Mills of the gods

Herbie

2010-12-06T14:33:00.002-06:00

One of the great friends of my childhood was Herbie Farnsworth. Herbie, later Herb,now Herbert, was in most of my classes in elementary school and his father was one of my little leauge baseball coaches.The first grown man to allow me to curse in front of him. There were times in my life when the Farnsworths probably believed that I had moved into their house,especially when we were 13 and used Herb's room as our base for listening to rock music and calling girls.

By the time we were sophomores in high school our old friendship was drifting.Sometime in the 8th or 9th grade Herb had started dipping snuff and switched from listening from Dylan to Ernest Tubbs.He then joined the Future Farmers of America.I had joined the debate team which meant that I had to spend a lot of time after school working and pretending to be smart. I recall walking home from the bus stop one day in tenth grade, after debate and running into Herb and John Phillips walking past in the other direction, both spitting snuff.Even a 16 year old can pick up on that metaphor.We all had chosen our paths, which of us having picked the better way, only God would ever know.

The thing was though, there was never really an oficial parting of the ways,never an argument or fight or petty disagreement.I would run into Herb from time to time and while there was none of the old comradery there had once been, there was always friendship and it is too bad that that was not enough to keep us closer.

Throughout high school, Herb developed a drinking problem. It started when he and John took a job in Fayeteville one summer hauling hay. By the time the summer was over both John and Herb could best be described as serious rednecks. Herb had developed a propensity of drinking a case of beer in one night.One unfortunate night he drank his case before driving home on Texas Highway 71 to Houston from a dance at la Grange. In those days Highway 71 included a dangerous little fork in the road inviting you to go left or right. Herb passsed on both offers and continued straight into an enormous Oak tree. The last time I recall being in Herb's room at his home was right after this while he recovered froma broken collarbone. He assured me that his being drunk had kept him relaxed and saved his life.

After high school I would run into Herb once in a blue moon. He had become a mechanic, and I was told that he was a good one. He had(although I did not know it) obtained a college degree.He had been married at least a couple of times and he had two kids from those marriages.I ran into his mother and father with somewhat more frequency and always maintained very cordial relations with them. Mr Farnsworh always called me his "old second baseman".

One day a couple of years ago I read a story online that Herb had shot and killed his wife.I checked a couple of things and confirmed it.I had a hard time keeping up with the case but finally figured out that Herb had been sentenced to 15 years for manslaughter.Herb, at the time was 55 or 56.

What do you do with information like that ? In hindsight I now know that I should have contacted him. I don't know why this seemed such a hard decision at the time.I have since learned a lot more about this particular dynamic and have come to realize that being emotionally supportive is a truly difficult thing. Especially for men.

As anyone who reads this is likely to know, my life has changed quite a bit over the last year and I see some things, especially regarding emotional support with much more clarity that I ever had in the past.I decided to send Herb a letter and see if he would let me come see him. This is a difficult process in the Texas Criminal Justice system.Indeed,if I were not an attorney I would have not received permission to visit.Even with that, the system threw up a couple of roadblocks that I finally managed to manuver through.I think that probably the vast number of Texas citizens would agree with being tough on the inmates.Here is a guy who killed someone. That's all anyone knows. They don't know and don't care that this inmate and I once had a very wide ranging and productive discussion on how many holes it would take to fill the Royal Albert Hall. That he and I would call up radio stations at the begining of Christmas season and get the DJs to let us sing Jingle Bells on the air. They never sat in the outfield seats at double headers at Colt Stadium and poured water over the top of their heads in an attempt to fight off dehydration. All of these things I did, and more, with Herbie/Herb and if they were not worthwhile, why would I remember them so clearly.

I am not going to talk about Herb's crime or our discussion.Everything he said to me was privleged anyway. That's one thing that the state can't take away from you. They can have a guard stare at you through a window for a couple of hours and make you talk on a phone through glass to your friend and say that it is done for your safety, and frankly, it is.The number of people incarcerated in this state makes it impossible for them to check on all the Royal Albert Hall stories you might tell in mitigation.Still, it hurts so bad. The years slip seemlessly away and you just can't believe that some one is treating your old friend like this.Then you remember how you treated him. How you waited two years before even trying to find out where we was locked up.

Toward the end of our true friendship Herb and I would sometimes get a bag of baseballs and an old bat his father had that was shaped like a fungo bat. It was a Kiki Kyler model.Herb and I would head over to the pony leauge field and he would hit fly balls to me until I was exhausted or darkness feel, whichever was first.I would stand in medium center fieled and he would hit ball after ball to my right, my left,over my head,in front of me. It was great exercise and we only did it at the very tail end of the seaon,late october, early November. When I had caught the last ball I was going to catch, we'd gather up all the equipment and head for home into the cool air that, if we were lucky,might even mean that Houston, Texas would have a fall that year.Sometimes we'd stop at the 7/11 and draw a softdrink out of the big ice tubs that they filled up every day. Most of the ice would be melted and very few of the drinks were left.I'd get a Grapette or a Nehi orange, Herb was a cola man, and we'd lean against those iced tanks and watch the last of the light vanish over the ballfields on Bissonett Blvd. in suburban Houston.We'd stick our empties into the cases ,which held only soft drinks, and walk together down to Herb's house where we'd part company.

There is an inevitability to parting in this life.There are only so many flyballs you can catch.But what I have found out through visiting Herb is that every parting invites a resurrection.Every parting is an opportunity, and every opportunity is a blessing.

Project Completed

2010-08-02T10:32:00.003-05:00

About a month ago I completed a project that I have been working on for over twenty five years.I finished reading at least one critical biography of every United States President.This project would not have taken twenty five years had all of the Presidents been as interesting as Lincoln or a Roosevelt.The reading part of the project does not slow you down. It is the procrastination in making yourself read a huge biography of Zachary Taylor.I bet that I read a dozen Lincoln bios before I finished one of old "Rough and Ready" Taylor, and Taylor only served for two years !

You know that line of Presidents you can never remember ? It goes from Van Buren to Buchanan, skipping over Polk.There is a reason you can't remember them. They are not worth remembering. Please take my word for this,no ones life was ever truly enriched by reading a biography of Millard Fillmore or through making a detailed study of Franklin Pierce.The same can be said about those other yahoos who served after Lincoln and before McKinely (excepting Grover Cleveland).Let me tell you, after about 100 pages you begin wondering just how long it is going to be before Garfield can get shot, or why no one thought of shooting him before.

I can say for sure that it is impossible to "rate" the American Presidents.Any historians list of a top ten presidents or a full ranking, which you see about once a year, is malarkey.No one can prove to you that George H.W. Bush was a better Presdident than Calvin Coolidge (although he was).All you can rate is how a President approached the problems he faced in his term(s).The worse off the country is, the greater a President can be.Some perfectly good Presidents were never challanged.Some fairly mediocre men rose to the occasions presented them.Now and then there will be a perfect storm, when the worst of times meets the worst of men. James Buchanan is the classic exapmple. People spent years trying to analyze his leadership ability (none) against his experential factor (great) to see if they could figure out what went wrong.Recently historians have decided that it is more interesting to try to figure out whether he was a homosexual.For awhile historians became so interested in that that they moved on to ask the same questions about Lincoln.Today's historians are mostly trained at the "E" Network I guess.

Mostly what I felt after reading all othese biographies is a sense of wonderment that the Republic has survived its many trials.Please believe me when I tell you that your high school Civics teacher would have made a better President than at least half a dozen men who held the job.Your favorite College Prof. would comfortably fit in the top 50% of the group.With the exception of three or four Presdidents,most of us know one or more people from our lives who would done as creditable job as any of them.The only two that I am sure were indispensible were Washington and Lincoln, so really, I knew as much about Presidential greatness in the first grade as I do now.I do know more than most about presidential mediocrity.Worse than the mediocrity is the cynicism of our two party system which would allow a Warren G. Harding to make it to the top.

Rather than rank these fellows, let me just give you a few thoughts about some of them, some good, some bad.

1.John Adams- I am one who believes that Adams was as great a man as Jefferson and believe that Jefferson was overrated.I will say though that I am not at all sure that John Adams' anger control issues would not have caused havoc and destruction in a Second Term.

2.Eisenhower-This guy was close to being indispensible, but I think that Truman could have handled what he did equally well.That is, to stand as the only reasonable person in the Federal government who could have kept the country out of war between 1953-1961.The country could very easily have emerged from those eight years exhausted and decimated from a limited nuclear war or armed to the teeth and turned into a rouge bully boy. Ike had to handle not just the Russians, but the nuts in his own country and military.Try balancing that beam for eight years without a shot being fired.

3.Eisenhower-Blew the chance of four lifetimes in not putting his unprecedented prestige behind Brown vs the Board of Education ruling.Allowed for an additional ten years of unecessary pain and strife because he, himself, did not believe in the decision or would not more forcefully support it.

4.Reagan-Was able to turnaround the outlook of an entire country in about three years.A tremenbdous accomplishment equalling that of FDR.Unfortunatly he gor rid of the tax and spend liberals in Washington and replaced them with borrow and spend conservatives, setting the stage for the enormous economic lie this country found itself in three years ago.

5.Wilson- the most brilliant student of forgien policy in our nations hisory but was too arrogant to know that to lead a nation to the promised land they have to be willing to come with you.George H.W. Bush used the same ideals of internationalism and pulled a nation along with him simply because he was not an arrogant son of a bitch.

6.FDR-Overcame the traditional isolationist viewpoint of the American people and was able to enter a war againt Germany two years before it was declared.A brilliant example of leadership and patience.He showed the same leadership domestically but without the patience that would have helped some.In the end, he did change the country to where it began to think of itself along the lines of a european state with at least some cradle to grave entitlements.In other words, gave American capitalism a human face.

7.JFK-overrated,overrated,overated in every area except possibly the bedroom

8.Grover Cleveland- Thoroughly honest, amazingly industrious, understood that not being reelected, or even being very popular, was a criteria for the job.

9. Andrew Jackson-Proof that no matter how brave and resourceful you are,you are a danger in the job if you have no knowledge of fiscal or monetary policy.

10.Richard Nixon-over analyzed,over analyzed,over analyzed,but you just can't help yourself. It's like looking in a mirror and seeing that you are exactly what you fear.

more thoughts later

Situational Ethics at the Soda Fountain

2010-07-31T16:33:00.000-05:00

Earlier today I felt like getting a What-A-Burger, not any hamburger, a
What-A Burger. It is a sign of a rich society that one can get cravings
for the exact same food ingredients, dispensed a little differently at a
dozen different places. Everyone knows the difference in taste between
the various hamburger lines across the country. They are all pretty
good, but What-A-Burger has the taste that is closest to what a diner
hamburger was when I was a boy and so, I think out of nostalgia, I often
eat there.

As fascinating as all of this is to you, it is not what I set out to
discuss. Readers of this space will know from hard experience of my
fascination with the sale of soft drinks. Generally speaking, I confine
my complaints to the fact that the Movie Theatre has just raised their
cost of a coke to $4.50 for a "small"(which contains more liquid than
one person can consume at a movie). For $5.00, "only fifty cents more",
they will sell you a "large" which seems to be about twice as big. For
$5.25 they give you a cup the size of your head and allow free refills.

The world did not always work like this. When I grew up, the only free
refills were for ice tea and coffee and some jerks would not even refill
those. If you bought a Coke at the hamburger place they went behind the
counter and filled up a glass, usually with way too much ice. and that
was it for your meal beverage unless dad would spring for another. Then
everything changed.

Taking a cue from the movie theatres, the fast food places, egged on by
the convenience stores, discovered that you could sell a carbonated
beverage for a price never before imaginable, as long as it was served
in a 64 oz. cup or the purchaser given unlimited refills. Why does this
work ? Because the cost for the syrup of a single glass of Coke is about
$0.000052. A penny buys about 200 Cokes. They make this Coke concentrate
in Ireland and for $2.60 (this includes labor costs)they can sell you
enough concentrate for 50,000 Cokes. That is how these places will let
you drink enough soda to displace the tonnage on your average aircraft
carrier for the same amount that they will sell you one small Coke "to
go". This has changed a soft drink purchase from the realm of a
"special treat" to a hum drum activity that many, apparently mostly fat
young people, indulge in several times a day. Ask your father, if you
are under 35, was there always Coke around the house ? The answer is,
almost never, and it was a big deal to go to the drug store and sit down
and drink a soda for five or ten cents, depending on how flush you were.

These changes, unimaginable to the baby boom generation, happened very
rapidly. It is not unusual to see a child put away three of four
fountain Sprites while eating a few "chicken fingers" & fries. Because
of this rapidity in the change of soda consumption, I do not believe
that social mores have ever been truly established as to exactly what
one is entitled to once one orders a Coke at fast food place. Those of
us interested in the subject of ethics have done a disservice to the
community at large through not defining exactly what we get for our
$1.75.

To begin with, of course, one never orders a "large". That is because
you can drink the same amount of soda, through free refills, for the
price of a small as you can for a large. I used to wonder about this, I
have now come to the conclusion that a "large" soda is only sold as a
"to go" order, or because the consumer has gotten so lazy, and so rich,
as to not want to be bothered making trips back to the soda fountain.
Consequently, it appears to me that ordering a small drink and refilling
it ten times is an acceptable practice and one has not violated any
ethical standards in consuming the beverage in this way. Some
convenience stores will sell you mugs to where you can come fill up for
free of all the drinks you want, apparently forever. I don't think that
this could work at fast food chains. But perhaps I am wrong, think
about this, is it ethical to go pour yourself a drink "to go" as you
leave the restaurant after you have already consumed a number of refills
drinks ?

I used to think that the answer to this was no. I now find that not only
was I wrong about this, but that some places encourage you to fill up
the "to go" cup as you leave. Can you come back later for a refill ?
That's doubtful, Apparently, some do believe that once you have
purchased the drink, you drink for free as long as the original cup
holds up. I saw a sign at the Federal Courthouse in Wichita. Kansas
which said that refills were only good through the date of purchase

The reason that these are tough questions is because the premise of the
issue is that if you order a Coke at a fast food place, you can sit
there for eight hours drinking your way right into a diabetes stupor if
that's how you want to spend your time. I really think that is the
agreement you make at Wendy's when you buy a Coke. Well then, since you
are entitled to all the Coke you want anyway, how does it hurt anyone,
or seem unethical, to share your unlimited drink with someone at your
table ?No one would object if you shared with your three year old, why
is it different that if you share with a 30 year old friend ? If you
share, does it have to be from the same cup, or can your friend use the
small free water cup they gave her when she ordered. Must you be the one
to do the refill, or can your dead beat friend do it ?

One way to gauge how society is expected or is no expected to act in
these Coke contracts is to look at the enforcement mechanism of the
vendor. They are just about non-existent. The drink bar is often even
out of eyesight of the eighteen year old kid who took your order. It is
my belief that the profits made on these drinks is such that it is too
expensive to waste labor policing the outcome of the Coke purchase
transaction. In other words, for the most part, we are working under a
true honor system. I suppose that would be fine if there were any honor
among soft drink junkees.I doubt that there is much. Do you think
today's ten year old tosses sleeplessly at night thinking about filling
up her water cup with Mountain Dew ? I doubt it, and yet there you have
it, an out and out breaking of the ten commandments, not matter how thin
you slice it (how's that for mixing metaphors ?).

Is this really what we want to tell our kids about capitalism ? That in
certain cases, vendors under our system wink at these thefts, perhaps
to the point of encouraging them. This cannot go on, if only because it
is spawning a race of 300 pound fourth graders.

There are three ways we can approach this problem. The first is to work
through the issues of ethics with our children to make sure they
understand the concept of value in exchange for money. OK, OK, stop
laughing. There are two ways we can approach the problem.

First, groups of concerned citizens can give up parts of their day each
day to sit around fast food places and police soft drink activity. When
confronted with an ethical breach, the concerned citizen can go over to
the patron (thief) and explain to he/she ,as well as the entire dining
area, why patron has broken the commandment, not to mention the law.

Second, since the first method would result in violence, is what I call
the bundling theory (actually economists call it that, but I am stealing
it for this blog, see the irony ?). I would propose that everyone who
enters a fast food chain pay $1.00 as an entrance fee, sort of like a
two drink minimum at a night club. After the payment of the fee you can
do anything that I have expressed concerns about in this blog, as I am
sure that $1.00 per person will keep the establishment profiting
greatly, maybe even greater than now. The downside of this is that it
hits hardest on those least able to pay for themselves, i.e. the
children. Good. They need to find other ways to spend their disposable
income. If it was up to me I'd have a value added tax of fifty cents on
every soft drink sold in this country and probably ban soft drink ads
from the public airwaves. All of the money collected by the government
from these would be earmarked for children's fitness programs, if anyone
even remembers what those are.

The alternative, of course is the status quo,eventually all societies
seem to emulate ours and the problems that we have they seem to happily
embrace. Can you imagine a world of 1.5 billion Chinese consuming cokes
at our per capita rate. That would at least help the balance of trade
problem in much the same way sales of armaments do. There is always
light at the end of a tunnel.

2010-07-22T16:28:00.002-05:00

Two old friends came in to see me this weekend. Craig Meredith and Bobby
Rayburn were part of a group I ran around with in high school which
included Jeff Franks, Dan Harrison and George Pfeiffer as , well as our
girl friends. Other folks were in the mix from time to time, but this
was the core group.

I had met Meredith in the eighth grade through my friend Herb
Farnsworth whom I guess I have told you before, now receives his mail at
a Texas penitentiary. Bobby I have known or known of most of my life,
as he grew up in the neighborhood. I know that I have written about Bob
at least once.

At any rate, the three of us were thrown together in an English class
our Junior year, Bob was also in my homeroom. In English, Bob sat right
next to me and Craig right behind me, there we would plot out activities
for the weekend which on more than one occasion involved the ingestion
of an illegal, but we felt harmless, drug.
The fact that marijuana was a felony at that time and there were people
serving thirty years in the slammer for possession of it, so we probably
should have been a bit more careful, but all's well that ends well.

At any rate, this story focuses on Bob, then aka Bobby, now Robert. Of
all my friends, Bob was the most energetic. He could not sit still and
always seemed to be somehow locomoting, even while sitting in a chair.
He was also one of those guys who, because he moved and thought so fast,
often did bother to think twice before doing something or saying
something. He was not cautious about anything. He has bought a
Volkswagen Beetle for $100 from someone and he drove it mostly in fourth
gear and without the use of brakes. It had brakes, I think, but as far
as Bob was concerned they were in the car just for decorative purposes.
Bob preferred dodging things like people, dogs and stop signs, rather
than to slow down , or, God forbid, stop down for them. That Volkswagen
could take any punishment and was used basically as a four wheel drive vehicle
with Bob taking it off road and, on one terrifying occasion for me, up a
hill which had no road. I will say that Bob was not so reckless as he
was fearless.

Now this English class we all took together was a hoot. The teacher was
a man named Sugg, and he was a very flamboyant character. He had a real
liking for Bob (most teachers did because they thought that he was a
little "scamp" and not capable of doing anything too bad. Depending upon
your definition of "bad" these teachers were all incorrect, but Bob, no
matter what he did, always landed on his feet.

This story takes place in January of 1970. We had all just returned from
a Christmas vacation and were starting the new semester. These were the
days before computers, or at least before the day that any computer
made was not stored in a building the size of a 7/11. In those days, at
the beginning of every semester, the teacher would hand out preprinted
index cards for all students to fill in with their name and address,
etc.. These cards were then alphabetized so that the teacher could
determine tardies and absences with them.

My class that January had a lot of new students. Our High School that
year was very civilized and had allowed us to change teachers a midterm
for any reason. In history class, I gave up a football coach with a flat
top, for a blonde former cheerleader from the University of Texas who
actually knew a little bit about the subject. But I digress.

As I stated before, Bob sat right next to me in Suggs room and I noticed
when I handed him the index cards that he took two.
It was actually fairly common practice in those days to fill out false
names on these cards in order to get a good laugh at the teacher, sort
of let him/her be put on notice that we would not be intimidated. Today
when they want the teacher to get that same message, they often assault
the teacher, but these were simpler times.

Our buddy Jeff Franks had told me over the holidays that someone in one
of his classes had turned in the name
"Sid Chauncey" and that that name had been called that name everyday for
three or four weeks before the joke became tiresome and someone told the
teacher that Sid had transferred to another class. I had related this to
Bob whom I guess decided to go a step further (or a bridge too far,
depending on your tolerance level for such pranks ).

The classic fake name, although one that I had never seen actually
attempted was Richard "Dick"
Hertz. You can probably see the humor in this, at least if you are
still on a seventh grade level sense of humor, which most of our class,
including me, was.

Now there are three things that came happen when you attempt this
particular trick. The first risk is that the teacher will recognize the
trick before calling the name. The second risk is that the teacher will
call out "Richard Hertz" which is not nearly as funny as Dick Hertz. The
their possibility which makes the joke work to perfection, the teacher
must go through a three line cycle calling out just like this, and in
this order: 1. "Dick Hertz" (pause) "Dick" (pause), and finally, "who's
Dick Hertz ?" Laughter then ensues and the teacher turns red. Bob's
effort succeeded beyond our wildest dreams. There was Sugg, going
through the correct order of call outs needed for the joke, ending with
the dramatic,
Who's Dick Hertz ? Ah, immortality for Rayburn, although his immediate
future did not quite so promising exactly At least he did not attempt
the last stage by answering the question, "Mine does Mr. Sugg."

After class, while Bob hid somewhere in the bowels of Bellaire High
School I approached Sugg to help him search through the cared and find
the culprit. By the way, this is the one mistake Bob made, if you can
get someone, not in the class to fill out an index card, you are bullet
proof. Bob had not done that, leading me to believe that it was a spur
of the moment idea. As I mentioned before, Bob did not often think twice
about such things, none of the great ones do..

As Sugg went through the cards I pointed out someone whose name I don't
recall, the was a manager (towel boy) for the baseball team Thus guy
was always trying to get us to sign petitions to support the team. I
figured, why not ? No one would blame me if I got this guy in trouble..
But Sugg then ran across Rayburn's card and compared them side by side.
"Well, you know it's not Rayburn" I said optimistically. Sugg gave me a
cold stare did not say a word, and went to lunch. I think he felt a
little betrayed because Bob was just about his favorite student. He
called him, for reasons I never understood, but was always concerned
about, "Bobble".

As the day wore on, "Bobble" made himself very scarce. Somehow, between
the end of English, and the beginning of that class the next day, The
evidence disappeared. That card being the only thing which could tie Bob
to the crime, he got off Scot free, as he invariably did, and the world
turned as it always had.

Perfection

2010-06-03T17:03:00.000-05:00

Are you going on to perfection ? Jonathan Wesley

Perfectio vera in coelestibus St. Jerome

I had never heard of Armando Galarraga prior to last night.I was surfing
around the cable when I noticed a note crawling across the bottom of a
screen on one of the sports networks which reported that said Galarraga
had been "perfect through six" in a game he was pitching in Detroit
against the Cleveland Indians. What this meant was that he had retired
the first 18 men in order in the baseball game and if he could get the
next nine men out he would have pitched a "perfect" game. It would have
been the 2oth such game in major league history, a history which goes
back about 135 years. It is quite a rare event, although, oddly, two of
the 19 pitched in the last 135 years had taken place within the last
three weeks. Only once before, 1880, had two such games been pitched in
one season and never before had three been pitched in one year.

In this era of instant communication, the sports network ESPN switched
from their regular programming over to Detroit after the 7th inning was
completed with the perfect game still intact, so that fans could see
history made. I was gratified that the switch was made and, along with a
couple of million of my close friends settled in to see what would
happen.

Perfection. It is impossible to say that something is perfect. Let me
retract that last sentence. It is impossible to say with absolute
certainty that something is perfect unless we have a previously agreed
upon definition by which to judge the effort. There is no reason why we
should, as a society, have settled upon a perfect game in baseball being
the retirement of 27 batters in a row. We could have said that no one
pitched a perfect game unless they struck out all 27 batters. We could
go further than that and decreed that a game was only perfect if every
batter struck out on three pitches , or, if every batter struck out on
three pitches AND if none of the three strikes per batter was on a foul
ball.

I was holding the channel changer in my hand as the ninth inning started
for Mr. Galarraga. The first batter, the immortal Mark Grudzielanek
swung and hit a deep fly in the gap between left and centerfield. The
ball was hit so hard and placed so perfectly that I actually had my
thumb on the power button of the remote so that I could turn the game
off when the ball hopped off of the wall for a double. A funny thing
happened though. The Detroit Centerfielder, a fellow named Austin
Jackson running full stride caught the ball over his shoulder, his face
to the wall. A catch that more than one commentator has likened to
Willie Mays famous 1954 World Series catch. It was not simply a great
baseball play, it was a remarkable example of human athleticism. I was
stunned. I moved my thumb off of the power button and threw down the
control. This was going to be a perfect game, I was sure.

The next batter grounded out on a routine play, leaving only one batter
to be disposed of. That hitter was Jason Donald. I did not know much
about Jason, but I knew that he was batting in the number nine spot in
the Indian lineup, so by definition, I knew that he was the Indians
weakest hitter participating in that game. Young Donald proceeded to hit
a ball in the no man's land between First and second base. Miguel
Cabrrera, the Tiger first baseman ran toward it and it was obvious would
have to throw to the pitcher Galarraga coming over to cover first base.
In baseball, this is known as a 3-1 play and it is practiced constantly.
Woe to the pitcher who does not get over in time to cover. I frankly
thought that Cabrerra was too far over to get the runner, and I also had
my doubts that Galarraga would beat Donald to the bag. No one wants to
be the last out in a perfect game and see themselves on videotape
forever after failing to do their job ,so Donald was running like the
wind .

Cabrerra gloved the ball (ironically, the second baseman was directly
behind him, if Cabrerra had covered first himself the play would not
have been all that close, but Cabrerra did exactly what he was supposed
to be doing) and threw to the pitcher who was almost to the bag. I
leaned toward the screen and saw, in this order, the ball hit the
pitcher's glove, the pitcher's foot scrape over the top of first base
followed by the runners foot hitting the bag. To my shock, the umpire,
James Joyce (oh, ok, he goes by Jim, but for literary reasons I'm going
to call him by his given name)called the runner safe. Ah ha, I thought,
when the pitcher swept his foot across the bag, he must not made
contact. Oh well, at least it's the pitcher's own fault. Several replays
later it was clear that the bag had been touched by the pitcher. After
the game, James Joyce, probably drinking Jameson's deep into the night,
stated that he thought that the runner had "beaten the throw". This was
simply a blown call, a mistake, the reason why we put erasers on
pencils, the reason why we say (and you knew this was coming) "nobody is
perfect" .

Back to perfection. Under the definition I gave you for a perfect game,
Galarraga was perfect. 27 men came up, 27 men made outs. My definition
was flawed. A man is not out, no matter what, unless an umpire says that
he is out Galarraga had achieved perfection, he had just not been given
credit for it, and never will be in the record books. Forever after the
cold box score will say that Armando Galarraga pitched a magnificent one
hitter on the night of June 2, 2010 in the city of Detroit, Michigan.
Millions who saw it both live and on television will know that he was
wronged and, in a lesser way, the millions watching were themselves
wronged, cheated out of seeing something that happens so infrequently.

Many a fielder's error has destroyed a perfect game. Last night an
umpire's error did so. Umpires, like all of us make mistakes. At least I
think we all do. Ironically, the original James Joyce's did not fully
agree with me. Joyce said that " A man of genius makes no mistakes, his
errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery." The umpire
James Joyce was more forthright about mistakes. "It was the biggest call
of my career and I kicked the shit out of it" he said last night. Indeed
he did, but you have to admire someone who would be so honest and you
have to hope that some of the great sympathy we feel for Galarraga, we
also feel for the umpire Joyce because really, it is a equal tragedy
for both men. Both men were doing the best they could, both were trying
to make their way on to perfection. I think that perhaps both of them
are closer to perfection now than they ever were.

We will hear in coming days, the appeal made again to allow use of
instant replay to be for these situations. I have always opposed that.
Baseball is a human game. Human beings are not about always "getting it
right". There is still room, even need, for catharsis in today's world
(Aristotle would have opposed instant replay).These small tragedies are
the things in life that remind us of what it means to be humans. If we
wanted to always "get it right" we could just program all of the players
and play the games on a computer like the kids do in their E.A. games.
Why bother with going through all the motions, to heck with hot dogs and
cracker jacks and seventh inning stretches ? To heck with stories about
real human beings like Galarraga and Joyce. To heck with cheering for
your flawed hero or booing an umpire. The spirit of Galarraga and Joyce
is what is needed in today's world. Much more than perfection.

Robin Roberts & the "Judge"

2010-05-07T15:29:00.001-05:00

The old fastballer Robin Roberts died yesterday. Roberts won 286 games
in his career and ended up in the Hall of Fame. He played for only one
pennant winner, the Phillies of 1950, but that was a famous team ,known
forever as the "Whiz Kids". Roberts lost his only World Series game 2-1
to the New York Yankees that year on a Joe DiMaggio home run off of him
in the 10th inning, which, as far as losses go, is about as memorable as
you can get.

My brush with Roberts came many years later. In 1965 Roberts was
released by the Baltimore Orioles and picked up by Houston. I was in the
Panhandle that part of the summer and unaware that Houston had acquired
Roberts. In those days I used to listen to baseball games on my
grandfather's big radio before I went to bed. On this particular night,
Gene Elston announced that Robin Roberts would be pitching for Houston
against his old nemesis, manager Gene Mauch of the Phillies. I was
shocked and excited. Despite a Hall of Fame Career, Mauch had had
Roberts released after the 1960 season. That night, August 19, 1965, old
Robin Roberts shut out the Phils on 4 hits while my mother, brother and
I cheered on the Astros him on from the pull out bed in my Grandfather's
living room. I remember that day like it was yesterday. Of course, days
in Shamrock, Texas in the summers of the 1960s did not vary too much.

At any rate, Roberts became a personal hero of mine and was signed by
the Astros for the 1966 season. My memory was that Roberts pitched
opening day for Houston that year and, indeed I found out upon checking
today that my memory was right. Roberts lost that game, but gave up
only on earned run over 7 innings, a fine showing.

No summer lasts forever and the Astros cut Roberts later that year. He
played out the rest of the season, his last, with the Cubs. What stands
out in my mind about Roberts happened off the playing field. The Astros
in those days were owned by a fat shyster named Roy Hofheinz, or, the
"Judge" as he was called. Roy had been County Judge in Harris County. He
had also been Houston's mayor and had come close to getting impeached
from that job. Indeed he was impeached, at least in part for having four
City Councilmen arrested. He refused to recognize the impeachment and
eventually the City Council backed down. Roy then introduced a change in
the city charter to recall all of the councilmen that year. That passed,
but Roy has defeated himself by the Old Grey fox, Oscar Holcombe, a man
the Houston establishment always called on when they needed things to be
calmed down.

Now even a shyster (or a huckster as one biography called him) can have
good ideas, they often do. They usually just don't have the money to
make them happen. They usually get private investor money and/or public
money to fund their ideas. The Judge did both in bringing a baseball
team to Houston. The private money came courtesy of R.E. "Bob" Smith's
millions and the public money came from Harris County's bonding
authority which built the Judge's grand scheme, the first indoor
baseball park in history. The fabulous Astrodome. Xanadu on South Main.
The eighth wonder of the world. He then raised money in secret and set
up a showdown with Bob Smith which ended with Roy owning the team and
the lease to the Astrodome which was paid off at the rate of $1.00
American, each and every year. Time constraints and not wanting to try
your patience prevent me from detailing the rest of the Judge's career
which, like that of most Hucksters careers, ended in tears.

Back to Roberts. In 1966 the Judge was riding high and you can ride
pretty high when you pay $1 to rent a building which generates tens of
millions of dollars annually. People were pouring into the Astrodome
even when there was nothing to see. This particularly galled my father
who was the ultimate huckster hater. He used to wonder out loud how
anyone would have the nerve to charge 50 cents to look at an empty
stadium on nonevent days, which old Roy did.

One Friday evening the Astros held "Bat Night". They were to give a bat
to every kid who came to the game that night. Not some cheap souvenir
bat but a real Louisville Slugger. My brother and I went down and paid
our half dollar for the cheap outfield seats. We went to collect our
bats and were refused same. It was explained to us that you could only
get a bat if you were accompanied by an adult who had purchased a full
price ticket. Our protests were ignored. On the way home our complaints
became so loud that my father suggested that we call the Judge. My dad
was always saying stuff like that. He once advised me to call K.S. "Bud"
Adams, owner of the Houston Oilers when I was upset about something.
That call had not gotten anywhere, probably because the fact that I
represented "the people of Robindell" did not mean much to Bud's
secretary.

As you might expect, I did not get very far into my quest to talk to
Judge Hofheniz. Having failed in that I asked to be transferred to the
Astros clubhouse and was so transferred. Upon being connected I asked to
speak to Robin Roberts and they put him on the phone.

Wait a minute ? Really ? These were different times my friends. We used
to telephone the Shamrock Hilton to talk to visiting baseball players
all the time. Jim Lefebvre of the Dodgers was a particularly nice guy.
Casey Weber of my neighborhood had the distinction of being hung up on
by Willie McCovey while trying to get through to Willie Mays. So I was
not totally shocked when Roberts picked up the phone.

I then proceeded to make my case and explained that Hofheinz had not
taken my call. Roberts put the phone down and went (he said) to get a
pen and paper, then he took down all the pertinent information and our
names and addresses and said that he would look into it.

This story would have a really happy ending if Roberts had sent us the
bats, which he never did. I never blamed Roberts, I always figured that
he'd tried ,but that the skinflint Hofheinz had put a stop to it." Send
them bats on your own nickel" I imagined Hofheinz thundering at Roberts.
After that though, I always had warm feelings for Roberts. Here's to his
memory.

Who Saves Haiti ?

2010-01-18T15:16:00.003-06:00

Riding to the Austin Book & Paper Show on Saturday with friends Bennett and Allensworth,the subject of Haiti naturally came up. "Why should WE save Haiti ? " inquired friend Bennett, a note of anger, or at least extreme righteous indignation in his voice. The Haiti catastrophe is the first I have seen, perhaps ever,where there seems to be a genuine backlash of a group of the citizenry against American help. A local braodcast called it "fatigue" and I think that there is a good deal to that.In a time of extreme economic uncertainty in the American economy, and a general backlash against liberalism, initiated and spread by the "Tea Party" populists ,which appears to have real traction, people are getting fed up.Right Wing Radio Host Rush Limbaugh announced, even before the aftershocks, that this whole tragedy would be seized upon by the Obama administrtion for political gain.This, contrasted to our last president, who used a devestating hurricane, which destroyed New Orleans, as a chance to show gross the incompetence of his political appoitments. Whatever happened to "Brownie " ?

But let us examine this fatigue which I believe has its roots in soemthing David Brooks disscussed in the New York Times on Sunday. As a backdrop, I am not fan of Brooks. I have not been since ther referred to himself and Tim Russert as among the "media elite" one day on "Meet The Press". Big time jornalists have coined this phrase to distance themselves from the common reporter who makes a living covering local politics for the Dallas Morning News.It just shows how desperatly we humans want to seperate ourselves from even the folks most like us.Brooks is somewhat of an ass. But he is intelligent, worth reading, and even worth seeking out for his opinion, no matter how different it may be from yours.

On Sunday, Brooks said what most of us know in our heart. The disater in Haiti is a problem of poverty, not natural disaster.Brooks points out that a larger earthquake in San Francisco in 1989 caused less than 70 deaths. The Haiti quake may hit 50,000.That's the difference that comes about when some people are rich, and can plan for the next earthquake, and some people are poor, and are trying to plan for the next meal, often without succcess.I don't know anything about bulding codes in Haiti and I really don't have to,they are either very lax or unenforced.Earthquake Protection is just not at the top of a country's list when they are as poor as the Haitians.

Brooks very accurately pointed out that nothing the West had been able to do over the years has had any affect on poverty in the so called "underdeveloped countries". The only real success stories of the post war era, with regard to massive aid, took place under the Marsahll Plan, where money was handed out to people who believed that economic growth was integral with their culture.The history of Haiti shows no such belief.Thus, Brooks argues (very carefully, for these are sensitive issues)that a change of culture is what is needed to create economic growth in Haiti and other poor parts of the earth.

Brooks portrays his bias when he says this.He takes for granted that capitalism is the only basis for a successful culture by defineing successful culture as one which has economic growth, so his circular reasoning can not fail.

I am inclined to agree with Brooks on one point. Successful capitalism has a cultural component which, up until now, does not seem to have been overcome anywhere, to any real extent, by the furnishing of aid to an economically poor country.You can make all kinds of argumentns against this, we have not had enough time, the West held back these nations through the use of slavery, colonialism, ecoonomic colonialism and, at least in our country, a policy of extermination. The biggest argument is that we have not spent enough money on the problem.All of these may be true,but neither Brooks nor I believe any of them to be determinative.

Brooks looks to changing culture as the only key to economic grwth and so, believes that this is what we must do.I agree with Brooks if we have all decided that the only culture worth striving for is market capitalism, because the only life worth pursuing is that of consumption. It is upon his premise which I disagree, and in which Brooks may certainly be wrong.Is it really possible to believe that the only economic systeem worth pursuing in this world happens to be our own ? I have a great preference for it, and would not want to change it,but that does not mean that it is the best for all people.It certainly does not mean that all people want it,or would be happiest under it.Very few of the Hawaiians who paddled out to meet Captain Cook did so out of a desire to change their life styles from fishing and simple planting and gathering to that of the sale of life insurance or trading of used cars.I am reasonably sure that the people of the Congo enjoyed their native lifestyle much better that the one Leopold thrust upon them as diamond mine slaves, even if it meant new industry for those tribes.

Many years ago, one of the greatest, posibly the greatest of American diplomatic thinkers, George Kennan, detailed his particular thoughts on diplomacy.One of his initial thoughts was for our country to more or less ignore the Southern Hemisphere, not in terms of friendship, but in terms of one that can have any true bearing on American self interets.Kennan's theory was that no great world power had ever arisen from the Southern Hemisphere.Kennan therefore reasoned that the way to bet was that one never would so arise.To date, Kennan has been 100% correct.No nation from the Southern Hemisphre, or even a nation in the tropics has ever been world economic or military power.There is a reason for that, and it is climitalogical.

The heat of the tropics and southern hemisphere have, throughout our recorded history,prevented the necessary native initiative required for widespread efforts at the accumulation of capital necessary to establish and maintain a market place economy.For years, the countries which had such economies took advantage of this by subjugating the labor of the southern countries and stripping it of its resources.One thing that they did not do was make it easier of the natives to live in areas of killing heat,tropical disease and often (but now always) infertile land.Let me also say that I do not believe that it is possible that the colonialists could have done so, had they been so inclined, which they were not.Late 19th century Europe could not have air conditioned Rhodesia.

The weather conditions of these countries made it not only impossible, but inadvisable for the native peoples to attempt large scale capitalism.The main reason was that most of them had a system that worked pretty well for them, barring the occasional earthquake.The Hawaiian people were so happy with their society that it became necessary for pineapple growers there to import Puerto Ricans to do the work ( these people were used to being exploited).Which one of us would have willingly given up the lifestyle of fishing, surfing and copulating in order to cut pineapple for a subsistent wage ? What's the point ?

I know what you are thinking. Can it really be all that easy ? Extreme hot weather is not compatible with the formation of a mass market economy ? How else do you explain it ? The people are equally intelligent.They just think differently because their climate is different. They had all figured out cultures that worked for them, until we came along. True, none of them had big screen televisions, but none of them had syphilis either.Their cultures were just different.Trying to impose our culture in places where it may not make much sense has been shown to be not only expensive,but often counterproductive. What plays in Peoria does not necessarily play in Pretoria.

Ultimately my view on all of this is somewhat symapathtic to Brooks thesis about culture. I simply don't agree with him that ours is better than others and we should really get tough on enforciing it, just because we enjoy it so much.It could be that for four hundred years we have been trying to put a round peg into our square hole because all of us thought that to be "there" you had to be "square".

Can a world survive with radically different cultures ? It did until 1492.Have all the changes we have wrought over the centuries made it impossible to order the earth with anything except market capitalism ? I don't know, no other system has worked on a grand scale.But that does not mean that one can't be found. What we need to do is to understand the culture of our poorer brothers and sisters and not try so hard to change it just so they can look like us.It will even be cheaper to go about it this way. The other thing we really need to do is export as many air conditioners as we can make so that thse folks can have the option of acting like us if they want. I bet that most of them would rather go out on their own.

Contracting with The Devil, Listening to a Jack Ass

2010-01-14T13:02:00.003-06:00

No matter how cataclysmic the event, or how high a degree of human suffering, the world can count on one thing. That thing is the Rev. Pat Robertson making it worse by blaming the victims.

I have written about this Jack Ass several times before and so won't repeat any of the other lunatic statements he made in the past. Today we will be focusing on just one. That one being his statement that the Haitian earthquake, one of the most devestating natural events in modern times, was caused by the fact that Haiti made "a pact with the Devil" over 200 years ago and, in exchange for independence, dedicated the Island to Satan.

Now to be fair, Robertson did not invent this fable. It has been around for a long time, much like the fable of Satan himself. The story is that on August 14,1791 at a place called Bois-Caiman near Cap-Haitien, several slave leaders who were about to revolt against French rule had a little gathering. There the leaders,lead by one Dutty Boukman, signed the contract with Old Scratch.To date, the contract has not been found among historic Haitian records, but perhaps it resides safely in the archieves of Hell.At any rate, the Haitian slaves won their battle of independence against the forces of Napolean and Satan got his island.Voo-doo (sic) fits in here somewhere but I certainly don't know enough about this deal to elucidate.My guess is that the story was told and perpetuated by slave owners in trying to explain why such "backward" people were able to defeat the forces of the greatest general in history and release themselves from bondage.
So now Haiti is devestated and Pat esentially says that it is inevitable because of this deal with the Devil.What a world that man lives in, a world where when something happens to people he does not like he can instantly tell you why God did it to them.It is also a world where once a mistake is made, it goes on forever,despite the power of forgiveness which is the ultimate tenet of the Church he works for and that of his boss Jesus Christ. Would that we all had the wisdom of Reverend Robertson.A lot of folks would not have invested in Haiti if they had known that the Devil pact was going to take this kind of toll.A lot of people would have left Haiti if they had known how badly their ancestors (who freed them from slavery) screwed up.Now that I think about it there are 600,000 Haitians in Florida alone, which I suppose now explains all these years of devestating hurricanes which managed to kill a lot of non Haitians as well. You (and apparently God) have got to break a few eggs to make mayonase).

So let us leave it there. Leave it for Pat to continue to say things to besmirch both my religion and my country. I am no less a sinner than Pat Robertson, I need forgiveness too. One thing is for sure though, I am not as narrow minded, stupid, warped, meanspirited and/ or senile as Pat. Of course that's no big deal, no one is.

Monday Night Moment Of Zen

2010-01-12T09:56:00.002-06:00

Scene:TV room watching new episode of The Big Bang Theory

Rayda: Mute the T.V while this commercial is on.

Wade: What ?

Rayda: Mute the T.V.

Wade : What ?

Rayda: I said mute the T.V.

Wade: I can't hear you, just a second, let me mute the T.V.......There, now what were you saying ?

Daughter Flying

2010-01-06T13:51:00.002-06:00

Well rats. It is the last day my daughter is working at my office before she goes back to College. It is always fun to have her here because she has to chauffer me to town and back home again. I could get usesd to that. Of course since she is not used to getting up so early, the first five minutes of the drive each morning are kind of rough. Especially if the weather is cold and the windshield frozen over. I get the hear her views of working for a living at that point. But she quickly calms down.

Another cool thing is that we get to eat lunch together. Lately we have been eating at a hot dog place (Franks)downtown. I would have never thought that Stacey would ave ended up such a hot dog connosieur,but she became one while eating sausages and german mustard on a trip she took to Berlin. That's an expensive way to learn something that should have been second nature to her, but we take what we can get in the parenting business.

One odd thing is that she develops a business like persona at the job.It helps me see why her teachers and friend's parents have always thought so much of her poise and articlateness (if that is a word).They see a diffrent person than the wife and I see. Turns out that she is graceful and charming, she just only lets on about this after she leaves the house.But because of this, I am always subject to great compliments from the people who meet her.There is some feeling that I may have had something to do with the way she turned out.I did too,by leaving the hard parenting to my wife who was good at that kind of thing.

I tried to convince her to give up her spring break trip to Maui which she has planned for a couple of years, in order to get her to work here in March.So far I have had no luck with this. Can't figure out why.Nor can I figure out why she prefers the academic life to that of a law firm runner who makes our trips to Costco and schleps mail around the office, but she does.She spends her evening hours studying for the GRE which is still well over a year away.I went over some vocabulary with her last night and was amazed at how many wrong definitions the GRE folks gave to words. How can the GRE claim any efficacy in student evaluation if they can't properly define "bonanza" ?

At any rate, it is fun having her here.Now I have to start driving again just as the nastiest days of the winter are to begin tomorrow.Hope she comes back for a hot dog a few times this semester.

57 Orbits of the Sun

2009-12-30T14:04:00.003-06:00

Today I am 57.The earth and I have traveled some 33 billion miles arond the sun together. The earth doing all of the work.That's a long way to travel and I have never even thanked the earth for the nice ride. Thanks !

I was thinking this morning about my early birthday parties, and a place called WEE Wild West came to mind. It was the kind of place we used to call a "Kiddie Park" although this one was larger than most. There are still a few kiddie parks around,there is one here in Austin called "Kiddie Acres".Wee Wild West was really something. It was located on the spot where the Houston Gallariea now sits. Like all Kiddie Parks it had a bunch of gentle rides that probably would not kill you if the machine misfired. They had little motor boats that were attached to rods and looped around a tank of water, a very small train,a merry go round, a small and short roller coaster and a few other rides.

The attractions I recall best were the self propelled mini trains and the Shetland Ponies. I don't recal the real name of the mini trains. They were small scooter like objects, attached to a metal track. A three or four year old could sit down on them without discomfort. A tall five year old could not. To propel this item of torture, you had to bend ove the front of the machine and grab onto two wheels on the front side of each scooter. Then, while painfully hunched over, move your arms as fast as you could, clockwise, to propel yourself forward (counter clockwise for a backwards trip.By the way, the seat of the thing was solid iron (burnig like fire in the Texas sun) and the wheels were always rusted.These items were used at Guantanamo on terrorists but that has been hushed up for obvious reasons.I never understood what was fun about this painful self propulsiom in that Houston heat. I'd have rather been water boarded.

The Shetland Ponies were the same as Shetland Ponies at every kiddie park. They were sad looking specimens with mangy hides and delapidated saddles. They were forced to spend all day, every day with a child on their back, often beating upon them, walking slowly around the outer fence at the park. They were the saddest looking animalss I ever saw.Imagine spending every day of your life, cicling and circling, one kid after another spilling popcorn and cotton candy all over you. Then you get a short night of sleep and tomorrow it is more of the same.Still, the ponies were the highlight of the park.

Could you take a seven year old to a place like that today ? Kids raised on video games,multi tasking and microwaved food. You could not keep a 21st century kid at a place like that for five minutes before the whining would start. I doubt that with current hygiene standards any mom would allow a kid on the back of one of those ponies.Times have changed a lot over the last 33 billion miles. PETA, of course would not allow the Ponies to stay at the park for any length of time.The park itself would have to carry about ten million in liability insurance which would cut out any profit they might make.I don't know how they stay open over at Kiddie Acres.

Regardless, here we all are,turning our rusty wheels in a clockwise fashion, circling the sun and trying not to fall off.We circle and we circle and end up 365 1/4 days later back where we started, a little older and with our back sore.That's the bad news. The good news is that it's a miraculosu thing to move around the sun, to see the weather change,the plants bloom and to hear the birds sing, not knowing what any new year will bring, but knowing that at the end, it was damn sure worth the ride.

Worth a Thousand Words

2009-12-28T12:58:00.004-06:00

" Sure it's a big job, but I don't know of anyone who can do it better than I." Kennedy, John F., 1960

Having spent the last twenty five years or so reading Presidential biography, I am always happy to learn something that has not been uncovered by the various writers.Today a picture of John Kennedy on a boat with four womnen surfaced.It is allegedly from his Carribbean trip Kennedy made with George Smathers in 1956. That trip, unfortunatly, coincided with the still birth of the Kennedy's first child.The fact that JFK was frolicking on a boat, while is wife was in labor is something historians have known for many years.There has always been suspicion that women were on board the Kennedy boat. The interesting thing about the four women in the picture published today is that they are all naked.

Now I have my suspicions about this picture.The picture has been looked at and is claimed to be authentic and the picture of the man appears to be Kennedy. That does not mean that the picture is authentic or that the man is Kennedy,but it's a good story for today anyway.

If the picture had surfaced in 1956 and had not been purchased in a blackmail payoff, Kennedy would have never been elected. While times were different regarding sexual mores in 1956 than now, if a picture of Obama in a similair situation had surfaced in 2008, Obama would never have been elected. Things have not changed that much. The American people would still have been leery of anyone on a boat with four naked women taken at the time that the man's wife was in labor, as the French always say,we are too puritanical over here.Morality aside, we can all agree that that is type of activity is in bad taste, right ?

In my reading on virtually every American President, I have found one thing to be true. There is something to dislike about each and every one of them.Kennedy's reckless behavior and boorishness, although tolerated by his economic class in those years, was a realistic reason not to vote for the guy.He was, in many areas a consumate liar. He apparently had unprotected sex with a number of women even though he had a venereal disease.He lied about his Addison's disease and obviously lied to his wife with fair regularly.Yet people today still adore him and histrians rate his abbreviated Presidency quite high.

The truth of the matter is that Kennedy's behavior was no worse than most of the other President's. It just happened to be in the sexual department, which attracts more interest than other behavior.Each President had something about him, which if known under today's standards, would probably have keept him from being elected.This does not prove that we have had a bunch of bums for our Presidents. It just proves that we have had a bunch of hummans for our Presidents who manged to keep the lid on many of their problems while in office.Think how much the world would have changed if that boat picture had surfaced in 1960. The whole world might be different, there might not even be a world if the Cuban Missle Crisis had been mishandled ( that assumes that there would have even been a Cuban Missle Crisis).Many will believe that the world is much better off that the picture did not surface. Many will believe that we would have missed enormous problems if the picture had come to light. Many believe that the press would have never let the picture come to light or that old Joe would have paid off the photographer.No one knows. Just like no one can ever really know if the picture is real, or really of Jack. Maybe one of the girls will surface 53 years later.It would take a lot of pressure off of Tiger Woods.

The Quiet Before Christmas

2009-12-23T09:19:00.004-06:00

" How silently, how silently
the wonderous gift is given", Brooks, Phillip (1867) "O Little Town of Bethlehem"

The Christmas season is drawing to a close. It seems to me that for the last few years I have had very quiet times the last couple of days before the holiday. The parties are over, business slows to a crawl and people seem to be letting out the sigh of relief that comes from a job finished and well done.That's the way Christmas should be. I realize that it is not that way for everyone, every year, but it is getting that way for most.There is a relaxation of the spirit that only this silence can bring about.Some of our most beloved Christmas Carols speak of this,"Stille nacht, Heilige nacht", "Silent Night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright".We sing those words and imagine Josef Mohr,the assistant pastor of the little church in the Austrian Alps, looking down from a high spot on his long walk home on December 23 and thinking of the words he wrote. We think of Franz Gruber, the organist at Mohr's church who had no organ to play that Christmas, but in only a day wrote the beautiful music for those words which would be played on guitar for the congregation that evening for the first time."Sleep in heavenly peace" the congregation sang.That peace which "passeth all understanding".

I always imagined the scene at the manger as quiet and cold, even the cattle and sheep quite still, the shephards standing in silent wonder.I know that this can't be true, no child birth is painless, but perhaps the labor made the moments after the birth of the child seem even more calming.For that little family, and that baby, it was the quiet not only after the storm, but before the storm to come as well. But for that night anyway,after all of the excitement, the family and the shepards and even the animals must have slept in that heavenly peace which Mohr wrote of 1800 years later, in a language the little family never knew, in a land that they did not know existed, in a future which would have been unimaginable.

I think of the Christmas truces in World War One, especiallly the first one where German and French soldiers sang carols together, ignoring their officer's commands to cease. That night, even if for only a night, the trenches were silent and no man had to sleep on his rifle. Heavenly peace.

I think of the long nights before Christmas in my childhood, where everyone except me was asleep.My excitement unabated by the quiet, in fact, perhaps enhanced by it as I looked over at my brother and listened hopefully for the sound of reindeer on our roof.

I think of the silence, leaving a church with my wife at midnight in Houston, holding a candle in my right hand and her hand in my left.I remember the chill as we walked to the car and the warmth when we got home.It was on a night like this when I heard the pastor of that church tell the beautiful story of Franz Gruber and his song.He told it every year, and I looked forward too it every year. Stille Nacht,Heilige Nacht, Silent night, Holy night.

I think of helping Santa Claus set out presents for my daughter, the most beautiful Christmas times of all. No present at Christmas is ever greater than your child's smile on Christmas morning or watching her wonder and excitement over a day which is different than all other days. That smile is the last quiet of the day, but by then your joy has overcome your need for quiet.

May you be granted this quiet before Christmas, this year and every year, and may it bring you the peace which was brought to that little family that evening as the Shepards looked on, and the Angels soared above proclaiming peace on earth for the family, and for all of us. Merry Christmas.

What's in the Daily News ?

2009-12-21T17:11:00.000-06:00

I have actually sworn off of blogging Daily News stories (the New York
Daily News is my personal paper of record) but friend Griesel sent me
one today that I had to comment on.

In Memphis Tennessee, which is one large river away from being a
southern fried Gary, Indiana, a lawyer is being sued for biting off a
good part of the nose of a "self employed hairdresser" at a night
hotspot there called "Dish". Dish is a tapas bar in midtown Memphis
which I was lead to understand the last time I was in that city is a
place for the tonier Memphis folks to hang out.

The story is an odd one, and it comes from the New York Daily News makes
it better than an even bet that it is false. Greg Lambers, an attorney
with the Cochran law firm (you may recall the late Johnny from the
O.J. trial)had just consumed four Vodka Sodas and headed for the
restroom. Reports do not mention the alcoholic consumption of the soon
to be denosed Greg Herbers, if any, who walked into the same restroom a
short time later. Anyway, Herbers walks in and notices that all the
stalls and the urinals are in use (one of the urinals by lawyer
Lambers). He waits awhile and then becomes upset that one of the stalls
is occupied by two men, neither of whom is using the stall for its
"intended purpose". Hairdresser Herbers becomes understandingly peeved
as he sees no reason why his issue should not take precedence over what
is going on it the stall. After all, the stall was built for the exact
thing Herbers had in mind to do.

Herbers began screaming at the two gents in the stall who apparently
still refused to exit. Lambers, standing at the urinal is said to have
become incensed at Herbers' attitude and butts into the conversation,
weighing in on the side of the boys in the stall and whatever it is that
they are up to. At this point, testimony differs. Lambers claimed that
Herbers came at him and tried to put him in a headlock causing Lambers,
in self defense, to bite off most to the left nostril of Herbers.
Herbers claims that the attack was the other way around and that he is
down to his last nostril because of it. No word as to what happened to
the two guys in the stall.Herbers, of course, has sued Lambers for $7.5
million dollars claiming that he will have to have plastic surgery (I
have got to agree with him on that), a prosthetic nose and has lost a
portion of his sense of small.

Now nose biting is not quite an everyday occurrence, even in Memphis,
but there has been many a barroom brawl that has resulted in the loss of
a nose or ear. Why was this one newsworthy ? One thing to notice is that
every paper who ran with the story headlined it "lawyer bites nose" as
if the profession of the biter was relevant to the issue. As an
attorney, I am much agitated at this typical slur by the media on my
occupation. I have been called a leech, a blood sucker, a shylock and
numerous other things (my grandfather preferred horse thief) but I see
no reason to add "nose biter" to the list. I have never known of an
attorney who bit anyone's nose and I have never heard of an attorney
even contemplating such a thing. When I was very young I did once bite
Mark Roland's nosed because he had me pinned down and I could not move
my arms. I will admit that the nose can be a very tempting target when
you are in a tight spot, but how tight could this spot have been ?Did
Lambers honestly believe that he could not take out a hairdresser
without resorting to that ?

I was stunned to see that Mr. Lambers picture is still on the web site
of his firm. I assume this means they will stand by the young man in his
time of trouble. They might even get him out of this with the fabled
"small mouth" defense. As Johnny would have said, "if the nose does not
fit, you must acquit ".

Tiger's Tail

2009-12-09T10:23:00.003-06:00

The world continued to rock with the news on the Nancy Grace show last night that Tiger Wood's number of mistresses has now climbed over 1,000, less than 100 being porn stars.Grace's investigators are still looking at the allegatione from an Australian Kangaroo that she had an affair with Woods, down under, during last year's Australian Open.Pictures of the Kangaroo are already circulating over the internet.

U.S. Weekly,which still claims that less than 500 women have had confirmed affairs with Woods, attacked the Grace story this morning. " This is typical of these cable shout shows." said that funny looking English woman who for some reason always appears on T.V. as the US Weekly spokesperson, "You can't expect a slipshod outfit like the Grace show to show to have the same journalistic integrity practiced by a respected magazine such as ours." Several sources from both of these news outlets,both of which leak like sieves, state that the difference in the divergent numbers is definitional in nature."It depends on what your definition of sex is.US Weekly is more Clintonian in its approach." said an unamed receptionist at US Weekly. " Quick oral sex and cigars do not count, jeez, didn't we learn anything from that impeachment trial ?"

Several of Tiger's fellow tour members have now come forward to admit they knew of what many have called for years, the "Tiger slice". "Woods would have a big lead in a tournament, playing perfect golf, and then he would slice a ball off into the trees so that he could go look for it. It took him a long time to find those balls and he always came back with his shirt tail hanging out or his zipper down, later we'd see some woman leave the woods and sneak back into the gallery. Put two and two together."

An interesting sidelight to the scandal has been the formation of several support groups of women who have not had affairs with Woods." It's really bad for your self esteem" sobbed a woman from the Pebble Beach group,"You throw yourself at this guy and he ignores you, then you find out that he's slept with most of your friends and just about every skank in America,imagine the humiliation."

The lasting affect of the scandal, other than ruining Tiger's career will be the new use of the term "Tiger", already competing with "Cougar" as the most overused sexual term in the country. A "Tiger", as everyone knows by now ,is a married man who will screw anyone, even though he is already married to a model.It is synonymous in some ways with "sexual compulsion" and in other ways with "death wish".

The Sailorman

2009-12-08T13:17:00.001-06:00

If one is to believe Google, and really, who else is there left to
believe ? Today is the 115th birthday of the creator of Popeye the
Sailorman. I don't know if anyone under a certain sensitive age recalls
Popeye. My guess is that the sheer violence which dominated all of his
cartoons prevents them from appearing much on television anymore. The
war time cartoons contained such racial stereotypes that I am positive
that they are hidden away somewhere (although YouTube may feature
some).The Age of Popeye has really come and gone and the truth of the
matter is, this is no great loss to anyone.

When I was a kid, Popeye was a staple cartoon for every cartoon show,
and most cities had a local show called "Popeye's Theatre" or something
similarly named, where for thirty minutes you could watch a Popeye
cartoons. In my town it was hosted by a young man named Skipper Conway
from 5:30 to 6:00 on Channel 13 (KTRK) in Houston. Skipper was one of
those guys, in early local television, who kind of hung around as
"utility men" for one show or another. He was in college during at least
part of his time at 13. Unfortunately for Skipper, the T.V. gig for
Popeye required him to wear a little white sailor suit which would have
gotten him beaten up in any beer joint on Telephone Road.

As to Popeye, I was never a huge fan. He always looked about 65 to me,
which seemed old to be a sailor. He seldom sailed, which also seemed odd
for a sailor. Mostly he roamed around town, muttering to himself until
he came upon Olive Oyl, or something he thought would please Olive Oyle
(his girlfriend who is, even today, the thinnest character in the
history of film). Then he would run into his nemesis Bluto ,who would
also be pursuing the object of Popeye's desire. Bluto would always
temporarily come out ahead in the competition, usually by beating Popeye
to a bloody pulp. Bluto appeared to be ten or fifteen years younger than
Popeye, at least a foot taller and 150 pounds heavier. As far as I can
recall, Popeye never won a fair fight with Bluto. He relied on Spinach
to do that. Toward the end of every cartoon, Popeye would be lying in
extremis somewhere, often bound so that he had not use of his arms. With
some ingenuity he would manage to get an entire can of spinach out of
his shirt, pants or over from where the can was sitting. He often
accomplished this feat with the pipe which was perpetually stuck in his
mouth. Popeye's use of his pipe was nothing short of miraculous. It
could even open a can of spinach. When Popeye had use of his arms he
could open the Spinach by squeezing the can and letting the pressure
burst the spinach through the top of the can. The spinach would fly into
the air in one big lump and land in Popeye's mouth to be swallowed
whole.

The spinach had the instantaneous affect of turning Popeye into an
unstoppable human dynamo (much like steroids do for today's athletes).
This allowed him to break free of his restraints and give Bluto a
beating which would have left any other man (at least a noncartoon man)
dead. Then Popeye would go get Olive Oyl and sing a song and toot his
pipe (which never appeared to have tobacco in it and was never lit) and
the cartoon would end. It was a thin reed on which to build a cartoon
character empire, but it has lasted in some form or another for over 75
years.

How has it lasted ? I think that it is the simple humility of Popeye
himself. Despite the fact that he appeared to have fathered a small
child out of wedlock (Swee'Pea) you had the feeling that Popeye was a
sincere and upstanding individual, if somewhat dimwitted and ill spoken.
Of course when compared to the other male characters in the cartoon, the
afore mentioned Bluto and Popeye's best friend Wimpy, whose life
consisted of bumming money to buy hamburgers, he was bound to look good.
But even putting that aside, he was a man totally without guile. His
philosophy of life was simple. "I yam what I yam and that's all that I
yam" said it all about his character. He was decent. Of course I would
have liked him a lot better if he had been funny.

Apt Aps

2009-11-24T08:32:00.003-06:00

I talked to my brother a couple of nights ago, both of us were talking on our I-Phones. Clay, who works in and teaches courses in television (and other things) at the Houston Baptist University is quite a bit more familair with technology than I am. Naturally, he has made use of the features of the I-Phone which I did not even know existed, so a lot of the conversation was me saying, "It can do that ?".

As you would expect, the discussion soon got around to APs. I think that AP (or Ap) may be an an abbreviation for "application", but I only think that because these hightech types (I think that it is politically incorrect to call them ""nerds")use the word application a lot. Of course, for all I know ,it can be an abbreviation for Apple Pie or short for Appendicularia.

Anyway, the APs (or Aps)are things that you can buy. Many or them are really just short cuts to get you to a particular site very quickly which, when your fingers are as clumsy as mine, is an advantage. Some, however are amazing things, the more amazing, the more expensive. I am lead to believe that there are APs for everything that you need in life.I think that you can now do just about anything you want in life, which requires some kind of communication or research, with one AP or another. I know that there are APs which will play your favorite music and Aps with which you can download books.I know this because those are the only two APs I have, primarily because they were both free. The music one (Pandora) is actually very cool if you just want to make sure that you will hear music that you like. I use it occasionally.

The reading Ap has been a non-starter. This is mainly because when you won't pay for books you only can look at thing that are in the public domain. Scroll down the lists on these free book sites and you will always find the American Declaration of Independence, the works of John Locke, the autobiography of Ben Franklin, poems by ancient Romans and numerous other things that are often not on your current reading list. Now the list contains classics as well, but who could read Don Quixote on an I-Phone screen ?

At any rate, the Ap is still in the rudimentary stage of development and at some point will actually begin doing things that are quite helpful. I have thought of several good ideas which I hope are being worked on.

1.Ap which will help you find your glasses, keys and wallet every morning. Now this does not solve the problem of how to find your I-Phone in the morning which would be the key to finding everything else. So some work will have to be done on that issue.

2. Ap which will tell you when your wife is about to get furious over your leaving your shoes downstairs in front of the T.V.. Notice that I did not say an ap which will remind you to pick up your shoes in the first place. There is no sense in an Ap making you work harder than you really have to.

3.Ap which will change the oil in your car on schedule and not have to remind you to do it.

4.Ap which will tell you the truth about how long you are going to wait for a table at a restaraunt so that you don't have to listen to the Hostess'lies.

5. Ap which will tell you the truth about when a delayed flight is really going to get to the airport so that you do not have to listen to the lies of a gate agent.

6. Ap which will alert you that you have left your zipper down.

7. Ap which will punch up your blog for you when you are having an off day in the humor department.

8.Ap which will automatically dial your mother when it decides that "it has been too long".

9. Ap which will break up any meeting on any subject which goes over thirty minutes (and can be reset for as few as ten minutes)

10. Ap which automatically stops any IM or e-mail(or Tweet) that you send out which you would regret later.

Now some of you may think, these Aps seem to be particularly geared to Wade Porter's problems and not mine, and you would be correct.But that's the great thing about Aps, you just take the ones you need.You are free to have your own Ap wish list if you want one.All I ask is that you not get in the way of the Ap folks perfecting my list.You may be shocked at the fact that you will need most items on my list at some point in life.

Rules of Life

2009-11-23T08:19:00.004-06:00

Returning from a wonderful day at the Christmas Market in New Braunfels yesterday, Rayda and I passed a couple of Pawn Shops.I have always liked Pawn Shops but seldom have gone into them. Anyway, passing the shops reminded me of some lifetime advice laughingly related to me by my father which he said came to him from his eldest brother, Worth.That made me think of all the other advice for life lessons I have heard and I thought that I'd relate some to you and remind you of a few others.

"Wherever you go in life, whatever you do, always keep something you can pawn" Worth Porter to Allen Porter- I laughed at this at the time, probably because I was living at home and eating for free. I see some wisdom in it now and if I'd lived through the depression would probably see even more.The problem is what to keep. Everytime I have ever been in a Pawn Shop there was a trombone hanging from the wall.Where would you keep the trombone ?

"Never open a gate without relocking it, never see a rattlesnake without killing it, never walk past a spigot without getting a drink of water." Justice Charles Barrow-
Barrow had grown up in the country down in South Texas where there is not much water, too many rattlesnakes, and cattle which can get out if the gate is not relocked.All three are keys to living down there. You perish withhout water, a rattlesnake can kill you, and even the best neighbor might shoot you if you let his cattle out.

"Never give a sword to a man who cannot dance" Confucious- this one has become easier to follow as the years have gone by. I always thought that it must have lost something in the translation.If the traslation is accurate I always thought that it just had to do with dexterity.Others seem think that it is about leadership and still others believe that Confucious is telling us that you must learn to love before you can fight.I guess the last two could be right, but I know for sure that your odds of living longer go up if you don't hand a sword to a clumsy guy.

"Trust everyone, but cut the cards." Mark Twain-This is one that I have preached all my life and never personally followed. There are a lot of people I do not trust and a lot of times that I wish I had I had been more careful with a decision.

"Never give a sucker an even break" W.C. Fields-This was Field's rebuttal to the "Great Commandment" of Jesus. Before relying on it, remember that when Fields was asked on his death bed why he was reading the Bible, he responded "Looking for loopholes."

"Always remember that even the most complicated legal problem can be traced back to one moron every time." Wade Porter-I discovered this early in my law career and have always referred to it as the "One Moron Theory".It actually very seldom helps the lawyer, but it is best used as a part of hiring practices by any company who wants to avoid problems.

"The Golden Rule"-Jesus, Confucious, Hillel- Every great religion has an example of the "do unto others" rule.I don't know how Confucious squared it with not giving a sword to a man who can not dance. It is the best known rule of life and also the one most consistently broken.

"Don't put all of your eggs in one basket"-Aesop. Or "Put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket !" said by both Twain and Andrew Carnegie (Twain printed this one first but it is alleged to have been "borrowed" from Carnegie who often used it). So which of the two maxims do you follow ? Well we don't know much about Aesop, but we do know that at one time Andrew Carnegie was probably the richest man in the world.You decide. But always remember that most chicken farmers back in the old days had only one basket anyway, so the point of the first one was often moot.

"When you come to a fork in the road, take it."-Yogi Berra-I agree that this one does not help you much, but you at least have the assurance that it is one rule of life that you will virtually always follow.

"Don't burn the candle at both ends." 18th century English saying- This one seems useless, who ever saw a candle with two wicks and, if you did, wouldn't the candlestick put the bottom one out ?

"The best laid schemes o' mice and men gang aft agley" Robert Burns-This one starts out allright, but requires that you be carrying around a Scotish dictionary to really get any use out of it.

"Eighty percent of success is just showing up" Woody Allen- I am not sure how he quantified it, but the sentiment is correct. Always show up and "Always tell the truth, that will gratify some people and astonish the others."- Mark Twain

There you have it, we could have gone on all day of course,but there is only so much advice you can hear, and even less that you can take.I think the best way to sum up the ultimate rule of life is "Be careful of the advice you take, it is often quite expensive and even more often, worth exactly what you paid for it. Nothing."

The Yellow Submarine

2009-11-06T09:04:00.003-06:00

Come on little Nowhere Man, we’ll take you somewhere. Starr, Ringo (animated), “Yellow Submarine”

I made a few factual errors in the blog yesterday. As anyone who reads this blog knows, I don’t care a whit about being accurate. It is the truth we are seeking. The fact that Major Hassan is still alive, or perhaps had never been deployed before, is as irrelevant for us as the answer to the question of what really happened the day Jesus fed the 5,000. Not that I’m comparing this blog to the Bible. I would never be that violent.

But in a sense I am sorry this morning. I wrote a sentence yesterday that was unduly pessimistic when I said “We (and I meant as a species) ain’t goin’ nowhere." Sometimes it seems like that, but as Ringo Starr understood, sometimes even a Nowhere man can be taken somewhere. It is still probably too early to write off the future of all humanity, and I’m probably not the one in the best position to make that decision.

So forgive me for that moment of doubt. While we plod along, measuring out our life in coffee spoons, there are still some of our kind who have made progress. The rest of us can learn from them and, in the end, the logic of their humanity (boy there’s an ironic term)may well control our destiny. All may yet be well. We may be goin’ somewhere.

And Cain slew Abel

2009-11-05T18:30:00.002-06:00

Buy me a flute

And a gun that shoots

Tailgates and substitutes

Strap yourself

To the tree with roots

You ain’t going nowhere Dylan, Bob, “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere”

Major Malik Nadal Hassan, the now deceased slayer of a dozen and shooter of thirty or more (the numbers keep changing ) was, in the words of a right wing blog headline I just saw ,“Probably not Amish”. He was apparently a mental health professional who, in the words of one unnamed source, had been despondent about being redeployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. He decided to express that concern by shooting of a couple of hand guns in a movie theatre area in Ft. Hood, Texas a couple of hours ago. Ft. Hood, one of the largest military based in the world is right down the road from here. It is named after a rather inept Confederate General who, none the less was a hero in these parts during the war between the states. “The Gallant Hood of Texas, played hell in Tennessee” was an alternate verse during that war to the Texas anthem “The Yellow Rose of Texas” That song was written about a beautiful mulatto woman who happened to be “entertaining” General Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana at the time the Texians started their charge at the battle of San Jacinto, the final battle of the Texas revolution.

The human species is simply violent. If not all of us, at least a subset of us. Whether we are Moslem or Amish, Yankee or Rebel, Mexican or Texan does not matter. Buy one of us a “gun that shots” and you always have the chance of a massacre. The Ft Hood area seems particularly prone to that kind of event, back in 1991 they were subjected to the great Luby’s shootout at a local cafeteria.

Now anyone who reads this blog knows that I am no particular fan of the Second Amendment, but even I never advocated the removal of guns from Army bases. There is a time and a place for guns, and Ft Hood, Texas during a period of time when we are fighting two wars seems particularly suited for the placement of weapons. So we gun haters can’t really make much of the fact that hand guns were used in these murders. You and I paid for those handguns and it was our patriotic duty to do so.

Likewise, the fact that the fellow was apparently at least a son or grandson of the middle east means very little, if anything, here. Nuts come in all shapes and sizes, colors and ages. This one happened to be of Arabic origin. He also happened to be in the United States Army. Whether Allah told him to do it, or he just felt like murdering a few folks, he was clearly a mental case. That’s the issue.

For years now people have been talking about our soldiers being overtaxed. This kind of thing is the inevitable result of that. Maybe it did not cause this, but this type of thing is the inevitable result, even if it did not cause these particular murders. It would have happened to some soldier, someplace and may well happen again.

We so seldom see the silent victims or war. We cry over the dead and the horribly wounded, but we don’t so often think about what the experience of war does to an average individual. Even when you are not on the front lines, I can’t imagine that you live a normal life, mental health wise, when you are sent off to a war zone. You probably don’t sleep well, you might have a tendency to get a bit depressed. Maybe that’s what happened to Malik. We will never know, although a lot of people (mostly fools) will make guesses.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not arguing that we should sympathize with Malik. He was a murderer, whatever caused it to happen. Ali I’m saying is that since the days of Cain, we human beings have been a very violent species. We have to always remember that about ourselves and be on our guard. We ain’t going nowhere.

Running Low

2009-11-05T10:23:00.001-06:00

The World Series ended last night with the Yankees prevailing. I thought on the way in this morning that I should write about the World Series , then it hit me. Every thought I have had about the proposed blog may have been written about before. I checked when I got to work and, sure enough, I had written a blog last October making the same points I had intended to make today. This means two things, I am running out of stories and I am running out of memory to recall that I have already told stories. What could be worse ?

The idea which really scares me is that this blog will soon become the electronic version of your 78 year old Uncle who tells you the same stories every time you see him. There is nothing you can do to prevent your mind making this dreadful turn. By the time you are doing it you have lost the mental capacity to know that you are doing it. You can be stopped only by the knowing nods of young people and the whisper, “yes, you have told me that”. Or, if you are lucky, you get a sympathetic youngster who will hear you out (when you can catch him) because he is too polite to tell you he has heard the story before.

I already have that problem at work. I will be in the middle of an old war story and realize that I must have told it before. I once asked my partner Matt Ryan why he had not stopped me from a repeat tale. He said, “Well, I would have, but you do an accent toward the end that I wanted to hear again.”

This shows you the limiting factor of this blog. I like to do different voices and even make noises made by non animated characters (furniture, the wind, etc.) when I tell my stories. My partner Basham said once that I tended to go overboard and sound like one of those NPR stories on Morning Edition where the radio reporter is speaking and suddenly you hear the background noise of a street scene or a village of Middle Easterners or cars honking at an intersection. Well, at least I keep it lively.

At any rate, the great P.G. Wodehouse once wrote a story about an English windbag, a formal military officer from the Victorian Era, who had a tendency to repeat himself. He made the mistake one night while he was eating dinner with a couple who had heard his stories many times, of beginning one by saying, “Stop me if you have heard this one…”. This was followed by the immediate shout “Stop !” I wish that you and I could handle the problem that way, but by the time you can say stop ! I will have finished the blog. Just keep your finger on the ‘delete” button from now on.

Saving Daylight, Borrowing Trouble

2009-11-02T08:24:00.002-06:00

God saw that light was good and he separated light from darkness. God called the light day and he called the darkness night. Genesis 1: 4,5

Does anybody know what time it is ?

Does anybody really care ?

If so I can’t imagine why

We’ve all got time enough to cry. Chicago, “Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is ? “ (1969)

I would like to know what kind of a goddam govment this is which discriminates between two economic carriers and makes a goddam railroad charge everybody equal and lets a godam man charge any goddam price he wants for his goddam opera box ?
Mark Twain, unsent letter to the Editor of the New York Times.

It is said that time waits for no man, and I suppose that if you live in Indiana or Arizona that may be true. For those of us in the other forty eight states, however, time waited an hour for us between Saturday night and Sunday morning, the government giving us back the hour it had stolen from us in the spring when Daylight Savings Time went into effect.

Now some may think that that it is rather arrogant of the United States government to tell God what time it is, after all, it was God who invented time, right ? Well, not really, God separated the day from the night, but he left all of the subdividing after that pretty much up to us. We are the ones who came up with the sixty minute minutes and the twenty four hour days. There were any number of ways we could have divided time up, some perhaps better than what we chose. I have never understood why the Europeans did not institute a “metric “ system of time with everything divided up into tens. It is still something that the E.U. might take up, once they have weaned Great Britain from the Pound and got them on the Euro.

This Day Light Savings Time was really economic in origin, was really pushed upon us by the warlords and capitalists running the country who wanted to squeeze an extra hour of production out of the masses during World War II. This did not affect the actual soldiers fighting the battles very much, since they tended to work around the clock and shoot when shot at or told to shoot. Also, in the army they use all that “24 hundred hour” stuff which they use a lot in Europe. I don’t know what Day Light Savings time does to that, maybe it gets them back to 2395, I simply don’t know. Just like I don’t know what Newfoundland does since they are always an additional half hour ahead of every one else

Then, for reasons I never figured out, Daylight Savings Time came roaring back in the 60s as part and parcel with Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society”. The worst use of Daylight Savings time came in the winter of 1973-74 when Richard Nixon used it to combat the first oil crisis, brought on by the October War in the Middle East. This idiocy was lampooned in a famous cartoon at the time, showing several small children waiting in dark freezing weather for a school bus. The caption read, “I’d impeach him for Daylight Savings time alone.”

After Nixon resigned, we went back to normal Daylight Savings time until George W. Bush directed that it be extended to about eight months a year because this would save the taxpayers billions of dollars. I never understood how this worked either, and I also don’t understand why, if it does work, we don’t just whittle down the national debt by extending Daylight Savings Time to twelve months a year and maybe spring forward two hours, instead of one each April. That sounds to me like it would end the recession. That was the problem with Bush, he had some decent ideas, he was just not bold enough in carrying them out. If Cheney had been running the country, he’d have sprung forward to whatever it took to balance the budget. The current President is not going to do that, but I understand that he is working on a plan which will allow us to “borrow” time. This will be great for us, but will certainly be no treat for our grandchildren who will have to figure out a way to pay the time back. By the year 2075, I understand, that there would be only about eight minutes of sunlight left per day under the Obama plan ,as presently configured.

Politics aside, that first Sunday of Daylight Savings Time is glorious every year. It would be even better if the nation’s retailers would all get together and open an hour earlier with Daylight Savings “sales”. The retailers have already made sales days out of almost all major holidays and taken those holidays away from their employees, why not stick them with just one more extra hour of work a year. What are they going to do during this downturn ? Quit ?

So, time marches on. We will continue to screw around with its increments forever, or at least until 2012 when the Aztec calendar and the world may come to an end. So enjoy it while you can. You may only get three more years of that extra hour of sun !

FW: Lobby clock- For heaven's sake, no! I've seen the future

2009-10-30T10:39:00.001-05:00

From: Chris Griesel
Sent: Friday, October 30, 2009 10:34 AM
To: Wade Porter; A&P Personnel
Subject: Lobby clock- For heaven's sake, no! I've seen the future

Anchor 1: Some sad news tonight from our Austin affiliate, lawyer Wade Porter, disappointed that the clock in the lobby of his building had been off by an hour for an extended period of time met a tragic end this weekend. After sending out a firmwide email noting how he was going “to fix it myself this weekend”, Porter- Instead of enjoying “Miller time”-attempted to fix the clock and apparently became entangled in it’s Inner working.

Proving that “time waits for no man”, a portion of the clock detached, struck Porter in the head ,and sent him off his ladder to the floor, where he met “an untimely end” at some point this weekend. The exact “time of death” can’t be pinpointed because the clock was broken and Porter was not discovered until Monday morning despite crack building security patroling the office building. Bystanders who reported the smell of decomposition where mistakenly told that the smell was from the operation of a nearby Thai eatery.

Porter, a lifelong Houston Astro’s fan loved “Lima Time”, his law partners reported that his favorite band was Morris Day and the Time, and he had recently attended a halloween costume party as Flavor –Flav, from the hit MTV series “Flavor of Love”, wearing Mr. Flav’s signature crown and a large timepiece around his neck. Now, it’s weather time with Burton Fitzsimmons

Burton: ha, ha. Thanks for that “timely” story. It was funny,except for the death part. Seriously, Wade was a fan who took the “time” to give me a shout out on his blog , but hey folks “time marches on “ and its marching toward fall. Better break out those sweaters, it going to be highs in the 60’s.

From: Wade Porter
Sent: Friday, October 30, 2009 10:02 AM
To: A&P Personnel
Subject: Lobby clock

I have had it with the lobby clock being an hour late for all this time. I promise that I will fix it myself this weekend.

The Son And Heir

2009-10-29T09:12:00.001-05:00

I had an e-mail this morning from Eric Marfin. Eric is a second year law student at the University of Notre Dame. The job market being what it is for future lawyers he was excited at the idea of making a living catching Pythons in the Florida Everglades. This is a high risk/high reward proposition. The reason the Burmese Python all but disappeared from what used to be Burma is because the Python skin was found to be a wonderful leather for all kinds of goods. Marfin could do worse than this trade. Still, there is an element of danger to the job. No one who went into the law practice was ever constricted to death by an 18 foot snake. At least not in the courtroom.

Eric worked for us this summer. That is he had almost all the indicia of having a job here. The one he did not have (pay) was a pretty important one, but at least there was no snake handling involved. Eric’s job was a classic win/win situation. The firm won by getting a lot of hard work out of him, then the firm won by getting the work for free. See ? win/win. I like to think that Eric learned a lot here in his apprenticeship role. I also like to think I am “Movie Star” handsome. Sometimes I delude myself.

At any rate I did not write about Eric this summer because I had too much respect for him and also, I thought if I did he might leave the job and my senior partner would not have anyone to remind him of where his next arbitration was located. William has been known (honest) to get on a plane for a Corpus Christi hearing and end up in Nashville. But I digress.

The main reason I did not write about Eric is that it took me the better part of a week not to be freaked out by him. None of this was his fault. I am a long time friend of his fathers and when his dad and I were around Eric’s age we spent a lot of time together. I don’t see Eric’s dad all that much anymore and so my mental image of him is the way he looked and sounded as a College and Graduate student. For my usual slothful reasons, I had not been around Eric very much as he was growing up so I had not paid attention to the fact that he turned out a carbon copy of his dad, in just about every respect that a superficial guy like me can see. So the first day Eric came in I had him into my office and as we were sitting at the table talking, strong waves of déjà vu overpowered me. It was literally one of the freakiest moments of my life. I could not distinguish between Eric and the old image of his Dad. I had to cut the meeting short to convince myself that I was not back on Harold Street in Houston drinking bad red wine and laughing about the George McGovern campaign. Now I know that you may see a little hyperbole in this blog from time to time, but this is not it. This was sort of like an out of body experience seeing myself and Eric’s father as 24 year olds again.

How does this kind of stuff happen ? One minute you are happy and stoned on a couch, reading a Kurt Vonnegut book. The next minute you look up and you are talking to the adult child of the guy that had been sitting next to you, and he’s in law school at Note Dame. That thirty five years that has gone by has vanished with the wind, leaving you fatter and grayer and not really all that much smarter. Then you think to yourself, thirty five years, that’s not all that long, until you stop and add thirty five years to your present age. It is then you realize that you are no longer even middle aged. Most people don’t live to be 112, so I’m probably safe in saying that I am on the way down the hill (although, like Sisyphus I always seem to be pushing a large rock uphill, go figure).

So there you have it. I have managed to turn another blog away from the main topic and back to my usual lament about aging. It’s funny though, I never believed when I was young that your children would give you some sense of immortality, the survival of the line. They do though. It’s easier to get old if you watch your child living a good life. It is especially easy to get old if you think that you can count on that child to financially support you in your dotage. I know I’m certainly counting on that. Hope you are listening Stacey.

Escape From Myanmar

2009-10-26T17:34:00.001-05:00

Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. Genesis 3:1

I’ve had it with these mother fucking snakes on this mother fucking plane. Samuel L. Jackson. “Snakes on a Plane”

Ain’t no Lion, ain’t no Tiger, ain’t no Mamba Snake. Randy Newman, “Sail Away”( explaining to a little African boy why he should leave Africa and come with him to the American South).

As I was walking out of the house this morning my wife pointed out the headline of a story that was appearing on her default web site page. I think it is Google. The story was called “Giant invasive Snakes Threaten U.S.” Wow “ I said, what kind of snakes ? “I don’t know” she replied.” Where are they coming from? “ I asked. “I don’t know” she replied. “Have you read the story” I wondered. “No” she replied. “Are you going to read the story ? “ I inquired. “No” she said.

People all have different interests. Variety is the spice of life, or it used to be before salsa became so popular. Here my wife was one click away from finding out which giant snakes were invading the United States (and where) and she was not interested enough to even think about it. I, on the other hand, could think of nothing else.

It turned out to be as chilling as I thought a I found out when I got to work. Listen to this, tens of thousands, that’s right TENS of thousands of Burmese Pythons now populate the Everglades in Florida. The first ones were released by families that raised Pythons as pets and then grew tired of them (possibly after they grew to 18 feet long and ate the family dog). Then, after these first few few were released, “nature took its course” as the Kingfish once said about Chinchillas. The Burmese Python, who used to live in Burma damn it, when there was a Burma, and is actually somewhat endangered there, is now competing with alligators for the spot of the number one predator in the Florida Everglades. Do you know what they eat ? Alligators !

Now I must assume that they are eating small or baby alligators, but what kind of a country has this become where we have tens of thousands of 18 foot snakes roaming around Florida eating alligators ? Did you know about this ? Did you know that in Burma they used to occasionally kill and eat children and use their constrictive power to kill adults ?

When I was a kid I used to watch a show called “Jungle Theatre”. Every Saturday afternoon a Jungle movie would be shown. Tarzan, Jungle Jim, Bomba of the Jungle. These types of movies were once very popular because they were very cheap to make. A lot of the film was stock footage taken in Africa years before of a Rhino charging or an elephant spraying water. What always got to me were the snakes. Snakes and quicksand. Someone, usually a bad guy, was always getting squeezed to death by a snake on one of those shows. You’d get a little scared, but then you’d turn off the TV with the certain knowledge that while you might someday be burned beyond recognition in a nuclear holocaust, at least you did not have to worry about being squeezed to death, and possibly eaten, by an 18 foot long snake. At least you had that much going for you.

Now fast forward to the 21^st century and there are more 18 foot snakes in this country than western wolves or buffalo. What went wrong ? What will be next ? Pockets of quicksand appearing in parking lots ?I mean could you even go to sleep at night if you lived near the Florida Everglades, knowing that you could be awakened any night by your spouse or child screaming that an 18 foot snake was crawling through the bedroom ?

So why don’t we do something ? Here is a comforting quote from the story “At this time we have no tools which would eradicate a large population of snakes once they have spread.” Where is this quote from ? USGS biologist Robert Reed in testimony before Congress ! The story also indicates (honest) that the biologists would feel a little insecure allowing small children to be wandering around near the snakes. My God, gold medal for those guys. Category ? “The Bleeding Obvious” as John Cleese use to say.

So there we have it. One of the most terrorizing things to hit this country since the killer bees got here, and Rayda had no interest in it. Well it’s a good thing for her that she’s married to me.

White Fang : Requiem in Pace

2009-10-24T15:30:00.001-05:00

I got a text message from my brother Clay yesterday afternoon informing me of the death of Soupy Sales. Sales was a staple around our house on Saturdays in the early 1960s. He had a children’s television show that was always the last kid show of the day on Saturday. Right after Soupy ate his lunch with you on the show, it was time to watch Baseball’s “Game of the Week” with Dizzy Dean and Pee Wee Reese (“Well howdy baseball fans, this is your old podnuh Dizzy Dean”…but we will leave him for another day).

It is no longer possible to understand how important Saturday morning T.V. was to my generation, just as it is no longer possible for my father’s generation to explain what was so important about going to the movies each Saturday morning. While children’s popular culture and adult popular culture have more or less merged in today’s world, things were quite different in my childhood. After a long and exhausting week of school work, it was indescribably wonderful to get up on Saturday morning and watch three to four hours of entertainment on television aimed right at you. Today there is never a time when a child cannot see something interesting to him/her on T.V. There are cartoon channels that run 24 hours a day, videos of favorite movies, TiVo’s from what was missed yesterday, and “on demand “ programming. In my childhood, once you were in school, you really had only the Saturday morning shows to look forward to.

As a young boy I’d get up early on Saturday, often before the shows started. I would usually have to endure watching the Saturday morning farm report show (which began with the sound of a dog barking). I recall being mystified by commodity futures. Some man would stand in front of the camera and say things like “pork bellies up ½”. What did that mean, who was buying only the belly of a pig ? At any rate, after getting through that (and when you are a child, thirty minutes creeps by) it was onto the kids programming.

Although I did not know it then, the first couple of shows each Saturday were old nighttime T.V. shows that were syndicated and sold locally to our channels. These shows had apparently been made for adults, but were so infantile that they actually became semi-hits as Saturday Morning staples. “The Tales of Texas Rangers”, “Sky King” and “Fury (the story of a horse and the boy who loved him)” were three I always watched, even though there were not all that many episodes made of each. You just watched them again and again, every time they came around. A little later were reruns of the “Lone Ranger” and “Superman” which were better known and better made shows, although you might get an argument from “Sky King” fans, especially those who had a crush on his “niece” Penny.

After these shows came the main events of Saturday, the cartoon shows. Some were straight cartoons, some were cartoons hosted by humans and puppets. Sherry Lewis and her sock puppets Lamb Chop and Charlie Horse were big stars. The cartoons were just like the adult shows, there would be brand new shows and brand new episodes every September. The shows changed with the taste of the times. They started out being mostly reruns of old movie cartoons,the Warner Brothers stuff was the best. Then the cereal companies who ran commercials for most all of the shows (along with Hostess and Red Goose Shoes) started making cartoon characters from their cereal box stars. “Sugar Bear” of Sugar Crisp cereals was my favorite, he was a cool bear who sounded a lot like Bing Crosby. I recall him spying a witch one time and saying “Ring a ling Granny, here I come.” Pretty funny stuff.

There was Rocky and Bullwinkle, Linus the Lion Hearted, The King Leonardo Show, Tennessee Tuxedo and his Tales, etc. Eventually, space travel became an important component of Saturday, “Fireball XL5” was a show about puppets in space. Well, not actually puppets in space, the astronauts were just played by puppets. Adam Ant, Secret Squirrel, Milton the Monster and others came on a few years later. By the time I was getting out of the Saturday morning business, the whole thing was being taken over by Super Hero cartoons.

But Soupy was something else. Soupy came on at lunch time, or just before. Indeed, the last thing on the show was sitting down to eat lunch with Soupy. Sometimes my mother timed our lunch so that we got to eat with Soupy. Once, I recall, we even had the same thing as Soupy (Tuna Fish). But when we bit into our sandwiches they did not sound like springs recoiling or gravel being turned in a cement mixer like Soupy’s did. Soupy’s world was different, the rules of physics did not apply, nor did the mores of Western Culture.

As near as I could tell, Soupy’s show had no script. Soupy would come out on the stage every Saturday and act, well, manic. That was the show, Soupy was manic. For thirty minutes, until he sat down for lunch, he would run around on the stage in disorganized skits which always ended up with him getting a pie in the face. He had at least three recurring characters on the show. There was a Lion puppet named Pookie, a dog named White Fang and another (I think) named Black Fang. The only part of the dogs that you ever saw was their out stretched arms and paw. Actually, just one arm. In White Fangs case, it was a long fury white arm that extended toward Soupy, occasionally grabbing him and pulling him off camera where you could hear his slobbering licking going on (Fang’s not Soupy’s).

The rest of the show, as best I recall, was literally Soupy running around the stage acting silly. This was not unusual in those days. Jerry Lewis had a similar act, and as hard as it is to believe today, it was funny. It was funny to a child because it was so different, it seemed almost risky. Soupy was the internal child in all of us who simply wanted to run amuck like we wished we could without having to be concerned about our appearance, our deportment, or whether or not we broke most of the items in any given room. It was no accident that he was the last children’s show of the day, the transitional show, the barely pre-pubescent show, Soupy had a purpose in life. He played to what is today called the “tweens”, although the culture is so different now that you could not get an eleven year old to watch one of Soupy’s old skits. Even with the pie in the face ending.

Childhood eventually outgrew Soupy, even though he never outgrew childhood. Children changed and Soupy did not. Thus his show left the air. The last time I recall seeing him on a Saturday morning, he was trying to introduce a song called “The Mouse” which he hoped would spawn a dance which would become a national rage. “Do The Mouse yeah, you can do it in your house yeah.” I don’t recall “The Mouse” making a splash and Soupy’s attempt to relate to a new generation of children was unsuccessful .He went off to become a regular panelist on day time game shows until he slipped out of site a couple of decades ago.

Now the generation who applauded him is aging rapidly. With them will die the memories of Soupy’s show and of White Fang. With them will die the innocence that childhood used to be before all of our children became too smart and sophisticated to laugh at a cream pie covering the faith of a hapless human being. I read an obituary a minute ago that said Soupy had taken more than 20,000 pies in the face. It is actually an enviable record, but unless the world turns backwards, it is a record which will stand forever.

Up Up and Away

2009-10-16T09:57:00.002-05:00

“Seeing a woman preach is like watching a dog walk about on its hind legs. Of course it does not do it well, but you are surprised that it can do it at all.” Boswell, James, “Life of Johnson” quoting Dr. Samuel Johnson

“The world’s a nicer place in my beautiful balloon. It wears a nicer face in my beautiful balloon.” The Fifth Dimension, “Up Up and Away” .

I tried three different news shows this morning and each one featured as its top, almost exclusive story the drama involving some reality show refugees who had sent up a helium balloon, reporting their son was on board and then when it turned out not to be true, having the six year old son give away to Larry King the fact that it may all have been a stunt. I did not pay any attention to the original harrowing chase of the balloon by local authorities, so I had no interest in the story, other than to be disgusted that real news was being hijacked yet again by nonsense.

The real news of the day was over on CNN where they were reporting that before the year is up there will be more females than males in the American work force. Well that did not take long. When I was a kid it was 20% and in my neighborhood of baby boomers it was much less than that, only an occasional nurse or teacher and a rare secretary bucked the trend of stay at home moms. Moms in my Reading books at school always stayed home. Moms on T.V. always stayed home. There was a difference in “men’s work” and “ women’s work “with the women’s work being, if not looked down upon, devalued. Today you would think men and women would do mostly the same things in the work force (although the women somehow do it for less pay) but that is not strictly true. The reason women are becoming the majority this year is because recessions more heavily land on traditional men’s jobs.

Was America a better place when discrimination was the rule and women stayed at home to raise children ? Define better. Anyone who reviews the literature will find that women are less happy today than when they comprised only 20% of the work force. Everyone knows the reason for that. It is because the traditional “women’s work” still fell on most women and, added to that, was a job outside the home. You’ve come a long way baby ,as they used to say in the Virginia Slims commercials (aimed at getting women to smoke 100 millimeter cigarettes so that they could add lung cancer to their burdens) and they have come a long way. Only an idiot or a Middle Eastern male would say that women have not proven themselves the equal of men in every area of work life with the exception of “sperm donor”. Without a doubt that means that they will start dying sooner and paying higher life insurance premiums.

My mother in law’s assisted living facility had a party for their 100 year olds the other day. Guess how many men attended ? I think you know (the number does not have a digit in it). Stress is now theoretically spread over the entire population. I say theoretically because I know from observation that women, at least those with kids, appear to be under a lot more stress than the men. Thus I can say that my prediction in 1971 has turned out to be true. The women’s movement made it easier than ever to be a man. While all my friends were concerned about feminism, I selfishly embraced it as a way to be able to relax and slack off a little more.

The big issue then, as now, is what will this do to the children ? As far as I can tell the only difference is that men stopped going to college and stayed home to play computer games. Women started dominating many of the professional schools and virtually all of the Universities. So I guess that somehow the movement worked as I predicted, it allowed men to be slackers in greater numbers. That’s not so good for the country, but if you know as many men as I do, you can see how it was inevitable. It also coincided with the explosion of sports on cable T.V. which tells us a lot.

So congratulations to the ladies for making it over the 50% mark in yet another category. The meek have inherited the earth so to speak. I really think that they will do a better job with it. They do have the advantage of men setting the bar in that regard awfully low.

Potato/Potato Tomato/Tomato

2009-10-13T16:24:00.002-05:00

You say potato and I say pot(o)to

You like tomato and I like tom(o)to, Astaire, Fred, “You Say Potato”

No, you left out the “e’ at the end of potato, Quayle, Dan in correcting a fifth grader’s error in a spelling bee.

I noticed that I mentioned attention deficit syndrome the other day. What I meant was attention deficit disorder. I am sorry if this caused in confusion to anyone. Psychological terms are confusing. A “disorder” in psychological terms is what we lay persons often call a mental illness, as a short hand rendition. We use other terms too, loony , batty, nuts, crazy, the list is endless. But when we use those words they are nonspecific in what they describe. A disorder is one of the many subdivisions of mental “illness” (a word which is often frowned upon). In other words, a shrink will not say, “he is bat shit crazy” and often will avoid “mentally ill”, she will say that the patient suffers from a specific disorder, such as “Generalized Anxiety Disorder” which is determined by looking at a book called the DSM and deciding if the patient has the requisite number of symptoms under a specific heading to qualify for the label. I don’t know what you have to do to be diagnosed with Attention Deficit disorder (ADD) but I do know one thing, ADD is a syndrome, so I correctly labeled the disorder yesterday, I just did not call it by the name by which it is commonly known .Potato/Potato as Astaire used to sing.

So what’s a syndrome ? You hear about syndromes all the time and the word is thrown around like it means something, “We are concerned about Stockholm syndrome” says the CIA agent ,if he is concerned that a long kidnapped person is becoming sympathetic with his kidnappers. Why the Swedes are particularly susceptible to this syndrome is unknown to me, but I assume that it has something to do Ingmar Bergman or perhaps massage where less pressure is applied than a deep tissue massage. Of course, it could relate to meatballs.

What a syndrome really is is several symptoms or signs that occur together , one often alerting the therapist to the others and ,when placed in combination by someone allowed to diagnose such things, are known as a syndromes (from the Greek for “running together”). Interestingly, there is such a thing as a “culturally bound syndrome” which means that what you and I think of as a disease, is considered perfectly normal elsewhere. Ironically, the first cultural bound syndrome (which involved sheep initially and then other animals) involves behavior considered perfectly normal behavior in Greece (and at Texas A & M ) and nowhere else. Another example, Wendigo psychosis, is a culturally bound syndrome once confined almost solely to the Algonquin Indian tribe. It is the fear of becoming attracted to eating flesh and because of this fear of becoming a cannibal. Not so many diagnosis of this are made any more as there are fewer and fewer Algonquians and no one else ever worried about it, either because it would never cross their minds or they saw nothing to particularly fear about becoming a cannibal.

The most common place to find culturally bound syndromes is in the Old Testament ( or , more politically correct, the Tanakh). Virtually all of the prophets and holy men in ancient Israel would be locked up today. In Ancient Israel, it was not only acceptable to know and speak to God on a first name basis, it was considered the prime road to social advancement. The guy preaching on Sixth and Congress whom many of us see every day is not so lucky.

I make these points only to indicate to you how time bound and culturally bound syndromes are. There are probably a good number of times places where ADD would be considered helpful and not a syndrome. We just happen to have a society which puts a premium on a certain type of education and study. If syndromes and disorders are as flimsy as I believe them to be, why do we worry about them at all ? The main reason is to preserve order in society. You just can’t have half of the population living in fear of becoming a cannibal. No one would ever get anything done. So we have to label it (really criminalize it) so that we can root it out and continue to advance as a species. Therefore we spend much time and treasure in not only convincing people to be “normal” but stuffing pharmaceuticals down their throats to get them to act “normal”. Mostly, because the non-normal guys make us feel uncomfortable. We would not feel uncomfortable around the non- normal if we had not bothered to decide, on a more or less political basis, what would pass as normal in our society. But we did. To be human is to label. To label is to exclude. To exclude confers a feeling of power or superiority on those who exclude That in itself is a disorder, but it is socially accepted and even demanded (as you may recall from Junior High School).

The basic issue we deal with in all of this is that there is no reason to believe that those doing the labeling are correct about the label or even about what should be labeled. Dan Quayle was Vice President of the United States when he decided that potato had an “e” at the end and disqualified a young man from a fifth grade spelling bee because of it. Potatoe/Potato, Quayle/Quail , these are trivialities that do not matter at all, except insofar as society demands that they matter. The fifth grader was lucky, all he got was disqualified from a contest. There are an awful lot of people in the world who look at things just a little bit differently than you and I and they suffer a lot worse.

The Joke's On Me

2009-10-11T17:07:00.000-05:00

“I’ve got a real treat in store for you this weekend !” Fitzsimons, Burton . Local TV Weather man, 10/9/09

She says the joke is on me.

I say the joke is on her.

I said I have no opinion about that

Well, we’ll just have to wait and confer. Simon, Paul “Fat Charlie the Archangel “

Sometimes the joke is on you. This weekend was heralded by the “experts” in weather prognostication as the “perfect fall weekend”, which it may have been if you live in say, Minsk. But here in God’s country we were looking for sunshine and 75 degrees. It is now Sunday at 1:45 and we are still looking. What we are seeing is weather in the high fifties and constant drizzle, sometimes turning into real rain. The sky has been the color of an aircraft carrier and it feels like those days you had as a kid when you would be lucky to be stuck indoors with a cold. No recess at school, just eraser tag. Yes, that’s it, it’s an eraser tag day.

I don’t know if the great game of eraser tag is still played. Probably not, it was a dangerous game. The rules required two elementary school students to stand back to back at the schoolroom’s chalkboard with a chalk eraser on each head. At a signal from the teacher, both students took off and the student getting all the way around the room with their eraser still on their head was the winner. Usually the linoleum floor was slippery from the students tracking in mud of dirt and wild spills were often the rule, especially if you were trying to make up time.

The best eraser tag player I ever saw was Bobby Smith. Bobby had the advantage of having the perfect flat top that seemed to allow the eraser to stick to his head. He was not fast, but he chugged around the room at a pretty good clip, arms pumping for balance, lowering his head and shoulders to give him a low center of gravity. I never saw him lose. If there was a Hall of Fame for eraser tag, Bobby would have been its Babe Ruth. If the Babe had had red hair and attention deficit syndrome.

I guess Bobby had ADS. Looking back I often wonder if I had been put in an entire class of ADS sufferers. I have mentioned before that, in the fifth grade, Bobby and I were unceremoniously hauled out of class and made to repeat the standard achievement tests. It turned out after the second tests came back that neither of us was as stupid as several higher ups had thought, but were spectacular underachievers. We had the scores to prove it. Lack of brain was not our problem, lack of interest and lack of patience was. But whatever causes you to make a 70 on a Geography test, it is still a D. If anything, the underachiever was more looked down upon than the simpleton (of which there were plenty)in my class. By the time we reached 8^th grade or so, our laziness unimpaired by the certain knowledge that we were not dumb, Bobby and I were spending a lot of time in summer school together. So, as smart as we figured we were, the joke was on us.

Bobby turned out to be a pretty good trumpet player and ended up at a different high school than me for music reasons. I lost track of Bobby after that but heard that he had been drafted and ended up a thirty year man in the Army. I never could see Bobby in the Army. I thought that in drafting Bobby the joke was on the Selective Service system. How were they going to get him up in the morning, how were they going to get him to make his bed, clean his gun, find his way back to camp ? What do you do with a fellow whose greatest physical skills require an eraser on the head ? Most importantly, what can the army make of a guy with that sweet a disposition ? I heard they made him a sergeant. Probably the only sergeant in the history of the United States Army who never raised his voice.

Bobby, I hope you are out there somewhere, living on the soldiers pension, sleeping late and, all in all living the kind of life that you always wanted. I bet that you are. I hope I see you again someday, if not in this life, than the next. There’s a special place in heaven for us underachievers. A place where a 70 on a Geography test is as good as a 95.At least I hope that’s the case. That’s the final joke old friend. We will see who it is on.

Nobel Prize

2009-10-09T08:50:00.002-05:00

I was shocked to learn this morning that President Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Talk about a fast track. Jimmy Carter brokered the Camp David Peace agreement and did not get his for another thirty years. Teddy Roosevelt got his pretty quickly, but he had settled a war between Russia and Japan.Dr. King spent years leading a true revolution to overcome three hundred years of slavery and its vestiges. As far as I can tell, Obama has taken a couple of trips , (one to get turned down by the Olympic committee) and decided not to put up a nuclear shield in Eastern Europe. Most of the rest of the term he has watched and at times participated in the health care debate.

What this prize really is, is an award to the American people for finally getting rid of George Bush. It is a European sigh of relief that the cowboy is gone, replaced by someone who listens as well as demands. The Nobel Committee should have been more forthright in what they were doing, but I guess that the committee could not give the award to the Twenty Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. Still, it could have been given to the American people and we could have had a national lottery to see which citizen collects the $1.4 million. I can’t say that I have done as much for world peace as the President, but really, at this point into his term, I am not that far behind.

With this surprising award I guess we should be on the lookout for other accolades for the President. A Pulitzer, the American League MVP, Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes and “employee of the month” (executive branch) are probably all forthcoming. I am pretty sure that there will be a Tony presented to him along the way. An Oscar is too much to ask, since he never made a movie, but he is a shoe in for an Emmy for any number of his T.V. performances over the past year.

Readers of this blog know that I like the President, I voted for him and support him in what he is trying to do. He has done a remarkable job in repairing the U.S. image in a very short time. But this is a bit much. How long did Mother Theresa have to wait ? and she will soon be a saint. I really think that the President ought to consider humbly not accepting the award. Maybe the committee could put it on hold for four or eight years to see how all of this turns out. There are going to be some pretty red faces in Oslo if this guy hauls off and nukes Iran next week, or even if he waits a couple of years for appearance sake.

Still, these things happen,Zolio Versailles had a good year for the Twins in 1965, but did not deserve his award and I will never figure out how Robert Preston won for Victor/Victoria. I am still mad that Joe Niekro did not win the Cy Young in 1980 and I don’t even recall the bum who beat him out for it. Not that the President is a bum. I have not changed my opinion about him in any way, but let’s see a little peace break out which can be attributed to him before we go this far. He can start in Iraq and Afghanistan

Listening

2009-10-08T11:02:00.002-05:00

Go lie down; and it shall be, if thou be called, that thou shalt say: Speak Lord, for Thy servant heareth.

1 Samuel 3 (9)

I was trying to finish the biography of Rutherford B. Hayes last night (I know, but you will just have to wait for my review) when I had a series of three phone calls, each hard on the other. I believe that the series of calls( total) lasted about two minutes, but since I had to get up to go answer the phone three times, and since I did not want to answer the phone even once, each ring was followed by a loudly screamed obscenity.

I never considered not answering the calls, although I assumed that each one was a solicitation. I just can’t screen a phone call. I prefer to rudely hang up after making an indignant noise. At any rate they were not all solicitations. One was a call for my wife from a good friend of hers. One was call from AT&T where they seem to have switched over from boiler room grumbling voices to happy, cheery voices, possibly because (as I was told) the call was being recorded. “Great” I replied, “Record this” , click.

The last call was the strange one. A recorded voice asked me to accept a collect call from a prisoner (whose name was then inserted from a previous recording of his voice) who was located at a state prison. This one I hung up on immediately. That was the one I sort of regret this morning.

I knew what the call was, and it was a mistake. This prisoner was probably trying to call “Wayne Porter” a local criminal lawyer. I will say that my experience with criminal lawyers is that he would have probably gotten the same message I gave to him, he would have been hung up on. These criminal lawyers would spend all day, most nights , and lots of money if they continually accepted collect calls from their clients who are languishing in the various dungeons of the State of Texas. The guys in the cells have nothing better to do than come up with ideas as to how they can be sprung. Generally speaking they are stupid ideas.

I thought later though; maybe I should have listened. There is so much noise in our lives now that I tune out a great deal of it, believing that the good things I miss out on are over balanced by the crap I don’t have to hear. But maybe I should listen more. What would it have hurt me to listen to a prisoner for a couple of minutes and add a lousy dollar to my phone bill ? It would have meant that I would not get back to Rutherford for a few minutes, no great loss there. Maybe I could have helped the guy. It’s one in a million that I could have, but it would not have cost me much to see. Now I will never know.

As the boy Samuel was taught, sometimes when you listen, you hear the voice of God. Mostly you hear the voice of AT&T, but sometimes it’s God. Only by listening do you know for sure which one it is who is speaking. I hate to think that I hung up on God last night, but maybe I did.

Life's Plateaus

2009-10-04T13:36:00.003-05:00

I seem to have plateaued. This happens to everyone who is trying to lose weight. Mine started about two weeks ago and during that time I have not lost or gained any weight. It is a generally discouraging thing and often results in giving up on the diet, which I have not. But maybe I have. Diets are never abandoned all at once. We kind of slide out of them much the way the human being is said to fall into sin. A little bit at a time.

My problem began when I badly pulled a muscle in California which prevented me from walking my 3-4 miles a day. Once the muscle was healed, I found that I had enjoyed sleeping late and I have been inconsistent in the walking every since. Really the walking is the key to this whole thing. It is the walking that makes me feel better and helps me be optimistic about the weight loss which in turn makes me happy to eat healthy things. Not walking depresses me which makes me hungry.

I do not write all that much about this diet for fear that the blog will turn into a diet blog. I think diet blogs are fine, I just can’t imagine anyone who reads this blog wanting to know what I ate for dinner every night and wanting to see my new recipe for low fat cornbread. There are lots of blogs like that and I think they are helpful to the writers as they do not want to fail in front of their readers. All of this leads us to Larry Besaw.

Back about a million years ago, not long after I came to Austin, there was a writer for the local paper named Larry Besaw. Larry was fat. Real fat. Now you can be fat in many ways that are not all that bad. You can be “distinguished” fat if you dress well. You can be “cute” fat if you have that kind of face. There are models who make a lot of money because they are “glamorous” fat. They call them plus size. Besaw was none of these. Besaw was a sloppy, disgusting fat guy. The kind of fat guy who gave the rest of us fat guys a bad name. He needed to lose a whole lot of weight and he hit upon a way to do it.

Besaw got his publisher to let him right a weekly column on his attempts at weight loss. The column was promoted all over town with billboards and T-Shirts of a big fat slob (Besaw) eating a chicken fried steak or a piece of pie, or something fattening with the slogan “Watch Larry Besaw take it off”. Upon seeing the picture, you desperately hoped that what was going to be taken off was weight and not his shirt, and indeed, that’s what the plan was.

So Besaw starts writing this column. I can’t recall how much we weighed. It was probably about 300 pounds, so he needed to drop quite a bit. He probably thought that the weight loss column was a key to job security because it takes a long time to lose 150 pounds or so. I guess he saw himself employed for several years. At any rate, a lot of people in town are reading his work and rooting for Larry to drop a ton. At first he did all right.

The first weeks on a weight loss program are an illusion, if you are greatly over weight. I have a friend named Bob who is over 300 pounds. He told me that he once lost 25 pounds just by “cutting back” on French Fries. That first week or two on a diet you lose a lot of water and you are so stoked that you eat less than you really should. The pounds drop off. That’s the way it was for Besaw. He would report going to his favorite barbeque place and getting a salad or his favorite Mexican place and eating a chicken breast. The guy was doing great. Then as the weeks went by you began to spot signs of trouble.

Besaw began to report little sins of commission in his eating habits. Not bad at first, an occasional hamburger, maybe he was not going to the gym as much as he should have. But then it got worse. He seemed to be plateauing and that plateau extended on for quite awhile. Then it got depressing. Besaw began eating like there was no tomorrow. Worse. He reported it all to us. “Well, I was doing great but I decided to get an order of cheese enchiladas and then I had three margaritas with it”. After a few weeks the guy seemed to have no will power at all and by that point he wished he was plateauing.

How embarrassing must it be to write a weight loss column and report that you have gained three pounds that week. Let me tell you, you lose a lot of readers. Eventually, the weight gain became such that the whole column became a farce and the paper canceled it. In his last missive, Besaw reported that he was not giving up, he felt that he could make a headway if he just stuck to salads and lean meats. I guess he put Thousand Island on his salads and did not trim all of the fat, because the next time I saw him he looked like a self of his former shadow and a big fat self at that. It was all quite sad, and I am sure humiliating. He soon thereafter left the paper, and I was told that he died very young (defined now as anyone below the age of 56).

There is a lesson in there somewhere for just about everyone and I wish that the story had a happier ending. Everyone I knew that knew Besaw loved the guy. He apparently was quite funny and was an excellent writer. While no ancient Greek dramatic character had overeating as his fatal flaw, it is certainly not worse than having sex with your mother. Indeed, Oedipus might have saved his vision had he been merely fat. But it is a tough flaw to overcome. I can tell you that for sure as I stand at the plateau with two clear choices.

Coda: Death greatly exagerated ?- I did a Google search and found a Larry Besaw who is the current head of publishing for the Texas Medical Association. I hope this is the same fellow, if only for the irony.

Muddling Through

2009-10-01T09:47:00.002-05:00

That government of the people,

by the people and for the people

shall not perish from the earth. Lincoln, Abraham Gettysburg Address (1863)

Democracy sounds good in theory, then the day comes for every citizen when he or she has to make a trip to the D.M.V. ………

Democracy in action, especially when the action is taking place right in front of you, is not pretty. I don’t disagree with Churchill ,who said that, and I paraphrase, “Democracy is a very bad form of government, but all the others are worse.” It is important to note, however, that I don’t disagree with either sentiment in his statement.

The evolution of forms of our earthly governments are merely representative of the evolution of the thinking of the human species. The long term trend of government is away from authority and toward the autonomy of the individual. Yet, paradoxically, it is away from individual consequences, and toward collective responsibility for the good of each citizen (or in the thoughts of some, each ”person”, whether citizen or not). This leads to inevitable conflict from the two sides of the equation, each tugging at the other for temporary supremacy in the body politic. The upshot of this is that the trains don’t run on time. Or, as in Austin, never open at all and bankrupt the public transit system.

When people say government is too large, they are really saying that a lot of people in the world are incompetent, and so the more people involved in the government, the more incompetent( and expensive, and destructive) that government is. That does not necessarily follow as a syllogism, but I have found it to be true none the less. It is also the collective wisdom of the world that the fewest possible people in government (one) is the most dangerous government of all. “Absolute power,,.” and all that crap we were taught in high school. That has certainly turned out to be true. So what is one to do ? Some argue for a capitalist based anarchy. Some believe in the Easter Bunny too, but we don’t base our society on fairy tales of either sort. If you take the American system as representative, about half of the people drop out of the political process for one reason or another. When I was in college, I was taught that that was caused by a lack of a feeling of efficacy on the part of the individual voter. I have come to believe that this lack of efficacy is, at best, a secondary reason as to why people do not participate in the system.

What has really brought us to the “tomb of the unregistered voter” ? I think that it is something my old friend Gary Marfin used to call “ Civic Confusion”. Civic Confusion, according to Marfin the elder, is exemplified by the loud, incessant and unnecessary honking of the horns of automobiles in crowded city centers (at the time, he was speaking of Matamoras). It is confusing, even dizzying. Your best option is to retreat, run away from it, even hide. This, in a nutshell , what democracy is today. It is hundreds of millions of dollars being spent to scream at a group of individuals (most of whom live in Florida or Ohio) in an attempt to persuade them that one philosophy or another will make a difference in their lives. The din is so much that it makes it impossible to think. Tell me what you like and dislike about the Health Care bill. You probably did not know that there are at least four such bills currently being debated. If you are a conservative, the thing you think you most dislike is probably not even in the bill. If you are a liberal, the thing you think you most like is probably not even in the bill. We are all arguing over nothing because we can never get clear of all the shouting. We can’t think because we don’t understand the subject enough to think about it and neither do most of the political hacks in Washington or Austin. That does not keep them from screaming at each other, screaming at us, and urging us to scream at each other (I think “ice cream” used to follow that sentence).

And that my friends, is the underlying reason of why when you go to the D.M.V., you lose faith in your government. All we can do is muddle through.

Bright Star

2009-09-30T09:45:00.002-05:00

But there is no light

Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown

Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways. Keats, John “Ode to a Nightingale”

Melancholy has descended upon me. I’m wondering if the trigger was the movie “Bright Star” that Rayda and I saw the other day. It is the story of the love of John Keats and Fanny Brawne. The problem with stories about Keats is that he always dies at 25, and he dies of consumption every time too. This movie was doubly tough because it focused on his love interest, Ms. Brawne, who took all of this kind of hard. I usually can’t be dragged to a sad movie. This one I went to because I knew there would be a lot of Keats poetry in it. With the exception of Shakespeare, Keats wrote the purest and most beautiful English of any poet in our language. He had the good sense to stop writing at the age at 25, although that decision was thrust upon him. It is a rare poet who can produce anything of true greatness past 30. In fact, it is a rare artist of any kind who can produce anything of true greatness past 30. The soul ages in rough proportion to the body, except to the truly gifted such as Grandma Moses and Nolan Ryan.

At any rate, watching young Keats cough up blood was probably not the most life affirming way to spend a weekend. Although truly, it is a marvelous film. I don’t know anything about the Greek philosophy of drama and the need for the human being to experience catharsis. I’d just as soon that we all hummed along our merry way and never had to deal with the uncomfortable. I always thought that those 7 Dwarves lived a pretty good life until Snow White moved in on them. After that it was nothing but trouble. But you know, no one would go to see a movie about happy dwarves. Walt Disney used to say that every movie has to have a tear. He took that view to its extreme in “Old Yeller”, but I suppose that he was simply being faithful to his source and true to his artistic vision.

It can be a sad world, but sadness is often made beautiful. Keats’ buddy Shelly said it best. “We look before and after and pine for what is not. Our sincerest laughter, with some pain is fraught. Our sweetest tales are those which tell of saddest thought.” In other words, the human being is not a Skylark, or a spelunker dwarf for that matter. So we have to take the sadness of life and make the best of it. We have to learn from it and try to make things of beauty from it as we wind through these “ mossy ways”. And then, of course, there is always Prozac.

It's a Living

2009-09-29T18:13:00.001-05:00

I was seated at my desk Friday afternoon when I heard the beating of drums out in the street. My window is on the second floor and, unlike high rise office buildings, my office is a “participant observer” in the drama that is daily life on Congress Avenue (The Main Street of Texas !). Drums are not an unusual sound for me to hear, they usually herald some parade, or perhaps a protest marching down Congress. Since it was not a holiday, I assumed that a group of people was outside my office, marching down the street with a banner which could have been anything from “Honk if you hate lethal injection” too “Obama is not a U.S. Citizen”. I chose not to get up and look. The drum beat went on for a few minutes and then stopped. Ah, the passing parade. But then, about ten minutes later the drum picked up again, just as loud and just as insistent as before, and by now, interfering with what little thought process I have late of an afternoon.

I finally summoned the energy to walk the ten feet or so to me window to look out. What to my wondering eyes did appear, but a miniature man, looking much like a homeless elf, squatting next to the bus stop bench across the street, beating insistently on a large white plastic bucket (turned upside down for the purpose of percussion). Well, this is something up with which I do not have to put. I called my office manager and asked her to call the Austin Police to come do their duty and remove the little drummer boy from the area, or at least force him to stop drumming. She told me they’d called with no luck, the beat went on. I then called the police myself and asked why they had not responded to this violation of the Austin noise ordinance being brazenly perpetrated six blocks from the Capitol of the greatest state in the Union. They replied that, at present, they had bigger fish to fry (they were probably holding one of their interminable press conferences where they are forced to explain why they have managed to kill yet another citizen in the course of making an arrest). Fine. “I’ll handle this one myself” I said. I was urged to be patient, but patience was never my forte, and what little I had had long ago run out.

It took me less than a minute to walk across Congress and confront the homeless elf over the choice of venue for his concert. “Stop beating the drum” I suggested. “I’m trying to make a living.” he replied. Several bus patrons, waiting for the heavily subsidized Capitol Metro gave me angry looks. This deterred me not a whit. “You are breaking the law. “ I explained. By this time I could see that the wee man was about my age, he also appeared to be missing a number of teeth. All this time, the drumming continued. “Well “ he explained, “at least I’m not robbing your house, some people feel bad for me and contribute money to me so that I don’t have to play.” This is known in the big city as extortion. “No one is going to pay you, although when the Police arrive I’ll tell them of your little scam, let’s just wait for them.”

Here my new friend raised up in horror, “why did you call the police ?” he asked, “a nice person would have just told me to move along and given me some money. Besides, I have a lawyer, I’ll be out of custody in 15 minutes. “ Well that was fine with me, that meant that he would be gone for the rest of the day. The elf then picked up his drum and began to “move along” as the cops say. As he walked away he continued shouting at me. To his credit there was no cursing, just a constant reference to the rudeness of my behavior. The bus crowd had, by now, tired of the sport, and greeted his removal with indifference.

I went back into my office and maybe a half hour later a cop showed up. “Where have you been ? “ I asked. He responded that the Police had more important things to do when I called, and then proceeded to tell me how I had done everything exactly wrong and that I should have been “patient” and waited for him. He was unimpressed with my argument that I would have then been subjected to another half hour of mindless drumming. He then went on to describe the long since fled culprit to me and it was obvious he knew exactly who we were dealing with. “I could not have done anything anyway because you told him I was coming, I need to sneak up on him and actually hear the drumming. I am getting some overtime to try to crack down on this type of thing.” “How about the extortion ?” I inquired, “do you have to hear that ?” “ No” he said,” I don’t deal with extortion, you have to call the D.A. about that. “ with that, Wyatt Earp turned on his heel and walked out of my office for what I assume will be the last time. We understood each other, he and I, we just did not agree upon anything. His view was that only he is allowed to stop noise nuisances on the street, it is also his view that he usually does not have the power to stop it, so, really, he is of almost no value. My view was that he was lazy and/or hamstrung by the law, and so with regard to this type of crime, a man is on his own.

I left later, It had been a good day’s work. I was beginning to “clean up” Austin, Texas. Clean it up to make it a decent place for us and our families to live. I was leaving downtown a better and, importantly, quieter place, than I had found it.

Les Miserables

2009-09-28T17:29:00.001-05:00

“Great talent allows for great license.” Dan Akroyd, ( upon being confronted with the fact that the late John Belushi was a drug abuser of outlandish proportions prior to his death).

While much of Europe, and a good deal of the cinematic community worldwide, is attempting to turn Roman Polanski into Jean Valjean over his weekend arrest in Switzerland, perhaps it is time to look at one of my favorite issues, whether greatness in any form can be used to trump justice.

A long time ago, Roman Polanski admitted to having sex with a 13 year old girl. When it became apparent that he might have to do some jail time ,and find out for himself what it is like to be on the receiving end of non consensual sex, he skipped of from the United States to Paris where they have a more lenient attitude toward such things. There he has remained for thirty years, continuing to make outstanding films. For thirty years, the thirsty bloodhounds at the Department of Justice have been waiting for him to slip up and wander into a place where they could extradite him. Switzerland was such a place and after a routine document was filed and acknowledged by the Swiss under out treaty with them to be correct, Mr. Polanski was picked up and held.

This lead to the current brouhaha which when broken down is really an argument over two points.

1. If you can hide from the law for thirty years for a crime you have admitted to, should you be allowed to remain free ?

2. If you are a world renown film director (or athlete or astronaut or politician or actor,etc, etc) should you be exempt from punishment from the laws which protect 13 year old girls from sexual predatory behavior by adults because you are just so damn talented ?

Here we have the French, in the person of Mr. Jack Lang, the former French Cultural Minister, explaining to us that “Mr. Polanski is a great creator and artist”….”In Europe it would be unimaginable to punish someone in this situation.”

Now to be fair, the folks in Arkansas would have agreed with this up until a few years ago (although the couple would have had to have been married) so I’m not here to pass judgment on what would appear to me to be a singular perversion of modern sexual mores. Maybe there are all kinds of reasons why old film directors should be deflowering 13 year old in Europe. It is all somewhat arbitrary anyway. How old was the step daughter of American Director Woody Allen when he decided that “the heart wants what it wants” ? Right, the heart wanted it , or should I say IT . I don’t recall the girl’s age, but it was close enough to this situation to sicken many of us, leaving aside the putative incest.

But as I said, putting aside sex, should a great director get cut slack just because he is a great director ? If you think so, it is probably because you know that that’s how the world works anyway. If you think not, you are probably not going to burn in everlasting hell along with Roman Polanski (again, I’m trying not to be judgmental). Roman Polanski is a fugitive from justice, perhaps Victor Hugo would have found more sympathy for his position than I do. Perhaps he really is Jean Valjean and the American authorities are nothing but a collective version Javert. Or perhaps Mr. Polanski is really Paul Muni as James Allen in “Fugitive From a Chain Gang”, the 1932 American rip off of Hugo. Whatever. I will bet anyone that Roman is not going to serve time in an American prison. You see, the rich are different than you and I Mr. Hemingway, they are allowed to screw 13 year old girls.

In the Grippe

2009-09-26T14:13:00.001-05:00

Influenza is running through Austin now at a brisk clip. Since there is more than one strain going around, and the medical community is no longer checking for the so called “Swine” flu, no one is quite sure of just what strain they are getting. I suppose that since the treatment and symptoms of the two flues are basically the same, it does not matter a whole lot once you come down with it. You still shiver and sweat and ache for about a week.

I can recall three separate occasions of my contracting influenza. A lot of people think they have the flu when they get a bad cold, or sometimes when they have stomach problems (the spectacularly misnamed “stomach flu), but the “true flu” is a different animal, if viruses are animals. If you ever had the flu, you’d know you had it. In fact, it would probably cause you to get vaccinated each and every year against that particular strain. That is what turned me into a flu shot evangelical. I had it two years in a row back in the 80s, and that was enough for me.

So I went down last night to get a “seasonal” flu shot (which does not protect against the swine flu, aids or other STD’s and may have certain side effects). I went to the “Minute Clinic” at my CVS Pharmacy where my insurance would cover the shot. When I arrived I began to see the shortsightedness of giving flu shots at a Minute Clinic. The Minute Clinic is an invention of CVS to try to have people diagnosed with diseases which require drug therapy, prescription or otherwise, right in the drug store. The theory is sound. It is certainly convenient to walk three feet over from the Doctor (or Physician’s Assistant or Nurse Practitioner, whoever is doing the prescribing that day) to pick up your drugs. It is the same reason that Optometrists can be found in optician shops and, for that matter, the same reason why the sell popcorn at the movies. There is nothing as desirable to a seller as a captive customer, especially one with 102 degree fever.

The problem is that the Minute Clinics are stuffed back into a corner of the drug store and there is no “waiting room”. People kind of mill around and cough and sneeze on each other. Worse, to sign in, you have to do about a fifteen minute check in procedure on a tap screen computer (that everyone in front of you has already tapped with their infected fingers). So those just there for a shot are taking quite a risk. Only CVS has figured out how to get the people most scared of the flu into contact with the people already suffering from it in such close quarters. It’s not good for the patient, but it is a step up for the Minute Clinic concept of a “point of diagnosis” drug sale. Now CVS can actually make large groups of people sick who would otherwise have never had a sniffle except for the fact that they decided to get the Flu shot (which does not help you until at least a week after injection). For years pharmacies have been trying to figure out ways to increase drug sale, now that they have hit upon this strategy of intentionally making people sick, they are going to really see the profits roll in.

Well call me cynical, but I figured out what was going on at the Minute Clinic pretty fast. I left what was at least a thirty minute wait in an area which sounded like a TB ward and went home. My plan was to get up early this morning and be at the clinic when the doors opened. I would have made it too, except I misplaced my glasses this morning and my vision is so bad that I need glasses to find my glasses. When I finally stepped on them, I had lost 10 precious minutes and thus was only second in line at the clinic. First in line, already punched in on the computer, was Typhoid Mary. I’m not kidding, this was a thirtyish year old woman in the midst of actively dying. I watched her go into the Doctor’s office and expected that if I saw her come out again it would be feet first. Indeed she stayed in with the Doctor for over half an hour while the corner at the clinic filled up with more of the living dead. There were also a couple of guys my age just in for flu shots. One of them was smart enough to move over to the magazine rack, thirty feet away, where I was cowering. He gave me a nod and a knowing grin.

When Typhoid Mary was finally released and was having her will notarized by the CVS Notary, I was called in. The Doctor was a young attractive lady whose visage reminded me of those in the Civil War movies after they have sawed off about 8,000 legs following the battle of Shiloh. “Pretty rough ?” I asked. “it was wild yesterday” she responded “and today looks like it is going to be more of the same, you are lucky you came in, we are almost out of Flu Vaccine”.

“What good is the vaccine going to do me anyway ?” I asked,” it does not protect me against the Swine Flu, and I bet that’s what your last patient, Ms. Lazarus had.”

“Well, you are right” she said “but think how much better you are going to feel after you get the Swine Flu knowing that you at least can’t get the seasonal flu.” Well, she had me there. So I rolled up my sleeve and assured her that I had no egg allergy. She gave me he shot. It must have been some new technique where they inject it into the bone, it hurt like hell. “Any advice on avoiding the Swine Flu ?” I asked. “Sure” she replied, “Stay away from places like this. “

Requiem for A Pony

2009-09-19T11:44:00.001-05:00

Some things in life you take for granted. They have always been there, they always will be. But that is almost never really the case. The Pink Pony, a Scottsdale restaurant where Time stood still ( at least during the early part of the evening, when “Time” was still sober enough to stand) has closed its doors after a 60 plus year run. For tens of thousands, it is a sad, sad event. For some of us though, it is almost unthinkable.

The Pony opened in 1949 and probably had its heyday in the 70s and early 80s. By the time my friend Broyles and I stumbled on it in 1988 it was still the best known and probably best loved restaurant among baseball fans in all of Arizona. You could not miss the Pony, its pink edifice and silhouette of a pink horse (both roughly the shade of aged Pepto-Bismol) beckoned to you as you cruised down Scottsdale Blvd, past the giant cut out cowboy who welcomed you to Old Town. It had been beckoning since Harry Truman ran the country and it is sad that I missed the first forty years of its reign.

While the outside looked like “Pink Barbie” had thrown up all over the sidewalk, the inside was a true institution, assuming that we are talking about an institution of 1955 or so. The booths were fully occupied by the ghosts of the post World War II families, stepping away from their ranch style homes, wearing their sport coats, boots and bolo ties, sipping Martinis and ordering steak medium rare. At least a million tons of iceberg lettuce had been served to those families over the years in the salads the Pony handed out. For the real sports in the group, you might throw in the extra 50 cents (later a dollar) for the homemade blue cheese dressing. I once directed a friend of mine to go to the Pony when I heard that he and his family were going to Scottsdale. He called when he got back and gave the perfect description of the experience (he had been twice). “Wade” he said, “it was just like a place my dad would take my mom for their anniversary, their FIFTH wedding anniversary.” That was the Pony, but only a portion of her.

The Pony was also a room full of drunk baseball men and spring training tourists, jostling for tables and trying to catch the eye of the owners wife who “worked the rope line”). There she would sit, chain smoking, and woe unto those who wandered in during the month of March without a reservation. She would give you her shriveling look of disdain at the nerve of one who believed that the Pony took walk in trade. The she would turn in her spiral bound notebook to look for a date that week when she might just squeeze you in. Even when you had a reservation, of course, you had to wait, often for quite awhile, but that was OK, you could stand at the bar and look at the Pony’s grand collection of baseball memorabilia. If you were over about forty, every name on picture, bat or ball evoked a memory, and a pleasant one at that. But that was March, that was the Pony’s season. March. Come back in November and you would be sitting alone in the same dining room you had fought so hard to get into. One of the sadder things in life was the Pony in winter. It was dark and quiet, only the overwhelming smell of tobacco ,which was layered into the wall paper over the decades, reminded you of where you were, that, and the homemade blue cheese dressing. The bats and balls hung glumly against the darkened walls, unsung, awaiting the coming of spring.

But I prefer to think of the gayer times. The night Harry Carey came bursting into the bar hollering “Hello everybody” and the crowd returning the salute in unison “Harry !” . It was the first time I had seen Harry in the flesh and was, of course, the sad harbinger of the events, set in motion by myself, which lead to that great man’s death years later. I like to think of the night I turned to the short dumpy man in the urinal next to me, when I sang out “How ya doin’ Zip ?” believing myself to be standing at relief with the manager of the Chicago Cubs. I like to think of the great night when Gaston and I lead our brides into the Pony and had the table picture made for us by a willing waitress. If the girls had had corsages, it would have been a perfect picture. It was not a perfect evening. My wife had to struggle to overcome the putrid smell of the evil weed which surrounded you on all sides, the noise of the drunken baseball fan and, in her words, “a completely tasteless Pork Chop”. Well excuse me your royal highness ! Not even a nice word about the thin blue polyester ties with the pink pony emblazoned on them that Gaston and I sported for the occasion. Some restaurants are an acquired taste, some, like the Pony, are given as a birth right. Rayda never ate a good meal at the Pink Pony. I never ate a bad one.

All the weeping in the world won’t bring the Pony back, and, after all, sixty years is a pretty good run. Still, there is an emptiness in the soul now which can never be filled, for the Pony was not really a restaurant, it was a Temple. A Temple that smelled like cigarettes , looked like chewed and discarded bubble gum and (often) tasted like cardboard, but a Temple none the less. The old world is dying.

Lowbrid

2009-09-14T17:58:00.003-05:00

Last year at this time, the good people at Hertz made a mistake and gave me a Cadillac. This was before G.M. went into bankruptcy and the Cadillac mark still had some value. I walked over to my stall at the Hertz garage in the San Diego airport Friday and found that I had been given an Altima, which seemed nice to me.That was before I got into the car and could not find the slot for the key, and before my wife told me that we had been rented a Hybrid. Did you know that these Hybrids use push buttons instead of keys ? Did you know that there is nothing on the dashboard which tells you how the button works ? Did you know that when you push the button, the engine turns on but you can't hear it which means that you keep pushing the button again and again, like you are waiting for an elevator ? Well I did not.Did you know that if you scream loud enough about trading in "this piece of shit hybrid for a real car" that your wife (or at least my wife) will get upset with you ? Some of you did know that.

The world is moving too fast. Why did it become necessary to turn this Hybrid into a keyless vehicle? Can't we just take things one step at a time when we are changing the way we have lived for the past 80 years ? If you have to push a button, couldn't they make the engine roar like a jet airplane when you push ? That way you know that you did something right. No amount of world fuel savings can possibly be worth my having to change a lifetime of familair automobile patterns.I don't know why they don't check with me before they do these things.

Amon, Allen and Barbara Allen

2009-09-08T17:22:00.001-05:00

Don’t you remember the other night

When we were in the Tavern ?

You drank a toast to the ladies there,

And slighted Barbara Allen. Barbara Allen, Traditional

I can hear the seagulls now. Allen Porter, attributed to Will Rogers

Alastair Sim , the English actor, was the finest Scrooge in the history of film. He appears in the 1951 version of the “Christmas Carol” should you ever want to see it. At the end of the film, Scrooge, having survived his three ghosts, pays a visit to his nephew Jacob’s house for Christmas Day. Jacob is the son of his late sister, his only surviving relative. Scrooge has been invited to the house yearly and has never gone. As he makes his way up the walk toward the door, the snow is falling and all we see is Sim’s back and the back of his head. Just as he is about to knock, the strains of Barbara Allen begin to play and his shoulders and head slump briefly in a sign of regret, which the song symbolizes. It is this moment which separates Sim from all the other actors who have ever played the role. The simple sign of regret.

In the song Barbara Allen, both Barbara and the “Young Man” die of regret, or at least are in a regretful state as they die,seperatly and alone. Nothing in the world is sadder than regret and it is almost impossible to escape this life without having some, even if you are Sinatra and have “too few to mention”. I have had some regret the past week are so.

I have been reading a biography of Amon Carter. Carter was the longtime publisher of the Ft. Worth Star Telegram and about half of the public spots in Ft. Worth are named after him. In his heyday, the 20s through the 50s he and his paper spoke for West Texas. The book, written by a fellow named Jerry Flemmons about thirty years ago, is delightful. My father was a West Texas boy in the Carter days. The paper on his breakfast table (and every breakfast table from Ft. Worth to El Paso) was the Star Telegram, and when he was old enough, he went down to the Train Station every morning, picked up and delivered the Star Telegram to the folks in his town. The newspaper and the country shaped my father. He lived in the big city for almost sixty years, but a part of him was always West Texas. A part of him was always the Star Telegram and the myths of Amon Carter about West Texas.

Many years ago, someone, I think it was the New York Times Magazine, ran a chapter of the Flemmon’s book in their publication. I don’t recall why. I was delighted with the story and sent it onto my father who was equally delighted. The next time I saw him he told me that he regretted that his brother Mike, who had recently died, had not seen the story. For a number of years I searched for a copy of the book for my father. It was quite rare because the publishing house which printed it had had a fire and it had destroyed most of the inventory. Every time I found the book at a used bookstore, it’s price was too high, always $50.

Book people (and I am one) are funny. They may pay $100 for the most frivolous time imaginable, but they will only pay exactly what a book is worth. I knew that book was not worth fifty dollars and I never bought it. Until last week, when I found a battered copy for $7.00. I began to read the book and found it to be even more delightful than I had imagined. Then, somewhere along the way, I began to hear the strains of Barbara Allen. Why had I never purchased the book ? Was my own father not worth a lousy fifty bucks, even if the book was overpriced ? Every few pages there is a reference in the book which reminds me of him and the stories he used to tell me about his boyhood. Regret set in deeply.

My favorite part of the book involves Will Rogers, a man who was very close to Amon Carter. Flemmons tells the story of Carter taking Rogers to the bank of the Trinity River and explaining to him how Ft Worth was going to dredge the river to the Gulf of Mexico, making Ft. Worth a port. Rogers wryly smiled and told Carter, “I can see the seagulls now. “ Or according to Flemmons that’s what he said. When my dad told the story he substituted the word “hear” for “see” which, because of the distinct cry of the Gull , is a lot funnier than the Rogers version. I’d have given anything to talk to my dad about that part of the book. Rogers had been a particular hero of his and he was devastated when Rogers and Wily Post died in a crash in Alaska when my dad was about 12.

Time passes so swiftly, my dad has been gone for a year, Flemmons for ten years. Carter died more than a half a century ago and we are fast approaching the 75^th anniversary of Rogers death. All of these folks are closely linked in my mind, how can they be separated by so many years ? I would have to check, but I’m not sure that there was ever a time when they were all on the earth together. But there they are all joined, in my mind, the strains of Barbara Allen playing over them.

I think regrets are natural. I’m not even sure that they are always such a bad thing. They are life lessons, even f they are of the “hard knock variety”. I think it’s better that I have the regret that that I never got to read the book at all. It has been good to be with my dad again this last week.

Local Man Celebrates Return to Dillard's Men's Department

2009-09-05T14:36:00.002-05:00

Austin blogger Wade Porter strolled into the Dillard’s Men’s Department at the Barton Creek Mall this morning, announcing to anyone who would listen that “they have seen the last of me in the ‘ Big and Tall ‘ Department ! “

Porter, who has dropped enough sizes on his present diet to have to now shop where normal sized men shop, was met with a decidedly mixed greeting from Dillard’s Men’s Wear sales personnel, many of whom had caught Porter’s act before.

“This is not the first time that Porter has “returned” to the Men’s Department. “said department manager Hubert Stone. ” “ He is one of the type of customers that we refer to as ‘yo-yos’ because their weight goes up and down , at times straddling the sizes of pants where Men’s Wear merges into “Big and Tall” wear. Actually, Porter is beyond yo-yo status. We call his kind ‘Super Balls’ because they go down in weight, but then bounce back so high that we don’t see them again for years and years.”

Some of the newer sales personnel appeared dubious that Porter could fit into anything on the rack in “Mens”. He was directed over to the “relaxed fit” area and urged to try on a pair of “expanding” pants. While being taken to the dressing room, Porter waxed philosophical about his weight loss. “It’s not really a diet” he claimed, waving off the very idea, “it’s a life style change ! “ One salesman noted that this was the third such “lifestyle change” he had seen Porter go through and wondered aloud just how many life style changes a person can get away with in one lifetime.

“He will come out in a minute to have us look at his pants” muttered Chester Walton, department assistant manager. “ Then he will go into an elaborate explanation of his dieting regimen. It will be a complicated and confusing recipe of exercise and nutrition, and you know what ? In the end it will be a matter of him burning off more calories a day than he takes in. Some big secret.” Walton continued, under his breath, “then he will buy only one lousy pair of pants because he will tell us that he has no idea how much weight he will lose, so he can’t afford to buy a lot of clothes that will not fit him in a couple of weeks. I’m tempted to tell him that he will always be able to wear them again when he starts regaining the weight. “ At this point, several of the salesmen began speculating as to whether this meant that Porter had to wear the same pair of pants every day. “You think the other pants just fall off of him ? “ asked Sonny Craig, who is moonlighting at Dillard’s during the current recession, having been furloughed from his job at Vinson & Elkins law firm and starting up his own practice in a trailer in his back yard. The comment brought a general uproar from a sales staff that had not sold three items between them during the first four hours the store had been open.

Porter emerged from the dressing room and beckoned a couple of salesman over to look at the fit of the pants. Noting that he had no discernable butt, a couple of salesmen said that the fit “did not make a whole hell of a lot of difference anyway. It’s not like anyone gives him a second look.” Following the purchase, Porter left the men’s Department, taking the long way out of the store so that he could hold his new pants up over his head in triumph as he passed the “Big and Tall” department. “Big deal, he’s still fat” shrugged Lester Whitehall, longtime “Big and Tall” salesman. “He will be back”, said department manager J.B. “Shorty” Nowatny, “they all come back.”

RE: September Song

2009-09-04T15:51:00.001-05:00

From: Wade Porter
Sent: Friday, September 04, 2009 11:50 AM
To: Wade Porter
Subject: September Song

Oh it’s a long long while from May to December

But the days grow short when you reach September

When the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame

One hasn’t got time for the waiting game. Weil and Anderson “September Song” from “The Knickerbocker’s Holiday” (1938)

Try to remember the kind of September

When life was slow and oh so mellow.

Try to remember the kind of September

When grass was green and grain was yellow

Try to remember the kind of September

When you were a tender and callow fellow. Schmidt and Jones, “Try to Remember” from “The Fantasticks” (1960)

You can look at Septmeber any number of ways. I always look at it fondly because it means that the month of August, which is tied with February for the worst month of the year, is over. The writers above looked at September in two different ways, but both teams were using Septmeber as a metaphor for a particular time of life. Looking at a life span as a year is a traditional metaphor, and it is a good one. Not that metaphors have that much to commend them. Metaphors are really only half a loaf (get it ?). A metaphor is what is left remaining after the myth is no longer believed. It is myths that speak the truth to us. Metaphors are just descriptions. Short hand renditions of the truth. They spring from the mind of a single writer (before they are stolen by others) and not from the collective memories of the human species, as does the myth.

I am, in the words of Sinatra, in “the autumn of the year”. I like to think that it is September, but I am sure that more than a few of my friends believe that I am more closely approaching Halloween than Labor Day. But it’s my blog, and September it shall be. Weil and Anderson say that the days are growing short. I guess that’s the traditional view (before the institution of daylight savings time, which now runs through Novemeber). Of course these fellows were writing during the depression when the life expectancy of an individual was shorter. I like to think that October is the new September and that a lot of us may survive at least until next year’s Groundhog Day (are you starting to see the limits of metaphor?).

But assuming that the old limits still apply, the days are going to “trickle down to a precious few” here at any time, if Weil and Anderson are to be believed. “September….November…”, the message is clear, soon comes the chilling frost, even in Austin, where that metaphor is normally as useless as seatbelts in a New Hampshire car. That last phrase was really more of a simile.

But then we have the more optimistic tones of Schmidt and Jones. Where we look back on Septmembers as wonderful times, when not only was the grass green, but you (and I) were tender and callow fellows. Will my September find me tender and callow ? To say that you are callow implies that you know what the word means. Callow comes from the German word for bald and for some reason has come to refer to an immature youth, or, more appropriately, unsophisticated (when it is used at all).I don’t think that Schmidt and Jones meant “Tender and bald fellow” Why would that be such a pleasant memory ?

I am many things, none of them are callow, with the exceptions of some parts of my hairline. Still, I like the idea of looking back on these September days with great fondness. September is, like January, a beginning. It goes back to when we were in school and started afresh every year (except in Geometry, which for me was sort of a dejavu experience all thorough high school).It was fun to buy the new school supplies. The 64 color crayon pack with the pencil sharpener was a little out of my league, but there was enough to make me happy. Fountain pens and cartridges which would stain a callow fellow all up and down his shirt sleeves. Rounded scissors, Big chief Tablets, Loose leaf notebooks with the little circle enforcers. On top of that, new jeans and shoes and shirts, a “back to school haircut”. The list of the “newness” of it all was endless, new schools, new teachers, new friends, new enemies, after awhile new cute girls.

I’d like to feel that kind of September again. Actually, I’d like to feel a Currier and Ives September just once. Blowing leaves and crisp autumn days, no one sweltering at a football game. The things we saw in our reading books every year in elementary school in the “back to school” stories. But I’d even settle for a Texas September, unless it included the occasional Hurricanes we had to deal with.

I wish everyone, in the September of their lives, or who is just excited about the beginnings inherent in the real September a great Labor Day weekend. Don’t forget to put away the white shoes until next Easter (white shoes being a metaphor here).

Victory For Common Sense

2009-09-03T08:39:00.002-05:00

-----Original Message-----
From: Sarah Eckhardt [mailto:Sarah.Eckhardt@co.travis.tx.us]
Sent: Wednesday, September 02, 2009 7:03 PM
To: Wade Porter
Subject: Re: this morning's paper

Wade:

I couldn't agree with you more. These two are human being with whom I
have personal relationships. While I see great good in them, their
continued employment was a poison to the organization. It is in the
best interest of the organization (and hence the tax payers) that they
move on. I moved to definitively terminate their employment yesterday
and my motion received a slim majority vote.

Thanks for putting in your two cents. I appreciate knowing there are
people keeping tabs on what we do.

this morning's paper

2009-09-01T10:30:00.003-05:00

Commissioner: I had a chance to meet both your mother and father over the years and had a good deal of respect for them. Due to that fact, I am assuming that their offspring can act as the ambassador to reality over at the County Courthouse. Sarah, I never get involved with county matters (until they turn into lawsuits). However, the article in this morning’s paper involving our tax funds paying a quarter of a million dollars a year to two people that appear to have been bent on poisoning everything in their path, including hard working employees who just wanted to stay out of the way, is more than I can take.

Now I am a liberal and proud of it. I believe that government can be used as a force for good in our society. It is hard to make arguments like that, for instance for health care reform, when we are treated to front page stories of waste, incompetence and (really worst of all) extreme pettiness on the part of high echelon county employees. It does not help to see that we spent $12,000 on a fruitless mediation to try to straighten the two out. The $12,000 would have been better spent on electroshock treatments for the both of them, since I doubt that anything else in the psychiatric arsenal would have worked.

All I can request at this point is your vote in preventing either of these two from receiving any further emoluments from the people of Travis County. Their activity shames our government which, in turn, shames all of us.

Moment of Zen For Abbott and Costello

2009-08-30T16:29:00.001-05:00

Leaving Airport Rental Car agency in Denver. The first ten minutes of the vacation weekend

Wade: Ok, where am I going ?

Rayda: Look for a sign that says to 22

Wade: 222 (two twenty two) ?

Rayda: Right, to 22

Wade: I don’t see any.

Rayda: Wait, look over there ! 22

Wade: No, that’s not a sign that says 222, that’s highway 22

Rayda: Right, it points to 22

Wade: But it’s not 222

Rayda: You don’t need to find a sign that says to 22 if it already says 22. Why do you need a sign to say to 22, you are already there ! ?

Wade: because you said to look for a sign that said 222

Rayda: no, I said look for a sign that said to 22

Wade: and that does not say 222, just 22. Wait a minute, are you saying a sign that tells us to go to 22 and not a sign that says highway 222 ?

Rayda: You are exasperating.

Ted

2009-08-26T08:55:00.002-05:00

“Our future may lie beyond or vision, but it is not completely beyond our control. It is the shaping impulse of America that neither fate nor nature, nor the irresistible tides of history, but the work of our own hands, matched to reason and principle, that will determine our destiny.” Kennedy, Edward , Funeral Oration of Robert F. Kennedy , 1968

He started out as Teddy. That’s what we all called him when he ran for the Senate in 1962. He was Teddy for a few years, then Ted, and finally he began to be referred to as Senator Edward Kennedy, a note of respect that took a long time to arrive. But Kennedy himself took a long time to arrive.

Every life deserves a second act, and Kennedy made the most of his. Timing is everything in life, and if “everything” can be doubled, that goes double for politics. For a time in his life, Ted Kennedy was a cheat and a dilettante, the facts speak for themselves. For a time in his life he was a drunk and a womanizer, the record is clear beyond any hope of rebuttal. Some feel that he was worse, that he was no better than a murderer. Of that event, we will never know the whole truth. But somewhere along the road away from Chappaquiddick, the man changed for the better. It did not happen all at once, there were starts and stops, but he did finally change and, in the end, he deserves the respect being accorded him this morning.

As I was watching the news shows this morning, my thoughts went back to the same shows broadcasting the death of Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago. Some sweet old Irish lady was crying on camera and telling a reporter that she had told her daughter that the mayor was now the “Saint” of politics. The camera cut back to the newsroom where Ted Kennedy, about to be interviewed, sat, stifling a chuckle. “Well”, he said, “we heard allusions to Sainthood, that may not be quite accurate.” The same can be said of Ted. Even among all the loving tributes you will hear over the next few days it should certainly be remembered that Ted was no saint.

But you don’t have to be a saint to have an impact. Kennedy worked hard for many, many years and , in the course of those years changed many people’s lives. In some ways, almost all people’s lives in this country were changed by Ted Kennedy. Whether they were changed for the better (as I believe) or for the worse, is a matter of political preference, but the change was undeniable. Every time an 18 year old votes, we see a change wrought to a great extent by the work of Ted Kennedy. In the end, a life should be judged by its totality, not by its parts, whether they were good or bad.

Kennedy had many, many tragedies in his life. All three of his older brothers were lost to him through violent means. One in war, two by murder. Kennedy himself survived a crash landing by being pulled out of an airplane. In another accident, he, unlike his companion, survived the icy waters of a car crash off of a bridge, and made it to shore.

But Kennedy was lucky too. Had Chappaquiddick happened today ,with around the clock cable news shows, Kennedy would have been hounded out of office in less than thirty days, never to be heard from again, at least politically. So his timing there was good. With regard to gaining the Presidency, his timing (and judgment) were bad. Ted was simply not destined to be President of the United Sates, and that’s probably a good thing. I voted for Ted and showed up for him at my precinct convention in 1980. I shed tears at his oration at the convention that year and felt , in my heart that he would be back. The Reagan revolution overtook him and four years later, and up until last year, it was impossible for a Democrat of his stripe to be elected President. If he had not lived in Massachusetts he would have been voted out of office along the way. But he was not, and I think that’s good.

In 1982 my wife and I went over to hear Kennedy speak in Houston, a friend of ours was involved in some local races and we wanted to see Kennedy’s endorsement of them. This is the Kennedy I will remember the rest of my life. His strong baritone, a voice which mellowed with age, far beyond that of his brothers, went through the slate of candidates until he got to the County Commissioners. There he paused, “And since 1948, E.A. “Squatty” Lyons has served proudly on the Harris County Commissioners Court, no Republican has ever run against him until this year. How DAREEEE they run someone against our “Squatty”! !!” The crowd roared. My wife and I were standing next to Squatty in that crowd. Kennedy came over after the speech and said, “What do you think Squatty, did I do all right by you ? “ Then he turned to us and shook my wife’s hand. Knowing his reputation, this did not surprise me, given the choice between Rayda and I, I knew that he would pick Rayda. He had a huge politician’s hand and in person he was simply bigger than life, an overwhelming figure. He lived for 25 more years and never got any smaller. In the end he was a man who stood up “for an ideal”, sending off a “tiny ripple of hope”, such ripple which when, combined with others can “build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” Many of those walls have still not been torn down, but at least for his part, not from any lack of trying.

King Of Pop's Death Ruled Homicide ,Show Trial Looms.

2009-08-25T08:40:00.001-05:00

The leaking of a coroner’s report out of Los Angeles County granted what every news agency in the country was wishing for. Michael Jackson’s death is being ruled a homicide.Ladies and Gentlemen, It’s Show trial Time !

The Trials of Summer

2009-08-23T15:59:00.001-05:00

Floyd the Barber: Oh, it’s hot

Sherriff Taylor: Everyone talks about the weather but no one ever does anything about it,

Floyd the Barber: Calvin Coolidge said that

Sherriff Taylor: No he didn’t, Mark Twain said that.

Floyd the Barber: Mark Twain ? What did Calvin Coolidge say ?

Sherriff Taylor: Nothing….

I have made some allusions to the heat of the Austin summer, but I have tried not to write about it, for the simple reason, as Twain implied, that I can’t do anything about it. But there comes a time when an event is so monstrous that it has to be spoken of, if only for the writer to maintain some type of credibility. For those of you reading this 100 years hence, the summer of 2009 in Austin was hot ! How hot ? Real hot ? How hot is that ? Above average.

We are on pace to have at least 70 days or more be above 100 degrees for the year. We will look back on this year with at least 20% of all days of 2009 being over 100.Certain people (my wife included) are getting some type of gallows joke out of each day over 100 and each day breaking the old record high temperature for the day. She figures that as long as it’s 99, it may as well be 100 and as long as it’s 105, it may as well be 106 if that means that we can break another record. The only good thing about the heat is that air conditioning bills are so high that the amount of money being made by the city owned utility is cutting into our city budget deficit.

But I must say that enough is enough. If I had wanted to live in Phoenix, I’d have moved to Phoenix. It never crossed my mind when I came here in the bicentennial summer of ’76 that I’d ever have to face this kind of heat. It is being blamed on some “high pressure” system which has somehow misplaced itself this summer and hovered over Austin instead of the Mojave desert or the Sahara or somewhere where the people who buy homes know what they are in for. There is a temptation to blame this all on global warming ,but many places in the country are having one of their coolest, wettest summers. So I guess that we should place the blame where it probably will fall, on the fact that this is the end of days and Satan has taken over Central Texas in preparation for Armageddon. I suppose that I always knew that it would end up like this, the final battle on the banks of the Colorado with the forces of evil overwhelming Sandy’s Frozen Custard stand over there on Barton Springs Road. Austin is as good a place as any to herald the “old earth” fading away.

But what if I am wrong ? What if this is not the rapture, but just the first summer of a lifetime of desert dwelling for all of us here in what used to be called River City ? I will say that this is the first time since college when I have thought about moving out of Texas. I could buy a bank repo house out in California , get a job at a Barnes and Noble and never really sweat again. My lifestyle would change, but so what ? I am too old to do anything exciting anyway, why not be comfortable as I enter what my senior partner calls ” my dotage” ? Think of it, 72 degrees everyday for the rest of your life. You can’t put a price on something like that. Brisk walks along the beach instead of dodging old ladies and teenagers in my mall walks. Lunches of cheap fish tacos and maybe some Pollo Loco every week or so. Crisp California whites being sipped and slices of Monterrey Jack being munched on in a quiet little living room with the patio door open, letting in that sea breeze which so entranced Balboa. All of this can be yours !

“Adieu, adieu, the plaintive anthem fades”. There is really only one way through this hellish experience. In the words of John Belushi, “I suggest that you start drinking heavily”.

FW: interesting....

2009-08-21T09:28:00.001-05:00

Dear Mr. President,

My friend Michael Klein (who by the way is no political supporter of yours) sent me this (name deleted) e-mail from a person who is presumably a rancher in Montana. In the e-mail, various accusations are made about the expense of your last trip to Montana. These expenses apparently include the shipping in of “THOUSANDS” of dollars of Lobster. The e-mail does not say if it was live lobster, but I presume that it was as there is no sense in the President and his party spending “Thousands” of dollars on frozen lobster. I mean what kind of a second rate country would we be if we were shipping around “Thousands” of dollars worth of frozen lobster for what must have been a hell of a lobsterfest there in Montana ?

Mr. President, I urge you to read the entire e-mail set out directly below Michael’s inquiry to me.. While I am only interested in an answer to the lobster accusations, there is a lot of other stuff in there about how you are controlling the news and salting the crowds with union goons and anti-abortionists at these affairs. There is also an implication that you somehow managed to shut out many, many sign carrying dogs from the shindig. I had not heard anything about health care reform in the veterinarian field, but perhaps some of the dogs are concerned about these death panels everyone is talking about. Dogs get gassed a lot in this country for the slimmest of reasons, as any trip to the local dog pound will evidence. I don’t begrudge the dogs being sensitive.

I urge you to consider all of this with great care. As a student of history I am sure that you know that our 8^th President, Martin Van Buren was defeated because of the rumor that he ate off of gold plates in the White House. That’s nothing compared to the money you are said to be throwing around on these trips. I urge you to carefully consider eating local Montana beef on your next trip to the Big Sky Country. Maybe you should think about inviting some of those sign carrying dogs into a private meeting and explain to them that they are not affected by any of the current health care bills. It might be too late to makes amends in Montana, but at least use this as a lesson for your next travel to Wyoming or Idaho (hint: don’t bring rice into Idaho).

Keep up the good work on your blog ! Mine is called “Mills of the Gods” and I urge you to check it out and leave comments ! You might consider changing your blog over to the place I use, BlogSpot. They pay you for advertizing on your blog based on the number of hits you get. You could clean up ! Just a thought I had to help control the deficit.

From: Michael Klein [mailto:mklein@smith-robertson.com]
Sent: Friday, August 21, 2009 8:49 AM
To: Wade Porter; William Allensworth
Cc: Incerto, M. Scott
Subject: FW: interesting....

Do you think this is true?

This was sent to me by a friend in Bozeman , MT who was there.
Why do we tolerate this?

Hello All,

By now you have probably heard that President Obama came to Montana last Friday. However, there are many things that the major news has not covered. I feel that since Bill and I live here and we were at the airport on Friday I should share some facts with you. Whatever you decide to do with the information is up to you. If you chose to share this email with others I do ask that you DELETE my email address before you forward this on.

On Wednesday, August 5th it was announced locally that the President would be coming here. There are many groups here that are against his healthcare and huge spending so those groups began talking and deciding on what they were going to do. The White House would not release ANY details other than the date.

On about Tuesday Bill found out that they would be holding the "Town Hall" at the airport. (This is only because Bill knows EVERYONE at the airport) Our airport is actually located outside of Belgrade (tiny town) in a very remote location. Nothing is around there. They chose to use a hangar that is the most remotely located hangar. You could not pick a more remote location, and you can not get to it easily. It is totally secluded from the public.

FYI: We have many areas in Belgrade and Bozeman which could have held a large amount of folks with sufficient parking. (gymnasiums/auditoriums). All of which have chairs and tables, and would not have to be SHIPPED IN!! $$$$$

During the week, cargo by the TONS was being shipped in constantly. Airport employees could not believe how it just kept coming. Though it was our President coming several expressed how excessive it was, especially during a recession. $$$$$

Late Tuesday/early Wednesday the 12th, they said that tickets would be handed out on Thursday 9am at two locations and the president would be arriving around 12:30 Friday.

Thursday morning about 600 tickets were passed out. However, 1500 were printed at a Local printing shop per White House request. Hmmmm......900 tickets just DISAPPEARED.

This same morning someone called into the radio from the local UPS branch and said that THOUSANDS of Dollars of Lobster were shipped in for Obama. Montana has some of the best beef in the nation!!! And it would have been really wonderful to help out the local economy. Anyone heard of the Recession?? Just think...with all of the traveling the White House is doing. $$$$$ One can only imagine what else we are paying for.

On Friday Bill and I got out to the airport about 10:45am. The groups that wanted to protest Obama's spending and healthcare had gotten a permit to protest and that area was roped off. But that was not to be. A large bus carrying SEIU (Service Employees International Union) members drove up onto the area (illegal)and unloaded right there. It was quite a commotion and there were specifically 2 SEIU men trying to make trouble and start a fight. Police did get involved and arrested the one man but they said they did not have the manpower to remove the SEIU crowd.

The SEIU crowd was very organized and young. About 99% were under the age of 30 and they were not locals! They had bullhorns and PROFESSIONALLY made signs. Some even wore preprinted T-shirts. Oh, and Planned Parenthood folks were with them.....professing abortion rights with their T-shirts and preprinted signs. (BTW, all these folks did have a permit to protest in ANOTHER area)

Those against healthcare/spending moved away from the SEIU crowd to avoid confrontation. They were orderly and respectful. Even though SEIU kept coming over and walking through, continuing to be very intimidating and aggressive at the direction of the one SEIU man.

So we had Montana folks from ALL OVER the state with their homemade signs and their DOGS with homemade signs. We had cowboys, nurses, doctors you name it. There was even a guy from Texas who had been driving through. He found out about the occasion, went to the store, made a sign, and came to protest.

If you are wondering about the press.....Well, all of the major networks were over by that remote hangar I mentioned. They were conveniently parked on the other side of the buildings FAR away. None of these crowds were even visible to them. I have my doubts that they knew anything about the crowds.

We did have some local news media around us from this state and Idaho . Speaking of the local media...they were invited. However, all questions were to be turned into the White House in advance of the event. Wouldn't want anyone to have to think off the top of their head.

It was very obvious that it was meant to be totally controlled by the White House. Everything was orchestrated down to the last detail to make it appear that Montana is just crazy for Obama and government healthcare. Even those people that talked about their insurance woes........the White House called our local HRDC (Human Resource and Development Committee) and asked for names. Then the White House asked those folks to come. Smoke and mirrors...EVERYTHING was staged!!!!!!!!!!!

I am very dismayed about what I learned about our current White House. The amount of control and manipulation was unbelievable. I felt I was not living in the United States of America , more like the USSR !! I was physically nauseous. Bill and I have been around when Presidents or Heads of State visit. It has NEVER been like this. I am truly very frightened for our country. America needs your prayers and your voices. If you care about our country please get involved. Know the issues. And let Congress hear your voices again and again!! If they are willing to put forth so much effort to BULLY a small town one can only imagine what is going on in Washington DC . Scary!!

Kathy
Bozeman , Montana

Moment of Zen

2009-08-19T17:08:00.001-05:00

The last few days I have been scrambling around trying to get things organized for my wife’s birthday on the 19^th. I had been on a retreat in Colorado the weekend before and so I had to get the card, pick out one gift and make sure the one I ordered was on time. Everything worked out perfectly and I got home with wrapped present and signed and sealed card in hand. As I walked in the door Rayda gave me a puzzled look. “who is that for ? ‘ she asked.”It’s for your birthday” I responded. “Seems a little early” she said. “Only a day, you can open it tomorrow morning, I’ll make you breakfast. “ I said. “You know that my birthday is not for another month” she said. “No, it’s September 19.” I said. “You know this is still August, right ?” she said. “Oh…….damn….” he said.

Health Care and the Sky Mall

2009-08-18T09:33:00.001-05:00

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Jefferson, Thomas, “American Declaration of Independence” , 1776.

Austin humorist John Kelso had a good time this morning poking fun at a recent Wall Street editorial written by John Mackey, founder of Austin based Whole Foods, a large grocery store chain masquerading as a health food store, lambasting the currently debated health care plan. Among the statements made by the sensitive Mackey was this gem, and it’s crudity does not change the fact that it is true. “A careful reading of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter. This ‘ right’ has never existed in America.”

The Declaration of Independence is not positive law, so it does not matter a tinker’s damn what rights it does or does not convey. It conveys the opinion that England’s American colonies were and ought to be free and independent. The declaration was enforced by a long war. Jefferson’s theft of John Locke’s ideas notwithstanding, the Declaration provides no such thing as a free lunch or a visit to a doctor’s office for only a small co-pay.

The Constitution does not explicitly provide for any of these things, although that is a shadowy matter as the meaning of the constitution shifts dramatically with the shifting of political winds. For all I know there is a penumbra somewhere in the Bill of Rights which guarantees every American both doses of the swine flu shot this fall. We will have to wait and see. Mackey, who recently learned a lot about Anti-Trust law while fighting off the government attempts to block his purchase of a chain of real health food stores, in order to try to perpetrate a monopoly on wheat germ, has every right (and this one is in the Constitution)to criticize government intervention in the health care system. It may be that he is correct in his assessment that a government system (the currently proposed one which has the potential of raising the cost of the benefits supplied by Mackey to those who toil in the organic spinach aisles of his stores) is a bad idea.

The question is not whether Americans have a “right” to health care anymore than it was 75 years ago as to whether old folks had a “right” to social security. The question is ,does the majority of the nation want to provide it to them, and at what cost ? For 60 years we have debated this issue. For sixty years, twice in the past 15 or so we have seen tremendous forces unleashed against the concept of universal health care. In all my days of watching legislation ripped apart, I have never seen anything like the effectiveness of the leaders of the anti-health care coalition in scaring people to death and preserving the status quo. They lose battles, but never lose the war, and if they do lose this time, it will be because the President of the United States has decided that he would rather be reviled by half the nation and bear the expense of possibly destroying the rest of his administration than not provide some sort of federally funded health care.

I am a provider of health care. Money I earn (along with my partners) pays for the health care of a number of my employees. It is a significant expense, which rose 60% this year alone. That gets your attention. You can see the money leaving your pocket, and it will get worse if the current plan is passed. Is that fair ? I don’t know what is fair .Ever look at the Sky Mall magazine while you are on a airplane ? That magazine is how I measure the richness of a country. By examining the fact that there are products on page after page of the magazine that are needed by no one and will only improve the lives of those who spend large amounts of money on them at the most marginal of levels Assuming I owned a swimming pool, how much better off would I really be with a giant floating screen so that I could watch DVD movies from the comfort of the shallow end ? Is it better that I get to do that, or own a pair of glasses which allows my on- airplane viewing pleasure, of the same DVD to appear as if it was on a 60 foot screen, or that some child should get treatment from leukemia with my money ? Is it better that I have a home theatre popcorn stand and a pair of goggles that shots videos underwater or that my money goes to a 65 year old to get a new kidney ?

I am not saying that national health care is a good idea. What I am saying is, Aren’t we really a better people than those which John Mackey would like us to be, than John Mackey, founder of the store known locally as “Whole Pay Check “ apparently is ? Can’t we move past what is “guaranteed” in the constitution and think about the most efficient way to provide health care to all, government involvement or not, not because it is a “right”, but because it is the right thing to do ? Maybe we are not those “better people”. We certainly have every “right” not to be.

Rocky Mountain High

2009-08-13T15:37:00.001-05:00

Talk to God and listen to the casual reply. John Denver, “Rocky Mountain High”, 1970

If all goes as planned I will be on an airplane from Austin to Denver tomorrow at this time (“Oh it’s a long way from Austin to Denver”)heading for our partner’s retreat at Pike’s Peak. In the entire world, only Mt. Fuji in Japan is a more visited mountain than Pikes Peak , and I have never seen it. I have hung around Denver from time to time and was looking forward to this trip, until I noticed we had picked about the only summer week where Denver is almost as hot as Austin. Well, maybe it’s a dry heat.

As I have written before, nothing good ever happens at these partner retreats. Over the years I have been to about 20 of them. Chief Justice Greenhill used to say, “I wish I could take three licks and stay home”. Greenhill was (is) a wise man. I think that this whole retreat concept got started in the church and was adapted for corporate types thirty years ago or so. The larger ones quite often have team building exercises which I have found can be duplicated by drinking tequila in a bar with all of your partners. As long as it is drunk to excess. Why else would you drink tequila ? It takes three shots to make you forget the taste. The only hangover I ever had in my life was a result of tequila shots at a firm retreat back in the 80s. I don’t think that you can drink as much at 11,000 feet as you can at sea level, so I am going to pace myself, as well as take an oxygen canister.

Pike’s peak, despite its name, never really belonged to Pike. We bought it from the French with the rest of the Louisiana Purchase. At the time it was known as Jacque’s Peak and subsisted mostly on escargot and Bordeaux. Since that time only Coors has been consumed there. The explorer Pike, who went by the somewhat suspect name of Zebulon, mapped the area in 1806, in an expedition that was overshadowed by Lewis and Clark, the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of American history. You can’t really say that Pike discovered it, it had been there for a long time and a lot of Indians and explorers knew about it. It’s hard to hide a mountain for very long They tend to be among the first things discovered on any given expedition..There are ten counties in America named for Pike. I don’t know which one is the famous Pike County which Ike and Betsy traveled from along with their yellow dog, red rooster and one spotted hog (too ra lee, too ra lay, singing to ral e to ral e to ral e eh). Oh don’t you remember them ? That Pike county must have been one sorry place considering all the trouble Ike and Betsy had with the landscape after they left.

But as John Denver (actually John Deutschendorf-he changed it because it was hard to spell ) from Lubbock, Texas tells us, God not only converse with you in the Rockies, he does so in a casual manner. This as opposed to other mountains where you run into God, Sinai springs to mind. God tends toward the pedantic in most recorded mountain situations. I think in the Rockies he lets you keep your shoes on which actually sounds less casual, but is much less intimidating. I’m not really sure how casual the conversation is going to be, I think cursing is still frowned upon. But it should give me good fodder for my next blog. “Area Man Casually Talks to God”. I have got a list of questions prepared for God, most of them about the Health Care Plan now being debated.

So it’s off to the high country to commune with God and my partners. I’ll see you when I get back closer to sea level.

Prognostication Wrong Again

2009-08-12T08:45:00.001-05:00

Way back in the Spring of 2008 I was writing a lot about politics. At the time I mentioned that I was going to vote for Obama over Clinton because I thought that another Clinton in the White House would be too polarizing. After his election, I felt Obama was going to be a calming influence on the body American Politic. He seemed to be for awhile, but that has changed. It has been a long, long time since I have seen a President as hated and castigated by a portion of the country as this guy is. I have seen pictures of him with Hitler moustaches, I have seen his name elongated to every insulting “Arab sounding” name a person can think of. Yesterday a small child was carrying a sign accusing him of wanting to kill her grandmother. It has been ugly, ugly, ugly. The proximate cause (as we lawyers like to say) has been the health care plan, which no one, either pro or con understands, but the ugliness that is being released is much deeper than that. We have had health care debates before, we did not paint swastikas on the offices of Congressmen who supports the plan.

The plain and simple fact is that there is a decent sized group of people in this country who hate the thought of Obama being President of the United States, they hate his policies, but that hate him more. I guess just because a country can elect a President does not mean that he/she won’t be harassed by fringe elements of the electorate. There was a time when I was in a fringe element and somewhere in the archives of Richard Nixon are the telegrams my roommate and I used to send him. At the time, the left was every bit a nasty as the right is behaving now. It comes from total frustration, and, I’m afraid, a certain disposition toward nastiness. A certain part of the element is violent and I imagine that we will see some of that before this particular debate is over, but maybe not, right now the element of choice is rudeness and intimidation.

The older I get the more stock I put in simple human decency. If John McCain had been elected, it would have never crossed my mind to paint a Hitler moustache on his picture, but some on my side of the table would have. George W. Bush was called vile things. Partially in defense of his detractors, he started an unjust war that killed thousands of our young people. But that defense only goes so far. We have always had debates over whether a particular war was necessary, it can be discussed civilly. I’m sure that I stepped out of bounds in some of the things I called Bush and as I see the morons of this country shouting down the policy makers, it makes me sorry for my past behavior. There is no reason to get personal in all of this.

I don’t know if the health care plan is worth a damn, mainly because I don’t understand it. I can’t hear the explanations over the shouting about socialism and death squads. My strong suspicion is that there are an awful lot of dumb things in it, and I would like to hear about them from a rational conservative source, preferably at a decibel level that in some way approximates a conversation. If I don’t like it, I will join the chorus of nay sayers,that’s my right and to some extent our duty. But we also have a duty is to admit that there are policies being debated here that are not motivated by the fact that the President’s middle name is Hussein .

It Had Been a Quiet Week in Lake Winnebago, Wisconsin

2009-08-11T08:49:00.003-05:00

Nothing special was happening. A married man quietly made his way to a cheap hotel room where he was intent on continuing his affair with a woman. After a few minutes the middle aged couple began to experiment with a little activity they had not tried before when the woman bound the man tightly to the bed with sheets and blindfolded him. Whatever the fellow was expecting next he certainly was not expecting his lover, his lover’s sister, his wife and a second woman he was having an affair with, to come over to his bed with a glue gun, glue his penis to his stomach with “Krazy Glue” and slap him around for a time. They also had a gun for good measure, although they never used it. Then they took the man’s wallet, cell phone and car and made their escape, leaving the bound man to free himself after a long night of “chewing through the sheets”.

Most people think that this is funny. The ones that don’t, other than the guy with his penis glued to his stomach, are the women who assaulted him, all looking at six years in prison, with perhaps (one would hope) some time off for creativity. Can you imagine though how bad this guy must have been to get his wife and two extra marital lovers worked up to this extent ? There is no doubt in my mind that it was one of the lover’s “sisters” who dreamed this up. Most scorned people (I almost said women) are egged on by a friend or a relative . It probably sounded good when it was first brought up, heck, maybe it just started out as an intervention, albeit an aggressive one, and things got out of hand when someone decided to bring a glue gun. I will admit that the bringing of the glue gun does make it sound premeditated, unlike that Lauren Bobbitt who used a pair of scissors on her husband some years ago, that always sounded like a spur of the moment reaction to me. I wrote a blog a long time ago about women who set their lovers on fire, I was shocked to find out how often it happens. Maybe this glue gun thing is all the rage and I just did not know it.

The thing which surprises me the most about all of this is that it happened in Wisconsin. It sounds like such a New Jersey thing to do. The other thing that surprises me is that it was reported to the police. If you are such a jerk that everyone you are having sex with decides to do something like this, it might be better just to buy some solvent and file for divorce, and perhaps move to Minnesota where the women are a little better humored and not as much beer is consumed. Making it public really is not going to advance your position in any specific way and could lead to turning you into a running national joke, making it impossible to keep employment, and certainly making you less attractive to women. I’m guessing that, at least as far as Lake Winnebago is concerned, the guy is going to have a tough time getting dates, and maybe that was the reason behind the women’s mayhem in the first place. If so, they got what they wanted.

Author, pictured on the left as Red X, celebrates his 500th post.

2009-08-07T09:36:00.002-05:00

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Without Feathers ?

2009-08-07T09:27:00.002-05:00

Student: What is a man ?

Plato: A biped.

Student: A bird is a biped.

Plato: A biped without feathers.

Diogenes: (handing Plato a plucked goose) Behold a man !

Both were right of course, man (or as we say now, a human) is a biped without feathers. However, you can’t translate that truth into a definition or syllogism, which is really what Plato was trying to do. So it is Plato who for once comes out the fool in this short dialogue. In a nutshell, that story is what this blog is about, trying to get to the truth of a matter without necessarily having to rely on accuracy. As with Plato and Diogenes, the question for the reader is not only what is accurate in any given blog, but whether they agree with my version of the truth. In that, the blog strives more to be like Diogenes, described by some as the “original smart ass” than like Plato, master of his culture. For anyone can be accurate, it is the truth we are searching for, and the truth is often, perhaps most often, a plucked goose.

If the BlogSpot people are to be believed, today is the 500^th entry of “Mills of the Gods”, but you probably already knew that from the T-shirts and gimmie caps celebrating the event you have seen around your town. Normally this milestone would be a time for reflection over accomplishments and I would be happy to do that here if we had had any accomplishments. In the sense of a successful blog, as most people understand that term, Mills is in the lower quartile of the contestants. But that is only because of definitional problems, like the one Plato had. Mills can still be a plucked goose and accomplish what it set out to accomplish, even if a plucked goose is not the standard by which society measures blogs . That is, fees generated and hits per day.

I think that about a dozen people read this blog from time to time. I have not done anything to try to increase readership (mostly because I have only about twenty minutes a day to work on it). Without large readership a blog cannot become remunerative or influential and, true to form, this blog is neither. Does that make it unsuccessful ? Not on its own. Successful events have happened when a leader has only 12 followers and if the author could walk on water or turn that water into wine, Mills would stand a much better chance. But Mills, unlike Christianity is not a proselytizing institution. Like the Buddhist, Mills looks inward for the truth and then like the bad drunk, regurgitates that truth each morning. By doing so, the truth comes out funny looking, perhaps not as people remember it or would like to believe that it happened. Like the last two sentences, Mills is not often very pretty.

Years ago, Woody Allen published a book of short stories called “without Feathers”. For years I thought that Allen was referring to the dialogue between Plato and Diogenes. Only after reading the poetry of Emily Dickinson did I later find that I had been wrong. Allen was referring to a poem by Emily Dickinson which begins:

Hope is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul

And sings the tune—without the words

And never stops at all.

It hardly need be said that I am no Woody Allen, and many a 17 year old Korean girl is glad about that. What Woody’s title means is that there is no hope. When I considered titling my blog “Without Feathers” I was thinking about man as a plucked goose. I finally decided to title it Mills of the Gods because, in the end, I believe that as slowly as the Mills of the Gods are said to grind, they will always arrive at the correct end. Sort of like Greek Karma. So as far as the philosophy of this blog is concerned, it is decidedly pro feathers,or anti-feathers, anyway, pro hope. Although we sing the words without the tune around here, we have no current plans of stopping. Maybe only a dozen people read the blog on any given day, but that’s eleven more than were even aware that Dickinson wrote poetry, so I got that going for me.

Squeaky To Go Free

2009-08-06T09:03:00.001-05:00

On August 16, just ten days from now, Lynette “Squeaky” Fromm will be leaving prison after thirty four years. Squeaky got a life sentence for attempted murder of the President of the United States when she wave a pistol at Gerald Ford one day back in 1975.Her supporters, of which there were few outside of her lawyer, and perhaps Larraine Newman who, as I recall, portrayed her on Saturday Night Live, always claimed that Squeaky knew very well how to use a gun and if she had really wanted to shoot the President, she would have pulled the trigger. That’s not much of a defense, especially when the gun is loaded.

It was too bad, Squeaky had started out in life as a child dancer who appeared on the Lawrence Welk show. Perhaps it was this horrifying experience which sent her off to Venice Beach where she met and began traveling with Charlie Manson. Looking back on her life, she would probably want a do over on that decision, but hey, it was the 60s.It was during Manson’s trial for the murder of actress Sharon Tate that Fromm (who camped outside the courthouse) carved the distinctive “X” onto her for head, a look, which despite its seeming potential, never really caught on. Fromm was around another murder a couple of years later but was the only member of the house that was not arrested. She then changed her name to “Red”, her roommates name was “Blue” and began to get concerned about California Redwoods. That was what she had gone down to talk to Gerald Ford about that day in Sacramento, carrying a Colt .45.

Fromm’s trial was the usual show trial of the day with the witness refusing to participate in her own defense, until she threw an apple at the Federal Prosecutor during his summation in the punishment phase of the proceedings. This was perhaps the only action she ever took in her life which I ever fully understood, even if I did not agree with it. To give Squeaky her due, the fellow had said some pretty nasty things about her. She was not heard from again until she escaped prison back in 1987 in an attempt to link up with Charlie Manson, who would not have been easy to reach. This slowed down her parole process for awhile and I frankly did not know whether she was dead or alive. Turns out she was alive and has been right here in Texas for 22 years. How about that ?

So maybe she will settle down here. This state has a history of offering second chances to people. Even those who dress in red nun robes and follow the religion of a convicted killer and then attempt to assassinate the President. “Forgive and forget” we say here in Texas, at least to those we do not execute. Those we just forget. So welcome home Squeaky Fromm, sorry the economy is so bad at present as it may slow down your attempt to get employment. But keep trying, there is always room here for creative and imaginative people.

FW: wadeporter sent you a video: "eh eh eh eh Heh Heh Heh Heh EHH EHH EHH EHH"

2009-08-05T16:17:00.002-05:00

Humor is subjective. So far I am the only person I have shown this to that believes it to be the work of a comic genius. Please click on the blue line underneath the picture of the dog wearing the tuxedo. The one which says eh eh eh eh heh Heh Heh Heh……. There is probably no reason to review the entire video unless you , unlike me, suspect that it has that it has a surprise ending.

From: YouTube Service [mailto:service@youtube.com]
Sent: Wednesday, August 05, 2009 4:06 PM
To: Wade Porter
Subject: wadeporter sent you a video: "eh eh eh eh Heh Heh Heh Heh EHH EHH EHH EHH"

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wadeporter has shared a video with you on YouTube: eh eh eh eh Heh Heh Heh Heh EHH EHH EHH EHH eh eh eh eh Heh Heh Heh Heh EHH EHH EHH EHH Heh Heh Heh Heh eh eh eh eh Heh Heh Heh Heh EHH EHH EHH EHH Heh Heh Heh Heh eh eh eh eh Heh Heh Heh Heh EHH EHH EHH EHH Heh Heh Heh Heh eh eh eh eh Heh Heh Heh Heh EHH EHH EHH EHH Heh Heh Heh Heh eh eh eh eh Heh Heh Heh Heh EHH EHH EHH EHH Heh Heh Heh Heh eh eh eh eh Heh Heh Heh Heh EHH EHH EHH EHH Heh Heh Heh Heh eh eh eh eh Heh Heh Heh Heh EHH EHH EHH EHH Heh Heh Heh Heh eh eh eh eh Heh Heh Heh Heh EHH EHH EHH EHH Heh Heh Heh Heh eh eh eh eh Heh Heh Heh Heh EHH EHH EHH EHH Heh Heh Heh Heh eh eh eh eh Heh Heh Heh Heh EHH EHH EHH EHH Heh Heh Heh Heh eh eh eh eh Heh Heh Heh Heh EHH EHH EHH EHH Heh Heh Heh Heh
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Momento de Zen y Momento de Zen y Veinte Anos

2009-08-03T09:07:00.001-05:00

February, 1989, Mazatlan, Mexico

Gaston: Ask the ticket seller what time the game starts today.

Wade: Que tiempo hace el juego ?

Ticket seller: Que ?

Wade: Que Tiempo hace el juego ?

Ticket seller: Que ?

San Antonio: August , 2009

Wade: do you have any other kinds of beans besides frijoles ?

Waiter: What ?

Wade: Do you have any other kinds of beans besides frijoles ?

Waiter: What ?

Fools Like Me

2009-07-31T08:55:00.002-05:00

All of us have our shortcomings, one of mine, contrary to the age old expression, is that I can’t see the trees for the forest. I thought about that on my morning walk today as I was looking at some neighborhood trees. I am 75 inches tall and most of my vision is focused straight ahead about 72 inches off the ground. I tend not to notice my surroundings unless they are in the form of a car bearing down on me.. The medical profession calls this shortcoming a “torpedo”, you give a third year med student instructions and she puts her head down and charges straight to the target, without any variance for any reason, and reeks destruction when she gets to the calculated point of impact.

But unlike most mornings I was noticing the individual trees in my neighborhood. Some are clearly more than a hundred years old and quite majestic. Some bend toward the street, forming a beautiful canopy of shade for those who walk in the morning. Some are dying, some are probably dead. At least one was transplanted in the front yard of one of our more affluent neighbors and looks as if it has been there since it broke through the ground during the Hoover administration. I thought a lot about trees on the walk.

When approaching the subject of trees you must start, if you believe in evolution, as I do, with the fact that you and the tree in your front yard have a common ancestor. You are both a couple of carbon based life forms whose ancestors made decisions about the kind of life they wanted to live and adapted accordingly. If you believe in evolution, like me, you believe that when the tree’s ancestors made their decision it was the most logical decision to make at the time for the long term survival of its species. It no doubt was. For eons, it was clear that trees took the correct turn at that critical Darwinian fork in the road, and the earth, at least the tree’s fellow carbon based life forms, benefited from that decision. Oh, there were occasional issues, the lack of mobility sort of hurt individual tree’s survival chances in any given forest fire, but all in all, it was a happy choice.

Then one day one of the tree’s cousins figured out how to use tools and that was the beginning of the downfall of the trees, both literally and figuratively. It did not take the tree’s cousin very long to understand that there was a great benefit to them from cutting trees down and cutting them up to use in various way for the cousin’s general comfort. Fire, chairs, houses, boats, fences, even antibiotics came from trees if you cut and shaped them properly. Worse than that, the tree’s cousin’s population exploded and more and more of them used trees in more and more varied ways. By the time of the settling of America, “clearing of trees” became synonymous with the advance of civilization and the conquest of nature itself.

After a good deal of the trees in many nations had been cleared, a realization came upon the tree cousins that maybe they had not thought the whole tree thing through. This thought was begun by certain leaders who liked to hunt and realized that a forest was a necessary part of hunting forest animals, so conservation societies were formed and large tracts of land were put off limits from tree murder. Since that time, the tree’s cousins have begun to understand their dependence on trees, at least in some theoretical sense. Most of that thinking has come from countries where most of the trees were already cut down. But wisdom must not be discounted merely because of its late arrival.

When the author was in law school, he studied a case where Justice William O. Douglas, in a dissent, suggested that the trees be appointed guardian ad litems to protect their interests in any law suit involving them. At least in the authors class, 125, mostly liberal, students had a good laugh. These students knew that the tree lacked the one critical component in the hiring of a lawyer for such activity, legal tender. But in some ways the tree has had the last laugh. In many places, including Austin, Texas, people no longer really own the trees which are on their property. You may think you own them, but you don’t. A budding George Washington cannot march out into his own backyard and curt down a cherry tree, not without the permission of the City Arborist, and you better have a pretty good reason to want to do it. One fellow in our town was given several years in jail for the murder of a particularly important tree, and that was only because the citizenry was not allowed to lynch him. The Austin Tree is given more protection than the stray Austin cat or dog, and is much less likely to be put to death by City officials or private citizens.

When I was young ,my father, who loved trees and poetry read me some Joyce Kilmer. He later told me a story of how, as a boy, he had chopped down a tree in his backyard. While this act was not exactly shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die, it bothered him all the same. He said that his conscience began hurting him about halfway through the job. I don’t think that he intentionally ever killed a tree again unless it was the obnoxious banana tree in our back yard and even that was just a case of attempted murder because it grew back every spring, much to his great consternation. Most of us have been sensitized to trees and will do what we can to protect them.

I say most of us, I realized this morning that I almost never look at trees. The ones in my neighborhood were beautiful. I have missed a lot ,walking with my eyes straight ahead, as does the third year medical student. I realized that when you are not looking at trees, you are not seeing birds, and when you are not seeing birds, you are not looking at the sky, and if you are not looking at the sky, you are cutting yourself off from the greater part of the wonder of your existence. So I’m going to start looking at trees. After all, they are part of my family.

I'll Speak With Your Mama Outside

2009-07-23T09:29:00.001-05:00

When you have the President commenting at his press conference on the arrest of some guy in Cambridge, Mass for “disorderly conduct” you look into it. Henry Gates apparently went ballistic when a cop asked him for his I.D. when responding to a 911 call. Gates is one of the top scholars in this country and runs the African American Research Centre at Harvard. You don’t get credentials much better than that in academia and Gates deserves our respect for that. He also deserves our respect for coming up with a great line. After the Cambridge cop asked him for about the third time to step outside of his home he responded by saying (according to the Police report). “Ya, I’ll speak with your mama outside”. After that statement he was arrested.

I wrote a blog awhile back about being polite to the Police. I am polite to the Police and most anyone else who is carrying a handgun. Then again, I’m not a big shot like Gates who can tell a cop “You don’t know who you are messing with”. The cops who stop me have a pretty good idea who they are “messing with” and it strikes no particular fear into their hearts. But for a guy with PHD, he sure said some foolish things and apparently said them quite loudly(if the Police are to be believed). I don’t think that you should be arrested for saying foolish things, but even an eggplant knows not to scream at a cop. The President said that the cops reacted “stupidly”. The President was not there and so I don’t know how he knows this and it strikes me that the President responded “stupidly” to the question. This, especially in light of the sensitivity of the issue. The resume of the arresting officer was not too bad. He is the one who performed forty minutes of CPR on Reggie Lewis, the great African American basketball player in a vain attempt to save his life. He also once ran a Police Athletic League which cops use to try to get kids with troubled backgrounds into sports instead of gangs.

What the president should have said was this, “Look, all the facts have not yet come out so I’m reserving judgment, but that does not mean that we can’t use the incident to highlight the important issue of racial profiling among our law enforcement agencies. We can all agree that that is wrong and is something we as a society should work on.” When the dust has cleared, and the Gates case is dismissed, which it probably will be, we can focus on the individuals at issue. I assume that the arrest was illegal. It is hard to be disorderly at your own front door. The Police report shows the actions of a highly intelligent man reacting foolishly, make that very foolishly, but probably not illegally. If you could arrest someone for being disorderly in their own home, I would be arrested every time one of my favorite teams blows a late lead, which is a lot of the time. But again, the police do stand for some type of order in the community and it is highly foolish, even if it is not illegal ,to make a huge scene while they are talking to you. As I always tell my friends, you don’t tug on Superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind, you never pull the mask on that old Lone Ranger and you don’t mess around with Jim.

Friends Worry as Local Blogger Celebrates Obesity Rating

2009-07-21T08:56:00.003-05:00

A smiling Wade Porter was announcing to friends this week that his recently instituted diet and exercise program had carried him well below the “morbid obesity” category and into the more comforting “obesity” level. “This proves the value of my diet and exercise plan” crowed the still portly Porter as he displayed a belt which he claimed that only two weeks ago had required the use of an additional hole in order to tighten. Many of Porter’s friends were concerned that he might be making too much of the achievement. At the top of the worry list is Porter’s Doctor, Austin Internal Medicine specialist Hans Haydon.

“Wade takes these categories too seriously.” said Haydon, who had been promised that he would not be named as a source in this story . “He understands that the term “Morbid Obesity” is a medical term much like “terminal illness”, but he thinks “obesity” is merely an esthetic term. I tried to tell him that he still has to make it through the plain obesity category before he can even get to the “overweight” category. He is miles from a normal weight for someone of his height, but he focuses on the word “morbid” thinking that he is out of medical danger. “

Porter, interviewed at his favorite Mexican restaurant, Juan in a Million, said between bites of cheese enchiladas, “It was really my family that got me through this. It was two weeks of pure hell, but their encouragement made it all worthwhile.” I look at myself in the mirror now and say. “You are not “morbidly” obese. The waiter at the barbeque place last night was very supportive and insisted on bringing out extra sauce for the celebration dinner, I feel like I’m walking on air.” Continually referring to himself as a “recovering” morbidly obese person, Porter said in a very serious tone. “I know that you are never out of the woods, it is no different than alcoholism”, here he ordered more tortillas from the grinning Juan. “The body mass index can never be very far from your mind. You are always only a binge away from morbidity.”

To the irritation of many, Porter announced that his blog, “Mills of the Gods “would be featuring a series of articles tentatively titled “How I beat Morbid Obesity” which according to Porter would, “chronicle my every step at the Barton Creek Mall which helped me achieve my goal.” He will also be featuring some of his favorite low calorie recipes which he claims that anyone can adapt to. “It turns out that if you change white bread to whole wheat bread and substitute mustard for mayo on a turkey sandwich you are more than half way home. I know it sounds disgusting, but you get used to the taste fairly quickly and it least it prevents you from ever wanting two sandwiches. I am going to try this change with pastrami and provolone for my next dietary phase and perhaps even substitute mustard for ketchup on my cheese fries.” Porter promised (or warned, depending upon your view point) that he would report back "in exquisite detail" on what he calls his “drive through mere obesity”in his blog reports. " I just want every morbidly obese person out there to know that with hard work and support they can make it to mere obesity.This blog can be their guide and their solace." said Porter, wiping a tear from his eye and frijoles from his mouth.

Moon plus 40

2009-07-20T17:01:00.002-05:00

It took eight years to get a human on the Moon ,from the time President Kennedy threw down the gauntlet. I did not know one person who did not believe that we could do it. I admit that most people I knew in those days also believed in the Easter Bunny and slept with recently pulled teeth under their pillows, but I recall most all adults believed that it would happen too.

There was a lot of optimism in those days. Very little of the cynicism which was brought on by the Vietnam War and Watergate and never left America. It was a very cool time to be alive if you did not mind waking up every morning wondering if this was the day that a nuclear war was going to start, turning you into ashes at your school desk. That was the bad part. The good part was that we always thought we’d win the war in those days.

I digress, as I said it took eight years to get to the moon and we have not been back in 37 ! I always thought that after we landed on the moon we’d end up traveling there a lot and I believed that by the year 2000 we would be able to stay in a hotel up there and bounce around like kangaroos. It never happened. We went up there and looked around a bit and then forgot about it. In a way it was like climbing Mt. Everest. Once you prove you can do it, why go back? The view will not have changed much. Still, that was an awful lot of time, effort and money to pull the plug so fast.

Nothing, I repeat, nothing that has happened since 1969 has been as exciting or satisfying as the moon landing was to Americans. Mostly it was a relief. We had to overtake the Commies in the space race and beat them up there. That was a huge deal. A Soviet flag on the Moon would have been the most demoralizing thing that could have happened. It so demoralized the Soviet Union that they gave up their plans to go and have never been up there. Only Americans have been on the Moon. No Soviet will ever make it for the simple reason that no Soviets are left. I suspect that the next human on the moon will be Chinese. Hopefully at the time of the Lunar New Year, so we can have one of those big parties snake dancing down the street, setting off fire crackers, behind a paper Mache dragon. I have always wanted to do that.

Interestingly, a summer storm in Houston had knocked out lights all over our neighborhood. But our house’s lights were still on. Consequently, numerous friends from the affected areas came over that night to our home. That made the event very memorable. Lots of friends cheering and enjoying themselves. All of us watching those ghostly white figures plant a flag on a world with no wind and listen to Richard Nixon talk to the Astronauts on the “longest long distance phone call in history.” One of the sad byproducts of the moon landing was the fact that the first object left behind on the moon with a name on it, bore the name of Richard Nixon. Oh well, you take the good with the bad. Nixon presided over all of the moon landings and then cut NASAs budget so that they could never do it again. I guess he wanted his name to be the only one up there. Although the truth of the matter is they sort of ran out of things to do on the lunar surface. The last guys took to sneaking golf balls up there to see how far they could drive a ball in a non atmosphere. That kind of signaled the end as far as I was concerned. I recall children crabbing at that time because moonwalks were interrupting the regularly scheduled T.V. shows. It was, perhaps, time to move on.

Move on to what ? Nothing that we were capable of doing could ever top that for excitement. Yet, thousands of things have happened in the last forty years that are much, much more beneficial to our species than landing on the moon. They always tried to sell the cost of the moon landing as something that would help us all out. I don’t know of any material way that the space race touched my life, except for the early invention of Tang, and I have not had a glass of Tang since before the lunar landing. I suppose that a lot of money was spent and effort used that could have gone to something more valuable. What if we and the Soviets had taken all of that money and put it into fighting hunger. It would not have ended hunger, but I suspect that at the very least hundreds of thousands who starved would still be alive. We used to talk about that stuff all the time in 1969. But no one in those days would have traded the moon for a few hundred thousand lives. I guess that’s very sad, but that’s the way it was on July 20, 1969. You could look it up.

Where They Say the Word Right Out Loud

2009-07-18T12:46:00.001-05:00

Cancer. Say it out loud. Say it boldly. Cancer is one of those words we fear. We all fear the idea or concept of something more than we fear the real thing when finally confronted with it. The reason is simple. You can fight a thing, but not your own idea of that thing. My mother has Cancer. Say it out loud. Cancer.

For the last several days I have been hanging around MD. Anderson’s Cancer Center in Houston for my mother’s pre-op, operation and post operation days. Three days in all. My brother and cousin (a retired nurse) have been taking care of my mother’s cancer situation for the last year and a half. They have spent hours and hours at M.D. Anderson, my time there has been comparatively short. But you can learn a lot about a place in three days. The biggest thing I learned is that the people at M.D. Anderson help bring cancer out into the light of day where you can talk about it and deal with it. I think that , more than even the treatment, the institute offers a chance to move past the terrors of the disease and turn it into something that you can deal with. It is a great service, almost as great as the healing itself, because it is the necessary beginning of the healing process. At M.D. Anderson they say “Cancer” right out loud ,toe to toe, eyeball to eyeball, and often as not, it is the Cancer that blinks.

For those of you who have not been to M.D. Anderson, I will say that it begins as an intimidating experience. Of necessity, the buildings of the Houston Medical Center are large and close together. One feels like one is walking through Albert Speers’ “Germania” concept brought to life. The immensity of the scale can leave you feeling powerless. For the week, my mother, a college graduate, traveled with a retired nurse from the medical center, an expert in media and public relations, and a lawyer. She needed everyone of them to cope. What would it have been like for her if she had been a non-English speaker from a small town in India or Thailand or Brazil walking these streets alone ? How would she have coped ? On the outside, M.D. Anderson looks less like a hospital (which it is only in part) than a terrifying series of massive steel Department of Defense edifices, some connected by skywalks which go on for a quarter of a mile. It is big beyond belief, each building filled to the brim with patients and medical personnel. Along the skywalk speed large electric carts each loaded with five passengers speeding from building to building, dodging the hundreds of pedestrians walking back and forth , most of them employed at the Center. How many must there be ? Yet, believe it or not, they all had something in common. They were all helpful.

I don’t mean helpful in the common sense meaning of the word “Oh, the doctors and nurses were all helpful.” I mean it in the strictest sense, the “I can’t believe this” sense, the “did you ever see anything like this ?” sense. At some point in time, and this is the only way this can be explained, M.D. Anderson decided that it was going to have a corporate culture which was the polar opposite of its physical appearance. When this culture started, or how long it has been ingrained in the system, I don’t know, but it has metastasized through virtually all of its employees. I have never at any business I have been to, witnessed more helpfulness from strangers. You never have to ask any employee where anything is, they see your face looking quizzical and they come over to help you out. Not just the security folks and the desk clerks, everyone. A trivial example is the surgeon who saw me entering one of the buildings from the skywalk and look around. “what can I help you with?” he asked. I said that I was looking for a men’s room. He proceeded to not tell me, but to walk with me over to a hall where he pointed out a men’s room. This kind of thing goes on there twenty four hours a day, as near as I can tell. It helps you relax. It gives you the feeling that you are never alone and that almost everyone is watching out for you and working with you.

After a couple of days, you don’t feel like you are fighting the huge bureaucracy that you have encountered, you learn to take the waiting and the tardiness of the professionals a little better. I sat in a waiting room next to a 70 year old fellow who was on his cell phone. “Oh, I’m just over here at Anderson, getting some chemo” he chuckled. I truly believe that that relaxed outlook would be impossible without the atmosphere that they are trying to promote there. It was that atmosphere that helped this guy say “Cancer” right out loud and not shudder. I was impressed. After awhile I could say it, really for the first time in my life, I could say it properly, not whispered or said nervously. “Cancer”, it’s just another word. We respect words, we don’t fear them. We should always remember as Humpty Dumpty tried to explain to Alice, that it is a question of who is to be the master, you, or the word ?

At the end of the three days, we took my mom home. None of us had had much fun least of all she, but I think that we all thought that it had been handled as well as it is possible to do. My mother said to me, “You know, it all happened so fast, it’s like it never happened at all. “ Well, it happened, as she knows and feels, but the fact that she could say something like that just a few hours out of a hospital bed said a lot about the process. It is not perfect, no one really likes it, but I think that they may be onto something over there. Say it with me, without fear, “Cancer”. That’s a big first step.

Man versus Machine

2009-07-08T11:43:00.001-05:00

I have always had trouble with anything mechanical. “Mechanical” to me has a broad definition. For instance, it includes can openers and corkscrews. I was the last person I know of to get an ATM card because I never thought I’d learn the machine and therefore would lose all my money. We were the last family to get a VHS when they came out. A young “runner” at my law firm once left a TV with a VHS attached to it in my office for me to watch a deposition . I had never used one before as they had been on the market for only about eight years, and I had to call him to ask about it. “It’s just like your one at home.” He said. “I don’t have one at home” I replied. He had to come back and put the tape in the slot for me. I am told that most people believe that action to be intuitive. I could talk about my work with computers and cell phones ,but we’d be here all day.

So I was more than a little upset when my doctor told me that my blood glucose tested a little high and he wanted me to check it for a couple of weeks and report back. I tried to get out of it. The nurse whispered to me, “it’s really not that high. He just wants you to lose weight “ and if we could have put the thing to a vote, I’d have won two to one and not had to do the test. The doctor did not favor a vote. Fascist.

Me: What’s the big deal, don’t some people have blood sugar that’s higher than others ?

Doctor: Sure, diabetics do.

Me: Oh.

So I had to set an appointment with a “Duty Nurse” for this last Monday to be given a machine and taught how to use it to check my glucose. The fact that they were giving it to me ,and not selling it, made me think I was probably not getting the state of the art equipment. I worried that it was some old fashioned thing and that the needle prick would hurt like hell. But mostly I worried that I would have to use a machine which meant that I would never use the machine, at least properly.

When I got to the Dr’s office for my appointment with the nurse, I was kept waiting. I had gotten there 15 minutes early and after twenty minutes past the appointment time I was still sitting around a waiting room among various people who all looked and sounded like they had the swine flu. Finally a very young blonde, slender nurse called my name. “Kelly” was maybe 27 years old and I was in a foul mood form the wait when she called for me. Fortunately for Kelly she weighed me first and we found that I’d lost five pounds over the last six days (I know, I know, water weight, but don’t ruin my high). At any rate, I was as nice as I could be after that.

Kelly sat me down in an examining room and told me in a manner normally reserved for fourth graders that she was going to teach me how to test my blood.

Kelly: Now a lot of people are squeamish about this, but the needle is nothing. It feels like a bee sting.

Me: (not particularly comforted ) A bee or a wasp or hornet because I got stung on the back by a Yellow Jacket once and almost wrecked a car at 75 mph.

Kelly: No, a bee, just a bee

Me: What kind of bee, a European bee of one of those African killer bees ?

Kelly: European Bee

Me: What kind of a European bee, Honeybee or Bumble bee. ?

Kelly: I’m not exactly sure, I have never been stung by a bee.

Me: Then how in the hell do you know that it feels like a bee sting ?

Kelley: That’s what the manufacturer reps tell us to tell people.

Well, this was going to be just great. Kelley then proceeded to show me the infernal machine and its parts, which included needles. She patiently explained the workings of the device and how I was supposed to prick myself and stick this little piece of cardboard that I bled on into this computer gizmo which would then, if I had done it right, give me a reading which I would record in a journal. The journal had pictures of an apple and an eaten apple in it. If you took the blood before eating you recorded it next to the apple. Even I could guess where you recorded it after you ate. Through all this Kelley continued to talk to me and treat ne as if I was about 10 years old. This was about two years above the level I needed her to use and so I slowed her down. Then, I actually put the machine together and took a sample myself. It all worked well and would continue to work well as long as Kelley promised to move in with us and supervise every morning. She would not so promise. But she gave me a step by step booklet. She said. I did not look at it.

I awoke at 4:30 this morning worrying about the machine. Finally, my wife came in a couple of hours later and encouraged me to face my problem head on. Which I did. I opened the box and there was a product I felt that I was seeing for the first time. It may as well have been a Saturn rocket for all I could remember about it. Well, at least I had the step by step booklet. I found it and opened it. It was in Spanish. Cursing ensued until I turned it over and found the English version. This was not a lot of help. The booklet was written by the same guys who write the booklets on furniture that you have to put together yourself. It had the information I needed, but just not written in a way that I could understand it. I tried the Spanish version and it was no better.

As I fiddled around with the thing ,I dimly remembered some of the instructions and sort of put the thing together. However, I had problems with the needle, and the spring portion of the gun which was the only thing keeping me from having to test my blood with a Paring knife. I yanked the needle out of the small barrel and proceeded to put a nice gash on my right index finger. This did not feel like a bee sting, more like wound from a sword, but blood was blood and I could have used it for testing but I had forgotten how to do that part too.

I got out the little computer and the little cardboard sticks that you are supposed to put the blood on, but after I dripped blood on the stick and stuck the stick into the computer slot it registered, not my glucose level, but flashed E-3. I cursed some more, by now blood was trickling onto my hand, moving toward my sleeve. At this moment my wife entered the room, the better part of an hour had passed since I had begun a process which had taken under thirty seconds in the nurses office the morning before.

Rayda: What level did it measure ?

Me: E -3

Rayda: That sounds like an error.

Me: you think so ?

We pulled out another manual and found that E-3 meant that I was putting in the stick incorrectly. I tried several more times (each including a needle prick) and E-3 appeared every time. It was time to give up and call Kelly to accuse her of giving me a defective machine. I did not look forward to this because I knew that the problem was the operator, not the equipment which meant that before I went back to Kelly I had to really break the machine somehow so she would not take the test and get a perfect result in thirty seconds. Can’t stand it when that happens.

After reading the manual (in English) Rayda discovered that I had not been waiting for the screen to flash a “blood drop” picture which was the sign that the computer was ready to analyze my blood. So I restarted the procedure and by now I had pricked myself half a dozen times, not counting the initial gash. Each time, other than the first, it felt like a bee sting. Once I waited for the picture of the blood drop to appear, I shoved in the stick and a reading came out. The same reading I had gotten the morning before. Well, I’m glad we got that settled I thought to myself, wiping blood off of the floor and tightening the tourniquet on my wrist.

Tomorrow is another day, but I have got the hang of it now, and will have as long as Rayda does not leave the room.

Emailing: 18968527.jpg

2009-07-05T13:15:00.001-05:00

The author and his new ensemble

Walk a Mall in My Shoes

2009-07-05T13:10:00.001-05:00

I missed the celebrations of the nation’s 233^rd birthday, and, closer to home, Mill of the Gods third anniversary , because I was out walking the Mall. The soaring temperatures and my waist line being what it is, I have moved my daily walks inside, which is allowing me to walk further, more comfortably and, more importantly to learn more about summer clear out items in various stores.

As a rule, I don’t go to Malls. Of late, several restaurants in a newly opened outdoor mall in town have had me violating this rule. Beginning last week though, I having actually been haunting the old fashioned indoor mall. The kind with a food court and kiosks selling Dead Sea soap and containing Yankee Candle Company’s.

The nice thing about it (I guess) is that because of the economy, no one seems to ever be at this particular mall. Thus, I can walk a couple of miles at a decent pace by not only walking in the mall areas, but walking through the stores themselves.

For the first three or four days I simply noted items that looked interesting. After awhile I noticed that the sales that were being held really did seem like good deals. I found myself slowing down by half a step each time I walked by a particular shirt in Dillards that I admired. I probably passed it half a dozen times before I timed my walk to end right in front of the very rack it hung upon yesterday morning.

The fact that Dillards was opened on the Fourth of July was a abomination. I will not retread the steps I have gone into before, concerning my views that holidays should not only be for those who can afford to shop at nice stores, but for those who labor there also. It used to be that way, but, one by one, the nation’s holidays been taken away from those who most need them, the non-exempt(hourly) store employee and those who toil for the tip at the restaurant. We are rapidly approaching the day envisioned by Ebenezer Scrooge who felt that just because Christmas only came once a year, that was no excuse for “picking a man’s pocket every 25^th of December.”

But back to the walking path. The shirt intrigued me. It intrigued me because it looked like it came right out of the closet of my fashion hero Charlie Sheen. Maybe not really Charlie, but the character he plays on the television show Two and a Half Men. Sheen. In that show, Sheen plays a writer of commercial jingles who works out of his condo on the beach at Malibu. I don’t particularly envy him that, although it is nice work if you can get it. What I envy is the fact that every day of his life he wears the same type clothes, a long untucked , tropical type shirt (often resembling a bowling shirt), a pair of shorts and some topsiders with no socks. I thought that maybe if I owned this particular shirt, I could start dressing like me hero Charlie Sheen and be as comfortable as he seems to be. I realized that I could not wear these things to work, but I could wear them everywhere else in an Austin summer (which lasts from February to October).

So there hanging before me was the shirt. It had been marked down by 20%, but those of us who walked past it twice a day knew that during the July 4 weekend, we could talk off an additional thirty percent which, means that,\ those of us with flashing calculators in our heads knew that you were paying only 30% of 80% of the list price of the shirt. Those who might know how to reduce fractions would know even more information, but I did not have time to hunt someone like that down. I looked at the shirt, sort of beige with a two tone brown which formed some type of tropical trees. A large pineapple on the inside collar told me that the shirt was made in the warm Pacific, and it was, if you count China as a tropical south sea island. The shirt was 70% silk and 30% cotton. I took two sizes into the dressing room and tried them on. To my delight, the smaller one fit.

But I still had to be careful. Years of experience have taught me that I seldom am congratulated at home after buying clothes. I am usually greeted with “Why would you buy a shirt that looks like all your other shirts ? “ or “did you even try that on?” Leaving aside the consistent comment that “you are going to get salsa on a $60 shirt”, the most harrowing question is, “How do you think that you would wash a shirt like that ? “ Which means that I have once again managed, through my ignorance of fabrics ,to add to my already dizzying dry cleaning bill.

So I was very careful. First I thought, hard. Seemed to me like I had brought home a silk shirt once before and gotten in trouble for it. But this was different, it was cotton and silk. That seemed promising. I know we wash cotton stuff at home. I have seen it come out of the dryer, or at least get piled up on the bed. I then did something I never do, I checked the tag. There it was, “Machine Washable in cold water.” Now instructions are not always a safe harbor. That very morning I had followed the instructions on the back of a waffle mix to the letter and produced batter which looked like rainwater. That was easily remedied. For the shirt, I had to be sure. You can’t just add more cotton to a shirt to make it thicker.

I went up to the sales woman and after commiserating with her over the fact that she was working until 6:00 on Independence Day, I asked her how I should clean this particular shirt. She did not bat an eye. “In the regular wash with cold water, no problem.” Here she held up the shirt by its sleeves and carefully looked at it, front and back.. “Say, this is a nice shirt, sort of going for a Charlie Sheen look are you ?” Now here was someone I could talk to. All of my fears vanished. I bought the shirt and had to restrain myself from buying several more of the same brand. Wonder what time they close today ? I took the shirt home and put on my full and complete Charlie Sheen uniform. I looked snappy. Just like Charlie, if Charlie was about 60 pounds overweight and had gray hair and was not handsome.

Within a few minutes my wife called and invited me to lunch with her and our daughter. The first test. I walked up to a suspicious look on Rayda’s part, “How are you going to wash that ?” she said, which really meant “How am I going to wash it because I can’t get you near the dirty clothes hamper ?” “Cold water” I raved. “Says so on the shirt and was confirmed by a highly intelligent saleswoman.” “Well, said Rayda, “the shorts don’t go with it, and don’t order anything in here which requires you to dip bread into olive oil. “ I did not, as of now the shirt is lying in a dirty clothes hamper without a spot on it. The big test to follow .Keep your fingers crossed.

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