brainsnorts

new blog site

2010-04-18T07:54:00.002-05:00

hi. i'm trying a new blog site. to read what you normally read, please click here:

http://brainsnorts.wordpress.com/

then please let me know if you like the look of that site better. i think it's more professional looking, although very little about me has ever been "professional." everything that i've ever written here has been transferred there, every post, picture, and comment. again, let me know what you think.

the overshift

2010-04-12T22:06:00.001-05:00

everyone knows i love baseball, especially baseball on the radio. however, radio announcers can be just as dumb as the rest of us. for example, my favorite right now is, of course, john sterling of the yankees. however, even john says something dumb very often.

when a left-handed power hitter is at bat, many opposing teams will "shift" their infielders over to the right side because some lefties, such as ryan howard and jason giambi, hit predominantly to the right side. see the picture below:

this leaves a big hole on the left side of the infield, but that's not what bothers me. what annoys me is when announcers like john sterling call this an "overshift." no, john, it's not an "over" shift. it's a shift. "overshift" suggests that you've shift too far. if you shift the right amount, it's a shift, as in the picture above. yeah, i know it's not really that important, but i have to do what i have to do.

what not to do if your car breaks down

2010-03-30T23:07:00.001-05:00

raise your hand if you've seen this before:

yeah, thought so.

anyway, i can't help but laugh when i see something hanging out of the window of a disabled car. it's usually a small towel, or sometimes it's a plastic supermarket bag. i think - stress think - the idea of the dangling item is to alert passing vehicles that there is a car attached to the item. i guess the driver of said non-moving car/truck/other fears that other drivers might not notice the disabled vehicle, and then the non-noticing driver might...what? crash into it? i imagine it would go like this...

teddy is cruising along in his honda accord, rolling down 295 south near carney's point on the way to cracker barrel. suddenly, something catches his eye. off to the right, a small white object seems to be floating. teddy peers, trying to keep one eye on the road, one on the steering wheel, and the other is allowed to glance at the moving object. "what the...is that...huh? i think something is moving over..." teddy speeds closer. without time to think, teddy reaches for the brake pedal and screams, "holy, snot! there's two-tons of sophistocated machinery attached to that very small plastic bag or towel!" yeah, like we're not going to notice the car without the bag.

if anyone actually does find themselves in this situation, please don't do the towel. if it rains, the towel gets wet, and then the water flows through the towel and into the car. you'll easily get a small puddle on the floor of the car. the floor mats will get soaked, and maybe the floorboards will rust and rot out. at least you'll get to play the flintstones and put your feet down and run in order to start the car.

let's be honest about healthcare reform

2010-03-26T19:03:00.003-05:00

i get really bugged by people who cloud the truth and disguise their lies with something designed to appear as helpful. a great example is the current republican stance in opposition to healthcare reform. i'm not saying that obama's healthcare plan is great. i'm not really smart enough to be sure in either direction, but the general public would be able to form better opinions if we didn't have so many half-truths to sift through.

here's what the GOP is saying:

1. we've got the greatest healthcare system in the world.

but the truth is that the united states is ranked 37th in the world, lying behind the following countries:

1 France
2 Italy
3 San Marino
4 Andorra
5 Malta
6 Singapore
7 Spain
8 Oman
9 Austria
10 Japan
11 Norway
12 Portugal
13 Monaco
14 Greece
15 Iceland
16 Luxembourg
17 Netherlands
18 United Kingdom
19 Ireland
20 Switzerland
21 Belgium
22 Colombia
23 Sweden
24 Cyprus
25 Germany
26 Saudi Arabia
27 United Arab Emirates
28 Israel
29 Morocco
30 Canada
31 Finland
32 Australia
33 Chile
34 Denmark
35 Dominica
36 Costa Rica
37 United States of America
(according to the world health organizaton, http://www.photius.com/rankings/healthranks.html)

2. we agree it needs to be fixed, but let's start over with a blank sheet of paper.

but the truth is that they want to start with a blank sheet of paper because it will frustrate the democrats, making them more likely to succumb to intentionally strenuous demands funneled from the insurance industry.

3. the american people do not want this bill.

but the truth is that there are some american people who are against this bill. notice how they never say "the majority of the american people, or most american people." if three are against it, it can be said that "the american people are against it." regardless, it's still a stupid statement because polls show that 49% of americans say this bill is a "good thing." only 40% said it's a "bad thing." clearly, more "american people" are for it than against it. see: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0310/34887.html

4. the american people do not want a government mandate on healthcare reform.

but the truth is that everything that comes out of washington is a government mandate. every law, every tax, every piece of legislation is a government mandate. seatbelts, FDA regulations about product labels, anything that protects the american people - it's all a government mandate.

let's please be honest. the GOP has collected a lot of campaign money from the insurance industry on the contingency that they do everything possible to stop this legislation. it seems it just wasn't enough.

how not to run a government agency

2010-03-10T22:53:00.002-05:00

Let’s pretend there have been some changes in your local government. Your police department is now going to be completely controlled by nine average but popular citizens. From now on, NO officers are hired or fired without the approval of this new, governing body. No guns, bullets, cars, or bulletproof vests will be purchased without their okay. Even the pens and paper for the police reports need the permission of this new, controlling group. They even have the power to decide which officers will patrol which neighborhoods and in which police cars. They can even change existing laws and write new ones for the officers to enforce. They can fire and hire the chief of police and even tell him exactly how they want him to run every aspect of the police department.

But wait! There’s more! Before this Divine Nine decides how much money will be spent on anything and everything, the entire town must first vote on the amount of funding the police department will get. That special group of 9 might tell the town that they need $20 million for this year's budget, but they will only get it if the majority of citizens vote “yes.” If the majority votes “no,” then the 9 must make cuts. Fewer bullets? Fire a few officers? No new tires for the squad cars? Maybe, maybe not. It seems now that the safety of your town is now in the hands of the chosen 9, and everyone else in town also has a say.

Here’s an important question: what qualifications does the Divine 9 have? Are they former police officers or retired security personnel? Do they at least have a degree in criminal justice? No. There is NO requirement whatsoever. Absolutely no experience or connection of any kind with law enforcement is necessary.

How does all this sound? Does it seem like an efficient way to run a government service? Believe it or not, this is what exists, but not with the police.

In New Jersey, this is exactly how our schools are run.

Really.

how to disrespect women

2010-03-08T20:15:00.000-05:00

i'm ashamed to say i haven't yet seen the hurt locker. however, that's not the important part. what matters is that some claim that "history" has been made because of the first female to win an oscar for best director. as i said in a previous post regarding race relations, this is exactly how to make things worse, not better.

when we go out of our way to highlight and draw attention to a woman winning such a presigious award, we have now created a separation, a different distinction. if we make such a big deal, then the female is no longer considered equal to the male. if you really want equality, then you have to treat both male and female equal. if you want equality, then do NOT act as if it's a huge event that a woman won. the comparison serves to draw INequality instead of equality. if you want equality, then treat her EQUALLY. when you go out of your way to say, "WOW! a woman won best director!" now she's no longer equal.

doesn't anyone get that?

nothing personal, but don't buy a car from this man

2010-03-05T23:45:00.006-05:00

the brad benson auto group

i love commercials as much as anyone. in fact, sometimes the commercials are better than the shows they sponsor. they're short, entertaining, and just in case they're not - they're only about 30 seconds long, so you don't have to wait long for the next one.

however, the commercials for brad benson's autogroup are just - just wrong. i don't like that i have to hear so much sexual innuendo at 2:34 in the afternoon. i don't like hearing comments about celibacy, tiger woods' mistresses and what they did, "doing it," details of politicians' affairs, and other sexually suggestive things. i can't imagine what it's like to be driving with a 10-year old son, listening to WFAN, a new york sports station, listening to mike francessa talking about the yankees, and then you have to quickly change the station because brad benson is talking about somebody "doing" someone else. how do you explain that to the boy?

on this website, you can hear all the things i don't like to hear at that time of day:

http://www.bradbensonautogroup.com/commercials.aspx

another commercial i don't like on the radio, also on WFAN in the afternoon, is for frank's hot sauce. don't get me wrong, i love the stuff. but i don't want to hear the word "sh*t" on the radio in the early afternoon. they have a spot with an old lady who says, "i put that sh*t on everything." no, not when kids are listening. you don't need the word "sh*t" on the radio at that time of day. the word is mostly bleeped, just the "i" is bleeped really, but you can easily tell what they are really saying. i don't like it.

what to do when someone breaks in

2010-03-04T19:33:00.001-05:00

i love these commercials designed to scare the monkey crap out of you. a woman is at home, sometimes with a kid, and a guy kicks down a door. they run. just a few seconds later, the phone rings. instead of running for safety, the woman answers the phone. now, i'm no safety expert, but it seems she should be running to find a safe place. maybe i'm wrong, she's doing the right thing, and i don't know jack. but i still don't like the commercial. it's like a GOP subliminal message to vote out democrats. BE AFRAID! YOU NEED THE GOP TO SAVE YOU! BIN LADEN IS AT YOUR DOOR!

there are plenty of people goofing on it at youtube.

why television sucks

2010-02-25T14:55:00.001-05:00

it seems there very few television shows:

1. GQ types who solve amazingly complicated crimes in 46 minutes using tests that normally take weeks to produce and incredible computers with non-existent databases

2. smart-asses who read minds, insult everyone around them, and take 14 guesses to get it right

3. attractive women with supernatural powers such as psychic visions or talking to the dead and missing

4. former couples, now professional colleagues - doctors, lawyers, etc - with love/hate relationships, constantly flirting, fighting, and violating sexual harrassment laws

5. "reality" shows about former celebrities we no longer care about or non-celebrities only known because they're related to semi-celebrities, but it's not a "reality" show when everyone can see the cameras

6. amateur talent shows with one nice judge and one who over criticizes until the contestant cries

7. staged news shows with bullies who read from a "fair and balanced" republican agenda with injections of biased personal opinion presented as fact

8. hollywood news/paparazzi shows that present questions instead of statements, which allows them to say anything because it's posed as a question, such as "did brad and angelina adopt madagascar?"

record snowfall and global warming

2010-02-25T11:55:00.006-05:00

World Drought Map

more than 5% of the world population

lives in extreme, life-threatening drought

In the Northeast, we've been hit with record snow this winter. Of all the problems that the snow has brought, there are two I care about most. First, how to make up all of the lost school days. My current schedule shows I'll be in school until at least June 28. With today gone and tomorrow in jeopardy, June 30 would not be a surprise. The second problem, and more important problem, is how this winter is being misinterpretted by those who claim that global warming and climate change is a hoax.

Too many loudmouths, the usual suspects reading Republican scripts, have said that you can't have record snow if we have global warming. They distort the arguement by pretending to not know or ignoring the fact that the word "climate" means long-range weather and not individual days or weeks, such as would produce record snowfall. If you understand what an average is, then you can understand that you will have highs, mediums, and lows at any given time, but you must follow trends and calculate averages to tell the whole story. They know what the story is, but they want neither to read it nor for you to read it. Of course there will be sub-freezing days during a climate crisis as that's a normal abnormality. However, focusing on one day is like reading one page of a book and believing you know the whole story. What they also don't realize is that this record snowfall is actually evidence that proves climate change rather than discrediting it.

Climate change is not just temperature. It's also about the redistribution of moisture. Behind my house is a farm owned and operated by a local family since forever. I was at my back fence one day as the farmer was walking along the edge of his cornfield. (Yes, I have thought about jumping the fence for corn, tomatoes, peppers, watermelons, etc) After he laughed at me because of how much time and effort I put into growing something as easy as grass, I asked his opinion on global warming and climate change. He stopped, looked around, and pointed at the field.

"See that plastic?" There were rows upon rows of sheets of black plastic running across the field. Every couple of feet a plant sprouted through it. It was something I had noticed but didn't think much about. "Never needed that before. Do now. You might remember when you were a kid. It'd rain once or twice a week, little by little, and I never had to water these fields. Ain't like that now. It'll be dry for a month, then it'll pour for two days. People tell me I must be thrilled about all the rain, but I tell them it's a bad thing. We get two days of rain, and the roots drown, crops all die. That plastic does two things. When it's in the 90's for a month, it traps the moisture on the roots and keeps the soil wet. When it pours for two days, it helps the extra water run off without washing away the soil."

Climate change, as I said, is also about the redistrubution of moisture. The map at the top of this entry shows areas around the world that are currently suffering severe drought. Water is finite. There's a limited, fixed amount on the planet at all times in various forms, such as snow, ice, rain, etc. If there are areas in the world suffering extreme drought, then there must also be areas who now have the moisture that has left the drought areas. Have you noticed the flooding in the news? Have you seen the unprecedented days of rain in the Los Angeles area? What about the mudslides that wash houses away? When I drive to work, most houses have ponds in their front yards from the amazing rain and snow we've gotten. Back in 2001, this same area was in the midst of a record drought, and now it's flooded. Up until last year, my town has had three years of water restrictions, and now it's flipped to flooding. This is all part of climate change and global warming.

Just like the evolution/creationism debate, nobody can 100% prove or disprove either side of global warming and climate change, but there's a big difference in the approach. With evolution/creationism, it's all in the past. It happened already, and there's nothing that anybody can do to change it. Regardless of how humans got here, we're here. However, climate change can still be acted upon if it does in fact exist. That leaves two options. Take steps to solve a problem and improve a crisis that's not really there. It's like insurance. If we take the steps necessary to stop or slow global warming, there is no question that the planet and its people will be healthier and safer. The other option is to do nothing when something very much needs to be done. We can continue on the path that has caused and will escalate great environmental destruction, including the human consequences, and do nothing about it. I would rather take steps that are not needed than to do nothing when I had the chance to help.

Would you rather take medicine when you didn't need it, or would you rather not take it when you should have? Just give me a glass of water - half full - to save some for the next guy.

just park the car

2010-02-11T23:14:00.000-05:00

if your car is anything like this picture, then you're excused. go about your business because there's no reason for you to read this. the rest of you, sit down and listen up.

there is NO good reason for you to back your car into parking spaces.

stop it.

please just admit that it is NOT easier to back in that to go in forward.

please just admit that it's much easier to pull in forward.

and, most important, please just admit that the only reason you back in is because you think that your car looks much cooler if you back it on.

just admit it, get it overwith, and move on.

haddonfield, nj - i'm glad i moved out!

2010-02-09T20:09:00.005-05:00

http://www.mastalk.com/inquirer/10_17_07.htm

check out these links and this story from haddonfield, nj. it's a ritzy, spritzy, spoiled, overindulgent town filled with people who have too much money and not enough brains to know what to do with it. a few years ago there was a party at which a bunch of teens trashed a house and actually had sex with the stuffed animals of a child who lived there. they also crapped all over a piano. since then, the town recognized that the spoiled kids where doing too much drinking, so the school installed a 24/7 alcohol policy which allowed them to punish students who abuse alcohol no matter when they used it - weekends, holidays, zero tolerance.

believe it or not, a parent, who also is an attorney, wants to fight the policy. doesn't that obviously show that the parents in that town are actually fighting FOR underage drinking? WTF?

http://www.kyw1060.com/pages/6039020.php?

http://www.kyw1060.com/Family-Sues-Haddonfield-School-Dist--Over-24-7-Pol/6319584

who dat? no, really, who da hell dat?

2010-02-08T18:14:00.002-05:00

congrats to the saints. after more than 40 years of nothing, you did it, and you beat one of the best quarterbacks to ever pick up a ball. it was a great game on both sides of the ball, including special teams in a big way.

nobody comes to my blog to read about the superbowl, so i won't recap the game.

but there is one thing that i have to ask:

what the hell was kim kardashian doing on the nfl network set after the game? just because she's currently greasing up reggie bush, we have to watch her bring the show to a grinding halt? we had to watch as rich eisen, already known to pay too much attention to pretty women who aren't his wife, actually stopped talking long enough to watch kardashian prance her way to the stage?

and to make matters worse, she totally shut the man up. there's reggie, his big moment, super bowl champ, and media whore kk takes the stage to tell everyone how much the game meant to reggie. WTF? yo' biatch! in case you didn't notice, reggie was actually there. let HIM tell us how important the game was. we don't want to hear from you unless you're asking us if we want the heels on or off. other than that, i don't want to see your mouth open unless something is going in and not if something is coming out.

someone please remind her that she's only famous for two things:

1. her father helped OJ go free.
2. a big ass.

serena williams vs. barry bonds

2010-01-30T13:06:00.000-05:00

hmmm...

sports uniforms

2010-01-23T00:01:00.001-05:00

it's no secret that i love sports, but i also love sports uniforms - except basketball. i like watching for subtle changes, the good, the bad, and the ugly. let's talk about bad and ugly.

i hate the new vikings unforms, mainly because i don't like the new purple color.

here's the old

and the new.

the cinncinati reds have the most boring uniforms in baseball.

although i love the yankees, the atlanta braves have the best uniforms.

the mets, with pinstripes, are excellent too:

as for colors, no teams should be allowed to wear black except:

boston bruins

pittsburgh steelers

oakland raiders

in case you're interested, the chicago bears aren't black. they're a really deep navy blue. no baseball team should ever wear a black jersey. no football team should have a black alternate jersey. like these by the eagles:

in fact, no team should have any alternate uniforms, especially something like this insult to one of the greatest sports teams in history:

and finally, the best sports jersey ever, which is not at all one of my favorite teams:

the F-word

2010-01-20T22:33:00.001-05:00

We have the “f” word, the “n” word, the “s” word. We call people “b” instead of bitch. We have all kinds of words that are bleeped and/or inappropriate, but I heard something recently that I just can’t accept.

A while back there was an actor who was fired from Grey’s Anatomy for calling someone a faggot. I could look up the guy’s name, but I don’t care enough. More importantly, I was listening to a great radio show out of Philadelphia on a rock station, WMMR. The show is called "Preston and Steve." Anyway, as Preston was talking about the firing of the actor, he referred to the incident as “using the 6-letter F word.” I almost crashed.

Are you shitting me? We can’t say “faggot” anymore? We have to say “the 6-letter F word”? The host of the show wasn’t calling anyone “faggot.” He was just referring to the fact that someone else called someone “faggot.”

I grew up in the 70’s. “Fag” was an everyday word, but “fag” had nothing to do with “gay.” “Fag” meant someone who wasn’t cool in some way. It was someone who did something that was wrong, something that they should have known not to do. If someone told the teacher that you were cheating on a test, they were a fag. If you couldn’t stay out past 9 on a weekend, you were a fag.

I know now that the word “fag” is too closely tied to “gay,” and I know that it’s negative. I know now that if I call someone “fag,” I’m going to be accused of subconsciously saying that being gay is not cool, but that’s never what we meant. We didn’t care if people were gay. People weren’t gay. They were people who happened to be gay, but they were people first. They still are.

You can be a fag without being gay, and you can be gay without being a fag. I don’t care if you’re gay, but don’t be a fag.

throw back the throwbacks

2010-01-11T22:00:00.004-05:00

i love the nfl. i really loved the nfl back in the 70's when it wasn't all about espn, end zone displays, and endorsements. back then it was all about the game and the players. it was about those stickers on the bananas, electric football, and the sunoco nfl stamp book. now, it's been ocho cinco-ed to death.

a few years back, the nfl thought of a brilliant way to make money - throwback uniforms. it's all about what they can sell. the problem is that the 70's were full of brilliant throwback uniforms, but the nfl doesn't agree. they've gone waaaay too far (throw)back. the rule should be that no throwback is valid unless there is someone alive who actually saw the given team wearing the given uniforms.

here are some examples of bad throwbacks:

new york jets

denver broncos

philadelphia eagles

______________________________________________________

now, some real throwbacks:

that about says it all.

don't even reply

2010-01-05T22:59:00.000-05:00

someone came to me today with a website and said, "hey, is this your website? are you responsible for this?"

i checked it out and thought it was damn hilarious. i also was jealous that it was NOT my site.

please check it out.

http://www.dontevenreply.com/

it's someone who goes on craigslist, finds interesting ads with things for sale, services, etc. they e-mail interest, but it's a joke, and they see how long they can keep the person going until they're told to get lost, f- off, don't even reply, something like that.

please check it out.

are giftcards good to buy for the holidays?

2009-12-22T02:31:00.003-05:00

i once believed that gift cards to a retailer were stupid gifts because it was like giving someone cash while saying, "BUT - you can only spend it at this one store." i argued that it was more efficient to just give cash to spent anywhere.

i later realized that if you give someone cash, they'll use it to pay bills or something practical, but gifts are not about practicality. they're supposed to be a way to spoil someone for a moment. if you give them cash, they have the option be practical.

if you know someone loves movies, give them a movie theater giftcard because it forces them to take a break from the world and go to a movie. if you know they love clothes, force them to go shopping for themselves with a card for a certain clothing store that you know they'd choose. it seems very impersonal, but it really does give them a chance to indulge themselves for a moment. maybe longer.

what tiger woods needs to do now

2009-12-14T20:54:00.001-05:00

Tiger is a tiger. Tiger was a tiger. Tiger was like a shark that smelled blood in the water. Blah blah blah tiger tiger tiger. We’ve all just seen the real Tiger, and we’ve all known the fake Tiger walking around with the fake blonde wife and the innocent kids. What’s a Tiger to do now? It’s simple. There’s only one thing left for Tiger to do if he wants to eventually get back to the Tiger we’ve always not really known. He needs to stop talking about being a better husband and start telling the truth. Start being a Tiger.

Tiger’s life has been an event. From being on television at age 3 to being on the world stage before he was 20, there’s no part of his life that hasn’t been controlled, until now. Everything we’ve seen of Tiger up to now has been the media version. Tiger 1.0. we only saw the Nike Tiger, the Gillette Tiger, the PGA crafted Tiger, or the Earl Woods influenced Tiger. As we watched Tiger, Tiger was lurking in the jungle.

Tiger made the same move as Bruce Springsteen back in the 80’s when he was at the top of the charts, 35 years old, and trying to figure out when he was going to grow up. Someone set him up with a sort-of model, he got married, and it all went wrong because, I hate to use this saying, but she wasn’t his type. Springsteen, one of my heroes, but not for what I write about here, grew up in bars. He likes bar women. Bar women aren’t models. They wear – and sometimes wake up in - worn jeans, show cleavage, do shots without a chaser, and sometimes smoke. He married a rather sterile woman with an almost promising television career. She was wrong for him, just as the blonde Swedish woman is wrong for Tiger.

Tiger has been protected, over protected. Tiger’s life has been swimming in anti-bacterial lotion. He’s been trying to be his image, and his image isn’t him. Because of his many commercials, endorsements, and investments, he’s had to be the TV-version of Tiger. He hasn’t seen the real world that’s been hidden from him. He hasn’t gone to clubs and left at 2am, staying between the four blurry lines as he tried to drive home. He hasn’t gone to cheap strip bars for a white-trash bachelor party. He hasn’t driven through McDonald’s or White Castle because he was just too damn hungry to make it to Fleming’s or Ruth’s Chris. He hasn’t been “real.”

Now, Tiger, here’s what you need to do. You face the fact that you’ve been hanging with the trashy women because, understandably, you like them. It’s okay. Just face it. Also, face the idea that if you stay with Elin, beg forgiveness, start vacuuming while holding the kids and making her breakfast, you’re going to be stuck with Ms. Blondie Boring forever. And, if you do that, you’ll continue to be bored with her, and you’ll soon fall back to the strippers. Once you’ve done that, phase 2.

Phase 2 is to stand up, be pro-active, and be you. Get to a press conference at which you decree that you’ll be making a statement but taking no questions. You tell the press the following:

“Ladies and gentlemen, I have lied to you. I have tried to pretend to be in love with a perfectly normal, regular woman. It didn’t work. I don’t like vanilla ice cream. I like rocky road with extra nuts and chocolate syrup. I made the mistake of pretending to be someone I’m not, but I’m not going to do that anymore. I will no longer be the media-friendly Tiger who smiles and drives home in the mini-van. I will be the Tiger who I am. It’s not a Tiger you will enjoy, but that’s not my problem. I don’t need sponsors, but I will be glad to take some on if you’re willing to know who you’re getting involved with. I will now go back to my yacht and host a Victoria’s Secret fashion show. I’ll see you all about a week after New Year’s Eve when I wake up.”

Stop lying, Tiger. If you’re into whores, that’s okay. Don’t make excuses. Just do it.

why i don't like christmas

2009-12-06T02:46:00.003-05:00

There’s only one day of the whole year that I truly hate, and it’s not one that I should hate. It’s Christmas Eve. For about nine years I’ve spent Christmas Eve doing pretty much the same thing. I wrap gifts for my kids and put them under the tree. No matter how much I might be able to give them, it never feels like enough, but that’s not the hard part. The really hard, hateful part is that I then go to bed knowing that I won’t see them at all on Christmas Day. I won’t go into those details because there’s a good chance that one of the kids will read this.

Regardless, when I go to bed on Christmas Eve, I try as hard as I can to not cry, but I always lose. And it’s not just crying. It’s choking, sobbing, heaving, shoulder-shaking cries. There have been some Christmas Eve’s that I’ve had someone next to me in bed. The woman who shall not be named, for reasons I can’t say here, was confused the first time it happened. She tried to console me and ask what was wrong, but it wasn’t easy to explain. No matter how well I explained it, there was no way she would have really understood it. The odd part is that I first met her on Christmas Eve, and I didn’t cry in front of her that night because we met at a party and then went our separate ways and didn’t see each other again until a couple of weeks later.

Christmas Day isn’t much better. I spend it trying to focus on who is there instead of who isn’t. I don’t like to open gifts because the gifts to my kids will just sit there until the 26^th. I don’t like a big deal to be made about Christmas. I know that’s selfish, but we’re all allowed to be selfish sometimes. I know that my attitude on Christmas doesn’t allow those around me to enjoy the day as fully as they might, but that’s because I don’t enjoy the day as fully as I might either.

I’m going to guess that IF my kids had been reading, they’ve gotten bored or annoyed and have moved on, so I can tell the rest now. I don’t see my kids on Christmas because of two people: their mother and the rotten divorce attorney that I had. In the divorce agreement that was written almost ten years ago, my ex wanted the kids all day on Christmas while I wanted to either share the day or alternate each year. My attorney wasn’t really a divorce attorney but was doing it to pay the bills until she became a prosecutor, which she did shortly after mishandling my case. She convinced me to let the ex have Christmas because a few years down the road she would be more friendly and willing to split or alternate Christmas Day.

Turns out she was wrong, and the ex has become more stubborn about the holiday. One of my kids recently asked her mother about spending half of the day with me. The ex went on a hell of a tirade and used the word “I” roughly 25 times in explaining how hurtful the suggestion was to spend any part of Christmas with me. Now the ex has a child with the new husband and is using that child to convince my kids even more strongly how wrong it would be to spend Christmas with me because it would mean that their little sister would miss them soooo much. That’s how disgustingly manipulative my ex-wife can be.

She’s defied the divorce agreement when it suited her needs to do so. She acts with impunity, not allowing me to have the proper time I deserve with my kids and the proper time that my kids deserve with their father. I could explain more, but the point has been made. I hate Christmas Eve, and I’m not all that find of Christmas Day either.

poor, poor tiger

2009-12-02T23:14:00.006-05:00

Oh, Tiger. Poor Tiger. Why, Tiger, why? And after all this hiding, you want what? Privacy? Hmmm. I’ll get back to you on that.

We don’t need to talk about the accident, hitting the tree, your wife and the golf club, none of that is important. Let’s instead look at how you handled it.

First, following the accident, you said that the “malicious rumors about my family and me are "irresponsible.” What does that mean? Are you saying that it’s irresponsible to talk about what you did? That’s unfair, because we didn’t do anything. You did. But we realize that you were trying to deny the story without lying. It’s an understandable move because you seem to be lying without lying.

Today, after the details spilled out about the woman you’ve been spending time with for more than half of your marriage, you said, “"But no matter how intense curiosity about public figures can be, there is an important and deep principle at stake which is the right to some simple, human measure of privacy.”

I have a problem with that. You’ve made millions upon millions, some say over a billion dollars, all because of your public image. When your face is on TV for Schick, Buick, or Nike, you’re giving a statement. You’re saying, “Trust me. Spend your money with this company because I’m telling you it’s good.” You have financial benefits of unprecedented endorsement proportions by selling yourself and our trust. If you’re going to benefit from that public exposure, then you must also accept the consequences. You don’t get to put yourself out there when the money is coming in but then pull yourself back when the money is replaced by questions. Being a public persona is a double-edged sword, and one edge points in your direction.

You also said, “"I have let my family down and I regret those transgressions with all of my heart.” I don’t buy that. You don’t regret the transgressions. However, you very much regret getting caught. You didn’t regret those transgressions for almost three years, so what changed? Oh, yeah, we found out. If nothing were to have become public over the past week, would you have stepped forward and announced your regret, or would you have continued those “transgressions”? I think you would still be doing them. Therefore, you don’t regret them. It’s easy to say “sorry” after you’ve been caught. If you want me to accept your remorse, you have to come forward first and admit it before anyone finds out. If you want me to respect your privacy, then don’t take our millions for a public endorsement.

The most important question in any situation normally starts with "why"? As in, Why did Tiger do it? Easy. He's a competitor. Some people need a challenge, competition, something to fight for. Tiger no longer saw the competition in golf as it became too easy. There was nothing left for him to "win." He knows that eventually he will overtake Jack Nicklaus in career wins and catch Ben Hogan in everything else. The billion he's already earned has sort of made those silly little golf accomplishments seem irrelevant. What's really worth more: $10 million or having more U.S. Open wins than anyone else? Hard to say, especially when he knows he's young, can play into his 60's, and will eventually have every record except those held by Mariano Rivera. But women? No matter how many you conquer, there's always another one. That's what Tiger was thinking. He's married, so he's accomplished that. But all those other women out there? He wasn't settling for just one.

But don’t worry, Eldrick. You won’t suffer much, not in public anyway. On the course, they’ll cheer you just as loudly, if not more loudly. They’ll say, “Isn’t that courageous of him to overcome that scandal and come out here and win another tournament?” Nike will keep you, so will everyone else, because they’ve learned how forgiving the public is. Forgiving, or maybe we just don’t care. If Kobe Bryant can rape a woman and still have the highest-selling NBA jersey, we are either forgiving or stupid.

So your image will be fine, your commercials will play, and your crowds will cheer. The only place you’ll suffer is at the dinner table, on Father’s and Mother’s Days, kid’s birthdays, at the Thanksgiving dinner table, Christmas morning, and visiting the in-laws. On television and the golf course, you’ll be fine. At home, that’s where you’ll suffer.

Fall, or Autumn

2009-11-03T20:09:00.006-05:00

There’s no question that I love summer, always did as a kid, having played baseball throughout childhood both little league and street league. However, as blasphemous as it seems, there came a time when I was ready to go back to school.

There’s something about new shoes, jeans, long sleeve shirts, and a light jacket that turns me back into a 12-year old. There’s something about picking out a new backpack, pens, erasers, and other school supplies that screams in smiles. That’s probably why I became a teacher. It doesn’t hurt to have an October birthday.

My first concert ever was 1978, Bruce Springsteen at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, NJ. It was a nice October night, and I've been able to snag a copy of the same show on CD off E-bay 30 years later. No, of course it wasn't legal, but it's gold, no doubt.

September through January, when school let out at 3pm, we ran home to change into play clothes and then headed to the town park for football. If you had a shirt with any amount of green, it was just as good as a NY Jets jersey. If blue, then you believed you were on the NY Giants. No other teams mattered. We played until the 5 o’clock whistle blew, which was loud enough to hear at every corner through the square-mile town of Lyndhurst, NJ, only five short minutes from the Lincoln Tunnel. Latecomers had to wait for an even number to join a team. Nobody had an arm like Pete Miserak. Nobody had the speed of Benny Esposito. Nobody complained like Scott Lindskog. Nobody knew everyone else’s touchdown totals like Mike Tesauro. And nobody thinks about those days as much as I do.

I worry about kids today. Those days taught us how to work with others, how to be fair when making teams, how to solve problems by watching defenses, when to stick to your guns on a controversial out of bounds call, and when to walk away when someone was too stubborn or about to call their big brother. We learned simple math from keeping score and geometry from figuring out which trees marked the goal line and sidelines. Today, kids shut themselves in the house with Nintendo, Playstation, Xbox, and whatever else is out there. They don't play together; they play against. They're too accustomed to hitting a "reset" button instead of working it out. They sit back and wait for their parents, or parent, or guardian, or grandma to take care of everything for them. They just aren't willing to work, and nobody has shown them how to get things done for themselves.

You want to smell the greatest smell in the world? If you're north of the Mason-Dixon Line, go outside on the first Saturday in October at about 10am. Feel which way the wind is coming from. Lean back slightly, flare those nostrils, and slowly, deeply inhale. It’s the closest I’ll ever get to a time machine.

thanks, roger (click here)

2009-10-24T12:29:00.013-05:00

since i was in about 8th grade i've admired few people more than film critic (don't like to label him with that) film reviewer roger ebert. bruce springsteen rises up a little, jimmy stewart too, but that's about it from the entertainment world. ebert is really in the journalism realm but still connected to entertainment of course. i love movies, and i love when people talk about movies, and through the 80's and 90's, nobody was more fun to listen to than siskel and ebert at the movies.

one of my friends in high school and college was mike senatore back in lyndhurst, nj. we spent hours upon hours watching and talking about films and talking about what was said on at the movies. two of his favorite movies ever were being there with peter sellers, and the in-laws with peter falk and alan arkin, not the recent remake with michael douglass and albert brooks. mike had a film camera, studied film with me at college, and we make some goofy, dumb films back then. he did the camera work while i dreamed up things to shoot. we did some claymation and junk, spliced in some real film like clips from mash and some beatles videos. henry "happy" markowski was in on it too. hey, hap.

anyway, back to roger ebert. for a couple of years i've been a subscriber to his online review page, and about a year ago he started a blog that was not just about movies. it included a lot of social commentary, which i've found very enlightening as well as entertaining. i've posted a lot of comments on his blog to the point where my girlfriend refers to him as my "buddy" because i'm often reading and writing there. it's not a blog where everyone blindly agrees and "sucks up" to what he has to say. there's just as much dissent, and sometimes it gets rather heated, especially when it gets political. his entry on evolution v. creationism was followed by an amazing array of debate. i'm not there just to agree and be liked. he and a handful of others strongly disagreed with my opinion of the great gatsby. i should point out that absolutely nobody there agreed with me, but that doesn't discourage me. i'm accustomed to being on the short side. if you google something like "great gatsby boring," you'll get a million people who thinks it's the best book ever and half a million who think, like me, it's horribly over-rated. if i can bat .333 for the yankees, i'm a hero; so i'm okay with those stats.

recently, roger (not "ebert," because i feel that would be unnecessarily formal) did something very nice for me. he wrote a blog about the blogs that he reads and finds interesting. of the half dozen or so blogs on which he commented, one of them was mine. that's about the greatest recognition of any kind that i've ever had for anything. he commented about my michael jackson hair accident hoax, in which i showed before and after pictures and video of the alleged accident. i also suggested that it was a staged accident, designed to help cover up the scars and scabs from hair transplant surgery. regardless of whether i'm right or wrong, i greatly appreciated that roger not only quoted what i had written but also suggested very strongly that he agreed with me.

in high school and college i loved reading newspapers and couldn't wait each morning to hear our copy of the new york daily news to hit the front porch. i had the idea that i'd like to work for a newspaper. i like the immediacy of reporting, the rush to get it right and get it quickly, and also the idea that your name is in front of people regularly. although i worked on the college newspaper (the beacon) at william paterson university and also edited the literary magazine (essence). i went into teaching instead, but i'm teaching about writing, which is also a good thing. i currently have two novels finished and a third almost there. i haven't tried to sell any yet, not sure why, or maybe i do. maybe those novels will put my name in front of people. even if they don't, i still don't have much room for complaint right now.

i took a few graduate writing classes over the past few years, and one of the professors talked about blogging. she said if you aren't blogging, you should. and if you think nobody is reading, you're wrong. i've had mine since about 2006, and for a long time i assumed nobody was reading. i know that roger reads it, and many more people are reading it because of his mention. that means i better keep writing, and i also better keep improving.

roger, you come across as a very humble guy. however, there's no need to be humble if i say that it's no small thing for someone of your literary stature to show your readers that there are smaller people like me who are worthy of a little attention. it may seem cruelly ironic that you're known for talking about movies, but recent operations have cost you your ability to speak. it's unfair and selfish for me or anyone to suggest looking for a bright side, but perhaps the blogging/writing that you've done since those operations has introduced you to a much greater worldwide audience. the cause was a great loss for you, but the effect is a gift to your readers.

thank you, sir.

you can follow him on twitter: @ebertchicago.

there's a phony guy pretending to be him under something like @rogerebert, but don't get fooled by that.

p.s. my daughter doesn't like my blog because my entries are too long. she's right. you can read hers at: >kate was here x or social vibe

what's up in the NFL?

2009-10-24T12:07:00.003-05:00

i love to watch football, especially nfl football, and especially with knowledgeable football people. the last place i want to be is at a superbowl party with those people who sit around waiting for the new commercials. i watch them, but that's just an unnecessary accessory. my three brothers have all been football coaches, and two still are. two of them have also been football referees, and one still is. because i've spent so much time studying football since 6th grade, i sometimes think i see things that don't make sense and i might possibly know better. for example: what's up with taking a knee at the end of the half?

why is it that when a team has the ball on about their own 30 with about ten seconds left in the first half, they almost always take a knee and let the clock run out so they can all trot to the locker room? why not toss up a hail mary? barry switzer once said that when you throw a pass, three things can happen and two of them are bad. yes, you can get an incomplete pass or an interception, and those two are bad, but you can also get a completion or even an interference penalty, which is also good. why not take a 5 or 7 step drop and haul it downfield?

i've heard a counter argument that says, "well, your quarterback might get hurt." true, but that can happen on any play. and if you're throwing a hail mary, you're not going to get much of a pass rush. they're going to drop everyone available back in coverage, so you'll only have to face a 3-man rush, 4 at the most, and your o-line should be able to handle that. let it rip. if it's in complete, so what? if it's intercepted, big deal, they're now down at their end of the field and time will likely have run out anyway. you might get a deflection, an interference or defensive holding call, and you're in good shape at their 20 with at least one play left. line up for a field goal at that point.

how not to solve the race issue

2009-10-16T21:25:00.002-05:00

click on the title to take you to the news story i'm referencing.

there's a very simple equation that goes like this:

the more we examine racial differences, the more racial differences we will have to look at.

it's like saying a=a. if we continue to dissect racial differences, we will never be able to accept all races and equal humans on the planet. one example is the link in the title in a story about how many times a day mexicans use curses. who cares? why does anyone need to know this? the only possible outcome of this will be for some people to think less of mexicans because of the amoujnt of times they curse during a day. there is nothing good to be found. it's a meaningless statistic that adds more fuel to the fires of comparison.

an even greater source of racial non-information that can only lead to negative racial attention is president bush's "no child left behind" legislation in conjunction with a mandatory, statewide school assessment in new jersey known as the NJASK, the new jersey assessment of skills and knowledge. in order for any school in new jersey to be classified as "successful," a certain percentage of students in every individual school building must "pass" this test. i put successful and pass in quotes for a reason, not just to play with punctuation.

first, what is "successful"? it's an arbitrary percentage that increases every year, forcing schools to do more to have more students "pass" the test. let's pretend that this year a school must have 75% of students with a passing grade in order for that school to be deemed "successful."

the students in every new jersey school are broken into a handful of groups called "sub groups," and they are mainly determined by race. white, african-american, hispanic, asian, native american, etc. and others are represented as well as students in special education or receiving other services. let's pretend that there are 7 sub groups and there are 100 students in each of these sub groups. it's possible that a school can have 100% of students in each sub group with a passing grade, except one sub group. a school can be considered "failing" even if 100% of the students have passing grades in every sub group except one, and let's use native americans. in that group only 74 kids, or 74% (because there are 100 students, for the sake of the arguement). every other group had 100% passing. how does this translate unfairly? easy. everyone will look at the school report card, which is public record, and they'll say, "oh, those native americans, THEY are the reason our school failed!"

we will never be able to view and accept all races as equal if we continue to separate them, pick them apart, and provide fuel for the fires of racism.

dinger

2009-10-12T20:24:00.004-05:00

the colorado rockies baseball team has a mascot that's a triceratops by the name of "dinger."

why? how about a yeti? were there many triceratops living in the rocky mountains? from what i recall, they were a cumbersome animal that likely wouldn't survive in a mountainous area.

is that the best you can do?

healthcare reform

2009-10-03T11:39:00.003-05:00

when an issue is in the balance, and there is equally strong support and opposition, it is necessary to determine what the opposition stands to lose. when an effort is made to help those who need help, then the opposition must have a very strong reason to oppose something designed to help.

who loses from healthcare reform? it is clear that the taxpayers do not lose because the money spent on universal health care will be saved through preventative care because 80% of healthcare money is spent on aftercare, taking care of someone after they've been inflicted by something that could have been staved off from preventative care. those who claim our pockets will suffer are wrong.

so then who loses from healthcare reform? some claim democracy loses because it will bring us closer to socialism. but medicare, medicaid, and social security are already socialist programs, and they are quite well accepted by those who use and need them. healthcare reform will simply bring more people on board a very popular boat.

so, again, who loses from healthcare reform? if there is a public option, or even if not, the insurance companies lose. if there is a public option, then we have the opportunity to have a great discount through a government-sponsored system. this system would take a great deal of money out away from the insurance companies. as it stands, they make more money by denying coverage, which they seem to be able to do at will.

then who wins from healthcare reform? everyone - except the insurance companies. then why do so many misguided americans oppose health care reform? because they have fallen into the propaganda trap set in motion first by the insurance companies. then the rightwing pundits give it a good push. too many people hear the limbaugh-o'reilly-beck-hannity machine spitting out rhetoric without anything to prove or support their claims. they could claim the sky is green, and there would be a great segment of society who would have to step outside and take a look. unfortunately, they don't look. they listen, they adhere, they fall in line. sometimes we need to step out of the line and take a good look around to see where that line is headed and what's at the other end of it.

the michael jackson hair accident hoax

2009-08-24T21:45:00.021-05:00

did michael jackson really burn his hair in that notorious pepsi commercial? i don't think so.
we've all seen the pictures of michael jackson on a stretcher with his head bandaged following what seemed like a horrible burn accident while filming a pepsi commercial back in 1984. why is it that i'm the only one smart enough to see that it was all a hoax? here's my proof:

first, look at these pictures of jackson shortly before the accident.

notice anything in all three pictures? notice the corners developing on the sides of his forehead? notice the balding that has begun? he's losing his hair, so he's taking pieces of the remaining hairline and greasing the hairs on his skin to cover up the bald spot.

then comes the alleged accident. watch and notice two things. first, at no time do you see jackson before he decends the stairs, so we can't really be sure it's him. next, notice his clothes weren't on fire. you see someone standing, back to the camera, then the video goes completely white, then the dancer's hair is on fire. go ahead and watch...

as i said, you don't really see if it's jackson until he pops up, so we can't be sure that was him going down the stairs. after that, we saw pictures of jackson on a stretcher with his head bandaged.

back then, people who had hair transplant surgery had to wear bandages around their heads to cover the scabs and bleeding following the surgery. today, the technology is better, but not then. jackson, who was so freaky about his appearance, was ultra freaky about his hair. losing it was the biggest obstacle for his "forever young" attitude. he couldn't walk around with bandages or the surgery would be obvious. he needed an explanation, so he came up with the fake fire accident.

not convinced? look at these pictures of him in the years after the accident. look how much better his hair looks, how thick, how straight. that's because it wasn't his hair but the hair from the transplant surgery.

looks pretty clear to me.

a crime against yourself?

2009-08-12T22:52:00.003-05:00

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1883376,00.html

a recent time magazine story (click on the title or the link above, if it's a link) explained how teenagers can be prosecuted for child pornography if they send naked pictures of themselves that they've taken with their cell phones. as the story explains, these children are both the perpetrator and the victim. they're also stupid.

does that mean if a teenager masturbates, they're now guilty of child molestation or sex with a minor?

mayor squidward

2009-07-28T23:16:00.011-05:00

i really like philadelphia mayor michael nutter, but i can't look at him nor listen to him without thinking of "squidward" from spongebob squarepants. you try.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqzfZwbccAY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9y8OJ_DFfk

...

In Defense of Gay Marriage

2009-07-08T22:42:00.009-05:00

Over the past few years, a great deal of money has been spent, efforts put forth, attention given, words spoken, words yelled, words cursed, and pain suffered in the debate of gay marriage. It passed, then it didn’t, then it sort of did but in limited run, but then it was taken back again. Make it federal, leave it in the hands of states, it was ping pong. I don’t know if all gays are for it, nor do I know the percentage of heterosexuals against it. What I do know is that I am one heterosexual in favor of it. I arrived at my conclusion through logic and reasoning, which have no place in a political debate, but this is a personal issue, not political.

Before I can explain my logic, I must set some definitions. When I use the name of God, it really includes both God and Nature in order to allow room for the Atheists, the Agnostics, and the Unimpressed. Also, God is easier to type and commands more attention from those against gay marriage. If someone says, “May Nature strike me dead,” we know it’s going to take about forty years longer than if God is called to the plate. My logic simply traces two roads, one each created by God and Man. One, however, has better landscaping and sewers.

First, we must examine the Man-made elements of the debate. They include law, marriage, the Bible, and/or any other supernatural reference material such as the Koran, the Torah, and a few chapters of Dianetics. Let’s admit that Man really wrote the Bible. God holds the copyright and may have edited some. God probably wrote the The Honeymooners, but Man is responsible for any The Three Stooges episode that includes Shemp.

Man created laws to protect innocent or uninvolved people from harm. Laws were not made to stop you from having fun, but a few sections of Philadelphia are definitely not as much fun as they used to be. Hunting laws protect us not by eliminating hunting but by keeping hunters at a distance so you can have a cookout without bullets ripping through the umbrella, or mother-in-law, that covers your deck. Laws don’t eliminate alcohol consumption but regulate it so you have to be either 21-years old or have parents who allow you to refer to them by their first names. Long before we created laws and marriage, we were doing a fine job of hetero-sexing it up enough to go forth and multiply for thousands of years without the existence of marriage. But you broke it, so you bought it.

What has been made by God? Man, woman, the conditions of hetero and homosexuality, sexual reproduction, and Play-Doh. There is one clear difference between what was made by Man and God. What was made by man can be changed by Man. What was made by God cannot be changed by Man, except for Joan Rivers. Whether Christians like it or not, God made homosexuals just as he/she/it made you and me. However, it was a mistake. Ouch. Sorry, but homosexuals must face the fact that being gay was not part of intelligent, Darwinian, nor any other design. Well, maybe ergonomic design, but only if they shave their body hair. Millions of people are born with various errors such as blindness, cerebral dysfunctions, muscular issues, and throwing like a girl. We must also count gay as one of those errors, but please let me explain before you hit me.

Similar to the explanation in Jurassic Park, all humans are female at conception, even Italians. At about three months into development, there are internal fireworks that release hormones throughout the body. If that body is supposed to be male and not female, there are hormones that alter both the body and the brain, sending them into a rather masculine direction. We know the male and female brains are different, and these hormones are responsible. A high school phys. ed. class might be involved too, but it’s only a theory. Anyway, if that body is supposed to be female, then the hormonal shower doesn’t take place, and the brain and body of that growing life form remain female.

The human body and other mammals have an immense lineup of organs, cells, and assorted parts and parts of other parts. Too often, the growth and development of these parts isn’t always on target. Sometimes the hormones that change the body from female to male are successful, but the hormones designed to make the brain male miss their cue. The result is a male body with a female brain. Female brains are designed to seek a male partner. A male body seeking a male partner would be a gay male. The other option would be when hormones successfully change the brain to male but the body remains female. A male brain seeks a female as a partner, thus producing a gay female and possibly an excellent college softball player. This happens to roughly 8% of all forms of life: humans, dogs, birds, monkeys, gymnasts, everything.

Man did not make homosexuality or homosexuals, which means we can’t change them. Man did make laws, which means man can change laws, even those written by our Founding Fathers. We’ve shown them great respect by treading lightly upon what they’ve given us, but we have made changes when necessary. Usually, action is needed to protect any one of their most vital gifts, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Legislation has banished slavery, given women the right to vote, and provided equal access for the physically challenged. We’ve cut down barriers to provide equal education and, right or wrong yet to be determined, we’ve taken Affirmative Action. We’ve done and undone a ban on alcohol, so clearly we can change our minds and change them back again, establishing that nothing is permanent. Compared to these other Constitutional changes, allowing gay marriage seems rather simple and unobtrusive, until you ask someone’s opinion.

A common mistake is made when choosing sides in this debate. People ask themselves, “Would I enjoy a gay marriage?” More than 90% of the population should say “no,” but that’s the wrong question because nobody is asking voters to be in such a marriage. What people should be asking themselves is, “Would I be negatively affected if gays were allowed to marry?” Probably not.

Let’s look at your co-worker Christine, or we’ll say Chris instead. Chris has a boyfriend also named Chris who lives about ten miles away. They each maintain one-bedroom apartments because neither can afford a mortgage payment. They’ve been a happy couple for five years, but the subject of marriage has been little more than a hint. They both have good jobs with health coverage, and they enjoy looking for antiques, travel, movies, and finding new street-side cafés in the city.

Unfortunately, their respective families do not like the other Chris, and neither Chris is welcome in the other’s family home. On Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter, they must decide whether to spend a solemn day together or listen to unasked questions as relatives and family attempt to include each Chris in a conversation before suddenly needing a refill. Together or apart, holidays are bittersweet and emotionally searing.

Chris A’s job and co-workers lean on him increasingly. When Chris B goes out with friends, they usually try to set him up on a date, but his disinterest feeds suspicion until they no longer invite him along. His isolation has manifested in excessive drinking and suicidal thoughts. Chris A occasionally finds him on the couch with empty bottles on the floor. Their relationship exists only because Chris A worries about what will happen if they don’t have each other because they were both alone for twice as many years as they’ve been together.

But what if they were married? They would proudly live together instead of coming and going at late hours to avoid prying eyes. They would combine incomes, easily afford a three-bedroom home and property taxes, support a nice suburb, and commute to the city together. Pooling two incomes means shopping in bulk to save a few bucks to spend elsewhere in a struggling economy. Two people on one car insurance policy, combined with a homeowner’s policy from the same company, brings a discount that saves more than $1,000 a year that Chris could put towards his master’s degree or spend at the Mom and Pop antique shop that might have otherwise closed.

Many companies offer an insurance “opt out” program in which an employee can decline health coverage and use the coverage of his or her spouse. The $10,000 that an employer spends for each policy is split, thus putting $5,000 back in the boss’s pocket and giving the other $5,000 to Chris. That’s a new car every three years or maybe part of an investment towards a small condo at the beach. Imagine more couples like Chris and Chris getting married, and more employers saving $5,000 for each couple. That also means more bonus $5,000 checks to Chris and others each year that would go a long way to stem the tide of layoffs and boost a weakened economy.

From what I can see, gay marriage shows only positives. It can help the economy and make for happier, more productive employees who drive their new car home or maybe to the beach on weekends. Most important, above the new cars and beach home, comes the peace and the acceptance among friends and family. Then Chris A and B can sit together with brothers, sisters, and parents to hold homo and hetero hands around the Thanksgiving table.

Up! Go! Now!

2009-05-31T21:45:00.003-05:00

i don't have time to write much, but PLEASE go see disney's Up as soon as possible. i haven't had this much fun in a movie in years. be aware that there is some sadness and even death to deal with, and kids might get a little confused, and you are going to cry for sure, but it's well worth it. laughing tears, crying tears, it was all there. and the dogs! oh, were they damn funny!

save your money. don't bother with the 3D version. it's about $4 more, but you won't see the brilliant colors as much because of the polarization of the 3D glasses. just see the regular version.

don't wait! go go go!

book review! - angels and demons, by dan brown

2009-05-12T20:10:00.005-05:00

In the beginning of Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown of The Da Vinci Code, super-duper “code breaker” (because symbologist just doesn’t sufficiently cover his mad skills) Robert Langdon’s phone rings in the middle of the night. A voice introducing itself as Maximilian Kohler tells Langdon to come to his lab immediately. Langdon hangs up and goes back to sleep. Then an image comes through Langdon’s fax machine that shows a dead body with what appears to be the word “Illuminati” branded across the chest. Illuminati is a historically clandestine organization that has a particular belief about religion v. science and evolution v. Creationism. Legendarily and violently, the Illuminati has promoted the conflict between science and religion. Langdon, recognizing the name, immediately hops on a plane and does what the voice tells him. Two things are certain: fax machines do not have the greatest picture quality, and only an idiot would accept that image as a fact without considering that the photograph might not be genuine. (see: Photoshop, Miss California)

Kohler is confined to a motorized wheelchair with more gadgets than a Rolls Royce and runs a lab called CERN, a nuclear research facility in Geneva, Switzerland. Within CERN is a private laboratory to which only two people have access: the recently murdered Leonardo Vetra and his daughter Vittoria. When Leonardo is found not just dead but missing an eye in his suite at CERN, Kohler calls not the police but Langdon and Vittoria instead. What follows is over 400 pages of setups and prefab-coincidences that happen so regularly that any competent reader will quickly get annoyed. Only the father and daughter Vetra team have access to their private lab, thanks to a retina scanner for identification and entry. When Kohler leads Langdon and Miss Vetra to their lab door following the murder, Langdon sees an eyeball on the floor near the door. Kohler tells Miss Vetra that he has already searched their lab. She quietly opens the lab and without noticing either the eye on the floor nor the statement by Kohler that he has been in the Vetra’s private lab. Did she forget that only she and her father had access to the lab? Shouldn’t she have said, “Yo, buddy, how’d you manage to get in? Perhaps you pulled out my father’s eyeball for the retina scan, the very eyeball that happens to be here on the floor.” Go, Sherlock, go.

Missing from the private Vetra lab is a canister that contains antimatter, a theoretical nuclear material that is suspended in a vacuum container, similar to the canisters that you send through the pneumatic system of a drive-thru bank. In order to keep the material suspended, Father and Daughter Vetra created a electro-magnetic field inside the canister. It has a little clock to indicate the time that the power will run out after it has been removed from the charging system. If the battery dies and the antimatter collides with the container, it will wipe out life within a mile radius.

Meanwhile, the recent pope has died, and the Vatican is in “conclave,” their process of selecting a new pope. Roman Catholic bigshots from far and wide gather at the Vatican to vote for a new pope, kind of like Miss Universe but without the swimsuit competition. Unfortunately, something else is also at the Vatican. The antimatter thief has managed to smuggle and hide the canister in the Vatican with the intent to wipe out the global leaders of the Catholic Church, now that they’re all conveniently behind the walls of Vatican City. What a merry coincidence. The guts of the movie involves Langdon and Vittoria following a trail of clues not left behind by the villain but assumed by Langdon after gaining access to the Vatican top super secret super library, which he has unsuccessfully attempted to visit numerous times in recent years.

Angels and Demons has too many contrivances and conveniences, which disallows the acceptance of the dramatic attempt. After only the first three pages, it is already clear that suspending belief would not be enough. It would have to be sold on E-bay. Dan Brown has created too many incidents in which the reader must look the other way and pretend not to see the obvious flaws that exist only as a convenience for a plot to continue. For example, the nuclear antimatter canister can only be a threat if someone knows that it’s hidden in the Vatican. The Illuminati didn’t make a YouTube video, so how does Langdon even know to look for it? It just so happens that the Vatican police, also known as the Swiss Guard, spotted someone walking into the Vatican with a canister that had a little digital clock on it. Naturally, that means the Illuminati smuggled antimatter inside. How could anyone possibly draw any other conclusion? Nobody in the world other than Father and Daughter Vetra even knows that these canisters exist, yet somehow the Swiss Guard knew to call Max Kohler at the CERN laboratory because a digital clock was on the surveillance tape. That leads to another question. When one smuggles an explosive device into the Vatican, would one allow it to appear on a surveillance tape? Wouldn’t one hide it in a Sponge Bob lunch box or camera bag? Wouldn’t one draw a little attention carrying a canister with a clock in the midst of a countdown?

Brown also spends a lot of time setting up a situation but holding back one piece of the puzzle, leading you to an “obvious” conclusion that is clearly not possible with only semi-careful reading. Such situations make you feel either like a genius for having figured something out or insulted that Brown would think he’s fooled you. Max Kohler immediately seems like the bad guy for having broken into the Vetra lab and not calling the police. Commander Olivetti of the Swiss Guard seems to have rogue tendencies, such as locking Langdon and Miss Vetra in his office and preventing them from talking to the Camerlengo. A cardinal is found dead where there should have been guards, but there weren’t any. Of course Olivetti must be responsible for pulling guards from their post. But don’t turn your back on the Camerlengo, assistant to the pope. They’re all bad guys, which means they aren’t all bad guys. In one scene, Kohler, in his motorized wheelchair, gets the Camerlengo behind a locked door. Then the Camerlengo screams as he is hit in the chest with a red-hot brandiron. Of course Kohler couldn’t have done it, and it’s insulting that Brown expects anyone to believe so. The red herring is way too red but not very herring.

There were also occasions of silliness. Miss Vetra was restrained, beaten, semi-conscious, and unable to open her eyes. However, just as the villain is about to knock Langdon off a balcony, Vetra somehow musters the strength to escape her bonds and save Langdon from certain death. The villain also possesses a legendary box of six brands used in torture by the Illuminati. As the villain chases him around a table in his secret lair, Langdon, who should be in fear of his life, notices there are only five brands in the box and demands that the villain tell him where the sixth brand is. Langdon at that point should only care about inhaling, exhaling, and his heartbeat, not demanding the location of a chunk of metal. After Langdon and Vetra escape from that villian, they take a secret tunnel into the Vatican but run into a locked door, as it has been for, oh, maybe a century. Oh good fortune abounds as the keys are waiting in the lock on the other side, thus allowing a curious guard to permit access to Langdon and Vetra. Don’t even ask about the camera woman and reporter who are able to stroll anywhere within the Vatican to film dead bodies without being stopped. Worse is when Langdon leaps from a helicopter more than a mile in the air by making a hanglider from one of those windshield screens that keeps the sun out of your car.

It’s possible to have a poor story but great narration, like some of Stephen King’s work, but that doesn’t exist either. The word “instinct” was scattered like dandelions to describe almost any physical movement by Langdon. Apparently he doesn’t know much of anything but can still do everything by instinct. Hearing the phrase “the hunter became the hunted” was cringe-worthy. An occasional mixed metaphor can be entertaining, such as “taking a back burner,” a hybrid of “taking a back seat” and being “put on the back burner.” A “pyre of flame” seemed redundant. The ending was worse than a soap opera because Langdon and Vetra have known each other for less than a full day, but that doesn’t stop them from passionately enjoying each other for breakfast. Speaking of breakfast, Angels and Demons lays an egg, but it doesn’t go over easy.

gay marriage and miss california

2009-04-21T21:45:00.013-05:00

please believe two things:
1. i didn't want to watch the miss usa pageant
2. i wish i hadn't watched it. however, i can change neither, and now i have to write this. i don't want to write it, but i have to.

miss california may have lost the title, may have landed in second place, because of this statement in response to a question about whether more states should legalize gay marriage:

"Well, I think it's great that Americans are able to choose one or the other. We live in a land where you can choose same-sex marriage or opposite marriage. And you know what? In my country, in my family, I think that I believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman. No offense to anybody out there, but that's how I was raised and that's how I think it should be, between a man and a woman. Thank you very much."

it's not fair to ask if she was wrong because there is no wrong answer. it's an opinion question. she's allowed to speak against gay marriage, just as someone else is allowed to speak in favor of that or abortion or any other controversial issue. she said, "in my family, i think that i believe that a marriage should be between a man and a woman." literally, that means she prefers to marry a man. she did not say that all marriages must be that way. she only said that she prefers her marriage, her family, to be that way.

she knew who was asking the question, and she knew which answer he wanted to hear. regardless, she spoke truthfully but not hatefully. i don't agree with her, but i do congratulate her. she said exactly the right thing. she said that it's great that americans have the ability to make that choice if she wants it, and she said that she doesn't want it. do we all have to be gay now because there are pseudo-media types like perez hilton who have bolted out of the closet and insist the rest of the gay community do the same before he "outs" them? i hesitate to refer to him as part of the media because he is barely more in the media than i am. we don't have to like gays. we don't have to vote for their equal marriage rights. however, we do have to respect them as equal people - provided that they also treat us equally. according to hilton, miss california is not worthy of the miss usa title because she believes that there is no place for a gay marriage in her family. that issue lies between miss california and her family, not between miss california and hilton, and not between miss california and the miss usa title.

her answer was not the better answer, nor does her answer agree with mine. however, she was not asked for the better answer. she was asked for her opinion. she gave it. if hilton was not willing to listen to and tolerate an opposing opinion, then he should not have asked the question.

book review! - the big bam, by leigh montville

2009-04-20T20:34:00.007-05:00

As previously stated in another book review, I love baseball and the Yankees. Therefore, it was a no brainer why I’d read The Big Bam, a richly detailed biography about George Herman “Babe” Ruth, by Leigh Montville. It was filled with things I both appreciated and didn’t want to read. I’ve always had a very high regard for Ruth because he single-handedly saved baseball when it was almost forgotten. He did save baseball, and he turned a game for boys into a respectable (until recently) industry. He grew so famous that he became a question on a test to check if someone really was an American trying to re-enter the country.

I knew that before Ruth started pounding the ball over the fence, people didn’t really care about homeruns. Fans actually were disappointed by roundtrippers because the homerun was considered a cheap run and not very strategic. Most fans then, but very few now, were more excited to see a run manufactured with a single, a stolen base, a ground ball to second, and a flyout to left center. What I didn’t know was how much of a creep Ruth was. He grew from an abandoned, penniless boy in an orphanage to a wealthy man who abandoned his wife and child. He should have been more grateful and humble, but then he wouldn’t have been Babe Ruth.

There’s no telling how many times a biographer takes liberties with the truth, especially when there’s no way for anyone to disprove what he or she has written. In this book, however, Montville often makes a specific effort to point out that the tale he’s telling might be true, but it might not be true. Either way, he’s going to tell the most commonly known legend and leave it to the individual to either stand with that legend or just let it go.

This approach is most evident from start to finish. The book opens with Ruth’s father bringing little George on a bus ride to a home for “incorrigible,” orphaned, and other unfortunate children. Montville is sure to let the reader know that his description might not be the truth, but it is the best version that he can find through his many interviews. Just like the story about Ruth telling a sick boy how he’d hit a homerun for the lad or the called shot in the World Series against the Cubs, there just aren’t any facts, only a lot of speculation and foggy memories passed on and on.

Montville doesn’t shy away or play anything safely. Ruth was a generous tipper and spread the wealth whenever it felt right. However, he also showed his fangs, as when he challenged an umpire to a fight on the field or stood on the dugout, screaming at fans who were treating him with less respect than he believed he deserved. Although he wasn’t African-American, he was regularly called names because of his large lips, olive skin, and flat nose.

Yankee Stadium was built because of him, so I didn’t realize that it literally was The House that Ruth Built. Yankee fans may have wondered why the grandstands didn’t make a complete circuit of the stadium. Instead, there's a single level of bleachers running from right to left field. It’s explained in the book, and it's because of Ruth. The New York Daily News was created because of Ruth, so I guess it should be called The Paper that Ruth Wrote.

If you’re a baseball fan, you should read The Big Bam. If you’re a Yankee fan, you must read it. You owe it to the legacy of The Team that Ruth Built.

another small step for publishing

2009-04-17T01:06:00.003-05:00

they did it again. pikerpress has another of my short stories on their website this week. it's a two-part story called "the accident." the second part will be there on or about monday, april 20.

i like titles like that, but i think i already wrote that on a previous post. anyway, here are two links to the first and second halves of the story.

let me know what you think.

this link gets you to part one (1) (not won)

http://www.pikerpress.com/article.php?aID=3512

this link gets you to part two (2) (not too, nor to, nor tieu)

http://www.pikerpress.com/article.php?aID=3513

one small step for publishing

2009-03-13T23:10:00.005-05:00

hey, i'm finally published - sort of. it's an "e-zine," an online magazine called Piker Press, and a literary one at that.

my story, "the sweeper," which can be found elsewhere on this blog, will be the march 16 cover story. about a month after that, another short story of mine will appear as a two-part short story. it's called "the accident." i like titles that are "the ________." i don't like titles that are either plays on words or trite expressions that we've heard a million times.

anyway, here's the link to my story, which was their "cover story" of that issue:

http://www.pikerpress.com/article.php?aID=3483

also, click on the "authors" link on the left side of the site and you'll see a short bio about me and a link to the story.

thanks, and good night.

obvious question 2: john mccain - liar or loser?

2009-02-23T23:14:00.005-05:00

here's what john mccain said in a presidential debate: (copied and pasted from the huffington post)

Transcript of second McCain, Obama debate (10/7/2008):
McCain: I’ll get Osama bin Laden, my friends. I’ll get him. I know how to get him.

Charlie Gibson interviews John McCain (9/3/2008):
MCCAIN: Well, look, President Clinton [had] opportunities to get Osama bin Laden. President Bush had opportunities to get Osama bin Laden. I know how to do it and I’ll do it. And I understand and I have the knowledge and the background and the experience to make the right judgments.

Wolf Blitzer interviews John McCain (7/27/2008):
BLITZER: You’re president of the United States; you’ve vowed that you will capture Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice. … What would you do differently [than George Bush]?
MCCAIN: Well, I’m not going to telegraph a lot of the things that I’m going to do because then it might compromise our ability to do so. But, look, I know the area. I’ve been there. I know wars. I know how to win wars. And I know how to improve our capabilities so that we will capture Osama bin Laden or, put it this way, bring him to justice.
BLITZER: All right. If you capture…
MCCAIN: We will do it. I know how to do it.

so, obvious question: if john mccain really knew what to do to get osama bin laden, then why didn't he share that with anyone? that's extortion.

he was only going to get bin laden IF we elected him president?

so now that he lost, he's not going to tell anyone how to get bin laden?

if he really knew all this time, wasn't he smart enough to realize that if he made the effort to get bin laden before the election, wouldn't it clearly increase his chances of winning the presidency?

he certainly exposed himself as a liar and a loser.

house

2009-02-22T00:03:00.012-05:00

(see end of entry for an update)

i don't watch much television, maybe only three shows: some sports, the daily show with john stewart, and i often watch house, but only because my girlfriend is watching it and i'm in the same room. although the character of gregory house is very interesting, it still comes down to the show, which is a stupid show because every episode is the same 12-step program:

1. patient with something unusual gets brought into the hospital.

2. patient has symptoms that seem to be obviously something

3. house makes a racial joke about foreman

4. treatment begins, and house is wrong

5. new treatment, still wrong, patient now critical

6. house will flirt with cameron, whose hair color changes as often as "13's" sex partners

7. new treatment, still wrong, patient really critical

8. yet another treatment, still nothing, patient about to die

9. house wants to try a controversial treatment/operation and pesters his boss, dr. cuddy (usually sporting an inappropriately low-cut top, a mop of sad hair, and a nice ass depending on the camera angle) into approving the treatment/operation

10. with or without permission, house orders the controversial treatment/operation even though the treatment/operation itself might kill the patient

11. just before the treatment/operation begins, house sees a random thing that causes him to realize what the problem really is.

12. house limps in to stop the treatment/operation and explain to the dying patient that he or she will not die is stupid in one way or another.

the other characters constantly make mention to the "fact" that house is never wrong, but i strongly disagree. if house were never wrong, then these patients wouldn't be on death's door so often, and they wouldn't be saved by such randomness. in one episode, it was a chess piece that triggered the realization. one of my favorites was when a woman was dying because of an irregularity that was connected to her period. house was talking to his boss and mentioned an "aunt flo." so the word "flo" made him think of "flow," which made him think of menstrual bleeding. the writers were really hurting that week. i think my real favorite was when he was leering at a 16-year old girl as she walked away from him, and her red thong was visible above the waistline of her jeans. the color red made him think of something, can't recall exactly. so i guess if he weren't staring at a teenagers ass, the patient would have died? and this man is a genius? not in my world.

if this were baseball, his batting average would be about .100 because it takes him about ten tries an episode before he finally gets it right.

update: 3/16. on tonight's house, a woman was about to have a brain operation until the random thing happened - which was a cat sitting on house's computer. they even pointed it out this time.

ramones

2009-02-21T23:37:00.007-05:00

anyone who knows me knows that my single favorite music artist is bruce springsteen. however, there is only one group that has no predecessor nor successor who could ever come close to their originality and influence upon the music world, and that's the ramones. nobody has ever made the most of what little talent they possessed. nobody did more to promote leather jackets, torn jeans, and cheap sneakers. nobody will ever make more something out of more nothing.

the reason i bring it up is because i recently heard a remake of their song "sheena is a punk rocker," and i almost puked. it wasn't until then that i realized two things:

1. i have never before heard a remake of a ramones song.

2. i never again want to hear one.

it was done by a girl group called "the yeah yeah yeahs," but they should never be allowed to make another record again. they attempted the worst possible move: to bring harmony, on-key vocals, and performance to a ramones song. those elements, or lack of said elements, is exactly what defines the ramones. they didn't sing, but they spat. they didn't play music, but they made pleasant and tolerable noises. they didn't perform, but they took up stage space. they shouldn't have been successful, but they were because they found a hole, crawled into it, and left enough bait for us to sniff them out and crawl into the same hole just to see what the hell happened.

if you hear the song i'm referring to, please call the radio station and tell them never to play it again. no, tell them to melt the CD.

i'm proud to say that joey ramone is buried in the same cemetery as my mother.

because

2009-02-19T21:03:00.003-05:00

book review! - mr. majestik, by elmore leonard

2009-02-18T18:52:00.006-05:00

this isn't really going to be much of a book review because elmore leonard isn't really my favorite writer. i'm not saying he isn't a good writer, but i am saying that his type of story isn't on my list. he's into violent, masculinity-proving, knuckle-busting, testosterone-testing kind of fiction, and i'm not. however, because someone in a writing class made a big fuss about how brilliant a writer leonard is, i figured that it would be wrong to not read at least one of his books. i picked mr. majestik only because i mainly do books on CD, and that was the only title my library had.

the book was adequate and what i expected. i prefer to come away from a book with at least one of two things:

1. more knowledge than i had before, but a good kind of knowledge, which would mainly come from non-fiction

2. a few good hours of entertainment that allowed me to forget work or the news or my ex-wife.

this book gave me version 1 because the knowledge i now have is that i no longer have to read anything by elmore leonard. grammar and language are a big deal to me. if someone is going to be considered an established, seasoned, and almost legendary writer, then they better be able to master the language. otherwise, it's like a carpenter not knowing how to use a saw.

here are three examples of mr. leonard's writing, with a little bit of paraphrasing:

a. there was a car chase, and at one point he wrote, "the cadillac veered off the side of the highway, turned, and came back this way." he's writing in 3rd person limited, which means the narrator is detached from and not present in the story (3rd person) and following only one character's movements throughout the action (limited). if a narrator is not actually in the story, then he or she can't use the words "this way." that can only be said by someone who is actually there. he should have written something like, "the cadillac veered off the road and returned towards the man." of course, i don't that it was a cadillac or what the man's name was, but the important and accurate part was the phrasing of "this way." you just can't write that.

b. a similar breaking of the narration rules took place when he referred to a character who was in trouble and being chased. the sentence went something like, "as soon as he had the chance, he was outta here." here? no, he should have written "there." as in, "he was outta there." if a narrator says "here," then he is automatically present and no longer an omniscient being.

c. a last example of a breach of narration was when a character was thinking about something that might or might not happen. the narrator said something to the effect of, "he would probably never go there again." the narrator is omniscient. he knows everything that is past, present, and future. he can't say "probably" because he would have to know for sure everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen in the future.

other than that, the story was okay. predictable, but okay.

performance-enhancing drugs

2009-02-15T23:53:00.003-05:00

two things are clear:

1. barry bonds, alex rodriguez, jason giambi, roger clemens, mark mcgwire, sammy sosa, and more than 100 other players have used performance-enhancing drugs to inflate their statistics, their biceps, and their hat sizes in order to hit the ball farther and hit up their team owners for more cash.

2. they will not face any penalty, punishment, or prosecution from major league baseball because there was nothing in the rules at that time that stated that it was illegal to use those performance enhancers.

what bothers me about this is that although there were no rules against it in baseball, there were and still are rules/laws against it according to the laws of this country. although they weren't guilty in the eyes of bud selig and baseball, they were guilty in a court of law. do we need a rule in baseball that says you're not allowed to bludgeon the pitcher with your bat if he strikes you out? i'm sure the baseball rulebook does not say that it's against the rules of baseball to shoot the manager if your team loses a game. but just because something is not in the rules does not mean that it's okay to do it.

about ten years ago a student in a school at which i worked was expelled from school for bringing a weapon into the building. the weapon was a pellet gun. the boy's parents hired an attorney who argued that there was nothing in the school rules that said he was not allowed to bring the pellet gun to school. therefore, the student should not be punished because the school rules were not clear about bringing a pellet gun to school. well, sir, i argue this: there's no school rule that says i can't glue feathers to a student and throw him out a window to see if he can fly. although there's no rule against that, i'm pretty sure i'm not allowed to try it.

fool me once...

2009-02-15T23:39:00.005-05:00

president bush, thankfully now an ex-president, has said many times that there has not been a second 9/11-type of attack on american soil since he implemented "the patriot act," started eavesdropping on american citizens' private phone calls, started opening our mail, and basically re-wrote the constitution according to his personal doctrine.

if anyone has a chance, please tell him this: hey, W, did you also notice that there was never a first attack until you were in office? did you also notice that although there has not been a terrorist incident on american soil, terrorism on foreign soil has killed more than double the number of people who were killed on 9/11?

i just thought he should know. i guess he does know, but he doesn't want us to know.

you don't own her

2009-02-15T23:29:00.003-05:00

i drive to work every day on route 322 which runs across southern new jersey from the delware river clear to atlantic city. a few times i've seen a car that leaves me unsure if i should laugh or just shake my head in sadness: it's a green car, a gran prix i think, with a license plate that says "marksgrl."

what's that supposed to mean? i guess it's a car driven by a woman who has a boyfriend/husband/significant idiot named mark. i guess this mark guy has an inferiority complex because he has to basically stamp his name on his girlfriend's car in a sad attempt to keep other guys away from his girl. i suppose he must know that he's really not that great a guy and believes there's a good chance she'll stray off with another guy, otherwise he wouldn't have to try telling everyone that this girl belongs to him.

should i feel sorry for her? or should i consider that if she's dumb enough to keep that license plate, then she deserves to be in such a position? maybe those two idiots are good together because then they won't latch on to any normal people and infect their lives.

good luck to both of you.

award - the power of the internet

2009-02-03T21:32:00.007-05:00

the following was copied from the person who gave me the award...

award...

i received an award from Hrix first. Thank you Hrix for the recognition. :)

so the rules are...first. pass the award to five others who you think deserve to be awarded.

second. state 10 facts about yourself.

third. add a meaningful quotation.

BTW if you received the award, please copy and paste the image and put it somewhere in your blog.

------------

back to me. as for the actual award, which is a picture that has a curse in it, i can't include it because my kids read my blog, and i don't want them to read that. i think it's very cool, however.
five people to whom i pass along the award -

http://kjlong-teacherwriter.blogspot.com/ - someone who knows more about writing than me

http://publishkestrel.blogspot.com/ - a woman tougher than me, although i'm not a woman

http://canabalisticmonkey1.blogspot.com/ - a student with more guts than me

http://consciousearth.blogspot.com/ - someone who is smarter than me, as impossible as that may seem

and it seems redundant because she gave the award to me, however...

http://hrix.blogspot.com/ - a woman whose thoughts are ahead of her time

----------------
10 facts about myself:

1. i'm jealous of those people who have sooo many more people reading and commenting on their blog entries. perhaps they just know a lot more people, or maybe they're just better writers.

2. i've been teaching for about 22 years, and i'm tired of it. i know i should just shut up and be thankful i even have a job at this point in the world's economic woes, but truth is truth. i don't want to teach anymore. i want to work for a newspaper or magazine.

3. there is no doubt that nobody has children who can possibly be more happy, fun, friendly, polite, intelligent, funny, thoughtful, or looney than my two children.

4. i know that i have several excellent novels in my head and begun on my computer, but i haven't yet figured out how to get them all written. last year i made great progress on one, finished the whole 300 or so pages, and found an editor to help me re-write it. she worked with me on a little more than half of it and made great changes for me. but then i actually started putting more effort into my real job, and i've greatly slacked on the novel. if i ever get things really going, i know it'll be fabulous. i'm positive that if a publisher ever sat and talked to me about my story ideas, it would be a week before they'd leave. aren't i modest?

5. i would like to be married again.

6. i love disneyworld.

7. i struggle between believing that i am sometimes the most intelligent human in the room or the most complete idiot in the room. more often it's the former.

8. i feel very inadequate because i don't know my mother's birthday.

9. there is someone against whom i will always carry a grudge because they lied to the police about me, resulting in my being arrested my mistake, and thus resulting in some very hurtful, irreversible effects on my life. because of what that person did, i occasionally find ways to hurt them back. however, if they would apologize, then i would stop. i've given that person several chances, but that person always denies what was done. i know two things: first, it's indisputable what was done. second, i know that person is too dumb to have thought of it and was coached and influenced to do it. i still want the apology.

10. i know how to save the world.

meaninful quote:

just because you CAN, doesn't mean that you SHOULD.

obvious question 1: job cuts

2009-01-27T20:06:00.006-05:00

there have been just a few too many job cuts recenty. bus boys, home depot, the healthcare industry, ibm, microsoft, ford, pfizer, gm, citigroup, the nba, mlb, and the list goes waaaay toooo on. but here's my suspicion:

what if some of these job cuts aren't necessary? what if some of these companies really don't need to cut these jobs? what if some of these companies are saying to themselves, "hey. everyone else is laying off people. what if we laid off some people and just let everyone believe that it's all because of the economy? sure. we can tell everyone that the whole job picture in general is mega-bleak, and we're part of it too. so we can lay off people now and the rest of the country will just assume that we're as fallible as everyone else. the general public will just believe that we had to make these cuts, just like all these other companies. if so, then of course nobody will hold it against us. right?"

today a guy in california shot his wife, his five children, and then himself, all because he and his wife were both fired or laid off. these are the real casualties. these are the people who are so embarassed by their financial situation that they will not allow their kids to suffer through it. i don't care how bad the economy gets, it's not an excuse to take the life of a child. if you want to take yourself off this planet because you're feeling kind of silly, then go ahead. we're already overpopulated, so everyone who leaves makes a little room for the next guy. but don't you dare take your kids with you. the only reason you did that is because you don't want your kids to grow up knowing what a wimp-ass, vanity-driven, ego-maniacal fool their father was. kill yourself, no problem. kill a child, i hope you burn somewhere. and you, dude who claimed your wife was a willing pawn in the plot - i doubt it. i'm certain that you didn't want her surviving you and living with the embarassment of whom she was once married to.

why ann coulter doesn't make sense

2009-01-13T23:52:00.004-05:00

just in case you don't know who ass, i mean ann coulter is, here's a link. just make sure you wash your hands afterward.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/tvguide/395886_tvgif13.html?source=rss

the funny thing to me about ann coulter is how she contradicts herself.

contradiction 1: in her new book, she complains about how obama praised single mothers as heroes, and she quotes statistics that indicate how many men in the prison system, failing students, and educational drop-outs are from single parents. let's pretend she's correct. let's also state that any abortion, albeit legal, is a sad occasion. then shouldn't she and the conservatives back off on trying to repeal roe v. wade? wouldn't the absence of abortion rights only add to the single-parent problem? she also fails to realize the reason obama was praising single mothers because it wasn't really about the mothers but about the children. if i'm a child of a single mom, and all i hear is a right wingnut spouting off about single mothers ruining the country, what's that going to do to my psyche? my self esteem? my respect for my mother?

contradiction b: for someone who complains so much about the whining liberal left, she sure writes a lot of whiny books about the whiny liberal left.

she's a bully using typical republican bully tactics. she argues by throwing sand in your face so you're forced to deflect her lies instead of presenting a coherent opinion. conservatives didn't lose this election because obama is a far better candidate. i mean, he is, but that's not why he won. instead of presenting reasons why we should vote for mccain, the g.o.p. spent its time telling us why we should not vote for obama. fortunately, we weren't fooled again. those tactics might win yodeling contests but not debates.

i try to look at her as a character, a facade, someone playing a role in order to sell books, get on television, and get attention. and just like when a new actor takes over the role of a steady soap opera character, i expect one day to hear, "the part of ann coulter is now being played by the scarecrow from the wizard of oz."

good night and good luck. no, really.

book review! - the long ball - by tom adelman

2009-01-05T23:07:00.007-05:00

I love baseball.
I love watching baseball.
I love listening to baseball on the radio.
I love being at a game.
I love playing catch with one of my kids or even myself, just throwing it up high and catching it or bouncing a ball against a wall.

I also love reading and learning about baseball.I’ve only read about four books on baseball, but the best by far is the long ball, by tom adelman.

When I was a kid, I would play wiffleball or any ball with my brothers and friends. We had our own wiffleball league, and I was always the homerun champ. I’m not sure why, but nobody hit the ball - I know it was just wiffleball - better than I did. I was a pretty good pitcher too. All this was from about 1972 to 1979 as i went from 5th to 11th grade. During those years, I lived in my parent’s basement where there was always that cool but moist summer smell. Even today, when I’m in my own basement, that smell is still there, and it immediately launches me back to the 70’s when I listened to many, many Yankee games on 770 WABC radio in new york. The yankee radio team back then was technically perfect Frank Messer, the emotional Bill White, and the character of Phil Rizzuto. If there is anything that could add to the nostalgia of that time, it’s this book.

Even though I love the Yankees and the red sox made it to the world series that year, it doesn’t take anything away from the fun of that great season. Adelman did a heck of a lot of research to trace the many steps - both on and off the field - that resulted in Cincinnati’s big red machine facing off against a boston club that I must admit I was rooting for, but only because carl Yastrzemski was to the red sox what ray bourque was to the bruins: a well-respected player who deserved a championship trophy. Although bourque moved out of town and eventually hoisted a cup, yaz would never have his day.

Adelman begins well before the season and covers trades and draft picks by the reds and red sox that were the building blocks of the series that year, but the book covers the whole league and not just those teams. Although I know a lot of baseball (not as much as my brother Michael), this book was a great education of the front office doings and back room deals that spawned free agency and other events that made 1975 such a landmark year for the sport. Being just a kid at the time, I was never fully aware of just what brought catfish hunter from the world champion Oakland A’s to the rebuilding Yankees.

in 1988 i passed pete rose in an atlanta hotel lobby and told him that i hoped he rotted in jail. i hate pete rose, mainly because of what he did to ray fosse in that all-star game collision, but I enjoyed reading about why sparky Anderson moved rose from the outfield to third base and opened up a roster spot for a little-known power hitter in george foster. i also learned that rose and fosse were friends before and after that game, and they even had dinner together the night before. I never liked carlton fisk, but it was great to learn the freak situation that allowed the left field television camera to catch his dramatic body language that convinced his fly ball to clear the green monster and force a game seven. i never liked - but always feared - jim rice when he came to bat against my yankees. however, it saddened me when i learned why rice's bat was kept on the bench most of the 75 season. although curt flood is usually credited with starting free agency, adelman presents a variation on that popular misbelief.If you like baseball even a little bit, the long ball will help you love baseball.

Pros: i loved the chronological approach to the entire season.

Cons: it's a dumb picture for the cover. why not fisk waving his homerum to curl fair?

The Bottom Line: even if you only like baseball a little bit, you'll still enjoy this book because it includes the games off the field as well as on.

kids today

2008-12-13T09:39:00.001-05:00

As I drive to work each morning from 6:30 to 8, I pass various residential settings. Along Atlantic County Road 575 there is a pair of trailer parks with half a dozen kids standing curbside, if there is a curb, as the school bus approaches. A similar group of children, a range of ages, stands in the driveway of an inexpensive motel on state highway 322, likely a location at which the state sets up as low-income housing during the non-summer season. Before I get to those places, I pass two suburban developments and a stretch of farmland.

First come the McMansions of the developments with once-clever outdoorsy names like “Deer Run,” “Dillon’s Creek,”and “Waterstone.” Announced by gold-lettered signs, the entrances of those subdivisions are clogged with SUV’s and crossovers, engines idling and spitting a stream of carbon monoxide into the precious atmosphere. Inside sit silent parents listening to an AM news station as the children are plugged into their Ipods and listen to collections of sounds that they believe are actually songs. September to June, regardless of downpour or wondrous and warm sunrise, these children are sheltered both physically and emotionally by their loyal parents until the bus comes rolling along.

A mile down the road is a gravel path that leads to a farmhouse partially hidden by the early growth of next year’s “live and cut Christmas trees.” Each morning, six or seven high-school kids stand where the rocks meet the road and watch for the same school bus that had been waiting for the other kids to crawl out of Mom or Dad’s SUV. The farm kids are different. They’re not plugged into ipods, and their parents aren’t driving back up to the house with the kids’ empty coffee cups. The farm kids talk. They interact. They play “catch” with hacky sacks. When it rains, they get wet. When it’s cold, they bundle up. When there’s something beautiful on the horizon, they see it.

They also see life. They see work, and they deal with problems, maybe feeling the residual, “trickle-down effects” of a poor economy while the kids up the road will still get Mom’s credit card and BMW to drive to the mall at will. The farm kids might get to college, and if they do, they’ll hustle out of class to get to their part-time jobs, the same jobs they have now in high school. They’ll learn life skills like how to please the boss, be on time, and get along with co-workers whom they don't like. The kids up the road will only go into a workplace if it’s the one their parents own. They’ll deal with college as more of a social opportunity and annoyance than an education. They’ll step into jobs, careers really, but they won’t have the drive that will have developed in the farm kids who actually worked hard but were never actually certain that they would get there.

I don’t know with whom I have an issue to take up. It’s hard to blame the McMansion kids because they don’t set the conditions, not at first anyway. They’re a product of their environment, and they’re what they have been taught and raised to be. One of the very few times my brother, a staunch Republican, has ever agreed with me was when I said, “I don’t want to hear parents complain that ‘kids are different these days.’ Kids are what we have allowed them to become. They are born no different than we were, but they’re raised much differently than we were.” Should I take issue with the parents who spend too much coddling time instead of quality time? On Friday night they leave a handful of $20’s on the kitchen table with a note that says “See you Monday,” then after work they head for the shore house or Atlantic City condo while the kids are home with the house to themselves all weekend. The parents are the ones who give the teenagers the new Lexus for Christmas their senior year and send them to the Caribbean after graduation, ruining a lifetime of expectation and entitlement.

Or maybe my issue is with myself.

too much tv

2008-12-04T23:16:00.002-05:00

my kids go to school in a tiny town, a very closed community with almost zero diversity. things there are probably the same way they were 30 years ago, and back then it was the same as 30 years before that except maybe the hairstyles. although the schools are very highly rated in the state, the kids are not really getting an all-world education because the town prevents kids from really understanding what the real world is like.

when i bought a house there about 13 years ago, i was told that nobody ever really leaves town. the realtor said that only two kinds of people ever sell a house in town: either people who had growing families and needed a bigger house in town, or people who were older, kids had moved out, so they needed a smaller house in town. many of the teachers in the schools live in town and also went to school there as children, which is a bad thing because it means the same information and attitudes are being recycled through generations. there is nothing new happening, nothing new coming in, and nothing going out.

so tonight i went to my daughter's school christmas concert. it was cute and harmless, and the kids sang well. there was nothing to complain about until i was on my way home from the school. in front of me was a minivan, and through the back window i could see they had a dvd player with cartoons going as the family drove home.

if i tried hard enough, i could literally hold my breath as i drove from one end of the town to the other. there's no way that anyone could have a drive of more than two minutes from the school. however, even though it was such a short trip home, these parents HAD to put the television on? couldn't they talk about the concert? couldn't they talk to the kids about how well they sang or played the saxophone or something?

as a teacher and a parent, i've noticed that our society over-uses two things to placate kids: technology and food. either we hypnotize and zombify our kids with tv's, psp's, nintendo ds's, or cell phones, or we keep stuffing their faces with sugary fatty goodness to keep them quiet. we're building an army of overweight and undereducated children who will someday be easily defeated by another country or organization because the USA will be too fat, weak, and stupid to fight back.

people, please, put down the remote, close your mouth, open your eyes, and maybe open a book too.

Book Review!

2008-12-03T23:13:00.006-05:00

Bleachers by John Grisham

There’s a commonly known formula, or at least it’s commonly known to me, that lies in almost every John Grisham novel. Either the government, a nationally feared law firm, or a conglomerate of a company is doing something wrong, usually doing it to regular people. Nobody can stop them, nobody except either a rookie lawyer or even “rookier” law student. I look for Grisham novels that avoid this formula, but they’re not easy to find. The first book I ever read of his was A Time to Kill, a fabulous book. Also avoiding the formula are The Last Juror (also fabulous), The Broker (not fabulous), and Bleachers (far from fabulous).

Bleachers centers on Eddie Rake, a dying high school football coach. He was a tough, no-nonsense field general who commanded his team to give more than everything to the team. Various players, some collegiate stars and some just stars in their own home, have gathered to pay respects, catch up on who’s done what since way back when, and relive the glory days that have faded along with their personal pride. Former players include a convict, a car thief, a Heisman hopeful, a bank executive, a sheriff, and a homosexual. These ex-players are about as stereotypical as you can expect. It’s the history of the Heisman hopeful that occupies most of the story, but it’s not really a story. There’s no plot, nothing hanging in the balance, nothing that drives us to wonder of the results or predict the outcome. It’s just a pile of reminiscences. Stress on pile. I've spent a lot of time on football fields, especially high school ones, and I've yet to see a movie or story of any kind get it right.

There are hints about an incident that happened between the coach and his star quarterback Neely Crenshaw, the Heisman hopeful but has been. Crenshaw hasn’t spoken to the coach since his last game senior year in which something erupted at halftime when the Messina Spartans were uncharacteristically having their heads handed to them. After the halftime explosion in the locker room, the team took the field with no coaches. They stood away from the field and watched as Crenshaw guided the team to one of its greatest victories ever.

And really, that’s about it. We eventually learn what happened at halftime, but it’s rather anticlimactic compared to everything else that has happened. There’s a reuniting of Crenshaw and Cameron, a former girlfriend, that is built up to be a long-lost lover reunion, but it fizzles into nothing and is rather poorly written. Crenshaw keeps trying to apologize for having cruelly dumped the girl during their junior year of school. She keeps telling him that it’s not a big deal, they were only kids. Yet, she punctuates the conversation with the fact that it took her ten years to forget about it. That’s not very consistent. Hey, sister, make up your mind. If it was really not a big deal, then why did it take you ten years to get over him?

Another problem was with the dialogue. Most of these characters are muscle heads, or they used to be, without much of an education. However, they toss a lot of big words around, phrasing sentences like a textbook instead of like someone who rarely brought home a textbook. Unfortunately, I listened to the book on CD, and I wasn’t able to play all the CD’s again in order to find examples of the poor dialogue. However, if you’d like an example of a writer paying a misguided, random homage to his hometown sports program, this is probably what you’re looking for.

the geometry of the white house

2008-12-03T21:22:00.010-05:00

nobody in washington, dc, has taken a geometry class. here's a copy of a letter i sent to Time magazine to point out something in a recent issue:

Perhaps in your recent story "A Brief History of: The Oval Office" (Nov. 24) you might have pointed out that the Oval Office is actually elliptical.

An oval is like a rectangle in which the shorter sides are curved and the longer sides are straight, like the track around most high school football fields. An ellipse, however, is similar to an egg, an elongated circle, like a rectangle in which all sides have a slight curve, or exactly like the "oval" office.

britney's new bod

2008-12-02T23:02:00.004-05:00

i'm not sure why everyone (by "everyone" i mean the media) is making such a big deal about britney's new body, snapping back from having two babies and snapping back from - snapping. she's only 27. she's got millions of dollars and two dozen hours in each day to do whatever she wants. she's got endless time and resources for personal trainers and more personal sweating.

when a real-life, everyday working woman gets herself in that kind of shape, that's a great accomplishment worthy of praise. for britney to do it? that's expected.

election thought 3 - questions for bill o'reilly and other republicans like my brother

2008-09-05T17:02:00.003-05:00

1. you told the alleged liberal media that it is unfair to judge sarah palin on the fact that her teenage daughter is pregnant, but you called the parents of jamie lynn spears “pinheads” for allowing the same thing to happen to their teenage daughter. don’t you see that as a contraction?

2. you like to refer to the democrats as “tax and spend,” but the g.o.p. just spent eight years turning the biggest surplus in u.s. history into the biggest deficit in u.s. history. don’t you see that as a contradiction?

3. john mccain said that if he’s elected president he will capture osama bin laden because only he has the military know-how and that bush and clinton had their chances but failed. if john mccain really knows how to get bin laden, why didn’t he do something about it all this time? why didn’t he tell the military what they have been doing wrong? shouldn’t he just go get bin laden and not use it to extort us into voting for him?

4. the g.o.p. claims that tax cuts for the wealthy business owners will create more jobs. how does putting money in the boss’s pocket make more jobs? seems to me that if we put more money in the pockets of the working class, they’ll go out and spend it, thus stores will be busier, product demand will increase, and we’ll need more workers, thus creating more jobs. seems like tax cuts for the lower and middle class will create more jobs than tax cuts for the wealthy. prove me wrong.

5. sarah palin is staunchly pro-life/anti-abortion. however, she said, “We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby…” which means she allowed her daughter to make her own choice, but she wants to take that choice away from the rest of america. don’t you see that as a contradiction?

6. john mccain said he supports alternative fuels, but on the same day that he voted AGAINST tax cuts for alternative energy he also voted FOR allowing the oil companies to remain tax exempt. don’t you see that as a contradiction?

7. why did john mccain vote against raising the minimum wage 17 times?

election thought 2 - nothing to fear but old white guys

2008-09-03T21:06:00.003-05:00

terrorism is based on - surprise! - terror. fear.

back in 1933, franklin d. roosevelt, an excellent president, said, "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself — nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror..."

however, the republicans want you to be afraid. their speeches at this convention are all about security, 9/11, the military, the war on terror, the enemy that wants to come here and blow us up, etc. they want you to believe that obama will allow the terrorists to waltz into the country, but mccain will round up the posse and head 'em off at the pass.

the want you to be afraid because a fearful citizen is an obedient citizen who will cower in the corner while the rough, tough sheriff rides into town to save the day.

a few months back, president bush criticized obama for saying that he'd have a dialogue with our enemies. bush likened that comment to what might have happened if we tried to have friendly chat with hitler back before world war II. what bush is too dumb to realize is that communicating with your enemy is a good thing. why do you think the police have hostage negotiators? so we can talk, find out what's wrong, what can be done, and what can't be done. just because obama wants to talk to the enemy doesn't mean he wants to give them his car keys and wallet.

i'm tired of the fear messages. mccain said that he'll keep the military in iraq for 100 years if necessary. now that's something to be afraid of.

and why is it that the republicans seem to be mostly old, rich, white guys?

election thought 1 - obama v. mccain

2008-08-29T15:39:00.003-05:00

i'm politically independent, not declared to either party because either side can and has had both very good and bad presidents. to automatically adhere to a candidate just because they are affiliated with a particular party is robotic, thoughtless, and silly.

i try to approach each candidate as an individual person and evaluate their core beliefs by comparing them to mine. for example, if i'm pro-choice and one candidate is but the other is not, then that's a plus for the first guy. i'm not claiming to have broken new thought-ground; i just want to explain how i work.

up to this point, all i have heard from senator mccain are reason not to vote for senator obama. more important than what mccain has said is what he has not said. if i'm going to vote for mccain, he's got to say, "vote for me because i'm going to do this, this, and this, and these things will improve your life because of that, that, and that." but hasn't said anything of the kind. all i have heard from him is that i should not vote for obama because he's inexperienced and will make it easier for the terrorists to come here and get us all as we sleep.

those fear-mongering arguements are silly and likely will be counter productive to anyone who made it to high school. and now that he's tagged the governor of alaska, a woman with only about two years of experience in public service, he just lost some ammo. how can mccain tell us not to vote obama because of his lack of experience when his v.p. choice has only a fraction of the political career of obama?

this is a desperation move because he's trying to grab the "hillary" vote. he knows he's got no chance, so he's hoping, just hoping.

god willing?

2008-08-27T14:40:00.004-05:00

Ramallah, West Bank

According to the New York Daily News, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Tuesday that "God willing" there could still be a Mideast peace agreement before the end of President Bush's term in office. let's examine two things about this statement that show just how foolish she is.

1. does she not realize that the decisions for peace or for violence in the mideast have nothing to do with god and only to do with the men who make those decisions? god does not send rockets across the gaza strip. god does not send suicide bombers into a crowded market place. these are the decision of men, not god, so it's not a metter of god being willing. it's purely a matter of whether or not man is willing. of course i include women in that, but i'm using "man" meaning "human."

2. does she not realize that the sole reason there is a conflict in the mideast is because of the different beliefs in god as held by the israelis, palestinians, arabs, etc? i would estimate that in 80% of all wars ever fought the causes can be traced back to god or differing beliefs in god.

the sooner that man realizes that he and only he is responsible for his past, present, and future, the sooner man will stand up and take more responsibility for his actions. the more we blame god and god's will, the more we will be picking up bodies and praying for there to be no more to pick up.

is ringo a sicko?

2008-08-23T20:11:00.008-05:00

in 1974 ringo starr, one of the "fab four," one of the beatles, of which there is no equal, wrote a song called "you're sixteen." here are the lyrics:

"You're Sixteen"

You come on like a dream, peaches and cream
Lips like strawberry wine
You're sixteen, you're beautiful and you're mine
You're all ribbons and curls, ooh, what a girl
Eyes that sparkle and shine
You're sixteen, you're beautiful and you're mine

You're my baby, you're my pet
We fell in love on the night we met
You touched my hand, my heart went pop
Ooh, when we kissed
I could not stop

You walked out of my dreams and into my arms
Now you're my angel divine
You're sixteen, you're beautiful and you're mine

You're my baby, you're my pet
We fell in love on the night we met
You touched my hand, my heart went pop
Ooh, when we kissed I could not stop
You walked out of my dreams, and into my car
Now you're my angel divine
You're sixteen, you're beautiful, and you're mine
You're sixteen, so beautiful, and you're mine
You're sixteen, you're beautiful, and you're mine
All mine, all mine, all mine
All mine, all mine, all mine

Ok, here's why i bring it up. Ringo was born in 1940, making him about 34 when he wrote that song. i've studied and written a lot of poetry, and i teach it too, and i know that the "voice" or the speaker in the poem is not always the person who wrote the poem. but when that happens, it's usually clear. for example, bruce springsteen has songs in which the speaker is a criminal, a state trooper, a woman, a child, a death-row inmate, a vietnam veteran, and all sorts of people. and when the "voice" of the poem is someone other than the writer, it's clearly evident. however, there's nothing in "you're sixteen" to indicate that the speaker is anyone other than a lustful, pedophilic ringo. if the speaker were a 16-year old boy, he could've written a line about seeing the girl in school, and all would be fine. but he didn't.

i know he's not the only one to write a song like this. chuck berry, who was found guilty of hiding a camera in the ladies room of his restaurant, wrote the even-more famous "sweet little sixteen," and that song is equally creepy. one of my favorite artists, joan jett, sings "i knew he must have been about seventeen," in the beginning of her biggest hit "i love rock 'n' roll."

read those lyrics again, please. he's in love with a 16-year old, and there's no two ways about it. the only thing i ask is, "is there any evidence that the speaker is anyone but ringo?"

something feels creepy about it. one more thing, why even point out the age? why are these artists making an effort to let us know the age of the object of their affection? maybe because that's the fun part for them, to have something you're not supposed to have. who gets away with that more than rockstars? oh, right, priests.

the tale of despereaux

2008-08-20T07:27:00.005-05:00

if you want to read a fabulously fun book, sort of - but not really - a kid's book, please read the tale of despereaux. my daughter suggested it to me, and i loved it. it's been made into a movie, the link above will show you the site, comes out a week before christmas. however, please don't wait for the movie. please read the book before the movie comes out.

it's about a mouse who lives in a castle, but he doesn't like to do the things that mice are supposed to do, such as be afraid. i won't give you any more than that except that what i loved most about the book is how it was told. it's written as if you're ten-years old and sitting on your grandmother's lap while she's telling you a wonderful story. it's about 260 pages, so i wouldn't call it a "children's book," although it feels like one when you're reading it.

http://www.katedicamillo.com/books/tale.html

moron (more on) studies and statistics

2008-08-19T10:32:00.004-05:00

here is yet another example of studies that don't realize that they make no sense. this is from the auto insurance industry.

Where Accidents Occur Most

Miles from home - Percentage of accidents

1 mile or less 23%
2 to 5 miles 29%
6 to 10 miles 17%
11 to 15 miles 8%
16 to 20 miles 6%
More than 20 miles 17%

please, let's put this into perspective. every time you drive, no matter how far, at some point, you must be within one mile from home. if i drive across country or across town, at some point i must be one mile from home or less. every trip, every time. however, i am not always going to be 5 or 10 or 20 miles from home. if you were to add up the total number of driving trips you take each year and then list them by the furthest point you drove each time, the numbers would probably break down into the same percentage as those accident percentages above and on the link at the top.

this study makes it seem as if something strange is happening very close to home, and maybe it is. for example, some people start driving while they're still getting their coffee, ipod, and seatbelt situated, or maybe they're fiddling with the radio. i would guess that by the time we've driven one mile, everything is in place. still, as previously stated, every trip touches a mile or less. not every trip touches more.

have a nice day.

the sweeper - short fiction

2008-08-18T17:24:00.009-05:00

A short man with an imperfect moustache pushed a broom across a concrete floor for what seemed like the millionth time. He could have believed he had been pushing the broom since the beginning of time and would still be pushing when it was all over, but he never complained, nor would he dream of complaining, nor would he even dream. Above him was a black ceiling that looked more vacant and empty than black except for occasional flashes that lit up only themselves before fading just as quickly, gone before they really had a chance to be there. Some lights had been burning since before the man had ever arrived with the broom, and some would burn long beyond him. Some hadn’t been there yesterday, and some would not be there tomorrow.

On the floor to his right, left, in front, and behind were squares. Each side of each square was about as long as eight of the man’s steps, which he knew for sure as he had walked past them endlessly, every day as far back as he could remember. The squares were surrounded by a wall about knee high. Cemented into each wall around each square was a wrought-iron railing about waist-high above the wall. Each railing had a clipboard on it that held seven laminated papers.

The man with the broom swept the floor outside the squares and had never reached inside the railings, but he would often walk close enough to feel that the air was much colder on the other side. There was no floor inside each square, just emptiness similar to the blackness above. The squares were in grid form, lined up in all directions as far as he could see or had ever walked. It was like standing on a waffle with endless depressions in the waffle in all directions. The squares were more like cubes, but the Boss liked to call them squares. “It makes them feel local,” he often said to the man with the broom.

In each square there were various objects randomly scattered left, right, high, and low. They were mostly spherical objects, some clustered, some isolated and alone. Some were brilliant balls of yellow, orange, or white, and some as dark as coal. Some were different shades of red and brown. Some slowly turned, traveled, or both, and some just stayed in one area of the “square” as others sped by. Some moved so imperceptibly that the man with the broom couldn’t notice a difference unless he passed by again a very long time after. Objects would occasionally reach the edge of their square and drop to the floor where the man with the broom worked that ran grid-like between the countless squares, and then the man swept them away.

“Careful with the broom, Eddie,” said the Boss.

“Si, Sir.”

“Did you sweep Gamma recently?”

“No, Sir.”

“We have a T-5 there, and it’ll be a T-6 soon. I thought maybe you had swept a little too hard.”

“No, Sir.”

The Boss held a clipboard that said “Duro 1638” at the top of all seven pages. Some pages had line graphs and pie charts that updated themselves when necessary. On the front page was a box that had “T-4” in it when the Boss had picked it from its hook but a “T-5” when he put it back.

“This one’s almost finished too,” he grumbled through a tight jaw. He exhaled and huffed. “I’m running out of ideas, Eddie.”

The man pushed the broom a little more softly and bit his tongue as the Boss’s words echoed throughout the place for the zillionth time. Each time a square went T-6, the man had to wheel out the vacuum. Each time, the man would look at the debris as he cleaned out the square and think, Too many fingerprints. He waited, always waited for the Boss to ask him what he thought. He didn’t dare offer help unless asked.

“Softly, Eddie,” said the Boss just before he was gone.

The man didn’t think it was possible to sweep any more softly, but he tried as he thought about the one day he had swept too hard.

He had been pushing his broom past a square, Aarank 714, and two very bright spheres were moving towards each other. As they grew closer, their relative speed accelerated and their light was nearly blinding and certainly beautiful. He knew he wasn’t supposed to stop in one area, but he couldn’t look away.

As if hypnotized, he relaxed his hands, the broom slipped, and the handle slammed against the hard floor. Dust kicked up. He reached in panic, which somehow made everything like slow motion, trying to catch the one, tiny fleck that soared over the railing and into the square. He was about to reach in and grab it, but he remembered the alarm.

He watched the speck as it moved towards the floating spheres that the Boss had so carefully placed. Eventually it touched one small ball and changed its path so very slightly. Its new path gradually took it into the path of another. An incredibly long time later, much more time than the man could calculate, the Boss put a T-6 on the clipboard. Then the man wheeled out the vacuum more slowly and sadly than usual.

“Slower, Eddie,” the Boss started saying almost every time he appeared.

It was rare for the man with the broom to be sweeping nearby when the Boss was starting a new square, and even rarer for the Boss to invite him to watch. A new grid was opening, a block of nine squares roped off with the Boss inside the middle square, like the center of a tic-tac-toe board.

“Thank you, Eddie,” he said when the man stopped his broom. There could no disturbances during a birth period. “Would you like to watch?”

“Si,” the man said.

“Come, have a seat.”

Without lifting a foot, Eddie was suddenly in a chair only an arms length from the square in which a birth had begun. He watched as the Boss pulled random objects from the pockets of his white jacket, shaped and reshaped them, and placed them at his whim throughout the three dimensions of the square. Some came from the pants pockets, front or back, each pocket yielding a slightly different material that he shaped or mixed with something from another pocket until, in some way only known to him, it all felt right.

Occasionally, he’d observe two objects for a length of time and then pack them together to form something new. Some he’d polish until they shone, glimmered, or glowed. Some of those would hold their light for a very long time while others might fizzle out before their light could escape the square, and they’d crust over dull and cloudy.

Too many fingerprints, thought the man in the chair. His bottom lip twitched a distance less than the thickness of a hair in his moustache.

“Yes, Eddie?” asked the Boss.

“No no, Sir.”

“You wanted to say something. It’s all right. Go ahead.”

“No, Sir.”

“Eddie, it’s okay.”

The man looked down, thinking carefully before speaking because it was the first time he could recall that the Boss had said anything to him other than what he should or should not be doing.

“Senor, what if you took all of those things in your pockets, in one big handful, and just tossed them into the square?”

The Boss waited. “And then what?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing.”

The Boss waited. “Why?”

The man spoke the words he’d rehearsed a million times. “Just to see what would happen.”

The Boss waited. “Nothing would happen, Eddie.”

The man began to sweat. “How do you know, Sir?” The man felt very small. Before he could figure out what to say next, he was back outside the block of nine squares, broom in hand, and the chair gone. He turned, sweeping now in the opposite direction from which he came.

“Break time, Eddie,” said the Boss.

A short time later, or possibly a long time, Eddie was in a chair at a table in a mostly white room. There were no doors, no way in or out, except when the Boss wanted the man either in or out. He noticed a glass in his hand, so he drank as much as he could because he could never be sure when break time would be over. He put down the empty glass, but one tiny drop was stuck in the whiskers beneath his nose.

Lentamente, Eduardo he thought as he passed a clipboard with 139121125-23125 across the top of each page. It was a square that the Boss had checked very recently, so recently that the clipboard was still swinging back and forth on its hook. On the first page it had “C-1” in the box. In the middle of the square hung one ball, nothing else. Nothing moved, nothing shone, nothing spun.

As the man pushed the broom passed that square, he heard a very faint “pop,” and he looked back because sounds were rarely heard within the squares. What had been a solitary ball had become countless smaller ones. Some glowed, some didn’t. Some streaked in a big circle, some stayed put. Some gathered near others while some remained alone. The man’s head had turned so quickly that the tiny drop that had stowed away in his moustache had escaped and was now sailing into the square. Before he was aware of what had happened, it was already too late. The drop hit the inside of the square, immediately slowing as its arc became a very straight path.

The man’s hands began to shake. He wiped his sleeve across his dry forehead, although he wasn’t sure why. He watched for a long time, or maybe a short time, waiting for an alarm or something, but nothing happened. He watched as the drop cruised slowly past the outer objects of a cluster, barely missing one with assorted stripes and coming close to one that was a very unique red color. They were so close that they leaned towards each other, both feeling the other’s presence and trying to touch, but they passed too quickly without a chance to meet. But the path of the drop was slightly altered by the near encounter, and it wobbled slightly askew past a brilliant yellow one that caused the drop to lose a tad of its moisture as it fizzled away.
Beyond the brilliant yellow ball, directly ahead, was a rusty brown one. It wasn’t turning nor moving quickly. It just kind of hung there, right in the line of the drop’s motion. The brownish, rusty one was not as solid as the man first thought, and he noticed how its shape was fluidly changing even though it looked very solid. But then the man realized that it wasn’t changing, but it was moving. As it spun, it also drifted, and the drop drifted towards it. As it spun, the side that faced the brilliant yellow one was a fiery rust, and the opposite side appeared very dark.
The floating drop was about half the size of the rusty ball, and they were on a collision course.

For a brief moment, a smaller, half silver and half black object with tiny holes moved between the rusty one and the drop of liquid, but then the silvery one kept moving on by and cleared the way for an impact. Eddie held his breath as the two objects neared, touched and then the drop broke into hundreds of tinier pieces that stretched away from the object before an unseen force pulled them all back into the rusty orb. The tinier drops mixed with the rock, which then broke apart before the pieces of rock and liquid rejoined each other and slowly started to solidify.

There was hissing as a gray fog shrouded the rock. The man reached down for his broom, not sure if he had been staring a long time or only a few seconds. His first thought was to sweep the floor quickly and get out of there, but he couldn’t break from the voice that constantly reminded him to push “slowly.” After he pushed the broom towards a square close by, he glanced back but could no longer see the rusty, cloudy ball. Instead there was something with a slightly bluish tint, a color he had not noticed before in any other square.

The man swept past a few more squares, relaxing a bit after each and thinking about other things that he would never remember, but then he was startled by the Boss’s bellowing voice.

“Eddie! Eddie!”

“S-s-si, Senor,” he trembled.

“Eddie!” The man’s hands trembled. “I did it! We got one!”

The Boss had never been so happy. Eddie shook his head, smiled secretly, and started walking towards the boss's voice.

gas tanks

2008-08-17T22:05:00.004-05:00

why aren't all gas tanks on the same side of every car?

why are some on the left and some on the right?

why do we have to do that car dance at the gas station, trying to pull in one way, but then someone pulls in straight at you because their tank is on the other side, and you have to be careful not to go too far and bump them but far enough so the nozzle will reach your tank?

if all tanks were on the same side, we could all pull in neatly in order, pull out neatly, and go on our merry way.

why? someone must know. someone? anyone?

where's the mom?

2008-08-05T17:02:00.012-05:00

has anyone ever noticed that in almost every disney movie in which a kid is a main character, and i'm mainly looking at the animated films, the kid only has one parent, and it's usually the father? where'd all the mom's go?

sleeping beauty is the only one i can think of in which the kid has both parents. i think dumbo has both also.

snow white and cinderella have only step-moms.

pinocchio has gepetto.

bambi and nemo (finding nemo) lose their moms early in the film and only have the dads left.

jasmine (aladdin) has only her father, as does pocahontas, belle (beauty and the beast), ariel (the little mermaid), and mulan, i think.

in toy story, andy has a mom, no dad.

hercules has both, but they're gods, so that doesn't count.

in the lion king, the father dies and the mother is still there.

alice in wonderland, i remember a female adult, don't remember if she was a mom, no male though.

in lilo 'n' stitch, both parents are gone, and lilo lives with her older sister. double ouch!

the winnie the pooh characters have christopher robin, so that sort of counts. there's no christine robin.

in dumbo, there's a mom who goes crazy, but i don't think she dies, and i don't remember if there is a dad.

oh well. i've got some dvd's to watch.

if anyone can fill in any blanks, leave a comment and i'll edit this post to include your information.

get it?

2008-08-05T16:24:00.009-05:00

this is my new license plate.

i know, i know. too much free time.

my brother says i'm sick. i'm just enjoying my time here.

smokers and cigarettes

2008-08-04T20:36:00.003-05:00

i don't mind if people smoke. it's a right that you have, and i would not do anything to take it away from anyone provided that they're not in my home and they're not in a place where i am unable to leave, like an airplace, elevator, hospital room, etc. however, i do have a problem with many - not all - many smokers.

i know that not every smoker tosses the cigarette butt out of their car while driving in front of me. i know they don't all think the roads are their personal trash can, but i'm getting very angry with those smokers who do that. would they also toss out the wrapper from the straw they just got from the burger king drive-thru? maybe they would, but i don't see anything else released into the wild from a car window as much as i see the burning, ash-flying cigarette butt. my ex-wife used to get very annoyed and tell me i was going to get shot one day because i would get out of my car at a red light, pick up the cigarette butt someone else just tossed, knock on their window, and say, "hey, you dropped this."

how many times do i have to walk to my car in a parking lot and step in a pile of what was once someone's car ash tray? why do smokers think that it's okay to pull the tray from the car, dump it in the parking lot, and leave it there for the rest of the world to deal with?

because of those littering habits, smokers seem like arrogant, selfish, flip-you-the-bird kind of people, and i know they are not all like that. the problem is that the nicer smokers don't stand out because they take care of their trash. it's the trashy smoker who draws attention to his or herself by trashing the world around them.

mazda 3 - 40 miles per gallon

2008-07-31T18:30:00.009-05:00

for 20 years i had driven nothing but nissan, the nissan sentra to be exact, because it was a small, reliable car that ran forever, almost 200,000 miles each one. i like silver cars because they don't show the dirt as easily as others. nothing looks better than a white or black car, but only immediately after washing and waxing. in five minutes, the luster will start to fade because the contrast shows up the dirt too easily.

a little more than a year ago it was time for a new car, and of course i went straight for the sentra, and then i went straight for the bucket to throw up in. eww. it looked bad, really bad.

i did research, compared prices, listed what i wanted and didn't want in my car:

stick shift, sunroof, mp3/ipod connection, cheap sticker price, good MPG, and an excellent review on http://www.edmunds.com/mazda/mazda3/2007/review.html.

when i boiled it all down, the answer was the 2007 mazda 3.

using Mobil 1 synthetic oil for each oil change at about 5,000 miles, i'm getting about 40 MPG.

the Smart Car isn't worth the money for what it gets per mile.

i'm not about commercial endorsements, but i would like to know, during all this oil price through the roof thing, why isn't the mazda 3 getting more attention?

unemployment

2008-07-30T21:58:00.006-05:00

shhhh. the president doesn't want you to know this, so don't tell him i told you.

every month, the white house gets all giddy when the labor department gets ready to announce how many new jobs were created that month. however, there's a problem: no matter what they say, they have no idea what the real numbers are. here's why.

first, you must know how they get those numbers. you might think they can somehow collect the numbers from each state, total them up, and say, "hey, a million new jobs were created last month." they want you to believe that, but it's not how it works.

each month, a certain number of people are on the unemployment roles. each month, some of those people have used up their unemployment benefits, so they're removed from the role. for the white house, this is a good thing for two reasons. first, it means those people are no longer getting money from the government. second, it allows the government to pretend that those people have now gotten a job, which is how they come up with the number of new jobs.

so next month, if the white house announces that 500,000 new jobs were created, you'll know that the truth is really that 500,000 people are no longer eligible for unemployment. yes, it's true that some of those people actually did get jobs, which would be great. but too many of them didn't.

and you know how sometimes congress calls for an extension of unemployment benefits, and the white house always vetoes it? yes, you guessed it. they veto the extension because it means that more people will stay on unemployment, thus taking away some numbers from the total new jobs created that weren't really new jobs anyway.

also, about a month or two ago, the president had to answer as to why the unemployment numbers had increased. he said it was because colleges had just held their graduations and there were a great many new graduates trying to crack into the job scene. unfortunately, that's not possible, and again president bush shows his ignorance of reality. you can't collect unemployment unless you've been working for roughly a year, give or take a few months. if these people just graduated college, then they haven't been working. and if they haven't been working, they're not eligible for unemployment benefits. therefore, it's impossible for the rise in unemployment to have been caused by college graduates.

way to go, idiot.

election '08

2008-07-30T21:54:00.004-05:00

i sent the following e-mail to senators barrack obama and john mccain:

dear senators obama and mccain,

i'm sending the same question to both of you because i'm an unregistered, undecided voter. i voted for the first president bush, president reagan, but also for democrats such as president clinton, mr. gore, and mr. kerry. i've been teaching in public schools for 20 years and have discussed politics extensively with friends, family, co-workers, and students.

obviously, nobody wants a dirtier, more polluted planet. however, more can always be done to make it cleaner. here are my questions:

1. why aren't ALL plastics recyclable?

2. why haven't either of you spoken out about it?

3. will you pass legislation banning non-recyclable plastics?

4. will you speak publicly on this issue?

thanks

i'll let you know if i get a response from either candidate. no, i don't expect one.

birth order

2007-11-27T22:21:00.002-05:00

i recently read a story in time magazine that discussed birth order. it covered the same old arguements and asked why the oldest child is usually the greatest achiever in a family and the younger the siblings, the lesser the accomplishments in life as a whole.

i'm not disagreeing with the results, but i am disagreeing with the suggested causes, of which the article named very few causes. but here's the only one you need to be aware of.

fact: the oldest and/or older children in a family usually out perform the younger ones.

fact: parents give the maximum amount of time and attention to the older or oldest child because subsequent children have no choice but to share time and attention with each other.

who wants cake?

creationism, a.k.a intelligent design, v. evolution

2007-11-27T22:07:00.001-05:00

i can end the centuries of debate about creationism, which has recently been semi-renamed "intelligent design," versus evolution. answer these two questions, and you'll have your answer.

1. according to the bible and the book of genesis, god created man first. then he attempted to create another living thing that would make a good partner to man. god started with the lowest form of one-celled creatures and worked his way up the ladder of intricate animals until finally he came upon the one creature that would suffice to keep man company - woman.

well, if god were really able to do that, and if god is so all-knowing and powerful, then why did he waste his time creating so many other animal "failures" that were just not good enough to keep man company? if god were really so perfect, he would have known exactly what to make from the beginning, and he would not have had to practice in his workshop with insects, reptiles, and rodents until finally creating woman.

2. catholics insist that god only wants us to have sex in order to create children. he doesn't want us wearing condoms or using birth control because we're only supposed to be doing that when it's time to make a baby.

if that were true, then why did god make a process, that being sex, that feels soooo damn good? if god didn't want us bopping around with each other, then he would have created a process that was sort of not so much fun.

the alleged liberal media

2007-11-27T21:56:00.001-05:00

i'm rather tired of hearing about the "liberal media." in fact, i don't agree with the thought, although i don't disagree either. let me explain.

are the media on the left, sort of liberal in their attitudes? i'd have to admit, yes they are. however, are they automatically left, just because they're part of the fourth estate? hell no. let me explain that too.

answer these questions please:

who pays more attention to world events than anyone else?

who pays more attention to u.s. events than anyone else?

who pays more attention to state and local events than anyone else?

whose job is it to examine pretty much everything that happens in this world, digest it, regurgitate it, and make sense of it in order that the general public can understand and react to it?

yes, the answer to every question is "the media."

therefore, let me ask you this:

given that the media is more aware of everything that happens in this world than anyone else, then whose opinion would be more informed than anyone else's? whose opinions are determined with a better awareness of the facts, a better understanding of the facts, and a better formulation of the facts?

yes, the answer again is "the media."

so, if the media is the most aware, most informed, and the most credible segment of society, then whose opinions, thoughts, and answers are probably formed with the best composition and understanding of reality?

yes, again, the media.

so, if the media, having been determined to be the best informed and most intelligent segment of society, has also determined that the best thoughts and attitudes are in the minds of the liberals, then i guess it makes total sense to trust the media - because who would know better?

certainly not the g.o.p.

george carlin v. george bush

2007-09-17T17:01:00.001-05:00

go back to the 1972 george carlin album and listen to the cut called "muhammad ali." listen to what he says about the u.s. involvement in vietnam. i dare you to replace "vietnam" with "iraq" and see if it doesn't fit 100%.

and there's a little song about the environment, a parody of "america, the beautiful." unfortunately, that fits even better, and you can't say we weren't warned.

http://shopping.yahoo.com/p:Class%20Clown:1921367291:upc=075679031242

eating his cake and having it too

2007-09-15T09:06:00.001-05:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/14/washington/14prexy.html?th&emc=th

there he goes again, the spinmeister general. president bush is bowing to the pressure of the rest of the nation in protest to his unjust, despicable war. everyone, including some dead relatives of mine, have called on the president to start bringing the troops home while, instead, he's been sending more. but what's a jackass to do? he, or someone in the puppet room, figured out that he can create a win-win situation. he can submit, and start bringing troops home to alleviate, placate, and shut up the american people. but he can do it under the guise of proclaiming that the recent troop surge was successful, thus allowing the opportunity to bring some troops home.

damn genius.

chicken vs. egg - part two

2007-09-15T08:21:00.001-05:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/14/us/14suicide.html?th&emc=th

what are we looking at? can we read? why is this so baffling to everyone else but me?

in 2004 there was an increase in suicides among adolescents and children, causing concern of course, but misguided blame. previous to the increase in suicides, there was an increase in the number of children and adolescents who were diagnosed as "depressed." those children were subsequently given prescriptions for anti-depressants. previous to that was in increase in the number of parents who no longer wanted to talk to their kids about normal "kid issues," so they sent those kids to psychiatrists , hoping someone could straighten them out.

so, more parents can't deal with kids - more parents send kids to psychiatrists - who sents kids to pharmacists - who put kids on drugs - followed by an increase in suicides. naturally, this was followed by a flood of parents, with lawyers of course, trying to sue the psychiatrists and the drug companies because they believe the anti-depressant caused the kids to commit suicide. understandable - but wrong.

so the f.d.a. tells the drug companies to put warning labels on the prescriptions, and the psychiatrists no longer wrote as many prescriptions for anti-depressants. naturally, you'd expect a drop in suicides, right? not so. the next study showed a steady number, if not an increase in suicides.

what should we learn from this? anyone? anyone? bueller? bueller?

obviously the kids commited suicide because they were not getting the right help, not because of the drugs. the concern was that a kid who takes the anti-depressant is more likely to commit suicide. yes, that's true, because the kids who are NOT taking the anti-depressants are NOT depressed, so they're NOT likely to commit suicide. the kid who is taking the anti-depressant is - DEPRESSED, and it's the depression that's causing the suicide.

and WHY is the kid depressed? we're not looking to solve why he or she is depressed. we're not trying to find the root of the problem. we're just trying to slap a bandage of drugs over it, out of sight out of mind, without really solving why johnny is so unhappy. let's find out why the kid is depressed. whatever those reasons are, and they're usually social, they're not going to disappear because the kids are now medicated. if a child is depressed because she thinks she's ugly and nobody likes her, putting her on drugs is not going to change that. talking to her IS. explaining

the drugs are not causing the suicides. we're relying too much on the drugs and not doing anything else.

it's like a recent study that said if someone tries just ONE cigarette, they have a 40% chance of becoming addicted. hey, guess what? i could have figured that out myself. wait, let me try one! if you never try a cigarette, you have a much less chance of becoming addicted? am i right? wheee!!!

here's another one i've read: most car accidents occur within a mile of your home. really? so if i park my car more than a mile from my home, walk to it, then drive, i'll have much less chance of getting into an accident. brilliant! i'll also drive less. how about the idea that we don't need a study to explain that no matter how far i drive, at some point i MUST be within a mile of my home. i would even say most of my trips only take me a mile from my home.

does it ever stop? this flood of genius just seems to keep rolling along.

the whites of their elbows

2007-09-15T07:58:00.001-05:00

have you noticed the white stripes on the elbows of many nfl players? have you wondered, like i have, "what the hell is that there for? to soak up elbow sweat?"

nope, not at all. it's just a decoration that says, "hey, look at me. i have a piece of material here just to catch your eye, just to draw attention to myself. this goofy helmet and tight pants aren't enough. nor is the dance in the end zone. i've now gained the need to decorate my elbow."

stay tuned for the eustachean tattoo.

boycott tropicana orange juice

2007-08-16T06:23:00.001-05:00

i was annoyed that tropicana orange juice won't use recyclable plastic on the caps of their 64 ounce cartons of juice, so i wrote them a letter of complaint. here's their reply:

From: ConsumerRelations@cs.tropicana.com [mailto: ConsumerRelations@cs.tropicana.com]
Date: Thu, 16 Aug 2007 05:17:57 -0500
Subject: RE: Tropicana Pure Premium Orange Juice , REF.# 026193784ARE:
Tropicana Pure Premium Orange Juice , REF.# 026193784A

Richard:

Thank you for contacting us about Tropicana Pure Premium Orange Juice. We are sorry that you found our packaging unsatisfactory.When developing product packages, numerous designs are considered. There are many factors involved in producing containers which function easily and best protect the product. The final selection is made on the basis of convenience, product safety and cost.Your comments and point of view have been shared with management. They are appreciated and will be considered in reviewing packaging in the future.

Michael
Tropicana Consumer Response

=====================

so what they're saying is that it's not convenient, it costs too much, and that type of plastic is not safe.

here's my reply to their reply:

michael,

while i appreciate that you replied, you in effect gave me no information. why is it that other juices, such as "florida's natural" and "minute maid," can use recyclable plastic caps, but you can't? why do they find it "cost effective" to make an effort to show some environmental responsibility, but your company thinks that reducing the strain on the environment is not "convenient"? you mentioned "product safety." how about human safety? how about planetary and environmental safety?if our planet is going to be livable for our grandchildren, then we've got to make a few sacrifices in cost and make sure that the future is "convenient" for our children.

thanks,
richard

homophobes - 1 snickers - 0

2007-02-06T19:58:00.001-05:00

when i watched the snickers super bowl commercial, i saw it coming and pre-winced and pre-icked. however, it was funny and entertaining. so - boooo to the homophobes who complained to such an extent that snickers has pulled the commercial off the air. relax. just because your kids, or even you, see this commercial is no reason to think that you're going to turn gay.

just calm down, and live and let live.

moron (more on) language

2007-02-04T14:15:00.001-05:00

"either side"

please, writers and speakers, stop saying "either side" when it's not what you really mean to say.

for example, i'll read/see/hear something like this: "there was a statue of a lion on either side of the door at the entrance to the library." what they are trying to tell you is that there is a statue of a lion on the left as well as on the right. but when you say "either side," that means "one side or the other." not both. this is an error made by the best writers, in the best publications, nobody (except me) is innocent. i have never seen this written correctly, unless it was something that i happened to write.

to correctly say there was a lion on both sides, you have two choices:

1. there were statues of lions on both sides of the library door.
2. there was a statue of a lion on each side of the library door.

if you want to use "either side," then here's how it would be used correctly. "jim, put the box down on either side of the door." that would be telling jim that he can put it on either the right or the left side. obviously not both.

work with me, people.

Miss USA Says She Dabbled in Stupidity

2007-02-01T05:22:00.001-05:00

copied from iwon.com

NEW YORK (AP) - Miss USA Tara Conner, who nearly lost her crown for hard-partying in New York nightclubs, says in the upcoming issue of People magazine that her recent stint in rehab was a wake-up call.

"I didn't think I had an issue - but I was willing to do anything to save my job. ... I've realized that I suffer from the disease of alcoholism and addiction," says Conner, who logged in 31 days at the Caron Foundation rehab center in Wernersville, Pa.

Bullsh*t, Miss USA. you don't have a "disease." you're not a victim of anything, so stop acting like something is beyond your control. alcoholics are made, they are not born. two things cause alcoholism: 1) and adult in your life was a heavy drinker, and you watched and learned and copied, or 2) you tried it and you liked it. you really liked it.

i'm tired of people acting as if drinking a lot is not their fault. nothing makes you pick up the bottle or glass except you. you don't have a gene that is whispering things like "yeah yeah, two more shots. go!" it doesn't work that way, and it's very disturbing that the public and the press allow celebrities and politicians to use their lack of control to get sympathy.

Did you know you were lost?

2007-01-29T18:03:00.001-05:00

More language pet peeves: finding yourself. One of the highest ranking overused phrases is when someone writes that a person “found himself/herself…” an example would be something like, “John was walking through his regular route in the city when he suddenly found himself in an unfamiliar place.” Another would be “John was just trying to keep a good pace with the other runners when he suddenly found himself in the lead.” It seems that the intention is to express the idea that someone was progressing towards something or someplace, followed by a period of inattentiveness and then a moment of revelation came upon him during which he was in a place that he did not expect to be at - or something like that. What bothers me is not the idea that we could lose track of attention and then be in an unexpected situation, but there have to be much better ways to write it.

“John was walking through his regular route in the city when he sensed that he had walked into an unfamiliar place.”

“John was just trying to keep a good pace with the other runners when a twinge of surprise ran through his spine as he took the lead.”

The point is that we can’t “find ourselves” unless there was a period of time in which we were lost or a moment of unconsciousness occurs. Of course there are allowances for figurative language, but that’s not the case here. It’s more of a tendency of people, specifically writers, to find an easy way to express something and then repeat, repeat, repeat until readers have been so bludgeoned with the phrase that they will easily accept it based on familiarity alone. Writers have to do better. We have to find a new way to say it, otherwise we may as well just write greeting cards.

preston and steve

2007-01-25T16:57:00.001-05:00

During the late 80’s, all of the 90’s, and halfway to 2010, I knew of no bigger Howard Stern fan than myself. Twenty years ago I bought a special double cassette deck that had a timer activation so that I could leave home at 7am, listen on the radio from 7 to 7:30, then the timer would click on and use two 120-minute cassettes to tape the show from 7:30 to 11:30. I’d listen to those tapes during the rest of the day. All that, combined with listening to the first hour from 6 to 7 during breakfast and in the shower, I heard every minute of every show except for the extra time that would run. I watched only a shred of television. If I were asked to pick from radio or television, including absolutely every channel available, I would have gone with radio, even if I could only hear Stern. I bought every video or CD that he sold, except the poorly produced Howard Stern’s Underpants and Negligee Party. I was a tremendously loyal fan, but I could separate the good and the bad from the ugly.

When he announced his move to Sirius satellite radio, I preached to friends and family to buy up stock because it would be climbing, and I was right – up to a point. Sirius stock doubled up to about $7 from when Stern announced his move in early 2005 up until the end of December of that year, only weeks before he began the next phase of his career. Since then, the stock dropped like a rock back to where it was, around the high $3’s. I told people all year, buy buy buy, but I didn’t follow my own advice until it reached its peak, and then I took the hit and lost half. But that’s not what I’m here to write about.

During my years listening to Stern, his loyal legions did an excellent job of exposing his imitators and competitors. Then he would trash them on the air until they ran away, resigned, and basically disappeared until, in at least two cases that I’m aware of, those two-bit DJ’s actually called Stern and begged for him to ease up and allow them to return to work, which he did, and they did. When Stern closed up shop on terrestrial radio in mid-December of ’05, I did not have Sirius so I searched for something adequate to hold me over until the new show. I remembered having spent a few fabulous Fat Tuesday’s at a bar in the Philly area called Bootlegger’s. I had friends who played in a cover band on those special days, and the whole packaged was run by a radio team from Philly called “Preston and Steve.” They were damn funny, and I found them again during Stern’s hiatus between land and space.

I never bought the satellite radio. It wasn’t the price or the equipment, not the complication of the choices or anything else. Preston and Steve are just that damn funny that I was able to do without Stern. I admit that the funniest individual on the planet, in a clown-like sense, is Artie Lange, the buffoon who replaced Jackie Martling. I admit the the most talented and intelligent man I’ve ever known of is Fred Norris, a member of Stern’s company since before my awareness of the show. I have a box of tapes of my favorite Stern moments that will individually beat anything Preston and Steve can do on their best days.

Three things are basically responsible for my abandonment of Stern. First is the already mentioned praise for Preston and Steve. Second, I grew tired of Robin Quivers, Stern’s newswoman. I was increasingly disturbed by her phoniness, meanness through her own insecurity, vanity, and willingness to pounce on the wounded. Finally, Stern’s greatest strength slowly turned against him without him knowing it. What I and most people loved about him was his upfront honesty. There was nothing he held back about his personal and professional life. He exposed everything and anything, and for that reason nobody could ever attack him because he had already revealed whatever it was that someone could have attacked. He began to lose genuine sight of himself, and his desire to be “right” became stronger than his desire to entertain. The best example is when Stern and his girlfriend played their version of The Newlywed Game. There was a question about a type of salad dressing that he believed he and his girlfriend had answered correctly, but absolutely nobody on the show, judges and all, agreed with him. Regardless, he fought tooth and nail and claw and razor to insist upon his rightness. He couldn’t admit that he was wrong and lost the game, no matter how clear the evidence against him.

The childish tantrum drove me away, not immediately but eventually, was unfortunately put upon him by his father. Stern grew up, as many of us did, with a father who was excellent at ridicule. My father had the most demeaning nicknames for me and took every opportunity to embarrass me in front of friends, family, and strangers. Those actions caused me to have an abnormal desire to be right, so much so that I would often argue my case even when I knew I was wrong. Eventually, I realized what I had been doing and calmed it down. Unfortunately for Stern, he has not yet reached such a catharsis.

Professionally, it wouldn’t matter much for him, but it might make him a little better of a person and a little more likeable. He has a winning formula, and he knows it. But being successful is not the same as being right.

It’s Time to fix the grammar

2007-01-25T05:31:00.001-05:00

I didn’t know, although I’ve seen evidence of it for years, that newspapers and magazines have taken it upon themselves to change the rules of language and grammar. It must have been a long ago conspiracy that concluded with the universal dropping of the serial comma – the comma where you have a list of three or more things and there is supposed to be a comma after each item except the last one. For example: I went to New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. A comma follows each item up until the conjunction, no comma after it. There are very few exceptions, the only one coming to mind being when two items are linked together in such a way that they lose meaning when separate, such as peanut butter and jelly. For example: I had milk, peanut butter and jelly, and fruit for lunch.” There is no comma after peanut butter because it would break up the commonly known pair of peanut butter and jelly.

Another modification of the language at the hands of publications is in the form of a new spelling. Flip through the newspaper and look for the a word spelled cigaret. Although it looks familiar, that’s not the correct spelling. Publications seem to have forgotten there is another t and then an e at the end: cigarette. But the self-imposed change that has bothered me lately is with the words got and gotten. Got is the past tense of get. Today, I will get lost. Yesterday, I got lost. However, if I’m writing in the perfect tense, using the helping verbs has or have, then I have to use the past perfect form of got, which is gotten. For example: That boy used to be short, but he has gotten taller. In the past six years that I’ve been a subscriber to Time magazine, I have seen at least ten instances when they have written got when it should have been gotten. In the January 22, 2007, issue (cover story on China) there was a story about the character Jack Bauer with the following sub-headline: “As the war on terrorism has got complicated, so has 24’s Jack Bauer.” Because of the helping verb has, the correct form of the main verb should be gotten.

This brings the obvious question that governs most of the universe, or at least the part of the universe occupied by humans – Why? Why do publications change the rules of grammar and the spellings of words? It’s the same answer to another question – What motivates man most strongly? Yes, money. “Money?” you ask. “What does money have to do with commas and a shorter version of a word?” In publications, space equals money. Any time they can save space, they are saving money. If they drop a (cigaret)–te here and a (got)–ten there, then they’re saving some pennies that eventually add up into dollars on the way to a free lunch.

Probably an even worse violation of language in print is the incomplete sentence. In Time’s “Man of the Year” issue, there was a story by Brian Williams of NBC news that was so riddled with one-word and incomplete sentences that I first thought he must have had someone write it for him. Never would I think that a national news anchor would have such a poor command of the language until I gave it a little more thought. Then I realized that he doesn’t write the nightly news, he just reads it. Someone else writes the news, and he does his best to be a talking head. However, for that Time story, he actually wrote it, but he wrote in the same way he speaks, and he (and most of the rest of us) does not always speak in complete sentences. We constantly give one-word or short-phrase answers because we’re speaking in reply to something for which the context has already preceded, so that allows shorter answers/sentences that seem to make perfect sense because of the context it is in at that moment.

In college I had a class called Linguistics and Grammar with a professor named Robert Kloss. It was the toughest English class I had ever taken, even tougher than the one I failed, but that’s because I got an A the second time. I never felt so inadequate during a class, nor did I ever feel as great an accomplishment at the end of a class. After a semester of ripping apart almost every word, both spoken and written, he said to us on the last day, “Please remember this about language: it doesn’t matter how well or poorly you say it or how well or badly you’ve written it. The most important thing about language is that the person or audience to whom you are speaking knows exactly what you mean.”

Note to Time magazine: instead of dumbing yourself down, how about you help out and raise the standards a little bit? Richard Nixon said, “When you lower standards, you lower expectations, results, and the future.” Set the bar a little higher if you want, but don’t lower it.

half mast or half full?

2007-01-25T05:30:00.000-05:00

What’s not up with the flag?

With all due respect for President Ford, why is the flag still at half-staff? He was buried on January 3, and today is January 24, three weeks later. I was under the impression that the flag is supposed to be lowered for one week following the death of such an esteemed person. Actually, I thought it was supposed to be three days, but then someone told me it’s a week. I still think it is supposed to be lowered for three days, but I’m willing to accept that I’m wrong about that. What I know I’m not wrong about is three weeks. Did everyone else forget the rule? Are they waiting for some kind of signal, something in the mail, or a siren to blow before putting the flag back up again? Is this happening everywhere across the country or just my fabulous corner of New Jersey?

blowing up and building brain cells

2007-01-20T08:41:00.001-05:00

Minesweeper
Click click click boom. Click flag click flag – wrong flag – boom.
As far back as I can remember using Windows, Minesweeper was always there, and it wasn’t until about four years ago that I actually learned how it works. I’d start a game, click random blocks, after about five of which I’d get blown up. One afternoon, in an education workshop, I watched someone with a laptop clicking away, planting flags, but without getting blasted. I waited until her game was over and then asked her to please teach me how it works. Only recently did I realize that this simple game is actually a very good learning tool that should be used in classrooms whenever possible.

For those of you who have already played the game, skip down a few paragraphs. Those who are clueless, as I recently was, keep reading from here. Minesweeper begins with a grid of gray squares with two number boxes above. The box on the right keeps the time in seconds from start to finish. The box on the left is the total number of bombs on the board. Your job is to find all of the bombs and mark them with a flag by right clicking and eventually clear all of the non-bomb spaces with a left click. Each time you right-click, it plants a flag and counts down the bomb spaces. Unfortunately, you must first take a few guesses and left click on a handful of hopefully non-bomb spaces at the beginning of the game. You should never plant a flag unless you are absolutely sure that a bomb is there. If you wrongly plant a flag to indicate a bomb, but there is no bomb, then you’ve got a good chance of hitting a bomb on a space that you’re going to think is safe. That part seems simple, but what about all those numbers?

Hopefully, when you left-click on all those gray blocks, you’ll see a number instead of an explosion. Numbers range from 1 up to 5, I think, because I can’t recall seeing anything higher than 5, but in theory I suppose they could go as high as 8. Lemme ‘splain. Each block is surrounded by up to eight other blocks, provided the clicked-upon block is not on the outer border of the entire grid. If left-clicking reveals a 1, it means that block is touching one bomb. Think of each block as the middle square of a tic-tac-toe board. If there is a 1 in the middle, then there is a bomb somewhere in one of the other spaces around it. If there is a 2 in that space, then there are two bombs all around it, even on the corners that seems to just barely be touching it. Some blocks are blank after clicking because they don’t touch any bombs.

You’ve got to begin the game by randomly clicking in about ten or so spaces until you’ll suddenly see a large portion of the grid, about 30 to 40% of it, open up cleanly. Once that opens up, then you can begin to pick away at corners. Again imagine the tic-tac-toe board with a 1 in the middle and all surrounding blocks blank except for a still-waiting block in the upper right corner. Since that 1 in the middle is touching only one bomb, and since there is only one unclicked block, then that block must be the bomb, and that’s where you plant the flag with a right-click. Once you plant that flag, look around for any other number blocks touching that now-safe bomb with a flag on it. If there is a 2 in that middle space of the imagined tic-tac-toe board and there are three unclicked blocks, then one is safe and two are bombs. One bomb is already flagged, so you’ve got two blocks to check, one a bomb and one safe. This is where the learning takes place.

The initial strategy is to seek the 1 blocks. If there is a 1 and you already know where the one bomb is that it’s touching, then you know that any other block can NOT be a bomb. That’s when you click away at anything that is also touching that 1 block because you know it can’t be a bomb as the one bomb for that 1 block is already flagged. Usually, you can find 1 blocks that are only touching one block, meaning it must be a bomb. Very often the rest of those blocks will be 1’s, and that will help you clear out safe blocks. Occasionally, you will have to guess, and sometimes you’ll guess wrong, but that should only happen maybe once in the entire game. I usually try to avoid the guesses and save it until the end by going elsewhere on the board and working my way back to that guess situation. Maybe something will uncover itself, maybe not. Some people choose to get the guess out of the way because, if you’re wrong, game over. So why wait until the end just to guess wrong and lose when you’re one or two clicks from the end of the game? Because the puzzle might solve itself from the other side, which won’t make sense until you’ve played and learned it.

Now, the educational part. First, it’s a counting game. Finding the numbers, counting the bombs that are touching it, numbers, and counting are all mathematical. It’s also a test of your powers of deduction. You’ve got to strategize and build skills in order to figure out where bombs are and are not. There are also patterns to follow. What’s great about this game is that it’s not just hand-eye coordination. Children can eventually win at any game that is no more than learning the timing of several clicks of buttons at a precise moment all wrapped with interesting and colorful graphics. Those games are not challenging because it’s just a matter of trial and error leading to proper timing. If I click too fast and lose, then I’ll learn to click a little more slowly next time and adjust continually until I get it right. This is not the case with Minesweeper. The only timing that counts is having your name or initials next to the high score for each level, if you’re interested in the recognition. There are small (beginner), intermediate, and large (expert) grids with more bombs as the grid grows.

Try the game. It can be addictive, but in a good way because it’s making you more smarter, not more drunker - er.

the need for speed

2007-01-12T19:43:00.001-05:00

It’s wonderful to live in a land of freedom, unless my freedom infringes upon someone else’s. Then I’m a target.

The speed limit on the highway I drive every day is 65. I have the freedom to drive that fast - or not. I have the equal freedom and right to drive more slowly. Because of gas prices and the age of my car, I choose to drive 55 most of the time. My car, a 2000 Nissan, gets as much as 40 miles per gallon when I drive that speed. I was going to say, “When I drive that fast,” but the word “fast” is relative.

I stay in the slow lane, all the way to the right and out of the way of those who exercise their right to drive 65 or higher. I’m cognizant of the traffic entering the highway, and I’m careful to slow down or speed up a tad in order to allow them to blend in safely. There are others who drive my speed as I’m not the only outlaw. I leave a little early for work just in case there’s some traffic, enjoy my hour listening to Preston and Steve on WMMR, Philadelphia, and am less likely to get into an accident because I’ll have more reaction time when driving at a slower speed. It’s all good.

The only bad is in the attitude of those drivers who want to do 75-85. Hey, go right ahead, but don’t get pissed at me for choosing to go slowly. I’m originally from Northern New Jersey, or “North Jersey” as people in “South Jersey” like to say. I used to be told that I had a North Jersey attitude. My response has been, “I really don’t know what you mean because, in North Jersey, we don’t even think about South Jersey, so I wouldn’t know how my attitude compares to yours.” I used to drive 75, but that was before our President allowed gas prices to shoot up from $1.79 to $3.59 in less than a week in the summer of 2005. That was when I turned more into my father: easing up on the air-conditioner, driving more slowly, turning off the water until I really needed it while brushing my face or washing my teeth.

I’m more like my father as I get older except in one area. He’s 74 and out dancing several nights a week while I’m in bed by 10:00 and barely leave the house, except for work. When I’m 74, I just hope I can make it to the bathroom on my own or at least without someone behind me telling me to speed it up.

The Not-So- Great Gatsby

2007-01-03T12:47:00.001-05:00

Either late in high school or early in college, I was ordered to read The Great Gatsby. I regarded it as the most boring thing I had ever picked up. However, roughly 20 years later, I decided that it may have been me who was boring, so I decided – through the recommendation of others – that I should read it again because I, as an adult, would now be in a better frame of mind to appreciate the literary genius of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Nope.

Why is it that so many writers, and especially so many writing teachers, are quick to proclaim The Great Gatsby as one of the greatest novels ever written? Shortly after its publication, H.L. Mencken – a rather significant writer and journalist – referred to The Great Gatsby as just a “glorified anecdote,” and I completely agree. It’s a worthless and boring piece of work that does nothing more than allow a handful of shallow-minded society folk to show off their ability to do nothing other than uselessly and wastefully spend money and pursue extra-marital affairs with people more dull than themselves. And without the convenience of coincidence, not even that could happen.

I must apologize however, because it is wrong to refer to this story as “fiction” since there is no driving plot and no likable characters. If Moby Dick could swallow the entire cast, the world would improve. Usually, good fiction can be summarized with the following statement: “Somebody wants something, but someone or something else is in the way.” So tell me, who in this story wants something? Or, to ask a better question, who in this story has a want or need that is so compelling that I actually want to read the book? Maybe Gatsby wants Daisy? Why should I care? Daisy seems to want Nick and kisses him several times, even though they’re cousins, while still proclaiming her love for both Gatsby and her husband Tom, who is having his own affair with Myrtle, the wife of George Wilson. Affairs can be interesting, especially when there is a great deal of tension between the cheating parties when their legitimate better-half is in the same room. However, it doesn’t take long for Gatsby to pop right up to say that Daisy never loved Tom at all. Tom’s reaction? Basically, “Yes she does.” Wow, that’s drama.

Or maybe what Gatsby wants is to be liked? People seem to enjoy his parties, but nobody really seems to like or respect him. They tell stories about him, but they don’t really care about him. Why should they? He never answers a question with a straight answer and basically bullies people while smiling and sending a butler to refill their drinks, possibly to keep them drunk so they can’t remember what a dullard he is.

The only time there was interesting tension or drama was when Tom realized that he was simultaneously losing both is wife Daisy and his lover Myrtle. However, I could not feel sympathy for Tom because he was a brut who broke Myrtle’s nose because she mentioned his wife’s name. That drama lasted about half a page, and before we could really get into a conflict between husbands, wives, and lovers, Fitzgerald did a very convenient thing: he killed Myrtle and made it seem Gatsby’s fault so that Myrtle’s husband would kill Gatsby. This was way too convenient and could only lead me to one conclusion: Fitzgerald was done. He had nothing else interesting he could say or do with those characters, so he killed them. And he started a pretty good trend. Did you see the film Love Story? How about Terms of Endearment? Those two highly regarded films are cleaned up the same way, and it shows only one thing of the writer. He or she had absolutely no ideas left, so they had to kill someone to end the story. It’s very hard to end a story in a way that makes sense and ties the whole plot together. Just ask Stephen King.

There are other ways that convenience rules here. Without the narrator, Nick Caraway, there is no story. However, there are times in the story where Nick tells of scenes that he cannot possibly know about. Yes, I need to back that up, but I’ll have to find it later. For the attempt of drama to begin, we had to know that Tom was messing around with Myrtle. We learn this because Tom needed to mention it to Nick, his wife’s cousin. Why would a man tell his wife’s cousin that he’s cheating? Because either he’s plain stupid – leading me to not care about him – or the writer is plain stupid if he or she expects me to accept that.

So, let’s review. There is no driving conflict. There is no clear protagonist for me to follow and wait to see if that character achieves success. There is no clear antagonist to hinder the unclear protagonist. There are no likeable characters. Nobody wants or needs anything that I care enough about to see what happens.
Someone please tell me why this book is often called one of the greatest works of American fiction?

faking it

2006-08-04T12:50:00.001-05:00

here's what one of mel gibson's best friends, movie producer dean devlin, said about him:

"...he is an alcoholic, and while that makes no excuse for what he said, because there is no excuse, I believe it was the disease speaking, not the man."

here's what you're not allowed to do: you're not allowed to say, "i'm not making excuses, but it's not my fault." gibson and others have said things to the effect that there is NO excuse for making the type of comments that gibson made, and yes, of course, there IS NO excuse. however, you can't say that you are not making excuses, but then you follow that by saying it's the alcohol talking, not the man. that's crap.

alcohol does NOT make you say things that you don't really mean or believe. however, alcohol DOES allow you to say things that you really believe but have been holding back, thanks to the judgement you lost due to the alcohol. when a guy is caught having sex and cheating with another woman, many of those guys said that they were drunk and did not know what they were doing. bull-. when guys are not drunk, they're holding back because they know it's wrong. but when they're drunk, then they're away from those mental restraint devices and start doing what they're really wanted to do but have been struggling to resist the temptation.

face it mel - you, and your father, hate jews and are in dire need of cultural education. it's not the whiskey talking. it's just the whiskey opening the door to let the real you out.

serious question i need help with

2006-07-10T07:05:00.001-05:00

can someone answer this question for me please?

we've all seen the little triangle with the number inside on various plastic packages, the triangle that indicates that the product can be recycled. here's my question:

why is it that there are still forms of plastic being used that are NOT recyclable? why is it that there are still packages in stores and elsewhere that are made of plastic that has not and/or can not be recycled?

are there items that must be made of non-recyclable plastic?

someone help me out with this.

when the government would rather protect votes than children

2006-07-07T06:26:00.003-05:00

Eager Helpers for the Gun Lobby

(copied from the new york times July 7, 2006)

Childproof trigger locks on handguns should rank somewhere near mom and apple pie as a measure of the nation's wholesome dedication to life. But not in the House of Representatives, where the gun lobby cowed lawmakers into actually barring the use of federal funds to enforce an existing law that requires child trigger locks to be sold with all handguns. This late-night treachery just before the July 4 recess means that federal agents will not have the resources to confront one of the deadliest facts of American family life: 10 young people die each day in gun homicides, suicides and accidents.

The rate of firearm death for children 14 years and under is almost 12 times higher in this country than in 25 other industrialized nations combined, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet there was the law-and-order majority caving in to the gun lobby.
Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, the Colorado Republican who dared to put this proposal on the floor, offered a shabby logic: locks on weapons don't stop the slaying and maiming of children, they only make "personal protection more costly."

She drew 42 Democrats to join 188 Republicans in the majority with an argument that summoned an old "Saturday Night Live" skit about a sleazy toy dealer peddling lethal toys to children.

"Many things around the home are dangerous when used without proper instructions or supervision," Ms. Musgrave said. "But it is not the government's job or responsibility to mandate every conceivable protective mechanism imaginable."

Surely the Senate will not endorse this nonsense when it arrives from the House.

when your government allows you to die

2006-06-29T08:32:00.001-05:00

when does your government allow you to die? when it makes enough money.

http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=10&ItemID=8481
http://www.nida.nih.gov/Infofacts/Tobacco.html

cigarettes = money. money = power. power = governmental success.

here is what seems like a great hypocrisy:

cigarettes kill. don't let rush limbaugh, bill o'reilly, or any other republican mouthpiece tell you otherwise. the g.o.p. is spouting off that there is no proof of the dangers of cigarettes. they continue to allow tobacco companies to churn out poison and to do their best to get children hooked on it. but why?

what? you say the cigarette companies do NOT market to children? of course they do. need proof? ok. consider that roughly 1,100 people die each day from cigarettes. that's a lot of friggin' people. if that many people keep dying, then won't the tobacco companies go out of business rather quickly? that would be true, except - no. the tobacco companies work very hard at replacing those 1,100 people. every day.

why would cigarette companies aim their advertising at children instead of adults? easy. because children have more years ahead of them, more expendable cash that they can part with, and have a more rebellious attitude in order to pick up habits that they are told not to start.

why are cigarettes so addictive? tobacco is not. cigarettes are because there are about 4,000 chemicals in a cigarette, but not all of those chemicals are in a natural growing tobacco leaf. those chemicals are added in order to get your brain and body addicted to such a profit-making product. it must suck to live under the control of a factory and its officials who are rolling naked in the money that you're giving them. so sad.

if i went to the food and drug adminstration with a product that produces hundreds of poisons into your body, including carbon monoxide - the same filth that your car's exhaust pipe spits out - you can be sure that i would be laughed out of washington. but why do they allow cigarettes to continue? $$$$$$$$$$$$$. the money trail is healthy. the tobacco companies fork it over to lobbyists. the lobbyists harp on the senators. the tobacco companies fork the money into campaign warchests. the politicians can not do without that money, they would not be in office without it, so they're going to obey the orders of those from whom the money flows.

in addition to that money comes the cash from the drug companies. do you have any idea what it costs to buy prescriptions drugs to fight cancer from cigarettes? if smoking stops, cancers slows, and so does the money from the poor shlubs who have to pay up for those drugs. so the drug companies are also lobbying to allow the free flow of cigarette smoke.

recently, a growing number of states have been banning smoking in public places such as resaurants and bars because the states do not depend on that money in the same way that washington d.c. does. the states are starting to feel the pain of the real families who are losing loved ones. employees are dying from smoking patrons. children are dying of SIDS because of the smoking that their mothers and fathers are exposing them to. adults are dying at younger and younger ages because they are starting at younger and younger ages.

but as long as the money flows - eyes will look the other way and pretend that someone else will take care of it.