Shards of Glass

If I Were a Republican

2012-01-26T20:56:00.001-08:00

If I were a Republican, I'd probably say, "Please don't make me choose between Romney and Obama? I'll probably choose nobody."

Heh. That's pretty funny when you think about it.

I decided today

2012-01-26T20:53:00.001-08:00

I decided today
to move more slowly
for all the rest of my days.
More thoughtfully, too,
I pray.

On Collateral Damage

2012-01-26T20:53:00.000-08:00

Collateral Damage
Must Not
Wither Forth
All That Is Possible To Be
Nor Be Ignored

If I Were a Republican

2012-01-12T22:01:00.000-08:00

The major difference between Romney and Gingrich is that, when Gingrich says something, it's often true. Romney just seems like a liar to me.

You can track the changes in Gingrich's ideology over a 25 year period. Romney's shifts are linked to the ideologies that surface in each cycle during the campaigns he has conducted.

I don't really like either of them. But I dislike Gingrich a lot less.

The Yurt in Moke Hill!

2012-01-10T17:47:00.000-08:00

A Liberal Conservative

2012-01-10T17:36:00.000-08:00

Conservatism has lost her way, is adrift, has found no authentic home. The need for conservatism is real. People are stressed. Why is the government everywhere? People correctly perceive that their lifestyle is in danger, that they individually have too little power to sustain it. People are whelmed: Too much data. Can't we just slow down for a minute? Homer assures me the Gods may have a sympathetic heart, a sense of humor and divine rage. For which shall I pray?

Nostalgia. Preservation. Culture. Community. Privacy. Freedom. Self interest. These are acceptable ideas. But Conservatism hasn't been well represented at the lectern or at the pulpit. For the past forty years, her supposed servants have fought to politicize conservatism in one failed attempt after another, and each follows the prior, like so much dishwater, down the drain. The promulgation of windmills like death tax - a rendition that helps no one. Most recently holding the country and economy hostage on the debt ceiling. Politicians , of all classes of people, telling others they love their country more. It is perfectly lousy as representation goes. It is self interest expressed at a level not frequently long tolerated, even in highly tolerant societies.. Those who claim to represent conservatism are more opportunistic than altruistic and more ideological than theoretical. They do not practice a recognizable variant. And, they are a lie. She, the truth.

Liberalism is just as lost. The band of individuals faced down by giants, only in union can they prevail. The face of the giant changes. The need for cooperation is immutable. Great foils are a fixture of history. Individuals organize and governments grow exponentially in response. We don't trust any other institution to protect us more than the government. That may not always be what we tell polling firms, but all other evidence confirms it.

Who would besmirch his reputation to claim this design? Could you even count the number of government programs? Enough with the government programs already. How is that model different from a peasant asking an advance wage from the lord? How is that better? More predictable? Thank a Prussian. Bureaucracy as the chief instrument of social welfare? Is that really how liberalism advances its agenda in the twenty-first century? This is not liberalism.

If I could get a conservative liberal, I think I'd have exactly what I want.

2011-11-15T21:00:00.000-08:00

Yurt without covering in the backyard. Taking it to the mountains in a week or so..

I am the box I came in

2010-02-16T00:59:00.000-08:00

I am the box I came in
I sit empty, inhabiting space
My confidence, the stale air inside
My soul, crumpled tissue paper
My strength but corrugated corners
I am used, useful but for to be used again
I am what remains of loyalty
I am the box I came in

Happy New Year!

2010-01-01T08:56:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year!

The Democrat's Ex-Spouse

2009-11-07T08:58:00.000-08:00

Joe Lieberman is like the Democrat's really destructive and venomous ex-spouse.

He stays in their house, and in fact, refuses to move from the all-glass master suite where he publicly trysts with friends and opponents alike, and with all possible fanfare. He demands ever increasing alimony payments. He attends all their important parties and functions, where his public behavior creates ever escalating embarrassment.

This marriage is very obviously over. You would think someone would make it stop. One would surmise the Democratic Party lawyers could finalize the divorce papers already. There is no evidence to suggest as much.

At least it is entertaining.

A Chorus Emerges from the Primordial Soup

2009-06-27T19:32:00.000-07:00

Since the time that I first encountered the concept of evolution, I have managed the simple image of some reptilian slug oozing its way from of the primordial soup, out onto the sludge that must have been the strand, exposing itself to all varieties of toxi-genated "air", and dragging with it in that instant the genetic markers for all future mammalian life.

My conceptualization, virtually static for three decades now, was fertilized last night by my nine year old son. We walked the dogs at about 9 PM, and discussed the random things that fathers discuss with their nine year old sons. He was interested in the evolutionary branch that gave rise to wolves and dogs, and wondered if dogs evolved from the wolves. I offered that maybe they both evolved from the same third thing. He headed for the swamp.

He refers to the place from which that first creature emerged as "the swamp". We discussed that point at which that first creature shoved its face out of the wet. This creature has served for my thinking as the pivot point, the sole link between the future air breathers and their plant-like forebears, a singleton.

Michael cleanly shattered my simplistic concept by asking: "How do we know that more than one thing didn't crawl out, and evolve into the many different types of animals now on earth?"

If I have encountered a more parsimonious addition to my understanding of evolution, I cannot remember it now.

Thank you, my son.

My Horoscope

2009-06-26T19:02:00.001-07:00

LEO - The Boss (July 23 - Aug 22) Very organized. Need order in their lives - like being in control. Like boundaries. Tend to take over everything. Bossy. Like to help others. Social and outgoing. Extroverted. Generous, warm-hearted. Sensitive. Creative energy. Full of themselves. Loving. Doing the right thing is important to Leos. Attractive. 13 years of bad luck if you do not forward.

Reading between the lines:

LEO - The Boss (July 23 - Aug 22) Like being in control. Like boundaries. Tend to take over everything. Bossy. Full of themselves.

Not sure what those other words were really for...

New Favorite Song

2009-06-24T23:10:00.000-07:00

Theme song from Gran Torino.

gentle now a tender breeze blows
whispers through the Gran Torino
whistling another tired song
engines hum and bitter dreams grow
a heart locked in a Gran Torino
it beats a lonely rhythm all night long
(complete lyrics)
Wow.

Palms Stretched Skyward

2009-06-24T22:42:00.000-07:00

Weary songs play the tired sentiment of middle aged men's tears
Strung out across the square where strangers wait on the perimeter
Palms stretched skyward
Looking for a missing God
Eye contact deflected by worn mattress springs
Away from the whispered reflection in broken tempered glass
Splashes of loss manage an escape in a sigh
Too tight girls in dirty sarcastic jeans rout a perfect blue
Nothing to buy, worth selling, to see
Home is as far as freedom, as close as death
Souls on display, hidden from view, and
Everywhere between
Prayers scrawled across the back of a burn victim's heart
Palms stretched skyward
Away
Palms stretched skyward

AIG and Third Rock?

2009-03-15T09:27:00.000-07:00

John Lithgow is a great actor. Edward M. Liddy (not to be confused with G. Gordon) is also pretty good.

Lithgow has had a lot of great roles. Liddy is also pretty funny. Both names begin with "Li". I think they even sort of look similar.

I have to believe that Liddy is basically trying to emulate Lithgow's hilarity with this bonus thing. It certainly seems like something from Third Rock. That is really the only reasonable explanation.

Source for photos:
Lithgow: Wikipedia
Liddy: NYT

Kosmix vs. CoolIris

2009-03-15T08:57:00.000-07:00

I just read a review of Kosmix.com in the NYT. It is supposed to be a new and upcoming cool thing. The author of that article compared Kosmix to google, by way of saying "do not compare Kosmix with google." I went to the Kosmix site and performed a couple of searches. It is correct not to compare Kosmix with google. All Kosmix does, so far I can tell, is parse the search results content into categories: web, video, blog, etc. Hardly novel or interesting. (Kosmix has a "new" service to allow you to specify keywords to drive the news content you want. Whoa! Cutting edge stuff. Five years ago.)

I am no fan of google. Kosmix is a fan of google, so much so that they basically return google results by category. You can "add your site to Kosmix" if you send them an email. An email? Yes, an email. On a scale of 1 to 5, that ranks as lame. So much for automated services.

CoolIris and CoolPreviews, on the other hand, are very interesting and somewhat novel. And you do not have to send them an email. If you have not tried CoolIris and CoolPreviews, you should have a look-see.

CoolIris is a sort of desktop application that presents web content in a metaphor that is as close to the "Minority Report" pre-crime application interface as I have seen. I think it is the next (or maybe current) predominant UI paradigm.

CoolPreviews is a browser plugin that displays the content of a link in a frame over the current window. You preview the content in the target by hovering over the CP icon beside every link.

CoolPreviews can sometimes get in the way, but not generally, and you can turn it on and off quite easily. CoolIris is, well, really very cool.

Score
CoolIris: 8
CoolPreviews: 7
Kosmix: 2 (for effort - it's a hard time to be a start-up)

NPR - National Dramatic Radio

2009-03-08T10:25:00.000-07:00

National Public Radio is trying everything possible not simply to become a dreadful place. It is not having much success. The news of the economy is almost never positive.

NPR is not in decline simply because of the economy, though. It is helping with its own brand of drama - terrible journalism. The recent story on college students with ADD sharing their Adderall was both devoid of any real utility and suffered from a complete dearth factual underpinning. Does such anecdotal fluff really constitute world news?

The dramatic crisis language used to conclude the Adderall story caused me nearly to be flung from my treadmill. A breathy voice invoked the fearful consequences of inaction regarding a complete non-problem. In a word, the piece was completely terrible!

A few college students sometimes take amphetamines! That's a story?

I hear more of this type of story on NPR than in earlier years. Maybe the frequency is the same, and I am more attuned.

I am going to stop listening to these stories. I hope I stop listening because NPR stops broadcasting these stories. The alternative is my iPod. It's a dangerous weapon, but I am willing to use it.

On Economic Predictions

2009-03-08T09:45:00.000-07:00

I must say that I am very impressed with the ability of various economists and other prognosticators to accurately diagnose the month, day and hour that the recovery will take hold. Seriously, how can they even show their faces? Their understanding and prediction of the crisis itself is matched only by the CIA's success predicting the dissolution of the Soviet Union at end of the cold war. Yet they spew their pithy opinion as though it were knowledge -- and I hear them parroted by family, friends and colleagues alike -- all day long, every day of the week. Of course we are depressed. The world isn't as horrible as the news.

Here is my prediction. The economic crisis will be over when we trust it is over. It will be followed by an economic recovery. Early trusters will cause it. Later trusters will engage later. Business trusters will need to believe it, because they will drive it.

The bailout may help.

A much greater help would be for all of us to turn off NPR and CNN. It will help tremendously if we all completely abandon the news for a few months: Total news blackout. I predict that, if we completely ignore the media for three to six months, we will return in late summer or fall to find the world in much better shape than we thought possible. Otherwise, the media output will continue to put pressure on the availability and price of cheap wine.

I should admit that, once the blackout starts, I may continue occasionally to read David Brooks' column, and sneak a secret peek at Gail Collins. We all have our addictions.

So let's all go out together and buy something today, and every day.

Regarding the economic turn-around, I hope it is not long.

Government Transformation at $800 Billion

2009-02-22T17:32:00.000-08:00

What do we know about transformation?
What have we learned about growth?
Is living through just dumb luck?
Can we hit the targets?

I watched a motorcyclist jump onto a large trailer.
Rather, I watched him miss, and crash under it.
His was a transformative experience.
He was transformed into a saline sack of shattered fragments.
He survived to cameo a bit part in the movie.

There was more concrete data available to plan that motorcycle jump than the federal bailout.
We do not know the speed required to succeed at this jump.
State and federal government stimulus packages are largely ahistorical.
There is no known or tested or even secret formula available to propel the economy onto that distant ramp.
There is no precedent.
We have never been here.
We have never succeeded in this space before, and never failed.
We must all be great fiction writers.
The goal of such fiction is the biography of Garcia-Marquez:
Living to Tell the Tale.

I have transformed small things with that specific goal in mind.
Houses. Land. Organizations. Kids.
I can point to a few successes.
I learn more from the failures.
I have learned three lessons.

First: Praxis.
Doing nothing yields an equivalent result.
Theory must be indistinguishable from action.
Every hypothesis, every thought, must result in some perceptible pressure on the rudder.
A thousand tiny points comprise a smoother arc than one grand theory.

Second, abort failure as early as possible.
Early failure is better than late failure.
Isolated failure is better than total failure.
A course correction is preferable to any of them.

Third, transformation is positivistic.
It must be realized to be real.
A Kuhnian paradigm shift replaces more than the skin it sheds.

I have never guided the type of transformation that involves filtering hundreds of billions of dollars through the bitter and opaque filters of state and federal bureaucracies.
My credentials are the exactly same as everyone else on the planet in this regard.
I would be capable...
Of failing,
Of succeeding,
Of some interpretable outcome.

I trust myself as much as I trust those in charge.
Equally.
Good luck to them and to us.
Perhaps, in the worst case, we will all survive to cameo a bit part in the movie.

Letter from a Friend

2009-02-19T21:25:00.000-08:00

On the far side
A field of troubled clover grows
The reeds are all doubled over
A girl from Carolina sits alone
She cries and cries and cries
The ocean sprays its salt in the sand
The dunes blow flattened into the sea
Sentimental contrails banished forever
The equality of the netherworld
I read this post card
I think of you
On the far side

Who is Watching Whom

2009-02-18T21:04:00.000-08:00

There are three invisible shadows
I cannot see the monsters
I cannot see their shadows
What if they find out
A dog is barking
A candle burns in a pumpkin
On the porch across the street
The empty lot beside it
The empty lot beside it
Someone is tying a string to a pole
The wind blows it out of his hand
Into the monster's face
I cannot see their shadows
What if they find out.

The Deceptive Practices of Folsom Lake Toyota - PostScript Second

2009-02-15T11:51:00.000-08:00

This post is a PSS to an earlier post.

The Folsom dealership called again this morning. It was the internet / fleet salesman. He said he "has some clout" there, and "can do things the guys on the floor cannot." What did he mean by that? Did he mean that he can keep his word? Did he mean that he corners the market on honesty or integrity at Folsom Lake Toyota? One has to wonder.

Folsom Lake Toyota appear to use various unethical and dishonest bullying tactics during the sale. This approach probably works most of the time. In phase one, they jiggle the numbers, play the "four corners" game, make repeated trips to see some managerial deity behind the curtain. They ignore the agreed upon price. They try their best not even to show you the calculations - only your monthly payment. And they just wear you down.

They then have a phase-two clean-up process for cases where buyers are intelligent enough to walk out. They use this secondary "call-back" mechanism -- let's get to the real deal -- to bolster their overall probability of success. It is really a very interesting strategy, and quite well conceived. The two processes together must have an even higher success rate than just the veracity-free bullying alone. In any event, it is clearer now, after this morning's call, that Folsom Lake Toyota are not ignorant of their end-to-end processes. It would be naive to think they were.

I strongly recommend that you avoid them altogether.

The Crimes of Folsom Lake Toyota

2009-02-14T13:23:00.000-08:00

It is hard to fathom how stupid Folsom Lake Toyota must think people are. People aren't really that stupid, are they?

I have heard of creative sales approaches. These guys are so ridiculous that unethical just barely describes it. We made an offer on a Prius. The Sales Rep told us the manager accepted our offer.

The rest of the day - 2 hours of my life that I will never get back - went something like this.

Us: we will pay $24.5 for car X with package Y

Folsom Lake Toyota Sales Rep (Mike): (Goes inside and returns):

Folsom Lake Toyota Sales Rep (Mike): Ok, the manager accepts your offer of $24.5 for car X with package Y. Let’s go inside and sign the papers. We should get you out of here quickly, 30 minutes tops.

Us: Sign forms. Drink Coffee. Watch Basketball. 45 minutes pass.

Folsom Lake Toyota Sales Rep: (Disappears to the back. Then returns.)

Folsom Lake Toyota Sales Rep: Please sign these forms for $30. These are not the final numbers. We expect you to put 30% down.

Us: These are not the real numbers. We want to see the real numbers. No need to negotiate here. We've got an agreement. By the way, no one uses a 30% down payment. That is just silly.

Folsom Lake Toyota Sales Rep: Right. Let me get the real numbers. Sorry. Be right back.

Folsom Lake Toyota: (Disappears to the back. Then returns with the Finance Rep.)

Folsom Lake Toyota Finance Rep (Kerry): OK. Here are the real numbers. Please sign these forms for $30.

Us: Uh, we agreed to $24.5, not thirty.

Folsom Lake Toyota Finance Rep: Right. $24.5. Sorry. Be right back.

Folsom Lake Toyota Finance Rep: (Disappears to the back. Then returns.)

Folsom Lake Toyota Finance Rep: OK. So sign here.

Us: Uh? This still says $30. That's not what we agreed to. How did you calculate this figure anyway?

Folsom Lake Toyota Finance Rep: I will get the printout.

Folsom Lake Toyota Finance Rep: (Disappears to the back. Then returns with a hand printed tally sheet.)

Folsom Lake Toyota Finance Rep: OK, here is the breakdown. We start with some erroneously high price that you did not agree to pay. We calculate sales tax on the sticker price plus fees, and add the extra sales tax back to our originally too high price. We deduct a small portion of the agreed upon discount. We use TFS rate of 1 point higher than your bank rate, but you can change that within the next 30 days. Voila, you pay $30.

Us: This is not the price we negotiated. Fix this. Now!

Folsom Lake Toyota Finance Rep: I am just trying to help you here. (He actually said that.)

Us: You can help us by using the price we agreed upon, calculating taxes on that amount, and getting us out of here inside of the two hour window we have available to us.

Folsom Lake Toyota Finance Rep: (Disappears to the back. Then returns.)

Folsom Lake Toyota Finance Rep: OK, here is the new price. $30.

Us: Thank you, and good-bye.

Folsom Lake Toyota Finance Rep: I will split the difference with you. (He actually said that, too.)

Us: Thank you, and good-bye.

Us: (Wife and son walk out the door. I pause to tell the Sale Rep thanks, and that we are leaving.)

Folsom Lake Toyota Finance Rep and Finance Manager – in unison: No! No! We fix! We fix!

Me: Why did you fail to honor our agreement?

Folsom Lake Toyota's Finance Manager (very sharply): "I'm trying to make some profit!" (I swear to God, he actually said that.)

Me: Good luck with that. (I really said that, as I spun on my heel for the door.)

Us: (Drive away in our old car -- 2 hours after we arrived.)

Us: Are people so stupid that they allow these unethical turds to pull such crap.

Is it even remotely legal to over-charge on sales tax and add the overage back into the price? Is it ethical to agree to a price, add thousands onto that price, and then just wear the customer down with the back-and-forth-with-the- manager game? Is this the fashion for all Toyota dealerships everywhere? I experienced this practice at two dodge Dodge dealerships, and two Nissan dealerships. Maybe it is ALL car dealerships. That would be so sad!

Somebody somewhere help me to believe that we have not all fallen to this level.

Update: I am told that a rebate is in fact taxable in California. This does not account for the delta in pricing this morning.

Postscript. We purchased a Prius this evening from Maita Toyota in Sacramento for less than we had offered in Folsom ($4k off sticker). Call Dave Lundgaard there (dlundgaard@maitats.dealerspace.com). Dave is the internet / fleet sales guy at Maita Toyota, and he is great.

We returned home from the dealership in Sacramento this evening to find a voice-mail message from Folsom Lake Toyota. "Mike the sales rep told me what happened to you. I'm very sorry. I think we can make it right." No thanks! (See PSS here.)

It has been three days

2009-02-10T20:19:00.000-08:00

It has only been three days
Seems like much longer than that
I have heard toasts that took longer
Put it on my grave stone
He listened for three days
The life of an insect
A healthy tropical storm
It has only been three days
It has only been three days

What are the Republicans Rebuilding?

2009-02-09T06:59:00.001-08:00

According to an article in the WP, "Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.) suggested last week that the party is learning from the disruptive tactics of the Taliban..." (here).

Has anyone asked yet just what are the Republicans trying to rebuild?

My First Plug

2009-01-15T20:50:00.000-08:00

This web site - Totally Looks Like - really makes me laugh.

http://totallylookslike.com

Enjoy.

Bearing Poetry

2009-01-11T19:47:00.000-08:00

Writing is the brain's birthing process.
Thought is mere conception.
Talking is but gestation.
Written work is a new, real, born thing.
Each draft is yet another target.
Text provides the visibility necessary for criticism,
usually much deserved.
Printed word is the unwashed face
on your obnoxious cousin's even more obnoxious kid.
You know your kid cannot turn out the same.
Then you see the dirty, snot-faced photographs
of a hybrid face,
a cross between your spouse's and father's faces,
only swollen with baby fat.
You soften.
Your cousin and his kid are not so bad.
Your writing, however, still is.
It is still a squalid, intolerable, filthy-faced target,
to which you gave birth,
in search of your cousin's empathy.

Music is a Train

2008-12-27T21:11:00.000-08:00

The drums are the iron outer shell,
steel wheels grinding on steel track.
The base is the steam engine,
the base player shovels the coal.
The violins are the whistling of the wind
through conversations and unsealed windows.
The guitar is the cushion where you sit.
The vocals are the meal.
All of these vary in quality.
But the food is
most noticibly,
most obviously
good or bad.

On Age and Speed

2008-11-02T19:50:00.000-08:00

I am not going to say that I am a slow guitar player, but a fly just landed on my left hand while I was pretending to be able to play "Let It Be".

On A.D.D.

2008-09-06T17:21:00.001-07:00

They say, we cannot effectively manage a single communication thread.

We say, they cannot manage the multiplicity of communication threads across which we need to operate.

They are holding the cookies.

President Bush is Fun At Parties

2008-09-06T17:21:00.000-07:00

The thing you have to love about President Bush is that he has insisted on having a good time as President, despite the state of the country. You have to give him that. At no time has he allowed actual problems to interfere with his clear intention to have a good-time on his turn at POTUS. You can see that he is having a good time. He wants you to see it. Credit for him. He has nailed it. I like that about him. I really do.

Influences

2008-09-06T17:07:00.000-07:00

These are the influences I can think of right now.

My Immediate Nuclear Family - I will sacrifice myself to preserve them.

My Self and Realization - I must preserve myself to protect ...

My Family of Origin

My In Laws

My long term friends - over great times and distances, patiently

People I like to think of as friends, but perhaps have not known long enough to be sure

People I have worked with

People I know

People I know of

People I have met and have never thought of again

People I have met who never existed

People I have never met

The Environment

And History

In some order.

My Pet Rock

2008-04-13T10:11:00.001-07:00

About a hundred years ago, I bought a router for my home network. It was either a D-Link or a NetGear. After several days of mis- and re-configuration of the settings of the router, the Windows NT Server, the laptop PC cards, the Windows work stations and my wife's expectations of when our internet access would be permanently back online, I returned it, and brought home a LinkSys.

The LinkSys router, though a little more expensive than the first one, was the same brand as my laptop PCMCIA cards. Hours and hours, spanning days, were required to get the all of the components correctly configured and the computers properly connected. Eventually, after a bit more mis- and re-configuration of the settings of the router, the Windows NT Server, the laptop PC cards, the Windows work stations and my wife's expectations, the network was finally properly configured, and I owed my friend Philip a lifelong debt of gratitude for his expertise and good natured guidance. The hardware needed to be reset every little while, but was maintainable.

I have replaced that original hardware a few times now. Network hardware lasts a surprising long time. Each generation is a bit simpler than the previous one; each new router seems to require a little less configuration than the previous.

Last week, my administrative assistant drove to Best Buy, bought a Belkin wireless router, and plugged it in. An entire conference of software engineers was connected in that instant. Zero Configuration: The total required time, including the drive to Best Buy, was but a tiny fraction of my first experience.

New computer components are getting easier to install and configure with each passing year. They sit virtually ignored for years.

Pet Rocks are much more functional than they used to be...

...but
they
require
the
same
level
of care.

John McCain: Competent Conservatism?

2008-04-05T16:54:00.001-07:00

I wondered recently what sort of world we would have now if Rove and his band of merry PowerSeekers had chosen someone with real hard-hitting competence to stand as figurehead for their movement eight years ago. [Here.] Maybe the past eight years under an über competent chief executive pursuing the same policies would be a fairer test of conservatism than the period overseen by President George W. Bush. Would we now (retrospectively) view the approaches, or the desired or actual outcomes any differently? An ideology based on faith leaves too many important variables immeasurable for my personal cognitive comfort. The question is still worth answering.

There is every reason to believe that an executive government administered by John McCain will not be a simple continuation of the Bush-Two Experience. The Bush Experience has two components: the Bush-Two Ideas and the Bush-Two Implementation.

A McCain Regime will be required by the joists on which it stands to adhere pretty closely to the Bush-Two Ideas, lest its supporting scaffolding collapse. Candidate McCain already held or has adopted President Bush's views on the war as an enterprise, taxes, the Evangelical Bundle, government underwritten capitalism, and a number of other issues.

This election may be a debate about the Bush-Two Ideas. Perhaps, on the other hand, it will be about the effectiveness of the Bush-Two Implementation. It could become a discussion of the engagement and the competence of this administration's implementation.

John McCain is no George W. Bush. A Pacific Ocean size chasm of personal competence and innate ability separate John McCain from George W. Bush. President Bush has many, many personal failings that do not saddle Senator McCain. The latter is smart -- not an intellectual superstar, but a very credible thinker. He is also an ubiquitously acclaimed doer. Senator McCain has demonstrated for a really long time now that he is fantastically capable of active engagement and producing innovative outcomes. We knew he was running for president the very first time we saw him speak on the nightly news -- a hundred years ago. George W. Bush is uninspired and uninspiring. John McCain is engaging and engaged.

The Democratic presidential candidate may have a difficult time running a general election campaign against the Bush-Experience as a general concept. The Republicans will easily counter an overly simplistic strategy. The team who run the McCain campaign are far from amateur, and are very effective campaigners by any measure. They will hoist great banners drawing attention to Senator McCain's demonstrated ability to accomplish missions.

********
If the Bush-Two Ideas are put on trial in this election, Candidate McCain could suffer a form of torture quite different from those known in his past. None of the Bush-Two Ideas is popular right now. Much of this platform has been completely discredited and nearly unanimously deemed illegitimate. There are not many parts of President Bush’s world view with support from even a third of the American voting population, and generally far fewer. Evangelicals love him publicly; defense contractors and energy executives love him in private. There is not much more love for him than that. If this election becomes a referendum on the Bush-Two Ideas, it will cause Senator McCain to look so old by November, that he will look even older than his already very old looking self.

Candidate McCain will seek to obscure his intent to continue Bush-Two Ideas. He will frame images of a competent implementer, while minimizing and overshadowing the central role and visibility of the Bush-Two Ideas themselves. He will hide these ideas the in the cargo hold during his Biography of Competence Bus Tour.

To counter Candidate McCain's claim, the Democratic candidate should aim specifically to show that the Bush-Two Ideas are the direct cause of our current predicament, despite one radically disengaged player. Did President Bush’s incompetence sink the country? No. The Bush-Two Ideas sunk the country.

All in all, this administration has done an exemplary job of implementing Bush-Two Ideas. They have been very successful in that regard. The Bush-Two Team successfully defined the Republican platform after their own. They successfully implemented their ideas as legislation. They successfully implemented their platform as federal and state executive policy. They successfully pursued their goals. They did exactly what they promised they would do.

What are these ideas?

The Bush-Two Ideas include not believing in evolution.
The Bush-Two Ideas include not believing in global warming.
The Bush-Two Ideas include a preference for drilling in the Alaskan wilderness over – well, over anything.
The Bush-Two Ideas include believing Iraq was more important than Afganistan.
The Bush-Two Ideas include believing alternatively in states’ rights or federalism depending solely on which one favored their argument de jure.
The Bush-Two Ideas include believing alternatively in limiting the role of "meddling" judges or an active conservative judiciary depending solely on which one favored their argument de jure.
The Bush-Two Ideas include... one could just go on and on.

These are the ideas President Bush and his executive branch have successfully pursued.

********
Why should we expect that a competent chief executive who pursues Bush-Two Ideas will make a difference in the quality of our world? In fact, we should not.

Bush and McCain administrations would share tens of thousands of elected and appointed Republican officials, officials whose behavior is, according to David Brooks [here], more important than what they say. We should simply wonder once aloud why most of those officials worked so hard during these last seven years - and on what, and then we should watch them as they go about their business. They will show America this: They will continue to do exactly what what they did for the last seven years, which is the same exact thing they would have done if George W. Bush were never President at all, and the same thing they will do for the next four years if Candidate McCain is successful.

They may not invite George to their parties. Little else changes.

Why have so many Republican officials bothered to cover for or stick up for President Bush for so long?

They did not. They successfully pursued the policies they support.

And that is conservatism.

Will the general electorate find in John McCain the competent leader required to continue the movement? If the Democratic presidential candidate can keep the focus on the Bush-Two Ideas, John McCain's competence will not be the issue.

If I am wrong,

these
  next
    four
      years
        could
          take
            a
              really,
                                really
                  long
time.

Let begin the General Election Primary!

2008-03-29T08:09:00.000-07:00

Democratic primary candidates should now campaign against the Republican Party turning this period into the General Election Primary. For the remainder of the Democratic primary campaign, starting right now, both Democratic candidates should turn and immediately train their fire on the presumptive Republican nominee.

In addition to the essential brilliance of such a plan, the General Election Primary resolves a number of practical problems, and may provide a blueprint for future primary contests.

How would this work?

Starting immediately, both Clinton and Obama should begin to contest the general election. Each Democratic candidate will ignore the other Democratic candidate, and each will campaign solely against the Republican platform, that party's presumptive nominee, his positions and ideas, and his legislative and oratorical history.

There are scores of benefits for Democrats from a General Election Primary.

Democrats can stop the internecine struggles. The Democratic candidates will stop sniping at each other. This change alone will lift the entire party. New cause for compromise may even be birthed here. The growing ire between the two camps has caused one camp to question the other campaign's legitimacy, with reciprocity in the question the of fitness of the first. Both are false questions. Democrats can move on, so they must.

The two campaigns will cease to provide made to order sound bites for the opposition general election commercials. Enough snapshots have been produced already to be sure. I do not take this issue terribly seriously. Most pundits agree, however, that it is a pretty common practice, and this year will be no different. Democrats can do better, so they must.

The Republican nominee is currently basically getting a free ride. Many pundits think that candidate is fairly squandering an opportunity by closely linking himself with the evangelical right and the neo-cons. Maybe. But this period is equally an opportunity squandered for Democrats, inasmuch as the overwhelming majority of voters from all political stripes have rejected the approaches of both of those groups as guiding principles. Highlighting the policy linkages of the presumptive Republican nominee and keeping him off-balance would be an incalculably much better use of the Democratic candidates' time and money than a continued discussion of the nearly non-existent policy differences between them. Democrats can be more effective, so they must.

Very importantly, the General Election Primary provides the voracious and bored -- and thus dangerous - media with something more substantive and interesting to cover.

One of the main problems in the current Democratic primary -- illustrated on The Daily Show's nightly video collage -- is that the 24 hour media cycle is bored. NOTHING happens all day. The OReilly-Olberman Twins are more dangerous when they are bored, if that is possible. The O-Twins actively misinterpret everything and NOTHING when they are not bored. They fabricate outright about NOTHING when they are bored. I like Keith Olberman and his Miami Vice-style "news" production much better when he is not also engaged in his dramatic teary-eyed Sally Struthers "The Children!" imitation, or his hollow and hallowed "How Could You?" euro-indigation.

Currently, a bored but ambitious reporter somewhere gleans and actively strips from its context some trivial one-phrase quotation about NOTHING from the news-free black hole. The MSNBC-NYT-CNN-WP-FOX-LAT-NBC-ABC-PBS ©Newsglomerate then reports slash repeats that context-free NOTHING ad nauseum over the next 48 hours, or until the next too-clever columnist diverts their ferret-sized attention span to the next phrase. A General Election Primary will provide the media a surfeit of appropriate material. As an editorial note, I love watching talking heads. I do not find it productive for the Democrats right now. Democrats can provide more substance, so they must.

Most importantly, the entire electorate will get to experience and evaluate the strategies and approaches, the inventiveness, the creativeness, and the effectiveness each Democratic candidate can muster against the Republican candidate. What an invaluable bit of data to have! Consider the General Election Primary an internship, with real on-the-campaign-trail training for the general election. All hiring-managers would revel to review a potential employee's work for three months before hiring him, but the factors arrayed against that option in business are many. In this case, however, the candidates will be doing exactly the same job as they are now for the same pay, but facing a new, more salient, and more legitimate target. Consider further the fantastic positive impact of two big guns pounding incessantly on the opposing machine. Democrats can innovate, so they must.

It is my observation that Obama is a great speaker on great issues. He is relatively less effective with wonk-speak. Clinton, on the other hand, does not inspire in the same manner with grand themes of hope and inspiration, but she is very effective at wonk-speak. Democrats should look forward to an experience mixing these ingredients in a simultaneous general race with the presumptive Republican nominee. Democrats can evaluate, so they must.

Begin the General Election Primary!

Democrats
    can
        compete
            with
    the opposition,
        so
            they must.

Questions of Loyalty

2008-03-21T08:31:00.000-07:00

Is loyalty over-rated? George W. Bush has certainly abused the concept.

Loyalty is but a carpenter's hammer for Machiavelli, most politicians, and many business associates. It is required for framing a house, but dispensable once you move in.

What about the lack of loyalty? If loyalty itself is problematic, then betraying loyalty should have no meaning beyond the span of short-term memory, no tangible or intangible benefit in public life, no impact on the collective conscience, and no inherent individual moral or spiritual value - positive or negative.

Maybe it is a form of poison. Perhaps loyalty is only reverse revenge.

Something inside me is greatly disturbed by this interpretation. It would not please me to wake up and determine my allegiances anew each day. Success built on such a fault-line ridden foundation would not be success at all.

Maybe I should grow up.

Maybe
I
do not
want to.

Do the Michigan and Florida Primaries...

2008-03-20T20:11:00.000-07:00

merely constitute those bumps in the road one so often encounters?

Is the absence of action in Michigan and Florida in fact paralysis? Is it simply doing nothing when doing almost anything would be better? Or is it some sort of strategy?

Is this situation an illness to which one randomly succumbs the day before vacation? Or self-sabotage?

Obama has not favored any particular resolution; pundits suggest he may enjoy at least short term benefit from the status quo. Clinton would appear to benefit from a re-vote, and seems to favors one.

It is hard to believe that this lapse will be consequence free for either candidate.

Democrats have to wonder why Howard Dean is the chair of anything. He either favors Obama or has no stature. Certainly the latter is true. Maybe both. What happened to his "fifty state" strategy? Democrats should hope they do not pay dearly in the general election for his many glaring inadequacies.

The argument in favor of a required "democratic" distribution of super delegates has proved to be specious and hollow. There can be no mandate for super delegates to adhere to the popular vote if Democrats cannot craft a solution to allow a popular vote in Michigan and Florida.

The Democratic Party would benefit greatly from a rapid resolution to the stalemate inherent in this primary: The stalemate that is become this primary. Near-term closure would be widely welcomed, regardless of the candidate chosen. This episode does not bring closure any closer.

Democrats will not benefit from the status quo in Michigan and Florida. They should try not to post their own eviction notice in those states before the general election.

I Learned Something about Myself 4.0

2008-03-17T19:17:00.000-07:00

I never get in a line I can go around.

Most people hesitate, or even stop. I find that curious.

Some hesitate out of perceived politeness. Others out of mere hesitation. Still others because they do not know the way around.

I accelerate.

Do not judge me inconsiderate or rude.

A line is but an arrow pointing the way to those who can interpret the signs.

Going around is natural to me. I have always wanted to be in front.

Maybe
     I
          will
               save
                    you
          a space.

Joey stepped up, ...

2008-03-16T16:38:00.000-07:00

...and he raised his hand and said, "We're not those kind of men
It's peace and quiet that we need to go back to work again".
Bob Dylan, Joey

I seem to have really angered some "Obama supporter" friends of mine because I argue in favor of Hillary. One has halted correspondence. Apparently the alienation of friends is becoming the rule in this contest.

According to exit polling in the Texas primary, 91 percent of Clinton supporters said they would be dissatisfied with Obama as the nominee; 87 percent of Obama fans said they would be dissatisfied with Clinton. Nationally, a quarter of those who back Clinton say they'd vote for John McCain if Obama won the nomination (while just 10 percent of Obama supporters would do the same if he lost).
Newsweek

I am shamed.

What is the real underlying cause of this fracture between two camps with policy differences so minor that they require a thorough reading of footnotes, appendixes and columnists even to understand them. The lamest explanations begin with "everybody knows...", but that phrase prefaces every diagnosis I encounter regarding the apparent antipathy between the Clinton and Obama camps.

Here is my message to Obama supporters: Get over yourselves.

Here is my message to Clinton supporters: Get over yourselves.

Here is my message to Democrats: One of the candidates will win. Maybe yours. Maybe not. One of the candidates will get second place and lose. Maybe yours. Maybe not. We will probably know before the convention. Maybe not.

Either way -- if your candidate wins or if yours does not win -- Democrats will be represented by a solid and fully vetted candidate in the general election. The Democratic candidate will win the election in November if average Democrats do not act like children, spiteful jilted lovers, or third world petty dictators.

Or like OReilly and Olberman.

This competition is not over. Neither candidate has won. Neither has lost. When that moment comes, electoral success will depend on average Democrats to follow the example of Joey, when he stepped up,

and he raised his hand and said, "We're not those kind of men
It's peace and quiet that we need to go back to work again".

What if, eight years later...

2008-03-16T10:55:00.000-07:00

We were facing a different choice?

What if, eight years ago, Karl Rove and Co. had used their considerable talent to steer the Republicans toward a candidate who was engaged, competent, clear thinking, hard working and, to be concise, George W. Bush's complete opposite?

What if Karl and the Republicans had fostered an era wherein the creative names they assigned to their legislative efforts reflected the actual content?

What if Karl and the Republicans had selected a candidate capable of understanding that content, let alone discussing or actually contributing to it?

What if Karl and the Republicans had been able to decouple their policy goals from the trademark slash and burn incompetence of the Bush-II Administration.

Is there an alternate universe wherein the Iraq war was competently executed, even more so the choice whether to enter it at all? Is there an alternate universe wherein Republicans effectively managed the economy for families of all socio-economic strata? Is there an alternate universe wherein all domestic and foreign policy was basically competently managed with only the occasional blunder, instead of blunderously managed with only the rarest example of competence - usually expressed as a resignation?

There is an enormous contradiction in the fact that the ueber competent Karl Rove and Co. ended up with such an incompetent standard bearer to lead the implementation of their ideas. Is there an alternate universe wherein the potential value of the Republican platform is successfully transformed into policy? I do not agree with many of their ideas, but an honest and competently orchestrated implementation would have been a fairer test.

Is overcoming this history the primary challenge for McCain? Or is its continuation his promise?

In fact, what does a successful implementation of the modern Republican ideal look like? Bush-II? Bush-I? Reagan? Nixon?

On second thought,
never mind.

I Learned Something about Myself 3.0

2008-03-07T20:49:00.000-08:00

Recent conversations with friends have caused me to realize something that I could not earlier have so clearly articulated.

I want Hillary Clinton to win.

I want her to beat Obama.

I want her to become the next President, Madam POTUS.

But I do not want you Obama fans to be mad at me because I want that.

You know, when we race, we race to win, and we race to the finish line. We do not stop before.

One does not race for some greater good against someone who is running for himself. It is not a good bet. Sometimes it works, though.

I do not think she should quit.

If you quit, you lose. It is a fact.

I have won a lot of races from much further behind.

You know I have. You have seen it.

We Hillary fans are still in this.

I don't want you to be angry with me about that, either.

If Obama wins, then he is my guy. Absolutely, man, all the way. It will be more fun than we have had in years kickin' these guys' butts out of Washington. Like a fantastical and wonderful dream that is in all the papers. O-BA-MA! Yes. If he wins.

We must strive always to have a civil discussion, but it sometimes becomes uncivil.

Even so, we choose not to quit.

I would not choose that. You know I would not choose that.

Mostly, I do not want you to be mad at me about my choice to race all the way to the finish line for something I believe. You know I do not have another choice inside me.

Go Hillary!

Religiosity Gene Discovered...

2008-02-28T19:08:00.000-08:00

...in Mouse DNA

Scientists have recently analyzed the impact of the certain receptor genes on the risk of high religious conservatism as measured by frequent church attendance, attendance at tent revivals, positive associations with evangelical ideas, and monetary support for corporate churches and conservative talk show hosts in white mice.

Results show that the mice's religious-based political conservatism is caused by a different set of DNA components than simple strong religious beliefs. It would appear that the political variant of this DNA sequence is a strand shared with reptiles. Replacing this strand with a sequence taken from a prescient mammal, such as a whale or baboon, it is theorized, would transform a rabid Repubvangical mouse into a mere European Social Democrat mouse.

iTunes, version 2

2008-02-23T14:35:00.000-08:00

Slow Train Coming by Bob Dylan

There is the form.

There is the content.

There is the intersection, where you have to serve somebody.

   Is
         this
               my past,
               my future,
      or
      is this,
   just
my present?

My so-called friends...

2008-02-23T12:20:00.000-08:00

have fallen under a spell.
They look me squarely in the eye and they say, "All is well."
Can they imagine the darkness that will fall from on high
When men will beg God to kill them and they won't be able to die?
Bob Dylan, Precious Angel

A few weeks ago I wrote that it would be an error for Democrats to expect to benefit from any pre-convention split among the Republicans.

Since then, the so-called "mainstream media" and the conservative talking heads have provided an exciting confirmation (see this - thanks KC; and my earlier musings here).

Today, Karl Rove re-initiated himself into the discussion with an Op-Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal. He affirms that the political contest to be waged by Republicans will become very unpleasant, very soon. He is also trying to deflect some the attention to stories on McCain's relationships with lobbyists. There are layers, and there are layers.

I am told in discussions with really smart friends, the really well-informed ones, that John Cougar Mellencamp was right. "Nothing matters and what if it did."

"...I hardly think Karl Rove is a source I want to devote much time toward."

"...it's just more of Karl Rove's diarrhea of the mouth..."

Perhaps I err.

Maybe this Obama-mania and the surrounding aura will be enough. Maybe his rhetorical flourish, intellectual armor and political instinct are so fantastic that they will protect him against his personal and political short-comings throughout the campaign.

Maybe this really is the year of the Democrats. Maybe Bush and his criminal regime have dragged down the Republicans to such an underwhelming state of disrepute that, as a national political force, they have already exhausted any realistic opportunity to win the Presidential contest in November.

And maybe, just maybe, none of us has never squandered an opportunity that was ours to squander.

Hope is not a strategy.

History shows that an opposing candidate underestimates the Rush Limbaughs, the Karl Roves and their oozing, beguiling ilk at his own great peril. These guys act as a forward area scout for an army of 300 million camped just beyond the hill.

So maybe,
    just maybe,
        we
            should
                prepare
                    for
        what is
    to come.

XM Radio, Version 1

2008-02-22T20:39:00.000-08:00

Eighties Station

ZZ Top is playing...

Every Girl's Crazy About a Sharp Dressed Man

Nothing to do with me.

I dress like a guy with no future.

I dress like a guy with no past.

I like it just the same.

It is family game night.

And...

I
finally
won
at
Uno Attack!

iTunes, version 1

2008-02-20T20:54:00.000-08:00

Mister Heartbreak by Laurie Anderson.

It would make me feel old

if

I didn't
love
it

sooooooo
much!

Excellent Birds.

Super Delegates...

2008-02-11T07:40:00.001-08:00

should be proportionally allocated.

Why is this confusing?

Why does an allocation of Super Delegates according to the proportion of the vote constitute something other than the simple proportional representation used in the Democratic Party?

Any
        other
        allocation scheme
                is
    less fair
            to voters.

Even Fox News...

2008-02-11T07:34:00.000-08:00

loves Obama, in their "Fair and Balanced" manner.

Last night they "interviewed" a representative from each of the campaigns.

Question to Clinton Campaign: You just had a campaign shake-up. The new advisor is a black woman. Was that an effort to improve sagging relations with black voters, with whom you are struggling?

Question to Obama Campaign: Your candidate gave a great speech last night. Tell us about it.

   Something
      strange
         is
            in the air.
      Something
         very
            very
   strange.

Democrats would be wrong...

2008-02-10T08:58:00.000-08:00

to assume that they can benefit during the November general election from the apparent disagreement among Republican factions during the primaries.

Civil competition during a primary helps a party in the general election -- as long as the money holds out. (This premise holds true for the current Democratic race as well.)

While Dobson, Limbaugh and Colter may lead a band of socially conservative ideological purists into the desert, no one in that wing has any reticence about changing directions. They will compete in full force at the Republican convention. They will exuberantly exert the absolute extent of their influence on their constituency during the general election. Their oxygen is derived from the game. They will support McCain.

Limbaugh and Dobson do not need to explain, or even acknowledge really, radical shifts in their positions, or dramatic changes in direction. Their flock do not evaluate or critique the logic used to develop their conclusions. Their particular constituency accept their conclusions on faith, not evidence. The assertion that "they forced" McCain to select Huckabee or Thompson as his running mate will drive their Volte face. They will support McCain.

The defection of Limbaugh's Lemmings is ephemeral.

The negotiations between the wings of the Republican party are well underway. History suggests they will come to a satisfactory - and competitive - resolution.

Democrats,
    it
        would
            be
                an error
    to interpret
these events
as favorable.

Huckabee is right...

2008-02-09T17:24:00.000-08:00

about one important issue.

The American People have embraced civility in this election to a greater extent than any election since before Reagan.

Every state primary and caucus has reacted negatively to negative campaigning. Candidates are not allowed to be seen trying to make another candidate look bad as a person.

On both sides, Republicans and Democrats.

Edwards picked on Hillary, saying he and Obama were the guys. He was wrong.

Romney hammered on McCain. That turned out badly for him.

There is a competition between both Clinton and Obama, and Huckabee and McCain, to be seen as the nicest guy, resulting in a conversation among gentle-persons, a very aristocratic affair.

I wonder whether this trait will or can be extended into the general election.

Would
          that
                    be
       a great
               change,
          or
               what?

I Learned Something about Myself 2.0

2008-02-07T20:39:00.000-08:00

I worry about things I cannot control.

This problem would appear to increase the number of things I cannot control, as I evidently cannot control what I worry about.

It is a great wonder I am capable of learning at all.

The issue of change...

2008-02-07T20:26:00.000-08:00

may be a bit of red herring if you have Ted Kennedy stumping for you. One of the great fossils of the Democratic party is for change?

There is a further contradiction in a "change candidate" supported by half of Washington.

There may be an even bigger contradiction in a "change candidate" surrounded by guys like Tom Dashle and others who were run out of Washington as the old guard a few years ago.

I like Obama. I will happily support him in the election. I also like Kennedy and Dashle. I really like them a lot.

I
     do not
          like
               hypocrisy.

I like politics because I like..

2008-02-04T19:09:00.000-08:00

To know candidates' stands on various issues. So what do I want to know? What bores me? What makes me mad?

Positions of interest
There are issues I care about. I want to know whether these issues matter at all to a candidate (a primacy of focus) or did he just create a policy to run; I want to know his or her apparent level of talent and experience in each area. Finally, I want to know the candidates level of tolerance for competing positions, and willingness to adapt to new information. I am interested in the following major and minor policy areas.

-International Relations
-Homeland Security
-Military Policy
-Immigration Policy
-Iraq Policy
-Energy Policy
-Environmental Policy
-Fiscal Security
-Social Equality
-An approximate budget for the US for their first year
-View of the role of the government in society
-Number of lies I know about
-Do I like them
-Able to incorporate new information into world views

[[Editor's Note: my mother correctly points out that I omitted education, which is a very important issue to me. Thank you, Mom!]]

-Education

I can vote for someone who does not make me want to have dinner with them. I will always vote for effectiveness over affability. I want to vote for a candidate I like, but it is not absolutely essential.

I think every candidate should be required to deliver an initial budget during the primary, and a revised budget during the general election. This budget will allow me to judge many of a candidate's issue positions.

I do not care
There are a number of things I do not care much about.

-Opportunism, unless it makes me not like them.
-Megalomania, unless it makes me not like them.
-God complex, unless it makes me not like them.
-Whoring around. Why do I care? I do not care.

I assume each of these unfortunate characteristics is significantly abundant in anyone motivated to run for office. I do not like to hear candidates accuse other candidates of these things. That is redundant and not useful.

Make me mad
There are a few things politicians do that absolutely make me mad.

-Ignores new information. This is listed twice because it is important.
-Party switching - these people are disloyal users, and should both be immediately forced to return all campaign contributions, and be unceremoniously forced from office and required to stand again.
-Lying - every lie requires a public admission apology. Flogging would be good, too.
-Confounding their particular perspective, platform or policy with patriotism. Grrr!

                          Now
             you know
                          what
             to expect
                          if I
             ever become
             master
                                       of the universe.

Sometimes I get it all wrong...

2008-02-04T18:47:00.000-08:00

I interrupt someone who is trying to agree with me.

I offer assistance to someone who is goofing on me.

I sneeze when I should cough.

Sometimes I get it right.

I see the feigned cooperation that is merely a disguised attempt at cooptation.

I see real cooperation that is masked by anxiety.

I offer an obvious target to someone who is goofing on me.

Sometimes I just do not get it.

I zig when I need not zag or zig at all.

I post when even a get is out of place.

I opt out when there is no option at all.

Sometimes I give it away.

Sometimes I just give it all away.

Demand a Grand Compromise by Voting for Second Place...

2008-02-02T17:33:00.000-08:00

in the primary. Why should anyone vote for the person he wants in second place?

The Bush years have taught us a significant and valuable lesson. We now know that the entire country can be run from the vice president's office. Pretty effectively, in fact, if measured against their stated intentions. No administration in history provides a clearer example than the Bush-Cheney regime that the country can be completely managed by someone other than the president. Simultaneously, Bush has taught us that being a likable figurehead can get one a four year contract renewal. We should sincerely thank President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for this valuable lesson.

What additional insight might be gained should we compare this configuration of the American political system to states with different positions for head of state and head of government? Could we parlay our system into one with a cordial, likable, spirited head of state, and a competent manager running the government? A Royal and a COO?

Is anybody thinking Clinton - Obama - Clinton - Obama - Clinton?

I will wage a fiver that a much larger majority of Americans would campaign for, vote for and enthusiastically support a ticket containing the two together in any combination - The Grand Compromise - than either could garner alone.

The primary variable for all Americans and all Democrats interested in a Grand Compromise is our inclination to give sufficient power to the candidate holding the second place ribbon at the convention. More is better. Even so, ordinary democrats may need to articulately, and yet forcefully, demand the Grand Compromise at the convention regardless of what happens beforehand.

Vote in the primary for the person you want second on the ticket. Vote for the Grand Compromise.

I Learned Something about Myself 1.0

2008-01-27T12:09:00.000-08:00

I suddenly realized that people who actually know how to care for their hands and nails do not use carpentry tools, or anything hanging from a key chain, to do so.

Dang. It seems so simple in retrospect.

Christmas has come

2008-01-05T11:19:00.000-08:00

...and gone.

The tree is gone. The wrapping paper is in the recycling bin.

The cookies are gone. I am fatter than before.

The toys are scattered around every room in the house and on the stairway. They make noises, aided or unaided by their new owners.

My son lays on the floor for hours assembling Bionicles, or fights bad guys on the Television screen.

My daughter grooms her dolls or horses or reads another Harry Potter.

My wife helps with the quilt using the new sewing machine.

I am spying on the "neighbors" on the hill, a half mile away, with my new binoculars.

Thousands of dollars in web shopping carts, wrapped or mailed packages, holiday flights, spent bows, and a cardboard packaging, wrapping paper and plastic mountain of trash later, and Christmas has gone.

It took New Years with it.

I
     wish
          you
               the best
                    year
                         ever!

Should I Secede

2007-12-16T18:41:00.000-08:00

... from the internet? I am certain that I will miss nothing, and I will be missed even less.

I knew an old German professor of Philosophy who refused to have an email account. His imagery of having to respond to alarm bells and whistles going off when he was trying to complete serious research is appropriate. The internet creates a huge amount of psychological noise dictating where we need to be, how to order videos and pizza, and displacing the physical act of Christmas shopping with its point-and-click counterpart.

I expect any day to find an advertisement for a web-based enema service -- to open up blocked electronic passage ways. (Do not search. I did and the results are not pretty.)

There are broken links. Links to smut, advertisements and phishing holes always work. Broken links are a phenomenon strictly limited to the tiny fraction of useful or interesting content on the Web. Broken links are always and only to something I actually need or want.

I am really tired of the spam. I used to believe that spam only came in email. I've come to understand that the most of the internet is spam. Email only alerts me to its exact location.

Most of the internet is comprised of disorganized web sites devoid of any useful content at all - four percent lean bits wrapped in an ethereal sausage casing, 96 percent ground up organ parts, ears, snouts and feet.

The robot brain so feared by human ethicists of the 1950s and '70s is already their primary mode of cognition. Do they see the worst-fear-realized state of an electronic community mind that lives independently of its contributors and consumers? It is here.

I do not mean to disparage the entertainment value of the internet. We are definitely entertained. Yet we are now privately entertained by content that we do not and cannot share with our mothers.

I love the internet. They can have my Web when the pry my cold dead fingers from my keyboard.

My fear is that we might all secede from the internet, but no one would notice.

            Raise
                 your
                      laptop lid
                           if
                                you
                                     are
                 NOT
            here.

The Great Intellectual Levelers...

2007-12-09T11:17:00.001-08:00

of our day exploit the diversifying potential of our new electronic democracy and other macro-level social trends. Moonglamper Services might have been summonsed to divine the most effective ways to squash intellect, flatten culture, and dishevel diversity. They would have selected exactly the methods to which we have migrated on our own lemmish accord. Society is stewed by these levelers into an oddly atomized, primordial intellectual goo.

Television - there are over six billion people on earth [i] and only 7 television shows worth watching. We are all watching the same ones. Some people watch TV all of the time. They have seen them all. Some people tell you they never watch TV. They lie. They, too, have seen all episodes of all seven shows. There are obviously a few other shows to watch. There are fifty-seven channels, and you are still stuck watching NBC, the Weather Channel, Judge Nobody, or The Extreme-Wheels Half-Pipe Championships -- or a rerun of an early episode of one of the seven shows. All other programs are really only commercials that broadcasters use to fill the air-waves and wire-waves while they rewind the tape containing the seven shows.

Sports - Class is completely leveled by professional sports. The neurologist and the homeless man excitedly discuss the Great Play in last night's game as if they are neighbors whose other common interests include first class upgrades, hotels in Heidelberg and the shrimp cocktail. They really only share brain death. "Oh, you live the 7,500 square foot mansion at 1215 Oak? Yes, I live under a tarp in the dishwasher box in the empty wood next block over. That play was awesome!"

Video Games - while there appear to be somewhere in excess of 178 billion different video games available, everybody I know bought the new Halo release and the new console to go with it: A very diverse panopoly of options, indeed. Our family owns a Wii console, and I am periodically obliged to play it for hours without respite. Otherwise, I only play Jello Car on the PC, though I have played Pac Man, Mine Sweep, solitaire and Wolfenstein at various times in my life. Mostly, find such games to be even more anti-social than I am. They train eye-thumb coordination, but completely stifle the diversity of our collective brain.

The NYT Best Seller List for books - This Moonglampers Service is made to order and defines culture as we live and read. Some people do not read at all. Some people read about a book, and claim to have read it. They nod slightly over-excitedly, and say, "Wasn't that great?" Some people read at the speed of a fiber optic webcast, and have no idea what they just read. All of these people have the NYT Best Seller List in common. The NYT Best Seller List doesn't just report on popular books any more than Dick Clark just played popular songs. It is a great leveling force that provides its followers with a socially safe orthodoxy and an acceptable list from which to choose their next topic of cooptation.

The Pottery Pier Crate Barn and Apple Barrel Store - Retail mass-uniqueness is an interesting oxymoron foist upon the oxy-deprived-moron. Old and wicker do not function well together. Distressed and refurbished are not the same thing. You can expect to see Apple zealots turn against their sacred boutique gospel like dragons in a thunderstorm should Mac sales increase to corner more than a quarter of the laptop market, i.e., when regular dumb people have them. (Except the Apple Deacons who own a lot of stock.) The advertisements for these retail outlets are more priceless than anything on a credit card commercial: Be Unique. Buy From Us Like Everyone Else!

These levelers are the glue of culture. They bind us together, provide a common basis for understanding the world around us, give us comfortable, familiar places to meet in a world of strange and uninterpretable events.

Do you ever feel
          like you are stuck
               to a giant
                    strip
          of flypaper --
               a huge,
                              common,
                                             comfortable,
                              familiar
                              strip
               of flypaper?

I am trying to decide...

2007-11-25T19:42:00.000-08:00

... who to vote for in the primary.

I like Ron Paul. I mostly like how he highlights the schizophrenia inherent in the coalition structure of the Republican party. His Honor, the good Guiliani, also illustrates the prostitution of the evangelical vote to her wealthy capitalist-Republican spouse. I wish them both the best in that endeavor.

On the Democratic side, there are a couple of principled choices, and a couple of strategic options. Kucinich, Richardson and Dodd are good, principled policy choices. Richardson could do the veep thing. None of them are likely contenders.

The real choices are Clinton, Obama and Edwards. I could live with any of them in a general election.

I voted for Edwards in the last primary. His message is solid. I still like him.

I like Hilary well enough, but she has allowed herself to be coopted by big money. She is also forced to appear a little too hawkish on national security issues to counter the "woman as soft" criticism. She has moved a little beyond my comfort zone in these two spaces. I still think she is clear thinker when she is allowed to think.

Obama is a refreshing change and he seems honorable. He has about as much experience as Edwards. He has pizazz. I think he is "for real."

Gore-Edwards? I like the sound of that. Alas, no comfort there. Al has just joined some venture capital firm. I wish he had invested in the election instead.

We have pretty good choices this election cycle.

I
    wish
       more
           of the choices
        were
               real.

I have not been cold...

2007-11-24T11:17:00.000-08:00

...for the past three winters (2004-05 through 2006-07). There is generally an early cold snap in October in the southwest corner of North Carolina where we keep the camper. I have fortuitously been in the mountains in mid-October during each of the past three years when that cold snap hit. It is not an Arctic blast, but is usually 30 degrees or colder, which is very cold in the open wind on top of a mountain.

The furnace in my camper has suffered an odd inconsistency. A mouse chewed through a wire on on the camper's heater in 2004-05. I waited nearly a year to have it repaired. The camper heater worked and I had a battery in 2005-06. The marine batteries I use were dead for October cold snap in 2006-07. I was essentially without heat for two of the three years.

The sky is clear and the stars are infinite when winter pre-announces his arrival in early autumn. The black-violet mountain sky carpeted with diamonds is beautiful beyond what the jewelers in the city could imagine. I stood on the deck outside the camper to watch the sky sparkle and let the cold whip me for as long as I could stand it, for each of those three years. I was not cold for the rest of the year during those years when I did so. I have traded my heavy coat for a lighter jacket.

I cannot be certain that facing winter in this way is the solitary cause for me not being cold all year long; I have a much thicker layer of fat than when I was younger. I believe this Old Man Winter Therapy is the primary reason.

I wrote this poem by candle light in my camper - trying to warm up by lighting candles and running the gas stove and oven.

meeting winter

How can you know Winter
if you have not stood on
your porch and met him?
Face him briskly by,
his scratches raking your face,
down your back,
rigid wicked shivers wrack your spine.
The night is clear.
The sky is wide open.
The greatness is greater,
the beauty more beautiful,
than the pain of the cold.
Winter tries with his screeching calls
to wrench this pleasure from me.
All rocks slide down the hill,
eventually.
For now, I greet the old man,
coming over the hill with his creaking bones
and his cane,
flailing at the leaves with his
unpredictable breath
this way, or not, in the wind.
He nods at me a prescient nod,
long knotted hair and silvery beard waving,
and continues on his crooked way
driving his icy winds
across this mountain top.
Later I retire
to contemplate
this poem.

I am in California this year, so I missed the Old Man when he went bolting over the North Carolina mountains.

        I hope
              I
                        have
                somewhere warm
        to go
                after
        I see him
again.

Bear Hunting is...

2007-11-09T20:35:00.000-08:00

...primarily a social activity.

The Bear Hunters in North Carolina use a range of tools and technology that would seem to minimize the bear's chances. The social component is the most interesting. I will leave the social aspects of the hunt for another article. Here I want to review the tools of the bear hunt.

The main components of the bear hunt are:

The dogs

The truck

The dog cage

The electronic tracking collar

The marine band radio

The training season

The baiting process

The rehearsal

The hunt.

The dogs. Bear hunters have dogs. The dogs are kept in circular dirt pits with a box in the middle. The circumference of the circular dirt pit is pi * twice the length of the chain attached to the dog tethered within it. Most hunters have multiple circular dirt pits with a dog in each. The bear dog wealth of any hunter is equivalent to the total number of circular dirt pits on his property.

The truck. Every bear hunter has a pickup truck. Not all of these trucks are Fords: Only 99.7% of them are Fords. All of them have four wheel drive. The quality of these trucks ranges from the 2012 model F350 diesel quadcab with monster tires and an elevator to the cab at the high end, to the 1962 Ranger rust bucket with manual spindles to engage the 4WD at the other. The pickup truck is not so much a source of pride as a source of identity. No one in Star Trek brags on their version of the transporter. It is just something that exists to transport.

The dog cage. Every pickup truck has a dog cage in the bed. Every dog cage has a platform on top, and a holding area below. The platform on top has a ring, hook or other aperture for tethering a dog on a very short lead. The dog balances on the platform connected to a lead during the slow ride down the road searching for bear. The dog on top is, coincidentally, the lead dog.

The electronic tracking collar. Each dog wears an electronic tracking collar. Each dog collar has an attachment that broadcasts a specific signature. Running dogs are tracked from various strategic locations in the mountains. An experienced hunter, using a device that resembles an old fashion television antennae fastened with alligator clips to an even older set of head phones, will know the exact location of dogs miles and miles away based on the strength and direction of the signal received at one of the strategic locations. [Ed: I am honored to own a knob that is a central and strategic point for signal reception.]

Hunters exchange very complex series of numbers with other hunters on the radio to uniquely identify dogs. Nothing is written. The hunter with the antennae listens to the signals transmitted from the dog collars. He mentally translates a series of longs and shorts to match the collar identification numbers previously provided to him over the radio. The ciphering and communication processes are pure magic to observe. The antennae man will alert other hunters as to the owner and location of the dogs. The hunt will converge in the newly discovered location.

The marine band radio. Bear hunters in the southwest corner of North Carolina, and the southeast corner of Tennessee use marine band radios to communicate. They have abandoned Citizen Band (CB) radios because, they say, the mountainous terrain dramatically reduces the CB's effectiveness. Different social groups stick to specific channels, but the scan feature is widely used to monitor the high traffic channels. Ever the voyeur, I can scan and monitor a wide range of territory and broadcasts from my camper on Bird Knob.

The training season. The states of North Carolina and Tennessee allow "hunting" but not killing during the two phases of the training season. The first part of training season must occur (or at least originate) on private property. The second part of training season eliminates this restriction. Training season primarily allows bear hunters to test and train the bear dogs. Some dogs "just won't hunt." Other dogs run away never to be seen again. A few dogs demonstrate themselves to be capable lead dogs.

The baiting process. A primary feature of the training season, but not the regular season, is baiting. Some bear hunters put out various sweet or fat based concoctions to attract bears. Bears, according to some hunters, prefer acorns to all other naturally occurring foods, and "follow the acorns". Even so, no bear's keen sense of smell can resist a pail of sugar water or M&Ms, a platform of stale doughnuts, or a five gallon bucket of lard. You cannot safely feed hummingbirds in bear country. The lard leaves a convenient and easy trail for the dogs to follow.

The rehearsal. The baiting process during training season is a type of rehearsal with two actors. Usually the food is put in a place that does not make it easy to attain. Sometimes one of the electric collars is used to trigger a timer so the bear hunters will know what time the bear is feeding. A bear will check back once he finds a meal, often at the same time each day. Thus is trained the bear. During training season, the hunters encourage the dogs to chase and tree the bear. They must not shoot the bear. Often, once the bear has been treed, the hunters leash the dogs, walk 100 yards away, and wait for the bear to descend from the tree. They then let the dogs free to chase and tree the bear again. Thus is trained the dog. One must wonder if the bear is not thereby also trained to understand the cost of a bucket of lard is simply the annoyance of being chased up a tree by dogs. The bear cannot know that the price increases dramatically after the last day of the training season.

The hunt. The very essence and origin of the hunt features a hunter driving his pickup very slowly down untraveled roads, looking for signs of bear crossings into and out of the woods and ditch lines, with the support of the dogs, who provide their own olfactory barometer of the existence of bear and other wild life. The best hunter sees the bear's trail through the ditch even before his dogs smell it. The radio chatter is constant. The scanner locks on to channels where there is action. Hunters converge on an active scene with speed and intent.

          Bear hunting
              is
              primarily
                       a
              social
                        activity.

Steriods are illegal...

2007-11-06T22:08:00.000-08:00

because the little old ladies of the Prohibition Era raised sons who now control TAC, the IOC, the USOC, as well as the NBA, NFL and MLB and other sports regulatory bodies.

No one can dispute how fast Ben Johnson ran. Nor Marion Jones. You cannot take a record back. That is absurd.

People should not take steriods. There is an argument to be made, however, that the label "performance enhancing drugs" is no more sensible than "death tax."

Anabolic steriods are training enhancing drugs. They allow athletes to train harder, and repair faster. Their use does not necessarily imply or result in enhanced peak performance.

Steriods constitute a health risk. We need some perspective.

We have a president who denies global warming. Insurance companies refuse to pay to help dying clients. North Carolina considers smoking a protected civil right[1,2]. Would the beef from Krogers pass a drug test for steriods?

I advise you to not use them.

I also advise us not to criminalize them.

Any substance will be much simpler to track if it is legal. (I would apply the same logic to other classes of currently illegal drugs, but that is a topic for another time.)

We should have steroid classes of events. We have age groups. We stratify winners based on gender. We have races for various special groups. Why not a "master men doper" 10k at the Crystal Palace?

It would be a sin to cheat, and enter into the non-doping class when you dope. We should continue to test. There would be little incentive to cheat like that if not for the little old ladies' sons who now run sports.

I need a champion for this cause.

     I
         wonder
         what
               Jack Kevorkian
   is doing
       these days?

Bits of paper...

2007-11-03T17:00:00.000-07:00

litter my world. I have written thoughts on scraps since my first year of college. I write ideas in the margins. I copy funny quotes, read and heard, at odd angles, on post-its and scratch pads. I have piles of notebooks dedicated exclusively to such nonsense. Some of my notebooks are over thirty years old. (Those who know me also know that I would never discard, well, almost anything.) [Ed. note: The oldest notebook I have is probably really only 27 years old.]

I found a small cache of scraps from my desk a few weeks ago. They were apparently transferred from my desk into a file folder for the move to California this past summer. They turned up during a frantic search for our ATV titles. (That is a whole other story.)

Most are not dated. Here they are -- exactly as they appear on the scraps.

"Applying an adjective to the word 'flexible' is another way to make apologies for any lapses in flexibility that exist." 18 April 1997
[Ed: I am sure I wrote this during a meeting or conference call.]

"Why do I care if anybody has sent me an email? Why do I care?"
[Ed: I sometimes tire of the expectations associated with email.]

"Most people confuse silence with agreement."
[Ed: Probably also a conference call note to self, though it is written in the margin of some Delphi code, my extension of the TStringList class.]

"(If) you say I've changed, I say how much the worse that I should stay the same."
[Ed: Written on the same scrap of Delphi code.]

Business card from my position as Director of Application Development at the Georgia Technology Authority.
[Ed: I left that position in 2003. My extension was 5282 - Java.]

Business card from a business I never really started: Data Analysis and Management. Circa 1995.

Conversation between two old men:
"Well, I ain't dumb. Hee-ow."
"Hell you ain't! You dummern hell."
"I'm dumb?"
"You're dummern hell."
"Damn. I'm hungry. Hee-ow."
[Ed: There's a kooky smiley face on the back of this one.]

"I'm sorry that my growing pains were so painful to others."

"By putting self as an object, I've created an infinite loop in any save routine."
[Ed: I'm not certain whether this referred to Delphi code or self actualization. Probably both.]

"We're such Gramma and Grampa types - we decided to skip parenthood and give birth to grandchildren instead."

"What would we talk about if other people didn't have any secrets?"

"Having control of your anger does not mean that one does not display it by shouting or even quietly slicing. Having control of your anger means that you understand its distant causes, its immediate causes, and the potential outcomes of those factors. We are just cogs in the great wheels of our anger. We should 'avail' ourselves to the solutions available to us."
[Ed: I might have read this somewhere. Or not.]

"A betrayal doesn't require an accomplice."

"Stupid people often ask other stupid people for advice. The unintelligent are pack animals, although this in no way impugns pack animals."
[Ed: That just feels like a conference call note.]

This one is my favorite. I don't remember writing it down, but I remember the event very clearly. My son was three or four years old when it happened.
"Michael sitting inside the shopping cart gets handed two cloves of garlic [and says]
'Now I can keep vampires away, two vampires at a time!'"

       These
   tiny bits
          of paper
  are also
       the bits
     that have made up
  my life.

A Flower and a Russian...

2007-10-31T19:47:00.000-07:00

kept me company so many years ago. A Flower and a Russian encouraged me always to write.

A Flower and a Russian tried to help me grow.

Consciousness and conscience are but a chorus of voices. The Flower and the Russian have been clear and distinct voices in my mind for nearly 30 years.

A small well-distinguished chorus of two provided a continuous light by which to pen my thoughts.

The Flower blossomed anew this week. I have never been without the memory of the fragrance, not even for a moment.

They tried to help me grow. I hope they succeeded.

I blog here now
       but for the gift
    of light
    given to me
        so long ago
    by
           a Flower
      and a Russian.

I am working on an entry...

2007-10-30T22:09:00.001-07:00

that I cannot seem to finish.

It is too controversial. I do not like to be controversial.

Maybe I am not smart enough to manage the pratfall.

Maybe I have never even seen a pratfall.

Maybe
     I am
        looking up
   from one
              right now.

An epidemic of public intolerance...

2007-10-30T21:46:00.000-07:00

seems to have overtaken the erstwhile tolerant.

A new publicly accepted definition of tolerance encapsulates intolerance. It requires that we publicly expel those who exhibit certain behaviors we characterize as intolerant. It perpetuates the myth that we are are still tolerant when we do not tolerate the intolerant. This dissembling is pure and simple Freudian projection. We are not intolerant; they are.

We are not tolerant. We have embraced a tolerance diet. We should call it tolerance light.

The number of celebrities lately in trouble for racist, sexist, homophobic or other intolerant remarks keeps growing. There is Mel and his dad, Michael Richards, Isaiah Washington, Trent Lott, Dusty Baker, Andrew Young, Don Imus, The Governator, a substantial number of football / baseball / basketball players, Police Constable Peter O’Kane, the entire Fox News Staff, and James Watson. Plus many more.

I am uncertain exactly how to characterize Larry Craig's foot flapping flip flopping affair. Is it neo-tolerance? What about the reaction of his reactionary colleages? Hypo-tolerance?

Perhaps Dr. Burke (Isaiah Washington) should not have been fired from Grey's Anatomy because he uttered homophobic idiocy, or even for actually being an homophobic idiot. He should be fired because, frankly, he is a terrible actor. Maybe he should be allowed to be a homophobic idiot -- one who obviously has some "latent issues."

Stick and stones, and words: We no longer seem to sanction this distinction.

I do not condone or countenance racists and bigots, their language or their behavior. But tolerance requires, by its definition, the acceptance of behaviors and attitudes with which I disagree, so long as they are not harmful to others. Words are often hateful but infrequently harmful.

Tolerance in an open democratic society cannot include a policy to ban hateful speech. We should not discriminate. Nor should we be reactionary.

Real tolerance will provide a more substantive moral example than our hypocritical version of tolerance light. Tolerance is a long term, classical liberal value. It is a good and necessary component for building a fair and just society. Yes, it is hard. But tolerance light is dangerous, and subversive of liberal democratic principles.

Tolerance light
             has become
              just
       another form
     of
social control.

Google wants to advertise...

2007-10-26T21:46:00.000-07:00

on my blog. The little box on another page says I could make money.

Would that make me a professional writer?

Or a whore?

I am comfortable either way.

Would I ever get kissed?

Many positions do not involve kissing. Or fame. Or money.

At least not getting money.

    I
     hope
            you get
               what
      you pay for.

There is a funk...

2007-10-25T22:05:00.000-07:00

in the air.

I cannot shake it.

Two dogs go racing after a cat. That cat could take them both, but she runs anyway.

She runs because she has no where else to go. Nothing worth watching is on TV.

They chase her because of a poem they heard a folk singer recite. It was rap music by another name.

They have forgotten the words.

The don't remember the tune either. So they run.

I met Amy Ray of the Indigo Girls twice. She lived in the next apartment when I moved to Georgia.

She decided to move. Her cat had run away. Her apartment was empty: no furniture and no cat. "Here kitty kitty kitty."

She said was she moving to North Georgia, "where the livin' is free."

I have been to north Georgia. It is not free there.

It was the second time I met her, when she was looking for the cat. I listened to her music every day when I lived in Germany. She could only offer a cliche in person. I expected so much more. Meine Gute!

That cliche banged around inside my head like an imitation Seiko watch in an empty clothes dryer. I walked away with my head hung low in disappointment.

I wanted the blue back in the sky, and the dogs to go back home.

I wanted her cat to come back so she could leave.

I
     want
          to erase
          the fall
          from
     my brain.

The Real Estate Market...

2007-10-25T21:29:00.000-07:00

is everywhere a bust. I spent last week in rural North Carolina. I have some real estate there. No one is buying.

I have been unable to sell my mountain cabin. It is completely renovated, and is beautiful. There are no buyers.

The people seeking refuge from Florida have been coming into north Georgia for a few years now. The spillover caused growth in North Carolina, Tennessee and even in Kentucky. Land prices sidled upward for several years.

The growth has stopped.

I advertised on Google and Yahoo for a while. I did very well with Google. I foolishly traded them for a realtor.

One would think I might have learned. Apparently, I had not.

My realtor is threatening to leave the business and move to some other part of North Carolina.

I wish they all would. Realtors are not a trustworthy lot.

If anyone wants to buy a great cabin in the mountains in rural North Carolina, let me know.

          I know
                    a guy
                              who
                    has
          a nice one
to sell.

Although I like Folsom, California...

2007-10-13T08:35:00.000-07:00

it reminds me of George Harrison's song, Crackerbox Palace. My use of the phrase is different from that in the song.

Many neighborhoods in Evansville, Indiana were originally composed of row upon row of shotgun homes. They were privately owned, but essentially "company house" construction. The homes were built with limited lot lines, including a small back yard and usually a small front yard.

These shotguns homes might cover eight or nine hundred square feet of internal floor space. There is very little variation in the floor plans.

Shotgun homes are made socially front-facing. The front porch welcomes visitors. It is where people greet and socialize.

Such neighborhoods are very pretty when they are clean and white washed. They have a certain cultural character that makes them attractive.

These neighborhoods resemble rows of neatly stacked saltine cracker boxes, which are proportionally constructed rectangles. "I welcome you to Crackbox Palace..."

The houses in Folsom, California are virtually indistinguishable on most variables.

The lot lines for Folsom homes are proportionally even smaller than the company house or typical row house construction. There is a ten foot strip of lawn in the front and back, and sometimes a 3 foot strip of rock on either side.

It appears to be the city of seven floor plans. They all feel the same inside, though there is some variation. These are certainly "company houses" though there is a slight variation in the meaning of "company house" here. They were intended to be sold by the companies. The Folsom builders did not have any more imagination than the row house designers.

They are larger than the row houses. Size is correlated closely with price in a non-creative way. Price also varies by school district and elevation. This is perhaps the most sociologically predictable city since Muncie.

While there are, I am told, regulations to govern the similarity of neighboring facades, the actual differences are merely formulaic. The variation is indicative of the range of solutions anyone with only 4 types of Lego would reach.

Folsom houses, while they have a certain architectural attractiveness, have no social character at all. Patio furniture may not be visible from the street. The front porch does not greet with warmth. You never see any actual people in front of the houses. There is no one outside to wave.

These neighborhoods are very pretty when they are clean and white washed. This city and these neighborhoods are very heavily regulated; ergo, they are ALL clean and white washed ALL of the time. Similarly, they have a certain cultural character that makes them attractive. They also have a certain sterility that is as clean and comforting as a very high quality hospital.

From the outside, these neighborhoods resemble rows of neatly stacked saltine cracker boxes, which are proportionally constructed rectangles. "I welcome you to Crackbox Palace..."

    We've
       been
          expecting
             you...

Sometimes my kids climb...

2007-10-12T20:20:00.000-07:00

... on stuff. I let them fall down. Sometimes they run when they "might oughta not". I let them fall down. We have a slide in the living room. They jump from the slide to the back of the couch. Guess what. I let them fall down.

I lost a lot of skin falling down before I was 15 (and since). It's ok to fall down.

My job is not to keep them from falling. It's to teach them to always get back up.

(Originally posted on the Unicylist.com forum. 2005-04-04, 04:00 PM)

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

My kids were aged 5 and 7 when I wrote that.

Today my daughter, almost 10 years old, was sent to the principle's office for the first time.

(It wasn't her fault. Is it ever?)

She cried like an infant when she told us about it. I was very stern, like a real adult.

I tried not to giggle when she was looking.

I am such a proud parent. I think my daughter grew up just a little more today.

So I had to kiss it and make it better.

Get out the band-aids, and find the Bactine.

        This
             little girl
                     is
                        still
                  my
              baby.

Failure is a great teacher...

2007-10-08T20:41:00.000-07:00

...if one lets her do her job.

I have trekked behind in Her footsteps for years.

The Goddess Quit is the angry nemesis of Failure. Quit aborts the unborn Will from Failure, and leaves her daughters Depression and Dismay to fester in the womb.

Quit is a low pressure system that teases the energy from Failure. I will side with Failure in every stormy battle against Quit.

I will ever choose Failure in Her n'er ending battle with Quit's vamp sibling Inertia.

I will battle Nothing with Failure.

"I will stand on the Ocean until I start sinking."

Failure breathe my final essence, I will not exchange a kiss with the seductress whore Quit.

I respect fair Failure and will battle beside Her. I do not pursue Her. She is but one of triplets.

I much prefer her most beautiful sister Success, of the three.

I have
         slept
                  most often
                           with the
                  homely
and
         good
                  sister
                           Adequacy.

I started to write a novel...

2007-10-07T12:04:00.001-07:00

about three years ago. I was selling voter registration systems and electronic voting machines. My company had developed a partnership with a firm in Texas. They had great products. Their voter registration system was vapor ware. It was, however, backed by a very solid vanilla HTML-based, wire-frame user interface, a legacy-system-port requirements package, and a fit-gap to complete the design. Their electronic voting machines, on the other hand, were the best engineered product on the market, and had the highest quality user interface. We had some limited success as partners. Their software and hardware products eventually made some money in their respective spaces.

I began work on my novel by developing an outline that included love scenes, major geek time, and a core of political intrigue. I wrote a great deal, off and on for over a year. I would write, and then real life would overtake my project. I would put it down for a few months, and then begin to write again.

Then a catastrophe struck.

My complete outline was published in the papers. It was carried by every major news organization in the country. It was shown in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, on CNN.com and MSNBC.com, discussed by Tim Russert and Chris Matthews. It was a nightmare that occupied my days.

I do not mean to suggest that anyone stole the outline I wrote, or plagiarized my written ideas.

All that I had conceived just came true.

I get my muse on now and again. I periodically visualize and vocalize the obvious before it occurs. Sometimes I even make wild predictions that are latterly proved true.

In this case, however, I was simply a guy with two passions - politics and information technology - who could see far enough into the past to understand how badly these two worlds would mix in the future.

I did not choose the topic accidentally.

I knew the level of integrity of several of the corporate characters in this space. The executive at Diebold finally spoke to the nation what all of us in this space had long known when he agreed to deliver Ohio to Bush. He was certainly not the only person thinking along those lines.

Information technology and politics well represent men and women in Tannen's book, "You just don't understand..." Information technology solves problems by applying rational solutions. Politics is pure passion; she wants nothing more than to be understood. She expects -- and accepts -- nothing more, as well.

I have seen politicians and political-bureaucrats put information technologists through a grotesque range of systemic contortions to support purely selfish political motives. Sometimes the technologists merely spend a long time, and waste a great deal of money, at failure. Frequently a team of technologists is scapegoated and fired. Periodically the offending politico is also canned.

It did not take a genius to predict that information technology would be skinned by politicians in the election space.

I left my notebook in the seat-back pocket on a Delta commuter jet in Dallas, Texas. I called Delta for months hoping to retrieve it. My version of the story was lost forever.

I saw no reason to revive the project when it ceased to be fiction. What could I really add to make it any more interesting, or more surreal, than it already was?

I saw an article in the news this week that indicated electronic voting was being suspended in The Netherlands.

Sociology has been defined as the documentation of the obvious. Perhaps fiction is but a race to stay in front of current events.

         Information technology
            "pwned"
                  by politics
         is now history
                  waiting
         to be written.

A guy who races go-carts...

2007-10-06T21:52:00.000-07:00

lives across the street. They look very small and unassuming. They churn along at over 60 mph on the tracks where he and his son race them. He says they will run 110 mph or faster given enough straightaway. NASCAR drivers train in them.

I was going to challenge him with my Sentra. I'm afraid he would bump me into a fence. His go-carts only weigh 80 lbs or so. Their center of gravity is lower than my Sentra. I would not be embarrassed lose the race. I would not like to explain to my insurance company that my Sentra had been bumped into a fence by an 80 lb go-cart.

I don't have a go-cart, but...

      I
           ride
                a unicycle
     to work.

I am the most gullible person...

2007-10-04T21:41:00.000-07:00

I have ever met. I used to be, at least. I want to believe everything.

I want to believe the people of Atlanta retain some trivial element of the warm southern hospitality for which the city is so famous. I want to believe such friendliness still exists in some part of the urban jewel of the south. I want to believe that some tiny fragment of the service industry there retains a legitimate smile and a genuine cordiality. This I want to believe. But the evidence is scant.

I want to believe that elected Democrats and the democratic platform are in some essential way related. I want to believe that the equitable and good core principles historically represented by the Democratic Party are somehow visible in the deeds and actions of at least a few current Democratic office holders. This I want to believe. But I cannot find any examples to prove it.

I want to believe that western society values people more than things, that Hobbes was wrong, that Marx was wrong, that nasty, brutish and short is not the means to justify an end gain. I want to believe that we expend greater effort to conquer hunger and provide health care than to achieve another market record. This I want to believe. But the poverty rate is enormous and death rates are so very different for those of no means that it would challenge even my gullibility to believe it.

I want to believe that the world is interested in its children. I want to believe that we really do everything possible to save energy, protect the environment, manage the green space, and to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and global warming. I want to believe that we adhere to our principles to build -- and leave -- a better world: to take only pictures and leave only foot prints. This I want to believe. But we make everything out of plastic, even plastic; and I saw not a single other pedestrian on my way to or from work today.

I want to believe that national boundaries are more than property lines to stratify wealth.

I'm gullible. I can believe these things.

        Maybe
               I
                    should
               watch
        more
     television.

Proving others are smarter than I...

2007-10-01T22:26:00.000-07:00

is a passion of mine. I have often said, "If I am not the dumbest guy in the room, somebody has got to go."

I once frightened a new employee with that statement. He realized within a week or two that he, too, was smarter than I.

Why would I consider hiring someone with less talent and intelligence than I have.

I may be dumb, but I am not stupid.

Today Ray proved again that he is smarter than I by actually doing what I could only describe in a cartoon diagram. He did not need to prove he is smarter. It is unanimously accepted. I contributed in my small way with a challenge to cross the hill. He found a gold mine on the other side.

I benefit from being near such people. Sometimes a small nugget falls from their heavily loaded wagon.

I donate it to charity when I find one.

I have lashed my pony's halter to the rail on his buck-board. I wish him all of our common great success.

He deserves all of the credit.

It is
        the least
                I
        can give,
                when
        it
                is
        not
                the most
        I can give.

I don't want to write...

2007-09-30T09:41:00.001-07:00

about facts anymore. Facts become true and then become untrue over time.

"These are the facts and they are not in dispute." That was the famous line of Capt. Jack Ross (Kevin Bacon) in the movie A Few Good Men. Such agreement is rarely attained.

The relevance of Captain Ross's facts were altered by the end of the movie.

I am intellectually inadequate. My facts always seem more dated than the facts of others: My facts less important, less relevant, less poignant. I am not sufficiently well-read on any topic regardless of how much effort I expend. I am just not good enough.

Sometimes I wonder if Stephen Colbert has not got it right.

So I stick to writing stuff about stuff. My approach allows me license to selectively use facts without putting myself in a position where I could be proved wrong. I adhere to the realm of the subjunctive and the Utopian, like:
          "that could be true...
                    ...in a parallel universe."

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

I used to be funny. Now I am tired. I used to read to absorption all the news everyday. Now I skim some headlines. I used to think facts were real. Now I know they are often no more enduring than the weather.

Thank you, Perry Howard.

I would rather write about history or politics or a story about the death of a friend.

I would rather write where I can avoid the fluctuations of interpretation associated with facts.

I would rather
    just
       make
         stuff
            up.

I was trained...

2007-09-29T07:19:00.000-07:00

as a sociologist. I was a graduate student for roughly two hundred years. I had many successes, but was an ultimate failure. I am a quitter. I am ABD.

I don't know if I know how sociologists think anymore. I have no intimate contact with any. I seem to remember that even the most broadly intelligent ones were also great babies whose days were filled by (attempts at) compelling intellectual discovery coupled with a grotesque personal pettiness. A few were bitter. Most were people with whom I enjoyed spending time.

The distinction with all non-academic careers I have encountered is the existence of intelligent discourse. Pettiness and personality foible is everywhere a constant. But America, Inc. generally impugns thinking for its own sake. It uses the word "philosopher" as a shrouded insult. Dumb-Luck, on the other hand, gets plenty of good press.

Intelligent discourse is not simply absent as a goal. It is simply absent.

Academic life was thrilling because of the constant intellectual pressure on all boundaries, in all directions, all dimensions. Great heated arguments in the coffee shop or the classroom expanded existing cerebral spaces, or created entire new galaxies from the matter previously hidden within cerebral and empirical black holes.

The gravity in these black holes sucks the curiosity and energy from potential intellectual discourse in real world America, Inc. before it is ever born.

Philosophy and empirical reality are spun together in academic discussion to show the absolute value of both and the absolute value of neither. Theory and fact are bashed on wet rocks to wash away the dirt and expose the underlying fabric.

Academics learned from hippies about their various treatments of blue jeans. Denim, theories and facts have life cycles. Depending on how you treat them, they break-in, shrink, fade, and wear-out. Patching them is an often option, as is creating patches from them. Denim will only stay blue and crisp hanging unused in the closet. Fact and theory are not so fortunate even there. Torn, ripped and faded jeans have a lot of life in them: So too with both fact and theory.

America, Inc. is wont to discard jeans if pressing them does not restore them to some proper sense of fashion. It takes a cowbird approach to the dissemination of ideas. Delineation and fine distinction are not valued when homogenization and domination produce a better result. Individualization gets high marks in America, Inc. but I don't advise that most individuals try it.

It would be flattering to suggest I was an adequate student in most regards. It was a very fulfilling life style, despite the poverty. My current standard of living would not have been attainable with my passion so overwhelmed by my limited competence in that environment. I understood the concept of self-actualization. More idiot than ideal, I failed to understand the gulf to cross to reach even its beachhead.

Craig Taylor of Western Kentucky University once distinguished between sociology as a profession and sociology as a career. Professional sociologists are paid to teach and research common and esoteric topics; career sociologists, once trained, take their pedagogy and zeitgeist into the world and apply it in their non-academic careers.

I am become forced to take the lower trail. I vault breathlessly down this career path trying to run astride the Goddess of Adequacy, hoping to keep the giants visible in my peripheral vision. Failure is common. I fall behind her. I lose sight of the masters. Although I have here circumvented the journal editors, I have no power and no influence. America, Inc. owns too much of the day.

Kristofferson wrote that, "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose." Perhaps this phrase has become cliche in America, Inc. Perhaps it is a matter of perspective, another small tear in these old jeans.

I bid the sociologists their own good day. Thanks for all of the memories.

I will
               watch
                   for you
       in my
      momentary glimpses
  of
                 the shoulders
    of giants.

David D died...

2007-09-24T18:55:00.000-07:00

in his early twenties. He was six or seven years older than I. His sister Donna was my age. I was in love with her in first grade. But her brother David was a local hero.

He was one of the funniest people I've ever met. His powers of observation and imitation were known to everyone. Our moms liked David. Our friends liked David. Our siblings liked David. Everyone who knew him liked David, except perhaps his mother.

David's mother kicked him out the house. She did it over and over, starting from the time he was about seventeen. David was a good person who drank and smoked and violated curfew. David never hurt anyone. He didn't drive fast or get in fights. She was a small town mother who worried more about reputation and discipline than where her son slept. I saw her crying at his funeral. She paid a huge and unthinkable price for her small-town morality.

I spent my fourteenth summer hanging out evenings with him and others in the park. He slept in his car when he couldn't find another place. He drank and smoked whatever was available. He was arrested once or twice for underage drinking -- once because he spoke up for someone else. The cop said, "blow in my face." David did. The sheriff smelled the alcohol. "Git'n the car," he said. David was never hostile. He never resisted. He had a bunk that night. He was back in the park the next evening.

David never spoke badly of anyone, though no one was beyond the reach of his humor. It was a privilege to be the subject of one of his jokes. A local dad named Owen had a signature gesture. His over the dashboard wave included wide eyes, a wide open O-shaped mouth, and an outstretched forefinger that tracked his long slow upward nod. We had all seen it all of our lives. It took David's powers of observation to convert something we'd seen a thousand times to the iconic "Big-O Wave". After David adopted Owen's wave, so did everyone else in town.

He had voices and gestures all his own, too, though many of them could be traced back to someone you knew. David always made us laugh. All of us, and our fathers, too.

I once spent a day with David trying to remove a heater core from an old car in a local farmer's barn. David was not mechanically adept enough to extract the used part. It was freezing. His good mood never flagged, though our ultimate failure meant he spent the winter with no heat in his car - a maroon Pontiac of some sort.

He accepted everyone. The rejection he suffered provides a metaphor for small town life. The range of the acceptable is narrow. Different parents handle their children's problems in different ways. David's parents handled theirs tragically. David merely drank. He wasn't a criminal. He wasn't violent. He wasn't abusive.

He was just enough of a clown to prefer a drink in the park to dying at home.

It has been over thirty years since that summer in the park, but I still miss him when I think of him. I felt very sorry for his baby sister Donna. His brother Bobby hugged me at David's funeral, and said, "We've both lost one now." I think I cried.

He left a lot of laughs in my heart, and a lot of tears in my heart, and a lot of laughs in my heart.

David used to laugh and say, "Don't bury me when I die. Just prop me up in the junk yard."

David committed suicide. As a final act of irony, he shot himself standing in a dump.

How can
             I
              not feel
                that
         we all
           killed
David D?

If I could choose a super power...

2007-09-23T17:44:00.000-07:00

it would be the ability to be relaxed and always pleasant.

It is harsh being coarse and having a temper. Impromptu presents a constant danger. I do not suffer an attack supine.

I do not drink alcohol. My continued abstinence has nothing to do with any moral judgment. It has mostly to do with my certain knowledge that intemperance does not mix well with my intemperance.

I am basic working-class peasant stock. I found my reflection just where I needed it.

I have worked very hard to educate myself, including diction lessons, German universities, and history books. I have poured tens of thousands of educational dollars into conquering my self doubt.

I have not overcome it.

I have not mastered the rage of inequity, though I have largely mastered its visible aspects. I have mastered the fear of public speech, but not the ellipsis of disorganization native to my mind. I have come to accept that I am often better at what I do than others, but I cannot relax to take my advantage for granted.

I am explosive with the need to prove myself to myself. Peasants have no need to prove themselves to others. Except to prove our control over self.

To what sort of inverted self-actualization am I addicted?

I know that my super power now comes in a bottle labeled Prozac or Seredyn. Personality in a bottle. I could not live with such an admission of failure.

I can live without my super power.

I hope
  those I meet,
            those I love,
       would be friends,
               can
          live well
          without it
   too.

I envy the gall...

2007-09-22T13:57:00.000-07:00

of a thief. I am enamored of anyone with so little anxiety - the prototypical sociopath.

Someone cut all of the wires off of my camper in the past week or so to get the copper. He (or they) cut the wires from three other campers on our mountain. He has also harvested copper wiring from some, perhaps many, houses in the area. Most boldly, I'm told, he felled trees to knock down power lines, and cultivated wire from that source. (I'm not certain power lines are copper, but our thief probably is not an electrical engineer.)

My Grandfather said, "A lock stops an honest thief." There are at least two types of thieves: those who steal because they can, and those who steal because they must. Some steal to get food; others steal because no one is looking. (This categorization omits the professional adventurer.)

I have hired a number of people from the area. I have sought help for various projects for several years. It is difficult to find people who want to work. I don't think most people steal - even most lazy people. But thieves who refuse available work earn no mercy.

The Cherokee County North Carolina police received a lot of press, and great accolades, a few years ago after their fortuitous, if accidental, capture of Eric Rudolph - the Olympic Bomber. He is alleged to have spent the better part of a decade "hiding" there. The current epidemic of destruction and theft of property has become clearly and well known to them.

Perhaps there would be limited incentive for the police to allocate appropriate and sufficient resources to solve such a case if it were only the personal property of a few snow-birds and rural folk located 25 miles from town. I have never seen the Cherokee County police within miles of my place -- except once when I called them. But this situation is a pretty substantial and wide-spread problem. I hope the attack on the other subdivisions and communities, and on the power company, will be sufficient to cause the police to engage.

I am pretty angry about the damage to my property. I would hate to think how I would react if I ever caught someone in the act.

It would be good
        not
      to have
   a gun
if I did.

Post-Script: Only a few hours after I posted this article, I have learned via telephone that a cabin in our mountain subdivision has burned down. The police and fire department were still on the scene around 11:00 PM EST, according to friends in the area. There is nothing left of the cabin.

I know of no reason to suspect any linkage with the copper thief.

Our modern written language suffers...

2007-09-14T17:21:00.000-07:00

from the sterility imposed by the Electronic Grammar Police. The word processor Spell Check Nazis try to impose the death of uniformity on the petals of my paragraphs the instant I create them. This is the great sin of modern technology: the enormous crushing pressure of expression into the mode.

The value of any word is, at best, the median of our inter-subjective agreement. The meaning of a phrase, of a sentence, or any longer construction, always contains an interpretative component.

Literary constructions are often more historically enduring when a bit more interpretation is required.

Gabriel Garcia-Marquez's "The Autumn of the Patriarch" is a grammatical nightmare, according to the algorithms available to my computer, but it is one of world's great books. Garcia-Marquez writes in his biography, "Living to Tell the Tale," of how he never learned to spell -- ever. (A difficulty with spelling is typical of a Montessori education in a non-phonetic language.)

I do not condone ignorance by those with a choice. There are many who just never learned to write. But the Blues are not subject to spell check. Nor are poetry, prose, and Bob Dylan lyrics.

The Microsoft Sentence Stasi should be recognized for it's heinous flattening of the robust consciousness of language; for it's violence against the potential variable character of every written construction. Word Perfect - and the name itself should send one groping for an air sickness bag - should be banished for suggesting and pushing sentences onto paper as polished and sterile as something spoken on a medical TV show written and taped in university theater in Ohio. Is this device now become John Fay's Monster?

Business doth not thereby prosper. Children do not expand intellectually. My mind becomes a leaden weight that watches for discolored text and I know not. I think even less.

Help me write badly, thus defined.

I don't
           know
         how
       to
     ignore it
here.

She asked me to stay all night...

2007-09-13T21:11:00.000-07:00

and I told her that I already had a place to stay, but that I appreciated the offer.

I was twenty-six, and dancing with one of the hottest girls I have ever danced with. I completely misunderstood her offer.

I was visiting a friend in Atlanta during a national Sociology conference. She was my best friend's friend's girlfriend. We spent several hours at her house before we went dancing. We got along extremely well.

I realized what I had done about three minutes later.

Three minutes and two sentences too late.

I've spent the last twenty years in utter disbelief. I'm nearly beyond the despair, the grief, the remorse.

Perhaps I'm no better now than I ever was at reading such signs. There's no telling what opportunity I might have alienated during nearly fifty years of completely missing gestures I thought covered by genetic receptors. I guess. I doubt if there are many hot women who've thrown themselves at me. I guess.

I wonder if my seamless slide into letchery has altered my perceptiveness.

It matters less now.

It matters
          less
       than
   ever.

A guy named Tracey...

2007-09-12T21:44:00.000-07:00

vomited out the passenger window of a 1976 Rabbit at over 90 mph.

Jim's reaction was pretty intense. He was asleep in the back seat. It must have been an immeasurably unpleasant awakening.

I was merely driving - and thus located outside the splatter zone.

Tracey demolished three-quarters of a case of Coors as we Jetta'ed across Iowa toward Kansas. You couldn't get Coors regularly east of Iowa back then.

Tracey was one of those toughish guys who emitted a great throaty post-gulping noise - "phhhffftsssss - aaahhhhh" - after ....... every ....... single ....... swallow.

Do you know how many swallows are in a case of Coors? Any idea how many swallows between Dowagiac, MI and Wichita, KS?

He demanded we let him drive at the next gas station. Jim and I cleverly declined, though it required one of us to remain in the driver seat for the entire stop - taking turns to manage all the essentials.

Jim was one of the greatest guys I ever met. I haven't seen him in over 25 years. How great is that?

I was welcomed by the Kansas State Police the next morning as I screamed into Wichita at 6 AM. He nailed me for going 76 mph in a 55 zone. I drove over 90 mph all night long, so I paid my ticket like a pathetic whiny baby.

I stayed drunk in Wichita for four days, and watched the 1979 National Junior College Cross Country Nationals. I was injured, useless and not terribly talented. I think my team was second. It must have been fun.

I bought an obnoxious straw baseball cap at a great western store, and wore it in the hotel hot tub. I kept that goofy looking hat for years. I can blame the initial weekend on alcohol. The subsequent period may be attributable to nature or nurture, but was combined with inexcusable ignorance in either case.

Tracey bought a lot of Coors on the return trip to take back to Michigan.

I think he stayed sober during the ride.

I wonder if
he
still
makes
that
sound.

You'd think the same thing...

2007-09-11T20:30:00.000-07:00

if you thought what I think.

Honor is not worth death for the poor. They are offered so little of the honor, so much of the death, in such great disproportion.

The wealth preserved beneath such moral concepts yields no legal tender. Honor provides no currency at the general store. No clothes, no bedding, no shelter, no food be had.

If honor is worth death, let us make infantry and marine officers of the those who vote for war. Let the offspring of our high office holders stand in the fore as foot soldiers in the armed services.

No, honor is not worth death to them. Death is contemptible.

There may be times, even judged by history, when the capable owe death to a cause. So many times the price was high. Too high. So many times we would have paid so much more.

Honor aspires to rule. It offers itself as a credential, an entitlement, a grant to the acquisition of power.

Science fiction and philosophy conspire to suggest my consciousness is contained within the dream of God.

             Then
                  he
                is
        having
a nightmare.

The town marshall chased us...

2007-08-31T19:23:00.000-07:00

all through our little village in southwest Indiana. We would stand in a field when he did his rounds, waiting for him. As he made a curve, his head lights would shine on us, and we would break into a run.

He would chase us for somewhere between thirty minutes and two hours, until we slinked home in the dark, or he got bored.

Cynthiana has under a thousand population, and stretches about a mile and a half end-to-end. It is shaped like a diamond: maybe a mile deep in the middle and a half-mile deep at either end. We had two long-term marshalls, and a few short-timers. "Specs" spanned most of my younger years; "Tore" was the marshall during and after my junior high years.

The town marshall knew us all. He knew where we lived. He knew our parents and siblings. He could probably recognize any of our silhouettes in the dark.

Curfew was eleven P.M.

I guess he figured that we'd get in less trouble if he participated in our leisure time activities. He was right. We spent a lot of time "running from the cops" but we never really did anything wrong or illegal. Mostly.

My best friend's parents owned a liquor store. We pilfered the random quart of beer or bottle of Boone's Farm. We were still too young to drive cars, so we were in the pre-DUI days. My best friend Kelly always got the girl. I was the fast one, on foot or on a bike - it didn't matter.

Once, after we had been throwing shelled corn at cars all night on 68/80 on the east end of town, Tore came driving up. It was after a Cynthiana-Haubstadt football game, near Halloween. We were hiding behind a 6 foot privacy fence, lobbing corn over onto passing cars on the highway. We had a guy stationed up the street to read license plates and tell us if the car was from Haubstadt. We had been at it for over an hour, and the road was covered with an inch of corn, when Tore arrived.

"Time to go home, boys", he boomed. "But Bob, it's only 10..." "TIME TO GO HOME!"

I wonder if kids have that luxury today.

I fear that
                 today
                      they
           would
       get shot.

Frank was a drunk and...

2007-08-30T21:55:00.000-07:00

a liar and other unpleasant things besides. But you couldn't dislike him.

He cheated at cards when we played for dimes and quarters.

We all stole corn - "roastin' ears" as my Grandfather called them - from the fields in the river bottoms. We took what we needed for a meal to go with a mess of channel catfish. Except for Frank. He didn't take a dozen, he filled up the trunk of his car. It had to go to waste.

He'd bring 3 beers, drink ten of someone else's, and put nine more in his cooler when he left - so he'd have an even dozen.

Or he'd leave his completely full cooler in his car, and deny he had any at all.

He'd seine every living creature out of any "bait pond" he could find, filling five-gallon bucket after bucket with bait - just to let it die. The bait pond would be ruined for a year for all of us. We'd never share the location of any pond we wanted to continue to use.

He was a bastard in every sense I can remember.

But we liked him. As a kid, I spent innumerable Sundays playing poker, spinning yarns and running trot lines with Frank.

He was always welcome. My Grandfather welcomed everyone. Frank came every Sunday.

I mostly remember
how much
I liked
that old bastard.

DB was the nickname...

2007-08-30T21:30:00.000-07:00

I gave to a manager I never liked. It was back when I was a snob about such things as people who I didn't think were as smart as I (thought I) was.

He didn't meet the minimum education requirements for the position of IS Manager in a hospital in Nashville. A Bachelors degree is not a high bar, particularly in such an environment, but he had failed to cross that threshold.

The Director of IS, Dave, hired him anyway.

I can't help but believe he regretted it later.

But that didn't give me any pleasure.

Once in a meeting, DB was so quick to agree with Dave that Dave said, "wait, we appear to be one opinion short here."

I liked Dave a lot more after that day, and had more respect for him.

And DB got his name: Dave's Bitch.

Everyone on the team adopted the nickname. So we developed a cover story in case it slipped out in front of him - which it periodically did. We said he looked like the actor who played DB Cooper in the movie (Treat Williams). He didn't.

DB left and went back to the renal facility whence he came.

I took my arrogant ass back to Georgia.

Dave kept the faith until he left.

And none of it matters
to anyone
any
more.

The Green River runs...

2007-08-29T18:44:00.000-07:00

from it's head near Mammoth Cave to it's mouth on the Ohio River just east of the bridge connecting Evansville, IN with Henderson, KY. It's a deep and gnarly river with a dam at Spottsville, KY, as well as a couple others.

I haven't any idea why there is a dam in Spottsville. I don't think it generates electricity.

I have only been a few miles up river from Hebbardsville, KY, but I've boated the twenty odd miles down to the mouth. The locks in Spottsville are a rush in a canoe. The cliffs at Bluff City provided us a lot of rocks for stepping stones.

I spent my childhood tugging catfish out of the Green River on trot lines baited mostly with crawfish. I seined every wet spot within 25 miles of Hebbardsville for crawfish, minnows, and any other bait we could find.

I was afraid of eels until I showed that fear publicly; the elders ensured I progressed beyond that fear. Ridicule is held in much lower regard now than it was back then.

The water came over the banks in the winter, commonly rising 20-40 feet from pool stage. Coal barges were tough to push through the narrow channel; the tugs regularly failed to navigate the bend above our camp, and came careening out of the channel. All that power.

And me, an 11, 14, 17 year old in a wide beamed 12 foot wooden john boat with a 4 hp Evinrude motor. I barely made any progress against a fast current.

I loved that boat,
that river,
and those old bastards
who taught me poker.

The Road along the Ocoee River...

2007-08-28T06:43:00.000-07:00

is a lesson in the tension between engineering and architecture. Maybe there are positive lessons and negative lessons as well.

The road basically tracks the river. Since the river wasn't built in a straight line, niether was the road.

I would complain about the road if I were in a car and I were in a hurry. It forces a moderated tempo. It's very dangerous. This road was not engineered for speed.

Safety wasn't even an engineering after thought.

One might also complain about it if he were in a kayak. Having to look at those cars and buses all day -- and to smell the exhaust -- could be a drag.

I never really noticed the traffic. The river holds my attention.

The road along the Ocoee is, in fact, a marvel in architecture and a beautiful drive.

It's really the best it can be.

I wish
             I
                        had thought
          to build it.

I was never in my life nervous...

2007-08-27T21:04:00.000-07:00

before I sat down at the table next to the Commissioner of the Department of Human Resources and a bunch of other politically appointed bureaucrats I didn't know (prior to that time).

I wasn't nervous until I suddenly realized how Gary Redding, then Deputy Commissioner of DCH, very adeptly distorted everything I had said beyond anything I could recognize. I like Gary Redding. Unlike many in public service, he's really quite talented.

But talented at what?

The truth is just another tool to political appointees -- as useful as pliers when you need them, and just as useless when a philips-head screw requires extraction.

I loved working in state government. Being in charge there is not for the timid.

While I came to like and respect Gary and many of the others at the table that day, only a few politically motivated bureaucrats ever gained my trust. (Kate and Tom, among them.) Most state employees are lifers -- with all that comes with such a committment. Many are gifted. A few climb, if only briefly, well beyond their ("her") greatly limited talent.

I hope Gary's still in charge of something substantial and worthy of his enormous talent.

I hope those who work with him
       know enough
           to
       be
nervous.

Criticism is the sole function...

2007-08-26T18:39:00.000-07:00

of a critic. A critic is not meant to provide advice. He should not be expected to aid in the development of solutions. He tears apart, rips to shreds, gores, exposes cancerous bloody inner organs to others who have not the native capacity to see them.

Outcomes are not the currency of a critic. Positive input is outside his purview. He is not called a Constructic nor a Solutionist.

His talent is his ability to see in the darkness, his x-ray vision that allows him to look through walls - physical and social walls alike.

The gemutlichkeit of the light he shines there is irrelevant.

I am only sometimes
worthy
of
the title.

Pole Vaulters and Distance Runners...

2007-08-26T10:18:00.001-07:00

have to be a bit insane. That's what my high school track coach used to say.

But maybe these are two normal evolutionary skills. I mean, didn't humans require long sticks to vault over wooly mammoths after they chased them twenty-five miles or so.

I'll bet there are no vegan pole vaulters. It's an evolutionary impossibility. Same for ultra-marathoners.

I've never been hungry enough to eat a dog, but it's hardly an absurd notion in another reality. I'm afraid eating my cat would give me a giant hair ball. I'm ill equipped for that.

Here I sit, but
                   in my mind,
I run
               and run
                                and run
      and
run.

My Cardiologist...

2007-08-25T18:34:00.000-07:00

suggests that I cut down on salt and ranting. Eat aspirin and fleshy green vegetables. Exercise and lose weight.

I think he doesn't like me, because apparently he wants to treat somebody completely different.

And yet, if he had his way, he wouldn't be able to afford that house of his that is worth five times mine; or the several cars he drives -- each of which also cost more than my house.

I hope I die early enough to deprive him of something.

But live long enough to enjoy thinking about it.

I'm sure there is an upside.

But I don't
              have
                     any more time
       to spare.

The guy next door...

2007-08-25T18:16:00.000-07:00

is an idiot.

He thinks the same of me. I'm comforted by our incongruent agreement.

I was thinking of buying a dump truck to park in front of his house. Maybe I would store a year's worth of used cat litter in the bed.

Do you suppose there is an ordinance against that?

But for the variable winds...

I'd like to rant, but I simply haven't the energy to spare.

And life is
just
too
short!