Fapo

The homestead in late autumn:

When I was thinking about buying “Two Plows” I was a little apprehensive about the maintenance issues. I had been spoiled living in civilization where there were neighborhoods, very good services, and where I was co-habitating with women. My broker looked at me oddly and reminded me that I would be purchasing this from an eighty two year old lady who hobbled on a cane.

With some luck I might be able to manage.

Still, the owner had only lived in the house during the summer months for at least a decade. Presumably her son spent a year living here a couple of years ago, so I suspect everything is in order for dealing with a long New Hampshire winter, but I am still a little nervous.

Because “Two Plows” is high on a hill-top we already had an infrastructure failure. The downstairs toilet had a “jiggle the handle” problem which was unattended for an afternoon, and the excess discharge of water dried up the well. It recovered in about a couple of hours, but it drove home the fact that living so high off the valley creates special challenges. Often when wells go dry, the pump at the bottom of the well can burn out. When the well is very deep, as this one obviously has to be, fixing a pump can cost thousands of dollars.

So a new rule for “Two Plows” is that showers are limited to five minutes. The other issue will be the high winds and cold that it is exposed to during the winter. When I lived with B1 in our small starter home, we had an ugly but very practical wood stove in the living room. B1 hated it because of aesthetics. I loved it because it kept us warm on brutally cold nights when the central heating either gave out or couldn't produce enough BTUs to warm the upstairs.

The art of loading up a wood stove on a cold winter night required learning how to properly adjust the intake of air. With air vents open, there would be a period of a few hours of slow burn as the wood would heat up and dry. Then there would be a burst of heat for one or two hours where the dried wood would incinerate all at once. I used to have visions of spontaneous combustion and would often go downstairs and sleep on the couch.

When I bought the house, the liner in the existing fireplace needed to be replaced. It would set me back at least two or three thousand dollars. I've always harbored survivalist instincts, so I started making phone calls to inquire about putting a wood stove in the existing fireplace, hoping that this alternative would give me a much better secondary supply of heat for about the same price that would have been spent fixing the fireplace.

I discovered a great local store that offered alternative heating energy solutions for the home. It included state of the art wood stoves, but lots of other choices: propane, wood pellets, and anthracite coal. I talked to the owner of the store for what I expected would be a five minute conversation. Instead the discussion went on for the better part of an hour as he enthusiastically talked about the variety of options and the pros and cons of each in terms of ease of use, price of stoves, and price and availability of fuel.

According to him pellet technology has a long way to go. Wood pellets are manufactured from sawdust collected at wood mills. The dust is compressed with some sort of binder into pellet form. The advantage of this system is price and convenience. It is cheaper than firewood and because the pellets are manufactured in small standardized pellets, the stoves can behave more like a conventional burner, with automated feeding of fuel that is controlled by a thermostat. According to the store owner, the problem with pellets is that the technology is new and the burn characteristics of the pellets problematic. He claimed that pellet stoves were forever having problems and were constantly in need of service.

Propane is becoming popular because of its simplicity and instant gratification. You just flick a switch and you have the aesthetics of a wood fire without the hassle of hauling in wood from a wood pile buried in snow and trying to get a fire started. Propane is good for easy local heat, but still not the solution for augmenting or replacing the oil system for the entire house.

When the heat store owner started talking about coal, the pace and enthusiasm in his voice quickened. Then he launched off for the better part of the hour explaining the nuances of modern automated coal burning stoves. He had one installed against the protests of his wife, who had nineteenth century visions of coal and steam technology churning in their living room, but after the installation, she was beyond pleased.

While his fervor was infectious, I was more entranced by the mix of both retro and contemporary technologies: intelligent sensors and motors to feed small uniform pellet size anthracite into a stove controlled by a state of the art thermostat. The stove itself looks like a throwback to the Victorian era, with a classic black finish with a window that looked like the coal hatch one would see in the engine room of an old locomotive. The brass fittings only enhanced this imagery.

What clinched it for me was the vision of having my Massachusetts Al Gore loving friends over on a cold winter night for beer and conversation, and excusing myself for a moment only to bring in a bag of anthracite to fill the coal hopper.

I trembled at the thought of watching their horrified faces.

“Two Plows” is going to be a lot of fun.

I’m calling it “Two Plows”.

It’s my unanticipated new home, just a little more than a mile from where B2 and I used to live, but light years away from the orderly life of an upscale residential neighborhood. The name is derived from two horse plows that were left on the property, at my request, by the previous owner. One of the first things I did after moving in was to carry them towards the mailbox. In my “free” time, I plan to clean them up, adorn them with paint and shellac and put in some landscaping light to silhouette their forms at night for people coming to visit.

A lot of folks have come up to look at the place with its funky cottage, outhouse, old stonewalls, dilapidated greenhouse, overgrown grape arbor, and the forested and abandoned country road. They all leave saying the same thing:

“This place is you.”

I assume it’s not intended as a left-handed complement. The dust bunnies in the upper hall could be mistaken for tumbleweeds.

I spent a couple of days camping out in the sunroom in my old sleeping bag and cheap aluminum cot. The first thing I did was clean out the fridge and stocked it with a case of Labatt Blue. The little old lady also left a slew of mason jars, which I ran through the dishwasher and placed in the freezer as beer mugs.

The day after the closing the movers arrived and I directed traffic, mostly to the abandoned cottage where my woodshop will be resurrected.

Then it was time to make lists. Lots of them, and to start living day to day to figure out what was missing. There were endless trips to Walmarts, Target, Home Depot, Lowe’s and Best Buy. This was followed by lots of phone calls to various subcontractors for doing electrical work, putting up fencing, stripping wallpaper putting down new flooring, winterizing the sunroom, and adding a deck. I’m still trying to sort out how much of this
I want to do myself: trying to balance the practicalities of saving money versus losing patience for all the things not done.

Surprisingly I had more furniture than I originally thought, and only needed to go out and purchase a bed, a segmented couch, and dining room table. I got a great deal from a consignment shop for the last item. It had wicker chairs and a rich pine finish, which complemented the pine in the living room.

Within three days I was ready to have some folks over for a first meal. I called up Adie and JayWon. A half-hour before arriving JayWon told me that she was bringing some company: Hannah, her fiancé Jim, and Amy (a softball colleague of JayWon’s). I was short of food by about three people so I jumped in the Jeep and headed off for some power shopping.

When I got back Hannah had found my Nikon and was busy snapping pictures of the new place.

She is a very talented professional photographer and I was delighted with what she left for me. Pictures of flora and fauna, and of Jaywon and Adie. My girls were home with just me and a few of their friends for a simple dinner. It's been eight years since this has happened.

The reason for no posting is simple: I’ve been very busy transitioning to a new life. The buyers from hell finally signed the purchase and sale agreement and deposited a big fat check. B2 and I are now officially moving on to our separate lives. They took their good sweet time coughing up the money for the agreement. We were hearing a lot of excuses about them being in Belgium and the additional delays it impose but frankly the Mayflower could have gotten the money here sooner.

The total time from offer, to inspection, to getting a signed purchase and sale was about five weeks. B2 was ready to commit herself. I was preparing a rope for myself in the basement, but stuck on what dieing message I would leave. I finally figure out what it would be:

“Welcome to your new home! While I was leaving I noticed a peculiar smell in the basement. When you have time could you have one of your kids go downstairs and check out what is wrong? I think I might have left half of a ham sandwich down there. And let me offer my congratulations. I’m sure this house will provide you with many lasting memories!”

While the time-line to get these cretins to sign kept slipping, the closing date stayed the same, which meant I had to scamper to find a new place to live.

When I divorced B1 I left all my furniture with B1 and the kids. B2 brought all her furniture with her when she moved up to New Hampshire and filled our house.

So this is what I have: a few antique chests, photo albums of Jaywon and Adie, some crappy clothes, a ridiculously elaborate set of heavy duty tools (lathes, band saws, table saws etc) and cabinet making equipment, and Lucy my eighteen month old Aussie.

I initially wanted a cheap low maintenance condo. But it would look weird with no furniture and a nuclear powered table joiner sitting in the living room. Compromise one was to bag the garden style condo and upgrade to a townhouse. Probably this would be more expensive and give me more room than I could use, but at least I could find a full basement.

My realtor took me around and found lots of great places, but nothing fit for Lucy. She needed a small patch of yard to at least go outside and sniff on her own. She and I both go nuts on a leash. I could have easily bought something nice, but my instincts were telling me that I was heading for a disaster.

Lucy is a fabulous animal. She is a beautiful tri-colored miniature Australian Shepard who has a sweet temperament. But she is still an Aussie, which means that she has herding instincts that can’t be broken. She goes berserk wherever she sees legs moving at a fast clip. Joggers, bicyclists, and baby carriages send her over the edge.

So things were starting to get difficult. I wanted a condo with a patch of yard, out of view of other people doing athletic activities. My realtor was starting to think I was nuts.

Compromise two: Look for a condex. More expensive than a townhouse, but for the additional money you get the worst of both worlds: all the headaches of homeownership coupled by hassles with condex associations.

With a condex, you own half a house, and have to maintain it but you are captive to having a working relationship with the owner of the other half of the property. This means they need to agree with you on when to repair the roof, paint the house, and mow the lawn. It also means that they have to love my dog, Lucy, a lot. This seemed like it could be a stretch.

The final compromise: I bit the bullet and suggested that I start looking for a house. Much higher cost and taxes, lots more maintenance, but we are talking about Lucy, my soul mate.

The next day I got one of those Thoreau moments of complete madness and did an MLS real estate search for something way out in the sticks. Escape has been an undercurrent of my existence for a while. Amazingly something showed up: a cute looking open concept house on a lake in Greenfield, New Hampshire. I called up my real estate broker and we drove off that evening to look at the place. Greenfield is “Deliverance” country, but I was up for an adventure, conjuring the sociological implications of conversations with folks about the benefits of sleeping with sisters.

We get to a dirt road leading to the lake, take a few turns and see the house. A crappy looking mud colored ranch sitting in an unkempt lawn that looked like former wetlands.

But there was a bigger problem: there was no lake to be seen.

For grins we decided to go inside and look around. Apparently, “open concept” means that the washer and dryer greet you as you enter the front door. To get into the full basement you needed to crawl under the dining room table and lift up a hatch.

What a great idea for an icebreaker.

“Let me get you another bottle of wine in the cellar, excuse me for a moment. My that’s a lovely pair of panties you are wearing tonight!”

My realtor now knew I was certifiable.

She had a suggestion. There was a small bungalow across from where she lived in my town not more than a mile from our current house. We drove up a high hill into countryside I had not seen before. The house is on a high hill overlooking a valley.
It had an odd shaped piece of property with a guest cottage and an outhouse (for the cottage). The property had been for sale for a year and was at a great price. I offered 10 percent less than the list, which was accepted in a day.

So in a matter of a week I morph from a metro-sexual bachelor to Green Acres redux.

Inspection reveals carpenter ants, radon in the water, a fireplace that needs relining, and a septic system that is locked up like Fort Knox. And I need a huge fence put in to prevent Lucy from becoming road-kill.

I don’t care. I brought three of the five kids up to see it and they all love the place.

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I call it the “hen house”. It is the product of estrogen “gone wild”: my former home which I left eight years ago when B1, my ex-wife, out of the blue told me that our marriage was over. Since then it has been the exclusive domain of females: my mother-in-law, B1, my two daughters, and our dog Daisy. The only two creatures remotely male are the pug, Titan, who was gilded (and as B2 has observed, is a little “light in the loafers”) and Sonny, a beautiful golden tabby.

I guess that elevates Sonny to being "the man of the house". He has a perpetual scowl on his face and annihilates birds and rodents, often filleting chipmunks alive to die a horrible death baking under the summer sun.

Let’s just say Sonny and I relate.

Today I spent some time helping B1 with her computer. I often go over to the hen house to drop off a check, visit with the girls, or catch up with B1’s latest grand scheme. She is always coming up with contorted ways of borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. Today was a little different in that she wanted me to help her with email.

Now when I say “help her with email”, this does not mean fixing some arcane software settings that have somehow become corrupted. Nor does this mean fixing network proxies, or rebooting the router. This means teaching her the basic concepts of how to use a personal computer: complicated things such as using a mouse, setting focus, and browsing on the Internet. You read that correctly, learning how to browse the Internet.

When you visit the hen house, it’s advisable to set back your watch a little bit, say about twenty years.

It’s not that B1 is not bright. She is extremely intelligent, witty, and fun. It’s just she has her priorities and they have trouble aligning themselves with some minor things in life: such as reality.

B1 loves to play dumb, and is the closest living being to the persona that Marilyn Monroe characterized on the silver screen back in many movies during the 1950s. I first met her around 1979 through a mutual friend of ours in Brookline, Massachusetts. She was a tall, drop-dead gorgeous Lithuanian blond, six years older than me.

She was over-the-top glamorous. She had spent many years hobnobbing in Boston amongst the elite, going to parties with Russ Frances and various other high profile professional athletes. Red Sox ace Luis Tiant was particular fond of her and for a while they were friends who partied together. According to Arthur Fiedler, B1 had the best legs he’d ever seen.

One time after we were married I took her to the Boston Symphony where a world famous flautist was performing. B1 was a big fan of his and we got front row seats right below his feet. During the performance, I started to get uneasy when I noticed that while twiddling on his instrument he was making flirting glances towards my wife. About half way through the concert, B1 piped up.

“Am I imagining this, or is he mentally undressing me?”

I didn’t want to know. The concert ended and the flautist took several bows, finishing with a dramatic one unambiguously directed to my wife. A thousand heads turned towards us trying to figure out who we were and why B1 was the focus of his attention.

B1 turned pure crimson. “Get me the hell out of here.”

Horny little French bastard. It still pisses me off.

Back to the hen house:

About two or three years ago after listening to my advice since we divorced B1 bought her first computer. For a day or two it stayed in a box, and then disappeared into a closet. This is not surprising.

Her beauty aides never are out of reach twenty-four hours a day. Take away her right eyebrow anti-wrinkle cream and she will have a meltdown. Take away her computer, and it can wait a while, say half a decade.

Today, when I went over to the house I saw that it had been dragged from the closet.

B1: “Would you mind setting that thing up for me?”

Me: “You mean the computer?”

B1: “Yes. I need it to type up my resume.”

Me: “Sure, where do you want it to go?”

B1: “Probably on the desk. Do we really need both of these things?” She points to the computer tower and the monitor. When it comes to technological jargon, the word "thing" seems to serve her like a Swiss army knife.

Me: “It would help. Where’s the mouse?”

B1: “I’m not sure. I think it is in another closet somewhere. Let me go look.”

I was sorely tempted to ask how the mouse and keyboard got separated from the monitor and keyboard, especially since the stuff had never really been used. But I bit my tongue.
Too often these kinds of exchanges start sounding like first drafts of a Burns and Allen comedy sketch. Frankly I was simply glad she didn’t ask me what a mouse was.

I sat her down in front of the computer after hooking everything up.

Me: “Okay. Now push that big button.”

B1: “This one?”

Me: “Yup”.

The machine powered up and she was almost rigid, intensely focused as if the machine were about to lift off to a trajectory towards Mars. I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be around someone who is computer illiterate. The whole experience was somewhat anthropological, like being the first white person young kids see in some remote tribe in Zambia.

Unfortunately Adie had played with the computer the day B1 first got it, and loaded it up with AOL Instant Messenger and lots of other interactive stuff. So as the machine was booting B1 was constantly be confronted with pop-ups.

Every time some new window would appear out of nowhere she would squeal, like Betty Boop getting goosed on a late Saturday night.

Then she would laugh and say, “What do I do now?”

Me: “Just close it.”

B1: “What does that mean?”

Me: “See that little red box with an X in the corner. Move the mouse over it and click.”

The box disappeared. B1 almost jumped out of her seat.

B1: “Oooh! Where did it go?”

She stumped me there. She does have this uncanny knack for asking obvious questions that are impossible to answer.

Me: ”It’s dead. You just killed it.”

B1 was having trouble disambiguating the context of all of the pop-ups. For her each window was simply another annoying thing from The Computer.

B1: “The computer is asking me for a password”.

Me: “That’s just Adie’s AOL Instant Messenger.”

B1: “What’s that?”

Me: “Another thing you want to kill.”

B1: She laughed. “Oh okay.” She positioned the mouse with the concentration of a Army sniper and clicked the button. “Oooh!” There was another slight jump, but not so high as the last. We were making progress.

After about an hour of this, she got to the point where she could turn on the machine, find the Internet Explorer icon, get to Hotmail, and send an email to her daughters. I made her do it twice, saving me another trip in one day. Then I got the hell out of there. The place was becoming toxic.

I can only imagine JayWon’s and Adie’s reactions. “Dad, you won’t believe this. Mom actually sent me an email.”

So much for my personal pity party. Happy birthday to my country. More than anything else in my life, it has exceeded my very high expectations

I didn't name this blog FAPO for nothing.

Inspired by Snapped Shot.

My language rating, based on a search engine that counts dirty words.

Guess I'm going to have to temper my language around here and start talking like Ma and Pa Kettle. The engine reports that my blog mentioned "breast" one time. Whoops, now I guess now it's twice. Well like the old Woody Allen punchline, "I hear they travel in pairs."

I went over to the site that generates this critical service and entered the URL for the Democratic Underground. I expected the lights to go dim in my office.

Instead I got this:

Well bless my suds, the kiddies have cleaned up their act.

Right.

Courtesy of Ace, the reigning king of right wing potty mouths.

Seldom do I see a technological advance that is virtually jaw-dropping. This one fits the bill. It shows a new technology being nursed by Microsoft that spatially relates photographs of the same subject to provide an amazing interactive visual experience.

God knows what the porn industry will do with this.

My workplace is supposed to be apolitical but it isn’t.

It is a high-tech stomping ground for presidential candidates traipsing through New Hampshire. The gleaming glass and brick building, and the marquee name of the company provide a great photo-op which allows candidates to babble about “cutting edge” technologies of the twenty-first century. It makes an interesting contrast to the other standard New Hampshire venues: the small town with the Congregationalist church in the middle of an early 19th century common, or the a crowded breakfast diner where people are more interested in finishing their pancakes than investing time in some presidential wannabe.

On 9/11, I arrived at my office about a half-hour after the first tower had been struck. I noticed a crowd gathering in an auditorium at the facility. It was full of people watching the events of lower Manhattan unfold on a large wide-screen television. People were sitting in chairs, stunned, watching the atrocity unfold in hushed tones, except for one lunatic who was thinking out-loud about the next shoe to drop.

I walked out after seeing the first tower fall. I was physically ill and was seething with rage. Most of the people in the auditorium were Americans. Non-Americans, if they stopped by at all, quickly disappeared to their cubicles or to quiet groups congregating around the various coffee stations. I think they didn’t know how to react to this situation. They were clearly not emotionally invested in the events of the day and seemed to want to distance themselves from their American co-workers. I also sense that they felt they were intruding on a family crisis, and weren’t quite sure how we were going to react.

At least sixty or seventy percent of my co-workers are Asian, about evenly split between Chinese and Indians. In general I find that the Chinese are much more reticent to talk about politics. I remember one time I was having a loud discussion with a friend of mine who is of Italian American descent. In other words smart, verbal, and very opinionated. A young Chinese colleague stopped by to ask some technical question and we tried to engage him on some political hot-button topic of the day regarding international relations with China. The poor guy almost went catatonic with fright and sounded like an oriental version of Sergeant “I know nothing!” Shultz. He went bug-eyed and started rapidly spouting platitudes of how all he wanted was peace and how he had no opinion on such matters. This seems to be a common reaction. A legacy of the stories they heard from their parents about the days of the "Cultural Revolution".

Indians are much more diverse and outspoken. They happily engage in political discourse and seem to thrive on it. Their comfort level is grounded on obvious reasons: the commonality of the English language and the shared experience of achieving independence from the British Commonwealth. There is a deep respect that exists between our two cultures that is one of the few positive developments of this first decade of the new millennium.

While there are obvious political tension points that fall along cultural lines, it is the generational differences between Americans that are more aggravating. The fact that this is an engineering environment doesn’t help the situation.

One would think that engineers, being hyper-rational by nature, would engage in constructive conversation. The opposite is true. Engineers are inherently detail oriented, cautious, and afraid of jumping the gun on a decision. These are wonderful traits when you are tasked with building the next jumbo-jet airplane or some new medical device that performs laser surgery on your retina. It is a lousy trait to bring to the table when debating the future of Western civilization. Virtually very conversation about foreign policy with an engineer becomes mired in warnings about all the things that could go wrong. Indecision rules the day.

Being very bright people you might also wonder how come a knowledge of history wouldn't mitigate these occupational instincts. That they would see that it is unrealistic to approach geo-politics with the same expectations of certainty as you would when designing a system of software. But that’s precisely the rub. These very well educated people barely know any history at all. I get the feeling that Generation X’ers I work with get most of their facts from “The John Stewart Show”. They pepper their political opinions with ad-hominids or specious wisecracks laced with cheap irony.

Even living through "interesting" history hasn't made an impact. The lessons of 9/11 only lasted a few months, and then it was business as usual.

A while ago I discovered that Google now has a search engine for patents. On a whim I searched on "sex" and came up with this.

The following is an abstract of the invention:

Abstract

A method of sharing erotic experiences includes providing a building with a number of compartments, entertainment viewable from inside the compartments and surround sound music audible throughout the building, participants entering the building and go to the compartments, starting the entertainment at a proscribed time, and turning on the power from a central control booth at a proscribed time to a stimulation device for sexual pleasure found in each of the compartments. The facilities are such that sounds from the participants are transferred between the compartments, such that couples or individuals in one compartment can hear others in the building also experiencing intense sexual pleasure. The individual compartments may further contain a whirlpool tub with jets starting at a proscribed time. Importantly, security is provided to maintain order in the building, and regular cleaning and sanitizing of the compartments and stimulation device is provided.

The diagrams are embedded in PDF documents and can't be displayed here. But the facility looks like a geodesic dome populated with little gas chambers. Only here the chambers service the Pee Wee Hermans of the world who pay to walk in, get artificially stimulated, and listen to others in various stages of ecstasy.

I have a few patents, and one of the things you have to do is differentiate your proposed patent from "prior art" (i.e. stuff that has already been invented.) The citations for this include:

THEATER WITH SEPARATE VIEWING BOOTHS Jun 1972

4843788 Modular seclusion room Jul 4, 1989

5024398 Office module for passenger aircraft Jun 18, 1991

5163447 Force-sensitive, sound-playing condom Nov 17, 1992

5651219 Dynamic workspace module Jul 29, 1997

5928170 Audio-enhanced sexual vibrator Jul 27, 1999

6199552 Bed with suspended platform Mar 13, 2001

6368268 Device for interactive virtual control of sexual aids using digital computer networks Apr 9, 2002

Notice the timeline and how things evolve from the mundane to the degenerate.

"Progress is our most important product."

One week and I have my first reference, courtesy of Free Thoughts. It is one of my

I remember when I first discovered blogs. It was a few months after 9/11. Fed up with going to MSM sites like the BBC and reading how America deserved the attack because of Kyoto and world poverty, I googled the phrase "to hell with root causes" to find a kindred spirit.

Google responded with a link to Rachel Lucas. After spending a few minutes there I was hooked and became a daily reader. Rachel is sassy and fun, and she is without a peer when it comes to taking on Hollywood liberal "asshats" (a term that she did not invent, but made popular). The combination of humor, writing talent, female sensibilities, and Texas values makes her a fun read (unless you are the unlucky actor on the receiving end of her wrath). The only warning is that she is an unabashed potty mouth.

Today's rant is about Cameron Diaz.

La Shawn Barber and various others are posting about the latest ham-fisted proposal from our newly elected Democratic Congress. It seems that legislation is being proposed to re-instate the “fairness doctrine” to radio, to force broadcasters to compensate the popularity of conservative talk-radio with equal time and access to liberal counterparts..

This basically means forcing owners to either drop Rush Limbaugh or use the show's revenues to subsidize the Al Frankens of the world who generate no audience, and hence generate no advertising revenue.

The whole idea is absurdly stupid on so many levels. Aside from it being demonstrably unprincipled, the intent of such legislation would never achieve its goal, which has nothing to do with fairness, but everything to do with changing the rules of the game because you are losing. Technology is constantly creating new and diverse means of communication: blogs, satellite radio, podcasts, YouTube. If there is a message that wants to be heard, it will find a channel that doesn't fall under some regulatory bucket.

And it’s not as if there aren’t already well established and entrenched venues for liberal spin.

From Iowahawk:

Let's face it, Bush had hate radio and "fair and balanced" Fox pushing him during the entire campaign. To counteract the incessant bias of "Faux News," Democrats need to have their own media voice. I've got an idea -- why not line up three or four television network news organizations, a couple of weekly news magazines and a dozen or so major newspapers to run non-stop anti-GOP stories? I know it sounds crazy, but it just might work.

Just from a tactical point of view , this legislation is an obvious non-starter. Talk-radio has a very good record of quickly mobilizing the ire of citizens to shoot down bad legislation. One can only imagine how listener's will respond when they hear that the show they are tuning in and listening to everyday is about to be targeted for censorship. Defeating this will be like shooting ducks in a barrel.

I have high respect for Betsy Newmark and Dean Esmay , both of whom give a big thumbs up for the Clinton “Soprano” video posted a couple of days ago. I took their comments at face value, that they constituted detached political analysis rather than any ringing endorsement of Hillary. (Although, interestingly, Dean conceded that it was close to even-money that he’d vote for her in a general election.)

After seeing the video, I had a completely opposite reaction. When I saw it I wanted to scream, “Are you freaking kidding me? Do you think we are idiots?”

Are we really supposed to swallow (pun intended) the nonsense about a warm and caring Hillary looking out for the well being of her shamelessly philandering husband? “Monica-Gate” paralyzed the federal government in protracted impeachment proceedings. The country was immersed into debates about semen stains on dresses and creative ways of enhancing Cuban cigars. Kids in schoolyards were getting a crash course on the merits of oral sex by the antics of the Command in Chief. Half the population was taking an extra bath every night after listening to the network news. This went on for almost two solid years.

All politicians take huge liberties in sanitizing their personal lives. But they do so hoping that their shenanigans won’t ever see the light of day. This entire revisionist “loving husband and wife crap” is WAY after horse has left the barn. The verdict on the Clinton's marriage was in years ago.

To me the video underscored my big problem with the Clintons, one that goes back to1992 when they did the famous “60 Minutes” interview that salvaged their tanking campaign in New Hampshire. My objection, then and now, had nothing to do with policy or extra-marital sex, but it has everything to do with respect for the people they are asking for votes.

They think we are dumber than a fence-post and have an attention span and memory of a three year old.

Yes our country is in peril, and if the Republicans don’t get their act together in a hurry, perhaps I’ll hold my nose and join Dean in voting for Hillary. Perhaps we need a cold-hearted witch who can dispatch her flying monkeys to get things done in this country. And it would be nice to elect someone who can convince Hollywood to look the other way if she decides to nuke Tehran on a hot summer night.

But I’ll never like these people or their approach to politics. They have nothing but contempt for the people they want to represent.

Rick Moran does a great job taking Bloomberg to the woodshed for his opportunistic leap from the GOP to independent status. He makes a good case against the aristocracy class which is constantly dabbling in political theater and making their own rules.

My take on Bloomberg and his presumed independent run for the Presidency is that it is a familiar and tired exercise in vanity. NYC is still ground zero for the next terrorist attack, and Bloomberg has spent his political capital fighting the evils of trans fats. It reminds me of Howard Dean and his war with bicycle paths.

A few months ago I surfed over to GutRumbles who represents the “old-guard” of personal bloggers. I was saddened to discover that Rob Smith had passed away, just hours after writing his last post. Friends and family are keeping the site alive, and recycling the best of the Acidman's rants.

I bring it up because about three years ago he wrote something about race relations, specifically that he objected to cross-racial adoption. Basically Rob was saying that mindless white parents were adopting black kids without thinking through the implications and hardships that would be imposed on the child. I posted a reply on his site, explaining that while there are serious issues when one adopts a black child into a white family, the problems are certainly manageable. With the myriad of serious issues that come up with kids, race differences are simply another parental challenge. It isn't insurmountable if you know how to make it to work. To drive home the point, I linked an essay in Adoption.com which was written by JayWon during her senior year of high school.

Rob got back to me personally that day and complimented my daughter. I passed this on to JayWon. I didn’t go into the specifics about Rob or his blog and I wasn't sure how she would have reacted to getting praise from someone who repeatedly characterized his ex-wife as a “bloodless c*nt”. Actually, in retrospect,I think I do know. She would have found such stuff crude, but she would have quickly looked past it, and recognized his writing skills and been amused by his direct and candid opinions, regardless of whether they aligned with her views.

Getting back to the issue of race, it will continue to loom large in our family dynamics since it looks very probable that the interracial ties will soon be extended. JayWon told me recently that she and K-Man are starting to talk seriously about marriage.

K-Man wasn’t originally listed in my post of “Players”, so I need to introduce him here.

He is an immigrant, six years out of the country of Togo which resides in what was once known as French West Africa. Togo is on the cusp of the cultural line that cuts across Africa and divides the Islamic north from the tribal and Christian south. Needless to say this line is not just a cultural boundary, areas it often represents a front of some civil war. Darfur comes to mind, as does Sierra Leone.

K-Man is the same age as JayWon and they started dating in their last year of high school, but instead of going on to college, he is working very long hours cleaning out cars at a rental agency. There wasn’t really a choice in this decision. His family is relatively poor and he spent his years in high school simply learning rudimentary skills and English. For a while he didn’t have money to fix his car so he had to resort to walking an hour each way to get to his work. He supports his stepmother, his adolescent sister, and his younger brother and pays the majority of the rent. His father abandoned the family about three or four years ago. K-Man doesn’t have much spare time, but he is working through the classes he needs to take to get American citizenship. All this responsibility at the age of twenty-one.

During the winter, B2 got tickets to a live stage performance of “Grease”. Tenacious was to bring one of his friends, but he bailed at the last minute. I invited K-Man thinking that this would be a chance for him to have a evening out doing something different that having a beer and catching a late-night NBA game on television. Whenever he is around me K-Man is soft-spoken and reserved, but he was even more so in the company of B2 and Tenacious. We went to dinner and then went on to the play.

I had to wonder what K-Man must have been thinking sitting in the balcony listening to some blonde cutie on stage crooning, “I’m Sandra Dee, lousy with virginity.” It wasn’t clear from his muted reaction whether he was bored or confused by all the pop-cultural references of 1950’s America. Frankly, Tenacious was looking equally disengaged. When the play ended we dropped K-Man off at his home, and he thanked us politely for the evening’s entertainment. B2 and I figured the evening was a bust for the two boys.

Later that week I talked to JayWon about taking K-Man to the play and how I didn’t think he had a good time. She laughed. Apparently one of K-Man’s buddies at work had given her a call to complain about his new passion.

“JayWon. Why did you give K-Man that god-awful CD?”

“What CD?”

“That musical. We’ve been listening to him play that “Grease” shit non-stop for the past twelve hours.”

Apparently one of the perks in cleaning out cars is that you get to use the built-in stereo and CD player to listen to your own music. K-Man had immediately gone out after the play, purchased the sound-track, and was inflicting Sandra Dee on his buddies. JayWon clarified that the CD originated with K-Man and that she never bought it. K-Man’s buddy relayed the information, and JayWon heard muffled protests of K-Man getting tossed into a dumpster.

JayWon also informed me that K-Man does a killer Michael Jackson imitation. Obviously there is a lot more to learn about him.

Tenacious graduated Friday evening and the event was uplifting. This was the fourth ceremony we attended in as many years, so I was expecting it to be somewhat anti-climactic.

When you are the fifth kid in line, the novelty of such occasions tend to wane and family attendance starts to thin out. When JayWon and Perfecto graduated we had a huge gathering of friends and family. This year though it was just B2, Adie, and myself. Two of our kids were away at college (JayWon and Perfecto), while JayToo was working on the Cape. She’s a serious and responsible kid, and didn’t feel comfortable asking for a day off on the first week of her job.

The night was one of those perfect northern New England evenings in June, reminiscent of the one idealized in the musical “Carousel”. The air was crisp, there were no mosquitoes, and the tall blue green pines that circumvented the football stadium beautifully framed the speaker podium and the graduates.

Perfect weather in New Hampshire is as rare as it is unpredictable. When it dovetails with a special occasion, it makes a lasting impression.

The student speakers complimented the physical grandeur of the occasion. Their addresses reflected poise, maturity, intelligence, and wit. One of the girls who sung the “Star Spangled Banner” was the cute co-ed Tenacious “dared” as a freshman.

It reminded me of a pre-9/11 moment that is still etched into my mind. It was in central New Hampshire in late August 2001, and I was attending a softball tournament at St. Anselm’s College, where JayWon was competing.

The reason the night was memorable owed itself to a strikingly beautiful rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner” sung by JayWon’s teammate and pitcher. The girl, slight in frame, sung it solo without any instrumental accompaniment, and without the strained pop-vocal theatrics that we hear nowadays at professional venues. She sang it with perfect pitch, purity, and reverence. When she finished people were visibly moved and stunned. Parents of the opposing team shook their head and laughed, “I hope she doesn’t pitch as well as she sings.” (She pitched very well, but lost in the tournament on a heartbreaking error in the outfield. She and JayWon would continue to play together and win the high school state championship two years later.)

I knew I was in experiencing one of those idyllic moments where everything in America was perfect. I also knew that it was transient, although I could not imagine how soon things would change.

I’ve already written two posts, and I’m starting to realize that politics is taking a back stage to the soap opera that I’m currently living through. I'm located in New Hampshire, which has traditionally been a conservative state but has recently taken on a distinct tone of purple. The newly elected Democratic legislature just failed in its first attempt to legislate the mandatory use of seat belts. We are the last state in the union to not impose this by law, and for the moment the Dems are being forced to regroup and attempt a more modest proposal. Perhaps they would be satisfied by simply modifying the state motto to “Live Free and Die”.

My family lives about fifteen miles north of Massachusetts and the town is being overrun by liberals and their failed policies. The most recent indication of this was an embarrassing break-out of lunacy in our local middle school, which held a "value diversity" night celebrating the enlightened culture of Saudi Arabia. The festivities included the segregation of women.

Massholes are fleeing their six percent income tax, their five percent sales tax, and a host of oppresive mandates from Beacon Hill. It’s not uncommon now in Massachusetts to spend fifty thousand dollars upgrading one’s septic system to comply with new state mandated standards. This upgrade needs to be done before any house is sold.

And for this enhanced revenue stream you get the Big Dig, with its billions of dollars of cost overruns and the excitement of knowing that you could be killed just by driving home through poorly inspected infrastructure.

Envious Bostonians float the canard of “Yah, you folks in New Hampshire don’t have a sales tax or income tax, but you pay through the nose on your property.” Property taxes are indeed higher in the Granite State than in Massachusetts, but this is an apples to oranges comparison which equates tax rates on the same dollar value assessment. The cruel fact is that the same house in Massachusetts can be up to fifty or a hundred percent more expensive to purchase.

In other words to have the same quality home in Massachusetts you have to pay a much higher mortgage, and the higher assessment value neutralizes any advantage of the lower property tax rate. And that’s before you get to the weekly six percent reduction of your paycheck and fork over an extra fifteen hundred dollars when you buy a new car.

The foliage is nice up here, but that’s not what is driving the migration from Boston.