I'm waiting for the 11D, it was later than usual for one of my trips downtown, hence ranker desert for a trip home, and my nerves, my nerves were not the steel thread they can be earlier in the day in a less ugly spot on the map . The police don't cruize past Heinz Hall quite as often after 11 pm. The duplication of '11' is bad for people with superstitions. It is only suprising how fast secular humanism can run from danger, and the cultural district starts to look bowery. This evening I was only one of two people waiting for the bus on Penn like two live chickens waiting for Colonel Sanders. And in the nervous fearful minutes, passing like heavy dumplings in rank stew, it seemed good, at first, that the the other guy struck up a conversation. He was working on his career in music. Country western.
The number '11' is never good, and the letter 'D' reminds me of a report card. The hopeful musician beside me asked if I knew when the bus was coming. This caused me to trip up. I have this thing I call the "Fred Rogers Reflex," which is an irrational need to sustain middle class courtesies while standing in a hell hole. I fished my bus schedule out, so to give a neighbor the exact time the bus probably won't arrive. I could see for myself the hollowness, since the bus is never on time, and the act of pulling out the paper schedule was an autonomic beourgoise ritual. People are supposed to be helpful, my ass. It was late, and the grunting of 'it's supposed to be here' would have been sufficient.
The musician warmed up immediately. The deceptive nature of common courtesy had been a regular tool in bag for people like Ted Bundy and Albert Desalvo, and less catastrophically, the pimply, sandy haired man nearest me launched into his recent past. "I just come up here from Nashville. Music industry in Nashville is all fucked up. I hear the music industry up here'll at least give a man a chance."
Going play by play, I was unaware that there was a country western music industry in Pittsburgh. A church or two got converted to recording studios a few miles out of town, and the outfits don't bring in much with the collection plate. The fact that this was happening against the humorless flanks of Heinz Hall brought optimism down a couple notches.
"Just bought this guitar at a pawn shop" He had his ax in a cheap boogie bag, like a body bag for a crumby instrument.
It's like saying 'that librarian is three inches taller than Roberto Duran.' I lost the rest of my respect for the singer because pawn shops are the outside worst place to buy a used guitar. You can score a good one anywhere, cheaper, unless you are the jerk I met at the bus stop. To strenthen his argument against Nashville, he said he's written more songs than Merl Haggard. Some people have more cavities in their teeth than others. He stepped closer to me and launched into one of his songs. He was smiling out a song he was proud of, and he was standing uncomfortably close. Had the bus come sooner, I would have heard less.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Federal Curling
Played on skates and ice, the sport of curling hasn't caught on in the US as much as it could. I've seen it done on television, and don't get too excited about it, but it's a sight to behold, and I was reminded of the exotic sport just this morning after reading an article about our national economic strategy.
For overview, a burly skater hurls his curling stone, a heavy, burly round stone with convenient handle, forward on the ice, towards a target. As the stone glides to target, two 'sweepers' skate ahead of it, corn brooms in hand, preparing the surface of the ice, both knaves furiously and comically sweeping the ice. Our federal government has taken the role of sweepers in the area of world money management.
This new governmental role as 'sweepers' has emerged because there are relatively few highly profitably large scale corporations. Rather than fostering new corporate development evenly throughout society, the gov is protecting the few, the proud, the really really rich.
One curling stone is Monsanto, more might be the merry friends of Halliburton and Blackwater. There are a lot of too wealthy curling stones, but not enough to help a ten percent unemployment rate and a declining standard of living off the ice.
Curling is a dull sport, and looks like paralysis compared to our glorious and brutal hockey, but it deserves respect in much the way you can't park in front of a fire hyrdrant. Need I say it is loved in places other than my own private state of confusion, and it has provided a model for purposes of greater understanding. Still more convenient, this sport has some of the characteristics of an exotic global dash for the cash. It is unsportsmanly conduct on the part of the Fed, though, to sweep.
For overview, a burly skater hurls his curling stone, a heavy, burly round stone with convenient handle, forward on the ice, towards a target. As the stone glides to target, two 'sweepers' skate ahead of it, corn brooms in hand, preparing the surface of the ice, both knaves furiously and comically sweeping the ice. Our federal government has taken the role of sweepers in the area of world money management.
This new governmental role as 'sweepers' has emerged because there are relatively few highly profitably large scale corporations. Rather than fostering new corporate development evenly throughout society, the gov is protecting the few, the proud, the really really rich.
One curling stone is Monsanto, more might be the merry friends of Halliburton and Blackwater. There are a lot of too wealthy curling stones, but not enough to help a ten percent unemployment rate and a declining standard of living off the ice.
Curling is a dull sport, and looks like paralysis compared to our glorious and brutal hockey, but it deserves respect in much the way you can't park in front of a fire hyrdrant. Need I say it is loved in places other than my own private state of confusion, and it has provided a model for purposes of greater understanding. Still more convenient, this sport has some of the characteristics of an exotic global dash for the cash. It is unsportsmanly conduct on the part of the Fed, though, to sweep.
Monday, October 5, 2009
Senile Musings: Accepting Your Movie Role
There is a hard numerology at work. The number of times you have seen a movie impacts, directly, the role it will take in your future. I watched Taxi Driver seven times, and began asking imaginary foes if they are talking to me. But that was a long time ago, and at midlife, my 19 viewings of the film Frankenstein is defining me.
I'm turning into the old man who played his fiddle. The Monster turned up at his shack in the Bavarian woods, and the blind hermit musician welcomed the huge, ugly crazy quilt of human parts. The kindly old cheese introduced Frankenstein's monster to the violin. "Music good." And to the grape. "Wine. Fucking good."
The hermit was an archetype of refined and marginalized individuals everywhere.
I'm turning into the old man who played his fiddle. The Monster turned up at his shack in the Bavarian woods, and the blind hermit musician welcomed the huge, ugly crazy quilt of human parts. The kindly old cheese introduced Frankenstein's monster to the violin. "Music good." And to the grape. "Wine. Fucking good."
The hermit was an archetype of refined and marginalized individuals everywhere.
Socialized Medicine For Privacy
From the origin of employee provided health care to our current crisis in managed health care, health coverage managed through one's employer has been a gross invasion of privacy.
In its infancy it was for the most part a good thing, omitting the fact that your human resource officer knows more about you than he/she should. With a safe point of origin placed at year 1980, people were better able to obtain medical service with employee health coverage. A cultural trend followed employee health care, in which ever more wants and needs were added to those services provided. At the zenith, people got nose jobs and liposuction, free to the people, like the motto of the Carnegie Library. And at the back end of this trend, human resource personnel began using its knowlege of employee health to decide who to fire. All along there was a cultrural drift from deep, reverent privacy to frivolous coffee talk about each other's hernias and cancers. Returning to the time frame of 1980 till now, there is a more pressing reason to exit out of employer based health care, and to shift to pure socialized medicine, isolated completely from the remainder of a free market economy.
People who espouse libertarian philosophy value and evaluate the right to privacy, the right enter into business, and the right to determine one's own state of affairs. The role of government is to protect those rights, and it is supposed not to act 'in loco parentis.' Most importantly, the economy operates best when individuals are able to enter into business, earn money, and in turn create jobs. To a libertarian, anything that gums up the process is probably bad. Government intrusion into the free market is probably bad. And with the crisis in health care at the top of national crises, a mandate to take health care off the shoulders of the entrepreneur should be recognised and acted on.
The bare need of the individual to obtain heath care is in crisis now. The point of privacy is only one argument among many for socialized medicine. In the main stream, a libertarian prefers a free market solution to the need for goods and services, medical service included. My point is that there no free market solution to the high cost of health care, and that options such a single payer health care won't work. As a means to allow a free market economic recovery, socialized medicine is the one point of deviation in an otherwise free enterprise model. In this veiw point, the need to create new jobs mandates the separation of government from private business, and the separation of medical service from the relationship of employee to employer.
In libertarian thought, privacy is one of many elements in the cement that foundations are made of. Without it, any fool can make sport of your sagging. stained undergarments. In business, your right to ply your trade can be undermined by anyone whose ear is pressed to your wall. Your secrets are no longer secret. You may be forced to hire people you don't want or need. You may be forced to adapt your shop to the needs of a political interest group. Too, you may be unable to sustain a place of business under the burden of outrageously expensive health insurance. The best option to revitalize the ecomony is an efficient, unified, professional and compassionate system of national health coverage. Socialized medicine, pressed to greater than current efficiency, will extend health care to all and will remove a millstone from the neck of free enterprise.
In its infancy it was for the most part a good thing, omitting the fact that your human resource officer knows more about you than he/she should. With a safe point of origin placed at year 1980, people were better able to obtain medical service with employee health coverage. A cultural trend followed employee health care, in which ever more wants and needs were added to those services provided. At the zenith, people got nose jobs and liposuction, free to the people, like the motto of the Carnegie Library. And at the back end of this trend, human resource personnel began using its knowlege of employee health to decide who to fire. All along there was a cultrural drift from deep, reverent privacy to frivolous coffee talk about each other's hernias and cancers. Returning to the time frame of 1980 till now, there is a more pressing reason to exit out of employer based health care, and to shift to pure socialized medicine, isolated completely from the remainder of a free market economy.
People who espouse libertarian philosophy value and evaluate the right to privacy, the right enter into business, and the right to determine one's own state of affairs. The role of government is to protect those rights, and it is supposed not to act 'in loco parentis.' Most importantly, the economy operates best when individuals are able to enter into business, earn money, and in turn create jobs. To a libertarian, anything that gums up the process is probably bad. Government intrusion into the free market is probably bad. And with the crisis in health care at the top of national crises, a mandate to take health care off the shoulders of the entrepreneur should be recognised and acted on.
The bare need of the individual to obtain heath care is in crisis now. The point of privacy is only one argument among many for socialized medicine. In the main stream, a libertarian prefers a free market solution to the need for goods and services, medical service included. My point is that there no free market solution to the high cost of health care, and that options such a single payer health care won't work. As a means to allow a free market economic recovery, socialized medicine is the one point of deviation in an otherwise free enterprise model. In this veiw point, the need to create new jobs mandates the separation of government from private business, and the separation of medical service from the relationship of employee to employer.
In libertarian thought, privacy is one of many elements in the cement that foundations are made of. Without it, any fool can make sport of your sagging. stained undergarments. In business, your right to ply your trade can be undermined by anyone whose ear is pressed to your wall. Your secrets are no longer secret. You may be forced to hire people you don't want or need. You may be forced to adapt your shop to the needs of a political interest group. Too, you may be unable to sustain a place of business under the burden of outrageously expensive health insurance. The best option to revitalize the ecomony is an efficient, unified, professional and compassionate system of national health coverage. Socialized medicine, pressed to greater than current efficiency, will extend health care to all and will remove a millstone from the neck of free enterprise.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
dates and fates
A few years back, I was looking for a date. So I ran a personal ad on Craigslist, stunning athletic male seeks leopard-skin pill box bomb shell, nothing freaky. I'm a plain kind of guy full of hope, and soon I got a response, then a meeting for coffee, with woman about my age of a half century.
She seemed nice, at first. Though, too, she expressed that her life at home was troubled, a husband had absconded with their life's loot, she had grown kids that didn't like her. The former boyfriend who committed suicide for no reason known to her, and they were dating at the time, made the nads shrink. There are some 'don'ts' in picking your mate. On the more normal plane, she had a job. She said she was a medical transcriptionist at a local psychiatric hospital. A well connected hospital.
We were chatting pleasantly on the phone when she told me that she had checked my psych history on her computer at work, and she was pleased to find that I have no history of mental illness in the United States for as far back as everything private went on-line. If I went nuts before then, like in the 1980s, I'm doing a great job of hiding it.
Using only my first and last name for her inquiry, she was able to find out if I had my head examined in New Zealand, and she could even find out if a general practitioner had prescribed me a psychiatric med, such a Xanax. She might have had half a romance novel in front of her if I had been involuntarily committed.
My date with an apparently unstable transcriptionist caused me concern. An amazing breach of privacy is possible by way of plain folks and an ominous network of computers. The right to privacy has been altered for the worse. On a bright spot, I'm probably playing with a full deck.
She seemed nice, at first. Though, too, she expressed that her life at home was troubled, a husband had absconded with their life's loot, she had grown kids that didn't like her. The former boyfriend who committed suicide for no reason known to her, and they were dating at the time, made the nads shrink. There are some 'don'ts' in picking your mate. On the more normal plane, she had a job. She said she was a medical transcriptionist at a local psychiatric hospital. A well connected hospital.
We were chatting pleasantly on the phone when she told me that she had checked my psych history on her computer at work, and she was pleased to find that I have no history of mental illness in the United States for as far back as everything private went on-line. If I went nuts before then, like in the 1980s, I'm doing a great job of hiding it.
Using only my first and last name for her inquiry, she was able to find out if I had my head examined in New Zealand, and she could even find out if a general practitioner had prescribed me a psychiatric med, such a Xanax. She might have had half a romance novel in front of her if I had been involuntarily committed.
My date with an apparently unstable transcriptionist caused me concern. An amazing breach of privacy is possible by way of plain folks and an ominous network of computers. The right to privacy has been altered for the worse. On a bright spot, I'm probably playing with a full deck.
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
Piggish Banking
I wish this didn't have to sound like a Nervous Whiner Gets Hit With A Bill type story, but this having happened right after the federal bank bail out can bring it out in people who are normally cool as cream.
Put up with me while I explain.
My auxilliary checking account with, oh I won't say which bank, had been left in a poet's state of limbo. It was opened mainly to do transactions through pay pal and ebay, and my nerdy attempt at being an internet Tarzan mostly flopped. Haven't sold anything on ebay since early post-Bill Clinton.
So I didn't look as eagle-eyed as I should have for a while. The last bank statement tells me I owe the bank $181.00 in overdrafts. They added a nine dollar monthly service charge like mice on cotton, and when the remains of a weak but wiry bank account was all eaten in those fees, they shot out of the bull pen with an $8.00 a day overdraft fee. I slap shotted myself to the phone, with the depressing statement in hand.
The game of phone processing, digitized, shake-the-little-weasel-off-our-tails tactics were as annoying as your last chat with a bank by phone. I managed to get them to close the account and stop the overdraft fees from continuing, and thus growing into a Stimulus Package for Bank Swine. Just now I'm sounding out an F. Lee Baily/Johnny Cochran/Barry Scheck speech to lay on some petulent bank manager. I'm going to ask, nice as Marsha Clark, to scratch the fees and refund the money they stole. With Cochran waiting to get in the game. It should come off at least as good as Lance Ito at a weenie roast for not-well-liked jurisprudentials.
Parting words on the brass agates of banks, they're criminals. Criminals, criminals, criminals, criminals, criminals.
Put up with me while I explain.
My auxilliary checking account with, oh I won't say which bank, had been left in a poet's state of limbo. It was opened mainly to do transactions through pay pal and ebay, and my nerdy attempt at being an internet Tarzan mostly flopped. Haven't sold anything on ebay since early post-Bill Clinton.
So I didn't look as eagle-eyed as I should have for a while. The last bank statement tells me I owe the bank $181.00 in overdrafts. They added a nine dollar monthly service charge like mice on cotton, and when the remains of a weak but wiry bank account was all eaten in those fees, they shot out of the bull pen with an $8.00 a day overdraft fee. I slap shotted myself to the phone, with the depressing statement in hand.
The game of phone processing, digitized, shake-the-little-weasel-off-our-tails tactics were as annoying as your last chat with a bank by phone. I managed to get them to close the account and stop the overdraft fees from continuing, and thus growing into a Stimulus Package for Bank Swine. Just now I'm sounding out an F. Lee Baily/Johnny Cochran/Barry Scheck speech to lay on some petulent bank manager. I'm going to ask, nice as Marsha Clark, to scratch the fees and refund the money they stole. With Cochran waiting to get in the game. It should come off at least as good as Lance Ito at a weenie roast for not-well-liked jurisprudentials.
Parting words on the brass agates of banks, they're criminals. Criminals, criminals, criminals, criminals, criminals.
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Another Fatuous Policy Statement
A certain local city council person is pushing a bill that would force all used car dealers in the area to place tall shrubbery in front of their wee places of business. It's a beautification effort with flies in its Noxema. How are we to buy used cars if the lots are hidden behind a forsythia?
From Fort Duquesne Tunnel to the fresh air of Brentwood, Rt. 51 has about 300 sweet looking, old school used car lots. That stretch of about four miles, all of it mighty bad road, is, smooshed pavement alone, a heap uglier than chain link fence and used cars. And don't come screaming at me that used car lots all look alike. They are diverse, each it's own oasis, each a living thing. Hillary Clinton would probably like them.
When I rattle my muffler driving the stretch, I always think about what life must be like in the trailers and bungalows with fenced in cars. The lots are limpid little tracks of dirt with ginger houses for the used car salespeople to sit in. I always imagine them as tall, firm, honest men, waiting to sell their next car so they can get the wife the Serta Perfect Sleeper she needs for her back. What kind of fiend would want to hide that in bushes?
From Fort Duquesne Tunnel to the fresh air of Brentwood, Rt. 51 has about 300 sweet looking, old school used car lots. That stretch of about four miles, all of it mighty bad road, is, smooshed pavement alone, a heap uglier than chain link fence and used cars. And don't come screaming at me that used car lots all look alike. They are diverse, each it's own oasis, each a living thing. Hillary Clinton would probably like them.
When I rattle my muffler driving the stretch, I always think about what life must be like in the trailers and bungalows with fenced in cars. The lots are limpid little tracks of dirt with ginger houses for the used car salespeople to sit in. I always imagine them as tall, firm, honest men, waiting to sell their next car so they can get the wife the Serta Perfect Sleeper she needs for her back. What kind of fiend would want to hide that in bushes?
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