Monthly Archives: August 2010

What Do We Pay Them For?

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And why do we pay so much?

About a lifetime ago, I paid income taxes to both New York and Vermont. My job was with a manufacturer on the left side of the pond but New York had those baby-puke colored license plates at the time and I really didn’t want to live there; we moved to the home of the green plates instead.

I didn’t much like paying income taxes to New York.

I still wouldn’t.

The NY state legislature finally passed the 2004 budget. That’s not funny but it is nearly true. The NY state legislature finally passed the current 2010-2011 budget last week, 125 days late. The press spin department called it a “fiscally responsible budget” with higher spending and an additional $4 billion in new taxes. New York will spend $136 billion they collect from you and you and you. And me, since some of the counted revenues come from Federal coffers. It is the fourth latest budget in New York State history.

Read that again. It is one of the latest budgets in New York State history.

“It takes more than 20 months to repair more than 40 years worth of damage,” State senator John Simpson (D-somewhere-in-NY-but-not-for-long) said as he harped on how much worse things were under the former Republicans’ rule.

Horse puckey.

source: http://parmenides.wnyc.org/media/photologue/photos/New%20York%20State%20budget%20history%20of%20delays.jpg

The pattern shows the legislature fritters when they aren’t afraid of the voters; they sort of buckle down when the voters are watching.

Everybody has an excuse. Whiners.

Legislators disagreed about capping property taxes. They disagreed about letting SUNY raise tuition. They disagreed about budget cuts if the hoped-for/planned-for/wished-for “FMAP” Medicaid supplements fall through. They disagreed about tens of millions of dollars of pork-barrel grants NY Gov. Paterson already vetoed (the legislature wanted to restore them in the final budget deal).

Incumbents called it the “most responsible budget” in a couple of decades.

Wow again.

Remember the veto? Gov. Paterson vetoed 6,709 line items of spending the Legislature tried to add, including $190 million in pork-barrel spending. Six thousand seven hundred items.

What are they, nuts?

We elect peeps for pretty much one reason: to spend our money on the things we want them to spend it on. We don’t elect them to fritter away their time or that money.

Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch got it right about members of his Legislature: “The good ones aren’t good enough and the bad ones are evil,” he said.

Sounds like a national sentiment to me.

It’s All About Cheating

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Or is it?

Chatter has increased about cheating and polyurethane. We’ll have to reach for the dictionary again.

[Editor’s Note: gekko and I are continuing our conversation in four long acts. Please read Green Eyes for her take on polyurethane.]

Remember the kid with the big ears in grade school? Cribbed off your quizzes until Miss Noble boxed his ears for it. Cheaters and tattle tales defined first grade morality.

So what’s cheating? Cheating is an act of lying, deception, fraud, trickery, or imposture. Cheating is lying to or deceiving or tricking your unknowing partner whether for a better grade or for sex.

Sculpture by Ania Modzelewski

Without knowing anything more than we might talk about poly-something-ism, the comments in the first week of this series flowed from “I am willing to take the tests” to “burn ‘em all at the stake.” If you are married, the consensus view holds that having sex with a non-spouse is cheating but not having sex with a non-spouse is not. Remember that. “Not having sex with a non-spouse is not cheating.” We’ll see that idea again next week.

Our preoccupation with nasty, dirty, slithery sex may go only to our Victorian great-grandparents but cheating is far older than that.

The Times called Renault’s order to Nelson Piquet, Jr., to have an “accident” at the Singapore Grand Prix, the “worst single piece of cheating in the history of sport.” The crash allowed Fernando Alonso to win a race, but that was just two years ago. The first incident of actual cheating I could find occurred in the Summer Games of 388 B.C. when Eupolus, the boxer of Thessaly, bribed three opponents to take a dive. On the relationship front, Bishop Burchard of Worms’ Penitential of the year 1012 offered 194 different sexual sins including cheating with your wife’s sister and your son’s fiancee. It was a best seller. It included positions.

Fidelity (straight- or in-) is still big business today. Cheating is a major industry. Happiness apparently isn’t. Our schools, our churches, our news broadcasters don’t survive on good news; they all sell unhappiness. Or put it on the news.

gekko overlooked Fred and Gwen and Bonnie and Carol in her sampling. Fred and Gwen Strong have been married for a couple of decades. Fred and Bonnie spend every Saturday morning together at the library; Fred and Carol spend alternate Thursday evenings at the Comfort Inn when Fred is supposed to be bowling. Gwen knows about Bonnie but not about Carol. Is Fred cheating with Bonnie? How about with Carol? On another hand we have Sarah and Ralph Pother. After 25 years of monogamous marriage, Ralph announces that he is polyamorous and Sarah disagrees. He is honest and open and communicating; he wants a lover. Is Ralph cheating? Finally gekko’s own long-married, toothsome couple, Paul and Polly Dent, have several lovers between them. Paul and Polly know and approve of each other’s lovers. Are they cheating?

And does it matter whether we think they are?

Society enables illegal immigration and tax evasion and welfare fraud, and yet we do not live in an enabling world in our own personal lives. Instead we live with Prohibition.

We all know how well the Noble Experiment worked out.

Jealousy, negativism, and assuming the worst of others all go hand in hand with Prohibition. And Puritanism. And Cheating.

“The accusation [of cheating] is laced with far more ferocity than when someone talks about defaulting on a loan,” gekko wrote.

As she almost said, Instead of knitting the fabric of society, prohibition- and bigotry- and rule- and expectation-driven jealousy creates gashes of anger in our lives.

Relationships should make us happy.

We define happiness as contentment, love, satisfaction, pleasure, and joy. A person who believes himself happy is just that.

I like to smile. Jealousy makes us frown. Cheating makes us jealous.

Fred and Gwen Strong self-report that they are a little dissatisfied; Gwen will be more than just unhappy when she finds out about Carol because Fred is not only stepping out on her, he is doing it behind her back. That relationship does not make them happy even though she does not know he cheats.

Sarah and Ralph self-report that they were happy until Ralph “changed the rules.” Their new relationship does not make them happy because some say he cheats.

Paul and Polly Dent self-report that they are happy with each other and happy with their various lovers. No matter what our panel says, neither Paul nor Polly thinks the other cheats. Their relationships do make them happy because they are not cheating.

Probably ought not call it cheating if your partner approves. Probably ought if she doesn’t.

“I want a good wife,” Mark Twain wrote. “I’ll take a couple of them if they’re good enough.” Mr. Clemens looked for happiness.

[Editor’s Note: The first part in this series on Polyamory may be found here . Please also read the companion pieces written by gekko, part 1 and the newly minted part 2, Green Eyes, for her take and lots more commentary.]

Next week, we get to look at the sex. And smiling. (And you wondered why I tagged these pieces as “Naughty.”)

I Still Have a Landline. Sort Of.

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I miss my landline. Can never find the damn cell phone! the lovely Chris.tine said yesterday. Naturally, that got me to thinking.

I’ve become a VOIP evangelist or perhaps a voipelist for short. A few years ago, I looked at my then-Verizon bill and my dissatisfaction with Verizon-chicanery and realized that technology could save me money.

One of Verizon’s cute tricks in this market is to charge for message units. They don’t use that Jersey-centric term here (they call it “local calling”) but the bottom line is that they charged a long distance rate for calling the next door neighbor and they hid the charge in an arcane counter rather than breaking out the individual calls. I prefer knowing how much it costs me to call Rufus, so that irked me. I hate toll calls. I bought the upgrade with unlimited local calls just to keep my blood pressure in check

At the time, Ma Bell and her progeny cost us about $75 per month and I was paying another $20 or so for dial up Internet access. Remember dial up? ‘Nuff said.

Cable service finally came to North Puffin and Vonage was advertising pretty heavily. I could buy “High Speed Internet” bundled with basic cable TV and switch my existing phone number to the VOIP provider, all for less than the $95 per month POTS and dial up cost us.

Sold, American.

This wasn’t an easy step for a Luddite like me. I just replaced my VCR with another VCR, wear button-down shirts, and drive a ten-year old car and a ten-year old truck. Not simultaneously.

On the other hand I also have a cellphone. SWMBO has a cellphone. I’m thinking about dropping even the VOIP service in favor of those cells alone.

I’m not alone. The number of U.S. households choosing only cell phones surpassed households with only landlines in 2009. Verizon reports that the number of homes with a traditional copper POTS connection dropped 11.4 percent last year, to 17.4 million on their system now. That also means Verizon recently announced it would cut at least 11,000 jobs, people they don’t need to maintain landlines.

The cell phone has come a long way since Motorola introduced the DynaTAC which cost $3,995 in 1984. (Wealthy) users could talk for 30 minutes or so before performing a 10 hour battery recharge in the two-pound “brick.”

One big operator offers discounts to landline-free wireless customers who combine Internet or TV service from the company which, of course, means they still tether you to their land-based infrastructure.

Even businesses are dropping their own landline phone systems, and moving to wireless.

I’m still a voipelist for a few important reasons. I really really prefer using all the house phones because the sound quality is good, the phones are convenient, and anyone in the house can access them. Cell docks don’t do that all that well yet and the speaker phone on my cell is lousy. I call Canadian numbers frequently. We have business contacts, friends, and a dentist north of the border. The cell plans that interest me make Canada a toll call. Remember, I hate toll calls. Oh, yeah, and cell service right here in North Puffin still sucks.

Hey, T-Mobiley! Fix those problems and I’ll dump my sort-of-landline in a heartbeat.

I am never without my cell. I feel naked without it. It was the house phone I would always lose, another correspondent wrote.

I probably shouldn’t say this out loud but I have never (yet) lost a cell phone and I rarely lose the housephone(s). Some of them are hardwired to the wall and the cordless variety all have this wonderful “page” feature. At the end of the day, though, I mostly carry the phone — whether cordless or cell — in my pocket.

The most popular irritation voiced in the surveys I checked is to figure out where the darned cell phone is.

Here’s a thought. One in 50 households has no phones at all.

I Love You. And You. And You…

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Here’s an important distinction: open, casual sex keeps you from getting elected. Deep dark sneaky secret sex gets you on the front page of the New York Times.

Prostitutes cost Eliot Spitzer the governorship of New York, not to mention 80 large. The next NY governor, David Paterson, confessed his own infidelities right after he was sworn in. Next up? Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s soul mate was his Argentine mistress. Oh, yeah, and then there was Bill.

[Editor’s Note: gekko and I again take up a conversation in four long acts much as Shaw described Major Barbara as “a discussion in three long acts.” Before you read this article, please go read Poly Pliability for our starting point.]

Polygamy comes from the Greek poly- meaning many plus -gamos which indicates a “strong smell of fox urine.” It is a marriage in which a spouse of either sex may have more than one mate at the same time. Probably because at least one of them smells a little off.

Sculpture by Ania Modzelewski

Polygyny also comes from the Greek poly- plus gune from which we derive woman or other female medical terms. It is the state or practice of having more than one wife or female mate at a time. Monogyny is practice of having single mate although that term, too, usually implies marriage.

Polyandry comes from the Greek poly- as well plus andr- which seems to have meant man but is also the root for automaton (android) as well as a popular phone.

“Many robots” makes more sense than “many phones” although the robots can’t really offer meaningful conversation.

You have already figured out that Polyamory comes from the Greek poly- with the amory tacked on from the Latin amor. No, it didn’t come from a National Guard Armory although battles have indeed been fought over it.

Polyamory is a made-up word for a real — and historical — cultural phenomenon. By all accounts, Thomas Jefferson had a long, continuous relationship with Sally Hemmings. And Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson and her king kept company for 20 years but didn’t they sleep together for 15 of them. They were in many ways partners in politics, in war, and in the arts. Madame de Pompadour remained at Louis XV’s side for 20 years until her death at age 43.

It is a lifestyle choice with as much dignity and commitment as traditional monogamous marriage is supposed to have, the lovely gekko writes.

Emphasis added.

I suspect most Americans would disagree. SWMBO does. According to polls, about 80% of Americans say that extramarital sexual relations are always wrong. That’s up from the early 70s (right after the “Free Love 60s”), when about 70% of people said the same thing.

Except that something between 3% and half of married men and a third of married women cheat. 50% percent of first marriages, 67% of second and 74% of third marriages end in divorce, according to the Forest Institute. They can’t all be upset about the pound cake.

So is polyamory cheating or is it something else?

Polyamory, however, is not really merely wife swapping, gekko adds.

So Henny Youngman (“Take my wife. Please.”) was neither swinging nor polyamorous?

“I’ve been in love with the same woman for 49 years,” he said. “If my wife every finds out, she’ll kill me!”

That, in a nutshell, is the rub. Stay tuned.

[Editor’s Note: gekko and I have again begun an ongoing conversation. Before reading this piece, please go read Poly Pliability for our starting point.]