The Last Airbender?

I – sure – hope – so!

After all, what’s the big deal about bending the air?

I’ve been breaking the wind for years, no scars yet!

Well, o.k., no physical ones anyway……..

Bump, Set, Spike

Spending some time near the beach while waiting for a work call (what did we do before cel phones?), an obvious volleyball analogy comes to mind…..

No,  not those bumps…

1. The Bump….. Stop the ball and bump it up to…..

2. The Set….. who will place the ball up to a good spot near the net for….

3. The Spike…..

The Bump, in the financial sense, is the depression that we here in the United States are deep into. Our “bump” hit hard, with little warning to those who don’t have their finances secured. Of course our politicos called it just a minor re-set of the financial world, nothing here to look at, move along……

The Set, is a chance to note the recession; jobs are very hard to come by, financing (home, car) loans about as prevalent as an honest politician, and yet we are urged to put our money into the banks for “safe keeping”. Put the cash into stocks again, the fire is over. Oh yeah, we’ve been “set”.

No corporate action here!

However, in the real world, a.k.a. “On the street”,

The Spike is represented by a full on depression. Try to find someone that doesn’t know of a friend or acquaintance that’s now out of work (unemployed or underemployed, as in asking “you want fries with that?”), or worse, one that’s sleeping in their car. There are several people I used to work with who are now in this situation. Or worse.

When I saw the film “Soylent Green” years ago, I just couldn’t believe that there would ever come a time when people in America, other than for some mental burn outs or drug addicts, would we would find “regular folks” sleeping in hallways. But now, that doesn’t seem nearly that bad considering how many blanket covered forms one sees daily nesting under the freeway overpasses, or out on the street.

Much of the media will say “move along, there’s nothing here to look at”, and they will keep up with that until they themselves are out looking for work and a place to live.

Mort’s Mort

My uncle Morty died last week, the last of my parents siblings to go. As the youngest of all of my uncles, he was almost like my older brother, and my hero. Even though for some reason he thought Nixon was an o.k. guy, I guess I’ll have to forgive him (my uncle, not “Tricky Dick”) for that.

The usual screed starts soon.

Carly, finish that sentence…

One of the great things about living in California, is the pre-election advertising.

As a new treat, one of these ads features a photo of our ex movie star governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, one that morphs into the queen of eBay bad feedback, Meg Whitman, but it’s not an improvement. And, we also have an old hippie chick running for a senate seat, paying for a big part of her campaign with money she received as a golden parachute.

Her ad goes “I’m Carly Fiorina and I ran Hewlett Packard”, however she neglects to include the three words that would make it a bit more correct.

Those three words (that preceded her being fired) are “Into the ground”.

She also talks about creating jobs, but omits the part that lists what the country was that she created jobs in, when she took her company “Off Shore”.

Here’s a hint for you, it isn’t the U.S.A.

Where You At?

I’ve touched on the impending end of individual privacy several times before, but it’s hit home once again. When my cel phone contract expired, I paid a visit to see what’s available in the world of communication bling that will have to do two specific things:

1. Make calls

and

2. Receive calls

Questions from the folks at “V” (a most appropriate nickname for a company that is very hi-tech in service but seems to be run by less-than-humans) led me to believe that they consider anything that handled these requests of mine to only be by-products, nice to have but only a side benefit.

I declined their sales pitches promoting phones that took pictures, saying that I had a camera that did that and allowed me to save, access and email my photos without paying someone for the privilege. I also passed on texting, since I consider that to mostly be a waste of time like sending smoke signals back and forth, whereas in most cases a single simple phone call could have resolved all of the issues in a short verbal burst.

Then I dropped the bomb…. Why can’t I just re-activate one of my ancient Motorola StarTac flip phones (which I still have 3 of, sitting in a box in my office) and just use that one?

This was my all time favorite cel phone, it was sturdy and small enough to slip in my jeans front pocket, and the damn thing just worked everytime and everywhere. Plus, you could flip it open just like a Star Trek communicator, and it didn’t take photos of the inside of my pocket like subsequent Samsung phones did.

Their shocked reply was, “We can’t re-activate that phone because it was made before cel phones had GPS systems built in, and the federal government now requires that all phones have a working GPS installed in order to be used on the ‘V’ network” (and one assumes, all other carriers as well). Wandering through the menu on my current phone (also a Motorola, but a piece of crap that has nothing in common with the StarTac), I did find that there is a GPS selection, on or off.

Hey, there’s a lot more to be added on to this post soon, working some long days in the fantasy castle lately preclude blogging.

Happy “B” day to ms. queen “B”

Well Jeannie (a.k.a. ex # 2), it’s your birthday tomorrow, and that’s why I’m celebrating today, knowing that you’re stewing in your own juices because of your internal angst over being another year older after midnight tonight. Actually, it’s after 9 p.m. here, so bingo, you’ve hit it! I should have started this earlier.

So what does is it feel like being a fat assed 55 in Greenfield these days? Are you still married to Mr. Bank Account # 3, or have you already strip mined all of  his financial world and moved on to the next one?

For someone who’s main claim to fame is being able to suck start a Harley, you’ve certainly done well, and to give the devil her due, you went far above (and below) all expectations in practicing your craft. The prodigious sweating you do and your dermographia enhance the process, but your gurgling sounds are just the icing on the cake, or a perhaps a pearl necklace if you will.

And just to clarify, that’s not at all what the “B” in the subject line refers to, if it did I’d have written “Happy BJ day”. No, it’s for a word that’s similar to the “Birth” in birthday with the same number of vowels and consonants, just flipping the order around of two letters and changing one of them.

This is not soduku, someone must be able to figure it our even if there’s no prize involved.

So, for your birthday, (eh, that’s number 55 isn’t it?) I wish you a long life, a really, really long one where you have time to think about your life.

Enjoy!

I’ll Tell You Where You Can Park It!

Yet another day and one more parking ticket from some fat ass wanna-be cop who couldn’t take the time or make the effort to walk all the way around my car to get a look at  the display side of the meter and see that it was showing FAIL, with the coin slot jammed with a bent coin placebo.

CSI research lab?

It’s not too hard for the meter cops to find their way back to their place at the trough, they only need to follow the trail of  bread crumbs that dropped from their chins  (“chins” is not a typo here), while on the way back  from their morning donut break.

I can’t recommend that anyone should do this since it’s not legal, but if people that were pissed off enough were to stop by some little hardware store and buy a spray can of paint and spritz a bit on the meter’s small window so it can’t be read from a car by some doughnut munching walking water bed driving by in his little Honda enforcement vehicle.  But if I was suggesting doing such a thing to someone, I’d have to add that mid tone grey makes a great choice as it is hard to see that it’s even there until you’re right on top of it.

The more militant ones out there might want to get hold of one of those             battery powered self defense taser sort of  hand held shocking device and press it against the metal housing of the meter, but again, as (history quiz here) that Cox sacker Richard M. Nixon said so often on his Watergate Tapes, “that would be wrong”.

The  +/- 50 thousand volts those sort of devices spark out with could whack some strong effect on the micro chip inside the meter that regulates the timer, not to mention the LCD display that might go black (and never go back).

Not that I would know about such methods.

Insult now added to (wallet) injury!

It’s been a week since the event described above, and I decided to pay the $55.00 fine using the online option listed on the back of the ticket, and in doing so I discover that there’s now a $2.00 “processing” fee to be added on. Since I’m the only carbon based life form involved in this payment “process”, why can’t they at least be honest and say “We’ve decided to bone you in the ass just one last time”? Or should I just be happy it’s not a $500.00 “processing” fee?

In Fear of Charly’s return……

If either the book with the title “Flowers for Algernon”, or the film known as”Charly” that was based on that book, a movie that starred Cliff Robertson, happen to ring a bell, perhaps you’ll understand why I have an issue.

Full disclosure; I’ve been doing crossword puzzles on a daily basis for years, and not far from the beginning I became aware that both the Los  Angeles Times and the New York Times puzzles start out easy on Monday and get progressively more difficult until you reach the Saturday edition, which by most peoples standards is a bitch killer. To quantify things, the Monday puzzle used to take me about 7 to 10 minutes, and by Saturday those times were more like 20 to 30 minutes, and on occasion I’ve even burned off an hour on one. Or maybe two with the NYT edition.

Several months ago I started taking an over_the_counter dietary supplement I found at Costco that, since I don’t get a penny for saying the name of it (nor even a discount), will go nameless here. Except, I will say that a photographic term will figure in there if you dig a bit.

A few weeks into taking 3 or 4 of those capsules a day, I noticed that my elapsed time to solve a puzzle seemed to be dropping, and after a few more weeks I found that I was finishing in less than half of my previous time. I no longer suffered from TOTT syndrome (this is my name for Tip Of The Tongue, that failure to be able come up with a word I know that I know, and I’m trying to think of). Words that I want to remember now will float to the surface like that triangle sort of thing that was in the middle of those old black magic 8 Ball party fortune tellers with a window on the bottom, the part that told you “yes, no, maybe, or ask again later” when you inverted the ball. I’m also speaking faster and hitting my marks on jokes that I tell, both are things I consider to be good. I’m not saying that I’m a Robin Williams, but hey, even Robin Williams isn’t exactly a Robin Williams any more.

Still with me? A quantum jump in my synapse firing speeds barely describes it, everything is clearer, sharper, and I feel like I’m really, really functioning. In effect, I’m pushing my personal throttle forward to what we called  the “Military” position when I was in the Air Force, a setting that went beyond 100% and was not supposed to be used except when shooting at the Vietnamese farmer’s water buffalos or doing evasive maneuvers to dodge enemy missiles and such.

And now for the catch. Many years ago when I indulged in experimentation in what I’d like to call psycho-active products, it was always with the idea that I could quit at any time. Which I did…. Eventually…. Several times. So, what has me worried is that if I were to quit being a user of, ah, let’s call it FF, I might go through what happened to Charly, a return to a slower state of being at a time when my brain functioning at full speed is necessary for me to just keep in place, much less pull ahead. I was never the retard (the film’s unfortunate and not very PC choice of a descriptive word) that Mr. Robertson played, other perhaps than in the opinion of my 2nd ex-wife, so a drop like this would be scary but not fatal. I just don’t want it to happen, so I seem to have a new life long addiction to deal with.

I guess the high (no pun intended) point of all this is that it’s not any kind of a  legal issue this time. After all, these days I’m buying my “meds on my American Express Card, not sniffing stuff off of it. Wish me well…..

P.S.

Yet another disclosure: I’ve worked with Cliff Robertson (one day on an ATT commercial) and Robin Williams (2 seasons on Mork & Mindy and a special on the Universal Studios lot for Spielberg to make a video birthday card for George Lucas) in the past, both guys were (and I have to presume still are) very nice, warm, and intelligent people.

More-on-Meg?

Kind of a slow day here, so I started wondering, why would the 126th richest American who’s worth is reputed to be in the area of 1.2 Billion Dollars spend about 130 million of those hardly earned dollars to get elected to a job that only pays only a little bit over $200,000 in U.S. dollars a year?

This calculates out that she would have to hold this job for about 650 years just to break even, which is somewhat longer than even John McCain has been alive.

However, this bought elected office has term limits that offer (at the outside) 8 years of possible employment, unless your name is Gray Davis, in which case, not so much. So in re-calculating it, she’s paying at least $16,250,000.00 for each of those years she’s in office. Maybe more if the electorate pulls their collective heads out of their collective asses and removes her from her money losing (for us) scheme.

O.K., so the answer is not too difficult to track down, she owns major holdings in many mega-corporations that stand to rake in mega-billions (that’s with a “B”) if someone at the top of the heap makes some decisions that favor them.

How much did the old fart bid on eBay for an “air kiss”?

Two basic sayings, “Do the math” and “Follow the money”, will usually give you the right answer. And in Meg’s case, you’re sure to find that it’s the “right” answer, in fact I’d go so far as to call it the “Far Right” answer…..

Toyota is not the first…….

…. to have an alleged  run-away car problem.

Do you remember the Yugo?

It had a similar problem, but this issue was seldom spoken about for a few good reasons…..

1. How many of these hardtop lawnmowers did they sell, a few dozen? This was one of the few cars ever made that could make the Soviet made Lada seem like an executive’s car.

2. If  one of these did manage to “run away”, it’s possible that no one noticed because they were unlikely to be able to find a speed limit they could break.

3. Even if they could eventually hit 75 MPH (and that’s only likely to happen driving downhill with a strong tail wind), after about 1/2 mile at that speed the engine would seize.

Le Limo, barely enough power to get off the trailer…

And to answer these most often asked questions….

1. What’s with those little lines in the back window?

Answer: They’re installed there to keep your hands nice and warm when you have to push start it in the winter.

2. What was the model called that crossed the river Styx?

Answer: Yugo to hell.

And….

3. The sales pitch that almost worked?

Answer: From Mr. Buckeroo Banzai; Wherever you go, there Yugo!