I FORGOT MY CHEESE?

From My Journal

July, 2014

This past weekend we drove up to Horsethief Lake State Park, across the river from The Dalles. That drive up and down 197 is rather neat. We met Sonia and Shauna along with their spouses and kids--a neat bunch. Bruce had their canoe along and Stinsons had Hannah’s kayak plus two other newly acquired kayaks and their raft. This park sits on Horsethief Lake, which is a part of the Columbia River that is cut off by the railroad. It was a nice place. We ate plenty, and had a birthday cake for Lorraine. Everybody except Haley, Lorraine, and myself spent time on the water in one or more of the aforementioned conveyances.
 

  

Bruce and Coda head out onto the lake. Coda is taking one final look at terra ferma.
 

Kevin, Sam, Shauna, and Hannah getting ready to take the kayaks out for a spin.
 

Bruce and Coda in canoe, Sam and Adam in raft, Shauna and Hannah in their kayaks. The two-man kayak in the background was photobombing my shot.
 

Another thing happened during the afternoon that just highlighted the detrimental effect age has on the human brain. To explain:  Lorraine and I brought some cheese for the picnic lunch--two pounds of cheddar, two pounds of pepper-jack, and three wedges of blue cheese. The other two families brought some other kinds. This group likes their cheese.

We ate some slices off both the two-pound blocks, and two of the blue cheese wedges. Shauna had put the two two-pound loaves in her cooler and left the last wedge of blue cheese sitting out on the table.

When it was time for us to leave I gathered up the only cheese that was observable (the blue cheese wedge) and put it into our cooler and was about to leave when Shauna asked if I had my cheese. I emphatically told her I had. She questioned that response by asking about the two loaves in her cooler. I of course had forgotten those two. That’s what I mean by losing ones faculties. This happened either because of advanced age or some serious head trauma. I HAD FORGOTTEN MY CHEESE!! Can you believe that? It was the first time that had happened to me and it was a shock, let me tell you.

So obviously, the cheese torch has passed to the next generation. A momentous event that I alone recognize in retrospect. Or maybe the others were just too polite to point it out to me.

Bank Robbers Beware - - and Other Stuff 

From My Journal

April 2009

In New Jersey the police responded to an alarm from a local bank, signifying that the bank was being robbed, or hosting some other sort of disturbance. The police surrounded the bank and using megaphones demanded that the perpetrators come out with their hands in plain sight and preferably not holding anything that might cause damage to the police. Through a front window they could see an individual in the bank, although the person didn’t seem to be very mobile. Finally, getting no response to their requests, threats, and admonitions, the SWAT team stormed the bank and subdued the perpetrators, which turned out to be a cardboard cutout made to look like a person, which is what they had been seeing through the window. They never did say what set off the alarm in the first place, although there was a consensus that it was not the cardboard cutout.

Nothing Like Family Time

April 2009

You know the expression “the family that prays together stays together“? Well the following has nothing to do with prayer, but does demonstrate a certain amount of family togetherness. In Indiana the police arrested a mother for drunk driving. She had her one-year old son along, so the police called a relative to come and get the young boy. The person who showed up was also drunk so was also booked for drunk driving. They called another relative and that one turned out to be drunk also and was booked. They then called the grandparents. The grandfather was drunk, but grandma had been driving and although she was tipsy she was not quite up to the legal limit of inebriation, so the police escorted her, grandpa, and the grandchild home.

Where’s a Cop When You Need One

April 2009

     There’s something to be said for doing your homework. In Harrisburg, PA, as John Comparetto was coming out of a stall in the hotel men’s room a man pointed a gun at his face and demanded his money. Now John is a retired policeman and was at the hotel attending a convention of 300 narcotics officers from Pennsylvania and Ohio. John gave up his money and cell phone, then alerted his fellow officers who gave chase and grabbed the guy as he was hailing a cab in front of the hotel. The perp had been out on bond awaiting trial on four other robbery charges.

     He’s not anymore.

If At First You Don’t Succeed _ _ _ _ _ 

April 2009

     In New York the police were canvassing the neighborhood looking for a guy who attempted a bank robbery earlier in the day. Guess where they found him? You got it--in another bank, trying the same thing. He was using a pellet gun and gave up without a struggle.

Science, and Then There Is Science

From My Jouranal

Big Results from Small Samples

October 2011

     The other evening we were watching a three-hour science program about threats to the earth, specifically meteorites crashing into our planet or the sun burning it up. Not global warming, but the sun actually expanding and being nearer the earth, therefore making it too warm for us to survive.

The meteorites, which they can sometime spot and track, I have no problem with, but the earth warming up gets me. They claim that the sun is warming up, and when it gets five percent hotter, will burn up the earth. They state with all the certainty of someone talking to a TV camera, where no one can ask them questions, that this would not happen for another billion years.

They have been measuring the sun’s temperature for what, maybe a hundred years now? And based on that miniscule sample they think that they can prognosticate what will happen after another billion years? This is like standing on the side of the road with your eyes closed. You blink them open for one-hundredth of a second then close them again and build a theory on what you’ve seen. Your conclusion is that there are only two cars in the world, one red, and one white. And because it has taken four billion years for these two cars to evolve, in another four billion years there will be sixteen cars in the world. (Do the math.)

During these programs they should pause every fifteen minutes and define the word “theory”. Many times they don’t even explain that what they’re talking about is a theory or a hypothesis.

I enjoy watching these science programs, but some of the ideas are put forward with such certainty that it is more entertainment for us than it obviously is to the scientists making the observations and predictions.

There is a new series out called “Through the Wormhole”, hosted by Morgan Freeman. He often explains that what he, or his scientists, are talking about are theories, and often only one of many about any one subject. I appreciate that approach.

Surprise, Surprise!

February 2012

     Today one of the headlines was “Three Members of Congress Receive Threatening Letters.” This was a surprise? Much more newsworthy would be a headline, “Today No Members of Congress Received Threatening Letters.”

Is This It, or Isn’t This It

December 2012

     The Mayans had a calendar that ran for 5,125 years ending on December 21, 2012. That’s a few days from now. Many people and groups are in a panic about what they assume to be the end of the world. Some groups are building arks and planning other survival schemes. There is a rumor that there is a space ship hiding in a mountain in the French Pyrenees. The French have thrown a military cordon around the mountain to keep out the people who are already seeking passage on this space ship that is purported to be leaving just before the deadline. My question is this: “Did anyone think to turn over the slab of rock this calendar is carved on to make sure that the next 5,125 years isn’t written on the back?”

Journalism at Its Best?

December, 2012

     A couple days ago some felons robbed Quebec of a good portion of their maple syrup supply, which amounted to about 10 million pounds of the sweet stuff. At least that is what the media reports. That sounds straight forward, right? Right. But let’s think about this for a minute. Ten million pounds is a lot to haul around. Considering that a tanker truck might carry about 80,000 pounds it would take 125 tanker trucks to carry the stuff away. Now how do you pull off a heist like this? A very sticky question to say the least. Am I missing something here?

 

 

 

Captain Schlepnickof Spady 

CCCP – The True Story

This might be a good place to include a very short biography of my, some might say, possibly imaginary, great Uncle Schlepnickof – or Schlepy for short. I got into this because I had just finished Bruce’s book by Solzhenitsyn titled “Cancer Ward.” I was complaining because it seems that every Russian has about four different names, maybe only one of which his folks gave him at birth, or shortly thereafter. And even with my great facility for languages, none of these names can I pronounce, so I never know who I’m reading about.

My relatives in Russia could only afford two names, and one of those could be only two syllables, which makes it a lot easier to write about them. One exception was a great-uncle (not Schlepy) who because of some trouble with certain of the Czar’s officials had several aliases. Well, now that you mention it, aliases just don’t count at all. (At least I never yet heard one yet that could count past three or four.)

This uncle, Schlepy, served in the Czar’s army. His unit was in charge of transporting the Czar’s cigars from a port on the Black Sea up to wherever the Czar happened to want his cigars. The unit was known as the Czar’s Cigars Cavalry Patrol, or CCCP for short. You might remember seeing those letters on some Russian stamps and space capsules. It was a very famous unit. Anyway, Schlepy was the Captain in charge of this unit and was a favorite of the Czar until he started stealing stogies out of the shipments and replacing them with a cheap kind of weed that some of the happier serfs were using. The Czar got so mellowed out after smoking some of these bogus stogies, that the serfs thought they could make their move, which they did and no more Czar.

That was when Schlepy started using aliases. However, after several years, when the serfs realized what a great service Schlepy had performed for the revolution, he became a great folk hero. He never did get over his entrepreneurial activities, so was always in warm water with the authorities from then on. If it had not been for his great service to the serfs he would not have survived. He used to refer to it as serfvival, when he had had too much vodka. So much for Schlepy.

Kids, Don’t Drop Out Of School 

A Public Service Announcement

From My Journal

Kids, Don’t Drop Out Of School

March 2008

     Education is a wonderful thing, and the lack of knowledge can be quite detrimental to a person’s well being. Such as what happened to this guy:  An 18-year old went into a muffler shop wearing a mask and waving a gun. He said he was there to rob the place. The employees told him they had no cash and didn’t know how to open the safe. This genius told the guys that he would leave two phone numbers that they should call when the owner got there with the combination to the safe.

The owner arrived and the employees called the number. They also called the police. The 18-year old returned, still wearing the mask and waving the gun around. The police collared this perp, after shooting him in the leg, and he is now awaiting the disposition of the Chicago judicial system. Now when this kid gets through with his course work at Graybar University he may have learned how to stick up a muffler shop with a better chance of success.

Russia Has Changed

March 2008

     Things have sure changed in Russia. Currently a shepherd is suing the government because a 10-foot long chunk of metal from a space rocket landed in his yard. Then to add insult to near injury it landed right next to his outhouse. Now every time he uses that facility he is probably thinking about where the next one is going to land. In the old days this shepherd would have been shot for not trying to cushion the impact of this expensive piece of the Motherland’s scientific equipment.

This Activity Should Be A Major In College

April 2008

     This morning, while waiting for Lorraine to awaken, I cast around for something quiet to do and hit upon the project of sorting through the medical file. This is a file of pending medical bills. It contains the EOB’s (explanation of benefits) from the luckless insurance company who inadvertently stumbled onto our business. It also contains any receipts of co-payments. Both of these categories are waiting for actual billings from medical providers, when all pieces of paperwork pertaining to a specific medical occasion can be matched up, the bill paid, and another batch of paperwork put to rest. Now with any other industry, this would be a simple function, except where lunatics were involved as either the service provider, insurer, or the recipients of the service--mainly Lorraine and me. Taking me and Lorraine out of the equation as one of the abnormal parties, and as much as I would rather not like to think of my medical providers as lacking in sound reasoning and/or highly developed mental agility, leads me to the only possible conclusion. One or both of the two major parties, providers or insurers, have to be either incompetent or lacking in the most primitive skills needed to keep track of their businesses.

Each medical provider will have the enclosed doctor’s name or names on their office door, which is usually not the name of their business. When you make your co-payment, the receipt, if it has any name on it at all, will not usually show the business name nor the name of the specific provider. When the EOB comes from the insurer it, in most cases, has the name of a provider you have never heard of. It’s like the provider has no idea of what the patient is going through to get him some money. And no thought is given on a way to make it easy for the patient/customer to deal with the system. My experience is that if the provider did recognize the problem he has no training or the skills to make him or her of any help to smooth out the system. To be fair, this plague is not necessarily unique to the medical industry.

Becoming a Psycopath 101  

From My Journal

The IRS Strikes Again

December 2004

     At last another piece of history has been explained. It seems that Adolf Hitler was being harassed by the German IRS prior to his being elected Chancellor in 1933. He was arguing with their rulings like some other citizens we might mention. Records show that in 1933 he had an income of 1.232 million Reichsmark, mostly from the sale of “Mein Kampf”. (Teachers were then making about 4,800 Reichsmark per year.) He was claiming deductions the IRS didn’t agree with (hard to imagine), and other marginally acceptable tax dodges. By 1933 he owed 405,000 Reichsmark in back taxes. So the short of this is that Hitler wasn’t such a bad sort (at this time), he was only ticked off at the tax system. That certainly makes his behavior a lot easier to understand. Then and later.

In dealing with our IRS, I’ve become frustrated enough to invade Poland myself, if it were closer.

Shortly after becoming dictator, the Munich office of their IRS asked Hitler’s permission to forgive him his tax debt. Hitler agreed that this would be okay. One other thing he could have done was just stall them a couple years, when his fiddling with the economy generated enough inflation that it would take 1.232 million Reichsmark just to buy a loaf of bread. He could have paid off his tax debt rather easily. As Hitler was reported saying, “Ich bin herauf wieder vorbei die Steuerleute verwirrt worden. Aber Ich habe das letzte Lachen, nachdem ich Auschwitz sende.” He wasn’t that articulate when haranguing extemporaneously, was he?

Because of this experience with the IRS he became a right snarly psychopath. 

 

Pizza to Go

January, 2005

You can tell something about a country by observing the corruption of its officials. Do they think big or do they settle for penny-ante bribes? A case in point (as reported by the BBC on Sunday, January 16, 2005), was that the Canadian Immigration Minister, Jody Sgro, had to resign because she was excepting pizza in return for help in an immigration matter. That’s right, pizza. It seems the owner of a pizza parlor was in danger of being deported and this immigration officer accepted pizza to make his problem go away. Now either this lady has a low opinion of her services, or this guy makes really good pizza. So if you have a hankering to bribe a government official, head toward Canada, where you can really get your money’s worth. As they would say in East Montreal, “Un bon dessous de table merite des autres.”

Now Jody looks to be a fine upstanding Canadian politician so there might be something about this situation that the news media is not telling us.

I know You’ll Feel Better After Reading This

February 2005

     The Transportation Secretary has issued some guidelines for commercial space travelers. Now I’m guessing, from reading between the lines, that the Department spent a lot of time and effort on these guidelines. Here they are:

1.  Get a physical checkup before going.

2.  Accept the risks involved by signing a form.

And that’s it--I’m not kidding. That’s all they could come up with.

But not to be outdone by this Herculean effort, the Federal Aviation Administration has established guidelines for the operation of reusable space ships:

1.  Operators must inform passengers about the vehicle’s safety record.

2.  Operators must provide safety training before the flight. (That’s what airlines do now with that 30-second spiel before takeoff.)

Now The FAA has also taken the time to develop guidelines for the crews of space vehicles:

1.  Pilots must have a valid pilot’s license.

2.  Pilots must be able to meet medical standards.

3.  Pilots must be trained to operate these reusable space vehicles.

As you can see our tax dollars are hard at work. I know that ya’ll feel better now about space travel.

 

Tell Me It Isn’t True

February 2005

     It seems there is a strip club that has found an artful way to prance around the city’s law that prohibits full nudity. They have what they call Art Club Nights, where for $15 they sell each customer a sketchpad and pencil. Now you have to admire the innovative marketing. Well I guess you don’t, but I found it interesting. But back to the nude women/dancers/models. You’ve already figured this out. The nude dancers become models, and the patrons, with their drawing materials, become art students.

Where would you guess this innovative strip club to be, New York, New Orleans, or the south side of Dallas? Try Boise, Idaho. That’s right boys and girls, Boise, the last bastion of the moral majority where family values are still talked about, at least in the churches, or probably at least some of them. But to find this type of thing going on in little old Boise just boggles the mind and almost ruins one’s concept of what’s right and good. You think my reaction is a little over the top? Okay, I guess you’re right.

 

Got Unwanted Bugs – You Might Want To Call This Guy

 

And Other Odd And Ends

 

From My Journal

 

Pest Control At It’s Finest

July 2008             

A man in New Jersey has discovered a new way to eliminate unwanted bugs from his apartment. He was spraying the apartment with some kind of insecticide when the insecticide ignited and exploded. It blew out the front of his apartment and caught the rest of it on fire. The good news--his apartment is now free of bugs, much of the owner’s personnel property, including his furniture along with other odds and ends.

 

Welcome Too Maine

The headline says, “Man finds second long Python in Maine in a week.” From that I would understand that a number of short ones have also been found. Now, if a person went looking for pythons, Maine would not immediately leap to mind as a logical destination. But, if the media alludes to an outbreak of pythons in Maine, who are we to doubt.  

 

 

Never To Late

     Well it looks like Lonesome George may be a daddy. This news is not necessarily startling because George is somewhere between 60 and 90 years old. The news is startling because in the 36 years that George has been incarcerated he has shown little interest in reproducing, even though he has been given many opportunities. When we saw him, he looked like just any of the other Galapagos Tortoises. George is the last of the Pinta Island Tortoises. Now they think that old George may have fathered some descendents. We’ll know for sure in about four months.

 

Run Rats Run

November 2008

It’s nice when people can come up with a win-win solution that will solve several problems. A state in eastern India has several problems:  1. The people are very poor. 2. The price of groceries has gotten very high. 3. The state is overrun with rats. 4. Rats eat 50% of the grain that the people need. 5. The shortage of grain is one of the reasons groceries are so expensive. So the government is asking the people in this state to eat the rats, thereby solving a number of problems.

 

What’s Happened to the North Carolina Educational System

     In North Carolina a guy robbed a gas station then ran across the street to a grocery store parking lot to steal a getaway car. Thinking ahead was not a subject he excelled at in high school. He tried to carjack a car from a lady who was loading her groceries into the back seat. Some neighboring car owners came to her rescue and started beating up on the guy. One concerned citizen was pummeling him with her frozen turkey. And if you’ve been hit by a turkey, frozen or not, you know it can smart. Why, I remember one time - -  back to our story. The perpetrator finally wrested the key from the car owner, climbed in and left the scene. But not before hitting several parked cars. The cops caught up with the guy in short order and took him to the hospital, where he was treated for frozen turkey wounds.