Author Archives: Dick

Premte Peeves

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I’ve been chasing an online payment around the country this week. I deposited a check here in North Puffin, then used my BillPay feature to send my South Puffin credit union account a check. One peeve is that the bank mails an actual check to the BillPay recipient despite the fact that the transaction is then done electronically.

That payment cleared my North Puffin account JULY FIRST. As of 4:30 yesterday, it hadn’t even made it to the Keys but the bank here grabbed the money from my account JULY FIRST. That’s the second peeve.

I called the bank here. My friend Sally Ripley (my garbage man Tom’s wife) investigated. The check hasn’t been cashed yet. That means they’ve had a couple grand to play the float with for more than 14 days.

I can blame some of this on the holiday weekend (there have been just a few business days since July 1) but that’s no excuse.

Hmm. I wonder if this electrical disconnect notice means the utility is waiting for a check that cleared my North Puffin account JULY FIRST as well. All I can do now is wait to see who else complains. Three peeves and you’re out?

Rolled Oats

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According to the NYTimes this morning, “Speaker John A. Boehner told his fellow Congressional leaders and President Obama that he did not spend 20 years working his way up to the top job on Capitol Hill just for the cachet of the title — he wanted to accomplish something big…

“The speaker’s lofty ambitions quickly crashed into the political reality of a divided, highly partisan Congress.”

Having Congress is like having 535 wives. If you think having one wife who doesn’t listen, just imagine…

That’s why I didn’t want to write about politics this morning; Washington is a fine mess. They’re smmoooooth but they just. don’t. listen.

Oatmeal raisin cookies are a significantly healthier breakfast than a smoothie.

My good friend Liz Arden had a smoothie for breakfast this morning. Despite the date, it didn’t come from the 7-11. She blended her own rolled oats, cranberry juice, yoghurt, fruits, and protein powder. She says it tastes like ice cream. Really? We’re alone here but this is a family column so I can’t tell you what that particular flavor and texture combination evoked. I can say that acrid, gooey, whitish, slime doesn’t seem all that appetizing to me.

Anyway, the rolled oats got my attention. I likes oats. That grain forms the basis for my third most favorite sandwich bread and my third most favorite cookie. We still buy Arnold Oatnut bread because I haven’t put together a recipe to bake it here at home and I’m noshing on an oatmeal raisin cookie right now.

Rolled oats. Did you ever wonder how Quaker teaches oats to roll over? Do they have classes? Do the slow oats get special tutoring while the quick oats command higher prices in the marketplace? Can oats learn to sit up and beg? Do we need to do some genetic engineering so they can shake hands?

Wikipedia reports that professional trainers should most likely instruct the oat’s owner to train his or her own flake; available group classes continue the lessons for the more mature grain. Grains can be so stick-in-the-muddish that the owner must repeat and reinforce the techniques taught in the original class.

Owners and groats who attend class together have a unique opportunity to learn each other’s likes and dislikes and how to work together to become flakes without being, well, flaky. Training is most effective if all oat handlers take part in the training to ensure consistent commands, methods, and enforcement. Classes also help socialize the flakes to the other flakes in the round cardboard shipping tube. Training classes are offered by many brands, including Better Oats, McCann’s, and Quaker.

Probably just as well that Ms. Arden had neither fresh prunes nor fresh raisins for her smoothie.

It’s all better than tipping cows, I suppose. After all, I’m pathologically parsimonious and they take umbrage at my usual 10 percent.

In the real world of agribusiness, grain processors apparently employ no private trainers. They use heavy rollers to press oat groats into flat flakes, then steam and lightly toast them.

Independence Day

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“Too often in recent history liberal governments
have been wrecked on rocks of loose fiscal policy.”

Here’s a revolutionary idea.

Independence Day commemorates our declaration of independence from the King of England. The revolution officially began two days earlier when the Second Continental Congress approved the legal separation of the American colonies from Great Britain, a resolution proposed by Richard Henry Lee of Virginia in June. After voting for independence on July 2, Congress debated and revised the Declaration itself for two whole days and approved it on July 4.

In the centuries since, only the 111th Congress has moved with anywhere near the speed of that first gathering, since the 111th Congress passed trillions of dollars of spending on millions of pages of bills in less than 100 days. And no one in Washington read any of them.

The Declaration of Independence fits on one page. Everyone in the Continental Congress read the whole thing.

In Peoria just one hundred fifty-seven years ago Rep. Abraham Lincoln said,

Nearly eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to enslave others is a “sacred right of self-government.” … Our republican robe is soiled and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. … Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it.

Lincoln spoke of the enslavement of persons. Today our republican robe is soiled and trailed in the dust by a government that would enslave We the Overtaxed People, taking more and more of our rights and our land and our life’s blood to its own purpose.

Just to rekindle our liberal friends, Franklin Delano Roosevelt made the “loose fiscal policy” quote.

The 112th Congress is back to its usual wiener roasts and Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus is indeed still fiddling in Washington.

Two hundred thirty-three years ago today, General George Washington marked July 4 with a double ration of rum and an artillery salute for the soldiers who fought off the foreign monarchy that did enslave us. It is now time to mark July 4 with a double ration of electoral salute to those who would be the modern monarchy of government.



Much of our litigious life today grew out of English Common Law. We abandoned one really good idea in the first Revolution, though. We abandoned the No Confidence vote.

An earlier version of this column appeared in 2009.