Don't Say I Didn't Warn You...

Seems that not a terribly long time ago, I warned my dear readers that one of the world's greatest dangers was that of a pandemic.

Guess what? It's here.

Now, I really think the media has hyped this one all out of proportion to it's real danger (this time) but I thought I'd add my own little bit of hysteria for those of you already donning your surgical masks and sanitizing your hands every sixty seconds...

Ready?

This killer flu has originated in Mexico.
Hardest hit are people of low income and poor health care.
It will be transmitted to US citizens first by those who have visited Mexico recently.

If you think I'm going to rag on our porous borders and illegal aliens, you're wrong.

There are plenty of low income Mexicans legally living here right now.

They do lots of work that others don't want to do.

90 percent of the public restrooms in SoCal are maintained by recently arrived Mexican - Americans.

I'll bet that 75 percent of the food service industry is the same.

These folks have frequent contact with Mexicans on the other side of the border.

If the pandemic comes, this is where it will start.

Things I'm Good At (Or Were...)

I think I could have earned a paycheck though my writing. It might have been a verrrrrry small and infrequent paycheck, but it could have happened. Having read, and reread, and reread, and reread a few thousand car magazines in my youth, I had the style down pat. I just didn't have anything worth writing about.

I've tried my hand at novels and have an appreciation to those who are able to bang them out, one a year, for decades on end. I could have done that, but gawddamn, it gets boring after, say fifty or seventy-five pages. I know how the murder mystery was created: after a hundred pages and half again as many rewrites, you want to kill your characters. Another problem for me is that the experts all say that you should write about what you know. I wanted to write about people and places I didn't know at all -- that's what made them interesting to me. As a result, I spent nearly as much time researching stuff as I did writing. Fun, but not highly productive, page count-wise.

I love to drive. Banging out a 155 mile round-trip commute each day doesn't bother me. I think it was breeding. My dad, for much of his life, was a salesman and sales manager who traveled the country by car, by rail, by airplane. He would spend as much as half the year on the road, and then when vacation time came, he'd load my mother and I into the car and go drive some more. We never went anywhere and stayed -- we just drove hundreds of miles for a week or longer. I loved seeing the USA in our Chevrolet, thank you very much.

Related to the above, I finally bought a motorcycle when I was in my thirties. It was everything I loved about driving, combined with a sense of agility, effortlessness, and occasional momentary terror. At the end of each ride, I knew I had experienced something only one out of a hundred other people on the road had felt that day. To ride well takes your full concentration; as such all other issues of your life are not just secondary, but forgotten. I came late to motorcycling, and left it behind too soon.

In my time, I was damn good at designing advertising. No boast, but in 25 years in the business, there were only a couple of people who could best me. Not that it matters anymore. Why I mention this, I'm unsure.

Wifey tells me I have a quick wit. They say that puns are the cheapest form of humor, which must make me the entertainment industry's equivalent of the local dollar store. Hey, youse want a cheap joke? I gots yer cheap joke right here, fella.

Things I Never Learned

I never learned to play a musical instrument. My few weeks in fifth grade honking on a clarinet got me no farther than extreme pain somewhere in my sinus cavities . My efforts at learning guitar from a book were fruitless.

Tying knots, other than my shoestrings, has always been a sticking point. After ten years of trying, I can, with the proper karma, tie a trucker's hitch about 75 percent of the time. I usually go with the old motto: if you can't tie a knot, tie a lot!

How to draw. A frustrating thing, because my dad was a natural artist; something he never pursued, but was able to call upon without thought. My best work involved Atlas missiles and Mercury spacecraft back in first grade. I drew hundreds of them, as did every other boy in America at the time. I haven't had the need to draw spacecraft lately, so I'll bet my work as a six year old will remain my artistic highpoint.

Anything more advanced than the most basic math sends cold chills down my spine. Back in the day, I was the victim of a cruel hoax. For a few, critical years, the nation's children were indoctrinated in something called "the new math". Everything we'd learned up to that point we were to forget, replaced with some genius's idea of a better way to do things. After a couple of years, we were told to forget the new math, and go back to the old way. Too late; I was forever to be confused. I confounded many a mathematics teacher by improvising new and creative ways to calculate things. I don't think I ever did the same problem the same way twice. Worse yet, I was unable to explain how or why I came up with the answers I did, even if they were correct. Thank God someone invented the pocket calculator; I can almost add and subtract accurately today.

Speaking a foreign language was something I really did want to learn. Unfortunately for me, due to frequent relocation to new schools, I was learning French one year, Spanish the next, back to French, back to Spanish... as a result, when somebody asks if I speak (fill in the language here) I answer with a simple "No Nintendo."

Just The Facts, Maam...

My heavily discounted subscription to the San Bernardino Sun having expired (not that they haven't stopped delivering the damn thing) Wifey purchased a subscription to the Daily Facts for the princely sum of $10 for one full year.

Back in the day, ten bucks would barely buy a month's worth of the local rag, being as how there was some sense of pride by the publisher that people would pony up good money to read the news.

$10 a year works out to a little more than three cents a copy. That's a hell of a lot less than it costs to print and deliver it, but since I have no love for the Facts these days, anything that costs them money is OK by me. Let them whore themselves out, regardless of the fact (pardon the pun) the paper serves a community who can well afford to pay full price.

Apparently, the industry as a whole has now agreed that anyone paying full price for a subscription is dumber than somebody buying an American car at full MSRP in today's economy.
As of 4/1/09 (no joke, honest) the Audit Bureau of Circulations, the independent body that for generations has guarded against misleading readership figures, now only requires that readers spend one cent per copy for the newspaper to be considered "paid".

I'd hate to think that at a ten-spot a year, I'm paying too much.

Thoughts On Obituaries

I see in the newspaper that my uncle, my dad's only brother, died.

Most members of a family receive a phone call telling them of such news, but our family is not a close one, so I received no such call. I haven't seen my uncle in about twenty years.

He didn't live far away, and I see from the obit that one of my cousins still lives here in Redlands. We were never close either, although for many years she lived just across the street.

Obituaries are odd things. They are the summation, a resume of sorts, of your life. They tell those who bother to read them of where you came, what you did for a living, who you married and what children you left behind. Some are long, and go on in infinite detail about which clubs the deceased belonged to, what far off locations they traveled, and how much the person will be missed. Others offer only the briefest outline of a life spanning many decades.

My uncle's obit was short; about four column inches. He wasn't a great success in life; he didn't hold any important positions within the community; he wasn't a churchgoer. So, the obit stuck to the bare facts. Birthplace, jobs, children, the name of his wife.

Usually a good obit contains the names of the parents of the deceased. This helps future relatives conducting a genealogical search make sure they've found the correct family. My uncle's obit left this information out. For the record, her name was Fayette, and his name was Ray. They were born in Missouri, and lived most of their lives here in Redlands. They were good people.

Another item a proper obit should contain (and my uncle's didn't) is where the deceased is to be buried, although it is increasingly common for the family to choose, say, scattering their loved one's ashes at sea. I think that noting this decision in an obit is a good idea, so that the aforementioned genealogists don't waste their time searching local cemetery records.

What with newspapers in decline, I wonder where future generations will post obituaries. Cyberspace seems too tenuous a location for such an important record.

Why Obama Fired The GM Chief

President Obama has been taking heat for being more forceful with the auto industry than with the banks. The reason, should someone look into this, is perfectly clear.

Obama never had a bank screw up his account, I'll bet. But I'll also bet that being a good rust-belt Democrat, he drove American iron for a lot of years. And can you guess what happened? I'm just speculating, but can't you see Obama as a young man, working as a community organizer for no money, out in some less-than-desirable neighborhood in Chicago, in a snowstorm, late for a hook-up with that hottie Michelle, with some crappy Chevy or Oldsmobile that refused to start? One with those nasty intermittent electrical problems that the dealer just couldn't find, but charged his ass $60 an hour to investigate?

Obama is seeking his sweet revenge, mark my words. There's a new Mr. Goodwrench in town, and he's going to stick his screwdriver right where the sun don't shine.

I can't blame the guy. Were I in the same situation, I'd do the same thing.

No Fool Like An Old Fool...

Happy birthday to me.

I am now so old, I remember things that happened half a century ago.

Fifty years ago, I was in kindergarten, and living south of San Francisco, in a huge apartment complex that stretched for blocks, it was so big. It was already my fourth - no, fifth! home.

Kindergarten, like all my school years, pretty much sucked. It got off to a dismal start. Sometime in the months prior, mom walked me to the school for enrollment. OK so far, except I had no idea what was going on. Then, an hour later, I was back playing with my friends. I forgot all about school. Weeks went by.

And then, school struck without warning.

It was like, "Huh? School? What's that? But.. I've got plans." I got handed a sack lunch and a towel to take a nap on, and got hustled out the door and into the next 17 years of schooling.

Being five meant I was old enough to get a bike. Dad brought home a used bike, painted top to bottom aircraft carrier grey, and taught me how to ride in the parking lot of the mall next door. It was your standard issue 50's cruiser bike, with big round fenders, and to me, it was huge. My feet barely touched the pedals.

I remember so badly wanting to ride it though, that I snuck it out of the house one evening, and rode it wobbly across the gopher-potholed lawn. It was like one of those old silent movies where Laurel and Hardy drive a Model T on the railroad tracks. I barely kept control as I bounced and swerved across the courtyard.

That was also the year I was abducted.

Several older boys lured me into an upstairs apartment in one of the neighboring buildings, and wouldn't let me leave for what seemed like the better part of a day. I remember considering my chances if I leaped from the window. I have not been as frightened for so long a period since that day. I don't think I've ever even mentioned that story to anyone before.

Fifty years ago...

And so, the next year, we moved. Again.

But that would have been only 49 years ago, and therefore the subject of a different blog entry.

So happy birthday to me; happy birthday to me...