scamming senior citizens

 

It seems that not a day goes by when we hear about another scam that some senior citizen fell for and someone took from them their entire life savings.  I usually have a couple of thoughts that range from: “How could anyone fall for that? And, “They sent someone their entire life savings?  Why not just a few hundred dollars?  Why did they throw away everything they own?”

Subsequently, I remind myself that being a senior citizen myself, could I fall for something like that myself?

And, my answer is always, no.  I would, at least do some investigation before throwing all my money away and I would like to think that if I were scammed I would start out slow and realize my mistake before giving away everything I have.

I think the key here is to do one’s due diligence.  If we get the facts, we are less likely to make colossal mistakes.  It is part of the American character to question and to get the facts before diving into the abyss.

I can’t help but think there were many senior citizens participating in the attempted overthrow of our government on January 6.  I think that because I saw the video and the photos, and a large percentage of the wanna be bin Ladens were people of my age group.  The question I asked myself on that day was why so many of my contemporaries— people who cherish this country, respect the constitution and the flag— were raising hell trying to end our democratic republic?  And using the flag and flagpole as a weapon.  Didn't these people ever hear about flag etiquette?

I think the answer may be that the Scammer-in-Chief was able to convince a large number of addled-brained contemporaries of mine to send him money.  His scam has netted him more than a quarter of a billion dollars so far.

Now, I don’t harbor any respect for scammers, and anyone who would put our country in a state of war to try to bilk the elderly of their savings descends to the lowest level of respect in my book and the sooner he is facing time in the big house instead of the White House, the better.

But, I have to poke these dimwits that fell for this scam.  How could you have been so stupid to fall for this scam when the truth was so easy to find?  How could you have been so gullible? I mean, for the President to take your money, it was like taking candy from a baby.  It is like my fellow senior citizens have no common sense.

Hang your head in shame.  And, quit giving this dope your money and stop trying to overthrow the republic for him.  Stop this crazy stuff and come back to America.  The United States of America was good enough for dad and grandpa, and it will always be good enough for me.

And, we have never been more sure of anything in Jimbo’s world.

so long 2020

 

I remember the day that COVID hit home.  I don’t remember the date, exactly.  It was March 11 or March 12.  I was texting back and forth with my progeny about the Big Twelve postseason tournament and it was the day of the play-in games.  Our team was the number one team in the nation so they weren’t playing for another day or two, but it had just been announced that two of the major teams in the nation—one of which was ours—were not going to play in the post season.  We figured that our team was going to be the favorite in the NCAA tournament so that was a bummer.

 

So the subject of our texts changed from basketball to the announcement that the urban counties, for which we are ex-burbs, were planning to lock down.  I texted my son that we were lucky we were not going to be locked down and his reply was, no, we were going to be locked down, too.

 

It was the first inkling of a lifestyle change, the extent of which we were only vaguely aware.  Life changed that day and it has stayed changed for the rest of the year and it will stay changed until sometime in the new year.

 

However, I don’t think there will be a day next year that we will be able to say, today is the day; the virus is behind us.  I think it will be one of those gradual things like lost love or lost friends where we carry the grief until one day we smile or chuckle about something and we realize that life will go on.  We will get vaccinated at soon as we can but we will still wear masks and social distance and wash our hands.  Maybe someday we will meet someone and shake their hand, or maybe we will never shake hands again.

 

We will bid adieu to this plague, I hope, but it will not be gone on the fifth hour of the fifth day of the fifth month, at an exact moment that we can pinpoint.  It will hang around for a while.  I think that we can be certain when the clock strikes twelve tonight and this year ends, the virus will still be with us. 

 

We just hope that it goes away sometime soon.

 

Until then, our wish is a happy new year.

 

And in Jimbo’s world, we mean it.

ode on intimations of immortality

 

We got the last of our Christmas cards sent out today.

 

Big woop, you might say.  You also might add that you got yours out two weeks ago and then throw in something like, “took you long enough.”  Or, you may say something like, why didn’t you just instant message?  I realize the habit of sending out Christmas cards is becoming a lost art, and mainly we just send out Christmas cards to older people—mostly the people who send Christmas cards to us.  I seriously doubt if our progeny have ever sent out a Christmas card.

 

I will predict that sending Christmas cards will probably die with my generation, if it isn’t on life support already.  Once upon a time, sending cards, and just writing to communicate back and forth, was a way of keeping in touch, much like we instant message today, only much lower-tech and much slower.

 

We received a Christmas card today from a fellow co-worker who mentioned that another fellow co-worker had passed away a little over a year ago.  It is funny how people who were once a daily part of your life fade out of your life, then fade out of your memory and finally a reminder comes that all that is left of them is a memory.  I have seen too many people who were once important in my life fade away and then I hear they are gone forever.  And all that is left is some memory of a good time you had with them, or something silly they did at work.  I know that we will all become just a memory someday, but I wonder too, if our existence is really summed up by something done one great summer afternoon that someone remembers fondly or that day at work when someone broke the stress with some quick phrase. 

 

“Do you remember that project we were working sixty-hour weeks to complete when Jimbo cracked us all up?”

 

Someday, we will all fade from reality and afterward fade from memory.  Maybe, though, we will do something that sticks in someone’s mind.  I hope that thing is good and is remembered fondly and not something that is lamentable.

 

At least that is our wish here in Jimbo’s world.

woody park

Things have changed a lot since I was a kid.  A Coke and a Whistle Orange drink (if they even still make the stuff) cost more than a dime.  A pack of baseball cards doesn’t cost a nickel anymore.  A much smaller percentage of the population is walking around with a smoldering cylinder of paper filled with tobacco leaves in their mouths. 

And, I would like to believe that a lot of attitudes have changed.  Realities change, but people hold on to old habits and old attitudes.  They die hard, sometimes.  Sometimes, though, we just look up and they are gone.  One day we all saw Hugh Hefner wearing a Nehru jacket and we all wanted one.  Fortunately the trend died before I scraped together enough cash to buy one and the style died quickly and uneventfully.

I noticed the other day that a gun associated with a famous trial has gone up for auction and it appears that people have an interest in owning it.  While I would like to think that there are those out there who have an interest in it for historic reasons, I somehow don’t think this thing fits into the same category of Whig campaign buttons and memorabilia. 

One time I bought a fixer-upper in Lawrence, Kansas, that needed some serious rehabilitating and some rewiring.  My father was good at the former and expert at the latter, and he spent some time helping me get the electrical system safe for habitation.  One warm spring Sunday—very much like today—we were working on the house.  He came in from outside and asked me whether I knew that I had black people living in my neighborhood.  I said I did.  Then he asked me if I knew there were a hundred black people a half block down the street at a park called Woody Park.  I said I had seen them.  He asked me why I had bought a house in a neighborhood with black people.

I told him that it didn’t make any difference to me.

Dad had grown up in a time where attitudes were different and he had been born in the South.  He had a prejudice that I didn’t.  I went back to work and he went back outside. 

Later, I had a circuit completed and, although I had a good idea what I was doing—after all, he had taught me wiring—I started looking for him to check my work.  When I couldn’t find him anywhere I asked if anyone knew where he was.

“He’s down the street at the park with a bunch of black people,” I was told.

A half-hour or so later, he wandered back into the house. 

“Where have you been?” I asked.

“I recognized Woody,” he said.  Black guy I work with.  Helluva nice guy.  We drank a couple and shot the shit.  Nice bunch of folks.”

We didn’t say any more about it.  Dad just took his home-made tester—a couple of insulated 12 gauge wires from a piece of heavy gauge Romex stripped one inch on one end and connected to a Bakelite screw-in socket on the other with a 220 volt incandescent bulb in it— poked the bare ends into a duplex receptacle and checked my work.  The bulb lit at half-brightness, indicating 110 volts alternating current, so we were good.

There was no more mention of my choice of neighborhood.  It was okay from then on.  I don’t think he ever questioned the location of my house again.

And someday, there will be no one alive with any idea of what a Nehru jacket is or anyone who would have any interest in owning that gun.

the "pooch"

Yesterday I told you of another of my time travels—one of the journeys I have taken into the past.  Okay, it was a journey I took in the present and didn’t cross any time/space continua.  It was another trip to 44^th Street.  While I was driving up and down 44^th Street, I remember seeing the garage door of a neighborhood house partially open and partly ajar.  It was obvious the door was broken and didn’t work.  I would not open or close because the lower two panels were broken loose from the rest of the door and just hanging there.  I could see into the garage and there was no car there.

But, once upon a time, there was.  And, that is where my story about the pooch begins.

We had a couple of neighbors within a block of our house on 44^th Street who worked at the same place my father did.  One of them was in the large, fancy house at the end of the block, next to the school yard.  He was one of the “big wheels” as my father would say.  The other guy lived almost across the street from the bosses house, but his house was more modest, and, just coincidentally, it was the one whose garage door was both a door and ajar.

If my memory is good (and that is currently at question) the guy who lived in that house was named John, and he was just a few years older than me, but he and my father knew each other really well.  Dad told me that there was a “Pooch” in John’s garage.  I made a quip that I didn’t know John was a dog fancier and why would he keep a dog in his garage?

That kind of angered the old man and he raised his voice a bit and said something like:

“It’s not a dog you dumb ass.  It’s a car!”

Even back then, in addition to being a bit of a smart aleck, I was pretty sophisticated and had already reasoned that there was a Porsche behind that properly-functioning-at-the-time garage door.  Dad and I walked up to see it and it was an un-restored Porsche 356A in somewhat rough condition.  I believe John said he had plans to fix it up when he had the money.

When I drove past that broken garage door the day before yesterday, I probably would not have thought anything about it, had it not been for something I saw on CNBC last week.  They were at an automobile auction, which was to be one of the largest in the United States this year and they showed a Ferrari or some exotic sports car in mint condition that was to bring a price in the multi-millions of dollars.  Next to it was a 1950s vintage Porsche 356A, un-restored and in rough condition.  Robert Frank, who was the guy doing the report said that it was expected—despite its rust and deteriorated seat cushions—to bring $300,000 at auction.

Like Aesop, I need to end this story with some sort of moral, so here it goes.  On the way back down 44^th Street the night Dad and I looked at the 356A, my father made a comment about how John would sink money into the rust bucket and not have anything to show for it.  And, maybe that would be true.  However, if he had the foresight to keep it un-restored for 45 years, it may have been worth something. 

My dad was a wise man, but it is not always easy to predict what the future will bring.  As a matter of fact, I think I may have agreed with him that night.  I am going to be offering some advice tonight and I think I may keep this story in mind when I do it.  When I am asked to predict the future tonight, I will be able to say one thing with certainty:  you just never know.

escape from the old neighborhood

Yesterday I drove back into a neighborhood where I used to live to look at a house I saw for sale and the neighborhood where it is located.  It was more of an experience than I planned on.

First, the house was pretty solid and well built, but it is 75 years old and shows some wear.  I liked the house because it was dirt cheap and the pictures of the house shows it has two marble bathrooms and the interior walls are all covered with hardwood planks and not drywall.  The exterior is stone and it was, at one time, probably something special.  I am guessing someone with money lived there.

The house was two blocks from where my maternal grandmother and step-grandfather lived when I was a teenager, so I had some familiarity with the area.  I am guessing, though, by the events that occurred, I will not be calling the realtor for a showing.

Just before I got there, I saw a half-dozen police cars with sirens blaring and at high speed pass by a block from the house.  I later learned that there had been a double homicide about six blocks away from the house five minutes before I got there.  I continued to hear sirens as I circumnavigated the neighborhood and got a look at the exterior of the house and yard.  When I left the neighborhood, I saw half a dozen more police cars-- sirens on and speeding toward north and east.

I was only a couple of miles from where the North Forty-Fourth Street Sidewalk Surfing Association used to ply their craft.  Since I was a former member and a resident of 44th Street, I figured I would drive by the old homestead.

Forty-forth street has fallen into disrepair, but the trees along the side of the street have matured creating a park-like atmosphere, but some of the houses show signs of being anything but park-like. Our old house is there but it is forty years distant from me.

When I left the area, I had to wait for a light at 47th and Parallel and a couple of gentlemen who were also waiting for the light decided to call each other out and got out of their cars and started fighting. Some young man, who apparently knew one of them jumped into the melee and started swinging and knocked one of the guys to the ground.  Then the kid jumped into his car and left.  It was other-worldly.

As I drove home, I saw a car beside the road that had obviously went off the road and been demolished with a fire truck attending to it.  Another mile down the road, two more cars had collided and there was a tow truck gathering them up.

Two deaths; one melee and two wrecks later I was heading west and back home, away from the old neighborhood and toward the current one.  I guess the current neighborhood is where I will choose to stay.

But tomorrow I will tell you more about 44th street and the "Pooch."

andy pafko

My memory is not good, but I can remember when Andy Pafko died.  Well, it was just this week, so I can remember even with memory loss.  I don’t remember Pafko as a player.  He came up in 1943 and retired in 1959.  I would have been nine when he retired and probably have been collecting baseball cards, so I may have had one of his cards.  I don’t remember.

What I do remember, though, is that he was number one in the 1952 Topps series of baseball cards.  I would have been one year old when that card came out and was probably not chewing gum, yet, so I probably didn’t have one.  I know he was number one because my son collected some 1952 Topps cards when he was young and he and I did research on them.  The Pafko card, in good condition, is valuable because I read that kids that collected the 1952 series usually sorted them by card number and put a rubber band around their stack of cards.  Therefore, the edges of the Pafko cards were worn down by the rubber bands coming on and off and many of them fell into poor condition.

I recently wrote about a trip I took back to Alden Street, where I grew up, and I remember I had a corrugated box from the grocery store that was full of baseball cards when I lived there.  I think I used rubber bands, so I probably messed up some of my cards, but I don’t remember stacking them in numeric order.  I think I sorted them by year of issue and team.

It was popular, back on Alden Street in the 1950s, to trade duplicates of cards to other kids and I remember I was always the youngest kid on the block.  I remember going across the street and sitting on the front porch trading cards with some of the big kids.  I specifically remember one day they asked me to go home and get something and just leave my box of cards.  They said they would watch them for me.  When I came back I remember seeing a bunch of Ford Frick cards in my box that weren’t there before I left.  Frick was the Commissioner of Baseball.  I protested but the older kids told me I was wrong—that those Frick cards were in my box and I just didn’t remember. 

Back on Alden Street none of us had much money and I think that sometimes morality can be equated with poverty.  I think the prevailing morality was that no one was going to steal a card from anyone else, but there would be nothing wrong with trading, say, a Ford Frick for an Elston Howard or Mickey Mantle, if the young kid didn’t know better.

It was survival of the fittest and I was not yet fit.  Although the transactional difference at the time amounted to pennies, the actual cost may have been in the hundreds of thousands of dollars at today’s prices for some of those cards.

We were poor but I had a 20” Huffy bicycle.  I probably had a dime in a good week of discretionary funds and probably spent most of it on candy and baseball cards, but I would take clothespins and baseball cards and make the spokes of the Huffy sound like a motorcycle.  In retrospect, I probably went on a number of $25,000 joyrides, based on today’s prices for those cards.

The most grievous throwing away of money was exactly that—throwing money in the trash.  One of my chores on Alden Street was to take out the trash every night, put it into an old steel 55-gallon barrel and burn it.  When we moved from Alden Street, we had a lot of things that we decided to burn rather than move.  I distinctly remember taking my box of baseball cards and flipping them one-by-one into the fire in the barrel.  After all, I was fourteen years old and too old to play with baseball cards.  If you have the mint condition Andy Pafko card that sold for eighty-some thousand dollars or a Mickey Mantle rookie card that may have eluded the spokes of my bike, I may have helped make you money that day.  If all of us had saved our cards, they would be less rare and less valuable.

No, you don’t need to thank me.  I think there were a number of us who discarded our cards and made the ones that escaped the spokes or the fire that much more valuable.

almost, but not quite, crazy enough

It is starting to play over and over again, like a broken record.

Okay, most of you have probably never had a turntable and spent much time listening to vinyl records whose primary flaw was that a scratch or a bit of dirt caused the styli to skip and repeat the same passage time and time again.  The particular thing I am starting to feel we are hearing over and over again is that someone took a gun, went into his workplace and killed a number of people for no good reason.

We are now starting to hear of the background of the shooter and the picture coming into focus is of a guy with a series of warning signs that weren’t quite alarming enough for someone to prevent this from happening.

He was arrested three times but not convicted of anything, so he had no criminal record.  I can understand that part:  innocent until proven guilty.

The one that concerns me, though, is that he told police that he was hearing voices and that he thought someone was using a microwave machine on him.  He also told police that he had no history of mental illness.  I have a theory about people who are hearing voices in their heads and my theory is that they are crazy.

The one plus I see in this whole thing is that he tried to buy an assault rifle and was not able to because of a waiting period for a background check.  However, he was able to buy a riot gun, instead.  Although he was able to slaughter enough people with the riot gun and another gun he was able to take away from a guard at the crime scene, I can imagine how much more carnage this loony would have been able to produce with an AR-15.  Chalk up at least a small victory for gun control laws.

How many more times will maniac go into a school, a commercial place of business or a workplace and open fire?  This is not a rhetorical question.  I am going to answer.  It is going to happen again, and again.  Unfortunately this time some people knew in advance that the dude was crazy, but, apparently just not crazy enough for anyone to detain him.

The interesting thing about the particular workplace where this happened is that there were armed security people on site, but even that was not enough to prevent the killing.

Wayne LaPierre of the NRA says that the answer to school shootings is to put armed guards at all schools and arm the teachers.  I am thinking that the incident in Washington, DC shows that armed guards are not necessarily the solution. 

To me, armed guards and arming teachers sounds crazy.

Apparently, to some, it must not sound crazy enough.

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.

phil must go free

Just when everything in the world seems to have gone topsy-turvy--for example the snow in late March and the unpredictability of the NCAA basketball tourney—weirdness has achieved a new hallmark.  It appears that prosecutors in Butler Co, Ohio, have indicted Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog who predicts the duration of winter and the arrival of spring every year.

The prosecutors (who apparently have nothing better to do) charged the groundhog with a felony against the peace and dignity of the state of Ohio.  The prosecutors want the death penalty.  Their problem is that Phil predicted an early spring and he was not correct.

I don’t know how well the weather prognosticators in Ohio do, but I can tell you that the meteorologists here are not always accurate.  They have weather maps and all sorts of data to use to make their guesses.  Poor Phil just gets dragged out every February second and shown the light of day.  Whether or not he sees his shadow is not of his own doing.

Now, the way I see it Phil is just another ninety-eight per center like the rest of us, being pushed and pulled by the powers that be and he doesn’t really have any control over his own fate, again just like the rest of us.  Phil doesn’t have any more influence on the weather than the prosecutors in Ohio have in enforcing the law equitably.

“Oh, Jimbo,” you are likely asking, “What can we do?”

Well, like I said, we are all ninety-eight per centers and there is not much we can do that will actually have an affect on anything, so I am suggesting a symbolic protest and here is what I want all of you to do.

Go online and find a small map of the United States.  Print it out on your computer.  Take a pair of scissors and poke one blade of the scissors through Indiana in the map you just printed.  Then start cutting toward the south through Kentucky and then east through West Virginia and north through Pennsylvania and continue across Lake Erie and west into the lower part of Michigan and then back south into Indiana.  You should come to the place where you originally started cutting, at which point Ohio should fall out of the map.  You should then have a somewhat circular piece of paper about an inch in diameter that will include the entirety of the state of Ohio.  Use the bulk of the rest of the sheet of paper to make notes, grocery lists, doodle, etc.

Take your inch of Ohio with you to the restroom next time you feel the need to go and drop the Ohio-containing wafer of paper into the toilet before you do your business.  At the conclusion of your call of nature, flush the toilet and speak clearly into the bowl the following line.

“That was for Phil, Ohio.  I did my business and you should mind your own.  Now leave our symbolic groundhog to his business.”

I doubt if your protest will do much to change the minds of the Ohio prosecutors, but at least you will feel you have stood up for the dignity of Punxsutawney Phil in a good, healthy way.

the secret numbers you need to fill out your brackets

Much like Captain Ahab in the cartoon posted here a couple of days ago, at this time of year we all put in massive amounts of time filling out our brackets for the NCAA tourney and give up trying to get our jobs done for a couple of days.  Because of all of the productivity lost and its damage to the economy, I felt it was time for me to spend a couple of days doing diligent research so you could work at your job and still make sensible choices on your tournament brackets.

Your first thought is probably concern that I am not getting my job done, but as you may remember I am retired, so my job is not working.  I am an elderly man on a fixed income, remember?

Anyway, I have come up with what I call The Jimbo Number or TJN for short.  The number for each team in the tournament was calculated by figuring in the team’s winning percentage, RPI, percentage against top 25 and 26-50 rated teams.  I also weighted the winning percentage for the team’s last 12 games, figuring that the guys who get on a hot streak have a better chance.  I added in some light weighting of free throw percentage, assist to turnover ratio and rebounding.

Anyway, the higher number the better.  If you get stumped in your selections, just compare The Jimbo Number (TJN) of the two teams you are comparing and use the TJN instead of flipping a coin.  You can find The Jimbo Number on the chart below.  It is in alphabetical order by team name for convenience of finding the teams.

Now, most of you are probably getting ready to mortgage everything and go all in with my numbers.  Before you do you may want to remember that this is just for entertainment and more than $5 should not be put at risk on the data I am giving you.  Before you do anything crazy, be sure you consult with the missus.  She will probably ground you in reality before you do something you shouldn’t.

“Wilma,” you may say, “Let’s get ready to mortgage the house.  Jimbo has given me all the information I need to make a fortune.”

“Isn’t that the guy who said to buy Apple at $500 because it couldn’t go any lower?”

“Well, yeah, but…”

“And wasn’t he the guy who said to buy the Greek shipping stocks because they would be the first companies to profit from a worldwide economic recovery?  And you have seen the Baltic Dry Index lately, sinking just like all those shipping stocks.”

And, Wilma is probably right, but if you are going to burn five bucks on the office pot, anyway, you may want the use the information on this table.
 

Step up your game to a higher level.

 

THE JIMBO NUMBER
School	TJN
Akron	309.78
Albany (NY)	251.35
Arizona	353.12
Belmont	319.41
Boise St.	298.81
Bucknell	333.67
Butler	337.40
California	317.85
Cincinnati	262.02
Colorado	310.49
Colorado St.	313.18
Creighton	315.58
Davidson	296.70
Duke	422.96
Florida	356.54
Georgetown	394.03
Gonzaga	441.93
Harvard	237.28
Illinois	283.79
Indiana	385.11
Iona	210.80
Iowa St.	289.27
James Madison	199.67
Kansas	444.44
Kansas St.	332.55
La Salle	271.37
Liberty	185.77
LIU Brooklyn	216.70
Louisville	422.00
Marquette	339.40
Memphis	349.87
Miami (FL)	395.31
Michigan	344.42
Michigan St.	345.94
Middle Tenn	330.29
Minnesota	280.84
Missouri	327.66
Montana	266.30
N.C. A&T	190.47
New Mexico	414.20
New Mexico St.	290.79
North Carolina	293.18
North Carolina St.	307.12
Northwestern St.	256.08
Notre Dame	328.54
Ohio St.	363.97
Oklahoma	268.70
Oklahoma St.	344.70
Ole Miss	333.32
Oregon	346.27
Pacific	271.92
Pittsburgh	328.18
Saint Louis	405.21
San Diego St.	302.14
South Dakota St.	309.98
Southern U.	238.70
St. Mary's (CA)	311.17
Syracuse	309.24
Temple	332.41
UCLA	357.61
UNLV	347.08
Valparaiso	273.01
VCU	307.94
Villanova	291.35
Western Ky.	199.17
Wichita St.	332.63
Wisconsin	335.89