I Hate Houseguests

When PBS airs Nature I know I’m in for a treat.

The photography is amazing, the narration is informative and sometimes humorous, and the animals are at their best – living their lives in the wild where we’re privileged to join them for awhile.

I recently enjoyed a new Nature mini-series, Super Cats.  The series featured plenty of time with large and small wild cats including lions, tigers, bobcats, the elusive snow leopard, Africa’s black-footed cat – called “the deadliest cat on the planet” – 31 cats in all.

But without a doubt the coolest cat was the one with partially webbed feet.

That’s right – webbed feet.

It likes the water.

When it’s hungry, it goes fishing.

It’s called…

The fishing cat.

Fishing cats are about twice the size of domestic cats, weighing between 11 and 35 pounds.  They live in south and southeast Asia, and we find them near water because that’s their primary hunting place.

They’re handsome cats, with dark stripes on their face and shoulders, and spots on their sides and legs.  Fishing cats’ bodies are muscular, and their legs are shorter compared to cats who chase their prey across wide, open spaces.

And then there are those webbed feet.  They come in handy when the fishing cat is perched on a rock, waiting to scoop up a fish, and the webbing is equally useful as the cat glides through the water and then…

Gotcha!  Dinner is served.

That webbing between their toes also keep fishing cats from sinking when they’re walking across muddy wetlands, and they do sometimes hunt away from streams and lakes – their diet can include snakes, rodents, young deer and yes, they’ve been known to invade farmer’s chicken coops.

Super Cats features a segment with a mother fishing cat showing her two kittens water for the first time – and they’re curious, but nervous.

The mother demonstrates her expert hunting technique, moving smoothly through the stream and catching a fish in her mouth.  The kittens learn that water can mean food, but catching that food, well…

Like so many animals in the wild, fishing cats are threatened by loss of their habitat.  The International Species Information Service lists only 256 worldwide, with 68 in U.S. zoos.

So I’m grateful I was introduced to, and have the chance to appreciate, a cat that doesn’t sing for its supper…

But sure can swim for it.

And now it’s time to mock yet another ridiculous article about how to make your working life something other than boring, tedious and degrading.

This time the article offers advice on “How to ease into your work routine” after you return from vacation.

The author, John “Johnny Jet” DiScala (left), has a modest 1100+ word bio on his website where he overshares about guess what – himself.  His birthplace, his asthma, and his college girlfriend, but nowhere in his bio could I find any mention of what he does for a living, though he’s “traveled more than 100,000 miles a year since…1995.”

I’m figuring he’s not a minimum wage employee at a fast food restaurant.

Perhaps overexposure to high altitudes have kept Johnny Jet from picking up on this reality:

Most working people who go on vacation are, in reality, on workation, meaning that throughout the time they’re away, they’re in contact with co-workers, managers or both; they’re responding to work-related emails and texts; and even attending meetings via Skype and other technology.

So to bring Johnny Jet back home from Fantasy Island and assist with his future advice articles, here are the realities vs. his fantasies:

Johnny Jet’s Advice	Reality	Reality
“Don’t go back to work right after your vacation is over.”	You never really left work, so going back will be no big adjustment.
“Take a day or two to relax and recuperate before heading back into the office.”	You can’t.  You used up your measly vacation time on your workation.
“On your first morning back, take some time to plan out your day.”	You’d better have your day planned before you arrive, and hit the ground running when you do.
“Be sure to give yourself alone time.”	A bit challenging, since you’re in a room with 47 other cubes, all occupied.
“Take a short break every three hours to breathe deeply and get back into the groove.”	The last time you took a break, HR had a little sit-down with you.
“Interact with others at the office…Your co-workers will want to know about your trip.”	No, no, no, no, no, no.  Do not even think about whipping out your phone and sharing 98 photos of you parasailing above a Caribbean beach.  Even if that was the one time you weren’t connected to the office.
“Conversations about your vacation will help you form bonds with your co-workers.”	No, no, no, no, no, no.  Conversations about your vacation are boring.  No one wants to hear about it, and haven’t you got work to catch up on?

So, John “Johnny Jet” DiScala, you keep sharing all that great advice and we’ll keep it in mind.

If we ever take a vacation.

Publication date:  September 2018

Review, short version:  Three roses out of four.

Review, long version:

Isn’t it great to find a new author you really like?

By “new” I mean new to me.  They’d written earlier books, but I just hadn’t discovered them.

But when I like that author, I go find those earlier books, and look forward to their next one.

Sometimes, though, after finding that author and reading a number of their books, I stop reading her or him.  For various reasons, their books don’t appeal to me anymore.  They keep writing basically the same book, and I get tired of it.  Or they start writing a different type of book, and it doesn’t resonate with me.  Or the book reads like they were rushing to meet their deadline instead of focusing on telling the story.

I’m not saying the authors I stop reading aren’t writing good books; I’m saying they aren’t writing books I’m interested in.

For various reasons, three authors whose books I’d stopped reading are Karen White, Beatriz Williams and Lauren Willig.

Then these three authors wrote a book together, The Glass Ocean.

I decided to give it a try.

This sounds contradictory since I’d given up on White, Williams and Willig, but the storyline intrigued me.  Most of it takes place on the Lusitania, a British luxury ocean liner that was torpedoed and sunk by a German submarine in 1915 during the first World War:

Of the 1,959 passengers and crew aboard Lusitania, 1,198 lost their lives including 128 Americans.  Rumors and conspiracy theories have surrounded the Lusitania ever since, but that’s not the focus of The Glass Ocean.

Instead the focus is three female lead characters in two time periods:  Sarah in 2013, and Caroline and Tess in 1915.  The book moves back and forth between time periods and characters, but there’s none of the muddle that can sometimes happen when authors use this storytelling technique.

Sarah, 30, is an author and historian; Caroline, 24, the aristocratic wife of a wealthy merchant; and Tess, also 24, is a forger and grifter.  They’re all connected and not just by the Lusitania, though the ship’s sinking as told through Caroline and Tess’ eyes is a highlight of the book.

The Glass Ocean is a great mix of history, intrigue, romance and suspense, and the surprises kept me guessing all the way through.  I cared about the characters, and how they dealt with their lives, in both this century – and the last.

In the book’s Acknowledgments the authors refer to themselves as “Team W,” and I was curious as to why White, Williams and Willig, already three bestselling authors, would join forces.  An online search didn’t answer my why, but I did learn that The Glass Ocean isn’t their only collaboration – in 2016 Team W published their first, The Forgotten Room.

That book debuted on The New York Times best seller list, so it looks like they hit that one out of the park, too.

Maybe I haven’t quite given up on White, Williams and Willig.

NASA stands for National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

In an earlier blog I suggested that NASA actually stands for “Needless And Stupid Assignments.”

The NASA budget for fiscal year 2019 is $19.9 billion, give or take a few million.

That’s a whole lot of Needless and Stupid Assignments.

Case in point when, in late November, the folks at NASA were doing the Happy Dance:

InSight Lander had successfully landed on Mars.

It was, in my opinion, needless and stupid.

It was also expensive:

Insight Lander cost $828.8 million.

InSight – which, because our government can’t resist acronyms – stands for “Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport,” a NASA Discovery Program mission that has now placed “a single geophysical lander on Mars to study its deep interior.”

Which got me wondering, “Why is our government spending my tax dollars to ‘study’ the ‘deep interior’ of Mars, or any other aspect of Mars?”

Simple answer:  Our government wants to colonize Mars with Americans before anyone else, especially the Russians, get there.  That way, we get first dibs on the choicest living locations, which might look like this:

Then I started wondering, “How many tax dollars is the government spending to ‘study’ Mars?”

A million here, a million there…

As for what we’ve spent on just our Mars missions, according to my guesstimate, it’s in the neighborhood of $10 billion+.  Here’s the what, when and cost:

Spacecraft Name	Year	Cost
Insight Lander	2018	$828.8 million
MAVEN	2013	$671 million
Curiosity	2011	$2.5 billion
Mars Phoenix	2007	$386 million
Dawn	2007	$446 million
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter	2005	$720 million
Opportunity	2003	$400 million
Spirit	2003	$400 million
2001 Mars Odyssey	2001	$297 million
Deep Space 2	1999	$29.2 million
Mars Polar Lander	1999	$110 million
Mars Climate Orbiter	1998	$193.1 million
Mars Pathfinder	1996	$175 million
Sojourner	1996	$25 million
Mars Global Pathfinder	1996	$154 million
Mars Observer	1992	$813 million
Viking 1 & 2	1975	$1 billion
Mariner 9	1971	$5.5 million (estimate)
Mariner 8	1971	$5.5 million (estimate)
Mariner 7	1969	$5.5 million (estimate)
Mariner 6	1969	$5.5 million (estimate)
Mariner 4	1964	$5.5 million (estimate)
Mariner 3	1964	$83.2 million

Keep in mind that the dollar figures are from that year.  So, for example, the $83.2 million in 1964 is actually $662 million today.

Further math is your option.

And all of the above is just for study purposes.  When we start talking about putting Americans on Mars, according to SpaceNews:

“Transportation costs alone could total over $100 billion before the first Mars mission in 2035.  A ballpark cost of the first Mars mission in 2035 would total $230 billion.  Second and subsequent missions, occurring at three-year intervals, would cost about $142 billion each.”

A billion here, a billion there…

I think that’s a lot of money to spend to go someplace that doesn’t even have a decent moon.  Unlike the lovely orb that lights up our nighttime sky, Mars has a couple of puny little rocks called Phobos and Deimos, and I don’t think you’ll ever hear Creedence Clearwater Survival singing, “Bad Phobos Rising,” do you?

But to fair – and clearly I’m committed to that – let’s compare and contrast Mars and Earth:

	Mars	Earth
Supports life?	No.	Yes.
Average temperature?	-81 degrees Fahrenheit.	58.3 degrees Fahrenheit.
Cost to get there?	$10 billion+ so far.	$0 – we’re already here.
Great place for a destination wedding?	Takes a year to get there – a long time to wait for gifts.	We’re already here.
Has tallest mountain in solar system?	Yes, Olympus Mons.	Who cares?
Has a TV show named after it?	Mars on the National Geographic Channel.	Never watched it.
Has the largest dust storms in the solar system?	Yes – on Mars they can last for months and cover the entire planet.	They’re inside my house, but I’m going to do something about that – seriously.
Fun fact?	A 100-pound person on Earth would weigh around 38 pounds on Mars.	Now that I could get into.
Have pieces of Mars been found on Earth?	Yes, from meteorites ejected from Mars.	If Mars is coming to us, why are we going to it?
Atmosphere?	It’s mostly CO2 – carbon dioxide – the stuff that spews out of car tailpipes.	If we don’t do something pretty soon, Earth will be, too.

So where were we?  Oh, yeah – on Mars.

In a day-after-the-landing article CBS News announced:

And here it is:  The InSight Lander selfie:

A selfie.  Now, that makes it all worthwhile:

The most expensive selfie in the universe.

So there’s our $10 billion just to “study” Mars.

And soon, that billion here and billion there will turn into…

It has the hallmarks of an ancient Egyptian site – a sphinx, pyramids, ankhs, hieroglyphics, sacred gods atop head adornments, gold face masks, balloons…

Balloons?

Oh.  Apparently it’s not an ancient Egyptian site.

Instead, it’s a recent offering from Angry Birds’ entitled Powerslave Tournament.

I’ll talk about that title in a bit.

In case you’ve been living in a cave, Angry Birds is an immensely popular video game franchise.  Angry Birds was created by Finnish company Rovio Entertainment in 2009, and that’s a long time for any video game to survive.

The Birds shows no sign of getting less angry.

The series focuses on multi-colored birds vs. green-colored pigs, their enemies.  I got hooked in 2015 and I’m not embarrassed to admit it.

The reason I’m hooked is because it’s fun, and involves some strategizing, hand-eye coordination, geometry, a touch of physics, and blowing things up.  You can get rewarded with online versions of gold stars, a gold crown, and if you win the tournament, a gold trophy:

Hey – I never said it was brain surgery.  It’s just satisfying entertainment.  Winning is fun, and nobody dies.

The Rovio team shows a lot of creativity in their themes, sound effects and graphics.  It’s the graphics I started out with, so let’s go back to that.

I hadn’t seen the ancient Egyptians graphics theme before, and it, too, is clever.  Evil pigs disappear and return and wrapped as mummies.  The star-lit sky is streaked with lightning.  The sphinx – which has bird face, rather than a human – makes ominous noises:

So I’m having fun with the game, but I really have to question Rovio’s choice of title:

Powerslave?

I think this goes way beyond poor taste and right into the realm of truly, politically incorrect.

C’mon, Angry Birds team.

Cause now, I’m getting angry.

The United States was founded by dreamers.

From the earliest Spanish settlers in St. Augustine, FL in 1565, to the pilgrims who landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620, to the millions of immigrants who’ve arrived since and are still arriving, if you had a dream – the U.S. was and is the place to make it come true.

These dreamers always envisioned – and still envision – a better life.  For most, that equaled more money.

We’re still a country of dreamers, and that “more money” is very much a part of our dreams.

But now, instead of traveling across oceans, we travel to the nearest mini-mart.

And buy a lottery ticket.

And why not?  When there’s a $1.537 billion possibility for a $2 investment.

That’s the amount someone recently won with a Mega Millions ticket purchased in South Carolina.

And we may never know who, because in South Carolina, lottery winners aren’t required to go public.

And if the winner is smart, she or he will never go public.

Winning a huge amount of instant money is an instant invitation to people who are related to the winner, know the winner, or just heard about the winner who arrive, hands extended and entitlement attitude in place, singing “Buddy, can you spare…”

Best to stay unnamed and unknown.

Unfortunately, only a handful of states allow anonymity, and the rationale is interesting:

“Winners need to be public so the public has faith in the lottery,” said California Assemblyman Phil Ting.  “Beneficiary anonymity cannot overshadow governmental accountability to the public.”

“We want the public to know these games are fair and that they can see someone actually won,” said Adam Prock, director of communications and legislative affairs at the Minnesota Lottery.   “The Legislature has made a priority of government transparency.”

“We’re dealing with public money.  And the public has the right to know who’s getting the money,” said James Carey, acting director of the New Jersey state lottery commission.  “It’s important for the integrity and transparency to see who the winners are.”

“Accountability.”  “Transparency.”  “Integrity.”

Yup.  When I think of “government,” those are the words that come to mind.

Not.

People looking for handouts aren’t the only pitfalls of winning big – stories abound about lottery winners whose great good luck turned into very bad outcomes.  For instance:

• William Post won $16.2 million in Pennsylvania in 1988.  In 2006 Post died alone and penniless, living off of welfare payments.
• Doris Murray won $5 million in Georgia in 2007.  A year later she was found stabbed to death in her home, her former boyfriend charged with killing her.
• Abraham Shakespeare won $17 million in Florida.  In 2010 his body was found buried under a concrete slab in the backyard of an acquaintance.

But even with all the moochers and all the bad endings, we dreamers will go on buying lottery tickets.

In 2017 we spent $73 billion chasing the dream.

And why not?  After all…

Somebody’s going to win.

As I talked about in an earlier blog, I love newspapers and I read mine every day.

The printed-on-paper, hold-in-your-hands-and-get-newsprint-on-your-fingers version.

I get a helping of current events, unbiased writing from intelligent, articulate reporters, and a dose of humans, sometimes acting wisely and other times…not so much.

Human behavior is very much the theme of Sunday’s The (almost) Back Page, a collection of short pieces mostly about people’s penchant for doing stupid and/or weird things.

A recent Back Page had three stories that particularly caught my eye, since all were reptile-themed and all happened within days of each other.

Our first story takes place in Kansas City, MO when a landlord was just going about his business, evicting tenant Sean Casey.

On this property was a hot tub.

And in the hot tub:

A seven-foot 200 pound alligator.

Sean called the alligator “Catfish” described him as “a big and cuddly lizard who smiled all the time.”

“I could pet him and he would wag his tail,” said Sean.

Sean’s other roommates included three pythons, rabbits, and several domesticated animals including cats.  Catfish had full freedom of the house, and I’m guessing he didn’t have to work too hard for his dinner.

It’s illegal to own alligators in Kansas City, MO so Catfish was rounded up by authorities and taken to a wildlife sanctuary.

Here’s Sean visiting Catfish – as affectionate as ever:

Our second story is crocodile-related and comes to us from St. Augustine, FL.

Brian Hatfield broke into the Alligator Farm Zoological Park and jumped into a pond:

The pond was full of crocodiles.

Big crocodiles.

Security video shows a nine-foot crocodile lunging at Brian, who escaped the water and sat down on the bank of the pool.  At that point, the “crocodile locked onto his left foot,” according to the park’s director.

Various articles don’t mention why Brian did this, but I suspect he read about Sean and Catfish, and thought, “I’d like to cuddle a big reptile, too.  Maybe it will wag its tail!”

Brian was arrested and being held without bond.

And, alas, without any cuddling.

Perhaps the best part of the story was that before he jumped into the pond, Brian took off his shorts and shoes.

The shoes?

Crocs.

Talk about “reptile theme”!

Crocs…………………………………………………and crocs.  Get it?

Our third reptile-related story happened in Davie, FL when authorities captured an unidentified owner’s pet.

This six-foot+ Asian water monitor:

Yes, in Florida it’s legal to own Asian water monitors.  You can buy a cute little baby monitor online for $170 plus shipping, while an adult will cost you $750 to $1,000+.

The monitor was first reported in August but wasn’t rounded up until early November.  During that time it terrorized residents of a suburban Miami neighborhood, lurking in their back yards and scratching at their patio doors.  It probably didn’t make the local rodents and frog population too happy, either, as those are its dinner du jour.

Which doesn’t mean it wouldn’t take a bite out of you.  It would, and gladly.

The owner of a wildlife removal and rescue company said the monitor was “released,” meaning its owner didn’t want it anymore and turned it loose.

So it’s ironic that authorities returned it to its owner, and issued a criminal citation for the monitor’s escape.

Can’t you hear the conversation?

Owner:  Dude, I told you to get lost!

Monitor:  Dude, I wanna cuddle!

After reading this, wouldn’t you agree…

When I’m reading a news story online I rarely look at the column of other stories that run down the right side of the screen.

But one headline caught my eye – it contained the words  “surgery,” “life support,” and “Mexico.”

I knew this story was going to have a bad ending.

And it does.

A woman – and it seems these stories are always about women – goes under the knife for cosmetic plastic surgery.

I’ll never know this woman’s reasons.  But I think women undergo cosmetic surgery because they believe they’re not “good enough.”

They want a “better” nose or breasts or thighs or butt or upper arms or chin or face or eyes or ears or lips…

And then – what?

She’ll be “good enough”?

She’ll be “happy”?

I have never met a woman who was happy with how she looked.  When I compliment a woman, her response usually sounds like this:

My compliment:  “What a great picture of you!”

Her response:  “Are you kidding?  Look at my thighs.”

I don’t know how Laura Avila, a 36-year-old realtor in Dallas, TX responded to compliments, but apparently she believed she wasn’t “good enough.”

So she decided to get some parts of herself “fixed.”

In my opinion, Laura was already a very attractive woman:

Laura, before surgery	Laura and fiancé Enrique Cruz

Laura scheduled “cosmetic surgeries” including “a nose job and breast implant replacement” at a RinoCenter in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico:

Americans traveling to foreign countries for medical procedures is a common story.  This process even has its own name – “medical tourism” – and according to The American Journal of Medicine, in 2017 more than 1.4 million Americans sought health care in a variety of countries around the world.

Cost is almost always a factor, and in Mexico procedures can cost anywhere between 40 and 65 percent less than in the U.S.

And Mexico wasn’t “foreign” to Laura and her family – when she was growing up, they traveled there often from El Paso to see relatives.  “To us, it’s home, it’s familiar,” said Laura’s sister, Angie Avila.

And Laura’s fiancé, Enrique Cruz, had researched the RinoCenter clinic and found positive reviews online.

I have so many issues here.  First, I think reading online reviews is a good idea – for restaurants and hair salons and movies.

But for surgery?  Life-threatening surgery, which means any surgery that involves anesthesia?

Second, instead of looking online for clinics for Laura’s surgery, why wasn’t fiancé Enrique saying, “Sweetheart, you look great and I love you just the way you are”?

Third, why wasn’t Laura’s family saying, “Laura, you look great and we love you just the way you are”?

Fourth, when will society and advertisers and loved ones and the world stop sending women the message that “You’re not beautiful enough, thin enough, young enough, good enough?”

And when will woman stop listening that message?

Laura and Enrique traveled to Ciudad Juarez for her October 30 procedures.

But the surgery didn’t happen.  According to Enrique, eight hours after the procedure started, doctors told him there was a problem.  They’d taken Laura to a hospital because “the anesthesia wasn’t wearing off and they didn’t know why.”

Doctors at the Mexican hospital where Laura was transferred told Angie that the clinic had put the anesthesia in the wrong place in Laura’s spine.  Her brain swelled, her kidneys failed, and she went into cardiac arrest.

Laura is now in an El Paso hospital and, according to doctors there, Laura’s brain damage means “she is not going to be able to eat by herself, or talk, or walk or even taste food,” said Enrique. “She might be able to hear what we’re saying, maybe blink.  But as far as being any kind of normal, they don’t see her doing that.”

Here’s the most recent picture of Laura:

According to a November 19 story, Laura was breathing on her own.  She has no insurance, so the family has started a GoFundMe page.  Mexican authorities raided the clinic and are investigating:

There’s talk of the family suing.  “As long as my heart is beating, I will make sure they pay for what they did and this can’t happen to anybody else,” said Angie.

This is where Laura’s quest for “better” – better nose and breasts and who knows what other procedures – has brought her.

If only the people who love her had told her.

If only Laura could have been at peace with who she was.

Laura’s story has dropped off the news cycle.  We’ve all moved on, all except for Laura and her family.

They’re left with a bad ending.

Update:

As of this morning, Laura’s profile is still on her employer’s website, where it details her background and interests:

They should take down Laura’s profile – she won’t be helping anyone find their “dream home.”

Laura died November 24.

When:  December 14, 2017, around 9pm

Where:  San Diego, America’s Finest City

It was that time of year when for many people, thoughts are turned to the holidays, and Christmas shopping.

Two of those folks were Stephanie Majsterski, 26, and James Graham, 41.  Steph and Jim were strolling around the Pacific Beach area, a nice neighborhood with a boardwalk lined with trendy hotel bars and casual cafés.

It was a cool, crisp evening, and Steph had added a blue jacket to her ensemble (see above image).  Jim had forgone the jacket, possibly to better display an impressive set of arm tattoos.

The couple was no doubt chatting – they did have so much in common, after all:

Steph was on probation for DUI and resisting arrest, and Jim was on parole – he’d had 10 robbery convictions going back to 2008.

However and whenever they met, clearly it was kismet.

It seems likely that holiday shopping was on their minds, too, when they walked into an apartment and demanded the occupant’s money and her car.  Why else would they want money and a car except to hit the pre-holiday sales at the nearest mall?

However and whyever they chose that apartment is unknown.

But that may have been a teensy-weensy mistake; breaking into an occupied residence transitioned their act from a plain old burglary to something called a “hot prowl.”

Judges and juries tend to frown on burglaries, a “hot prowl” even more so.

Judges and juries tend to really frown when the occupant is a woman, alone, and seven months pregnant.

The victim, Caroline Souza, told Steph and Jim that she didn’t have any money, and here the couple showed some nimble thinking:  Jim grabbed a wallet, laptop and some other items off a table.

While Jim did this, Steph stood blocking the front door, in case Souza tried to escape.  Clearly Steph and Jim were in sync – simultaneously grabbing and blocking, all bases covered.

Then the couple left the apartment, walking “hand-in-hand,” according to Deputy District Attorney Lucy Yturralde.

Coverage of the story isn’t clear on who notified the police, but when police arrived the couple ran in different directions.  See?  There’s that in-sync thing again.

Jim was quickly caught – perhaps weighed down by that wallet and laptop and stuff – and Steph got away.

But Steph must have circled back, because the next thing she did was steal a police car  at the scene of the crime.

Steal a police car.  Wow, talk about nimble thinking!

(Later, a San Diego police officer said he left the keys in his cruiser while he and his partner chased Steph and Jim.)

Steph hopped on the freeway, headed south at 90mph to Fiesta Island and then crashed into Mission Bay:

Showing even more of that nimble thinking, Steph jumped out of the cruiser and into another car, this one occupied, and asked the driver for a ride.

In a clear demonstration that chivalry is not dead, he apparently agreed, but police stopped the car and after a struggle, Steph was arrested.

In August Steph pleaded guilty to robbery, burglary, false imprisonment, theft of a patrol car and two counts of resisting arrest.  In late September she was sentenced to five years in state prison.

Jim faces trial December 4 on charges of robbery, burglary, false imprisonment and resisting arrest.

Now, Steph is only 26 so five years puts her release at age 31, assuming all goes well.

Jim, however, at 41, is looking at 55 years to life, says Yturralde.

No Christmas shopping for him for a long time.

But once he’s out, this hand-in-hand couple?

They’ll have even more in common.

Publication date:  July 2018

Review, short version:  Four roses out of four.

Review, long version:

I am an Anglophile:

I love many things British.

I love British history, British royalty, the history of British royalty, British castles and churches, colloquialisms and accents, and exports, like the Beatles.

I don’t love all things British – mushy peas, for one:

Mushy peas are dried marrowfat peas which are first soaked overnight in water with sodium bicarbonate, then rinsed in fresh water and simmered with a little sugar and salt until they form a thick green lumpy mash.

Eewwww.

A new British export I love is Dear Mrs. Bird, by AJ Pearce.  Pearce was born in England, and this book, her first, begins in London, December 1940.  World War II had started in September 1939, and the “Blitz” – the German bombing offensive all over England – began in September 1940.

So our narrator of Dear Mrs. Bird, 22-year-old Emmy Lake, is in the thick of Hitler’s bombardment of London, and Germany was relentless:  attacks mostly at night but also during the day, on industrial areas, government buildings, military targets, and on civilians – not accidentally, but deliberately.

Thousands of Londoners killed or injured, homes and businesses destroyed, life uncertain except for the certainty of more bombs, deaths and destruction.

Emmy’s parents live outside London, in a safer (though not safe) area.  Emmy says,

“Mother always worried about how we kept going.  I had no idea.  We just did.”

And Pearce puts us right there with Emmy who keeps going, like most people in England:  determined to be brave, continue on with her life, and never, ever allow Hitler to defeat her, military-wise or morale-wise.

Emmy goes to work, volunteers for the Fire Brigade, hangs out with her best friend Bunty, and meets a nice, young man, Charles.  The English are known for their stiff-upper-lip outlook, and also for their understatements, and here’s a perfect example, as Charles and Emmy head out one evening to the cinema.  In reference to the bombings Charles’ brother says,

“You know it could be a heavy night, don’t you?”

“That’s all right,” says Emmy.  “We know all the [bomb] shelters on the way home…And I reckon you may as well be a moving duck as a sitting one.”

Stiff upper lip.  Good show.

When Charles calls Emmy the morning after another bombing:

“Charles said how pleased he was that I had been all right during last night’s raid and I said it wasn’t that bad really and didn’t mention seeing two children and a Fire Brigade nearly get squashed to death in the street.”

Understatement, yes?

Another delightful aspect of Dear Mrs. Bird is the characters’ so-very-English colloquialisms:

Colloquialism	Translation
“Really does take the biscuit.”	Someone has done something you find very annoying or surprising.
“I’ll have his guts for bloody garters.”	A threat of a serious reprisal.
“Make not too bad a fist of the thing.”	Try not to mess up too badly.
“I was a pretty thin show.”	I messed up badly.
“In the bag, sir.”	It’s handled.

At this point I realize I haven’t said much about the plot of Dear Mrs. Bird, why the book is called that, who Mrs. Bird is, and what she and the war and all the rest have to do with Emmy.

And I haven’t conveyed the full horror of the Blitz, its impact, and the astounding courage, fortitude, and “just carry on” attitude of the people during this terrible time.

But Emmy does all that, and it’s a bit of alright.

Dear Mrs. Bird may not turn you into an Anglophile, but don’t be surprised if at some point you find yourself saying,

Release date:  June 2018

Review, short version:  Thumbs up for the story; thumbs down for the perpetrators.

Review, long version:

In the documentary Three Identical Strangers we meet her at her apartment – petite, silver haired, and gracious, everyone’s dream grandma or, at 91, great grandma – offering coffee before conversation.

She obviously enjoys walking her visitors through her photo gallery of “buddies,” as she calls them – pictures of herself with “Michelle Obama, Barack Obama, Robert Redford, Al Gore, Errol Flynn, Picasso.”

She is Natasha Josefowitz, Ph.D., an internationally recognized poet and lecturer, author of 17 books, inducted into the San Diego County Women’s Hall of Fame in 2015 for her dedication to empowering women.

Unfortunately, she apparently wasn’t interested in empowering a small group of women back in the 1960s and 1970s, when she was part of a secret scientific study that deliberately separated multiple-birth children who’d been put up for adoption by the Louise Wise Services agency.

That group was up to a dozen unmarried birth mothers who didn’t know that their twins – and in one case – triplets – had been separated.  The adoptive mothers (and fathers) didn’t know, either.

Josefowitz is adamant about distancing herself from the study, conducted by psychiatrist/psychoanalyst Peter Neubauer.  She was a “peripheral person,” she insists.  She was “not part of the team.”  “I was in the office,” she shrugs.

She makes excuses for Neubauer’s years-long plan of studying the nature vs. nurture debate, portrays it as benign, calls it “an exciting time.”  Calls him “Sexy.  Nice looking.  Interesting.”

I call Josefowitz a damn liar, a hypocrite, and a collaborator in what one of the adoptees angrily described as, “This is like Nazi shit.  They studied us like lab rats!”

That adoptee is Bobby Shafran, and he was one of not the twins, but one of the triplets, separated shortly after they were born in 1961 and adopted by three different families.

Three Identical Strangers is the story of how Bobby and his brothers, Eddy Galland and David Kellman, found each other 19 years later, after growing up within 100 miles of each other in New York.

The brothers bonded instantly, became inseparable, and became the focus of massive media attention, the 1980 version of “viral” – newspapers, national magazines and network television, the triplets’ every outfit, word and gesture (many of which were often identical) admired and exclaimed over.

It was a fairy tale, and no one – including the brothers – spent much time wondering why they’d been separated 19 years earlier.

No one except their angry adoptive parents.

The six parents asked for a meeting with representatives from Louise Wise Services, “the pre-eminent adoption agency on the East Coast, for Jewish babies in particular.”  They were lied to, told that no adoptive family wanted multiple children.  The parents went home, unsatisfied and still angry.

But Bobby, Eddy and David were having the time of their lives.  They opened a restaurant in New York, named – of course – Triplets, in 1988, described as “wildly successful.”  They married and started families.

They also met their birth mother but, sadly, didn’t connect.  It was a “prom night knock-up type of thing,” says David.  But “it was OK.”

There’s much more to Three Identical Strangers including reporter Lawrence Wright’s investigation into the triplets’ story, where he learned a lot about the Louise Wise agency’s cooperation with Neubauer.  But Wright ran into a stone wall:  Neubauer’s nature vs. nurture study was never published, and on his death in 2008, Neubauer’s papers were placed at Yale University, sealed in a vault until 2065.

What conceivable reason could there have been for that, other than to conceal the secrecy – and the separations?

By 2065 all those twins – and the Three Identical Strangers – would be dead, and couldn’t cause trouble.

In a June 2018 interview with the San Diego Union-Tribune Josefowitz continued to insist she wasn’t a part of Neubauer’s study.  She was “unhappy” that the documentary suggests a conspiracy between Neubauer and the adoption agency.  She was “saddened” that information is locked away.

Perhaps Josefowitz could ask for assistance from some of her highly placed “buddies” in getting that information unsealed.

Before she, too, is dead.

At first, exploding toilet sounded funny.

A joke, at about the level of whoopee cushions and plastic vomit.

There’s even a name for it:  Bathroom humor.

Funny, at first.

But then, as the story continued, I pictured myself with an exploding toilet and it quickly went from funny to unfunny.

Let’s say it happened when I wasn’t home.  Imagine the mess I’d come home to.  Like a bomb went off in my bathroom.  Where do you start cleaning up a mess like that?

Or suppose I was home.  Even if I’d had the TV on or the earbuds in, I would have heard something very damn scary.  Was someone breaking into my house?  Had my house been hit by something falling out of the sky?

Then I’d discover, no – no break-in, no meteorite.  But what a mess.

But then suppose – suppose I’d been in the bathroom when the toilet exploded.  I’m picturing sharp, lethal shards of porcelain and metal flying everywhere, including at – and into – me.

And according to the stories, that has happened:  at last count 23 people injured, one requiring surgery.

Close to $1 million in property damage.

Not funny at all.

It turns out that the exploders are pressure-flush toilets, vs. the gravity-flush toilets that we’re more familiar with, the latter having been around for more than a century.

The pressure-flush toilets are the Flushmate II 501-B, which Flushmate discontinued in 2013.  The company says it’s received 1,453 reports in the U.S. and Canada of the units bursting.

I can’t help but wonder how long those reports have been coming in – and why we’re only now hearing about it.

But wait – we’re not only now hearing about this.  Check out these headlines from 2012…

2014…

2016…

Oh, yeah.  Flushmate has been having serious problems for years, and so have its victims.

So serious that in 2014 Flushmate “agreed to pay $18 million to resolve multiple class action lawsuits”:

And I have to believe the company knew about the issues with the Flushmate II 501-B, since they stopped making it in 2013.

We have a government agency, the Consumer Protection Safety Commission (CPSC), that’s “charged with protecting the public from unreasonable risks of injury or death associated with the use of the thousands of types of consumer products under the agency’s jurisdiction.  Deaths, injuries, and property damage from consumer product incidents cost the nation more than $1 trillion annually.”

And CPSC has dutifully posted a Flushmate recall notice on their website, dated October 18, 2018:

Considering the injuries that have happened since 2012, and the potential for more “unreasonable risks of injury or death,” wouldn’t you think maybe just one of the 500 CPSC employees might pick up the phone, call the company and say, “Flushmate, we have a problem”?

I realize the CPSC’s budget is only a measly $123 million, but hey – Flushmate has a toll-free number (844-621-7538) so the call is free.

So here’s where we are:

Flushmate estimates there are almost 1.5 million Flushmate II 501-B exploders – I mean systems – in the U.S. and Canada, and the company is telling people to “turn off the water supply to the toilet and flush the toilet to release any internal pressure.”

And then, says Flushmate, “We are communicating with customers who may still own the product to offer a free Flushmate replacement unit and installation by a technician.”

So if I have a Flushmate II 501-B system, I’m supposed to go toilet-less until their technician shows up?

I’m supposed to smile and agree that, yes, I want a replacement, and a technician, from a company that’s had recalls of their systems in 2012, 2014, 2016 and now in 2018?

Fortunately, there are no Flushmates in my home.

What about you?

What’s in your bathroom?

Back in May I wrote about the inventiveness of Americans, specifically, how we invent something…

And then invent a crime to go with it.

One example I cited was the snowmobile.  Some creative American invented it, then another one stole it and rode off into the sunset.

Voila!  The new crime of snowmobile theft.

Now let’s get current.

In November 2017 Kate McClure was driving into Philadelphia.  She ran out of gas, pulled over, and started walking to a gas station.

Johnny Bobbitt, a homeless man and Marine veteran, approached McClure and told her to get back in her car and lock the doors – he’d get the gasoline for her.  A few minutes later he returned with a full can of gas.  He said he’d used his last $20 to pay for it.

McClure was so touched, she started a GoFundMe page to raise money to help Bobbitt get back onto a better path.  The goals in the story she posted on GoFundMe included a new home for Bobbitt, his dream truck, and two trusts, one for daily expenses and one for retirement.  Kate’s goal was $10,000.

McClure’s post went viral, and therein lay the magic:  More than 14,000 people were touched by Bobbitt’s situation and his gallantry in rescuing McClure, and they responded with donations totaling more than $400,000.  It looked like Bobbitt’s random act of kindness was going to lead him to a better life.

Only, it hasn’t.

Bobbitt is suing McClure and her partner, Mark D’Amico, because the $400,000 is gone.  Bobbitt says he did receive about $75,000, which he used to buy a camper and SUV – both of which he no longer has.  He also, sadly, bought drugs.

As of early September:

• Bobbitt was entering a 30-day residential treatment program.
• Authorities had executed a search warrant at McClure and D’Amico’s home, towed a BMW off of the property and removed boxes presumed to contain evidence.
• McClure and D’Amico were asked by a judge to appear and explain what

  

  happened to the money. Their lawyer said they are “unable to defend themselves or respond in any meaningful way” to requests for financial statements made by Bobbitt’s lawyers because the couple no longer had access to the records.

• The judge postponed legal action in the case until December 7.  Maybe between now and then McClure and D’Amico can raise more money on GoFundMe defray lawyer expenses?
• GoFundMe has promised that Bobbitt will receive the rest of his $400,000, so perhaps this Good Samaritan’s cloud will have a silver lining, after all.

People who commit fraud are scum.  People who defraud a veteran are…

OK, I realize that McClure and D’Amico are innocent until proven guilty.  But it sure looks like American inventiveness at work again:

1. Americans invented GoFundMe.
2. Then we invented a name for it:  Crowdfunding.
3. Americans invented GoFundMe fraud.
4. Then we invented a name for it:  Crowdfrauding.

Crowdfrauding is so egregious that in 2016, freelance financial reporter Adrienne Gonzalez started GoFraudMe.com where she writes about fraud occurring on GoFundMe.

In the GoFraudMe.com FAQs Gonzalez says, “You really have no way of knowing which fundraisers are legit and which are cooked up by modern-day robbers using technology rather than guns.”

And the variety of those modern-day robbers is staggering – here are just a few recent headlines from Gonzalez’s GoFraudMe site:

• Prosecutors:  Mom Who Stabbed Two Sons to Death Hoped for Lucrative GoFundMe Payday
• GoFundMe For Georgia Widow Removed After the Woman is Charged in Husband’s Murder
• Marine Scams Fellow Marine Into Starting a GoFundMe for Him, Fails to Mention He’s Facing Several Drug Felonies

And the really bizarre thing about GoFundMe is, it appears that someone you know – or don’t – can set up a fundraising page on your behalf, for a real or fraudulent reason, collect the money.  And vanish – without ever meeting you.

Here’s the story that motivated Gonzalez to start GoFraudMe:

In Florida in early 2015, Bart the cat was hit by a car. His owner, thinking Bart had died, buried him in the backyard.  Five days later, the cat rose from the dead and crawled back to the house.  The story about the zombie cat spread far and wide, and someone quickly set up a page on GoFundMe to pay Bart’s mounting medical bills.

Except there were no bills to pay.

According to Gonzalez’s reporting, Bart’s medical bills were being paid for by the Humane Society, and the cash from GoFundMe was being collected by a neighbor.  Despite Gonzalez’s best efforts, GoFundMe did not take down the campaign.  It ended up raising more than $6,000.

I don’t know what prompts people to donate to GoFundMe but a lot of them do; according to the website, “more than 50 million donors…helped organizers raise over $5 billion.” 

And I don’t know how people decide which plea to respond to – the parents who need help paying for their baby’s cancer treatment?  The family in need of funds to bury a loved one?  Another veteran, like Bobbitt, who served his/her country and has been abandoned by the VA?

I do know that I believe the two guys who started GoFundMe back in 2010 did it with the best of intentions, including making money, which is, after all, the American dream.

I believe McClure and D’Amico started the GoFundMe for Johnny Bobbitt with the best of intentions, but that $400,000 was just too tempting.

And…I believe Americans will go on inventing, and Americans will go on creating new crimes as new inventions come along.

As I said back in May:

What a country!

Update:

I wrote this blog when the lawsuit story appeared in September, but hadn’t posted it yet.

At the time, I easily believed that Bobbitt was the victim of two scammers, and the generous people who had donated to the GoFundMe campaign were victims, too.

Now it appears that the whole world was scammed by McClure, D’Amico and Bobbitt.

On November 15 this story appeared:

The irony is, if Bobbitt hadn’t sued McClure and D’Amico over the money, the three apparent scammers could have gotten away with this.

So how do I feel?  Duped.  Naïve.  Sad.

And if it turns out that Bobbitt, McClure and D’Amico are scammers…

I’m hoping all three go to prison for a very long time.

Here’s the headline:

Here’s the name of this new addition to our family of opioids:  Dsuvia.

As I read the article I had two questions:

First:  Why does this country need with another opioid?  Especially when there are nearly 400 opioids currently on the market, including brand name and generic drugs.

Especially in a country where opiod-related overdoses killed 49,000 people in 2017?

Second:  I wonder who owns AcelRx – the company that makes the just-approved Dsuvia – and could it possibly be a bunch of rich guys who will get richer from this?

Rich guys who smiled on October 10, when it looked like Dsuvia was on its way to approval and AcelRx stock skyrocketed nearly 36%?

Rich guys who smiled even more when they heard that AcelRx projects $1.1 billion in annual sales of Dsuvia?

Could rich guys have anything to do with the FDA approving yet another opioid?

So who owns AcelRx?

According to CNN Business, here are the top five of the top 10 owners of AcelRx:

Here’s how Nasdaq slices the owners’ piece of the pie:

To get an idea of the value of these top five, I had to learn about something called AUM – Assets Under Management:

AUM is the total market value of assets that an investment company or financial institution manages on behalf of investors.

Now that I knew what to look for, I spent a fair amount of time looking at (rich) pale males in gray suits.

Here are some of the key people at those top five owners of AcelRx, and each company’s AUM:

#1:

The Vanguard Group, Inc.	F. William McNabb III, Chairman
AUM:  $5.1 trillion in 2018	Tim Buckley, President & CEO

#2:

Blackrock Fund Advisors	Larry Fink, Chairman & CEO
AUM:  $6.3 trillion in 2018	Robert Kapito, President

#3:

Renaissance Technologies	James H. Simons, Co-founder & Board Chair
AUM:  $84 billion in 2018	Howard L. Morgan, Co-founder

#4:

Fidelity Management & Research	Charles Morrison, President
AUM:  $219B in 2018	Gerard McGraw, CFO, Director

#5:

Geode Capital Management	Vince Gubitosi, President
AUM:  $84 billion in 2018	Jeffrey S. Miller, COO

But Dsuvia isn’t just for rich investors – the Pentagon has spent millions of dollars helping to fund AcelRx’s research, and where does the Pentagon get its money?

From us taxpayers.  So you, too – willingly or otherwise – had a hand in bringing a new opioid to our nation.

And there you have it.  With all the readily available opioids in this country, and with all the opioid-related deaths, our FDA saw fit to give yet another opioid the nod.

Is there a connection between that FDA approval, and the owners of AcelRx making more money?

You connect the dots, and then you tell me.

In closing, here’s an old melody, What The World Needs Now, with new lyrics written especially for this occasion:

What the world needs now Is drugs, more drugs. It’s the only thing That we’ve just too little of.
What the world needs now Is more opioid drugs. No, not just for some But for everyone.
Doc, I don’t need another aspirin. I’ve got Advil and Motrin and Tylenol. I need real stuff, the hard stuff That gets me high, the stuff that kills, If you want to know.
What the world needs now Is more opioid drugs. New one just approved Catchy name:  “Dsuvia.”
Just a tiny pill Slides right under my tongue. No needles for me – Got Dsuvia.
Doc, can I have some more Dsuvia? Cause my knees hurt, my back hurts, they’re really bad. Please just write a prescription, and no more pain. I’ll never feel… Anything again.
What the world needs now…

 

The last time I went to the dentist, I sat down in the waiting room, opened the newspaper, and started reading.

Out of the corner of my eye I noticed another patient glance at me, then do a double-take.

“OMG!” she said.  “I haven’t seen anyone actually reading a newspaper in years.”

I LOLed and went back to my reading.

The newspaper she was referring to was the kind printed on paper.

The kind that’s delivered to your front porch and you read with your morning coffee.

The kind that you hold in both hands and leaves traces of ink of your fingertips.

If you’re thinking, “Geez, what a dinosaur!” I just smile.

Unlike the dinosaurs, there are still some of us around, and we actually do read paper newspapers.

With no apologies.

Every Sunday I read a page of brief stories called The (almost) Back Page, assembled by the Associated Press, or AP.  Talk about dinosaurs – this newsgathering agency was founded in 1846.

The AP stories fill about two-thirds of the page, and the rest is two columns devoted to News of the Weird.

And these stories are weird – like a recent one about a guy in Florida who got annoyed at his mother when she accidentally bumped into him while she was cooking his dinner.  He started pelting her with the sausages, then put his hands on her neck.  He later said he just wanted his mom to apologize for bumping him, but police arrested him and charged him with misdemeanor domestic battery.

Weird, yes?

On the rest of the page, the AP story headlines range from Man Rescues Five-Week-Old Kitten Glued To Busy Road (yikes!) to Authorities Capture Suspected Serial Diaper Dumper (huh?) to Military Officials Say Humvee Dropped From Plane By Mistake In Rural Area.

Since I love seeing our tax dollars at work, I decided to check further into that last story.

It turns out that this was a routine training exercise performed in late October.  The military takes a High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, an HMMWV nicknamed “Humvee,” straps it onto a platform, attaches parachutes, loads it onto a plane, and then flies to a ground target.

To goal is to land the Humvee on the target, platform-side-down, detach the parachutes, disconnect the platform, and drive the vehicle off to its mission.

The military in this case were Army testers from the Airborne and Special Operations Test Directorate at Fort Bragg, NC.  The plane, an Air Force C-17, was stationed at Joint Air Force Base Charleston.  The reason for dropping this vehicle from an airplane was to “test new equipment and procedures to support the aerial delivery and transportation of military equipment.”

Something went awry, however, and the vehicle landed seven miles from its target.

Now, I’ve heard of target practice, though not with Humvees, but maybe…

I can imagine the dialogue:

“Dude, you wanna go do some target practice?” “Yeah, man.  My Humvee or yours?

A spokesman later said the aircraft was flying at 1500 feet when the Humvee was launched out of the plane about a minute too early.

I’m imaging the soldiers on board:

“This hitting the target thing with a Humvee has gotten really boring.  Why don’t we aim for that spot over there instead?” “Right on!  Ready?  One, two…push!”

Three tons of vehicle, palette and parachutes crashed in a wooded area between two homes.

And I’m imaging the homeowners:

“Honey, what was that noise? “It’s the military doing that Humvee target practice thing, but they won’t be driving that sucker anywhere soon!”

“Everything went as planned except for the early release,” allowed the spokesman.

And the landing, I’ll add.  The platform and damaged Humvee were loaded onto a flatbed truck and taken away.

Apparently the “new equipment” being tested was a new “heavy drop platform.”  If this was a new Humvee – modified or “up-armored” as they call it – and new parachutes, and knowing that the military isn’t big on bargains, I figure the cost for this target practice (including airplane, fuel, personnel, etc.) was around $1 million.

Oh, well.  A Humvee here, a platform there…

At this point if you’re thinking, “Paper, schmaper.  You had to go online to get all that information,” you’d be right.

So I’m not a complete dinosaur.

But as long as paper, schmaper newspapers are around…

I’ll keep sipping my coffee and turning those pages.

Ink stains and all.

Fads can be fun.

Well, until you look at an old picture of yourself and wonder, “What was I thinking with that outfit?”  Or, “Please tell me my hair didn’t really look like that.”

And fads can be fun to watch.

We’ve watched some fads come and go, and come back again:

Platform shoes were hot in the 1970s, then disappeared, and now they’re back…

1970s

2018

Likewise, bell bottoms came and went and came back again…

1970s

2018

Then there are fads that come and go and – fortunately – don’t come back.  Some 1950s fads come to mind:

Car stuffing…	Phone booth stuffing…	Goldfish stuffing…yes, he’s eating live goldfish.

And how about fad diets?

Scarsdale diet, 1970s…	Zone diet, 1990s…	Keto diet, 2018

Lest you think fads are mostly followed by women, check these out:

Ancient Egyptian male royalty – wigs, eyeliner, serious jewelry…	17th century male royalty – wigs, furs, stockings, high heels.

But here’s a fad I didn’t get then – and now it’s come back and I still don’t get it:

Ripped jeans, 1980s…	Ripped jeans 2018

And not just jeans –

Ripped shirts…	Ripped skirts…	Ripped…whatever…

Here’s a brief tutorial on ripped clothing, culled from various online sources:

There are two classifications of ripped jeans:  Distressed and Destroyed.

Distressed is where you can see the inside of the fabric – the white horizontal threads (weft); and Destroyed jeans are completely torn-off garment areas.

Distressed denims are given their vintage worn-out look in the manufacturing processes.  Jeans are faded on purpose.  Additional methods to distress denim include extreme stone washing, enzyme washing, acid washing, sandblasting, emerging, and micro-sanding.  Frayed hems and seams are also popular in the distressed denim category.

And talk about ripped – let’s talk about ripped off.  Meaning, how much you can pay for someone to rip, distress and/or destroy your jeans before you buy them:

Women:  Mr. Porter Farfetch Amiri Crystal Painter Jeans $1500 40% Off $954	Men:  Mr. Porter Amiri Thrasher Skinny-Fit Appliquéd Distressed Stretch-Denim Jeans $1770

For that kind of money send me the jeans and I’ll rip them.

And distress them.

And destroy them.

In 2017 a number of residents of America’s Finest City – San Diego – opened their mail and found something not-so-fine:

Their water bills had increased dramatically.  In some cases, doubled.  In some cases, a 500% increase or more from one billing cycle to the next.

Bewildered, these residents called the water department at San Diego Public Utilities for an explanation.  The residents knew they weren’t using more water than the previous month – in the drought-ridden, fire-prone San Diego area most of us tend to be very vigilant with our water use.

The water department offered a number of possible reasons for the residents higher water usage:

1. Higher water rates
2. Longer billing cycles
3. Changes in the weather
4. Overwatering their landscaping
5. Leaks inside their homes
6. A child home from college
7. Relatives visiting for the holidays

At no time did any water department customer service rep indicate that the water bill amounts might – just might – be an error on their part.

The unhappy customers, as the song goes, couldn’t “get no satisfaction.”

And since they didn’t want their water shut off, they paid up.  Emphasis on up.

Here’s just one of many examples:

Kelli lives in a 900-square-foot house with her husband and their nine-year-old.  For years, she’d received San Diego water department bimonthly bills of around $150.

Then in January 2018 she opened her bill and saw that the city had charged her $3,334 for using 234,140 gallons of water, up from 6,732 gallons in the same billing period last year.

Kelli knew there was something wrong because “We did not use that much water.  It’s impossible.”

Following a February 2018 story in the San Diego Union-Tribune, her bill was lowered from $3,334 down to $187 after officials confirmed that her meter had been misread.

So I guess it wasn’t her nine-year-old “home from college” (see #6, above).

In addition to coverage by the Union-Tribune, additional help was at hand.

One of San Diego’s TV stations, Channel 7, is home to Bob Hansen, better known as “Consumer Bob.”  He’s been covering consumer news in San Diego for close to 30 years, and in 2016 launched NBC 7 Responds, to “research concerns, look for answers and find solutions to make things right” for consumers.

I’ve watched a lot of Consumer Bob’s stories and I’m telling you – this guy is a pit bull.  In the best possible way.  When he and his team “make things right” for consumers – and that happens a lot – he does a follow-up story on the news.

And I cheer.

Consumer Bob wins another one for the little guy!

So when those water department customers couldn’t get any satisfaction regarding the spike in their bills, some of them contacted Consumer Bob.

In January 2018 viewers learned that NBC 7 Responds had been investigating the water bill situation since July 2017, and that – if you’ll allow the expression – opened the floodgates:

February 2018:

July 2018:

October 2018:

At the same time, other water department stories were surfacing about:

• Meter reader error – one reader alone misread 334 meters.
• Meter reader employees who’d learned ways to hide mistakes made out in the field.
• San Diego’s $67 million+ problem-riddled “smart” meters program, which won’t be completed until 2020.
• A backlog of 21,605 water meter boxes in San Diego that are in need of replacement or repair; perhaps not a surprise when …
• In August 2018 an auditor found staff for the Water Meter Box Repair and Replace Division worked an average of 3.6 hours a day during a full eight-hour shift:

And the hits just kept on coming:

• June 2018 – Deputy Director of SD Water Dept. retires.
• August 2018 – Director of Public Utilities Dept. resigns after less than a year.
• August 2018 – Installation of “smart” meters put on hold – no new meters are being connected to that system, according to NBC 7 Responds.

And…

October 2018:

What’s it all mean?

It means San Diego is doing a lousy job managing your water.

And?

Now San Diego wants to manage your electricity, too.

It’s called CCA – Community Choice Aggregation.

Dumbed-down so I can understand it, in some parts of the country, cities are entering into or considering CCAs:

Community Choice Aggregation allows “any city, county or combination thereof to form an entity to take over the responsibility for purchasing power for their community.”

The goal of CCA is to reduce power costs to customers, and to go greener by obtaining more power from renewable sources like natural gas, solar, and wind.

Once elected officials decide in favor of CCA, customers have these choices:

1. Staying with CCA.
2. Opting out and continuing as is with their current power provider – in this case, San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E).

With either option, the traditional power provider (SDG&E) continues to maintain the transmission and distribution system, and handles billing and customer service issues.

Sounds grand, doesn’t it?  Stay with CCA, spend less on your energy bills, and feel good about getting more power from renewable sources.

A win-win!

I think not, and here’s why.

In San Diego, the elected officials who will make the decision about entering into CCA are the mayor and city council.  They are, bottom line, responsible for running the city.

Including the water department.  See above.

With CCA, elected officials are responsible for making decisions about where and how much power will be provided by other sources.

And as we all know, elected officials are never subject to greed, graft, bribery or corruption.

Yes?

Since elected officials often don’t have expertise in energy markets, many CCAs hire third parties with experience in energy markets to perform all sorts of complex scheduling and marketing transactions.

They are paid by CCA organizations, using rates charged to their customers.

Another charge – customers who opt to stay with CCA will pay a monthly Power Charge Indifference Adjustment (PCIA), or “exit fee,” to the traditional provider.

In California, the California Public Utilities Commission sets the amount of the exit fee.  For San Diego it was first set at 2.5 cents per kilowatt hour, then raised to about 4.25 cents.  For the average customer, this amounts to around $17-$20 per month.

Raised the exit fee.  CCA has not even been approved and it’s become more expensive.  And there’s no doubt there will be future increases.

On page 23 the city’s October 2018 CCA Business Plan estimates start-up costs of $105 million:

Page 24, here’s the ongoing administrative costs of CCA, estimated at $16 million a year:

And as we all know, bureaucracies never spend more than they first estimate.

Yes?

In October San Diego’s mayor announced his support for CCA.  The City Council is poised to vote in December 2018 to move forward with it.

This could put CCA up and running in 2021.

As I research CCAs I see a lot of words like “could” – I call them hedge words, as in

Hedge (verb):  To avoid making a definite decision, statement, or commitment.

CCA could save customers money.  CCA could help San Diego reach its renewable energy goals.

And here’s another hedge word:  “should.”  With CCA it should be cheaper than buying power from SDG&E.  It should provide more renewable energy jobs.

And “may” – other cities in the county may join San Diego’s CCA plan.  And their customers may save money, too.

Check out another hedge word, the “Uncertainties” from page 32 of San Diego’s CCA Business Plan:

Based on this business plan, one media source stated that with San Diego’s CCA:

A Joint Powers Authority (JPA) would be formed in 2019, along with the appointment of a board of directors.  From there on, the board would hire an executive leadership team, a chief executive and a chief financial officer.

These executive positions would guide the JPA through the CCA implementation process, in hopes of delivering power to customers by the plan’s target date of 2021.

“In hopes of.”  More hedge words.

“A billion-dollar bureaucracy,” summed up another media source.

There are many individuals and groups both in favor of, and opposed to, CCA for San Diego.

Supporters say that 18 other communities in California have adopted CCA, and many more across the country.

I say San Diego is doing a lousy job managing your water.

Now San Diego wants to manage your electricity.

Heads-up, residents:

Oh.

You’re right.

It is my money, and it never should have left my hands.

But I had no choice.  I use electricity, so I pay my utilities bill.  That means a monthly payment to San Diego Gas and Electric, SDG&E.

SDG&E = Secretive Diabolical Greedy Enemies.

In early September SDG&E’s 1.4 million residential and business customers received the following announcement:

SDG&E is “giving” customers a one-time “big” reduction in our October bills, and ongoing piddling deductions in future bills.  The amounts will depend on how much electricity and gas we use.

The ongoing deductions will continue until SDG&E has returned the approximately $750 million we didn’t owe them and shouldn’t have paid them.

Why did SDG&E take our money?

Back in the 1960s, when some people thought nuclear power plants were a great idea, SDG&E and Southern California Edison (SCE) built the San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station, cleverly nicknamed SONGS.

SDG&E, owner of 20% of SONGS, is owned by Sempra Energy, a Fortune 500 publicly traded company.  SCE, owner of the other 80%, is owned by Edison International, another Fortune 500 publicly traded company.

SONGS was built on what was a lovely piece of Pacific coastline, about 50 miles north of San Diego and 68 miles south of Los Angeles:

In 1968 SONGS began generating energy, and lots of nuclear waste.

Fast forward to 2012.  SONGS developed serious problems and had to be permanently shut down.  Without going into the technical stuff, SONGS was toast.

Very expensive toast:

$4.7 billion in costs related to the shutdown of SONGS.

The investors didn’t see any reason why they should be on the hook for $4.7 billion, so it seems to me that SDG&E and SCE would be paying for their cleanup.  If I owned a hair salon and it burned down, I wouldn’t ask my customers to foot the bill, would I?

I wouldn’t, but they did.

And in 2014 the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) agreed.  They decided we customers should pay $3.3 billion of that $4.7 billion.

Customers were now going to pay for a power-generating facility that was producing…

Nothing.

We weren’t happy, but what were we going to do?  Stop paying our utility bills?

The CPUC and SDG&E and SCE were happy – a veritable alphabet of happiness, until two local attorneys sued and won.  The settlement:

SDG&E and SCE would shave $750 million off that $3.3 billion.

And customers then owed a mere $2.5 billion for our “responsibility” in the SONGS debacle.

But in the interim, SDG&E had been charging customers at the rate of collecting that original $3.3 billion from us.  When the amount was reduced by $750 million, it turned out that now SDG&E owed us money.

Money we should never have paid them.

SONGS still sits, shut down and useless, on that lovely piece of coastal property:

Its ugly buildings store 3.5 million gallons of nuclear waste.  That’s 29,190,000 pounds.

That’s 14,595 tons of nuclear waste that has nowhere else to go.

Waste that could spill into the Pacific Ocean.  Waste that threatens harm to the eight million people living within its 50-mile radius:

But SDG&E is happy.  SCE is happy.  The investors are happy.  And those two lawyers who filed the suit?  Their fee was $5.4 million, so they’re happy, too.

And me?

Well, here’s my October bill, with my “big” credit indicated:

Where, oh where, will I spend it all?

Publication date:  March 2018

Review, short version:  Four roses out of four.

Review, long version:

I highly recommend Elizabeth’s Rival, with this caveat:

It helps if you’re crazy for English royal history, as I am.

Otherwise the focus of this biography, Lettice Knollys Devereux Dudley Blount, may appear just another bewigged, smothered-in-clothes, aristocratic but obscure Elizabethan Englishwoman.

Well, the wig, the clothes, aristocratic – yes.  But obscure?  Lettice was anything but that.

The book is subtitled The Tumultuous Life of the Countess of Leicester:  The Romance and Conspiracy That Threatened Queen Elizabeth’s Court.

This extraordinarily long subtitle is appropriate for a woman who, in an age where the average life expectancy was about 40, lived an extraordinarily long life – 91 years.

Born in 1543, in those 91 years Lettice arrived in one reign, survived five more and lived into a seventh:

1. Henry VIII, reigned 1509-1547
2. Edward VI, reigned 1547-1553
3. Jane Grey, reigned 1553
4. Mary I, reigned 1553-1558
5. Elizabeth I, 1558-1603
6. James VI, 1603-1625
7. Charles I, 1625-1649

Just that fact that Lettice managed to keep her head on her shoulders when throughout these reigns, people all around her were – literally – losing theirs, is also extraordinary.

Especially after Lettice secretly married Queen Elizabeth’s long-time favorite, Robert Dudley, in 1578.  Elizabeth could have had Lettice’s head – or at least imprisoned her for life – for this (to Elizabeth) heinous offence.

As it was, Elizabeth never forgave Lettice, though she forgave Dudley easily enough.  Perhaps it was the fact that Lettice and Elizabeth were blood relatives that stayed Elizabeth’s hand?

Lettice was the daughter of Katherine Carey, who was the daughter of Mary Boleyn, and Katherine may have been Elizabeth’s half-sister as it’s highly likely that Katherine and Elizabeth were both fathered by Henry VIII, when Mary Boleyn was his mistress prior to his marrying Mary’s sister Anne.

And if you followed all that, then I know you’re crazy for English royal history.

Biographies can range from semiarid to Sahara dry, but Tallis has written one that, while full of information about Lettice and her times, is not at all dry and is easy to read.

Tallis doesn’t pull any punches, though.  Early on she describes Lettice,  when portrayed in a 1971 movie, as “outspoken, haughty, arrogant and unrepentant,” and concedes that Lettice “did display some of these traits.”  Tallis also portrays Lettice as a loving daughter, sister, wife and mother, a woman who wasn’t afraid to take risks, and to speak up for herself in a time when women were barely supposed to speak at all.

And above all else – Lettice was a survivor.

She survived her three husbands, all six of her children, and six monarchs including Elizabeth, who didn’t hesitate to behead, or hang, draw and quarter, or at least imprison people who pissed her off.  Elizabeth did behead another blood relative – Mary Queen of Scots – as well as Lettice’s oldest son, and her third husband, but…

Lettice survived.  And not just survived:

Thrived.

In the book’s introduction Tallis notes that Lettice “has never been the subject of a full-scale biography.”

I think Tallis did Lettice justice…

Even if Elizabeth never did.

I’m not sure, but I think my alliteration is great.

When I saw this headline:

My first thought was…

Ew.

CPR on a squirrel?  Are we talking the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation thing?

Who knows where that squirrel’s mouth has been, or what she/he has put in it?

Major Ewww.

Then I read on and learned that no, it wasn’t mouth-to-mouth – it was chest compression.

OK, chest compression.  On a squirrel.

But why?

The “man” in the headline was Chris Felix, 19, of Brooklyn Park, MN.  Recently he was driving to work, encountered the squirrel in the street, and his car hit or stunned or something-ed the squirrel with enough force to knock it onto a front lawn, where it landed on its back.

Apparently unconscious, no visible bleeding.

Chris stopped his car, threw open the door, rushed over and squatted down next to the motionless animal.  He then did what few – if any – of us would do:

He started applying chest compressions to the squirrel.

A police cruiser happened to be in the neighborhood and when they saw the abandoned car and the man at the curb poking at something, understandably they were concerned.

The officers stopped and, with body cams recording, approached Chris, who explained what had happened as he continued the chest compressions.

After a short while one of the officers suggested turning the squirrel over, which Chris did, and he began stroking the squirrel’s back.

Shortly after that the squirrel blinked, came around, and dashed for the nearest tree.  Happy ending and high fives all around.

We now segue into no happy endings:

What else can I call it but “stupidity,” when people are so in love with their own images – and posting them on social media – that it costs them their lives?

This is according to a recent study by researchers at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in New Delhi, which found that 259 people died while attempting to take selfies between October 2011 and November 2017.  “This is just the tip of iceberg,” said the study.  “Many cases are not reported.”

About three-quarters of the deaths were men, with the study suggesting men were more prone to risky behavior when taking selfies.

The average age of among the 259 people was 22.9 years, but the recorded ages ranged from ten to 68 years.

An article in Rolling Stone called this “The never-ending pursuit of the ultimate shot for social media sharing,” and listed just a few of many stories about just how far people will go to get “that killer shot”:

• Two Russian soldiers in the Urals region west of Siberia posed for a selfie with a live grenade.  The grenade detonated unexpectedly.  Only the phone with the photo survived.
• A man was gored to death after he left the audience-protected area at the running of the bulls in Pamplona.  A bull came from behind and fatally pierced his neck and thigh with its horns.
• In Colorado a pilot lost control of his Cessna 150 while posing to take a selfie.  The plane crashed, killing both him and his passenger.

To return to my title’s question, Are these stories related?  Perhaps the commonality is life:   One is life saving and one is lives lost.

The first story makes sense.

The second story:

None.

TO:  Mr. Jeff Sessions, United States Attorney General

RE:  Marijuana

Dear Attorney General Sessions:

You’re all about marijuana being an illegal “controlled substance,” but how much do you actually know about it?

For instance, can you pronounce, let alone spell, the psychoactive component of marijuana?

It’s tetrahydrocannabinol.

You and other marijuana-challenged folks can just call it “THC.”

So Mr. Sessions, in the interest of helping you become better informed, here’s a Pot Quiz.  No cheating and skipping to the end for the answers!

1. Which of the following is not a marijuana nickname:

a) Muggle.
b) Maui Wowie.
c) Broccoli.

2. In your very own place of business – Washington, DC – marijuana is:

a) Legal for medical purposes.
b) Legal for recreational purposes.
c) All of the above.
d) None of the above.

3. At your confirmation hearing in 2017, when you were asked about marijuana,you said, “I won’t commit to never enforcing federal law.”  With that in mind, is the following statement true or false:  Jeff Sessions understands the double-negative rule of English grammar.

a) True.
b) False.

4. Medical marijuana is legal in a majority of states in the U.S.

a) True.
b) False.

5. Recreational marijuana is legal in nine states. Three of them are:

a) Florida, California, Nevada.
b) Vermont, Maine, Oregon.
c) Colorado, Wyoming, Alaska.

6. Which of the following can be legally traded on the U.S. Stock Exchange:

a) U.S. marijuana company stock.
b) Canadian marijuana company stock.
c) All of the above.
d) None of the above.

7. Even though you consider marijuana illegal, you’re considering investing in publicly traded marijuana stock because:

a)  The U.S. Marijuana Index, compiled by Marijuana International Corporation, has delivered 158% returns over the past one year, as of October 17, 2018.  The S&P 500 has over the past year generated only 9.78% returns.
b) You’ll be out of a job soon, and money is money.
c) You won’t inhale.
d) All of the above.

8. What’s the difference between politicians and stoners?

a) Politicians don’t inhale…they just suck.
b) All of the above.

And finally…

9. What moron said, “Good people don’t smoke marijuana”?

a) Jeff Sessions.
b) Jeff Sessions.

Answers:

1.   Fooled you! They’re all nicknames for weed.  I mean, marijuana.
2.   c) All of the above.  Medical marijuana has been legal in Washington DC for almost 20 years, and in November 2014, voters in DC legalized recreational marijuana for adults 21 and older.
3.   b) False.
4.   a) True.  Medical marijuana is legal in 30 states, plus Washington DC.
5.   b) Vermont, Maine, Oregon.  The nine states where recreational marijuana is legal are Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Nevada, California, Colorado, Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, plus Washington, DC.
6.   b) Canadian marijuana company stock.
7.   d) All of the above.
8.   a), b)
9.   a), b), and below.

There’s not a lot that’s noteworthy about Lynchburg, TN.

It’s not quite in the middle of a state that’s not quite in the middle of the country:

And has a population of around 6300 people, who are managing just fine with just one traffic light.

There’s not a lot going on in Lynchburg, though Columbia, TN isn’t far, and it’s home of the Pumpkin Paradise Festival:

“Take a hayride, play in the corn box and test your skills with steer roping.  Kids spend some energy running around the indoor hay maze, enjoying the duck races, and the corn cannon which launches corn in the air.”

A corn cannon.  Whew.  After all that excitement, I need a drink.

But I won’t be getting one in Lynchburg, TN because Lynchburg is a dry town, and that means no buying alcohol, nowhere and no how.

Well, with one exception:

The Jack Daniel’s distillery, home of the world’s most famous bourbon, is located in Lynchburg, TN.  This is the oldest, most famous distillery in the U.S. and it’s in a…

A dry town.  So dry, that Tennessee enacted its own prohibition 10 years before it became the national law.  After Prohibition ended in 1933, counties could vote to remain dry or not, and so far, Moore County – location of Lynchburg – is a “dry.”

It’s illegal to purchase or drink Jack Daniel’s bourbon anywhere in Lynchburg except at the distillery, where, according to the website, you can take a 90-minute tour for $20 and “you’ll linger over and sip five of our most popular whiskeys and liqueurs.”

Hmmm.  Doesn’t sound all that “dry” to me.

But healthy?  Oh, yeah.  Several Jack Daniel’s products list “Zero” for fat, sodium, carbohydrates, sugar, protein and caffeine.

Though after sipping “five of our most popular whiskeys and liqueurs,” who cares?

If you want to know more about Jack Daniel’s bourbon or even Jack himself – and yes (see above photo), he was a real person – you can learn all that on their website.

And if you want to find other exciting things to do in the area – besides the corn canon – try hanging out at the MoonPie General Store on Lynchburg’s charming Main Street:

“Hundreds of MoonPie varieties and novelties can be found within the store for the MoonPie lover in your family!”

Do you know any MoonPie lovers?

Do you know what a MoonPie is?

No?

Then…

You’ve heard of the movie Sleepless in Seattle?

I propose a new movie:  Clueless in Cairo.

That’s my take on Melania Trump’s recent trip to Africa.

Melania’s trip took her from Washington DC to Accra, Ghana; to Lilongwe, Malawi; to Nairobi, Kenya; to Cairo, Egypt; and back to DC, a trip of close to 17,000 miles, by my reckoning:

While she was there, Melania…

Hugged babies…
Met some Republicans…
Hugged more babies, and…

Wore an outfit that numerous Internet wits have likened to…	That of Nazi collaborator Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

And yes, this is the same woman whose idea of a fashion statement was a jacket emblazoned with “I really don’t care.  Do you?” on a June visit to detained immigrant children who were separated from their families at the U.S.-Mexico border.

But back to Africa.  The trip was made under the auspices of Melania’s BE BEST initiative which, according to the website, focuses “on some of the major issues facing children today” and concentrates “on three main pillars:  well-being, social media use, and opioid abuse.”

Memo to Melania:  If one of your “major issues” is opioid abuse, you didn’t have to travel 17,000 miles to, around and back from Africa.

When it comes to opioids, there’s no place like home.

On your BE BEST website it says “more than 300,000 Americans have died from overdoses involving opioids since 2000.”

Here’s an overdose death map from 2016 – and we know it looks even worse today:

Pick a state.  Any state.  In fact, every state.

You could easily travel thousands of miles around the U.S. to get up close and personal with people (including children) affected by opioids.

And Melania, here’s a thought:  While you’re in a travel mode, why not spend some extra time in states that have been devastated by hurricanes, floods and wildfires – just this year.  Places like…

Hurricane Florence, September 2018, North Carolina, South Carolina	2018 Wildfires in AZ, CA, CO, ID, MT, NV, NM, TX, UT, WA, and WY

Here’s another idea:  Since you like hugging children so much, why don’t you spend a little extra time hugging kids in California, the state with the highest poverty rate in the country:

You can log 17,000 miles in no time!

But lose the pith helmet, please.

Clueless in Cairo:  Melania displayed either her total ignorance or total lack of caring, and wore a pith helmet in Africa.	The pith helmet has strong negative connotations in Africa, recalling British colonialism – and oppression – in the 19th century.

 

I wouldn’t watch a beauty pageant even if I was in one.

And the chances of that are…

None.

I think beauty pageants suck:

Beauty Pageant:  A fiasco* in which females in various age groups, from toddler and up, invite the public to objectify, trivialize, and criticize them, based on their appearance.

*Fiasco:  A thing that is a complete failure, especially in a ludicrous or humiliating way.

But the September 2018 Miss America Beauty Pageant sucked slightly less.

And that’s because of one contestant:

Miss Michigan, Emily Sioma.

Since we’re both from Michigan, I’m going to call her “Emily.”

As I understand it, at some point in the pageant the contestants are given about eight seconds to introduce themselves.  Instead of highlighting her achievements, here’s what Emily, 24, said:

Wow!  When I read that the next day, did I sit up and take notice!

And so did the media:  the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, the BBC, People Magazine, numerous other newspapers, and network and local TV stations.

People were on Twitter, too – few doofuses, sure, but most praising Emily for using that short stretch of time to make a strong statement about her state – and herself.

Emily’s “none for its residents to drink” was referring to the water crisis in Flint, MI that began in 2014.  Flint’s tap water had become contaminated with lead after officials switched from the Detroit system to the Flint River to save money.

In 2014 and 2015, Flint didn’t properly treat corrosive water that was pulled from the river.  As a result, lead in old city pipes contaminated the water going into homes and businesses, and it streamed from household taps as a brown, smelly fluid.  Some children were found to have elevated lead levels in their blood, leading to long-term health concerns.

There were tons of blame to go around:  Michigan’s Governor Snyder, the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services, the Environmental Protection Agency, and emergency managers appointed by Snyder to help the city handle its finances.   Attorney General Bill Schuette charged at least 15 people in his criminal investigation.

As of early 2017, the water quality had returned to acceptable levels, but residents were instructed to continue to use bottled or filtered water until all the lead pipes have been replaced, which is expected to be completed no sooner than 2020.

Shower with bottled water.  Yeah, right.

Many residents – understandably – still trust neither the water nor the officials who are telling them their water is safe.  In the meantime, the state had been providing free bottled water to Flint residents, but that assistance ended back in April.

As Emily said, “none for its residents to drink.”

This isn’t the first time Emily has stood tall and spoken out; here she is bravely standing – alone – during her 2016 graduation from the University of Michigan, with I survived written on her mortarboard:

Emily says she was sexually assaulted twice in college, and found few resources for help.  When she was crowned Miss Michigan this past June, Emily said she hoped sharing her story of campus sexual assault will raise awareness of the issue and encourage other survivors to be proud of their recovery journey:

“I realized this is going to be a hard battle I’ll be fighting for the rest of my life, but if I don’t start now, who’s going to do it?”

And here’s Emily on Facebook on September 14, speaking out in support of VAWA, the Violence Against Women Act, due to expire September 30, and urging people to contact their reps:

This federal legislation, aimed at protecting women from violent crimes, was granted a short-term reauthorization only until December 7 in the stopgap spending bill that was passed in September.

So, OK.

This year, for the first time ever, the pageant did away with the swimsuit competition.  And the organizers don’t call it a “pageant” anymore, but rather a competition with the emphasis on scholarship.

If Miss America becomes a platform for energized, intelligent women to raise their voices on behalf of those who aren’t in the spotlight, then perhaps it will suck even less.

It’s a big if.

Emily was her own woman when she walked onto that Miss America stage.  She didn’t make the top 15, but who cares?

She’s still standing tall and speaking out, and as she told Glamour magazine, “I’m just getting started.”

There are words in our language that do not induce warm fuzzies:

1. Tornado
2. Hurricane
3. Typhoon
4. Earthquake
5. Sarahsanders
6. Flood
7. Wildfire
8. Avalanche

Let’s go with avalanche.

An avalanche is “a mass of snow, ice, and rocks falling rapidly down a mountainside.”

You’ve heard the stories, seen the videos – avalanches are unpredictable.  Uncontrollable.  Scary, and worse than scary, deadly:  Avalanches kill more than 150 people worldwide each year.

It’s hard to find anything good to say about an avalanche.

So could someone tell me why – WHY – General Motors named a car “Avalanche”?

With nearly a half-million words in the English language to choose from, why choose a word that denotes a disaster?

Yet GM did, and the Chevrolet Avalanche was in production from 2001 to 2013.

This came to mind recently when I was at a stop light and noticed the name of the car in front of me.  “Avalanche?” I thought.  “What kind of car name is that?”

Actually, I thought, “What the @#$%&! kind of car name is that?

Q:  What does this avalanche………………Have in common with this Avalanche? A:  Nothing.

But auto makers seem committed to using strange names for cars.  And not just using – but creating names for car models.

Let’s start with the strange names that are, at least, real words.

A guy gets home and says to his wife, “Honey, I got the Viper!”  Logically, she’d expect him to walk in with a nasty poisonous snake.  But somehow Dodge thought Viper was a cool name for a car for 20+ years.

Or how about “Spider,” used by several car manufacturers?  Supposedly that word indicates a small convertible, but to me spider indicates a huge, ugly, possibly deadly bug with eight legs and, if it’s in my house, on a suicide mission.

Maybe the worst of all:  the Eagle Talon.  Now, “eagle” I can understand – eagles are fast, smart, powerful, and impressive to look at, suggesting that the car is, too.  But an eagle’s talons – are its toenails.  Its long, curved, sharp toenails that the eagle uses to catch and kill prey.

What was Chrysler thinking with that one?

As for the made-up car names – with that half-million words in English, car makers couldn’t find anything to name their latest and greatest?

And if it isn’t an actual word, what are these supposed to say about the car?

1. Allanté
2. Astre
3. Elantra
4. Invicta
5. Sentra

Here’s the conversation:

Husband:  Honey, I got the Invicta!
Wife:  Oh, no!  Do you need to see a doctor for that?

I guess I’ll just continue wondering about automobile names, and longing for the good old days when a car’s name made sense.

Like Henry Ford and his Model T.  Ford had been producing cars for years, starting with his Model A in 1903, then progressing with the Model B and C and so on, skipping some letters when the plans for those models didn’t make it off the drawing board.  He didn’t do all that well with any of them until 1908 when he struck gold with his Model T – a name that made sense, as the next letter in the alphabet.

By 1914 it was estimated that nine out of every 10 cars in the world were Fords.  The Model T put Ford on the map, put millions in his pocket, and put thousands on the road in the first car middle-class Americans could afford. 

Of course, then there was Ford’s Edsel, which was supposed to be the car of the future but lasted only from 1958 to 1960.  Ford named the car for his only child, his son Edsel, who was named for Henry’s close friend, Edsel Ruddiman.

At the time some wit wrote in Time magazine that the Edsel looked like “an Oldsmobile sucking a lemon.”

The car’s name became synonymous for “failure.”

But at least the name made sense.

When:  October 16, 2018

Where:  Washington DC

The interview is about the missing Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.  This appears to be a tragic story with no possible good outcome.

In the midst of this I couldn’t help but notice:

It’s raining.

He’s got an umbrella.

She doesn’t.

He doesn’t even make a pretense of sharing it with her.

He’s probably too busy thinking about other things.

Like…

Human rights.

Yeah.

Thoughtful.

Publication date:  September 2018

Review, short version:  Three roses out of four.

Review, long version:

I generally don’t read memoirs because unhappy people write them.

I think they’re people whose lives are mostly misery, starting with their dysfunctional families and not improving much after that.  Whatever moments of hope or joy they experience are often smothered by the next tsunami of misery, until the book ends and I’m left shaking my head and wondering, “Why did I read that?”

But I read Sally Field’s memoir, In Pieces, because I like Sally Field.

I think she’s an actress of great range and great endurance, and she’s a survivor – of parents who divorced when she was four, leaving Fields with a mostly absent father until he wanted to borrow money, and a distant, narcissistic mother (my words, not Fields’); of a stepfather, actor Jock Mahoney, who sexually abused Fields throughout her whole childhood – which I believe her mother knew about, and did nothing – and who also borrowed money; two failed marriages; and 50+ years in show business, experiencing the highest highs and lowest lows.

I like survivors, and I like Field.

Field’s mother, Margaret Morlan, was put under contract with Paramount in 1945 at age 23.  Margaret’s career never amounted to anything, and I’m betting it galled her to witness Field’s numerous successes including:

• Primetime Emmy, Outstanding Lead Actress, Miniseries or Movie, Sybil, 1977
• Academy Award, Best Actress, Norma Rae, 1980
• Academy Award, Best Actress, Places in the Heart, 1985
• Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actress, Drama Series, ER, 2001
• Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actress, Drama Series, Brothers and Sisters, 2007
• Best Supporting Actress, New York Film Critics Circle Award, Lincoln, 2012

If I listed all her wins and nominations I’d still be writing this into next week.

Fields’ career started in television in 1965 as the lead in the sitcom Gidget – not bad for an 18-year-old with no TV experience – and has encompassed dozens of TV and movie roles.  And she’s still working; in 2017 she appeared on the Broadway stage in The Glass Menagerie, for which she received four award nominations including a Tony for Best Actress in a Play.

Pretty good for a woman who thought she’d be forever pigeonholed as a flying nun.

I’ve twice said “I like Sally Field” and I do, but I’m also alluding to an event Field doesn’t mention in her book – the decades-long mockery of her acceptance speech at the 1985 Academy Awards.

Field spoke for just 67 seconds but afterwards people chose to repeat – to mock – just the last 15 seconds when she said, “And I can’t deny the fact that you like me!  Right now!  You like me!”

It was a sweet burst of honest enthusiasm rarely seen at the overly hyped, overly long, and overly tedious Academy Awards.  I read elsewhere that Field later said she was trying to describe the fleeting experience of being at the top of her field, knowing that she’d been on the bottom and might be again.

Why anyone would mock that is beyond me.

There’s much more to In Pieces than I’ve mentioned, and the book offers many insights into Field’s life and journey.  There is a fair amount of the aforementioned misery, but I think there’s a good balance of ups to go with the downs.

Enough balance to give me the right answer to, “Why did I read that?”

Ouch!  That must have hurt!!!

Oh, wait.  I misunderstood.

That headline should have read,

Jet Lands On HMS Queen Elizabeth

 A ship.  It landed on a British ship, not on the actual queen.

Whew!  That’s a relief!!!

The F-35B jet landed on the ship last month, just days before an F-35B crashed in North Carolina.

Ouch!  That really hurts!!!

That sucker cost $122,000,000!!!

Give or take a few million.

To ease your mind, the pilot of the crashed F-35B ejected safely and no one on the ground was hurt.

This is the first time an F-35B (full name: F-35B Lightning II single-seat, single-engined, all-weather stealth multirole fighter) has crashed.  The F-35 “family” has drawn sharp criticism over its lengthy development and cost overruns, despite reassurances by US military leaders who say the kinks are being worked out.

Ouch!!!  Those are expensive kinks!!!

The aforementioned “family” is a veritable alphabetical and numerical soup that includes:

• F-35A CTOL (Conventional Takeoff and Landing)
  • F-35I Adir (an F-35A with Israeli modifications)
  • CF-35 (proposed Canadian variant of the F-35A)
  • F-35D (possible future upgrade to the F-35A)
• F-35B STOVL (Short Takeoff and Vertical Landing)
• F-35C CATOBAR (Catapult-Assisted Takeoff But Arrested Recovery)

That’s a lot of soup!

Why, you may be wondering, are there three F-35s – the A, B, and C?

Because the Air Force, Navy and Marines each required their own special touches.  You might want your “Probe and Drogue,” or your “Gattling Gun,” or your “3-Bearing Swivel Nozzle” or all three, or some combination:

And how about a sun roof?  Sure, we can do that:

None of that one-size-fits-all stuff for our military!  And what the hell, it’s not their money.

Here’s a photo of the F-35A, F-35B and F-35C – can you guess which is which?

Of course you can!

What sets the F-35B apart is that it can take off and land vertically, like a helicopter.

That comes in handy when you’re landing on Queen Elizabeth.

On the ship, that is.

Once again, all over again:

Our East and Midwest are drowning in floods…	Maine, Summer 2018
…while the West is on fire.	Colorado, Summer 2018
Too wet in too many places…	Florida, Fall 2018
…and too dry in too many others.	California, Summer 2018

But, what if…

Just fantasize along with me here for a minute, OK?

What if…

We built a pipeline system to control flooding in the East and Midwest, and sent that water to the West?

What if we did?

I’m not talking about siphoning off someone else’s water.  I’m talking about floodwaters that evaporate or end up in sewers.

What if, before that water evaporated or went into sewers, we saved some of it, shipped it, and disbursed it to the West?

If we have the wherewithal to build the Keystone Pipeline for oil, surely we can build a cross-country pipeline for water?

The Keystone oil pipeline, according to the TransCanada website (the pipeline owner) runs from Alberta, Canada to Houston, TX, about 2,687 miles.

The distance from New York to San Diego is about 2,760 miles.

There are so many reasons to move this from the realm of “What if” to “Why not”:

Saving lives:  Every year people die in floods and fires.  Flood control in one part of the country could ease the dry, fire-prone conditions in another part.

Saving money:  Every year fires and floods cost billions, and insurance costs increase.

Stopping trauma:  Every year victims of floods and wildfires are traumatized by deaths, injuries, loss of homes and businesses.

Stopping waste:  Every year we lose vital infrastructure, and natural resources like forests and other ecosystems.

But a little time online shows that, of course, I’m not the first person to think about this.  There are plenty of reasons to move from “What if” to “Here’s why not”:

Pipelines are expensive:  Fossil fuels are laden with profits while water is not.  This morning the cost of gasoline is $2.90 per gallon.  On my last bill (not including all those unidentifiable fees) I paid $3 for 1,000 gallons of water.

One gallon vs…

1,000 gallons

Right of way:  People along the pipeline route might not agree to having it on their land.  Business owners who might be displaced or negatively impacted won’t support the idea, either.

Location:  Not many places flood on a reliable timetable, so some parts of the pipeline might be unused for decades.

Invasive species:  The chance for the introduction of invasive species such as the zebra mussel, grass carp, etc. would be great.

I know this country has the smarts, the money, and the ability to build a water pipeline.

But perhaps we lack the leadership, the imagination, and the guts to make it happen.

So I guess my fantasy will remain a fantasy.

And I’ll keep wondering…

I love words.

I are a wordsmith:

So I was thrilled that Merriam-Webster recently announced the addition of more than 840 new words to its online database.

After all, Merriam-Webster knows a thing or two about words – they’ve been around since 1828, when George and Charles founded G & C Merriam Co., and then bought the rights to An American Dictionary of the English Language from Daniel Webster’s estate in 1843.

Hence, the Merriam-Webster dictionary.  And thesauruses, and atlases, and apps, and eBooks, and so much more, including The Official Scrabble© Player Dictionary.

But going back to the new words, here’s just a sampling:

Bingeable:  Having multiple episodes or parts that can be watched in rapid succession.

GOAT:  An acronym for Greatest Of All Time.

Hangry:  Describes that feeling when you’re super-hungry and getting cranky, or angry.

Time Suck:  An activity to which one devotes a lot of time that might be better or more productively spent doing other things.

There are so many new words entering our lexicon that Merriam-Webster also added a bunch earlier this year:

Glamping:  Outdoor camping with amenities and comforts (such as beds, electricity, and access to indoor plumbing) not usually used when camping (glamour + camping).

Hate-watch:  To watch and take pleasure in laughing at or criticizing (a disliked television show, movie, etc.)

Subtweet:  A usually mocking or critical tweet that alludes to another Twitter user without including a link to the user’s account and often without directly mentioning the user’s name.

Welp:  Used informally instead of “Well,” (as to introduce a remark expressing resignation or disappointment).

Now, I don’t know about you, but to me, some of these words sounded more like sniglets:

If so, Merriam-Webster, then surely these sniglet gems are also worthy of your consideration:

Expresshole:  A person who brings more than 15 items to the express lane in the store.

Flopcorn:  The unpopped kernels left in a bag of microwave popcorn.

Musquirt:  That runny stuff that comes out of the mustard bottle before the mustard does.

Newswafer:  Newspaper left on the driveway that has been wet and run over for a period of time.

Profanitype:  Symbols used by cartoonists to replace swear words.

Snackmosphere:  The pocket of air found inside snack and/or potato chip bags.

My spellcheck went crazy with all this but…

Aren’t words fun?

Yes, it’s true:

Several years ago I was very annoyed at something said by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Not that she ever knew, or cared.

It happened during a hearing about campaign contributions, and was mostly overlooked by the media due to all the politicking and posturing around this very volatile subject.

Ginsburg said:

“Then the little people will count some and you won’t have the super-affluent as the speakers that will control the elections.”

What incensed me was her phrase “the little people,” and in a blog I speculated – to whom, exactly was she referring?

Not me, that’s for sure.

Not anyone I know.

In fact, I doubt that any Americans would include themselves in that derogatory description.

Now, for me, that’s all changed.

I do feel like one of those “little people” who doesn’t “count some” – or at all.

What brought this about was a little-noticed story amidst all the media coverage of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings in late September and early October.

On Saturday, October 6 it was coming down to the final vote that would – or wouldn’t – seat Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court.

The Republicans needed the majority of votes for this to happen, but one of their members – Republican Senator Steve Daines of Montana – was not going to be present.

On October 6 his daughter was getting married in Montana, and Daines was absolutely committed to walking his daughter down the aisle.

“Wow,” I thought, “what a guy!  To pass up this crucial, history-making vote for his daughter’s sake – that’s one great dad.”

Um, no.

Daines’ presence to vote – if needed – was never in doubt.  No, he couldn’t be two places at once, but he could attend his daughter’s wedding in Montana and vote in Washington DC.

How?

Hop on United Airlines at the last minute in the middle of the night and fly coach from Montana to Washington DC while the Senate held the vote open, waiting for him?

Not likely.

Instead, said Daines, “My good friend and colleague, Greg, has come to save the day.”

And just like that, fingers snapped, problem solved.

So who the hell, I wondered, is “Greg”?

“Greg” is Republican Representative Greg Gianforte, and if you didn’t know this either, with 435 Representatives, who can keep track of them all?

Gianforte “saved the day” by offering Daines the comfort of his private jet to whisk Daines back to Washington DC if needed.

It turns out that Gianforte is one of the richest people in Congress, with an estimated net worth of $350 million.  He won a special election to replace another Montana Republican, Ryan Zinke, who’s worth a mere $1.8 million, when Zinke became U.S. Secretary of the Interior in 2017.

When Gianforte made his offer, I imagine the dialogue went something like this:

Rep. Greg Gianforte:  No prob, Steve-o, I’ve got a sweet 12-seater jet and a crew, just standing by.  Help yourself!

Senator Steve Daines:  Gee, thanks, Greg!  I’m only worth a lousy $14 million, and haven’t been able to do the private jet thing yet.

When I learned this is when I started feeling like one of those “little people.”

No millions.  No jet.  No finger-snap problem-solving abilities.

Yeah.

Little.

And maybe a little bitter.

I call men like this the “Pale males in grey suits.”  Perhaps I should change that to the “Rich and powerful pale males in gray suits.”

Daines……………………….. Ginaforte………………………………. Zinke Pale males in gray suits.

What chance do we “little people” have of being heard, when “super-affluent” politicians operate in this rarified stratosphere?

Ask any politician a simple, straightforward question and you’ll mostly get non-answers or lies.  Example:

Interviewer:  Senator, how much is two plus two?

Senator #1:  I’m glad you asked that, and speaking of two, there should be only two political parties in this country.
Senator #2:  Well, it’s clear that hardworking, ordinary Americans want to know the same thing.
Senator#3:  I can’t speak for my colleagues across the aisle but, as I’ve said in the past, we’ll have to wait and see.

We hear this answer avoidance so often that it even has a name:

Pivoting.

When politicians are interviewed, and at press conferences, during campaign debates, in TV ads – in other words, nearly every time they opens their mouths…

They pivot.

Of course I’m not the only one who’s noticed – the Internet has lots of articles on this technique, including this succinct piece:

A first-grader will give you a simple answer to “How much is two plus two?”  They’ll say, “Four.”

So how do those straightforward kids grow up to be adults who prevaricate, dissimulate, obfuscate, or just outright lie every time they’re in front of a microphone?

Here’s my simple, straightforward answer:

PSOLNA:

(The “P” is silent.)

A top-secret institution, PSOLNA teaches neophyte politicians to look straight at a questioner or TV camera and do a verbal tap dance that leaves the listeners/readers wondering, “Huh?”

And PSOLNA isn’t just a few meager weeks or months of training; this is a full-on, multi-year course that offers a number of degrees including:

• Bachelor’s of Perfect Prevarication
• Master’s of Truthfully Lying
• PhD in Spinning, Dodging and Evading

It’s easy to tell when a politician has graduated from PSOLNA:

Interviewer:  Congresswoman, what’s your position on the opioid crises?
Non-Graduate of PSOLNA:  This morning I’m introducing a bill that will provide the funding to address this national epidemic.

Interviewer:  Congresswoman, you recently said that when it comes to affordable health care, you’re neither for nor against it.  Can you clarify?
Graduate of PSOLNA:  That comment was taken out of context.  Next question?

And PSOLNA isn’t just for elected officials – appointees, nominees and employees are proud PSOLNA graduates, too:

Reporter:  But you’re the Press Secretary, can’t you just answer “Yes” or “No”?
Press Secretary:  It’s more than a matter of “can’t” or “can,” it’s a threat to our national security.  If you ask that again, the guards will escort you out of here.

Reporter:  Your Honor, you’re up for a position on the 9^th District Court of Appeals – how can you be certain of not bringing your own biases into the courtroom?
Judge:  “Certain” is such an uncertain word.  Existentially, how can we be certain of anything, except the uncertainty of how the other party is addressing our immigration issues?

Reporter:  Sir, you’re not the first nominee the president has considered for this Cabinet position.  What are your thoughts on that?
Cabinet Nominee:  I think my thoughts are my thoughts as are your thoughts, and it’s incumbent upon all of us to agree that the American people’s minds are a wonderful thing.

But wait!  If you, an ordinary, unimportant American citizen have found yourself thinking, “That politician sure knows how to pivot.  I wish I could do that!”

NOW you can!

For the first time ever, PSOLNA is no longer limiting this top-secret training to politicians.  PSOLNA is opening its doors to the public so you, too, can learn to Pivot Like a Pro:

Restaurant Patron:  Waiter, what kind of cheese is on the pizza?
You:  That’s an interesting question, and could have important repercussions regarding the NAFTA dairy guidelines between the U.S. and Canada, especially the issue of ultrafiltered milk.

Co-Worker:  Beth, do you have those reports printed for our two o’clock meeting?
You:  The average person wouldn’t pick up on this, but I’m sensitive to what you’re asking, and are you aware that paper comes from trees, and deforestation is threatening both our ecosystems and our children’s futures?

Doctor:  Sam, the last time we met I asked you to start exercising – why haven’t you done that?
You:  With all due respect, the issue isn’t exercise but the larger issue of lifestyle, and whether or not we average Americans are going to see benefits from the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.

Now it won’t just be politicians who are experts at prevaricating, dissimulating, and obfuscating – you can be, too!

But not on the high-speed train, Arnie!

Once upon a time there was a land that was so rich, one of its congressmen could afford to spend $600 on an airplane ticket for his bunny rabbit.

Yes, it’s true!

Or at least it’s true according to Federal prosecutors, and that will all get sorted out in court, I guess.

But that’s how rich this land is!

In fact it’s so rich, that’s it’s spending billions – yes, billions – of dollars on a choo-choo train that goes nowhere!  And it’s going nowhere for a long, long time, maybe forever!

Welcome to the land of California where, in 2008, a bunch of suckers, I mean voters, said “yes” to Prop 1A, the Safe, Reliable High-Speed Passenger Train Bond Act for the 21st Century.

Wow, that’s a long name!

That meant the people in this rich land were OK with pledging $9,950,000,000 to partly pay for a high-speed train.

Wow, that’s a lot of zeros!

But that was only partly.  In 2008 when the proposition was passed, the California High-Speed Rail Authority guesstimated the total cost of the project at $40,000,000,000.

Wow, that’s even more zeros!

Where’s all the rest of that money coming from?

It was supposed to come from other sources like the federal government (meaning your tax dollars), private investment (which hasn’t materialized), and something called “cap-and-trade auctions,” a system meant to limit carbon emissions by selling credits to pollute.

What’s it all mean?

It meant that someday, we’d be zipping around on a high-speed train to go even faster from one ever-more-polluted city to another!

But the people of California were cool with that, because it meant we’d have a high-speed train that could take us from Los Angeles to San Francisco in less than three hours!

And when you’re driving, that’s a trip that can take anywhere from eight hours to eight days, depending on traffic.

Then in 2011 our friends at the High-Speed Rail Authority had a surprise for us!

They issued a new cost estimate of $98,500,000,000 to $118,000,000,000.

There we go with all those zeros again!

When Prop 1A was passed in 2008, the high-speed train’s completion date was 2029, which seemed like a long time to wait a train to come.

Now that opening date has been pushed back to 2033.

That’s a really long time to wait for a train to come!

But that’s OK.  Because in the meantime you can follow the high-speed train’s excruciatingly slow progress on Twitter…

And Facebook…

And its own page on the State of California website…

And you can call it by its nickname:  The Bullet Train To Nowhere.

Wow, that’s a fun nickname!

And lots of people have another name for it:

Boondoggle.

Do you know what a “boondoggle” is?

“A work or activity that is wasteful or pointless but gives the appearance of having value.”

And:

“A public project of questionable merit that typically involves political patronage and graft.”

Do you know what “graft” is?

“Practices, especially bribery, used to secure illicit gains in politics or business; corruption.”

While Californians will have to wait until (at least) 2033 to zip from Los Angeles in San Francisco in less than three hours, in (maybe) 2022, we’re told,  Phase 1 of the high-speed rail will be complete.

You’ll be able to zip from Bakersfield to Fresno in – well, in a big hurry!

Though why anybody would be in a big hurry to get to Bakersfield or Fresno is a mystery to me.

Do you know what a “mystery” is?

“Something that is difficult or impossible to understand or explain.”

In the dictionary, here’s the picture that illustrates “mystery”:

Finally, I’ll close with this final thought, recently verified by PolitiFact, with regards to how California politicians choose and don’t choose to spend our tax dollars:

 

 

Publication date:  June 2018

Review, short version:  Four skunks out of four.

Review, long version:

One of the fun parts about writing fiction is that the author is free to make her characters anything she wants them to be.  What they say, do and think, how they look and where they live – those are all an author’s choices.

So I’m at a loss to understand why Jill Hall, author of The Silver Shoes, chose to create a female lead character who was a boring, whiny dingbat.

Seriously – several light bulbs short of a chandelier.  Several sandwiches short of a picnic.

That character is Anne, who is “past 30,” and an aspiring artist.  To support “her art” (you see that phrase a lot), she works as a valet parking cars.  One night while parking a car, she knocks over a trash can.

And leaves the trash in the street. 

Anne “loses track” and forgets to pay her rent; “money management had never been one of her life skills,” she admits.  Nor is housekeeping; her apartment is “its usual cyclonic mess.”

Another sign of Anne’s maturity is her way of venting frustration:  throwing her hat on the floor and “jumping on it.”  She quits her job without another job but no worries:  “It was all about making art.”  As opposed to, I guess, making rent money.  And now she “loves having hours on end to do her art.”

And shop – somehow Anne has the wherewithal to buy a pair of silver shoes she sees in the window of a resale store.

In keeping with all this, Anne is in love with Sergio.  Anne lives in San Francisco and Sergio, New York, and Anne is panting for Sergio to commit:  “I hoped you were going to invite me to move here [New York] with you,” she whines.

Way to give up your power, girl!

In fact, Anne spends most of the book waiting and wondering and handing all the power over to Sergio.  Every time Anne brings up moving to New York and commitments, Sergio puts her off.

The other lead character is, Clair, 18, and her part of the story is set in 1929.  Clair leads a rich but restricted life with her widower father in expensive digs on Manhattan.  Clair is no dummy, but her lack of spine gets wearying.  She does everything her father tells her to do, including agreeing to marry the heinous guy Daddy chose for her.

Because it’s 1929 you know the stock market is going to crash, and Clair and Daddy lose their nice home.  They move in to mooch off her aunt, Clair has a one-night stand with a stranger, gets a job, and then starts performing in a burlesque show.  One of her costumes includes a pair of silver shoes – yup, the same shoes Anne buys 90 years later.

But you have to read 319 pages (out of 324) to learn this.

I haven’t done justice to how juvenile this book is.  Anne is a major space cadet, and Clair is a major pity party.  Anne continues making her collages (described as “kindergarten art” by one gallery owner) but not making money.  Clair keeps trying and failing to form the word “No,” even when she’s walking down the aisle with Mr. Heinous.

You – reasonably – may be wondering why I finished a book I disliked so much.

Well, I kept hoping Anne would get smarter, and Clair would grow a spine.

But I won’t tell, so don’t worry about spoilers.

Besides, how can you spoil something that’s already gone bad?

What’s in a name?  That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.  – William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

That quote is pretty much what the government of the People’s Republic of China is telling its citizens, and the citizens aren’t buying it.

Literally.

It appears that for years, fish sellers in China have been labeling rainbow trout as salmon.

And for consumers, it does not smell as sweet.

“I am SO not buying that 拉屎,” said one 20-year-old woman, who spoke on conditions of anonymity.

The story broke awhile back after the Chinese state media recirculated a video profiling a freshwater fishery in Qinghai province.  The company, according to the video, supplied one-third of China’s salmon.

Other media outlets smelled something fishy (you know I had to say that) because, as you can see from the map, Qinghai province is nowhere close to the ocean, where salmon spend most of their lives.

And that freshwater fishery?  It’s a rainbow trout farm.

Outraged, thousands of people took to social media, including #RainbowTroutBecomesSalmon, protesting the deception:

So recently, various authorities – including the China Aquatic Products Processing and Marketing Alliance, an industry group affiliated with China’s Ministry of Agriculture, as well as 13 commercial fisheries – offered this comforting thought:

“Salmon and rainbow trout belong to the same family.”

Well, so do my brother and I, but we’d both be pretty annoyed if someone suggested we were the same person.

The authorities also said that markets and restaurants must list the species of the fish and its origins.  So you might see a label that either says:

Salmon (Atlantic salmon)
or
Salmon (rainbow trout)

Can’t you just see that labeling logic applied to other products?

Label Says	You Get	Gov’t Response
Fresh chicken (chicken) or Fresh chicken (buzzard)		They’re from the same family.
2019 Nissan (Sentra) or 2019 Nissan (from 1982)		They’re from the same family.
Thoroughbred horse (horse) or Thoroughbred horse (donkey)		They’re from the same family.

Then there’s the matter of freshwater parasites that could infect humans if the rainbow trout is eaten raw.  If an unaware resident of China orders (raw) salmon sushi, how does she/he know if they’re getting salmon, or freshwater rainbow trout that may contain parasites?

Salmon or rainbow trout?  Only the Chinese government knows for sure!

Oh, right.  Just look at the label.  Though I personally have never seen sushi served with a label.

I’ll close with another quote, this from an unnamed ancient Roman who was hip to deceptive labeling:

(Let the buyer beware.)

Release date:  April 2018

Review, short version:  All thumbs down.

Review, long version:

When I started this blog I decided, “I’m qualified to do book reviews because I read a lot of books.”

Can I extrapolate that and say, “I’m qualified to do movie reviews because I watch a lot of movies”?

I can.  I will.  I do.

The movie is Amy Schumer’s I Feel Pretty, released earlier this year.  I was interested in seeing it because I think Amy is frequently funny, and I admire the courage and persistence of people who do stand-up.  I especially admire comediennes because they haven’t had an easy time breaking into the very-much-old-boys’ club of stand-up comedy.

And though I think Amy is frequently funny, I didn’t find anything funny about her 2015 movie, Trainwreck.

But give her movies another chance, I thought.

Amy is, after all, not just a comedienne and movie actress; she’s made numerous TV appearances, released albums, videos and a book, is the recipient of many nominations and awards, is currently on a national tour, Amy Schumer and Friends, and she can be funny.

Sometimes.

But once again, not – in I Feel Pretty.

I knew the premise going in – Amy plays Renee,

A woman who struggles with feelings of insecurity and inadequacy on a daily basis.  After suffering a fall, she wakes up believing she is suddenly the most beautiful and capable woman on the planet.

There is no verbal explanation for Renee’s feelings of insecurity and inadequacy, but the reason is immediately obvious:

Renee doesn’t look like an anorexic, therefore, she is overweight and incapable of being successful at anything.

This message is loud and clear in multiple early scenes:

• While checking in at the gym and getting shoes, she lies three times about her shoe size, and then cringes at asking for “nine, double-wide.”  Even her feet are fat.
• In the gym everyone has a buff body but Renee.  She’s body shamed without anyone having to say a word.

  

• At home she surrounds herself with fashion magazines, the covers featuring perfect, thin women – something Renee will never be, which equals failure.
• She goes shopping and is totally humiliated when the saleswoman assumes Renee is looking for a gift – there are no clothes in that store for her horrible body. “You could probably find your size online,” the saleswoman suggests.
• At home Renee undresses in front of a full-length mirror.  She’s wearing Spanx – a skintight ribs-to-thigh body shaper – something no magazine cover model would ever need.  As Renee looks at herself she tears up and turns away from her reflection.

All this humiliation happened just during the opening credits.

In case you haven’t gotten the message yet, Renee is ashamed of her body.

Not too much further along, in a store Renee encounters a (thin, perfect) woman from the gym.  After a guy tries to hit on the woman – but not Renee, whom he calls “Sir” –Renee says,

“I’ve always wondered what it felt like to be undeniably pretty.  And just have all those parts in life that just open up to you, that you only get to experience when you look like you.”

Renee finishes this self-inflicted self-shaming with, “I’ll just pray for a miracle.”

Renee’s “miracle” comes in the form of a hard hit to the head, after which she sees her hopelessly awful self as something entirely different:

Slender arms.  Slender thighs.  Slender all over.

What she’s always dreamed of being.

Again Renee looks in a mirror, but this time says, “I’m beautiful!”

This belief transforms Renee’s life, and the meaning is clear:  Thin equals beautiful.  And not just beautiful; desirable, charming, amazing, fascinating, admirable, fun, happy, successful, and capable of anything.

At this point I wasn’t even half-way through the movie, but I’d had enough.  And I knew where the movie was going:

Through another knock on the head or some other means, Renee will realize that she isn’t thin.  At the end she’ll give a boringly predictable speech about how her body is the same, but now her attitude about herself is changed!  She can reach for her dreams in spite of her weight!

No more Spanx for her!

I was sickened by the movie’s body-shaming message, but more sickened that Schumer would make a movie with this message:

You must be thin, or at least believe you’re thin, to be beautiful, to succeed and be happy.

Now, once upon a time, Amy Schumer may have been thin, but she isn’t now:

Amy then…	Amy now.

She wasn’t thin:

In 2016 when she

• Was nominated for a People’s Choice, a Golden Globe, and numerous other awards.
• Posed nude for the cover of her book, The Girl With the Lower Back Tattoo.

In 2017 when she

• Was nominated for two Grammy Awards.
• Filmed I Feel Pretty.

In 2018 when she

• Hosted Saturday Night Live.
• Was nominated for a Tony Award.
• Married Chris Fischer.

Amy Schumer’s life sends a positive message:

You can have a great life without having a thin body.

Why couldn’t her movie have said the same?

To sum it up, after watching enough of this movie…

I Feel Pretty…

Nauseated.

The cover story of the September 24 issue of Time focuses on teachers.

The article was of interest to me, as I have the greatest respect for teachers – knowing I could never do that job, that I would never have the endless patience, endurance, and dedication that so many teachers demonstrate every day.

Having known many teachers in my life – in classrooms and, later, in friendships – I consider teaching both a profession and a vocation.  The difference:

Profession:  a paid occupation, especially one that involves prolonged training and a formal qualification.

Vocation:  a person’s employment or main occupation, especially regarded as particularly worthy and requiring great dedication.

I think of teaching as a higher calling, not in a religious way, but in a selfless way.

Nobody goes into teaching for the glamour, unless you consider dilapidated schools, overcrowded classrooms, outdated textbooks and threadbare supplies glamorous.

And nobody goes into teaching for the money; according to the Time article, “Annual pay for America’s public school teachers has barely budged in three decades.”

Teachers have impacted my life in many good ways and a few bad ways, and I prefer to focus on the good.  With that in mind, I’ll share one story, from one year in school, when…

A teacher changed my life forever in fourth grade.

That teacher was Mrs. Snyder.  To my nine-year-old eyes she was old-looking, older than my mother, more like a grandmother, slightly stout, with short, graying blond hair and ordinary clothes.  Nothing special about her, I thought.

How lucky I am that I was so wrong.

Mrs. Snyder quickly took control of all 50 of us – that’s 50 nine-year-old kids in her classroom.  How did she do it?  The same way any savvy teacher would:

She bribed us.

If we were good – and I mean very good – 15 minutes before lunchtime Mrs. Snyder would stop teaching, and read to us.  Read to us?  No teacher had done that before.

Not much of a reader, I didn’t know what to expect.  She started with the first in the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, and soon I was caught up in the story about a girl who shared my first name.

If we were super good, and we were – all 50 of us – Mrs. Snyder would read to us again, for 15 minutes before the end of the school day.  For 30 minutes a day I lived in the Little House in the Big Woods, followed by Little House on the Prairie.  Then Mrs. Snyder began the next book, On the Banks of Plum Creek.

And then, the school year ended.

Oh, no!  No more Laura and Mary and Pa?  No Mrs. Snyder to read to me?  I was really sad.

So Mom took me to the library, helped me get a card and now I could follow Laura’s story myself.  And so I did, follow Laura’s story, and the stories of thousands of people all captured between the covers of books.

Reading became one of my greatest pleasures – and necessities.

That’s how my life changed forever in fourth grade.

Mrs. Snyder didn’t teach me to read.

She taught me to love it.

Perhaps someday, someone will help me understand why we pay people more to entertain us – than to teach us.

Rosa Jimenez, Teacher Los Angeles,CA Salary $73,000	Hope Brown, Teacher Versailles, KY Salary $55,000	NaShonda Cooke, Teacher Raleigh, NC Salary $69,000

Floyd Mayweather Boxing Salary $275M Endorsements $10M	Lionel Messi Soccer Salary $84M Endorsements $27M	Conor McGregor Mixed Marital Arts Salary $85M Endorsements $14M

Publication date:  June 2018

Review, short version:  One rose out of four.

Review, long version:

As I was reading Those Wild Wyndhams the word esoteric came to mind.

Esoteric:  Intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge or interest.

The author, Claudia Renton, describes her book as “a project that has taken some eight years from inception to publication,” and that’s a lot of time on a book that, in my view, only a relatively small number of people would appreciate.

Readers need to be interested in:

1. England in the 1860s to post World War I, including The Gilded Age (1870s to 1900).
2. England’s upper class, particularly women of the upper class.
3. Big books, and this one weighs in at 458 pages.

Since I could check all three, I was in.

Unfortunately, only as far as page 153.

And it wasn’t as big a book as I’d thought.  From the total of 458 pages, subtract

1. 71 pages of notes
2. 10 pages of bibliography
3. 25 pages of index

No wonder this took Renton eight years.

My problem is that, ultimately, the main characters just weren’t that interesting.  For the most part they were just – silly.

And rich.

I know it’s not fair to judge people who lived 100 and more years ago by current standards, but I found it impossible to find empathy, and difficult to find sympathy, for people who were so rich that the parents give their eldest daughter and new husband a house as a wedding gift.

And not just any house; this house:

These were people whose preoccupations included spending money, “bemoaning the impossibility of finding good staff,” moving in the right circles, marrying well, having children, having affairs, and having children with whom they’re having affairs.

And then giving some of those children names like Alfred and Edith, then nicknaming Alfred and Edith “Boysie” and “Little Woman,” and then giving the nicknames nicknames:  “Bosie” and “Wommy.”

In the not-quite-half of the book I did read, I also got a bit weary of the Renton’s word usage.  I’m all for an expansive vocabulary, but I found these a bit much:

Page 27:  It is not too tendentious to extrapolate from this fundamental elements of her character.

Page 66:  Mary and Arthur’s obvious mutual attraction, however, was not beclouded by the bavardage of “flirtation practice.”

The book’s title mainly refers to the three Wyndham sisters – Mary, Madeline and Pamela – who had plenty of drama in their lives, very little of it interest to me.  But there was one good thing:  The 10 feet x 7 feet painting of the sisters by renowned American artist John Singer Sargent in 1899, featured on the book’s cover, above.

I guess, in the end – well, by page 153 – “Bosie,” “Bets” and “bavardage” just did me in.

Whenever I see a politician speaking to a group of people, it seems like there’s always a herd of people behind the politician, as well.

And I always wonder, “Who are those people?  And why are they crowded around the politician like sheep around a feeding trough?”

• Are they tourists who wandered by and are waiting for a selfie op?
• Are they the politician’s close personal friends, promised cocktails and heavy hors d’oeuvres if they’d hang around and look interested?
• Are they staff from the politician’s office who were told, “Attend this and look enthused or you’re fired”?

Well, now I have the answer to why one of those people was standing behind one of those politicians.

Meet Tyler Linfesty, a young (17) man with no ax to grind.  He’d simply heard that President Trump was coming to Billings, MO on September 6 to speak at a rally, and Tyler wanted to see the President of the United States.

No story there until…

There was an incident at the rally.

It involved Tyler.

In interviews after the incident Tyler comes across as an articulate, informed guy – so informed that he lost me when he talked about a “Democratic Socialist” vs. a “Socialist Democrat.”

Or maybe it was the other way around?

Anyway, because Tyler was clearly tuned in to politics and had formed some opinions, he wanted to see the president up close and personal, so he got tickets for himself and two friends.

Tyler had no idea how up close and personal he’d get.

The morning of the rally, says Tyler, he got an email saying that he’d been selected for VIP status, which meant that he’d get to meet the president and have access to premier seating.  Tyler says he hadn’t applied for the status and figures he was chosen by chance.

Rally day arrived and Tyler happened to be wearing a plaid shirt.  His VIP status entitled him to take a quick picture with the president before the rally.  As long as he was on a roll, Tyler asked organizers whether he and his friends could sit together behind the stage.

Rather than simply behind the stage, they were put right behind the president.

Now, Tyler is a guy with integrity, so when the organizers instructed the crowd to clap and cheer, Tyler knew he’d clap and cheer only when he agreed with the president’s remarks.  He wasn’t there to protest or even be noticed, but he wasn’t going to perform on command, either.

Or, as requested, wear a “Make America Great Again” baseball hat, like several others did.

Tyler didn’t realize that his position on stage put him directly behind the president’s shoulder – and directly on camera.  If Tyler smiled or nodded – on camera.  If Tyler looked skeptical or baffled – on camera.

Viewers noticed and quickly dubbed Tyler the “Plaid Shirt Guy.”

At some point someone somewhere made a decision, and a woman sidled over to Tyler and told him she was taking his place.  Tyler looked confused but left the stage without argument.  Shortly afterwards, his friends were replaced, too.

Local police and Secret Service agents walked Tyler over to a chair outside the arena, told him to sit and asked to see his ID.  After 10 minutes they asked Tyler to leave and not come back.

“I had to be honest to myself,” he said in one interview.  “I wasn’t going to change my views just to please the people at the rally.”

And somehow – because this is what we do – video of Tyler and the president went viral.  There was a veritable Twitter storm, with new fans of “Plaid Shirt Guy” from the U.S. to Canada, Australia and Europe:.

The media clamored for interviews.  Tyler took it in stride, knowing that Internet fame is fleeting, indeed.

Tyler Linfesty did not have an agenda.  He was not “making faces” as some media claimed, or “trolling,” which was also bruited about.

Tyler is just a kid who hasn’t learned to prevaricate, dissimulate, and dissemble…

Like we adults do.

My takeaway?

If you’re going to cluster around a politician, best be prepared to perform regardless of what you believe.

Remember the good old days when the bad guy would just snap a pair of pantyhose over his head before he robbed a store?

Today, apparently, that would not be considered his “dress for success” look.

Though he might need to rob a store to afford that look.

And here it is:  the Nike X MMW balaclava:

Yes, this is the latest in criminal headgear, at least according to myriad people who took to social media to denounce it in August:

“This is a disgrace,” tweeted one.  “Disgusting gang culture for profit.”

Another wrote, “Hey @Nike what are you thinking with this image on your website?  You’re not allowed to be this stupid.”

From yet another tweet, “Endorsing gun and knife crime, as well as enforcing racial profiling.”

And on Facebook, “Absolutely menacing…quite inciteful.”

Here’s where I get confused.  In the image above the model is wearing the Nike balaclava, and appears to have something slung around his neck and hanging over his shoulders.  Many on social media likened it to a holster for carrying weapons.

However, on the Alyx Studio website, which includes the item in its offerings, a different model wearing the same balaclava appears to have no holster as part of his ensemble:

And while the product description says it’s “Equipped with a pocket for small items,” it says nothing about a holster.

So I guess Nike “dressed up” the model with a holster to…what?

Nike isn’t saying, but they did respond to the social media storm by saying, in part,

“We are in no way condoning or encouraging the serious issue of criminal and gang culture,” and removing the balaclava from its website.

It’s sold out on the Alyx Studio website.

So I guess the bad guys will have to hang on to their pantyhose – it may be awhile before they can dress for success.

But if you think Nike is embarrassed – I have to deal with my embarrassment at not knowing what a balaclava was, when my husband read the Nike article and queried me about it.

I are a wordsmith, after all.

“Balaclava is that hair coloring stuff that’s supposed to give you a blended, natural look,” I said confidently.

He disagreed, saying that didn’t make sense with the rest of the article.  I went online for verification:  Whoops, the hair coloring stuff is balayage.

“Then it’s that Russian stringed instrument?” I said less confidently.

Wrong again.  The Russian instrument is a balalaika.

More research revealed the meaning and origin of balaclava:

Headgear worn originally by soldiers serving in the Crimean War (1853-1856), named after the village of Balaclava in the Crimea.

So now I know better.

I hope Nike does, too.

Phil is happy.

Phil gets to go to work without socks.

Phil’s office is so big he can ride a bike in it.

Phil is head of a company that will make $125 million this year.

Phil says after 40 years he “Still loves the business” and wakes up “every morning anxious to go to work.”

Because Phil is so happy, he has lots of advice for those of us who don’t head million-dollar companies but do wear socks:

Phil:  Most companies will keep you employed for…as long as you bring value to the company.

Me:  The 8.7 million people who lost their jobs during the Great Recession might disagree.

When Phil isn’t riding his bike around his office – sockless – he’s apparently writing important stuff on his website, including his (get it?) PHIL ▪ OSOPHY 101:

“About half of your waking life will be spent working, so it’s paramount that your work be something you can be passionate about, that you enjoy, that brings you not just financial rewards and security, but a sense of pride, accomplishment and fun.”

Yessiree, I go to work especially for that “fun” part.

In a different article Phil said he’s in the 10% of the workforce “who wake up in the morning eager to go to work.”  That’s Phil in the red area below.

Phil then took the remaining 90% and divided it into three levels:

Translation:

The 40% who “like their jobs, sort of, but they’re very happy when Friday rolls around.  That’s when they get to do what they really want to do with the rest of their lives.”

Then there’s “the next 40%, the ones who say, ‘Oh, my gosh, it’s only Wednesday?  This is the longest week of my life!’”

Finally, there’s that “bottom 10%…who exclaim when that alarm goes off, ‘Please, please, please don’t make me go to work today!’”

My estimate is a bit different:

But no worries – because, of course, Phil has advice for us:

“I believe life is too short to merely tolerate your job.  So prepare yourself and go for the top 10%!”

That’s SO helpful, Phil.  Now I have some advice for you:

Buy some socks and…

You may have heard this quote, attributed to Andy Warhol:

“In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.”

From this evolved the widely used expression, “His/her 15 minutes of fame.”

In August a San Diego woman got her 15 minutes of fame, and it was, indeed, worldwide – the story was picked up by TV stations across the U.S., covered by United Press International (UPI) and appeared on multiple social media platforms.

All for an act of stupidity, which says something interesting about our culture, though I’m not sure what.

It seems the woman and her family were cleaning their house and when her wedding ring somehow ended up in the trash.

Her $30,000 wedding ring.

The stories talk about the ring being “accidentally thrown” and “inadvertently tossed” by someone but are otherwise vague – none of the stories say how or by whom.

None of the stories say where the ring was or when it went missing.

None of the stories say why this incredibly expensive ring wasn’t on the woman’s finger.

Or why, if she took the ring off to clean house, she didn’t put it in a safe place until she was ready to wear it again.

Seriously, what was she thinking?  “Well, it’s time to scrub the toilet, so I’ll take my ring off and put it in the wastebasket till I’m finished”?

Or maybe one of the kids, ticked off at being told to put down their phone and run the vacuum, thought, “Oh, look, there’s Mom’s wedding ring.  Wow!  The vacuum just sucked it right up!”

The story gets vaguer.  At some point someone, somehow, realized the ring had been thrown away.  More bad news:  The trash had been collected, apparently on the same day someone realized the ring had been tossed.

So the family called the city, and city workers tracked down which truck had picked up their trash and where it dumped its load at the landfill site.

At this point we’re still missing in the who, what, where, when, why and how.

But this story has a happy ending.

Thanks to the city workers, who started searching through the mountain of garbage:

They found the ring.

In four minutes.

Amazing, but true.

Something else was missing in all the extensive coverage:  The woman’s hand with the recovered ring is shown, but not her face, nor is she identified.

Which was probably a good idea.

You don’t want mobs of people dumpster-diving your trash to find what else someone “inadvertently tossed.”

California has a reputation as a state of extremes:

Extreme conditions
Extreme scandals
Extreme excesses

But even for California, this is extreme:

• Extremely inappropriate.
• Extremely aggravating.
• Extremely unsurprising.

It appears that while we peons are spending endless hours in lines outside the DMV, only to wait in more lines inside the DMV, and once our number is called, we can expect to be treated like scum…

Our legislators are not.

Instead, in Sacramento they have the option of strolling across the street from the Capitol to a private DMV office in the Legislative Office Building…

• Down a hallway that has no signs directing you to this DMV office.
• That has an unmarked locked door with a peephole.
• Because peon scum are not welcome.

Was I right?  Extremely inappropriate and aggravating, and totally unsurprising?

Check, check, check.

Especially since now, with the new, federally mandated REAL ID cards (a major SNAFU that merits its own blog), lines at the peon DMVs have gotten much longer.

And while we wait – and wait – these privileged few:

1. Current and retired members of the Legislature and Congress
2. Current legislative staff
3. Employees of the Legislative Analyst’s Office, the Legislative Counsel and the Legislative Data Center
4. Elected and appointed officials

Can just give their private DMV a little ringy-dingy to make an appointment, and then register their cars, renew their driver’s licenses – or apply for that pesky REAL ID.

Or, hell – why not just take the morning off from work, do all three, and then have a nice, long, leisurely lunch?

Which you can no doubt put on your expense report.

And I’m going to verify that – once I’m done standing in line at the peon DMV.

Publication date:  May 2018

Review, short version:  Four skunks out of four.

Review, long version:

One of my writing teachers often said, “Don’t use clichés.  Express your thoughts in your words.”

It’s too bad Mary Kay Andrews, author of The High Tide Club, wasn’t in that writing class.

Her book is crammed, start to finish, with clichés, including:

1. The lead female character, Brooke, is a runaway bride.
2. Prior to running away, she quits her job before finding another job.
3. She’s also an unwed mother.
4. The father of Brooke’s son doesn’t know about the child.
5. But we know, and we know he doesn’t know we know.
6. Brooke’s father left her mother for another woman.
7. Brooke doesn’t like her new stepmother.
8. Brooke’s former mentor has the hots for her.
9. Brooke’s mother Marie discovers her father isn’t who she thought he was.
10. So Brooke deduces her grandfather isn’t who she thought he was.
11. Marie’s mother, Millie, is a murderer who gets away with it.
12. Old lies.  Old secrets.  Old money.  Old mansion.  And an old, nasty lady.  All this takes place – and this has gotten old – in the Deep South.

And I haven’t even touched on other highlights listed by an Amazon reviewer:  “Rape, racism, reparation, abuse, illegitimacy and white privilege are all dragged into this mess.”

Almost as abundant are Andrews’ references to bodily functions:

1. Page 9:  “You scared the shit out of me!”
2. Page 158: “Dweez [a cat] doesn’t like to poop in new territory.”
3. Page 171: “And you [Ruth] had terrible gas,” followed later by, “a faint phhhhht coming from Ruth…”
4. Page 221: “He [Henry, Brooke’s three-year-old son] pooped in the potty.”
5. Page 265: “Put a big ol’ bag of flaming dog poop on my mama’s doorstep Friday night.”
6. Page 320: “I poop,” Henry said proudly.
7. Page 321: Her cute low-cut top had somehow come into contact with Henry’s soiled backside.
8. Page 352: “I pooped,” [Henry] said solemnly.
9. Page 466: “I think [Henry] gets a subversive thrill from pooping in his pants at the most inappropriate times.”  (I wasn’t aware that there’s an appropriate time.)
10. Page 467: “I pooped,” [Henry] announced proudly.

I especially thank Henry for sharing.

Then there’s the editing, or lack of.  A great editor would have cut at least 200 pages from this 470-page travesty.  A mediocre editor would have at least caught these errors:

Pg 151:  Brooke finished her iced tea and set it in the sink.  (Set what in the sink?  The iced tea?  The glass?  Her ass?)

Pg 287:  “What exactly are you looking for?” Felicia asked, sitting in Josephine’s recliner, a seat Brooke had consciously.  (Yup.  That’s how the sentence ends.)

Pg 315:  “Her head might just spin all the way off her head at the very idea.”  (Wait.  What?)

If you’re looking for a cliché-ridden, bodily function-filled, error-permeated book and have tons of time to waste, by all means, read Andrews’ latest.

And, heck – at least Brooke had one brief flash of self-awareness.  On page 102, she whined, “I’m like some big, stupid sitcom.”

Yes, you are, Brooke.

And so is The High Tide Club.

A member of congress may have broken the law.

That’s not unusual.

In this case, though, he got caught.

And not just caught – but indicted.  And arrested.

That is unusual.

Specifically, meet Republican Chris Collins, representing the 27^th District of New York.

As usual, he’s a pale male in a gray suit – as are so many of our congress members.

As usual, he denied the charges.

As usual, his attorney says Collins will be “completely vindicated and exonerated,” which mean the same thing.  Maybe the attorney is paid by the word instead of by the hour?

Not as usual:  On August 8 Collins was actually arrested by the FBI on charges lodged by the Justice Department.

Not as usual:  There appears to be video of Collins on the phone with his son Cameron committing the crime while at a picnic on the White House lawn in June 2017.  (Nice touch, Chris.  Couldn’t you have excused yourself and hidden in the bushes to make your call?)

Not as usual:  There’s no sex scandal element in this story.

Not yet, anyway.

I never get tired of writing about politicians who get caught.

And I never – unfortunately – run out of politicians to write about.

In Collins’ case, on August 8 federal prosecutors arrested him on accusations that he took part in insider trading.  He has ties – ties, hell, he’s the largest, or second-largest (depending on who you’re reading) shareholder – in Innate Immunotherapeutics, an Australian biotech firm.

In June 2017 Collins was emailed by the head of Innate who advised him that a drug had failed an FDA test, which was going to cause the stock to tank.  Which, in fact, in did – the share price crashed by 92 percent.

But before that happened, Collins, it’s alleged, called his son Cameron, also a major shareholder, telling him to “Sell!  Sell!” or more likely, “Sell that @#$%&! Innate stock!”

Then Cameron, obviously a chip off the old block, passed the information along to another shareholder, Stephen Zarsky, his fiancée’s father.

Collins, his son, and Zarsky have been charged with 13 counts of securities fraud, wire fraud and false statements.  Collins hasn’t been charged with doing the trading himself – he’ll let Cameron take the fall for that.

These activities allowed the three men, prosecutors allege, to avoid more than $768,000 in losses they would have incurred if they had traded the stock after the drug trial results became public.  All three then lied about their actions to federal agents, according to the indictment.

Clearly a misuse and abuse of Collins’ power, position and connections.

Well, as long as we’re handing down indictments, could I suggest one for Collins’ misuse and abuse of the letter “C”?

Collins’ full name is Christopher Carl Collins.

His son and fellow indictee is Cameron Christopher Collins.

Then there’s daughter Caitlin Christine Collins.

And daughter Carly Collins Coleman, who had no choice but to marry a guy whose last name begins with “C.”

C what I mean?

Collins is up for re-election this November, and here’s hoping the voters give him a “C” – or worse.

Then he’ll be free to relocate.

Perhaps Christopher Carl Collins can go to the CCC:

California Correctional Center.

Christopher Carl Collins;
No mug shot was available
so I faked this one.

Let’s talk theories for a moment.

Definition:  A theory is “a proposed explanation whose status is still conjectural and subject to experimentation, in contrast to well-established propositions that are regarded as reporting matters of actual fact.”

Translation:  What I’m saying is true.  Unless it’s not.

First:  A theory:  I know what I’m talking about.

Second:  See “Translation,” above.

Third:  Another theory:  Trickle-down economics.

Trickle-down economics suggest that when the rich get richer, they spend more money and that trickles down to benefit middle- and low-income people.

Fourth:  Another theory:  The 2018 tax cuts will exemplify the best of trickle-down economics; companies will pay less tax, have more money, and pass some of that along to employees in the form of raises and other benefits.

Fifth:  Another theory:

“It’s in all of our best interest to have these tax cuts for corporations so that they will have more money to invest in their business and pay their workers.”  Rep. Mike Conaway (R-TX)

Sixth:  What he’s saying is true.  Unless it’s not.

Seventh:  Reality:  Instead of giving raises, many companies are using that money from tax cuts for other purposes.  Recent wage growth remains slower than it was prior to the Great Recession:  Median wages grew at an average annual rate of 4.6 percent from 1983 to 2007, while wage growth for the past 12 months was just 2.7 percent.

In fact, thanks to inflation, the average paycheck is worth 0.1% less than a year ago.

Eighth:  A larger portion of that money from the tax cuts is going to stock buybacks:  As of the end of June 2018, buybacks were up 80 percent from the same period last year, and the value could reach a record $1 trillion by the end of this year.

What’s a “buyback”?

Let’s say you start a company but you need more money to get it up and running.  You issue shares of stock in your company, and investors buy them, becoming stockholders.  When your company starts making money, you pay dividends to the shareholders, and everybody’s happy.

Then the 2018 tax cuts come along – the corporate tax rate drops from 35 percent to 21 percent – and now you’re making beaucoup bucks.  You say to yourself, “Self, instead of paying out dividends to my stockholders, why don’t I buy back some of those shares and keep all that money for myself?”

So you do.

Ninth:  Another theory:  Then you say to yourself, “Self, what should I do with all the money all my shares are now earning me?  Should I spread the wealth around and give my employees raises?  Bonuses?  Give them better health insurance?

“Nah.”

So you don’t.

Tenth:  Final theory:

We know Deryck Bacon graduated from high school in New Hampshire and then enlisted in the Marines, serving for two years.

We know he died in San Diego in April at age 59.

The 40 intervening years are almost a blank.

Deryck Bacon was like 1,300 other veterans in San Diego, like 40,000 nationwide:

Homeless.

Someone who served in our military, received an honorable discharge, and for one reason or two or 20, ended up on the streets.

In Deryck’s case, he’d received a medical discharge after being diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Somewhere in between his discharge and death he connected with Karen Castro, a single mother of two.  “He took upon himself a woman and two children.  They were halfway grown when he came into our lives,” Karen, now 63, said.  Deryck worked as a cook to support the family.

But “He didn’t want to take his medication and that was the beginning of the end,” Karen said.  That end was on the streets, homeless.  The last time she saw Deryck was 10 months ago.

That night in April, Deryck was sleeping on a sidewalk when a driver jumped the curb, hit him and killed him.

Deryck was the victim of a hit-and-run, but he was also the victim of a broken system that gladly takes young people into its military, and just as gladly disposes of them when their service ends.

There is no doubt that the Department of Veterans Affairs is a broken system, and while no one could force Deryck to take his medication, to me it appears no one from the VA was trying to find Deryck, or discover why he was on the streets, or what the VA could do to help.

Help, after the end, came from strangers.

Karen wanted Deryck buried with military honors, but had no idea who to talk to or how to make it happen.  After learning about Deryck’s death, Michael McConnell, a homeless advocate in the San Diego area, wanted to help.  So did Rex Kern, the director of Miramar National Cemetery, a federal military cemetery in San Diego.

Their assistance included Kern teaming up with KFMB-TV to verify that Deryck qualified for a military burial with honors.  McConnell paid for the casket.  And on August 14, Deryck was buried with full military honors at Miramar.

From April to August, Deryck received more attention from strangers than he received from our government in the 40 years since his discharge.

When will the words “homeless” and “veteran” stop appearing in the same sentence?

 

A recent trade show offered the opportunity to check out products from Framery, Silence Business Solutions and other companies hoping to launch a new wave – with their new product – in places of business:

Nap pods.

There’s reality, theory, and fantasy going on here.

Reality:  We don’t get enough sleep.  Our productivity at work can suffer, and that negatively impacts employers’ bottom lines.

Theory:  A brief, say, 15-minute nap during the workday – also known as a power nap – may help improve employee productivity.

Fantasy:  American employers will welcome with open arms the idea of allowing employees to nap during the work day, and even provide a cozy, pricey place to do it.

Manager:  OK, I think we’ve covered our agenda, does anyone have anything to add?
John:  Well, since you asked, I just read an article that said more than a third of Americans aren’t getting the enough sleep!
John:  And this contributes to problems like health issues and mistakes at work – it costs $411 billion in annual economic losses!  That’s the equivalent of about 1.23 million working days lost each year to insufficient sleep!
Manager:  Your point, John?
John:  Your yawn is my point.  If there was a quiet, private spot here in the office, anyone could take a catnap, and wake up re-energized and refreshed and ready!   To make less mistakes!  To make more money!
Manager:  Catnap?  You know we don’t allow animals in the office.
John:  A catnap.  You know, 40 winks?  Power nap?
Manager:  That’s great, John, you’ve given everyone a good laugh.  Now, if there are no further questions…
John (starts passing his phone around the table):  Look, I found these really cool nap pods online…
Manager:  Pods?  Don’t whales come in pods?  I thought I said no animals in the office.
John:  …it’s all self-contained, so you just go in, close the door, and have a quick nap…
Manager:  Am I understanding you correctly, John?  You’re advocating that the team here act like a bunch of babies, and take naps during the day?  On company time?
John:  …and the nap pod you’re looking at has an exterior light that goes on so we know it’s occupied…
Manager:  On company time, John?  You want to get paid for napping on company time?
John:  …And it’s only $19,000!
Manager:  This meeting is adjourned.  John, let’s you and I take a walk over to HR, shall we?

 

Don’t ask me why I started reading the packaging wrapped around my Quilted Northern® toilet paper.

But a headline on the back caught my eye:

Compulsive Design For A Comfy Clean

Then below that:

CONFESSION:

(I hoped something quasi-salacious was coming, so I continued reading.)

“We can be a little obsessive about all the tiny details that go into our products.  After all, crafting Quilted Northern Ultra Soft & Strong® to meet your expectations matters.  That’s why it includes…”

Whoa.  Before I read what “it includes,” I paused to reflect on some of this language:

• Compulsive
• Confession
• Obsessive

This sounds like the psycho’s stream-of-consciousness in the latest Women’s Fiction>Mystery, Thriller & Suspense book.

Either that, or this company takes very seriously a product that most of us spend no time thinking about.

Unless we run out it.

At an awkward moment.

Curiosity sent me to QuiltedNorthern.com, maker of the product about which they claim to be both compulsive and obsessive, and I’d have to say – I agree with them.

First I encountered something I never thought I would:  A toilet paper test.  Just answer three questions and you’ll get a diagnosis about which kind of Quilted Northern® to use.  I got tense, fearing I’ve been using the wrong type of toilet paper!

With great trepidation and a great deal of thought, I slowly, carefully answered each question and then…

I was indeed using the right toilet paper.  Whew, what a relief!  If you’ll excuse the expression.

And look at the top of the image – you even get a do-over!

There was more excitement to come when I looked at the “Did You Know” section, starting with something I didn’t know:

That it would even occur to a toilet paper producer to include a “Did You Know.”  Who wants to know anything about toilet paper other than – is it available?

Well, I learned that:

“The Quilted Northern® brand has devoted the last hundred years to rethinking, innovating and designing the best toilet paper.  An unmatched legacy of craftsmanship and obsession about all the tiny details that go into its products delivers the most comfortable bathroom experience.”

Whew, again – devoting 100 years to toilet paper.  There’s a job I don’t want.

Further exploration revealed…

I confess I did not know this.  I wonder if Sears did?

I plead ignorance again.  But “splinter-free” sounds good.

Well, I’m 0 for three here.  And TP-ing the Earth sounds like another job I don’t want.

I continued perusing the website, then went back to the toilet paper packaging to keep reading.  From these I encountered benefits including…

• Two soft, durable layers with interwoven fibers
• You won’t have to chose between comfort and strength
• Super-flexible paper designed to hold up
• Responsibly sourced renewable materials
• 100% biodegradable
• Septic safe for standard sewer and septic systems

Clearly the Quilted Northern® brand wants to present itself as both kind to our posteriors and kind to our environment.

Perhaps even compulsive – and obsessive – about it.

If so, then I can’t help but wonder…

Why, oh why, does Quilted Northern® come wrapped in…

Publication date:  June 2018

Review, short version:  Two skunks out of four.

Review, long version:

I’m OK with formulaic books.  They’re predictable, but successful, and if a formula works, why not use it?

In this case, Karen White’s Dreams of Falling follows a predictable and successful formula I’ll call

Young-Woman-Returns-To-Where-She-Grew-Up-
And-Discovers-Countless-Secrets

The young woman is 27-year-old Larkin, who returns to where she grew up in Georgetown, South Carolina.  The formula is particularly popular when the story is set in the Deep South, where secrets breed secrets.

Larkin left home nine years ago.  The reason she returned home is clear – her mother was injured in an accident.  The reason she left home is, of course, a secret.

Waiting to welcome Larkin home are Ceecee and Bitty, two eccentric (eccentricity in the  South – required) 77-year-old friends of Larkin’s long-deceased grandmother Margaret.  Ceecee and Bitty have secrets, and so did Margaret.  And so does Larkin’s mother, Ivy, who’s in a coma but who we hear from on a regular basis.  How that can happen is, I guess – a secret.

Also waiting in Georgetown is Bennett, the mandatory stunningly handsome man who grew up with Larkin and of course has been in love with her all along.  But that, of course, is a secret.

Then there’s Larkin’s family’s old plantation, Carrowmore, which burned down years ago during a hurricane.  Burnt down plantations and hurricanes are also very big in – guess where – the South.  What caused the fire is (here it comes) a secret.  What caused the hurricane is not.

The Big Reveal – and there’s always a Big Reveal – comes near the end (where else?) in the form of a letter.  Larkin discovers the letter in a hidden compartment (where else?) in an old desk.

We don’t know the letter contents and before we can find out, Ceecee takes the letter away from Larkin.  Then Bitty takes the letter away from CeeCee.  Then Bennett gets the letter from Bitty.  If Ivy, even in her coma, had been in the room I’m sure she would have taken the letter from Bennett.

Don’t believe me?  The letter round robin starts on page 376.

And I almost forgot the Tree of Dreams, a character in its own right.  The gnarly old Tree of Dreams is full of secrets, and guess what – it’s not telling you.

At the end of 400+ pages, everyone’s secrets – including the Tree’s – are revealed.

Except one secret, and that is:

Why didn’t I give this book more skunks?

And guess what…