1129 Frank

1129 Frank

No one called him that.  Everyone knew him as “Bubby.”  He was a meter reader for Con Ed.  Made a decent living.  Not a fortune, but enough to drive a Packard, the clipper model, a little down scale but still a Packard.

Bubby had a union card.  He had a route.  He’d amble through his days looking at electric meters and gas meters and writing down what he saw, then get into his green Packard Clipper and deliver the results.

Guys like this are still out there, but not for long.  The electric companies of America are replacing the meter readers with digital devices.  The modern era has arrived.

But the modern era techno-Bubbies don’t just write down what the little dials on the meter say.  The new brainy digital stuff knows what you use and when you use it.  Is your washing machine certified Energy Star?  They know by how much electricity you use for it and when you use it.

Is that fair? Is it right?  Well, today, saving money on (unionized) workers is the current Big Thing.  It’s almost as important as outsourcing and “offshoring.” Bubby’s heirs in south Queens will have to find other work.  Con Ed doesn’t need them anymore.

Frank was good to his mother and father.  And mom and dad respected him.  He was a diligent worker with a good trade.  His brother John was a construction guy.  They haven’t yet figured out how to replace him with a microchip.  If he’s still alive, he’s probably still working and probably at the age of 108.

John was less pretentious than Bubby.  He drove a Renault.  Gotta have a cheap car when you’re in a trade that has ups and downs like installing PermaStone.  Still, no microchip can do that.

You have to go with progress.  No doubt about that.  But what else do they find out about you by knowing about every kilowatt minute you use and when you use it?

The family -- Ozone Park people -- was not against technology.  Bubby was the first guy on his block with a tape recorder.  The parents were the first on the block to have a television, and we’d gather in their yard or on their porch to watch blurry black and white TV shows.

What, one wonders, would they think of technology that put people out of work and gave big corporations the inside scoop on when you run your flat-screen, your computer, your washing machine and your wireless telephone?

So, here’s to the memory of Bubby, a nice Italian boy from Southern Queens, a prince of labor with a clipboard and a green Packard Clipper and a welcoming smile.  A guy who could make a shut off notice seem like a birthday card.  A guy who could fudge the figures when you weren’t up to paying your bill.  Which, of course, he would never do.  Never.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them.
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2013

1128 Four Wheels and An Engine

1128 Four Wheels and An Engine

Cars are getting better all the time.  Better gas mileage.  Fewer emissions. Better construction.  More sensible and safer interiors.  Better visibility.

And it doesn’t matter whether the maker is one of the majors like Toyota, GM and Ford (the current iteration of the “Big Three”) or one of the margin players like Subaru which has become bigger because college professors and aging hippies no longer can buy Saabs; same with  Chrysler and Germany’s Big Two.  They’re all better than they used to be.

But still:  four wheels and an engine.

What happens when these guys stray from the basic formula?  They go out of business.  Anyone seen a Messerschmitt three wheeler lately?  How about the flying cars and the cars that turn into boats?  Nope.  Four wheels and an engine.

This same principle applies to other large, complex and customer-dependent corporations.

Which brings us to the two major political parties.

But wait, you may be saying:  political parties aren’t industrial companies building durable goods.  They’re representative of ideas, actions, ideals, principles.

Really?

The parties are private corporations with huge government and private subsidies that produce one product and one product only:  elected officials.

Just like Chevy and Fiat.

When they stray from their version of four wheels and an engine, they go out of business.  

The Republican Party has long been thought of as “the party of business.”  But they’ve lost the blueprints and they’re heading for chapter seven.  They are not doing their jobs.  They are not producing winners.

Their showrooms are dingy.  Their production lines are antiquated and so are their body designs.  

They keep pushing niche cars, when their bread and butter is four wheels and an engine.

Ford learned early on there was no market for Mercury.  Chrysler and GM have each shut down two major brands.  The market wasn’t there.

GM knows there’s just so far it can promote Cadillac.  Car buyers know niche when they see it.  The main GM players are Buick and Chevrolet.

What does a car builder or any other large corporation do when sales slump?  Generally, they fire the top brass and start over.  For Republicans, the time to do that is now.

Oh... and efforts to prevent people from shopping the competition don’t work, either.  So trying to block Democratic Party voters with phony i.d. laws or changing the way a state distributes its electoral votes for President isn’t going to work.  You have to make something people want to buy, as all you free marketeers seem to know but do nothing about.

The job of a party is manufacturing winners.  Any other business that has done things any other way has failed or will fail.

The Dems have their niche cars, too.  But they know they’re niche cars.  

So if you don’t want to be the Whigs or the New York Liberal Party or the Greens, throw the bums out.  Start over.

Stop being the party of no.  Stop, as the governor of Louisiana said, being the party of stupid.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2013

1127 Sorority Equality Fraternity

1127 Sorority Equality Fraternity

French motto makers will be rolling in their graves over that one.  But this is the 21st century and now, the Pentagon has knocked down one of the last bastions of male exclusivity, the battlefield.  Can the New York Friar’s club be far behind?

All of a sudden, it’s okay.  A day or two ago, it wasn’t.  What changed?  Times? The whim of the Department of Defense?  The number of women who can carry a 60 pound backpack while performing a timed run of between 1 and a half and three miles?  

(The various service branches have different specifics in basic training, another point of inequality, but the services have different needs.)

The Secretary of Defense says the physical requirements will be the same for men and women.  Certainly they will be at the beginning.  And certainly there is no scarcity of women with those qualifications.

Can any woman qualify for the Navy SEALS or the Army Special Forces?  Hard to tell.  The best guess is probably not.  At least not now.  But who knows what the future will bring?

Combat readiness and experience certainly will be helpful in post-military civilian life.  Guy knows the woman he’s about to attack has this training will think twice before he tries anything funny and will get the surprise of his life if he doesn’t know but tries anyway.

But that’s a side issue, though a decent one.

The public eventually will get used to this.  Many of you can remember when a woman firefighter, cop, letter carrier, railroad engineer or doctor was either non-existent or rare.

Now, it’s normal and no one seems to give it a second thought.  How long did that take?  Not long.  There are continuing objectors, but they’re the same cranky types who object to women doing anything but baking pies and popping out litters of children.  (The objectors’ club isn’t all male.)




Shrapnel:

--Women in combat are not the only potential “new equals.”  The people who give out the Hollywood awards are thinking about dropping gender requirements for actor, actress, and so on.  Great if it happens because the presentation TV shows will shorten enough to fit in their time slots.

--When the Republican Party calms down and returns to normal, it probably will become the source of the first woman President of the United States.  But not until the Palins and Bachmanns and Coulters and their male counterparts are shifted back to the margins from which they came.

--A friend suggests that men should be allowed to work as nannies and he’s right.   Not that they’re barred from those jobs by anything but the unwillingness of people to hire male help of that kind or the agencies’ apparent reluctance to list them.  And given the antics of many of the women who do those jobs, giving some men those jobs sounds better all the time.


I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2013

1126  Sleep On It

Frustrating!  Buying a mattress is pretty close to the way you had to buy used cars in olden days.

The “old” mattress here is not so old, but it’s worn out. (No snide comments, please, about either laziness or athletic activities!)  Still have three years to go on its “unconditional” ten year warranty.  This is a problem, since the maker went out of business two or three years ago.   So much for “buy local.”

We are inundated with ads for mattresses with user-variable firmness (a glorified airbag with a remote control,) mattresses made of “space age” materials that didn’t exist a generation ago and “conform to your body shape.”  (Most of us would rather not be reminded of our body shape, thank you.)

We are inundated with ads for phone order warehouses (“leave the last ‘s’ off for savings.”)

Even shopping TV sells mattresses, and offers “White Glove Service,”  which means they don’t just plop the thing at your front door, they’ll go upstairs, set it up and then take the old one away.

Customer:  Does your 30 day return policy apply to mattresses?
Customer service rep: Of course, sir.

But it really doesn’t.  You’ve already let them take the old one away.  And when you sleep on the floor, your body shape conforms to it, not the other way around.

Most people seem not to care all that much about which of the handful of jointly or private equity fund-owned mattresses they buy, they just want a decent night’s sleep.

Sealy owns Stearns & Foster and Bassett and in turn is owned by KKR, the private equity company which bought it from Bain Capital.   Simmons and Serta are jointly owned but operated more or less separately by Ares Capital and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.

Got all that?  No?  Okay, here’s a summary:   all the major brands are owned by two entities neither of which has anything but a financial interest and a fixation on the bottom line.  And it’s not YOUR bottom we’re talking about here.

There are no “mattress guys” in the mattress business as there are no “car guys” left in the auto business.

Which brings us to the used car lot aspect of the “buying experience,” as retailers now call shopping.

A carnival atmosphere.  “Yay! You’ve come to the right place.  Tell ya what I’m gonna do.”  Forced, in your face “friendliness.”  You wonder where all the guys who sold Oldsmobiles, Pontiacs, Plymouths and Mercurys went?  Now you know.

It’s hard to deal with the big tooth human hovercraft at the Mattress Carnival.

At classier shops, the sales people have smaller smiles and correspondingly smaller teeth.  But they all sell the same stuff.  And usually at the same price.

So, you pick your poison:  glad handed to death or intimidated.

The big stores and the chain stores have too many choices.  Confusing.  The small stores have too few.  

So maybe the answer is to find an empty cover and a dealer in hay and straw.  Stuff your own.  It’s like having one of those adjustable firmness air mattresses without the remote control.  But much cheaper.


I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2013

1125 Near Death of a Dinosaur

1125 Near Death of a Dinosaur

The new phone book has arrived.  The official, baby bell edition, not one of the 234 imitators trying to compete for a shrinking ad dollar as printed phone books go the way of printed newspapers.

The arrival once was a cause for celebration.   Admit it:  when it arrived each year, you checked to see if you were correctly listed.  You looked up friends.  You sunk your teeth into the Yellow Pages, once the second most important reference book in your library... after the unabridged dictionary.

In the five boroughs of New York, the dropping of the books in front of your apartment door sounded like a series of gunshots.  The books were heavy.  Crack! Crack! Crack!   In the suburbs they made a satisfying thump as someone heaved them into your driveway.

Even in rural America, you could hear the books drop.

Not anymore.

Phone books?  Phone pamphlets is more like it.

No residential listings.  Just white page business phones and yellow page ads for lawyers and pizza.

The phone company tells you if you want to look up a number, go to their website.  Okay.  When you go there, it asks you to choose a state.  Okay.  When you go there it asks you to choose a place.

If you place isn't listed, you’re out of luck.  You can, for now, get a free copy of the residential directory by calling and begging and threatening.

But wait, you’re saying now: there are all kinds of websites that give you phone numbers.  Yes, but gradually, they’re moving behind their own paywalls.  Even the once-excellent MSN White Pages has scarcely any free lookups left.

Google dropped its pretty good phone search function years ago.

So now, it’s MSN, Spokeo, and three dozen other pay-per-view sites.  Expensive.  Often inaccurate or outdated.

There is an advantage.  Everyone has an unlisted phone number without paying the customary fee for it.  But even that has a downside.  Robocalls are made by dialing random numbers.   So Senator Klutz can still reach out and touch you.

Current conventional scientific wisdom has it that common birds are the descendents of dinosaurs.  Perhaps so.  And as Whateversaurus Rex has shrunk into a pigeon, so have the Great Phonebooks of the past have shrunk into anemic booklets.

You know what happens to you when you stand beneath a perched pigeon at exactly the wrong time, right?

Well, don’t stand under the new phonebook, either.  You never know.

Shrapnel:

--Today is inauguration day.  It also is Martin Luther King Jr. day.  We note with sadness as we do each year at this time that people have still not gotten his message but merrily and in tones of great authority co opt his image and memory for their own agendas.

--Anyone else bothered by Ford’s current slogan “Go Further?”  It’s go farther, people.  Farthermore, it’s hard on the ears.

--So a former fast peddler is now a back peddler.  Lance Armstrong “tells all” about his doping to Oprah in efforts to resurrect his image.  Move over, OJ and all the steroid-shamed professional athletes, make room for your fellow phony, Mr. Bicycle and save some room for the guy with the fake girlfriend while you’re at it.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them.
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2013

1124 Cannonballs

1124 Cannonballs

Just over two years ago, we had some advice for President Obama which he did not take.  We praised his intelligence, sensitivity and good heartedness, but also suggested in fairly blunt terms wrapped in a history lesson that he should display a little anger and a little backbone to re-tell the main point in euphemisms.

With the string of executive orders about guns, he finally has come around.  But by now, the opposition that was treading water in 2010 has learned speed swimming and how to use Vladimir Siminov’s ingenious APS underwater rifle.

Efforts to deny the president his rights under Article II of the Constitution will fail.  But not completely.  The disloyal opposition has Obama in its sights and those underwater rifles (really!) have had almost 40 years to prove themselves, and they have.

And the thing we forget about executive orders is that the next executive in the oval office can reverse them.

And the thing Obama never dealt with is the moron opposition in congress, where Representatives pretty much live in gerrymandered districts and therefore are responsible only to their own particular amen choruses (Thanks for that phrase, Patrick Buchanan) and have little to no regard for the national interest.

Even some former NRA lobbyists have little argument with the Obama plan.  The main guy in that corner is one Richard Feldman who heads the Independent Firearms Owners Association and is author of the book “Ricochet... the Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist.”  Feldman says some of what the President wants makes sense.  Tepid.  Odd, considering the source.  But a good beginning.

It’s likely the NRA thinks Feldman, a Washington lawyer, is right up there with Benedict Arnold and the Rosenbergs.  And the degree of his or his organization’s influence may be small.  But it’s a thread to pull.

To read the post from November 8, 2010, click here.  (caution, minor adult content.)


Shrapnel:

--So far, the highlight of American Idol Season 12 is the faux war between judges Mariah Carey and Nikcki Menaj.  Beneath her clown suit and wigs and her indescribably bad records, Menaj has shown a little technical knowledge of music.  Carey is the brain dead answer to “X-factor” judge Britney Spears only older, better looking and with a legitimate claim to musical artistry.

--You have to feel sorry for poor Jamie Dimon, CEO of the Chase bank and whose salary has been slashed in half because of last year’s huge trading losses and to show regulators that the bank’s board of directors is a dandy watchdog.  Dimon was unfazed.  You would be too, if you took home a mere 11 million dollars a year even though it was cut from more than 23 million.

--Boeing’s “Dreamliner” could be a nightmare for the company now that everyone on earth has grounded it because its batteries catch fire.  You’ve heard this here before:  it’s always the low tech stuff that screws up, things like O-rings, the glue that doesn’t hold fast and allows heat shields to fall off, seats that come loose and seat belts that don’t when they should.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2013

Who Ya Gonna Call? Goat Rustlers

1123  Who Ya Gonna Call?  Goat Rustlers

(NEW ROSES, PA) -- The local paper here reports that “up to two dozen” goats were stolen from a farm in mid to late December.  This is serious business.

State Police are on the case.  They have search warrants for every goat farm in the region.  They will find the missing goats and arrest the Awful Horrible Person who made off with them.

We all know how important goats are to the local economy and ecology.  Where else can you find animals that ingest soup cans, discarded vacuum cleaner bags and any other old junk?  Goats are the ultimate recycling kings and queens.  They turn otherwise dangerous materials into … well … goat excreta which we all know is great for crops and biodegrades in a matter of a few moments.  Goats turn metal into fertilizer.  They are valuable.  They give milk which is made into “Goat Cheese” which is exotic and expensive, thus boosting the local economy.  And they have cute goatees.

Who could get through elementary school without paying tribute to the “Three Billygoats Gruff?”  Stealing goats is a horrendous crime. (An horrendous crime for grammar luddites.)

Twenty four missing goats.  Posters have gone up on telephone poles throughout the region.  “Have you seen this goat?” is posted along with pictures on the local cartons of milk -- both cow’s and goat’s.

Who would do such a callous thing as rustling goats?!

What’s even more horrible is the thought that these goats would be butchered and sold for their meat.  It’s just not right.

It’s even worse than sneaking into someone’s garden and rustling vegetables.  “Unhand those carrots, Mr.  I have my assault rifle at the ready.”  Is there a stand your ground law here?  “It was self defense, your honor.  I was just protecting my castle.  I saw the thief with his hands full of my organic carrots, identified myself, said I was armed. Demanded he put them down.  Fired a warning shot when he didn’t.  And finally, had to kill him.”

“Sir, shooting a rabbit in your garden is not a crime.  Unless it’s out of season, which this one was.  Twenty-five years to life.”


Shrapnel:

--A video has surfaced in which president Lenin of Egypt has called Jews “bloodsuckers.”  The video is from about two years ago when he was chairman of the Muslim Brotherhood and was expected to say such things to keep the contributions rolling in.  Of course, we can all assume that as leader of the most populous Muslim state in Africa, he will have changed his tune.

--Chances are pretty good jurors will find Jodi Arias guilty of murder and there  are at least two reasons to think so.  First, she admitted the killing and her claim of self defense isn’t going to wash.  Second, these jurors don’t want to be subjected to the kind of hate fest that befell the Casey Anthony jurors when they came back with a not guilty verdict.


I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®
Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com
© WJR 2013