Archive for Life - page 3

When I do a Music Friday post I usually like to give it some sort of theme.  I had a little trouble this week because as I write this it is 5:10 AM and I am not at my – shall we say – sharpest.  But I have nothing to lose, so here goes.

OK, coffee’s kicking in now.

The whole Music Friday theme itself came about kind of by accident.  I’ve always had a Music category on the blog from day one, but it just so happened that a few weeks in a row when I posted about music it happened on Fridays.  Theme junkie that I am, Music Friday was born and the rest is history.  So where was I?  Oh yeah.  Searching for a theme.  Searching.  Searching.  If only…wait…I have an idea.

Here’s one everybody knows;  Artist: Chicago

Here’s one some of you might know;  Artist:George Benson

Here’s one you should know;  Artist: Average White Band

Finally;  Who the heck is Lasgo?

Whew!  that was close, but I knew I’d find a theme if I searched long enough.  Thanks for watching, listening and reading.  I have to go now in search of a paycheck.  Have a great weekend!

So I read this today.  According to Matt O’Brien at The Washington Post WonkBlog:

Economists Have Discovered How Bad The Economy Really Is

Excerpt:

“…even though the unemployment rate tells us the most about the labor market, it doesn’t tell us the full story. All it does is show us how many people who are actively looking for work can’t find it. But that leaves out the “shadow unemployed” who want full-time jobs but have either given up looking for them or can only find part-time ones.”

So we have a lot of “underemployment” instead of unemployment.  Not to mention those who are employed full time in jobs of last resort because their are no jobs available for them in their chosen field and they need something to pay the bills.  You know – the engineer who works at Home Depot or the middle manager who is selling phones at the AT&T store, or the former factory worker who now a cosmotologist (at an 80% pay cut).

Huh.  Who Knew?  Oh…that’s right.  Everyone who doesn’t work for a newspaper.  Well, at least one guy who works (blogs?) for a newspaper knows.

Nothing to see here!  Move Along!

Cross posted at Cuana Enterprises Amazon Store blog, the Men Out Of Work Blog

April 18th marked the 70th anniversary of the death of WWII journalist and war correspondent Ernie Pyle.  Most young people know precious little about WWII and probably even less, if anything at all about Ernie Pyle.  Suffice it to say that he was a popular journalist of his time, a man committed to something larger than himself, and  a soldier’s friend.

There is an archive of his work maintained on the web by the Indiana University School of Journalism.  One of his more moving columns is The Death of Captain Waskow:

“In this war I have known a lot of officers who were loved and respected by the soldiers under them. But never have I crossed the trail of any man as beloved as Capt. Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas.

Capt. Waskow was a company commander in the 36th Division. He had led his company since long before it left the States. He was very young, only in his middle twenties, but he carried in him a sincerity and gentleness that made people want to be guided by him.

“After my own father, he came next,” a sergeant told me.

“He always looked after us,” a soldier said. “He’d go to bat for us every time.”

“I’ve never knowed him to do anything unfair,” another one said.

I was at the foot of the mule trail the night they brought Capt. Waskow’s body down….”

You owe it to yourself to follow the link and read the whole thing.  Pyle was killed by Japanese machine-gun fire on the Island of Ie Shima in 1945.  He is among the few civilians to have been awarded the Purple Heart.

It is the Official Observance of the beginning of The American Revolution in 1775.  240 Years ago yesterday were fought the battles of Lexington and Concord.

Could it happen again today?  Read this:

Seventy Two Killed Resisting Gun Confiscation in Boston.

That sounds like it could be ripped from today’s headlines.  I guess that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

California’s Leaders and Visionaries are lacking in leadership and vision.  Other than that, things are going great.

People are starting to notice that the “leaders” in California aren’t doing such a great job.  Over at The Daily Beast, Joel Kotkin does a nice job of making his case that California is becoming a feudal society of the very rich, the very poor and a vanishing middle class, with a liberal-socialist dominated state government that is incapable of dealing with any crisis large or small, no matter how much advanced warning they have.  The “no-growth” and “environment first” policies have resulted in a state whose crumbling infrastrucure is insufficient to support it’s burgeoning population.  Hell, it was insufficient 40 years ago during the reign of Moonbeam I, and now during the Weekend at Bernie’s administration of Moonbeam II and III we’ll be lucky if there’s water to flush the toilets.

What am I talking about?  THE DROUGHT!

Who could possibly have foreseen a drought?  Only anyone with a pulse, that’s who.  What are we doing about it?  Letting our lawns die.  Visionary!  More importantly what are we doing to alleviate the next drought?  Because there will be a next drought.  California’s history is basically a list of droughts that occur on a regular basis.  You can practically set your clock by them.  SO…are we planning a system of aqueducts like the Romans did?  Nope.  Are we building more dams and reservoirs for water storage capacity?  Nope.  We passed a bond measure (translation: borrowed money) to deal with the problem.  What are we building with the money?  A giant bureaucracy to create regulations on how we use water.  Problem solved!

It’s not that we can’t afford to do something about it.  God knows our politicos are shoveling the taxpayer’s money down various holes like a fireman shovels coal on a steam locomotive.  (Governor Brown: please don’t get any more ideas!).  Even with businesses and middle class taxpayers fleeing, there is still record tax revenue.  The state budget has more than doubled in the last 20 years.  So what’s the problem?  The problem is the mindset – what we chose to spend (and not spend) on.  The mindset about what ends are achievable and desirable versus those that are counter to the laws of economics, not to mention the laws of physics and indeed the laws of nature itself.

Some time ago I wrote that California needs leaders – Men to Match Her Mountains.  Or Women.  Women or Men with the vision to see what needs to be done and the courage to see it done.

I am not advocating mass disregard for the environment, but if you’re going to have forty million or more people live somewhere, they are going to have needs and those needs must be met.  Meeting those needs will leave a footprint.  Visionaries look forward and find innovative ways to meet challenges.  Yeah, we’ll leave a footprint or two.  But we can also tread lightly as possible and mitigate the effects of the things we need to do, the things that we must do.

There is nothing “progressive” about a mindset that says in order to move forward we must lower our standards of living and make do with less.  That we must aspire to less.  That we must scale back our dreams.  If that is what our leaders and visionaries are telling us, then they are neither leaders nor visionaries.

Trigger warning – it’s Monday and I’m cranky.  This could get profane.  Hide the children.

This post is about the drought in California – an unecessary drought.  I know many of you who are looking at California in your rear view mirrors, and your attitude is “so what?”  I still live here, so I care.

Yes, I care.  I wish our “leaders” cared as much as I do.  They obviously do not.  Either that, or they are monumentally stupid.  Two choices.    Well, I guess there is a third choice: they don’t care and they are monumentally stupid.  Come to think of it, that seems like the safest bet.  Yeah, I’m going with that.

I say that because there are some conditions here, both climatic and social that are so obvious ignoring them or otherwise failing to meaningfully adress them requires an absolute lack of mental acuity or ardent willfull blindness.

I made  a case a few months ago – read this and see if you agree with me;

California Politicos:  Need Water?  Build a Train

All the preceding is preamble to a long, well written piece in City Journal by Victor Davis Hanson that is worth ten minutes of your time:

The Scorching of California

Jerry Brown had a chance to do something about the drought the last time he was Governor – back in the 1970s.  But he and the rest of the “visionaries” in his administrations practiced a “no growth” mentality.  Infrastructure planning and implementation ground to a halt.  Because building new freeways would create more traffic or something.  And more dams would equal less water?  More likely “fish first, f*ck everybody else”.  Or maybe they believed “if you don’t build it they won’t come”.  News flash, Jerry – you didn’t build it and they came anyway.  And now we’re all screwed.

But hey – trains!  Just like Europe!  Problem solved!

…except this.  Possibly.

The admonition “Don’t believe anything you read on the internet today” could well be true any day of the year, but no more so than today, April 1st.  April Fool’s Day.  Anyone been pranked yet?  Me neither.  But I’m afraid to leave the house.  And since I’m shuttered inside with the shades drawn (and the shotgun handy…just in case) I have some time to ponder what started this whole April Fool’s Day thing.

What I found was an article that I’m relatively certain is not an elaborate April Fool’s prank in itself.  Though it is at a site called Hoaxes.org.  Hmmm…I’m suspicious already.

Wait!  What was that noise? **picks up shotgun, chambers a round**

OK…false alarm.  Where were we?  Oh yeah…Hoaxes.org.  Seems legit, so here goes.

The Origin of April Fool’s Day is a compilation of theories on the origin of pranking April 1st.  Going back as far as the 15th and 16th centuries, we find that in Europe there was wide inconsistency in how the calendar was observed.  Even though Julius Ceasar had invented the Julian Calendar in the 1st Century A.D. local jurisdictions pretty much decided on their own when to observe certain dates.  In the 16th Century, leaders (Kings, Popes, etc) began trying to reform the calendar and make things consistent.  This reformation did not take place overnight, but spanned almost a century.  One of the changes made was a universal decree that January 1st was to be the beginning of the year.  Since some locales had been starting their year at Eastertime, often around April 1st,  this could possibly have imparted an aura of confusion on the date April 1, or led to a person who believed the new year started on April 1 being dubbed an “April Fool”.

My take: plausible.

There are also several paragraphs devoted to searching for early references to April Fool’s  Day in literature.  Of course, some alleged references are vague, but there seems to be a fairly straighforward one in a 1561 poem by the Flemish writer Eduard De Dene about a nobleman who plays tricks on his servant by sending him to do silly errands on April 1st.  This checks off the boxes for both  “April (1st) Fool’s Day” and the term “Fool’s Errand”.  So, most likely the custom had been established by the mid 16th Century.

So whether your filling your boss’s car with ping pong balls,

redirecting your friend’s Facebook page to a midget porn site,

or just faking your own (or someone else’s) death,

you can be assured you are partaking in a long and well established tradition.  And…if you’re wondering who it was who glued your coffee cup to your desk?  It wasn’t me.  I told you – I haven’t left the house all day.

It’s Friday and you know what that means.  That’s right.  Songs with “Cat” in the title.  What?   You were expecting BillBoard Hot 100 1976 through…?

According to Alaska Jim this is the list of songs with cat (or some form of “cat” i.e. lion or tiger) in the title.  And, no, I have no idea who Alaska Jim is other than the fact he has a list of cat titles on a website that I found by googling “songs about cats”.  But anyway, thanks Jim.

Some of these you’d know if you gave it a minute’s thought.  Others you have never heard of.

Let the fun begin!

I’ll start off with the obvious choice – the song and the name of the group both have “cat” in the title:

Here’s another you’ve heard many times:

Here’s a fun one from a movie with the same title:

Now let’s get a little obscure (unless you are a Lovin’ Spoonful fan):

Finally, a song that is seared into my memory due to the fact that it played in heavy rotation on KRAK radio in 1965:

Tiger by the tail indeed.  Dedicated to cat lovers everywhere.  Some more than others.  Welp, time to go to work.  Hope you enjoyed these.  Have a great weekend!

Back about the middle of December I began a series of posts entitled “A Puppy’s Tale”.  I intended it to be a trilogy, and completed parts I (A Fortunate Encounter) and II (The Winding Road).  This post is part III (Epilogue), though it will be a bit of a non-sequitur in that I will depart from the third person storytelling format and move into the first person narrative.

I was motivated to write the story as a method of dealing with the grief I experienced after the death of my 16 year old dog, Desa.

I have lost pets before, but the level of grief I experienced this time was deeper than I had felt before and I thought that perhaps I needed a coping mechanism.  I decided to write a story of her life – which coincidentally would be a story of my life during the years we shared.  This turned out to be an immensely personal task and after completing the first two parts I did not and still do not believe that my writing skills are up to finishing the trilogy in a way that will do justice to the truth.  Suffice it to say that when this dog and I crossed paths, both our worlds became better, though whether hers really did is merely an assumption on my part.  I do know that when our paths parted I was left with an emptiness that seemed disproportionately profound.  I still feel it today.

The story of how Desa joined our family as told in Part I is unimbellished truth as told to me by my first (late) wife who was not an exagerator or prevaricator.  Desa was not the first dog I have owned, but for reasons that are not obvious to me I was closer to her than any other dog I have known or owned.  Perhaps it is because I believe that I grew a great deal as a person during the years I owned her.  I don’t know – like I said – the reasons are not obvious to me.

A Puppy’s Tale ended the way one might expect – an ageing animal’s health fails to the point that euthanasia is neccessary.  A common scenario that is played out most likely thousands of times daily across the country.  My active role in her death, while neccessary and humane, weighs on me though I know I had no choice.

So I bid farewell to a canine friend and carry on.

…Big Government, having been kept out of the  bedroom (for now), lays siege to our backyards and hotel showers.  Of course, it’s For Your Own Good ®.

Remember a few years back when there was a big brouhaha over some states’ antiquated anti-sodomy laws and other laws dealing with inter-racial relationships?  There was a movement to identify and repeal these laws on the basis that they represented unwarranted intrusion of the governement into our personal lives – a position I support, BTW.  So these laws were wiped off the books, and the public at large now has freedom of sexual*ahem*expression without fear of the sex police breaking the door down to verify the correct techniques are being employed or that the participants’ genders meet statutory requirements.  Yay freedom!  U-S-A!  U-S-A!

So that’s all well and good.  We don’t need old outdated laws intruding on our freedom.  Nope.  What we need are some new laws intruding on our freedom.  Why?  Because in the Progressive Utopia of the 21st Century and Beyond we either will need to be protected from something or we will need our behavior modified to comply with the modern and correct norms of liberal groupthink.

Examples?  OK.  Take barbeque grills for example.  They are sources of pollution – they must be – look at all that smoke!  And the poor grillmaster!  Exposed to all those carcinogens!  Forced to sacrifice his health just so that others may partake of tasty meats.  It’s an injustice, and quite frankly I do not understand how we as a society can tolerate it.  Luckily, EPA to the rescue!

Backyard Burger and Wiener Roasts Targeted By EPA

Of course, they’re only studying it now, but it will be coming to your backyard soon enough I’m sure.  No need to thank the EPA.  They’re just doing their job.  Someone has to micromanage your life so you don’t hurt yourself.

Now go take a shower and wash off all that soot and grease.  Just don’t stay in the shower too long or we’ll have to modify your behavior.

EPA Wants to Monitor How Long Hotel Guests Spend In The Shower

Why hotel guests?  They gotta start somewhere, I suppose.

“First, they came for the hotel guests and I said nothing because I was not a hotel guest.  Finally when there was a bureaucrat with a clipboard living in my home taking notes while I showered there was no one left to stand up for me.”  – me in five years

So, as I said, the siege continues.  Certainly the government was pushed back out of the bedroom, but they’ve made it into the backyard and now they’re in the bathroom.  You know what’s right next to the bathroom?  That’s right!  The bedroom!  And you don’t want to know what’s going to happen when they get back in there!

Because in the Progressive Utopia of the 21st Century and Beyond, that which is not forbidden will be mandatory!