Author Archives: Dick

Conservation of Resources

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It is more important to honor Martin Luther King Jr. than to honor blacks.

It is also more important to honor George Washington and Abraham Lincoln than to honor “Presidents.”

And it is more important to honor Mollie Beattie than to honor women.

What? You’ve never heard of Mollie Beattie?

Black History Month is celebrated each February in the United States and Canada and in October in the UK. This month-long homage highlights contributions of black people and events.

Presidents Day (note the lack of an apostrophe) is a federal holiday here in the United States. We celebrate not on February 12 or February 22 but rather on the third Monday of the month so we can have a three day weekend.

Women’s History Month in March is major commemoration of the economic, political and social achievements of women.

Wow.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m glad that American women can now own entire properties by bequest or outright purchase. The farmhouse we bought in Vermont came with an interesting history: the first Mrs. Stevens to live here outlived the first Mr. Stevens to live here (this was originally the Stevens farm). Mr. Stevens, apparently worried that his children would turn their mother out, bequeathed to her the use of a bedroom, “cooking facilities,” and the cellar for storage.

I’m glad that American politicians can now spend endless time on world-altering events like declaring holidays and then going on them.

And I’m glad that Americans, whether black or white or purple or green can now buy houses, build businesses, go to school, marry, and vote. When I lived in New Jersey, the election judge who signed me in was a black man named Harper. He looked at my ID, looked at his name badge, and looked at my ID again.

“Oh,” he said, “You’re from the other side of the family.”

I was pleased but someday, we won’t notice which side of the family we came from.

We certainly need Presidents. Without them, Congress would have run amok with all this holidaying far sooner and the now-233 year history of this particular democratic experiment would have been written in about 87 years.

Martin Luther King Jr. started out as pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Alabama. As arguably the strongest voice for civil rights, he was first a man people might never heard of.

Mollie Beattie was a Vermonter and the first woman to lead the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. As arguably the strongest single voice for wildlife conservation, she was a woman most people still have never heard of.

George Washington and Abraham Lincoln are larger than life now but they were just George and Abe to their families and to the people nearest them.

They all gave us something more. George and Abe share two important traits with Martin and Mollie: they did more than they thought they would and they all inspired us to do more than we thought we could. That’s heroic.

We need heroes. When we honor mere Presidents, all we get is another sale.

Sea Kittens Are Us

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PETA has gone off the deep end.

The terrorist group determined to end humankind’s position at the top of the food chain has learned to be soft and fuzzy. Probably from Al Gore, the Nobel laureate who has mastered the art of advertising to move most of a population away from real science.

PETA wants to rename fish.

Renaming fish is their 2009 contribution to political correctness.

Kindergarten educators (I can’t call them teachers because teachers know better) want to prevent kindergarten bullies from offending the less fortunate. The Political Correctness Police (ever wonder why that equates to PCP?) compel us to avoid upsetting the non-white, the homosexual, any female, the crippled, the ugly, the fat, or the stupid. One of my favorite Clint Eastwood movies is “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.” The man in the lice-ridden poncho would lose a lot of punch if he starred in “The Good, The Goodness-Challenged, and The Unfortunately Handsomeness-Challenged.”

Political correctness comes in all flavors and all of them irk me.

I wonder whether Brazilians are annoyed by the name we have given (mostly) Bolivian almendra nut. The annual harvest of Brazil nuts is about 20,000 tons; Bolivia sends about half of those to market.

The American Fisheries Society moved Floridians to call the jewfish the “goliath grouper.” The Oxford English Dictionary lists the first usage of “jewfish” in this 1697 quote: “The Jew-Fish is a very good fish and, I judge, so called by the English because it hath scales and fins, therefore a clean fish, according to Levitical law.”

Seconds before his ouster in 1999, public advocate David Howard, was quoted thusly, “I will have to be niggardly with this fund…” The political firestorm came as others called this 700 year-old synonym for miserly, a “racist” epithet.

Muslims have castigated Prince Harry for calling a fellow cadet a “raghead.” (As an aside, I find it interesting that it is politically CORRECT for Muslims pledge to kill all American infidels and to shout *death to Israel*.)

The term “politically correct” traces back to Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book and was adopted in the 1960s by the radical left. RightSpeak (or in this case, LeftSpeak), ought to give us pause no matter what the origin. After all, the entropy of the universe never dwindles and once your peers decide they can trash your mental treasury, the penalties they impose grow larger with every alleged infraction.

The death of language comes when words lose their meaning in favor of their consequences.

Got to dial it back:

I do not use racial or ethnic slurs.

I do know that people who call me a redneck WASP show only their own brilliance.

I do know kids need to build immunity to germs both bacterial and conversational.

I do not tolerate RightSpeak or RightThink.

And now PETA wants us to call all fish, “sea kittens.”

“Nobody would hurt a sea kitten!” the group says on its website.

They hope to start their campaign to end “fishing” by retiring the name for good.

OK, OK, I understand that no one takes PETA seriously and the sea kitten campaign is at best laughable. I’m not laughing. PETA’s agenda is quite simply to destroy our meat and fish industries which, when you look at the expected results, means PETA’s agenda is to destroy humankind.

After all, it is already so illegal to catch or eat a kosher goliath grouper in Florida waters that the penalty for simply having one aboard may be forfeiture of one’s fishing boat.

Time to trot out my recipes for cat.

Happy New Year!

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Curmudgery.

I enjoy my role as a curmudgeon and we all know that Curmudgery sells newspapers better than kitten rescues. After all, we get a warm and fuzzy feeling in our hearts for the firemen who spend thousands of taxpayer dollars digging a bedraggled, mewling, critter out of a storm drain, only to have it procreate more brain-dead, sewer-jumping progeny to add to the gene pool. However, comma, that story doesn’t sell newspapers. It gets buried on page 34. Below the fold.

People want blood.

People want gore.

People want veins in their teeth.

At the race track we regularly repeated this litany that was true-to-life for most spectators:

Was there a crash? I hope there wasn’t a crash!
Was anybody hurt? I hope no one was hurt!
Was there blood? I hope there wasn’t blood!
Did anybody die?

Speaking of car wrecks, Happy New Year!

I most sincerely hope. You know the saying, “It can’t get any worse?” Well, of course it can but I doubt it can get any more surreal. I mean, who could make this stuff up? If I had written that Ken Lay went to jail but AIG CEO Martin Sullivan took $15 million in cash as his company but-for-the-grace-of-thee-and-me sank and that Merrill Lynch CEO Jeff Thain would ask for a $10 million bonus because he “kept the losses to only eleven billion dollars,” nobody would believe it.

It is dispiriting to have to hammer on the same bad behavior by crooks in business, crooks in finance, and congress critters.

So, here’s the deal. I want to smile more in this new year. Send me happy stories. I can’t guarantee I will spin all of them into columns but I can guarantee they will make me smile.

2008 Bail Out

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We’ve heard of the Year of the Rat. The ancient Chinese welcomed the Rat as their protector and source of material prosperity. 2008 was the Year of the Thieving Rats.

I don’t usually like to see a year end. I love sunsets because the sky colors light up my life at the end of the day but the end of 2008 just means I’m another year older and deeper in debt.

I started out the year with a Schwab One account and now have a Schwab .015 account.

Speaking of our financial institutions, we also started 2008 with a credit fiasco when some mope lifted Herself’s wallet in Philly; the credit card processing center kept sending substitute cards they wouldn’t let us activate.

“What are the last 4 digits on your card, Mr. Harper?”

5884.

“This looks like a replacement for a card that was lost. That’s your old card number.”

No, my old card ended in 3399.

“That’s not right. I show the old card as 5884 and the new card as 6091. Let me put you on hold.”
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“Thank you for holding. We value this opportunity to service your call. Please continue to hold for the next available advisor.”
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“The current hold time is approximately 8 minutes.”

At least they had a nice symphony playing as their hold music.

I found out later that, while I was on hold, the banks scored $700 Billion on my other credit card.

Start a spreadsheet. Right now. Immediately. List every credit or debit card you have. All of them. Include the card number, the institution name, the institution phone number, the full name in which it is issued. Include its expiration date. Make a column with every autopay you pay with each card. In a spreadsheet.

Did I mention to do it in a spreadsheet? Spreadsheets are cool.

Brett Favre, who is Herself’s favorite quarterback of all time, lost his last ever Championship hope with an illegal forward pass yesterday. On the other hand, the rest of the Jets did complete more lateral passes in a single play than anyone had seen in a professional football game this year. If they hadn’t been using their hands, we would have thought it was professional soccer.

I bought my first hard disk-based “Personal Video Recorder” this year so I could pause the news and Herself could pause fuhball.

Built in China, of course, so I did my best for the economy.

This may be the second most irritating product on the market. The operating system was designed to operate bulldozers instead of showstoppers and the remote control pretty much doesn’t. Despite that, I wanted to buy two of them and the seller shipped two of them but only one arrived. Somebody stole the second “in transit.” And now this brand is off the market. Maybe if I had ordered three or four…

Our neighbors decided a couple of years ago that my project to rebuild the North Puffin garage “disappointed” them so they sued us. In the process of beating on us with their lawyers they magically grew their postage stamp sized camp lot by a few feet to the South and a few more to the North.

We lost a few feet of land on our southern boundary and our other neighbors lost a couple of feet of land on their northern boundary but at least we have finished that episode and are done with them.

I bought General Motors stock earlier this year. Automakers and auto dealers immediately tanked. GM suspended its dividend; later Congress decided to suspend GM. I didn’t understand it then but I understand it now; I spent 100 hours and $200 selling a $1,700 used car for $1,400 this Fall.

Regular readers will recall that I had had a yen for a special plate and expected, when I bought this particular KeysCar, that I would get one. After all, DICK was available in Vermont.

Unfortunately, Vermont said I’m not a Dick.

I listed the car on the free craigslist classified advertising site. Three legitimate buyers called. I sold it to one of them for a stack of $100 bills. 15 Nigerians or Nigerian-trained operatives offered cashier’s checks. Every last one of those bounced.

Gasoline flirted with $5/gallon about 20 nanoseconds after I decided to start driving everywhere again. I have some small hope that the oil speculators who caused that spike (and have now taken it in the ear when oil dropped back to traditional levels) were the same financial wizards who robbed us in the mortgage markets.

Or maybe not. There was very little justice in 2008.

Denny Crane sure was something, though. All he asked for was my interest every week but he earned my respect and he got my vote.

The stories we Pollyannas tell ourselves are more optimistic than these. 2009 is going to better, right?