Chili Today, Hot Tamale

We're having a chili cookoff in my office today, the first one we've had in the twenty-three years I've worked here. It may signal the end of Civilization as we know it.

Why? Well, to paraphrase the late H. Allen Smith, whose book, "The Great Chili Confrontation" has been one of my favorites since high school, a true Chilihead believes that HIS chili is the only one worth eating and that the chili of all others is slop that a coyote would turn away from. As I've looked around the various crockpots with bubbling concoctions from clericals and others lawyers in the office, I've already seen ingredients that I'd never even think about putting into MY chili (which is, of course, the best ever made by Man).

Chili has, for some reason or another, somewhat like BBQ, engendered all sorts of controversy and, occasionally, fistfights over which is the best. Texans, of course, rebel at the very idea of putting any kind of beans INTO the chili, preferring to have it, if at all, on the side. Others don't mind the beans, but will eschew all but the basics (meat, chili powder, onions, garlic and perhaps tomatoes), sticking up their noses at the wild concept of ingredients like bell peppers, mushrooms, truffles and even chocolate.

Me? I'm more of a purist, wanting to stick with the tried and true basics, though I do like beans in my chili. I don't generally use cubed meat (which would probably have me drummed out of the International Chili Appreciation Society), preferring hamburger for the most part. I used to like Two or Four Alarm Chili, which usually required one to blow his nose after taking one bite and was considered for many years as a good cure for sinus infections. However, as I've gotten older, I've discovered that my body has become less accepting of the nuclear option, so I've gone the route of the less hot, but more flavorful style. This time I've used a dried ancho chili, boiled and pureed, as part of my sauce, along with ancho chili powder and the usual hot stuff.

We'll see if the judges have the good sense and intelligence to make my chili the undisputed #1 after the tasting has been completed. If they don't, that will say a lot about their upbringing and general education in all things culinary. I may have to hunt them down.

Blue's Updates

Even more months have gone by without a rant or gentle observation; no excuses, just busy with work and family, vacation and illnesses.

Littlest Blue has left the family nest for the Fall Semester at our local State University, just a few miles down the road and in the same town. We get to see her once a week or so, particularly when she needs to do her laundry. She's enjoying herself, being semi-independant, probably a lot like I did when I first came to this burg back in 1973 to go to the same school.

Her big sister is still at home, though finally starting the local Community College (again) next semester. She's got issues, that one, and maybe, just maybe, some day she'll shake them off like a bad cold and start making some progress with herself.

Mrs. Blue had a scare with cancer over the summer. She had surgery and it appears all is well, no chemo or radiation therapy needed (or wanted). She's finally back at work, which may explain the increase in her blood pressure over the last week.

We took a family vacation in August to Maine, Quebec and Vermont for three weeks. We flew to Maine and rented a car, driving up the coast to Bar Harbor eventually. I had my first taste of fresh Maine lobster and wild blueberry pie and took the opportunity to tour a potato vodka distillery and sampled the wares of various microbreweries.

After getting a short view of Maine, we drove through the middle of the state up to Quebec, staying first in Quebec City, then the little town of Sainte-Anne-de-la-Perade and finally Montreal. We enjoyed our stay, trying out the new foods (and more beer) and learning a little French here and there.

We finally dropped back into the States by going to Vermont and seeing where Ben & Jerry's ice cream is made (by a large multinational conglomerate now), celebrating Mrs. Blue's birthday at at nice Chinese restaurant in a nearby college town and finding a mom-and-pop soda company that we ordered unusual soft drinks from. We also had dinner at a microbrewery that we were glad we found, almost by accident.

Me? I've been back at my job, nailing people to the wall again and counting the years until I can (and probably should) retire. I periodically listen to politics and get disgusted, listen to the drumbeats from the chicken hawks in the Administration about nuking Iran because they won't comply with our eminently reasonable demands that they obey us in all things and feel sad that my girls will probably live in a world where the U.S. will probably be a lesser-power in the not-too-distant future.

As the late, lamented Kurt Vonnegut used to say in his novels (or rather, had the Tralfamadorians say), "So it goes".

Dead Tired

Yeah, I know, I know; months have gone by with no posts, so whoever was reading it before has probably forgotten to look anymore.

Lessee...old home finally sold.

I'm still working with even less time to go before retirement.

Less hair than I had six months ago.

Less money in my investments than I had last week because of those dadgum Chinese...

So it goes.

Happy Birthday, Daddy

It's August 30, 2006. My father would have been 88 today and might still be around but for the asbestos-induced cancer he contracted in the automobile repair business.

The older I get, the more I understand my dad. He wasn't exactly an intellectual--it took him a couple of years to get through high school and he didn't bother with college--but he had a wit about him and was a genius with mechanical things. The smartest thing he ever did was marrying my mother, who should have gone to college and would have done well if she had, but she was the financial brains of the family and did really well with what little an auto mechanic brought in. With two kids of my own, I realize more now how hard a job being a parent is, something I didn't get as a child in the old days. He wasn't a big one for hugs or telling me all the time how much he loved me, his generation wasn't always that demonstrative, but he was there when I needed him.

I miss both my folks every day and wish they were still around to talk to. Happy 88th, Daddy.

The Usual

Well, Mrs. Blue, Littlest Blue and I had a good time in Atlanta. We survived the traffic, the multiple streets called "Peachtree" and the financial drain called Lenox Square Mall. Lots of pretty things, odd people and fairly good food were part of our experience during our stay in the hub of the South.

Life, upon our return to our fair city, has returned to what passes for normal for us. I did come back to my office and was told I'd gotten a raise on top of the one we'll all get in October, so I was pretty happy. I'm still underpaid for what I do, but it was a nice start.

Littlest Blue has left the fields of our local big public university (sniff) and gone back for the sorry excuse of what our School Board calls a "high school". No wonder the kid wants to dual enroll ASAP, even the so-called "magnet" program at her current place is so poorly run as to make the kids bored to tears. I'm not a big fan of the voucher program, so highly touted by the neo-cons as the answer to all our educational problems (since it is really just an excuse for the taxpayers to fund religious schools--"Rah, rah, GO BIG TALIBAN!"), I just want my daughter to get the education I'm helping to pay for. Lots of kids less well off intellectually than she will never learn much from the way things are currently going.

Meanwhile, Israel has stopped bombing the bejeezus out of Lebanon (at least for a little while), North Korea says it might preemptively strike at the South Korean and American troops running maneuvers in the South, Iran says it's ready for "serious talks" about its nuclear program (as long as the West kowtows to its demands, of course) and the Big W has said in a news conference that Iraq has damaged America's "psyche" (which to him probably means something like Tai Chi). Yup, life goes on.

Mrs. Blue turned....uh....39 on Saturday. She doesn't look a day over 38 if you ask me.

More Random Updates

Well, I've managed to let another sizeable block of time pass since updating this-blog-that-no-one-else-reads-anymore, so here's another entry into the blogosphere...

Went down for a conference in Hurricane Country (no, not the university, the place that's like Florida's glass jaw during hurricane season) and Mrs. Blue and I had a good time. Enjoyed a short stay in my old hometown, seeing the old homestead that not owned by us anymore, visiting my grandparents and parents at the Memorial Park and having good food downtown. We got a nice room in the hotel a bit further south with a beautiful view of the beach and the sunsets (when they weren't hiding behind rainclouds), which makes up somewhat for last November, when they put us next to the laundry room. I lost out on an annual award, but no big deal there. Came back through Tampa and visited with my brother and his wife, who showed off their new coffee house/art gallery--nice.

Bigger Blue seems to be enjoying school up in Thomasville (thank GOD!), making the increased fuel costs bearable. Littlest Blue is moving into her last week of a class at FSU, giving her her first college credits while still in high school. She wants to early enroll in the worst way and I think she's more than capable. Mrs. Blue is still working part-time and looking forward to her youngest sister's moving here (if she can ever sell their house down south).

We're leaving weekend after next for a few days in Atlanta, staying next door to the Lenox Square Mall and looking forward to touring some of the sights in the old heart of the Confederacy. I just hope I don't blow a vein dealing with the traffic up in Rhett Butler's old haunts. I need the relaxation; too many nutcases lately to deal with.

Maybe I'll start writing more creative stuff again one of these days. Just gotta get in the mood for it.

Random Updates

Another couple of months have gone by without my updating the oh-so-important aspects of my life to the by-now-not-reading-anymore public.

My parents' house in Sarasota finally sold.

Bigger Blue decided to go back to school, this time a small college in Thomasville, GA, just up the road (and beaucoup gasoline in the tank).

Littlest Blue is enjoying her time off from high school. Good grades as usual. She's gotten her standard Driver's License finally, though Momma Blue and I don't plan on her driving anywhere solo just yet.

We survived Tropical Storm Alberto with no damage, although the winds that made the trees creak woke me up at 1:39 A.M. and kept me up worrying about fragile limbs coming down all over the place most of the night. Of course, last night, with nary a breeze to worry about, a cherry tree limb came crashing down into the back yard. At this rate, I told Mrs. Blue, we won't have to pay the tree service that's coming out next week a dime.

I've been nominated for a new annual award at our annual Conference, due to take place next month at a nice resort in South Florida. Some of the great honor of it all has worn off since I found out that just about no one else has been nominated so far. Maybe the lobbying group that's sponsoring it will attach a cash prize to it. I should be so lucky.

We've hit the 2,500 mark in U.S. casualties in Iraq and the U.S. Congress seems to be more worried about gay marriage.

I finally figured out last night why my DVDs were playing in black and white instead of color.

Father's Day is coming up Sunday. I still miss my father, who died in December, 2000 of mesothelioma, and wish he were still here. I think he would have been if the SOBs who knew of the dangers of asbestos had given guys like him proper warning.

Well, at least now I don't feel so guilty about not updating things for so long.

Fond Fairwell

Well, it's apparently over with. The house I grew up in finally sold today, my brother calling to confirm the signing of the papers this afternoon. I'm pretty sure that the three lots that made up our property will be split up, the old 1926 house and the detached garage demolished and most of the old orange, avocado, mango and other trees will be pulled up and thrown into the landfill.

It's a bittersweet event for me, but then most events are. I've always tended to get emotional over inanimate objects with no perceivable soul. I've said goodbye to a 1971 Ford Maverick, a 1978 Pontiac Grand Prix and our 1998 Toyota Sienna over the years and gotten misty-eyed each time when I bade them fairwell. The house is a little different, granted, having been in our family since 1944, first purchased by my grandfather, then my parents after his death in 1948, then sitting silent and empty since my mother was moved out to a home up in Tampa after my father's death. Still, perhaps it is a bit foolish for me to get sentimental over a tiny (by today's standards), un-air conditioned, dusty old relic with jalousy windows and a single bathroom that was certainly not soundproofed.

I'll certainly enjoy the half of the sale proceeds (after taxes, of course) that I'll be getting soon. I'm sure my parents never would have guessed that the old place, in a run-down, ungentrified neighborhood in Sarasota, would ever have sold for what it did today, but I think that, wherever they are, they're happy that it did, just about the last asset they can pass along to their two sons to help with their financial security. After all, they were the soul of the old place.

Eating Out

Oldest Blue shocked us all last night by asking for us to go eat out "as a family". Of course, it was a ruse to simply eat out as opposed to eating something I might throw together, which lately has been tomato soup or some such concoction, since I've been under the weather for the last week or so. Anyway, we decided to honor the request and hit the road.

We went to a local Italian eatery which we've enjoyed now for a while and seated ourselves at a booth. The waiter was a very nice young man who took our orders promptly and brought them back pretty quickly. In the meanwhile, we did our family bonding thing, talking about odds and ends of things.

The food came and was rather here and there in terms of quality. It all LOOKED good at least. Littlest Blue had gotten manicotti, taken a couple of bites and declared that something was not to her liking. Mrs. Blue took a bite and agreed with her, so I took the next bite and figured out that there was a bit more than the usual amount of fresh parsley in the cheese stuffing. It was, I agreed, a bit off-putting.

My meat lasagna was just about that; ground beef and lasagna noodles, not much in the way of cheese (except on top) or sauce (not even as much as they've usually put around the perimeter of the noodles). Usually lasagna has layers of sauce, cheese, meat and noodles repeated three or four times. This one seemed to be noodles, some meat, noodles, some more meat and finally topped with some cheese. It was OK, but for the money we paid it should have been a lot better. My garlic bread (little pizza rounds with cheese and garlic) was much better, as was my salad. Mrs. Blue's salad and bread sticks (same thing, just no cheese) was also quite good, as was Oldest Blue's calzone.

Oh well, at least I'll get some money back for college expenses, since this place contributes to UPromise, which puts a percentage of the bill into a college savings account. We're probably over $160.00 by now; that'll pay for a book (maybe) by the time one of the girls goes to school.

Back Again

I seem to keep taking time off from updating the narrative, but things just keep getting in the way. Everytime I think about doing something, either my ADD kicks in and I shift gears to some other thought or I just keep thinking that I don't need to be doing another long rant about how stupid some situations around me continue to be. Maybe this time I'll break it down into smaller, more digestible parts.

I like jellybeans...but why, oh why in God's name do they persist in making licorice ones?

Tom Delay is gone...at least from the current political scene, but I'm sure we'll get more than enough of him when his cases finally come to trial and his crookedness is finally revealed in all its glory.

I haven't been to Utah since I was a kid...but I'd like to travel there if for no other reason that to get myself a six-pack of "Polygamy Beer" with the best tag line I've seen in a while; "Why stop at just one?".

Some of the best political commentary is on bumper stickers...like the one I saw the other day that said "Don't blame me, I didn't vote for him, his daddy or his brother!".

Just because you find it on the Internet doesn't mean its true...as someone in my office found out recently when they posted something purporting to be a "1895 8th grade test" that they downloaded, printed out and posted in the Men's Room bulletin board (I'll let you figure out just where THAT is!). The test was supposed to be from Salinas, KS and was so hard that someone with three or four doctorates today probably couldn't finish it. Fortunately, someone else looked up a site that deals with "urban legends" and found out that the "1895 test" post is almost certainly faked by someone with either a sense of humor or an agenda about "Why Johnny Can't Read".

Personal updates: Littlest Blue is sick as a dog with the stomach flu, Bigger Blue is still looking for a job, Mrs. Blue loves the new van and is looking ever forward to her youngest sister's return to town and I'm still waiting for my parents' house to sell and waiting to get over my current bout with sinusitis or just plain old Tallahassee pollen. Had to pay for a new capacitor for our heat pump (I looked "capacitor" up in an Internet dictionary--seems it comes from a Latin word for "costs an arm and a leg") and looking forward to paying for our TV to be repaired, which I'm sure will be quite reasonable (i.e., more than I want to pay, less than it would cost to buy a new one).

Until next time...

I Owe, I Owe, It's Off To Work I Go...

We got our new Toyota Sienna last week (finally). It's beautiful and our garage has that new car (i.e., chemical) smell in the morning. It's amazing to see the differences in design eight years have made from our original Sienna. This one handles better, supposedly has better gas mileage despite having a bigger engine and a lot more cupholders and assorted gewgaws thrown in for our convenience. Of course, now we've got to start paying for the remaining two-thirds that the insurance didn't cover.

Youngest Blue is on Spring Break with the family of one of her school friends. She left Friday and won't be back until the end of this week. She's staying at a Marriott time-share community down in Orlando that we had to sit through a ninety minute (and more) sales pitch years ago in order to get free tickets to Universal's theme park. Nice place; we just didn't have the money all those years ago to fund our "vacation lifestyle" in the manner they wanted us to.

Speaking of vacations, we're thinking about going to Montreal this year. I've started looking at websites and books about the cultural center of French-speaking Quebec. When I was very young my parents took my brother and I up there one summer on vacation--there was a family they'd known shortly after their wedding who'd been nice to them, so we went to visit. I vaguely remember some things, mainly the cathedral, wooden slides at a playground and a very cold swimming pool. Maybe this trip, if we go, will be a bit more memorable.

Mrs. Blue and I talked this weekend about what we're going to do with all the pictures and memorabilia we (mostly I) have in the hopefully distant future. It's unlikely our daughters will want to inherit and lug stuff around from place to place in their futures, which begs the question of why take photos of vacations anyway, if they are just going to be tossed someday into the trash heap post-funeral? Some stuff is undeniably historical and will get donated to a deserving museum or university, but most of it is of people and places that my girls have no memory or interest in, except to see their old man when he had hair and their grandparents when they were young. A photograph does freeze a moment in time, but I suppose all moments in time must melt eventually into the liquid of the past.

Boiled Down

The current political debate (if you can really call it that) in this country has stagnated to the point that nothing is really being discussed.

On the one hand you have the Republicans who, because of Karl Rove, have both a great strength and a great weakness in their present style of distilling everything into a literal "Good/Bad" terminology. For example, Taxes BAD! Small Government GOOD! Abortion BAD! Iraq War GOOD! Gays BAD! Well, you get the idea. It's a strong technique because it simplifies the discussion for those folks out there who really don't want to think much about anything. It's also a great weakness because it has reduced the discussion to the lowest level, a level that doesn't allow any real expansion of thought or maturity in dealing with the very real problems this society faces.

Do I like paying taxes? No more than then next guy. But taxes pay for the military, for the infrastructure (roads, sewage systems, etc.) and services that we've all come to depend upon. Get rid of all taxes and yes, we'll all be the richer for it for a short time, then we'll be complaining about having to pay a patchwork of private companies to do all the things that local, State and Federal governments do now (of course, maybe that's the real goal--privatize EVERYTHING!). Abortion also isn't my preferred way of keeping down the population and preventing unwanted pregnancies, but to simply say that no woman should ever have the right to abort a pregnancy for any reason is unrealistic and will simply create the same back-alley trade that existed before Roe v. Wade. The Iraq War did get rid of a brutal dictator, but it also created a power vacuum in Iraq that has allowed the growth of sectarian violence that will probably lead to a civil war, the way things are going lately. And NO, giving gays some rights in society to common ownership of property, among other things, will not cause the traditional family structure to fall apart.

But our Big Elephant friends will usually call anyone saying anything different either a LIBERAL or will say someone dissenting from the party line a "coward" or a "traitor". Our country was built on vigorous and lively debate, both verbal and in print, and any attempt to stifle that kind of discussion is both foolish and short-sighted. Rove and his disciples (and believe me, even in local elections, his style is being used by Republican candidates) have only succeeded in keeping Republicans, particularly the moderates, from presenting common-sense approaches to problems that might be acceptable to all sides.

But again, has my party, the Democrats, got anything better to present? Not lately, given the level of rhetoric. As most commentators point out, who knows exactly what the Democrats stand for? It's simple; they don't, because they are really two or three parties disguised as one that no longer has a single direction. You've got the traditional Northern Liberals with their positions, the Southern Conservatives with their positions and then the slightly muddle-headed Moderates like me who'd love to have a seperate party to run to if there was a chance in hell that someone with any national reputation would lead it. Nope, until the Dems either kiss and make up and let new leadership move the Party in one direction or split up and let the various factions go their own way, nothing much will happen.

Somehow, someway, the debate has got to move from the Republican side of the board.

I'd Give My Right Arm To Be Ambidextrous

It's Monday. No van yet

My brother-in-law (actually, Mrs. Blue's brother-in-law, since he's married to her sister; I guess that makes him my brother-in-law-in-law?) and I went to a local "pub" last week for a beer. He's back in town, working for a State agency as a lawyer after a private practice in the Orlando area, and living with the in-laws for a while before my sister-in-law and one of the nieces move back up here in the summer. He's been into beer quite a bit longer than I have and I can truthfully say that I've learned a lot about both the beer world and that of stronger spirits by having known him.

Anyway, this place is quite literally a hole in the wall. Apparently it shares business space with a used car lot (well, not exactly a lot, more like a postage-stamped sized parking lot in front of the pub, so there isn't a lot of parking for us patrons). You wouldn't be going there for the ambiance, as there is none to speak of, unless you call the odd mix of bar and used car parts ambiance. Most of it has been there for quite a while and not well maintained. But, it does have a huge selection of beers and ales, probably about as big as anyone in town and more than most. Anyway, we ended up having one of his favorites, Fuller's ESB, an English ale. It was quite good and had quite a bit more flavor than most of what Americans settle for in such things. One glass was quite enough for me.

I noticed that Ann Coulter was coming to speak to some campus organization at the local big university sometime soon. I've half a mind to go just to feel my blood pressure go up. She is one of those uber-cons (folks way to the right of the Neo-Cons) who are making money out of polarizing the political landscape with their intense hypocrisy. There was a big deal in South Florida a few weeks ago when they found out that she'd put her realtor's address on her voter's registration (which just happens to be in a different district than her house) and she ended up voting in a local election in the wrong district. Oddly enough, the Republican Election Supervisor for the area decided that Coulter didn't break the law, so he didn't file any complaint against her with law enforcement. I noticed our friends at FOX News didn't bother to pick up THAT little news item. So much for fair and balanced...

Yup, the Republicans are running scared these days, since George W. is a lame duck and very unpopular outside of the lunatic "base" of right-wing church goers and their well-paid preacher parasites. They are terrified of the November mid-term elections and fear that their stranglehold on the Congress might be lost. I'm not sure, however, that they should be afraid, since the Democrats apparently cannot punch their way out of a wet paper-bag these days. All they have any more is "Screamin'" Howard Dean, "Alky" Teddy Kennedy and "I'm Really a Conservative" Hiliary Clinton doing their talking for them and, believe me, even I'm not impressed. The Big Elephants have done such a good job of leaving the Donkeys punch drunk over the last few years that the Northern Liberal side and the Conservative Southerners cannot communicate any more and, therefore, cannot put out any kind of coherent message to the masses (who are apparently more scared of gay marraige and Arabs blowing up the local City Hall than they are of losing their basic constitutional rights, their dignity on an international scale and essential services that only a government can provide, so they've been siding with the Elephants).

Me? I just keep doing my job (and pretty well, lately), keep my head down and post the occasional anti-Republican jibe on the men's bathroom wall in our office. Someone's gotta let them know us Dems are still around...

Same-O, Same-O

I haven't posted for about a month; things are generally the same except for the fact that our beloved 1998 Toyota Sienna got totalled in a wreck with a 90-year old lady driving a Ford Focus wagon. Mrs. Blue got a little black-n-blue over it and littlest Blue got sorta-kinda traumatized by it (kept telling me over the telephone that "It wasn't that bad" and "We were able to pull over to the side of the road" when, in actuality, the van was literally pushed over into a culvert!).

My insurance company paid out roughly $9,000 for our pristeen eight-year old van, that had kept us safe to Washington D.C., Colorado and Chicago. We've got a new one on order, which should be quite nice, though I'm having to start paying for it a little bit ahead of schedule (of when I wanted to be paying for a new car). Well, at least about a third of it is already paid for.

The Legislature's in session and, of course, any consideration of guys like me getting a pay increase to make up for the lower-end guys getting bumped up a few years back is already DOA, according to the Speaker of the House (who managed to get HIS local boy a bump-up in budget outside of our Organization's pay plan, making him the 2nd-highest overbudgeted agency in the bunch). Politics as usual. Ain't America great?

Just One Of Those Days...

My work has good hours and bad hours...

I was on the telephone yesterday afternoon for a good half hour with a frantic daddy of a soon-to-graduate student who I'm in the process for prosecuting, trying to explain how easy it would be for the case to go far, far away. Today, the son comes in and starts nearly hyperventilating, trying to decide what do to. I have to basically hold his hand and explain the facts of life to him three or four times before the glimmer of understanding pops into his eyes.

My brother, handling the sale of our parents' home, called this morning to tell me that the deal was off because the prospective buyer couldn't get his financing in order. This afternoon, he calls and tells me that the deal is back on because the bank was concerned about environmental impact of an old propane tank and an old oil fuel tank in the yard; the buyer is apparently so eager to buy the old place that he's willing to take the tanks out at his own expense and resubmit the deal to his bank. I'm keeping my fingers crossed, since mentally I've been figuring out fun and exciting ways to spend (and invest) my half of the proceeds.

My process server won lunch for twenty from a local barbeque place. My fingers still smell like the ribs I had for my portion and it reminds me that I really have to go work out tonight at the gym. Mea culpa, mea culpa....

Long Time, No See

Time flies, particularly during holidays. I, master of procrastination that I am, kept putting off updating my usual verbose commentary on life around me from November 2, 2005 until today. Guess I just didn't have anything screaming to get out of me to say.

Not much has changed. We're still in Iraq, soldiers and innocent civilians are getting blown up by roadside bombs (IEDs in military vernacular); the President is still telling us that all the money and lives we're expending in Iraq will "keep us from getting hit here" (to quote him from last night's State of the Union speach) and that anyone who questions his policies "has no strategy" (again, to quote him directly). Of course, now the NSA is listening in to our telephone calls without recourse to obtaining a warrant through a special court established for that specific reason (because, to listen to the Bushies, it takes too long to follow the law and the bad guys will hang up first), the Palestinians exercised their democratic right to elect Hamas into power, a group that really hates Israel and has been devoted to terrorist activities over the last twenty years or so and Iran has decided that it's going to have nukes whether we or the Europeans like it or not. On the home front, Katrina victims are still trying to figure out how to rebuild their lives without much help from FEMA and the radical right has finally gotten one of their own on the Supreme Court, Sam Alito, who'll probably vote to OK torture and warrantless wiretaps the first chance he gets after helping put the screws to Roe v. Wade.

Like I said, nothing much has changed.

Me? I and Mrs. Blue have been going to a local gym for the last six months, trying to get healthy. It's gotten really crowded there, however, since January 1, with all the guilt-tripping New Years resolutionists trying to lose fifty pounds by Spring Break. I've had to just about abandon the weight machines in favor of elliptical workout machines and the track. At least I've managed to work my way up to five or six miles a night, three or four times or more a week. Don't know that it's done me any real good, but at least I'm not sitting around the house feeling guilty about NOT doing it.

It looks like my late parents' house is finally about to sell. My brother is handling all of that mess. It's only been three years since our mother died and we cleared the place out, but the delay seems to have really helped the final price tag because of the real estate bubble. It'll be sad knowing that the old place, which has been in our family since 1944, won't be there any more. No one in their right mind would try to refurbish it and it isn't exactly a Frank Lloyd Wrightish-looking place that someone would haul off for preservation purposes. Nope, it was built in 1925 and has probably been rode hard and put away wet. It survived hurricanes and termites. As uncomfortable a place as it was, particularly during the summer and winter (no air conditioning or central heat), it was home to me for my first seventeen years and will always be in my memory.

As Kurt Vonnegut would say, "So it goes".

We Have Met The Enemy And He Is Us

It's rather fun reading about how the Republican leadership of the Senate was shocked and dismayed that Harry Reid would invoke a rule requiring a closed session over the "investigation" of whether or not the Bush Administration manipulated (i.e., LIED) about the information used to justify the invasion of Iraq. According to Dr. Bill, the Republican Majority Leader (probably soon to be indicted himself for a Martha Stewart-style insider stock trading, then lying about it scheme), this was just a grandstanding act by Reid and he'll NEVER be able to trust Reid again.

I guess what's fun about it is to see the utter hypocrisy of the Big Elephants as they are in crisis mode. Harriett ("George Bush is the most intelligent man I ever met") Meirs got eaten alive the by extreme right wing of the party (aka the American Taliban), "Scooter" Libby's been indicted by a Federal Grand Jury for perjury (and NOW the Elephants are talking about "presumption of innocence"--where was that during Whitewater and Clinton's impeachment?) and now the Democrats have decided to play hardball, kicking the Elephants right where it hurts as a means of getting them moving on looking into things they obviously don't want coming to light. On top of all of this mess, now we find out that the CIA has got "secret" prisons around the world where they keep high-end terror suspects and, even worse, have official sanction to use interrogation techniques that we would probably scream and yell about if someone else used them on our troops captured in wartime.

Yeah, I know, these guys are bad, they're evil, they like blowing up innocent civilians along with our troops, but why are we turning our heads to legalized torture? That's why the recent scandals in Iraq and Guantanimo are so shocking, because the world looks at us and EXPECTS us to follow the rules that we want followed with our guys; when we don't follow the rules and it gets out, we look even more hypocritical and foolish than usual. The Big W blew his, and our, chance to look good in the world after 9/11 by using the World Trade Center disaster as an excuse to take out Saddam Hussein and get a toehold in the Arab world. First it was WMDs, then it was to "liberate" the Iraqi people and set up and spread "democracy" in the Middle East, now the rationale seems to be about fighting all these terrorists that have magically popped up in Iraq (who weren't there before we invaded, by the way, no matter what W and his cronies have said).

Now right-wingers are saying that the recent statements by the new Iranian hard-liner President (yes, he WAS elected, believe it or not) that Israel needs to be "wiped off the map" is yet ANOTHER reason for us to have gone into and stayed in Iraq, so that we can eventually encourage democracy there (i.e., a government a bit more friendly to us). How about this scenario, that Iran, faced with an openly hostile and bellicose U.S. on its border, with hard-liners talking about invading Iran to prevent the spread of nuclear material and weapons (sound familiar?), decided to elect someone who wanted to stand up and let the infidels know where they stood? Is it possible that, had we NOT invaded Iraq and opened an outpost there, that the Iranians MIGHT have moved more and more towards the center? That maybe, just maybe, they wouldn't feel so threatened?

According to W and Condi, the answer to that is NAAAHHHH.

Hurricanes-R-Us

Well, Hurricane Wilma has finally come on shore in Florida, right about at the point where Mrs. Blue and I are planning to go in about three weeks for a conference. My conference had to be rescheduled to November because of one of the summer hurricanes that barely brushed the same place and caused little damage; guess they weren't so lucky this time. Maybe everything will be back in place and all shiny by the time we're supposed to leave.

I think that the entire Gulf coast of the U.S. has gotten a bad case of hurricane nerves. This is where all of our technology, the radar, the satellites, the aircraft and the computer modeling of the path, has probably made things worse rather than better. In the old days, folks just looked up and said "Looks like a hurricane's comin', best we lash ourselves to a tree"; now we sit glued to the TV and to various internet weather sites, waiting to see if we're going to be in the crosshairs of an increasingly arbitrary Mother Nature. We either sigh with relief when we realize that the Big One isn't coming our way or we begin sweating with fear and start trying to figure out which set of china to take with us on a mad dash to somewhere, anywhere, just as long as it is far away from where the Big One might land.

We had that experience quite some time ago in Boca Raton. We were there for a conference when a hurricane started making its way towards our hotel. Mrs. Blue started telling me that we really should leave, as she was watching the hotel staff put up all the outside furniture, while I was reluctant to leave until the bosses putting on the show said to leave. They finally did so and we started trooping north with all the other refugees...oops, I mean evacuees, up the Florida Turnpike. We finally stopped at my sister-in-law's place just north of Orlando, only to find out that the hurricane had missed our hotel and was heading our way. Too late to run anywhere else, we just sat and listened to the monster move by in the night. We never lost power (though others in the neighborhood did) and had a good visit with our relatives.

That's what you put up with for living in certain places. In Florida, it's hurricanes. In the Midwest, it's tornadoes. In California, it's earthquakes. Up North, it's ...well, it's being a Yankee.

It Ain't The Years, It's The Mileage

I turned fifty last week. It is a very strange sensation, to intellectually know that I'm a half a century old, yet to still feel like I've barely experienced life.

The title of this entry comes from the first of the Indiana Jones movies where our intrepid adventurer, beat up and battered by the Nazis, is put to bed by his old flame Marion and he points out that it really isn't your physical age that matters so much as the experiences that you've been through that make you feel old. The Interstate of life has a lot of potholes on it and running over and through them is what puts the dents and dings in our psyche.

My youngest daughter, on the other hand, turned sixteen. Right now she's like a little sportscar that is still in the showroom, all potential but very few miles on the odometer. I hope she stays that way for a while; there's plenty of time to experience life's detours and some of the wrecks that are probably inevitable.

Me? I'm starting to feel like my dad's old '39 Ford coupe.

Blue As Omega Man

There are a couple of old sci-fi movies out there based on a short story by Richard Mathieson from the Fifties dealing with a guy who survives some sort of plague or chemical war and finds himself the last "normal" human on earth. Vincent Price and the the great scene-chewer himself, Chuck Heston, took turns playing this guy who finds that everyone else, that's still sort of alive, have been turned into creatures that sleep during the day and only come out at night. Our hero is the only one with immunity from the disease and somehow feels compelled to go out during the daytime to dispatch the mutants in various and sundry ways (wooden stakes, fire, bullets, etc.). In the original story and the Vincent Price movie version, the lonely guy begins to realize that HE'S the stuff of nightmares for the new inhabitants of the Earth, their boogeyman, their monster-in-the-closet to scare mutant kiddies for all time to come as the mutants catch up to him one night when he gets sloppy.

There might be a good reason why I've always liked the story and the two movies ("Last Man on Earth", I believe, was the Price version; "Omega Man" was Heston's), the sense that maybe I'm the only one who thinks the way I do, who sees the world through my particular set of lenses. It might actually explain a lot about my life, why I have such a fascination with wondering how I'm perceived by others and why I seem to so easily offend folks that I deal with, both on the business and the personal level. Maybe I'M the mutant, the one who has a different take on things than everyone else; perhaps my ideas and views are the ones out of touch with the mainstream.

Heaven knows that I've had an impact on literally hundreds of thousands of lives over the last couple of decades doing what I do for a living. It makes me wonder if I'm the bogeyman, the source of nightmares for a bunch of folks out there. Well, the bright side of being the bogeyman is that you're certainly memorable.

Proud To Be An American

My ancestors started showing up on the shores of the New World, much to the future consternation of the native population, with the Pilgrims. That line of the family hung around New England for about a century, then started moving South, then West to Kentucky and Illinois, then out to Iowa. In the meanwhile, another line of the family had popped up in the deep South, taking the future site of Jacksonville for its own, while a German immigrant showed up in Virginia to start yet another eventually converging line of ancestry. These divergent people, English, Germans, picking up some Irish and probably Scottish along the way, eventually came together in the great State of Florida, where I live today. I'm proud to be an American and wouldn't know what else to be.

That's what I find so strange about the current element of criticism that's going on in our society; somehow the more conservative types have decided that anyone who is critical of our government and its policies "hates" America and wants to pull it down. A new movie is coming out about Joseph McCarthy and Edward R. Murrow's coverage of him on CBS; George Clooney, one of the stars and a co-producer, was approached by a prominent Big Elephant Hollywood mover and shaker who asked him why he "hated America" enough to put out a movie like "Good Night and Good Luck". Clooney was apparently taken aback by the comment, since he thinks, as do I, that criticism of your government doesn't equate with hatred of your country.

This does seem to be the methodology of the Big Elephant tacticians, to smear the reputations of those who disagree. Karl Rove, the Dark Lord of the Smear, has gotten the Big Smear down to a true art form, using it to pummel the Democrats and even moderate Republicans (ask John McCain next time you see him about the South Carolina primary in 2000) and now just about every Big Elephant running for everything uses the same tool in every race ("Yep, ole' Clem over there, my opponent for dog catcher, is a liberal and would let them Nepotists and Thesbians run the country!"). "Liberal" has become a dirty word, even an epithet, spat out by Rove-clones at all times, but the tactic has expanded now to question the patriotism of anyone who dares question the wisdom of the Iraq War, the free spending and borrowing of the Big Elephants in D.C. or the credentials of those nominated for a seat on the most prestigious Court in the Free World.

Well, if being critical of the government and its policies is treason, then I should be hung with the rest of the pack. The policies of Bush and his cronies have just about ruined what once was a great nation. We're now more concerned about someone's religious beliefs than we are about making sure that our schools are the envy of the world (which they most certainly are NOT), more concerned about cutting taxes than we are about making sure all of our citizens have adequate health care and can afford it and not starve to death (which at least 30 million cannot) and more concerned about the riches of the few than the welfare of the many. Instead, we're told constantly that those of us who disagree are disloyal and traitorous, that we're "persecuting" Christians and others of "faith" if we don't agree with giving money to private schools in voucher programs instead of doing our damnedest to make sure the public schools are the very best they can be and by insisting that religion stay in its place in society and not be rammed down our throats every ten seconds in government-funded programs and facilities.

No, the patriotic among us are the questioners, the critical, the ones who make everyone else mad by wondering if we're going down the wrong path. It doesn't mean that Democrats have a monopoly on common sense or that they are the only ones raising questions; even some Big Elephants are getting hammered by their own more right-wing brethren for daring to question the party line. Anyone can ask "Why?" and shouldn't be attacked for doing so; it is the Attackers who are the unpatriotic and the disloyal.

Fun Stuff To Be Found

In my last post, one of my "dark" views of human nature and the future of humanity, I mentioned "Star Trek" which, despite its sometimes Pollyanna-ish views of our distant future, I still watched in its various incarnations from my days in grade school until the cancellation of "Enterprise" last year. There's little doubt that the concepts in "Star Trek" and its progeny have had an impact on our society, both cuturally and technologically.

However, just to show that you cannot take cultural icons too seriously, I ran across a website talking about a Finnish takeoff of the sci-fi horse opera genre called "Star Wreck: In the Pikinning". It was made over a seven-year period by students and others on a very low budget, but if the trailer is any indication, "Star Wreck" should be a real hoot. From what little the trailer shows you, "Emperor Pirk" (i.e., Kirk) somehow goes back to our time to insure that the "P-Fleet" will exist in the future and then somehow gets involved with "Captain Sherrypie" of Babel 13 (Captain Sheridan of "Babylon 5"), resulting in a "fragfest" with Federation-style starships fighting a huge battle with ships from the "Babylon 5" franchise in what looked like pretty good special effects.

Now, for those of you who never watched those shows or who laugh at the occasional pretentiousness of them, I have to tell you that anything that spoofs modern culture in the way "Star Wreck" seems to is probably worth watching, if only because it lets me laugh at stuff I've watched over and over and over. My wife can testify that I watched the reruns of "Bablylon 5" until the Sci-Fi channel finally lost the broadcast rights a few years back and I'll still sneek a peek at the reruns of "Star Trek: DS9" on SpikeTV whenever I get home for lunch before 1 PM on weekdays. Yes, sometimes the stories and the physics weren't always so hot, but I'm a sucker for sci-fi horse operas (as the original "Star Trek" was labled by a network suit in the Sixties because of its resemblance to "Wagon Train").

I liked "DS9" (and yes, you can always tell a sci-fi show geek by the fact that they usually refer to the show by initials or acronyms) because it eventually told a fairly good story, albeit with stutter steps and downright weird curveballs. Many of the characters ended up with all-too human failings and some of the plotlines wouldn't have been out of touch with a good dramatic movie set in the present day. B5 (at least the first four seasons) was one of my favorite shows because it didn't try to be all nice and fuzzy about Earth's future; yes, we'd made progress, but we'd also made stupid mistakes that were going to come back and bite us in the posterior. There was a dark side to Earth politics that seems pretty much on the mark to the present day and there wasn't a lot of preaching about our "better nature" that the "Star Trek" universe has occasionally lapsed into.

The kind of Sci-fi that I like is at the very least not another lawyer/cops and robbers/doctors in crisis/formulaic sitcom creation. Those type of shows are few and far between and there's a fine line between drek like "Lost in Space" and on-going sagas like "Stargate SG-1", DS9, B5 and others. The trouble now is that everyone has decided to get on the bandwagon this year after the success of "Lost" last year, so every network has a supposed rash of "sci-fi" stuff that, from what I can tell, may well keep everyone from producing good sci-fi for years to come, once the big crash happens and everything gets cancelled.

Oh well, there's always DVDs, the last resort of geeks like me.

What Does the Future Hold?

There's a job out there that I'd love to have and cannot, for the life of me, understand how someone gets: Futurist. These are folks who peer into a crystal ball of some sort and look for social, political and technological trends and what they might morph into ten, twenty or thirty years down the road. The big problem is that years later, when someone rereads those predictions, sometimes the Futurist ends up looking like a real idiot when history takes a right when he took a left.

It's got to be a tough job, trying to pull the future out of current trends. I find myself amused at sci-fi shows from the 1960s, like the original "Star Trek", talking about advanced space travel happening in the 1990s, when we're having trouble keeping the Space Shuttle fleet operating halfway through the first decade of the 21st century. I doubt that anyone foresaw the changes that the personal computer and cellphones would have on our world when they were first introduced. When the Internet was first installed in our office in the very early Nineties, everyone looked at it with great curiosity and wondered what in the world we'd ever do with it; now we look up Driver's Licenses, addresses and telephone numbers of long-lost defendants and grind out letters to them on our desktops to remind them of old obligations. I never thought that I'd be lugging around a cellphone everyday when I got my first one years ago; it would have required a shoulder strap to carry around and I'd probably be glowing in the dark now from all the radiation that thing emitted. Now I clip my new Sanyo phone to my belt every morning and await the world's interest in all things Blue (usually just my wife calling to check on my day or my daughters bugging me about something).

Unfortunately, my view of the future isn't real optimistic. It isn't because our technology won't advance, because it will; it isn't because answers to society's problems and ills aren't available, because they are; no, I'm not optimistic because of basic human nature. "Star Trek" has it all wrong--one of the movies had Captain Picard talking about how we'd managed to advance beyond greed and avarice and become more noble in our treatment of each other and other species--but I haven't really seen any indication that we're moving in that direction. If anything, it looks like we're moving backwards, though I honestly think we're in a state of stagnation. Our mistreatment of others continues (think Hitler was the last guy to act on "ethnic cleansing"? Just look at the old Yugoslavia with its struggles between "Christians" and "Muslims" or Chad, where apparently the Muslim government is trying to wipe out the Christian minority. In Zimbabwe, President Mugabe is working hard to make life untenable for white settlers and farmers, to supposedly give the land back to the native Africans, though his main success so far has been to destroy one of the few prosperous economies in that continent) and we've managed to keep destroying the natural habitat that keeps us alive in order to maintain our comfortable lifestyles.

What about God's Chosen Country, the U.S. of A? Well, the latest hurricanes have shown that the poor, even in emergencies, get quickly forgotten about until a TV camera shows the disparity for the world to see. The religious right and the Big Elephant neo-cons have worked hard to begin to turn our country into a theocracy, run by those who KNOW better than the rest of us, those to whom God continually speaks and shares his wisdom with (like the old slave-owners of the South, who saw in the Old Testament His Wisdom in keeping the child-like and barbaric black race of Africa in chains). We're seeing gangs forming all the time, living for power and violence with a sense of togetherness, rejecting the enlightenment of education because it might make them "too white". We're losing our natural resources because we cannot bear to be without our monster SUVs and power-sucking 50" plasma TVs. Our attention spans have been fractionalized by remote controls and television shows that are 50% commercials, encouraging us to flip, flip, flip to the next bit of sensory overload.

Maybe in twenty years I'll look back at this blog and laugh, wondering how I could have been so short sighted. Maybe I'll read it in my little corner of the American Gulag, established for those who rejected the dictates of God's Chosen leaders and wonder why I didn't do more to stop it.

No, I'm Not a Lyric-Listener

My wife and I had a curious discussion the other day about whether or not I listen to the lyrics of songs on the radio. As a matter of fact, I rarely actually listen to lyrics these days, mostly because I have a difficult time with the way most so-called "singers" manage to butcher their deliveries. Apparently most either are screaming the lyrics or cannot manage to maintain a note longer than a millisecond before smearing the one-syllable word across the chromatic horizon into five or six portions. I thought that I was somehow unusual in that characteristic until I heard a portion of a great NPR show last Saturday called "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me" in which a female rocker told the interviewer that she didn't worry about what her husband and kids thought of her sometimes suggestive lyrics because "they aren't lyric-listeners".

As someone who studied classical piano in his youth and who still listens to that genre predominantly, most lyrics don't interest me nearly as much as the melody and the harmony. If it is a good or even great piece of music, I couldn't care less what the words are. I remember in college, during my senior year, my preacher-in-training roommate got furious with me for not listening to the words of a song on the radio that were particularly suggestive; of course, his admonition caused me to listen to the words for probably the first time and I finally figured out what the all the hubbub was about.

Nope, give me melody, give me harmony, give me something I can tap my feet to, something I can be inspired by, weep over, let my mind soar to the heavens with while my body is mired in the mundane. Listening to Chopin is like drinking a great dry white wine; Beethoven is like eating a great meal in a five-star restaurant.

Now, once in a while I do like lyrics, but usually when they are witty or humorous. One of my first CDs was a greatest hits of Spike Jones, the 1940's band leader with wonderful, farsical stuff that made me laugh and still does. The Bob and Tom radio show has lots of comedians who use music to express their sense of humor; the old Eagles' song "Fly Like an Eagle" became "Fry Me an Eagle" in someone's hands and I still laugh out loud when I think of it.

I have to listen to stuff my kids (and wife) prefer to classical when we're taking trips together and so far cannot say that my opinion has changed much over the years. Most of the songs are quickly forgettable. Besides, I'm getting too much stuff crammed into my ever-increasingly fewer brain cells to have to remember to worry about listening to and retaining dime-a-dozen lyrics by a one or two hit wonder.

On Being Pin-Headed

As I was growing up in Sarasota, I was both a Cub Scout and a Boy Scout. The first Boy Scout troop I belonged to was in the south part of town, meeting at a church quite far away from my home, but my then-best friend belonged to it, so I joined it as well. They "didn't believe" in tent camping, so our camping trips out in the nether regions of Sarasota County were spent in lean-tos, open to the elements and, needless to say, to what some say should be Florida's State Bird, the mosquito. Some of the most miserable nights I've ever spent under the stars were with clouds of skeeters buzzing around my head while I tried to keep a very inadequate netting from letting the little buggers drain me of blood. It's surprising that more of us didn't develop encephalitis.

My friend eventually left the troop and I stayed in, though it wasn't the same. I became an Assistant Patrol leader in my little group and, because the Patrol Leader couldn't attend a camping trip one weekend, I became the Acting Patrol Leader, with all the privileges thereunto appertaining (to lapse into lawyer-speak). I pretty soon figured out that the position wasn't exactly all it was cracked up to be (adolescent boys, even in the Scouts, not being amenable to taking orders, even those that made sense). It got worse in the night, when I was laying down in my lean-to and overheard some of my erstwhile charges talking about the "pin-headed patrol leader".

A few months later I was called during a troop meeting into a little conference with one of the adult leaders; he asked me a few questions about what I thought about the troop and my experiences (which naturally I sugar-coated a bit), then proceeded to tell me that he thought it would be better for all concerned if I left the troop. So, here I was, all-around nice guy, being asked to leave a Boy Scout troop! It was a pretty shocking experience for me and it really hurt my feelings. I eventually joined another troop, one much closer to home, with boys that I saw in school everyday. My time in that troop had its moments as well, but at least I remember the names of a lot of those guys and attended a reunion a few years ago with the remaining leaders and some of the now-grown up boys and their families.

Ever since then, I've hated the idea of people talking about me behind my back. It isn't that I'm paranoid (although I'm really getting tired of those aliens sending me messages through my fillings), but it seems to happen on a pretty regular basis. When I was clerking at a State agency during my last year of law school, I found out that my supervisor was saying some pretty ugly things about me behind my back. When I went to him to see what the trouble was, all was sweetness and light. No wonder all of us referred to him (behind HIS back, naturally) with a pun for a lunchmeat based on his name.

When I worked at a small, two-theater mall cinema in high school and during my first summer back from college, I noticed that some of the old-timers there (remember, this was Sarasota, second only to St. Pete in Florida as a retirement town) got downright odd around me at times. I finally overheard one old doorman talking to the much-younger manager one day about me, with the manager making it sound like it was SO hard to get help that he HAD to keep me on, despite some unnamed shortcomings. I never really figured that one out; I was a bargain at $1.10 per hour, popping the best popcorn in Sarasota in pure coconut oil and the finest artificial flavorings and I could change a roadway sign in the middle of a thunderstorm with the best of them.

My church days were always full of fun and excitement, particularly when one of the "older" brothers told you what was wrong with you. At least they were being honest, in a biblical sort of way, about it. I did find out one time that one of the respected couples of the church saw me go into a liquor store and apparently felt compelled to share that with everyone but me (not that there was anything unbiblical about the liquor store itself, but rather the "impression" I would have given to others, saved or not, about me).

Even now I sometimes wonder what's being said about me when I'm not around. Perhaps that begs the question of what it is that I'm doing (or not doing) that leads others to talk about me. Maybe I worry about it too much, that talking about others behind their backs is a time-honored tradition, a way of blowing off steam or expressing frustration that doesn't necessarily mean that they truly think ill of you. Sure, and that's probably what Abraham Lincoln was thinking at Ford's Theater that fateful night in 1865 when John Wilkes Booth so rudely interrupted his enjoyment of "Our American Cousin".

Maybe being a pin-head has its advantages. I suppose those folks who think that I'm a pin-head, who talk behind my back, think that I never notice or don't care. Maybe they feel superior to me in their criticism, running me down so that they'll feel better about themselves. Maybe they think I'll never do anything about it.

All I have to say is this: I know where you live and you've GOT to go to sleep sometime.

I'm stocking up on Ben-Gay, Super-Glue and indelible dye packs.

Sleep well!

Slogging Through Quicksand

I have a nightmare that reoccurs rather frequently; I'm running as fast as I can from something or someone, but making very little forward progress. It's as if my limbs are made of concrete or I'm running in something thick, like quicksand. I never find out what happens to me when whatever it is that's after me catches up.

There are days when I feel like I'm slogging through quicksand. Everything is passing me by. Life's problems just cannot be outrun on days like that and the old "fight or flight" instinct that's hotwired inside my genetic structure is pretty much limited to the "fight" option, as flight has been eliminated. My dream is probably my subconscious' way of dealing with the frustration of days when I can't run away from the problems that face me.

Our society seems to run on pressure. Europeans look at us like we're crazy, while many of their countries have legislated vacations for their people. Sure, we're more productive than they are in terms of industry and business and we're busy policing the world from bad guys, but are we happier? We're becoming a county of short attention spans and an addiction to quick fixes and adrenalin rushes in everything from entertainment to religion, but the frustration of trying to keep ahead of the next guy, the next disaster or the next family crisis keeps us unfulfilled.

Supposedly big disasters cause us to "reexamine" our lives and priorties. There was a lot of talk about concentrating on what was "important" after 9/11 and we'll probably hear a lot of it in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I'm not dismissing that idea, since Socrates said that the unexamined life wasn't worth living, but we Americans rarely look beyond the surface of issues anymore, choosing rather to polish over the readily viewed imperfections in our society and in our personal lives. When someone calls on us to do so, as did Jimmy Carter with his so-called "Malaise" address to the county, still reeling from Watergate, Nixon's resignation and the aftermath of Vietnam, he was lambasted by many on the Right as a defeatist, leading to Reagan's election and a "New Dawn" in America. All Ronnie did, as far as I could ever tell, was run up a big deficit and tell us that we were the greatest country on earth; he never really addressed the core problems that Carter was trying to get us to see.

Oh well, that's the American Way. Shoot the messenger and ask questions later.

Writer's Block

I haven't written for a while and I'm not really sure why.

It isn't that I haven't anything to say. As I said in an earlier blog, I've got opinions out the wazoo, but the trouble is figuring out what to say that might be interesting to you, the reader, as opposed to me, the writer. Maybe that's why I don't get "modern" art; the artist sees something in what they've slapped down on canvas, but when I look at it, all I see is a bunch of squiggles. I have this sneaking suspicion that all some of you see when you read some of my musings are my mental squiggles.

Political topics are always a fertile source of writing material, but just about everyone in the blogworld seems to write about politics from the Right, the Left and every other conceivable angle and my two cents worth are worth just about that much. I probably tend to ramble on with political ranting more than I should anyway.

On the other hand, I sometimes think that my navel-gazing essays are, well, just that; navel-gazing, and we all know how fascinating it is to watch someone else doing that all the time. Somehow, someway, there are those fortunate folks who get someone else to actually buy a book or article in which navel-gazing is the primary component. Most autobiographies are probably in that category, but my life story will probably never make the best-seller list anytime soon.

Nope, between work and relatively tiny family issues, I just haven't felt much like writing. I cannot even imagine what a professional writer goes through on a daily basis trying to grind out something that everyone, or at least a majority of their audience, will find worth reading.

Gotta go get my youngest daughter from Borders, where she's been going after school a lot lately to "work" on school projects. She's getting ready to turn sixteen next month (two days before I hit the big Five Oh) and is getting more and more antsy to be out of the house and with friends, particularly boys.

That'll give me something to write; my "You toucha my daughter, I breaka you face" lecture. I'll have fun with that one.

Like I Care...

About Brad and Angelina--There's still stuff in tabloids, newspapers and television "entertainment" shows about what's going on with these two morons, juxtaposed against the horrific scenes from the Gulf Coast of corpses rotting on sidewalks and overpasses and survivors quickly descending into Stone Age conditions.

About Brad and Jen--Enough about each one "telling their story" in the media already. Divorces happen all too often in the country as it is and to keep hearing two spoiled, incredibly rich beyond belief, who probably never should have gotten married in the first place "actors" whining every other day in the media has gotten boring, particularly juxtaposed...well, you get the drift.

About College and Pro Football Season--I'm sorry, it's just hard to get really excited about seeing thousands of fans and dozens of monsterously large football players in stadiums when there are tens of thousands of refugees who are slowly dying in stadiums and arenas around the Gulf Coast. I'm all for cancelling at least the early part of the season and using a Federal State of Emergency to take over all the enclosed stadiums and use them for temporary housing. ESPN be damned.

About the fingerpointing--Yep, it's already started. I suspect we'll hear on Rush Limbaugh that it was those sorry Democrats who caused Katrina and Howard Dean will fire back that it has to be all the hot air eminating from the Republicans that caused it all. Katie Couric was roasting the head of FEMA this morning on "Today", asking why the levees hadn't been updated, why earlier plans for dealing with a Cat 3 hurricane hadn't been used, why food and water wasn't getting to New Orleans faster, etc. The mayor of New Orleans has been on radio and TV complaining about everything and everybody. Look, there will be plenty of time later for recriminations and hearings to make everyone involved look stupid. Now is the time for everyone to work together and make sacrifices to help out our fellow citizens.

About "stars" doing televised benefits--Not that doing benefits itself is bad, but more of the well-to-do should follow Harry Connick, Jr.'s example. He's been down in New Orleans for days, actually going down to some of the worst places, like the Convention Center (which, by all accounts, is something like the Black Hole of Calcutta, only on a much larger scale), taking his life and livelihood in his hands and distributing water, food and supplies that he's brought in himself. A "Today" interview this morning with him on the scene revealed a guy who has obviously gone without sleep, who's talked himself hoarse and looks about ready to keel over. Him, I respect.

About people like me who get antsy when their gas gauge gets around 3/4s full--Yep, I sat in line last night in one of the few gas stations open, waiting to get my Camry filled up because I'd used all of a quarter-tank since the beginning of the week getting to work and running errands. I complain about hoarders, but I went out filling up the tanks in all three of our cars before the big price increases and the shortages made themselves evident. At least I'm better than those guys and gals driving around in their big SUVs and trucks, sucking up all the available gas (with apologies to some of my relatives who bought such monstrosities when gas was still below $1.20 a gallon). We've got air conditioning, fresh food and water and enough gas to get us around; practically paradise compared to a few hundred miles to the west of us down I-10.

Turning Points

Life allows us to make changes from time to time and, fortunately, the decision to change in most of those circumstances is voluntary. Unfortunately, Hurricane Katrina has probably imposed an involuntary turning point upon our country that will be felt for many years to come.

We've gotten used to cheap gas, long vacations with hotels and restaurants alongside massive Interstates. Food and supplies have been trucked all over the country so that we could have produce out of season and inexpensive products from all over the world in our malls. We've enjoyed driving big SUVs and cars to allow us to stretch out in comfort so we wouldn't have to be cramped while making a trip to the local grocery store for that forgotten item for supper. We've had it good for fifty years or so.

However, our long summer of national indulgence may be turning into the fall of fuel shortages, power outages and then into the winter of discontent. We've probably forgotton how to live with less and to make do with what we have; some of our older generation remembers rationing for food, gas and other essentials during World War II and us younger types may have to get familiar with their experiences from then in the here and now.

Katrina will force this country to start making some hard decisions on the governmental, business and personal levels. Will our government, at all levels, begin to make decisions that will reduce our national dependance on oil? Will businesses, particularly the auto industry, quit telling us in advertising that we MUST have the biggest and most energy-hogging appliances and cars? Will we as individuals cut back on our driving and our consumption of increasingly scarce resources? Or will we listen to naysayers like Rush Limbaugh, who on the radio the other day said that there's PLENTY of oil, that higher gas prices are the fault solely of the futures marketeers and that we've got nothing to worry about?

Our county is at a turning point. We don't have the option anymore to think about making changes; the changes are being forced upon us. Had we started making changes on the national level back in the early 1970s during the Arab Oil Embargo, things might have been very different in the post-Katrina world. The loss of oil from the Gulf wells and refineries might have simply been a blip in the national scene as we dealt with the massive human tragedy on the coast. Cars running on non-petroleum fuels might have been developed and in garages by now, fuel-cell technologies might be providing our local energy needs along with solar, wind, biomass fuels and other renewable resources. But no, we were too short-sighted, too addicted to our lifestyles, too afraid of what it would cost to switch over and as a result, here we are in the opening decade of the 21st-century, going through the withdrawals of going cold turkey from oil because of a natural disaster.

I hate to be a pessimist, but we're going to have to get used to things being in short supply and being more expensive. I just wish we had the leadership in this country to acknowledge the current reality and that they were willing to push our economy and our attitudes in the right direction. Unfortunately, we'll probably get more "We're the best county on earth", "We're fighting a war on terrorism, so that's where the money is going" and "There's plenty of oil to go around" instead.

On the Fragility of Human Nature

Watching the news reports as they come in about the disaster that was Hurricane Katrina, a number of random observations come to mind:

There's a fine line between what we perceive as greed and survival. It's easy for us, watching the horror on the sidelines, to be critical of the looters in New Orleans, pillaging their way through ruined stores, for food, water, clothing and (weirdly enough) high-end TV's and electronics (real useful when there's no power). Sure, some of the looters are probably the same ones who were carjacking and robbing people in the French Quarter just a few days ago, but most are those too poor to leave before Katrina hit and are just desperate for something, anything to cling to while the waters continue to rise. Put US in that same situation, no way out and death staring us in the face, and see what we do.

Having said that, any looter found to be armed, threatening police, National Guard or emergency personnel, ought to be shot on sight.

Never underestimate Mother Nature. Apparently a lot of people, particularly in Mississippi, were thinking Katrina would be like Camille in 1969 and stayed put, assuming that, since Camille didn't get them then, Katrina wouldn't get them this time. Surprise! Katrina was much bigger and much nastier than Camille even on her worst day. We think we've got Nature licked just because we can dam up her rivers and lakes, mine her riches out of the ground and tame the lesser mammals, but the Old Lady continues to pull the rug out from under us.

Numbers equal numbness. One person's death can be a tragedy; hundreds make our eyes glaze over. CNN was talking about Katrina's aftermath this morning then cut in with a special report about well over 600 dying in Baghdad during a Shiite religious celebration; most of the victims, women and children, were trampled in a stampede. The voice of the reporter barely changed in tone, but what was she supposed to do? Break down and weep? Natural disasters, even those as well covered as Katrina, create an enormity of scale that our small minds can barely comprehend. I cannot even imagine what the folks in FEMA see when they look at the reports.

The veneer of civilization is thinner than we think. Reports out of the disaster area have been talking about the lootings, but now it seems to be getting much worse, with armed carjackings and people walking up to reporters and cameramen demanding money or food, sometimes with weapons in their hands. It wouldn't surprise me if some of these people were in church on Sunday and with reputations of being "good" people. It doesn't take much, does it, to strip off that veneer of politeness, of consideration for others, and to reveal the animal instinct underneath that is willing to do just about anything to survive.

I'm not trying to be cynical about human nature, just realistic. I've been through a few hurricanes (mostly near misses) over the years and had to wait in long lines at Wal-Mart or Lowes for supplies and seen little old grandmotherly-types hoarding batteries and camp stove fuel cans. I know that, had Katrina taken the course it was supposed to have taken after going through South Florida, it might have been us taking the brunt of the winds and rain, not those poor souls in New Orleans, Mississippi and Alabama, and it might be me crawling over others to grab stuff out of the local grocery and convenience stores with the other looters.

Desperation breeds changes in our character that we cannot possibly imagine outside of it.

Happy 87th, Daddy

Today would have been my Dad's 87th birthday. He was born August 30, 1918 in Chicago, IL; however, if you asked him, he would have claimed that he was born up there while his parents were on an "extended vacation" from their home in a small settlement just to the southwest of Lake Okechobee in Florida. He hated the idea of not having been born in the South and never wanted anyone accusing him of being born a "Yankee".

You'd probably have liked my Dad. He was a lifelong mechanic, loved working with just about anything that could be worked on, even when he wasn't at work. His hobbies at home were cutting and polishing rocks and restoring old "flywheel" engines, even dabbling in old sock-knitting contraptions and cord-weaving devices that I never knew existed. He wasn't the best-educated guy around (it took him a couple of years extra to finish up high school down in Lakeland) but that doesn't mean he was dumb; he just didn't get a whole lot of out of traditional education. He was the type of person who made everyday things work in America. He worked for over forty years as a Pontiac mechanic at a dealership in Sarasota, day in and day out. He took a half-day out one time when he hurt his back, but otherwise he worked unless he was on vacation. He paid his taxes, groused about politicians (particularly Republicans; he was a life-long Democrat, although he was anything but a liberal in most of his views) and really didn't trust guys with beards (which made me really popular around the house when I came back from college my freshman year for Christmas break with a very scraggly beard; our only true yelling and shouting match came over that).

My Dad enlisted in the Army Air Force right after Thanksgiving, 1941 and was in Camp Blanding in Florida when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Fortunately for the AAF, he got the assignment he wanted and was best suited for; a B-24 bomber mechanic. He was sent for training to Texas, then California and then to Oklahoma. His group, the 98th, was sent to Palestine and moved westward across Africa to Libya, then up to Italy as the war progressed. He never talked about his experiences, though one of his best friends from the group lived in Sarasota and his son and my older brother were friends in high school. In the mid-Ninties I finally heard about a stash of photographs my Dad had in a bureau drawer along with his diary from 1944 and we had a pretty good time talking about his experiences. To hear him tell it, the worst part of it all was the extreme weather conditions in the desert and in Italy (always cold and damp), otherwise it was just another day at the office. It wasn't until later that I found out about the strafings by German aircraft at a port in Italy and the time he was trying to defend a British seaplane from saboteurs while manning a .50 cal. machine gun one night in Libya.

He loved my mother. They met in Sarasota at a party while he was stationed at what was then a military airfield (now the airport) and working part time at the Pontiac dealership. They got married, had my older brother, suffered the loss of his father, scraped up money to buy a house from his mother, suffered the loss of a month-old baby boy and then had me in 1955. They took everything in stride. They fussed at each other from time to time about things, Momma handling the finances and doing most of the talking to her two boys while Daddy worked hard to keep the money coming in. We took vacations each summer and drove all over the United States, looking for rocks and fossils, camping most of the time to save money, sometimes staying with relatives and friends in odds and ends of places I'd never heard of and probably wouldn't recognize even now.

About five years ago at this time of the year, my Dad was diagnosed with mesothelioma, an agressive and invariably fatal form of cancer caused by exposure to asbestos. Being in the car repair business got him exposed to that stuff pretty much every day from brake pads and transmission parts. He told us in the hospital after his surgery that the practical jokers in the garage would use compressed air to blow the asbestos dust from brake pads over the guy working on them; a lot of those guys have died of mesothelioma already or will pretty soon. Daddy looked at his cancer treatment as just another job for a different type of mechanic to do; take out the bad parts and make the rest of it work. It didn't end up that way; he died in December, 2000.

My mother missed him terribly, though she wouldn't say it in so many words when I would see her, but you could tell. She died in 2002. They are together again in a memorial park in Sarasota, in a nice, uncrowded section near a tree, just down the way from his mother and father. Whenever I get down that way nowadays I stop by and talk to them, thanking them for the way they raised me (at least in retrospect) and for what they left me, both in material and in memories.

So, Happy Birthday, Daddy. I miss you something awful.

The Big Blow

Unless you're a foreign tourist in New Orleans, you probably know about Hurricane Katrina, which at this moment is getting ready to turn most of the Big Easy into the the biggest toilet bowl in history. It slowed down a little bit from the 170+ m.p.h. winds it had Sunday to "only" 135 m.p.h. this morning when it made landfall. The trouble is that this hurricane is huge, with clouds covering about half of the Gulf of Mexico. It's essentially a F3 tornado on steroids.

What did Floridians think when Katrina moved more towards the west? "Thank God it isn't US again!" The original computer models on the National Hurricane website showed the monster coming up the Gulf towards my little part of the world. Of course, just because we didn't get the big bullseye painted on the Big Bend this time doesn't mean we won't get another one in a few weeks. The experts are telling us that the bulk of the tropical storms for this season probably haven't even happened yet, which will make the rest of this fall SO much fun. I suspect that the prescriptions for antidepressants are starting to skyrocket all over the Gulf States.

Perhaps this should remind us that we are at best a fragile species. We have to live in a cocoon of a very specific mix of gases not found on any other planet in this solar system. No potable water for a few days and we're toast. No food for a while and our body begins to devour itself in a frantic attempt to keep the cells happy. Yet, we've begun to think of ourselves as the masters of this planet, able to overcome anything and everything that Mother Nature or God in some of his more unpopular "Acts" throws at us. It doesn't take much, a tsunami here, a massive hurricane there, to reestablish the fundamental concept that we're breakable.

As much as we like to think that we're noble, loving and kind to each other, let's remember that the National Guard gets called out to places like New Orleans just as much to prevent looting and thievery as to protect lives during disasters. When bad things happen, people tend to turn into opportunistic vultures (as they did down in Peru last week after the crash of an airliner; people from surrounding villages literally stripped the crashsite bare of luggage and scrap aluminum for their own use while troops sent to guard the site for investigators just moped around). It's only afterward the danger has passed that the angels of our better nature (and government) step into keep things peaceful and start putting things right. No, we'll still crawl all over each other to get out of the way of a coming disaster when we see it coming.

The latest technology of satellites and radar, which helps us see the uncontrollable coming on a moment's notice over the Internet, is both a blessing and a curse. Yes, the Web helps us prepare with more time than ever before, but it also begins the frenzy earlier than ever. Maybe being unknowing and unprepared wasn't so bad.

20/20 Foresight

As someone with a little bit of training in the field of history, I think that the current wave of revisionism within the blogging/conservative talking-heads world is very interesting. A lot of the columns/blogs or shows I watch on TV or listen to on radio have a clear message: ALL PAST DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENTS WERE IDIOTS AND/OR TRAITORS! Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage and the granddaddy of them all, Rush Limbaugh, along with all the more minor conservative "experts", pundits, bloggers and people who write into the local newspaper to give their Big Elephant-tinged opinions all seem to have an amazingly similar outlook and it all involves splashing every Democrat in U.S. history with tar and feathers, while every Republican has been a genius. Ronald Reagan, to listen to all the aforementioned, is practically a god who single-handedly whipped up on the Commies and made the U.S. a wonderful place to live.

What freakin' planet were these people living on, particularly during the '80s? In my opinion, the last really good Republican President was Theodore Roosevelt and even he had his moments that, in the light of the present day, weren't so hot. Lincoln, the first true Republican as President, is one of my heroes, but remember, he also played pretty fast and loose with the rules when dealing with opponents during the Civil War, suspending such minor rights as habeus corpus and occasionally even free speech. Compared to Lincoln and Roosevelt, however, every Republican President since has either been a crook, a reactionary or a do-nothing. Anybody remember the Teapot Dome Scandal of the Twenties? How about the Depression? How about them old white-bread Fifties, when I was born, under good old Ike? Pretty good times unless you were black or suspected of being a Commie pinko sympathizer (or at least called one by someone behind your back). Howza 'bout Nixon? Or Ford? Or Poppa Bush (remember "READ MY LIPS! No new taxes!")?

But they all pale in comparison to Reagan and George W. Bush. Conservatives nowadays almost go orgasmic at the mention of either of them. Reagan's face is on just about any website or advertisement about the purchase of gold coins, because he's the guy who allowed all of us little people to own gold again as a hedge against the coming dark days when the dollar became a second-rate currency (oops! That seems to have already happened under the bold leadership of our current President). He was called the Great Communicator, basically because he took his massive skills in acting and read stuff written for him by any number of conservatives like Peggy Noonan (who's making a living these days, as far as I can tell, writing books about how wonderful Ronny was). Frankly, Ronny basically spent the Soviets under the table, mortgaging our future by building an 800-ship Navy, looking into Star Wars-type technology for shooting down incoming warheads and making supposedly not-for-public-consumption statements about bombing Moscow and starting WWIII. He let Ollie North run wild, trading stuff to the Iranians (not our friends then or now) and supporting ruthless guerillas in Nicaragua, all in some weird back-door deal to free hostages in Lebanon. I never understood that stuff then and still don't. I just know that Ollie gets a lot of TV time on FOX News as "consultant", which ought to tell you a lot right there.

But even Reagan pales in comparison to W, the new poster-boy for the right-wing of American politics. Give him credit, he (or rather his managers like Dick Chaney and Karl Rove) has managed to bamboozle the electorate not once, but twice. It helps when your brother (the Governor) and your campaign coordinator (masquerading as the Secretary of State) give you a hotly disputed election in Florida, of course. W, through dirty tricks, outright lies and pandering to the religous nutcases who think that the earth was created 6,000 or so years ago, has managed to get us into one of the worst situations our country has ever been in, yet his supporters still weep at the mention of his name and reject all calls to critically look at what he's done (or not done) as President.

Republicans used to proudly say (before Reagan and Bushes 1 and 2, of course) that they were the "Party of Peace", since they hadn't started the Civil War (them bad old Southern DEMOCRATS did that one), the Spanish-American War (well, Teddy had a little bit to do with that one, but the Spanish blew up the Maine first! Well, they probably didn't, but that's never bothered too many Big Elephants); WWI was a Democratic job as was WWII. Korea? Well, that was Truman's mess that Ike got us out of. Vietnam? Democrats again and it took a Republican like Tricky Dick to extricate us with honor (and got thousands of refugees in the bargain). However, starting with Ronny Raygun, we've managed to get into all sorts of foreign adventures, whipping up on such menacing world powers as Grenada, Panama and Iraq (not once, but twice!).

Don't get me wrong; Democrats have managed over the years to screw up things just as much as the Big Elephants, but at least they aren't quite so smug about it, nor nearly so self-righteous. Democrats tend to feel guilty about taking taxpayers' money and getting servicemen and women killed in foreign adventures. Republicans just tend to make proclaimations and self-serving defenses about such things. The day will come, with any luck, when a new centrist political party will rise up, unfettered by the nutcases of most 3rd-Party forays, and bring some sense back to the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Until then, we'll have to settle for folks who keep telling us how much better they are equipped to run things than the rest of us poor bastards.

Kill 'Em All...Part II

If you've been keeping up with the latest news you've noticed that the 700 Club's Founder and Chief Poo-Bah, Pat Robertson, has done two things of significance since his faux pas about the U.S. illegally assassinating the President of Venezuela. First, he claimed that he'd been "misinterpreted" by the "liberal" media and all them mean anti-Christians out there as saying he thought Hugo Chavez should be killed when he really meant "kidnapped" or otherwise "taken out" (yeah, like that's SO much better?). Second, the Right Rev. Pat issued a written statement on his website essentially apologizing for his misstep in saying Chavez should be assassinated, then proceded to quote the martyred German theologian Deitrich Bonhoffer (killed, along with hundreds of others, by Hitler's goons after an abortive assassination attempt late in WWII) to somehow justify his "mistake".

Robertson STILL doesn't get it. The world does not revolve around him and his right-wing religious ideology. He's been saying wacky stuff like this for years; he claimed that feminism leads women to kill their babies and into lesbianism, that judges are "more dangerous" than Islamic terrorists and that a well-placed nuke at Foggy Bottom, home of the U.S. State Department (and probably, in his eyes, still full of Commies from the McCarthy era) would do our foreign policy a world of good. It seems to me that we've prosecuted any number of Arab Americans under terrorism laws for saying less than the stuff that Robertson's been getting away with for years. Maybe it's because no one really takes the senile old coot seriously except those folks who obviously have more money than sense who keep supporting the puppet ministry turned global religious empire that is the 700 Club.

There's something inherently dangerous about someone with that much power and influence who supposedly has God speaking in his ear every few moments with a "word of wisdom". There's also something inherently dangerous about the numbers of people who, like sheep to the slaughter, follow morons like Robertson and the rest of his televangelist ilk. The worst part about it is, however, that there are a lot of folks in the right wing of the political spectrum who really do think we should be in the assassination business. Don't like that country's policies? Why, just shoot the guy running things! Think that country over there's got nukes WE don't think they should have? Invade 'em.

Next thing you know, we'll be sending a crack hit squad out to bump off Jacques Chirac, then maybe Vicente Fox and maybe Vladimir Putin. Of course, if we have the success with them that we had in trying to off Fidel Castro (one of our plots apparently involved putting a powder in his beard that would make all his hair fall out), they don't have much to worry about. Nope, Robertson should stick to what he knows best; fleecing his flock.

Kill 'Em All, Let God Sort 'Em Out

Pat Robertson, TV evangelist, failed Republican Presidential candidate, University founder, bon vivant and Man About Town, has managed to add yet another title to his list of stellar accomplishments: rank idiot. On his 700 Club show last night, apparently during his nightly "taking softballs--oops, hard-hitting questions--from the audience" segment, Robertson said that the U.S. should send down a "covert squad" to "take out" Hugo Chavez, the erstwhile President/El Dictator of Venezuela, since he's spreading "Communism" and "Muslim extremeism" throughout the Americas. According to Robertson, it would be just a lot cheaper to assassinate him NOW rather than have to spend billions later in fabricating intelligence about "weapons of mass destruction" and sending in our troops to conquer and occupy Venezuela for years, fighting an insurgent war while we wait for them to develop a Constitution that will insure the uninterrupted flow of their oil to the U.S. for decades to come.

Well, that last part was really just me putting words into the Right Rev. Pat's mouth, but you get the general idea. The man is a moron, albeit a rich and influential moron. He's also a fascist and obviously very interested in the U.S. becoming a religious theocracy with guys like him (unless all the other TV evangelists BUT him get "taken out" by his covert 700 Club hit squad) running things because God speaks directly to them each and every day. Who needs democracy when the Big Guy is telling the Patster what to do? Rip up the Constitution and replace it with the Ten Commandments; take all the judges out and shoot them at dawn (well, having been a lawyer for a couple of decades, I'm not sure that's such a bad...NO! NO! BAD lawyer!); send all those evil Democrats in the Congress home along with those liberal Big Elephant posers who think that a woman should have the right to chose whether or not to have an abortion, who aren't repeating the party line as it comes out of Karl Rove's mouth. Nope, if Monsignor Pat had his way, we'd be assassinating or invading everyone who disagreed with us. Mothers, get ready to have LOTS and LOTS of babies to act as cannon fodder for the new Christian Republic of the Americas (What? You thought Canada and Mexico would still be around after El Presidente for Life Robertson gets done undoing NAFTA and CAFTA? After Canada didn't help us in the WAR on TERRORISM? Not a chance. Besides, I'm sure Pat will be told by God after his ascention to the Holy See of the Americas that He always intended the U.S. to include all of North America when He lead all those white settlers here originally).

The arrogance of guys like Robertson never ceases to amaze me. They talk a lot about how God blessed America, how we were supposed to be the great example of godliness in an increasingly secular world, yet it is OK for us to shoot foreign leaders and invade the foreign lands we don't agree with. Don't get me wrong, Chavez is also an idiot, but he's a democratically elected idiot. The Venezuelan masses elected him fair and square (maybe; it depends on who got to the ballot boxes first) and he's managed to survive an attempted coup that the American Ambassador was, of course, terribly surprised by when it happened. No, Chavez is there because the rich elites, who've run Venezuela for decades, who've not shared the wealth or land with the formerly powerless hoi polloi, are now upset because the little guys have finally put someone in power that talks to and about them (stuff like that has historically helped thugs like Chavez, Hitler and Mao Zedong to take over countries while everyone else wonders what the heck is going on). It doesn't mean he's good for them; I suspect that eventually Chavez will either turn Venezuela into a Cuban-style dictatorship or he'll have his head blown off in a military coup as seems to be the usual standard in that part of the world. However, none of that gives Pastor Pat the right to assume that God's blessings are on a government-sanctioned murder of someone who isn't in lockstep with American policies.

Maybe I'm being too hard on our increasingly senile-sounding evangelical nutcase in blaming just him for his pronouncements. Actually, I blame W and his right-wing cabal, who by their invasion of a county that DID NOT INVADE US or, by any credible evidence, HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH 9/11, have made it fashionable for the Robertsons among us to say outrageous stuff like that on TV (while at the same time screaming that a bared breast on a TV show should be prohibited). They are the ones who broke the rules while proclaiming that they were working within the U.N.'s rules (when the U.N. wouldn't give its imprimatur to our new Holy War) because everyone else was too lily-livered to take out bad old Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction that didn't really exist. It's gotten to the point where mainstream folks in interviews, even relatives of those killed in W's adventurism, are parroting the Big Elephant line that if we weren't fighting the terrorists in Iraq now, we'd be fighting them in the streets of New York City tomorrow.

It's sad and it's wrong.