err on the side of being right

There is one thing nagging at me in this whole Syria situation and that is that we need to see the conclusive evidence that Assad delivered the poison gas.  While he sounds to me like the kind of low-life that would do something like this, the fact that we warned him not to step across that line and he did, anyway, makes me wonder why he didn’t commit suicide in some way where he had more control.  When we warned him not to do it, he had to know that it was not an empty threat.  He seems to be more than able to slaughter his people with conventional weapons, so why did he use the gas?

The assumption that al Qaeda has a role in the Syrian opposition makes me wonder if they had something to do with this.  For example, did they have a way to deliver gas to an area the Syrian government was shelling to make it look like Assad did it?  After all, don’t the al Qaeda guys have a reputation for putting innocent civilians in harm’s way to try to give themselves a tactical advantage?  How do we know they wouldn’t try something like this?

I am pretty sure the President would not jump in with both feet if he was not pretty sure his feet were going to land on the side of being right, but I just have a bad feeling that something just doesn’t add up.  Perhaps it is because there was that thing in Iraq a few years back where Saddam had the weapons of mass destruction and our president at the time was cocksure that he had to act, and, well, you know the rest of the story.

This morning the Red Chinese were using that same argument and when I heard them saying it I figured I had to be wrong, but after weighing it all, I would like to have all of the facts.

If we have the evidence, then let’s throw the Tomahawks at them and then pass that evidence to the Russians afterward, but let’s make sure we have the evidence before we light them up.  Let’s not get dragged into something unless we have clarity.

11,346,595 people like mitt romney

I signed up for a Facebook account this week so I could monitor my granddaughter's daily doings.  Facebook gives me daily suggestions of who I might like.  Today one was Willard Romney.

11,346,595 people like him, which is currently 11,346,592 more than like me.

Needless to say I did not-- and do not-- like him.

I just had to get that off my chest.

turn on the WABAC machine, sherman. OK there I said it after all

Last week, before I time travelled, I went online and did some research.  As I examined my life, I knew it was necessary to go back to where I came from.  Up to now, life has been anticipation:  looking forward to what was going to happen; working toward a future.  Now, life is beginning to be a reflection, looking back at what was and trying to make some sense of it.  Oh, I still anticipate a future.  I have not stopped in the present with no plans for what will be, but where I came from and what I did now seems almost as important as where I am going.

A few years ago I went back to Alden Street and viewed the lot where the first house I lived in used to be, so I already knew the house was no longer there.  However, it was not just the place where I slept and ate, it was the neighborhood where I lived to which I needed to return.  In addition to the cradle where my infant architectural history was nurtured, I needed to wander among the other structures and places where I walked as a lad.

Because I had a couple of paper routes in the general neighborhood, I knew that the big houses across the street were where the rich lived at the time—an area called Parkwood—and I did some research.  What I found piqued my curiosity so I had reason to fire up the WABAC.

Parkwood was not a departure from other upscale areas of Kansas City, with winding streets that didn’t form the normal grids with streets at ninety-degree angles that I was used to.  Parkwood had streets that formed sweeping wyes with semi-triangular islands with flowers and bushes.  This was nothing out of the ordinary for me.  I had seen Westheight in Kansas City, Kansas; Mission Hills and the Country Club Plaza, so I figured this is just how all the upscale areas were built.  However, my research led me to Sid J. Hare.  Sid and his son S, Herbert Hare formed Hare and Hare, a landscape architecture company.  Parkwood was Hare’s first project of note.  Later Hare and Hare laid out Westheight.  J.C. Nichols saw Parkwood and Westheight and hired Hare and Hare to do a shopping area for him—the Country Club Plaza.  Many years later Hare did Mission Woods among a plethora of other things, including the University of Kansas, Wyandotte High School, Loose Park, the Truman Library, ad infinidum.  I have been to most of them and I see the similarities.

So, I set the dials on the WABAC machine and I travelled back to the day.

Parkwood had fallen into disrepair and become a bad area of town fifty years ago or more so I was expecting a ghetto.  I was surprised to see a number of the houses well maintained with yards trimmed and landscaping clipped.  The islands were all weeded and flowers were in bloom.  There were some houses in disrepair with elderly cars parked by them but I was surprised by the condition of the area.  There were four upscale-looking guys on the tennis court playing doubles and there were no cars around so I am assuming the walked there.  So far, so good.

I drove back down Quindaro Boulevard and was surprised to find a couple of blocks of new houses, some under construction, and drove west to 17^th Street and went south toward Alden.  For some reason, many of the streets in the old neighborhood are one way, so I had to drive around for a while before I could get myself where I could drive north down Alden.  I parked in front of the vacant lot that used to be the old homestead and took some photos.

A neighbor come out of her house and asked me if I was the guy who was going to cut down the tree.  I told her I was not a tree trimmer and explained that I used to live there fifty years ago and was taking photos of where I used to live.  She came out and talked to me for a while and I told her about where my old house was and the garage.  Her house, sitting next door to where I used to live was two years old.  There were three new houses on the block that were not there last time I visited.  I told her I was going to walk around the lot if she didn’t mind and she told me to be careful.  I’m not sure of what I should be careful, but she probably figured I was a doddering elderly person who might fall and not be able to get up.

Anyway, the yard that seemed so large when I was a child, seemed miniscule to my elderly eyes.  I walked to the middle of the back yard, where second base had been in our waffle ball games and looked toward where the outfield fence had been and then home plate.  I remembered it took a mighty swing to put that waffle ball over the fence when I was a kid, but now I could almost spit from second base and hit the outfield wall or home plate.  And, I have worked on construction sites where there were gentlemen who could put some serious distance between their lips and their spittle, their mucus or their sputum, and I was not a guy who could match their distance, or even spit very far.

I took some pictures of what was now so I could have the record to compare in my mind to what used to be.  Few landmarks were the same.  None of the yard was recognizable.  There was a large walnut tree where the house had been.  My knowledge of trees was that walnuts take a long time to grow, so the house must have been razed many years ago.  I was hoping, much like Ponce de Leon that I had found the wellspring of my youth, but though I stood among the ghosts of the past, I was still old.  I guess the problem was that nothing was the same.  Even the lay of the land was different.  The side yard, which used to be a serious enough slope we could use it for sledding in winter snows, had been dozed to a lazy grade.   The front door of the house was on the main floor and the back door in the basement opened to a level just below the level of the back yard.  Now the grade was more uniform.  The landmarks of my youth were gone and things were so changed that it was hard to determine the exact place they used to be.  After all, it has been fifty years since I walked these grounds.  A half a century can erase some memories.

I guess I wanted some moment of epiphany—some recollection that brought me back to a time when a young boy ran the width and breadth of this property.  It didn’t happen.  In one regard it was good to be back but it was almost like coming home to a place I had never been.  There were some good times I had in this house and in this yard, but there was no house and the yard, for all I know, might have been six feet below me, forever covered by the bulldozer’s blade.

It was melancholy to be home but just as good to be going.  It was home no more and the WABAC had other destinations to which it would take me.  It was time to travel again and I will detail those further adventures later.

a year in and what i know

Unexamined life is not worth living.  Socrates said that.  Okay, Plato said that but he was just repeating what Socrates said.  I am a year into this retirement thing and what I know is what I know, and what I know is that retirement has given me the chance to examine life.  My examination has led me to the conclusion that I have missed a lot during my lifetime because I was busy working.  I think I prioritized things in approximately the right order, but I think I put too much emphasis on and, consequently, too much thinking time devoted to my various jobs. 

In one regard, my career gave me the opportunity to have a meager amount of money saved so I could afford to retire in the first place, but it has taken me all of the first year to wind down.  I still find myself prioritizing life like I prioritized my time at work.  That is to say that there is never enough time to do everything one wants to do and some things have to be glossed over or relegated to the bottom of the pending file until the realization hits that there just isn’t enough time to do them.  There is always the feeling that maybe, had I spent another ten hours a week working that I would have gotten them done and one or two of them would have resulted in something worthwhile.

In retirement I have little trouble pushing those thoughts aside.  If it is important I will get it done:  If not, it will wait until tomorrow or next week, or next month.

In Wampeters, Foma and Grandfalloons, Kurt Vonnegut says the following about Socrates’ quote:

 

“Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?”

 

It is my opinion that, since our lives are viewed from the point of view of our own egos, we may not even know that some of our lives are clunkers.  My own life had its low points, and many things that I should have or would have done differently, I would like to think that my own life would stand the test, but now is the time to examine it.  And my first examination was to go back in time.  The next entry will be the detail of that time travel.  If I was a dog with a vast knowledge of history and physics and I had a geeky boy as a master whose name was Sherman, I would probably say, “Turn on the WABAC machine, Sherman.”  Since I’m not and I don’t I will just say, “Until next time…”

I stole this photo from Wiki.  It depicts

Mr. Peabody and Sherman entering the WABAC machine

 

bronco bama, part two

Over the weekend some rodeo clown at the Missouri state fair put on an Obama mask and stuck a broomstick up his ass while someone got on the public address system and asked if the crowd wanted to see Obama trampled by a bull.

Ha, ha.

It goes without saying that there are a lot of people in Missouri who hate the federal government.  It also goes without saying that there are a lot of people in the show-me state who are still upset about that emancipation proclamation thing, and are not fond of black people.  It doesn’t need to be mentioned that there are Missourians who don’t buy into this gay rights thing (the symbolism of the broomstick up the ass, in case you didn’t catch the humor).

The State and the State Fair have apologized all over themselves, as they should have, and they are telling us that someone hijacked the microphone and blurted out their own racist anti-American venom.  If so, it was just a breach of security, but I am hearing too many people saying that it was all done in good clean fun and no harm was done.  Unfortunately, I am detecting a lack of sensitivity here. 

They interviewed some hillbilly today that suggested that, and this is just a paraphrase that, “Last time I looked we still had freedom of speech.”

He is correct.  As a matter of fact we do still have freedom of speech.  Freedom of speech is when someone in the crowd wears an Obama mask, stuffs a broomstick up his ass and carries a sign that says “I hate queers, blacks and America.”

Or if someone carries a sign with a swastika with the words, “Seig heil.”  That would be some dumb-ass stuff, but freedom of speech allows a Nazi to do it.

It would also be freedom of speech if someone carried a sign that said “Down with heterosexual white people.”

When someone shows up to protest, they are protected by their first amendment rights, but hijacking the microphone and the event goes beyond freedom of speech.

Would it have been in good clean fun and would it have been freedom of speech if someone would have dressed a rodeo clown like Jesus Christ and shouted over the public address system:

“Allah Akbar!  Who wants to see Christ the infidel trampled by a bull?”

Well, maybe some would think that was just clean fun.

conversation with a hummingbird

Apparently I have become fluent in the language of hummingbirds.  I had a face-to-face with one this morning.

Okay, I don’t think he knew what I was saying and I don’t know what he said to me, if anything, but we had a “moment.”

I guess I had better explain.

Several years ago my dentist suggested I use an electric sonic toothbrush and I have been using one almost every morning since.  The rest of the day and before bed I use the old manual type that requires me to push it across my teeth with my own muscle power.  After a year or so of watching myself in the mirror for the three minutes or so that the sonic toothbrush runs, I became bored so now I walk around the house while I brush my teeth.  I do things like pick up dirty laundry and throw it into the hamper or look out the windows.  Today, if you will pardon my French, I looked out the front window at the cul-de-sac in front of chez Jimbo, over the tops of the flowering cherry bushes that landscape the front of the house.

To my surprise, there was a hummingbird tapping a leaf of the bush with his beak, or proboscis, or whatever that long pointy thing hummingbirds have protruding from their face.  To my greater surprise, he turned his attention from the leaf, made a ninety-degree turn to his left and looked me square in the eye.  I have to think that he thought I was saying something to him because of the vibes coming off the toothbrush.  There was that brief moment of surprise on his face (and he probably saw the same on mine) because he just eyed me for a couple of seconds and flew away. 

I hope my toothbrush didn’t say any four-letter hummingbird words because I hope to continue the conversation some day.

bruised orange

Dostoevsky said that the degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.  Run Fyodor’s quote through Jimbo’s qualifier that reality is only what it appears to be and the synthesis is that the degree of civilization of a society can be judged by watching its portrayal of prisons in movies and television series.

All of that leads me to Orange is the New Black, an original series on Netflix.

I have to admit that after I watched House of Cards all the way through three times, it left me feeling like I couldn’t wait to see season two.  I have not said anything on this site (until now) about House of Cards, but I will officially go on record as saying that it is about the best thing I have seen on TV for a while.  So, when I heard about Orange is the New Black, I figured it could not be as good.  However, having watched all of the episodes this week, I say it runs a really close second.

Orange is the story of Piper Chapman, a young woman played by Taylor Schilling, who goes to prison for having been involved with drug trafficking when she was younger, and it catches up with her after many years.  Prior to being incarcerated, Chapman is a partner in a startup business and lives with her fiancé, an aspiring writer, Larry Bloom (played by Jason Biggs).  Once behind bars, she has to adjust to an institutionalized lifestyle where her free will as a decision-maker and a small businesswoman no longer is useful and finds that simple faux pas made in the slam can be “epic” screw ups, leading to retribution.

The fascinating thing about this drama is that all of the characters—much like all of us in real life—are flawed, and the prison guards and administrators are the most flawed of all.  We are shown how ill-prepared Chapman is for a life without freedom and how she must conform to a situation that her tools and skills from the outside world are powerless to fix.  Her fiancé may be the single most inept character in the history of drama.  In trying to “help” her, he continually makes horrifyingly awful decisions that put Chapman in frequent danger.  I have to assume that portraying him as a writer was intentional as his words are, for all intents and purposes, what is known in literature as an unreliable first person narration.  He says things that have personal meaning to him but without fully realizing how they are going to be interpreted by inmates, prison staff and management and others on the outside who hear them.  He reveals so much to everyone without having any clue as to the meaning of the words he speaks and writes. 

One of the most interesting relationships is between Chapman and lesbian Alex Vause (played by Laura Prepon from That 70s Show).  It turns out that Vause is Chapman’s former employer from the drug trade days, and a one-time very close friend.  Let’s just say that Vause is a radically different character than the one Prepon played on TV.  The scene where she makes a threat to an evangelical Christian inmate is stunning—one you may want to back up and reply a couple of times just to make sure you heard and saw what you thought you did.

Season 1 of Orange has thirteen episodes and there are so many great scenes that picking a few is difficult but in one scene guard Susan Fischer (played by Lauren Lapkus) comments to Chapman that they had met on the outside.  Fischer said she had bagged Chapman’s groceries at the market where she shopped.  Fischer reminded Chapman she was the one that always forgot her cloth bags but then found them in her purse and everything had to be re-bagged.  Yes, Chapman agreed, that was her.  Fischer then comments that the two of them were not all that different and that she had done some things wrong and it could have been either of them serving time in there.  An interesting comment, as Fischer appears to be perhaps the least flawed character in the entire series.

But, well, then let he of us who is without sin cast the first stone.

Throughout the series we view flashbacks of the various inmates and the backstories of what they did that led them to their stays in the slam.  Some of the inmates were there because of a misstep and some were there because they absolutely, positively deserve to be there.  It helps us to see why the characters are the way they are and foreshadows why we should expect more malice from them and why we should not be surprised that some of them aren't as dangerous as they appear.  Sometimes it seems that the roles are reversed and that the guards and administrators are the evil ones we should fear and we would probably get along just fine with the inmates.

I tend sometimes to get immersed in what I am doing or reading or watching and if I like it, I like it to superlatives.  However, as much as I liked House of Cards and as much as I am lusting for another season of that program to be posted on Netflix, I am now lusting for season two of Orange is the New Black.

I will be ready for both of them.

Now, Netflix, what are you waiting for?  Please hurry it up.

the hall of mirrors at versailles

We watched The Queen of Versailles on CNBC Prime last week and I think I will be able to sleep with the lights off in the next day or two if I am able to get the terror out of my mind.  A better name for this documentary would have been American Horror Story, but, as we know, that name was already taken.

Watching what happened in The Queen of Versailles was much more terrifying to watch than even Connie Britton eating raw brains in American Horror Story.

The documentary is about an aging billionaire timeshare owner and his much-younger trophy wife whose fortune has been whittled dramatically by the 2008 financial crisis and their difficulty in coping with their loss of liquidity.  Sure, we all had difficulty coping with what happened when the bill for all of Dubya’s wild-ass spending came due, but I guess these rich folks had more trouble than the rest of us.  The billionaire’s credit line dried up with the banks and his empire, which was reliant on the credit the banks extended to him, suffered and his wealth was not enough to cover the bills that came due.

Perhaps most terrifying was that he had to lay off thousands of his employees and had to face realities from which his money had insulated him.  Notably that he had a house full of young children whom he and his no-longer-young wife had failed to teach discipline.  His kids had let their pet lizard die because they failed to feed it or give it water.  Their dogs defecated on the living room carpet so that everyone had to step around the poop.  Perhaps the defining moment of the movie happens when he comes home from work to find the front door open and all the lights in the house on.  Just like any father might, he questions why no one closed the door or turned off any of the lights.  Just like any father, he suggested that he would not pay the electric bill, just to teach them a lesson.  Unlike any other father, however, he fails to understand that it was his failure to bring discipline to his kids that was the problem.  The electric bill never mattered when there was more than enough money to pay it.

Versailles was the name of a huge mansion he was in the process of building—the largest single family house in the United States.  Construction of Versailles had been halted due to lack of credit from the banks, so it was just a hollow shell, the size of a sports stadium.  He and his family were forced to live in a smaller mansion pending the completion of Versailles, which we learn is very much in doubt.

What added to the horror was his wife’s inability to live a throttled-back lifestyle and a shopping trip to Wal-Mart that required multiple shopping carts.  I am sure that some of this stuff had to have been staged just to make her look ridiculous, and I am sure she played along.  However, the slapstick of the antics of his once-beautiful trophy wife failed to create enough humor to offset the horror.

The horror.  The horror.

Oh, those poor rich people.

Watch this thing at your own risk.  It is just more reality TV (although it is actually a movie and probably was not made exclusively for TV) that fails to get to first base.  I say skip it unless you have nothing else to do and have a strong stomach.

more or less miserable

Last night we watched the blue ray of Les Miserables (pardon my French) and were somewhat less than impressed.  I know this thing has had universal critical acclaim, but I have to admit that I found myself wondering why they couldn’t just talk between songs, instead of singing three-word answers.

I was asking when Leonard Pinth-Garnell was going to make an appearance.

“There, now.  That wasn’t very good at all, was it?

You may remember, Pinth-Garnell was the character played by Dan Aykroyd on Saturday Night Live.  Aykroyd hosted skits titled Bad Theatre or Bad Ballet, which featured performances by ensembles that were—well—bad.  Usually the skits featured “our own Ronnie Bateman,” a character played by Bill Murray.

Anyway, I know I am going to fall on the wrong side of this one because I have heard so much praise, but I just was not entertained by the movie.

Many of you will naturally assume that I am just some kind of inarticulate, artless hick without any culture or taste, but I am going to recommend that you may want to skip this one.

It seemed to go on and on into tedium, with everyone singing, when an unsung, spoken, yes or no answer would have sufficed.  I was too bored at the end even to watch the credits, even though I wanted to see if Ronnie Bateman’s name was among them.

hey, mr. president, some old dork wants you to call

I read this morning that Republican Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa says that the President hasn’t called him in four years.

Waa!  Boo hoo!

Let me get this strait.  Some octogenarian senator who is part of the Republican minority in the senate, who have made it their business to try to derail our economy and punish the American people as much as they can, is expecting a call. 

Sorry, dipstick, I wouldn’t call you either.  Have you tried to phone the President, or is this a matter of waiting for his call?

Oh, by the way, I am a little ahead of myself.  Grassley will not actually be eighty years old until late this summer.

I am sure the President is a sick and tired of your crap as I am of your party trying to derail an economic recovery.  I am sure that he is just as fed up with the do-nothing congress and the filibustering minorities in the Senate as we all are.  You minorities get on our nerves.

Do something positive, Senator, and maybe you’ll hear from the White House, because, until you do, I will be the only one to respond, and I don’t matter.