"they get a quality education in lowell and it costs cheap"

proposals to raise student fees another $1500 at umass lowell have the local student body taking to the streets. (judging from the newspaper's choice of front page quotations, i'd say somebody there still has a sense of humor). it's also easy from it to conclude that the needs for our local affordable educational institution remain significant each and every day.

however, in preparing for my oldest's impending needs for tuition, fees, and room & board, and having reviewed the costs at the various educational choices at his disposal, i'm not sure if these kids really know what they're complaining about. put it off to a cranky old man bragging about the glories of a bygone era, but i put myself through four years at one of the most expensive private colleges in the northeast with a combination of scholarships, loans and year-round job income back in the day, and i can hardly look at what these kids are paying today and feel sorry. would i have chosen the same school today? no way. but i'd have felt like i had won the lottery if this is all i would have to pay for a solid college education. (umass lowell's physics and engineering departments are some of the more rigorous and will-respected around just for starters).

as a matter of fact, digging out my records from my senior year in 1982, i paid more then in un-inflation-adjusted dollars and cents than these umass lowell students are paying 27 years later with today's copious-like-snowflakes dollars, and earned less per hour than these kids can make at mcdonald's for just getting out of bed and showing up. oh, yes, i know indeed that it is very tough these days, and i don't mean to make light of that. my car cost me $500 and almost nothing to insure and gas up, for one thing, and rent and groceries and utilities were but a fraction of today's costs, too. not to mention that beer at the pub on wednesday nights (we could drink at 18 back then, too) started at fifty cents until ten o'clock, and then topped off at a buck til closing. so i know it's not apples to apples.

but, add it all up, and look at the money that doesn't exist in our state coffers to pay for things, and i'd say these kids still have it pretty good. yup, they're being asked to come up with another $30 a week for the privilege of their education, and it's going to hit some of them pretty hard. but, at today's costs for beer, we're talking about cutting back on relatively little to achieve it, and i'm sorry that i'm not feeling compelled to take to the streets with 'em, except to try to correct their grammar and punctuation, and admonish them to get back to class where they can continue to get more of what they lack.

nothing is more valuable than education. it shouldn't come as cheaply as its absence might be these days.

mr. sirk, i apologize

recently i became involved in a discussion regarding maudlin movies and whatever passes for "romantic" in hollywood terms. in that discussion i relayed my experience that, among all directors i had ever known, only douglas sirk was able to consistently scale heights of awfulness to which other directors could only aspire...

until today. until wednesday night, actually, when i had the god-awful misfortune (actually, don't buy the hyperbole--it was so bad it was funny, and laughing that sincerely at a movie is never a bad experience) to endure a 1946 doorstop of a movie called "a matter of life and death", directed, as partners in crime, by michael powell and emeric pressburger. it recalled to me a particularly horrible movie i had seen recently, "black narcissus", which also, inexplicably, gets high marks from a lot of movie fanatics, and, whatdya know, but the same pair of miscreants had directed that one, too.

what are the odds?

yup, this pair is now my pick for worst director of all time, (an achievement so immense, that no one man could have accomplished it alone, apparently), and I am confident in how these two films will stand testimony to my argument. so unbelievably bad, that you have to watch just so you can see if they can't top the last bad moment you just saw with the next one. here's how wednesday's movie opens: quoting classic english poets, the doomed and bravado-besotted bomber pilot engages the innocent and virginal (female) air traffic controller in an emotional conversation about being in love with her just from her inane "come in lancaster" air chatter. ("come in lancaster, i don't understand you"). wouldn't you know it, but when he survives against all odds and with the help of some metaphysical coincidence, he washes up on the very same beach where she is riding home on her bicycle the next morning. (cue to close up and clinch). what are the odds??? ;-)

the editing is poor, the lighting is worse, and the dialogue is so inane that you'll soon be doing just like the air traffic chick and saying "come in lancaster, i don't understand you". the makeup is ludicrous, especially on the gay french courier guy whose mistake it was that the pilot didn't buy it in a fiery crash in the first place, and if anyone can explain to me why it was necessary to place a completely naked boy, sitting butt-down in the sand on the beach when the pilot washes up, playing his little flute, i would sincerely appreciate it. (not the least of the constant homo-erotic references, but certainly one of the most jarring an unsettling). it's not art--it's cinematic backwash, and its particularly noissome at that.

so, mr. sirk, in summation, i apologize. having rock hudson romancing jane wyman in the autumn leaves (all that heaven allows) is NOT the most ridiculous classically-gay archetype of melodrama i've ever seen on screen. nope, this one, a matter of life and death, takes the ever-luvin' cake.

more coke v pepsi

this time, from pakistan: the AP is reporting that the pakistani supreme court has barred nawaz sharif from holding office because of prior criminal conviction. not content to stop there, they even overturned the election of sharif's brother, shahbaz, to the punjab assembly, ostensibly throwing him out as the head of the government in pakistan's most populous and wealthiest region. coincidence? (oh, yeah, and did i mention that nawaz and shahbaz are two of the most popular rivals to the teetering regime of asif ali zardari?)

this, to me, reeks of the same sort of evil that has the israeli legislature passing laws barring muslim citizens from office over questions of "loyalty".

disgusting--and the fact that we would invade a sovereign nation over far less than either of these examples (wmd my ass) makes me even sicker to my stomach.

if we are serious about spreading democracy, we have to start by holding our allies to the same standard to which we would hold our enemies. and, then, when we're done with that, maybe we might even take another look at our own electoral shenanigans (gerrymandering, voter fraud, automated voting machine insecurities, etc. etc. etc.) in the mirror, and resolving to do something about that, too.

democracy is a fragile thing.

happy birthday

while still married, my son's penurious parents would never have considered it, but the good news for my broken-homed progeny is that divorce can have its benefits all down the line. some of us have somehow found the freedom to choose to get ourselves the new rides we really want, while others can find themselves presented with other things of similar emotional uplift just for being who they are, and, ipso facto, well-worthy.

by way of background, it's fair to say, each of my three scions is as different from the others as perhaps could be. the first, as disinterested in automobiles as he could possibly be, as much for the anxiety of needing to navigate in order to get where he'd want them to go as for anything else, found GPS in his christmas stocking, much to his continued appreciation. as for other "traditional" teenage obsessions, he's his own young man, and one can forget video games and text message platforms as being of any interest whatsoever. he's just who he is. the second, however, too young to be indulged his classic teenaged automotive mania, can instead be indulged his classic teenage compulsion to communicate with his friends, and so he has.

the first reason this never would have happened under the old marital regime (and i'm also sharing full responsibility for my part in the old oppression--this isn't intended nor is it to be taken in any way as a spouse-bashing rant) is that the current piece of hardware is nowhere near verizon's "trade-in" time, and without the network subsidy, the prices on most handset equipment is scarily prohibitive. as a joint purchasing decision, such things would have been rejected out of hand in favor of other priorities. however, with a little help from my friendly neighborhood boy's toys shopkeeper, and perhaps as a little reward for our copious repeat business, it was possible to find a deal on one particular touch-screen and full-keyboard-for-texting widget at a price that wasn't too extreme ($150 if you're curious) and the economics of divorced parents in full touch with the importance of their children makes such decisions quite different in their outcomes, even while the amount of money available for such frivolities is far less than ever before.

but here's the thing--he is going to get more of an emotional lift out of this little macguffin than almost anything else tangible that i can imagine. (the love and attention and devotion of his father being the far-more-important intangible thing that i'm resolved that he get a piece of each and every day). so what would have previously been a reflexive "no" is immediately transformed into an indulgent "yes", and, voila, he gets instant hallway cred for having such a kick-ass new text toy, and the joy of using it to his heart's content. except while doing homework. and, i have to say, it's a pretty sweet little setup, complete with games and all sorts of cool gadgets. i'm a bit jealous...

best part is that the joys trickle right on down the line. whereas his little sister was previously limping along with a battery-compromised antique of a cell phone, now she gets to inherit the late-model setup her brother had been madly mashing in the meantime. she's tickled pink, he's madly ecstatic, and their father is wondering how it is that people can get so lost in being married that they lose who they really are, and the things that are really important.

in retrospect, i would have done SO many things differently...

oh well, never too late to start!

happy birthday, son

"war on"

if wall street ever sold stock in whatever our politicians declare war upon, i'd be first in line to buy some.

used to be, when we went to war, big things changed. the union jack in favor of the stars and stripes... emancipation from slavery... the fall of so many forms of fascism... but, recently, the changes, whenever luck has had it that there have even been any at all, are getting smaller and smaller, (saddam was a pretty small man in the grand scheme of things), and the things left unchanged that we're supposedly fighting against are getting stronger and stronger, and/or more pernicious. (drug cartels, terrorists, our economic malaise, energy dependence, etc.)

if i were king...

my radical agenda would be simple:

1) energy independence to solve our monetary, security and (potential) climate challenges via harnessing midwest wind and southwest sun and conducting it to the coasts where we're using all our energy. (the midwest is, btw, the place where we need jobs the most, so it's convenient that all the work building and maintaining our national and patriotic wind farm is right where it ought to be).

2) decriminalization of pot and many other recreational pharmaceuticals in favor of treatment to reduce demand, instead of scarcity to finance supply. this will have the corollary benefit of starving the columbian, mexican, taliban, etc. etc. etc. criminal terrorists further reducing our security issues, and it will also, via taxation, put us straight into the black for good, and pay ourselves out of this terrible mess into which we've gotten ourselves.

3) flat tax, to throw all those tax lawyers and corrupt politicians out of work who have made a huge cottage industry out of gaming our national treasury--make it so simple and inexpensive to pay taxes that everybody does it. first of all, if we're not fighting wars against terrorists and drugs and our citizens who would use them, by elimination of all three with one fell swoop, we won't be needing such a large federal budget, while all that tax revenue from sin is going to be bulging our coffers in no time. but, second of all, even at our current bogus budget levels, a legitimate flat tax which would fund our treasury at its current levels if the burden were truly shared would be between 12 and 15%. (how would you like a more than 50% tax cut?)

4) education and civil liberties would be the only business of the government that wasn't oversight and enforcement of law, and care for the elderly and others who cannot care for themselves. we'd throw in a few infrastructure projects, like our wind and solar farms, and things like the internet and such, but that's it. small govermnet and a free citizenry.

too bad those criminals in washington would never allow such things to happen, since it would take all the pork and profit out of their little racket...

why bailing out homeowners is both wrong, but also right

the previous post, or the next one if you're reading these first in blog order, made strident point of how insane it is for people to complain about the illogic of "bailing out" people who were irresponsible, if not outright frauds, because of our having already bailed out the wall street bankers to the tune of several hundred billion dollars, and how the whole thing is absolutely locking a barn door after the horse and all its eventual progeny have been stolen.

but as much as i abhor the whole concept, i am a billion times more inclined to bailing out homeowners who don't deserve it than i am bankers, if only for the fact that the same amount of money goes far further that way in terms of positive human impact. it's the same way i can feel far better about the billions requested by the failing auto industry, preserving as it will the jobs of millions of people, than the hundreds of billions soaked from us by the banks which, ironically enough, are just as likely to end up in one six figure bonus for one guy, than a dollar in the hand of six-figures worth of people who are actually working for a living.

yeah, i know, i'm painting with a pretty broad brush, and there are likely some very hard-working bankers doing some very good things for our economy, but for me it still remains a numbers game, which is something that a good banker is trained to understand.

we are america. each and every individual of us. if our money is being used to bail anybody out, (which, unfortunately for us, it is already decided is going to happen), it ought to be for *us* first, and, at that, the greatest number of us that we can manage to help with this assumed burden of debt that we'll all as individuals be paying back for the rest of our lives and nobody else.

the socialists are the politicians who have insisted that we do this bailout thing in the first place. (i thought reagan had routed the commies and socialists decades ago when he stuck it to the russians, but i guess we must have been mistaken because, paraphrasing walt kelly, we have met the socialists, and they is us). but if i'm going to be a party to socialism, which i would otherwise detest on principle of freedom, but nobody is asking me, then i'm still hopeful i can convince enough others in my boat (who have no practical way to resist it either) that we ought to do our socialism in the american all for one and one for all way, instead of the russian oligarchical one where some animals are more equal than others.

so how about it. let's help out the people for a change, because there are more of us, and as we have livelihoods by which we can raise and educate our children, there'll be that many more future engines of capitalism to put this train back on its tracks someday. rewarding the bankers and money managers who are simply more capable of stealing more money more quickly (right, mr. madoff?) isn't going to get us anywhere but more broke.

i would say i trust people who haven't made a career of stealing to be that much slower on the uptake on how to do it wholesale. it seems the least of all the evils on the table, anyway...

wake up, people

barack obama has proposed bailing out struggling homeowners with some of that money that they're printing these days down in washington, and now he's touched off a firestorm of righteous indignation that it might reward people for bad decisions if not outright fraud.

first of all, a nod to the logic--it's not wrong.

but, you see, right or not, it's got my jaw on the floor and i'm just plain amazed that THIS is what finally has people awake and complaining.

HAS ANYBODY BEEN PAYING ATTENTION???

the bankers have done far worse than any individual homeowner has ever dreamed possible, and they got their trillion-plus with nary a whimper of dissent, from both the previous administration and the present, and their respective republican and democratic supporters, whom we ought to just start calling "republicrats" to save time and print space, since they're both just the two sides of the same pork-addled-and-addicted DC coin that's been ruining this fair nation of ours for years...

(as i've often mentioned before, if you act in support of either party, then you are actually aiding and abetting the one you think and say you don't like, since, in actuality, it's the opposition to the other which keeps them both in such lucrative business, and if you can't see it, then you're both guilty AND fooling yourself about it, but, of course, as usual, i digress...)

so, back to the point:

if you feel it's not right to give a few thousand to an irresonsible mortgagee, then multiply that outrage A HUNDRED MILLION TIMES and ask yourself where you were when congress gave that much away to wall street without nary a shred of oversight. (not even an iota--one of those crimes of the bush administration that i can't believe isn't being prosecuted, which would be the handing of HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF YOURS AND MY DOLLARS to bankers proven by the failure of their banks to be at best incompetent, though, at worst and most likely, criminally fraudulent).

as they say, if you borrow a hundred dollars and can't pay it back, then it's your problem, but when you borrow a hundred BILLION dollars and can't pay it back, then it's the bank's problem, only, this time, the joke is on us because the "bank" is the federal treasury, or more accurately, the federal taxpayer whose entire lives will be lived in debt to the repayment of this whole stinking, fetid mess.

WAKE UP PEOPLE

trees by their...

in analyzing the emotions of a major purchase, it's not always easy for the purchaser to know which end is up for awhile, (e.g. it took me a decade or two in my marriage), but i couldn't help but notice that everything on my foot last night went into the net. (my misfit bunch of thursday night 50-somethings actually won a playoff game against a bunch of 30-year-olds, and i'm taking the lion's share of the credit, with their eager encouragement). my preferred analysis is that i'm pretty jacked up about my new ride, and it's all good.

i could feel it even riding around in the old bolt bucket last night--that feel of the road, and the simple pleasure of going somewhere, even if somewhere was more or less nowhere special. of course, decades from now we could be writing a different story, but i'm guessing that owning a two-seat mobile amusement park isn't going to be something that someone regrets.

it feels to me like this place and all that's in it feels to me. i drove into shangri-lowell last night going on midnight by my favorite route along the river, and gassed up down on dutton street while letting the snowflakes settle in and slowly melt in my hair. (i love winter, if i haven't mentioned it before). the spot that'll be just for me and my new ride was waiting, as were the boys (ben and jerry, if you haven't met the gerbils) and my guitars and, most humbling and exhilarating of all, even if only 1/3 of the full complement of wonder, my son... and he asked more about the car (he was a participant in the test driving yesterday, and i have to say i'm both proud and worried as a parent of a soon-to-be-driver that he could, from the passenger seat, tell the difference and articulate it between the ride of the miata and the ride of the s2000) and 1000 questions about when and how it was going to be picked up, cared for, driven, polished, etc. etc. etc. i think he knows, if he's patient, he's going to get a crack behind the wheel some day--he's already planning out the stick-shift driving lessons/practic that'll be needed...

me, i fell asleep to beautiful dreams of road trips and seatcovers thereof.

for a limited time only

the deal is agreed, (it's a good one), and all that's left is signing the paperwork and waiting to take delivery. the pictures likely won't last long, but peek at 'em while they're hot.

the ride will be outfitted for me with a new top, custom-fitted car cover, and, (at my extra expense, but you know how i am about such things), a brandy-new ipod-ready car tune setup that'll be able to compete with the noise of the wind whistling through my thinning hair.

call it a mid-life crisis, the rebound effect from too many years married, or whatever you will, but i'm going to be driving a rocket sled and loving every practically impractical minute of it. it is a honda, after all. yes, a turbocharged redline at 9000 and corner like its on rails honda, but a honda nonetheless.

doesn't get more practically impractical than that.

i even have just the seatcovers in mind... :-)))

woo hoo!

identification

i was profoundly moved by a piece i once read, written by a vietnam veteran, to review the events of 19 april, 1775, in and outside the city of boston. (for the life of me, i dearly wish i could remember the author and title, and i will strive to do so when i have more time). by way of my best-recalled synopsis, the author, as one who had bled in the rice paddies of vietnam and watched his brothers in arms die to uphold the cause of those patriot farmers who fell that day long ago, endeavored to relive the events of that same momentus day from the perspective of the british regulars, asked to jump out of creaky wooden boats into a tidal marsh and ford water up to their chest, with 125 pounds of kit, and in heavy woolen uniforms with wooden-soled shoes lacking right and left feet, and march 25 miles through enemy territory in an 85 degree swelter (can you imagine starting a hike like that in wet wool?) and endure near-constant small arms fire all the 25 miles back, erupting from every fence, rock and tree... (and to maintain good military order, all while having to leave wounded and dying comrades behind because there was no way to save them, and still survive the battle...)

the author realized his experience in the jungles of southeast asia, against a people determined to determine themselves, were most alike to that of the british soldiery, and quite unlike that of his people who doing the sniping 200 years before, and not the marching and the lion's share of the dying. i have always tried to hold that sacred and most honorable point of view whenever our best and our brightest are in the field, bleeding and dying for the very same principles that were bled and died for on the very roads i travel each and every day of my life, preserving my life and my liberty and my pursuit of happiness, and maintaining lincoln's last, best hope of earth for ALL her inhabitants.

i am always since reading that piece equally moved by the union jacks placed over the remains of the british soldiers fallen on their march as i am the stars and stripes over my most honored and revered patriots. perhaps it's because i understand that it takes two sides to define a struggle, and that the glory of one requires the ultimate sacrifice of the other just as surely as anyone's. maybe it's because i understand that the english were and are a free people by any relative measure in this cruel and dangerous world of ours, and "enemy combatants" would be the most polite term held out for traitors against their crown, (which we most assuredly were and are), which stood and stands for them and for all today as the emblem of the magna carta and the rights of englishmen.

we just believe our rights as americans are "more perfect", and we're not wrong about that, even while there is much still remaining about which we most assuredly are...

here are some of their words, which are now OUR words in this struggle against those who would tear us down.

the bill of rights

i'm no constitutional scholar, but the 17 uighurs currently "detained" in guantanamo (we have such nice words for things that authors like dumas chose to describe otherwise) seem to me to deserve better of our bill of rights than they currently enjoy. our previous administration split semantic geopolitical hairs and cowered behind excuses of citizenship and sovereignty (how we can possibly argue that our own laws need not apply wherever our flag is raised is one of the most mephitic examples of totalitarianism we've ever made of ourselves) and if this hasn't become orwell's animal farm and 1984 all rolled into one, it's the closest example i can think of short of our actually executing them for their inconvenience. (something which we restrict in only 18 of our 50 states over trivialities like diminished mental capacity, so why wouldn't we?)

were we to consider these animals to be as equal as others, here are some of the ways we have made traitors of ourselves to our constitution, our country, and our forces in the field fighting and dying to preserve them:

our first amendment protects religion, speech, press and assembly. i don't believe the uighurs were publishing their grievances, but the other three categories of rights seem to have been categorically denied to them when they were rounded up.

our second amendment about keeping and bearing arms in a well-drilled militia (the colonial meaning of the word "regulated" is no longer understood in our present-day common speech, so i've presumed to use a synonym) seems equally affronted by their round-up. (to be both swarthy and armed seems to be a serious crime to us these days...)

we'll give the third (quartering of troops) a pass, as i'm unaware of any requests for them to have taken in any of our GI's into their tents...

the fourth regarding search and seizure seems to be the one most grievously ignored: "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause..." yeah, i know, it's a war zone, but we've clearly acknowledged THESE WERE NOT ENEMY COMBATANTS. what we think we're doing "detaining" them is completely beyond me. (as if we don't have enough enemies in this world, we've taken to provoking more of them).

the fifth regarding due process would seem to be completely disrespected as well.

the sixth and seventh, promising speedy trial by jury? just as completely disrespected.

the eighth involving bail and a freedom from cruel and unusual punishment would seem to be at least in question.

the ninth and tenth, protecting all rights not ennumerated, and preserving to the people any power not delegated to their states or their federal constitution, would seem also to be somewhat relevant here.

so, let's see, how are we doing?

out of ten primary civil rights we fought and died to preserve for a government of and by and for the people, we've only failed to offend one of them here. i know all the apologists are going to flee for the cover of "they're not citizens!" and "they're not actually IN the united states!", but i call bullshit on that right here, and right now.

who are we? are we king george's minions, over which we would have an entire world fight to resist us, because we are denying them the very rights which we have insisted we are justified in killing to preserve for ourselves???

we are better than this. we are better than what our previous administration has caused us to be. (and, indeed, we are all culpable owing to our citizenship in this travesty).

we are a free people with the free will to insist upon what is right. this simply cannot be allowed to stand.

down to...

the 4-seat benz ragtop seems more and more to be less and less practical as an impracticality--it's 8 cylinders of overweight sluggishness (it's a heavy cruiser best suited for the highway where its top is absolutely the least useful or fun) that will get crap for mileage and cost an unnecessary amount to maintain. and all for what? a back seat that's barely comfortable in the first place?

on the other hand, with the money not spent on the benz in favor of something a little "less" (though less can be more, as we'll examine in a sec), the current underpowered piece of peoplemover might be kept around for passenging and toting of other stuff while a second car is kept in the garage for more enjoyable purposes.

and what about this ephemeral "more" that might be possible? i took a ride in a honda s2000 this afternoon and had my socks knocked off. it's a rocket sled on rails that red lines up over 9000rpm and has a neck-snapping turbocharger that kicks in around 5000. WOW. seats 2 and has luggage space for not a whole lot, but, WOW. it's also way less money and better on (regular instead of high test) gas and likely, as a honda, not to need a whole lot of care and attention beyond oil and windshield washer fluid for all the bugs that are going to get smashed into it. the ride and handling are as stiff as they are precise, and the short-throw 6 speed manual gear box jumped into gear way quicker than i was prepared to handle at first, but i got quickly used to it. i understand the mazdas give up a little speed and stiffness in favor of slightly better balance, so i'll be interested to compare one of those tomorrow. the short answer is that once you give up a need for a back seat, the open-air driving experience gets both eminently more practical as well as exponentially more enjoyable. that's the kind of math i can get into.

remaining is just a lingering curiosity for AWD options that come with four doors and trunk space, but without a top that comes off, (as with cars as well as women), what fun would it be?

lucky for me i have a plethora of indoor parking.

the terminal

somehow resulting from the chaos of afghanistan and iraq, the united states detention center in guantanamo bay, cuba, has long ago come by 17 uighurs who have never been categorized as enemy combatants, nor have ever been accused of doing anything AT ALL against the interests of the united states. (apparently, we just have them because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time while we were rounding up captain renault's "usual suspects", and now we just can't find our way clear to put them back since china of all countries considers them dangerous to their interests, and so has warned the entire world neither to take them in, nor let them out, and, apparently, we have not only suspended our constitution at the behest of terrorists, but now we're also taking marching orders from communists, too).

un-f'ing-believable.

for our part, we have a couple courts engaged in a pissing contest over who might have the authority to deal with them on an immigrant basis, even while there are ethnic uighurs in the us who have volunteered to serve as host families to sort this whole mess out, but, honestly, WTF???

that the previous administration is not up on war crimes charges in the hague over so many things continues to remain a mystery to me, but this here would seem to be one of a litany of indefensible offenses and affronts to our constitution for which we should at least consider having somebody in the old executive branch up on charges here in the US. (constitutional to begin with, but civil absolutely right afterwards--can you imagine being detained FOR NO REASON and refused release FOR YEARS because somebody didn't care for your ethnicity or politics???) but, maybe, observing points of citizenship, we believe that some animals are more equal than others...

who are we???

are we, like saddam, an outfit that incarcerates without cause and tortures at whim? on what basis did we overthrow saddam's government if not this? (don't say WMD, because we're the #1 miscreant in the world when it comes to WMD, and there are hundreds of thousands of dead japanese to attest to our being the only outfit in history to drop one of these things on a CIVILIAN POPULATION, and nobody's invaded us over it, least of all ourselves, though, sometimes, i wonder if that might some day become necessary...)

it's moments like these when there is no other thing to say other than i am ashamed of my government. (and, thanks, h.l., for conferring upon me "decent man" status for doing so). we have people fighting and dying to preserve something, and this is how we repay their service???

80 gigs

a gig is a beautiful thing. it can be a sublime musical evening (MT&TFM's and JK&TLO's recent gig at Toad, e.g.) or it can be the sum of 250 sublime musical parts. (MT's and JK's combined publically-released ouvre could be packed four times over into an electronic one).

yes, with the former as well as the latter, more is generally always better, and yet there are also prices to be paid for the luxury and this morning i'm facing a big one. i'd say two, since one of this morning's challenges is also bar-excess-related, but in this particular case it's not musical, but rather due to the soccer arena bar's playing the recent inter/ac milan clash on the big screen after our own equally-thrilling match, (ok, well maybe not quite, but it feels that way to us while we're playing), and our compulsion to douse the occasion, as we always seem to do, with beer. the other, however, is purely the consequence of, as jeffrey jones' emperor joseph II in amadeus would say, "too many notes".

you see, ipod libraries are finicky things. even when they're safely ensconced on an external drive in order to require no copying at all when hooking up a new computer, they still seem to lose their way on a number of things, including all those meticulously prepared playlists, as well as, i've come to discover, the little info/id tages on .wav files.

taking the last first, so to speak, i'd like to say once again to sony, "well played", though i have also, once again, emerged victorious. (nyah nyah). by way of background, it should be mentioned that i have successfully boycotted all sony music discs since discovering, to my once and temporary chagrin, that their drm-protected discs do not like to play nice with itunes. well, two can play at that game, and i have, indeed, unlocked the secrets of rachael yamagata's happenstance so that i can listen to the music that i lawfully purchased in the manner that i prefer. (via ipod). however, unrealized to me at the time, the little utility that i utilized to unlock the goods left the music files in .wav format, and not .mp3 or .aac or whatever else itunes likes, which wouldn't be of any consequence at all beyond the unnecessarily fat file sizes involved, except for, now that i've redone my itunes library a couple of times and noticed that, among all the other music i own, this is the one collection of songs for which the info/id tags (artist, album, etc.) refuse to come along automagically. what do you know, but .wav's don't seem to come with tags on them. note to self: convert RY's Happenstance to .mp3 at some point and fix this little annoyance once and for all. (and, as usual, sony, you can suck it).

i really shouldn't be so rude about sony, though, because their hardware people, as opposed to their content people, absolutely rock. (my new computer, for example, is a sony).

but this only brings us to the real source of this morning's procrastination: itunes playlists are easy to become disconnected from their source music, and fiendishly difficult to reconnect. this all wouldn't be so much of a problem except that when you set up a new itunes library, each and every pod (i'm currently maintaining 3 of them, which doesn't count all the kids') insists on needing to scrub itself clean and start over. this can be time consuming enough, but when 2 of the 3 widgets are so old that their batteries can't last as long as their syncs, it takes a lot of charge, sync, recharge, sync, lather, rinse, repeats before everything gets updated. and then, of course, you notice that all the nifty playlists are long gone, and you've got to set them all up again.

so i've got one of the old pods in one hand, (connected to the wall socket to solve the battery issue, but because i don't have my dual cord that allows simultaneous wall charging as well as usb porting that i lost in the divorce, it's still going to need the CSRSLRR treatment in a bit), and a thumb on the scroll wheel to trot down the list of songs on each playlist so that they can be faithfully dragged and dropped on the itunes library being operated by the other hand. this was all fun and games at 40 gigs, but now that i've gone 80, and the music library has burgeoned to the size of rhode island, (don't you love how sometimes the comparison to rhode island can imply diminutiveness, whereas, in other contexts, it can be used to convey implication of expansiveness?), it's taking me DAYS to get through it. (i'm only up to green day so far, and when you get to the L's and the prodigious quantities of led zeppelin and little feat involved, the process is undoubtedly going to bog down quite a bit more).

80 gigs is a s***load of music. i've only eaten up 56.80 gigs of mine, and it's still amazing how much that is. at some point, after all this is through, i'm going to sort my itunes library by song title and determine, once and for all, exactly how many versions of "motherless child" i own. (after which, we'll investigate "god bless the child" and maybe even "sweet child of mine", but then that last one only to ensure that that particular total remains safely at ZERO... and let me digress to ask WTF was VH1 thinking by putting GNR up so high on their "hard rock songs of all times countdown? ahead of zep??? puh-LEEZE). i'm guessing the winner from my collection will be "take me to the river", but who knows. lowell george recording and re-recording "willin'" so many times himself, and then having it covered by a few more are going to put that one well into the running, too.

i'm guessing, before too long, i'm going to be in the market for a 120 gig unit. (there's all that vinyl to be ripped, still, after all).

i love amiestreet.

quick HU update:

hi all,

i know you're as eager as i am to keep up with the prevailing winds among the heather unruh fan club... so, today's latest query used to link back to this site, (the de facto heather unruh fan club site it would appear), is "heather unruh twin sister".

yes, even though the bathing suit photos haven't yet appeared (that we know of) the hopeful springing eternal are already conjecturing about the possible existence of a second bespectacled beauty. with props to jimi h:

"cuz if my baby don't love me no more / i know her sister will"

amy's up early this morning

the new computer is a big hit all around. it's convenient that being the parent of teenagers during a school vacation week means uninterrupted free computer time first thing in the morning, or i'd never be getting a shot at it. yesterday it was practical, but today it's on to nothing but the fun stuff.

yes, the pragmatist in me made sure the first installation was quicken (have to make sure i can pay for the thing after all) but right after that it was itunes before the eager hordes of pubescent chatmongers descended on the macguffin. today, in delightful augmentation of my itunes installation, it's the DAK vinyl-ripping suite that goes along with my handy-dandy little turntable mixer. (necessary to get the voltage and volume levels just right for pc audio in). yes, this is the little sweetheart rig that made possible amy being home tonight, complete with cheesy 80's organ and "power" chords on the fuzzy guitars that aren't so much powerful as "cute" these days. (hey, it's my arrested childhood development, i can listen to what i want). first order of business is to send a copy of amy along to a friend of mine who carries a soft nostalgic spot for the partridge family...

and the computer is already paying for itself--if i wasn't tinkering around with audio software i'd probably be down at the car dealer's right now getting sold a new car. boys and their toys are, indeed and thankfully in this one case, single-threaded.

whats better than bowling in billerica in billerica?

why, that would be salisbury beach on salisbury beach! (actually, on rings island, but there's no need to be technical this close to the real deal).

melvern taylor and his fabulous meltones rocked the eponymous beachfront community this past friday night, and it was my-t-fine. the venue was stipers grille & inn, and the inn part will come up again in a sec, so don't worry while we talk about the grille for a bit. as for the name of the place, observing that the road in goes right past a strip joint, it's convenient to be precise about the name of the place (stripers, not strippers) when talking about it with web strangers and special-needs relatives. (had to laugh that such came up in conversation with another party guest). the bar is a generously proportioned room-centering monster, and the food (sampled by my twin brother, who's not actually my twin, nor my brother, but when you share a birthday and similar tastes in music things are ok to be expressed closer) smelled wonderful. (go grille).

as for the inn part, it was my highly-entertained privilege to have been sought out by a 37 year old ingenue who informed me, quite loudly so as to have been clearly heard over the music, that she had herself a $40 room downstairs and would i like to come see it with her. now i'm not trying to imply that the rooms were $40 rooms in quality or appearance, (though i never saw any, so i suppose i can't say for sure), but, knowing the owners, she had apparently been offered a great deal on one, which was, i think, her way of trying to imply that she hadn't booked herself one to be using it as bar bait so much as had one to be frugal. you know me--i'm not one to give any credit for semantics, so it was all the same to me. the fact that women of a certain age (or any age, for that matter) do this sort of thing has always seemed alien to me, but now that its been happening with such regular frequency, i'm beginning to understand that it's just the way the world has become to be these days.

i tried to be a gentleman about it in two ways, the first by declining to take advantage of someone so clearly into their cups. you can give me credit for being a much better man than i used to be in my 20's, or you can choose pessimism to note that my first obligation as the driver was to get my twin bro back to shangri-lowell. (though i will also point out that it was twin bro's amusement to insist that he'd be happy to wait in the car just to be a funny guy, so i'm giving myself full credit for better sense and a thumbs up for the joke). but, either way, it was just not my preference to be sipping the sloppy seconds of a whole flock of grey geese (poured very liberally into schooner glasses so that it wasn't so much cranberry juice as just a faint tincture used as a mixer) and it was back to 495 for the ride home.

oh--yeah--in the meantime, my second gentlemanly impulse was to offer the windfall, soused as she may have been, to another acquaintance among the retinue present who has bemoaned in the past there being no good hook-up options left for him in shangri-lowell for having, or so he says, done just about all the available ones already. i'm not sure if he completely understood the full humor of it as it was intended, (maybe i was inspired by twin bro's humorous example), but, either way, to his credit as well, our poor ingenue was destined to pass out alone, and so off she went.

so, in summary, the show was great, (i was even able to snap up one of the full color event posters from the bar to add to my collection), and the crowd was fun, and to be able to add salisbury beach in salisbury to my bowling in billerica in billerica is already something in and of itself before we even get into the fun of watching the old folks dancing (he in his western shirt with the bucking broncos above the piping, and she in her thick-as-your-thumb glasses and overly-ample cheek rouge and push-up bra) and talking to the guy who runs a karaoke dj business with his other drunken irish buddy when he's not single-handedly keeping multiple stripers bartenders employed.

and a good time was had by all.

stimulation

today's stimulation took the form of a brand new sony vaio all-in-one desktop pc. the going on eight year old dell (256M RAM, can you believe that?) was running slow as jason varitek (sorry, tek, it's just gotta be said), and it really was about time. the new rig carries 4G RAM and a dual-core 64bit CPU to eat it up. the guts (everything but the keyboard and mouse) are all packed neatly behind the 20" screen, and the whole thing plugs in with a single power cord. perfect for condo living.

goodies to be investigated include an on-board video camera and dvd-burning capabilities. goodies already appreciated include on-board wireless networking and a plethora of usb slots for connecting extra drives and printers and what have you. (actually, the printer needs to wait because its cable doesn't do usb, and the new one needs to be pending the forbearance of ups, but the backup drive with the itunes library is all set to go).

i don't mean to be bragging, but everybody needs to feel good about stimulation, and i'm no different.

my stimulus check

i make too much money to have qualified for last year's "stimulus" check from the geo dubya bush administration. ($600 wouldn't have made any significant difference to my standard of living, so no big loss there, and i'm glad that those for whom $600 makes a bigger difference might have been given the chance to make better use of theirs). the good news for me, however, is that i'm getting another version of a stimulus check soon, and it's many orders of magnitude larger.

see, my ex and i invested in real estate awhile back, and, as part of the divorce, it was agreed last year it was best for us to liquidate. (no other way to cut a house in half and make anybody happy). there was no way for us to avoid a loss on the transaction, which was made even greater by the costs of capital improvements undertaken while we owned the place, but for every cloud there is a silver lining, and ours this year is going to be right there at the top (and, even better, at the bottom) of our 1040's.

no, this year, which otherwise would have been like all the other years except for our coincidental little economic meltdown, the irs will not get to pocket their usual lion's share of box #2 from my w-2. i imagine the story is going to be very similar across a very large number of this year's returns.

a couple of thoughts: our congress has done an extremely poor job of managing the tax windfall enjoyed during the boom years. instead of putting large amounts ahead for this inevitable downturn, we have spent like drunken air national guard awol's and put ourselves in a double hole. because we and our government are not only going to have to make do with far less this year for the normal day-to-day workings of our government, as reflected by all the capital losses and job losses over the past year, but we're also going to find ourselves right there on the hook to pay back all the debts we're running up from the largest crock of pork barrelling there's ever been in the history of the world. (i bet even fdr would blush).

it's sickening when you think about it.

oh well, me and my little tax refund check are going to have to do our best to muddle through. trust me, it's all going to debt retirement and as cushion for the fast-possibly-approaching rainy day. the only stimulation i have in mind right now is catching melvern taylor and his fabulous meltones up in salisbury tonight, and going light on the bar tab since i had my share at toad last night--and wasn't mt&tfm great, and wasn't sa--- ooops, the anonymous trumpet muse great, (too funny how melvern had to catch himself from actually introducing her), and wasn't jen kearney & tlo great, and wasn't carl great, (had to nod yes when i was asked if he was one of those cultural icons like cher who doesn't need a last name), and wasn't the whole thing great--and because saving my wallet will coincidentally save me from risking any unfortunate conversations with state troopers on the way home.

life continues to be good.

one last thing

not all arabs are muslim, and not all israelis are jewish. (though one of the jewish extremist parties in israel is trying to legislate that last one away, which, if i might digress, ought to have all clear-thinking americans on high alert for it's echoes in our own past, and, yes, i mean you mr. mccarthy).

while we're at it, not all muslims are arabs, and not all jewish people are israelis.

which is to say, all people tend to generalize, and it's a very slippery slope.

while they're asking the vatican to clarify their frocking of a priest who somehow claims that all those ovens found with remains of dead people in them by american and russian soldiers near the end of world war two are, maybe like dinosaurs are supposed to be to strict readers of the old testament, figments of satan's imagination, maybe we should all take a moment to ask ourselves what our prejudices really are, and resolve as diligently as we can to confront them and to banish them.

we all have 'em. it comes with being human. it's what we do with them that defines us as honorable men and women or otherwise.

semitism

the middle east would appear to be this century's balkans. (the balkans, for those unfamiliar, are wherefrom sprung world war one, among many other travails of the previous century). which is not to say all was sunny in the lands of shem's scions back then either, but we're clearly breaking new ground these days, and i can't think of any greater genie not properly bottled.

which makes a good point to point out that "semitic" is a word that literally means "descended from shem", (you know shem--he was one of noah's boys), and it includes (ironically, given the mess in the middle east) both jews AND arabs.

the reason i make a point of pointing this out is that it would appear that fewer and fewer people these days understand the origins of the term, and what it really means. it's the troublemaker in me that's led to point out that the jewish portion of shem's descendants have made quite a cottage industry around crying "anti-semitism" whenever their interests are harmed, which isn't something they're not entitled to do, and is also NEVER meant to imply that having six million innocent people killed during the second act of the balkan kerfuffle is in any way to be marginalized, minimized, or--and i can't believe i even have to type something like this--denied. but it is to point out that the holocaust has somehow found itself intertwined with the term "anti-semitism" in the popular lexicon, and it's done an unfortunate disservice to the greater concept because it loses sight of the fact that the arabic portion of shem's descendants haven't these days been much better characterized or treated.

my fear is that we've set up another coke vs. pepsi situation where folks are entreated to pick a side, and end up harming everyone because of it. (much like we're allowing ourselves to be distracted by blue vs. red vs. democrat vs. republican while both halves of our elected officialdom are looting the treasury). i've often found that people defending the memory of the holocaust are rarely those i feel properly concerned about the humanitarian crisis in gaza. i've also often found that people alarmed about police abuses against muslim youth in europe are rarely those taking a stand against criminals lobbing explosives at civilian settlements across the border from gaza. and, yet, the way i see it, those innocents on both sides of that gaza fence will never see a moment's peace until both of those other sides stand up for the other, and lead us to do the same.

here in the us, you can't board a plane wearing a shirt with arabic lettering on it. (that's just one of anti-semitism's many gifts to the erosion of our civil liberties). just once i'd like to see the anti-defamation league hop on something like that. just once. also here in the us, too many continue to endure desecration of synagogues, temples and gravesites. where is the outrage of the mullahs? i ask you, where???

actually, i know the answer to both questions. it is we, the civilized majority, who bear the responsibility for both. equally. we are responsible to be outraged at abuses against ALL people for their ethnicity and religion of any kind. (we'll get to sexual orientation someday, i sincerely hope).

heaven forbid in the meantime someone finds themselves a gay arab convert to judaism...

stimulus

at some point, "stimulus" must become "beating a dead horse with a stick", and i'm almost afraid to look too closely at the beast (our economy) our elected officials are trying to prod. are we all mad???

i'm no college business school educated economics expert, (ok, well, maybe i *am* college business school edumacated, but that still leaves the expert part unproven, just like it does with all the rest of the folks blathering at me from the evening news who were also college business school edumacated, so where were we?) but too much financial loosey-goosey can't possibly be best undone by a trillion dollars more of it. what the f are we thinking???

some ideas make profound sense to me--like observing (as have al gore and others) that our triple threat problems of national security, energy dependence, and economic meltdown are all interconnected, and like concluding that owing to our limitations of resource that the solution to all three needs to be similarly interconnected. well, somebody in technology review this month observed that it would cost about $400 billion to build out the energy infrastructure necessary to power our ENTIRE COUNTRY with the sun from the southwest and the wind from the midwest, so, hearing the "one trillion" number from the lips of everybody on all sides, i can't help but think, "great, that leaves six hundred billion left over"!!!

but wait... nobody is talking about energy independence in 10 years and powering our entire country from our own sources and resolving our sovereign debt, balance of payments and geopolitical quagmire problems in one fell swoop... (why the f not???) everybody is talking about which and whose pork barrel we're going to fill with a trillion dollars worth of non-energy-independent slop.

h.l.mencken once opined that democracy was the theory that the people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. sobering thought. (he also observed that every decent man is ashamed of the government under which he lives, so there's hope for me yet). but his quote that sticks closest to me this morning is the one about every normal man's eventual temptation to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. (you go, h.l.). i, for one, am so disgusted by this whole security/energy/economy debacle, and by our party political system that has promulgated it, and the red and blue (purple) faced idiots who have been spawned by the process who won't stop chicken-littling the country every chance they get about it and everything else, that i'm not sure i know whether or not its time to break out my mencken "plan b" that includes an ak 47 and the most uncivil of disobedience. (patience, dan shays, patience).

lucky for me, i have a massage this afternoon, and ukulele music tomorrow, and a vacation all next week through which to try to get a better grip.

hudu voodoo hulu

anything advertised by tracy morgan is going to have an immediate advantage where i'm concerned, and hulu.com's little splash during the superbowl makes for a great example. that whole rotting your brain thing is perfectly suited for me, too.

so it was without horror that i discovered last night that my tivo season pass priorities had (once again) thwarted my desire to watch the most recent episode of heroes with my son. i'm not looking for a free pass on the deserved ridicule that such should have been our priority, but tv and bad tv are, after all, somewhat synonymous, and why else would a teenager and his teenage-minded dad want to tune in? (cue tracy morgan).

so we got the rescheduled episode of big bang theory instead, which was, as usual, pretty funny, and went to bed comforted by the thought that hulu.com would be there for us tomorrow after school. (after the homework but before the hockey game, of course). it's a great concept. taking advantage of the networks' and film distributors' collective inability to figure out how to organize and deliver content at a profit on the net, hulu aggregates and streams all of the above and more directly to your desktop just for the asking. last night's heroes episode, for example.

it's what i want, when i want it, (a beautiful concept), and something that i'm glad tracy morgan had the generosity to tell me all about so i could enjoy it, rotted brain and all. yum.

what the people are thinkin'

albert collins didn't care what the people were thinkin, ("i don't care / what the people are thinkin / i ain't drunk / i'm just drinkin") but statcounter and other freely available internet utilities make it pretty easy for anyone else who might have a curiosity about how it is that people might end up taking a peruse at their blog postings.

so, in the going on three years that i've been putting stuff out there, sometimes two and three a day, and of all the topics i've covered in my rambling no-sense-is-best prose style, can anyone guess what is the #1 (and there is hardly an effective #2 to compare to the magnitude of it) subject that draws random readers to this nonsense?

aich eee ay tee aich eee are, you en aich are you aich

(i don't dare type it out, lest i perpetuate the madness by trying to resist it).

ok, i can't help it: heather unruh.

yup, heather unruh's glasses would appear to be the fascination of boston. no kidding. and not just her glasses, but how tall she might be. and what she looks like in a bathing suit. (of course in a bathing suit, even though she's a newscaster, or, perhaps *because* she's a newscaster--you know this is the internet, right?). don't forget naked. (a small but determined subclass of the curious). no matter that my blog can't answer any of those questions except, and i'm giving myself credit here, to serve as the very first source anywhere on the net to note that heather starting wearing her glasses on the news. (which i figured out by trying one of those queries myself the other day). i mean, i know i said i thought the glasses were hot, but, geez, you'd think her publicist or somebody else with a real clue would have picked up on this tsunami of curiosity and done something with it instead of leaving me to be the (apparent) best source on the subject.

yup, if you took all the queries on all the other possible words that have led people here, and added them up, with the single exception of melvern taylor, (who makes a very creditable showing as #2), you'd have what amounts to a rounding error on the number of heather unruh queries.

too funny.


oh well, maybe someone perving for ms unruh will trip across a melvern reference on here instead, and find themselves redeemed by it...

until then, yup, heather wears glasses and looks damn fine doing it.

now get to the melvern taylor show up at toad on thursday night and REALLY live!

heroism, "winning", and proper respect

kurt warner played brilliantly in his third and most recent super bowl, even if not perfectly, and he came up, like he did on his second and previous brilliant time, just a handful of points short. he knows (i hope) that he played no more brilliantly than either of thost times when he enjoyed the good fortune of winning on his first try, but that sometimes there is such a thing as reality (and the other team) that has something to say about results. in my book, nobody should be any less feted for such efforts, nor held to be any less of a hero. in fact, given the effort it takes to do what's right and ones best without similar hope of success, i'd suggest that it makes such folks even more of a hero in such circumstances. (on the subject of un-superbowl-winning football players, ask me sometime about stanley morgan, who is the ONLY nfl player to ever gain 10,000 yards while averaging over 19 yards per catch, almost five full yards per catch more than the estimable and multiple-superbowl-winning jerry rice, who had the better fortune to be catching his from the likes of joe montana and steve young, making, in my crude mathematics, stanley much more of a hero to me than jerry could ever be to any niners fan, but i digress).

captain sully sullenberger's comments on his successful water landing were also interesting to me in that he deferred any talk of heroism to the idea that he and his crew were simply doing well what they and countless other pilots and crews have always been well trained to do, no more and no less. of course we have no trouble recognizing through that modest smoke screen the words of a true hero, but i would suggest that his good fortune not to run into a random river barge once having made the irreversible decision to go for the hudson as opposed to teterboro has as much to do with his ultimate success as anything else.

we americans have a hard time distinguishing such finer points, but my most recent blatherings were never meant to mistake them. to put in in comparative terms, i would say that "nation building" is something that i find disgusting to hear whenever it is uttered from the mouths of self-serving and human-life-sacrificing politicians who are running their political agendas at the expense of what is possibly right in the face of what is rightly possible. HOWEVER, "nation building" as the incremental result of every bead of sweat, drop of blood, and second spent away from loved ones invested by our armed services is the most heroic of undertakings and deserving of no end of our accolades, regardless of its ultimate success. imagine that sully had *nowhere* to put his airplane safely. would he have been in that moment any less of the man we know him to be today???

there are those in the military who are (likely rightfully) concerned about the importance of "success" (i.e. "winning") to the morale and efficacy of the efforts being put forth on the ground in iraq and afghanistan. they want a whole plane of survivors, both on the bird and on the ground, and in the us armed forces and among the civilian populations of those countries where they remain in harms way. i understand that. but i also understand that they quite likely have been given a losing position even before they started by their civilian master (the thankfully ex-president of the united states, geo dubya bush) and it is critically important that we get the contest put back into a proper context before it is too late.

we shouldn't be mistaking a fool's errand (my word for iraq, and not meant to imply it's anyone else's, because there are many who rightfully disagree) for those heroes who will undertake it for all the right and best reasons. tennyson regaled us with his tale of the six hundred, and glorious charges of light brigades shouldn't seem to us any more glorious or important than the case of a solitary parent who is called away from their own children so that they might serve to protect someone else's. heroes all.

but for those who would give the order, there is a far higher standard of heroism.

our civilian leaders have not, to my way of looking at things, passed that sniff test as far as our engagement in iraq is concerned, and that is a profound shame on all of us.

connecting some dots

music fans and barma-angst fans and lowell-icana fans can skip this one, but i've read a couple of things recently that clicked a little bit for me, so i wanted to write 'em down.

one was a thoughtful summation by the new englander about how impossible-to-quantify things like the amount of social trust that exists within a community can have a profound effect on its workings. another was a thoughtful forward of a washington post piece (yes, i know, conservative readers who know who you are, if it's in that liberal post rag thingy it's not normally to be trusted, but i'm putting an asterisk on this one because it was forwarded to me by the author of right-side-of-lowell who swears he's not one of those L-word people, and i'm willing to take him at his word based on many things including his experienced-based preference for the f-16 over the f-15 for purposes of general geopolitical diplomacy). it should also be noted that mr. right was also the forwarder of the original piece that prompted mr. new englander to opine on his blog, so if you're looking to assess blame for having to put up with me opining this morning on my blog, i think you know where to start. ;-) the third is on the front page of the lowell sun, where is told the account of an author's presentation in chelmsford of his experience building schools in afghanistan.

so where was i?

oh--for lack of a better word or two, "nation building".

see, i'm profoundly uncomfortable with the projection of american power overseas for social purposes. i get the wmd rationale, (were it only true instead of grounds for plausible war crimes charges in the hague regarding the us in iraq, but i digress), but i truly do not get how we feel like we can spread the virus of democracy via the point of a gun. (i LOVE the way the newenglander put it--"jamming the pointy end of an M-4 into someone's face and telling him to start reading tocqueville"). by way of explanation, i have read literally every book on the american revolution i have been able to get my hands on, and the things that have jumped most prominently out to me from those pages are that we had two extremely important things going for us here back in the 1700's that exist almost nowhere else in the world where democracy is lacking, either then or since.

the first is the rule of law. by this i don't mean the rule of power in the name of "law", (fascism by any other name that's not totalitarianism), but a true adherence to a set of written understandings that are (reasonably) fairly assessed for and against all regardless of station. in my definition this extends to land/home ownership and other enforceable and reliable property rights, as well as confidence in ones personal safety, both from criminals as well as the state. (nods back to the newenglander about how the absence of this necessarily destroys social trust, and my own righteous indignation that many people in gaza, as well as those in many urban us neighborhoods, can't go down to the corner store without the reasonable assumption of being harmed). here's it's also noteworthy to observe that such (reasonably) fair assessments do not even have to be absolutely reasonable nor fair, as our own us constitution's slavery & 3/5's abomination, not to mention complete disenfranchisement of women, are hardly reasonable or fair by any stretch of even jesse helms' imagination, but we were still able to strive to continue to overcome both, and it seems to still be going in a positive direction, so fingers crossed and props to the founders.

the second is prevalent public education. again observing that this was hardly universal back in the us colonial day, it's still noteworthy to point out that the populace at large here was educated, and could read and form informed opinions about their situation, which is also not the case is most spots where democracy is absent in the world today.

so where does this leave us vis-a-vis the us military's massive social projects in iraq, afghanistan and elsewhere?

i would say, absent rule of law and a widely and consistenly educated population, we're spinning our wheels. we'd of course like to believe that everyone in the world believes in the same truth, justice and the american way ideals that superman and all of us do, but the truth of the matter is that inequities in the basics of property rights, personal safety and access to education (and resulting opportunity) are going to undermine us at every turn.

here's what i think: if i were living in iraq, or afghanistan, or gaza, or darfur, or most anywhere on the horn of africa for that matter, as well as countless other places in the world, i would put my interest in food, safety and shelter (after all, maslow's hierarchy gets into both of those long before it gets into self-actualized ideals of democracy and other ephemera) well ahead of whether or not me and my enemies down the street are able to trust ourselves far enough to settle our differences via plebescite. and if a foreign army showed up and told me how to go about getting that vote thing settled, i think myself and a whole bunch of my other thoughtful neighbors would still be on the fence about how to act, given that publically siding with the wrong bunch has been proven from experience to get folks killed quite reliably. (speaking of book learning, just looking out ones window at the aftermath of ied's, white phosphorous incendiaries, rocket-propelled grenades, land mines, cluster munitions, not to mention just plain old bullets, is, i'm sure, a very educational experience).

so anyone who tries to sell me "welcomed as liberators", or "spreading democracy", or any other of a number of extremely well-worn geopolitical phrases, is going to have an extremely tough sell on their hands. i simply do not buy it. yeah, it's theoretically possible, just like it's theoretically possible to police the mountains of afghanistan if you were given enough billion policemen, but the costs in terms of dollars, not to mention the lives and limbs of the best and the brightest of our armed services, who are, after all, simply the best and the brightest of our children and our brothers and our sisters and our parents, is far too high. far, far, far, far (a trillion fars) too high.

if we ought to be exporting anything, it ought to be, after food and shelter, the means for education. that's where it all starts. everything else among our high-minded ideals we should be looking at logs in our own eyes (katrina certainly wasn't anything over which to be proud) and providing all that sort of thing for our own people who still lack it. yes, we'll still be compelled (or at least we should) by humanitarian disasters in places like darfur and gaza to send the us marines and all their other service branch brethren to go and kick the unrighteous ass of all those who terrorize others at the point of a gun. but that's where it ends. in and out. just like kuwait was during bush sr's tenure. he always worried he should have "finished the job" straight into baghdad, but i say, observing the results of the cock-up by the fruit of his loins, he stopped his tanks at just about the right place. yes, the iraqi people deserved better for themselves than they were getting under saddam, but that's THEIR fight as long as they have a sovereign government against which they are not rebelling. (the point at which france came to our colonial aid, btw, and not before).

we won the cold war, after all, not through force of arms. (arms, also, i know, but not *force* of them--just the support of the threat/deterrence of them). continuing improvements in the lots in life of eastern europeans are not from itinerant nato or us nation-building armed invasions, but by trading with them the means to continue to make their own progress.

think back on all that we've been through with our own government. slavery for example. it took us a civil war and almost 150 more years after that before we saw a reflection of any measure of equality at the top of our power pyramid. but we're elbowing our way into places in the world which have had their present governments for far less of a fraction of that time and demanding of them more than we were able to achieve in almost 200 years. (180+ years before we even had voting rights fairly allotted). why do we think we can do that???

the benevolent & protective order of elks

it's no complaint to say that some ideas are far too perfect for any potential reality to match them. seeing melvern taylor and his fabulous meltones at an elks club on a saturday night is certainly one such theoretical occasion, though i will say, by being serenaded among the elks' warm-up PA tunes with things like queen's "good old fashioned loverboy", you have to believe there are about a million potential realities that still wouldn't have measured up to the one to which we were treated last night.

maybe it's because the trumpet goddess declined her solos in favor of anonymity beneath the bright lights of elkdom... maybe it's because the wall of elk photo fame (all those old heavyset white guys with dark framed glasses and short haircuts--you know the lineup) was so far upwards towards the ceiling overhead that you couldn't really get a good look at them... maybe it was just because the whole place was too big and too *not* what you would have preferred it to be... though, judging by the parking lot, there were a lot of other elks taking advantage of their private bar somewhere else in the complex, so it's fair to say we never really got a look at the sanctum sanctorum.

but, despite any rumormongering that could ever be suggested to the contrary, we're splitting the hairs of perfection here and not concentrating on the reality of things, which is that the music was and is wonderful regardless, and there's nothing not to like about watching folks pitch beanbag horseshoes while melvern sings about bowling in billerica while no-fooling actually being IN billerica. i would not have traded the opportunity for the rest of my life to be able to tell the story of being there for any other potential saturday night. if anyone else thinks they have a concert scenario that tells better than this one will, you go right ahead and suggest it, and we'll trade anecdotes. from the substance-enhanced ever-cheerful t-shirt guy, to the charming five-year-old obviously-well-trained ballet dancer (to see her inspired expression of the music was *great*) for whom the women at my table were universally wringing their hands that she might be imprinting badly for dancing with the t-shirt guy, to the endless collection of characters throughout the evening munching down on the warehouse-store-sized bags of potato chips and pretzels at every table, the ambiance was as good as you could really expect it to be, and still be in this universe of reality.

AND, all that and draft bass ales at the worthen as a nightcap which were cheaper than the buds in a bottle they were selling at the elks club. (i told you, the story that can be told is a formidable one).

more later--gotta get to soccer!

rrrecords

rrr records

mmm

buried within the last post was an altogether insufficient plug for rrrecords on central street in lowell. having searched more than a quarter century for an impossibly obscure piece of vinyl, i can't begin to tell you how elated i was to find that ron could pull it off his magical shelves in less time than it took for me to describe to him that for which i sought.

and it sounds exactly as i remember it.

the whole thing has once again motivated me to dust off the mixer to hook the turntable back up to the pc so i can rip the object of my musical affection straight down to my ipod, and that's yet another good thing ensuing from an entire litany of good things, that all started when the impossible was made possible in the best place on earth.

thanks, ron, and thanks, bosstown records, for being yet two more links in a musical chain between a boy and yet another one of his many muses.

"it's always half the fun
anticipating the one
who makes you laugh and cry"

amy's home tonight!!!

shangri-lowell -- the best place on earth

many of you have heard me say it, but it always seems to bear repeating--i live in the best place on earth.

today, after putting in a long (cough cough) day at the home office, i decided to venture forth and do some errands. i had already been out a couple of times earlier: once to drive a friend to the train, another time to put out the recycling bins, and though it was a little chilly, it's my favorite kind of weather, so what's not to love. so far just another beautiful day in the neighborhood.

my first stop was the mail room downstairs, and i know it's less sensible for me to grab mail on my way out instead of back in, but i'm all about the instant gratification about such things, and i can never wait. sometimes things fit into my pockets, and sometimes they don't, but it's a small price to pay for what i want when i want it. so what did the us postal service see fit to deliver to me today? well, waiting for me in my little locked mailbox was a white tyvek bag, the contents of which have better words silk-screened onto them that could ever be found to describe it: a black cotton t-shirt bearing the inscription "shangri-lowell, the best place on earth".

i don't mean to brag, but does anyone have anyone who loves them more than that?

(i cannot wait to be wearing it tomorrow night at the benefit mt&tfm show at the elks club in billerica, and it'll be even better than the time i was at the show in portsmouth wearing the fresh killed poultry one).

but, enough about t-shirts, next came serendipity of the most sublime sort as i took an unusual route towards the train station, which was not to intend to go to the train station, but the industrial clothing outlet in the rustic mill building next door to the train station. you see, my favorite flannel lined cotton canvas shirt had finally begun to give up the ghost, (once cotton fabric starts to break down it's remarkable how it does it so widely across an entire garment, and, in this case mine had from the sleeves to the collar to everywhere in between, and it was becoming critical that a replacement be procured asap, because i wear the thing almost everywhere), and i further needed some replacement boot laces for my favorite work boots, and i figured i could hopefully kill two birds with one stone and enjoy a nice, brisk walk in the process. flipping a mental coin instead of taking the usual more-direct route, i opted instead for a little stroll around the canal and up central street just because.

on central street in downtown lowell is a remarkable little audio brigadoon known as rrr records. it's never open on any discernable schedule, and, in having lived here a year its fair to say i had assumed it wasn't hardly open at all. but there it was today, with the lights on and the door unlocked as i walked past, and an inspiring thought crossed my mind that compelled me to stop in my tracks and return to the door in order to open it. you see, back in 1981 or thereabouts, my boston music fandom knew no bounds, and it most naturally extended to a remarkable little combo fronted by a trio of zamchecks (erika, betty and mark) known as "the make". (guitars by fritz drayton, because, you know, to me, it's all about the guitars, but we'll give some love to dean cassell and jim treacy on bass and drums, too, so nobody feels left out). the make weren't particularly famous among the retinue at bosstown records, just a good, honest band playing good, honest music, but they were talented enough to have put together a little ep called "democracy", and a tasty little hit single contained therein entitled "amy's home tonight".

how or why do i remember all this, you ask?

i'll tell you. i've been walking in the wilderness for 28 years... 28 years... because i made the fatal mistake once of putting off my purchase of said ep for just long enough for it to be sold out and run out of print. (such pressings didn't last long, and there weren't any mp3's to tide us fanatics over, either). by coincidence i had even run across a copy of it while canoodling with one of the dj's at the wellesley college radio station a couple of years later, but my motivation for sex had trumped any capacity i might have had for larceny at that moment, and even when they unloaded all their vinyl years later, and i was prescient enough to show up to try to bag that tasty biscuit, the holy grail of obscure boston music history had once again eluded me. and the yearning had come back to me, over and over and over again over the years. i've googled and i've ebay'd and i've looked and asked everywhere, (even pumping greg hawkes about it during last year's ukulele noir at johnny d's), but it's as if the music had never happened, except in my own imagination. people don't even remember the band, let alone the ep, let alone the single, and i'm always getting that "creepy old guy" vibe from folks whenever i start to go on about it...

*sigh*

so!

back to shangri-lowell, the best place on earth:

ron, the twinkling-eyed proprietor of rrr records, asked what he might be able to do for me, and i started in with my usual don quixote spiel: boston band, the make, ep, democracy, amy's home tonight... he smiled a smile that, in retrospect, was clear that he knew it was there, and right where there was, but i was still not going to believe anything so fantastic to be possible right up until i was able to see it with my own eyes...

he went right to it. the exact cubby. pulled a handful of albums out to be able to read the titles... VOILA.

the make. democracy. amy's home tonight.

NIRVANA!!!!

shangri-lowell, the best place on earth.

i bet there isn't another record store you could ever find in all creation that will have a copy of this EP. not even rrr records anymore, because i have ron's last copy. nowhere. no how. (28 years of searching would stand to prove it). and there it was, right around the corner from me, right downtown, in the best place on earth.

the rest of the story, as much as i can remember from the cloud of euphoria swimming before my eyes, included a carhart lined work shirt that fits exactly right and a set of chippewa boot laces of just the right sort and length, but that's all just gravy.

if it wasn't for headphones, there'd be a serious noise violation in shangri-lowell tonight.

could you be loved?

bob marley found me this morning pondering one of the larger questions of my life--namely, why it is i have such a hard time accepting kindnesses (let alone love) from others. (i'm getting better, i swear!) could you be loved?

"you're never gonna miss your water until your well runs dry / no matter how you treat mankind you'll never be satisfied"

i get it.

idle musings

they're asking the smithsonian for help diagnosing the species of birds sucked into the jet engines of sully's waterski rig, and it put me in mind of a story i once read in newsweek back in the 80's questioning the outfitting priorities of our armed services.

you all know the cliche--some general somewhere gets a hard-on for a multi-million dollar weapon, and, before you know it, eisenhower's military-industrial complex has turned it into a multi-billion dollar sacred budget cow, (witness the clusterfuck of senators, 44 and counting, all falling over themselves to press obama on ordering more f-22's even though the pentagon clearly said it doesn't want to buy any more), and nobody ever says one more word about whatever such weapons might mean or not mean to our fighting effectiveness, let alone the life expectancy of our soldiers on the battlefield.

so, anyway, back to 80's era newsweek...

seems some guy in minnesota somewhere (i really don't remember the details, most of this is in dire need of fact-checking, but the general gist is pretty accurate) discovered that if you put a small explosive charge in the bottom of a cardboard mailing tube that is packed with the seeds that, upon presence of air, turn into those little puffy styrofoam packing peanuts, then the resulting "weapon" (weighing all of about 2 pounds and costing a whopping $5 to make) could be strapped to the back of every GI in a combat zone vulnerable to enemy (i.e. russian) strafing warplanes and helicopter gunships, and instructed to set them off whenever an enemy bird was in the area and, for pennies, remain safer than if they were "covered" by a "smart" and multi-billion dollar ground-to-air missile system. it's not a coincidence that, just like the engines of an A320 don't care for migrating waterfowl, most any jet engine, military or otherwise, will have a very hard time once crammed full of styrofoam. its especially convenient for the mailing-tube approach that once said styrofoam is up a hundred yards or two (where anti-personnel aircraft tend to prefer to aviate, and where that little cheap explosive charge is more than capable of sending the peanut pellets before the air interaction causes them to expand into their fluffy "adult" versions) the intake suction of the engines themselves will guarantee perfect projectile guidance, straight into paydirt.

guaranteed kill. $5 per GI. even fun at base parties.

so why are such bountiful fruits of american ingenuity so rarely developed or employed???

think about it: our troops went into iraq without sufficient body and humvee armor. i have to imagine, at $140,000,000 per f-22, we could have sacrificed at least one of them to cover a few thousands of troops in harms way with a little bit more than lip service, AND, (for those disinterested in the value of human life), at HUGE savings in medical and rehabilitative costs for those lucky enough to survive their resulting wounds. and i'm not dissing the f-22, either, because i understand it's a kick-ass weapon, and the best thing in the world whose only major objection is that our enemies don't have anything sophisticated enough to warrant us needing many. i'm only saying, at $140,000,000 a pop, there's room to wonder if there are other priorities that can be balanced into the mix.

bottom line is, i guess, that the kevlar lobby isn't quite as effective as lockheed-martin's...

oh, and one last jab at the ridiculous concept of "homeland security" as a euphemism for "let's go kill terrorists"--per thehill.com, our current domestic air defense is calculated by the GAO to become inadequate for its mission within the next 10 years. even if new equipment is agreed soon, still 14 of our current 18 air defense sites will need to suspend operations sometime between 2010 and 2020 in order to swap out aircraft too old to be used anymore. (we're already flying the oldest fleet of planes in the history of our country). by 2020, if nothing is done, 11 of our air defense sites will be out of viable aircraft, and, hence, out of commission entirely. (what was it that those terrorists used to knock down those buildings again?) but, by all means, lets make sure the boys and girls protecting the iraqis from themselves have all the $140,000,000 toys that they can fly, even though we have perfectly good air defense options that cost $70,000,000 LESS APIECE that are desperately needed here at home. (f-15's are still way cool, too, even though, as i understand it, both they and the f-22 contain less on-board software than some of the new cars presently sitting unsold on dealer lots all around the country).

either way, all sarcasm implied, i'm feeling more secure already, aren't you?

or does the idea of protecting americans in america, as well as the men and women who fight to protect us overseas, within our means, not interest anyone anymore?

the worst kind of news

following up on my post from awhile back on armed forces suicides--

the army's reported numbers (i got them via the AP) from january are quite possibly going to surpass the total number of combat deaths from ALL branches of the service for the month.

i suppose it's good news that there were fewer than 24 army combat deaths this past month. (24 being the number of suspected suicides currently being investigated, as compared with 16 combat deaths from all branches of the armed services in january). however, the suicide rate for the army represents a stunning number, considering they had only 4 suicides from the same period last year. (there were 128 army suicides confirmed over the course of 2008, which was exactly double the number from as recently as 2004, and that doesn't even include the additional 15 cases still pending investigation, or those from any other branch of the armed services).

altogether the wrong kind of surge.

people who first sent our forces into this swamp with insufficient vehicle and personal armor, and then further ignored the factors which have led to this horrible, tragic and continuing loss of life through mandatory reenlistments and other pressures (sorry if i don't have correct the technical term on the re-ups, but i'm too riled up to go look it up) ought to be made more fully accountable for their craven abuse of power. it makes me blind with frustration that politics would have had us believe that somehow these were the people who were "supporting our troops".

we have a huge debt to pay here, and our insufficiently funded VA hospitals are only one tip of a gargantuan iceberg.

bowling in billerica

yes, it's america's favorite family sport, and i'm willing to bet good money that melvern trots the song out during his show this coming saturday night at the billerica elks--even if i have to throw a wad of cash at the "cradles to crayons" folks (for whose benefit the show is being held) and seriously guilt the band into it. (it's the greatest song ever that's never been recorded, and you can quote me on that).

here's a paste from the email announcement:

Hey Folks,



Melvern Taylor and his Fabulous Meltones

will be doing a benefit show for a great organization called "Cradles to Crayons" (www.cradlestocrayons.org)

This Saturday night Feb 7th

Show starts at 9 or so.

@ the Billerica Elks
Webb Brook Rd.
Billerica, ma 01862



Also appearing is Reverend JJ and the Casual Sinners



Should be a great night!

how 'bout dem tomatos

the colder the winter gets, the hotter the music needs to be, and amiestreet has once again delivered the goods: not one, not two, not three or four, but FIVE, count 'em FIVE, live feat collections for our listening pleasure.

burn your ears off these tasty tomatoes will, and the right place to start is right at the beginning. check out the lowell george classics at the top of "raw tomatos" and tell me you can't hear it. (lowell, we miss you). "crack in your door" has always been one of my very most favorites of all time, and this here one is about as definitive a version as i've ever heard, and i can never hear too many. and, dare i say it, but the demo of "trouble" has to be one of the most breathtaking stripping downs that it's ever been my simultaneous shame and pleasure to never be able to ever play like that... (and check out the way they've rocked up fat man in the bathtub here--what a GREAT treatment!!!!!)

the amiestreet credits are 25% off today, so no excuse not to load up $20 or $30 bucks worth and grab yourself some tasty tomatos of whatever sort suits *your* palate. something there for everybody.

spread the word

in admitting my problem (the first step to achieving a solution) regarding carbs, fats and protein in my diet, (as in, that IS my diet, that is, if you con't count beer), a caring friend cared enough to share a link to a local farming initiative that offers shares in next fall's harvest for a very reasonable share/donation up front. ($550 for veggies, or $710 for veggies plus fruits, and who wouldn't find $160 a bargain for fresh local fruit!) it's likely going to be WAY more food than i'll need for just myself, but i'm sure i'll be able to find people interested in enjoying my surplus. (if i'm lucky, they might be the same people who would be interested in showing their gratitude by cooking up some of it for me).

the home run involved is that two local shangri-lowell businesses, c'est, (who, you will remember, is my connection for shaw farm milk), and the upcoming market street market, are both considering acting as local outlets for the shares, depending on interest and uptake here downtown. (imagine living walking distance from a cornucopia of all the best from local farmers!)

so, spread the word!!!

buy your share, freeze what you can't finish fresh, and enjoy healthy living all year round while supporting sustainable agriculture all over your area. doesn't get any better than this.

where was i?

it's easy to get off the track no matter what time of year it is. between soccer three days a week, (outside the city limits! egads!), a couple of ski trips and various other related comings and goings with the kids, i'm beginning to forget all the things that are going on right outside my door. (ok, well, i did get to the devils / baby b's game last weekend, so i'm not entirely removed from the goings-on here in shangri-lowell, but it's definitely beginning to feel like i'm missing more than i'm catching, and that's no way to live).

courtesy of my favorite music journalist, there's something promising over at mickeys tonight at 8. soccer doesn't kick off til after 10:30pm, so there'll be plenty of time to do both. (now THAT's an evening). winterfest reigns friday and saturday, (gotta make sure not to miss the human dogsled racing!), and sunday afternoon there's another devils game. monday night it's a screening of zorba the greek over at the athenian corner, (bread!!!). i will have to take a break from my lowellian bliss on tuesday cuz the sharks and bruins are down at the gahden and i have tickets (a grateful friend always remembers), but i'm claiming an asterisk for thursday's music binge down in cambridge because it's lowell's best two (count em, TWO) bands, melvern taylor and his fabulous meltones, and jen kearney and the lost onion, over at toad starting at 7pm, and on top of that i'll be sharing a table with another lowell resident (and two of the prettiest young things you ever did see) and that's gotta count for something, too.

wanna know my best valentine's idea this year? umass riverhawks vs the bc eagles over at the tsongas arena. who's looking for a date?

republicrats

heard a joke the other day about conservatives and global warming. (since a black man was elected president, they just assume it's hell freezing over...)

but i think i've found another explanation for all that cold and snow across the midwest--republicans are now flogging a plan in congress that would double the home purchase tax credit, open it up to all buyers, cap interest rates on those new home mortgages at 4 or 4.5%, and then utilize fannie and freddie to repurchase all those cut-rate loans from the banks so they can go out and write more of 'em. all this on top of a linked proposal to halve the income tax liability for taxpayers in the two lowest tax brackets!

pass me my long johns!!!

the democratic plan isn't so far apart, with mortgage incentives and tax breaks too, but the thing that's spinning my little pointed head around today is how quickly we've arrived at the emergence of not one, but TWO socialist parties atop our failing political and economic systems.

WTF???

bailouts for banks are insult to injury. it's like being robbed, and then getting a second bill from the police for the amount you're already out. yes, the banks have held up our entire economy, and the cops (the federal government formed out of the combination of the republican and democratic parties) are whacking us with the tax bill to pay for it all over again. their only disagreement is on the means for applying the bill.

same for their "stimulus" plans. anyone notice how quickly the republican silence accompanying bush's insistence that we needed to flush the better part of a trillion dollars down the same toilet where the first one went has turned into the braying of a hundred asses that obama's insistence on the very same thing is going to drive us to ruin? of course, the democrats are assuring us that all this is "necessary", whereas when it was bush proposing the thing it was nonsense...

guess what: we're being screwed on both sides. coke vs pepsi on capitol hill would have us believe that if only we held fast to our support for one side against the other, then somehow we might save ourselves from certain destruction from the other side. but what they're not telling us is that the only guarantee is that we're going to be destroyed in either case. both sides will naturally see to that. (it's their business--it's what they do). one minute it's republicans crying bailout or we die, and democrats beating their high horse with their tired old rhetorical sticks, and now it's democrats on the bailout bandwagon, and republicans preaching til their blue in their states. (or was that red?)

to be fair, home purchase incentives (like that german car purchase plan i like so much) are a very smart thing. kudos to both sides for figuring that out. and tax breaks on the bottom ranks of taxpayers, too. it's fairness that is LONG overdue, IMHO. so why couldn't we have agreed on this back in 1980 whatever, before the deregulation of wall street (courtesy of the republicans) and the holding of fannie and freddie above oversight (courtesy of the democrats) caused our entire economy to collapse onto itself once placed under the burden of a bipartisan military spending spree intended to "save" us from terrorists that can't even build themselves plane #1?

i have no idea.

but i do have a suggestion: vote every mother's son and daughter of them out of office if they have ever supported military solutions to social problems and socialist solutions to capital problems. we've needed fairness and fair regulation for a long time. hooray for that. but the net result of this current crisis seems to be that our economy is being assimilated by socialists, and our freedoms defeated by terrorists, and that's something that all of us should be able to oppose on all sides. seems a lot of people have been and are continuing to get killed in a pair of causes being lost for us right under our noses.