Non-Conformity in the New Age

Modern life affords iconoclastic people many opportunities for pride by presenting a growing array of depraved behaviors to spurn. Simply by remaining static they improve relative to the sheep around them.

However, distinguishing achievement from relative improvement becomes difficult. Thus they too are victims of useless technological additions. It cheapens their isolation.

Romney's Base

Selling books at the Mt. Dora show yesterday, I spot a blue Romney t-shirt in the crowd walking by - a man and his wife.  With my OUTSOURCE ROMNEY bumper stickers at the ready, I say "Hey - I have a bumper sticker for you."

 

On viewing the sticker the puzzled woman says to the man, "Is that good?"

 

He considers briefly, then says, "No, it is not."

 

Then she blurts, "Outsource communists."

 

Under his breath as they walk away, the man says about the sticker, "That's bullshit." 

 

This is what  politics does to people.

Zero tolerance

You gotta love a society that makes a great show of trying to keep kids off drugs while televising an ad on major league baseball presenting four guys who easily could be high school age having a great time together because each of them, at long last, holds a bottle of beer in a public venue. The closing caption reads “The good times are waiting.”

Yep. Just hang in there kids, in your presently dull beerless life. Soon you won’t have to try to figure out how to have a good time with all your faculties operating. You can just get inebriated. You’ll be grown-ups. And hey - as long as you’re getting drunk, you might as well get out there and drive around a little. Maybe do some texting while you’re at it. It’s all good. But never, ever forget – Don’t do drugs!

Watch any ball game on television...

Watch any ball game on television and you'll get the message loud and clear. The commercial interests want you to be caffeinated during the week, full of beer on the weekend and stupid all the time. And they start early. They know kids watch televised sports and they want them to learn from the ads that fun and Budweiser are inseparable. Hard alcohol doesn’t need to advertise. Beer is their gateway drug. Once you become Joe Sixpack, the rest is easy.

Hey Dad – why do you always drink beer when you're watching football?
Beer makes it fun.
Well, why don't you and your friends just go outside and play football yourselves? Wouldn't that be more fun?
Because you can't drink beer and play football.
But if you were playing, you wouldn't want to drink beer because playing would be the fun of it.
Look son, Americans drink beer when we're not working. That's what we do. It helps the economy. You know how many people would lose their jobs if Budweiser went out of business?
Little Billy thought for a moment. I know! I know!
What son? You could buy the beer so Budweiser stays in business, then pour it out and go outside and play football with your friends.
Listen Billy. I don't want to hear that kind of crazy talk from you. People'll think you're goofy. I can't afford to buy beer just to pour it out. If I buy the stuff, I'm damn well going to drink it.
But it doesn't cost any more if you don't drink it.
But I don't want to not drink it.
But if you didn't drink it, you could go out and play.
Listen. Suppose I'm out playing football with my friends instead of watching the Super Bowl. And, incidentally, I'd have to get some new friends because nobody I know would do that. Anyway I go to work the next day and everybody's talking about the game. Somebody says, Hey Roger. Did you see that amazing game winning pass? Then I say, nope. I was outside playing football with my friends. But you should have seen this catch I made. You see what I mean? I've got nothing to talk about. Then everybody looks at me funny and just walks away and they don't trust me anymore.
So if everybody stopped drinking beer and went outside and played, you could do it too.
Sure. But everybody's not going to do that son. It would be, well, un-American.
But then you can't go outside and have fun. Little Billy's heart breaks for his father. He starts crying. I hate beer!
Now don't say that, son. Beer isn't bad. Look! See that commercial? A beer waterfall. Doesn't that look like fun?
The boy's eyes widen. Wow! It sure does. Can I have some beer, Dad?
No son. You have to wait until you're old enough.
But I can't wait.
Dad pulls his eight-year old son onto the couch next to him and puts his arm around his shoulders. You're going to have to.

TV weather lady

I just heard a TV weather lady say, "If you're not in front of your computer or your TV, then you need to get our channel 7 SEVERE WEATHER ALERTS." That's ridiculous. Why would anybody not be in front of their TV or computer?

Okay.

Okay. The democrats won the convention contest. O'bama gets to be president again.

On the many ways the cookie crumbles

Guns don’t kill people. Automobiles do. Before Americans get too vocal about the disastrous nature of guns, they might consider the sanctioned slaughter of hundreds of thousands on the nation’s highways perpetrated by certifiably sane people. Many babies who never agreed to the odds are included in this. More people are destroyed in cars every day than in a year of gun incidents. Every year the highways of America approach the carnage of the Viet Nam War. Where are the protestors? Where is the outrage? Where are the pro-lifers? In what cause does this particular misery and grief reach into as many American households? Why, the solvency of the various transportation industries. Production of automobiles is, after all, a traditional source of American pride. As usual the public debate misses the big picture and the real issue. And the real issue is not about us holding onto our guaranteed freedoms, like owning guns and cars. It’s about industries profiting by making these instruments of destruction available to us; and affordable, if barely. When it benefits them for us not to have these items, I’m pretty sure they will be no longer available. Furthermore, with our general over-population, every little bit helps. People want the freedom of movement a car grants them, yet they sit in an office all day to afford a car to zoom back and forth to work in. Does anybody actually think about the merits of this trade-off? How About this? As a caring, compassionate country of people, we might view the horror produced by cars and balance it with the convenience and fun they seem to offer, noting how the scales tip. Next we could imagine being the one paralyzed by a crash or the one whose loved one has been torn from him on the highway. Then we go read John Donne’s No Man is an Island and stop looking at the victims as “the other guy.” We adopt the new perspective that we are part of humanity with individual wills. We believe that what befalls our fellow man befalls us. We realize that humanity together is a powerful force that can improve our destiny while individually we have no such influence. Then we start challenging the major evils instead of granting them immunity and quibbling about their various details as if they were the weather. We drop the token righteous indignation the media wrings out of us and we, us millions, make a sacrifice in aid of Americans as a whole. We do something wild, extravagant, completely unimaginable, not through the appropriate government channels through which all things threatening navigate to nowhere but with the leverage we possess only outside the prescribed paradigm. We stand up for all the people who will be killed and maimed on our highways in the coming days, weeks and years, all the people who today wear bullseyes on their backs and we boycott. We don’t buy cars and we don’t drive them. Next we could tally daily the number of our fellow Americans not killed and maimed in their cars and the number of households not wracked by the resulting grief. We could stand tall and feel gladness in being sentient beings instead of consumer-puppets. Now that would be a true case of the slave throwing off his shackles. That would be an exciting episode of people caring enough about other people to do something about it. What a national adventure it could be. Okay, let’s ratchet it down. Over 3,000 people are killed each year by driving on the phone. How about we take that as a national affront? That’s 3,000 fellow Americans, (including babies, you pro-lifers) going to be executed next year by irresponsible drivers using their phones. The phones easily could be manufactured incapable of operating in a moving car but they’re not. That is because the communications companies are willing to accept that human sacrifice to boost their profits and keep their products popular. How about we practice a bit of the Judeo-Christian ethic we supposedly live by and save next year’s victims by boycotting cell phones until the proper adjustment is made? It would be a great, inspiring spectacle but let’s face it. It’s probably not in our genetic make-up. As our pets look to us, we look to our masters.

Modern Times

The computer was on and on and on and on never off, always soft and waiting. A Mastercard of death it swiped the population, time for this and time for that, no time for constipation. They scanned the planet earth while sitting in a chair and soon everybody and their brother had been to everywhere. They Googled all the facts that were ever known to man and what they couldn’t Google went in the garbage can The knew of all the horror as soon as it occurred safe in the sacred internet compressed into a word They never paused to wonder where all the good times went until the great bonanza entirely had been spent. Then one by one when they got old and the time had come to die they expected just to Google it and get on with their lives. “Don’t worry,” God boomed to put their minds at ease, “we have pc’s in Heaven now pass the biscuits please. “You can Google all the stars, the grandest and the mere, and Facebible all your friends who didn’t make it here.” So happily they went to death, knowing what was there and didn’t even bother to bring fresh underwear.

Getting Small

Now that the fundamental Lego of the universe has been discovered by chimps with glasses, what next? Maybe it’ll get its own comedy show – the Higgs-Boson Hour. I sure hope we can follow it on Facebook. Where's de white wimmen?

Just back from the Florida Folk Festival

Just back from the Florida Folk Festival. Got talking with a woman there who made a lot of sense, as people often do until they bring up politics. “So what’s wrong with Obama?” I bit, always willing to take my brain where no brain has gone before. “Why can’t he produce a birth certificate?” “I believe he has,” I offered. “It took him long enough.” Just to push the topic a little I asked her why he should be required to produce one at all considering no other recent presidents have been. This stuck her for a bit, like how could the answer not be perfectly obvious to me. Eventually she grumbled, “Look at his name,” to which I replied lots of Irishmen have been born in the United States. She really had nothing to say to that.

Land of the Free and Home of the Chickenshit

First Tony Bennett had to publicly apologize for being an American stating his opinion and now it's Ozzie Guillen. And apparently Guillen's doing it for a bunch of very sensitive Cubans who are in Miami on the pretense of valuing freedom! Maybe I've been misinterpreting this concept of free speech so frequently touted as the great thing about living here. I think it actually means they just don't tax it yet.

Better Treed than Feed

Courageous is he
Who steps from a tree
Only to land undefended
Smack on the ground
With lions all around
None of whom he has befriended.

Foolish is she
Who follows down he
To give him a kiss for his daring
And turns all around
with a fierce looking frown
to count all the lions she is scaring.

Eaten are they
In the usual way
Who are heedless of lions below them
And hope to escape
Without laceration or scrape
From lions that don't even know them.

Puffin

If a puffin was a puffin, what would he be a puffin on?  Perhaps if a puffin was sitting on a pipe he would be a puffin on it.