Post  #2418.   Like flies on a steaming turd.      Will the news ever return to wars, mayhem and politics? Probably not. This, and by this I mean the last three days, is evidently what we want and they, and by that I mean the media, would know. Michael Jackson around the clock until there was just the briefest pause ... during which Billy Mays had the extraordinary good timing to die, thus assuring himself of a place in history. We won't know exactly where that place is for around a thousand years when some future social scientist takes a look at this period.

A black man buys three white babies. Then he changes himself into a white woman, fakes Lupus to get pain drugs in huge amounts for life, charges hundreds of millions of dollars to get stuff with no inclination to pay for any of it, and the world is pretty much okay with the whole fandangle. I have to think at least some black people have privately noted this with considerable amusement. Rick Macherat

posted by Rick at 11:08 PM

Post  #2417.   The end of Day 2 without Michael.     And the sadness continues seemingly without end. I wrote this last night before finally drifting off to a fitful sleep,

I'll always remember Michael Jackson for the children. It was always really For the Children, wasn't it? He always wanted to do something special just for them, and now he has. He died. And now they're safe. Well, the boys anyway.

Yes, things won't be the same now that .. The gravytrain has derailed ..

Yesterday, when I awoke from my nap, turned on the television and stared in bewilderment at the scrolling information, interestingly enough a single thought came first to my mind

Crap. Now we'll never learn how this freakorama ends.

See, this passage was never on the program. I feel quite certain that Michael had planned something much more lavish. This was so .. so LupeValezsque. Just imagine Michael Jackson dottering into his sixties and seventies, still fooling most of the people most of the time. Not only that, there was still unimaginable amounts of money rolling in every day and, since Michael didn't believe in paying bills, just think of the future scenarios which might have played out. The London concerts would have to be put off forever, since one cannot sing without a nose, and the machinations to accomplish that alone showed considerable promise.

So many questions. Now that the payroll truck has gone off the cliff, who will talk first? Doctors, lawyers, accountants, victims? Pharmacists? Pharmacists? Why Pharmacists? Michael apparently accomplished something no other human being in the history of the word has managed: Credit at the Pharmacy. He stiffed his local drugstore for $101926.66. Imagine that. Rick Macherat

posted by Rick at 12:01 AM

Post  #2416.   Big Bang.     I was watching that show, The Big Bang Theory, and got to wondering if the guys CV's were on the Internet. Well, of course they are. Everything is on the Internet, including a detailed summary of the plan by the European Union to standardize the documentation of a CV to allow for trans-border checking and evaluation. They don't miss an i or a t. Those Euroes. Also on the subject of that show, did you know it was syndicated in Albania and Fiji, plus about thirty other countries? There was a flap awhile back when translators in Italy "dumbed down" a number of references to make them more understandable to their audience. For a nerd, something like that would really sting.

Scenes from next week's Life After People program show the Space Needle falling down. I like this show but question some of their conclusions, like the Space Needle for instance. We all love to show the Space Needle falling down. It won't, ever. Oh sure, it will be consumed along with rest of the planet else when the sun goes supernova, but until then it will continue to stand there, overcharging everybody.

I saw a man taking his cat under water wearing its own little kitty scuba gear. I wonder what type of and how much meds he had to give that cat. Then there's the guys who take flightless birds like chickens up for some hang gliding. I have mixed thoughts about this stuff. I could provide some "enjoyment" or entertainment for a chicken, or eat chicken, but not both.

Comedian Bo Burnham has to be the funniest, cleverest 17 just turned 18-year-old in the history of the world. Yeah, you bring up Mozart .. but was he funny? I hope he doesn't get ruined. With a youngster like that, you sort of hope he looks around one day and sees how crappy life has become, how shallow and awful the hangers-on are, and just bugs out. That's enough fame, sex, drugs and money. Back to college and Anthropology.

You have to wonder .. but is she really happy?


Even though I'm fairly conservative as political leanings go, I'll admit to some stirrings of latent liberalism from time to time. Nothing wrong with the getup, face, nose, jewels, breasts, gown, of course. Someone else would have purchased the emeralds anyway. Still ..

There are several Asian families on our street. One of them that I'm acquainted with is the Wongs. They have two boys, Wordsworth and Watson, and a girl, Winnemucca. Mrs. Wong told me she loved the sound of of "Winnemucca" when she first heard it while watching Tales of the City. I didn't have the heart to tell her, you know, about Winnemucca.

Television went digital. It was somehow reassuring to hear that quite a few people were staring at their sets when they went to noise and snow, and they had no earthly idea what was wrong. By the thousands they called somebody, mainly the tv stations, but there were banks of operators standing by just about everywhere it was believed those people might call. On the newscast reporting the changeover, one of our local stations recorded it: KONG-TV has been paid a fee for this progr zzzzzzz-t buzzzzzz. Things like that tend to mark this era for me. Another is the announcement that Kodak is discontinuing the production of Kodachrome film. Think about that. Just about everything will be finite from now on, exactly the way the machines want. Just think about that for a bit and decide if you like it. Rick Macherat

posted by Rick at 10:02 PM

Post  #2416.   DB's.     Both of my parents saw a person die while they were each quite young. My father was 12 when he witnessed another child slip and fall while running at a swimming pool, splitting his head open and dying instantly. My mother saw a young boy's jugular cut when a bottle rocket exploded. She watched in horror as he bled out too quickly for anything to be done. She was ten years old. That incident figured prominently in some cautionary behavior the rest of her life, and the same is true of my father. Naturally, since they told me the stories when I was about the same age, I have been similarly affected/afflicted ever since. I never run at the pool, and I don't do too well around blood.

I was lucky though, never viewing a dead body until I was thirty-nine. Pretty lucky. It was a Sunday, I had the duty (hotel,) when the security #2 called me, DB on the beach. He was a man of very few words. Very effective security man though, as I remember. There was nothing for me to do, of course, except make an appearance. Unfortunately, the new Big Boss has recently and ignorantly put all of senior management into jackets and ties, and it was in that garb that I went out to the beach to inspect the body. Yep, dead all right. And based on the amount of bloat, possibly for awhile. I can still relive the scene in my mind as if I'm right there: about a hundred near-naked gawkers, one bloated dead body, temperature in the high eighties and humid, and me in a jacket and tie. I would not have thought a human being could sweat that much. Between the heat and the setting, I started feeling a little woozy, so I placed Jim (the security guy) between the body and me so I couldn't see it and told him to talk. About what, sez he. I don't care, Jim, Just talk. Talk like you never talked before, then get me the fuck outta here. Good old Jim, bless his heart. He probably said more than he had in years until I was safely away from there and into the shade, and I think he understood very well that it definitely would not do for me to go crashing into the sand at that particular moment.

It really didn't bother me that I was in the clear minority of hotel execs regarding death and the staff knew it. Most of the top managers love the adventure of it. My boss would pause a major boinking in the middle of the night to go and attend a mortal event. Especially suicides. Not me, boy. If I got a call while asleep from the night manager, it would go something like this, my end anyway.

(Sleeeeeep.) (RING!) Hello.. (Listen, listen, listen)
Was it natural?
Messy?
I feel pretty confident that you've already done absolutely every thing that needs to be done. Have you?
Good job. Good night.

He would have fabricated an imaginative account of how I appeared shortly after the event and quickly took charge of the situation and written it all down very expertly in the Manager's Log had I asked him to, but I didn't. Wouldn't. He was a good guy, all of them were. I miss them.Rick Macherat

posted by Rick at 12:42 AM

Post  #2414.   General Motors.     The inevitable letter arrived. It was from Troy A. Clarke and included an attached coupon, "Owner Appreciation Certificate," worth some money toward the purchase of a new GM vehicle. Troy's letter said, in part,

As you may know, GM is using an expedited, court-supervised process to accelerate the reinvention of our company.

Yes, I thought so too .. we used to call comments like that mealy-mouthed. Here you have the greatest single failure in the history of the world - I considered the Third Reich briefly, but there was a time when General Motors could have bought the Reich - and they are recording it pretty much like taking care of a parking ticket. Frankly, I expected better. Some falling-upon-swords would have been nice, some kind of drama at least. Now, I've been in business situations where .. uh .. mistakes were made and maybe people got financially roughed up a little and there were meetings about it and, yes, public comments were pored over and reviewed and made to sound as mealy as possible and the key was above all DON'T MAKE IT WORSE, so I understand. It's just that this time was special, and the world won't get a chance to gawk in horror at a failure of this magnitude for awhile. Probably not until the U.S. itself goes down the tubes, which might not be that far off actually, and by then you have to wonder if anyone will even bother taking the time to do a statement.


a note: And The Google saw that he had typed about GM and It thought, "Look, he has typed about GM. Let Us send him an ad about that. And It did. Rick Macherat RMacherat

posted by Rick at 10:40 PM

Post  #2413.   Observations from a recent outing.      Had some stitches removed, then went shopping on a terrific, postcard Seattle day. When you shop on a Monday during a deep recession, customer service is fairly good. Not as good as past recessions, but that's only because the notion of "service" is anathema to Generation Z. They haven't learned that you serve when you're young and poor so you can get-served when you're old and rich. Will they figure it out - I'm not so sure about that. Their parents were almost as indulged as they are. Prices have a ways to come down yet. It's almost as if the retailers don't realize how close to death many of them are. Hey Guys! Look at the strip mall, see all those empty stores? I shop 99.999% online, so this trip was solely for Brother's benefit. He's getting a new computer for his birthday, and he wanted some hands-on. No exaggeration, Employees:Customers was at least 20:1 at Best Buy. I re-booted their system while doing my own hands-on. They weren't too upset about it that I could tell, although they did send the girl out to get the old geezer off the computer.

Did you hear about the Cuba espionage case? It went on for over twenty years, and now the State Department is going to conduct a thorough investigation. If everyone involved wasn't so damn dumb, they'd be embarrassed. I mean, really .. what secret would we bother to keep from Cuber?

I actually uttered this statement today, "I have too much money in my checking account." What I meant, speaking with the extremely Asian bank customer service woman, is that I wanted to transfer some funds from Checking to Savings but the machine wouldn't let me do it. Thinking back, I had to laugh. When I was younger, when would that remark ever have been remotely accurate?

FOX News actually had this line on their news scroll: FUTURE DRUG STRATEGY TO FOCUS ON U.S. - MEXICAN BORDER. Must have been intern day at the news desk. Speaking of, have you noticed that television newsrooms are filled with people working away at computers? So, what could they possibly be doing? At most, cable news does 5-6 stories per half hour and the evening news not much better. And most of that is simply rip 'n read. I have a feeling all those "newspeople" are just folks they've pulled off the street and paid minimum wage to sit there and look busy.

Now it's a Compensation Czar. Seriously, is "Czar" the right word? The guy in charge of a catastrophically failed economic system which came before a more recent catastrophically failed economic system?

Another peeve, probably just me. I was a military brat, you knew that. Our family went through two long separations while we kids were pretty young. For me, it involved all of first grade and half of of the eighth and ninth. And the idea of my dad coming into a class I was in after being away for a year or so and staging a reunion in front of everybody PLUS a television audience .. unthinkable, insane, would/could never happen. Thank God.

Our multi-zillion dollar Rem Koolhass PUBLIC LIBRARY and HOMELESSATORIUM has had to make some new rules. First, they've cut back on the shopping carts full of crap that the presently-unresidenced-visitors bring in. Second, security wakes people up more often, at least those who appear not to be doing any work at all (possessing a book for instance.) Third, and most draconian of all, the penalty for starting fires or selling drugs has been an increase in the expulsion time from one to two years. Now that's some tough love, Seattle style. Rick Macherat RMacherat

posted by Rick at 10:50 PM

Post  #2412.   This was pretty funny.      I enjoy reading Columns, the University of Washington alumni magazine. There is so much active brainpower in that part of our city that I think the local temperature actually runs a few degrees warmer up there. Sarah DeWeerdt writes columns for the magazine, and I was reading "Orca's Best Friend." We're totally into whales and salmon around these parts.. anything that swims for that matter, so I wasn't surprised to learn that a UW professor has been doing research on Orca scat. As is my bad habit, I scanned the intro without really reading it or absorbing anything until I got down to

To find orca scat in the water, Tucker stands at the bow of the boat and sniffs the wind. When he catches a whiff, he becomes animated, straining over the edge of the boat. Then, the boat tacks back and forth as dog and humans play a collaborative interspecies game of getting-warmer and getting-colder, racing to spot the sample and fish it from the water before it sinks.

Wow, I thought, gee whiz, this prof is really into his whale stuff, one of those amazing people at the university, completely unknown outside of their brainy circles. (I missed the intro and "dog," an offshoot of my last ministroke, perhaps.)

Eventually, as always, I re-read things and discover .. Oh, Tucker is the dog; the professor is Samuel Wasser. He's the researcher along with grad student Katherine Ayers. Another hilarious mis-reading adventure.Rick Macherat

posted by Rick at 11:33 PM