Hammer Down

Every Young Man's Fantasy


The ultimate video game partner. I am absolutely transfixed by this video. I can't tell whether the young woman is flexing her butt cheeeks to show off for the camera-man or if she is so into the game, that she is flexing her leg muscles in synch with driving the car.

I wonder what the demographic would be of young teenage boys that would actually like to play this game, as opposed to the ones that would rather watch her play the game. I suppose that would be seperating the the men from the boys.

Young Men Love The Booty

I wonder what else is on his cellphone?


Some folks like to check the stock market on a regular basis to see how much money they have and some guys can't live without checking out the sports scores of their favorite teams on a regular basis. My little passion is checking out who's publisist is working overtime to get their clients on the covers of checkout stand magazines and entertainment television.

The rise of the celebutant as a cultural phenominon is something that has preplexed me for the past decade. Why anyone would consider the likes of Paris Hilton, Brittany Spears or Lindsay Lohan to be anything worth watching or paying attention to is beyond me. Yet, there are hundreds of websites and celebrity blogs that document their every move. These women have no known talent, nor do they contribute anything to society as whole, other than teaching young girls how to be anorexic and shallow.

One of my current favorites is Kim Kardashian. The daughter of the late Robert Kardashian, of O.J. Simpson defense fame. Kim and her pod of siblings help prop up "E!" Entertainment Television with their show called "Keeping Up With The Kardashians", which basically documents how rich and shallow people manufacture cheap and ditzy drama for the masses. Kim is pretty easy on the eyes and has a pretty face, not to mention a thermo-nuclear rear end.

While I have often wondered what sort of mind set would actually relish the idea of having a platoon of paparazzi document your every move, I have to assume it is because they have huge egos that need to be satisfied on a regular basis. Which is why I find this image (recently posted on "The Superficial") to be so funny.

Here is Kim, returning to her car after doing some athletic store shopping and she is mobbed by all these bystanders who whip out their cellphones and start taking pictures of her. Mind you, they aren't taking pictures of her as much as they are taking pictures of her ...ahem...assets.

I will never really understand where living the life of a fantasy peice of meat has any allure for anyone. Obviously, I have lost touch with the younger generation.

clicking on the picture takes you to the supersize version of Kim

Letting Go

You Are What You Know, Not What You Own


We burden ourselves, sometimes more than we know. The burdens can be real or imagined. They can weigh tons or be as light as the ether. They are a curse that greed, envy and insecurity have given us. Learning how to free ourselves of the burdens we bare should be the most important lesson in our lives. Alas, some people never even pick up the textbook.

If you own, or ever owned, a pickup truck, you suddenly find yourself with a whole bunch of new friends. When you have the ability to haul a lot of stuff, you find that there are a lot of folks out there with a lot of stuff to haul. When my mother-in-law (M-I-L) moved in with us at the beginning of February, all the able bodied relatives were called into help her move from her retirement community to our home.

I knew from the get go, that this would not be an easy task. My M-I-L is one of those people that defines her life based on the objects that she has collected. Material wealth is the gauge that let her know where she had been and what she had done in her life. So even though she had invited her grand-daughters over to her apartment to 'go through' her stuff to see which grand daughter wanted to be 'bestowed' certain family heirlooms, I knew there would still be a lot of stuff left over to move.

Prior to the move, the grand-daughters expressed their surprise at exactly how much 'junk' their grandmother had accumulated. They wanted little of her possessions, but took those things that were offered to make her move easier. Never the less, when the son-in-laws arrived with their pickup trucks on the weekend of the move, we found 95% of the contents of her life still stuffed into closets and dresser drawers...untouched.

She hadn't packed anything, nor had she thrown anything away. She was content to have us move it one more time, into an even smaller living area. The inanimate objects that held the memories of her life needed to go where she went....even if they never saw the light of day, or where hidden in boxes in the back of closets.

I really can't point a finger at my M-I-L. Once upon a time, I was a pack rat. Collecting things at thrift stores and garage sales. Trinkets or projects that I thought would bring me happiness or would somehow enrich my life. Then, one day, something snapped. I don't recall what it was, but something made me realize that I was a sucker and I needed stop believing what the television and billboards kept telling me.

That weekend, I walked through my entire house and touched everything I owned. I physically laid my hands on every single possession and made a mental note:

1) Have I touched this item in the last 6 months?

2) Am I likely to touch this item in the next 30 days?

If both answers were "no", I threw it away. The only exceptions were photographs and correspondence. Everything else went into a huge garage sale, and what didn't sell, went to the dump. I reasoned that if I made a mistake, and I really did need something that I threw away, I could just buy another one. As it turns out, I ended up buying very little when all was said and done.

As a result of 'flushing' all the material baggage out of my life, I had a very clean and organized house, with one very unique feature. It had an empty room. I mean a room with NOTHING in it. No Furniture, no pictures, nothing. It was the envy of all my friends. They all asked if they could store stuff in it. I told them no. It was my shrine. It was a symbol of living without.

The end result of this experiment was not what most people would think. Many people I tell this to have a sense of horror at losing things that have long term significance. But I found the opposite to be true. It was liberating. I hadn't felt that free in years. It was as though a weight had been lifted off my shoulders.

Sadly, my M-I-L will never be able to feel this way. The pot-holder that her husband won for her at the 1955 Nebraska State Fair is woven so deeply into her psyche that removing it would be akin to taking out her kidney. Never mind that it sits at the bottom of a dresser draw, forgotten and unused.

It makes me sad, that so many people could be free and soar to new heights, if they would just let go of the past.

Letting Go

You Are What You Know, Not What You Own


We burden ourselves, sometimes more than we know. The burdens can be real or imagined. They can weigh tons or be as light as the ether. They are a curse that greed, envy and insecurity have given us. Learning how to free ourselves of the burdens we bare should be the most important lesson in our lives. Alas, some people never even pick up the textbook.

If you own, or ever owned, a pickup truck, you suddenly find yourself with a whole bunch of new friends. When you have the ability to haul a lot of stuff, you find that there are a lot of folks out there with a lot of stuff to haul. When my mother-in-law (M-I-L) moved in with us at the beginning of February, all the able bodied relatives were called into help her move from her retirement community to our home.

I knew from the get go, that this would not be an easy task. My M-I-L is one of those people that defines her life based on the objects that she has collected. Material wealth is the gauge that let her know where she had been and what she had done in her life. So even though she had invited her grand-daughters over to her apartment to 'go through' her stuff to see which grand daughter wanted to be 'bestowed' certain family heirlooms, I knew there would still be a lot of stuff left over to move.

Prior to the move, the grand-daughters expressed their surprise at exactly how much 'junk' their grandmother had accumulated. They wanted little of her possessions, but took those things that were offered to make her move easier. Never the less, when the son-in-laws arrived with their pickup trucks on the weekend of the move, we found 95% of the contents of her life still stuffed into closets and dresser drawers...untouched.

She hadn't packed anything, nor had she thrown anything away. She was content to have us move it one more time, into an even smaller living area. The inanimate objects that held the memories of her life needed to go where she went....even if they never saw the light of day, or where hidden in boxes in the back of closets.

I really can't point a finger at my M-I-L. Once upon a time, I was a pack rat. Collecting things at thrift stores and garage sales. Trinkets or projects that I thought would bring me happiness or would somehow enrich my life. Then, one day, something snapped. I don't recall what it was, but something made me realize that I was a sucker and I needed stop believing what the television and billboards kept telling me.

That weekend, I walked through my entire house and touched everything I owned. I physically laid my hands on every single possession and made a mental note:

1) Have I touched this item in the last 6 months?

2) Am I likely to touch this item in the next 30 days?

If both answers were "no", I threw it away. The only exceptions were photographs and correspondence. Everything else went into a huge garage sale, and what didn't sell, went to the dump. I reasoned that if I made a mistake, and I really did need something that I threw away, I could just buy another one. As it turns out, I ended up buying very little when all was said and done.

As a result of 'flushing' all the material baggage out of my life, I had a very clean and organized house, with one very unique feature. It had an empty room. I mean a room with NOTHING in it. No Furniture, no pictures, nothing. It was the envy of all my friends. They all asked if they could store stuff in it. I told them no. It was my shrine. It was a symbol of living without.

The end result of this experiment was not what most people would think. Many people I tell this to have a sense of horror at losing things that have long term significance. But I found the opposite to be true. It was liberating. I hadn't felt that free in years. It was as though a weight had been lifted off my shoulders.

Sadly, my M-I-L will never be able to feel this way. The pot-holder that her husband won for her at the 1955 Nebraska State Fair is woven so deeply into her psyche that removing it would be akin to taking out her kidney. Never mind that it sits at the bottom of a dresser draw, forgotten and unused.

It makes me sad, that so many people could be free and soar to new heights, if they would just let go of the past.

Conspiracy Theory

"Taking One For The Team"


Now maybe I am just getting old, and maybe I don't trust the government or big business, but something has been gnawing at the back of my brain for the last 30 days.

Let me give you a little scenario and tell me how far fetched you think it is.

Four really, really, rich and powerful people sit down to have lunch at a very, very expensive and exclusive Washington restaurant. In attendance is the current government appointed head of General Motors (who just got a government approved 7 million dollar bonus I might add), an international investment banker, a high ranking official from the United States Federal Reserve bank and a wealthy industrialist that has multi-million dollar holdings in several of the worlds largest corporations.

While they are waiting for the crisp iceberg salads to arrive, the conversation goes something like this:

GM Prez: "Things are tough, folks just aren't buying our cars. This bankruptcy stigma is really hitting us hard."

Reserve Banker: "We are tapped out, 'B.O' won't even think about giving you any more money, he got really burned the last time around ('B.O. = Barrack Obama)."

Investment Banker: "You need to give people a reason to buy your cars. Make it worth their while with some type of government mandate. Otherwise cash will never start flowing from the world community back into your industrial base....and that is going to hurt ALL of us in the end. Collective governments and 'The Club' are projected to loose hundreds of billions if the auto / petrol infrastructure of the United States continues to stagger."

Industrialist: "We can't raise tariffs on foreign cars, the U.N. and smaller countries won't stand for that. Americans have become used to buying cheaper, well built foreign products. Detroit can't compete with that."

GM Prez: "Make them less well built."

The salads arrive and the croutons are shuffled while the ranch and the thousand island dressing are poured on.

Reserve Banker: "....less well built?"

GM Prez: "Make people think they are crap. Industrialist, you own a bunch of Toyota stock don't you?"

Industrialist: (nodding his head)

GM Prez: Have a sit down with Mr. Toyota and tell him to find a few defects in their cars. Surely there have to be some lawsuits out there in the courts alleging something wrong with the Camry or the Prius. Remember the Corvair, the Pinto, the Crown Victoria? Inflate one of those class action suits in the media so that people assume that Toyota is crap. Problem solved. Folks dump their Camry and buy a Malibu.

Reserve Banker: "Why would Toyota be willing to lose all that money?"

Industrialist: "Because 'B.O' is going to guarantee them a windfall down the road?"

Investment Banker: (chuckling)

GM Prez: "Problem solved."

Reserve Banker: "I'll make some phone calls....."

Industrialist takes out his cellphone and punches a number...."Leo, have my jet standing by, the destination will be Osaka."

-----------------------

I just find it a bit odd and sort of a coincidence, that the best selling and presumably the best built cars in the world for the last 50 years, suddenly has 4 major recalls just when GM and Chrysler are about to go under. Hmmmmm, I really need to stop watching the nightly news....I would be much happier if I were blissfully ignorant.

No Conscious

The Wolves Amoung Us


My wife and I recently had my mother-in-law (my wife's mother) move in with us. It hasen't been easy. This type of transition means that a lot of changes have to be made. Our personal freedoms have been taken away and our lives have to be re-arranged. We have to be on call to attend to her needs (she is very frail) and having an 80+ year old child living in your home is...frustrating, to say the least.

We had to do this because my mother-in-law (M-I-L) is indigent. She has no money and can no longer afford to live on her own. She never planned for retirement, has no real property and frankly, she never planned on living this long. It just wasn't on her radar. Add to the mix, that she was a pampered princess most of her life, which has given her the mindset that she is entitled to things that most others have to work for.

However, there is a silver lining to almost any cloud that passes overhead. Periods of despair and hard times can teach us things that we would have never learned otherwise. Such is the case with my M-I-L. Unfortunately, what we have learned has not been a pleasant experience so far, but has served as a lesson of what to expect in the latter years of life.

There are a lot of 'hidden' economies in the world. Arms smuggling, drug trafficking, Internet pornography, all make billions and billions of dollars every year, but they aren't reported on the local news and these 'entrepreneurs' seldom pay taxes or release profit / loss statements. It is one of these hidden economies that we have ran into after my M-I-L moved in.

About 20 years ago, when I moved to Phoenix, Arizona, I rented my first studio apartment and went about setting up my life as a young bachelor. I continued to receive mail for the previous tenant, whom I assumed had passed away. Every week, a letter arrived from a televangelist (Television Christian Ministry) addressed to the previous tenant with a little 'trinket' inside. A small coin, a feather, or a vile with a sliver of wood in it. With each little trinket there was a letter indicating that the trinket had some religious significance or power to heal and the recipient only had to perform some small ritual with it (i.e., holding the coin to their forehead and reciting the enclosed prayer) and their prayers would be answered.

I found the whole scam somewhat humorous, since each letter requested a 'prayer gift' of $20 to the televangelist. The previous tenant was obviously being scammed by this tax exempt money collection agency masquerading as a church. After about 5 weeks, the letters stopped arriving. Their accounting department obviously realized that the well had dried up and they weren't going to waste anymore postage to send trinkets through the mail in hopes of getting an income stream.

I realized then, that the previous tenant must have been desperate for something. A cure for a disease, fear of death, anxiety over being lonely. Whoever they were, they were grasping at straws and were willing to send money for help. The sad fact was, no help ever came.

We like to think that people in the twilight of their years have things figured out. They have learned from their mistakes, they have accumulated wisdom and they want for little because they have learned that the true value in life isn't what they can hold in their hand, but what they can hold in their hearts and in their minds. We assume they have found inner peace. We like to think that, but it isn't always true.

People in their geriatric years often times worry a lot. They have fears and little ability to cope with them due to lack of ability or lack of resources. So they start grasping at straws. The last thing an elder parent or neighbor wants to do is ask for help, appear afraid, or cry. It is the ultimate sign of disgrace to them and extremely embarrassing. They want to hold onto their self esteem, because it is often times all they have left.

Which is why it was a shock, several days after my M-I-L moved in, when my wife was looking through the joint bank account that they share. There was a lot of money missing. She didn't have much money to begin with, but suddenly, she had significantly less. My wife started doing some checking and then confronted her mother regarding the large number of checks, in small amounts of $20 to $30, that had been issued over the past 8 months.

The M-I-L admitted that they were processing fees for large cash payments that she had been told she was owed. Large cash payment notifications that she had received in the mail at her old nursing home. We dug through her old paperwork and found over 50 letters that she had received in the last 6 months, all promising cash awards in amounts of 1 to 3 million dollars. All she needed to do was send in processing fees to receive the money. She had sent in over $1,000 in processing fees.

She was scared. She was running out of money and didn't want to be a burden to others. So she grabbed at straws. Never mind that buying lottery tickets or going to an Indian Casino would have given her a better probability of return. These offers came right to her, in the mail. They looked official and promised to solve all her problems.

Some scamers use religion, others the possibility of wealth beyond your wildest dreams. Either way, they are thieves that pray on the elderly and the infirm. Robbing them of what little dignity they have left.

The end result of all this is the cold hard fact that my wife and I must face. Despite her calm demeanor and pleasant personality, my M-I-L is a very nervous and anxious individual that has a lot of fear and desperation bottled up inside of her. We can't really trust her anymore, because we don't know what the fear and anxiety might make her do. If she could fall for mail scams promising millions of dollars, what about identity theft or bank account fraud over the Internet? She does have her own computer and access to e-mail.

My wife and I have to think in new parameters and look at new forces that could adversely affect our home and security because the M-I-L has moved in. And it has also taught us, that anyone will go to extraordinary lengths if they are desperate enough.

(if you click on the blog graphic, you can see one of the scam letters she received (redacted). I appologize for my absence from the blogophere of late, but as you can tell...I have been a bit distracted by other things recently.)

Que The Laughter

This is painful to watch

I used to watch a lot of comedy on television when I was a kid. Stuff like Gilligan's Island and The Munsters. I can still recall Sammy Davis Jr. getting a twinkie from Edith Bunker and planting a kiss on Archie's check. It was racism reduced to slapstick on national TV. Groundbreaking stuff.

But I haven't watched situation comedies on television in decades. I think the reason is that they are just so badly written it hurts to watch them. The video clip above is from the television show "The Big Bang Theory", which I have never watched. Seeing it filmed, without the canned laugh track (it obviously is NOT shot in front of a studio audience) is downright painful. My guess is, that if this were shot in front of an audience....they wouldn't laugh. I sort of wonder how the actors can sell their souls to perform this crap.

If you want to continue to live in the fantasy land that is bad television comedy, the link to the same clip with the canned laughter is here.

If I want comedy, I just rerun any old George Bush speech and laugh my ass off, no laught track is needed.

First Friday Flashbacks

Everyone hides their flaws. No one goes around with a badge stating they are dyslexic or a kleptomaniac. Its one of the things that makes this country great. We don't label one another.....but once in a while, we let our guard slip.

The Weak Link

(first published February 12, 2008)




I have often mused in this blog about the lessons that we all learn in life. Those things that can't be learned in a classroom or from a book. You have to see them to understand how important or how dangerous they really are.

When I was a young man, with less fat, more hair and far less common sense, I decided to take up skydiving. Along with one of my high school classmates, we secretly signed up to take classes. Had our parents known, they wouldn't have been too thrilled. When my father finally did find out that I was getting ready to jump out of an airplane he was not pleased. Having been an Air Force pilot, he could not see the sense of leaving a perfectly good airplane to take your chances of slamming into the ground at 160mph.

For those of you that have never sky-dived, it has changed over the years. Now-a-days, you learn the ropes in one day and jump in 'tandem' with an instructor. That is to say, you jump harnessed together, so that in case something goes wrong, someone that knows what they are doing is there to help you out.

This wasn't the case back in 1974 when I jumped out of a plane. There was no such thing as tandem jumping back then. You jumped solo, all by yourself. The instruction lasted for a week, every night, for 4 hours. They put you through drill after drill. The drills included, how to enter the plane, how to exit the plane, how to arch your back in free-fall , how to pull the emergency chute, how to steer your chute, how to land, etc, etc.....they taught us every eventuality and then made us do it 20 times, over and over.

They weren't stupid though. On the first 5 jumps they wouldn't let you actually pull your own ripcord. The ripcord was tied to the plane in the form of a "static line". As soon as you jumped from the plane, your ripcord was automatically pulled and your chute opened within 5 seconds.

So after all this training and psyching ourselves up for the big day, my high school buddy and I drove for 2 hours to the drop zone and got ready for the thrill of a lifetime. There were about 20 people in our class ranging in age from 16 to 40. Each plane could hold about 3 students, so we all waited around as groups of us went aloft for our first jump.

Without going into all the details of a jump, it was quite a rush. Nothing can really describe what jumping out of a plane is like. You have to do it for yourself. It is a liberating experience. My jump went off without a hitch and I managed to steer my chute to land almost dead center on the bulls-eye in the middle of the drop zone. By the time it was all over, I was pumped with adrenaline and beaming from ear to ear. My high school buddy followed me with the same results. We congratulated ourselves on the ground for having 'balls of steel'.

As we sat in the summer sun watching our other classmates prepare for their jumps, one of the instructors came running towards us. "We got a floater!", he yelled at another instructor that was sitting next to us. The seated instructor glanced upward, jumped to his feet and they both sprinted off to a waiting jeep parked next to the runway.

We looked up and spotted a lone parachutist drifting downward. As the breeze slowly pushed him away from the drop zone, it was evident that he wasn't' steering his chute as we were trained to do in class. He had 'freaked out' when he left the plane and gone limp in his harness.

That was the lesson. No matter how much training you have, no matter how good someone looks on paper, you can never be sure of how they will react in a crisis. We had all been trained the same. We had all passed the same tests. We had all made our jumps correctly, except for this guy.

The 'Floater' drifted about 3 miles down-wind and flopped into a corn field. They had to chase him down in the jeep and haul him back to the drop zone. He was lucky enough not to have drifted into any power lines or come down in a tree.

I knew then, that if this person was ever under fire in a combat zone, or in an earthquake, or a burning building, he most likely wouldn't survive. He couldn't overcome his fear.

From that moment on, I have always looked at those around me and wondered. They all seem competent and well trained, but there are a certain percentage of people that I can't trust in a crisis. The trick is figuring out who they are before the crisis hits. Life is full of booby traps, and some of them are sitting right next to you.

A Street Car Named Desire

Mass Transit


I haven't been writing a lot recently, for good reason. My mother has been in and out of the hospital experiencing the wonders of modern medicine. Basically, they are experimenting on her to try and figure out what is wrong with her. Most frustrating. On top of that, my mother-in-law moved in with my wife and I at the beginning of the month. That has been.......challenging, to say the least. I have a blog in the works about the revelations of that move.

However, I came across something today that I wanted to share. A blogger that I read recently made the comment that she took so many pictures because if she didn't document the past, she was afraid that she might forget it. I know exactly how she feels. While looking through pictures I took back in the 1980 (blown up on a good monitor), I often realize that I have forgotten all the little details in the background. The binder I used to keep my school work in, my old journal, my favorite pair of jeans. Lost in my memory, but still preserved on celluloid.

If we dig back deep enough and make an effort to find it, there are images of our past, before we were born, that says a lot about the way we used to be. As a society we used to be a lot different. We weren't so rushed, we were more of a community, we interacted more.

The above picture is from one of my favorite websites called Shorpy.com. It features high resolution, large format photography from decades gone by. This particular scene is New Orleans near the turn of the century. What struck me most about it is that in a time before everyone owned three cars and a motorcycle, everyone walked, had a horse or took the trolley.

There was a time in this country when mass transit was for 'everyone', not just the poor. It was an expectation and a right. Then we all climbed inside little metal and glass air conditioned boxes made by GM and Ford and stopped talking to one another.

Take a trip down Canal Street in New Orleans circa 1901 and count the number of street cars they had on just one street. Clicking on the image will take you to the huge full resolution image of the picture. We have come a long ways, but we have also lost quite a bit along the way.

(for bonus points, see if you can count the correct number of street cars in the picture...(it is more than you think)....and post it in the comments.)