469 Audit THIS

469 Audit THIS

Taking a course for which no credit is given and no fee is charged can be a lot of fun, a good "learn" and a major downer.

This last one comes from observing the other "kids" in the class, most much younger.

This space has never had much use for the grammar police, the spelling police or even the concept police. But there are limits.

Don't they teach English in high school any more? Or is it just that in the 21st century world of computer instant messaging and "texting" as the kids call it, there's no room for anything even barely formal.

"Texting" isn't new to some of us. It's a compressed and abbreviated form of communication that today's generation has embraced, and because thetelcoms charge a lot for this service, compression and abbreviation rule.

Any among us who've worked for what we old timers call "the wire services," know better. In the early days, the "long lines" companies, like AT&T and Western Union, which allowed the news to be spread worldwide in an instance charged by the word. So the AP, United Press and International News Service developed a min-language for communicating among their bureaus.

We at the AP called it the message wire. Can you figure this sentence out? "Richmond: unfind VA poll results. -NY." Simple, really. It's New York headquarters telling the bureau in Richmond that it was expecting a story about an election poll in Virginia. Six words instead of ten. Saved space, time and -- originally -- money.

By the time we got to the wire, the per-word thing had already long been a thing of the past. But the tradition of using that lingo persisted.

One guy is said to have quit his post by sending a message that read "Upstick job assward."

So texting is nothing new.

But the men and women of the Associated Press message wire were literate. They did this stuff intentionally. Today's texters -- and today's class assignment writers often aren't.

The problem isn't the chin-up appropriateness of the language. The problem is when the language deteriorates, so do the concepts the words and sentences represent.

Upstick class assward.




Shrapnel

--In February, 2006, I wrote this item about Paul Harvey, a tribute to a giant in my trade, who managed not to retire despite the rumors at the time. Now, in his 90s he's rarely on the air and when he is, he's sounding not just old, but old and ailing. I hope people will remember him not as he is, but as he was.

--Did you catch the Obama infomercial the other night? Apparently it was aimed at pushing straddlers onto his side of the fence. For those of us already there, it didn't mean much.

--Note to GEICO. Thanks for lowering my car insurance premium for the upcoming year. But I still want to crush that advertising lizard of yours and plan to put in a damage claim if I do.

I'm Wes Richards. My opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.(R)
(C)WJR 2008

468 The First Scratch

468 The First Scratch

Some old horse died in the Black Forest and got made into a windbreaker, which dad wore for something close to 50 years. At first sight, it was already battered to the point that the dead horse wouldn't recognize it. He refused to part with it. "It was nice and shiny and deep brown when I first bought it," he said. But all those decades later, he insisted on wearing it. "It was fine after the first scratch," he said. After that first one, all the others felt -- and looked -- at home.

Same thing with the new car. Pristine on the showroom floor. Not so pristine after you pull into a parking space and Griselda in the mammoth SUV parked to your right swings a door too wide and puts in the first scratch.

Goldy the sportscaster had a leather satchel of a briefcase, probably made out of the same horse as dad's coat. He didn't much care about the way it was scratched. He didn't even seem to mind when your correspondent spilled a whole container of Pepsi on the thing. It was scratched to the point the horse wouldn't know it was him. It was like a leather portrait of a rat's nest. "The more, the better," Goldy said. Keep those battle scars coming.

So here's the next job: getting a job with the Fender guitar company. They keep cranking out the same stuff as they made in 1952. But now, they've added "distressed"models. These are new guitars that look like they've been on the road for half a century or more. They look it -- but they were made yesterday in the factory in California.

They have guys who wear them out as soon as they come off the production line. Those people scar them with matches and cigarettes. They scrape off pieces of the finish -- using knives and sandpaper and make the new guitars look like they've been on the road all this time. And they charge extra for "finishing" them as if they were 50 years old.

It's a job no guitar freak could resist. And since demand is so strong, maybe they're hiring.

If they aren't, maybe Michael Kors or Dooney and Bourke need handbag agers.

Or maybe Chrysler. Get one of those new "300s," and turn it into a rolling wreck. Then sell it as new -- but distressed and aged.

No one will care. The factory will have made the first scratch.

A 1955 "300" with "aging toner and some dents.

What a concept!




Shrapnel:

--Is this one foot in the grave, or what? The Christian Science Monitor is going all digital -- Internet only, stopping the presses. Forever.

--What's a college degree worth today? No, not what does it cost. What is it WORTH?

--Alcohol-free beer, beef bacon, fat-free everything -- is nothing real anymore? Up next: Water-free water. Just ad water, and you get ... water.



I'm Wes Richards. My opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.(r)
(C)WJR 2008

467 The Hose

467 The Hose

It's getting toward winter and that means it's time to put the garden hose in the garage. Good thing, too, because it's really an eyesore out back. Yes, time to turn off the outside water and bring the stuff inside.

Hoses have lives of their own. And they're rebellious critters. Never can get 'em straight and never can get 'em rolled up neatly. They always develop kinks and no matter how elaborate your storage thingy, it never looks right with a hose on it. Funny, the catalogs never show that. When you see the pictures of the hose holders and rollers and such, the hose always is lined up and perfectly symmetrical. The rows are all perfectly even. There are no kinks and there is no dirt. Probably the picture hoses never have been used. Any fool can roll a virgin hose up perfectly. No one can roll up a used hose.

In reality, the hose never reels in properly no matter what you do. Further, the hose is always sandy -- even if your yard is 100% loam or clay and 0% sand.

Not only don't they roll up properly, they spit. They never hook to the water faucet perfectly. It doesn't matter whether you use the helpfully provided rubber washers. The seal never gets completely sealed.

You'd think the manufacturers would have figured this one out years ago. But they haven't. In fact, they probably have committees of engineers and executives and production workers who meet regularly to find new ways to make your garden hose look sloppy and kink up and spit at you.

We need to eavesdrop on some of those meetings. We need to learn their strategy. You can bet the participants go home at night chuckling gleefully about the messes they're about to make of America's back yards.

It's sinister. And it's too conveniently consistent to be accidental.

We used to be able to send a man to the moon, win wars, calculate Pi to the 256,233rd digit. But we can't make a hose that doesn't kink, doesn't spit and rolls up evenly.

Yes, it has to be intentional.

Shrapnel

--A guy at work notes that Wal-Mart is selling Palin costumes for Halloween. The price is $14.99 for Democrats. For Republicans, it's $125,000.00.

--Also at work: We have a guy who does a real estate show every Saturday morning. For Halloween, he's talking about how to talk to your broker if you think the house you want to buy is haunted. Basically, it's okay, unless the ghost is named Fannie or Freddie.

--A correspondent notes there are a lot of "buy one, get one free" items in the supermarket these days. She suggests you use the paid one first, especially when you dislike whatever it is. That way, goes the thinking, if you throw out the second, you won't be wasting money.

I'm Wes Richards. My opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.(R)

(C)WJR 2008

466 Self Help Book

466 Self Help Book

A favorite "self help" book is called "Think and Grow Rich."  A guy named Napoleon Hill wrote it for publication in 1937 and it's still in print and still selling well.   Hill was a lackey of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie and was the first to go public with Carnegie's "secret" which essentially this:  If you think you can do something, and you make an organized and viable plan, you CAN do it.

There is, of course, no data to support this thesis.  But it's been around so long, it's kind of "in the atmosphere."

Most richness happens either by accident, or -- as Balzac put it -- with a crime.

We just LOVE those self help books.  

Let's forget about the crime and concentrate on the accident.  After all, we don't want to encourage some budding Al Capone or Richard Nixon here, do we?  Nah.

You get rich accidentally, and often you get poor the same way.  So, do you think there's a market for a self help book called "Think and Grow Poor?"  Sure.  Why not.  Think it'll sell?  Of course it will.

We'd start out with some case histories.  Self help books love case histories.

We'd tell the story of, say, Uptown Jerry, who started life with plenty of dough, but ended up living in the projects.  We'll trace his history from born realty magnate, ended up as a bus washer and weaseled his way into the food stamp program and subsidized medical care and housing.

Then, we'd analyze his lifetime journey, show how he turned a pile of loot into a pile of Health & Human Services I.D. cards and the good life.  Guy hasn't worked a day in 25 years.  We'll show you how you can do the same.

You say no one wants to be poor and no one wants a book on how to become so?  Nonsense.  There's a crying need for this.

No job, no education, no problem.  You, too can become a member of the underclass.

No ambition, no energy, no problem.  You can join the ranks of millions of your fellow Americans and hundreds of millions of brethren around the world.

Work, education, ambition and energy are your enemies.  To use a frequent self help cliche, the longest journey begins with the first step.

Then, it's on to more case histories and more analysis.  

Shrapnel

--The above idea now has been rejected by eight legitimate publishers.   They're obviously afraid of the daring new concepts.  But they're not the only game in town.

--You think the "Amos 'n' Andy" show is dead, not so.    It's lighter weight than the original and even includes some white guys, but the 21st century version is on TV every morning.  They call it "The Maury Show."

--Shameless plug.  Using the new Google "Chrome" browser makes a lot of stuff faster, especially on a not-too-gracefully aging computer.  But there are worries that as the company spreads, it's going to become the next Microsoft.

--

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

(C)WJR 2008

465 Projections

465 Projections

Here's the key to understanding and combating the slime campaign that's being waged against America's centrists. Whatever it is the extreme right says? Think of it as projection. Projection in the Freudian sense. That's when you take something bad about yourself and think of it as someone else's quality. Like this: you, Josephine Sixpack, are having lunch at the diner with Henrietta Hockeymom. She is wearing green lipstick. She says the shade of red lipstick you're wearing looks crummy on you.
Henrietta is projecting her lousy sense of color onto you.

Here's another. A radio comedian and conservative commentator says Colin Powell is racist for endorsing Barack Obama for President. Who's the racist? It's projection.

That same comedian and his followers want you to believe the opposition (they don't think of it as the loyal opposition, more about which later) wants to tax you to death. What's the projection? This one's a little tricky. But only a little. By taxing you to death they mean directly suck money out of you. Why? To make the government bigger and more powerful, right? Maybe. What they mean is the so-called liberals in America want you to be subservient to them, and so tax you to the point of dependency. The Comedians want the same thing. But they do it in other ways. What THEY do is make it nearly impossible to succeed by distracting you, by making you focus on mere subsistence. How? By taking away those government programs that allow you the freedom (they're always yelping about freedom,) to concentrate on the important.

If you're scraping by with their privatized health insurance (or have none,) if you can't afford your groceries, your gasoline and your heating fuel, you will spend all your time fixing that instead of oh, say, starting a bank or making widgets in competition with existing widget makers. They don't want you focused on success, they want you focused on subsistence, which translates into having power over your life. So "taxing you to death" is the same as not taxing you at all.

But of course they don't really want you to be tax-free. And they see to it you aren't by starting 10-billion-dollar-a-month wars and trillion dollar bailouts for their screw-up friends. And you can only do THAT with tax dollars.

Now, what about the "loyal opposition." They're projecting when they talk about the "real America." They're telling you if they disagree with you, you're not a real American. Huh? The "real Americans" don't live in places like New York or Philadelphia or Washington DC, Los Angeles, San Francisco (especially San Francisco!,) Miami, Boston, Chicago, Detroit and Baltimore. REAL Americans live in places like Opelika, Alabama, Sutton, New Hampshire, Provo, Utah and Abeline, Texas.

Projection. Turn what they say on them, and you'll find something akin to the truth.



Shrapnel:

--Someone has registered a goldfish to vote in Chicago. Things like this used to be cute. But now, they're just grist for the shrill mill the Republicans have going as a way to cast doubt on any and all voters.

--We've come upon an actual, working payphone. It's in a strip mall in a little town in the middle of nowhere. Probably soon be shipped to the tel-com museum, since no one's used the thing in the last ten years.

--Hospitals usually take their time in sending you the bill. But then they make up for it by sending the "second notice" and collection agency threat the same week. Sometimes, they even send the second notice first.


I'm Wes Richards. My opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.(r)
(C)WJR 2008

464 Mars, Maybe

464 Mars, Maybe

Where are all those socialistaphobics going to go when, as seems likely, that Commie Arab Terrorist Obama gets elected President of the rest of us? It seems almost certain that those who think Social Security is socialism will want to flee from the Great Blue Menace (formerly known as the Red Menace, when "red" meant something else.)

You can almost hear the wires and cell towers humming with calls to United and Allied and the Santini Brothers and all those other moving companies. But where is everyone headed?

Surely, they figure their American Citizenship is being yanked out from under them. Their so-called values are being trashed, their very existence threatened. By one skinny sort-of black guy, at that.

There are all kinds of places they'd be welcome -- to an extent. Utah, Montana, Wyoming? Lots of room there. Get all those self made men and women, JoeSixpacks and Hockey Moms out in the wide open spaces where they can work their freedom loving magic on these depressed areas. Or not. Some people from Utah, Montana and Wyoming have no use for these guys either.

Idaho? Too liberal. Northern New England? Too cold and not all that much room. Mexico? Not likely.

Lots of room in Canada, but the Canadians aren't especially fond of illegals any more than all those self made men and women, Joe Sixpacks and Hockey Moms. (What ever happened to soccer moms?)

Many of them are just going to have to stay put and suck it up -- kind of like the rest of us had to do during the last eight years.

But the real independent self-made socialistaphobis will opt for interplanetary travel. (There's some thought they originally came from other planets in the first place, but there's no hard evidence.

The moon is almost as inhospitable as San Francisco, New York and Seattle, although for different reasons. Plus, it's been rumored that the people who live there now are all Marxists.

Jupiter has the wrong kind of gravity. You'd triple your weight there, and most of these people don't need 50% of their weight on earth.

So, what's close enough, somewhere similar to, say, Idaho or Georgia? Where can you go and automatically weigh less than you do here?

Mars, maybe.


Shrapnel:

--There are too many of the wrong Alaskans in the news. Palin and Stevens. Palin thinks her nomination was a gift from God and Stevens knows his house was.

--This past weekend was the Republicans' day in the television sun. The real Palin was on Saturday Night Live, joined by look-alike Tina Fey. And Joe the not-plumber was on Fox's Huckabee show, grousing that he has become so famous, he can't work.

--Reagan wanted creation of a weapons system he called "peacekeeper missiles." This may have been the very beginning of Neo Orwellism. The first test firing was in 1983, just in time for 1984.


I'm Wes Richards. My opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.(R)
(C)WJR 2008

463 The Sunnyside Crab

463 The Sunnyside Crab

"I'm not President Bush, if you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago." Catchy line from John McCain at the third and final presidential debate.

It's good, but it's no "...you're no Jack Kennedy," which Lloyd Bentsen said to Dan Quayle in 1988, immediately establishing the gold standard for debate one-liners, which has yet to be equaled.

Other than that, McCain sounded like he was running for County Supervisor, while Barrack Obama sounded like he was running for President. And Obama wasn't even at the top of his form in this latest trouncing.

The best McCain can hope for now is a huge sympathy vote, because no one's going to vote for his positions on issues -- if they can figure out what they really are that week -- unless they're voting for a County Supervisor.

Obama refused to get into the gutter with McCain about degrees of nastiness, guilt by association and the like. All he did was mention that it wasn't cool for McCain's lunatic fringe supporters to be labeling him a terrorist or threatening to murder him. Grace under pressure, to invoke Kennedy for the second time in few words.

When the Democrats call McCain "unstable" do they mean he keeps lurching from pillar to post, can't seem to focus on anything meaningful and is getting crankier and his movements more erratic and jerkier by the day? Or do they mean the guy belongs in a rubber room somewhere where he can't harm himself or others? Depends on whether you can read their minds, but for public consumption, be sure the latter is (mostly) out.

Back in Sunnyside, Queens, we used to call guys like McCain "crabs," because they were always chasing you off their property or angry at your dog because some other dog used their sidewalk as a bathroom even if you cleaned up after it, or because they just didn't like people.

Those same crabs seemed to assume that others were out to get them. They cast sideways glances at such threatening figures as the letter carrier, the sanitation worker and the Good Humor Man. And when no one else locked their doors -- the crabs did. (And yes, there was a time when New Yorkers, at least in the outer boroughs, did not always lock their doors!)

John McCain is a Sunnyside crab.


Shrapnel:

--Turns out "Joe the Plumber" of presidential debate fame doesn't have a license. Right on, Joey, you don't want the gummint to dictate who can and cannot do which work. Are you listening, doctors, dentists, veterinarians, barbers, makeup artists, civil engineers and airline pilots?


--Social Security payments are going up next year. Almost six percent, pretty healthy by today's standards. How many of the guys who fear we're getting too socialist will turn back their increases, do you think?

--They're working on an environmentally advanced wind-up refrigerator. Uses no electricity. Small problem: it doesn't keep food cold, either.


I'm Wes Richards. My opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them.(r)
(C)WJR 2008