Personal Musings category archive

Penn State alumni think that Happy Valley is the Only Place on Earth.

Sort of like Virginia Tech alumni, who think that Blacksburg, Va., is the only place on earth.

(Happy Valley and Blacksburg have something in common. They are both surrounded by miles and miles of not much of anything except mountains.)

Nevertheless, I hope Penn State wins the ball game tonight, because I am a Joe Paterno fan.

He is one of the few really classy coaches in American College Football.

I remember the first time I saw a Joe Paterno coached Penn State team in a bowl game. Orange Bowl, 1969, Penn State vs. Kansas. My brother and I sat up and watched it.

Kansas had a seven-point lead going into the final seconds of the game.

Penn State scored.

And went for a two point conversion. And this was back when the field goal was king and taking the safe choice was the common choice. Penn State went for two–almost unheard of in those days.

And made it.

After the game, the interviewers asked Joe Paterno why he had his team go for two. Now, I can’t remember his exact statement–it was many years ago. But it was something to the effect that

“Ties aren’t fun. This game should be fun.”

I hope Penn State wins tonight.

(If you don’t understand what “go for two” means, go here.)

(Link fixed. Thanks.)

David Ignatius explores the writings of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams (emphasis added):

My Christmastime reading of the Adams-Jefferson letters was prompted by this year’s most interesting political speech but one I also found troubling — Mitt Romney’s Dec. 6 speech on “Faith in America.” It was a fine evocation of our twin heritage of religion and religious freedom, until he got to this ritual denunciation of the bogeymen known as secularists. “They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America — the religion of secularism.”

Anyone who reads Adams and Jefferson — or for that matter, Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton or other voices of the American Enlightenment — can make their own judgment about what the Founders would say about Romney’s broadside against secularism. My guess is that their response would be something like: “That is bunkum, sir.”

(snip)

One theme in this year’s political campaign has been whether the United States will move from the faith-based policies the Bush administration has celebrated to a more rationalist and secular approach. In this debate, religious conservatives like to stress their connection to the Founders and to the republic’s birth as “one nation under God.” But a rereading of the Adams-Jefferson letters is a reminder that in this debate, the Founders — as men of the Enlightenment — would surely have sided with the party of Reason.

From the local rag:

You’re standing at a checkout counter, ready to pay, and the twentysomething behind the register is talking on her cell phone. So you wait, and wait, and wait, and when the clerk finally finishes her conversation, she offers not an apology, but a grimace that suggests you’ve interrupted.

Sound familiar? It has a name: the Service Gap.

That’s not a hip clothing store for soldiers. Or a new motto for the London subway system.

It’s business-speak to describe a phenomenon fueling plenty of holiday-shopping frustration: the difference in how baby boomers and members of the “millennial generation” define the concept of customer service.

(Aside: If clerks are using cell phones while they should be checking out customers, that is not a service problem. That is a management problem. Management has clearly failed to lay out the expectations of the job. And this surprises us how?)

The other day, when I left the cooling tower place and before I started my quest for a Real Ham (TM), I stopped at the Cooling Tower Town’s Super Wawa to fill up with gas ($2.85). The pumps, as usual, were crowded, with at least two vehicles waiting to get to them.

I pulled into the nearest line where the pumps were on the correct side of the vehicle.

The person ahead of me was not pumping gas. Rather, she was sitting in her car.

“Okay,” thought I, “She’s waiting for the car ahead of her to pull away so she could move.”

More fool I.

After about four or five minutes, she got out of her car, ended her cell phone conversation, and started to open the little cover over the fuel pipe on her Cattle-Rack. (Something she proved incompetent to do, but that’s another story.)

SHE’D BEEN SITTING THERE BLOCKING THE BLANKETY-BLANK PUMP TALKING ON HER BLANKETY-BLANK CELL PHONE FOR HEAVEN’S KNOWS HOW LONG.

And was easily 20 years older than me. (And I’m old.)

My friends, being a rude, selfish, inconsiderate a$$hole is not a generational phenomenon.

It is rather another manifestation of the constant,

K sub I,

the Idiocy Constant in human nature.

When you get enough persons gathered together in one place, a certain percentage of them will be idiots. It’s just a fact of life.

Sooooo, I went to the local post office today to mail Christmas presents.

I wanted to get them off because a couple of them were to APO addresses.

I thought that by going early, I would miss the rush.

More fool I.

The rush got there before me. And the early rush included large numbers of persons picking up certified mail, registered mail, and holiday holds. When those persons got to the counter, the clerks had to leave their stations to look for their mail. further slowing down the process.

The clerks looked pretty numb.

(Thank heavens I had my mp3 player–I was listening to Diane Rehm’s Friday News round-up.)

Then, when I finally got to the counter, got the postage figured, and filled out the customs forms, the credit card/debit card system went down.

No, I didn’t have $67.41 cash on me. I got cleaned out over the weekend and made the mistake of not stopping at the ATM on the way to the post office.

The clerk was kind enough to hold my packages while I went to the ATM, though when I got back, I had to stand in line again.

The clerk told me that she had heard that this was not a local outage–that multiple post offices were affected.

I said to her, “There must be hell to pay in L’Enfant Plaza” (Post Office HQ is in L’Enfant Plaza South–I did a training class there once for the security department).

First smile I got from her all day.

Delaware’s playing for the championship.

Not that I’m a big Delaware fan–they kick my alma mater up and down the field regularly, but two of my kids went there and a third is considering it, and, hey! it’s football.

Unlike what goes on up the road a piece.

Addendum, 12/17/2007:

Well, someone played football. It wasn’t Delaware.

I mentioned a little while ago that I believe that bigotry is at the heart of the Republican furor over immigration.

I am convinced that, if hordes of English-speaking Canadians were pouring over the the northern border to take jobs in the call centers of Sioux Falls, the hullabaloo over illegal immigration would merely be a baloo.

Atrios nails it. It’s the “Southern Strategy” all over again once more redundantly.

Hating the other is very popular among Republicans even if immigration per se isn’t so important. So Republican primary candidates have to signal they’ve got a sufficient amount of hate, and they do that by wanting to “double Guantanamo,” invade several more countries filled with scary Brown people, enacting punitive measures against immigrants, etc.

Immigration isn’t the issue. Hating immigrants is the issue.

Yesterday, I listened to an interview with Rick Warren on one of my favorite radio shows. Rick Warren’s name rang a bell or two, but I didn’t remember at the time that he is the author of The Purpose Drive Life.

(Now, Rick Warren may not necessarily be my cup of tea, but I give him credit for walking the same walk that he talks.)

Soooo, I whipped out my trusty cell phone, fired up Opera, and googled him. I found a Wikipedia article:

Today, the article starts out like this:

Richard D. “Rick” Warren (born January 28, 1954) is the founding and senior pastor of Saddleback Church in Southern California, the largest Christian church in California. He is also the best-selling author of many Christian books, including The Purpose Driven Life, and an influential evangelical leader.

Yesterday, it started out something like this:

Rick Warren is a famous American heretic blah blah blah.

Being on my cell phone, I wasn’t able to do a screen capture. By the time I got home from church, the Wikipedia gremlins had already edited the slurs out of the story.

Where am I going with this?

Actually, I’m not really sure, except that I wish had had the chance to get the screenshots of the adulterated page.

And, oh, yeah, what does it say about someone whose only recourse to support his position is to place a lying entry on a webiste?

Then, again, whoever it was was only following the example set by the Current Federal Administration, which has raised lying to a fine political art.

Up the road a piece, they have something called “pigeon shoots.”

Now, I am not a hunter. That’s just sort of through inertia; my Daddy wasn’t a hunter. But many of my uncles and cousins and friends are hunters, and I have no objection to hunting.

(And I love Bambi burgers. Venision is delicious.)

But this is not hunting:

At the cry of “Pull!” a pigeon is catapulted from a small spring-loaded metal box in the middle of a field at the Pike Township Sportsmen’s Club. A shooter poised 30 yards away with a shotgun fires, sending the gray and white bird plummeting to the ground.

Over and over for two hours scores of live pigeons are launched into the air as shooters vie to kill the most birds and take home the prize money.

And those who participate in it are not hunters.

Heck, if they were “hunters,” they would find their own damn pigeons to shoot.

They can’t even dignify themselves as “target shooters.” Target shooters are satisfied with clay pigeons.

This is just disgusting.

What happened to Phillybits today.

The cops would not let him take pictures of Philadelphia from the Ben Franklin Bridge.

Like plenty of pictures of the Ben Franklin and Philadelphia aren’t floating around out there already.

This is not increased security.

This is just dumbness.

But, you know, it is where Bushie induced paranoia (as opposed to real actual security) has taken us.

On a personal note, I’ve considered downloading a copy of the Koran, sort of on the theory that knowing something about it might actually help me understand what the hell is going on in our world–and I’ve been deterred because I might be labelled a terrorist or terrorist sympathizer for doing so.

And I would not dare stop to take a picture of the flight line at Dover AFB, because the flight line is just plain impressive (though, frankly, a C-5 is kind of difficult to hide), for fear of being rousted.

Welcome to 1984–twenty years late.

Has anyone out there, when leaving a message on someone’s cell phone, ever “Press(ed) five to page this person”?

King George the Wurst speaks:

President Bush this month issued his first signing statement since the Democratic takeover of Congress, reserving the right to bypass 11 provisions in a military appropriations bill under his executive powers.

By God, it’s his country. He owns it. Why the hell should he obey the law? After all, isn’t his word the law?

Give me a break.

Via Susie.

The local rag carries a daily feature on the front page of the local section.

The feature is entitled “A City’s Deadly Toll.” It lists the number of homicides year to date in Philadelphia. There have been more homicides this year than there are days in the year 2007 so far.

And, no doubt, when I open the paper tomorrow, two or three more murders will have happened over night.

Actually, two is not a bad night. Sometimes, it’s three or four or five.

Yeah, I know I live in Delaware, but I worked in Center City Philadelphia for many years.

I used to be a member of a Center City church.

Philadelphia is a great town and I love it.

When I read David Aldridge’s column this morning, I thought it was a powerful piece of writing, but I wondered, just how could I share it with my two or three regular readers?

Then I realized.

It’s a powerful piece of writing. Who cares to whom he directed his column? He speaks to all of us.

For when one life is wasted, all of us are diminished.

From today’s local rag:

A doctor and his wife who face deportation because of a long-ago mistake on their immigration paperwork reported to federal authorities Monday but were allowed to return home while lawyers seek political support for them to remain in the U.S.

Dr. Pedro Servano and his wife, Salvacion, obeyed an order to meet with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials in Philadelphia and were told to report back in 60 days, attorney Gregg Cotler said. No deportation date was set, he said.

“I think that’s very hopeful,” Cotler said.

The Servanos, parents of four U.S. citizens and prominent members of their central Pennsylvania community, could be deported to their native Philippines because of a change in their marital status during their visa-application process more than 20 years ago.

The Servanos were single in 1978 when they applied for U.S. visas. They did not receive them until after they were married, but U.S. officials were not notified of the change in their marital status.

By all indications, they were not aware that they had to amend their applications.

They have served their community well and lived exemplary lives.

And the United States is preparing to throw them away.

This is not right.

Upyernoz sums it up well:

so now the administration is switching tactics entirely. it’s giving up on reconciliation, which means it’s not trying to fulfill any of the benchmarks anymore. which can only mean that the surge was a failure–the benchmarks are the measure set by the administration to measure the surge’s progress and now the administration itself admits that those benchmarks will not be met. the surge simply did not do what it was supposed to do.

Yeah, well, he’s right and you all know that. All the claims of “success” are rationalizations for failure. Some slim gains in calm on the streets of Baghdad and not much of nothing anywhere else. And no political gains at all–and, remember, the idea of the S(pl)urge ™ was to buy time for political consolidation, not to perfect the occupation.

Another Bushie failure.

The war in Iraq–conceived in lies, prosecuted with incompetence, propagated in duplicity.

And this surprises us how?

My brother is an umpire.

I’ve seen him in action. He’s actually pretty damned good, as much as it pains me to say that.

(Full disclosure: I got suckered into umpiring once, first base. Never again. Give me a training class in front of a bunch of hostile railroad conductors who have just come off 90-day disciplinary suspensions any day of the week and twice on Sundays.)

It’s not his day job. He’s one of the persons who umpire Little League and Babe Ruth and High School games, for no or for only token pay, so kids get to play the game. He’s been doing it for almost 30 years.

He doesn’t do it because he enjoys the abuse from coaches and parents and fans. He doesn’t do it because he likes ejecting the occasional obnoxious player or parent or coach from the park (something he doesn’t hesitate to do, with an autocratic streak he didn’t show when I, pulling three years’ rank, was Wild Bill to his Jingles).

He umpires because he loves baseball.

He sent me this link. Welcome to umpiring (oh, yeah, he’s got some great stories about the parents and the coaches and the players, but they are his to tell):

The most common cause of fatalities amongst recreational boaters is getting drunk and falling overboard.

That’s one reason I run an alcohol-free boat. The other is that the water is so much fun, who needs a drink?

The next greatest danger for recreation boaters is fire, not so much for outboards–because everything is pretty much out in the open–but for I/Os and inboards. If there’s a leak or a mistake, gas fumes can build up in the engine compartment and kabloeey!

I was out on the Chesapeake one day and saw a recreational boat burning. It’s a pretty gruesome sight–lots of smoke and the fire doesn’t go out until it reaches the waterline.

Fiberglass burns good.

As a couple found out yesterday.

I feel for the couple and their loss. I once met a couple at Georgetown Yacht Basin who, upon retirement, had purchased a sailboat and pretty much used it as their home as the sailed about North America, much as some persons purchase RVs and cruise KOA.

I wonder whether they had the boat inspected by a marine surveyor when they bought it–buying a boat to sail down the Intracoastal Waterway is a lot bigger investment than buying a little runabout to trailer from here to there.

And, you know, the water is a dangerous place. And what you can see from the boat is only the top of it.

Little Ricky had his first column in the local rag yesterday.

I could not bring myself to read it. I didn’t want to ruin an otherwise okay Thanksgiving. Okay because my girlfriend’s convalescense from her recent hospitalization is pretty rough: she’s convalescing–that’s good; it’s not easy–that’s not good.

So I didn’t want to ruin it with Little Ricky Sanctimonious-orum.

Fortunately for me, Will Bunch saved me the trouble of backtracking and reading Little Ricky’s drivel.

Via Atrios.

. . . is a term referring to the day after Thanksgiving in the USA, a term I did not hear until I moved to the Greater Philadelphis Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Somehow, I have never been able to wrap my tiny brain around the idea of compulsively doing Christmas shopping on the Friday after Thanksgiving. Actually, I rather like shopping on Christmas Eve. There’s a certain desperation about last-minute shopping that appeals to me.

Karen Heller dissects Black Friday here.

(Aside–I don’t get lots of hits, but I know I do get hits from all over the place. How common is the term, “Black Friday” for the day after Thanksgiving in your part of the world?)

(Aside again–One of my neighbors has already decorated his yard for Christmas. He had his landscapers out to hang lights in his cedar tree. A little early, thinks I.)

About a week ago, I blogged about the futility and fatuousness of self-styled “diversity training,” which, frankly, I view as a fraud and deception foisted on the training consumer.

The local rag (the one to which I don’t subscribe because I want a paper that takes more than 5 minutes to read) had a good follow-up story today.

This quote illustrates what happens when bad training is implemented by incompetent trainers:

Freshman Ryan Schneer, who is majoring in chemical engineering, believes the diversity program is an attempt to force students to adopt university-approved ideologies on debatable matters. And he doesn’t like the aftermath he has seen.

Schneer, who is Jewish, said he is concerned for a friend on another floor of his Russell Complex dormitory who is a devout Christian. Schneer said his friend wound up standing alone on the “No” side of the room when students in the Residence Life program were asked if they approved of gay marriage.

“Everyone else was on the other side,” Schneer said. “He’s a great guy, a nice person, but I ran into some girls at a party and they talked trash about him. I asked them, ‘Is he a bad person?’ But they’ve already made their decision. People who are different or outspoken are looked down upon. Things like this are tearing up the ideological diversity this nation was founded on.”

Lanan, a geology major, said people who objected to the program have been wrongly accused of intolerance.

A program which is supposed to foster tolerance, but, which, instead, creates it, deserves any bad publicity that it gets.

(Full disclosure: I believe the evidence resoundingly shows that sexual orientation is born, not made, and, because it is born, not made, cannot be changed.)

In case of the student described in this piece: If, whatever his personal beliefs and attitudes, he treats all persons in the same way, who the hell cares what he believes? His beliefs are his own.

Only his behaviors are the concern of his family, his friends, and the larger society–and only to the extent they affect his family, his friends, and the larger society.

(In other words, if he wants to show one face to his family and friends and another face to the larger society, that is, so long as no one is harmed, his privilege. Where does common courtesy end and hypocrisy begin? When there is harm. If there is no harm, the duplicity, if such there is, is between him and God, but society doesn’t have a stake in it.)

The latest on the s(pl)urge:

The lack of political progress (in Iraq–ed.) calls into question the core rationale behind the troop buildup President Bush announced in January, which was premised on the notion that improved security would create space for Iraqis to arrive at new power-sharing arrangements. And what if there is no such breakthrough by next summer? “If that doesn’t happen,” Odierno said, “we’re going to have to review our strategy.”

Brig. Gen. John F. Campbell, deputy commanding general of the 1st Cavalry Division, complained last week that Iraqi politicians appear out of touch with everyday citizens. “The ministers, they don’t get out,” he said. “They don’t know what the hell is going on on the ground.”

Dan Froomkin has more.

I have been amusing myself today, in between cooling towers, by trying to think of anything that the Current Federal Administration has touched that hasn’t turned to shit.

The economy?

The Federal budget? (Oh, yeah, there used to be a surplus, before it was given away to the rich. Remember?)

The justice system?

The tax code?

Civil liberties?

The War in Afghanistan?

The War in Iraq? (See the opening citation.)

It’s the Midas touch.