887 For the Good of the Children

887  For the Good of the Children

News item:  A prominent doctor in Boston, David Ludwig, recommends parents of some obese kids lose custody “for the good of the children.”

News item:  The President and congress can’t agree on a way to solve the somewhat artificial economic crisis but both sides seem willing to soak the poor to the benefit of the rich by cutting Social Security and Medicare while fighting expensive, useless and unnecessary wars in places that don’t count, bailing out banks and car companies and handing responsibility for governing to the lobbyists.

The connection here:  Politicians do little but harm.  Medical politicians are the worst kind because they have the title “M.D.” after their names and took the Hippocratic Oath.

Ludwig is not just “any” doctor.  He’s affiliated with the mighty, well connected and often miracle-performing Boston Children’s Hospital, which gives him much more influence than “Kindly Old Doc” in the “urgent care” clinic down the street.

But he is a politician and he is offering a political solution to a non-political problem.  He may be operating from the most noble of motives, “the good of the children,”  kind of like your school board when it hires 15 new administrators and fires 50 teachers, buys pre-fab edu-fad academic programs and replaces 500 laptops every year instead of every five years.

Get real.  The children are pawns and excuses.  Take them out of their homes because they’re too fat?  Put them on diets of sprouts and soy patties?  Then return them to their homes as sleek, healthy kids who make a bee-line for Burger King the first minute no one’s looking?

While you’re at it, blame the fast food joints, the advertisers, the working parents (if the parents are lucky enough to hold jobs) who don’t have the energy or time after a long day at the office or factory to do much nutritional research as they throw a fist full of Hamburger Helper and a pound of chopped meat into a pan and call it dinner.

Sure, kids are too fat.  So are adults.  And, yeah, parents should help develop decent eating habits in their kids practically from birth.  But it doesn’t happen and seizing the kids and uprooting them will reduce their fat only temporarily, but enlarge their mental and emotional problems, embitter their parents and cost zillions.  And all that is permanent damage.

Better not figure on spending money for a project like this.  Not when the money that might ordinarily be available for it is going into the pockets of the people who least deserve it.

You want to know what causes tea parties and other anarchists?  Re-read this blog.


Shrapnel (MoreOn Murdoch Edition):

--Soon after publication of the post about closing “News of the World,”  Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp dropped its bid to acquire the part of BSkyB it doesn’t already own.  He thus saves about 12 billion dollars and loses nothing.  Murdoch already controls the thing with just under 40% of the stock.

Senator John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WV), among the least worst in his occupation, is going to investigate Murdoch.  Rockefeller may be too rich to corrupt, but he’s not too rich to shun the spotlight.  We’ll go through a month of televised hearings and learn Murdoch is a bad boy, which of course, no one will have known previously.

--It looks like Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford) and the FBI also want a piece of Rupert and have or will or plan to launch investigations.  That works both ways.  P. King, duck.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com.

© WJR 2011

886 Love Child

886 Love Child

You might say that the just-closed “News of the World” and its master, Rupert Murdoch could be the love child of a union between Aldous Huxley and George Orwell.

The paper, Britain’s biggest seller, peddled the “Soma” drug of “Brave New World” and the high tech eavesdropping of “1984.”

It was filled with headlines about nonsense going on behind the scenes of Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace and in the lives of celebrities. And at the same time, reporters were poring over the electronic phone records of poor souls who had the misfortune to have public misfortunes, most prominently, political big wigs.

The British tabloids, those owned by both Murdoch and others, make the American tabloids look tame.  Everyone is a pervert.  Everyone is immoral in any way you gauge morality.  And anyone is fair game.

They amuse us to death, as Neil Postman said in his book of a similar name.  And they use the latest technology to delve into the personal lives or celebrities, royals, and government officials.

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire and Murdoch’s British papers have done more than just obtained supposedly secret cell phone conversations.  As his visit to Britain continues, it comes out that even his snazzy and respected London Times engaged in hanky panky to get medical records of the family of at least one-high-ranking government official.

We can huff and puff about privacy all we want, but in the age of electronic technology, forget it.  The stuff is on a computer somewhere and someone who wants to will find a way to get it.

There are two forces at work here and only one of them has drawn public mention.  That’s a little battle to keep Murdoch from buying the portion of Sky News that he doesn’t already own.  The second and far more sinister aspect is an effort to bring greater government control to the British media.  

It’s not just Murdoch. All the tabloids open closet doors and let the secrets out.  Fleet Street has been doing this for what, maybe a hundred years?

Once the politicians gain control over the flow of information -- the accurate and the inaccurate -- the deprived class will be the British public.  And how long before American politicians, drooling with envy and their usual power lust, will try to affect similar restrictions here to those proposed by the supposedly stiff upper lip Brits?

Do you want Newt and Boehner in charge of what you read?

(For a closer look at Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, please Wessay™ #634 from 12/7/09.)

Shrapnel (MLB Edition):
--Major league baseball is the stat-happiest of sports.  So now we know that hitting in the first half of the season is lower than in any year since 1985.  Can you break that down into left handed and right handed batters, and those with blue and brown eyes and the number of sunny days in the first half seasons from ‘85 until now... and if so, thanks.

--Actually there’s a method to the madness of that first season hit count.  It’s designed to show that steroid use is down in MLB.  So how does that affect attendance?

--Congrats to Derek Jeter, the first Yankee with 3,000 career hits.  A gracious fan, Christian Lopez, caught the valuable ball in the stands then gave it back to Jeter instead of selling it; the Yankees showered him with all kinds of gifts.  Now, Lopez, already deeply in debt, will have to pay taxes on the gifts -- 14-thousand dollars worth -- about what he would have gotten for selling the ball.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments and spyware to wesrichards@gmail.com.
© WJR 2011

885 Men Who Shop Like Girls

885 Men Who Shop Like Girls

Ever take a 13 or 14 year old girl shopping?  They treat department stores as a starving man or woman treats an all-you-can-eat buffet.

It can take her 20 minutes to decide on the color or pattern or size of a t-shirt.  It can take an hour to decide on the tightness or looseness or height above or below the knee of a skirt.

And makeup?  If you’re her ride, bring a book.

Even on checkout, they’re still debating and still asking and still doubting and still wondering “maybe I should have taken the blue one instead of this.”

Well, believe it or not, there are guys like this, too, usually -- but not always -- skipping the makeup part, or most of it.

Most guys don’t think thus:  “Do these shoes go with my silver-grey jeans?”  “Is the medium too tight and the large too loose?”  Most guys need a shirt or a tie or a pair of pants.  They walk in, they pick things, they buy them, they walk out.

Not men who shop like girls.
“I’m going to try on all eight of these t-shirts again.  Sorry I’m taking so long.”

If they were there to pick up a present for their wife or girlfriend, they’d shop like real men.   “Okay, it’s a nice ring.  I’ll take it.”  Over and out.

But a watch for themselves?  The legit questions are “where do you get batteries?”  Or “how do you set the calendar?”  But NOT “can I wear a brown strap with a blue blazer?”  Or can I wear a gold tone watch with silver bling?”

These are the same guys who study logos on baseball hats and ask “Is that ‘NY’ the Mets or the Yankees?”  These are the same guys who want to know the difference between Barbasol and Gillette facial cleanser.  These are the guys who actually USE facial cleanser instead of plain old soap.

This doesn’t mean they don’t BUY soap.  They do.  Vast quantities of soap and shampoo.  But first, they have to open and smell a dozen different fragrances.

Take the lavender, fella.  Make you smell like a British call girl.

While they don’t hit the makeup counter, this kind of man IS likely to buy lip gloss (“My lips chap easily.”) That’s another color-size-fragrance debate.  And sometime, they buy nail polish for their toes, something we don’t get to see -- but THEY know it’s there.  (“Do you think green is too showy?”)
(“If no one can see the polish but you, you’re the only one who can answer that question accurately.  But ‘yes’ is probable.”)

A shopping formula for frustration.  And even more in a grocery than a department store.  Can you imagine looking through and squeezing two dozen tomatoes to find the “right” four of them?

Shrapnel:

--Friend and colleague Dianne Stanciel has written a moving and important posting on the conditions of race relations in America.  A link to her site is in the column at the right of the page.  But to save you the trouble of having to locate it (it’s next to the top, but some folks have trouble) here is another link that requires nothing more than for you to click.

--Betty Ford: she was a healer and special.  Special because she was so ordinary, so open about her problems and yet so public.  As was her husband the President.

--Nancy Grace makes Rush Limbaugh look positively scholarly.  And she’s the one with all the degrees.  At least Rush has no acknowledged children, so the blood line stops with him.
--
COMING ATTRACTION:  Wednesday, 7/13/11:  Rupert Murdoch’s “real” Parents?

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com.
© WJR 2011

884 Sheryl Crow The Landscaper

884 Sheryl Crow The Landscaper

Note to readers:

This week’s two previous blogs have drawn far and away the largest e-mail response of any other posts from this site.  Reaction to “Happy Birthday America” was almost universally favorable, although some called it overly harsh.  Response to “A Note to the All News Channels,”   was divided, with most people opposing the favorable view of the Casey Anthony jury, but agreeing with the criticism of HLN and TruTV coverage of the trial.

Maybe the critics of the second blog would be satisfied to know that this posting is sponsored by Anthony Anesthetics of Orlando, Florida.  “Chloroform. Duct tape for when Chloroform is not enough.”  The jury said “not guilty.”  This is America.  Deal with it.  More in Shrapnel.

--0--

Lee, the landscaper and snow plow operator and lawn/sand mower here at central Pennsylvania’s Cutsie Condo Community has been upstaged by a crow we’ve named Sheryl Crow after the singer.  We are unsure of Sheryl’s gender, but we are not in the least unsure about her crow-ness or “her” ability as a landscape designer.

Sheryl doesn’t have the kind of restrictions Lee has.  She does not report to the condo board or the real estate management company.  She doesn’t ask residents whether they want red plants or yellow plants or green plants.

She just eats the seeds and drops some of them in appropriate places.  We have a crow infestation.  But you have to exempt Sheryl.

One day she was flying past, probably unaware of what she was doing -- maybe she was hung over.  This IS central Pennsylvania, after all --  and apparently dropped (maybe placed) a seed out front.  One crummy little seed.

Maybe she knew this would happen or maybe she didn’t.   The seed sat there unmoved and unnoticed for a day or two and then became a little plant.  A day later, Sheryl’s contribution was about knee high.  A week later, Sheryl’s contribution was as tall as a 12 year old.  Two weeks later, Sheryl’s contribution turned into a five foot tall stalk too thick to cut down without a chainsaw.  Three weeks later, Sheryl’s contribution grew two small flowers.  A week after that, it was two enormous and gorgeous sunflowers of the kind nurseries both pay and charge big bucks for.

So, good -- and thanks -- to Sheryl, part of the Crow or crow infestation and spreader of beauty into an area that needs all the beauty it can get.  Our five foot sunflower is a monument to nature, a nature with which we can’t and won’t interfere.  It is a monument to the beauty and randomness of the wild.  And it probably will draw a strong note and a fine from the Cutsie Condo Association.

And now from the Wessays™ Songbook, the real Sheryl Crow with some fat guy who did a fairly nice job with a  work by Mozart.

Shrapnel (Anthony Edition):

--Casey Anthony’s biggest expense after jail won’t be paying the cost of investigating her lies.  It won’t be paying the lawyers.  It will be paying the bodyguards she’ll need as half the neighborhood buys sniper rifles and waits for its Bernie Goetz Moment.

--Maybe Sara Palin can help with protecting the not-killer mom.  She’s got the rifle, she’s got the helicopter.  And pretty soon, she’ll have the time and need the money.

--All this caterwauling about “Justice For Caylee” is fine as far as it goes, but where’s the caterwaul about justice for GI Joe and GI Jane who come home from Afghanistan or Iraq in body bags?  And what about police officers Joe and Jane who get killed on the job, Harvey and Harriet Homeless who freeze to death on the street... or some poor cabbie who gets shot dead by a robber for a couple of bucks in the till?



I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com.
© WJR 2011

883 Casey Anthony and A Note to the All News TV Channels

883  Casey Anthony and A Note to the All News TV Channels

Okay the jury said Casey Anthony is not guilty of the main charges, Murder-1, Manslaughter and Aggravated Child Abuse.

Of all the blah blah that followed the “stunning” “news” is this:  The state did not prove its case.  They proved she was a liar and a lousy parent.  They proved she was a party girl with a walnut brain.  But they didn’t prove she killed her daughter.

Maybe she did the deed.  It sure looks like it on the surface.  But this was a case of pure prosecutorial ineptitude.   So howl all you want about “justice for Caylee” and miscarriage of justice and all that.  

As William Blackstone said “It is better that ten guilty men go free than one innocent man be wrongly convicted.”  It’s an old saw, but as good now as when said -- a long time ago.  Blackstone’s 288th birthday is this coming Saturday.


Now, to the Newsies:

Hey, guys, that little ribbon that runs horizontally across the bottom of the screen?  We used to call it the crawl or the “lower third” or the “lower fifth.”  You can use it for more than just promoting the next program.  You can put real information in it.

So here’s a suggestion:  Next time you don’t know what to talk about, put what you DO know in the crawl and forget the wall to wall coverage of whatever walls you’re covering.

Here’s an example: “Jury deliberating Casey Anthony case... Live coverage when there’s a verdict.”  You can play that over and over for hours or days instead of doing what you do now.

What you do now is replay tapes from previous moments in the trial (or the firestorm or the battle or the congressional hearing.)  No one failed to see those the first hundred times you played them between court recesses or firefighter down time, lulls in the battle or congressional throat clearings.  And no one needs to see them again.

What you do now is speculate.

Anchor: “Hey we have Judge Alex of the ‘Judge Alex Show’ here.  Hey your honor, how long do you think the jury will deliberate?”
Alex:  “Well, it’s hard to tell.  You never can really know what a jury is going to do.  Could take a few hours.  Could take a long time.  I think it’ll take two or three days.  But you never know.  It could take three weeks or three months or they could be coming back right now.”
Anchor:  Our Countdown Clock shows the jury has been deliberating for 4 hours, 23 minutes and 12 seconds.  Back with wall-to-wall coverage right after these messages...”

Judge Alex has just revealed his biggest secret:  He doesn’t know any more than you do.

Then there’s talking to people with little or no standing.

Anchor:  “You helped George Anthony search for his missing granddaughter. What do you think?  Did he hide evidence?”
Middle Aged Female Interviewee:  “Oh, he couldn’t possibly have done that. He’s such a nice man.  A real trouper and a real trooper.   No, of COURSE he didn’t do anything wrong, a nice man like him.”

M.A.F.I has just revealed her biggest secret:  She wants to believe in George Anthony and she wants you to, too.  That George Anthony is not on trial, that he may or may not have had a hand in killing or hiding or covering up or not covering up the death of his granddaughter is completely irrelevant.

Repeat:  A peripheral player is analyzed by an even more peripheral player about a subject on which she has no evidence to back her claim other than a gut feeling based on spending a few minutes here and there with the guy at a time when he might have been either genuinely concerned or hiding something, we know not which and neither does she.

Guys:  Instead of throwing this mud against the wall-to-wall, how about playing music videos, covering other news, doing a cooking segment, selling vacuum cleaners for three “easy payments” or running travelogues or home improvement programs, all the while with the crawl at the bottom of the screen, “Jury deliberating Casey Anthony case... Live coverage when there’s a verdict.”

Also:  can you please stop hiring men and women who don’t speak but yell and screech and who continue to promote the notion of guilt even after the jury has said otherwise?

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them.
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com.
© WJR 2011

882 Happy Birthday, America

882 Happy Birthday, America
(Warning:  Adult themes, adult content.)

You have become a joke, a self parody.  You have taken important principles and turned them into a carnival of trivia.  You have squandered world leadership and self leadership.  You have turned the greatest potential in the history of mankind into a chain gang of pebble crushers.  And you have sold out your birthright for a handful of air, and it’s air you can hardly breathe.

In less than a few decades, you have destroyed the security that took almost two centuries to build.  You have turned your citizens not just into sheep, but into frightened sheep,  and they’re right to be afraid.

You have made it impossible for the productive to work or to organize.  You have turned retirement from a lifetime dream into an end of life nightmare.

We sit before our computer screens and our TV sets and we hear political fakers with racist and sexist and religious and classist agendas bombard us with a calliope symphony of lies.  

The banks steal. The tax man steals.

America, you ask us to focus on the small and the ugly. You use distortions of our founding principles, distortions of faith, distortions of both present and future.

And who is at the calliope, hitting the notes, playing this merry march?  

--Churches who condemn us to a Hell worse than the hell they’ve helped create for the here and now.

--Elevators of the small and mediocre to greatness.  

--Singers of a song of tribute to the individual as abstraction while murdering the individual as flesh.

You have given over governing to the monied minority.  You have squandered tens of thousands of lives and trillions of dollars on useless “wars.”  Iraq (twice,) Afghanistan, Libya, with Iran and North Korea in the pipeline.  You have turned the most solid currency in history into shifting and shiftless paper.  You have put lobbyists into the business of writing legislation and purchasing the legislation they write in your name.

You have turned schools into money sucking intellectual hovels and then wondered why students don’t meet useless standards that you pull out of your hat.

You have filled the media with a coven of worthless celebrities and called it “news.”

You have abandoned our mighty factories to other countries in the name of saving a dime and then wondered why the workers of, say, China or Indonesia are suddenly demanding a living wage -- which you deny to your own workers such as there are left of them.

You have howled for the “return” of the “free market” which never existed and have learned to manipulate what passes for that market so that none of your lauded individuals have a chance at making something of their finances.

You have allowed runaway, renegade speculators to crash our transportation system by twisting the price of gasoline and then tried behind a facade of false ecology to substitute alternatives that merely hide their energy greed behind corn and wall sockets.  

You have poisoned the air and the water and then told us it’s for our own good.

Some birthday.  

Happy 235th America.  You will reach 236 and probably 240.  After that,  who knows?  Ask the guy playing the calliope.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com.
© WJR 2011

881 Easy Bake, You’re Dead. Thanks, Estelle

881 Easy Bake, You’re Dead. Thanks, Estelle

Remember the Easy Bake oven?  That’s a kids’ contraption that looks like a little stove and is powered by a lightbulb.  Well it’s dead.  It doesn’t know it yet.  But it is.  

Hasbro makes it these days.  Bought it from Kenner.  Been around since the early 1960s.  Used to look like a tiny oven.  Now looks like an almost full size microwave.  Comes with little boxes of cake mixes and such.   

Follow the directions on the package.  Make yummy stuff.   Take an English muffin, cover with ketchup, add oregano.  Bake.   Presto, Pizza!

But while technology and the times have caught up with the cabinet, they haven’t caught up with the innards.  The Easy Bake still is powered by a lightbulb.  A plain old, old fashioned, Thomas Edison style light bulb.  And when you no longer can get ‘em, what do you do when the light blows out, which -- of course -- it will.

Even if one fit, try to get enough heat out of one of those corkscrew bulbs to warm a pizza, let alone actually BAKE something.

From here on in, the Easy Bake Oven might as well be called the Environmentally Sound Tester of Lightbulb Longevity.  ESTLL, pronounced “Estelle,” for short.  Because that’s all the “oven” is going to be good for.

That’s all you’re going to be able to do with it.  The Easy Bake comes with a “warning,” but it’s not about the lightbulb.  It’s about small parts choking hazards.   No need to warn about touching the lightbulb, pretty soon. No worries about unplugging the thing to avoid a fire either.

The original Easy Bake used two 100 watt bulbs.  The current models use only one.  Toy Slow-Cooker?  

About a million of these things have been recalled for safety issues over the years -- the last of ‘em being 2006.  A year later, it was inducted into the Toy Hall of Fame.  That’s hall of fame, not hall of flame.

Pick up a couple of these.   And a supply of real lightbulbs if your state still allows them.  They’ll be worth something some day on the antique and collectible market.

Forget stocks.  Forget metals.  Buy famous old toys.  Get rich quick.

Shrapnel:

--So you’re now paying for the NYTimes website’s full access?  Are you at least the least big angry that they’re still flashing full screen ads at you before you get to the news?  At least the Times gives you a place to click called “skip this ad,” while Forbes.com -- the capitalists are not charging … yet -- tells you you can “skip this ‘Welcome Screen.’”

--Congratulations to Chris Brown, winner in four categories at the BET awards.  Would have been five, but they don’t give a statue for his best known hit.  They give jail time for that.

--Wall St. 24/7 predicts Sears will be among the national brands to disappear before the end of 2012.  Earth to 24/7:  they’re dead already.  They just don’t have the sense to lie down, kind of like the Easy Bake.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com.
© WJR 2011