I'm So Confused...

Cheney says the announcement of the withdrawal of some of England's troops from Iraq is a sign of progress. Bush says we need to "surge" more American troops to make progress.

How freakin' stupid do they think we are. Oh wait! I know.

UPDATE: You know, I really would like to be wrong about this sometime but I'm not.

Dance Like No One's Watching

You're famous when you make it to YouTube. One of our favorite people has done so. She got the boogie in her.

Outrage Overload

I know that my reader has missed my posting since I haven't done anything for a couple of weeks. A combination of computer problems, laziness and inertia have contributed to this. However, I believe the most significant factor has been "outrage overload". That's the state of being so pissed off about so many things that you can't bring yourself to write about any because that would seem like ignoring the other, equally important topics. The Bush administration and the Repugs at large continue apace with their illegal, immoral and unethical practices. Torture, the "surge", usurpation of the powers of the others branches of government, illegal wiretapping and snooping, complicity with treasonous war profiteering, etc., etc., ad nauseum are all subjects that I would like to address in an intelligent and cogent manner. However, since that probably exceeds my grasp, I will rail out against such practices in a shrill, emotional voice. I plan to do that soon. Unfortunately, we have much too much time left in this administration to talk about its crimes.

In the meantime, if the Democrats and the few ethical Republicans that are starting to exhibit some backbone don't do everything they can to rein in this abomination, I will be forced to flagellate them verbally also. That should scare them straight.

Come on, guys, do something!

A Life Unfinished.

We all will experience death. But sometimes death is not what kills us. Case in point: I had an ex-brother-in-law. He had a twin brother and I was married to his older sister. During the time that I was married to his sister, I observed him graduating from high school as an athlete, starring in basketball and football. He was awarded a scholarship to play football in college. He was handsome, smart, gregarious, funny and had many friends. After he started to attend college, he began to change. He was always a little forgetful and bad with directions but only enough to make him human. When this type of behavior began to increase and other problems arose, some of us thought it was just part of his quirky personality. Then, he began to have hallucinations and be belligerent. This was totally unlike him. He had become schizophrenic. Science knows that there was nothing in his family situation or his environment that caused this. It was the unfortunate malfunctioning of his chemicals and electrical impulses. In spite of his problems, he managed to graduate from college and get into law school. During law school his problems intensified as the disease continued to ravage him. I tried to help him by assisting him in withdrawing from law school for a time and then helping him get re-entered. His parents struggled with much more complex problems with his care and treatment. He perservered in the face of long odds and managed to graduate from law school, although his concentration was impaired to the extent that he could not complete the rigors of the bar exam.

I had my own set of problems and after I was no longer married to his sister and by extension not very well connected with his family, I would get periodic reports from my children about their uncle. Advances in medications enabled him to experience some modicum of normality and gave his some relief from his torments but not nearly to the extent that his early promise had indicated. Then recently I received the phone call from one of my children. Their uncle had been found dead in his car from a heart attack experienced while attempting to get to a doctor's appointment to investigate lung problems brought on by the extensive smoking that was exacerbated by his mental illness.

He was in his mid-fifties. The promising young man that I had known and was fond of had been gone for more than 30 years. That man died many years ago, his body just did.

I wish him peace in his rest. He had experienced enough of the other.

Dr. King Would Approve

Beware Clear Mountain Lakes

Great News!

The spousal unit and I have 5 children total, all from former marriages. None are married as

yet, presumably because they didn't want to emulate our bad examples. However, recently two sons have announced that they are engaged and will be married this year. They are engaged to intelligent, beautiful women with just the right amount of lack of good taste in men.

We are very happy.

A Call For Sacrifice At This Point Is Just A Call For Further Human Sacrifice

Bush, the elder, provided Bush, the lesser, with a semi face saving opportunity with the Iraq Study Group. Bush, the lesser, desparate to try to rescue the legacy his handlers told him he would have when they told him to go to war, is now apparently going to call for "sacrifice" and completely ignore the recommendations of the Study Group. In conjunction with this he is going to ask for a "surge" of 20,000 more troops and an additional billion dollars to throw after the billions already embezzled in the supposed rebuilding of Iraq's infrastructure. This is the "new way forward" that he is supposedly going to propose after having a "listening tour". I wish I were articulate enough and had a sufficient command of the English language to adequately express how truly corrupt and amoral I believe this is. I just don't have the words.

This can not be truly viewed as anything other than a ill conceived and desparate smoke screen to delay the inevitable until after his term expires. Bush has not seen fit to call for any sacrifice by the American people in his war so far, other than the sacrifice of their sons and daughters and the sacrifice of the future economic viability of the United States.

The throwing of further troops into this horribly designed meat grinder can not help but result in increased deaths of both U.S. troops and Iraqis. 3,000 dead troops, tens of thousands of other troops injured and maimed, over 600,000 Iraqis killed and nobody knows how many others injured, rendered homeless or without family.

Bush did this.

Comparatively, Saddam was a pussy.

Here Lies American Democracy

Things I Dislike About Sports and Sporting Events

Even though one of my New Year's resolutions was to watch less television, I have spent most of today watching football bowl games. After some thought, not always coherent, I have the following lists of things that I don't like about sports and sporting events (again, in no particular order):

• When athletes wave their hands and exhort the crowd to cheer more. Do something good, Dude, and I'll yell my head off. Concentrate on your job: playing. I'll decide when to cheer.
• When a football player, whose team is trailing by multiple touchdowns, picks up 6 or 8 yards for a first down and then bounces up and gesticulates like he just scored the go-ahead points. You must be competitive in order to deserve to celebrate like that. Do your job and when the score gets tighter you might be entitled to celebrate some. Same thing for a basketball player that dunks and pulls his team within 20 and then snarls and yells. Really, not cool.
• Athletes talking in cliches. Actually, just athletes talking.
• Sideline announcers talking in cliches. Actually, just sideline announcers.
• Any event that has any commentary from Chris Berman, Dick Vitale or Paul Maguire. Doesn't anyone have the balls to remove these guys from the media sphere? They render any event, however otherwise enjoyable, almost completely unwatchable for me. Am I the only one that feels like this? Apparently, since they show up everywhere.
• Referring to the Rose Bowl always as "The Rose Bowl, the Grandaddy of Them All". It seems as if the name is trademarked and the announcers can't say the Rose Bowl without adding the trailer. After the 60th or 70th time, it really gets trite.
• Athletes gesturing toward the sky after a home run, touchdown or other happening; giving "God all the glory" for their win, record, first down, etc.; or making some other religious gesture (e.g. crossing themselves before a turn at bat or a free throw) to try to get God on their side in an athletic contest. Does anyone actually believe that the forces that put this universe together give even the slightest shit about what happens in something as unimportant as an athletic event?

And the thing I really dislike is other people criticizing athletic events. I am the only one qualified to do that.

New Year's Resolutions

My resolutions for 2007, in no particular order, are:

• Watch less TV and read more
• Blog more regularly, even though I'm the only one reading it
• Reinstitute regular exercise rituals and work on physical health
• Travel more
• Update estate plans and other records
• Take some risks
• Ignore resolutions if needed. I am almost 61, after all, and you should be able to ignore most rules, even your own, at that age.

Things That Make You Go WTF?

“Maw, what’s on the teevee tonight?”
“Nothing, Paw, no reruns of Hee Haw, no Larry the Cable Guy and NASCAR’s not on on Tuesday.”
“What the hell are we gonna do then?”
“Well, if your porn files have downloaded, we could watch the border.”
“Great idea, we can hate on brown skin people and act like we’re protecting the good ole’ US of A at the same time. I’m sure them furriners are coming to take my job”.
“No, Paw, they’re probably over trained for that.”
Governor Rick Perry of the former nation of Texas has discovered the key to getting 38% of the vote. He has focused on “border security” with the motto “If the Feds won’t do anything to protect our borders, Governor Perry will”. God, that makes me feel safe. One of the keystones of his program is a plan to put a series of cameras along the border, which are accessible via the internet (a plan put to good use by the other porn sites) and deputize every God fearing, Latino hating red necked white person with a modem to view the cameras and report every transgression picked up by the unblinking eyes in the sky.
Perry, in an attempt to out cowboy that other pseudo macho dude ostensibly from Texas, has committed $5,000,000 to build this marvel of internet security. The first phase of the program was to install 12 cameras and run them for a month. The original cost for the month was $100,000 but cost overruns brought the overall price to $210,000+. The site went live three days before the election for governor. Wow, what a coincidence. It has now been shut down until a more detailed plan is developed. During the month, the site got about 27,000,000 hits and about 220,000 people registered to use it. If there was any doubt about the appeal of a xenophobic, jingoistic (warning, Thesaurus alert) site like this, all doubts have been erased.
It could be that the appeal of this site was the impression that it might be combined with the technology of the original internet hunting site and the cumbersome ideas of due process, fairness, compassion and the use of actual policeman could be eliminated. I’m not sure that Perry would be opposed to this if a vote could be obtained.
The $5,000,000 allocated for this project bears some further inspection. The Texas/Mexico border is about 1,000 miles long. If you assume that 25% is already fenced, is in a metropolitan area, is adequately guarded or policed or is basically unsuitable for crossing, that leaves 750 miles to be observed by the Perry Peepers. If we further assume that one camera can adequately cover about a hundred yards (putting aside for the moment that obstacles and technical issues, e.g. electrical power, maintenance, etc. may require more), that means that at least 13,500 cameras would be needed. Just for the sake of mathematical simplicity, let’s reduce that to 12,000 cameras. 12 cameras cost $210,000 for less than one month. Using simple ratios would mean that $210,000,000 would be required for one month operation of the full project. Let’s see Good Hair sell that one. I know that simple extrapolation like this is fairly inaccurate but you get the idea. This doesn’t even consider that this system should be fairly easy to avoid by cutting the power, avoiding areas where the border patrol is not present or shooting the cameras.
It should be apparent that this is intended only to pander to the worst instincts of the electorate and is a cynical, hypocritical attempt to garner political advantage on the back of brown skin people again.
Lord, won’t we ever learn?

Things that make you go Hmmm?

German scientists and condom advocates are proposing to develop a spray on condom. This is designed for use by the male and is not to be confused with a Chinese product that is already available but is used by the female. Condom use should be strongly encouraged. I believe we should have baskets of them on each street corner. They should be dropped out of airplanes. They should be free, freely available and stigma free. In the early years of my pharmacy career, state regulations provided that condoms could not be openly displayed in the pharmacy. If inspectors came by and condoms were visible, some points were deducted from your overall score. If your store was marginal to begin with this could have been a serious problem for the pharmacy. This lead to the infamous condom drawer in the pharmacy department and the hesitancy and embarrassment of some people to ask for and therefore use condoms. Situations like this were illustrated in the painfully awkward scene in the movie “Summer of 42”, where the teenager buys a magazine, an ice cream cone with sprinkles and hems and haws before he gets the courage to ask for a condom. This leads the pharmacist to be an ass and embarrass him even more. It’s funny and painful to watch but situations like this lead to people avoiding the hassle and therefore not having a condom when the need arose. I’m sure you know that the urge to have sex is stronger than the urge to be safe, so I feel safe in saying that more than one pregnancy occurred and more than one sexually transmitted disease was transmitted because of this short sighted arrangement.
Having said all that, let’s review the male spray on condom concept for a moment. The advantage to this, the developers say, is that it is effective for all sizes. The concept is for the penis to be inserted into a type of spray can whereupon at the push of a button, rotating nozzles coat the throbbing member with a latex spray and voila!, a condom is created, which is custom sized for the participant.
I hope this works and is widely used. However, here are some problems I envision. Carrying a spray can around in your wallet will lead to uneven sitting and back problems. When I was younger, we carried around the single condom until it made an impression on the outside of your wallet and was so old that when you opened it, it probably had turned to dust. However, you could sit on it without much pain. Also, some of you will recall the condom dance, the unwelcome interlude in a process where the last thing you want to do is stop. The fumbling for the package, either in your wallet, your pocket or the bed side table. The often ineffective attempt to open the package that was not designed to be easily opened with fingers that, for whatever reason, usually did not provide the best traction. That was followed by the ritual installation and unrolling. Often this takes place in a dimly lit environment so you can’t readily tell the proper direction to unroll it. So you place it up there and begin to install. If you guessed right, it fairly easily unrolls and fits into place. If you placed it there upside down, you are left with two options: either take it off and turn it over and reinstall (all this with the admonition in our heads that we have heard before that this increases the chance of future child support obligations) or force it into place hoping that it will unroll in kind of a reverse order as you force it into position. Most males know that we have evolved into a creature with a brain and a penis but with only enough blood to operate one of them at a time.
Now, let’s run that again, using the spray on condom. There’s still the same awkward interruption while you get the spray can from your back pack, the glove compartment of your car or the bed side table. I’m assuming that this would be most effective only if you insert your appendage while it is in the most turgid state. So you lower a hollowed out spray can over your hoo-hah and hit the button. Hopefully the can is calibrated so that you only have to hit the button once and the proper amount is dispensed. I don’t think that it would be very effective to leave that decision up to the male at that point. The hitting of the spray button is presumably followed by the standard whoosh of a spray can, which signifies that the latex is being dispensed. The developers think that a five second burst will be sufficient for adequate coating. I’m guessing here again but most aerosol delivered products are dispensed at less than body temperature. The releasing of the propellant creates a distinctively cooling effect in most sprays. I’m also assuming that a suitable curing and drying time is required. So you are in the throes of arousal and you stop to place yourself in a spray can that coats you with cold latex. I’m thinking this will act as an effective birth control device in and of itself. The discussion: “Oh, baby, I love you. Hold it right there and let me do this.” Whoosh! “Oh! Never mind. Is Letterman on?”
Like I said: Condom use good. Proper use good. Right size good. Cold, wet genitals, not so good.

World Aids Day

Today is World Aids Day. This frightful disease is killing millions of people. And no one seems to care. Actually, that's an overstatement. Many people care, like these. Just not enough people yet. However, you can always count on Bush's government to come up with workable and common sense solutions to this and many other problems. Not!

Age, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing! Wait, maybe experience?

One of the few advantages of growing old is that you gain experience. Whether the experience is relevant to anything is subject to debate, but you get experience, whether you want it or not. I have been in the business world for 40+ years. During that time, I have filled prescriptions for retail pharmacies of all sizes from single person apothecary shops to mega chains and for hospital pharmacies. I have attended 4 institutions of higher learning. I have two professional degrees. I have practiced law for a medium sized firm, a large firm and as a sole practitioner. I have been in-house counsel for two very large companies. I have been married twice. I have fathered at least three children and been a step parent to two more. I have lived in three states. I have bought 6 or 7 houses and multiple cars. I have observed the people with whom I have come in contact during all these situations and I have made a seriously large number of mistakes during this period, all of which translates into experience. As a result, I have devised a number of rules to live by. Some spring from my own experiences and mistakes. Some I have gleaned from observation of the other people in my world. Some are my own words and some are completely stolen from others. Some are intended to be serious. Some are stated in humorous terms but hopefully convey a serious message. Others are just silly. Indulge me, it’s my blog.

1. Observe scrupulous honesty in all dealings, except maybe the small personal ones like “Do these pants make my ass look big?” This can not be over emphasized and is an integral part of many of the other rules here.

2. Tell bad news (and all of it) immediately. There is a tendency to refrain from telling clients, employers, significant others, children, etc. bad news ostensibly to protect them from it. Really it’s just that you don’t want to do it. Things like: “Your appeal has been denied”, “I’m being sued for sexual harassment”, “I’ve been fired”, “Your sister is carrying my baby”, “Your hamster just died”, really don’t get better with age. They also don’t get easier to tell. Telling the bad news, apologizing for it, if necessary, taking the lumps and getting on with your life works much better than attempting to cover it up or hope it will go away. We have all seen high profile examples of this.

3. If you have to eat shit, take big bites. This is a corollary of Rule 2. If you have to take on a task that is difficult or unpleasant, get it done. If you are beaten, humiliated or embarrassed, deal with it, get it over with. Don’t procrastinate. Don’t avoid. It will not go away.

4. Don’t screw a client, either literally or figuratively. Two lawyers are walking down the street. A beautiful girl walks by. One of the lawyers says “Man, I’d like to screw her.” The other lawyer says “Out of what?” This illustrates both points. If you are a professional (attorney, accountant, financial adviser, clergy, etc.) and you provide services to others, in a lot of situations, the client will be in a vulnerable state. This vulnerability extends to both material (money, property) and immaterial (sex, emotional involvement). Resist strongly any temptation to take advantage of that vulnerability. Rule 1 above should cover any questions about the material matters. As to the other, if you are going to get romantically or emotionally involved, end the professional relationship first. You can not adequately provide ethical services to the client if you are also sexually involved. Disbarment, divorce, malpractice, etc. are just some of the risks you run with this.
A corollary to this rule is “Don’t screw anybody with whom you work”. I mean this more literally than this discussion above. This is also expressed as “Don’t fish off the company pier”, “Don’t dip your pen in the company ink” and “Don’t get your p***y and your paycheck at the same place”. I have observed the problems this causes on more than one occasion. Law firms are probably one of the places in which this occurs most frequently. You have highly motivated, successful, egotistical people thrown together for long periods of time, so it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that this happens with alarming frequency. Or maybe I have just associated with some very horny people. In any event, this almost always ends badly also. One or both of the participants frequently loses a job. Firms split over this stuff. Emotions flare and feelings are irretrievably harmed. Two lawyers share an administrative assistant (formerly a “secretary”). One says to the other: “Are you screwing our secretary?” “No”, the other replies. The first says “Good, then you fire her.”

5. Never play poker with a man called “Doc”. Obviously, this applies to more situations than just cards. Anybody with enough experience and cachet in a business situation or card game that is well enough known to have a nickname or inside information, is in a superior position to you. As Matt Damon’s character says in the movie “Rounders”: “If you can’t spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker.”

6. Never eat at a place called “Mom’s”. Make of this one what you will. Any place or anybody that needs to advertise themselves in such a manner, needs to be regarded with a healthy dose of skepticism.

7. Never pass up a chance to pee. This needs to be taken literally at my age. Even when you don’t need to go, you will shortly, so go now. Figuratively, it means don’t pass up opportunities because you think they will come by again. They may but not at the right time.

8. Never go to bed with someone who has less to lose than you do. If your partner doesn’t have as much invested in the situation as you do, it will end badly for you. I also refer to this as the “Bill Clinton rule”. Bill violated this on more than one occasion. Come to think of it, everybody had less to lose than he did.

9. Live each day to its fullest. Carpe diem and all that crap. This is the sort of thing that appears on greeting cards and inspirational posters. As a result it tends to get marginalized and ignored, particularly by young people. They don’t fully appreciate that the days you have are finite. As you get older, like me, you see the wisdom of this short statement. Having a friend’s mother die in her sleep at the age of 50 without prior symptoms brought this home to me. On your death bed, you will never wish you had spent more time at the office. A cliché, sure, but the truth.

10. Do not confuse the amount of money you make with your worth to society. Movie stars, professional athletes and rock stars make a lot of money. Attorneys make a lot more than the average worker. Does this mean that Russell Crowe, Alex Rodriguez and Britney Spears are more valuable members of society than your local cop, your dad that works in construction or the minimum wage maid that works a second job to help support her family? Obviously not. If you are lucky enough to make some money, appreciate it, support your family well, share it and don’t look down on those who, for whatever reason, don’t make as much.

11. If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. This is not so much a rule as a manner of looking at the world that you should try to avoid. It literally means that if you only know how to do one thing, you will try to force everything you approach into that mold. Attorneys fall into this approach because of familiarity, laziness or lack of creativity. There are many ways to get to your goal and being creative with the journey sometimes can be the best part.

Are these rules important? Some are, some not so much. Pick and choose to see if there is any wisdom hidden in this. Have I violated some of these rules? Yes, most of them and have almost always regretted it. Why am I writing like Donald Rumsfeld talks? Goodness gracious, I just don’t know.

Things For Which I Am Thankful!

OK, everybody does a blog post this time of year on what they are thankful for and why they are thankful. Generally this is for big stuff: family, children, significant other, world peace, surviving a serious illness, etc., etc. I too am thankful for all the big things. I have been exceedingly blessed with my family, children, wife, job, health to the extent that it almost goes without saying. I truly hope I never get what I deserve because that would be a serious reduction in what I have now. So, the big stuff is taken care of and here is some small stuff for which I am thankful (not an exhaustive list and in no particular order):

• warm weather-being able to exercise outdoors in shorts and tee shirt in January
• hitting a series of green lights when I need to be somewhere soon
• the laughter of small children at play
• the enthusiasm of dogs for almost anything
• sunlight shining through trees onto water
• being able to vote, even though I rarely vote for the winning candidate
• the sincere smiles of strangers
• association with younger people
• learning something new
• being pleasantly surprised by the quality of a restaurant meal
• elevators and escalators
• frozen Margaritas (with salt) and queso
• the easily discernable but not overpowering fragrance of a women wearing good cologne
• a book, television show or movie that is enertaining, well done and aimed at someone with an IQ in excess of a house plant
• baseball (any level), viewed in person on a soft summer night
• the smell of rain on a summer day
• a full night's sleep
• a shaded country road in the summer
• easy open containers that actually do open easily
• things that work as they are supposed to for a long time
• people that do the same
• the feel of my favorite shirt
• the sound of the exhaust of a really nice, powerful car
• e-mail and the internets
• being able to express myself in this blog without fear of anybody reading it (except possibly the NSA).

So thanks for these things, big and small. Thanks a lot!

Cliff Clavin moment Number 2: J.R.R. Tolkien's Full Name

J.R.R. Tolkien's full name was John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. He was the author of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I have read many fantasy books as a result of getting hooked on his writings at an early age. He was born in South Africa and as a child was bitten by a baboon spider. The doctor that treated him for this bite probably served as the model for Gandalf in his later writings. He later moved to England, graduated from the University of Oxford and fought for the British in WWI. He contracted trench fever during the war, which a bacterial infection carried by lice. Isn't war a noble enterprise? His first civilian job was with the Oxford English Dictionary where he worked on words of Germanic origin that began with the letter W. He would have killed in that category on Jeopardy. He later worked in academia and during this time he wrote the works for which he is famous. He disliked automobiles and rode a bike for most of his life. He died in 1973.

Thank you for your work J.R.R. or John Ronald or John Ronald Reuel, whatever you would have liked to have been called. You expanded my horizons.

What did we do before Wikipedia?

Sunday Morning Dog Blogging

Taters blows out the candles on her birthday cake on her third birthday on Nov. 11. (below), while Buster is more interested in playing with Taters' birthday present when Taters is not looking.

Basking In the Afterglow

OK, the election has come and gone and my worst fears were not realized (see previous post). The Democrats got almost as much as they could have possibly expected and regained control of both the House and Senate. This has already begun to bear fruit. Bush has expressed a desire to a bipartisan approach to governance. What this really means remains to be seen. The Repug’s idea of a bipartisan approach before this election was to allow Democrats to apply lubricant before they were sodomized.

In addition, Bush’s dad has come to try to bail him out again. Has this guy ever successfully completed a task either with or without the support of the familia? Bush (the elder) has now thrown Rumsfeld under the bus. Bush (the lesser) is only the messenger (not a change). Bush (the elder) has run in some of his old cronies, including Mr. Gates and Mr. Baker. They will attempt to come up with something in Iraq that the Democrats can support and that will allow Bush (the lesser) to save a little face. This is an amazingly familiar recurring pattern. Whether it is covering up a DUI or a drug problem, keeping him out of Vietnam, destroying records of an AWOL military performance, bailing out a bankrupt oil company, letting him play at working for a baseball team, getting almost all the boys a state to play with or trying to put lipstick on the worst looking pig of an administration ever, Bush (the elder) has had a full time job getting his cronies to prop up his idiot child.
This election is a good start but 2008 can not get here soon enough for our country.

Hurry sundown, please hurry.

Looming Election

Of course, the mid-term elections occur this Tuesday. We have already early voted and have been fairly active with MoveOn.org in making calls to recruit other callers and we are also hosting a Rock The House (and Senate) calling party this weekend. All the polls seem to point to significant Democratic gains and I pray that this is the case. However, I can't even contemplate what it will mean if the Republicans retain control of both chambers of the legislature. When Bush had the hubris to claim a mandate with 51% of the vote in 2004, I put a bumper sticker on my car that reads: "Mandate, My Ass!". It remains there today. However, if the voters see fit to keep the Repugs in power (without another election being Diebolded), then it seems that it may be a mandate and that the U.S. deserves what it gets.

Lord, deliver us from evil.