Book Report

I just finished a book about human organ harvesting. It's a popular topic. There have been movies about it and a lot of books.

This one had the bad guys trying to follow Plato's Republic, with the bad guys playing the part of the Guardians. The other two castes were Producers and Auxiliaries. You could Google Plato's Republic and see how this plays out.

The bad guy Guardians were all doctors...transplantation specialists who figured that since they were the ones who did the transplantations, they should have the major say in who got the new organs. There's some merit to this notion, or at the very least, nothing really objectionable to the idea. But that quickly evolved into deciding that if X deserved a transplant, he should get it as soon as possilbe, meaning they had to find and kill a matching donor to get the needed organs. Very logical, if you're monomanical.

The protagonists were three disparate souls, two of whom fall in love. The third, having received the lung of one of the first two, gives back the lung and makes them real Guardians. It was a fun read: The Fifth Vial by Michael Palmer.

Know Thy Black Holes

A Bill Mahr routine:

"I'm the product of a mixed marriage. My mother is Jewish, my father is Catholic. I was raised Catholic, but with a Jewish sensibility. When I went to confession, I took my lawyer...

"Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I believe you know my attorney, Morris Fishbein..."


Okay, now it's me... Did you know that every galaxy examined has a Black Hole at it's center? The Black Hole at the center our Milky Way is massive. Or as more than a few scientists have opined, "It's Super Massive!" I get that a lot myself...

If you chose to assume there is a God, please explain why He created such magnificent Super Massive objects, perhaps the most profound and important of all His creations, and never mentioned it to his worshipers? After all, it is a possibility that the end of the Universe as we know it will come when all light, matter and energy, and the 11 dimensions of vibrating strings -- which will stop vibrating if God runs out of quarters -- are absorbed into these Black Holes.

(No religion, that I'm aware of, deals with the reality of the physical sciences. Why is this? ...Creationism!? Oh, please!)

So here is my suggestion: Religions should decree that Black Holes are the Hereafter. Meaning that each galaxy has its own Hereafter and everything winds up in it.

Why not? Introducing logic, and a touch of spirit of inquiry, into religion ought not to be automatically discouraged.

Laztheism and Man's Appetites

You know those Seven Deadly Sins? Explosives, munitions, sugar, pornography, petroleum products, the Media & possessions?

Well, Laztheists know all about them and says you should avoid them all like the plague. But the thing is, you can't. Can you imagine being alive and not involving yourself with these "sins"? So it's not about avoiding them; it's about using them, instead of them using you.

Those other so called sins: pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed & sloth, are relatively meaningless without access to the first list of deadly sins. If you're living off the land, a bare subsistence existence, who cares if you're full of lust, or greed or envy? It's when you have full access to the first list of deadly sins that your behavior can become a problem.

Anyway, Laztheists, every one of them, will tell you, all things being equal, don't be a bully, don't blow people up, don't shoot them in the back, learn to take 'no' for an answer, don't believe everything you read or see, love who you can, not who you want... Get the point?

So, yes, Laztheists know how to dream big. But here's a difference... Laztheists know that violence can be a solution, and at times the best solution.

An Exercise in Caution

I drove by this place the other day. I wasn't invited in. There's a 'commoner centre' near by, but who wants to visit the farm when Paris is right at hand?

Anyway, did you know that if I spelled out the name of this place, a world wide web crawl by this organization would see their name in print and come running to see what was said. A friend of mine was 'persecuted' by this organization because he didn't like some of the things they did and talked about it. In a world gone weird, these guys are a good fit.

Me, I could not care less what they do, or what they believe. After all, American Prime time television is filled with shows whose plots or premises have no basis in reality. And even when television think they are dealing with 'reality' they're not.

So go ahead and tell Tabitha to twitch her nose and make me disappear...

A Public Service Announcement. Someone tell Ted Kennedy...

I haven't called the number. I've been trying to get through to Verizon customer service to find out how to turn off my caller ID so that if I were to call the above number they wouldn't know it was me. In other words, I don't know how to make crank calls...

(In college I did learn to spin a penny from the quarter slot in a pay phone so that it would hit the dime funnel and thus make phone calls for a penny. That's now about as useful to my life as what today's kids are going to experience with their skateboarding skills...)

Anyway, I've done my good deed for this century. Remember, the first consultation free...

I took my BA in Advertising & Public Relations, from a Religious School...

Which means I am supposed to be totally unequipped to be able to comment about this ad. Other than to say I would like to have been at the photo shoot. She probably is an excellent conversationalist, as well as a good chess player. Plus she looks very flexible...

You'll probably remember her face, and parts of her figure, long after you forget the name of her vodka, or even that it was a vodka commercial. And I do remember from one of my classes that this was one of the indicators of a bad advertisement.

I once worked for an ad agency on Park Avenue, just one block west of Madison Avenue in wonderful Manhattan. Yep, for those two weeks I was an absolute hero to the cohort with which I'd graduated just a few months earlier. But then prejudice raised it's ugly head and chubby, stinky old man fired me for "Frivolity." Or was it "Facetiousness"? He used a multi-syllabic "F" word which was definitely evocative of my inner spirit. So that was that. No more trains into Penn Station from Edison, NJ...

Once when I was still in school, we had to go to a local radio station and write copy for our choice of one of the station's sponsors. I picked a malt shop/burger stand operation. I wrote some hilarious copy that was nothing but filthy double entendres ("Give it to me," she begged, "Give it to me good!" "Everything here at the Burger Barn is good!" said the wait-person... Stuff like that, totally puerile, sophomoric, etc. I've never been prouder...)

When I turned in a copy of what I'd written, the instructor, a devout religious person (or perhaps he was faking it until he got tenure?) said that it was unfortunate that I'd wasted my time and the time of the people at the station. Four days later, when ALL my copy went into heavy rotation on that radio station, he pretended never to hear it. My class mates were in a quandry: congratulating me might have appeared as if they condoned my use of sex to sell a product. And I don't think Utah has changed all that much since then.

If there really were a god, the instructor and the guy who fired me would be in hell. Or in denial, whichever is warmer. Although, thinking about it, denial would be wetter...

Where I live; Get your magnifying glass and you can see my house!

Okay, look intently at the exact middle of the photo. Now let your good eye drift a little to the left. Don't worry about where your lazy eye is drifting...

There are two creme-colored water tanks on a hill top. They'll probably just look like a creme-colored spot. After you've got your good eye focused on the water tanks, look down just a skosh and left a mini-skosh and that's our house. If your magnifying glass is really good, you can see our dog looking out the sliding glass door. She senses I'm looking at her.

Apple Valley is All-American, All-Inclusive and All-Dirt, except for the sand, which if 'finer' than dirt, but not in the way most of us think of as 'finer.' If I could live anywhere else, it would be a place with an equal lack of trees, but lots of grass, babbling brooks and a couple of big lakes. What do I have against trees? People hide behind them...

"Who do you think is telling the truth"

Journalism is currently seen as a career for a person with an agenda. Journalism schools are seen as incubators for people who want to, and will be able to, change the world. That's not the way it should be.

Quick, what political party were Woodward & Bernstein? Sure, the temptation is to say they were Democrats, but are you sure? With regard to the modern breed of 'journalist' we seldom have any doubt about their politics.

So my remedy is: Every news story that has quotes from people has to end with the above question, or some variation thereof: "So who do you think is telling the truth?"

The goal being that the reader cannot determine whom the reporter believes is telling the truth. Wouldn't that be a refreshing change? Imagine stories about Global Climate Change where the you can't figure out what side of the issue the reporter is on!

Oh, sure, Fox News says, "We report, you decide," but most of us don't think they really mean it.

A super-duper Pulitzer Prize, platinum plated, would go to the journalist who wrote that year's most controversial story and who did the best job of giving no idea with whom he agreed.

By the way, the question is purely rhetorical; the reporters do not want you clogging their email in-boxes with your opinions. That's what blogs are for.

I've Still Got It !!!

I spent the night in my van, in a parking lot in front of a Bally's Total Fitness, in Culver City. I had a lot of work in West LA, with more the next morning in Long Beach. I had planned on getting a motel room, (with a tank of gas now costing $55, why not just stay at a $49 Motel 8 and get more sleep?) but then decided that I could use the $49 to help pay for a new golf bag.

It's been a long time since I've roughed it. It was self-amusing, which rhymes with self-abusing. I probably got about 4 hours of sleep. I asked my wife, Liz, to call me at 6:00 a.m., and when she did, I'd already found an open McDonalds and was chowing down.

Now it's a little after noon and I'm done in Long Beach and heading for Huntington Beach, and possibly San Diego. And then I have to be back in the Crenshaw district tomorrow morning. It's exciting being a curb number painter! But tiring...

I didn't see any unusual behavior whilst in the Bally's parking lot, but cars kept coming and going the whole night, what with all that Yuppie fitness going on.

The "I've still got it !" remark is in reference to pretending that I'm just as good now as I was 20 years ago. It's a bald-faced lie, which makes sense, because 20 years ago, I had a beard.

Somebody Needs a Hug ...

Isn't that the lamest declaration you ever heard?

Of course somebody needs a hug! There probably isn't a day that goes by that we - you, me, the entire frickin' world - don't need a hug!

Therefore, I am introducing legislation to create a Federal HugBunny Authority. My proposal will afford a daily hug (Monday thru Friday, including holidays!) to each American who is either an emancipated minor or over the age of 18. AND at the same time it will reduce the welfare rolls by 73.6%. I have figured that it will take 6,509 per 100,000 to man - and woman - this new bureaucracy. But it's a win-win situation. It will spread happiness and spread more money around.



Best line from tonight's Simpson's: "I was voted the best kisser in my POW camp."

How many precious angels from God are enough?

Depends on who you ask.

If you checked in with the heads of consumer-oriented manufacturers, you'd hear that you can't have too many consumers.

If you ask Al "All" Gore, you'd probably hear about slowing down population growth.

If you asked some members of the Chinese Communist government, you'd hear that we need to put the brakes on population growth.

As is the case in almost all situations, there is no right answer, because there is no one administering a test and grading us. The human race could cease to exist tomorrow morning at 8:00 GMT and the Universe would get over it.

So what's my answer to the question I posed? I'm afraid I can't give an answer, because my integrity is compromised. But I would like to see men and women who don't want a baby in nine months have access to all the birth control they can comfortably carry in a back pack. Birth control out to be as available as bubble gum. Birth control ought to be an ingredient in fast food, alcohol, cigarettes and desserts.

What better way to prepare a man to deliver viable sperm, and a woman to be able to conceive than to have each of them give up fast food, alcohol, cigarettes and desserts for the six weeks it takes to clear the system of the birth control ingredients?

What? My plan would wipe out the human race, except for religious fanatics? Yeah, but at least then the Mormons and the Orthodox Jews could gang up on the pious Muslims and get them to give up Jihad.

The Sky Is Falling!!

Here's a quote lifted from a place where you can lift quotes:

"We truly are standing at the edge of mass extinction of species."

This could have been said just before the do-do and passenger pigeon died off. But it wasn't. It will be said next month, April of 2007, according to the media inflammation officer of a think tank that wants your attention. And they are likely to get it, because many humans like their pap spicy.

Everything you read, take with a grain of salt. Then live long and prosper. Or live short and prosper. Or live long and just get by. Or live short and just get by. Or live long and find a way to snicker on occasion. Etc. & etc.

And you will do yourself a tremendous favor if you stop looking for things to be fair. But at the same time, try to be fair. And don't stay too long at the fair. Remember the old Hungarian saying, "Each man speaks of the Fair according to what happened to him there."

Whose Job is it...?

Whose job is it to decide if a piece of music written between 1789 and 1888 is Classical or Light Classical?

We've had Charter Cable, DirecTV and now Verizon Fiber optic whatzit and all three had a music channel for Classical and a music channel for Light Classical. Is there one person somewhere who decides this or is this just someone's idea of a joke?

For those who have been wondering, a marimba is a 'resonating' xylophone. There, I said it...

Geography and $Geography

I took these two photos from a hillside on one side of the valley, looking towards the other hillside. I will give a prize, one entire book of the Best (expurgated) Book of Golf Jokes, to the first person who can tell me what city this was in.

The remarkable edifice is a Buddhist Temple. When news of the construction of this Buddhist Temple was made public, the non-Buddhists in the area started planning early retirements. And it came to pass that Buddhists from all over the region started buying homes in the area. Prices tripled back in the early-80s when this was being built. A friend of mine sold the house she'd paid $75,000 for, in 1977, for $285,000 in 1983. It was pretty outrageous.

Word also has it that you can't win at Texas Hold'em unless you go give a suitable offering before playing.

Apparently Buddhists gamble...

Roscoe Obama

Some of you are aware that I have promised to vote for Barak Obama if he changes his name to Roscoe Obama. (He was called the Big B.O. at Harvard Law School, where due to a tremendously outrageous sequence of improbable coincidences, he was 'tapped' for Skull & Bones. Weird, huh?)

Say it to yourself a couple of times: Roscoe Obama. Feels good, doesn't it? While not at all agreeing with his politics or anything he might eventually allow himself to stand for, I can't help but acknowledge the prestige our nation would garner with a President Roscoe. On that basis alone I would pick him over any Republican candidate.

Unless, of course, Mitt Romney changes HIS name to Butch Romney. That would be the salvation of the Grand Old Party.

Global Swarming: An Inquiry.

Global Swarming is a hoax.

There, I said it.

A Day's Work

At lunch I left the office and walked to the library. It's only about a block. But on Tuesdays the library doesn't open until noon. I got there at 11:41. So I walked around the civic center. Did you know that the new 'Aquatic Center' is open Monday through Friday from 6:45 a.m. to 9:45 a.m. for laps? Amazing!

When the library opened I checked out two books. Then I went back to the office and worked 'til 5:00 p.m. The I drove home and had dinner. I started reading the first book during dinner. It's now 9:00 p.m. and I finished it.

Summer times, when I was in high school, I would read a book a day. Life its ownself made keeping up to that schedule impossible. But I'd like to get up to four a week. That's doable.

Right now, behind me, I've got Cricket on, some kind of cup play from England, with the English against the Indians. From the looks of them, they're Apache.

Recipe for Life...

My wife is an excellent cook. And thanks to the internet, she been able to find new recipes to try out. A week ago Sunday she made a big pot of chili that was to die for! She's always made chili, and it's always been good, but this recipe had something in it that made it special.

And living here in SoCal, we're exposed to some excellent South o' the Border cuisine. She's learned to make killer chicken enchiladas. Man, with rice and beans and really cold Diet Coke, it's pure heaven.

Eating good, in good company, is right up there with doing good in a sport and the joy of sex. In fact, a perfect day for me would be 36 holes of golf, well played, dinner with my wife and then sex with her, in the dining room! It might freak out the kids, but heck, I think they already suspect how she and I feel about each other.

But could you do this every day? Financially, no. 36 holes of golf pretty much takes up the entire work day. There is night golf, but I've never played it. Neither did Bobby Jones, Ben Hogan, Fred Couples... I don't know about Tiger Woods.

What if I became insanely rich? Would I want to play golf every day? No. There'd be some days I'd just want to sit around reading and poking at the keyboard. And I'm too old for sex every day. But maybe I'm wrong about that? But realistically, I'm running out of time to prove my belief wrong.

I believe that if you weren't brought up rich, learning to be "idle" is very, very difficult. Especially for men, who don't really shop. We buy, but we don't shop. While I might give up painting addresses on curbs, I'd have to find something else that I could pretend was 'useful' to society.

My main hope is that my excellent genetic constitution would allow me to put myself out to stud. There is probably a good living to be made selling and delivering sperm that's in the genetic top 10%.

Jury Misconduct, for the Record...

this is a silly story. But since it really happened (according to my sources), it's a silly piece of American Jurisprudence History.

It is extremely doubtful that any of you have ever asked yourself, "What's the longest time a jury has deliberated before returning a verdict?"

Lucky for you guys, I did wonder that question and then set out to discover the answer. And here's my answer:

Romanos v. New Testament Life Assurance Company, New York Supreme Court, Borough of New York, Case # NYSC0003045, filed 10/22/1931. It took me longer to find out what the case was about than how long the jury "deliberated." This last answer is six months, 18 days. They returned a verdict for the plaintiff, ruling that New Testament Life Assurance Company owed Gladys Romanos the $5000 value of the life insurance policy Rodolfo Romanos had purchased from the company two days before telling his wife that he wanted a divorce. When he told her, according to the only witness, their son, Hubert Romanos, Gladys didn't say a word. She walked from the front room of their third floor apartment on the upper West Side, into the kitchen. The two Romanos men watched her retreat from their view. But she was gone for only five seconds, at most. She then ran screaming back from the kitchen, brandishing a cheese knife. Rodolfo bolted from the apartment and out into the corridor, and thence towards the stairs, with Gladys in hot pursuit. Mr. Romanos started down the stairs, tripped, rolled down to the first landing where, according to expert, undisputed testimony, he came to rest with a his neck broken and his life over. Mrs. Romanos, a delicate flower of a woman, came daintily down the stairs where she stood over the body of her deceased, almost ex-husband, cursing at him with a vocabulary that made one tenant on the second floor faint dead away, such was its perversity. Then about three minutes into her soliloquy, she reared back and tried to stab her husband's body in the rectum. (Rectum? She killed him!)

The life insurance policy had a clause that forbade a named beneficiary from collecting if that beneficiary caused the death of the policyholder. So the issue for the jury to decide was, "Did Gladys Romanos cause the policyholder's death." While not denying that she was a factor, Gladys Romanos, through her attorney, argued that being a factor was not the same as being the cause and that the cause was Mr. Romanos own actions, across the board.

Now to the issue of the jury's deliberations. The case-in-chief took only three-quarters of a day to present. The defense took the rest of that day, and the following day, to explain and justify their refusal to pay, including the presentation of the fact that while Mr. Romanos bought a $5000 policy naming Gladys as the sole beneficiary, he had also purchased a policy for Miss Trixie Ann Cutterhunt, identifying her as his fiancee. That policy was in the amount of $250,000. (Miss Cutterhunt collected her check and disappeared from the annals of history.)

So on 10/26/1931 the jury was given it's instructions and the twelve men retired to the jury room where they began their deliberations. At that time, jury duty paid $1 per day and they got lunch. This was paid out of a fund which got it's money from "jury fees" that have to be paid by any litigant demanding a jury trial.

In April of 1932 the jury finally returned its verdict. One intrepid New York Times reporter, when he wrote his story about this record time to come back with a verdict, took the time and trouble find out why it had taken so long. As he remarked in this story, it wasn't until he met with the fourth jury, and promised anonymity that he got the truth.

Twelve Depression-era men, all out of work, all facing what turned out to be a harsh winter, and who found out that they all played Bridge, parlayed their jury time into a nice, warm, fairly coddled winter. It started when they came to their decision within an hour of sitting down to discuss it. But one of the men pointed out that if they delayed returning the verdict until the afternoon, they would get a free lunch. After returning from the best meal many of them had had in months, their path down the slippery slope had shifted into high gear. This is when the fact that they all played Bridge came to light. And that was all she wrote, folks...

So for over six months they all ate one fine meal a day, courtesy of the court system. When the weather finally cleared and they had just finished a marathon Bridge tournament, and decided that $200 in jury duty money was enough, they turned in their verdict.

so now you know...

Mail Appendages!

The USPS is proposing a rate hike for first class mail, from 39¢ to 41¢. One of the driving forces behind this move is the cost of labor; letter carriers want a raise in pay.

While not being against either increase, I would like to see letter carriers working harder. Their routes should be increased. Thus fewer letter carriers would do more work, but for more money.

Were my proposal accepted, they would need bigger bags, often called mail appendages. I discussed this with our letter carrier, a wee slip of a girl. Her immediate reaction was profound distress! She said that she was having enough trouble as it was with her mail appendage. There was no way on earth for her to handle a larger mail appendage.

I told her that she was being negative, and that she should look for the silver lining, that if my plan worked, getting used to a larger mail appendage would be a benefit, and it would be something she and her loved ones could brag about. I even suggested that there could be some kind of competition to see who could handle the largest mail appendage, with appropriate rewards, as if just knowing you had the largest mail appendage wasn't reward enough.

She said she'd think it over and get back to me.