Post  #2411.   Something must be done about these gangs.      Just tonight on the late news, shootings in two locations. Down in Tacoma, one car full of gang members encountered another and the first car blasted away with too many rounds to count. Two gangsters got hit, both survived. About the same time up north of Seattle, another big shootout in a parking lot, but all we viewers were shown was the collection of 14 numbered cards on the ground. Evidently, this depicted the number of shots fired, still no one dead.

Dudes .. hombres, a little pride, huh? Go down to the gun club and get some practice ferfookssake. If the rest of us are supposed to cringe in our basements from dusk to dawn so you can own the streets, at least accomplish something out there and thin out the ranks some for a change, yo? Rick Macherat

posted by Rick at 11:04 PM

Post  #2410.   Simile of the day.      Getting old is like being run down by a speeding, overloaded garbage truck and then dragged for a mile or so and, unfortunately, surviving. For another twenty-five or forty years. There, anyone young who stumbled in here will recognize the status of the typer and quickly click out. Old people are irrelevant, especially these days. he twitted.

It's true about the garbage truck, you know. Funny, our parents and grandparents didn't complain nearly as much as they could have. (Or as we do.) Of course, we have great insurance which enables the System to discover many, many more maladies to treat, maladies which would have killed most of us off much more rapidly in the past. I have to sympathize with X and Y here; it must be gawdawful to find the golf course and about everywhere else you might want to go just overflowing with bald but muscular 80-year-old men and their blonde and stretched wives. It's only going to get worse. Wait til the money situation improves. Most of us are staying home at the present, saving money. That's what we do. As soon as we can roll some of these lousy CD's into brand new 8% Jumbo's, watch out. Dust off the scuba gear!

Here's an excellent picture of our mayor and the challenger. Repeating, this is a


good picture; most of the time both of them are really, really scary looking. It probably isn't very kind when I refer to them as Commissar Nichols and Comrade Drago but, geesh, look at that picture.

With every year that passes, we add about four million sets of eyes to watch television, and none of them realize that the cable channels were not always like this. In fact, it wasn't until Gulf War I that they began to scroll information along the bottom of the screen. Believe it or not, The War was on 24/7, and they evolved the scroll to handle the other news at it happened. CNBC had this scroll one day last week,

.. BREAKING NEWS .. HP 3Q EPS .89 vs. .88-.90 forecast ..

Jim Norton, a comic, did a bit on the Comedy Channel where he made fun of the Kennedy assassination. It was graphic, mocking the President's head when struck by the bullet and Mrs. Kennedy's climb onto the rear of the Lincoln. The audience roared. They loved it. I wonder ... will 911 be that hilarious by, say, 2055? Probably.

There was an ad for a Saturn (presently a car made by GM) featuring zero down and 72-months to pay. Seventy-two months! Will GM even be around that long. Uh .. not too likely, as of this morning. Hayell, will the country even be around in 72 months? I just mention that in passing as I'm watching two blondes and four legs bare to the crotch and prominently displayed discussing the Korean Situation. Speaking of the news, I was watching cable on Memorial Day when it came time for the Moment of Silence at 3pm EST. I caught me off guard since I was planning to be silent at around 3pm Pacific Time. During the moment, the scene moved from John King to some appropriate images starting with Arlington and a panorama of the rolling hills of graves, then settling at one grave with a heavyset woman standing in front with flowers and then .. Oh Good Lord, for once please don't zoom in on her ample ass just as she bends over to lay the fl .. they zoomed in. As they always, always do. Am I the only one who rails at news videographers being drawn to fat-women-bending-over like bugs to a summer porchlight? I believe you are. Let it go. Okay, one more thing then I will


This is a room full of ladies picking out the nicest cherries for you. There are thousands and thousands of them in the food industry, and they do not make $50,000 a year. This is what farmers would have to pay Americans to do this work, so this is what it is really worth. Your cherries would therefore cost a lot more, as they should. You would not be able to buy as much other stuff as you do now, because your overall food bill would be a great deal higher. As it should be. Sometime, fifty to a hundred years from now, people are going to look back and judge us for this, and it won't be kind. Most of us would get all indignant and argue that this isn't anything like slavery. But it is.Rick Macherat

posted by Rick at 9:21 PM

Post  #2409.   Climate Leadership in Action.      Our Governess, Christine Gregoire, is way out front on this. She did an executive order which accomplishes the following

• Develop emission reduction strategies and industry emissions benchmarks to make sure 2020 reduction targets are met.

• Work with TransAlta to reduce emissions from the company’s coal-fired power plant near Centralia by more than half.

• Ensure Washington has trees to capture harmful carbon, while creating financial incentives for the forestry industry.

• Work on low-carbon fuel standards or alternative requirements to reduce carbon emissions from the transportation sector.

• Join with neighboring states and the private sector to implement a West Coast highway accessible to electric and alternative-fuel vehicles.

• Address rising sea levels and the risks to water supplies.

• Increase transit options, such as buses, light rail, and ride-share programs, and give Washington residents more choices for reducing the effect of transportation emissions.

• Continue to work with six other Western states and four Canadian provinces in the Western Climate Initiative to develop a regional emissions reduction program design.

• Work with the Obama Administration to help design a national program that is strong, and reflects state priorities.

In other words, Do Absolutely Nothing actually, except keep about 25,000 cubicle-dwellers down in Olympia busy for many, many years. Talk-Environmentalism in Action. We need much more of this in order to get climate change off the ground. Don't you mean the Fight Against Climate Change? Oh, that's right, of course. Against. Following the announcebration, there was scheduled a dawn-to-dusk Question/Answer/Blather/Whine session with representatives from EPA. A rally outside was also planned.

And a repeat from an old entry, just because I liked it,

The reason why I'm completely and utterly and every other adverb you can think of cynical about Climate Change and Global Warming? Because is has only about 1% to do with science and climate and 99% to do with the young American suburbanite female driving a 2.5 ton SUV with 2.5 spoiled children in back, going somewhere (in her own world.) It might seem hard to understand because we see (endure) the phenomenon every day, but to the rest of the world it is a wasteful, moving, dismayingly expensive carbon-dioxide spewing example of everything that is America and its excess. And up until now they (the squalid rest of the world) has been unable to do anything about it. Yes, they have voted, and in two years they will have another meeting and THEN they will do something about us.

CARBON IS THE ENEMY. DO THE PLANET A FAVOR: SEQUESTER YOURSELF. THANK YOU.Rick Macherat

posted by Rick at 10:10 PM

Post  #2408.   The Forbin Project.      Amazon.dot.com sent me a book recommendation, "My Forbidden Desire," by Carolyn Jewel, An exciting escape into a world of dark enchantments, powerful images and fiendishly sexy immortals. It appears we've been given a respite from the computer takeover if Amazon's otherwise brilliant machine is under the impression that a cranky old geezer would be interested in this book. Now, if had been Suniti Namjoshi's, "The Conversations of Cow" [The Women's Press, 1985,] a witty and sharply satirical dialogue between Suniti, an average middle-of-the-road lesbian separatist, and Bhadravita, a Brahmin lesbian cow, well then it would have had me pegged for sure.

There has been a lot of publicity lately about Brad Pitt's humanitarianism. For instance, he has lent himself, his time and his face, to a fund-raising effort for those houses in New Orleans. Evidently, he was touched by the recent removal of so many of them. I can certainly understand that - imagine having numerous houses all over the world and then learning there are people who don't even have one. Most of us would be anxious to write a check. Or at least make an appearance, smile a lot, be photographed and encourage other people to do so.

There was breaking news, sort of, at least to the extent that publication of a paper on the environment can be breaking news. It seems, now follow me here, that melting of the Antarctic peninsula ice sheet will raise sea levels planetwide by 10 Feet instead of the 20 Feet previously described. The real significance of this announcement was more in the area of scientist's retirement planning than actual science, i.e., 20 feet would mean the end of life as we know it for 67& of earth's population and therefore the end of any need for environmental science. Ten feet means there is hope, and much more research is needed. Think about it- as long as there are environmentalists employed, there will always be hope.

Do you know what a blivet is? Either (1) (also known as a poiuyt,) an undecipherable figure, an optical illusion and an impossible object, OR (2) Computer slang for an intractable problem or a crucial piece of hardware that can't be fixed, OR most clearly, (3) Ten pounds of manure in a five-pound bag. These have always been the standard blivets. However, I think we have to add (4) National Health Policy. That is unless the two parties give up, as follows, Party A - the health system: getting rich; Party B - the patients: getting well. When that happens, we'll be back to having only three kinds of blivets.

Have you noticed that almost everyone of a celebrity nature has ultra-white teeth now, just like Ross's, only his were supposed to be a joke?

From Wikipedia:

Athol Guy (born 5 January 1940), is one of the members of the Australian pop music-folk music group The Seekers. Guy played the double bass. He was characterized by his wearing of black horn-rimmed glasses. During live performances, Guy also often acted as the group's compere in between songs.

Post-Seekers, he had his own variety series on Australia's 7 Network: "A Guy Called Athol." 1971 saw him elected to the Victorian Parliament as one of its youngest members, winning three terms with an ever increasing majority, before he returned to the commercial world as a corporate consultant.

In recent years, Athol has invested in Hanging Rock Winery and West Rock Farm, the latter being a health and lifestyle centre.

The Internet has also given Special thanks to Pete Sanfacon with the New England Anti-Mascot Coalition for help in providing school mascot information in Massachusetts. The mascot for Athol High School is this


fellow. Frankly, I think the kids who attend, and who are going to be graduated from and bear the mark of, Athol High School for their entire lives, ought to be allowed to have an Indian mascot if they want. But that's just my opinion.Rick Macherat

posted by Rick at 9:47 PM

Post  #2407.   Dennis Miller.      Dennis' epistemological question, Can you tear someone who is one a new one? has only shown up on the Internet about six times. I thought it might do better than that. Dennis has carved out an interesting niche for himself in the world of lofty intellects with genuine wit (pretty sparsely populated up there, by the way.) I admire him a great deal for his simile involving a trout anticipating the inevitable urge needed here and all that.

Time magazine came out with its 100 Most Brilliantest people, or whatever they call it. I've skimmed up to about #75 or so. They let Bono do George Clooney. Didn't Clooney do Bono the last time? He would have had to, for I believe the two of them are the only persons on earth who don't realize they are both monumental phonies. If that wasn't awful enough, they had Aston Kutcher write the section on Twitter. Time made this choice because they regard Kutcher either as the Number One Twit, or the next C.P. Snow. I would go with the latter as we move rapidly toward Eloi World, way before AD 802701, you can be sure of that. Rick Macherat

posted by Rick at 9:48 PM

Post  #2406.   The Economy.      A conversation between the sister-in-law and me.

I've been thinking about economics lately, like a lot of other people.
Oh?
Yes, and I think I've got it figured out. It's like "It's a Wonderful Life," where Jimmy Stewart tries to explain that the money isn't IN the bank but rather out in people's homes and businesses. I get that.
Right. And that's almost true.
Almost?
Yes. See, the banks loan out the money all right, but they can loan out the same money over and over as well. That's called leverage.
How do they do that?
They order it. From the government.
Oh, I see. And the government gets it from taxes, or how does that work?
No, they just print it.
You're kidding. They print it out of thin air, out of nothing but paper?
Yep.
So, it IS magic then? The economy? Just like I always hoped?
Yes, yes it is. So long as you Believe.

Okay, you guessed it, the sister-in-law and I never had this conversation. She doesn't care where the money comes from. We both care about where it goes, to some extent anyway. Remember the episode of a few days ago, the Transportation Department management fiasco? Well, there have been developments.

First, and I dearly love Nicole Brodeur, our Section 2 columnist, even though she is appallingly liberal, wrote a piece on freedom of expression where she talked about anonymous commenting. The column was a good one, but I was interested in her mention of all the fat comments about the Snow Removal Guy, and another point where a reader just wished the conversation could be elevated above the fourth grade level. Truth is, we may not be able to have this discussion for much longer, as the level of intelligence in our country is rapidly approaching that of the 4th grade. I wonder how much longer Jay Leno can do "Jaywalking" before people don't get it anymore. Besides, our youngsters have no use for newspapers, which are too much like school.

Second, the Fiasco has now been elevated to Catastrophe (by the public, not the principals; they haven't a clue.) Get this, in addition to the $515,000.00, Council approved an additional $800,000.00 for the consultation into ways of fixing management problems in the Snow Removal Department and settling employee harassment claims. I wonder how many teachers/police officers that would save from the layoffs.

On the celebrity front, while Amy Winehouse might have been named a United Nations Ambassador for World Peace, we have our own local achiever. Pearl Jam guitarist Mike McCeady testified at the state legislature for better public restroom access, including employee restrooms, for people like himself (Crohn's Disease) who suffer from inflammatory bowel disease. Representatives were impressed and made new law. Of course, one has to possess a special card or a letter from his/her doctor in order to be granted explosive access to these otherwise off-limits facilities. An unkind person could possibly make unkind comments about spic 'n span little men, but I won't.Rick Macherat

posted by Rick at 10:01 PM

Post  #2405.   Odds.      I went to the dermatologist again last week and had another melanoma growth excised (that's what they call gouging it off.) Kids, watch your sun exposure. They give you a lot of pain shots, so you don't feel anything, but when they go especially deep .. WOW, you get to know how steak feels. Then I made the mistake of asking, "Say, how's about letting me take a look at that thing once you cut it all out." Kids, don't ask to see the things they cut out/off.

Anyway, the point of mentioning this is the ice cream. I asked brother if he wanted some after dinner, and of course he did, and I even had some myself. As I was scooping it out, I thought, Say, why am I scooping out only 1.5 scoops of coffee-with-chocolate-chip when there's also some Breyers vanilla in there? So, I scooped some more, quite a bit actually, eating it right now between types. Melanoma .. biopsy will take at least a week .. why the hell not. Reminds me of my grandmother one summer when I observed her serving herself a massive dish of ice cream, she with BP of something like 280/180 and 100 pounds heavy, "Grandmother, should you be eating so much ice cream?!!" "Don't worry, honey," she sez, "It's just the way it sits up in the bowl." She lived to be 80. Hey, I'd settle for 80 any day. Rick Macherat

posted by Rick at 9:29 PM

Post  #2404.   Snow. Seattle. Roads.      A topic with all kinds of potential for hilarity, but you'd think that after 156 years of it we would have exhausted just about every angle. It seems we have not.

Our city has 27 snowplows to take a swing at the occasional snowfall. What I imagine they have always done is plow real, real good the route from the mayor's house to City Hall, and not much else. Evidently, someone got wind of that, an investigation got going, and all hell has broken loose. The investigation widened, morphed .. into accusations of poor management, discrimination, the usual things, involving this individual, frankly


not entirely the most sympathetic-looking person to have the task of defending. His supervisor, the lady seated between him and the sleeping gentleman decided to commission a report/investigation which ended up costing $515,000 and running to 8,000 pages. That's EIGHT THOUSAND PAGES. The brief summary of the summary of the Executive Summary summarized by saying their were "management issues." Then she promoted him. That's her defending the decision.

At a pause in the furor which arose, is arising .. and I hope if enough people write about it will arisify into a mob of pitchforks and torches .. at the pause, the City Council and Mayor announced they were going to hire two consultants to look into the matter. Consultants .. taxes Consultants .. taxes Consultants .. taxes one might begin to mutter madly. Our city has a 62-story Municipal Office Tower


next to City Hall, filled with .. administrators, and apparently not one (or two) of them is capable of "looking into" it.

Since I don't pay taxes in Seattle, I'm only crazy about this in principle.

Oh, and further to what I reported a day or two back, these were some the programs on last night

Channel 500-something "The Condemned"
Channel 500-something "Before Devil Knows You're Dead"
Channel 500-something "Gangs of the Dead"
Channel 500-something "Death Sentence"
Channel 500-something "Shadow Zone: Undead Experience"
Channel 500-something "Reality Sex"
Channel 500-something "Richard Pryor: I ain't dead"

Not that tough of a choice there, though occasionally the cable mild porno channels will feature a combination murder/porno which can be a nice change of pace I guess.

Read somewhere yesterday .. "so great was their love that she (Julia Roberts) agreed to work for scale when she appeared with him (Benjamin Bratt) on that episode of Law and Order." Discuss.

Guess what the very first thing our former Gov. Gary Locke did once he was sworn in as U.S. Commerce Secretary: released 53 million dollars (which we definitely don't have) for salmon (which people with access to government money believe we don't have enough of and no amount is too much if it saves even one of them.) I just put that in to see if I could type a salmon story without going all nuts on it. So far so good.Rick Macherat

posted by Rick at 11:16 PM

Post  #2403.   Hooray hooray for the 8th of May! It's outdoor intercourse day.      I was washing dishes and happened to look at the clock a few moments after midnight, then the calender. My-oh-my, have I gotten that old? How could I have forgotten? Once, long ago, Washington State University appeared as a footnote in Playboy's List of the Greatest Party Schools, something about WSU being in a class by itself and partying a "field of study" as much as anything else.

See, in those days WSU was 90% residential and the women's living groups were segregated far from the nearest male and had strict closing hours. This was serious business. Few people had cars, there were no motels - as if anyone could afford that - so, basically it was outdoors or not at all. And, by the 8th of May, it was finally WARM ENOUGH!! And this site explains it all. See the comment by "Mark" too.

I was saddened to note that in 2009 WSU not only was put in the rankings, it was in 16th place. Surely not. Have they ever been to Pullman? Rick Macherat
posted by Rick at 12:18 AM

Post  #2402.   Gun violence.      A couple more Indo-Canadian teenagers were kidnapped and murdered this week, their bodies found in an abandoned car. The Canadians are shocked, though it helped when they indicated that the town where this happened, Abbotsford, is quite close to the United States. Whew. However, I would like to point out


that a great deal of Canada is quite close to the United States. I included that map and information because it was in the article. Really.

All this mayhem hasn't cost the Canadians their sense of humor. I occasionally enjoy their standup comedy shows on CBC, which we get up here because in Seattle we're practically Canadian. Sometimes it's nice to laugh like it's 1953 again, but I do draw the line at Red Green which is just waaay too Canadian. Tonight, the show came from Winnipeg, which can be awfully funny by just being there. The host came out, and the audience went wild. They obviously knew him, a man in unbelievably thick glasses who behaved like he was mentally challenged. I was starting to feel uncomfortable because he clearly wasn't a "retard," though he was talking like one and the audience was loving it. First act up was a mixed-race person doing .. mixed-race jokes. The punchline of his last one had his Japanese mother mispronouncing some word with an "L" in it. Then came the blind guy doing blind jokes. I stuck around because I hadn't heard any hilarious blind humor lately. The story about how his walker had pointed him in the wrong way in the restroom almost brought the house down, apologies to people who were just washing their hands. Finally, the man destined to be the star performer arrived; I figured this out by the audience reaction. I'm not sure if he had Cerebral Palsy or had been victim of a stroke, more likely the former. That was enough. I hit the remote when he explained how he learned to cross himself in (Catholic) church was by making the Mark of Zorro wildly in the air with his hands, which he demonstrated. They loved it. Me, not so much. Rick Macherat

posted by Rick at 10:41 PM

Post  #2401.   Successful cropping.    There's been a lot of controversy over "megahomes" going into older neighborhoods. As far as I'm concerned, it's none of one person's business what someone else builds on their property, but that opinion isn't shared by many. At least this house, though gignormous, is generally of the typical grandmotherly style of the neighborhood,


and seems to fit all right. Let's move out a bit and take a wider view,


Uh-oh ... hello neighbor! Okay, maybe we could talk about some minor adjustments to the lot size requirements.

Last night, I clicked through the following channel lineup

Channel 6 - "Dead Like Me"
Channel 7 - "Dead Zone"
Channel 8 - Infomercial
Channel 9 - "Secrets of the Dead"

and of course the cable channels were all death and megadeath over the Swine Flu (which is doing a Roseanne Roseannadanna today by the way.) So, I just watched the early local news to catch up up the weekend shootings with dead bodies, drownings and looking for dead bodies, lost in the mountains and still no dead bodies found, and sports. Rick Macherat

posted by Rick at 10:40 AM

Post  #2400.   A landmine of sorts.      Reaching 2,400 posts calls for some kind of pithy observation. Wish I had one. What brought me in tonight .. kind of a long story: I checked the counter, and a search engine had directed a student to my blog with his query, a conclusion for an essay in agreeance with offshoring from a managers point of view. That in turn led me to a discussion of the word or non-word "agreeance," which after several more in turns led me to the Internet's apparent acknowledged expert on proper usage, Professor Emeritus Paul Brian from my alma mater, Washington State University. Go Cougs! So, it's nearly 11pm already because I've been reading his staggering Vita and trying to figure out why I don't know him. Then it hit me: he arrived after I graduated and has retired already so he must be old, and that means I am too! Jeez, what happened to forty years anyway? (I was going to type "was graduated" because this is about usage and all. Nah, sounds too fussy.)

I love the word "agreeance." My first secretary (in Hawaii) insisted on doing dictation because she wanted to practice. I thought dictation was stupid and a waste of time. I always felt it was invented solely to permit bosses to strut back and forth with their crotches at eye level of a subservient female. Anyway, I gave in, and we did dictation for awhile, up until agreeance. See, it is a word in Hawaii and in the OED, but pretty much nowhere else. No, I'm pretty sure I said "agreement." You did, but I changed it to "agreeance." She won that one too, and my letters went out slightly in pidgin (Hawaiians do possessives and tense a bit differently also.) She eventually got bored with it, and I could go back to typing my own drafts. Hawaii has a way of letting you not worry too much about things, like the way your letters back to the world look and sound.

You might wonder how she was able to "win" things since I was supposed to be the boss. Well, that was just Hawaii too, and her especially. More on her sometime. Rick Macherat

posted by Rick at 10:29 PM