil you see, to so harm our Mother.

See now the cow, it’s perfect how it fits with Mother Earth:
Nothing it takes, but it forsakes, and gives it back, rebirth.
For grass to live the cows all give it back those things it needs
From their shit, the nutrients to grow, so more cows can feed,

To be reborn, and more grass support, for some future herd,
All it takes is eat some grass and then drop a massive turd.
Should we like cows the grasses graze, and so with our own shit
Fertilize the grass, and be stuck in a closed loop pit?

Do cows cogitate while ruminate what causes all of it?
What do they think these cows of ours, just where do their minds sit?
On God, Life, or Mom Earth? No, it’s: Is killer wolf at bay?!
You see it’s man that from cows keeps the big bad wolf away.

And kid me not, nature’s not nice, things die for no reason
But feed some other thing in need. There is a killing season
For most every kind. They need to kill so they can live.
It’s savagery, a killing spree, let’s not excuses give.

We would not hold cows in such fine and lofty sentiment,
If domesticated them we’d not, in a niche cement.
The cows don’t care, by them its fine, if all wolves we did kill.
I have not doubt that of all cows, each wishes all wolves ill.

We eat some cows, others we keep for milk and some to breed
To make more cows, but in exchange the whole herd we will feed.
But have you seen what cows do to forest, brook and briar?
They’ll eat it clean, leave not a twig, make stream a soupy mire.

Cows are not noble, no indeed, nor are other breeds;
The elk will eat their way to death; fish don’t do good deeds
For other fish, or even us; that is a human wish:
To reach out hand, do what we can, for man and even fish.

To wish the world was pristine, denies that which makes us Man.
If all the earth was pure “Green,” with no man, so seems the plan,
Then who would cherish it, this pure Earth that so many wish?
For Man would not exist to love cow, wolf, or even fish.

Scientists

2010-02-25T17:14:00.000-08:00

I’ve been saying for years that I thought global warming was a load of BS. I would get a little passionate about it, to the point that whenever the words “global warming” came out of my mouth my family ran from room, arms flailing and screaming “No Mas! No Mas!”

Looks like I was right all along.

Just a few months ago, even the President of the United States was saying the “science is settled” and we should quit debating it and get on with fixing it. However, for years there have been these tiny little voices from out in the wilderness, relegated there for not toeing the global warming line, arguing that even if the data is accurate its interpretation to conclude that global warming is man caused and will result in horrific disaster for the planet is far from settled. Now we know that not only were the interpretations highly suspect, the key data itself is not accurate, or missing, or misrepresented, or never existed in the first place, or is the result of such awful science that the folks who promulgated it ought to have their degrees revoked.

For example, key historical warming data are drawn directly from temperatures recorded over the years at weather stations scattered around the globe. The average among those stations has gone up. Wow. What more proof do you need that the place is getting hotter? Come to find out, a large number of the old weather stations, mostly located in high cooler elevations or remote areas, were dismantled, abandoned or destroyed over the last several decades. In the 70’s there were about 6,000 such stations worldwide, now there are 1,500 or so. Canada used to have 600 or so, now they have about 35. The weather stations remaining are mostly in populated areas or near heat sources like factories and the end of jet washed runways. Any high school math student getting a C grade will be able to tell you that if you remove the cooler measurements from the average, the average temperature will go up. Duh!

There is also the whole problem about what temperatures do you average to get an average. Do you take the high temp of the day or the low one, or the median, or just what exactly? I don’t know where you live, but I’ll bet its quite a bit warmer at 3 pm than it is at 5 am, whether in the Florida Keys or the Fargo, ND. All it takes is a little fudge to the afternoon this decade versus some other method last decade and, “My, is it hot in here?”

It is almost amusing watching all the “warmists” scrambling to explain how even though there are suddenly all these problems with so much of the data, or lack of it, upon which the global warming theories hinged, that doesn’t mean that global warming isn’t true. Those who have read my piece on Dan Rather and the forged Bush National Guard documents will appreciate the irony when I remind them that the New York Times, in acknowledging the Bush documents were forged, nevertheless ran a headline about the documents that said, in essence, “Fake But Accurate.” That’s exactly the message so many of the rabid warmists now find themselves giving out.

I also love the irony surrounding the whole weather thing.

Do you recall back when Hurricane Katrina hit that all the global warming supporters were saying that the hurricane and all the other recent bad storms were the result of global warming? It was further proof, they said, that we needed to do something right now or we would find our civilization devastated by increasingly severe storms. A bunch of folks with more sense suggested that this was too much a stretch to come to that conclusion. They were shouted down or ignored, the usual response by warmists for anyone who disagrees with them. So naturally, now that the country is buried in snow, I had 16 inches at my house last week, people are asking how there could be global warming with so much snow all around. Snow is cold, it is not warm, so what’s up? I literally laughed aloud when I read two different answers to the question.

The first made the reasonable argument that global warming is a worldwide phenomenon and we can’t judge it by the amount of snow in Ohio or Alabama. We must distinguish between “weather” and “climate.” Weather is a current event, while climate is a long-term one. It is possible to have snowy weather even as the global climate warms. The amusing thing is that this is not what the warmists were saying when Katrina hit. Then global warming was driving Hurricane Katrina, remember?

The second is from Kevin Trenberth, head of Climate Analysis for National Center for Atmospheric Research (by the way that would be a US government agency). He said recently that the heavy snowfall is caused by global warming.

Okay, so which is it?

Global Warming is just the latest science fraud foisted on us by advocates with science degrees. Remember Alar? It’s a chemical that they spray on apples to keep them on the tree longer so they ripen but don’t rot before they fall. It sort of prevents premature apple jackulation (sorry, couldn’t resist).

A bunch of environmental group scientists put out that Alar was a carcinogen. All their studies proved it. The EPA piled on with its own studies that concluded the same thing. Then they all tested apple sauce and baby food, and found traces of Alar in both. The hunt was afoot. 60 Minutes did one of the typical hatchet attack jobs. Meryl Streep did TV commercials wailing the question “What are we doing to our children?” Soon, Alar was banned from sea to shining sea. It hit Washington State’s apple growers hardest. The market virtually collapsed and bankrupted apple growers left and right.

Later, it turns out that the level of Alar used to cause cancerous tumors in lab rats would require a child to eat a boxcar of apples a day to get the same dosage. Even Consumers Union, which had been pushing the Alar scare, later admitted that their own studies concluded that Alar would only cause 5 cancers in a million, and that kids were at less health risk eating an apple than a candy bar.

In the Pacific Northwest back in the 90’s, there was much ado about that poor little creature the spotted owl. Turns out the little bugger could only live in old fir forests, being evolutionarily incapable of adapting to young or middle aged forests. A whole bunch of scientists said so, government scientists to boot. Of course, everyone knew that the issue wasn’t really about the owl; it was about a bunch of folks who got all goo-goo eyed every time they thought about a tree older than any human alive being cut down. The owl was the excuse to stop all that evil logging of those old trees. The Ents might go to war, justifiably and finally, you know? However, not to worry, according to the scientists the poor little owl really was in serious danger of going extinct because we were cutting the trees down.

The fir forests of the Northwest have a curious life cycle. I’m talking about the cycle for the forest, not the trees themselves. Too many can’t see one for the other, or tell the difference. If the old trees aren’t periodically destroyed, they will live so long that they will eventually choke off all other life, including that of any young fir trees. It’s the shade from the old trees, you see. It is so dark in those old forests that seedlings don’t get enough sun to survive, nor do any other plants. When the trees eventually fall down and leave a little light, faster growing hardwoods fill the space and choke out everything else; the baby firs don’t have a chance. I have been in truly old forests comprised of really old trees, and I can tell you that they are dead places. Nature took care of this problem by periodically burning the forests down. The cycle repeated for millions of years. Once the old trees are down, fir seedlings can take root because the hardwoods are not adapted to move into the burned landscape as easily. These firs eventually take over and grow to be old trees until they too burn. If they didn’t burn, the fir forests would become hardwood forests, similar to those of the Eastern US.

Along came the white man who started cutting the trees down. Of course, as a trade-off we stopped the all-consuming forest fires. We have traded logging the forests for burning them down. The irony is that if the folks who can’t stand the thought of those old trees dying either by saw or fire have their way, eventually they will cause those very forests to disappear by interrupting the cycle.

One thing always puzzled me about the spotted owl. Not one of those scientists ever explained where the owls went and how they lived each time their forests burned down. The owls have been doing it for quite a long time. Seems to me a rational scientist would have asked that question at some point.

You can almost hear the eco-terrorist response: What’s the temporary economy of a few states or the disruption of a few hundred thousand people on the chance that we could save the owl from extinction. Being extinct is forever! Besides, it’s not like anybody got killed.

Yeah, right. Tell that to the millions of people who have died over the last 30 to 40years from Malaria. They need not have died but for the off chance that we might save some birds from extinction. Oops, sorry, we can’t tell those people that because THEY ARE DEAD!

DDT is the evil scourge of all creatures avian, or so a bunch of scientists said. The stuff doesn’t break down very fast and sort of hangs around a long time. It gets into birds’ blood and organs and stuff, you see, from the insects and seeds they eat that are covered in DDT that evil men spray about indiscriminately. Once enough accumulates, every time poor mama bird lays an egg the shells are all wrong and the baby birdies die.

Bird lovers led by the Audobon Society launched a massive and successful campaign to ban DDT worldwide. Their inspiration was a pseudo-scientist named Rachel Carson, whose research is more than just suspect (it's doo-doo, really).

But, no matter. Yippee, the birds were saved!

The trade off was that Malaria, which had been on the decline worldwide from the use of DDT to reduce the mosquito populations, suddenly exploded back into prevalence. Had DDT continued to be used, millions of people who died from Malaria would not have done so. Still, one supposes that sacrifices must be made. Look at all the birds and who knows what other creatures that were saved from certain extinction by banning the evil DDT.

The only problem with all this is that it has been conclusively proved that DDT is not what was killing the birds. Indeed, it has been shown to not have any damaging effects to humans or other animals. The truth is it is relatively harmless to everything but some bugs, especially killer mosquitoes. Take a look at this site for more on the issue:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article847896.ece

When I was a kid, scientists were heroes. They cured diseases like polio and smallpox that had killed millions for centuries. They created new materials like plastics, sent rockets to space, split the atom, invented computers, and on and on. We all thought of them as smart, honest, and full of integrity. In contrast, the mad scientist was often the villain of the movie or book because of some passion or delusion that kept him from being rational about what he was doing and thereby imperiling the world.

A great number of the today’s scientists qualify by definition as mad scientists. They have crossed over the line from science to advocacy, and in so doing have let their beliefs, their passions, and ultimately their delusions, remove from them any scientific rationality they might have had. Scientists who actively plot ways to prevent those who disagree with them from being published or peer reviewed are scientifically irrational. Scientists who knowingly insert falsehoods into UN sponsored reports because they think it will help the politics of their position are scientifically irrational. Scientists who begin their research with the answer they want already in mind and pay attention only to the results that support this answer violate one of the basic tenets of the scientific method and are, therefore, scientifically irrationale. Irrational is another way of saying insane. It makes me mad.

All this leads me to the conclusion that anymore I don’t trust scientists about anything they say. Do you?

It also makes me very sad.

About Hypocrites

2010-02-21T15:25:00.000-08:00

Hypocrisy is a form of lie. A lie for our purposes is to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive, to create a false or misleading impression, to make an untrue assertion whether believed or not by the one asserting, to create an impression that something is what it is not or vice versa.

I could stop there and simply say that liars suck, and I doubt a single person would disagree with me. Unless of course, if the liar is your sweet grandma who always tells you that you look nice even when she knows you don’t, then maybe it’s not so bad.

Lie isn’t really what I want to get at. However, it does provide the proper context for this rant about hypocrites.

According to my Webster’s, a hypocrite is one who affects virtues or qualities he does not have, one feigning to believe what one does not.

Everybody at one time or another says they will do one thing and does the opposite. I’ve often said to my wife and friends, as an example, that if I become an invalid and can’t take care of myself, just shoot me and put the body in the garbage can by the curb. I think I mean it. Yet, I have this sneaky suspicion that if I ever really found myself in that circumstance, I might very well say wait, I didn’t mean it, I was just kidding! I would be something of a hypocrite at that point.

I think most of us have these sorts of built in and ultimately innocent hypocrisies in one form or another. I think we can forgive each other the great majority of them. The truth is most aren’t really hypocrisies at all, but are just changes of heart or mind. We are allowed to change our minds or opinions, you know. In fact, we should do it more often than we actually do; we would all get along better if we did.

What are not forgivable are those hypocrisies that arise from the dreaded…gasp…ULTERIOR motive.

As it happens, I have a particular group in mind for which I believe their hypocrisies are unforgivable: journalists. Perhaps I should be more precise and say “The Media”, since we don’t really call them journalists anymore. Do you hear it referred to as big journalism? No, now its Print Media and Broadcast Media, and Whatever Media. Using the word media might actually be a step in the right direction, at least it puts “news” organizations on par with other entertainment vehicles like sitcoms and movies.

Just because I disliked the man so much I’m going to pick on Dan Rather and CBS News to make several points about why journalists are the worst kind of hypocrites.

You may remember the two Rather versus Bush stories. To rekindle your memory you might check out these two sites. Both do a decent job of portraying mostly unbiased facts, even if the ratherbiased.com agenda seems a little obvious.

http://www.ratherbiased.com/bush_attack.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killian_documents_controversy

Hypocrisy number one: Journalists are dedicated to telling the real story based on facts that they ruthlessly check and double check until verified or disproven.

Most living thinking people will recognize that this is not true as often as it is. It seems the media is more concerned with selling papers or advertising than telling a literally true story. Facts so often get in the way of a good, top selling story. Here is the Dan Rather example.

In early September of the presidential campaign as Bush was running against Kerry, Dan Rather reported that Bush failed in his National Guard obligations and that it was covered up. This was potentially election-losing stuff for Bush. The Democrats and liberals were all aghast. It was also a very nice foil to the Swift Boaters’ allegations of Kerry’s military misdeeds. As proof, Rather produced four documents made available to CBS by an “unimpeachable” source, Bill Burkett. Rather asserted and assured the public in his original broadcast, as did other CBS New broadcasts or statements in the following days, that the documents had all been rigorously authenticated by unbiased experts. That was a load of crap.

As was subsequently later proven, the documents were all forgeries, probably created by the “highly impeachable” Burkett on a modern computer and photocopied a bunch of times to look old. The authentications? They never took place. In fact, two of the “experts” CBS originally asked to look at the documents both told CBS they thought the documents had a number of problems that prevented them from being authenticated. There were so many problems with the documents that a first year journalism student could and would have easily fact checked them into disrepute, as did “bloggers in their pajamas” within hours of the original broadcast.

Not only were there big problems with the documents, most of the other “facts” turned out to be false as well. For example, the general who supposedly gave the order in the documents to cover up Bush’s alleged misconduct had been retired for the National Guard for a year and half prior to the dates in question and couldn’t possibly have given the orders. He was still alive at the time of the story, yet CBS never contacted him, let alone asked him if he did it.

For Rather and CBS, just a little earnest fact checking would have killed the story, but it was just too good a story to not be aired.

Hypocrisy number two: Journalist are rigorous professionals who don’t let personal bias interfere with the truthful recounting of the facts.

I don’t care if you watch CBS or FOX, you are going to get slant with your story. CBS is liberal, pro-Democrat and hates Conservatives and Republicans. Fox is the opposite. I think Fox does a better job of trying to get their facts straight, and not presenting just the ones that make their case. Still, none of “Big Media” seems able to stop themselves from letting their bias influence the story.

Here is how Dan Rather illustrates the worst of media’s actions. It comes in two historical parts. The first is an interview that Rather did with the first President Bush, when he was Vice President and running for President. Prior to this, Rather had done a series of benign profile interviews with the other presidential candidates. Rather saved Bush for last and through CBS contacts told Bush he wanted to do a similar type interview with Bush. Rather and CBS lied.

The Bush interview was an ambush. It started with a lengthy new documentary purportedly outlining Bush’s involvement in the Iran Contra affair of the Reagan years followed by the live interview that Rather devoted to trying to get Bush to say he was involved in Iran Contra. That interview was so aggressive, rude, and over the top that many in the press, including the liberal press, thought it was out of line, biased and unprofessional. By most accounts and opinions, the elder Bush got the better of the debate, and Rather came off looking bad. A number of sources say that Rather hated Bush with a passion after that. It wouldn’t be too much a stretch to assume that Rather transferred those feelings to the younger Bush when he gained prominence.

Now we fast forward to the younger Bush and Rather’s “expose” of the alleged National Guard affair. It seems likely that Rather was so eager to air the piece, accept the forged evidence, and to this day completely deny any possibility that he was wrong, simply because of that animus to the Bush family. I have little doubt of it.

Many others have written and published accounts of the whole affair. It is generally accepted that Rather and his staff were obsessed with seeing the second Bush defeated. Not only was this driven by his hatred of the family, it also arose from his self-professed liberal politics. Dan Rather had two very powerful reasons for wanting Bush defeated and Kerry elected, and those drove him to push the story relentlessly and with energy all out of proportion to that which he devoted to other probably more important stories.

There is nothing rigorously professional or unbiased in any part of how Rather approached both Bush affairs.

Hypocrisy number three: Journalists take very seriously their roles as members of the “Fourth Estate,” that they are an essential component to keeping government honest and accountable.

Wow, that sure sounds important and I’d love to feel good that they are out their protecting me. Unfortunately, it’s all a bunch of hooey and always has been. They only keep government honest when they don’t like the people who are running it at the time. Otherwise, they are willing conspirators with those they do like.

The Dan Rather episodes reveal a perfect example of the failure of the press to act in their role as the people’s check on government. One of the most troubling occurrences was that the “source” of the forged documents wanted access to Democratic candidate Kerry in exchange for providing the documents. Doesn’t that seem strange? Why would a man agree to give documents to a news organization on condition they give him access to a Presidential candidate? Unless he thought they could? How is it that he even thought they could or would? How is it they thought they could?

Worse, they did! Mary Mapes, Rather’s producer, called Joe Lockhart, Kerry’s campaign manager, and asked him to speak with Burkett. Two days before the original broadcast by Rather, Lockhart did just that and the two talked. Can you say quid pro quo? Sure sounds like the Dan Rather-Democrat Party’s mutual back rubbing association moved well beyond that to heavy petting and then to oral sex. (Which isn’t really sex, as we all know, according to Bill Clinton, so I guess it was all okay and nothing to really get concerned about.)

It is hard to argue that you are the Fourth Estate, and be convincing, when you’re in bed with the very people who you hope will make up the next government.

There is no way, for example, you can say that the New York Times is aggressively investigating and reporting on all the wrong doings, problems, dirty deals, and all the rest going on in the current Democrat dominated US government (as they were enthusiastically wont to do with the previous administration). They only report on negative stories when every other news organization already has done so, and then they immediately have their apologist opinion writers provide a couple thousand words about why it’s okay, or a right wing conspiracy, or just misunderstood by the idiotic public that is too ignorant to understand.

There are a whole delusional group of opinion writers that are fundamentally incapable of writing a complimentary thing about anyone who does not agree 110% with Obama, progressives, democrats, or all of the things they all stand for, no matter what the truth is. Obama ought to have Krugman, Friedman, Dionne, Huffington and Dowd dress up in skimpy little pleated skirts and knit sweaters and jump up and down waving pom-poms at all his press conferences. In that way, we can see them for the air headed cheerleaders they really are. At least Huffington and Dowd could come close to pulling off the look, though not so much.

The New York Times even gets a dishonorable mention in the Rather/Bush forged documents debacle. Even after it was conclusively shown that the documents were fake, and without doing any fact checking on their own, which would have revealed that the entire accusation was insupportable by any witnesses or real documents, including the people who were there and involved at the time of Bush’s National Guard Service, guess what the Times did? They ran a story about a typist who could not remember ever typing the memos in question, essentially had no firsthand knowledge of them, but thought they sounded about right. The headline for the story said of the documents that they were “…Fake But Accurate…” Now that’s solid journalism.

Can you imagine if someone had raised a credible possibility in the run up to the election in 2004 that George Bush was not a US citizen and refused to produce a birth certificate to prove he was? The New York Times, and the rest of the media, would have bankrupted themselves trying to prove he was not a citizen. They haven’t really taken that one on with Obama, have they? Of course, Dan Rather would have simply found someone to provide him an “independently authenticated” birth certificate and saved a lot of money not doing real journalism.

I suppose others have done and will do a much better and coherent job of making the argument against journalists as they exist in America today. I’m just a humble average guy, who had to get it off his chest. I feel better for doing so.

The bottom line is: I don’t trust any of them. I don’t believe much of anything they say. I think they are a plague on all of our houses.

Whither the Moon?

2010-02-16T11:53:00.000-08:00

Why don’t we have a functioning populated Moon base by now? We’ve had over thirty years to get it set up and going. So what happened?

Just what was more important that we had to spend our time and money on? Welfare? Farms subsidies? Bridges to nowhere in Alaska? A billion here or there spent to do something in some backward country that the rulers appropriate for their personal use? How many billions upon billions have we simply wasted that we could have used to move into space in a big way?

Don’t we get it? We’re like all the eggs in one basket here. One little slip and splat, we all die and the species goes down with us. The only way we are going to help ensure our species survival is to do what good insurance companies do: spread the risk. That means getting ourselves living on other planets going around other stars. This Earth Mother Gaia is all very nice, but maybe she has some relatives we could go live with? At least send the kids to live with?

Heck, we don’t even need planets. Hollow out a few large sized asteroids, grab a comet or two for water and gases, and make a nice little cave away from home.

The point is, eventually, something bad is going to happen. A big ass asteroid is going to go plop. Some idiot Muslim fanatic is going to get the bomb and it’ll be “Oh Boy, don’t you just love to hear things go bang!” And bang, bang, bang!

We wasted thirty years of getting off this rock. With a viable moon base operational in even the last 15 years, we would have learned better how to live, work, and play in space and all those nasty conditions that go with it. We would have gotten better, faster, cheaper at this space travel thing. Our technology focus would be outward, instead of like today when we seem to be more fascinated with our individual comforts such as the latest tweeting cell phone.

Our plan should have been and should still be first to get the moon base going. Then we move on to Mars. Then, maybe one of the moons of Jupiter. From there, it is manifest galactic destiny baby! It is not a sci-fi nut’s dream. It is a survival imperative.

There are millions of European and North American people who think that we, mankind, are a plague on this earth. They act and talk as though they see us, the whole species, as some sort of evil, a cancer killing Earth Mom. You begin to wonder if they don’t secretly hope we all die, and leave the planet to be inhabited only by those lovable critters like the spotted owl and snail darter. How soon before they actively begin to plot for that outcome? It is getting that goofy around here that I can’t help but think it’s getting way past time to leave the neighborhood, because I don’t much care for the crazies that are moving in next door.

Where did we lose the adventurous have to look at the next valley, move to a new land, make a new life part of our human spirit? Those folks who jumped on a leaky Mayflower and sailed off into the unknown or who hiked for four months across the great plains and Rocky Mountains for some greener Oregon grass would think we are a bunch of spoiled, soft, sissies. We are, not only in body but also in will and determination.

It’s a disgrace.

And where the hell is my flying car?!

A Word About English

2010-02-13T17:12:00.000-08:00

It Rocks.

Okay, that’s two words. Maybe you think I said one thing and did another, which would be lying.

Possibly, you thought I meant “a word” as in a conversation: “Can I have a word with you?” You would be correct in this second interpretation.

A word, especially in English, is a very tricky thing.

Only in English do we have so many words that mean almost the same thing, and so many words that have so many meanings all in one word. We have lots of words that sound alike but mean different things. We have words we didn’t have a year ago but nearly everyone knows what they mean now. We don’t care a bit about stealing words from other languages; if it fits, we use it.

In many ways, this makes the English language pretty cool.

Just look at that last sentence. It uses two words that have taken on entirely new meanings over the relatively recent decades. “Pretty” can mean “very” and not just “attractive.” “Cool” now also means, variously, “neat”, “hip”, “calm”, “desirable”, as well as a low temperature. It is interesting how “neat” has also taken on a new meaning in the last 100 years; it no longer just means “tidy”, but also means “good”. “Hip” is a word that in the mid-1900s came to mean more than just that seductive convex shape of a woman’s body.

How is a person supposed to keep up? Keep your cool, man. It’s groovy.

Let’s go back to the possibly that I wrote a lie at the beginning of this rant. Look the word up in your dictionary. I have two at my desk, a 1968 edition Funk & Wagnall’s Standard College and a 1981 Webster’s New Collegiate. In both, to tell a falsehood as the definition of lie is a bunch of places down the list of possible meanings. For example, one can lie, as on a bed, have a bad lie as in golf, or lie at anchor in a harbor.

Do you think anchors lie? I do. Research Dan Rather if you don’t believe me.

One of the great American wonders is the Grand Canyon in the American Southwest. But, did you know that its name isn’t even of English origin? It wasn’t in the lexicon in 1776; hell, it didn’t even make in until 1834 or so. Canyon is a Spanish word. Hey, canyon is exactly what the thing is so it’s the perfect word for the place, and we are just fine with calling it that. Besides, it wouldn’t be quite so impressive if we called it the Grand Ditch.

Speaking of rivers—we were sort of, because the Grand Canyon is formed by the Colorado River—one of my favorite names for a river is one in Washington State called the Skookumchuck River. Go ahead and Google it if you don’t believe me it exists. By the way, did you know that google was a real word before that clever search engine company appropriated it? It may also be spelled googol, and means 1 followed by 100 zeros, which is a very big number, but not as big as a googolplex, which is 1 followed by a google of zeros. Of course, now google is not only a number and the name of a company but is also a word meaning to search on the internet no matter what engine you use.

How about Internet? It is a word that didn’t exist the year I was born. It is completely made up, like telephone, broadcast and diode. Because, well, Benjamin Franklin and pals didn’t have anything like it, so how could they have a word for it? Ben did invent bifocals, so he did get to create his own technology-based word.

I get grumpy when I hear people say something like, “I am really anxious to see what I got for Christmas.” What, presents scare you? “Anxious” implies fear, trepidation, and foreboding. Don’t they really mean they are “eager” for their presents? Eager implies hopeful anticipation. I am eager for my tax refund but anxious about doing my tax return. Saying irregardless doesn’t bother me nearly as much.

I read somewhere that the accent of New England today is very close to that of Shakespeare’s time. I don’t remember where I read that, or if it is even true. I suppose the first thing one must ask is who is around today who remembers what it sounded like when Henry VIII was lopping off heads and Elizabeth was lying with Sir Walter Raleigh. It does provide a bit of a segue to what English sounds like. (Remind me to come back to seque later, because to digress now would be to violate the principles of what segue means.)

In college I learned that English is generally recognized to come in three distinct flavors. Old English is the language on hand before The Norman Invasion. A mixture of Saxon, Nordic, and others was very German sounding. Middle English followed, which developed after William the Conqueror did. Modern English followed, which, surprisingly, is what Shakespeare spoke, though you won’t convince many students of that as they struggle through the plays and sonnets.

I can’t read or pronounce Old English, so we won’t even go there.

I can read and pronounce Middle English, because I had a Chaucer professor who was a sadist and made me learn it. Don’t tell anybody that I rather enjoyed the process. Anyway, the cool part about Chaucer was that most critics for a very long time thought he was a lousy poet. His poems didn’t even rhyme for crying out loud. His principal and famous work was The Canterbury Tales, and he is one of the first old guys whose stuff survived and was readily available. However, it sounded terrible when you read it aloud, and confirmed for the modern critics that they really were barbarians in the 14th century.

Up until someone said, “Hey, what if we change the sound of the vowels just a bit?” Thus was born the English pronunciation transformation know as the Great Vowel Shift. How cool is that? Change just one letter and you have every grumpy Chaucer student's dream for ridiculing that which gives them pain.

Before the Great Vowel Shift, the Middle English “A” sounds like “ah.” “E” sounds like the A as in say, “I” sounds like e, as in he, she, and be. You get the picture. Then some other guy said, what if they pronounced the “gh” in sight, night and fright? In fact, what if they pronounced all the letters in a word, and didn’t leave any of them silent? In this way, “knight” is pronounced with a hard K to begin, followed by the N, then a soft I to E sound, followed by the GH as a sort of “kuh” sound with a finishing “T”. Think of it as four syllables instead of today it would only sound like one syllable. A simple word like "time" would be pronounced as teema (in this case the e has a soft A sound). Suddenly, Chaucer rhymes, has meter, and, voila, is a great poet!

And, he told some racy tales, too. They don’t teach the good ones in high school, that’s for sure.

I’m done ranting on this subject for now. Except, if you don’t like English, you don’t know shit. That word has its own surprising origin that has nothing to do with manure stowed on sailing ships as a spate of emails suggest.

Did we talk about alliteration? Forget segue, I’m tired and need to stop.

The Case for No Referees

2010-02-09T09:48:00.000-08:00

There you are, sitting on the edge of your seat, chewing your fingernails, mentally willing the batter for your favorite team to get a hit. Men on second and third, two outs, bottom of the ninth, the batter has a full count and your team is down by one run. Here comes the wind up, the pitch, and a swing! The ball flies over the third basemen’s head, a classic sinking line drive headed for the corner. The left fielder isn’t going to get there! The runners take off and the ball falls in bounds and heads for the corner. Game Over! We win!

Oops, not so fast.

The third baseline umpire signals the ball was foul. It doesn’t count. The coach storms out of the dugout, screaming, pointing, and jumping up and down on his hat. 30 million people watch the replay repeatedly, and even the big screen in center field shows it. The ball was fair by a half foot. Not half an inch, not two inches, but the ball hit a full six inches inside the line, more than the diameter of the ball. It's no use. The call stands. The next pitch is called a strike that replay clearly shows is 6 inches outside and low. Game over. You lose.

This happens every day in sports. The referee or umpire, or whatever the official n whatever the sport is, gets it wrong. In fact, he often screws it so badly that the entire outcome of the game is changed. Go ask the Irish about the recent non-call of a French player’s hand check that cost the Irish a spot in the World Cup.

This situation is more than a little ironic.

The whole point of referees is to make sure games are fairly played and according to the rules. Without referees, aficionados assure us, everyone would cheat. The games would be chaos. How can one have a fair contest without a referee?

For many, the question is becoming how we have a fair contest when the referees do such a poor job and have so much influence on the outcome.

Instant replay and computerization have the ability to eliminate most of these errors. A computer, hooked to a couple of radar detectors could call balls and strikes with nearly 100% accuracy. Why can’t the umpire look at a replay and say yes the ball was fair? It would be the fair thing to do. All the players
simply need to remember is that any given play can be reviewed, so play them all like they count.

Not so fast say those wedded to the tradition, who maintain that an essential part of the game is the human element, including referees and umpires.

Really? You like going to a football game and watching the referees play throw the yellow hanky on every other down? If that’s your idea a good time, you are some kind of masochist.

Do you know what game doesn’t have referees? Golf. Every player is on his or her honor to follow the rules and penalize himself when he violates a rule. And they do. Imagine that. Do you think some of them cheat? Sure. However, they aren’t invited back if they do it too much or too flagrantly.

One of my favorite golf stories is on Stewart Cink. He was playing in a tournament in New Orleans and found himself in a fairway bunker. He hit his shot out of the bunker and his ball went well down the fairway but ended up in a second bunker next to the green. In frustration, he slapped at the sand with his club as he was climbing out of the fairway bunker. He played on, finished the hole and later signed his scorecard for the number of strokes he had taken. Later that night, he realized that he had grounded his club in a hazard by hitting the sand in the first bunker, while his ball was in a hazard, the second bunker by the green. This is a violation of the rules. He should have added a penalty to his score for this infraction. The next morning he showed up at the official’s tent and announced that he had signed an incorrect scorecard the day before and explained why. The rules were clear, and Mr. Cink knew that he would be disqualified from the tournament, but he admitted his error anyway. He could have gotten completely away with it, because no one had noticed or didn’t realize what the rule was. The proof is that I watched a PGA player on TV do exactly the same thing last year. He did not call the rule on himself, the TV announcers didn’t catch it, an official watched him do it and said nothing, and no viewers called in. Maybe I should have, but I considered it was a sort of character and knowledge test for that player. He failed it.

Golf has been using replays for years. Craig Stadler was playing in the third round in a tournament in 1987. He was in contention at the time. His ball ended up under a low hanging tree. He could get a swing at the ball, but only if he got on his knees to do it. The grass was wet and he did not want to get his pants soaked, so he placed a towel on the ground and then knelt on the towel to hit his ball. The official following the group said nothing. The TV announcers said nothing. However, a fair number of TV viewers telephoned and pointed out that Mr. Stadler had violated the rule about artificially building his stance. Because it took until after Stadler had signed his incorrect scorecard for the officials to be informed, and because he did not penalize himself and essentially signed an incorrect scorecard (as Cink had done) he was disqualified from the tournament.

Mr. Stadler might very well have thought this unkind, but the moral of this story is that the TV viewing audience made the call, not a rules official, and yet everyone agreed that the violation had occurred and the consequence that entailed was the right one, even if belatedly applied.

So, tell me again, why we can’t rule a baseball is in bounds within seconds of the play ending by looking at incontrovertible replay proof? That would be because of…

But let’s not hold golf up as the shining example. It has its flaws, and it does indeed have officials who can impose penalties and apply rules to the outcome. Although, I don’t think I ever saw them get it wrong. Would you believe there is a fast moving, highly athletic team sport with no referees? Yep, there really is one; it’s called Ultimate Frisbee.

If you haven’t watched a game of Ultimate Frisbee played by reasonably accomplished players, you owe it to yourself to take some time to do so. You will be amazed and entertained. It is something of a cross among football, soccer, and basketball. It is fast moving, with players running, jumping, diving, and generally flying around the field at top speed. The Frisbee throws all by themselves are amazing.

The goal is to catch the Frisbee in your end zone, which is one point. You can’t run with the Frisbee, but must move it only by throwing and catching. You can’t interfere with a person trying to catch the Frisbee, as in football, or the person throwing it. No part of the body can be touching out of bounds while catching the Frisbee, though it only takes one toe touching in bounds for it to be legal catch. If the Frisbee touches the ground, it goes over to the other team at that spot, and they go on offense immediately. Play continues as in soccer, being continuous and only stopping for goals, team time outs and half time. Play stops on out of bounds throws or the Frisbee hitting the ground only long enough for the other team to get them situated before they pick up the Frisbee and start play again. These are the basic rules, though there are some others. Obviously you need referees to monitor and enforce these rules, right? Nope. The players do it themselves.

If a player thinks he has been fouled or the catch was not legal, he makes the call. Sometimes the offending player will call the foul on himself. Usually a player calls a foul or infraction only if the play had a bad outcome for the team that was fouled, such as a failure to catch the Frisbee. Play stops right there and then. If the offending player or team agrees with the call, the team that was fouled gets possession of the Frisbee at the spot of the foul and play resumes. If the two teams do not agree, and after some brief discussion, it becomes clear that they will not, the offensive team takes the Frisbee back where the play that resulted in the foul began and replay from there. That’s it, the entire conflict resolution: play on where it happened or do it over. There are no penalty kicks, added yardage or free throws.

The players of the game, just like those in golf, have a tradition and a pride in being honorable. One of their tenets is that they enjoy the competition first and win second. Winning by any means, especially by cheating or bending the rules is not thought of well. At times, a team will have field lawyer who wants to call a foul on every play. At other times one or more players may engage if too much rule breaking. The other side will usually tolerate either situation for a little while, but eventually the captains will get together and have a frank discussion. In most cases, the teammates of the offenders will pile on and make it clear they need to cool it. The offenders usually do.

Do cheaters and unfair applications of the rules occur in Ultimate Frisbee? Sure. However, it happens much less often than you might think, much, much less often than in other sports where the referees are the cause.

I don't intend to argue that Ultimate Frisbee is the ultimate team sport. Rather, it is an example of how to play a team game without the often All Knowing OZ rulings of referees and umpires dictating the outcome of the game incorrectly.

I like instant replay reviews, what little they are used. Baseball could be umpired almost entirely with cameras, radar, computers and replay. Why shouldn’t it? Really, why not? The call would be right 99.9% of the time. Look what they can do now with Tennis line calls.

Do the various replay systems have their downsides and flaws? Of course. It shouldn’t take 5 minutes to make a decision from looking at the replay. Most sports commentators do it in seconds, whereas the trained officials seem incapable of anything approaching snail fast speed. I also don’t like limiting coaches to just two challenges as they do in professional football. Seems to me, once a coach uses up all his two challenges the officials have no incentive to get it right thereafter.

It is possible to go on about the current flaws in the various replay systems, but there is nothing so far wrong in my view that cannot be improved and fixed. However, if the last seasons in football and baseball are any indication, there doesn’t seem to be much that can be fixed about referees.