Category Archives: Writing

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.

Breezy

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My great grandfather, Enos Barnard, kept a diary. Many people in that age did; some have become a great resource of sociological, marketing, and real-time observations.

“The meeting was stirred by A.D.’s announcement more than by the Indian Mutiny.”
“Shipped 30 pounds of butter to NY on PRR for $31.”
“Patchy fog this morning but Sunny for the day. One little shower this afternoon. Breezy.”

Right. “Breezy” is showing up in modern weather reports but my great grandfather never used the word in his life.

Probably because he liked words and used them with precision.

Friday morning started pretty grim looking. 80° and 69% humidity which is better than it has been but the sky full of heavy-bottomed black clouds. It was supposed to be mostly sunny with just the slightest 10% chance of showers so the clouds confused us. And “becoming breezy.” Heh. East winds about 15 in the morning increased to 20 – 25 mph by my afternoon beach time. I guess breezy meant about 20 mph on Friday. Better than “fresh,” I guess.

Saturday was mostly sunny, and “breezy” again. Local television meteorologist Trent Aric called it “blustery” Friday night.

I see it will be “sunny and breezy” in Southwest Puffin with wind gusts up to 30 mph this afternoon.

The Urban Dictionary calls the word breezy “a combination of the two words which describe a woman that is easy. The word ‘broad’ is combined with the word easy creating the derogatory word ‘breezy’.”

That was a lot of help.

Breezy could an adjective meaning “pleasantly windy.” Yourdictionary.com comes closest to my own idea by calling breezy, “slightly windy.” And the American Heritage dictionary calls it “a light current of air; a gentle wind.” Now we’re talking.

The second American Heritage quantifies the breeze as “any of five winds with speeds of from 4 to 27 knots, according to the Beaufort scale.”

Uh oh. That’s still a pretty informal approach to a definition.

Sir Francis Beaufort’s Wind Force Scale gives wind speeds in measurable velocities and describes those speeds in terms of empirical observations at sea or on land. A light breeze (3-6 knots) brings mall wavelets and leaves begin to rustle. In the gentle breeze (7-10 knots), brings some whitecaps to the Straits and the leaves and small twigs move constantly. Moderate breeze (11-15 knots) means small breaking waves, dust and paper in eddies in the air, and palm fronds dancing. The fresh breeze (16-20 knots) is getting serious with some spray coming aboard and small trees swaying. A strong breeze (21-26 knots) takes your garbage can.

I fell in lust with Kay Lenz when she played Kate Jordache in the TV series Rich Man, Poor Man but she made her bones as Breezy, a teen-aged hippy with heart. Clint Eastwood directed her in the film of the same name. It’s a schmaltzy story of a hitchhiker who escapes a man who wanted her for only sex.

So I’m thinking the weather peeps should use the appropriate qualifiers unless they want us to use these breezes only for sex.

What a Disaster!

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Policemen police. Runners run. Writers write. And we all look over our own shoulders now and then.

This week I write about what I missed. And what I didn’t.

I cherish a few beliefs about myownself. This blog isn’t about me. These columns are what Faux News calls fair and balanced. And I AM™ never w-r-r-rong.

OK. Two out of three ain’t bad.

Last month, in writing about millionaires, I admitted that I’d rather be a millionaire than not. I’m not going to increase my personal wealth much by putting a Paypal button on this site. The week before that, I confessed that I now understand why liberals don’t geddit. And just two weeks before, I told the story of my mom at the corner of High and Gay.

This is my 333 entry since I started blogging in 2008. 220 of them have been in the op-ed category I call Random Access. Many of those (151) fell in the Politics and News category. I imagine you can figure out what topics I covered.

“Politics is like the weather,” I wrote in 2008. “Everybody talks about it. People think they can predict the weather. Or change it.”

The pieces that had more impact were more personal. 2010 was a busy year. Liz Arden sent me a family picture of herself with her parents and I riffed that into a story about my mom as an elderly woman who could have been slain by a taxi. We learned that “full” in a small town parking lot is different than “full” in Miami or New York. gekko and I wrote an ongoing series together.

My family didn’t have a lot of stuff when I was growing up. We had a boat but not a lot of cash. My dad’s job was the typical junior exec and we shared the homestead with my grandfather; we all had to work for what we did have. I came out of that feeling depraved but not deprived.

Rufus missed [bleep]ing Asbestos Dust back in May. He was amazed. The rest of us about died. A week earlier, I had written that “Kids aren’t allowed to eat dirt.” Number One daughter had been banned from classes because she wore a t-shirt to school.

I did spend some time wondering why my friend Swampy Swamtek, with all his brainpower, with all his education, with all his belief in conservation, can’t remember to turn out the lights when he leaves a room. I remembered that, since the heady days of Apollo 13 forty years ago, no man has had to walk twenty-five miles to school every morning, uphill, barefoot. Both ways. According to this president’s plan no American man ever will again.

And I took some time off from worrying about the claim that women’s hot flashes are responsible for Global Warming to reminisce about my sports car races in the 70s.

I somehow missed the fact that the Mets did not make the World Series. I didn’t once write about the United/Continental airline’s merger that brought together 700 planes, dropped employment from 88,000 to 77,000, and shared 7 bags of 2003 peanuts among us. Airlines put fares up $20 across the board. I never once mentioned Christine O’Donnell’s Rhodes Scholarship in comedy which is at least as credible as her candidacy turned out to be.

I’ll keep hammering the small town politicians who want you to believe that paying twice as much for half as many police officers in your town is a way to save you (tax) money. And when Congress acts on H.R.6907, a measure to ban further activity at Eyjafjallajökull, you’ll hear about it here first. Most important, in the spirit of WikiLeaks, pretty much everything personal rattling around between my ears will sooner or later fall out on these pages.

Politics is like the climate. Everybody talks about it. People think they can predict the climate. Or change it.

How Many Millionaires?

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“Rich politicians take care of their own,” Fred Grimm wrote in the Miami Herald yesterday. “The rich are different from you and me. Well, me anyway. And they’re damn well positioned to keep it that way.”

Here’s his proof: Florida has a fabulously wealthy governor-elect who spent $73 million of his own money to get elected and a Legislature “laden with millionaires.” 18 millionaires will be “slumming in the state Senate. That’s 18 out of 40 senators.” 34 millionaires vote in the House. Out of 120 state reps. “Rich reps are forced to mingle with the unwashed rabble,” Mr. Grimm wrote.

“The U.S. Congress wallows in even more disproportionate affluence than our elected moneybags in Tallahassee.” He used the Center for Responsive Politics to find that 261 members of Congress are millionaires, and 55 are worth more than $10 million. Median wealth in the Senate rose from $2.27 million to $2.38 million last year.

I apologize in advance. I tried to make this funny. It isn’t.

This kind of writing irks me. My neighbor Stan is a millionaire. He doesn’t feel rich. In fact, he complains about anything but rich. A Texas friend, Billy Bob, is just about on the median wealth of the Senate. He feels richer than I do, but he ain’t buying jet airplanes. Not many other millionaires are, either. So the Herald columnist who wants grimly to stick it to we fabulously wealthy types mingling with the unwashed rabble seems to have left out a fact or two.

Let’s look at some real figures, albeit from 2009 before the electoral shakeup. Only about 17% of Congress Critters are women although 51% of Americans are. 178 representatives and 58 senators are lawyers although only .3% of Americans are. 400 representatives and all but two senators have earned college degrees; many have advanced degrees although only 27% of Americans do. The average age in the House is about 56 and in the Senate, almost 62 although the average age in America is 37.

So, it looks as if our Congress critters are mostly rich, white, college-educated lawyers between 55 and 64, and the general population isn’t.

The general population is about 37 years old, and a mixed bag of ethnicities and schooling. Just .7% of them overall are millionaires. Zero point seven percent.

So what happens when we compare Congress critters to mostly white, college-educated lawyers between 55 and 64? Or even just to college-educated Americans?

The Federal Reserve Bank looks at the median value of financial assets for most folks in America, primarily so banks can sell us checking accounts. The median is the “middle number” of a sorted list of numbers so half the numbers in the list will be less and half the numbers will be greater. The smaller numbers can be a lot smaller or just a little bit smaller but, in this case can never be less than zero. The bigger numbers can be just a teeny bit greater or can be hugely larger.

The Fed reported on those median values. It turns out that households of people aged 55-64 had about $95,200 in cash and stocks in 2007 (college graduates of all ages held slightly more at $99,400). Household median “nonfinancial assets” like your house and your car was $347,000 for the Congressional age group and $435,400 for college graduates of all ages. So the mid-line for college grads of any age is to be half a millionaire.

Half the college educated households are worth more than half a million?

Mr. Grimm didn’t tell us that.

27% of Americans have a college degree. 5% of Americans are “rich” millionaires. That means that about a fifth of Americans with a college degree are probably millionaires.

Mr. Grimm didn’t tell us that either.

Perhaps Mr. Grimm spent Thanksgiving with a can of Spam so he wants us to swallow his turkey.

Perhaps we need more college educated households although that offers no guarantees. The BLS reports that more than 482,000 college-educated Americans are customer service reps. Over 100,000 college-educated Americans are maids and janitors; 5% of those have a Ph.D.

And perhaps, as Mr. Shakespear reminds us, our bigger problem with Congress is the number of lawyers rather than the number of rich lawyers.

Mr. Grimm irks me because he trotted out an abundance of ogre words and a sparse few facts to back them up. I guar-an-damn-tee you that being a millionaire ain’t what it used to be.

I searched for a biography of Mr. Grimm who says “the way [the rich] see things . . . well, they’re different from you and me.” No joy. He was a general assignment reporter at the Herald after working for other newspapers. He has been a columnist there for about 20 years. I’m going out on a limb here without giving you the data I wanted him to give us, but I’m thinking Mr. Grimm is a limousine lib. He probably has a college degree. He certainly rubs elbows with the very same kind of folks lounging around Tallahassee and Washington that he excoriated yesterday. After all, the BLS also reports that the top 10% of news analysts, reporters, and columnists (meaning senior staff at major metro dailies) earned more than $77,480 per year.

Columnists are supposed to make waves. I do.

But Miami columnists ought not complain about how cold it is in South Florida when the fact show it is 60° colder in North Puffin. We do better making waves with facts that stand up to daylight scrutiny.

Warning: Unexpected transition ahead. Follow along and be careful where you step.

I will address the question, Is Liberalism really Liberalislam another time.

The Herald column does what so many limousine liberals and fundamentalist Muslims alike want to do: drag down the rich so everyone is poor and scrabbling in the dirt.

Me? I’d rather be a millionaire so here’s my proposal. If you are so apologetic for your personal wealth, give me your fortune. I guarantee I will hire a dungeon master to help you feel really ashamed.

You libs want something worth groaning about? Mr. Grimm could have offered a couple of valid statistics:

  • In about 40 years, the average U.S. CEO pay has grown by an order of magnitude. Mine hasn’t.
  • Congress critters upped their average wealth by 16% in 2009, a year the rest of us took a hit.

Americans should celebrate that some of us can become wealthy. Want to do better? The answer is not to tear down those who have but rather to improve the odds for the have nots.

Did You (Can You) Pass Math?

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Did You Pass Math? is a blogware plug-in that “restricts comment spam by throwing the commenter a simple math question.” It works about 100% of the time against automated coments. Unfortunately, it also works about 50% of the time against real coments. When it fails, it eats your comment. I think it fails most often around suppertime.

Here’s the scoop. Either include a nice, Dunning-sized scoop of rum raisin ice cream with your comment or write your comment in a separate app like Notepad or your word processor of choice, then copy and paste it into the comment field.

Thanks!