The Mind of Joe

Doris Has a Point, and Obama doesn't get it

2010-04-12T06:00:00.001-06:00

When President Obama gets something right, I’ll be the first to admit it.

The problem is he’s got such a lousy track record for ever getting anything right.

Most politicians have a hard time answering a question directly, especially if the question doesn’t exactly fit in with the talking points that they have chosen to cover at the time.

But Obama set a new standard for exhibiting the symptoms of diarrhea-of-the-mouth with his answer to Doris’ question last week.

You can read the entire exchange here, and you can see the first part of it here.

At a recent event in Charlotte, North Carolina, a lady who identified herself as Doris asked a very simple question: Is it wise to add more taxes with the health care reforms that have recently been passed, since we are over-taxed as it is?

A simple question. It deserved a simple answer. If I had been asked that question, I would have no problem coming up with a concise response: No, it is not, and that is the primary reason I was against health care reform as it was passed by Congress.

The President never sees things as simple as that. Maintaining his campaign mode in spite of his recent victory, he rambled incoherently for 17 minutes and 2500 words.

He talked about cobra. He referred to people with insurance as being “lucky”. He said that lifetime limits are “fine print”. He made a “final point” at the four-minute mark and kept talking for 13 more.

He talked about federal health care systems already being out of control and suggested that they be replaced by — wait for it — another federal health care system.

He talked about the deficit — which Doris never asked about — and then cited programs that will by their very existence, blow the deficit out of the water.

He talked about the “quality” of medical tests and suggested that doctors send emails to each other, even thought the health care bill doesn’t address those issues and Doris never asked about them.

Somebody must have told him that an analogy of fixing the roof on a house resonates well, because he told some sort of awkward story that claimed if I fix the leaky roof in my house, the people who are shivering outside in the cold are somehow going to benefit.

He complained about President Bush’s war in Iraq — supported by virtually every Democrat in Congress. He complained about the Medicare prescription plan — passed by Democrats in Congress. He complained about Medicare Advantage — passed by Democrats in Congress.

He threw one of his biggest supporters — Warren Buffet — under the bus, calling him out by name and bragging that he was going to raise Mr. Buffet’s taxes on dividends and capital gains, not to raise more revenue, but because it was an issue of “fairness”.

Finally, he interrupted himself as he was explaining the Congressional Budget Office’s accounting gymnastics to make sure he was answering the question — which he never did.

If the President had been philosophically honest, he could have given Doris a very succinct answer: “Frankly, Doris, I don’t believe you are taxed enough already”. It could have been that simple.

If he had answered the question honestly, he would have to reveal the fundamental difference that he has with the Tea Party movement, which received its name by blending the name of the famous 1773 Boston tax revolution with the acronym “Taxed Enough Already”.

Unwittingly, perhaps, Doris expressed her sympathy with the primary purpose of the revolutionary movement.

I’m not sure what a “fair” amount would be for a federal government to involuntarily extract from its citizens to promote the common welfare. Five percent? Ten percent? Ninty percent (as suggested by some members in Congress)?

I just know that we passed that threshold a long time ago. Enough is enough.

Britain’s Health Care Began With Propaganda

2009-11-03T06:00:00.000-06:00

As America debates the merits and follies of nationalized health care, many people hold up “the rest of the world” as an example of a system that should be emulated.

After all, the argument goes, America is the only industrialized country on the planet that does not provide “free” (or at least, heavily subsidized) health care for its citizens.

It’s true. We’re the last hold-out. For a very good reason. Our health care system mirrors the principles that our founding fathers laid, which in turn created the greatest civilization on earth. There’s no reason to mess up a good thing.

The rest of the world believes that government exists for the benefit of the people. Taken to an extreme, they believe that the role of government is to “take care” of the people. That’s what Annie Leonard declares in “The Story Of Stuff”. She pooh-poohs the government’s true role of national defense, the foundations of capitalism, and the free market. Then she declares that the government should intervene to make sure that we, the consumers, don’t consume too much.

This notion that the government should have an active role in defining our quality of life has deep roots in European culture. We’re reminded of this by watching a charming piece of British propaganda: “Charlie’s March Of Time”. Created by the British government to introduce socialized health care to the Brits, the film traces British government back hundreds of years. In feudal times, the king took care of the people. In more modern times, the House of Commons took care of the common people.

The theme is consistent. People are not able to deal with the standard trials of life — unemployment, hunger, illness, retirement — without the government’s interference.

In a classic case of socialistic incrementalism, the film chronicles one act of Parliament after another, each removing one more area of personal responsibility from the citizenry while claiming to cure all social ills. The culmination of all this effort was 1946’s Health Service Act. The film reminds us that the utopian state costs only a few pounds and tuppence each week.

That’s fine for “the rest of the world”. But there is a very good reason why it won’t work in America. That’s because our country was founded on the principle of freedom FROM government. Americans believe the responsibility for care of the population rests in the population itself, not in the government. The constitution is concerned with what the government CANNOT do, rather than what it MUST do.

America is a collection of individuals. We were founded by a group of men who believed that the rights of the individual superseded the responsibility of the government to care for their needs. Most of our wars have been fought for the purpose of freeing citizens from a repressive government.

That’s what makes America unique from the rest of the world. We realize that rugged individualism and free-market capitalism always succeeds in the long run. And we have seen that socialism always eventually collapse under its own weight.

Let the rest of the world keep their nationalized health care. If it suits them well, so be it. But America has produced the greatest society in the history of the world by believing in the individual’s responsibility to take care of himself. There’s no reason to abandon a system that works.

This Is Why I Need to Go to Washington

2009-06-19T14:47:00.002-06:00

Oh, I wish I could have been there. I wish I could have been a Senator in that room.

Actually, I wish I could have been the Junior Senator from the Great State of Missouri in that hearing room, scheduled to ask the next question after the Junior Senator from California completed her round of questions.

Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) was questioning Brigadier General Michael Walsh about something — it doesn’t matter what — during a hearing of the Environment and Public Works Committee. Senator Boxer received her seventeen seconds of fame on the Internet with a terse and extremely irreverent tirade against the General.

If you missed the video, here it is.

The exchange went like this:

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

Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA): Well, why has it been delayed?

Brigadier General Michael Walsh: Uh, Ma’am, at the uh, LACPR is a …

Senator Boxer: I don’t… You know, do me a favor. Could you say “Senator” instead of “Ma’am”?

General Walsh: Yes…

Senator Boxer: It’s just a thing. I worked so hard to get that title. So I’d appreciate it. Yes, thank you.

General Walsh: Yes, Senator.

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

(If you listen closely, you can actually hear a little giggle from somebody in the background right after Senator Boxer’s declaration of working “so hard to get that title”.)

In my wildest of dreams, I am the Senator from Missouri. Immediately after Senator Boxer, it is my turn – according to the rules of the Senate Committee – to ask my questions of the General.

The exchange would go something like this.

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

Senator Joe DeShon (R-MO): (To Senator Boxer) Thank you, Senator, for yielding your time. (Turning to the General) General Walsh, before I start my questioning, I want to inform you that you are welcome to call me “Sir”, or “Senator”, or “Mr. DeShon” – maybe even “Joe” – as you see fit. You have certainly earned that right in return for your service to our country, for which I am eternally grateful.

General Walsh: Thank you, sir.

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

And, with that formal exchange, the questioning would continue.

Senator Boxer has forgotten that being a Brigadier General is a service to the country. General Walsh certainly has a right to show his pride by wearing his uniform and displaying his stars in public.

A Senator, on the other hand, is a job for which someone is hired by the voters of their respective state. They are to serve on behalf of those citizens by making laws as mandated by the Constitution of the United States.

The Senator further needs to realize that the first thing that members of the military are taught is to show respect for authority. That respect is usually demonstrated in public by referring to everybody as “Sir” or “Ma’am”. At worst, the general was demonstrating that he is a creature of habit. At best, he is showing respect to the Senator by calling her “Ma’am”, much more respect for her than she showed for him.

If somebody feels that they had to “work hard” for the title of Senator, that person should be shamed into retirement. That is especially true if that person is so insecure in her title that she feels the need to proclaim such a fact on the public record by humiliating a member of the Armed Forces of the greatest country on Earth.

I’m sure after my little display of arrogance in the hearing room that I would be chastised in the hallways of the Senate — perhaps in public — by Senator Boxer or her representatives for the disrespect that I displayed to my colleague. That’s okay; I have tough skin. I can take it.

I am also sure that I would be privately taken to the woodshed by the Republican leadership of the Senate for failing to respect the esteemed opposition and the majority party. I would probably be relieved of any leadership in the Senate. That’s okay; they didn’t hire me for the job.

I am also sure that my mailbox would be full of congratulatory words of encouragement from my constituents at home and that my chances for re-election by those voters would go up by several percentage points for standing my ground on principle.

It would be worth it.

Yep, I definitely need to get serious about this run for Congress…

On Losing My Job and Starting a New Career

2009-03-30T06:00:00.000-06:00

Today I begin my new career as an “independent consultant”.

That’s just a fancy term meaning that the employer with whom I had spent the last twenty years of my life has informed me that my services are no longer needed.

They still need the services of people who had been there half as long as me. As well as people who make half as much money as I made. They even still need the services of people that made twice the money I made. They just don’t need my services any more.

I know. They told me.

I’m in good company. I join the ranks of the unemployed along with 6,000 other people in the largest restructuring and downsizing in the company’s history. I wasn’t singled out — I was just caught up in the cleansing.

I’m not bitter. I’m going to use the opportunity to control my destiny outside the confines of corporate America for the first time in my life.

I have always considered myself as something of an “intrepreneur”. An “intrepreneur” is somebody who has a lot of good ideas, but who implements them within the confines of a corporate setting. That’s how I always saw myself. I was the guy who would get things done inside the company — even if I was just a little bit outside the normal operating process.

That’s how I did things until they didn’t need my services any more.

Recently, I did some research comparing “intrepreneur” and “entrepreneur”. I discovered that the difference is who accepts the risk. Along with that is who reaps the reward.

When I was an “intrepreneur”, I accepted virtually no risk. If I failed a task, I still had my job; I still had my salary. The corporation risked my salary and my resources and was willing to absorb the loss if I was unproductive.

On the other hand, if I was successful with a project, the corporation reaped potentially huge rewards. I usually received an acknowledgement from boss at the next staff meeting. No risk; and not much reward.

Now my role will change from “intrepreneur” to “entrepreneur”. It’s not the course that I chose for myself — I fully intended to retire from my former employer. But it’s a course that I’ll gladly accept with open arms.

The risks will be totally mine from now on. And they will be great risks. I risk losing everything I’ve worked the last 30 years for. I risk losing my life savings, my house, my car — indeed, all my accumulated wealth, such as it is.

But I don’t risk losing the things that are most important to me. I won’t lose my life, my family, my friends. I won’t lose my faith — not in myself nor in my God. No, the things that are the most important to me are at the least risk. And only the things that are least important to me are at the greatest risk.

On the other hand, the potential rewards are great. I can finally be in control of my own time. I can work when and if I want to (subject only to the pressing need to put food on the table). I can set my own rules, establish my own procedures, and choose the guidelines that I want to follow.

Most important, I can treat my customers the way that I want to treat them. I can establish a new standard for customer service. I can set my own prices. I can control my own expenses.

And every post-tax dollar that I earn will be mine to keep — to dispose of or to enjoy or to share in whatever fashion I choose.

It’s a liberating thought. And, frankly, a bit scary. For the first time in my life, I will be in total control of all my risks and rewards.

I can hardly wait to get started.

America’s Best Poet

2009-01-22T06:00:00.001-06:00

We get a new President only every four years or so. Even when the President isn’t the Messiah Obama, a presidential inauguration is the closest thing we have in America to a royal coronation.

Usually at such a solemn event, it is incumbent upon us to enlist the very best. Of course, we would have the best military band to provide the pomp. And the best soldiers to provide the best honor guard.

We would also have the very best Queen of Soul to sing “My Country ’Tis of Thee”. The best evangelical preacher to give the invocation. The best classical musicians to perform a specially-commission piece, written by the best classical composer of our day.

And, in this case, the best ... poet. Perhaps she can call upon the poetry gods ... to inspire her to give a recitation ... of the best ... poetry ... that this great nation ... has to offer.

In case you missed it, Dr. Elizabeth Alexander was the best, uh, poet, that Barack Obama could find.

In deference to copyright laws, I won’t publish her work here. You can read it here.

I think I can call upon the “fair use” clause to give you this sample, the first few lines of “Praise Song for the Day”:

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

It goes downhill rapidly from there.

I don’t doubt Dr. Alexander’s credentials. After all, she has three college degrees (just like me). A work of hers was a finalist for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize (okay, she has one up on me in that category).

She is a former journalist for the Washington Post and currently is a professor of English literature, African-American literature, and gender studies at Yale University. Impressive credentials.

Her brother, Mark, was an adviser to the Obama presidential campaign and a member of his transition team.

Well, that explains a lot.

In an interview with the New York Times, she downplayed the role that her inner-circle connections with the Obamanistas played in her selection for this honor. “[E]very choice he’s made is ... based on what he perceives as excellence,” she says.

Here’s another example of what Dr. Alexander believes that Obama “perceives as excellence” as she tries to paint a verbal picture of a slice of life in America:

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Uh-huh.

Writing the things that need to be written. Saying the things that need to be said. Driving to the places that need to be driven to. Doing the things that need to be done.

Not a plethora of substance here.

In 1961, John Kennedy called upon Robert Frost to speak at his inauguration. Frost responded by writing “Dedication”. But in the glare of the white snow on a sunny day, the 86-year-old poet could not read his own commissioned work. Instead, he recited “The Gift Outright” from memory.

Frost later presented his handwritten version of “Dedication” to the President, who had it framed and hung on the Oval Office wall. That copy is now in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum in Boston.

The poem Frost wrote for the occasion was a stirring tribute to the history of a great nation, including the following verse:

Now came on a new order of the ages
That in the Latin of our founding sages
(Is it not written on the dollar bill
We carry in our purse and pocket still?)
God nodded his approval of as good.
So much those heroes knew and understood.

Frost’s go-to poem when he couldn’t read his manuscript was no less majestic, a reminder of our colonial roots and our Manifest Destiny:

The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, Still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.

Forty-eight years later, Barack Obama asked a friend of his to write her best poetry as a gift to the nation. Dr. Alexander came up with this:

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.

The President has four years to search for our country’s second best poet. Let’s hope he doesn’t get a chance to reveal his choice to the nation.

The Inauguration: So Much Material

2009-01-21T06:00:00.003-06:00

The Inauguration of Barack Obama yesterday as our 44th President provided so much material for comment. Where to begin?

Today, let’s stick to the speech itself. Here are some key phrases from the rambling speech that caught my attention, along with my coherent commentary:

Forty-four Americans have now taken the presidential oath.

Actually, since Grover Cleveland had non-consecutive terms, he was both the 22nd and the 24th presidents. So there have only been 43 men who have taken the oath. And you barely stumbled through yours. Yeah, I know, on further review, the replay shows the fault for the flub goes to the Republican, Chief Justice John Roberts. I'll cut you both some slack, but it’s a shaky start.

At these moments, America has carried on not simply because of the skill or vision of those in high office, but because We the People have remained faithful to the ideals of our forbearers, and true to our founding documents.

That’s a direct contradiction of your speech a couple of weeks ago where you proclaimed that our problems are so big that “only government” could fix them. Which is it, Mr. President? Are we successful because of “We the People”? Or are we successful because the government is always here to bail us out? I would like to believe the former. I think — regardless of what you say in your inaugural address — that you believe the latter.

Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age.

What hard choices have we failed to make? How have we failed to prepare the nation for a new age? It seems that’s a direct attack on the former president sitting just a few feet behind you. But I believe that the economy has been weakened mostly by the intervention of government in the free market, not by its failure to intervene.

Homes have been lost.

No, sir. Homes have not “been lost”. Some people who could not afford to buy a home — but who had been told by the government that they could buy a home anyway — now realize that the government has failed them and has duped them. President Obama believes that people who can afford homes are supposed to buy homes for those who cannot afford them, because the government has already lied to them and told them that they could afford them.

Jobs [have been] shed. Businesses [have been] shuttered.

Employees are assets. Employers are not charities. When the cost of an asset exceeds its value, it must be shed. Interference by Big Government and Big Labor has resulted in the cost of an employee to be two or three times his salary. If the government were suddenly miraculously found to be irrelevant, most of those people would be back at work.

Our health care is too costly.

Our health care is costly, but saying it’s “too” costly is a value judgment that you are not qualified to make. If it’s the best health care in the world — which it is — then it’s not “too” costly. If you think health care is expensive now, just wait to see how much it will cost when it’s “free”.

Our schools fail too many.

The success of our school is a local concern, not a federal one. The failure of our schools is a federal concern, not a local one.

Each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

The solution is to invest in nuclear energy (a proven technology with virtually no environmental impact) and clean coal energy (we have more coal reserves than the Arabs have in oil reserves). We have already built all the hydroelectric dams that are economically feasible. Good luck if you think you can power your Presidential Limousine with solar cells and a windmill.

We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.

My safety comes first. Your “ideals” — which will only bankrupt me — are of no concern of mine.

Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine...

Not to take anything away from the perils that the Continental Army encountered, the worse peril they faced was a bullet between their eyes. King George’s army was not capable of flying a plane into the tallest building in Philadelphia.

... drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man...

They drafted a charter to limit size and scope of the federal government. The rule of law and the rights of man are directly correlated to the behavior of the population and the extent to which the government stays away from governing that behavior.

...a charter expanded by the blood of generations.

It wasn’t “expanded” by the blood of generations. It was “defended” by them. Was this a Freudian slip, caused by his belief that it needs even more “expanding”?

Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake.

According to the ideals of President Obama, extracting information from captured terrorists is currently being done because it’s “expedient”, not because it’s actually saving lives.

Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.

Begin again? Remaking America? I don’t think we ever stopped making America great in the first place. What happened? Did we “forget” how to make America and now we need you to remind us how to do it? America was made great because the government allowed its citizens to be great, not because the Commander-in-Chief told us that we’re supposed to.

America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity and ... we are ready to lead once more.

Actually, we never stopped leading. The failure of other countries to follow is not a result of our failure to lead. If we hadn’t led in the war against terror, who would have? The French? The Spaniards?

There you have it. A blow-by-blow, paragraph-by-paragraph rebuttal of virtually every salient point of the President’s inaugural address. I’m tired. It’s going to be a long four years. But I’m up to the task.

Don’t Get Comfortable, President Obama

2009-01-20T18:00:00.000-06:00

This is the day that I knew would eventually come. Barack Obama is inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States. By winning 53% of the popular vote, it can hardly be said that he had an unconditional mandate of the electorate. Nevertheless, today’s festivities are more of a coronation than an inauguration. One thing can be said of his supporters: they turn out and they make themselves heard. What they lack in numbers, they make up for in spirit, and they are to be commended for that.

He wasn’t my candidate, but now he’s my president. I wish him well, but I don’t wish him success. If success were to be measured by the revitalization of our nation’s economy, that would be a good thing. But if success means the successful implementation of his Pollyannic socialistic ideals, that would be disastrous for our country.

Even before taking office, he has shown a dangerous tendency to deliver the best news to a crowd of people at the best of times, while directly contradicting himself by his very actions. And his followers are blissfully unaware of his true intentions as the rapturously absorb his platitudes.

While campaigning for the office, a common theme was “Change doesn’t come from Washington, change comes to Washington.” Shades of Ronald Reagan! The Great Communicator won the hearts of the nation when he proclaimed that “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” and “We are a nation that has a government — not the other way around.”

The difference is that Reagan meant it and governed by that principle. For Obama, it was a handy sound byte, designed to win adoration and votes. It got him both, and he immediately abandoned it.

In his Linconesque train ride from Philadelphia to Washington, he proclaimed that we need “a new declaration of independence, not just in our nation, but in our own lives — from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry — an appeal not to our easy instincts but to our better angels.” What he has forgotten in that his very election proves that we have already declared ourselves independent of prejudice and bigotry. But if he would celebrate the civil rights victory for what it is, he wouldn’t be able to operate in perpetual campaign-mode. A common flaw with liberals is that they believe that declaring victory over a cause would put them out of business — and that’s a situation they can’t afford to be in.

In his pre-presidential speech outlining our nation’s economic woes, he felt a need to remind us of our misery, and to remind us of our impending dependency on Big Government. He claimed that our problems are so big that “only Washington” can fix them. So much for bringing change to Washington! Washington has always believed it was the only solution to our problems — that’s what has created so many of our problems. It’s just that politicians are usually smart enough not to tip their own hand. Apparently, Obama has believed that the “dumbing of America” has worked to the extent that he doesn’t need to sidestep the issue any more.

Will the change that he promised be realized on his first day in office? Nope. Obama’s inauguration will cost four times as much as the next most expensive inauguration. Hardly representative of an austere government in difficult economic times. And will it be for the common people? Nope. It has primarily been financed by the same corporate giants and liberal millionaires that got him elected in the first place.

But that didn’t stop him from literally raffling off a ticket to the event on his web site. Yep. Thousands of people donated money to his cause, hoping to be the lucky one to win a coveted seat at the proceedings. He graciously accepted the working people’s money, even though it was a pittance compared to the corporate sponsorship and had virtually no effect or influence on the outcome. But it made people believe they were contributing something useful and it gave them “hope” for “change”. That’s about the only hope they’re going to get.

Obama’s claim that there is only one President didn’t keep him from demanding hundreds of billions of dollars in stimulus relief from Congress — fully expecting the bill to be on his desk awaiting his signature Wednesday morning.

He doesn’t realize that the only stimulus package we really need has already arrived... it was the housing bubble and the collapse of the stock market and some of our leading financial organizations. That wasn’t a symptom of the problem, that was an indication that the free market was correcting itself. I can’t help it if you don’t like the medicine. It’s the best thing that could have happened.

Instead, he wants to repeat the same mistakes of FDR, actions which lengthened the depression by ten years.

So, enjoy your parties your parades and your balls today, President Obama. Settle into the White House tonight. Enjoy your first day in the Oval Office tomorrow morning. But don’t get comfortable. The honeymoon is already over. The loyal opposition is already in place. And we’re ready for you.

Understanding Billions of Dollars

2008-12-03T06:00:00.002-06:00

Jed Clampett had a problem. Representatives from the OK Oil Company were willing to pump that pesky oil out of his swamp — even pay him for it. But for some reason, they didn’t want to give him “regular” dollars. No, they wanted to pay him with some kind of new-fangled “million” dollars.

And with that, Jed learned the value of putting six zeroes after a number.

Not content with that, Washington politicians insist on putting nine zeroes after every number. Sometimes twelve. They treat “billion” (and increasingly, “trillion”) as if they were mere adjectives. The words “thousand” and “million” are tossed aside like the quarters and nickels you find under your couch cushions.

In an era where the price of a cruise missile is treated as a rounding error, it’s easy to lose perspective of exactly how much money we’re talking about. Maybe it’s easier to understand if we bring it down to a personal level.

There are about 135 million 1040 tax forms filed each year. So for argument’s sake, let’s say there are about 135 million taxpayers in the country. To get an idea of the impact of federal spending on the “average” taxpayer, simply divide the number in question by 135 million.

Here’s how it works:

One billion dollars represents about $7.41 per tax payer. That doesn’t sound like much. For example, if the government needs to build a billion-dollar bridge across a river, that bridge would cost each tax payer a little over seven dollars.

The problem is most federal projects aren’t measured in billions; they are measured in hundreds of billions. A seven hundred billion dollar bailout costs each taxpayer over five thousand dollars.

A trillion dollars costs each taxpayer almost $7500.

If given the choice, would a taxpayer be willing to spend five thousand dollars to “bail out” the economy by giving it to banks, insurance companies, and mortgage companies that have already shown poor business judgment?

Or would it be more effective to give each taxpayer five thousand dollars to invest in the economy by spending it the way that he wants to?

Or would it be better to cut out the middle-man altogether and simply reduce taxes by five thousand dollars and let each taxpayer keep the money that he earned in the first place?

Washington isn’t just broken; it’s broke, too. It’s my money that they’re spending — and yours, too. There’s no hope for sanity until we replace the ones in charge of the checkbook with people that actually understand that concept.

Who to Blame

2008-11-05T06:00:00.002-06:00

Yesterday, we elected our first African American to the Presidency of the United States.

Although he wasn’t my choice, I wish Barack Obama the best for the next four years. I’m not going to whine; we survived four years of Carter and eight years of Clinton. Let’s see what can be learned as we suffer through four years of Obama.

I had to wonder how we got into this mess. There is certainly plenty of blame to go around — on both sides of the aisle. John McCain obviously ran the most inept national campaign since Mike Dukakis rode around in that tank with that goofy helmet.

McCain certainly wasn’t my first choice. (Mike Huckabee dropped out several months ago; Fred Thompson never registered a blip on any charts.) Barack wasn’t my choice, either. A year ago, I lined up all the potential candidates on both sides in order of my preference. McCain was dead last on the Republican side and Obama was dead last on the Democratic side. Sometimes, you just can’t buy a break.

Back to how we got here...

It can all be traced back to the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court in 1991. Bear with me; this is the only place you’ll see this analysis. I’m going to share with you how an ill-qualified, unknown product of the Chicago Political Machine became the President of the United States.

The confirmation of Clarence Thomas was arguable one of the most contentious displays of dirty politics ever held in the United States Senate. George H. W. Bush was pressured on all sides to replace Thurgood Marshall with another African American. But the Democrats couldn’t bear the fact that a Republican would have the gall to nominate a conservative black guy to replace a liberal black guy. Of all the nerve!

So the televised mud-slinging started. Charges of pubic hairs on Coca-Cola cans and mentions of “Long Dong Silver” filled the air waves.

Since the Democrats had a 57-43 majority in the Senate, Bush needed to convert every Democratic senator he could to his side — while at the same time preserving his Republican base.

Bush and Thomas won with a vote to spare: 52 to 48. They did it by garnering the votes of eleven Democrats.

One of those votes cost a senator his job, and set into motion Obama’s trip to the White house.

Illinois Senator Alan Dixon was one of those turncoat Democratic senators who voted to confirm Judge Thomas. That single act so enraged Carol Moseley Braun — a former state legislator and the Cook County Recorder of Deeds — that she decided Dixon would have to pay. She decided to run against him in the Democratic senate primary in 1992

It was a bitterly-fought election. Moseley Braun had several things in her favor. She was black — always a plus when you’re a Democrat. She was a woman — how convenient. She was liberal — the trifecta of the left.

And she had the backing of the Chicago Political Machine. Icing on the cake.

Al Hofeld, a millionaire attorney, ran as a third candidate in the Democratic primary. He didn’t see Moseley Braun as a legitimate threat; he was only out to defeat Dixon. So he ran a series of vicious anti-Dixon ads to bring down the incumbent. The result was that he just split the vote. Moseley Braun barely won the three-way race and became the Democratic candidate.

She had no problem defeating a total unknown Republican, Richard Williamson, in the general election. Thus, she became the first African-American woman to win a seat in the Senate.

Once in Washington, Moseley Braun showed her true colors. Everywhere she went, she tried to out-liberal the liberal establishment. Her term was full of charges of corruption and was total embarrassment to the Democratic Party (and to politicians in general).

Not even the Illinois Democrats could salvage her miserable display. She narrowly lost her reelection in 1998 to Republican millionaire banker Peter Fitzgerald.

As much as Moseley Braun tried to out-liberal the liberals, Fitzgerald tried to out-maverick the mavericks. He was always at odds with the Republican establishment in Illinois. The home boys probably didn’t think he had much of a chance to defeat Moseley Braun in the first place and were frankly surprised by his victory. They did everything they could to make sure he stayed at odds with the party. And he obliged.

In 2001, his was the only dissent in the 99-1 vote to aid the airline industry after the September 11 attacks.

Seeing the writing on the wall, lacking support of his local party, and not needing the job, Fitzgerald decided not to seek reelection in 2004.

Moseley Braun, by this time, had enjoyed a nice stint as the us Ambassador to New Zealand. She was spending her Senate pension, running a private law firm in Chicago while working on a run for President. She said she wasn’t interested in being a Senator again. (Later, she wisely withdrew from her presidential bid and threw her support to Howard Dean. Maybe that’s why he screamed in the Iowa caucus.)

That left a huge vacuum for the position of junior senator from Illinois. Barack Obama was biding his time in the Illinois State Senate, having been groomed by the Chicago Political Machine. He was now ready to strike.

The primary race involved 15 different candidates. Obama hired political strategist David Axelrod, who launch an advertising campaign featuring former Chicago mayor Harold Washington and the daughter of the late Illinois Senator Paul Simon. The voters rewarded the campaign with 52% of the primary vote. The only thing that stood between Obama and the us Senate was the Illinois Republican Party. They proved to be as effective as a wet paper napkin.

In a crowded Republican field, one man was left standing after the torturous primary. Millionaire Jack Ryan barely garnered more votes than Jim Oberweis (36% to 23%) for the privilege of challenging Obama. Other than being rich and beautiful, Ryan’s primary claim to fame was being the ex-husband of former Miss Illinois and Star Trek:Voyager actress, Jeri (“Seven of Nine”) Ryan.

Jack and Jeri had split up several years prior. In order to protect their son, they both agreed to have their divorce records sealed. The judge obliged and nobody cared. At least, nobody cared until Jack became the only roadblock between the aforementioned Obama and the Chicago Political Machine’s quest to fill the us Senate vacancy.

The Chicago Political Machine contacted the Los Angeles Political Machine and finally found a judge that would over-rule the wishes of the parents and the best interest of the child and open the court records. Allegations of public sex tumbled forth, the Illinois Republican leadership withdrew their support, and Jack Ryan, seeing the damage done, withdrew from the race in June, 2004.

Meanwhile, what was Obama doing? He was busy writing a speech that would change the history of America. It’s very rare that a sitting state legislator would give a keynote address at a major political convention. But never underestimate the power of the Chicago Political Machine.

The Democratic Party was set to nominate John Kerry in Boston. The Chicago Machinery — aligned with the Kennedy machinery — was eager to humiliate their arch-rivals, the Clintons, while on Kennedy’s home court.

Obama — admittedly a great orator — spoke of change to the convention. Bush was bad, socialism is good, widows and orphans are starving, the Iraq war was a mistake, the Democrats have a better plan. He conveniently belied his own liberal agenda as he proclaimed, “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America.”

The audience went wild. The news pundits drooled and crowned him the successor to Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson.

And two presidential hopefuls in the audience — Hillary Clinton and John Edwards — put on their poker faces and gamely smiled. Behind those smiles, their jaws were on the floor as they could only mutter to themselves, “Oh ... my ... gawd!”

Meanwhile, back in Illinois, the Republican Machinery — who by now couldn’t get a dogcatcher elected in Peoria — were desperately trying to fill the gap left by Ryan’s fall from grace. Remarkably, not one Republican in the entire state was deemed worthy. Not one candidate — not even Republican primary runner-up Jim Oberweis — was either willing or able to be a worthy opponent to the newly-anointed Kennedy-esque black messiah.

When their last chance of a Great White Hope — Da Bears’ Coach Mike Ditka — declined to run, the Republicans sunk to a new low in stupidity.

In one of the most amazing examples of futile desperation in modern political history, the Illinois Republicans reached all the way to the state of Maryland to persuade Reagan-sidekick-turned-talk-show-host Alan Keyes to carpet-bag his way to the ticket. Keyes, already coming off several failed attempts to be a Maryland senator, obliged. He rented an apartment and a post office box in Chicago and said “Where do I sign up?”

He didn’t need to sign up. Three months later, the Illinois voters saw through the transparent sham and sent Obama to Washington with 70% of the vote — a mandate by any standard.

Keyes went back to Maryland to prepare for his 2008 presidential run. Obama went to neighboring Washington dc to prepare for his 2008 presidential run.

His run for the presidency culminated last night.

It’s been said that we walk through life backwards — only glimpsing at the present, ignorant of the future, while staring at the past.

In this case, we stare at the bold nomination of a Supreme Court justice, the fateful vote of a senator from Illinois, and the rage that ensued — and we now realize that it set into motion the election of a President, and the future of our nation.

Save America

2008-10-25T06:00:00.004-06:00

My experience has taught me to be rather skeptical of forwarded emails that I get through the Internet. But I received an email today from a friend of mine that was especially intriguing. I was so taken by it, I decided to contact the original author, John Dini.

He was kind enough to send me an immediately and personal reply, verifying his original authorship. He also included the original verbiage of the email. (Things tend to get scrambled a bit after they have been forwarded several times.)

Here is something that I have never done before. (And I probably will never do it again, so don’t even ask.) Today’s posting is written entirely by John. It speaks for itself. Feel free to contact John yourself or to spread his message.

-------------- Forwarded Message: --------------

Dear Joe,

Before you mentally check out because of the “Save America” headline on this email, please read the next 2 paragraphs.

This is not a conservative or liberal, Republican or Democratic letter. This is for anyone who is angry about how our government is running, or who is frustrated by a feeling of helplessness, or who feels unable to do anything about our current mess.

A legislature that has a 9% approval rating, one month before an election, just passed a bill that constituents’ comments ran 100 to 1 against! Not only did they ignore voter opinion, but under extreme scrutiny they still added lots of breaks for cronies, and they did so knowing that 90% of them would be re-elected anyway. This letter is long, but at the end I will tell you how I think we can do something about it.

My name is John F. Dini. I am a small business owner in Texas, with 4 employees and well under a million dollars in gross revenue. I have lived in both red and blue states, on the east coast and the west. I don’t think what I have to say should offend anyone. That’s why I’m willing to put my name on it. My email is jdini@mpninc.com. Unlike many of our legislators, I will take personal responsibility for my actions. You are welcome to let me know what you think, and whether you’re signing on to this.

If you don’t want to read about the bailout bill, skip down to where the bullet points end.

Last week Congress passed hb 1424, the “Emergency Economic Stabilization Act.” As you’ve probably heard, it was a bit more than just the bailout bill. I’ve gone through all 451 pages. Here are some highlights:

• Sec. 103: The Treasury can also purchase mortgages on apartment buildings. To my knowledge, those who own apartment buildings aren’t usually in danger of having their house taken away.

• Sec. 110 allows the regulators (there is a whole new bureaucracy being formed) to make any change to any troubled mortgage, including giving the property away.

• Sec. 116: Keeps the bureaucracy in place until the last asset is sold, or the last loan is paid.

• Sec. 122: Raises the debt ceiling to $11,315,000,000,000. For historical reference, we broke the $1 trillion debt limit in the Reagan administration. That runaway borrowing is what George H.W. Bush called “Voodoo Economics” Last week we borrowed another trillion in a day.

• Sec. 132 suspends fasb 157. That’s what made banks show the real value of their assets on their books, even if it had fallen to zero. That is no longer necessary, (but we will form a commission to decide later on what they should be showing to their shareholders, presumably something other than the actual value of their assets.)

• Sec. 136 raises the fdic published coverage limit to $250,000 per account. What they haven’t mentioned is that this higher “coverage” expires in 15 months, and the fdic is ordered not to adjust the insurance for these new risks. That law actually just orders the fdic to change the number $100,000 to $250,000 everywhere, nothing else.

That is the first 112 pages. The next bill (actually several different laws, passed on the same vote) extends a bunch of energy tax breaks for wind, clean coal, biofuels, geothermal, and others. It also gives credits to the steel industry, for plug in vehicles (in addition to the $25 billion handout to gm and Ford last week), for the black lung trust fund, and for home appliances that recycle gray water.

The next bill tacked on is a Tax Relief bill. That one raises the amt trigger by a fraction (from $66K to $69K) and has special tax breaks for:

• Restaurant and retail depreciation
• Rum from Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands
• Businesses in American Samoa
• Mine rescue training
• Businesses on Indian Reservations (casinos)
• Railroad tracks
• Motorsports Racing Facilities (the “nascar” break)
• Employees of companies affected by Hurricane Katrina
• Investing in Washington dc
• Wool producers
• Film and television production
• Wooden arrow manufacturers
• Winners of Exxon Valdez lawsuits
• Farming Machinery purchases

Also, the failed 2007 Paul Wellstone mental health bill is included here, which requires all health insurers to cover mental health treatment just like physical illness. I’m not sure how long this bill has been trying to get passed, but Senator Wellstone died in 2002.

Under “other” that bill has another 100 pages including the following:

• Funding for schools, roads, weed control, forest ecosystems, improved cooperation among Federal agencies and the Oregon & California Railroad.
• Secure payments for states with Federal Lands, which you would think was everybody, but is defined as only la, ca, or, pa, sc, sd, tx and wa.
• A call for proposals to cooperate with Federal agencies, which upon reading is actually a requirement that blm accept a minimum of 50% 0f timber logging contracts over the next 3 years.
• Doubling of the “Mine Reclamation Fund”
• Rewording of the Katrina relief bills to include il, ia, in, ks, mi, mn, mo, ne, and wi
• Further extension of Katrina Relief to anyone “affected” by Hurricane Ike.

My sympathies to the folks in Maine and North Dakota, who appear to have been left out (unless that’s where the wooden arrow makers cluster.) Actual outlays are not $700 billion, but an estimated $852 billion, apparently not counting tax reductions.

Are you angry yet?

end of bailout bill discussion

In her 1957 novel “Atlas Shrugged” Ayn Rand foresaw an America where corrupt businessmen and politicians allied to loot the country for all they could get. They got away with it because most people either believed that a bit more hard work, a bit more struggling, would see things turnaround eventually, or that everything was beyond their ability to control anyway. Many people disagree with Rand’s conclusions and philosophy, but on this she was truly clairvoyant.

Most voters believe that Congress is full of bad actors, except for their guy! Your congressman (or woman) came to your Rotary meeting, or saved a local industry, or got funding for your favorite park, and therefore is one of the “good guys.” I put forward the idea that if any one of them was truly above the corruption, he or she would have been back in your district screaming bloody murder rather than in dc casting a vote for or against this farce. Instead, every single Congressman is telling you that it was the other guys who got us into this mess. They are cultivating and depending on our fear of each other to stay in power.

what you can do to save america
I don’t “do” chain letters, even the ones my relatives send me that say “return this to show you care for me.” This is my first-ever exception. I care enough to risk your annoyance with me for sending this. It’s up to you to decide whether you care more about saving this democracy, or having a friend, customer or client think you are “too political.”

I believe that if we continue “business as usual” by returning over 90% of Congress to office, we are rewarding their arrogance; and surrendered any fantasy that our government is answerable to the people. They obviously don’t believe it. That is why Congress has exempted itself from labor law, equal opportunity, osha, Social Security and any liability. This may be our last chance to remind our elected officials that this is supposed to be a government by the people.

“My vote can’t do anything”
You can’t vote to throw out the other guy’s representative, you can only vote for or against your own. In 2006 the Democrats won their average district with a 54.8% vote, considered a landslide. The so-called Republican Revolution of 1994 was won with an average of 51.6% of the vote. So if one person in twenty changed their vote, the result would be an almost complete turnover in Congress!

Our Founding Fathers designed the checks and balances of government well. The Senate is supposed to change slowly, so that it provides a longer-term perspective. Congress changes every two years because it is supposed to reflect the current mood of the people! Returning 90% of Congress to office year after year, decade after decade, is surrendering the responsibility that Jefferson, Adams and Washington placed in us. It confirms their belief that they are untouchable.

On November 4th, vote for whomever you feel would be the better President, Senator, Governor, and for any state or local office, but vote against your incumbent congressman or congresswoman. It doesn’t matter who it is. It doesn’t matter who the other candidate is. Cross party lines. Close your eyes or hold your nose when you do it, but do it. In 30 days we can send the biggest message to Congress of the last 100 years. It’s a message that says “You aren’t above the law. You are answerable for this mess. You still serve the people of this country.”

And pass this along widely and quickly. Remember, we have less than 30 days, and it will only take one in twenty.

Thank you.
John F. Dini, cmba, bcb, cbi
President, mpn Incorporated
www.MPNinc.com

Abortion Isn’t a Privacy Right

2008-10-22T06:00:00.000-06:00

Katie Couric, anchor for cbs Evening News, did her best to play “gotcha” journalism with Alaska Governor Sarah Palin during her interview shortly after the governor announced her candidacy for Vice President.

Couric knew she had Palin in a corner when she brought up the question about abortion. Her surprise follow-up question tripped the governor, especially since Palin was not answering from her heart, rather from the very strict and politically-correct coaching that she had been fed from the John McCain campaign.

The question was why did the governor believe that Roe v. Wade was a bad decision by the Supreme Court. The governor was forced to give the party-line answer, positioning it as a states’ rights issue. That gave Couric the opening she needed to assert that Roe v. Wade was a privacy rights issue, not a states rights issue. She got Palin to admit that the constitution guaranteed a right to privacy — It does not — and therefore she must be in conflict with her own assertion.

Palin tried to backpedal and get the topic back on states’ rights issues, but the damage was done. Couric countered with a challenge to name any other Supreme Court decision that Palin disagreed with. Sarah clutched, gulped, and fumbled. She never recovered.

Okay, Sarah, I’m sorry you had to learn the hard way that politics in the federal arena is very nasty business, especially if you’re a pro-life evangelical fundamentalist. I know it was no surprise to you, but it still hurts, doesn’t it?

On the other hand, I am not being interviewed by any national news anchor. I am not accountable to a national party candidate and I have nothing to lose. (Joe the Plumber and I have that in common.) So here is the answer that Sarah Palin wanted to give:

Katie Couric’s question: Why, in your view, is Roe v. Wade a bad decision?

My answer: The individual states had already decided for themselves whether to allow abortion and under what circumstances. The tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States grants all powers to the states if those powers had not been otherwise granted to the federal government. The purpose of the Supreme Court is to interpret law, not to create new laws. Since neither the Congress nor the Constitution had specifically addressed the issue of abortion, the right to regulate it rests with the individual states. Until and unless that changes, the Supreme Court should have never even accepted the case, much less ruled in that way.

Q: Do you think there's an inherent right to privacy in the Constitution?

A: No. I believe there is an inherent expectation of privacy in our society. And there are various laws passed by Congress and by individual states to enforce that expectation. But it is not guaranteed by the Constitution.

Q: But the right to privacy was the cornerstone of Roe v. Wade.

A: And that was wrong. If your question is about Roe v. Wade, the answer is it’s a states’ rights issue. But if you’re asking about my views on abortion, I believe abortion is wrong because it is murder. A fetus is not a cystic mass to be surgically removed by a doctor at the whim of a woman. It is a human being. The rights of the mother are limited when they would infringe upon the rights of the baby to be born. There is no inherent right to reproductive decisions once conception has occurred. And the right to privacy is just a red herring that abortion advocates have put up in their attempt to de-humanize an unborn baby.

There you have it, Governor. I know that’s what you wanted to say. Maybe in your next career, you can be a contributor on Fox News Channel and you can throw that verbiage at Alan Colmes. You don’t even have to give me credit for it; I know you would have come up with it yourself if you were given the opportunity.

Health Care is not a Right

2008-10-21T06:00:00.000-06:00

The presidential candidates were tossed a simple and fair question in their second debate by moderator Tom Brokaw.

Is health care in America a privilege, a right, or a responsibility?

John McCain answered that it is a responsibility, and then went on to trash Obama’s health care plan

Barack Obama said that it should be a right, and justified his answer by noting how wealthy we are as a country.

McCain was close with his answer. Obama was dead wrong. Here’s why:

A “right” is bestowed from a higher authority. It cannot be revoked, it cannot be transferred. The Declaration of Independence refers to “inalienable rights” — those which cannot be taken away. Wikipedia defines them as that “which are not contingent upon the laws, customs, or beliefs or a particular society”.

If health care is a right, then why not define other necessities of life as a “right”? How about food? I could go a week without health care, but going a week without food could be fatal. Should I have a “right” to have my food given to me by my federal government?

How about “transportation”? I need a ride to get to work. Perhaps door-to-door public transportation should be a right that is given to me by my government.

Or my job itself. Many countries guarantee employment. Shouldn’t mine? Should my employer be forced to keep me hired in all circumstances because I have a right to have a job? And if I cannot find one, should my government grant me a job as a right?

If health care is defined as a right, a slippery slope of new “rights” is sure to follow. There will be no stopping people who demand more and more rights bestowed upon them by government.

As the states of Massachusetts and Hawaii have already proven, government cannot afford to grant that right to its citizens without going bankrupt.

Don’t be fooled by Obama’s claim that his health care plan merely supplements whatever existing insurance the population already has. As soon as federal health care is made available, large numbers of people will drop their personal insurance (or their employers will do it on their behalf). The government will have to pick up the tab for just about everybody anyway.

And that’s just fine with the Obama/Hillary socialists, because universal single-payer health care is exactly what they had in mind for everybody in the first place. The plan in Obama’s presidential campaign is merely a placation for the control-minded HillaryCare advocates that have been around since FDR.

My health care is my responsibility. Your health care is your responsibility. The health care (as well as the well-being) of innocent children and those who cannot fend for themselves is society’s responsibility, which may or may not involve the federal government.

But the federal government is the last person I want in charge of my health care. You will never believe how expensive health care can be until it’s free.

Health Care as a Comodity

2008-10-09T06:00:00.000-06:00

Atroubling trend in presidential debates that I have noticed is the tendency not to answer the question that was asked.

Candidates seem to have a template of talking points to cover and they just drop those points whenever they some key word in the question that matches the template.

Since the candidates won’t answer the questions, I’ll answer them here — the way they should have answered them in the first place.

I’ll start with the definition of health care, as asked last week in the “town hall” debate in Nashville between Barack Obama and John McCain.

Question: Do you believe health care should be treated as a commodity?

Senator Obama ignored the question, whined about how health care costs are “breaking family budgets,” and how McCain was going to tax health care benefits.

Senator McCain talked about his health care plan — which includes government giving everybody $5,000 to buy insurance — and how Obama is going to fine small businesses that don’t insure their employees.

Neither answered the question. So here’s my answer.

For the economically uninformed, a “commodity” is defined as a good or service for which there is a demand and abundant supply and for which that supply is essentially undifferentiated except for the price.

Using that definition, yes, there are many aspects of health care that are commodities. In fact, most trips to doctor’s offices are very routine. A prescription for an antibiotic; a bandage on a wound; relief from the symptoms of the flu or a sore back or a headache.

This is not to diminish the work of the medical profession — it just illustrates that a large portion of their work can easily be undifferentiated in the marketplace.

That type of treatment is rightly a commodity. In fact, health clinics to handle routine health care are already cropping up in pharmacies all across the nation, handled quickly and efficiently by medical paraprofessionals.

Do you know what happens when a product becomes a commodity? The price goes down!

I’ve seen it happen in the telecommunications industry. The telecom companies fought for years to guarantee that long distance and wireless voice communications were not commoditized. As soon as they were, competition and the invisible hand of the economy drove the price down — even while the quality of service went up!

It happened in telecom; it can happen in health care.

Let the marketplace determine the cost and availability of routine health care. I guarantee that if the government would get out of the way, everybody who needs health care would be able to afford it. The companies that provide the service would finally have the incentive to provide a quality service at a price that everybody could afford.

There are already government programs in place to act as a safety net in catastrophic and extreme circumstances — as there should be. But if the socialist policies of Obama and Hillary and the DNC were ever enacted as they would like, every antibiotic, every BandAid, and every tongue depressor would be dispensed by a Washington bureaucrat with the compassion of the DMV and the efficiency of the IRS.

That’s a scenario that should inspire Republicans and cure Democrats.

Yep, except in extreme cases, health care should be a commodity.

Maybe next time I can explain to Senator Obama the difference between a right and a responsibility.

Watering My Family Tree

2008-08-12T06:00:00.001-06:00

Since I am an amateur genealogist by choice and a perfectionist by nature, my life is full of complex ambiguities. Genealogy is as much an art as it is a science. In art, there is rarely a definitive resolution. And that drives the perfectionist in me crazy.

I was recently reminded of this when I was browsing some Internet genealogy sites and discovered a record for my late father. The birth date listed for him was several years off. This site’s policy (as is the case with most such sites) is that records cannot be corrected. The best you can do when you discover incorrect data is to post the correct data and then let succeeding generations sort it all out.

One such site reminded me to include my sources when posting such correctional data. My sources? He’s my dad, for crying out loud! Don’t you think I’d know when his birth date was? (The scientist within me calmed the nerves of the artist within me and cooler heads ultimately prevailed.)

Bad data isn’t the worst part of genealogical research. The hardest part is determining your limits. Thus, I have constructed the three most agonizing dilemmas that face me in my pursuit of ancestry:

How deep should I go?

Fortunately, there’s an easy answer to this: as deep as possible. My ultimate goal as a genealogist is to find the oldest possible ancestors. As long as they’re in my blood line, I’ll go backwards as far as I can to find my great-great-great-great-great whatever.

Unfortunately, the farther you go back, the messier it gets. Spellings are not always consistent, the handwriting in family Bibles is almost impossible to decipher, and census takers were generally undereducated and poorly paid.

In addition, a couple of hundred years ago, it seems like every male was named either William, or Henry, or Harry. (Including President William Henry Harrison, but I digress.) Just because you find a person with the same name as a great ancestor of yours, that doesn’t mean you’re related. Challenges like that keep the work interesting.

How wide should I go?

No clear answer on this one. I finally had to draw the line one time when I had the names of my third cousin’s ex-wife’s parents. Fully knowing that I might regret it some day, I decided not to include them in my family tree database. It’s not likely that I’m going to run into them or their descendants in the mall. Let their family build their own tree.

I could be wrong about that one, but that’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

When should I stop?

That’s easy. When people stop being born. And when people stop dying. When history stops living. And when the lion lays down with the lamb.

That’s the beauty of genealogy: It’s a living history. It keeps going and going. And its blessing keep giving and giving.

There are times when I’m working on a particular part of my family’s history when I’ll stop, take a breath, and step back to see what I’ve done. It puts things in perspective. It lets you know where you’re going by seeing where you’ve been. It makes you realize that everybody deserves a legacy, even if it’s just a birth date and a death date in a database.

Then, I get a phone call or an email. Somebody in my family has died. Or somebody has been born. Two people have been joined in marriage or split by a divorce. A new tombstone has been discovered in an old cemetery or a new obituary has been discovered in a yellow, tattered newspaper.

So I open up my database and enter the new information. Another legacy has been preserved. And my great-grandchildren will thank me for it.

That’s a Lotta Zeros

2008-08-11T06:00:00.001-06:00

I have always loved studying really big numbers. I mean really big. Like the number of grains of sand on a beach. Or on all the beaches in the word. Or the number of hydrogen molecules in the sun.

Or the price of a loaf of bread in Zimbabwe.

This third-world African nation is in the midst of some truly world-class hyper-inflation. The rate is somewhere between 2.2 million percent and 12.5 million percent, give or take a few million percent. When it gets that high, it’s hard to imagine.

Currently, the country with the next highest rate of inflation is Myanmar/Burma (I don’t want to start any arguments here about the official name of that country), with a rate of 39.5%. Not much of a challenge for the inflation gold medal, huh.

A loaf of bread costs around a hundred billion dollars. (When Zimbabwe achieved independence and renamed itself from Rhodesia, they adopted the “dollar” as the name of their currency. Any resemblance to the American dollar is strictly comical.) Next month, it could cost a lot more. Or a lot less, depending on whose math you choose to believe.

The Zimbabwe government, in typical federal government fashion, attempted to stop inflation by making it illegal. Such price controls didn’t work for Richard Nixon in the 1970s and they didn’t work in Zimbabwe, either. It’s funny how the free market demands that it remain free — however rowdy and insane that may be.

So a couple of years ago, they attempted to control inflation by ignoring it. They just lobbed three zeros off the currency and declared the problem fixed. That didn’t work, either.

Last week, they took more drastic action. Gone are ten zeros. Ten. What used to be ten billion dollars is now just one.

Yeah, like that exudes confidence in the federal government.

To understand how they got into this mess would require a study of a complicated history of civil wars, border wars, and generally lousy government. Add to that some over-zealous printing presses in the government capital turning out worthless paper currency with zeros that multiply like rabbits and you have a recipe for disaster.

Through it all, President and resident idiot-for-life Robert Mugabe is clinging to power. He got the job in 1987 by simply abolishing the position of Prime Minister and assuming power. Pretty convenient. He managed to get himself re-elected in 1990, 1996, 2002, and 2008. Apparently, there are more dead voters in Zimbabwe than in Chicago.

Now there is some debate over whether it’s Mugabe or the military who is currently running the county. Whoever is in control has a lot of explaining to do.

It is said that the Illinois Republican Senator Everett Dirksen invented the quote, “A billion here, a billion there; pretty soon, you’re talking real money.” Obviously, Dirksen never went shopping for a loaf of bread in Zimbabwe. He was off by about a dozen zeros.

Obama’s Confused Lingual Policy

2008-08-07T06:00:00.004-06:00

Barack Obama recently sent the conservative blogosphere into a tizzy by suggesting that our children should learn how to speak Spanish. It was touted as another nail in the coffin of our Anglo/Christian heritage that so many Americans hold dearly.

Actually, I’m going to give him a little bit of a break. I think our children should learn another language. But I sincerely doubt his motivation and certainly his implication.

To be fair, here’s the quote — in proper context — from Obama as he spoke at a recent campaign event in Georgia:

I don’t understand when people are going around worrying about “We need to have English only.” They want to pass a law: “We want English only”. Now, I agree that immigrants should learn English. I agree with that. But, understand this: Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English — they'll learn English — you need to make sure your child can speak Spanish. You should be thinking about how your child can become bilingual. We should have every child speaking more than one language. You know, it’s embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe and all we can say is “merci beaucoup”.

At first, Obama appears to chide us into pandering to Hispanic immigrants — telling us we should accommodate their language rather than forcing our own language on them. Then he turns that into a plea for our children to be bilingual. It’s an effective ploy — he is a master of such turn-arounds while stumping on the campaign trail.

But he is missing the point when he compares our language skills to the language skills of Europeans. And I can prove it by asking and answering three simple questions:

Why did I learn Spanish?

To know English better.
I took two years of Spanish while in high school — and a year of French in college. They were some of the most rewarding educational endeavors I have ever done. I learned more about how to conjugate English verbs by conjugating Spanish verbs. I learned more about irregular English words by studying French irregular words. I had a greater understanding, a greater appreciation, and a greater respect for my own language because I learned another language. Sometimes you have to get away from a subject to actually study it.

Why do the Europeans learn English?

Because they have to.
English is the language of law, the language of science, and the language of business. English has become what every French speaker and every Esperantist hoped for their respective languages. It’s the language of the un. It’s the language of the Olympics. It’s the language of nasa. In Europe, every country is the size of one of our Midwestern states. Language barriers abound. Many countries have multiple official languages and dozens of indigenous ones. They need one communicative glue to hold everything together. It may not be the best or most efficient language in the world, but English has become that de facto glue.

Why don’t all Hispanic immigrants learn English?

Because they don’t have to.
I knew we lost the battle the first time I had to press “1” for English at my local atm. I’m reminded of it every time I read the signs in the aisles at Home Depot. (Long ago, I learned that the Spanish word for “exit” is “salida”. How long does it take Hispanics to learn that the English word for “salida” is “exit”?) With bilingual customer service, bilingual menus, and even bilingual ballots, we have accommodated the Spanish-speaking world so much that their incentive to learn English has completely disappeared.

Obama is right, our students should learn a foreign language. They should do it to make themselves better students.

Immigrants to America should also learn a foreign language: English. It’s the glue that holds America together. And it’s the glue that will keep us together unless we choose to dissolve it by accommodating foreigners who refuse to learn it.

Name That Instrumental Tune

2008-02-14T06:00:00.002-06:00

What’s the composer of instrumental music to do? The title of a song is usually defined by the lyrics. But when there are no lyrics, there is nothing to hang one’s hat on. Nothing that intuitively determines a title. How does a composer of a purely instrumental song put a label on his creation?

In the old days, it was good enough to name instrumental music by the type, key signature, and serial number. Is it the fifth symphony in C-minor? Then I guess the name would be “Symphony #5 in C-minor”. Gee, that was easy.

Somewhere along the line, opus numbers came into being. But they were often added posthumously. Composers really didn’t care about opi. (Actually, the plural of opus is “opera”, but it’s not nearly as funny. And who would believe it, anyway?)

Occasionally, some descriptive word would get attached to a piece of music. That’s why we have a “Moonlight” sonata and a “Revolutionary” etude. These names filled the need to identify the songs, but they really weren’t the “names” of the songs.

In the 19th century, some popular composers realized that their songs actually needed marketable names. John Philip Sousa attached names to his marches like “The Washington Post” (it was actually commissioned by the newspaper) or “Stars and Stripes Forever” (it really has lyrics, but nobody cares).

Scott Joplin earned a whopping $360 in his lifetime for “The Maple Leaf Rag”. A better title wouldn’t have helped. And “The Entertainer” was certainly entertaining enough; it just wasn’t real popular until Marvin Hamlisch rediscovered it in “The Sting”.

So what’s a modern instrumental composer to do to title his songs? Here are a few hints.

Make it memorable
Use real words, even if you put them in some strange context. There may not really be such a thing as a “Pink Elephant”, but it would make a cool name for a song.

Make it appropriate
Chuck Mangione’s “Feels So Good” works because the song really does feel good! “Grazing in the Grass” may not make you want to graze, but it sure makes you feel like you should be doing “something” in the grass. And it’s a whole lot better title than just “That Song with the Funky Cowbell Part”.

Make it unique
There are probably a million songs named “I Love You” or some generic title like that. If you do a Google search and you find your song title, you have some more thinking to do.

Make it personal
One of my favorite instrumental titles is “Tuesday Morning”. I bet you can tell when that song was written. Of course, it means something to the composer. Whether it means anything to the listener is irrelevant, because it’s so easy to implant yourself into the song’s history.

Have fun with your titles. It’s usually the first thing that your fans encounter — even before they hear the music. Never forget that the melody makes the song enjoyable, but the title makes it memorable.

Richard, the Space Tourist

2008-02-11T06:00:00.000-06:00

Some over-achievers have all the luck. Consider, for example, the case of Richard Garriott. At a time when most people his age are entering mid-life crises, he’s getting ready for the adventure of his life. And I am extremely jealous.

Growing up, Richard had a dad with the coolest of jobs. His father is Owen Garriott, astronaut. How cool is that? Owen has the distinction of not only being one of the few that worked on the short-lived Skylab mission in the 70s, but who also got to fly on one of the very first Shuttle missions in the 80s. He was there while nasa made the transition from the heydays of Apollo to the truck-and-bus missions of the Shuttle.

As for Richard, he became one of the first truly pioneering and successful PC game programmers. While in high school and college, he made a name for himself writing computer games and giving them away to friends. He soon parlayed that into a business, paying for his college education with the games he sold.

He wrote the first in what was to become a blockbuster series of “Ultima” games. One after another, Ultima sequels were churned out with Richard writing or producing every one of them. Sell a few million copies; make a few million dollars.

The son of the astronaut had become a computer entrepreneur. And in his early 40s, he had more money than he new what to do with. And all the time to spend it.

What’s a fella to do? Follow his dad’s footsteps into space! Lucky guy.

Just about the time he amassed his fortune, NASA and the Soviet space agency started working with private companies to create something that Arthur C. Clarke had dreamed about for decades: space tourism. For a cool thirty million dollars, you can be on top of the world as they light a candle under you and catapult you to a week’s visit on the International Space Station. How could Richard refuse such an opportunity?

Already five men have had their turn. Richard gets his chance in October, 2008. Of course, it’s not all fun-and-games. While on the space station, he will perform vital research into the commercial applications of the effects of weightless on extremophile bacteria. Pretty heady stuff.

Along the way, he has also made a name for himself as an accomplished magician, having appeared on the cover of MUM, the magazine of the Society of American Magicians. And he has served as the corner man for boxer Jesus Chavez. In his spare time, he built a haunted house museum at his home in Austin, Texas.

My mid-life crisis is coming along just fine; thanks for asking. I can look back on my life — I’m about the same age as Richard — and think about what I would could have done differently. My dad wasn’t an astronaut. Every computer game that I’ve written has been a commercial flop. People laugh at my magic tricks. And nobody reads my blog.

But Richard is still an inspiration to me. As soon as I make my first thirty million dollars, I’ll start my weightlessness training in preparation for my trip to the moon. Gee, I better start saving my pennies right now.

A Tribute to Some Lovable Space Junk

2008-02-08T06:00:00.000-06:00

It’s fifty years old and it’s a piece of junk. In another couple hundred years, it’s destined to be destroyed in a violent and fiery blaze of glory.

But it’s a lovable piece of junk. And maybe — just maybe — it deserves to be on some nation registry of history things.

It’s Vanguard 1, currently the old piece of space junk orbiting the Earth. And it’s celebrating half a century of weightlessness.

Vanguard 1 was the fourth artificial satellite put into space by man. The previous three long ago succumbed to the Earth’s gravity and atmospheric drag. But Vanguard 1 is still up there, having completed almost 200,000 orbits so far. It circles the Earth every two hours and fifteen minutes in a highly-elliptical path that takes it almost 2500 miles from the Earth at its highest before dipping to a low of about 650 miles.

And it’s that “low” that’s eventually going to kill it. With every orbit, it briefly touches the very outer limits of our atmosphere. So briefly that it will still be up there another 200 years or so. But eventually, it will run out of inertia and become nothing more than a shooting star for my great, great grandchild to wish upon.

It’s not much to look at. It’s roughly spherical, about six inches in diameter. Six short antennae protrude, one from each side. On Earth, it weighed less than three and a half pounds. In space, it weighs nothing.

It’s shiny on all sides, the first satellite to be solar powered. That was revolutionary at the time, and it allowed Vanguard 1 to transmit a good radio signal for more than six years. At a time when most satellites were burning up in the atmosphere or blowing up on the launch pad, trusty little Vanguard 1 was still up there, beeping its location to anyone who wanted to tune to its 5 milliwatt signal.

Even today, it’s being tracked optically and through radar. Its symmetrical shape and unique orbit has given us valuable information about the limits of the Earth’s atmosphere and the precise shape of the Earth. By tracking slight variations in its orbit, scientists determined that the Earth is slightly “pear” shaped; the southern hemisphere is a tiny bit bigger than its northern cousin. And by watching the orbit degrade slightly through the years, we can measure the extent that upper limits of the atmosphere rises and falls with the sun’s 11-year cycles. Such serendipitous research wasn’t imagined when it was launched. At the time, they were just happy to get it off the ground in one piece.

Vanguard 1 was launched on March 17, 1958, at a time when the Russians were beating us at everything and President Eisenhower was looking forward to retirement and to handing the reigns of the presidency over to Vice President Nixon in a couple of years. From its unique vantage point, it has watched as Man has gone to the moon. It watched Skylab orbit the Earth and fall back in the ocean. It has watched more than a hundred Shuttle missions and witnessed two Shuttle disasters. It has waved an antenna at the International Space Station a time or two.

Its beeper has fallen silent over the years. And the mirrored finish of its solar panels probably isn’t as glossy as it used to be. But it continues to circle the Earth proudly, knowing that it’s the granddaddy of all the satellites. Perhaps, before it’s too late, we can send a spacecraft to meet it in its orbit, gently pluck it, and bring it back home. It would be a fitting tribute for a piece of space junk that deserves a little more respect than most.

After all, Vanguard 1 is a survivor.

My Office, My Playlist

2008-02-07T06:00:00.000-06:00

Several years ago, Muzak (the corporation, not the irritating genre) had a saying something to the effect of “People are more productive when listening to boring music”. And with that, they sold hundreds of thousands of installations of Muzak (the irritating genre).

Through the 1980s and early 1990s, I worked in several offices that had piped-in music — Muzak, adult-contemporary radio, and god-awful country music. It was alternating annoying and soothing, but mostly it was irrelevant. The problem was that nobody could agree on what it should be — what style, what volume, or even if it should exist at all. It seemed like the only one that was happy was the office manager who picked the music.

The revolution toward personalized playlists started with Walkmans and portable CD players, but it really took off with iPods. Now we can add streaming Internet radio, satellite radio, and CD ripping to PCs to the mix. It seems that everybody is plugged in. And that’s fine with me.

I’m constantly amazed at the variety of tastes that exists in the officeplace. When the listener is shielded knowing that nobody else can tap into his style (by virtue of ear buds, tucked away into his aural cavities), all inhibitions are lost.

There are times that I have “peaked” into my co-workers’ playlists. The only thing I can be sure of is that I can never predict what other people are listening to. My own playlist (mostly smooth jazz with some light classical mixed into it) is no match for the mixture of heavy metal, country, blues, and American Idol mush that I know everybody else is listening to.

And that’s fine with me. Individualism is good. It empowers the office worker, giving him a sense of importance. His it department can tell him what version of Microsoft Office he has to deal with. His boss can tell him what font he has to use in PowerPoint presentations. His finance department can tell him what receipts he has to turn in after a business trip. His hr department can tell him what documentation he has to gather before he can fire his slackered subordinate.

But, by golly, nobody can tell him he can’t listen to Def Leppard while he works on his client’s latest proposal.

What harm can possibly come from that?

The Best Sitcoms Ever

2008-01-15T06:00:00.000-06:00

The sitcom was invented for television. It has a dilemma, a development, and a resolution all neatly wrapped into a 30 minutes package with some laughs thrown in for good measure. Here’s my list of the best of the best.

I Love Lucy

The granddaddy of all sitcoms. The one that established the rules by which we all live today. This is the one that established the three-camera standard that is the norm today. It was one of the first to be filmed in front of a live audience on high quality 35mm film, ensuring its preservation forever. We are eternally grateful for that.

Neither Ball nor Arnez needed the job — they were already at the height of their respective careers. And that let them take chances with the show, giving it a unique personality. Owning their own production studio helped, too. They were beholden to no one, only to the enjoyment of their fans.

WKRP in Cincinnati

Arthur thought turkeys could fly. And that pretty much sums up this ensemble farce.

One of the very best comedies to be cancelled at the height of its creativity. It was a true character study. Johnny, the washed-up stoned DJ. Les, the never-been-washed news guy. Venus, the nerdy teacher turned cool DJ. Herb, the slimy salesman. Bailey and Jennifer were a study in contrasts never seen since Mary Ann and Ginger. All presided over by the befuddled Mr. Carlson. And all revolving around loveable Andy, trying to make sense of it all.

It all fell together perfectly. Such an ensemble cast will never again be constructed. Nor should it be.

MASH

The Korean War lasted three years. MASH, the TV show, lasted eleven seasons.

But the MASH wasn’t about the war. In fact, the war was just one character in the series.

MASH was about love, pain, comedy, loss, farce, and everything in between. It was equally about the tragedies of war as the resilience of humanity. It was about distain for authority as well as the rule of order. It was about the weakness of man resulting in infidelity as well as the love of a man for his family.

MASH covered the entire spectrum of emotions and pathos. Who knew that a war could reveal so much about ourselves?

Mary Tyler Moore

Laura Petrie busted out of her capri pants and landed in Minneapolis as the naïve Mary Richards. She fell in love with Mr. Grant and he returned the favor, even though she could never call him “Lou”.

Over the years, the show evolved. Mary moved from the apartment with the kitchen on the left to an apartment with the kitchen on the right. Phyllis and Rhoda left for their own shows. Georgette and Sue Ann took their place. Ted never grew up. Murray never got a promotion.

And in the end, everybody was fired except for the goofball Ted. In the ultimate TV irony, everybody huddled, sang a song about Tipperary, and turned out the lights.

What’s missing?

I could have written about lots of other shows. Both of Bob Newhart’s hits. Andy Griffith. Dick Van Dyke. My Three Sons. And the trifecta of Green Acres, Petticoat Junction, and the Beverley Hillbillies. Each of those almost made my cut.

But two shows won’t be on my list. How could I miss writing about “Friends”? And what about “Seinfeld”?

Well, I would have had to have watched them, wouldn’t I? But I gave up television as a vast wasteland the same time that Bob Newhart woke up in bed with Suzanne Pleshette and realized his second series was just a bizarre dream. I’m sure television has produced a good sitcom since then. It just hasn’t been in front of my eyeballs.

My Blog Ranking

2007-10-09T06:00:00.000-06:00

Sometimes you get a particular piece of news and you just really don’t know what to think of it. That’s the dilemma I face today.

Technorati is the authority for tracking blogs on the World Wide Web. I mean the authority. Nobody tracks blogs like Technorati does.

The blog tracking business is specialized. Not just anybody can track blogs. Technorati does it by inviting bloggers all over the blogosphere to put a little snippet of code on their page. Every time the page is refreshed, a server at Technorati gets pinged and the blog is tracked. Not rocket science. But pretty cool.

Heck, when I first established my blog last year, I balanced the corner of a heavy book on the “refresh” key and left it there overnight, just to raise my blog ranking.

Well, it didn’t work. (I think they have filters for that kind of stuff, anyway.)

Anyway, I just checked my Technorati statistics. According to their web site, they track 108.5 million separate blogs. (That’s million, with an “M”. Not as impressive as a billion with a “B”. But a lotta blogs, nonetheless.) There’s a whole lotta bloggin’ goin’ on out thar!

Out of that 108.5 million, my ranking is, uhm, 1,803,855th.

That’s when the good news / bad news starts to sink in.

Let’s see. On the one hand, I’m in the 98th percentile. Gee, that’s good enough to get into just about any Ivy League school. I oughtta be proud.

My guess is that there are a whole lot of dead blogs out there. Because it looks like there are just about 100,000,000 of them that actually have lower readership than mine. And my readership is just about as low as the belly of a flat skunk on the center stripe of a country highway.

On the other hand, I have almost two million blogs that I have to leap-frog to get to that coveted number one position. (That rank is currently held by “Boing Boing” at www.boingboing.net, described as “a weblog of cultural curiosities and interesting technologies”.)

Heck, I have 800,000 blogs that I have to leap-frog to get to that coveted one million position!

I’m not going to fret too much about it. I pretty much write what’s on my mind. Some of it is actually good. And some of it can be used for bird-cage liner.

I’m going to write what I want. A few people are going to read it. I may get lucky and get a book deal some day. All I need are about a million of my friends to commit themselves to balance a heavy book on the refresh key.

I think I just saw a pig flying by my window. With a melting snowball in his mouth. Maybe there is a chance for me after all.

That Dreaded Season

2007-10-05T06:00:00.000-06:00

The Earth revolves around the sun once a year. And it rotates on its axis once a day. I’ve always had a problem with people who never can remember the difference between a “revolution” and a “rotation”. But that’s the subject for a different day.

The Earth’s axis is tilted at a 23.439281 degree angle. And therein lies my problem for today.

I live almost exactly half-way between the Equator and the North Pole. Around 40 degrees north latitude.

That means that here in the Kansas City area we have four seasons. Go a couple hundred miles north and they only have two. Go a couple hundred miles south and they only have one. But we have four.

And since it’s the first part of October, that means we’re coming up to the saddest season of all. It’s fall. Or autumn. It’s miserable enough that they thought it deserved two different names.

In my mind, “crisp” is just a euphemism for “cold”. There’s nothing “crisp” about this air. I like my crackers “crisp”. I like my air breathable.

It’s not that I don’t like autumn (or fall, whatever). I just think it’s sad. Summer is the time to get everything done. The yard gets mowed. The house gets painted. They play baseball. We go on vacation. Stuff happens. I like it.

Fall (or autumn, whatever) comes around and ruins everything. Suddenly I’m painfully aware of everything I didn’t get done over the summer. It’s a weird combination of a mad dash to get everything done and a sinking realization that it’s not going to happen.

The sun used to stay up until 8:30. I know it did. That’s about the time I have to flip on the headlights on my lawn tractor in July. And I still had a good hour of mowing time left. Now I can’t even get started mowing when I get home from work.

And don’t even get me started on the fact that we revert from Daylight Saving Time around this time of year. You lose a couple of minutes of daylight each day and then suddenly — BAM — a whole hour gets wiped out in one weekend. Depressing.

Holidays? Nope, just Halloween, that dreaded, stupid excuse for making your kids look ugly and cute at the same time so they can mooch candy from their neighbors. Each year I turn off my porch light and hang around the wholesale club until it’s all over. Pushing around a shopping cart full of five-gallon tubs of corn flakes was never so much fun. (Actually, there’s nothing as amusing as those institutional-size jars of mayonnaise.)

The only good thing about autumn (or fall, whatever) is that it’s only two seasons away from spring. Wake me up in time for Christmas. Then I’ll hibernate some more until March.

FactCheck Has Company

2007-08-29T06:00:00.000-06:00

You can measure the credibility of an organization by noting how much it’s interested in achieving its stated goal, rather than in taking credit for it.

For example, if an organization is dedicated to curing cancer, would it not rejoice if cancer was cured by a competing organization? Or would it try to discredit the cure, or inhibit the progress of finding the cure?

Moving from cancer to politics — not much of a stretch, actually — our collective hats go off to FactCheck.org, the arm of the Annenberg Foundation dedicated to keeping politicians honest, and to informing the public when they are less than so.

FactCheck.org rose to fame in the 2004 Vice Presidential Debate when Dick Cheney accidentally referred to them as FactCheck.com. Although a certain George Soros web site suddenly got a lot of hits, the confusion was cleared up the next day and I suddenly became a fan of this wonderful site.

It is the purpose of FactCheck.org (emphasis on the ORG!) to check on all the things that politicians say in public — both mundane and outlandish. When the outlandish is discovered, FactCheck.org (emphasis on the ORG!) rushes into action, publicly chastising the politician and setting the record straight. They are entirely non-partisan; Democrats and Republicans get equal treatment. They have no bones to pick; nothing to sell except the truth. It is truly American politics at its finest.

So I was pleasantly surprised when an email landed in my inbox from FactCheck.org (emphasis on — oh, I’m tired of that joke already) with the subject line, “We Have Company!”

That’s right FactCheck (dot whatever) is actually announcing the arrival of their competition. And, in true character with the organization, they couldn’t be happier.

The St. Petersburg Times has started a new web site, PolitiFact.com. (Yep, they’re a for-profit newspaper; dot-com is okay.)

Whereas FactCheck.org deals mostly in the hard truth (or fiction) of an item, PolitiFact.com attempts a little bit of qualitative judgment by assigning each item a “Truth-o-meter” rating. This unique 6-level scale rates each fact from “True” through “Half-True” all the way to “Pants on Fire!”

PolitiFact.org has been known to get slightly whimsical at times. Joe Biden’s comment that “The president is brain-dead” got an unmerciful “Pants on Fire!” rating, noting that brain death is defined as “irreversible unconsciousness with complete loss of brain function”. Gee, lighten up; I think a little poetic license in political rhetoric is acceptable.

But the point is that FactCheck.org welcomed the competition with open arms. Gotta give them credit for that. In a time where everybody is clambering for their share of the pie, FactCheck.org says the water’s fine, come on it.

FactCheck.org has always gotten my vote for their unbiased reporting and diligent quest for the truth. Once again, they have shown their true colors. They are more interested in getting the facts out there than they are in taking credit for it. And I admire them for that.

Mr. Baldwin’s Winter

2007-02-13T06:00:00.000-06:00

It’s been one of the warmest winters on record in New York. For the first time since 1877, no snow was recorded in New York City for the entire month of December.

Actor Alec Baldwin used the occasion to advance his personal liberal agenda. Writing in the Huffington Post blog, he said “All around us are signs of global climate change. And this Administration’s response is to send in more troops. If you don’t think there is a link between the weather and Iraq, you are wrong.”

Two weeks later, New York state was digging out of a record 100-inch snowfall.

Wow, I didn’t know George Bush was empowered to increase the world temperature by two degrees in a century, which somehow raised the temperature in New York to thirty degrees above the average, which in turn crystallized all the water in Lake Huron and dumped it on the Adirondacks.

Liberals and other global warming Chicken Littles fail to understand one basic concept of global climate science: the Earth’s temperature is not nearly as stable as they’d like it to be. And it never has been.

But their hatred of George Bush and anything capitalistic and entrepreneuristic blinds their better judgment into believing that a war on the other side of the world causes hurricanes on this side. (They literally salivated at the prospect of another Katrina last year and were publicly disappointed when the Atlantic went an entire season without depositing one significant tropical depression on our shores.)

The 10th through 14th centuries were warmer than “average”, which gave rise to the term “Medieval Warm Period”. That was followed in the 16th to 19th centuries by a period of cooler than “average” temperatures, now known as the “Little Ice Age”. What comes next? Yep, warmer temperatures. Duh.

This is in spite of the scare that we all endured in the 1970s of the threat of “Global Cooling”. Remember the Nuclear Winter that we were all going to face because of the carbon emissions of the time? Now those same carbon emissions are being blamed for a warming trend.

Guys, the main source of the heat of the Earth is the sun. The sun gets warmer, the temperature goes up. The sun gets cooler, the temperature goes down. It’s a big, big sun. Really, big. That means that it has a rhythm, but it’s a very, very slow rhythm. It takes it a long time to get a few degrees warmer and then a few degrees cooler.

Accurate temperature records measured with mercury thermometers were virtually non-existent before 1880. If a weather station moves across town (as it has in recent years in Los Angeles and Kansas City) the “average” temperature can fluctuate by ten degrees or more. You can plant a tree near a thermometer and lower its temperature reading. Or you can build a sidewalk near it and raise it. But none of those events have global impact.

You can count all the tree rings you want to, but nobody could have measured the temperature five hundred years ago with the accuracy of today.

And what of Mr. Baldwin’s snowless New York? Well, it’s the warmest winter in New York since 1877. Oh gee, Alec, I guess that means it was warmer 130 years ago than it is today. Are you going to blame that winter on George Bush, too?

The Richification of America’s Poor

2007-02-12T08:00:00.000-06:00

It is a well-established fact that the poorest of America’s poor is wealthy when compared to the poor of most other countries. But that fact is lost on liberals who depend on the poor for their political survival. The constant redefinition of “poor” is the very foundation from where they derive their power.

In the thirty-one years between 1973 and 2004, the U.S. Census Bureau tells us that the percentage of people in America living in poverty “grew” from 11.1% to 12.7%. Did that mean that the billions of dollars spent on raising people from the depths of poverty has been wasted? Nope. It just means that the liberal egghead bureaucrats have done a great job of raising the poverty level each year to make sure a sufficient number of citizens fail to clear the limbo bar of prosperity.

Senator Ted Kennedy likes to refer to those “poor” as people who “go to bed hungry each night”. He and his fellow liberal legislators fail to understand the basic principle of algebra that says that if you define the bottom ten percent of your population as “poor”, then about ten percent of your population will always be, uhm, poor. Duh.

Let’s look at some facts about America’s poor that the think tank Hoover Institute uncovered.

Half of all households under the poverty level has cable television and at least two television sets. A fourth of them own a personal computer. Most of them own a vcr or dvd player.

Friends of mine who teach school tell me of students on free lunch programs wearing hundred-dollar designer tennis shoes and sporting fully-loaded iPods and GameBoys.

Half a century of Great Society reforms has bred a generation of sponges that take pride in beating the system while living in a luxury that the richest citizens of most third-world countries could only dream of.

How do we stop such abuses while still providing an adequate safety net for those who are truly needy? I think the answer lies in the numeration of the luxuries of those receiving aid. I propose a simple plan. With a little tweaking, it just might work.

In my plan, certain “luxuries” would be denied to those receiving federal aid. Simply put, if you are receiving food stamps or Medicaid or welfare payments, there are some things that you simply cannot buy.

For example, nobody receiving federal could subscribe to cable tv. Period. Cable providers would be required to submit a list of their subscribers to federal agencies who would match them against lists of recipients of certain federal programs. A letter would be sent to all households that match. They’d be given a simple choice: tv or federal money. You can’t have both.

Same for cellular phones. You want a phone? Give up your monthly check.

It wouldn’t have to stop there. Why should they be able to rent movies? No Blockbuster or Netflix memberships for these people. If they want to watch a movie, they can relinquish their government subsidy.

Magazines? Nope. There is no need for the poor to read TV Guide, Reader’s Digest, Playboy, National Inquirer. None of them. In my system they could have their choice: magazines or a check from the government. But not both.

Things like magazine subscriptions and cable service and Blockbuster membership — those would be easy to enforce. But heck, I honestly believe that the technology exists to prevent individual purchases, too.

Purchases of any shoes over fifty dollars would be off-limits to welfare recipients, if I had my way. The same goes for ice cream, grocery store bakeries, fine deli meats, and sugar-ladened breakfast cereal. And certainly no alcohol or tobacco products.

Entire stores would be off their list. They wouldn’t be able to buy anything from Starbucks, Crate & Barrel, or any department store fancier than JC Penney’s.

I think it’d be a good idea to force at least 80% of their purchases to come from Wal-Mart. Well, maybe Wal-Mart and Target.

Please understand that I believe in a capitalistic society where everybody should be buy what they want to and shop where it suits them. It’s not my intent to actually deny anybody any freedom. But when you accept federal money, you need to check your capitalism at the door.

I think everybody should have a right to buy all the fine things in life. I just don’t want them to do it with my money.

Hillary wants to take it — all of it

2007-02-05T08:00:00.000-06:00

Do you own anything? Anything? You might as well hand it over to Hillary Clinton. Right now.

She is currently the odds-on favorite to become the 44th President of the United States in 2008. And she has just declared that she wants it. All of it.

What is “it”? While speaking at the Democratic National Committee winter meeting, Hillary made this chilling statement:

The other day the oil companies reported the highest profits in the history of the world. I want to take those profits and I want to put them into a strategic energy fund that will begin to fund alternative smart energy alternatives and technologies ...

Those are six stunning words. Words that should never be uttered in public. Certainly never by an elected official...

“I want to take those profits.”

They send chills up my spine.

Just whose “profits” does she think she’s “taking”?

Mrs. Clinton, with all due respect (actually, with a total disregard for respect, but that’s just a polite thing to say), corporations don’t earn profits! They can’t. By their very definition, the profits belong to the owners of the corporations. In a capitalistic society, we refer to those owners as stockholders.

If you have money in a bank, if you have money in a mutual fund, if you have money in a 401k or an ira, if you have attempted to put away a little bit of money for your retirement years — there is a good chance that you are a stockholder. And Hillary wants to take your profits.

Hillary doesn’t want to take the profits from some nameless, faceless, fat-cat puffing on expensive Cuban cigars. She wants to take money away from you. She just doesn’t have the guts to admit it.

She has already identified several industries that — in her mind — don’t deserve to exist. Their role is better done by Big Government. They include the oil industry, the health care industry, and the pharmaceutical industry. At least. Big government has already taken over the education industry. Can transportation be far behind? Communication? Farming? Construction? Manufacturing? Where does it end?

“I want to take those profits.”

Well, Mrs. Clinton, there are a few profits of yours I’d like to take.

As a United States Senator, you earn a salary of $165,200 every year. I want to take those profits.

In 1979, you turned a $1,000 investment in cattle futures into a $100,000 profit. I want to take those profits.

In 1996, you wrote a best-seller named “It Takes a Village”, which earned you hundreds of thousands of dollars. I want to take those profits.

In 2000, you earned an $8 million dollar advance for your book Living History. I want to take those profits.

Watch out, people. Hillary is coming after you. She wants to take your profits. She thinks they belong to her.

Straight Shootin’ Dick

2007-01-25T08:00:00.000-06:00

Vice President Dick Cheney is a guy of not many words. He’s also a guy that isn’t running for any election. You can tell that because he doesn’t need to soften his words when confronted with a liberal interviewer. No spin for Dick; just the facts, ma’am.

Consider this little clip from a recent interview with cnn’s Wolf Blitzer.

Blitzer: Do you think Hillary Clinton would make a good president?
Cheney: No, I don't.
Blitzer: Why?
Cheney: Because she's a Democrat. I don't agree with her philosophically and from a policy standpoint.
Blitzer: Do you think she will be president?
Cheney: I don't.
Blitzer: Who do you think will be?
Cheney: I'm not going to speculate.
Blitzer: Will it be John McCain?
Cheney: I'm not going to speculate.

That's what I like. Straight to the point...

Would she make a good president? Nope.
Why? She's a Democrat.
Think she'll be president? Nope.

Shades of Herbert Hoover.

Cheney gets criticized for being too corporate. Well, yeah, he was the ceo of a Fortune 500 company and was on the board of several other companies. Anybody with a resume that looks like that doesn’t need to be political. No punches pulled, no bushes beat-around here. He shoots straight. (Just don’t go duck hunting with him.)

When Cheney was tapped for the veep job, he didn’t need it. He didn’t need the money. He wasn’t seeking fame or lime-light or glory. He had no legacy that he had to write.

He decided to serve his country. Pretty admirable, if you ask me. And since he expects nothing in return, he feels no need to play politics with the media.

Reporters beware. If you ask Dick Cheney a question, expect an answer. Quick. Direct. Truthful.

In contrast to Bill O’Reilly, the spin doesn’t stop here. Nothing was ever spun in the first place.

Liberals Say the War Isn’t Over

2007-01-16T08:00:00.000-06:00

I was prepared today to write an article congratulating liberals on their victory. I was going to say that they had won the civil rights war; there was no longer any reason to continue fighting it.

As evidence that they had won, I was going to point to the federally-mandated observance of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. Dr. King is the only human being that we honor is this method. We do not honor any president on their birthday. (We used to; we had separate holidays for presidents Washington and Lincoln — just watch Bing Crosby in “Holiday Inn” to see how they used to do it in the 1940s. But it was too inconvenient to have two holidays so close together, so they were morphed into a single celebration, supposedly honoring all presidents.)

We don’t honor any other birthdays. Not even the birthdays of liberal bastions like Franklin Roosevelt or John Kennedy or George McGovern. No liberal is worth of such tribute. None except, of course, Dr. King.

And in typical liberal fashion, we don’t actually celebrate anything he did, we just celebrate the fact that he was born. We don’t celebrate each August 28, the date he delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. We don’t celebrate each March 25, when he led the famous march to Montgomery. Surely these — or any number of similar events in his life — would have been worthy of note.

No, liberals are never interested in what people actually do. One’s intentions, their wealth (or lack of it), or their heritage is sufficient for notice.

Of course, that’s in direct contrast with King’s dream that his “four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." True liberals are not interested in judging people by the content of their character. Their love of affirmative action policies proves that they would much rather judge people by the color of their skin.

As I was saying, I was prepared to congratulate liberals for winning. They had successfully used the birth — not the accomplishments — of a great American and perverted his message in a way that merely stretches the already-too-long Christmas holiday by another two weeks while doing nothing to advance the causes for which Dr. King so fervently fought.

I was going to congratulate liberals for winning, until I read about their surprising admission that they were, in fact, losing. That admission came from the deep south that Dr. King loved so much. It came from Shirley Franklin, the African-American Democratic mayor of the great city of Atlanta.

Ms. Franklin took to the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist Church, the very church where Dr. King was once pastor. Instead of celebrating the victories of the last half century that Dr. King had worked so hard for, according to an ap article, she admonished congregants not to pay tribute to King's dream on his birthday and then contradict it the next.

Millions can't find jobs, have no health insurance and struggle to make ends meet, working minimum wage jobs... Thousands of black and Latino students drop out of high school believing education will not matter. And statistics say it doesn't because they can't find jobs.

Yep, it isn’t good enough to have a black associate on the Supreme Court and a black Secretary of State. It doesn’t matter that the richest woman in the history of television entertainment is black. It doesn’t matter that no black has been denied attendance to a college or the right to vote or told to sit in the back of a bus in fifty years. It doesn’t matter that almost half of all professional baseball players are black, sixty years after Jackie Robinson broke one of history’s most famous color barriers.

No, liberals such as Ms. Franklin point out as evidence that the war has not been won the fact that black high school dropouts who understand rap music better than the concepts of balancing a checkbook have a hard time finding a job in a growing economy with virtually full employment.

Mayor Franklin, you are correct. As long as you keep reminding blacks of their failures and their shortcomings, the war will never be won. With people like you in power, Dr. King’s legacy is indeed one of defeat.

Slim Pickins Ain’t All That Bad

2006-07-31T07:00:00.000-06:00

When I was young, I realized that I had two pairs of aunts and uncles that were related to each other both my blood and by marriage. Aunt #1 was married to Uncle #1 and Aunt #2 was married to Uncle #2. But Aunt #1 was the sister of Uncle #2. And Uncle #1 was the brother of Aunt #2. Nothing incestuous; it’s just that a brother and a sister married a sister and a brother.

I thought that was rather odd, so I ask my mother about it. (She was the sister to Aunt #1 and Uncle #2.) She said there was nothing strange about it at all. A one time, it was very common for brothers and sisters to marry among the same families. In the small country church that my mom grew up in, there were only two large families, the “Smiths” and the “Joneses”. Since each clan had several children, it wasn’t unusual for several of the Smith boys to pick out Jones girls to marry. Heck, there weren’t any other families to choose from.

They called it “slim pickins”. And the lack of slim pickins is one of the things driving up the divorce rate today.

When the pickins are slim, people tend to be content with what they have. And when things aren’t exactly the way they think they should be, they work together to make it right.

When a Jones boy looked across the one-room school house at the Smith girl, he knew that was pretty much as good as it was going to get. And ya know, she didn’t look half bad. He could picture little Miss Smith snuggled up to him at the bonfire after the hay ride on Saturday night. And she looked pretty good.

Soon Mr. Jones and Miss Smith were married. That’s when Mr. Jones realized that maybe he had painted a rather optimistic picture of the new Mrs. Jones. But it didn’t matter if she put on a few more pounds or left the cap off the toothpaste. She had a big plate of fried chicken ready for him when he came in from the fields. And she kept him warm at night while she soothed his aching muscles. And that kept him pretty happy.

Besides, pickins were slim. What else was he to do?

Today, the pickins aren’t so slim. A few strokes of the keys or clicks of a mouse and Myspace, eHarmony, or www.i-wanna-hot-date-tonight.com is all one needs to find an alternative. The choices are abundant; the temptations are inviting; the consequences are few.

Maybe if we went back to our slim pickins and realized what a good deal could be found right in our own back yard, we’d be less tempted to stray and more content with what we have.

Why I Collect Postcards

2006-07-28T07:00:00.000-06:00

Guys collect things. There’s just something about seeing a bunch of disorganized stuff out there that demands that some order be enforced. It’s human nature. It’s what makes us different. It’s what makes the “chaos theory” apply to geology, but not to the human soul.

Several years ago, I collected baseball cards. What a perfect hobby! There were hundreds of thousands of baseball cards out there and they were practically begging me to take them all in, place them in their proper place in an album, and give them a well-deserved home.

One thing in particular intrigued me about baseball card collecting: the hobby was somewhat finite. You could pick up the newest edition of Beckett and, within some reason, you knew exactly where you stood in your collection. You knew exactly what you had, you knew exactly what you needed, you knew exactly what it was worth.

Baseball card collecting was finite. Been there. Done that.

A couple of years ago, I discovered postcards. It was completely by accident. I was poking around on eBay and I stumbled on a postcard of the church I grew up in. A little more stumbling followed, and I was soon introduced to the hobby in a very serious way.

I discovered an interesting paradox. Postcards are at the same time finite and infinite. On the one hand, there is certainly some number which represents the total number of collectable postcards out there. On the other hand, nobody could ever claim that their collection of postcards — no matter how extensive — is “complete”.

Postcard collecting is one of the most satisfying hobbies I have ever found. Sometimes you find what you believe to be a real “gem”. And it is a gem simply because you say it is. Other times, you find a card that you believe to be “routine”, but a friend of yours will claim it to be the greatest find since the Dead Sea Scrolls! I have had both experiences, and they are equally enjoyable.

Every time you hold a postcard in your hand, you are holding a very, very private part of somebody’s life. Whatever was important to that person when they mailed that postcard is forever inscribed on that thin piece of fragile cardboard. Cherish it; it deserves honor and respect.

Just about every postcard contains two messages — the generic message of the picture on the card, and the very personal message of the person who sent it. That’s why I believe both the front and the back of the card are important. In them both exists not only the slice of life in the picture — but the slice of the person’s life who sent the card.

(Interestingly, postcard enthusiasts — deltiologists — say the “front” of the card is the side with the picture and the “back” of the card is the side with the address. Philatelists — stamp collectors — consider it the other way around; the “front” is the side with the stamp. But I digress...)

Most postcards can be picked up for a buck or two. I’ve never paid more than ten or fifteen dollars for one. But I’d never sell one of mine for a thousand dollars.

Collecting postcards as a hobby is not only inexpensive, it’s flexible. If you just buy a bunch of postcards, you don’t really have a collection; you just have a bunch of postcards. But most people don’t do that. They collect “themes”. I chose my hometown as my theme. But other people buy pictures of old buildings. Or bridges. Or trees. Or street scenes. Or churches. Or hospitals. The possibilities are infinite.

I encourage you to consider joining me in my pursuit of the perfect postcard collection. To learn about the hobby, go to your favorite Internet search engine, type in “postcard collecting” and start reading. Go to eBay and look for your favorite subject. You’re sure to find a postcard that can be uniquely yours.

You’ll soon discover, as I did, that collecting postcards is truly an infinite hobby.

Superman Can't Read Your Mind

2006-07-27T07:00:00.000-06:00

Some of the greatest love lyrics are in the song Can You Read My Mind? It was from the original Superman movie with Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder. This song is amazing because it can be studied on so many levels.

Can You Read My Mind?
by Leslie Bricusse and John Williams

Can you read my mind?
Do you know what it is you do to me?

I don’t know who you are,
Just a friend from another star.
Here I am, like a kid out of school,
Holding hands with a god. I’m a fool.

Will you look at me, quivering,
Like a little girl shivering.
You can see right through me.

Can you read my mind?
Can you picture the things I’m thinking of?
Wond’ring why you are
All the wonderful things you are.

You can fly! You belong to the sky.
You and I could belong to each other.

If you need a friend,
I’m the one to fly to.

If you need to be loved,
Here I am.
Read my mind.

Superman and Lois Lane are falling in love with each other, but they can’t let the other one know about it. Superman doesn’t want Lois to love him as Superman; that would be too dangerous. He wants her to love him as Clark Kent. Of course, Lois thinks that Clark is a bumbling fool. On the other hand, as a liberated woman who never had to rely on anybody else for help, she’s not sure that she wants to give her heart to anyone, let alone an alien with super powers that she doesn’t yet understand.

This is very early in Superman’s career. He’s not really even a super hero yet. Many people don’t understand him. Some people believe he may even be evil. And, although people know he’s strong and that he can fly, people don’t know what other powers he has. Some have even postulated that he can read minds.

Lois is trying to figure him out. She knows that he can fly. And she knows he has x-ray vision. (“You can see right through me.”) But she doesn’t know if he can read minds.

So, as a test, she sings this song to herself. (Actually, during the movie, the John Williams score plays softly in the background while Margo Kidder softly recites the words.) “Can you read my mind? Can you picture the things I’m thinking of? You can fly! You belong to the sky! But you and I belong to each other. If you need a friend, I’m the one to fly to. Here I am... Read my mind.”

In her mind, she’s begging him to understand her. She smiles at him. He smiles back.

The irony, of course, is that he can’t read her mind. He has no idea what she’s dreaming of.

Why do we feel like we have to play games in relationships? Why can’t we just say what we feel? Why can’t Lois just declare her love for Superman? On the other hand, why is Superman so clueless that he has no idea what she’s thinking?

Such is a microcosm of so many relationships.

The Government We Deserve

2006-07-26T05:00:00.000-06:00

The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw once mused “Democracy is a system ensuring that the people are governed no better than they deserve.” He was right. The irony of democracy is that we don’t always elect the best person for the job. But we’ll usually elect the most appropriate.

One reason is because the best person for the job usually isn’t running for election. “Politicians” do a good job of getting elected because, by definition, that’s what they do for a living. But they are rarely the best citizens available. And they are not always the best law-makers. They are usually simply the last ones standing — the least of an abundance of evils.

The good news is that — over the long run — things have a way of working out. After a period of time, a consensus develops. It may not be the one that everybody agrees with, but one that everybody can live with.

And that’s the beauty of the democratic system. Properly done, no one person or ideology can exceed the generally accepted boundaries of common sense because enough other voices will eventually join in unison to act as a buffering agent. In the end, wisdom will prevail.

In the short run, however, the news isn’t always good. The wrong people are often elected. Bad laws are enacted. Corruption erupts. And consequences are suffered.

The next time you are lamenting over the loss of your candidate, or the stupidity of recent legislation, remember the words of Henry Longfellow during the darkest hours of the American Civil War:
“The wrong shall fail, the right prevail.”

Things have a way of working themselves out.

Why We Vote

2006-07-25T05:00:00.000-06:00

During the American Revolutionary war, a common battle cry was “No taxation without representation.” That was a relatively new concept at the time. The idea that the common man should have any right to self-governance was not yet universally accepted. It was generally accepted that the crown was the defender of the land and the insurer of common welfare. To even think that a regular citizen could have a say in matters such as taxation was literally an act of treason.

Over the years, wars have been fought and lives have been lost defending the right to self-governance. We now believe that the power to govern comes from the people, not the other way around.

The right to vote is the ultimate expression of that belief. And it is the duty of all good citizens to inform themselves of the issues and exercise that right.

Don’t be discouraged by recent reports of election scandals. Electronic voting and cyber-fast news delivery has only made evident what election officials have known for years. When millions of votes are cast, thousands of mistakes are made. New technology doesn’t prevent those mistakes - it only makes them more evident.

When elections results are close, there is a slight danger that such errors can actually affect the ultimate outcome. But those cases are very, very rare. Indeed, it is in those very close that fewer mistakes are made because election officials are even more diligent. And it is in those elections that your vote counts the most.

Don’t believe the lie that your vote doesn’t count. Learn the issues; know the candidates; do your homework. And then vote. The very future of democracy is counting on you to do your part.

Liberals and Zero-Sum Gain

2006-07-24T05:00:00.000-06:00

A caller to a local radio talk show yesterday gave an interesting insight into the mind of a liberal. The call illustrated a common theme that runs through most liberals’ thought processes. Liberals believe in the almighty power of the zero-sum gain.

The caller complained that President Bush was not really serious about capturing Osama Bin-Laden. He claimed that the war in Iraq was taking too many resources away from the search for Bin-Laden. If only Bush had not been distracted by the situation in Iraq, he would have devoted all the resources of the u.s. armed forces to the search for Public Enemy Number 1. Obviously, Bush was much more interested in conquering Iraq than he was in fighting the true source of terror in the world.

In the caller’s mind, the success of one project obviously contributed to the failure of the other. Or put another way, the failure of one project is obviously the result of the dedication of resources to the wrong place.

In fact, the capture of one individual in a hostile, foreign environment is very much an art, not a science. Of course, when the person does not want to be found and is surrounded by resources that help him evade capture, that makes the job that much harder.

America is full of hundreds of criminals that have evaded capture. On our home turf, there are men that are walking the streets that are currently on the fbi’s most-wanted list. If we can’t find all of own home-grown criminals, is it such a sin that we’ve lost one man half-way around the world? Besides, he has been rendered virtually powerless by our anti-terrorist activities. Having him in custody (or dead) would be nice. But having him as a whimpering, sniveling coward ain’t half bad.

Liberals have an uncanny desire to celebrate defeat. Their notion is that no victory could possibly be good because it was certainly caused by bad news somewhere else.

They especially don’t like the war in Iraq, so it seems to get blamed for everything bad that happens. Bin-Laden hasn’t been captured because we’re fighting in Iraq. The government couldn’t respond to Hurricane Katrina because we’re fighting in Iraq. All the cops that President Clinton put on the streets are gone because we’re fighting in Iraq. Aids in running rampant without a cure because we’re fighting in Iraq. Every hangnail on every Democratic congressman is the direct result of the war in Iraq.

In fact, the liberals’ obsession with zero-sum gain is evident in most of their pet philosophies. Since they do not believe in the creation of wealth, they believe that every tax-break-for-the-rich (to them, it’s a hyphenated word) can only be achieved on the backs of the poor.

If I get medical treatment and pay for it myself, that denies some poor soul his due right of medical treatment. If the natural flow of the economy increases gasoline prices at the pump, it means that some oil executive is getting rich. If a college-educated white guy works hard and gets a promotion, that same job has been denied to a poor uneducated black single mother. If a car is built overseas, a Detroit union autoworker has lost his job.

And the list goes on. To a liberal, a butterfly flapping its wings in China is just the beginning of the polar ice caps melting

Whenever you hear a liberal complain about some evil injustice in society, just remember that they are incapable of understanding anything except the most simple of cause-and-effect relationships. The complexities and dynamics of a free society and a growing economy are too much for them to comprehend. It helps when you view their feeble attempts to rationalize life with that kind of perspective.

Ups and Downs of Fashion

2006-07-21T05:00:00.000-06:00

Things go up. Things go down. And it’s inevitable that things will meet in the middle.

One day, I was picking up my son at school. I was sitting in the parking lot with the car running and the air conditioner on, undoubtedly irritating Al Gore by not remaining carbon-neutral for the day.

As I was waiting, a young high school couple walked by. They were both about 17 years old. She was a tiny waif; no more than 85 pounds soaking wet and probably hadn’t eaten anything larger than a cheese cube in the last ten days. He was a good looking clean-cut football-jock type. They would have been a great couple for prom king and queen.

But the odd part wasn’t about what they looked like. It was about what they were wearing. She was wearing tan capri pants and he was wearing dapper khaki shorts.

Some of you have already figured out the punch line, haven’t you?

His shorts were longer than her pants!

Ya know, it used to be that pants were long and tops were long and shorts were short. That’s how they got their names, after all. When I was growing up, our bell-bottom pants literally dragged on the ground. That was a status symbol; the quality of the pants could be measured by how well they were frayed on the bottom. A side-benefit: nobody could tell that you weren’t wearing any socks. Heck, nobody could tell that you weren’t wearing shoes.

Girls’ shorts were short and guys’ shorts were short. Life was simple. If your knees were showing, you were wearing shorts. Of course that also meant your thighs were showing, too. And the bottom of your pockets hung from underneath the frayed ends of your cutoffs. It was cool. It was the way it was supposed to be.

Once I was flipping channels and I stumbled on that sports classics network where they show games from other decades. An nba game from the 1970s was on. Those guys had long legs. And short, short shorts. No piercings. No tattoos. No green hair. Just a tank top and short, short shorts.

Oh, and high-top athletic shoes. But those are so retro, they’re actually in style again, aren’t they? Maybe soon I’ll see a 17-year old waif in capri pants, a tank top that doesn’t meet her belt, and high-top Keds. Probably with a pierced eyebrow.

Just Another Day on Mercury

2006-07-20T05:00:00.000-06:00

Even though Mercury is one of our closest celestial neighbors, we know less about it than most other planets. It has inspired legends and mysteries through the ages and is only recently beginning to yield its secrets. Let’s look at this strange little world.

The ancients actually thought there were two “Mercuries”. They saw one that magically appeared in the sky just before sunset and another that magically arose in front of the sun just before sunrise. It didn’t occur to them that they were actually seeing the same planet on both sides of the sun at different times in the year.

Of course, a “planet” to them was nothing more than a point of light in the sky. That’s why Mercury was named for the wing-footed Roman messenger god. Most of the other planets simply “wandered” among the stars. By comparison, Mercury “scooted” — appearing here, then there, then not at all, then back again. Surely, Mercury must have seemed to be the swiftest and most perplexing of all the gods.

As planets go, Mercury is kinda an odd duck. A planet’s orbit is never exactly circular, but Mercury’s is more oblong than most of the inner planets. In its path around the sun, it gets as close as 25.6 million miles and as far away as 43.4 million miles. In the course of a Mercurian “year” — which is really only about 90 earth-days — the sun seems to slowly “pulsate” in the sky.

Such a close yet eccentric orbit causes another weird aberration: Mercury’s unusual day. For years, astronomers assumed that Mercury was “tidally locked” into the sun, i.e., the year and the day were the same length with the same side always facing the sun, much as the moon is tidally locked to the Earth. But we now know that Mercury’s day and year are in a strange 2:3 resonance. There are exactly three Mercury days for every two Mercury years.

That means that there are some areas on Mercury that would see the sun rise, then set, then rise again before traversing across the sky. This weird orbital and rotational ballet challenges our very thoughts of what is a “night” and a “day”.

Mercury is the only major planet without an atmosphere. Just like our moon, it is rocky and barren, pocketed with craters formed by millions of years of meteor hits and occasional collisions with small asteroids. With no protective atmosphere to shield it, it is literally lying naked to space.

Mercury sits up proud in space. Most planets tilt from their orbit somewhat — such a tilt is what gives the Earth our four seasons. But not Mercury. Its axial tilt is less than 0.01 degrees.

That means that Mercury hosts some of the hottest and the coldest surface temperatures in the solar system. At noon on the equator, the sun is directly overhead and stays in one place for so long that the surface is baked to 800 degrees F — hot enough to melt lead. But at the bottom of some craters near the poles of Mercury, there are surfaces that have never seen the light of the sun for millions of years. Temperatures there hover around minus 300 degrees F and never get any warmer.

For all the mysteries of this planet, only one spacecraft has ever seen it up close. Mariner 10 visited it in the mid-1970s. We haven’t been back since. Getting to Mercury is no easy task. Even though it’s one of the closest planets, it actually takes more rocket fuel to get there than it takes to go to Mars. That’s because once you get there, you have to contend with the gravity of the sun to slow the spacecraft into an acceptable path for scientific purposes. Otherwise, the craft would pass by Mercury in the blink of an eye.

The Messenger spacecraft is currently on its way to Mercury to unlock more of its secrets. It solves the whole orbital gravity problem by looping around the sun a few times, passing the Earth and Venus in a round-about path to Mercury to get it into the right orientation. After a couple of quick fly-bys to Mercury in 2008 and 2009, Messenger will settle into an orbit around Mercury in 2011.

When it gets there, who knows what strange stuff we’ll learn about this quirky planet?

My Kingdom for a C-Prompt

2006-07-19T05:00:00.000-06:00

For the last few days, I have been reading about “Vista”, Microsoft’s new operating system that is due to be released the beginning of 2007 (or whenever). I’m especially intrigued by the minimum — that’s minimum — system requirements just to get this thing installed on a computer. Five hundred and twelve megabytes of random access memory. That’s four times the memory that is on the 8-year old computer that I usually use at home.

Ah, my home computer. 128 meg of ram. 10 gig of hard drive space. A zip drive for backup. And Windows 98. State of the art when I purchased it. It’s as old as my refrigerator. Almost as old as my pickup truck. Only half the age of my house.

But in computer years, it’s ancient. As old as the hills on Grandma’s chest. Older than dirt. It’s so old, its serial number is negative. The last time I called Dell’s customer service, the guy on the phone just sorta chuckled when I told him my model number. I just hung up. He was no help.

So here I am will a moderately functional computer and an operating system that’s six versions behind. No upgrade path. No residual value. Scrap value of maybe a couple of bucks if you melt the silver out of the motherboard. But hey, it’s paid for.

While reading about Vista, I became more than painfully aware of the limitations of my computer. Last month, Microsoft officially stopped supporting my operating system. According to onestat.com, almost 87% of all personal computers run on Windows xp. 2.7% run on my operating system. I have never been in such an ignominious minority. For a middle-aged white guy, that hurts.

A long time ago, I was a C-prompt guy. The computer waited patiently for me to tell it what to do. And then it did it. One thing at a time. I didn’t have to point at anything or drag anything. It didn’t connect to the Internet behind my back and download viruses. It just did what I told it to do.

Sometimes I long for those days. Sometimes I just want a computer to ask me what I want it to do. Then I can type in a command and it will do it for me. Sigh. It’ll probably never happen again in my lifetime.

I’m saving up for a new computer. By the time I can afford one of those new-fangled giga-ram computers, Vista will be three of four versions behind. It’ll take twenty gig of ram to load the operating system, which will probably be code-named “Leroy” or something like that.

If I had a kingdom, I would give it up for a computer that had a C-prompt and an operating system that could run on a meg of extended memory with a 32-meg hard drive. Then I’d type on a black screen with green letters in a fixed font.

And life would be good.

Exposing the Myth of the Problem with Outsourcing

2006-07-18T05:00:00.000-06:00

If I had been in the labor force fifty years ago, I couldn’t do the job that I do now — mainly because my job didn’t exist fifty years ago. Heck, it didn’t exist ten years ago. I work in a very high-tech industry. Most of the people that I work with have jobs that didn’t exist even five years ago.

And it’s true the other way around, too. Fifty years ago, my mother was a telephone operator. That was back in the days when every small town had a lady named Sarah that would ask “Number, please?” when you picked up the phone. No need to dial; no need to remember esoteric codes or numbers. You just had to say, “Hey, Sarah, could you ring my wife at the office for me?” Sarah would know who you were, who your wife was, and what office she worked at.

My mom’s name isn’t Sarah, but you get the point.

Nobody cried when modern telephone technology replaced Sarah and my mother. And I won’t cry five years from now when my current job becomes obsolete. Because, just like my mom did, I’ll find another — a better — job.

And that’s the way economic progress works. Why is it that so many union bosses are just now getting it?

When a job is shipped overseas, it’s almost always for a good reason. Company owners don’t move a job overseas just because they think it sounds exotic. They do it because — for whatever reason — the lower price overcomes the slower delivery time, the increased transportation costs, and the increased logistics. That’s right. The price is so much lower that it’s actually worth the extra trouble.

You can make an argument that manufacturing workers over there are that much underpaid. Or that manufacturing workers over here are that much overpaid. It really doesn’t matter. The differential in the labor cost justified the change.

Who benefits? Here’s the little secret that not one union member wants you to hear. Everybody! Yep, everybody benefits every time a job is moved offshore.

The manufacturing company benefits because the cost is lower. And that almost always means that the price to the consumer will be lower — slowing inflation and giving consumers more money in their pockets and more places to spend that money. Even if the manufacturing division of the company loses workers, the logistics division benefits because managers will be needed to track the production and deliver of the product in this country. The shipping industry benefits because they get to ship the product. And, of course, the foreign company benefits because they get the increased business.

Even the displaced worker benefits because he now gets an opportunity to get out of his buggy-whip manufacturing job and into one that is more suited for today’s service-oriented economy. The education system benefits because they get to train the new worker.

And the economy in general benefits because that worker will probably no longer be a member of a labor union — and lower union membership is good for the entire country.

I’ve been preaching these basic concepts of economics for years. It’s finally sinking in. A new study done by two Princeton economic professors was recently presented to a meeting of the Federal Reserve. The paper claims that outsourcing generally boosts wages in America — exactly they opposite of what the traditional labor-dominated liberal egg-heads would want you to believe.

Maybe somebody finally realized that the outsourcing movement has been going on for more than a decade and what do we have to show for it? Inflation under control and virtually full employment — even with an influx of millions of illegal workers in the country.

This is in an economy where your Dodge truck may be made Mexico and your Toyota Camry may be made in Kentucky. The global economy took over while the unions were rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Please Pity the Poor Penny

2006-07-17T05:00:00.000-06:00

The news is finally official. It had been suspected and rumored for a long time. Now the federal government has finally admitted.

It costs more than a penny to make a penny.

This is not good. In fact, it’s illegal. Congress has told the us Mint in no uncertain terms that it cannot spend more than the face value of a coin to produce it. It makes sense. If there was more than a penny of value in a penny, people could just buy them and melt them down and sell them for scrap. The Hungarians did something similar to that after World War ii when they papered their walls with worthless Hungarian paper money.

But it’s not hyperinflation that is the source of the penny’s problems. It’s the price of copper. There is now almost two cents of copper inside each penny, which is ironic because since 1982, a penny is mostly made of zinc; only about 2.4% of a penny is copper. Nevertheless, it still would cost more to melt a penny than it’s worth. But that may not always be true. The mint is going to have to think of a better plan.

Of course, many people think they have solved the problem. Just get rid of the stupid thing. Nobody has been able to actually buy anything with a penny for years. The only thing it’s good for is to make sales tax come out even. And nobody would complain if merchants would simply round everything to the nearest nickel. Or dime, for Heaven’s sake.

Because of that, many people have taken to throwing their spare pennies into dresser drawers, glass jars, and water fountains. Heck, the Jerry Lewis collection tray at the drive-through at McDonald’s is full of them. People seem to be in denial. They just don’t want to have anything to do with them.

And that creates a problem for the mint. At the same time that they cost too much to make, they have to make more of them because people are hoarding them. It’s hard being a government entity.

I take the exact opposite approach. At any given moment in time, there are between zero and four pennies in my pocket. And none at home. None. None on my dresser. No glass jar collecting spares. No Pringle’s can that weighs a ton from collecting worthless copper — I mean 97.6% zinc and 2.4% copper.

Nope. I use pennies the way they’re supposed to be used. When I make a purchase that ends in 97 cents, I pull two pennies out of my pocket and hand them to the clerk. If I don’t have two pennies, I get three back in change. No more than four pennies are ever — I mean ever — required for any cash transaction.

See? Pennies aren’t a problem. You don’t need a jar of them. You only need at most four.

Oh, yeah, the mint says that a nickel costs more than a nickel to produce, too. They have nothing to fear. I’m not hoarding those, either.

Mike Brown, the Planet Hunter

2006-07-14T05:00:00.000-06:00

The surname “Brown” is one of the most common in America. And “Michael” is one of the most common names for men. So it’s no surprise that there are a lot of “Michael Browns” out there.

Most of them live in somewhat obscurity. But simple statistics would indicate that a few of them would achieve fame. Wikipedia lists 25 different men named Michael Brown. The list includes politicians, athletes, musicians, and artists.

Two of them are scientists. And one is an astronomer. And Michael E. Brown the astronomer is the subject of today’s article.

Mike Brown discovered what may turn out to be our tenth planet. Or our twelfth, depending on how you count them. And perhaps many more.

Mr. Brown is a voracious planet hunter. He’s an associate professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology and he spends a lot of his time peering at the heavens through Caltech’s telescopes in search of planets. In the last five years, he and his associates have been responsible for discovering no few than 10 new bodies of rock and ice hurling around our sun and eligible to be considered planets.

Three years ago, he discovered Sedna. Careful measurements later determined that Sedna was almost as large as Pluto. That news set the astronomical world on its ear.

Once astronomers started looking in earnest for new planets, our time-honored definition of planets started crumbling. It fell completely apart last year with the announcement of the discovery (by Brown and his team) of a new heavenly body, tentatively named. Xena. When the orbit and size of Xena was carefully plotted, yep, Xena is actually larger than Pluto.

Brown’s wife proved that a prophet is without honor in his own city. When he called to tell her the news that Xena was larger than Pluto, she said, “That’s nice, dear. Can you stop by the store and pick up a loaf of bread on your way home tonight?”

Mr. Brown estimates that there could be as many as fifty bodies out there that are big enough and round “round” enough to be considered a planet. (Potato-shaped rocks need not apply for planet status.) Science textbooks are soon to be re-written on a scale that hasn’t been seen in a generation.

Rather than a tightly defined list of exactly nine planets, it now seems that the rocks and balls of gas that orbit our sun exist in somewhat of a continuous spectrum of sizes, shapes, and characteristics. Perhaps there is no limit to the variety of stuff that is out there. Things seem to be a lot more complicated than we first suspected.

For his efforts, Michael Brown was honored by Time Magazine, having been included on its list of “100 Influential People of 2006”. Good for him. I’m not a big fan of the magazine, but if they would ever like to recognize my superior blogging skills by including me on a similar list, I wouldn’t turn them down.

Shoeboxes of Data

2006-07-13T05:00:00.000-06:00

After my formal computer education, one of my very first real job interviews was with a company that produced computer output on microfiche.

For the uninitiated, microfiche is kinda like microfilm, except that the media is a 4x6 card instead of a roll of film. It’s a medium that has all but disappeared in common business practices today. It has been regulated primarily to government archives and libraries. But in the early 1980s, it was definitely bleeding-edge technology.

Until then, the process of creating microfiche was strictly photographic and analog. The document was printed on regular paper and then the pages were photographed one page at a time to create the fiche. It wasn’t much better than actually standing at a photocopier and recreating the entire report by hand.

But this company was using a new-fangled technology called com or “Computer Output Microfiche”. In this process, the fiche was created digitally, directly from the data source — usually a computer tape. It was much faster and cheaper than the analog process and it could create an unlimited number of perfect images.

In my job interview, I was indoctrinated by two guys who were the microfiche disciples of the company. They extolled the virtues of microfiche over conventional means of storage and lookup. They made a convincing argument that disk storage was particularly expensive and ineffective. After all, it required expensive online disk drives and indexes and the energy and upkeep to keep them running. And horror of horrors, online disk storage required that people have those expensive crts at their desk. We can’t have that, can we?

Ah, yes, crts. Cathode Ray Tubes. Dumb terminals. Essentially, a tv screen with an oversized typewriter keyboard attached. That’s what people had before there were pcs on every office desk in the universe.

The compelling argument in favor of microfiche was that you didn’t need a $7,000 television set on every desk when you could have one $500 microfiche reader that would serve the entire office. Need to look up a customer’s account? No problem. Just walk over to the microfiche cabinet, find the appropriate card, insert it into the reader, search for the customer’s page, copy the information to a notepad, and walk back to your desk with the customer still on hold.

That was 1980. It took about five microfiche cards to hold about a meg of data.

I have a memory card on my keychain that holds about a gig of data. That’s a thousand meg or 5,000 microfiche cards — enough to fill ten shoeboxes.

For less than a thousand bucks, I can walk to my office supply store and pick up a one-terabyte external hard drive that will plug into the usb port on my laptop. I can tuck the entire drive into a corner of my briefcase. A terabyte is a thousand gig. A thousand keychain memory cards would fill about ten shoeboxes.

Conventional wisdom used to say that bigger was better. All we needed was more shoe boxes. And bigger shoeboxes. In the ultimate irony of technology, we have come to realize that bigger is smaller. And instead of a shoebox, all your really need is a shirt pocket.

A Particularly Perplexing Pill

2006-07-12T05:00:00.000-06:00

A few years ago, a friend of mine in the health care industry told me that a man my age needed to take an aspirin every day. Something about thinning blood and preventing heart attacks or something like that.

I have to say that it was a friend of mine that told me to take the aspirin because I never go to a doctor. Never. I can’t remember the last time I was at a doctor. I went to a Marcus Welby-type for a few years. Then he retired, as all good Marcus Welby-types do. I haven’t had a decent reason to visit a doctor since then.

You know all those commercials where they say things like “be sure to consult your doctor” for whatever? Well, I don’t have anybody to talk to.

Back to my story. So I was told by a friend to take an aspirin each day. So I did. No big deal. Later, I found out, oops, not just any aspirin. Think of your sensitive stomach! You want ulcers? It has to be children’s aspirin.

Really? I had been taking regular aspirin for several months and I didn’t notice any difference. No heart attack. No stroke. No ulcers. Just a half-empty aspirin bottle to show for my efforts. (That’s why I don’t like preventative medicine. How do you know when it works?)

Nope, that’s not good enough, said my friend-the-surrogate-doctor. It had to be a children’s aspirin. Or at least, it had to be one of those new mini-dose aspirins.

Mini-dose aspirins? Yeah, it seems that so many middle-aged men were being advised by their doctors (I guess they actually had doctors) to take children’s aspirin that there was a rush on the stuff. But a lot of guys didn’t like the idea of taking “children’s” aspirin.

So the marketing suits at the drug companies came up with a brilliant idea. Let’s make children’s aspirin but put it in a bottle that says “Mini Dose”. Same drug. Different label.

It was a hit. Soon millions of men in America were relieved of the embarrassment of buying the kid stuff. Now they could get real he-man drugs. Little bitty, tiny pills.

Okay, so I went to the store in search of the new drug. Hmmm... I guess this is it. But look at the size of the dose. 81 milligrams. Eighty-one? What’s the deal with that? Why not an even 80? Or 100? What’s the business about a silly milligram more?

Back to me friend with the question du jour. That’s just the way it is, I was told. A mini dose is 81 milligrams. Get used to it.

Never one to be satisfied with an answer like that, I had to do some digging. This is what I found out.

A standard aspirin is 325 milligrams. Back in the days before children’s aspirin, parents were instructed to split an adult aspirin. And then split it again. The kid was to receive one-fourth of the original pill.

When children’s aspirins came around, it seemed logical to introduce a pill that was exactly one-fourth the size of the adult aspirin. Well, technically, 325 divided by 4 is 81.25. I guess they figured the extra quarter milligram was taken up in the dust left behind on the kitchen cabinet when the pill was split. Whatever. The drug companies weren’t going to quibble a quarter milligram, but by golly, they were going to get that extra milligram in there.

So a children’s aspirin is 81 milligrams only because the drug companies are good at math and they like rounding.

When the adult mini doses appeared, it made sense to manufacture them in the same molds that were used for the children’s aspirins. So the 81 milligram adult mini aspirin was born.

Doesn’t matter. I take them every day. I still haven’t had a stroke or a heart attack. Or an ulcer. Or an upset stomach, headache, diarrhea, night sweats, fainting spells, or anything else. I still operate heavy machinery any time I feel like it.

And I still don’t have a doctor to call my own.

Vote to Win: A Bad Idea

2006-07-11T05:00:00.000-06:00

The state of Arizona will consider on its November 7 ballot an idea which should be soundly defeated. It’s an idea that is so patently absurd that I’m surprised that I even have to write an article condemning it. But registered voters signed referendum petitions in sufficient numbers over the summer to get this stupid idea on the ballot. So the whole state is going to vote on it in the next general election.

The idea: Pay people to vote.

Actually, the plan is that each person who votes in either the state primary or general election will be given a chance to win a state-run lottery. The grand prize of the lottery (actually, the only prize) will be a cool one million dollars.

Proponents of the plan claim that their goal is to increase voter turnout by giving people something tangible as a reward for their vote. Apparently, these people don’t realize that participation in the democratic process is supposed to be a reward in itself.

Neither side of the debate has forgotten that federal law prohibits making or offering of any “expenditure to any person, either to vote or withhold his vote.” Fans of the law claim that the chance to win a million dollars has no value because it is just that — a “chance”, not actually any compensation.

Well, they’re wrong.

Any statistician, economist, accountant, or casino operator will tell you that the probability that an event will occur contains an inherent value. It is the value of the event multiplied by the likelihood that the event will occur.

I’ll use very round numbers for demonstrative purposes; the concept is the same. If four million people vote and receive a chance to win a million dollars, each chance is worth exactly twenty-five cents. To say that it doesn’t have a value mocks the intelligence of the voting public and denies basic fundamentals of mathematics.

That’s right, they would serve the same purpose if they just handed everybody a brand new Arizona-commemorative quarter at the polling place. And they’d probably make more people happy at the same time.

Even if this hare-brained idea could pass legal muster — which it can’t — I would still question the wisdom of attempting to use such methods to increase voter participation. That makes the assumption that increased voter participation is always a good idea.

In fact, if incentives such as this are enacted, all it will guarantee is that more people will vote that wouldn’t have voted otherwise. People will vote who haven’t studied the issues. They will vote without any idea of who the candidates are. Many will vote without even being able to read English. Many will turn in blank ballots or ballots that will have to be invalidated because they voted for more than one candidate for the same office. Some people will just make random marks on squares on the ballot. They'll do it because they have no interest in excercising their right to vote; they just want that million dollars.

In fact, I can envision the worst possible scenario. A couple of days before the election, the Democratic Party will release advertising with the following message. “Confused about who to vote for, but still want to be entered in the lottery? No problem. Just vote a straight Democratic ticket! That lets you vote for all the best candidates with only one stoke of the pen.”

The biggest problem is that the proposal incites the very people to vote who actually have the least valid reason for voting. The least educated, the least informed, and the those least interested in the democratic process are the ones that would be most drawn to this type of incentive. I don’t want to deny them of their right to vote; but I see no reason to offer them special incentives to do so.

Let’s hope that wisdom prevails among the voters of Arizona and this measure is defeated. It’s a bad idea.

Related to the Pope

2006-07-10T05:00:00.000-06:00

A recent Associated Press article illustrated the intertwining of the generations, using actress Brooke Shields as an example. It seems that the lovely Ms. Shields is related to Charlemagne, William the Conqueror, Niccolo Machiavelli, Hernando Cortes and at least five popes.

The point of the article is not that she is distinguished by her pedigree, rather that such a pedigree is completely normal. Anybody that lived more than a few hundred years ago probably had a half dozen or more children. As such, they undoubtedly have millions of ancestors today.

It is estimated that at least 80% of the population of England is directly descended from King Edward III, who reigned 700 years ago. Even six U.S. presidents can be counted among his descendants.

The Mongolian conqueror Genghis Khan spread his influence — as well as his seed — almost as far as the Holy Roman Empire. Traces of his dna have shown up literally on all corners of the world.

So we don’t have to go all the way back to Adam and Eve to prove that we’re all “cousins”. But that’s not what struck me about the Brooke Shields article. I got hung up on the fact that she was descended from five popes.

When I first read that, my feeble Protestant mind started protesting. Waitaminnit. Aren’t popes actually people that received the ultimate promotion from priesthood? And isn’t a fundamental tenant of priesthood one of celibacy? And if one is celibate doesn’t that make it kinda hard for him to have, uhm, decendents? This certainly required further investigation.

I discovered that the Catholic Church considers celibacy to be a discipline, not a doctrine. It wasn’t until around the year 800 that they decided that a celibate lifestyle was the only acceptable one for a priest. Prior to that, several popes had been family men in quite the literal sense. Even after that, there were a few popes that married and fathered children before they entered the priesthood. In those cases, they can rightfully claim descendents.

And there were a few popes that were just scoundrels. Popes that had illegitimate children (or at least illicit affairs) during their papcy include Pius II, Innocent VIII, Alexander VI, Julius II, Clement VII, Benedict IX, and Pius IV.

It has been claimed that Clement II died while being treated for a venereal disease. And Paul III was said to have postponed his own ordination so he could continue his promiscuous lifestyle, spawning the Protestant Reformation in the process.

In fact, nepotism was so rampant with the pre-reformation popes that several of them were father-son combinations, handing down Peter’s keys to Heaven much like a father might hand down a dry-cleaning business to his son. Maybe it’s not ironic that the word “pope” is taken from the Latin “papa”, which means “father”.

So, Brooke, rejoice in your heritage. There’s a good chance that your family tree — as well as mine — includes a cacophonic mixture of royalty, papacy, mass murderers, world explorers, and shepherd boys. Mixing all that dna over the course of a few generations contributes to the fact that we are all unique in our own little way.

The Pool Ain’t Cool

2006-07-07T05:00:00.000-06:00

We’re coming up to the hottest part of the year. And once again I hear the same insane comments from people. No, I’m not talking about the stupid it’s-not-the-heat-it’s-the-humidity  comments. Those are bad enough. I’m talking about people that think the best way to beat the heat is to go swimming.

“It’s so hot today. All I want to do is get in the pool.”

Excuse me. The last   thing I want to do when it’s hot is to be in the sun. Outside.

I know where these people got their idea. It’s from the Depression. Back then, everybody was poor and nobody had air conditioning. The movie theatres put blocks of ice in front of electric fans to cool the audience. Yeah, I bet that was a treat. But that’s all they had.

Combine that with the drought, dust-bowl conditions, and record-breaking heat of the early 1930s and you can see that people were looking for whatever they could to stay cool.

So they slept on their porches. They slept on their roofs. They slept in the city parks.

And during the day, they cast off their inhibitions and went to the pool. After all, it was the coolest are in town.

Not any more. The most comfortable place in town right now is my living room. 72 degrees. Or whatever I want it to be. It doesn’t get any better than that.

When I drive by a swimming pool on the hottest day of the year, I see a lot of people having a lot of fun. Nothing wrong with that. They’re laughing and playing and splashing and generally having a good time. Good for them.

They’re also sweating, but they probably don’t know it because their too wet from being in the pool.

One thing they’re not  doing, however, is keeping cool. They’re hot, they’re just having too much fun to realize it. They’re playing in the sun, for crying out loud. Nobody is keeping cool by staying in the pool. They’re just keeping their mind off how hot it is.

So if you want to go to the pool on the hottest day of the year to have fun, go for it. God bless you; if that’s the kind of exercise you believe is fun, who am I to stop you? Just don’t tell me that you’re going there to “cool off”.

Next January, when it’s ten degrees below zero, I think I’ll suggest that we all go to an outdoor community campfire so we can stay warm. That makes as much sense as going swimming to stay cool.

The Art of Telecommunications

2006-07-06T05:00:00.000-06:00

Have you noticed that radio transmission towers have lately become more ... well, more interesting?

Before I go further, I had better define a couple of terms. Those tall skinny things supported by guy wires with their regulation faa blinking red lights are not radio antennas. Technically, they are towers. The antenna is just the thing that sits on a tower. Sometimes an antenna sits on the very top; sometimes they are hung on the side. Antennas come in all shapes and sizes. They may be long and slender, they may be spherical or oblong, they may be boxy, or they may be flat.

It’s the antenna’s job to actually transmit and receive radio signals — usually from another antenna far away. The only purpose of the tower is to hoist the antenna into the air to make it more effective.

And lately, it’s the antennas that are making the towers interesting.

Long ago, transmission towers were primarily the domain of commercial radio and television stations. They were impressive; tall and skinny. Well, that was about it. The taller they were, the skinnier they appeared to be. Straight up. About as aesthetic as a pencil lead.

A few years ago, more and more of them started sprouting on the landscape. And these newcomers were different. They had character.

Suddenly, the tops of the towers sprouted wings. Instead of one boring antenna on top, just about every imaginable antenna could be found. Many times, several different types were on the same tower. They jutted from the sides, they sprang from the top, they ringed the midsection.

The thing that made the difference, of course, was the sudden ubiquity of mobile telephones. Now that there are millions of wireless devices roaming around out there, thousands of new transmission towers are required to communicate with them.

Wireless phones have different transmission needs than a regular commercial radio. For one thing, the communication is two-way, unlike your car radio. It’s also full-duplex — which means, unlike a cb radio, the phone can send and receive at the same time.

And other “housekeeping” transmissions have to occur, which you may never be aware of. These are telemetry signals that help the network keep track of where the phones are and whether or not they are turned on and available to receive a call. They also tell a phone when to ring.

And mobile telephones are only part of the wireless communication revolution. All types of wireless devices demand similar communications networks. Blackberries, gps devices, satellite radio signal repeaters; even the computer that I’m typing this article on is plugged into a virtual wireless network and is in constant communication with a tower down the street from my house.

Of course, such complex communications require complex antennas. And in the process of building them, the communications companies inadvertently gave us new works of art. To make it even better, many of them have banded together to put multiple communications systems on one tower. The same structure may contain antennas belonging to Sprint, Verizon, Cingular, and a couple of other local carriers. Each antenna adds its own special flavor to the total picture that makes every transmission tower unique in its own way. And that makes it unique art — high in the rural sky.

The next time you’re zooming down the interstate, look up. There are some really neat high-tech patterns of wires, steel, and fiberglass up there, ready for your viewing pleasure. After you have enjoyed it, don’t forget to thank your wireless provider for the show.

How Cars Move — And Why they Don’t

2006-07-05T05:00:00.000-06:00

Have you ever been stuck in traffic and wondered why nobody is moving? I’m not talking about heavy traffic where you crawl down the interstate at 20 miles an hour. I mean where as far as you can see nobody is moving.

Barring some sort of obstruction in the road — like a major accident or a giant meteor — how can that be possible? If everybody is pointing the same direction on the same road and wanting to get to the same place, how can everybody be sitting still?

This was the question on millions of minds last fall as they attempted to “race” out of New Orleans while Hurricane Katrina was barreling down upon them. Highway officials had reversed the traffic flow on the interstates so extra lanes were available to leave town. Everybody had plenty of warning and they were all essentially going the same direction, i.e., away from the city. So why did they spend so many hours just sitting on the highway?

The same thing happened a few weeks later as Hurricane Rita took aim on Houston. Tempers flared, cars overheated and ran out of gas, but for the most part people found themselves just sitting on the highway for hours at a time.

There’s a simple answer for this. Although cars are generally built to move very fast, they do not maneuver very quickly when they are in close proximity to each other. The closer together that cars are, the more awkward they are and the slower they are driven. It doesn’t matter that they are all going the same direction. It really doesn’t even matter if there are a lot of merging lanes. A congested highway is a slow one.

It’s easiest to understand this concept if we put it in human terms. Let’s say we’re at a major league football game in a packed stadium filled with 75,000 fans. In the middle of the game, an announcement is made that everybody must leave. But half the exits are blocked, so everybody needs to leave via the exits on only one end of the field.

Oh, and there are a few restrictions around leaving. The most important restriction is that nobody can touch anybody else. No touching. At all. Period. You can’t brush against each other, you can’t touch elbows, you can’t even place your hand on somebody’s shoulder.

To make sure nobody touches each other, you should keep a reasonable distance from each other — at least three to eight feet. No closer than that. And when the person next to you moves, you should wait two to five seconds before you begin to move.

That’s what it would be like if we applied the rules of the road on a human scale. Under normal circumstances, a large stadium could be evacuated in half an hour or so. My guess is that if we all had to act like cars, it would take all day to get everybody out of there. And there’d be a lot of people just standing around for a long time.

Another Parent Trap

2006-07-04T05:00:00.000-06:00

Every male who as ever seen Disney’s 1961 version of “The Parent Trap” has fallen in love with Hayley Mills. There’s no way you could get around it. Who wouldn’t fall for the girl with a big grin bouncing back and forth with her hands innocently behind her back as she sings “Let’s Get Together, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah”?

Even girls would have to admit that Brian Keith would make a really cool dad in his country ranch house in northern California. I honestly believe that this is one of the most perfect live-action movies Disney ever created — with the possible exception of “Mary Poppins”.

So why in the name of Walt did the Disney studio believe that this gem needed to be re-made in 1998? Oh, I know. Let’s make money with a proven product. Yeah. Well, I’ll have no part of it. When the new version came out, I had absolutely no interest in it. Nothing was going to mess with my perfect image of Hayley’s Susan and Sharon.

Nothing, that is, until it showed up on cable tv and my son wanted me to watch it with him. No, no, no, don’t watch that version! Let’s rent the real one. You know ... Hayley!

Nope he wanted to watch this one. So I relented.

Actually, it wasn’t too bad. This one was a launching pad for Lindsay Lohan in the dual role of Hallie and Annie. This was a pre-teen Lindsay, when her hair was really red and her freckles actually frecked. She definitely showed promise as an actress. She even hummed a few bars of “Let’s Get Together” in homage to Hayley.

The most remarkable piece of acting was that she pulled off a proper British accent for Annie. In the original movie, Hayley’s British accent was never really explained. Heck, it just added to her charm. In the new version, Annie was raised in London by her mother while Hallie was raised in California by her father. Lindsay did a wonderful job of switching accents seamlessly.

And, of course, technical standards have improved greatly in the last 45 years. Whereas Susan and Sharon’s shots seemed rather contrived and stilted, Annie and Hallie interacted with each other in front of a panning, zooming, and tracking camera with perfect ease. It’s amazing what they can do with electrons in Hollywood these days.

But dangit. Some things just shouldn’t be messed with. Just ask the guys who remade “The Poseidon Adventure”. The ship only overturned but the movie sank quicker than the Titanic. And remember that shot-for-shot re-do of “Psycho”? Sicko.

So Lindsay pulled it off and went on her way to a very successful career in the process — re-working “Freaky Friday” and “The Love Bug” along the way.

But I really wish the suits in Hollywood would realize that some things — such as fond memories in an old man’s heart — are really just better left alone.

Hopefully, This Will Satisfy the Purists

2006-07-03T05:00:00.000-06:00

Being somewhat of a linguistic snob, I take notice when I am accused of puncturing the Queen’s English. So I was somewhat taken aback when I was privately chided for my use of the word “hopefully” in a recent article. I have chosen to come to my own defense.

In the purist sense, “hopefully” means “in a hopeful manner”. It is not to be used casually as a replacement for “I hope” or even the more passive and stuffy “it is hoped that”.

For example, it may be okay to say. “She gazed down the street hopefully, wondering if her lover would ever return.” But it’s not proper to say, “Hopefully, the math teacher will be sick and we won’t have to take that algebra test tomorrow.”

Well, that may be true. But I think that ignores the fact that occasionally we need small pauses in casual writing to allow the reader to grasp the true meaning of what’s being said. Actually, I just demonstrated it. And I just did it again.

Most people read faster than they should. When that happens, the words tend to overflow their comprehension buffer. Words mindlessly enter their consciousness without being adequately considered, studied, pondered, and comprehended.

When writing in a casual style, sometimes the author needs to plant little devices into the text to slow things down. Kinda like linguistic speed bumps. They aren’t exactly “noise” words because they actually provide some extra meaning to the sentence. But they require a little extra mental processing, which in turn slows the mind down. If these little gems weren’t sprinkled through the text, the reader would be, in effect, “over-driving his headlights”, venturing into uncharted territory without proper guidance.

For some reason, adverbs fit that bill very well. An occasional “actually”, “really”, and yes, even “hopefully” can be used in that fashion. Not only do they provide a little emphasis or clarification to the subject, but they provide a brief pause in the action — a time for the reader to reflect on what has just been said and to anticipate what is to come.

Of course, any device like that can be overused — especially in casual conversation. I once worked with a guy who began every sentence with “basically”. It didn’t provide any meaning or clarification. It didn’t enhance or give any credibility to what he was about to say. It was just a bad habit. A dreadful habit, actually.

In one meeting, several of us threatened to throw a stapler at him the next time he began a sentence with the word “basically”. He looked at us — quite terrified — and never said another word the entire meeting.

Actually, it was a very pleasant silence. Hopefully, he learned his lesson. Really, he had it coming.

Tipping

2006-06-30T05:00:00.000-06:00

The most insane of all Western customs that exists today is that stupid little practice known as “tipping”. Whoever first came up with this asinine idea should be paid minimum wage and then should be tied up and have unimaginable things happen to him as everybody passes by, bribing him for better service by waving dollar bills in his face.

Depending on the circumstance, the idea of tipping is either:
  a) to bribe a service provider to give you with superior service
    or
  b) to reward a service provider for providing such service.

At least, that’s what they’d have you believe.

Okay, so why do I have to tip the doorman at a hotel for carrying my bags? Isn’t that his job? If I don’t tip him, what’s he gonna do? Drop them down the elevator shaft? Maybe the idea of the tip is so he provides service genteelly. Is that what I’m doing? Paying a buck a bag for a smile?

And why am I supposed to tip the skycap if he takes my bag at the curb, but not the ticket agent if he takes my bag at the gate? And what about the poor guy who’s actually in the hot sun or blizzard-like cold throwing my bag on that conveyor belt that leads to the belly of the plane? He probably works harder than all of us, but he doesn’t deserve a tip because he doesn’t get a chance to smile at me? That’s ridiculous.

Since I have a hard time figuring out tipping of bell staff and baggage handlers, I’ve taken to always giving them their tip as wadded up dollar bills. They always smile and cram their reward in their pocket, feigning humility as they salute me with a tip their hat. Hopefully, my dollar bill will get mixed up with everybody else’s and they won’t know if I tipped them one dollar a bag or five dollars a bag or twenty-five cents a bag.

See? The tipping system is so out of whack that I have resorted to crumpling George. I should be ashamed.

I never have to tip the front desk people at a hotel. They smile without it. They’re polite. Heck, they usually even speak English intelligibly, unlike any taxi driver I have ever met. But they don’t need a tip. They just do their job. Duh. Like they’re supposed to.

What about casino dealers? I win a big hand so they think they deserve part of it? Like they had something to do with my luck? Did they put their money at risk? No, they just happened to be there.

But the silliest of all is waiters and waitresses. I know, they’re in a strictly service job. You’re totally at their mercy. Or they’re totally at your mercy. Or something like that. But they’re supposed  to provide good service. They’re supposed  to smile. It’s part of their job. Why should they have to be bribed to do it?

The room service menu on a hotel I recently stayed at says that a 20% gratuity is added to every bill. 16.57% of that goes to the delivery person and the remainder goes to the kitchen and support staff. Where in the world they came up with that formula, I have no idea. But that doesn’t stop them from having their hand out when they deliver my meal, begging for more. It’s insane.

Why can’t the restaurant owners just pay the wait staff what they’re worth? Makes sense to me. What? That would increase the price of the meal? Would that put anybody out of business? The price of a $5.00 hamburger would go up to $6.00. Would anybody notice? Probably not. But I’d be so happy at the prospect of not having to figure out a tip that I might just eat there every day.

So here’s the punch line. Workers: Do your job. I don’t get tips for my job; why should you? Employers: Pay people what they’re worth; let the economics level the playing field for all.

It just makes sense.

New Car Smell

2006-06-29T05:00:00.000-06:00

I got my car washed today. Notice that I didn’t say I “washed” my car. I can’t remember the last time I “washed” my car.

I take it to one of those full-service car washes. At this one, you pull up and talk to a well-groomed college kid — five years from now, he’s going to be a vice president at some bank or maybe a top salesman in his district. You decline the special that they’re having today on detailing and hand-waxing, take a receipt from him, and turn over your car for the bath of a lifetime. It goes into a long tunnel where it is showered, scrubbed, polished, and rinsed.

It emerges from the other side, drenched but generally happy. Then about three or four more college boys pounce on it to give it a good rubdown. (In ten years, they will all be cpas working for Mr. Order-Taker on the other end of the tunnel. But today, hey, working at a car wash pays better than spending your summer as a life guard.)

When they are done, they signal that your car is ready. You press a few dollar bills in their hand — nobody knows why, but everybody has to do it. And then they ask you “the question”.

“What fragrance would you like today, sir?”

The answer, of course, is always the same.

“New car.”

If people would stop and consider what the “new car smell” really is, they probably wouldn’t be so excited about it. It’s actually a complex combination of volatile organic compounds including several varieties of glue, solvents, and paint. Mix that with some fumes from freshly-curing leather and vinyl, bake it with sunlight in an enclosed environment for several hours each day, and you have a delightful aroma — sure to please your senses and remind you of the first time you sat in the car and look down, noticing an odometer that registered fewer than ten miles. What a treat!

There’s a good reason why we treat the new car smell with the same sense of denial that forbids us from thinking about what’s really in a hot dog. The reason is because the sense of smell is one of the most effective triggers for memories — usually fond memories. The source or the toxicity of the smell are overcome by the association to the memory.

And the association with “freshness” is one of life’s greatest joys.

A friend of mine once told our department secretary that she smelled like a freshly-mopped floor. It was intended as a compliment and she took it as such. She knew that “freshness” was the true association with the smell. It didn’t matter if she smelled like Ajax or Mr. Clean or Glade. The fact was that she smelled “fresh”, and that’s all that mattered.

Anybody over the age of 40 remembers the fresh aroma of a page printed by a spirit duplicator. Sparkling white paper and fuzzy blue ink were the rule of the day when I was in school. It didn’t matter that your algebra test was printed with a 50/50 combination of isopropanol and methanol. The fact was, you knew everything was going to be okay because, well, the test smelled “fresh”.

People are making millions of dollars today because they have perfected car odorants that smell like volatile organic compounds and women’s perfume that smells like Lysol.

I think I could make a bundle if I could invent a spray that smelled like a ditto machine. Image the sniffing that would happen in my next meeting if I were to spray the agendas before I passed them out. We’d probably have to adjourn the meeting early, just so everybody could go back to their cubicles and inhale to their heart’s content in blissful privacy.

The Uh-Oh Second

2006-06-28T05:00:00.000-06:00

In this world of micro-seconds, nano-seconds, and pico-seconds, it is becoming more and more important to measure increasingly smaller units of time.

I’ve heard that the smallest measurable unit of time is the time between when the light turns green and the guy behind you begins to honk.

I have determined that there is an even smaller, more definitive unit of time. I call it the “Uh-oh second”.

An uh-oh second is the unit of time between when answer “Yes” to the computer’s question “Are you sure” and you realize you weren’t. Uh-oh.

You just deleted a file that you didn’t intend to. You just exited a program. You just closed a session. You just completed an order. Your credit card just got billed. Whatever. You did it. It’s too late.

The uh-oh second can be applied to many other aspects of life. It’s the time between when you slam your car door shut and you realize your keys are in the seat. It’s the time between when find yourself pouring catsup on a hot dog and you realize that your son had asked for mustard.

It’s the time between when you complete drilling a 3/4 inch hole and you realize you should have drilled a 3/8 inch hole. It’s the time between when you introduce your new wife to your best friend and you realize you just used your ex-wife’s name.

Uh-oh.

I discovered a whole new genre of uh-oh seconds recently when I purchased a new shredder for my home office.

The office trash can is a wonderful invention. It’s a kinda purgatory for paper. It’s the place where paper goes when you don’t think you need it any more, but before you’re really ready to give it the official heave-ho to the landfill.

But privacy concerns — and a burning desire to experiment with a new source of mulch — lead me to replace my office trash can with a brand new Fellowes shredder. This is the one that they advertise on television with a bulldog confetti-making machine, making a mess of the office to the delight of the owner. “Good boy.”

What I learned very quickly about office shredders is that they are very unforgiving. Instant judgment.

Credit card solicitation. Rrrrip. Another credit card solicitation. Rrrrip. Home equity loan solicitation. Rrrrip. Mutual fund solicitation. Rrrrip. Credit card bill. Rrrrip.

Uh-oh.

The shortest measurable unit of time is the time between when you shred a bill that you need to pay and you realize you have no idea what in the heck that was that you just shredded, but it must have been something important.

Purgatory never looked so good.

Systematically Learning About “Systemic”

2006-06-27T05:00:00.000-06:00

A few months ago, I had a problem with bugs in my bushes. So I made a trip to my friendly lawn and garden store and explained my problem. An associate at the store reached up and pulled off a bottle off the shelf. “You need a systemic pesticide. This will take care of it for you.”

I consider myself to be somewhat of a master of the English language. I try to use words like “ubiquitous” and “esoteric” in everyday conversation just to keep people around me on their toes. But I absolutely hate admitting in public that I have no idea what’s going on. So there was no way that I was going to admit that I didn’t know what “systemic” meant.

Assuming the store clerk knew more than I did, I bought the potion, sprayed it on my plants, and the bugs curled up and melted away. Oh well, who needs linguistics when chemistry works?

Some time after that, I heard some people talking at work about their bug problems at home. “What you need is a systemic pesticide”, I overheard. Hmmm... Well, I still don’t know what it means, but it must have something to do with killing bugs. So that’s good enough for me. I filed it away in my brain with the definition of other horticultural things and went on with my life.

A few days ago, I was listening to some political commentary on the radio. The analyst said that corruption in Congress was “systemic”.

Waitaminnit. What does pesticide have to do with Congress? Obviously, there is more to this word than I originally thought. This demands some investigation.

I discovered that “systemic” comes from the original Greek word that means “to combine” and is related to other English words such as “system” and “synergy”. They all have something to do with the bringing together of disparate things so that they act together. Makes sense.

In agriculture, a “systemic” pesticide is one that is absorbed into the sap of a plant or the bloodstream of an animal which is harmless to the host but which renders it toxic to invaders. As an extension, it can be applied to anything that is rampant throughout an organization to the degree that it affects the body in general — such as the usage when applied to corruption in Congress.

The Tower of Babel aside, human language is essentially an invention of, well, humans. As such, it is an imperfect creation, but one that is rich in history, tradition, and culture. English as we speak it today has only been around for a few hundred years. Deciphering the language of our Founding Fathers only 250 years ago can be somewhat of a challenge.

But that’s part of the charm of the language. There is a wonderful serendipity that results when we discover that the same word can be used in reference to pests in the garden as well as to pests in politics. And we can trace it all back to ancient Greece.

I hope I never learn everything there is to know about English. It would be a shame to think that I already know it all and that there are no more mysteries waiting to be unraveled.

Rocking with Ringo

2006-06-26T05:00:00.000-06:00

Men deal with mid-life crises in many different ways. Some men have an affair. Some buy a new convertible. Some quit their job and go on a world-wide cruise.

I brought a drum set.

I’ve been a musician my entire life. I think I’ve played the piano ever since I could read. And I’ve been a percussionist for the last 15 years or so.

But I’ve always wanted to be a drummer. My best friend in high school was a drummer. I had hung around drummers all my life. But I remained safely ensconced in the confines of timpani, congos, tambourines, and xylophones. All the while, I yearned for the free-wheeling and controlled-frantic feeling that only a rock drummer can enjoy.

So, being of sound mind, proper financial means, and appropriate motivation, I brought a drum set, a few sticks and cymbals, and yes, a copy of “Drums for Dummies” — just to keep from totally embarrassing myself.

How does one practice drums without a band or a regular venue in which to perform? I bought a set of sound-isolating headphones with an extra-long cable. I plugged it into my stereo, tuned the radio to the local “oldies” station, and started rocking to the greatest hits of the 60s and 70s.

With a little practice, I got pretty good. Soon I was playing along with the Beatles, the Stones, Elton John, Linda Ronstadt; it really didn’t matter who or what was playing. If it came on the radio, I rocked along with it. There was something comforting — fulfilling — about finally living the dream of being a great rock musician, even if it was only in my own mind.

One night, I was playing along with the Beatles’ “Let it Be”. Suddenly, I was struck with a sense of awe that took me quite by surprise.

I was playing drums with Ringo Starr.

It was almost like Ringo was right in the room with me, smiling approvingly as he watched his protégé learn his trade, albeit late in life. I literally had to stop for a moment and, with my hands to my side, listen to the symphonic orchestration of Ringo’s percussion for the rest of the song.

Ringo had already established himself as a great drummer before he was with the Beatles. John and Paul actively sought him out to be in their band. They knew he was exactly what they needed to round out their little group of musicians. And with the addition of Ringo, the Fab Four from Liverpool spent the next seven years rewriting the history of rock music.

In his early days, he played with a four-piece kit rather than the standard five-piece — eschewing the middle tom-tom. Even though he is left-handed, he played with a right-hand setup, often leading with his left hand. These innovations gave Ringo’s style a distinctive sound as he influenced the development of early rock-and-roll drum music.

Ringo understood that the role of a drummer in a rock band is a supportive one. His playing was never in the forefront, was never ostentatious. But if you listen closely, you’ll hear him doing things in the background that are so creative and so unique that it is no wonder he remains one of the most influential rock drummers even today.

And that’s exactly what I do. As I’m playing along with the radio, I’ll play just about any song that happens to come along.

But when a Beatles song comes on, it’s more likely that I’ll just be listening. Listening for inspiration. Listening to learn.

Thank you, Ringo, for everything you’ve taught me.

Mayor Bloomberg and His Money

2006-06-23T05:00:00.000-06:00

Michael Bloomberg is the mayor of New York City. And he must have really wanted the job, because five years ago he spent $74 million on his campaign to get it. His own money.

He must have liked the job once he got it, because last year he spent $85 million to get reelected. His own money. That comes to about $113 per vote.

Mr. Bloomberg founded one of the largest and most successful financial information companies in the world and has a personal wealth of more than five billion dollars. So he can afford to drop a few million here and there on extraneous ventures. He doesn’t need to work another day in his life. So he has decided to lead the largest city in the world’s last remaining super power. The city that sits in the middle of a red bulls-eye for every terrorist organization with a plane ticket or a stick of dynamite.

When studying elected leaders, we are often urged to “follow the money”. The prevailing wisdom says that politicians are usually beholden to the whims of those who put him in power. That makes sense when the major contributors are labor unions or fringe activist groups.

But what does it mean when the major contributor is the politician himself? It can’t be that he needs the job to support his ego; there are much easier (and cheaper) ways to have one’s ego stroked. It’s not just a power grab. In spite of his great potential power, he still regularly rides the subway to work. And it certainly isn’t because he needs the money. Refusing the traditional mayor’s salary, he receives a token one dollar per year in compensation.

Bloomberg seems to be one of those rare breeds who actually is a public servant because he feels like he needs to serve the public. He spent his own money to avoid the repressive campaign finance reform laws that limited his opponents. As a result, he doesn’t owe anybody anything. Nobody can buy him. Nobody can influence him. He can stand on his own principles and govern in a way that is most beneficial to the people who elected him.

New Yorkers must like him. The staunchly liberal city reelected this Republican by a 20% margin last year.

You gotta admire a guy that puts up 17% of his entire personal worth to get a thankless job in a city that should be suspicious of a rich corporate suit. My hat’s off to him.

The Original Diet Coke

2006-06-22T05:00:00.000-06:00

In 1963, the marketing guys at Coca-Cola had an interesting problem. Coke needed to respond to the Royal Crown Cola Company, who had come up with a fairly successful product known as Diet-Rite Cola. Today we take diet versions of cola for granted. But in the early 1960s, that was a revolutionary concept. All these bikini-clad girls were suddenly concerned about their figure, but they still wanted to drink their favorite beverage without guilt. Substituting cyclamate for sugar seemed like a good plan.

So the product development department at Coke got busy and developed what was essentially Coca-Cola without the sugar. All that was left was to put it in a bottle, stick it on the grocer’s shelves, and kick some Diet-Rite butt with a 300-pound gorilla marketing plan.

Watiaminnit, said the Suits. What are they going to call this stuff? They can’t just call it (gasp) “Diet Coke”. After all, they had spent millions of dollars protecting and preserving the honored, hallowed, cherished Coca-Cola brand. To dilute it by putting the word “diet” in front of it would be — well, it would be heresy! (Today, we would call it “brand extension” — think “Honey Nut Cherios” — but that was a foreign concept at the time.)

So they turned to the market research department. Come up with a brand new name for this product. Some short, snappy, memorable. And do it quick! We can’t afford to have Diet-Rite eat one more fraction of a percent of our market share.

(Meanwhile, the execs at Pepsi were watching all this with a combination of amusement and blissful ignorance. It would be a couple of years before “Diet Pepsi” showed up on the market — with no apparent concern about diluting a trademarked name that had been playing second fiddle to Coke for years.)

The marketers at Coca-Cola huddled in their conference rooms in Atlanta, shuttering and shivering at the thought that they might make a marketing blunder. This was too important of a job for mere mortals. They must call upon the gods. The gods of ibm.

At the time, the ibm 1401 was a relatively new workhorse. It was the size of an average living room and had been introduced as a “business” computer, as opposed to a scientific computer. It was used to maintain customer records at banks and actuary tables at insurance companies. It was a 6-bit machine that contained a maximum 16Kb of data in its core memory. (For perspective, a typical two-page Word document is about 20Kb in size. Yes, folks, this computer could just about hold this entire article in memory.)

The folks in the it department were eager to find creative uses for their new toy. So they were overjoyed when the marketing department asked for their help. Could they use their brand new computer to generate a list of all possible four-letter word combinations?

The geeks put their slide rulers to work and their pencils to paper. Did they realize that would generate a list of 456,976 words to chose from? Back to the marketers. Hmmmm... Okay how about a list of four-letter words that contain only one vowel? Back to the slide rulers. Okay, that would be a list of only 192,000 words.

So the computer went to work. Disks whirred, tapes spun, lights dimmed. Green-bar paper spewed from high-speed printers. Long hours, late into the night.

Finally, the list was delivered. Marketing poured all over it, eliminating unpronounceable and potentially offensive words. Brows sweated. Pizza was consumed. Tensions rose.

Finally, they emerged with the winner. The new product was going to be named...

“TABB!”

The creative guys got their hands on it. Okay, that could work because they could use the double-entendre of keeping “tabs” on the calories that are consumed. But the extra “B” was kinda in the way. A logo was invented with distinctive capitalization: “TaB”. Yeah, that’s it. Genius!

The rest, as they say, is history.

The geeks were left scratching their heads. Hey, we thought they wanted a four-letter word. If they had asked for a list of three-letter words — gee, that would have generated only (putting the slide-ruler to work again) 17,576 potential words to pick from. Why can’t anybody in the marketing department get their requirements established before they ask us to do all that work?

The ibm 1401 computer is now legendary with computer history buffs. Today, you probably have more computing power in your wristwatch than the machine that named Tab. In fact, doing the research for this article, I wrote a macro in Excel that duplicated the effort. It took me about three minutes to write and 3.5 seconds for my computer to execute.

But this represented one of the first successful joint ventures between a marketing department and a computer department and is thus worthy of historical note.

Of course, 40 years later, it still doesn’t do what marketing initially asks for. And marketing still can’t write user requirements that they can live with through the end of the project.

Some things never change.

Buying Cred

2006-06-21T05:00:00.000-06:00

Many years ago as a high school student, I gave piano lessons to my little brother for a few weeks. It was a big mistake. I’m surprised that we still talk to each other after all these years.

When it came time for my son to take piano lessons, I wisely opted myself out of candidates to be his teacher. There was no way that I was going to put my fatherhood on the line by trying to assume the role of piano teacher.

And the reason why? In my son’s eyes, I lacked credibility, or “cred” as it’s known on the street. (With the bro’s in the ’hood, why should one use five syllables when one will do?)

The funny thing about cred is that you first have to earn  it. Then, after it’s earned, it must be purchased  to be effective.

Consider this. If you have some problem — personal, financial, professional, whatever — the last person you should go to for advice is a close friend or family member. You need to go to someone who has earned  cred. That’s probably somebody with a degree, with appropriate experience or training, or somebody that is recognized as an expert in his field.

Even if you’re fortunate to have an expert in your family who has earned cred, they probably aren’t a good candidate to help you because of the other requirement — you have to buy  the cred from them. It doesn’t do any good to get advice from somebody unless you have some “skin” in the game. And the way you get “skin” is to pay for it.

Countries with socialized health care systems are learning this the hard way. When you have to pay for your medical advice, you tend to ration your need for it. The system balances itself naturally.

But when health care is free, the patient has nothing at risk. Even though the doctor has earned  his cred by going to medical school, the patient isn’t required to buy  his cred. With nothing to lose, there is nothing stopping the patient from consuming the product (in this case, health care advice) with aimless abandon. Soon the health care system is overloaded and would collapse if not for some sort of mandatory rationing.

Ask any doctor in Canada and they will tell you that their day is filled seeing perfectly healthy people that just want to have somebody to talk to. And nothing is stopping them from doing it because they have nothing to lose. They aren’t required to buy the “cred” from the doctor, so the system is imploding.

Back to the piano lessons. I may have earned my cred with my brother and my son, but neither of them had to buy it from me. So I was irrelevant and ineffective.

“Son, I think you should practice each hand separately on that song and then put them together only after you have mastered each one.”

“No, Dad. That’s not the right way to practice piano.”

See? No cred.

A couple of months later...

“Son, I’m glad to see that you are practicing your hands separately now.”

“Yeah, that’s the way my piano teacher told me to practice. It works so much better than trying to learn them both at the same time. I’ll put them together after I have learned them separate from each other.”

Same advice, different results. His piano teacher has cred. His dad — me — well, my cred might as well be crud for all it’s worth.

Dixie Hockey

2006-06-20T05:00:00.000-06:00

I woke up this morning to the news that the Stanley Cup finals for the National Hockey League ended last night. And the winner was Carolina.

My first thought — after I realized they were still playing hockey in the middle of June — was, Carolina has a hockey team?  Isn’t the land of Raleigh/Durham/Cary/Chapel Hill the domain of Duke and North Carolina and NC State? Do they even know what a puck is? Heck, do they even know what ice   is? Do they know how to play any sports down there that doesn’t include a 10-inch round orange ball or a football-shaped brown, uh, football?

And for Pete’s sake, they beat some Canadians. Not wimpy French “Canadiens”, as they’re known in Montreal. These are real manly Canadians: the Houston, er, I mean Edmonton Oilers.

Shoot, the Canadians practically invented  hockey. They actually understand the definition of “icing”. And they know how in the heck somebody can be “offsides” when there are men skating all over the place instead of starting each play lined up neatly on each side of the ball, uh, puck. I think the Canadians deserve to win just for being cerebral enough to understand the game.

But wait, there’s more. It turns out this wasn’t just a Dixie-vs-Cannuck fluke. Yessir, ladies and gentlemen. Last year’s Stanley Cup was won by ... (are you ready for this?) ... the Tampa Bay Lightning. That’s right, they actually play hockey in Florida!

Sheesh, next you’ll be telling me that they play baseball in Montreal. Waitaminnit. That’s right. They actually used  to play baseball there, but nobody noticed. So they moved the team to Washington dc.

God bless America. At least Major League Baseball finally figured out what sport belongs where.

Now, if we can only convince the nfl to restore the St. Louis Cardinals, the Los Angeles Rams, and the Baltimore Colts to their rightful locations.

The Golden Rule of Business

2006-06-19T05:00:00.000-06:00

Most of the work that I do is project-related. A project is identified, a team is assembled, and a team leader is chosen. Some projects last only a few days; some go on for months. They all overlap so I’m usually working on several projects at a time in various stages of completion.

One project team I was involved with had one very uncooperative team member. Although he claimed to be working on the project’s behalf, it was very obvious to me and to the other team members that he was much more interested in drawing attention to himself. I was the one on the team that had to work the closest with him — which meant that I had to put up with most of his foolishness and cover for many of his mistakes.

The project leader knew of my problems and was sympathetic to them. But in the best interests of getting the work done, we all agreed to do the best we could with what we had to work with — even if that meant putting up with the rudeness and incompetence of the most uncooperative team member I have ever worked with.

Toward the end of the project, the team leader caught me in a particularly “down” mood, pulled me aside, and said “Joe, it’s nice to have somebody like you on my team.”

What a breath of fresh air! With one statement, I learned what the project manager was actually looking for. And received a “stroke” to make me feel better.

As the project progressed, I watched the other team members’ behavior, compared it to my own, and put myself in the position of the project lead. I soon realized that the best behavior would be one that I would want if I were the leader of the team.

Obviously, “Mr. Uncooperative” didn’t understand that concept. I can’t believe that he would actually want himself on his team. Certainly, he wouldn’t want a whole team of people like himself. Nothing would ever get done because everybody would be fighting for attention for themselves.

When you were young, you probably learned something about the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” With this project, I realized that the rule works in business as well as it does in personal relationships.

I learned that the best way to be a team member is to be the type of member that you would want to have on a team. I now measure my behavior on a team with the question, “Is that the type of behavior that I would want a member of my team to exhibit?” All I have to do is remove myself from the process, turn around and look at myself, and observe what I am doing.

If the Golden Rule of life is “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”, the ancillary Golden Rule of Business should be “Be the type of team member that you would like to have on your team.”

Why No Pope Joe

2006-06-16T05:00:00.000-06:00

I have always been proud of my given name. There were several great men named Joe in the Bible. Joe was Jesus’ earthly father. A guy named Joe donated the tomb in which they laid Jesus to rest. And that fellow in the Old Testament with the Technicolor Dreamcoat was named Joe.

So when we got a new pope last year, I was excited that his name was Joseph Ratzinger. There had never been a Pope Joe before. At last, this fine name had a chance to be recognized in all its papal greatness.

But waitaminnit. Cardinal Ratzinger decided he didn’t like “Joe”. He was going to go down in history as Pope Benedict XVI. There would be no Pope Joe I.

Needless to say, I was crushed. “Benedict” may be a fine name in Vatican circles, but in American culture, it conjures up images of the traitor, Mr. Arnold. Nobody names their kid “Benedict” any more. Benjamin, perhaps. But Benedict sounds so 18th century.

That got me to thinking about why popes are named the way they are. Why don’t they like the names their own mother gave them? And what’s with all the X’s and V’s and I’s? So I did a little research.

It can all be traced to a 6th century monk named Mercurius. He had the distinct misfortune of being named by his mother after the Roman god Mercury. Poor kid. He might as well have been named Darth Vader. All the other kids in seminary laughed at him.

That is, until they he was elected pope. Funny how life-changing events like that turns everybody’s perspective around.

Knowing that he was due the last laugh, he could have gone on with his life as Pope Mercury. But there was something, well, sacrilegious about that. It was a legacy that he couldn’t bear to take credit for.

So he started a new trend. He decided that he should be named after his favorite ex-pope, who had reigned just a decade or so before. Nobody was going to argue because, hey, he’s the Pope. And that’s how Monk Mercury became known as Pope John II.

The Catholic Church treats tradition with as much respect as Tevye’s prayer shawl. So when one pope decides to do something, most of the others follow suit. For that reason, virtually every pope after that has assumed the name of some previous pope. There’s really no reason for it. It’s just something that Mercury, I mean, John II did. And it seems like a quaint little tradition to uphold for 1500 years.

But all those Roman numerals get messy sometimes. After all, there’s a finite number of names to pick from, so they start getting reused rather quickly. And it seems like every other one likes the name John. Or Paul. Or John Paul. Which brings us to an interesting story about Pope John XX.

When popes first started borrowing names from each other, nobody cared much to keep track of everything. (The marketing geniuses at the nfl figured out that numbering Super Bowls with Roman numerals was pretty cool; the marketing guys at the Vatican weren’t that on the ball.) After a while, there were a bunch of Johns and Pauls and Stephens piling up and somebody decided to make sense of it all. So here come the Roman numerals.

But that got even more complicated with anti-popes and the Holy Roman Empire (which was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire). How do you count the guys that laid claim to the papacy but that were later found to be heretics? Or how do you count heretics that were martyred although they were later found to be true men of God?

It took several hundred years to sort it all out. After a bunch of arguing about who’s “in” and who’s “out” as a pope, they settled on a bunch of numbers to give everybody.

And all was fine until the year 1276 when Pedro Hispano — the first Portuguese pope — wanted to be called John. Oops. They found out that he was only the nineteenth Pope to be named John, but there was already a Pope John XIX. So for some reason, they decided to skip a number and Pedro became John XXI. For that reason, there is no Pope John XX. And there never will be, either.

There’ll probably never be a Pope Joe I, either. I think that’s a shame. It’s such a nice name.

How Knives Work

2006-06-15T05:00:00.000-06:00

Have you ever wondered how a knife works? How is it that a machine as simple as a blade of metal is able to accomplish things so elegantly that we could only do with brute force?

Take, for example, a steak knife. If you want to eat a steak, you have the option of picking it up in your fingers and ripping off bite-size pieces to put in your mouth. But isn’t it much more neat and convenient to have a knife neatly slice through the meat, giving it a clean edge and a perfectly sized piece? How does it do that?

Everybody knows that a knife is better when it’s “sharp”. What does “sharp” mean? It means that the edge comes to a definite point instead being rounded.

Consider it this way. When you push down on a knife, you exert force through the knife onto the piece of meat. Let’s say that’s a force of, oh, five pounds or so. But it’s not just five pounds. That force is spread over the surface area of the meat where the knife meets it.

Hang in there. We’re getting close to understanding how this works.

Suppose you lay the knife on its side and push down. That five pounds of force is now spread over the surface of the knife blade — perhaps two or three square inches. Not much cutting power there, huh? Just a mushed-up piece of meat.

Now turn the knife on its sharp edge. Push down with the same force. That same five pounds of force is still being exerted on the meat. But instead of being spread over two or three square inches, the force is concentrated. Let’s see — how much area do you think is represented by the edge of the knife as opposed to the side? Infinitesimal, don’t you think? And the sharper the knife is, the less surface area is represented by the edge and the more concentrated the force is.

Knives work not because they are strong, but because they concentrate all their strength in a very small area.

There’s a lesson to be learned from this. When we are in a struggle, it often isn’t important how strong we are — individually or collectively. What really makes us effective is when all our strength is concentrated in a small area. The greater the concentration, the more effective our relative strength.

“Sharpening” our skills doesn’t refer to making us stronger, smarter, or better. It means learning how to effectively utilize the skills that we already have — concentrating them in a small area — to get the job done.

Katrina was not a Hurricane

2006-06-14T05:00:00.000-06:00

A few days ago, I heard the voice of a commentator on the radio railing about global warming. Giving examples of receding glaciers and rising sea levels, he said “Katrina was just the beginning!”

A few days later, I saw a similar article in the paper. “If you thought Katrina was bad, just wait till you see this year’s crop of hurricanes spawned by the fastest rise in global temperatures in centuries.”

As bad of a storm as it was, the fact that these commentators are forgetting is that the tragedy of Katrina was not that it was a hurricane.

Most of the people that died in Katrina actually died a couple of days after the storm struck. They were the people that foolishly stayed behind and drown in the flood.

Most of the property damage was not the result of buildings being blown over. The buildings were destroyed by the resulting flood that left them standing in water up to their eaves for weeks after the storm went by.

Did you catch that? Katrina was not a hurricane. It was a flood.

Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans as a Category 3 hurricane, somewhat weaker than the Category 5 Hurricane Andrew that barreled across Florida over a decade ago. It was an unfortunate coincidence that a slightly stronger-than-average hurricane hit a heavily populated area. A little more to the east or west and it would have been a lot different story. A slightly stronger or weaker hurricane would have created a completely different scenario.

But there it was. A monster, but not the biggest monster ever. And not the product of increased global temperatures. Just an average hurricane that wandered into the wrong area of demographics. Literally a meteorological bull in a china closet. The bull doesn’t know how he got there or what damage he was doing. He just wants out. And that’s what Katrina was. She didn’t aim for a large population area; it just happened to be in the way.

The real tragedy was the failure of the levees.

Thousands of people had weathered the storm in their homes. Thousands more had sought refuge in the Superdome. And they all lived through the storm, wandering outside the next day to a clear sky and an uncertain future.

But then the levees broke. There is plenty of blame to pass around for the failure of the levees. They were managed by corrupt, disjunct local authorities who failed to communicate with each other. The Army Corps of Engineers now has evidence that they weren’t as structurally sound as they originally thought. The city of New Orleans failed to spend money properly that had been allocated for their maintenance. The federal government failed to properly oversee the distribution of that money. Everybody failed to heed years of warnings by engineers and in the local press that the entire levee system was a disaster waiting to happen.

Add to that, the population of New Orleans had suffered through years of corrupt Democratic rule which had trained them that the government was the solution to all their problems. So when they were told to get out of town, a large number of them decided to sit and wait, thinking they were going to be cared for. When the local government collapsed and the federal government was slow to respond, they had nowhere to turn, because they had no means or inclination to help themselves.

Katrina was a massive failure of engineering, government, and society which exacted a toll of epic proportions on the property and the population of New Orleans. But please, don’t use the words “Katrina” and “global warming” in the same sentence. They have nothing to do with each other.

Message to AARP: I Don’t Need You

2006-06-13T05:00:00.000-06:00

This year, I celebrated one of those dreaded birthdays with a “zero” in it. Turning over a new decade is kinda like walking down a hallway in an office building and then rounding a corner. Everything is familiar, but suddenly different at the same time.

What do I get for my half-century of life on this planet? I am deluged with offers to join that most dreaded of all liberal organizations, the aarp.

They don’t like to be called their former name, the “American Association of Retired Persons”. They discovered a few years ago that they could get more members if they target “old” people, rather than “retired” people. Of course, they define “old” as anybody over 50. (We younger old people tend to hang around longer — less attrition, you know.)

So the aarp (Don’t you just love that acronym?) wants me to join, eh? Well, they can save their money. I have long known that aarp (It just flows from the tongue, doesn’t it?) is an ultra-liberal organization, much more interested in selling their services to finance their left-wing causes than they are in actually providing value to their membership.

In their marketing literature, the aarp (Aaaaaarp! They should fire the marketing department that came up with that name!) lists 22 specific “benefits” that I would receive by joining. I won’t bore you with all 22. Here are the highlights; the most comical benefits from aarp (Sounds like a cat with a fur ball, doesn’t it?) and the reasons why such benefits are totally irrelevant in my life.

A subscription to the bi-monthly magazine, AARP The Magazine. This thing used to be called Modern Maturity. They took a magazine that sounded like it belonged in a nursing home and changed the name to a combination throat-clearing sound and a redundant noun. I think I’ll write a book and name it the “Auugggghh Book”. It would make as much sense.

A subscription to the AARP Bulletin to “keep informed on current legislation and issues that affect you most.” Like cradle-to-grave government health care and other failed socialist programs.

Access to the aarp web site. What, is there something there that I can’t get anywhere else on the Internet for free? Have they never heard of WebMD? Or Google?

Savings on hotels, motels, resorts, airfares, cruises... The list goes on. A combination of Expedia and PriceLine is all I need.

Know that aarp is standing up for your rights like fighting predatory home loan lending. Oh, they’re protecting stupid people from making stupid investments.

Low-interest credit card. I haven’t paid a dime of interest to a credit card company in years. When you come out with a NO-interest card, I may be interested.

aarp endorsed auto and homeowners insurance. Just because an insurance company paid aarp to endorse them doesn’t make them a better deal.

Pharmacy services with convenient delivery to your mailbox. I haven’t taken a prescription drug in ten years. When I do, Walgreen's is just down the street.

Rewarding volunteer opportunities. What? I need to pay to join an organization to volunteer?

aarp safe-driving course. Now they’re insulting my perfect driving record!

Reduced cost health insurance.They actually think it’d be a good idea for me to buy health insurance from a company whose primary customers are old people who consume 85% of all health care expenses in this country. That makes about as much sense as buying dental insurance from the nhl Player’s Association.

Sorry, aarp. You have nothing for me. You can save a bunch of money by not marketing to me.

Try me again in another 25 or 30 years, when I’m really old. I won’t listen to you then, either. But I could probably use another good laugh by then.

What Makes a Joke Funny

2006-06-12T05:00:00.002-06:00

I have always wanted to write and get something published. There have been times that I thought the best way to do that would be to submit something to Readers’ Digest. After all, every issue practically screams the words “Earn $300! Just send us your funny stories.”

Some of the stuff they publish is pretty lame. It’s real easy to take the “gee-I-can-do-better-than-that” attitude. And they’ve made it so easy now with online submissions. Just go to their web site, fill out a form and click on “submit”. You don’t even need a stamp.

So a few weeks ago, I submitted what I think is just about the funniest little ditty I know. It goes like this:

  Roses are red,
  Violets are blue.
  Most poems rhyme
  But this one doesn’t.

I thought it’d be a perfect addition to rd’s “Laughter, the Best Medicine”. Or maybe it could be one of those little snippets they put at the bottom of the page when they can’t quite stretch an article to fit.

Apparently, the folks at Pleasantville don’t share my enthusiasm for humor. I never heard a word from them. Oh, well. Their loss.

At least the experience caused me to think about what makes a joke funny. And it gave me an excuse to write about it.

I have been told that to be funny, a joke has to have a sense of exaggerated reality. That’s what makes the comic strip “Family Circus” so funny. Everybody can relate to Bill and Thel as they try to raise their four young children in a house with two dogs and a cat. Haven’t we all pointed to a panel that we thought was particularly funny just because it was so dang true?

That may be one quality of humor, but I heard Bob Hope give another explanation that was equally true. He said that good humor often rests in its timing. The longer you wait before revealing the punch line, the funnier the joke will be.

He gave this example. In the late 1950s, the Cold War with Russia was at full steam. The Russians were sending satellites into space with alarming frequency. Meanwhile nasa was alternately blowing up rockets on the launch pad or ditching wayward spacecraft in the ocean without ever achieving orbit.

In one of his shows, Hope decided to poke honest fun at our misfortunes. Here’s the entire joke:

“Hey, have you heard the latest good news coming out of Cape Canaveral? They just successfully launched a new submarine!”

(Insert rim-shot here.)

The joke is rather dated now, but at the time it was hilarious. In a fraction of a second, the audience was on the edge of their seat only to be duped.

Good news from Cape Canaveral? Hey, we could sure use some good news right about now. Those nasty Ruskies are hammering us in the space race. Who knows what kind of nuclear stuff is floating around above our heads right now? Yes, Bob. Please tell us. What is this great news of which you speak?

They just launched... Great! They launched! They finally got one of those Roman candles in the air! Oh, I feel so much better now. And they launched a ... a what?

Oh, a submarine.

Heh, heh. Very funny.

By successfully delaying the punch line until the very last word  of the joke, Hope successfully turned a national embarrassment into good-natured laughter, teaching me a lesson in humorous timing in the process.

Now, look back my submission to Reader’s Digest. “But this one doesn’t.” I think that’s a great punch line. Delayed as long as possible. Definitely funny. Definitely worthy of inclusion in any fine literature.

Oh, well. I’m not going to quit my day job, waiting for somebody to realize my creative genius.

The Marketing of Redeployment

2006-06-09T05:00:00.000-06:00

A friend of mine who had served in the military told me that there are three ways to do everything: the “right” way, the “wrong” way, and the “military” way.

The fact is that the military has a different way of doing several things. And they can get away with it because, hey, they’re carrying weapons and I’m not.

For example, the military has words that mean things only to them. In the military, you don’t eat “food”, you eat “rations”. They aren’t served in a “cafeteria”, it’s in a “mess hall”. And when you’re done eating, you don’t “clean” the area, you “police” it.

The military doesn’t “move” troops, it “redeploys” them.

Enter the Democrats.

Nothing would please the Left more than if we would pack our bags and leave Iraq right now. Or at least say that we’re going to leave next July 1st. Or April 1st. Or something. The point is they want to get out of there.

But Democrats develop foreign policy based on focus groups. And the focus groups don’t like the word “retreat”. They also don’t like “surrender”. They don’t like “defeat”. And they sure as heck don’t like “cut-and-run”. Sounds too “girly”, you know.

Notice that it doesn’t matter what word the Democrats like. It’s what the focus groups like that matters. They learned their lesson from the Republicans during the Vietnam conflict when Nixon tried to convince everybody that “Détente” was a good thing. Most people simply shrugged their shoulders at that French word, leaving Nixon and Kissenger wondering why they hadn’t listened to the focus groups and called their strategy “can’t-we-all-just-get-along?”.

Back to the present. The Democrats needed a term that they could use that would mean, “Oops, we’re outta here. Good luck with your new constitution, y’all!” without sounding chicken.

Somebody at the dnc opened a military manual and discovered the word “redeploy”. Hey, that works. We’re not retreating; we’re just “redeploying” our troops. We’re just moving them to a place where they can be more effective. Yeah, that’s it.

In their fight for public opinion, they have taken a word that has a very specific technical meaning to the military and have marketed it as legitimate foreign policy. And they’re doing a great job with it.

Somebody should tie a Democrat to a chair and read the Constitution to him. Although Congress can declare war and authorize the spending thereof, nowhere is the authority to direct troop movement given to them. That still belongs to the “Commander in Chief”. That’s why he’s called the Commander.

The framers of the Constitution feared a government controlled by the military, so they wisely put the military under the control of civilians. But they also realized that a camel is a horse that was designed by a committee. You can’t have 435 elected representatives telling the military what to do and when to do it. For that, you need a boss.

You don’t have to agree with everything that President Bush has done in the execution of the war. But leaving Iraq prematurely would create a vacuum that would throw the country into anarchical chaos. And announcing a withdrawal timetable would simply signal to the insurgency that they have extra time to accumulate weapons, recruit teenage boys, and throw some of those charming ied-building parties that they’re famous for.

No, we owe the people of Iraq better than that.

Empty Space

2006-06-08T05:00:00.000-06:00

Space is really big. And really, really empty.

If you look at a detailed map of our solar system, you’d think that it’s pretty crowded between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. There are thousands — millions — of little planetoids and asteroids floating around out there. Some of them have wonderful, exotic names like “Massalia”, “Alexandra”, “Petrina”, and “Seppina”. Others have sterile, provisional names like “(29075) 1950 da”, “(3360) 1981 va”, and “(15760) 1992 qb1”. It seems as though the sky should be filled with them.

As we started sending spaceships to Jupiter and beyond, many people expressed dismay that our daring little robots would be pelted to smithereens by flying space rock. As a child, I remember seeing movies where spaceships would fly through asteroid belts and it was like pushing your way through the crowd in the mall on the day after Christmas to buy wrapping paper at half price.

But after 30-some years of trans-Jovian exploration, not one craft has been as much as brushed by a pebble. Have we really been that lucky?

No, space is really that empty!

Cosmic scales are really hard to imagine. Let’s put it in perspective.

If the sun were the size of a basketball, the earth would be smaller than the round head of a push-pin. And it would be about 100 feet away.

And what would be between the two? Nothing. Well, Venus and Mercury would be floating around — even smaller than the earth. But they’d be just as likely as not to be floating around on the other side of the sun — far, far away. The largest of the asteroids would be smaller than dust particles in smoke.

Space is so empty that the odds of a spaceship being struck by a stray asteroid are literally billions to one against. You have to try really hard to catch up with an asteroid. We’ve sent a couple of craft specifically to track some asteroids. And we’ve gotten some good pictures of them as a result. But it ain’t easy, even when you’re trying.

So the guys at nasa had a special challenge recently with their New Horizons spacecraft. It was launched last January and is currently speeding toward Pluto faster than any craft has ever traveled before. So fast, in fact, that it’s already going through the asteroid belt.

The New Horizons project team wanted to have a chance to test some of their navigation and imaging equipment. After all, there’s not much else to do while you’re coasting along on the way to the most distant planet in the solar system. So they decided, hey, if we’re going through the asteroid belt, let’s see if we can spot one.

Yep. They weren’t concerned about being hit by one. They were trying to even find one.

Quite by coincidence, they found a tiny asteroid that they were flew close enough to track. They found and photographed asteroid 2002 jf56. It’s a little rock, about one-and-a-half miles across. At the time, it was more than 63,000 miles away. The most powerful of New Horizon’s digital cameras resolved the asteroid only to a couple of pixels.

So a casual cruise through the most densely populated neighborhood of our solar system yielded a chance encounter with a tiny rock tens of thousands of miles away. The paradox of space is that it is both crowded and empty at the same time.

Delegation and Control

2006-06-07T05:00:00.000-06:00

I always have fun when I get to perform in musical or drama presentations for church, school, and civic groups. And I can usually learn something as I watch how the leaders of the production manage the process of “herding cats”.

There are probably no two groups in the world that have bigger egos than thespians and musicians. (Well, maybe politicians, but that that’s a whole nuther subject.) When you get thirty of them on a stage, you’ll have at least fifty different opinions on how a scene should be performed.

The secret to good management is knowing when to delegate  and when to control. I saw that perfectly illustrated in a recent rehearsal.

One scene was going particularly poorly and was restarted several times as new problems arose. Finally, all progress came to a halt as the assistant director, choreographer, music director, and several cast members argued about how to proceed.

The director of the play had been watching from the rear for some time without offering much help. After all, he had successfully delegated the responsibility for this scene to several of his underlings. And opening night was only a couple of days away. Finally, however, he realized the situation had reached an impasse.

He ran to the stage from the back of the room. “Hold it, everybody. This is my  decision!” Then he waved his arms in a controlled frenzy. “You go over there. You stay there. You enter from there. Now. Let’s try this again from the top of the number!”

Then he turned around, walked to the back of the room, and took his place on the back row to watch the rest of the rehearsal.

Everything went smoothly from that point forward. The director didn’t seize  control. He restored  control. He knew that he had placed the right people in areas of authority. He gave them all the rope they needed. But he also realized when enough was enough. He exercised just barely enough control to nudge the project back into sanity.

And he provided me with a perfect example of the appropriate way to manage my business, my family, and my life.

Frogs, Drowning, and Risky Behavior

2006-06-06T05:00:00.000-06:00

Here is one of my favorite jokes — one that demonstrates how one can be presented with the facts in a logical manner and still reach the absolute wrong conclusion.

A young science student decided to experiment on a live frog. He placed the frog on an observation table and said, “Jump, frog! Jump!” The frog jumped eight feet.

Then the student cut off one of the frog’s legs and said, “Jump, frog! Jump!” This time, the frog jumped six feet.

He cut off another leg and said, “Jump, frog! Jump!” The frog jumped three feet. He cut off one more leg and said, “Jump, frog! Jump!” This time, the one-legged frog could hop only a few inches.

Finally the student cut off the last of the frog’s legs and said, “Jump, frog! Jump!” The frog did nothing; he just stared blankly at the student. “Jump, frog! Jump!” Once again, nothing. The frog didn’t move.

So the student wrote in his notebook: “When all the legs of a frog are cut off, the frog becomes deaf.”

Another example of possibly coming to the wrong conclusion involves the recent news item. It reported that 80% of all drowning victims are male. If you’re not careful, it may be tempting to conclude that women are better swimmers than men.

But I believe it has more to do with the way a man’s mind is wired than anything else. Men are inherent risk-takers. Given a set of possible actions, a typical woman will generally choose a safer alternative than a typical man. Women want stability and security; men want challenge and excitement.

So men are more likely to drown simply because they are more likely to put themselves in a position where drowning is a possibility. It has nothing to with their physical abilities and everything to do with the choices they make.

Since risk and reward are so highly correlated, that explains why men seem to be at the polar extremes of almost every category. It explains why men dominate boardrooms and lists of the wealthiest people. It also explains why prisons and homeless shelters are filled almost exclusively with men. Men choose risky behavior and are more likely to accept the rewards and suffer the consequences for their actions.

See? If you stick around me, you’ll be sure that you’ll always come to the correct conclusion.

Cats

2006-06-05T05:00:00.000-06:00

I have had the pleasure this month of performing in a local community theatre production of “Cats”, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s record-breaking Broadway musical.

Cats has been rightly criticized for its apparent lack of plot. But I’ll cut it some slack. After all, it is a collection of T.S. Eliot’s poetry set to music with great choreography and a stunning wardrobe.

But what it lacks in plot, it makes up for in its study of human behavior — vicariously through the minds of felines.

The musical concerns itself with the tribe of cats known as the “Jellicles” as they prepare for their annual gathering at the “Jellicle Ball”. Every cat in the tribe is introduced individually as the audience slowly becomes aware of the distinct behaviors and personalities of each.

I have been especially drawn to the three oldest cats of the tribe — and I have been intrigued by the treatment each of these cats gets from the younger ones.

Old Deuteronomy is the oldest and wisest of all the cats. He’s the patriarch of the clan; heck, he’s probably the father or grandfather of many of the kittens. He is held in the highest esteem, virtually worshiped by all as he makes his appearance.

Gus is a “theatre cat”. He’s like the old uncle that shows up at the family reunion with old war stories — except that Gus’ stories deals with all the great theatrical parts he’s has played through the years. The kittens adore Gus and clamor around his feet, purring over his every word.

And then there’s Grizabella, "The Glamour Cat". She has led a hard, hard life. Her coat is dirty and mangy, she walks with a weak shuffle, and her eyes are sunken and sallow.

None of the cats like Grizabella. They shun her. They ignore her. They gnash and snarl at her. The old cats pull the kittens away from her and the kittens shirk back in fear. It’s a sad, sad, sight.

I always wondered why the cats treated Old Deuteronomy and Gus with such high regard, but they were always downright mean to Grizabella. The director of our local production finally gave me the answer.

Grizabella made all the wrong life choices. She left the tribe many years ago, seeking her own fame and fortune. She once had a life of glamour and charm and beauty. But she gave that up, seeking something more. In the process, she turned herself into a shell of what she used to be. She spent her fortune, she wasted her life, she prostituted her body. In the process of seeking more, she lost everything she owned.

Now she has returned to the tribe, seeking kinship. But the cats will have none of that. They have spent their lives acting like respectable cats. They have played by the rules, they have led a good life, they deserve to be called whatever they want to be — and Old Deuteronomy reminds us in one song that the proper term is simply ... “Cat”.

The cats love Old Deuteronomy and Gus for what they are. But they hate Grizabella for what she did. Perhaps they show no mercy, but you can hardly accuse them of being bigots. They realize that cats are ultimately responsible for their own actions. And the lesson to be learned is that there are always consequences for one’s actions — even if those consequences are harsh by our human standards.

In the end, Old Deuteronomy, in his supreme wisdom, redeems Grizabella and allows her to enter the “Heaviside Layer” — a place of reincarnation for the most-worthy of all cats. In doing so, he teaches the tribe a profound lesson. Whereas they hated Grizabella for what she did, he loves her in spite of she did.

That is a lesson we should all learn.

Microsoft Brands

2006-06-02T05:00:00.000-06:00

A fundamental lesson you learn in Marketing 101 is that it is rarely a good idea to brand a product with a generic name. In other words, you can’t just put some tap water in a pretty bottle, invent a snazzy logo and brand it as “Water”.

Marketers often invent completely new words like “Kodak” or “iPod” for their product. If they feel like they need a generic word, they usually misspell it slightly to give it a distinctive feel. Like “ReNu” or “Embarq” or “Chex”.

But if your title is “The Richest Man in the World” (seriously, that’s what’s on his business card), you don’t have to follow conventional wisdom.

So when Microsoft created their new graphical operating system based on a series of windows that allowed multi-tasking, they named their product, uh, “Windows”. Real catchy, huh?

Seizing the opportunity to establish new standards of chutzpah in name branding, they created a pretty cool word processor and named it “Word”.

They didn’t stop there. Their graphics program is called “Paint”. Their project management software is “Project”. Want a calculator? They’ve got one. It’s called “Calculator”. If you want to explore the Internet, you’ll need a program called “Explorer”. Want to edit a photo? Try “Photo Editor”. And if you have some media that you want to play, the best choice is a little ditty they call “Media Player”.

If you have an office in which you want to run most of these software programs, you’ll find they’ve been neatly combined into a nifty little package named “Office”.

About the only time they actually came up with anything original is when they developed presentation software. For some reason that I’ve never understood, it’s called “PowerPoint”. I guess you use it to make a powerful point. I dunno.

I’ve decided that I’m going to compete against Microsoft on their own turf. I’m going to write the world’s greatest graphics-based word processor. It will be three times better than “Word” — much more granular. I’m going to name it “Syllable”. Or maybe “Alphabet”.

My lawyer told me that I needed to end with the following disclaimer: The trademarks mentioned in this article are the property of their respective owners. In other words, the people who own them are the people who own them — even the words that should be generic terms but for some inane reason, Bill Gates has determined that we should capitalize them when we are speaking of his domain.

Airline Travelers’ Religion

2006-06-01T05:00:00.000-06:00

People pick the funniest things to base a religion on. I bet you never realized that there is an entire religion based on the baggage-checking habits of airplane travelers.

It’s true. There are two main sects in this religion: people who never check their baggage, and people who always check their baggage. Both adherents feel that they have attained some higher state of consciousness because they have discovered the universal truth to the definitive method of air travel. And both can rightly argue that their method is superior and that members of the other “denomination” are obviously doomed to eternal damnation for believing otherwise.

I have always fancied myself as an equal-opportunity apologist. The cynics in the audience will say that’s a fancy way of saying that I can argue out of both sides of my mouth. I like to say that I’m “objective” — so much so that I can effectively argue both sides of an issue without giving away my true feelings.

I shall now demonstrate such talent. See if you can determine my true religious leanings based on the contradictory arguments I give:

I always check my baggage

There is no group on the face of the earth that is any dumber than a bunch of passengers loading themselves onto an airplane. There’s something about hearing your row called while you’re holding a boarding pass that reduces the cumulative iq of the population by at least 50 points. I want to have no part in the madness.

People lose perspective when they attempt to gauge whether an item will fit into an overhead bin. I’ve seen people carry on golf bags, horse saddles, and mounted moose heads, thinking they were going to stow them above their heads. Hey, buddy, it ain’t gonna fit.

Even baggage that is specifically designed for overhead stowage seems to confound them. What part of “put the wheels-end in first” do they not understand? Folks, you can fit one roll-on baggage in a bin if you put it in sideways. Stow it correctly and you can put three or four in each compartment. Is that too difficult for your feeble minds?

No, I am not going to be guilty of such transgressions. My baggage goes to the nice man with his hand out and palm up at the curb. He takes my suitcase, puts a nice bar-coded ribbon on it, and loads it gently onto a waiting conveyor belt. Miraculously, it reappears on a suitcase merry-go-round only a few feet away from my rental car at my destination. No lugging through the airport and no cramming anything over my head getting dirty looks from all.

My laptop fits comfortably under the seat ahead of me. I fasten my seatbelt low and securely around my waist. And I watch the madness, wondering all the time, “How in the name of the Wright Brothers does that idiot believe that he’s going to stow that lampshade in the overhead bin?!”

I never check my baggage

People who check their baggage are stupid, wimps, and incredibly naïve. I can’t believe that anybody would actually trust their precious possessions to a bunch of nameless, faceless people on the other side of that conveyor belt who are making minimum wage and are only working in baggage handling because they couldn’t be trusted to work with metal detectors.

Did you know that the airline industry loses about 127 billion pieces of luggage a year? And they destroy the handles and straps of at least that many every day. They have a policy about “normal wear and tear” that must have been written by a team of lawyers, guaranteed that they are absolved of all blame.

Besides, when I get off the plane, I want to go where I want to go. What’s this idea of having to wait for you baggage to appear, if it appears. I’m ready to leave; why isn’t my baggage?

No, my luggage stays with me. They always warn people to keep their possessions in their sight and under their control. Well, mine stays with me. It goes where I go when I go there. Under the seat, above my head, in my lap. I don’t care. It ain’t getting out of my sight.

Conclusion

There, I did it. I successfully argued both sides of a very controversial topic. And I did it in such a way that nobody who reads it could possible tell which side of the issue I’m on.

Nope, none of you guessed that I believe that people who never check their baggage obviously have the iq of warthog. Here’s hoping that their contents will shift during flight, because my contents are safely stowed in the lower levels of the aircraft. I’ll calmly pick them up on the way to my rental car, thank you.

Political Traffic

2006-05-31T05:00:00.000-06:00

I’m one of the only people in the world that can take an issue like freeway traffic design and turn it into a political issue. Watch how I do it.

My recent business travels have taken me to a couple of cities where the freeways have hov (or “high-occupancy vehicle”) lanes. Sometimes they’re called “diamond” lanes. The idea is that there has to be at least two people in the car to drive in the lane. Yeah, that’s “high” occupancy. Two people.

The intent is to encourage carpooling. Maybe if we can get more people to share rides to work, we’d have fewer cars on the road polluting our air, filling our atmosphere with ozone, and melting those ice caps.

The problem is they don’t work.

hov lanes do virtually nothing to change people’s behavior. If you’re going to carpool, you’re going to carpool. If you’re not, you’re not. The prospect of saving a few minutes on the ride to work isn’t usually worth the extra time it takes waiting for Dagwood to plow into the mailman on his way out the door.

So hov lanes reward people for practicing the behavior that they would be doing anyway. They get to shave a few minutes off their commute just because they happen to have a friend riding shotgun. Oh, and sometimes that “friend” is an inflatable guy named “Irv” whose only purpose is to thwart the system and scare car-jackers.

And at what cost? Well, it makes sense that if one lane is less-traveled and going fast, the other lanes are more crowded and going slower. Yep, hov lanes not only reward the unworthy, they punish people just for trying to get to work on time.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to evenly distribute the traffic amongst all the lanes and give everybody a fair shot at a pleasant driving experience?

Which leads me to my political discussion. I have noticed that hov lanes appear primarily in cites with a predominant liberal bent. This is a rather unscientific observation, but it makes sense. hov lanes demonstrate exactly what liberals typically do. They attempt (and fail) to legislate behavior while giving the appearance of rewarding that behavior. The chief benefactors are people who don’t deserve to be rewarded. Although most people experience a reduced level of service, the authorities can pat themselves on the back for giving the appearance of doing something worthwhile.

I’m familiar with at least one city that has a different approach. Dallas has express lanes that let you fly past the stalled traffic. For a price. It costs something like a quarter or something to enter these lanes. Kinda like a toll road parallel to the main road. You can decide whether the improved experience is worth the cost.

What a concept! Making people pay for a rewarding experience and then giving them a proven benefit as a result.

Oh, yeah, Dallas is one of the most conservative cities that I’m aware of.

Conservatism. Works every time it’s tried.

Slaves to Fashion

2006-05-30T05:00:00.000-06:00

Every year about this time, women’s fashion turns inside out, upside down, and just about every way except the one that makes sense. You start seeing parts of their bodies that you don’t normally see. Like their ankles sticking out from beneath their pants.

They’re called capris; pants that are almost long enough, but not quite. When I was growing up, “high-water” pants were any pants that didn’t quite meet the top of your shoe. And it wasn’t meant to be a compliment.

In the early 1960s, Laura Petrie delighted men with her amazingly-tight, painted-on capris. The culture of the time wasn’t quite ready for explicit displays of sexuality, but the producers of the show saw that young Mary Tyler Moore had assets that they couldn’t afford to ignore. So capri pants became popular, women showed their ankles, and men smiled.

Men are still smiling, but not because they are seeing women’s ankles. That’s old news. Seeing women’s body parts is no big thrill any more. But watching women being total slaves to fashion is still a hoot.

Capri pants left us after the Dick Van Dyke show went off the air, but they reappeared on the scene in the late 1990s. And for only one good reason: fashion designers — mostly men — love to mess with women’s minds.

The fashion mavens have convinced women that they need two completely distinct sets of wardrobe; one for winter and one for summer. It has nothing to do with the weather or with comfort. Rather, it concerns arcane rules like not wearing white after Memorial Day. Or before Labor Day. Or something like that. I can’t keep it straight.

Men like me have it easy. I have only a couple of fashion decisions to make every day. If I’m not going to work, it’s blue jeans. If I’m going to work, it’s not. Other than that, short sleeves or long sleeves. That’s not hard.

Before my company went to that oxymoron called “business casual”, the decision was basically my gray suit or my other gray suit. Well, it really wasn’t a decision, I just rotated them. Luckily, I had two suits and there are five days in each week, so it wasn’t like I wore the same suit every Monday or whatever. (Think about it.)

My ties were in a similar rotation. After all, every tie goes with a gray suit and white shirt.

But women. Poor women. They have suits and pants and dresses and skirts and sweaters and shirts and blouses and shoes and shoes and shoes. And tops. I never have figured out what a “top” is. Isn’t it a blouse? Or a shirt? Why does it need its own name?

And double that list because winter pants can’t be worn in the summer. And summer pants show ankles and we can’t have that in February, can we? And tops may be sleeveless, but only a few months every year.

And sweaters aren’t built to keep women warm; their purpose has something to do with showing curves or hiding curves or something like that. But not in the summer. No, during that time they are moth food in some drawer somewhere.

I’m glad I’m a guy. I show my ankles only when I’m not wearing socks, which is usually only in the bathtub. Nobody tells me what to wear or when. I can wear the same shirt on Christmas or on the Fourth of July. My shoes are practical and functional, not fashionable.

And my “tops” are never sleeveless. For that, you should be eternally grateful.

My Favorite Wedding Song

2006-05-29T05:00:00.000-06:00

My nephew got married last week and I had the honor of providing the piano music for the wedding.

This wedding, like most, could be pretty much summed up in a few key points: The bride was beautiful, the groom was clueless, and the father of the groom (in this case, my brother) was totally irrelevant.

When preparing music for a wedding, I usually work exclusively with the bride. After all, besides the obvious, the groom has only two jobs: Say “Yes, Dear” and “Where do I sign?” If it wasn’t for those two duties, the groom would be as irrelevant as his father.

A bride usually has a few songs in mind that she definitely wants included in the ceremony. I’m expected to “fill in the gaps”, based on my standard wedding repertoire.

This wedding followed that script exactly. The newest-member-of-our-family-to-be had a couple of songs that she wanted me to play. Beyond that, I was all on my own. Just the way I like it.

The reason I like it so much is because it allows me to “sneak” in a couple of my favorites — songs that the bride would probably never have requested, but that I like. And keeping the musician happy is part of any good performance.

Given my absolute and total distain for country music, it is ironic that my all-time favorite wedding song is (I cringe to say this) a county ballad. The way I play it, it sounds more like it came from Barry Manilow or Lionel Richie. But it was actually first made famous by Lee Greenwood.

I.O.U.
by Austin Roberts and Kerry Chater

You believe that I’ve changed your life forever
And you’re never gonna find another somebody like me.
And you wish you had more than just a lifetime to give back all
I’ve given you; and that’s what you believe.

But I owe you the sunlight in the morning
And the nights of all this loving that time can’t take away.
And I owe you more than life, now more than ever.
I know that it’s the sweetest debt I’ll ever have to pay.

I’m amazed when you say it’s me you live for.
You know that when I’m holding you you’re right where you belong.
And, my love, I can’t help but smile with wonder
When you tell me all I’ve done for you,
’Cause I’ve known all along.

But I owe you the sunlight in the morning
And the nights of all this loving that time can’t take away.
And I owe you more than life now, more than ever.
I know that it’s the sweetest debt I’ll ever have to pay.

If every groom would read these lyrics to his new bride on the night of their wedding, the world would be a much better place.

One partner may enter a relationship thinking that the other has done everything to give their life more meaning. But a great relationship begins when one realizes that they go into the partnership owing the other so much more.

It’s a debt they’ll never be able to repay. But should spend the rest of their life trying.

On Being from Missouri

2006-05-26T05:00:00.000-06:00

I have lived in Missouri my entire life. That gives me the right to say some things about Missouri that people who don’t lived here can’t say.

Just because I live here, that doesn’t make me a “Missourian”. In fact, there is no such thing as a “Missourian”. We aren’t really from  here. We just happened to live  here.

I’ve always admired people who live in Oklahoma, Texas, or California because they can proudly and rightfully say that they are Okies or Texans or Californians. There is a distinct culture behind those words. People know exactly who they are and what they stand for.

Being from Missouri, however, simply means that I live in Missouri. In has no significance beyond that. There is no defining culture that we can associate with.

Missouri isn’t simply a diverse state; it’s a downright fragmented  one. There are two large cities: St. Louis and Kansas City. People from St. Louis don’t like the people from Kansas City. People from Kansas City don’t like the people from St. Louis. People who live in neither city don’t like anybody  who lives in a city.

Well, I’ll take that back. Everybody has an allegiance to one of the big city’s sports teams. Somewhere down the middle of the state — probably right along Highway 63 — there is a line that separates the Royals fans from the Cardinals fans. And it separates the Chiefs fans from the Cardinals fans. I mean, the Rams fans. Whatever.

Another line of demarcation is the Missouri River. It splits the state in the other direction. There are mountains to the south (if the Ozarks can be called “mountains”) and there aren’t  mountains to the north. Nobody from north of the river likes anybody from south of the river. And the people south of the river don’t care.

The city names in Missouri are funny, too. Did you already notice that one of the largest cities is actually named for a rival state? Who’s idea was that? Oh, well. Half of Kansas City is in Kansas, anyway.

Even though the largest cities are St. Louis and Kansas City, neither of them is the capital. That honor goes to — anybody? — that’s right, Jefferson City. Who woulda thought? It was named after the president that bought the state from the French. (The name “Missouriopolis” was first proposed for it. In a rare move, wiser heads prevailed.) It has the distinction of being one of the few state capitals that isn’t served by an interstate highway. Now, there’s  an honor that needs to be passed around.

Other cities are named for other states, too. It’s like they just couldn’t be original. There’s both a California and a Florida in Missouri. And there’s a Nevada, too. Except that they pronounce it Nuh-VAY-duh. Nobody knows why.

Some cities were named after exotic places like Paris and Versailles. (Don’t even ask how they pronounce that.) They just couldn’t think of anything better to name them.

Heck sometimes they’d just give up naming cities. Halfway is, well, half way between Buffalo and Bolivar. Ten Mile is ten miles from Macon. They might as well have named them “We’re almost there”.

We haven’t had our fair share of famous people originate from Missouri. Well, there was Mark Twain. But he didn’t want anyone to know who he was, so he didn’t use his real name. When he wrote his famous books, the non-anthropomorphic star wasn’t the town in Missouri, it was the river — the river that is named after another state! Sheesh.

Oh, yeah, and Harry Truman was from Missouri. Of course, he was a failed businessman who was used by the political machinery of the time to become a senator. Then he accidentally stumbled into the presidency. He was barely re-elected once and then he saw the handwriting on the wall and decided to get out while the getting was good. He was replaced by a Jayhawk from Kansas.

It’s hard being from Missouri. Easterners call it “flyover country”. Westerners think we’re somewhere near Pennsylvania. Northerners think we’re a Confederate state. Southerners call us Yankees.

Of course, I can say things like that about my state, but you can’t. After all, I am a Missourian. Whatever that is.

Soaps in Perspective

2006-05-25T05:00:00.000-06:00

A recent interview with actress Kelly Monaco provided an interesting view of the unique perspective enjoyed by television daytime dramas (“Soap Operas”, to the uninitiated).

Miss Monaco said she hoped her win in last summer’s “Dancing with the Stars” reality show would provide more interest in daytime dramas. (Her “day” job is playing con woman Sam McCall on “General Hospital”.) She expressed that desire after noting that daytime television has “kind of fallen off a bit ... ever since the O.J. Simpson trial.”

Honey, that trial was ten years ago. And you’re just now noticing it?

Kelly’s confusion can be excused, considering she has spent the last six years in the fantasy world of the tube. Such is how things move on soap operas. They broadcast five hours a week with hundreds of pages of dialog in each show. But the plot moves at glacial speed. And that’s being generous.

I admit that when I was fresh from college and teaching in public school, I got hooked on “The Young and the Restless”. Since I generally had the summers off with little to do, I got involved in the lives of Lorie, Leslie, Lance, and Lucas as they bounced their affections amongst each other. It was a harmless diversion. And the neat thing was that I could occasionally skip an episode and never miss anything.

Being a school teacher, I had a week off during Christmas. What had happened while I was gone? Not much. Usually by Tuesday, I had filled in all the gaps. I swear that sometimes I would leave Lorie and Lance in the middle of a discussion in late August and they were just wrapping up their little chat in December.

We usually had a snow day or two in January and February. That let me keep up with things. When June rolled around, I was back at it. Except now it was Lorie & Lance and Leslie & Lucas instead of Lorie & Lucas and Leslie & Lance. You get the idea.

A few days ago, I had to get my car repaired. While waiting in the “customer service” room at the dealership, the television was tuned to — you guessed it — “Y&R”. (It is now hip to identify soaps by their initials. I dunno, I guess it saves electrons in cyberspace or something.)

Well, the four L’s are now gone. But wait. I recognize ... could it be? Yes! Victor and Nikki. Gosh, I hadn’t seen them in years. They were rather minor characters during the LoorieLancyLukeyLeslie era of the show. But, yeah, I remember them.

Turns out they’ve been there all this time. Gosh, 25 years or so. I think during that time they’ve each been married seven or eight times. To each other a couple of times. But they keep plodding along in one of the most-coveted gigs in the entire acting industry.

In the episode I watched, they were carrying on a discussion that I think they started last October. It had something to do with somebody’s baby who had amnesia and who looked a lot like the character that they had killed off a couple of seasons ago during a contract dispute. Victor said something profound. The camera zoomed in on a close-up of Nikki’s face to capture her reaction shot for, oh, about twenty seconds. It must have been a slow dialog day.

Then they went to a disposable diaper commercial followed by a tile cleaner commercial and another for some woman’s product that I didn’t fully understand.

Then I heard the announcement that my car was ready.

I think I’ll catch up with them at my next oil change to see if Nikki’s face is unfrozen.

Being a Great Employee

2006-05-24T05:00:00.000-06:00

I have written a bunch of performance reviews in my life. I’ve hired a lot of people and have written reviews on them. I have written reviews on myself so my boss could claim ownership of the review while relieving him the stress of actually making a judgment on somebody else’s performance. And, through the miracle of “360” evaluations, I’ve had a chance to write performance reviews on my boss. (Those are usually a hoot.)

When I am asked for my philosophy on what makes a good employee, it is easy for me to narrow my thoughts down to two guiding principles. When these principles become the driving force of an employee’s work ethic, the employee is virtually guaranteed a stellar review and success in business beyond all imagination.

1. Make your customer happy.
2. Make your boss look good.

That wasn’t hard, was it? But that’s how simple it is. To look good at work, the secret is to unselfishly help those around you.

I have never worked in any retail environment in my life. Not once have I actually had to deal with the public. When I refer to customers, mine are always “internal” customers — people who work in the same company with me but that I do work on behalf of. But I suspect that the same principles hold true even with the more traditional definition of “customer”.

Notice that I stop short of saying “the customer is always right”. We all know that in many cases, the customer really doesn’t know what’s best for him. After all, that’s why we’re providing the service, right? So the secret isn’t to always do exactly what the customer tells you to do. Success occurs when the customer is “happy”. That way he’ll pay his bill on time, leave with a smile on his face, and tell all his friends what a wonderful experience he just had.

If the customer isn’t “right”, that’s okay; you just have to figure out some way to make his see the error of his ways. And make him think it was his idea — that’s the tricky part. A customer who has just been sold the “wrong” product won’t be happy, even if it was his idea. But a customer who believes he changed him mind of his own free will — and only because it makes sense — that’s a customer that will keep coming back for more.

Regarding the second principle, keeping your boss happy. Now that Scott Adams has appeared on the business books scene, it is finally fashionable to say out loud what we’ve all know for ages: bosses are clueless. Sadly, they kinda enjoy it. There’s really no reason to interrupt their ignorant bliss. But the fact is, they somewhat control our destiny. They have the power to hire and fire, they give and deny raises and promotions, and they provide for our general well-being. So what are we to do?

It’s not enough to make them happy. The funny thing about our bosses is that they are actually smarter than our customers. So they can’t be duped into believing that changing their mind is a good idea, whether it’s their idea or not.

But the one thing they do understand is recognition of their successes. They love to be praised for good work — whether they actually did the work or not. They have fragile egos that must be constantly stroked. (Most of them are men, after all.)

So your job as a good employee is to make sure that your boss is in a constant state of looking good to his boss and his peers. Your boss must look like the hero. Your boss must be the one who saved the company, who invented the perfect product, who raised revenue and cut expenses with one blow. You do the work, he gets the credit, and I can guarantee you, everybody will be happy.

Lay your selfishness aside; there is no place for it in business. Not when you could have pure greed instead. It’s much more rewarding. And it can be yours if your customers are happy and your boss looks good.

My Commencement Address

2006-05-23T05:00:00.000-06:00

One fantasy that I have had my entire life is that just once I would love to give the commencement address to the graduating class of a high school or college. It wouldn’t have to be a big school. A few dozen mortarboards in front of me would be fine.

I’ve done plenty of public speaking in my life, but it’s mostly been corporate presentations or training or some sort of church teaching. What I really want to do is face a group of skulls of mush who think that they know everything and impart upon them my half-century of wisdom. I figure I’d have plenty to say.

Actress Jodie Foster recently got her chance when she gave the commencement address to graduates at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. I’m not sure exactly what her credentials were that got her the gig. Well, okay, she did graduate twenty years ago from rival school Yale. I guess I can’t say that. My mba from a prestigious private school and my stellar career in marketing makes for a good résumé, but not much star power.

Oh, and she’s got four Oscar nominations and two wins. That beats my recent victory in the Pinewood Derby at church.

Of course, any Hollywood type with a penchant for left-wing activism can’t be satisfied with merely reminding graduates that this is the first day of the rest of their life. Or that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. No, she was obliged to insult the very country that gave her the right to speak to the graduates in the first place. And she didn’t disappoint us in that regard.

She told the graduates that the county is worse off than it was four years ago. Regardless of who is in power, when either side uses the term “four years ago”, it is euphemistic for bashing the President. So a free Iraq, lower taxes, a booming stock market, and virtually no unemployment are all Bush’s fault.

She also ragged on the administration for the “disastrous and shameful” handling of Hurricane Katrina. Hey, lady. I was there. The place was a mess. You think you could’ve done better? Anyway, both the mayor and the governor are Democrats. There’s plenty of blame to go around.

Okay, I’ll cut her some slack. After all, she graduated from an Ivy League school.

If I had been in front of that audience (or any appreciative audience, for that matter), I could have summed up my entire speech in three words: “Never stop learning.”

Well, maybe four words: “Never ever  stop learning.”

Don’t ever think that you know it all. You’re just beginning. You haven’t learned anything yet. You’ve just learned how  to learn.

School doesn’t teach you anything. It teaches you how to organize your life. It teaches you how to do research. It teaches you how to figure things out for yourself. Then you spend the rest of your life doing just that.

When I interview people for a job, I rarely care what kind of degree they have. I only care that they finished something. You don’t learn stuff for my job in college. But I need to know that the people I hire know how to learn. And want  to learn.

They need to display to me an insatiable desire to do better. To figure things out for themselves. Not just to think “outside the box”, but to figure out how to build a box and then build a better one.

There. That’s my graduation speech. Now I’ve just got to wait for my phone to ring from some Ivy League college president wanting me to say the same things to his graduates.

But why should I? They could just come here and read it for themselves.

Faking It

2006-05-22T05:00:00.000-06:00

Just about anything that can be manufactured can be faked. Money. Drivers licenses. Designer jeans. Even conversation.

A couple of weeks ago, a friend of mine told me that he had to hurry home to watch that evening’s episode of “American Idol”.

I acted unimpressed. “The chick’s gonna win,” I offered.

“I dunno,” he replied. “I think that skinny guy’s got a pretty good chance.

I smiled. Once again I had proven to myself that any conversation can be faked, even if you know absolutely nothing about the subject.

I hadn’t watched an episode of “American Idol” all year. I have absolutely no interest in the topic at all. I read an article in Reader’s Digest about last year’s winner and I had seen enough in the papers to know that most of the time a chick is usually one of the last ones standing. So I figured it was a safe bet to lead any discussion about the show with “The chick’s gonna win.” Can’t fail.

I live about half of my life making conversation about things I have absolutely no knowledge of or interest in. I’m one of those guys who knows just a little bit about a lot of things but not a lot about anything. So it’s relatively easy to find some common ground, run with it, and then just follow the lead of the other person.

When the topic turns to sports, it’s almost always possible to say something like “Hey, how about that game last Sunday?” It doesn’t matter that you don’t know who played on Sunday. The chances are that somebody played. Once you figure out who played and whether they won or lost and if the game ended on a controversial play, the rest is easy.

This is possible because of two tendencies of human nature. One is that people will always fill in the blanks in their own mind. That’s why pixilation works. People can see that digital pictures on a computer screen or in a magazine are really just a series of dots. But their minds fill in the gaps between the dots to make a continuous picture. They do the same thing in conversation. When presented with incomplete facts, people fill in the unknown facts with facts of their own choosing. That’s why you don’t have to say the name of the chick that’s going to win or the name of the team that played last Sunday. Given an incomplete thought, people will instinctively fill it in.

The other bit of human nature that makes it work is that people tend to advertise their thoughts. It’s called “telegraphing”. Poker players learned this a hundred years ago. They don’t know if their opponent has a good hand by reading the back of the cards. They can tell a lot more by reading their eyebrows and the corners of their mouth.

Mind-reading magicians — they like to be called “mentalists” — have made a living of doing this. A common trick it to get an audience participant to reveal secrets without realizing it. A mentalist may ask a widow, “Did your husband linger before he died or did he pass quickly?” When the widow replies that his death was very quick, the magician can say, “Yes, I thought so, because I hear him telling me that there was no pain.” She goes away amazed that the guy actually talked to her dead husband.

Most of my friends don’t know how many conversations I fake, but my guess is that it’s three or four a day. It’s not really deception, sometimes it’s just the polite thing to do. I’d rather spare them the embarrassment of telling them that I’m really not even remotely interested in their trivial drivel. I’ve kept a lot of friends by being dishonest with them.

Besides, it’s kinda fun.

Continuity Goofs

2006-05-19T05:00:00.000-06:00

Every movie fan knows that films are full of continuity errors. These are little inconsistencies from one shot to the next within the same scene that are usually blamed on somebody not paying attention in the editing room.

Meg Ryan’s sandwich reappears after having been eaten in “When Harry Met Sally”. Hugh Grant’s tie changes patterns in “Love Actually”. And Julia Roberts’ croissant magically turns into a pancake in mid-sentence in “Pretty Woman”.

Some people delight in spotting these subtle nuances of movie-making. The “goofs” section of imdb.com is full of user-contributed tidbits. Sometimes it seems that people spot these things just so they can say, “Aha! Gotcha with another error!” They can’t wait to email their brother-in-law with a new discovery.

Famous writer-actor-director Garry Marshall lets us in on a little secret about continuity goofs. Many times, they are included in the final cut of the movie for a very good reason: To make the actors look good.

Each scene in a movie is usually shot multiple times. They are shot from every conceivable angle. From above, from below, from the left side, from the right side. Sometimes that’s done to move equipment out of the picture. Sometimes it’s done to create an illusion of three dimensions on the set. Sometimes it’s done to create alternate dialog or alternate plot lines that may be selected from later.

And many times, it’s because directors know that actors are human.

To maintain a sense of spontaneity in dialog, movies aren’t always rehearsed as thoroughly as theatre productions. The actors are often creating their mannerisms and nuances of dialog literally on the spot. In one take they may raise an eyebrow or emphasize a syllable differently. They may look down or up or away at a particular moment. Those are the subtle little things that audiences see but never notice. But they’re the things that make a movie believable. The director is constantly looking for them.

In the editing room, a director will pick the best takes in each scene and cut them together to create a seamless stream of dialog. And that’s where Mr. Marshall is willing to fall on the sword for his actors.

When a continuity error is discovered, nobody blames the actors. It’s always the director’s fault or the film editor’s fault. But if an expression isn’t right, if a line is slightly mis-delivered, if the “magic” isn’t there, the actors take the heat.

As a director, Marshall would rather be blamed for a continuity goof than have his actors look bad. So he always takes the very best performance. If somebody’s hair style doesn’t quite match up from one camera angle to another or if a water glass is full after having been drunk, so be it. The actor’s performance is the sole determining factor in selecting a take for a particular shot.

In Marshall’s movies, the director’s job is to make the actor look good. The result is a great movie with believable action.

And if it adds a few more bullets to the “goofs” section at imdb, then at least somebody’s brother-in-law is happy.

How I Eat

2006-05-18T05:00:00.000-06:00

It’s a good thing that I never took up smoking. If I had, I’d be one of those guys that has about five different lit cigarettes in various stages of being smoked spread around in every ash tray of the house.

That’s assuming of course, that I would smoke with the same degree of self control that I exhibit when I eat snacks. And I think there is enough similarity between the two habits that that’s not a long stretch to make.

I often buy bags of potato chips from the vending machine and bring them back to my desk at work. Three minutes later, I absent-mindedly reach for another chip and discover — horror of horrors — the bag is empty.

And I don’t remember eating a single chip beyond the very first one.

My right had is a venerable feeding machine. And my mouth is a most gracious receiving trough. The act is completely automatic and instinctive. It doesn’t matter if I’m actually hungry. If there is food within two feet of my right hand, it is scooped up and deposited into my stomach.

I used to work with a woman who had the exact opposite tendency. She was a tiny waif of a creature, and her eating habits matched her stature.

One time, a salesman brought a box of chocolates to me in the office so I decided to share them with my co-workers. I stopped at her desk and offered her a piece. Why yes, she graciously looked over the variety and picked one with the appropriate swirl.

Then she set it down on her desk next to her keyboard, smiled at me, and went back to work.

I almost fainted from the shock.

Waitaminnit! Don’t you understand? This is a piece of candy. A piece of chocolate candy. It is designed specifically to be taken from the box and placed between your teeth. You don’t make a masterpiece like that wait until you’re in the mood to nibble on it. You devour it. Then you look for the next one. And you repeat until the box is empty.

No thanks, she smiled. She’ll eat it later.

There was no reasoning with her.

Of course, this was the same 90-pound weakling that bought a bag of m&ms from the vending machine, sorted them by color, and lined them up on her desk to eat them one at a time. One “M” every ten or fifteen minutes.

She could make a three-minute bag last all week.

I may not have the most health-conscious eating habits in the world. But at least I appreciate the value of good, quality vending machine food. I only wish I could make it last longer.

The Paradox of Digital Data Eternity

2006-05-17T05:00:00.000-06:00

Man has dreamed of eternally preserving data for, well, forever. The ancient Egyptians thought they had done a pretty good job of doing that by drawing on the walls of tombs buried in the desert. Until everybody forgot how to read hieroglyphics. Thank goodness for that Rosetta Stone thing.

The Romans assumed that their empire and their language would exist forever. Their language is kept alive in state mottos, but not much else.

In the twentieth century, we invented methods of converting all data into digital formats. And that, we thought, solved the problem. Not only could we preserve data for all eternity, we could effortlessly and precisely transmit that data instantly over virtually unlimited distances. And we could replicate that data over and over and over again with absolutely no loss in quality from the original to the ten million copy with a precision that those 12th century monks would surely be envious of.

Alas, it didn’t occur to us that the very technology that would make that possible would soon be replaced by — better technology. Sheesh. Who woulda thunk that?

You have seen this problem if you have ever tried to recover that résumé that you “preserved” five years ago on a 3.5 inch floppy disk. Heck, most the computers today don’t even have a slot to plug that thing in any more. I worked for a company that had shelves of data sitting on eight-inch floppies. That was back when floppies actually flopped. That data might as well be sitting at the bottom of the ocean today.

The Census Department discovered the problem in the 1980s when they realized they could not read data from the 1960 census. It all existed on magnetic tapes that could only be read by tape drives that didn’t even exist any more. They spent $10 million dollars figuring out a solution to fix the problem.

nasa had a slightly different problem. It had acres of data from the early lunar explorations that it could read, but it couldn’t make any sense out of it. The documentation and original file structures had been lost and the men who worked on those projects had mostly retired. They had to pull a bunch of their old engineers off the golf courses to come in and make sense of the mess.

Since technology outpaces technology at an ever-alarming rate, this is not a problem that’s going to go away soon. The irony is that we can’t read data that we wrote half a decade ago, but 500-year-old books are just as legible today as when Mr. Gutenberg first moved the type for them.

The best advice is if you really want to preserve something forever, write it down.

Ants

2006-05-16T05:00:00.000-06:00

I have always admired ants. I love the way they organize themselves into teams to get the job done. I love the way they leave an invisible scent trail behind so they can follow each other in a straight line. I love the way they communicate with each other by touching antennae. I love the way they can lift a billion times their weight. And I love the way they send out little scouts to find food, returning with a report of some new tasty treat that the queen will love.

In my house, however I absolutely detest ants with every fiber of my being. They are disgusting little scavengers. They can’t be killed fast enough. They overtake the tiniest crumb left on the floor and then they scamper all over the kitchen without even a polite “Please, sir, can I have some more?”

I live on the very edge of suburbia. My back yard opens up to a lake-front development, whose homeowner association demands money of me every year, offering me a swimming pool in return, which I have yet to ever visit. My front yard opens to a hay field and other assorted agriculture beyond. Being on the frontier of civilization means that I occasionally have to tangle with miscellaneous vermin attempting to invade my domain.

None of them are as hideous as the ants.

My front porch is especially susceptible to their advances. Ants don’t eat good wood, but they sure love the taste of decaying carbon life forms. Through an unfortunate mixture of building code violations and generally bad engineering, I have needed to replace several boards on my front porch as they rot away. And each time I discover a new board that has “bit the dust” under a million layers of paint, I have discovered a nest of ants that have decided to take up a tasty residence inside. Evil, nasty creatures they are.

And somewhere — I still haven’t found it — there is a crack between my deck and my dining room. Every once in a while, a scout ant finds his way through that crack and starts snooping around in my kitchen. If he finds the smallest morsel available to him, it’s only a matter of hours before he has summoned a million of his brothers to form a conga line and enjoy the feast.

This isn’t intended to be a commercial, but I’ll swear, there is one and only one product that does any good. Forget the traps, forget the sprays, forget the bait. If you have ants like I do, get a tiny bottle of Terro Ant Killer. You have to get the bottle; the traps by the same name are worthless.

You get a three-ounce bottle of a thick, clear liquid, about the consistency of molasses. Put a drop of that stuff on a small piece of cardboard or paper and place it directly in the path of the ants. As soon as they discover it, the magic occurs. Their first reaction is, “Wow, this is really good stuff!” Kinda like the first time you discovered Krispy Kream donuts. They stand there and suck it up like pigs eating Twinkies. Man, it’s a sight to behold.

Their next reaction is to race home and tell all their brothers. Of course, in the process, they take home a present to their mom. And bang! Overnight the whole colony looks like the day after a frat party with no hope of recovery. A sweet sight to behold.

I keep a bottle of that stuff in my kitchen. If I see even one stray ant, I whip out the bottle and I make sure he “discovers” the meal I have created for him. I can’t afford to let them get out of control. No tolerance. One ant equals a drop of Terro.

Remember that name: “Terro Ant Killer”. They didn’t pay me for this endorsement, but maybe they should.

Who Chooses Your Music?

2006-05-15T05:00:00.000-06:00

In the beginning, all music was religious. After all, there was no other reason for music to exist except to please God — or the gods, in the case of the ancient Greeks. If you wanted music, you went to church. You kinda had to like what music they had there because that’s all there was.

The church  chose your music.

The Renaissance came and went and we were all thusly enlightened. So royalty took over the music industry. Music came out of the churches and went to the castle. If you were a peasant, you may hear something coming over the walls around the moat. But for the most part, musicians were hired by nobility and were thusly at their service.

The king  chose your music.

It pretty much stayed that way for a long time. The masses had some folk music. But the really good stuff was for the wealthy. It wasn’t until the first part of the 20th century that recorded music became available, which finally gave music to the masses. In fact, it wasn’t just available, it was downright ubiquitous. The Muzak Corporation decided that people worked better when they listened to boring music. Thus, they had the honor of seeing their corporate trademark devolve into a generic term for bland, retail music — heard everywhere, including elevators.

Corporations  chose your music.

When rock and roll came around, radio stations learned that they could win the hearts of teenagers by playing their music. Soon, dozens of music formats filled the airwaves. You still couldn’t pick your songs, but at least you could pick your genre. It was now possible to retreat to your car during lunch and tune into whatever you wanted — at least, you could if they were playing it.

Radio stations  chose your music.

Now you can put your entire music into a little box the size of a pack of cards. Two skinny wires can connect your ears to literally thousands of songs for your listening pleasure. You can control what songs to listen to, in what order, and how loud to listen to them. Heck, you can even choose to “shuffle” them (play them randomly) so it sounds like you’re actually listening to radio. But it’s your  radio, the way you  like it.

You  chose your own music.

When people plug into mp3 players, it is often because they want to withdraw from society. They want to create their own little reality inside their heads. Music gives them an opportunity to do that.

It’s ironic that in olden days, the church and the nobility isolated the populous from music. Now that it’s available for mass consumption, people use music to isolate themselves from the rest of the world. The isolated has become the isolator. Have we really made any progress?

Just for Feet

2006-05-12T05:00:00.000-06:00

A few days ago, I worked in the yard for a couple of hours. The grass was damp and my tennis shoes were, uh, a little porous.

I came inside to do some more work. After a while I realized that I wasn’t comfortable, but I couldn’t figure out why. I walked around thinking to myself, something is wrong. What is it?

Finally, it dawned on me. I went upstairs, took off my soggy socks, and put on a pair of clean, dry, white socks. Ahhh, much better.

Pay attention the next time you watch the news and they interview somebody who has been kidnapped, or lost in the woods, or drifting at sea for a long time. What’s the first thing that they usually want — after they get a hamburger from McDonald’s?

They want a pair of clean, dry socks.

It’s been said that the eyes are the window to the soul. Acupuncturists tell us that the feet are the path to your internal organs and thus, all happiness.

An old saying goes: “Ain’t nobody happy until Mama’s happy.” A natural extension to that is: “Mama ain’t happy until Mama’s feet are happy.”

It’s true. Offer any woman a foot massage. None of them will refuse it.

Have you ever noticed that some people are “shoes” people and some people are “not-shoes” people? I know some people that declare that the first thing they put on in the morning and the last thing they take off at night are their house slippers. They are never without something on their feet. I know other people that declare that the first thing that comes off their feet when they get home are their shoes. They’re the ones that sneak from their cubicle to the printer and back wearing socks.

Both groups are equally adamant. Their feet control the way they organize their lives.

What is it about feet that make them such effective determinants of our happiness?

I think it’s because they are the foundation on which we literally stand. The health of a house can be measured by its foundation. And the health of a person is often determined by the health of their feet. It’s easy to forget about them — they’re just so darned functional. So I think every once in a while they remind us exactly how important they are.

Sometimes — just to get your attention — the feet have to say, “Hey, these socks are a little damp. Hey, hey! A little attention please! We’re choaking down here.”

See? The only tool they have to communicate is by signaling discomfort. It’s a special language that they’ve developed to get attention. And it’s very effective.

Answering “That” Question

2006-05-11T05:00:00.001-06:00

Any parent who has a young child full of questions spends a great deal of time waiting for “that” question.

The exact definition of what “that” question is varies from one parent to another. It really doesn’t matter. You know what I mean. You’re not really sure if you want your child to ask “that” question. You think you’ve rehearsed a pretty good answer. But what if it’s not right? What if there’s a follow-up question? What if the answer isn’t satisfactory? What if it’s taken the wrong way?

The best a parent can do is to rehearse the answer over and over again until it becomes second nature. Don’t panic. Don’t draw too much attention to the question. Answer it casually. Answer it coolly. Perhaps a one-off sentence will suffice. This time. Maybe you’ll get lucky. Who knows?

But you’ve got to be ready.

We were driving home tonight when my nine-year-old son — completely out of the blue — said, “Dad, I want to ask you a very important question.”

Uh, oh. This is it. He’s going to ask “that” question. Okay. Get ready for this. What did I promise myself I’d do? Oh, yeah. Don’t over-react. Casual. But make sure I appear to be genuinely concerned. After all, it was important enough for him to ask. I have to demonstrate that I’m actually paying attention. But not too much.

I turned off the radio. That’s my universal signal to him that even though I have to keep my eyes on the road, he has my undivided attention.

“Okay, son, what’s your ‘important’ question?” Here it comes. Grip the steering wheel. Eyes straight ahead. Don’t over-react.

“Which would you rather eat: poison ivy? or a mosquito?

“Uh, a mosquito, I guess. It’d be a lot smaller. In fact, it’d probably be so small you’d hardly even notice it.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought, too. Besides, I wouldn’t want to get poison ivy all down my throat because I wouldn’t be able to scratch down there.”

“That’s a good point.”

“But sometimes mosquitoes carry diseases.”

“Well, sometimes they do, but not very often. The chances that the mosquito that you would eat would be carrying a disease would be pretty small.”

“That’s true. Mom said that she’d rather eat a mosquito, too.”

“That’s nice.” Whew, at least I agreed with his mother. That was a relief.

Okay, it wasn’t “that” question. I’m still waiting for that one. But I guess I cleared up the whole mosquito/poison ivy problem that had been vexing him for some time.

On the way home, we bought some ice cream. I doubt that he ever really understood why.

This Information Highway is Super

2006-05-10T05:00:00.000-06:00

I am constantly amazed at the power of the Internet. I had an experience today that reminded me of some of my very first Internet experiences.

In the mid-1990s, I was just starting to figure out what all the Internet stuff was all about. I had been programming mainframe computers for years. We had always noted with a certain amount of pride that computers were like “islands”. They had a vast amount of processing power within them. And, oh yeah, if you wanted to move data between them, that’s what tape drives were for.

But now I had my brand new Packard-Bell computer, complete with Windows 3.1 and a 2400 baud dial-up modem. A friend of mine had shown me a really cool program called “Netscape”. I was ready to impress people.

Of course, the easiest person for me to impress was my mother. So I hauled her into my office. I was going to show her this Information Superhighway that Al Gore was talking about.

I only knew about one site, a search engine called “WebCrawler”. Look, Mom. All you have to do it type a topic into this screen and it will go out to the Information Superhighway and find out everything there is to know about it.

I will never forget what happened next. Of all the things that I could have demonstrated to my mother, for some weird reason I picked — are you ready? — “Meg Ryan”. Look, Mom. Let’s see if there’s anything at all out there about “Meg Ryan”.

I pressed “enter” and 3.276 seconds later, a list of Meg Ryan pages came on the screen. Dozens and dozens and dozens of pages. I thought she might be mentioned in one or two places. But there they were. There were Meg Ryan pictures. Meg Ryan movies. Meg Ryan scripts. Meg Ryan fan clubs. There was a whole universe of Meg Ryan in my office in front of my eyes and Mom’s eyes.

I don’t know who was more surprised, me or Mom. No, it was me. Mom responded with a polite “That’s nice, dear.” My eyes were huge and my chin was on the floor. Oh, my God. What has just been invented, and I didn’t even know about it?

That was my first omg experience with the Internet.

In the intervening years, there have been several others. But for the most part, I have come to expect that literally the world of information is at your fingertips if you have an Internet connection.

Just think of the places to have your questions answered. You want a real expert to answer? Go to www.allexperts.com, pick an expert, type in your question, and you’ll have a response in a couple of days.

Can’t wait? Type your question into answers.yahoo.com. It’s like yelling a question into a room crowded with people. Within minutes, half a dozen people will have responded.

Want to clarify the meaning or spelling of a word? Mr. Webster is waiting for you at www.m-w.com.

Want to read a more seminal article about just about any subject from aardvarks to zymology? Check out www.wikipedia.org. My son has done research for compete homework assignments without ever leaving the Wikipedia site.

Which brings us to my current astonishment. A few days ago, a friend of mine told me a joke. I wanted to re-tell it, but I wasn’t sure exactly how it went. Could I possibly find something as mundane as an insider musicians’ joke on the Internet, knowing only the punch line?

Yep. I typed a couple of words of the punch line into my favorite search engine (I’m a Yahoo! guy — Google is for snobbish wimps. Real men search with Yahoo!), and there it was. Not only the joke, but four or five variations of it. The same joke in slightly different settings, slightly different set-ups, but the same punch line.

I shouldn’t be amazed. I should come to expect it. But I do this stuff for a living and I still don’t understand how it all works.

The Internet gives us jokes, facts, pornography, civics, movie critiques, mp3 files (free and pirated), weather reports, sports scores, driving directions, and advice for the forgotten and the forlorn. All mixed together like noodles and tomatoes in goulash.

I think my generation has done a pretty good job of gathering and delivering all this stuff. It’s up to the next generation to sort it all out.

Unpopular Presidents Just Can't Win

2006-05-09T05:00:00.000-06:00

Few presidents are popular while they’re in office. Even less so in their second term.

Even John Kennedy, who barely won an election over Richard "I-am-not-a-crook" Nixon, didn’t enjoy overwhelming popularity when he was in office. History was kind to him because he was martyred. If he'd had a chance for a second term, he would have been totally ineffective.

His successor, Lyndon Johnson, realized that and got out while the getting was good.

George Bush is currently experiencing that phenomenon. His popularity numbers are in the toilet and he still has a couple more years of lame-duckness ahead of him.

When interpreting popularity numbers, it helps to remember that there are really three types of voters in America. There is the left, the right, and the middle. And they are approximately evenly divided. About a third of us are basically liberal, about a third are basically conservative, and the rest are somewhere in the middle.

Which brings us to the fallacy of popularity polls in presidential politics. When a politician says they don’t pay much attention to the polls, that usually means they are lying. But at the same time, a politician that is really true to his principals shouldn’t worry about polls for two good reasons. First, it’s a game he can’t win. And second, his job should be to serve his constituents, not to be “popular”.

The biggest problem with polls of this type is that they ask a question that is usually interpreted differently by either side of the political spectrum. The basic question is usually something like this:
“Do you generally approve or disapprove of the job that (politician “X”) is doing?”

No matter what kind of job he is “doing”, those on the opposite side of the spectrum are always going to answer “disapprove”. After all, that’s the whole idea of politics, isn’t it? To make the other guy look like an idiot? No matter how well a politician is performing, he usually won’t score much more than 70% because a third of the people are going to hate him no matter what. In school, that’s usually about a C-minus.

But here’s the dirty little secret. Many people on the same side are also going answer “disapprove”. Why? Because the guy isn’t enough. He’s not liberal enough or he’s not conservative enough. Kinda hard to win that way, huh?

Some of Bill Clinton’s harshest critics while he was in office was from the far left, who thought he had sold out his principles to the Republican-led Congress, especially on issues such as Welfare reform and nafta.

And many critics of Bush are from the far right, saying that he has sold out his constituency on issues such as limited government and border security.

Remember those thoughts the next time you look at Bush’s — or any president’s — numbers hovering below 50%. Many times, that’s not a sign of a president not doing a good job. It’s just one that is meandering too much in the middle while pleasing nobody on the fringes.

Why Doesn't Water Burn?

2006-05-08T05:00:00.000-06:00

Every first year chemistry student knows that water is composed of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen. That’s what that “H-two-oh” thing is all about.

In our chemistry classes, we also learned that hydrogen is just about the most combustible thing out there. You know the story of the Hindenburg and “Oh the humanity” and all that.

And we also learned that three things are needed to create a fire: fuel, oxygen, and heat.

And any third grader knows that you can put out a fire by pouring water over it.

Waitammint. Am I the only one to see a paradox here? You put out a fire by pouring two-thirds of the formula for fire on it? Gee, it seems like water should be a tinderbox, just waiting for a match to turn it into a lighter-than air blazing inferno.

What gives? Well, if you just sorta mixed up the hydrogen and oxygen then, yeah, you’d have a ball of gas that’s ready to light up like a Kuwait oil field. But that’s not what water is. The hydrogen and oxygen form together at the molecular level.

In a union that is only fully understood by God, atoms can bond together to form something completely different — something that didn’t exist before. Something that that has absolutely no characteristics of the original raw materials.

God allows us to use electrolysis to break the hydrogen and oxygen apart. But He bonds them together so tightly that it usually requires more energy to break them up than what is yielded in fuel. When God sticks things together, He generally doesn’t mess around.

In the book of Second Corinthians, the Apostle Paul tells us that “if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature”. The implication is that we are made into a new species, literally something that never existed before, something that has no characteristics of the original raw material.

I guess God knows what He’s doing. After all, He can take the most perfect fuel in the universe and turn it into a pretty good fire extinguisher.

Children Don’t Have Governors

2006-05-05T05:00:00.000-06:00

When I was a teenager, I mowed lawns for a living. Like most teenage boys, I had an obsession to take apart internal combustion engines any time I was around them. I didn’t know anything about what I was doing, but sometimes my Briggs and Stratton mower found itself in pieces in my back yard, just so I could figure out how to put it together again. Luckily for it (and for my career as a mower), I always managed to get it back in working shape without too many parts left over.

One of my discoveries was a nifty device that I later discovered was the engine’s governor. It was a spring loaded paddle attached to the throttle and located next to the cooling fan. As the engine turned, the fan blew air against the paddle and the throttle opened and closed appropriately.

If the engine speed slowed down, the fan blew less air, and the spring on the paddle moved it closer to the fan. This opened the throttle a little bit, giving more gas to the engine, which increased the air and moved the paddle back to its original position.

If the engine sped up a little bit, the paddle moved the other direction and the throttle delivered less fuel. You get the idea.

This delicate balancing act kept the engine at a somewhat constant speed. When mowing tall grass, the engine would slow down slightly, but the governor would deliver a little more fuel, preventing the engine from stalling. The governor also kept the engine speed in check by guaranteeing that no more fuel was being delivered than what could safely be burned.

It doesn’t take much technology to impress me. I’m always having those gee-why-didn’t-I-think-of-that experiences. I was struck by the fact that the governor didn’t actually measure the rotation of the engine. Rather, it measure the effect of the rotation — the wind that was created. And the wind was actually just a by-product of the natural cooling of the engine by the fan. I was amazed at the simplicity and the economy of the unit.

As an adult, I discovered that children don’t have a governor. It’s not something that’s “built-in” to a kid when they are born. It’s something that comes from experience. It’s a sign of maturity.

Children don’t know how to “measure” their own activity. They live for the moment, indifferent to the consequences. I had a teacher in college that put it this way: Children only know two words — “Me” and “Now”.

The next time you’re at an amusement park, notice how many parents are carrying sleeping children on their shoulders at the end of the day. How can they possible sleep with all this excitement around them?

Lacking any built-in controlling mechanism, children spend all their energy as soon as there is an outlet for it. They ride every ride. They eat every hot dog. They gobble every cotton candy. They have no idea how tired they are or how sick they are becoming. They cannot measure it for themselves.

Finally, equilibrium kicks in and the body shuts down. Asleep on Dad’s shoulder, they ride home in the back seat, dreaming of the fun they’ve had.

The same thing happens with teenagers and video games. As they are consumed in the moment of the game, they have no idea of the effect it is having on them. They play and play and play until their brains are mush and their thumbs are as brittle as toothpicks.

It is our job as adults to be the governor for children. It would be nice if each of them had an energy meter in their forehead. Or a zombie meter in the case of teenagers. Or something that would let us measure the effect the activity is having on them.

But no such meters exist. Instead, we can measure them only indirectly. The lawn mower governor didn’t measure the engine, it measure the effects of cooling the engine on the atmosphere and made adjustments accordingly. In the same way, we need to search for clues in our children’s behavior and the effect they are having on the environment around them so we can let them know — in the most loving but parental way — that enough is enough.