Monthly Archives: July 2008

Throw Da Bums Out, I

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We need a loose cannon in politics now more than ever but we’ve been growing little water pistols and arming them with blanks.

Lee Iacocca’s 2007 book, Where Have All the Leaders Gone, finally made it to Vermont. OK, some excerpts did, thanks to my friend “Bob” who wrote, “Iacocca has for decades been one of my heroes (even if he IS a democrat!)…”

Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, “Stay the course.”

Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I’ll give you a sound bite: “Throw all the bums out!”

The Leadership Blog wants to see Michael Moore and Mr. Iacocca “collaborate to turn this book into a movie.”

<shudder >

“Bob” wrote, “Don’t really see any answers here, though…”

And that’s the trouble with a “challenge.”

It interests me that T. Boone Pickens and Al Gore have both gone to television advertising to sell their quests, but Mr. Iacocca stayed with a book.

I’m afraid television is the wave of the future for idea generators–particularly if the idea is a bad one or a heavily politicized one. Marketing ideas is not the problem. We’ve used the media to sell ideas to the public for as long as there has been a media. In the early days, people wrote pamphlets (Thomas Paine) or owned a newspaper (Ben Franklin). The difference between then and now is that the Paines and Franklins rallied the proletariat and then went out and led them. Nowadays, the Gores and Pickenses rally the proletariat and whine about the politicians rather than implementing their so-called bright ideas theirownselfs.

The Obama camp makes the “change” noises, and the McCain camp makes the “stay the course” noises. For the record, Senator Obama has the water pistol and Senator McCain the blanks.

Throw da bums out.

For 30 nanoseconds I thought I might join Deck and vote for Ralph Nader. After all that’s a sure vote for Mickey Mouse or NOTA. Too bad the messages sent with that vote is that Mr. Nader represents the change I want to see. That’s not my message.

I have retracted the Goofy vote.

Yeah, I know. I could vote the Librarian party. Unfortunately, they are all whackos who keep trying to shush me.

Wot to do, wot to do. Next up, I will have at least a half-a-suggestion but right now I have desk butt and it’s time to go play with my tractor.

Some Assembly Required

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My bank insisted the other day that I get new checks. They had changed their routing numbers in 1997 or so and really wanted me to spend my money with something that didn’t screw up their machinery.

They also wanted me to pay for the new checks but I declined. After all, I didn’t change the routing numbers.

They paid for the checks which arrived from Deluxe today.

I do most of my banking online so I write very few checks any more. Not only that, since all the banks were forced to accept colorful (and inexpensive) checks from sources like Checks-R-Us-In-The-Mail, I haven’t bought anything from Deluxe since about 1978. Taken together, I’m thinking the near-captive check printing operations like Deluxe are the buggy whip manufacturers of the 21st Century and that the days of even independents like Checks-R-Us are numbered. Imagine a wry grin at that. Our writer friend Alma in Washington state would thwap me.

Someone at Deluxe got the bright idea that they would save money by shipping the checks with a flattened box.

“Let the customer assemble the box and we’ll save money,” that Deluxe genius thought.

And it was so.

Understand that the cardboard pre-box had been printed, cut, folded, glued, and taped together by machines at the factory. Then the (flattened) pre-box and the little stacks of bound checks were bundled loosely into an envelope to be mailed.

I don’t see the savings.

After all, the cardboard pre-box could have been printed, cut, folded, glued, and taped together as a box shape by machines at the factory and the little stacks of bound checks could have been put inside the box!

I’m a mechanical engineer with an actual diploma and everything. I have built a boat from scratch and gotten it out of the barn. It even floats. I can put the top up on one of Carroll Shelby’s original Cobras. I can even program my VCR. I just spent half an hour folding and gluing and taping this darned box together.

Bean counters. Bah.

At least the couple of hundred checks they sent will likely last my lifetime. Or until the next routing number change.

60-Cubed … Cap Cancer!

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Some regular readers know that I have “long-ish” hair. Anne has cut my hair for most of our 30 years of marriage but she quit when I started renovating the kitchen. See, with the house in an uproar, she had nowhere to cut it. And in fact, my hair has been growing out since 2003.

I’m lucky to have so much hair.

My mom lost hers when she went through chemotherapy. She bought a fright wig and loved it. Read more…

Not Writing

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I write but I rarely write about writing. I think about writing. I sometimes talk with friends about writing. I have written once or twice about writing*1*. Thank goodness I don’t do it very often.

See, the first piece of advice a young writer gets is, “Write what you know.” Unfortunately for readers, most writers know most about writing so they tend to, well, write about it. I’d rather write about nude wimmens or careening to the inside of turn 7 at Lime Rock or whether I can catch a cow on a hook in the deep blue waters of the Gulfstream.

But the sun is shining. Life is good. And Duma Key the place is, for now, very far away.

I’m reading Duma Key the book right now and have been thinking about why I like Stephen King and, as a broader question, why we all like Stories-with-a-Capital-S and the people in them. See, I don’t read fantasy. I don’t even like horror stories. I never told ghost stories around the campfire nor believed them when I listened but I like Stephen King and he tells some serious ghost stories.

I have just two simple truths to share here:

1. We want to spend our time with interesting people.
2. Characters in novels are always busy.

The USA Network peeps have it right with their “Characters Welcome” promotion. The books I like best, the movies that grab me, and the television serials I keep going back to are all peopled with interesting characters. It doesn’t matter as much what they do in the stories as it matters what makes them interesting.

I may be an interesting person. Or not. You may even like me as a person. Or not. No matter. Neither of us particularly wants to share our time with someone doing what I did today. I brushed, pooped, showered, and wandered around my office in my underwear for a while. I spoke to a couple of clients. I researched a strategic plan. I wrote this blog and my weekly column. I worked on a couple of photo images. I checked that I have a band booked for the weekend concert. I may have passed gas. I ate lunch and will eventually eat supper. Tonight I have a heavy evening planned with the t00b.

Yawn.

That was a busy day. Absolutely no part of it moved this story forward. In the novel we could have skipped directly from finding the red picnic basket in the attic to catching the cow on the hook.

Any writer who can create someone we like and keep us hooked with his or her day-to-day puttering is a treasure.


1 My 10-1/2 Hot Tips for Small-Town Op-ed Writers was commissioned and published by Inklings in 1997.

Back to School?

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Big Mistake. Really big mistake. Today, as I write this, is July 7. I realize it may not be July 7 where you are or when you read this, but I can live with that. Here and now it is definitely the Monday after our long weekend long birthday celebration for America and the Back to School sales have already started.

Franklin County, Vermont, celebrates the Fourth of July twice: once on the Fourth of July and once on the Sunday closest to the Fourth of July when thousands of residents and guests crowd in to St. Albans Bay for a day of family stuff, music, and fireworks. I got my Summer Sounds concert band, Rumble Doll, set up, got my mug on teevee, and, of course, spent some quality time in the lake. My new sandals seem to have stood up to total immersion.

Tom Oliver did a great job with the fireworks; this may have been his best yet with some new “spiders” that dropped their legs all the way to the water and a finale that included high and low skybursts with Roman candles.

And it took only an hour for enough cars to clear out that I could drive home.

Summer.

The entire summer is ahead of us.

I don’t know about the rest of the world but I don’t want to be in a classroom in July.

We read the Burlington Free Press on Sundays here in Vermont because it is the only Sunday paper sold here that has a TV section and a reasonable number of advertising inserts for the stores we patronize.

I like the sales, see…

The sales often confuse me, though. I have to wonder why stores expect to sell Summer clothing in February, Winter clothing in June, and school supplies this week.

Staples® has “one cent deals” through Wednesday as part of the Back to School ’08 national promotion. I’m reading their advertising flier now. Dixon® #2 yellow pencils for a penny. I like #2 pencils and Dixon® makes pretty good ones but does anyone actually use wooden pencils anymore? There are two-pocket paper folders for a penny, too. I like two-pocket folders but I don’t use them much for reports because I prefer a report that reads like a book, so I use staples or a folder that grabs the edges.

Back to school? It is weeks, count ’em, long weeks before school starts.

The mistake? Timing is everything. The stores obviously should have held the sales in June when people were still actually thinking about school, not now when I want to sit on the beach. That was easy®.