873 If You Don't Say it, it Isn't There

873 If You Don’t Say it, it Isn’t There

Cancer!  There, you heard it.  Or read it.  We are superstitious about this.  If we don’t say it, it isn’t there. If we DO, say it, we have it.  Once we have it, we talk about it a lot because it dominates our lives.

Survival rates are going up.  This is good.  But the fear levels remain.  We give it names (“the critter,” “the Big C,” “the thing.”)  We think strange things (If they hadn’t open me up, it wouldn’t have spread.)

We dread phrases from the doctors like “I can’t operate,” or “I’m afraid it’s spread from your (name organ) to your (name other organ.)” Or “once they see that spot on your lung in the x-ray, it’s gone too far to do much about.”

All that medical-speak boils down to five little words:  “you’re gonna die, probably soon.”  They don’t say that, of course.  And when you ask them if that’s what they mean, they’ll hem and haw and say things like “well, we don’t really know.”  And you leave the office and write your will, figure out what to say to loved ones and make nice on people you hate.

It’s not like heart attacks or diabetes or even AIDS.  It makes us hopeless and at the same time it makes us hopeful.  We say things like “I’m going to beat this thing.”  And sometimes we do.  But there’s always the lingering fear -- “‘it’ always wins.  And when it wins, that’s the end.”

Sudden, we can live with.  A stroke if we’re even aware it happens.  A broken bone -- it’ll heal.  Diabetes, if we can control it.

Chronic we can live with.  Arthritis, even the debilitating kind.  Back pain, bad knees, bad hips.

Alzheimer’s will affect those around us far more than we’ll realize the effects ourselves.

Cancer is different.  It has a life of its own and it’s feeding on yours.  So it plays games with your head.

Change your diet.  Eat only sprouts.  Stop drinking.  Stop smoking.  This’ll make it go away.  And maybe it will.  But it’s always the murderously crazy uncle living in the attic.

If we don’t have “it,” we never talk about it.  It might overhear us and pay us a visit, like the place and stay forever.

If you don’t say it, it isn’t there.



Shrapnel:

--Young minds want to know.  Does hot coffee go through you faster than coffee at room temperature?  It certainly seems to, but further study is needed.

--How long before Jack Kevorkian joins Elvis and Tupac.  The tabloids will have it first.  “KEVORKIAN FAKED HIS DEATH.”

--If you have a Linkedin account while holding a full time job, are you demonstrating employee disloyalty?  If people thought that way, Link’s IPO probably would have bombed.  We would be seen as not being team players.

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

872 Weiner Roast

872 Weiner Roast

Someone should start a website called PrudeAmerica.com.  The name’s available and so are a bunch of variations: .net, .org and so on.

Give everyone a chance to ventilate about the poor schlub Anthony “Tony Dicks” Weiner, the soon to be ex congressman from Queens and Brooklyn who idiotically put pictures of his bare chest and his you-know-what on line and then lied about it.

About the last thing anyone wants to see is Tony Dicks’ dick.  Or his bare chest.   And we’re getting so huffy as a country that even Bill Clinton seems out of ...um... joint.

Weiner’s co-congress Person Nadia Velazquez (D-Brooklyn) is widely quoted as asking rhetorically “How do you explain that someone can be so smart but so stupid?” (NY Times 6/8/11)

Should Weiner resign?  Yes.  Because he’s a horn-dog?  No.  Because he’s married to a hot babe who used to work for Hillary Clinton and the former first couple is honked off?  No.  Because PrudeAmerica.com rules?  Yes.

He’s lost his effectiveness as a congressman.  And he’s a pretty good one.  He’s also a joke because of his antics and because of his antics combined with his name.  He shouldn’t have done what he did.  And we shouldn’t be making such a fuss over it.  But this is the way things are in this country today.

Maybe he can get a talk show.  He’s way too liberal for Fox.  CNN already has Spitzer.  So maybe MSNBC?

Can you see the headline in “Out” Magazine or “The Washington Blade”: “Openly Straight Congressman Quits.”

The Congressional Republicans want him to go away.  Fair enough.  The Democrats were pretty quick to want Sen. Wide Stance Craig (R-ID) out of the picture.

The Democratic leadership, not to be outdone, is tut tutting and spewing nonsense like “I wish I could find a reason to defend him, but I can’t.”

And some of his constituents are saying stuff like “What a bum.  He should go get a real job.”

So what’s with this apparent intensifying of bluenosedness?  Most guys and a lot of women don’t really care about this stuff but pretend to for the same reason they don’t swear:  they don’t want the neighbors to think they’re “that kind of person.”

That’s not going to change, except maybe for the worse.

That simple.  The guy’s a moron.  Not for doing what he did.  Not even for lying about it.  He’s a moron for thinking it wouldn’t come out and even if it did, people wouldn’t care and it would blow over.

The folks in Mill Basin and Howard Beach are thinking everything from “Who needs this?” to “Hey, Jamaica Bay’s in the district, go for a swim with these cinder blocks.”  

Shouldn’t have to be that way.  But that’s the way it is.

How do you like your hot dogs, boiled or roasted?

And now... a selection from the Wessays™ Song Book. Here's Perry Como.

Shrapnel:

--Ann Curry’s debut as co-anchor of “Today:” Right choice.  Later than it should have been.  But right.


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

871 The Machine

871 The Machine

Note to readers:  as construction continues on a so-far untitled book about shopping for people who hate shopping, snippets of the draft will make their way into this space, ahead of time.  Here’s one of them.

Other note to readers:  this one’s much longer than usual. -WJR

Question:  What is the best exercise machine you can buy?  Is it the folding collapsible store-under-the-bed tread mill?  The Body Form Fitness Stick?  Free weights? Stair Stepper? The Bowflex? The Stationary Bike?

Question:  What is the best cooking machine you can buy?  The slow cooker?  The Cuisinart Food Processor?  The Waring Blender?  The Nu-Wave, the Genius Chef 9-in-one?  The NorPro Chopper?

Answer:  Whichever machine you will actually USE.

It looks so easy when a couple of smiling hard bodied models get up there and shake those sticks or tread those mills.  You think they got to look that way by using the Zingo Amazing Six Way Exercise Machine.  They got that way by being naturally thin and muscular, going to the gym 40 hours a week and THEN using the Zingo Amazing Six Way Exercise Machine.

Did they become lithe and powerful by following along with the Zumba Dance videos?  Nah.  They worked out at Bally Fitness for ten years and THEN bought and used the Zumba Dance videos.

The Zingo or the Bowflex may fold up flatter than a pancake and store easily under your bed or in your closet.  But beware!  It’s going to stay flatter than a pancake and store under your bed or in your closet forever if you don’t haul it out, set it up and sweat.

Then there’s Wolfgang Puck and his Bistro Elite Ten Cup Digital Multicooker or his 22 Liter Convection Oven and Rotisserie.  

Fine machines.  But in order to use them, you have to USE them.  

We love our NuWave.  We love our Fagor America Halogen Tabletop Oven.  They’re on the shelf along with our mini version of Rodin’s “The Thinker” and our Pioneer Farms 1950 milk bottle.

The first thing you realize when you buy a cooking machine is that after you use it, you have to CLEAN it.  Usually not easy.  The Fagor has a “self cleaning” cycle.  Nonsense.

The first thing you realize when you buy the Quantum Fitness Home treadmill is that it doesn’t do anything unless you tread on it.

Some warning signs:  If they offer you a free video and a sample lesson, duck and cover.  Videos and samples are expensive and if they’re giving them away, the product costs as much as a car.

If Tony Little endorses the exercise product, skip it.  This includes shoes.

If you want a treadmill, go to Sears and try one out.  You may not need all the features that the home shopping channels offer.  You can use your own iPod for background music.  You don’t need to keep minute statistics on your progress:  your scale and your feelings will do just fine.

If Wolfgang Puck endorses the product -- or Emeril Lagasse, look for similar stuff without the endorsement.  It’ll be cheaper.

You do not need an ice cream maker.  You do not need a cooking machine that’s harder to clean than the oven in your stove.

You can get a perfectly good slow cooker or panini maker at Wal-Mart or Target.  The Jack LaLanne juicer: do not pay more than $99 and be prepared to clean and clean and clean.  (Store bought juice is just as good and nutritious as what you make at home and way easier and you can get an awful lot of it for a hundred bucks.)

Analon cookware is as good as it gets.  Not cheap, but it’ll last forever.  Look for sales at Macy’s or other mid-price department stores.

A toaster oven may be worth having.  But all you need is the generic version.

Ditto, the treadmill and stationary bike.

Shrapnel:

--Scott Pelley has set a fine tone for the third ranking CBS Evening News and fired a shot across the bows of both NBC Nightly News and ABC World News Tonight.  It’s a new tone for the very young, but an old tone for everyone else: quiet, deliberate, un-flashy, and reeking of reliability, stability and credibility.  And it lacks the obnoxious self involvement and self consciousness that Rather and Couric brought to the program after Cronkite retired, but Schieffer didn’t.

--Followup to Wessay #863 of 5/20/11, “Cut!” Santa Monica, CA apparently is following the lead of San Francisco and trying to ban circumcision of male infants.  But there’s a difference in this new city where the Jewish community is calling it what it actually is, an anti-Semitic assault on religious freedom.


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

870 Big Bad John

870 Big Bad John

So the Newt of the left, John Edwards, finds himself in some legal hot water. While his wife’s health deteriorated, John-Boy was busy making a baby with a girlfriend and covering it up. And now he’s been indicted on half a dozen federal felony charges having to do not so much with the girl and the baby but with the hiding and the shifting around of money -- which either was or wasn’t campaign bucks for his presidential run.

Glad they waited for the wife to die before indicting. She had enough trouble without having to layer this emotional nonsense atop her ultimately fatal cancer.

Did Edwards break the law? That’s for a jury to decide. Or maybe he’ll cop a plea and law license.

But it doesn’t much matter either way because either way the guy is washed up and good riddance. Don’t confuse southern charm with southern smarm. Snake oil salesman in an Armani suit, giving a bad name to both snake oil salesmen and Armani suits.

Never mind that his pal lied for him and claimed HE fathered the kid. Never mind that the hush money trail is so convoluted as to prevent accurate forensic accounting. And never mind that another “family values” presidential candidate and ex senator practiced what he preached against.

It’s the cover-up. Period. Nixon found that out. Clinton came close to finding that out.

And it’s the response. “I take full responsibility for my ‘mistakes...” blah blah blah. What does that mean? The focus group says it means nothing.

So a hot shot lawyer from a place Jimmy Breslin called “one of the low- I.Q. states” comes up with a few good ideas as a candidate and then throws it all away, whether or not illegally?

This is a dummy.

John-Boy: if you get a do-over, go find a sex toy, you know -- an inflatable doll or somesuch. Or if you must find a live woman willing to find out what -- if anything -- is beneath the suit, follow Dr. Ruth’s advice and “always use prrrotecccction.”


AP Shrapnel:

--Putting right wing apologist reporter Nedra Pickler on the Edwards story is like putting Keith Olbermann on the Newt Gingrich story of the same kind. Pickler busts the AP’s 165 year tradition of straight-down-the-middle neutrality as if it were meaningless. Which it’s becoming.

--How does a Pickler get a big national job with the most important news service in the country? Easy. Just wait 165 years for a non-up-through-the-ranks non-journalist salesman gets the top job at the news agency.

--So there’s a sales guy from USA Today running the AP, and you figure they got a guy who can bring in the bucks, which they need. And while news conditions have changed on his watch, you’d still expect the non-profit, user-owned wire service to make whatever non-profits call their profits this week, but it hasn’t been. Loss for 2011 was about $14 million and ‘09 would have been a loser year too if they hadn’t managed to sell a major European asset, their German language service.

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

869 Evangelists

869 Evangelists

Let’s start with John Lomax Jr’s song about preacher Aimee Semple McPherson (That wonderful person):

“Well, the Grand Jury started an investigation,
Uncovered a lot of spicy information.
Found out about a love nest down at Carmel-by-the-Sea,
Where the liquor was expensive and the loving was free.

“They found a little cottage with a breakfast nook,
A folding bed with a worn-out look.
The slats was busted and the springs was loose,
And the dents in the mattress fitted Aimee's caboose.”

McPherson apparently had faked her kidnapping in 1926, searching for ransom money -- $500,000 … quite a sum in those days.

Money or sex or both, these holier than thou church guys often seem up to their wallets (or slightly lower) in trouble. Roberts, Swaggart, Bakker and now the Schullers, Robert H. and Robert A.

The Garden Grove, California Crystal Cathedral is for sale. Ten thousand panes of glass and a capacity of how many thousands? The founders can buy the place back eventually, maybe. It’s going into the sales contract. But they have so much debt they’re being crushed. And there’s a family fight going on in Schuller land that probably means an end to the place.

Billy Graham’s kid is as much of an anti-semite as his daddy and doesn’t bring in Daddy’s kind of bucks, so keep an eye on that outfit for much the same as the Garden Grovers.

Herbert W. Armstrong’s legacy, long and properly dead, was hastened into the grave by his son’s massage parlor shenanigans banging the coeds at the cult’s so-called college and the boys at the bars in Pasadena and later Big Sandy and Tyler, Texas.

Jimmy Swaggart cruised for hookers. Nothing wrong with that unless it comes on Sunday night after a nationwide flock hears you preach about the sins of cruising for hookers.

Jim Bakker was busy with Jessica Hahn of Long Island, while selling “partnerships” in the PTL or Praise The Lord Club. If you woke up each morning to find Tammy Faye in your bed, you’d look for a Jessica Hahn, too.

Jerry Fallwell’s Moral Majority gave a platform to guys like Lester Maddox and George Wallace. What the heck, folks. These were good Christians, just a little misguided.

Pat Robertson is Nobel Prize level Smarmy. And he’s grown rich being such.

Oral Roberts didn’t do too badly in the rich department, either. But his son messed things up by using part of the gargantuan collection plate to buy furs and sneaking money into the campaigns of “appropriately” conservative politicians.

Someone, please buy that Crystal Cathedral and see what you can do to turn it into computer chips and recycled booze bottles before the Garden Grove crowd gets enough money to buy it back.




Shrapnel:

--When gas was four bucks a gallon a few years back, everyone moaned and groaned and pleaded poverty. Now, it’s back up there and everyone’s making less money now than they were then, and no one’s raising hell. Stockholm syndrome -- we love our captors.



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

868 Pork Like An Egyptian

868 Pork Like an Egyptian

With apologies to the The Bangles.

And so another non-entity filled with himself and his lofty position has been accused of boffing a New York hotel maid against her will.

This time, it’s not France’s Dominque Strauss-Kahn, it’s Egypt’s Mahmoud Abdel Selam Omar, banker and tete de bite. And this time it’s not the Sofitel on 44th but the Pierre on 61st off fifth and owned by Taj Palaces of India.

Omar needed to blow his nose. And apparently, this banker couldn’t tear off a piece of toilet paper like the rest of us when the tissue box is empty, so he called downstairs and ordered some from housekeeping and instead and tore off a piece of... well, hotel maid.

The cops find the complaint “credible” which is NYPD Speak for “he did it.”

This and the Strauss-Kahn fiasco makes hotel housekeeping in Manhattan a dangerous job, like, well, banker or IMF chief or NYPD detective or clerk at a 7-11.

These guys don’t get “diplomatic immunity.” But they do get special treatment.

And security people at the snotty hotels have perks, too. They get to not call the cops and report a crime until someone in the papers writes they didn’t call the cops for “x” days after the incident. Then they get suspended, but not fired. Then, it goes from covering up the underbelly of a luxury hotel to unindicted co conspirator.

Guys from Cleveland commit rapes, too. But usually not under circumstances like this, and Ohio is not like Paris or Cairo.

You want to be a hotel maid? Apply at the Holiday Inn on W 57th. The uppity types like Straus-Kahn and Omar don’t go to places like that. They’re for thread salesmen from Ames, Iowa and steel salesmen from Pittsburgh, guys who know how to read the Yellow Pages for escort services and pay for what they get, bring their own tissues and none of these issues.

Maybe Omar has Paris envy.



Shrapnel of Sports:

----The Badminton World Federation has overturned the idiotic dress code described in Wessay™ #867 earlier this week, the one where the women had to wear skirts. Well, not exactly killed it. In full CYA mode, they’ve “tabled implementation for further study,” which means you’ll never hear of it again -- at least not from them.

--Attention High School football stars: Don’t bother with the OSU program. The world found out about the perks and they’ve gone away along with the coach on whose watch they were doled out. Find a school where giveaways of money, cars and other stuff haven’t been found out yet.

--Nassau County NY residents are going to get to vote on a bond issue to build a new arena for the Islanders of the NHL. Good plan, a referendum of this kind. The present home, the Coliseum has deteriorated to the point that it’s one step away from rubble and that’s part of the reason no one goes to the games (the other one being the Isles forgot how to win games after their Stalney Cup glory years.)


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

867 The Babes of Badminton

867 The Babes of Badminton

News item: Women who play Olympic-level badminton must now dress in skirts instead of gym shorts. Brings more dignity to the sport according to its governing body.

This is an unabashed publicity stunt. First off, almost no one watches badminton. Second, the only reason men watch is for the babes in gym shorts. Third, the average woman player is not much to look at anyway.

And, oh yeah, fourth, the newly prescribed clothing restricts movement. Skirts, indeed.

Some women wear shorts or slacks for religious reasons and they’ll still be allowed to do that. BUT... they’ll have to wear a skirt over them.

Some players already wear skirts. And if that’s how they play their best, fine. Let ‘em. But those who don’t?

Let’s not show all that flesh! It makes the men crazy. Actually, men who watch this sport are crazy to begin with. Both of them. But there are some more popular sports in which the viewers aren’t.

How about women’s basketball, for example. Showin’ a lot of arm and shoulder, there baby! Not to mention leg. Can’t have THAT.

Soccer? Nah, no problem. They move so fast you can’t see ‘em anyway. Except the goalies. Maybe the goalies should be forced to wear skirts.

And track and field? How about pole vaulting in a skirt that falls below the knees. Or hurdles. Or sprints. (Anyone remember when a sprint was something besides a phone company?)

And how about tennis! Gonna get the Williams sisters in long dresses?

Very ladylike, all this.

And since women of sports set the trends for women of not sports, we can go back to the days when women are required to wear dresses or skirts and blouses at the office.

So where did this dress code idea come from in the first place? From Octagon, the marketing company that markets itself as a “world leader in thought.” (Never mind Einstein, Aristotle, Leonardo and Darwin. Octagon is the world’s mind!)

Wonder if they have clients who are skirt makers. Probably not. That would be too brazen. Or would it?

Anyway, what kind of “thought” is behind a move like this? Well, let’s see. The mere sight of a woman in form fitting slacks or spandex or (heavens!) running shorts is distracting? Or is it “women should be seen as above the fray.” There is a sexual component to athletics and it’s been well known since the start of sports, how many thousands of years ago?

But even swimmers of the Florence Chadwick era wore form-fitting one-piece bathing suits (Chadwick had a pretty good body. So there!)

Sport takes movement. Running, jumping, the swinging of arms and legs.

It’s okay for the guys but not the gals?
Someone hold a seance and get in touch with Babe Ruth. “Hey, Bambino! Could you have knocked them out of the park in a dress?”

Any one got Muhammad Ali’s phone number?


Shrapnel:

--Memorial Day 2011. You know what to do. Do it.

--Radio ratings are essentially vaporware and meaningless. Rush Limbaugh’s numbers have tumbled 30% recently. Conclusion: the drop doesn’t mean much because the original figures didn’t mean much to begin with.

--Oink! The USDA now recommends cooking pork to a minimum of 145 degrees, 15 degrees lower than its early standard, which people have been doing for generations without contracting trichinosis. The “other white meat” lobby’s cloven hoofprints are all over this change.

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