Story time

You may be wondering about the picture of me that appears on my front page (no, I'm not a seahorse --- I mean the other picture). It was taken on Christmas morning, 1976, less than 2 months after my 4th birthday.

I really don't know what the Groucho get-up was about. I don't recall seeing it in any pictures other than from that day. The toy I'm playing with was called Putt-Putt Speedway, and I absolutely LOVED it. You don't see it in the picture, but there was a little TV camera that went on the bridge. The camera had a little sticker with the number 12 on the side. In and around Wilmington, Delaware - which is where I lived at the time - Channel 12 is the local PBS channel. In the days before any of the seemingly dozens of Nickelodeon channels (not that we had cable, mind you), PBS was pretty much it for kids' shows in the morning. I was a "Sesame Street" kid through and through, so I was quite familiar with Channel 12. I recall thinking that this TV camera with a 12 on the side must be connected to the Channel 12 which I watched every morning. Perhaps my races were being broadcast!

But the real story here, of course, is the cast on my leg. Some weeks before, I had broken my tibia. I went with my mother to pick my brother and sister up from school. I was laying down in the front seat, and back then we never wore seat belts (the last time I was discussing the event with my mother, she insisted that I was wearing my belt, but I am certain she's mistaken - we never wore them back then - I never wore a belt till I took Driver's Ed and had to). I didn't always go with her to pick my siblings up, and since I was laying down and my sister couldn't see me, she figured I wasn't there and started to open the front door before she saw me. She closed the door... sort of, as it turned out... they both got in the back, and we were on our way.

We turned a corner leaving the parking lot, the door swung open and I started to slide out. I would have gone all the way out, except that right foot caught under the dashboard. When I was hanging out the door, my body twisted but my foot was held firmly in place. Something had to give, and that something was the tibia in my right leg. It split in a corkscrew pattern, something like when you pop open a tube of biscuits. I don't have a clear memory of this happening, but I do seem to remember seeing under the car as my head bounced on the street a couple of times (that explains a few things, don't it?).

Here's what I think is the best part of this story. I hope it happened. Picture someone walking their kid(s) home from school. You're walking along, just like any other day, "How was school?", "Blah, blah, math, spelling" whatever... and here comes this big green boat station wagon rolling by, door wide open, with a kid hanging out, arms flailing (I would imagine), head bouncing off the street. How freaking hilarious would that be?!? I mean, that person still has to be telling that story today. That guy's grandkids know about me by now.

Since when do you have to be hungry to eat a doughnut? It doesn't taste any better.

I would not be surprised if you are not familiar with the movie Other People's Money, from which the above is taken. I don't believe it was an extremely popular movie. It's not bad by any stretch --- as far as I'm concerned, anything with Danny DeVito and Gregory Peck is worth 103 minutes out of my life at least once. DeVito plays "Larry the Liquidator" Garfield, a corporate raider attempting a hostile takeover and dismantle of a family-run business, run by Peck as Andrew Jorgensen.

The climactic scene of the movie is when the shareholders vote to either retain the current leadership, or install Larry and his team. The company's president, of course, wanted to keep things on their current course - "One day when the yen is weaker, the dollar is stronger, or when we finally begin to rebuild our roads, our bridges, the infrastructure of our country, demand will skyrocket." In his speech to the stockholders, Larry's reply was that the company, New England Wire and Cable, would be unable to recover from its bad economic state because the emergence of fiber optics (the movie came out in 1991) would render it obsolete - "You know, at one time there must've been dozens of companies making buggy whips. And I'll bet the last company around was the one that made the best goddamn buggy whip you ever saw."

I read the letters to the editor from newspapers in 3 cities daily. Two of them have, in their online versions, recently allowed comments about the letters to be posted online, which I also read. I'm not a news junkie, but I do pay some attention to what's going on. Obviously, there's been a lot of discussion lately about the price of gas, and about fuel and energy overall. And whether it's politicians or the public, the only thing you hear from folks on the right is, DRILL. Drill here, drill now. They want to drill in ANWR. They want to drill off-shore. They want to drill, drill, drill. That's their only answer. Gas prices too high? We need to drill. We're too dependent on foreign oil? We need to drill. Heartbreak of psoriasis? We need to drill.

I can't help but wonder how many buggy whips they'll find down there.

There are plenty of opportunities out there - wind, solar, biofuels, to name a few. And, to quote an old David Letterman Top Ten List item... How 'bout Superman getting off his ass? I'm not going to pretend to have the answers as to what the best solution is. I don't personally know.

Here's what I do know. Whatever the source is, energy will be produced. The organizations that control the sources will then sell the energy to those of us who want it to power things. (It's almost kinda sorta close to the way things work now.)

Politicians, especially Republican politicians, love to boast about the ingenuity of Americans, especially American businesses. So why are the energy companies not working on this? They should be in serious competition to be the first to develop the new technologies, so they can, at least for a time, corner those markets.

Obviously, it will take an enormous expenditure to research and develop the needed technology. Our current government has given huge tax breaks to the big energy companies. Wouldn't it be a good idea, instead of just giving a tax break of $X, to mandate the company spend that money researching and developing alternative fuel? Had we done that even in just this decade (we should have done something long ago to spur on the development of other sources of energy, but that's another story), just imagine how far along we'd be, if there had been a serious investment of money and effort --- of that hallowed American ingenuity. The same companies would be supplying and selling the energy, so they'd still be making money. Once the infrastructure to deliver the power was in place, I would think their costs would reduce significantly. It can't cost as much to draw power from the sun, the wind or water as it does to pump it out from under hundreds of feet of desert, ocean or tundra, can it? Seems to me their profits would still be through the roof. They wouldn't have even really lost anything in the development, since the money would have come out of what legitimately should have been taxes paid. We, in the form of our government, wouldn't have lost anything since "we" so graciously declined to accept those taxes in the first place. It's wins all the way around, isn't it? Am I missing something, some way where this doesn't work?

I'm just one guy in little Elk River, Minnesota coming up with this. I don't understand why the brightest minds in business and our government... well, in business... couldn't have come up with this, or something better. I don't understand why they're still making their goddamn buggy whips.

Little Early-Pearly came by in her curly-wurly...

...and asked me if I needed a ride.

How much of the way we think (not what we think, the way we think) is by choice, and how much is hard-wired? I don't know, but I was thinking about it this evening.

When I'm doing cardio at the gym, I listen to my MP3 player. I set it to "Shuffle Once" mode, which means that, if it were not turned off, it would play every song I have on it one time, in some order that has nothing to do with the way I have the files arranged and organized, without repeating any song. I believe it would stop after playing each song, but I'll never know - I have more than 30 hours of music loaded in there, and I don't think I've got a battery that could play the whole player all the way through. For the record, the way that I have them arranged and organized is that (with two exceptions that have no bearing on this discussion) every artist for whom I have more than one song loaded has a folder (e.g., my Beatles song are in a folder called "The Beatles"), with a folder called "One Songers" which holds the songs which are the only one by a given artist that I have on there.

Tonight, I heard Bruce Springsteen's original version of "Blinded by the Light," (which I prefer, by the by) immediately followed by the (probably) better-known cover version by Manfred Mann's Earth Band. (Guess what song the lyrics that form the title of this post, and its continuation, are from!) My immediate thought when I heard the 2nd version start was, "Huh. What are the odds?" I followed that thought, through no conscious effort on my part mind you, by answering myself (not in these exact words), that the odds are precisely x-to-1, where x = y-z; where y = the number of songs I have on the player, and z = the number of songs that had played since I turned it on this evening, including the original version of "Blinded by the Light."

I don't dispute the content of the thought. It's correct (unless I screwed up my thinking somewhere) - each of the songs that had been played was ineligible to follow "Blinded." Each of the songs that had not yet been played had an equal (from my perspective - I don't know if there's some formula or system that determines the order of play in the shuffle modes, or if it's truly random) chance of being the next song. The fact that it was Manfred's version of "Blinded" was no more or less likely than if the next song had been "Heartbreak Hotel," "Hurts So Good," or "I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues." (See what I did there? Heartbreak, hurts, blues?) It could just as easily have been "Never Been to Spain," "Mexicali Blues," or "Back in the U.S.S.R." There was an equal chance of the next song being any one of a number of silly love songs, or "Silly Love Songs." I could go on. In fact, I did. For quite a while. Erased it. It ended with the conclusion that, if I were going to be buried instead of cremated, a fitting epitaph for my gravestone might be, "I couldn't resist the terrible pun." You're probably better off not knowing the details. Besides, I've already digressed too far from where I'm trying to be.

So... I don't dispute the thought itself. What I do question is... WHY? My internal conversation very easily could have, and I believe for most people would have, ended at "What are the odds?" Why in the world would I go on to consider the actual math (in hypothetical form, since I don't know how many songs I have on my player and was not aware of how many had already played) involved in those odds?

Obviously, in this situation, it's not a big deal. But this logical, analytical M.O. is how I tend to operate overall, and it seems to me that most of the people I encounter to not have this tendency. Most of the people around me tend to have more of a sense of wonder, uncertainty, mystery (whatever you want to call it) than I do. Things are unexplainable, unknowable. It seems to me that most people tend to take most things at face value - it is what it is, and if they don't get it... well, it's just one of those things. I've never been much of a tinkerer, but I seem to with thoughts what they do with things - take them apart to see what they're made of, then put them back together to be sure I know how they work. Or something like that.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying this is a bad thing, or a problem of any kind. I mean, my little Springsteen math problem was a perfectly logical thought. But where do I get this tendency to, without conscious thought or effort, immediately analyze this way, to deconstruct and reconstruct so that the reassembly turns my "Hmmm" into an "Ahhhh"?

I don't recall ever making a conscious choice to think this way. It is, as far as I know, just something that I naturally do. As far as I know. Did I choose, consciously or not, to think this way? Or did it come about naturally?

And why is it that the basic way I use my brain is markedly different from the way most of the people I know seem to?

I don't have any answers to those questions. I've been thinking about it all night. The only thing I can come up with is, in our society, we're not really encouraged to be analytical. We're not taught or encouraged to be critical thinkers. (Overall, that is. Some individuals are so encouraged by a parent, teacher, or some such source. I'm speaking in general terms here, however.) Of course, that opens a whole host of lines of thought about why that would be the case, and why so many people seem to be so willing to comply, and why I'm not. (Put another way --- Mama always told me not to look into the sights of the sun. Oh, but mama, that's where the fun is[more song lyrics]). That's not the topic of this post, tho.

All of this from a Bruce Springsteen song. Who knew?

Doubleplusungood

"This bill will help our intelligence professionals learn who the terrorists are talking to, what they're saying and what they're planning." That is what President Bush said about today's passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008, HR 6304. Like a crap container that's full, he's full of crap. What it will actually do is allow people and companies who broke the law, violated our rights and our liberties, to face no repercussions for doing so.

We've had a law covering the surveillance of foreign intelligence since 1978. Over time, as technology changes, as the types and sources of intelligence change, such an act would naturally need to be amended. Or, if you're President Bush, you simply completely circumnavigate the existing law and, by executive order, allow the National Security Agency monitor, without warrants, any and all communications (if they so desire) that involve a party the NSA believes to be outside the US. Don't matter if the other party is in the US, it's not domestic surveillance, lies the Bush administration. It's a legitimate power of the executive branch to do this, lies the Bush administration. Besides, they assure us, we're surveilling on terrorists, enemy combatants and other all-around evildoers. I don't believe them. I believe they used the program with the intention of spying on American citizens who they considered opponents. There would have been no need to go around the existing law otherwise. There would have been no need to create a new, secret (because everyone was always yakking about FISA before this broke) program that violated U.S. law.

Make no mistake - that's what they did. They broke the law. They engaged telecommunications companies to break the law in assisting the program. Of course they deny this. And some people believe them We call those people "idiots." Were their actions consistent with the law, one might wonder why the administration insisted on an amendment to the 1978 law that, among other provisions, retroactively grants immunity to those telecom companies. As their actions clearly violated the law, there is no need to wonder. They want to protect and benefit their business buddies. It's what they do. It's what they've done day in, day out since 1/20/01. It's the basis for damn near every policy and action of this administration.

Bush insisted that the new law was absolutely necessary to protect Americans from terrorists. ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY. And yet, he was adamant that he would sign no such bill unless it provided said immunity. That's how much he truly cares about our safety and security. Again, there are those who believe him. They're the same ones we call "idiots," and for this we call them "morons." His only interest is the interest of businesses and corporations. (If one can call violating the law and facing no repercussions an "interest.") If the Bush administration was actually concerned with the safety of Americans, and truly believed that the provisions of this bill that... oh, I don't know - ACTUALLY DEAL WITH INTELLIGENCE GATHERING - are necessary to said safety and security, then President Bush would have gladly and proudly signed the bill regardless of whether it provides immunity to businesses that broke the law.

High-minded rhetoric extolling the public good which mask actions to the public detriment and the benefit of a select group is nothing new. In fact, one might say this administration's actions hearken all the way back to 1984. This kind of stuff, in one form or another, has always been the case, and I imagine always will. But these guys seem to take it to a new level. They're so far over the line, and so blatant about it, and have the balls to deny it. They'll walk up to you, knock you down, take a dump on you, steal your wallet, take the cash and give it to a CEO buddy, then look you in the face and say, "Wasn't me."

AND THERE ARE PEOPLE WHO BELIEVE THEM!!!!!

One of my state's Senators voted against the bill today. I emailed her and thanked her for the effort. The other voted for it. I'm familiar with his record, so I can't say I'm surprised. I wrote to him and told him that I think he should be ashamed. (I expect his reply to request an explanation of that concept.)

I'm disgusted.

Simple pleasures

I guess I'm easily impressed.

I got a new car over the weekend. It's nothing special - a 2007 Chevy Cobalt. I got tired of thinking - twice a day, to and from work - "This'll probably get me there." I got tired of unexpected, multi-hundred-dollar repairs. I got tired of wondering, "What's that noise now?"

So, we wanted to get something that was going to be reliable - so, newer - and get better gas mileage. And we did. We actually made a list of about 2 dozen wants and have-to-haves that would describe a car that we'd buy. We found one with all of the have-to-haves and most of the wants. I would have liked a sunroof (mostly for ventilation purposes when parked outside) and that it not have previously been a rental, but you can't get everything you want.

I've never been a big car guy. I don't care about the alleged status of having a particular style or make of vehicle. Mostly, I want my car to be a car. I want it to get me where I'm going. Like I said, the 2 main concerns I had were that it be reliable and be a gas-mileage improvement. I don't much care about a lot of features and gadgets and doo-dads. The car I traded in didn't have a CD or tape deck or anything like that. AM/FM, that's it.

So, in looking for the new car, I wasn't much concerned about the features it might have. I wanted cruise control, as it helps conserve fuel. I would have liked a sunroof, but it wasn't a reason to not look at a car. I've been fine for 2 years with just a radio, I would have been fine continuing that way.

That said, I think a couple of the features my new car does have are really cool. They're probably nothing to impress a real car guy, but I like them. The radio (which does have a CD player) can be set to automatically increase and decrease its volume based on the speed I'm driving, so as to counteract the additional noise of driving at higher speeds. Also, it's got 6 preset channel buttons. I can set it to have anywhere from 1 to 6 "pages" of presets (i.e., 1 page = 6 preset channels, 6 pages = 36 preset channels). The cool thing, different from any other car I've had before, is that I don't necessarily have toggle between AM and FM presets. One any one page, I can have any combination of AM, FM (and XM, were my vehicle so equipped, which it is not) channels. Neither of these are huge deals, but I like not having to raise and lower the volume so I can hear at 55 but not force others to share my music at red lights, and I like not having to switch between AM and FM to cover my 6 most-listened-to stations.

Another thing I like is that it's got a "Driver Information Center." Where it typically displays the odometer (and outside temperature - I admit it, this is why I bought the car, I absolutely refuse to driver a machine that does not tell me the outside temperature), I can scroll through 2 trip odometers (don't know that I'll use either, let alone 2), an estimate of how far the current tank of gas will take me based on my driving conditions, what percentage of the oil's life is left, the coolant temperature, and - this is the one I really like - an MPG calculator. It counts from the last time it was reset (which was this morning before I left for work), and tells you from that point your overall mileage per gallon. Of course I have only today's trip to and from work to calculate so far. I got 39.3 mpg, according to my car. (In my last car, I was lucky to get 29). If today's mileage holds, I'll save about 3 gallons each week. Not bad.