brain lynt

Music and drugs

2012-01-10T16:11:00.000-05:00

Throughout the 20th Century, especially from the Jazz Age onwards, musicians were increasingly associated with drug use. It certainly wasn't all of them, but no one was ever surprised to learn that this one or that one was using something, whether it was alcohol or something more exotic. Little has been said, however about the addictive nature of music itself.

My music fixation has led me to consider that very subject and to do ten minutes of exhaustive research. My first and last stop was Helpguide.org, whose Google snippet showed that it might contain the kind of checklist of warning signs of drug abuse that I was looking for.

This opening statement hit on critical similarities immediately:

"Some people are able to use recreational or prescription drugs without ever experiencing negative consequences or addiction. For many others, substance use can cause problems at work, home, school, and in relationships, leaving you feeling isolated, helpless, or ashamed."

Substitute music for drugs and you get this:

Some people are able to use recreational or instructional music without ever experiencing negative consequences or addiction. For many others, music use can cause problems at work, home, school, and in relationships, leaving you feeling isolated, helpless, or ashamed.

Helpless! Isolated! Ashamed! That sounds like me after a tough recital or String Band session. The others take off. Helplessly I flounder after them. I feel isolated as the worst excuse for a musician in the place. I'm ashamed that I did not practice more, and that I present myself as any kind of a musician whatsoever. I swear I'm going to quit. But do I? No. Within HOURS I'm "practicing" again.

The same site offers this list of signs and symptoms of drug abuse:

Common signs and symptoms of drug abuse

You’re neglecting your responsibilities at school, work, or home (e.g. flunking classes, skipping work, neglecting your children) because of your drug use.
You’re using drugs under dangerous conditions or taking risks while high, such as driving while on drugs, using dirty needles, or having unprotected sex.
Your drug use is getting you into legal trouble, such as arrests for disorderly conduct, driving under the influence, or stealing to support a drug habit.
Your drug use is causing problems in your relationships, such as fights with your partner or family members, an unhappy boss, or the loss of old friends.

Common signs and symptoms of drug addiction

You’ve built up a drug tolerance. You need to use more of the drug to experience the same effects you used to attain with smaller amounts.
You take drugs to avoid or relieve withdrawal symptoms. If you go too long without drugs, you experience symptoms such as nausea, restlessness, insomnia, depression, sweating, shaking, and anxiety.
You’ve lost control over your drug use. You often do drugs or use more than you planned, even though you told yourself you wouldn’t. You may want to stop using, but you feel powerless.
Your life revolves around drug use. You spend a lot of time using and thinking about drugs, figuring out how to get them, and recovering from the drug’s effects.
You’ve abandoned activities you used to enjoy, such as hobbies, sports, and socializing, because of your drug use.
You continue to use drugs, despite knowing it’s hurting you. It’s causing major problems in your life—blackouts, infections, mood swings, depression, paranoia—but you use anyway.

Again substituting music for drugs the parallels are disturbing:

Common signs and symptoms of music abuse

You’re neglecting your responsibilities at school, work, or home because of your music use. Or how about dragging in even later than usual the morning after your weekly String Band session and spending most of the day listening to the tunes you're trying to learn, collected on your MP3 player?
You’re playing music under dangerous conditions or taking risks while high on it, such as driving while plinking on a dulcimer you just bought because it looked easy to learn, using strings you should have changed long ago, or having unprotected sex.Wait. What? Maybe if I was a better musician I could use it to get laid, but not at this point!
Your music is getting you into legal trouble, such as arrests for disturbing the peace, driving under a frigging dulcimer, or stealing to support an instrument collecting habit.
Your music use is causing problems in your relationships, such as fights with your partner or family members, an unhappy boss, or the loss of old friends.These mostly take the form of WOULD YOU FOR GOD'S SAKE STOP PLAYING THAT THING FOR A WHILE?!?! Or maybe you feel you have to hide your practicing so they won't all get together and stage an intervention.

Common signs and symptoms of music addiction

You’ve built up a music tolerance. You need to play longer to experience the same effects you used to attain with smaller amounts.
You play music to avoid or relieve withdrawal symptoms. If you go too long without playing, you experience symptoms such as restlessness, depression, sweating, shaking, and anxiety because you know you're forgetting everything you've worked so hard to try to learn.
You’ve lost control over your music. You often play for much longer than you planned, even though you told yourself you wouldn’t. You may want to stop playing, but you feel powerless.
Your life revolves around jamming. You spend a lot of time using and thinking about music, figuring out how to get more sheet music or learn more tunes, and recovering from the effects of hours of practicing. These vary depending on the instrument and the method of playing it.
You’ve abandoned activities you used to enjoy, such as hobbies, sports, and socializing, because of your music.
You continue to use music, despite knowing it’s hurting you. It’s causing major problems in your life—mood swings (Yes! I nailed that! Oh no, I totally suck at this!), depression (No, I just totally suck at this and always will), paranoia (Everybody wishes I would quit showing up but they're too nice to say so.)—but you play anyway.

I would worry about myself but I have to practice as soon as my wife leaves. Other people may have problems with music, but not me. I can handle it.

The struggle for existence

2012-01-08T08:34:00.001-05:00

If I had known that winter was going to die out in my lifetime, I would not have wasted all that time learning to ski. My life would have been very different. Chaos being chaos, once you change one thing you change a myriad of things. Multiple universes beckon in every fraction of a direction.

In the world we know, many of us invested time and energy in the continued existence of winter. The lack of it is going to cause a great deal of inconvenience for everyone, whether they choose to believe it or not.

In one small sport shop in one small town in one small state on one small patch of the Earth's surface occupied by the self-styled greatest nation on the planet, we struggle to survive. Our biggest adversaries are the weather and the economy. Their allies are other activities we do not service and the human tendency toward sloth.

We can't do much about the weather because too many people don't agree that we were capable of damaging the global climate in the first place. We can't do much about the economy because it is controlled by madmen with self-serving theories about who should prosper and how that is accomplished.

The attack on 9-11-01 was a blow, but the nation's response was more damaging. This was part of Osama bin Laden's plan: he knew that the powerful emotional response, coupled with our diverse philosophies, added to our technological ability to over-react would create massively destructive tension in our tenuously joined society.

The economy is bad, but it is made worse by the Republican immune system's response to Democrats. In the coming election we can either elect a Republican president who will join the misguided right wing of Congress to strengthen the grip of oligarchy on our society or we can re-elect the Democrat and face four more years of destructive opposition from the Republicans as they try to make the economy such a mess for the average citizen that we will vote for whatever platitude-spouting orator they put forward in 2016 to promise to fix it.

Elections are no longer about leading this country to greatness or even goodness. They're about picking someone to lie to you for a few years until you have to pick a replacement knave or fool to occupy your television screen while unseen minions have their way with the nation's finances.

Who you callin' a pansy?

2011-12-08T22:39:00.001-05:00

These pansies are still blooming underneath the Christmas greens in the planter beside the back door to the shop. They've survived two major snowstorms and numerous sub-freezing nights since the end of summer. So tell me again why we use the term pansy to describe something weak?

Pansies! Yeah!

The problem of wealth

2011-10-25T15:00:00.000-05:00

Protestors all over the country are demanding greater accountability from the small percentage of Americans who control the vast majority of its wealth. It is only the latest installment in the debate which has gone on since the beginning of human social life.

In a group of social animals, leaders emerge based of clear-cut abilities that give them dominance over the lesser members of their band. As humans evolved, their brains not only gave them more tools with which to manipulate their environment and each other but also superstition and flawed logic with which to create belief systems that would perpetuate the dominance of certain humans and their descendants regardless of the actual abilities of specific individuals.

Dreamers who believe in the unstoppable power of hard work and initiative, and the self-correcting nature of a completely free market are confident that the concentration of wealth is not a bad thing at all, and that it simply gives all the hard-working strivers a goal toward which to work. Taxation is not the way to break up this clot of wealth. They haven't said exactly how the free market will provide the leverage. They're simply confident that the government should not be used as part of the solution.

Compare that point of view for a moment to the pot-smoking teenager who does not want his parents to come into his room. Of course he doesn't want adults coming in telling him he can't indulge himself as he wishes. He may even be making money on a little commerce in his chosen field. If you object to the example of an illegal drug and illicit commerce, substitute chronic masturbation and a stack of Playboy magazines. As distasteful as that habit may be to contemplate, it's still legal as far as I know. And it creates jobs, as our little wanker buys publications to stimulate his imagination and suitable lubricants to ease friction. It shares another characteristic with immense wealth, being that it is done exclusively for the gratification of the one at the expense of whatever else has to be neglected during the pursuit of it.

Like any metaphor, it can be beaten to death. Flogged too hard, as it were.

Most shorthand economic arguments being tossed around today are based on incorrect assumptions, like the notion that rich people are the only job creators. Anyone who buys goods or services is creating demand. Demand creates jobs. Existing jobs need demand to keep them viable. I create jobs.You create jobs. We all create jobs. Hurricanes and earthquakes create jobs.

The margin of error in the debate grows even larger because we're looking only at dollar amounts. A million dollars today is less money than it was ten, twenty and thirty years ago. Who knows what it will be worth in ten more years. Money is just a number. A $100 bill and a $1 bill produce exactly the same amount of heat and light when you burn them. The difference to us is entirely the result of what we make them represent.

Numbers don't lie but people certainly use them as part of many falsehoods and misdirections. Because actual currency and verifiable value are only a small part of our financial world, clever fabricators have developed --derived, if you will -- numerical rat-mazes based on theoretical principles that sweep a few digits at a time into one person's column instead of someone else's. It's done in a room as sequestered from reality as our fantasizing teenager's bedroom, yet its consequences are vastly greater.

Mid Autumn

2011-10-18T18:16:00.000-05:00

Canadian cycling blogger Rantwick holds a foliage photo contest every year. He passes a magnificent maple on his daily route that inspired him to put it up against all challengers. It's all for fun. Shown above is my own challenger. It has usually reached this state of disrepair by the time I manage to ride over there with the camera. This year, high winds and the strange, slow progression of color conspired once again to strip many leaves while some still remain green. The cloudy day didn't help.

This photo of the rapids at Effingham Falls goes under the heading, "Why I Live Here." For all the inconvenience, this area has managed to remain fairly pretty and undeveloped thanks to small environmental initiatives and a major lack of anything resembling a strong year-round economy.

Power

2011-10-04T14:30:00.000-05:00

Power doesn't necessarily corrupt but it tends to select for corruption.

As an evolutionary characteristic, power enhanced breeding success. Social customs developed from animal behaviors before the emergence of conscious thought. After the development of language, the power of bullshit could be added to physical qualities such as size and combat skill. Along with thought and reason comes misdirected thought and faulty reasoning. Along with the naturally-occurring errors these can generate, they provide leverage for manipulating people through mistaken perceptions.

Fair-mindedness would cause an ethical leader to step down over certain issues in which a corrupt leader would look for some way to excuse remaining in power. Because various margins for error coincide nicely to provide these justifications, the traditions of leadership tend to accumulate greater tolerance for corruption up to a certain point. Beyond that the dirt becomes obvious. This might not cause a leader to topple if the leader can command enough forces to stay on top of the heap, but it commits that leader to the role of despot rather than merely "flawed" or "controversial."

Uncorrupted leaders still manage to operate even now. Because they tend to limit themselves through their ethics they are still in the minority, where they can be expected to remain. The system as we accept it still favors people who grab for power and cling to it tenaciously. We even praise the qualities of energy and ambition as signs of the ever-valued work ethic almost regardless of the outcome.

Where a would-be leader of old might need to command fighting forces to bolster that ambition, now the seeker of power needs to command money or solicit donations of it. While this can be less destructive in the obvious sense of riding roughshod over the countryside pillaging, it raises corruption to new importance as the supplicant makes deals in return for financial support.

The Tenth Anniversary

2011-09-11T08:10:00.000-05:00

Today America observes the tenth anniversary of the day that sudden death and the tangible possibility of spectacular murder-suicide entered our consciousness forever. With elaborate and beautiful ceremonies this country marks the event in all its pain and glory, all its loss and hope, all its death and rebirth. It's all about us. That was kind of the problem in the first place.

9-11-01 was a wasted teachable moment. If the president had come out of his trance in that school room and said something wise and insightful to a shocked nation instead of cheerleading for revenge in echo of popular sentiment the nation might actually have been united by the experience.

To be fair, for a few minutes that morning I myself wanted to nuke the troublesome areas of the world until they were a sheet of volcanic glass. I got caught up in the flood of nasty possibilities that a truly effective terrorist network could have prepared to unleash. Why should we have expected a mere human leader to transcend the human response to a serious threat?

The 9-11 attacks joined us to a world where tragic, nasty things happen more frequently, on a less cinematic scale. It was a time when we could have felt not only an insular connection to our fellow citizens but a wider connection to all people similarly wronged everywhere. It could have been a time to examine our human relationship to life and killing, not just a specific fight between certain adversaries. The stated motives for the attacks, and the willingness to die to commit them, highlight the philosophical difference between people who want to enjoy this life and those who only care to leave it in such a way that they earn some sort of cosmic reward that no one can prove exists. The believers believe with every fiber of their being. In a case like that some will say that how one lives matters much less than why one dies, and for whom.

Death surrounds life. We come from a place we can't remember. At some point, each and every one of us leaves for a place of similar mystery. Is there blackness, oblivion? Is there heaven and hell? Paradoxically, some of those who believe that the real action takes place in the eternal afterlife make all kinds of trouble during their brief mortal span over injustices that are guaranteed to be temporary, just as life itself is temporary. None of it really makes sense. It merely justifies the unfortunate human propensity to lash out angrily and hurt or kill someone. That anger may be a brief, passionate flash or a long, slow-burning smolder. Not everyone feels it to the same degree. But those who do feel it are capable of inflicting vast amounts of unnecessary suffering into a world already well supplied.

Terrorism wins the battle to take lives because taking lives is pathetically easy. There are too many ways to kill and walk away. That number goes up exponentially when the killer no longer wants to walk away safely. The only way to screen out most of those possibilities is to give up a lot of freedom where large numbers of people assemble. Who wouldn't submit to a little pat-down if in return for that you have some sense that a killer might be stopped? So the terrorists record a victory either way. They may not have changed our society as much as they hope to, ultimately, but they have certainly changed the way we live and think.

Certainly this incremental erosion of freedom starts a slippery slope. We do it because it's part of our strategy of resistance to our insidious attackers.

On September 11, 2001 a war began that can never end. When neither side will ever surrender, the result is an endless exchange of atrocities.

Make no mistake: the terrorists are wrong. Terrorism exploits dark peculiarities of the human psyche that find their expression in murder-suicide all the time. It feeds on some people's willingness to set deadly traps basically for the fun of it. It gives these creeping killers an ideology to exalt something they would probably do anyway. The terrorists should quit. But don't expect them to surrender. The delusion that propels them is too irrational to see any sense in getting along. Why bother to coexist when you can actually get someone to strap on a bomb and explode their own guts to score a blow against someone with whom you disagree? That power must be intoxicating to someone twisted enough to want to cause mass casualties in the first place.

No one was in the mood to hear that kind of truth after a spectacular defeat with a large loss of life. That doesn't mean it should not have been said. People say the attacks changed the world, but do they have any idea how much? In a way, not much at all. The tendency to do nasty things to each other over petty disagreements is a long-standing human tradition. In another way, it marked the end, forever, of America as we knew it and the hope of a peaceful world in which we enjoy and gain strength from our differences. After a few days at best of stunned unity, the attacks heightened our own disagreements in this country.

We unite again today to commemorate a horrific day that no one who witnessed will forget. The day was marked by courage and devastation that demonstrated the very best and worst about humanity. We won't know for a very long time which quality will prevail. We may simply continue to attack and defend, to wound and heal, to kill and bury and have sex and produce new life and to argue bitterly about what it all means without questioning the irrationality of reasons we state for it.

Life goes on, for now.

Pretty and Scary

2011-08-09T21:24:00.001-05:00

Lobelia Cardinalis is in bloom

Big hairy spider by the Pine River

Too Big to Fail?

2011-07-29T06:49:00.002-05:00

Extremely principled members of Congress are going to push the government past the deadline to raise the debt limit. That seems inevitable. Whether you agree with them or not, the Tea Party faction of the Republican majority is going to take us all along on their experiment in economics.

Some economists predict dire consequences. Others are less concerned. I've heard a lot more shooting around my rural neighborhood as the deadline approaches, so maybe the survivalist demographic thinks we'll face real social breakdown. Or maybe they finally saved up enough money to buy some ammo after a very quiet early summer.

Because the government's financial obligations won't disappear just because the Tea Party wishes it were so, expenses will rise, further straining the middle class. Because the middle class has been deemed unnecessary, this will be no loss. However, the bottom layer of the top class will start to crumble away as it takes more and more money to maintain a lifestyle that will have to include privately purchased replacements for many services government currently provides.

I'm not sure how much longer we could have afforded ourselves anyway. China is rising, but what will they stand above when civilization as we've come to know it is no longer affordable? We could have staved off a massive change in the not-too-distant future with some small changes back when a nerdy peanut farmer from Georgia suggested them in the late 1970s, but why dwell in the past? We are a nation that has been well served by charging obstinately forward for about three centuries. It's not like the whole thing will come crashing down immediately. Disruption creates opportunity. It doesn't guarantee that everyone will see an opportunity. Change is not always good, and certainly not always good for everyone.

We don't even know how much will change, how quickly.

We do know that there will not be another bailout. We're going to ride this one down to the ground for better or for worse. Happy landings!

Periodic Fiddle Report

2011-07-04T13:46:00.003-05:00

Beginning musicians go through two phases. In the first phase, you can't recognize what they're trying to play. In the second phase you can recognize it, but you wish you couldn't. Your mind supplies the rest of the phrase as the player still gropes to pull it out. It's like listening to someone with a stammer. As a player, it's like having a stammer. The thought is there, it just gets jammed up in processing.

Most music students get to the second phase. A certain number never get past it. In a way it never ends. As one fiddle player I know says, "you never get to the finish line in music." A musician pushing further will attempt more difficult music. It will come out mangled a few times before it comes out right.

For the most part, teachers and better players have been very encouraging. Once in a while, though, someone makes a remark that makes me wonder how well I might ever play.

The phrase, "as long as you're enjoying yourself" serves not only as permission to dabble in the province of real musicians, but also a hint that it's not only okay to sound tentative and incompetent, it may be all you can hope for. But "as long as you enjoy it" it's okay.

More ominously, at String Band one night, someone said something about playing a tune well and Seth said, "it's an accomplishment just to play it recognizably." All I could think of was identifying a mangled accident victim from a tiny scrap of visible tattoo or dental records. Wow. Is that all there is?

The leader of the adult classical ensemble I play with said something similar that sounded kind of like, "learn to enjoy being mediocre." She wants us to try our hardest and not to run ourselves down for our musical disabilities, but then the veil seems to slip and we see the inscription on the wall behind it: "Don't kid yourselves."

In the past couple of years I have focused on practicing frequently and well. Last fall I started attending a weekly session run by a local musician and teacher who specializes in folk music.

The term folk music conjures up images of the commercial product in the 1960s, but it really encompasses the indigenous music of the people wherever "folk" gather. Instruments range from recognizable implements one could buy or rent from a music store to weird objects pieced together in places remote from formal music education. It can also include formalized traditions quite different from the music most familiar to people living in Europe and countries derived primarily from European culture.

Most of what we play on Thursday nights in String Band comes from old-time and Celtic genres.

Folk music was the popular music before commercial pop music became widespread in the second half of the 20th Century. Modern popular music owes a lot to various tributary streams from all over the world, mixed together and fed into a microphone during the rise of radio. Because of this, a little or a lot of any given folk tune might have a familiar ring to it. Also, since much of folk music is meant to be dance music, it has the same earworm potential as many modern popular tunes. Like it or not, the pattern digs into part of your brain and won't leave. It may subside, but it is seldom eradicated.

If I like a tune it takes root more quickly in my brain. Unfortunately, all these tunes get into my mind far sooner than they get into my fingers. I can't play a single one as fast as I can hear it in my mind.

On the classical training side, the music is more complex. I find it more difficult to pull off the page than the simple patterns of the fiddle tunes. I could probably turn into a reasonably competent hack fiddler. Becoming a violinist is a lot harder. The two tracks appear to support each other. Fiddle playing, as long as I maintain posture and technique, provides a lot of mechanical practice. The reward is a tune. On the other side, reading more complicated pieces off the page reinforces technique and pattern recognition.

Music is a vast universe. Many modern musicians combine formal training in the classical tradition with explorations in the genres that transmit knowledge with no written notation or with specialized notation developed within a musical subculture. This approach, that blurs boundaries, makes it all accessible. That would seem good. However, some adherents to specific traditions will say that the global musician who drops in, soaks up a few things and moves on, doesn't get the full cultural basis and significance the tradition represents.

I don't know enough to pick a side. Exploratory musicians generally seem like pretty cool people, and I'm all about sharing culture and fun, so I'll try whatever comes my way. It might even come out recognizably.

Two Seasons

2011-06-27T20:36:00.002-05:00

New England has two seasons: winter and getting ready for winter. Whenever anyone makes a joke about New England and its seasons, winter is always one of them.

Today I spent hours stacking wood in the shed. I also tested the Ossipee River, testing a pair of waders at the same time. It's handy to get this gig testing hip boots just in time for presidential primary campaigning.

This year we got four cords of wood instead of the usual three. Three fills our shed. The fourth will have to go up in the back yard. This will make it more convenient to bring to the living room to feed the new wood stove that will heat that space since we had the gas bomb removed. The old gas unit had just gotten too scary. A wood fire in a good stove gives more consistent heat from a fuel that literally grows on trees. During the lean times I would burn busted up pallets, scrap lumber, old furniture (don't worry, not the antiques) and logging slash gleaned from old sites nearby.

When you're stacking wood you're not doing anything else. It's a long, steady grind. You can't look too often at the pile or you'll just quit and find something else to do. You have to get into a groove with a good train of thought or some sort of meditation. If I get a really good idea I might stop to jot it down or keep refining it until I finish the day's labor and turn to the evening's contemplation.

Right now I'm sitting in the dark so I can see the fireflies outside. Unfortunately, the door screen is pretty well shredded by the cats. Less enjoyable bugs than the fireflies are making their way in to investigate the light of my computer screen and drink my blood. Maybe I can drive them away with some bad fiddlin' in the dark. Or perhaps they'll take that annoying whine to be a mating call. We'll see.

Help in the studio

2011-05-31T16:10:00.004-05:00

Ordinarily I will have one cat helping me at my drawing table. This is the primary reason I use dry coloring and toning materials rather than wet washes and paints. That and the fact that I can leave dry methods at any point for other interruptions and use them easily in the field. Lame, I know, since intrepid painters and dip-pen artists have been working in adverse conditions for centuries. But being a belt-and-suspenders kind of guy I believe in a margin of safety.

Because I've been working in the studio more than usual lately, the cats have decided to increase their efforts as well. They've put on a double shift on my table now in case I thought I was actually going to get a lot of work done.

Proving my wisdom, they are lying right in the middle of what would be a cooling puddle of colored water if I'd risked doing brush work.

Memorial Day 2011

2011-05-30T18:57:00.003-05:00

On this solemn day of barbecues and trips to the beach, we honor those who serve our country, especially those in harm's way right now. That's what I keep hearing, anyway.

Actually today we remember the ones who didn't make it. Because that is commonly forgotten in the rush to try to make service members and veterans feel properly appreciated, every American holiday is simply turning into a combination Armed Forces Day and Veterans' Day. Is there any hope our species will just outgrow the bloodletting or are we hopelessly locked into the model of combat without end, amen?

We salute those who have been sacrificed to human combativeness. Honoring the fallen is the best we can do, even though it comes a distant second to actually learning to get along.

You can't go home before the pig roundup is finished

2011-05-29T21:58:00.003-05:00

About a mile from home on Elm Street we saw the lights of cars stopped in the road in front of us. The one facing toward us approached slowly. I rolled down the window.

"There's a pig!" the driver called.

I looked ahead in the patches of headlight glare. A young woman was just trying to snare the beast with what looked like a brassiere. The pig jerked its head away, snapping the flimsy garment. I pulled in behind the car in front of me. The cellist put the emergency flashers on as I got out.

The woman who had been trying to snare the beast asked, "Do you have any rope? My bikini top just isn't handling this."

Do I have any rope? We could probably have woven a sturdy and sizable net out of the amount of rope I typically have stashed in my car. In this instance I pulled out a piece about 15 feet long that's thick enough to tow a car. I know this because I've used it for that during a snowbank mishap or two.

"Is it yours?" I asked.

"No," she said. "It belongs to my neighbors up the road." She gestured in the direction we had all been headed on our way home after a long day.

"They went to get help," she said.

The young woman seemed very confident and capable. That was good, because I did not feel like going to the mat with 100-plus pounds of porker. I tied her a lasso and handed it to her.

The pig had its own ideas. We shadowed it and nearly got a line on it once or twice, but it evaded us and went into the woods. One more herder joined us from a truck that stopped. Then when the pig went into someone's yard, the couple in that house came out to join us. At that point the pig changed course and started heading back toward where the young woman told us it lives.

I kept hoping the cavalry would show up so I could retrieve my rope and go on home. Instead we gained more recruits as our straggling chase took us several hundred yards along the road.

One pair of guys had a snare with them that they intended to use on the pigs foot or snout. The couple who had joined us from their house had brought out a bucket of grain. We tried to bait the pig with it, but a few fumbled snare attempts ruined that gambit. The pig went into another yard and made another stand in front of the house.

I knew this house. An enormous Saint Bernard had lumbered out from it once and bitten me as I rode by on my bike. I'd chatted with the owners. I wouldn't call us friends, but we parted cordially. Still I wondered how they would react to an impromptu pig rodeo in their yard at 10:30 at night.

They actually didn't wake up for five or ten minutes while the herders urged each other with suggestions and instructions and dove in unsuccessful tackles that the pig greeted with outraged squeals and thrashing escapes. We ended up all the way behind the house before the homeowner stepped out onto the deck to see what the hell was going on.

As luck would have it, the pig turned out to be his. We had inadvertently returned it to its home after all. We declared victory and dispersed.

The cellist had left me so she could go on and take care of our friend's cats. I set out in the warm summer darkness to walk the rest of the way home. As the other herders passed me in their cars and trucks they called out friendly good nights. I have no idea who they were. We just did what needed to be done.

The cellist was able to take care of the cat chores and still make it back to retrieve me by the Pine River Bridge. Now for a shower and some sleep before I get up at dawn to test rivers.

I'm thinking about bacon for breakfast.

What do you call two exhibition halls full of cartoonists?

2011-05-23T19:29:00.003-05:00

In this case it was called the Maine Comics Arts Festival.

My friend Jamie had half a table at the event, which was held this past weekend at the Ocean Gateway in Portland, Maine. I went over on Sunday, meeting my associate George over there with his wife Delores.

Portland is a great little city. My favorite part is that I can sneak in a side entrance until I don't feel like driving any farther and park for free on Sundays. I won't tell you how its done because I don't want the route to get crowded. Suffice to say it's not the obvious one, but it's quite direct. Metered spaces are free on Sunday, so I can ditch the car and walk, which is my favorite way to get around the tight confines of a downtown area. I could have parked near the venue for free. I just wanted the walk.

Not knowing what to expect, I brought a drawing kit, a camera and my netbook in case I had the opportunity to sling some ink with anyone. It turned out that horizontal space was scarce and the place was crowded, so I lugged that dead weight just for the exercise. I did get to show a few sketches to some people.

Jamie is very well informed about our cartooning world. I wish I was as outgoing. The next best thing is knowing him, though, because he made sure I didn't miss anything good that he'd found.

George is another asset. A lifelong traveler, he quietly observes his surroundings and is not afraid to strike up a conversation. He spotted Jeffrey Lewis, who is a musician first and a cartoonist as a sideline. Big G saw the CDs and asked Jeff about himself. As a result we both bought some music. Turns out that one of Jeff's musical collaborators is a friend of my musical friends and teachers Seth and Beverly. Jeff probably didn't know that, but when I started putting ones and zeroes together on the Internet after I got home the connection soon surfaced.

Jeff's CD turns out to be a grin a minute and great to cartoon to. Maybe that's because I know all the connections. Still, anything that helps me stay happily at the drawing table for more than a few seconds is welcome. For some reason I find it very hard to settle down and draw compared to the hours I'll spend on a piece of writing, or sawing cacophonously at the violin in hopes of improvement.

Jamie said George and I should be sure to check out Mike Lynch, a genuine professional gag cartoonist who sells to real magazines like Reader's Digest, Playboy, the Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business review and others. That was an excellent tip, because Mike turns out to be an extremely nice guy. Maybe I only think that because he busted out laughing at one of my drawings. Every little bit helps.

I had brought two books of Nordic skiing cartoons George and I had drawn during our time at the Jackson shop. When I told Mike it was a collaboration he said he'd noticed the two styles. Nordic Confidential I and II were just hacked together in a mix of rough sketches and more finished renderings, just to get the material out.

George also spotted the title "Bikeman" at one exhibitor's table. The writer and artist there is Jon Chad, who also turns out to be connected with the Center for Cartoon Studies, where I met Jamie at their one and only gag cartooning workshop in 2006.

When I asked Jon if he was a cyclist, he declined to identify himself as such. As we talked, though, he said, "I love my bike. I love taking care of it and going places on it." I bought the two issues he had left of his Bikeman comic. It's not so much a graphic novel as graphic serialized fiction. While I would spell more meticulously and perhaps make different decisions in the drawings, I totally agree with his affection for his bike and the simple joy of going places on it. To me that is the essence of biking as opposed to a specific specialty in cycling as a sport or "lifestyle."

The Center had a lot of table frontage at the festival as well. I did not try to stop Robyn Chapman in mid flight, but it was nice to see her nonetheless. She seemed like a magical creature when I went to cartoon camp in 2006, popping up all over the neighborhood in White River Junction at moments when I needed help or guidance. At the festival she was doing portfolio reviews for aspiring cartoonists.

Time and again we tell each other: just keep cartooning. It's good to hear it.

Cartooning: The Original Social Media

2011-05-17T09:54:00.004-05:00

My friend the talented and prolific cartoonist Jamie Smith wrote in his blog recently about how he likes to work in public spaces like cafes because the background noise of people helps him concentrate.

As often happens with Jamie's observations, it made me realize something: cartooning is inherently social. As also so often happens, I feel like an idiot for not realizing it sooner and incorporating the principle years ago.

It makes perfect sense. Who is the cartoonist? The doodler draws in the back of class and hands the sketches around for the reward of laughter. Even the most awkward social outcast who draws will try to find someone with whom to share it. Fine art might or might not be snooty, but cartooning is always looking for a friend.

Writers have been known to haunt cafes and bars, too, but their art takes more time to absorb. A cartoonist has the unique ability to dash off a sketch that can be appreciated in seconds, but viewed over and over.

A stand-up comedian can snap off a hilarious observation, but repetition might make it tiresome to the performer or the audience. For the cartoonist, the panel or page can be as fresh as when it was new. If the material doesn't depend on a topic that goes stale, every new viewer can enjoy it at full potency. The cartoonist can draw in a room alone or with a handful of people, but the product can be reproduced and distributed almost infinitely.

When I moved to the woods in 1987 I did not fully appreciate how the isolation of rural life would affect my ability to work. I have the same need for social contact that any cartoonist has. When I lived in a small city I liked to go out into it to watch people. I didn't need to meet them, just to have them around. Then I got pulled off into outdoor writing, which is a strange name for the genre, if you think about it. I did do a lot of the writing outdoors, but the term refers to writing about activities conducted outdoors. The craft required that I do these outdoor things. I wanted to know if they were really a good option for the working class compared to the more expensive and destructive pursuits marketed to them. The answer turns out to be yes and no. By the time I came back around to my original goals I was already here with a snug home and an income that looks better and better as other sectors of the economy topple.

A recent public radio segment I heard featured some people interviewing for jobs at a call center. The salary was $20,000 a year. The company they were applying to work for has very strict policies. One applicant came in with very businesslike attire and years of experience to try for this job that pays what would barely be a living wage in many parts of this country. Seriously, try to have a halfway decent place to live, a somewhat reliable used car and regular dental checkups for $20,000 a year in the Baltimore-Washington area. Forget trying to live in a truly nice place and have a solid vehicle and maybe a family for that kind of money. So my steady trickle, which has actually managed to exceed call center money after all these years, doesn't seem like such a stupid choice.

Jamie mentioned that some other cartoonists have said they run the radio or have the TV news on in the background. I get drawn into the broadcast, which can be good for generating ideas, but hard when I'm trying to follow through on one of them.

Ideas flow when I'm supposed to be doing something else. The social context of work or school provides the base level of activity that stimulates the brain and offers the promise of someone to laugh as soon as you finish and show them your work. In Jackson I could often do good finished renderings. In Wolfe City I can't. I drag home bedraggled scraps of scratch paper with scribbled doodles and notes and hope I will have the energy to overcome my media paralysis and actually finish some of them on my so-called "days off."

Web publishing offers the possibility of a worldwide audience. The tricky part is hooking up cash flow to this exposure. You also have to avoid getting sucked into the vast array of truly fantastic passive entertainment and educational material on that same worldwide buffet. Your odds of being seen are really no better than if you scrawled on the wall of an alley in a second rate city on the skids. The difference is that the city can now be anywhere in the world, with the correspondingly greater number of lost pedestrians who might stumble into your seedy neighborhood and appreciate your doodle. Unless they leave a comment, the social aspect is conspicuously lacking. And processing and responding to those comments requires another chunk of your time.

Home alone today with cats climbing on me or my table, I have to try to get some work done.

I Ponder Economics

2011-05-10T07:48:00.002-05:00

In this world of illusion you have to choose your level of illusion carefully. If you have none at all you can easily become suicidally depressed, whether you act on it or not. Depression is by nature a slow-motion suicide because you sit and wait for death when you do nothing else with your time. So it pays to avoid the realization that all human existence is pointless unless it propels you into a hardworking pursuit of distracting hedonism. In that case you become a driver of the economy. You have to pay for those physical gratifications somehow, and that means trading goods and services.

If you want to try for happiness you have to come up with a solid set of stories you tell yourself about the things you do to fill your day and calm your mind for sleep at night. I was going to say lies, but if you know they're lies they will cease to work and you're back to suicidal depression or a knowing pursuit of distraction in a vast cosmos of pointlessness. The veil will inevitably slip from time to time, leaving you staring into the fathomless blackness.

If you decide your life has a point or points, pursuit of them will provide the structure to support the comforting facade you place over the big black hole. You can equally validly decide that you simply like certain things in life and will enjoy them as much as possible until the end, making no bets about their higher purpose or what experience might lie beyond the point where our perception appears to cease.

While you're here you have to figure out how to generate income.

I know a lot of people in the realm collectively known as The Arts. They are actors, writers, directors, painters, cartoonists, musicians and even tradespeople who have an artistic approach to their work. The tradespeople have an advantage over the purely artistic types because they offer a practical service like auto repair, carpentry or plumbing in their own eccentric way.

The unifying trait in the artistic personality is independent thought. Their creativity might be completely derivative, but every artist feels independent and does not perform well under someone else's authority. My auto mechanic started his own shop because he did not like how he was being told to fix people's cars to low standards in shops where he was merely an employee. For the luxury of setting his own standards he undertook the endless work of being his own boss. He's staying afloat, but he can't tolerate helpers with low standards any more than he could work for an employer with them. He works as hard as he can to meet his own standards for as many customers as he can serve at that level. It means a lot of six-day -- if not seven-day -- weeks.

Many of my friends in the pure arts: music, drama, visual media both serious and humorous, teach others their craft. The money they get for lessons and classes helps fund their more speculative creative ventures. However, they create more creators as they go. If even a fraction of the students go on to put up their creations for the public to view, judge and perhaps purchase, they fill the display with more and more for the consuming public to pay for, or not. That money has to come from somewhere. Even the money for lessons has to come from somewhere.

Right now, the Internet has evolved to a point at which creative people, good or not so good, can put up their work and possibly gain some income from it. I gather from my musician friends that the model is not serving them well because their intellectual property can escape through too many leaks without producing a return flow of cash. While a performer can gain worldwide exposure, apparently it's very easy to lose all benefit of the fame because the cash flow fails. In fact, according to one musician's article, musicians now find themselves paying more and more services to publicize them while receiving no money in return. If no one has to pay for recordings anymore, the only sources of income are live gigs and authorized merchandise. That seems like a throwback to the age when musicians played not only without being recorded, but without amplification except by their own numbers and the acoustics of the performance space.

Returning to the concept of what is worthwhile in human existence, how much should we care about people who have chosen to devote extraordinary amounts of time to perfecting skills that do not produce food, build shelter or move people and goods from place to place? The answer begins with the fact that we are not ants. We as a species seem to believe there is more to our existence than mere existence. We evolved these arts as a way to enrich our lives. The fact that some of us prove more adept than others at them complicates matters because then the arts of a few become desirable by a larger audience that finds itself incapable of doing as well, or who simply like the product even if they are fellow creators.

Many adult advisors did their best to convince me to get a good job and do art as a hobby. As far as they were concerned I was throwing away my life by chasing a dream of creative success. Was it because they'd seen my art and knew it wasn't good enough to succeed or did they give the same advice to any student? I'll never know.

How often do you find yourself looking at something and asking "but what good is it?" It seems like a reasonable question when looking at a piece of art that seems badly done or in poor taste, or listening to music that's disturbing or sloppily performed. In the realm of pure art, so much is subjective that a lot of it can seem like crap and a certain amount undeniably is. But apply the same question to everything you see, not just art, and be ruthlessly critical. Keep at it long enough --perhaps not long at all -- and you question the value of nearly everything. And that's a good thing. You want to keep checking your assumptions not just once but as many times as it takes to get around all sides of them and make them prove their worth. Even if you continue apparently unchanged, at least you ran the checklist.

This just in: Osama bin Laden is still dead

2011-05-03T10:46:00.002-05:00

At the cost of billions of dollars and thousands of lives the man most associated in the public's mind with the 9/11 plot has finally been gunned down by an amazing team of fighters from the United States.

In terms of cost effectiveness, chaos is always a better deal than order. That would not be true if all was chaos. Nothing would be a good deal. But if your hobby is anarchy or subversion you definitely get more bang for your buck as the evil genius planting bombs in unexpected places or sending suicidal minions out to blow themselves spectacularly to smithereens as a political or philosophical statement. While the chumps try to keep a functional society going, you can hide out in your lair, plotting. Release the occasional propaganda video to stir the pot.

Osama may be dead, but who really won? We have no idea how much he might have been enjoying life. What did we really take from him? It could have been everything. It could have been not much. Rumors had circulated about his poor health. He could already have been on the way out. And he can't have been surprised that the forces of retribution continued to hunt him. The magnitude of the hunt will give the dead man an aura of greatness among those inclined to admire killers who accept their own death as the price of their lifestyle choice. Is that supposed to make it all right?

Now that first impressions are wearing off we can get down to the serious long-term business of arguing over it. It has to be used as political football for as long as it will rise nicely to a sharp kick. It will go flat eventually, but hardly soon enough.

Meanwhile, the actual snuff operation has the makings of a great movie. Who's got the hot hand writing that shit these days? This one practically writes itself. When was the last time a mission like this worked so well and could actually be publicized?

When the world changes right nearby.

2011-02-23T20:53:00.002-05:00

The world is always changing. it's just that most times it's far and muffled. But sometimes you're yanked out of bed, swung around by one leg and flung into a new universe.

The phone went off with a harsh jangle at about five past midnight last night. Usually the initial surge of alarm subsides when the caller turns out to be someone in a different time zone who forgot the difference or a caller excited by something great that happened to them.

Once in a while it's as bad as the first surge of fear and then some.

The cellist answered the phone. It's on her side of the bed.

"What? No! How? When? Are you all right?" She sounded instantly breathless and shocked. I could hear a tearful woman's voice on the other end of the line. I began repeating the questions the cellist was asking, to know what had happened, to whom, and how badly.

Her brother had been found dead in his house while his wife and two toddlers were away visiting her parents. He was 47.

Over the years I have had friends of friends die young. Just a couple of weeks ago I finally got a solid Google hit on one of my old fencing teammates I'd been trying to track down for years. It was his obituary.

While I'm no great fan of death, it doesn't freak me out when it happens to someone young. By the time I finished high school I'd lost one schoolmate to cancer when she was in fifth grade. Another graduated from high school with one leg. By the end of the following year she had lost the other leg and her life. I know death has no respect for your age, your plans, how beloved you are or your social position. Some people live a long time. Others don't. Sometimes the death makes a certain amount of sense: the deceased may have a medical condition, dangerous habits or hazardous activities. Our cars kill 40,000 of us a year in the United States alone. But when someone just drops, and he's the only parent in his group of siblings it changes everyone's outlook. The man is dead, that's shocking enough. His survivors still need to live. We all have to figure out how to help them with the plain practical matter of going on.

When we went to bed we thought the bad news was that we had less time than we had thought to find a kidney transplant facility for her and see if we need to set up one of those transplant chains to get live donors lined up with matched recipients. If I match her it's just $150,000 worth of plug-and-play. The odds are against it.

Organ transplantation isn't like any other purchase. You only get one shot. The organ has to be right. The surgical team has to be right. It's a lot to absorb. We have about six years. Will a medical miracle change our situation? One can hope, of course, but again, the odds are against it.

The future looks complicated and expensive. In the meantime we still have to get to work every day and pay our bills. The future is unknowable. Lay the groundwork for what you hope to reach. Remember that most of your plans and absolutely none of your hopes guarantee anything.

Attention Motorists

2011-02-06T10:47:00.003-05:00

The only time it is appropriate to leave your vehicle idling is when you are using it to kill yourself inside your garage.

We also request that you rethink that decision and choose a more environmentally sensitive suicide method like drowning in the ocean or smearing yourself with raw steak and going for a naked hike in grizzly country.

It's gonna get deep in New Hampshire

2011-02-01T07:38:00.002-05:00

Yeah, we have a big snowstorm headed our way. The total between today's light shot and tomorrow's big dump could be as much as 22 inches. It's gonna get deep around here.

It makes a nice metaphor for the beginning of primary campaigning for the Presidential election in 2012.

My risk of a stroke went up with my blood pressure this morning when I turned on the television looking for an updated weather forecast and instead caught a few minutes of Mitt Romney in an interview on Good Morning America. That's not good for an aging man with no health insurance.

Mitt's health care plan in the 2008 campaign was to make everyone in the country buy health insurance, as he had made everyone in Massachusetts buy it when he was governor. Now he says that President Obama's health care bill, requiring all Americans to buy health insurance, is unconstitutional. He says it's a power reserved to the states. If your state is a slum, tough luck.

According to what I've read, Thomas Jefferson would never have envisioned a state like California or Texas, as big and rich as a small country. His original concept called for small states of more uniform size and a largely agrarian character. As I recall, we weren't supposed to keep a standing military force, either. Instead we would call together the state militias in the event our federation was threatened. The coastal states can furnish naval forces. The ships can be built of the native wood.

Following Mitt's logic on health care, instead of trying to get a plan through one federal bureaucracy, we the taxpayers and working stiffs have to try to get something through 50 state bureaucracies with widely varying tax revenues. If the federal government offers some sort of aid, that bureaucracy will have to grind its gears to dispense these funds to help the poorer states make up their shortages.

Mitt says he's pro-business. He's certainly favorable to the insurance business. While politicians wrangle in Congress and state legislatures all over this mythically great land, the insurance business will go on as usual, making book on people's health and writing rules to suit themselves.

Living in New Hampshire gives us a front-row seat to the political circus early in the process. It can be fun to watch all the candidates until you start to listen to them and care what they say. Then you wish they were doing it somewhere else. It's only funny when they step on a cow flop. And with the state of agriculture in this country, that doesn't happen nearly often enough.

The Magic Words

2011-01-18T16:21:00.002-05:00

Live = Free. Live - Free = Die.

Listening to a dope-growing pig farmer at a public hearing about wetland buffers last night, I realized that the phrase "Live free or die" effectively nullifies all environmental protection.

If you subscribe to The Code, any restriction on your freedom, by anyone, for any reason, calls for your armed resistance. If you fail to remove the restriction, by logic you must die. Even self restraint counts as unacceptable tyranny. It might set a precedent for a standard of behavior less than free. At the first urge to show self restraint, the true believer should commit suicide. Anything less will dilute the purity of everyone else's freedom.

Obviously, any concern for your neighbors, descendants, other species, aesthetics, or any factor other than the fulfillment of your immediate and ongoing desires makes you less than free. The true believer that we must Live Free or Die has an obligation to destroy the environment that supports all life, since death is the alternative to living free. We must live free to the hilt, to the bitter end, or it won't have been worth living at all.

The supporters of living free or dying have made it an unofficial governing document. It's four blunt one-syllable words. It's easy to remember and it sounds so tough!

In the rest of his discourse, the pig farmer basically said that he was too stupid to understand the proposed ordinance, so it was wrong. It is clear that the speech centers of the brain are nearly the last thing to be destroyed by decades of drug use.

This same pig farmer walked into my yard when I moved here in 1989 and told me he was the local dope grower, so if I wanted any smoke I should look him up.

"The cops know all about me and they don't do nothin'," he said. "So it's perfectly fine."

About four years later, some friends moved in about a quarter-mile away, just across the river. The pig farmer appeared as if by magic, walking right into their house. He repeated the same welcome-wagon message.

I hadn't seen him in years. I thought he might be dead. Only from the neck up, it would appear.

He left, daring anyone to come change his lifestyle in his swampy lair down a mud road.

In the same meeting we spent an hour and a half on one definition because a dyslexic was wrangling over homonyms. Of all the crap I had brought regarding the science of wetland buffers, the one thing I needed was my big, fat dictionary.

You want to know why nothing gets done by the government? By the time everyone is finished arguing the problem has either gotten too big to be fixed, in which case it becomes "an engine of the economy," or gone away on its own. Gone away doesn't necessarily mean it got better. Maybe whoever you were trying to save had already died. Maybe the problem mutated into a different problem.

Sullen people sulked over their bad real estate investments as if the rest of us owed them something for their stupidity. We let them speak. Their supporters growled their tough slogan. They sneered at government, the big and bad. No individual here is any more responsible than average for the collective bad choices made in America from the mid 1970s onward, but we're all paying the price. We have to be absurdly careful going forward because we were so greedily careless when we should have been starting to adjust our behavior while the problems were smaller.

People made bad decisions in other parts of the world, but America, self-styled leader of the "free" world, owed that world a better example. Instead we chose vanity and an escalating standard of self indulgence.

I subscribe to no religion. I am afraid of most of them. I don't moralize as someone who believes we should dress in somber clothes and deprive ourselves of fun. I just believe in doing a personal environmental and social impact statement on that fun. Hedonism is absolutely fine as long as it's sustainable.

Environmental standards are meant to put helpful limits around development. People who just want to plunge ahead without restraint won't view those standards as helpful, but those are exactly the people from whom the standards will protect the rest of us.

I get lonely when the sun goes down

2011-01-10T16:56:00.003-05:00

I thought my old laptop was spazzing out as I worked on the minutes from the last Conservation Commission meeting. Text kept highlighting itself, the cursor was jumping around. Then I realized that the cat on my lap had a paw on the touch pad.

I get lonely when the sun goes down. I was making up a song about that, kind of a nice one to start with, but it deteriorated, the way my compositions so often do. Perhaps the cat was responding to the soulful blues-y tone of my lament when she clambered onto my lap beside the computer and started her accidental editing.

She has left me to my work. I should get it done.

Political Vitriol

2011-01-09T18:04:00.002-05:00

The recent shooting spree in Tucson has brought attention to the ugly rhetoric in American politics as if it was a recent thing.

A Republican I know, a man in his 80s, has told me more than once that a woman he worked with in 1963 made no secret how pleased she was when John Kennedy was shot.

In a nation founded on a war of independence from its colonial parent and then advanced with systematic genocide against the indigenous people of North America, violence is part of our fundamental makeup. A large chunk of this nation insisted it was their right to enslave persons of African descent they had imported and bred for servitude, until the issue came to a head in the 1860s and the nation fought a long, bloody war over it. Once the official war was over, the subjugation of those African Americans continued, even as the country returned to its westward expansion at the expense of the aboriginals.

When cattlemen and sheep herders had a conflict, guns were drawn. When labor got uppity and demanded concessions from the privileged management class, goons beat them into submission. Examples abound of force crushing reason throughout our nation's history. Those are only the recent chapters in the history of our species.

Evolution moves very slowly. In every generation, more and more people do see that humans need to move on to more intellectual, less brutal forms of conflict resolution. A more cooperative society emerges, excruciatingly gradually. Attempts to force a revolutionary change of mind and heart always meet intractable opposition. Will we destroy ourselves before understanding becomes widespread? I probably will not live to find out. Visionaries envision, but grunts continue to obstruct. People who think that killing somebody actually proves something keep doing their thing, making the actual task of governing more difficult than it already is.

Why private health insurance can't help but fail

2010-12-14T15:08:00.002-05:00

An advertisement for United Health Care on television last night stated that they can provide high quality service because of their size. In other words, their group is large enough to buffer inevitable losses, should they be forced into actually paying a claim. They take in enough in premiums to pay their executives and managers, and the legions of telephone operators health insurance companies place between the customer and customer satisfaction, i.e. medical services actually reimbursed by the company.

If you believe the advertisement, all is well with the health insurance titan. As a corporation competing in the marketplace, it has gathered many customers. One can safely assume these customers have been gathered from United Health Care's competitors. Those competitors are therefore smaller, less able to withstand the stresses of being in business, and less able to offer tempting premiums (relatively speaking) in the health insurance field.

By the principles of business competition, these weaker players must fail or consolidate. Unless some artificial external force, like regulation, steps in to prevent United Health Care and the other players from duking it out everywhere in the country, market forces will prevail.

By the principles we've been told guide the level of premiums, the biggest company should be able to provide the best coverage. Let's ignore for a moment the temporary and misleading "introductory offers" a smaller company might use to gather customers who will later pay for their folly with a sharp spike in their costs. Just judging a company's value on the basis of size, the best health insurance company would have a nationwide monopoly and a group that includes every living soul. In short, it would be universal. But just when you think the socialists have maneuvered the free marketers into checkmate, remember two things: monopolies get broken up (at least according to legal technicality, if you're thinking of the oil and drug cartels), and private businesses will push for the most profit they can squeeze from the industry in which they operate. If that industry has no real competition, everybody has to fork out whatever the company demands. Introduce a competitor and you make smaller groups, pushing premiums up on the basis of the increased risk.

One giant group, insured by a non-profit entity, is the only approach that will control costs and cover everyone fairly. That's never going to happen in this country. I just wanted to remind y'all what you will be missing and why.

Ain't freedom grand?

2010-11-07T10:43:00.006-05:00

One of the paradoxes of American freedom is that no one needs to feel a sense of national responsibility. As long as we can hire an army and make a little fuss over them, no one else needs to do a thing except for themselves. The fact that almost anyone with a choice chooses not to serve their country in that way should tell us all something about the desirability of continuing with conflict as a model of interaction. So far, that message has been lost. We continue to dare each other to back up our positions with brawn. This great nation boils down to my great country club. Who let all these poor people breed? Didn't anybody tell them that if they won't work for nothing we won't employ them?

The problems are always somebody else's fault. The fact that some of the finger pointing has merit makes it even more complex and contentious.

The only hope the middle class might have had in the face of this is that the producers need consumers. But as the manufacturers build up poorer nations by sending factories over there, they also create customers. Those new consumers, nearer where the goods are produced, have a little less money than the residents of former industrial nations in decline, but the manufacturers will save a bundle on shipping.

Durable change is always evolutionary, not revolutionary. A cataclysm may alter things in the geological world, but human nature remains human nature. In years, perhaps decades, the developing nations will have caught up to the previously developed ones. Only then might we deal with the inequities between labor and management. But even that remains questionable. Several factors could keep the debate from proceeding. To name but a few:

1. Industrial development in less advanced countries could finish destroying the climate balance that makes life itself possible.

2. Some jackass could start a bigger war than has been fashionable recently. Wars are great economic engines, but when the environment is already delicately balanced the impact of major destruction could tip thing over the edge even more quickly than careless industrialism. Idiots trying to preserve the status of a nation in decline might be willing to make an "all or nothing, live free or die" effort to put their faction back on top or go down gloriously in the attempt. Similarly, idiots in one of the countries that was never great and has no industrial future might feel like detonating whatever they can get their hands on.

3. Governments in the formerly great world powers could crumble before their form of social stratification has had a chance to spread uniformly around the globe. If communication and transportation degrade, local customs and superstitions will regain their former power to promote xenophobia. English is the language of aviation. It didn't need to be English, but that's how it worked out. If the spread of one language falters, everyone who is interested has to pick up another one, should a single candidate emerge from the ruckus. Will it remain widespread if people don't do a lot of flying? We're not that far from xenophobia as it is. Take away the ability of people to mix and mingle and we're right back to eating or enslaving strangers who crawl ashore from shipwrecks. The cute ones we might have sex with first.

Because everything you do makes a difference, but nothing you do matters, future generations (if any) will simply deal with whatever reality they inherit. If we go back to the level of the 17th Century, that's what the kids will breed in. That's the ultimate truth: if anyone is left to eat and screw, that's what they'll do. The rest is just ornamentation. No one planned in the long term to get us where we are. We're here because of a combination of short term goals and philosophies intended to be observed without end. That's not a long-term development plan.

No one explained this adequately when I was growing up. I doubt if too many people thought in these terms. I was taught short term planning and lifetime philosophies. Short term includes a whole human life span. Some people like to dwell on how brief that is (tick tock), but seldom go beyond the impact that has on retirement planning or how much time we get to spend hanging out with our friends and loved ones -- short term aspects again. Humans make a big deal out of themselves when, in geological terms, they're just a passing itch on the surface of the globe. This planet doesn't need us. Only we need us.

As far as national responsibility goes, we're better off without too insular a sense of national unity and purpose. Unfortunately, as national identity shifted to a particular flag waving above personal gain, we've been slow to accept the concept of the individual human living on the human planet and needing to take care of it. Too many of us have no sense of ownership or stewardship, depending on your inclination. Those who fear one-world government see only that. They recoil in revulsion from anything that looks like global leadership. And they are right to do so. Why should one-world government work any better than the many examples of messed up national, regional and local government? But we're stuck with each other. We'd better figure out how to balance all our competing wants before we are no longer able to meet our needs.

Evolution grinds slowly. It tends to hinge on physical characteristics. Species success depends entirely on creating future generations. We've got that down. Now we deal with the trickier problem of intellectual evolution. Signs of it are obvious. So are signs of resistance to it. The mere fact of an individual's existence and breeding readiness mean nothing to the future survival and prosperity of an idea. The idea needs minds in which to flourish. So humans, always cooking up something, keep experimenting. Because so much is theoretical, we argue and argue while physical effects of previous decisions continue to accumulate.

2010-11-04T06:13:00.000-05:00

The 2010 election in a nutshell: "I got tired of waiting for your computer to download an important update, so I hit it with a rock."

November 2: The Groundhog Day of politics

2010-11-02T15:03:00.002-05:00

I predict that no matter which party controls Congress at the end of today's voting (and any necessary recounts) we will see no improvement for at least two years --if then.

If the Democrats retain control, the Republicans will continue to obstruct them. As shown in the sabotage of the health care bill, even if something big does pass, it will be so mangled as to be completely useless.

If the Republicans win, they will do as little as possible to make things better to make sure the Obama administration does not get any credit for turning things around. The financiers of the Republican Party can weather considerable hard times to squeeze the majority of voters and get them to blame the wrong people, as usual, for their difficulties.

Once the Republicans assure themselves both Congress and the White House they can return to strip mining the country as they so happily did under George Bush. They have put themselves against government for so long that they no longer know how to run one for the good of an entire nation.

The vocal factions that want even smaller government will make sure that the debate includes lots of pistol-wearing and head stomping.

Don't like my prediction? Prove me wrong.

About the labor charges:

2010-10-17T15:48:00.003-05:00

You are purchasing an irreplaceable part of another person's life to perform a task you were unable or unwilling to do yourself.

Much of my job involves solving problems for peanuts. Some people obviously consider the tasks they bring us to be beneath them, while at the same time requiring skills they do not possess. These are the people who typically complain about how much our services cost. They have decided their lives are worth more than ours. Some of them might be surprised to hear it put that way. Some of them might acknowledge the fact and say that we are where we have put ourselves. But by rank-ordering people by their occupation we create a climate in which people on lower levels think only of getting above them at any cost. This does not translate into excellent job performance. Think instead of a camp full of prisoners of war trying every trick they can think of to tunnel out, go over the wall or sabotage the schemes of those who hold them. Not everyone who ends up on a lower rung "deserves" to be there.

Updating the technology

2010-06-21T18:51:00.002-05:00

I'm writing this on a new-to-me iMac G5. My old notebook, the faithful HP ze5170 has been manifesting more and more ominous symptoms. I knew I wanted something that would do more tricks. When a Mac-savvy friend mentioned this unit she had been harboring I made the move to Apple.

I had been bilingual. The newspaper used Apple computers, and so does my wife. They really do have a knack for getting the software out of the way of creativity. My Mac-tech friend, who is also awesome musician Beverly Woods, fitted this thing out with a big honkin' hard drive and various graphics software. And I could lay the monitor flat and sleep on it. There's a lot of acreage here.

I picked it up earlier this week, but haven't had a chance to turn it on and load drivers for the resident peripherals until today.

I must now live up to it. My wife has a song project she wants illustrated.

After getting by on the netbook for so long it feels wonderfully roomy to have a full-size keyboard. I have to resume my dutiful attempts to learn touch typing.

I keep reaching for a touch pad that isn't there. But this is nice. Pretty darn nice.

Beginning summer with a chore for winter

2010-06-21T15:47:00.004-05:00

Wood is not a heat source for the indolent. This summer I actually got motivated to make drying stacks from the unruly pile dumped from my firewood supplier's truck. What you see in the picture took nearly four hours. I have more to do, but I got tired. The job gets old long before it gets done.

Wood pellets have become fashionable, but pellets are a manufactured product. Their price and availability fluctuates radically. Pellets and wood chips also contribute to forest loss. They seem at first like a great way to use more of the tree, but the removal of slash and treetops from logged areas contributes to soil loss as more organic material is carted off and turned into carbon dioxide and soot in heating and energy systems instead of being left to rot.

Firewood won't work for everyone. If too many people used it, North America would become a desert in a matter of months. There are simply too many people. For now, it works for some of us. Other energy sources came to dominate for good reason. But there's no fuel like and old fuel, when it's right for the job.

The fan droned placidly

2010-06-18T05:48:00.004-05:00

Members of the conservation commission attended the selectmen's meeting on Tuesday expecting to be criticized and possibly insulted for a decision they'd been forced to make based on inadequate information. We had not been summoned, but presented ourselves to report, as civil and rational colleagues, if the board had any questions or comments.

We are technically appointed by the select board. They could fire us and form a new commission if they chose. I do my best to help here, but if the town leaders decide that a less active and committed commission reflects the will of the citizens better, they have the power to take that controversial step. I can certainly find other ways to keep busy during the declining years of life on Earth.

We were not on the agenda. The board would only have received our decision that afternoon. We were there as a courtesy in case they wanted to address any of their concerns immediately.

Apparently they did not.

I had to leave before the end because of a previously scheduled personal commitment. Before I left I watched them govern for a while.

It's a strange little anti-government government. These people are paid with our tax dollars, which makes them kin to all in that position, but their caustic comments and eye rolls about the feds and state officials clearly showed that they do not sense it.

The chair of the board walks a convoluted tightrope above his constituency here in town. As referred to in an earlier post, the small population here holds the width of viewpoints held in the national population. We have tree-hugging socialists and gun-toting authority-haters. Interestingly, both these polar opposites get together to agree on the basics like road maintenance and other routine functions of the community before returning their customary scathing assessments of each other's mental competence.

The select board does not hold this place together so much as balance on top of the constant minor earthquake. The political speech is a caricature, the duplicity almost instantaneous, as people come forward who have very different positions. Politicians aren't lying, they're just trying to reflect the desires of whoever is in front of them at that moment. Sensitive to the entire audience, this board leans in an anti-government direction and praises property rights and jobs over environmental protection. The environmentalists are used to taking crap and being dismissed. Apparently we can take it and always will. The sad fact is, they're right. Short-sighted, selfish people who are willing to act out and destroy things always get attention over the small, the peaceful, and the hard to understand. If something is hard to understand, get angry at it and order it to become simple! And spout a catch phrase when you do it.

I don't say it's easy to govern, especially when you can face a room packed with angry neighbors. They also stop you in the grocery store, the post office and on the road. Not me, mind you. The board and commission on which I serve tend to function mostly ignored. But the selectmen are the headliners. They become the lightning rod. I've seen the chairman go from being a quiet but open person to someone not vastly, but noticeably, more guarded and angry.

Service to the people forces you to deal with everything about them. It either hardens you somewhat or it cuts you to pieces. That hardness does not have to be cold and cruel. It can simply be a measure of clinical detachment or prudent defensiveness. Or it can form a shell around a bitter center.

Local Control

2010-06-14T19:35:00.003-05:00

Small town government is really depressing.

In the human race there's only a small pool of good leaders and another pool of leaders whose style falls more into the category of warlords and dictators. These two groups account for all the ideas the rest of us get recruited to support or oppose. People who possess fewer leadership qualities fill the management and labor positions. Some people try to stay out of social systems entirely.

So much for the general situation. Someone somewhere has compiled statistics on the actual proportions in the population. The idea that 80 percent of the work is done by 20 percent of the people springs to mind, but that's a tiny fraction of the story. Leaders pick the work.

In a small population the smaller percentage of good leaders represents a minuscule actual number. They seldom hear praise, but complaints are often delivered face to face in unconstructive terms. Leading in a small town can be like leading outlaws or pirates. As long as you can maintain control in the ranks you won't be deposed. You have to show them victories and plunder and prove that you are still tougher than they are.

In some towns the veneer of civility may be thicker than in others. In this one the division between people with what you might call a global perspective and those with an intensely self-centered one is sharp. At this point there appear to be no swing voters. It all comes down to apathy. The ones who would choose not to be governed do their best to ignore government and remain invisible to it. The ones who believe government can be conducted civilly and productively for long-term benefits keep plugging away. But there aren't enough of them to fill all the necessary slots.

The present supreme leadership of the town seems unduly susceptible to pressure from the faction with very short-term goals. Unfortunately, small towns get run by people with the time to devote to it. The alternatives who have offered themselves for the position have all been demonstrably worse.

Petty people in positions of power present a particular problem. Some people fear rules because petty leaders can use them as power tools. But petty leaders who try to circumvent the rules end up doing worse damage to the system we are supposed to operate for the good of all. Sometimes the authority figure hung up on procedure is not just doing it to swing a big stick. Sometimes it really has to do with respect for the institution that is supposed to operate on a time frame beyond a single human lifetime. The system is supposed to outlive each of us individually because it serves us collectively across generations. Therefore it may have needs that supersede our short-term desires.

The 1960s brought about a great many good and necessary things. Unfortunately it also fed a culture of self indulgence and impatience that finds expression in such disparate ways as huge cars, suburban mansions, swingers' clubs and doomsday religions. Party or worship like there's no tomorrow. There's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The good things from the 1960s were a willingness to question authority at all levels and a sense of individual worth that can lead to a very responsible respectful society if you recognize that every self has worth, no greater or less than your own. It's hard when those selves choose to do things that range from annoying to abhorrent. No one said life was easy. It just gets hard in different ways as we learn more and more about ourselves and our universe. For every physical hazard we have reduced, a new ethical dilemma arises. For every technology that makes life seem easier we have a new set of unintended consequences to discover and mitigate.

I didn't ask for this. If I didn't have to work for a living I would happily just sit for days at a time, watching the mountains erode under the ever-changing weather. I've never felt the need to be constantly busy. But someone has to do something about, or for, the people who do. I have to walk into the arena of the pissing contest, umbrella in hand, and speak in defense of reason.

Cartooning is fiddling in the world of art

2010-06-07T15:07:00.004-05:00

The world of fiddling includes hot players with extensive classical training and highly regarded performers with little or no formalized training. Likewise the ranks of cartooning include many who attended or even finished art school. Others have acquired skills mostly on their own to bring their ideas to paper.

Ultimately, the result is what matters. The formally trained practitioner in either art or music may have a bigger toolbox or a deeper understanding of the few tools applied in a given circumstance. I won't argue against a proper education. But as one who has evaded a full formal education I have to hope for the outsider as well.

Fiddling is music of the people. Cartooning is art of the people. I'm sure the first cartoon was an unflattering depiction of the tribal chief that led directly to the first commandment forbidding graven images and the first cartoonist to get stoned. Before Art was invented, people just tried to get a point across with pictures. You need me to draw you a picture? As art has developed, certain artistic people have collected advanced techniques to help them make a picture they find more satisfactory. At the same time, scribbling miscreants all over the world are doing crude renderings and eliciting huge laughs from their audience. I remember a few times in school when my friends and I could not inhale because we were trying to control our laughter during a class when someone had made or found a scribbled cartoon.

One of the best art teachers I've met was a fellow student at the first and only Center for Cartoon Studies gag cartooning workshop in 2006. I hope I would feel the same way if I encountered him as an undergraduate properly enrolled in one of his classes. All I can say is that right now what he says resonates with me.

Jamie Smith posts items about his teaching and cartooning endeavors at his blog, Ink & Snow. Here is a link to his profile information. If you wonder how it's done and how you might do some yourself, scroll through his articles. If you just want to laugh at his cartoons you can find links to take you to a bunch of them.

He did not get a college art education. But he is hardly uneducated.

One thing unifies successful people: they identify their core interest and refuse to be dislodged from it. The same quality afflicts many unsuccessful people who for various reasons fail to make it, but you seldom find a successful person who got there without trying.

I am a fiddler by temperament. I never took well to formal education even though I remained institutionalized for 17 years. I did not have the drive and the need to break out when I could remain subsidized and still pay attention only to what interested me in my immediate vicinity. My major regret is that I did not take more advantage of what I could have sniffed out. I don't really regret any lack of attention in the actual classes for which I registered.

Live and learn, the saying goes. Of course it's easy to pick alternate choices looking back. It really doesn't get any easier looking forward. You can make more rational choices but you can't control what comes from outside. You can only continue to follow your interests in the style that suits you.

When I started cartooning in seventh grade, I did not study it exhaustively. I did not understand the difficulty of the drawing process. Words and ideas came easily. They still do. The drawing comes as hard to me as prying notes off a page and hammering them one at a time like nails into my skull so that I can twiddle through 45 seconds of music. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but I can come up with a thousand words far more quickly than I can produce a professional quality drawing to depict them. After looking at some of the cartooning blogs on the glorious Interweb, I'm not sure I have ever produced a professional quality drawing, regardless of what has gotten published, even though I got paid for some of it. There is some serious damn' art out there.

I scribble on.

Sawing Down a Redwood Tree with a Nail File

2010-05-24T11:46:00.003-05:00

My music teacher puts her adult students in her school recitals along with her other students. At least once a year we stand or sit before the assembled audience to perform what we've been practicing for a few months. Sometimes we only perform as part of a larger group made up mostly of children. At other events we have enough pieces of our own to rate a short section of the program in our own age group.

On Friday, May 21, we had two pieces supposedly ready, and then were scheduled to join the whole orchestra for a three-page finale number. It had a lot of eighth notes.

Your common eighth note doesn't look like much. One or two at a time they present only a quick hurdle to hop in the normal 4/4 world. But when they gang up on you it's a different story. And then there's cut time. Take your 4/4, chop it to 2/2 (that's two beats to a measure, half note has one beat), smear liberally with eighth notes, heat and serve.

One fellow striver in the adult group pointed out that you can cheat your way into it by counting it as a fast four, seeing as there weren't any half notes anyway. I do the same thing riding rollers to music. I'll subdivide a beat to find a cadence that keeps me in time to whatever is playing. It's a damn sight easier when you're strapped to pedals on fixed-length crank arms than when you're trying to find a series of unmarked targets with the fingers of your left hand while coordinating the movement of the bow held in your right.

Over the years I have avoided practicing when my teacher was at home because I did not want to subject her to student noises when she's off duty. Sometimes I can't help playing when she's home, because I have to get ready for one of these recitals. At other times she'll throw me a new exercise or book or show me a technique. Only recently did she actually tell me she prefers not to have to hear me struggle because she is so conditioned to respond. So now it seems more important to find other times and places to practice.

I don't like to be heard by anyone, really. The noises I make just aren't that good. It's supposed to be enjoyable, unless you're a really advanced modern composer for whom the academic exercise of a particular piece of music theory is more important than the listener's pleasure. Some of them seem actually hostile to the notion of listening pleasure. But that's a small group. I hardly qualify as an advanced musical theorist.

Now that the weather is mild I can practice in the garage. The mosquitoes can be a problem, but that may help with faster tempos. Also remember to stand between the hanging kayaks so you don't jam the tip of the bow into the bottom of a boat.

The recitals always seem to come a week or two sooner than I'm ready for them. This time I had put a lot of time into the long, difficult piece, which made the shorter pieces seem easier. If nothing else I figured our plucky group would knock those out of the park. On the longer one I had drilled the hard sections over and over, and tried to knit them together. Music in parts sounds weird when the parts are played separately.

Many of the parents in the audience know me from other activities. Others are strangers. Anyone who has a student in the program for a season or two finds out about the adult group, but not every child stays in it. Sometimes the audience includes nonplussed adults looking at the handful of people on stage who are their own age or older, but who sound like they're anywhere between 10 and 17 when they play. Who are we? Why do we put ourselves and our audience through this?

Some of the parents in the audience tried to learn with us. They understand the best.

When we finished this time I felt drained, and not in a good way. Every piece went off the rails at some point. We dragged it back every time, but I had let myself hope for better.

After every recital, our teacher tells us we did well. She listens for what went right and praises it. She always tells us to keep reading and find a place to jump back in when we fumble.

I look forward to a time when every performance isn't a continuous exercise in damage control. It's actually a mark of improving skill to know how to do damage control, but damage occurred nonetheless. If someone hadn't been playing the right stuff while those of us in the weeds were getting out of them, our detours would not have sounded anything like what the composer put on the page. Sure, the audience isn't looking at a score. Even if we're playing a scaled-down version of a popular classic, like the 1812 Overture, people might assume the part they've never heard is part of the rearrangement. But I know the difference. It wasn't supposed to be that way.

At one point in the 1812 on Friday, my teacher was playing my part along with me. I heard a mess start to my left. Suddenly the teacher was yanking on the downbeats. I didn't know if she was trying to get me to do something differently, so I hit turbulence. It turned out she was trying to get the cellist to hammer the downbeats. I don't know if the cellist got the message. The thing about these short versions is that they're over quickly. Right or wrong, finish together and look like you planned it that way.

Because my music teacher needs to put these events behind her as soon as they happen, I don't even have anyone to discuss my performance with until many days later when she might be willing to talk about it. I might want to groove on the fact that I found a note I could pedal on for a measure or two until I could jump back in, or that I worked out a shift to avoid having to work around my fat fingers crossing strings.

Musicians can suffer from a certain kind of jealousy or competitiveness, a hierarchical consciousness that makes them critical of concepts they themselves did not bring to the conversation. It's especially pronounced when a novice discovers a concept independently or learns it during independent research. Who am I, without a music license, to develop theories? A rare few seem to possess only a generous spirit, but maybe I simply have not seen them at their worst. Some have it really badly, others only display it under the right provocation. As with any insecurity, it rises and falls with the sufferer's general level of insecurity. I have to phrase questions carefully.

In the hierarchy of musicians, the known better musicians can expound with relative impunity, especially if they do so with charming humility. Even if they're arrogant jerks, if they have the chops to back it up they can be as snotty as they like. Musicians of nearly equal, completely equal or greater skill may engage to various degrees in the exchange of barbs, but the rest of you louts may only grunt along with whichever team you choose to support.

Free-range musicians can work on a personal style completely outside any of the established hierarchies and then break in as a discovery, if their music is good enough. And many of us just grind away as best we can. Anyone tramping through the musical forest who hears the sounds coming from my campfire will probably fade into the darkness and continue to search for real talent elsewhere.

"As long as you're enjoying it,..." my teacher says. Every teacher and most local musicians say the exact same thing. As long as you're enjoying it, keep doing it. Talking to Darol Anger after a Republic of Strings concert at Stone Mountain Arts Center in Brownfield, Maine, a couple of weeks ago, I was joking around about my wretched skill level. "As long as you're enjoying it," he said.

It's a little hard to reconcile this "any number can play, DO try this at home" attitude with the supercilious response of some of the musical cognoscenti. It is important to know your place. So for the foreseeable future my place is the garage, and student recitals, local string band gatherings if I'm so inclined, and other corners and closets.

The violin is the hardest thing I've ever tried to learn. Fretless stringed instruments played with a bow demand the absolute highest level of coordination and precision. I may not possess it. But small successes lure me on and the music so far is fairly straightforward to decipher, even when playing it completely eludes me. I don't have to grapple with massive piano chords or the intricacies of multifarious picking techniques. I know for a fact I won't settle for three chords and high amplification. So I keep sawing away.

The music teacher is off at work. I can play in the house today.

SEC Officials Addicted to Porn

2010-04-23T06:12:00.003-05:00

According to news reports, regulators at the Securities and Exchange Commission suddenly started spending hours viewing pornographic material, just as the financial system was beginning to tumble into its collapse in 2008.

While this appears to be a scandalous, outrageous neglect of their duties, I wait for their legal counsel to put forward the only possible defense.

"These regulators were actually doing work-related research. They knew the economy was about to be completely fucked, so they were studying what happens in that situation."

Liberty Logic

2010-04-19T14:32:00.002-05:00

If external laws and regulations enacted by your elected government keep you from doing whatever you want, whenever you want, you have been coerced into giving up your freedom.

If your own voluntary self restraint keeps you from doing whatever you want, whenever you want, you've been brainwashed into giving up your freedom.

The only way to know you are truly free is to rip, tear, grab, guzzle, reproduce and lay waste like there's no tomorrow. Even if you don't, you can be assured that plenty of people will.

Angry Sign Wavers

2010-04-19T10:14:00.003-05:00

The words Tea Party make me want to take up alcoholism.

I don't like angry sign wavers, no matter what they represent. If your political position will fit on a sign, you haven't thought hard enough about it. If you're thinking, you probably aren't yelling. By extension, if you are yelling, you probably aren't thinking, unless your yell is tactically calculated to create noisy confusion to mask the advance of a more complicated agenda behind that screen of unthinking sign wavers you have recruited.

The only thing worse than an unthinking sign waver is a cunning one. They are most likely no more honest with their followers than they are with their adversaries. So don't talk to me about who is more likely to set us up for fascism or lead the country into ruin. What will lead the country into ruin is the preference for angry sign waving over well-reasoned plans, articulately presented.

Too many big words.

TOO MANY BIG WORDS! TOO MANY BIG WORDS! TOO MANY BIG WORDS! LET ME HEAR YOU NOW! TOO MANY BIG WORDS! TOO MANY BIG WORDS! TOO MANY BIG WORDS! HOLD THOSE SIGNS UP! ALL THE NETWORKS ARE HERE!

I could ignore it as long as it stayed on the television. I could drive past the shiny new Don't Tread on Me flags hanging from poles in front of scattered houses around the area. Then I heard one of my employers asking about getting a Tea Party tee shirt. If I have to listen to it every working day I may go insane.

I'm too responsible to go to work drunk. Honestly, though, when faced with the human race's ineradicable narrow mindedness and tendency to threaten violence over almost any disagreement I go home every night and seek the solace of ethanol.

2010-04-17T19:07:00.001-05:00

1.5 million years ago, humans developed conscious thought. This was immediately followed by the world's first bad idea.

Capitalist Leaders with Socialist Defenders

2010-04-12T19:44:00.004-05:00

Looking at graphs on the Campaign for America's Future website depicting the federal deficit and the relationship of its rise and fall to tax rates and defense spending, I imagined a future in which a small private sector commands a large defense force made up of what used to be the working class. The system could work quite well.

The power class, the elite private sector families who control all wealth, would pay taxes only to fund a huge defense department. Since these wealthy families would control all real estate, and all other citizens would be employed by their government, the country would not need to fund parks, welfare or public transportation for the messy lives of free-range citizens who can't or won't afford their own cars, medical care and sprawling estates. As military personnel, the working class would receive a fair wage, uniforms, medical care and housing, as well as job training and assigned tasks. Even in wartime, military personnel get R&R. In peacetime it's just another job. Children would be raised on military bases, taught in base schools, using a standardized curriculum that would prepare them for the life of service ahead of them.

Assuming that the majority of people have no great ambition and don't really care what they do for a living, this would keep that large segment of the population occupied and controlled. The power class could then do what they wanted with the environment and the economy, because the dutiful military would not be allowed to bargain for better terms.

Success depends on good management to keep the military from taking over completely. It would depend on the perfect balance between threat and actual destructive warfare. Terrorism provides an excellent adversary to stimulate nationalistic paranoia. They really could do something tragically nasty. We don't need to be attacked by lizards from space. We have plenty of cold-blooded killers right here on our own planet. If we choose to focus only on that we can easily justify the militarization of most of our population to protect our wealthy minority.

The wealthy minority will see much more direct benefits for their tax dollars with a virtual mercenary army looking out for them.

The reason this won't happen is simple. The wealthy in this country won't want to employ everyone else in their citizen army. We will always have more people than we need. In the finest tradition of business, the bean counters will lay off the extra personnel, creating unattached workers again.

Early Monday Morning

2010-04-05T07:25:00.002-05:00

The cats clustered nervously around the living room stove. A mysterious creature scrabbled in the stove pipe. I'm guessing the Easter Bunny got trashed at the after party and started dissing Santa Claus. This led to the inevitable challenge bet. Guess who lost.

I opened the clean-out door on the outside of the chimney. Two cats tried to enter, but pulled back quickly. When I inserted a mirror to look up and down, I heard a hissing noise. An unidentifiable appendage flicked up toward my hand, so I withdrew it. I draped an old towel over the lip of the door as an escape ladder. I'll check it later.

Health Care Passes. Right?

2010-03-23T14:48:00.002-05:00

Politicians are what we have made them. It's popular now to growl menacingly about the next election when things don't please us. Then we turn around and complain that they're always campaigning and they'll take funds from Satan himself to pay for the next election victory. Thinking is always someone else's job, and then we complain about how it gets done.

Because leadership in this country is a popularity contest every leader loses the ability to lead in the process of getting elected.

The private sector is no better. I've experienced the management style and social skills of a number of business leaders. They can be as loud, confident and wrong as Joe Biden is reputed to be. It's great to have their energy and their delicious money behind projects like a local bike route, but some of these go-getters make up in decisiveness what they lack in cycling experience and technical knowledge. And their egos restrict who they will allow to educate them.

A manager does not need to know how to do everything. He or she needs to know where to find the people who do, and how to motivate them to produce it. If the underlings don't do well with the overlord's personality, less gets done, or it gets done less well. Observers on the sidelines can simply watch the waves crash on the shore as the two forces interact.

Because the campaign never ends, politicians need to show miraculous results on questions that don't succumb to quick fixes, like health care. We needed to pass some comprehensive legislation a couple of decades ago (or longer), but we could dicker about it for 20 more years and never get anything better than we just got. So there it is. If it survives the court challenges already brought against it it will still be a deformed monster put together by the mad scientists of Congress.

Truly progressive citizens complain rightly that it doesn't go far enough. Conservatives complain that it exists at all. They say they want to do something, but they want to do it thoughtfully and, by their reckoning, "right." A good time might be several Congresses after all of them have retired as Taxpayers' Heroes and gone on to that great golf course in the sky.

Let's give the supporters of this bill credit for going out on a limb with it. They have much more to lose than the opponents, because things WILL NOT get instantly better. The opponents will have plenty of time to say "I told you so" before the next election. They can blame domestic turmoil on the failed bill rather than their own obstructionism.

Imagine some people clinging to a rock as heavy surf smashes them. Progressives say we should make a human chain toward the cliff and try to climb up to a more secure perch. Conservatives point out that only a minority of people are getting sucked into the ocean to die, whereas this hare-brained human chain project looks dangerous to them. The status quo is manageable.

The human chain requires more people than the progressives can muster. Every attempt to make the human chain with only the willing ends in disaster. The conservatives look on smugly as their prophecies of failure come true time after time. At the same time they inch higher on the rock, oblivious to the rising tide which will eventually crest above its peak.

And the Grief Goes On

2010-03-02T10:04:00.002-05:00

A month into the grieving process, the bereaved is like a Superball whipped hard into an empty room in a vacuum at zero G. Other objects and substances are injected into the room from time to time. Sticky items impede the ball or stop it completely, but inevitably something explodes and launches it again, up, down and off the wall.

Actually it's not like that at all. You can use physics to predict the motion of the ball, but you have no way to know which way the aching mind and heart of a human being will go next. You might predict with 80 percent accuracy, but the remaining 20 percent error is more than enough to make a situation worse. Grief amplifies every stress you already had, as well as dumping on its own unbelievable load.

At times she can be deceptively normal. Don't be fooled. The year is only a twelfth gone. And some vestige of the pain will be with her forever. Hopefully the random outbursts of anger and the harsh comparisons to the lives and luck of others will cease. There is no set schedule for these things, only some data on averages.

People have to decide early in life: do you want to be lovable and beloved, and leave a gaping, aching hole when you die, or be surly and cold, however useful and virtuous, so people are just as glad when you're gone?

I've tended to be clinical. Some view that as cold. I think of it as keeping a solid stance from which to offer genuine help, not just sympathetic emotion. I have to stay on balance as much as possible in a surging tide of unbalancing forces that can as suddenly turn into a placid sea, only to spew forth a monster from the depths that turns out to be a playful otter that gets eaten by a shark and a beautiful sunset leads to a black night and so on.

All the while, important decisions have to be made, as in any life. Advice from others who have grieved says to avoid making important decisions for as long as the random agonies are going on, but life doesn't wait. You can only make what seems like the best decision at the time. To those inclined to worry, there's always something to worry about. To those inclined to regret, the same principle applies, even under the best circumstances. You move forward even when you try not to move.

Opportunity and hindrance

2010-02-21T22:42:00.004-05:00

I married my music teacher. While that has brought me many musical opportunities, it also keeps me from practicing as much as I might like. I hate to make student noises when she's trying to relax at home, so I tend to try to practice when she's away.

For the past week she has been in California at the American String Teachers Association national conference. She did a presentation on teaching adult beginners, which was very well received. She used a poster of one of my cartoons, which was also very well received. I am going to have to set up an e-commerce site so teachers can download cartoons for a fee. She set me a deadline some time in May.

Once that is up and running I suppose I can add sections on other topics. Obviously I have to learn some things.

While she's been away I have had an orgy of practice. I wish I could say it had made me a lot better, but it certainly hasn't made me any worse.

I still have trouble with paper training. Music tends to get into my head. I like to play while wandering around the house or standing in front of my computer speakers, harmonizing with drones on a collection I purchased from Darol Anger's website. The tracks play for about six minutes in iTunes. Oddly, it appears no longer to be available. Glad I got mine.

The drones help train the ear. They also generate some weird resonances. Each drone suggests a tune to me. I'll work the riff over and over until the track changes to the next one in the sequence. The change makes me hunt around for the musical relationships that work with the steady note. Or, if I like what I've been playing, I will start the previous track over again.

The Internet needs Tune Search, where you play the little scrap of tune you've picked out and it tells you what it's from, if it's from anything. If it's not from anything, congratulations, you're a composer! For the moment, you can only play it for a more experienced friend who might be able to identify it. But that risks embarrassment.

Eventually I have to put away the instrument and get to bed. I've had to work every day she's been away, so I should not have been staying up as late as I have. But then the house is quiet and cold. The cats do what they can. My natural restlessness when alone keeps me up and playing. I'm even plinking stuff out on the piano with one hand while brushing my teeth.

With a musician co-worker I was browsing mandolins on a website he frequents. When he bought a travel guitar there it came with a free mandolin. Crazy. But a fifty-buck mandolin sounds about like you'd expect when they can go for as much as $230,000. And we thought the one for a mere 23 grand was impressive.

Looks like a solid starter instrument will go for about $200. Just thinking. The cellist and I had both been thinking one might be handy. Tuned like a violin, it offers another platform for trying out some of the same tunes. And it's easier to play when slouched on the couch in front of the tube. Why fight it?

After six straight nights of practice my fingers are wrecked. But it's like when I finally got the Telemark turn. My legs were screaming, but I wasn't going to stop when things were finally working right.

Learning a difficult instrument as an adult is like trying to saw down a redwood tree with a nail file. You're only going to get it if you keep at it.

Free Market Failure in a Service Economy

2010-02-11T14:37:00.002-05:00

A sport shop in town sharpens ice skates. The owners invested thousands of dollars in a large, console-type machine to provide top-quality service to their customers.

Other businesses in town have offered skate sharpening. On the basis of price, quality and the intangibles of customer service, these establishments competed for customer dollars. Gradually, all but one gave it up.

The survivor, a multi-sport shop, balanced its offerings through the four seasons of each different year. It did not set out to have a monopoly on sharpening. That condition was an accident.

One customer, an accountant with several hockey-playing children and ample disposable income, decided he no longer wanted to pay the established sharpening business for their services. He invested instead in his own machine.

Over the years, he has developed a sort of client list among various skating groups. What is not clear is whether he is charging for his services or simply giving them away because he enjoys it.

If he is giving away a service another business has made a capital investment to offer at a professional level, he is undermining the free market. He takes unfair advantage of his position, having a comfortable income from another source, to reduce the income of hard-working people who don't have the same options he does. If he is charging a rate so low that no commercial establishment could match it, he's competing unfairly, using his other income as a subsidy.

From a standpoint of personal freedom, this guy should be allowed to do whatever he likes. But if his hobby involves legitimate services someone else has to charge for, its ripples travel throughout the financial world. In this microcosm you can see what dooms the fantasy of a completely free, unregulated market. Unpaid dabblers throw unmeasurable turbulence into the calculation. And they are but one variable.

The First Six Days

2010-02-01T19:05:00.001-05:00

Helping someone grieve for one of the most important people in her life is especially hard because the thing you want most to give them is impossible to provide. You can't make it not hurt. You have to let it hurt and walk with them at their own pace.

The New American Eagle

2010-01-28T22:36:00.005-05:00

A birdy with a yellow bill

Spoke to me from Capitol Hill.

It fixed me with a beady eye

and said, "If you get sick, you'll die

'cause Hell will freeze, it surely will,

before we pass a heath care bill."

So Begins a Year

2010-01-26T14:34:00.002-05:00

The cellist's mother died about 12 or 14 hours after the cellist arrived in Maryland.

Recovery from the death of a loved one or any other intense experience takes a year. If you've been through a rough patch, you may be in several overlapping years of recovery.

The Bullet Not Dodged

2010-01-24T19:45:00.002-05:00

The cellist's mother is dying. It is imminent. The cellist is leaving tomorrow morning on a flight to try to be there before it happens.

The process has lasted for years. It accelerates now. First there were the cystic kidneys, the same disease that will kill my wife. In the nick of time, a donor organ became available. Then it turned out the cystic kidneys had developed cancer. This happens. Chemo failed to stop the metastasized disease. Side effects accumulated. The family members have gone through the wrenching process of trying to come to grips with it.

Tonight she lies in the hospital receiving comfort care only, with a Do Not Resuscitate order. The final bullet cannot be dodged.

Everybody dies. I can't really call any way a good way, but some sure seem better than others. The one thing you can't deny is that you end up dead when your particular process is over.

A Sudden Challenge

2010-01-12T20:23:00.003-05:00

Several years ago we received a Jotul 118B box stove from someone who was clearing out some excess possessions. We put it in the garage because we already had a Taiwanese copy of a Jotul heating the house from the basement.

Comparing the two, the real Norwegian was clearly of higher quality than the Asian knock-off. When I moved the old stove to the basement in 1993, it seemed massive. It certainly isn't light. But it sounds like tin when you clank the side after rapping your knuckles (carefully) against the Jotul. I could just lift one end of the Taiwotul. I could barely lift one end of the Jotul.

The heavy beast sat in the back of the garage while I found many reasons to avoid coming to grips with it. Then last night as I stoked the Taiwotul at bed time I saw a hairline crack up the side of it. The side bulged very slightly but the crack was only a faint line. I didn't think the plate would split and dump hot coals onto the floor before morning. That didn't stop me from adding house fires to the list of short film subjects in a busy dream queue.

The Taiwotul served me for 20 years. It came with the house, so it wasn't new two decades ago. No hard feelings. The inner plates of the fire box have warped and broken. The chunks that had fallen off in later years had been small enough to blend with the ash I shoveled out every few days. I expected it to give out before much longer.

At least I had a nice day for all these maneuvers. I used a block and tackle to drag the Jotul into the center of the garage and hoist it onto the garden cart. Then I drove out to the hardware store to get a hydraulic jack and a hand truck.

Since the stove is a crucial part of the winter heating system, I needed to get this done. I wasn't completely sure the Jotul had all its parts. Because it is so heavy, it made just as much sense to go ahead and try to install it as it would to assemble it somewhere else and then knock it down so I could move it to where I needed it.

I moved the box without its legs. The box is so heavy, I feared that the mass would bend or break the legs if I leaned the stove too far over with them in place. Once I moved away from where I could rig the overhead tackle I had to do everything with leverage and the jack.

The actual move went smoothly. No one could have helped because the box is too small for two people to grip effectively. Two people couldn't lift it safely anyway.

With the box on the hand truck I installed the front legs. I placed the box in such a way that I could lower it onto its front legs with the back end elevated on a piece of timber. One grunt at a time I was able to lift that end and insert chunks of two-by-four to gain enough clearance for the bottle jack. With the jack I lifted the box high enough to block it up while I bolted on the remaining pair of legs.

The outlet lined up with the stove pipe better than the old stove. I thought I had it made. Then I noticed the light shining through the rusted-out bottom of the connecting reducer. Crap!

I'd already had to make a second trip to the hardware store to exchange a defective jack. Now I sprinted out again to get stove pipe parts to improvise the connection to the chimney.

Again I got lucky as the simplest piece did the trick.

With no manual I had to figure out how the internal parts fit together before I put the top plate back on the stove. Between the Internet and the Taiwotul I figured it out.

Once lit, the stove showed its quality right away. Superficially nearly identical to the old stove, this one draws better and more quietly. It heats quickly, despite the thickness of the metal and the intact inner plates. Within a couple of minutes it had heated the basement enough to allow the Monitor, which had done repeated long burns during the day, to shut off.

I didn't get anything else done with the day, but I can't complain. I would have been in a fix without a spare stove hanging around.

Smart People are Bad

2010-01-11T12:13:00.003-05:00

It wasn't obvious for the first few thousand years. Smart people seemed to make things better. They invented new tools for hunting that could be used as weapons when tribes disagreed. They figured out how to use medicinal plants. They devised languages to convey information from person to person and generation to generation. They invented ways to protect ourselves from the weather, and travel farther with less effort. They gave the gifts of their intellect to people who hadn't thought of those things yet.

No one foresaw that this apparent rising slope of continuous improvement could be the greatest threat to species survival. But so it is.

Smart people invented weapons that enable smaller, weaker people to defeat larger, nastier ones. That works until the larger, nastier ones get the new weapon technology. Or various factions of smaller people decide to throw their weight around, enhanced by technology.

Smart people figured out how to harness various forms of energy. This led to coal mines. Coal mines used to be tunnels that swallowed up hundreds of lives, so smart people figured out how to destroy entire mountains to make a huge, open hole from which to extract coal. Coal is then burned to produce smoke. This smoke contains particles, acids and CO2, all of which destroy the environment surrounding the giant gash that formerly was a forested hill and the fume-belching power plant some distance away.

Smart people invented comfortable clothes that make living in cold climates much more pleasant for those with sensitive skin. They invented motor vehicles, fast ships and aircraft. It's great to be able to get around quickly. We can go visit Aunt Gladys on the other side of the globe and deliver shocking, awesome blasts of hellfire to enemies of our nation from high in the sky or far out at sea. And enemies of our nation can deliver their opinion to us by a number of incendiary methods.

If we could count on smart people to get us out of the jam their smart ideas have created, all would be well. Unfortunately, they have a poor track record in that regard, largely thanks to the larger number of less thoughtful types who are the primary beneficiaries of civilization's amenities. The vast majority of consumers of technology could not and would not have invented it, even if they learn to operate it (and bitch about it) after it has been developed.

It all came to a head on September 11, 2001, when some cave dwellers used a partial skill set to fly some jetliners just well enough to destroy a landmark building and do permanent damage to the national psyche of the United States. We are told by both the cave dwellers and the American intelligence industry that those attacks were just a down payment. The cave dwellers hope to use far more devastating weapons in a future attack.

We are told that the cave dwellers base themselves in the freest lands on Earth: failed states and lawless border lands where the rule of law is enforced by local chieftains and their armed henchmen. Libertarian paradise indeed. The cave dwellers do not establish schools and universities where someone might learn to develop advanced technologies. They use whatever they can piece together, whatever they can keep operating under the challenging conditions of their rustic existence and their fugitive lives when they venture into more scrutinized, civilized nations. Once they have destroyed their enemies, will they be able to maintain a high standard of living? Or will they bid a willing farewell to the technology they no longer need, which they could never have built for themselves in the first place?

If smart people had not invented weapons of mass destruction for their own purposes, these thieves of technology, these suicidal murderers, could not hold those weapons to our heads. They would be forced to fight more openly.

Meanwhile, civilization fouls itself with the waste products of its own rich diet. Anyone willing to take less sees it grabbed and gobbled by someone all too willing to take more. All this was invented by well-meaning smart people.

If small, smart people had not invented ways to hold off big, dumb people, big dumb people would have made small, smart people extinct long ago. No one would miss them if they had never been allowed to flourish. Anti-intellectualism, relentlessly pursued, would have brought stability that attempts at universal education never will.

Getting back on that track will be unpleasant and possibly completely catastrophic. It certainly won't be any fun for those trying to enjoy a few pleasant years before extinction, especially when the reaper shows up for them. Because so much firepower has been built in the last century, the superstitious idiots who want to use it have plenty of it to use, as soon as they manage to get their hands on it. And even of they don't, the needs of the "the economy" demand that we continue to despoil the planet anyway.

All this brought to you by human intelligence. We know so much, but so many don't seem to know any better.

Merry Giftmas

2009-12-25T16:32:00.003-05:00

The December holidays have evolved, in Euro-American culture, into a generically religious event. Giftmas seems like an appropriate name.

Giftmas is probably most prevalent in the United States. We are the kings of consumerism.

While many people complain about the commercial avalanche burying the solemn, joyous religious event that supposedly underlies all this celebratory activity, I have a problem only with the excess that seems to accompany every American demonstration of strong emotion. Excess defines the good life for many Americans. What is more good than Christmas?

The good of Giftmas is the warmth of human fellowship that supposedly accompanies our salvation. The flaw is that Christmas is a classic case of "I have good news and bad news." The good news is that you are saved from death by this cute li'l baby. The bad news is that assholes still rule the Earth, so not much has changed. You need to overthrow yourself and then take whatever the assholes dish out without stooping to their level. Meanwhile, the cute little baby is going to grow up to be a scruffy-looking adult who will preach inspiring sermons and get nastily executed by the assholes in charge. That sacrifice is supposed to complete the salvation formula.

Ick.

Since most human and animal emotion seems to have a biochemical basis, I am trying to figure out the biochemical basis for the Christmas spirit. No doubt the emotion predates the dispersion of Christianity. Is it rooted in this season in the northern temperate zone because of qualities of sun angle? Can it be that simple? All of winter lies ahead. We are hardly safe from the grasp of cold or the wounds of wind and weather. Yet somehow this moment marks a strong enough birth of hope to give imported Christian legends something to settle on. Aside from satisfying scientific curiosity, it probably doesn't matter.

People came into the shop all week, filled with unusual warmth. Some of them are normally scary rednecks. They don't seem like the type to get all gooey and warm over a soul-saving ancient infant or the fretful, warring creeds that child's life ushered in. No, the spirit of Giftmas lies upon them. They absorb and reflect its warm glow for a magical few days before returning to their more customary demeanor. They may identify it with the modern form of Christianity. They may be right, to the extent that modern Christianity (anything later than about 100 AD) is a big junk box full of whacked theology, accreted through the centuries with other useful bits of belief and ritual from lands it entered and systems it absorbed. The modern believer needs to look with unfocused eyes on the lighted facade of the beautiful church, listen to the sonorous pronouncements of benevolence and not poke too hard at any of it.

The modern unbeliever can enjoy the pretty lights and pleasant sentiments without the need to plug into the vast matrix of whacked theology. It's still nice to think of everyone getting along in warmth and fellowship. Like so many gifts, it gets used up, broken or lost by early January, but the reinforcement helps. The goal, getting along in warmth and fellowship, is a good one. It will save us from our destruction. We don't have to hug and slobber all over each other. Indeed, I would prefer not to. But we need to get along. Anything that reinforces the idea that we are all connected at a basic level helps to keep that goal near the front of many minds. So the basic concepts of Giftmas transcend specific faiths. And the rituals can be fun. Enjoy the food, the lights, whatever music you like, and the upwelling of generosity. Those are all genuinely good. What better gift could you want?

Health Care Reform? We wish.

2009-12-22T15:28:00.002-05:00

"He's not getting any better. Should we put on another leech?"

Morning broadcast

2009-12-02T07:41:00.001-05:00

In honor of all the politicians on TV this morning, I'm having waffles for breakfast.

In other news: Tiger Woods pays minor fine, but faces multi-million dollar lawsuit brought by the tree. Tree claims damage to limbs, diminished desire and ability to pollinate due to post traumatic stress.

There's Good and Bad in Health Care Reform Bill

2009-11-30T11:22:00.005-05:00

As summarized in an article in the Salt Lake Tribune, the Senate version of the health care reform bill offers some signs of hope and some unacknowledged blunders.

It was inevitable that any bill would require all Americans to buy health insurance. In a true national system, taxpayers would be buying coverage through their taxes. In that way, premium increases would be buried in the huge, complex mass of all government spending. Personally, I would find that easier to take than a blatant, in-your-face bill from a private corporation completely unapologetic about taking your money and doing its best to provide nothing in return. But that's just me. Since the Senate bill appears to include a viable public option at this time, it means that we are not just being driven into the livestock pens of the present private insurance barons.

The penalty for failure to either buy insurance or establish a legitimate exemption is a very reasonable $95 a year for the first year, rising eventually to $750 by 2016. The good news is that I could pay $750 a year and still be saving vast sums compared to the premiums for my former do-nothing policy. Double that to $1500 for myself and my wife and it still adds up to roughly a quarter of our former annual premium. And that does not include the 20 percent annual premium increase we were getting slammed with just for managing to live to be a year older. So bring it on.

The Senate will allow states to opt out of the public option if they don't like it. What's not to like? And what Federal carrots and sticks would be used to promote the choice the national government would prefer to see the states make? All that remains to be seen. Any state politician pushing to keep health insurance in the robber-baron era would have a tough campaign.

The Senate plan actually dances around the abortion issue more creatively and responsively than the House version.

Then we get to funding. How do we pay for this system? Here is the summary from the Salt Lake Tribune. My comments follow in italics.

House » Leaders in the House plan to cover the cost of reform with a tax on medical devices and a 5.4 percent surtax on wealthy Americans (individuals making more than $500,000 or families making more than $1 million a year). They would also raise about $400 billion through Medicare, by reducing projected spending and trimming government subsidies to privately offered Medicare Advantage plans.

Reducing subsidies for Medicare Advantage shifts costs elsewhere, so taxpayers receiving the benefit of those subsidies will see an increase, not a decrease, in expenses. Reducing Medicare spending also potentially stresses the health care system by forcing it to replace those revenues with economies of its own. Maybe it trims fat. Maybe it has to digest an organ or its own muscle tissue instead.

Senate » Senate Democrats take a different route, funding reform with a series of taxes and fees, among them are:

» A 40 percent tax on "Cadillac" insurance plans in which premiums for an individual top $8,500 in a year, and run more than $23,000 per year for a family.

Oh yeah, grand idea. Do the revenue projections take into account that such a tax seems designed to drive customers away from those plans, drying up the tax revenue to be derived there? I also wonder how sick you would have to believe yourself to be to make a policy that expensive look like a good investment.

» A 1.95 percent increase in the Medicare payroll tax for people making more than $250,000 a year.

Sure.

» A 5 percent tax on elective cosmetic surgeries.

Here's where you want a 40 percent or greater tax. Not only would it turn vanity into a public asset, it might also serve to delay the extinction of the natural breast.

» Fees on insurance companies, medical device makers and drug manufacturers.

And then we pretend to raise funds while actually increasing expenses: Put a fee on an insurance company, medical device maker or a drug manufacturer this morning and it has been added to the price of said items with a little extra by this afternoon.

Like the House bill, the Senate also squeezes future Medicare payments and slices subsidies to Medicare Advantage, raising more than $400 billion."

See notes above regarding cuts in Medicare spending and reduced subsidies.

To fund health care and create incentives for healthier behavior, tax junk food, cigarettes, booze, gasoline and luxury cars, video games, giant televisions and extraordinarily comfortable living room furniture. Provide tax incentives to employers who provide facilities and corporate philosophies that support bike commuting. Provide similar incentives to employers that provide exercise time for employees. This includes workers who would typically get no such opportunities, like delivery drivers.

Based on the principle that freedom isn't free, anyone who decides to go their own way and retain an unhealthy lifestyle would renounce coverage, too. If they wanted to pay the huge premiums a private insurer would charge to cover a high-risk customer, that's their business. If they go uninsured, the fine they pay should reflect what their care will cost. That money would go into the health care funding channel. Most other funding should come from as far from medical care as possible so that it does not run the risk of making the problem of medical expenses worse.

My brilliant wife also proposes "medical testing clubs." Based on the model of fitness clubs, members could pay to join a facility that has all your popular testing equipment: MRI machines, X-ray, mammography, colonoscopy, lab work, you name it. As with fitness clubs, members could buy in at different levels to get access to more test or the option of more frequent tests. They can then take their results to the appropriate doctors for actual treatment if required. A medical testing club could run for profit at a reasonable margin without gouging the customer, because it is merely an information-gathering facility. Each test is a discrete financial event. It's not a potential financial sinkhole the way health insurance is. Since results are reviewed by physicians the customer consults after testing, liability for interpretation is spread over at least two entities' malpractice insurance.

20 November...0600

2009-11-30T09:48:00.003-05:00

The sounds of a cat and mouse game had awakened us in the part of morning that belongs to the night before, but they had subsided. We drifted back into our dreams.

At 6, with dawn lightening the gray skies slightly, we heard the hunt resume. I had to get up anyway, so I bumbled around looking for the sheet of cardboard and the plastic container we use to trap and release our little visitors.

The cats had driven the mouse into cover in our bedroom closet. I pulled things out until Bonnie dove in to start the rodent running. The two other cat s and I joined in the chase. We all scampered around, maneuvering it next to the bed.

As I herded the mouse with the cardboard and the little tub, it darted from under my attempts to contain it. But then it came back, looking up at me as if to say, "you're taking too long." It made direct eye contact for a long couple of seconds before it hopped onto my foot and crawled up inside my right pant leg. It moved calmly, without hesitation.

By the time I was sure it was in there, it had begun to climb at the same calm, steady pace. Since it seemed neither panicked nor aggressive, I figured any containment was good containment. I walked toward the back door with a strange, stiff-legged gait so I wouldn't tighten the fabric over it and scare it into doing something we would both regret.

A steady rain pattered down on the deck off the back of the house. I stepped out into it and hastily undid my pants. As smoothly as possible while balancing on one foot and then the other, disrobing in a November rain, I removed pants, socks and moccasins. I never felt or saw the mouse leave, but it was not in the garments I wore or carried when I went back into the house.

All this before my first cup of coffee.

Next mouse hunt I have to remember to tuck my pants into my socks.

Fiddleheads Music Camp

2009-09-14T12:16:00.005-05:00

Taking a trip outside my comfort zone, I attended the Fiddleheads Music Camp this weekend with the cellist.

Comfort zones were the theme of the weekend.

Laurie's friend Melissa had urged her to attend this camp. Melissa is a violinist who has been exploring the fiddle genre and has been tugging the cellist into some gigs using fiddle tunes. Both of them are classically trained. Cutting loose and learning by ear can feel alien and risky. One incentive was the presence of professional musician Darol Anger at this year's camp.

The cellist tells me not to worry, just to play, because no one gets hurt when they mess up a piece of music, the way one might when crashing a bike, falling off a cliff, flipping a kayak or falling while skiing. But the stakes get higher when you have a professional reputation, or even a strong ego involvement in amateur performance. It probably feels more like an injury.

"I'm outside my comfort zone," Laurie said to Seth Austen, one of the instructors and a local friend.

"We're always outside our comfort zone," he said. "It's just part of it."

"Let me just jump in here to point out that even if everyone feels like they're out on a limb, you guys are producing a lot more for it than someone at my level," I said. "You're reaching for the next level. I'm just trying to get to square one."

We set out to push our limits.

After registration on Friday evening there was a big group jam session in the Geneva Point chapel. The chapel is a big, uninsulated barn with a small stage at one end. It's all dark wood inside; a quintessential group-camp meeting place. I hadn't brought a fiddle because I had come from work and Laurie thought I wouldn't get a playing opportunity. I was happy enough to hide in the back of crowds. Melissa and Laurie both offered me their fiddles, but I was too uptight.

Late in the jam, Laurie finally forced her fiddle into my hands just as the group started one of two tunes I actually know, Angelina Baker. Hot damn! I let the brain go wandering while my hands fell into familiar patterns. The inexplicable joy of producing music in a group dispelled every shred of anxiety. And there was plenty of noise to cover my clams.

We did not stay on the premises at the camp, preferring to commute from home. Melissa stayed with us. We had to get up and out in jig time on Saturday and Sunday mornings, but we had familiar beds (except for Melissa, but she got a private bathroom she wouldn't have had at camp) and we had excellent breakfasts.

The camp information had said "all abilities welcome." Certainly everyone was very friendly and inclusive. But just as the time trial is bicycling's race of truth, the musical performance soon separates musical abilities. Some forms accommodate beginners better than others.

I headed for the session on Irish jigs, taught by Ryan Thomson, a.k.a. Captain Fiddle. Things started off promisingly enough. Early on, he pulled out another tune to which I at least knew the A part, Egan's Polka. He'd taught it to Laurie years ago, but she'd forgotten the B part by the time she got home and taught it to me. She'd also forgotten the name. So I got the name and the B part, and we trotted through the tune few times.

It went straight downhill from there. The others in the class had been at this longer, regardless of their ages, and had picked up many of the scraps of music theory vital to the various forms of folk music. They had a shared vocabulary and understanding that made even their fumblings more informed and directed than my complete groping. I leaned on my instrument, watched and listened.

Feeling minor and diminished, I went to my next session, Learning a Tune by Ear, taught by Beverly Woods. Seth and Beverly often come as a set. Their love for what they do and an equal love of bringing others into it make them one incredible asset to have in the neighborhood. Since my commute to work will now pass their house all year, I hope to drop in often in my quest to make up for decades of lost time in pursuit of my own musical development.

Beverly's session was the best for me. At least half a dozen classically trained musicians confessed to being "paper trained" and dependent on the formal approach. Their competence was nullified by the unfamiliarity and intimidation of just letting it rip by sound and feel. It leveled the playing field somewhat, because Beverly provided the theory we would need to proceed. Only in the actual playing did their skill on the instrument give them an edge.

Much of the time we just sang the parts. Most folk music started out as vocal music, so it tends to fall within vocal ranges. By singing the notes one gets a feel for the intervals and rhythm, the overall pattern of the tune. Words, if available, also provide a memory aid because they develop a verbal idea on which to hang the tune and meter. Tunes that started from an instrumental basis may not sing as well, but trying to sing them still helps.

I came out of there feeling downright hopeful.

Next I'd planned to attend a session on basic theory, taught by Beverly and Ryan, but Beverly herself talked me out of it, urging me to attend a session on the blues, taught by Darol. She may have been trying to kill attendance at the theory workshop entirely, so she could go to Darol's session. I willingly fell in with that.

The blues session was very informative, but totally packed, as all Darol's workshops were, and it was well above my playing level. I hung in for scraps of it, and did manage to crack him up briefly with a spur of the moment joke from back row center, but I would have been better off as a music student to eat my veggies and go to theory class. Six of one, I suppose. When will I get to spend so much time in the same room with a player like Darol Anger? That was Beverly's logic. Osmotically, subliminally, I may retain some musical tidbits that will emerge from my deep subconscious once I learn enough other stuff to be able to activate the memory files.

Melissa suggested I join her in the Harmony Fiddle workshop that followed, taught by camp organizers Ellen Carlson and Kathy Sommer. They would be working around Miss Molly, one of two featured tunes for the camp. Music files of Miss Molly and Shady Grove had been sent around before the camp for people to listen to. It seemed safe enough, even though my work schedule leading into the camp had kept me from putting much time into music beforehand.

Things got too deep for me in a hurry. I desperately needed to have attended the theory workshop. My brain and ear overloaded so I couldn't process any more input with so little framework to fit it into. But Darol had been awfully fun to watch and hear. The guy just exudes music constantly. He did a quick run-through of Jimi Hendrix's Purple Haze that I would have recorded on video if I'd been sure I wasn't infringing on some intellectual property issue. Laurie has used a Kronos-inspired version of Purple Haze in her classes for years.

Laurie appeared outside the classroom with fifteen minutes to go. She'd bailed from another session. We retreated to Seth and Beverly's Old Time Jam workshop in time to get in on the last tune. Feeling somewhat reconstructed, we went to the chapel where the musicians were supposed to split into several bands to work on one tune each for the evening's concert. After that the ubiquitous jamming in small and large groups would resume.

Laurie and Melissa went to the band doing a Beatles tune. I went for Seth and Beverly's gypsy band. The other bands included Country, Latin, Cajun, Swinging Bluegrass and a "Mystery Band."

The gypsy band convened in too small a room to begin work on a Serbian tune called Ajde Jano. It's in 7/8, which Seth and Beverly broke down into chanted syllables. Using a three syllable word followed by a two syllable word repeated twice you get the length of a measure. After trying various possibilities we settled on "Mandolin Fiddle Fiddle."

Seth also had the subversive notion to morph the traditional 4/4 tune Shady Grove into 7/8 as a little musical joke on one of the two "official" tunes of the camp. Since Ajde Jano ends on A and Shady Grove starts there, we could slide into it sort of unnoticed. Tweaking Shady into 7/8 called for some easy shuffle bowing. The lead in from Ajde helped set that up so we found ourselves doing bow tricks that might not have been part of our toolbox before. Don't think! Play!

When we tossed out suggestions for our band name, I said, "Balkan at Nothing." It was acclaimed the winner. We went forth with our official entry (Ajde Jano) and our little secret (Shades of Seven Groves).

We got to borrow bassist Steve Roy for our band. The bass made a nice wall on one side of me, while a row of hot young fiddlers, including Ryan Thomson's son made a nice screen in front.

The concert was a blast. Since just about everyone in the audience was going to be on stage in the course of it, it had a communal feel you don't get at a performance where audience and artist are clearly delineated. There had been much mixing and mingling in the jams, workshops, meals and conversations. I met people I knew from other contexts (shop customers) and people I had somehow managed not to meet even though we live within a few miles of each other. I was stepping out of my world. It reminded me how I need to do that more often. Even if I just expand my routine circle, I have to get out of the rut of work and rest and the same old crap.

The Effingham bus pulled out a little while after the concert. The evening's jamming hadn't gelled yet, and we needed to get something like enough sleep before Sunday's early start.

Laurie, Melissa and I went to Seth and Beverly's workshop on Eastern European Music to start Sunday morning. The others were interested in the material, especially as the genre is already more cello-friendly than much of folk, which have a tradition of fiddles and basses, leaving cellists and violists wondering what's wrong with them. Trust the Jewish people to appreciate a good cello and provide a solid platform from which to approach the other forms of folk.

As an added bonus, one of the workshop tunes was Ajde Jano, so I was ready to rip. At least I was closer to the right note at the right time than on stuff I'd never heard or played. Every little bit helps me, as well as being a blessing to anyone in earshot.

With nothing in the next slot specifically aimed at the novice fiddle aspirant, I went with Laurie and Melissa to another Darol Anger session, on Improvising Within a Tune. I had no intention of even opening a case, but I figured I would again absorb some things that could come out of hiding in the future.

I sat, watched and listened for 15 minutes or so, while I cleared some dead wood off the memory card in my camera. Then I actually did pull out my fiddle and pluck some of what I'd been hearing without listening. Quite a bit of it was there. It wasn't so much that I wanted to make a loud noise with my bow, but I could pick it out quietly while I listened to the more advanced skills Darol demonstrated and led. Again I noted that I need those basic theory principles so I understand where a technique is going, and why. I'd already picked out one of Captain Fiddle's books on just that subject. I sat next to him as HE quietly bowed along with Darol's instruction. We are all students forever.

This last workshop was followed by an open mic session in the chapel. Anyone with the notion could sign up for a certain number of slots of stage time before the gang had one last jam, on Miss Molly and Shady Grove. This was the time for some of the participants who play gigs or jam together to trot out their favorites. It offered a nice variety.

More than one person has told me I chose a difficult instrument. Certainly the highest echelons of violin and fiddle players do things I never will. However, the same is true of a large number of merely good players who still blow me away. I've seen this sorting occur in every activity I have pursued or closely observed. Some people are amazingly good. The best of them are usually very cool about it. The ones I have met seem to have the attitude that we're all in this together. Their hard work, combined with other qualities, have brought them to their exalted level. They don't act like the lesser performers are less of a person because they have sorted out differently.

Usually, the real posturing jerks inhabit lower levels than outright awesomeness. Is their attitude the thing that keeps them from greatness?

I detected no posturing jerks at Fiddleheads.

Competitive sports seem to attract more jerks across the board. Competition depends on finishing with a ranking. But even in those activities I have met very welcoming and inclusive awesome performers. They can duke it out with their peers while still being generous to the strivers. Maybe they are this way because they see the strivers as no threat. I prefer to think of it as love of the activity and generosity of spirit. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Darol Anger himself shook my hand and commended me when I mentioned I had taken on the challenge of learning from scratch starting at age 44. And 44 was a while ago. I can twinge about all the good practice time I've lost in those nine years.

"It's brave of you to do this," he said. "You chose a difficult instrument." He spoke with warmth. The handshake was a spontaneous gesture. Suddenly I felt better than a hopeless idiot. And I was already going to buy one of his CDs anyway. He didn't have to butter me up. So I believe he meant what he said.

The difficult instrument bit scares me a little. I like the fiddle. I also know that bad violin playing ranks in the top 10 worst sounds in the world, sixth according to this poll: (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2007/jan/24/uknews.sciencenews). This fact makes me careful about where, when and how loudly I practice, and how frequently and prominently I perform. I know my place.

I do not see myself as a soloist. When I was a preening young twit I had delusions of illustrious stardom in vaguely unspecified accomplishments, but years of self-assessment have convinced me I function better in back rows and behind the scenes in most endeavors. Music is no exception. I hope to achieve reasonable competence given my late start.

The cellist puts me out there in recitals, in ensembles, thankfully, not naked and alone, center stage with a music stand and a terminal case of the shakes. Ensemble play, whether classical or folk, really feels like the best team sport. You have to do your own thing, but you're merging it with the others, more or less successfully. It's quite addictive. Try some.

Clearly, from the comments in person and on the Internet afterward, just about everyone seems to have come away with the same feeling and the same desire to do it again soon.

Self-indulgent autobiographical prattle

2009-09-14T08:55:00.000-05:00

I never had an inner child, even when I was outwardly a child. I had an inner middle aged, neurotic adult.

At ten years of age, I stood in the back yard, frozen with the fearful realization that I had no career path picked out. How would I ever pay for retirement?

That question remains. Experience has broadened my perception of what happens throughout the course of life, so the idea of working until I drop holds no more terror than the concept of dropping all by itself. No natural organism retires. Why should we be different?

Retooling the basic principles of human existence we could develop a system in which we take advantage of our numbers to lighten each individual's work load. No one would bring home disproportionately huge rewards, but everyone would get some work time and some free time. Place no limits on inventive and creative thought and work, since these generally carry a level of enjoyment beyond a daily grind kind of job. For the more mind-numbing kinds of occupation, keep the shifts and the schedules endurably short.

Of course the whole thing falls apart at the administrative level. Right now we make the rich the custodians of our major blocs of resources. Then we try to figure out how to pry some of it away from them when we need it. In a broader-based, more uniform prosperity, the representative government would end up controlling resources, supposedly for the betterment of all of us. Even if control fell to citizen groups independent of the elected administration, those would take on the quasi-governmental position now occupied by corporate boards. More directly responsive to the rank and file citizen, these controlling entities might succumb to pressure to make a different kind of bad decision than the typically narrow, greed motivated ones for which corporate boards are known today. Pristine holdings now reserved to the wealthy and their friends could become grubby, abused public spaces trampled by recreating masses with inadequate environmental knowledge and ethics.

The problems just keep multiplying from the simplest concept meant to make things better.

Private Charity vs. "Big Government"

2009-09-09T09:12:00.002-05:00

A certain set of social commentators likes to disparage the notion of government programs to help citizens, holding up the few surviving helpful organizations funded with what look like non-governmental sources as the preferable alternative. These are often religiously based and very specifically targeted. They are presented as examples of how everything can and should be, once government is shrunk to the point of utter impotence.

Excuse me, but if you get rid of a lot of taxes, you get rid of the need for big tax write-offs, and much of the incentive for the kind of chunky charitable donations required to keep these so-called "independent" organizations alive.

The non-profits with which I am associated live hand to mouth. Many efforts depend on government grants to supplement private donations. They also depend on the whim and favor of regular donors who at any time might decide they have better things to do with their money.

Certain things, like the environment in which we all live and the health care needs of the growing percentage of people who fall below the financial threshold necessary to pay their own way are quite appropriate concerns for the citizen government of the nation. Quit thinking of government as a separate entity. It's a job we all have to do, like taking out the garbage or mowing the lawn. As soon as you distance yourself from government or let it distance itself from you, you invite more problems than stupid humans are bound to create even when they try their best. The answer isn't just to make it cost less. When was the last time the cheapest item on the market did the best job?

In a land with more than 300 million citizens, on a planet teeming with more of the same, there are going to be details to consider. The task will never be finished until we give up on civilization entirely

Why Universal Coverage is NOT Socialized Medicine

2009-09-06T18:40:00.003-05:00

The Federal Government already acts as the purchasing agent for its citizens in a number of important transactions. The best example is the US military.

Currently, the Pentagon consumes at least $534 billion of your tax dollars. It's always been the big eater in the federal budget. Has anyone called it "socialized defense?" Hell, no. Even though the military services are in fact socialist societies, no one makes much of a time about that. And that's not the critical factor here. What matters is the way government expenditure interacts with the private sector.

No one can claim that government funding and involvement has stifled innovation or decreased profitability in the area of inventing exciting ways to devastate enemy nations. Quite the contrary. Competing for competitive bids, the military-industrial complex has supplied an endless stream of guns, bombs, missiles, tanks, aircraft that don't show up on radar, shrapnel that doesn't show up on X-rays, stuff with computers, lasers, gas, germs and trained dolphins. Why should the response of the medical industries be any more restrained?

By making the government our negotiator and purchaser of medical supplies and services, we put the full power of the treasury to work for us. Hey, we put that money there! Let's get something back.

Private insurance is a mortally wounded business. They're shot, they just haven't fallen down yet. Here's why: a service provider can only be profitable if they can reasonably estimate their costs. Sickness does not succumb to the same statistical modeling as death, for instance. The stakes are higher. A policy holder could become expensively ill. The cost effective thing to do with someone who has started costing more than they're bringing in is to lay them off. Private insurers hire legions of phone operators to try to hold back all but the most determined petitioners who have been denied. It's frustrating and expensive for all concerned. Putting them out of this dead-end business would only be merciful. Euthanize the private health insurance companies! They'll find someplace else to invest their money! Corporations have diversified and evolved forever. If they're so crappy at business that they can't weather a complete market shift like that, we don't want them managing something as important as health care anyway.

There is no need to fear a non-profit, public funding source that will act the way insurance began: as a shared risk pool in which everyone pays a share and gets only such recompense from it as they actually need. We're not furnishing someone's corporate suite, paying for their private jet or funding their weekend in Vegas. With a public, non-profit health insurance system, we're paying for health care, period. As a government entity, it HAS to operate under full disclosure (nothing classified in health care, UNLIKE the military). We get to look at the books whenever we want. When was the last time (or even the first) that a private insurance company invited you to do that?

The government can be frustrating to deal with. Just remember that it is your government. Take some interest beyond simply voting in the Candy Man and then throwing him out when he isn't perfect. We have laws that give us tremendous access to what goes on in domestic affairs. It isn't perfect, but nothing is. And it isn't socialism. It's our shared business venture as shareholders in the United States. Let's build it right and make it work. We owe it to our investors.

A Bunch of People Shouting in the Dark

2009-09-04T15:18:00.003-05:00

In the debate over health care reform on the Internet, you have to judge a person by what they write and link to, unless they post video.

Yesterday I let my temper get the better of me when I saw a comment under a post on a friend's Facebook page summing up anyone without health coverage as a lazy person who wanted a free ride. Such an assertion had to come from either a rapacious neocon of the sort that has been laying waste to the financial services industry for nigh on 30 years, or an aging conservative who has been hating "hippies" for nigh on 40.

For some reason I envisioned the poster as a neocon female. Its name was Dana. Its chirpy tone reminded me of Republican housewives I know, who spout a good line about getting a job and pulling your own weight, but who are buffered from many of the realities of the quest to obtain and retain gainful employment. As the conversation evolved, however, I began to sense that this was an older gentleman. The femmy vibe probably has to do with the fact that the body produces fewer masculine hormones as a man ages. At least he sounds like a young bitch rather than an old one.

It was joined by what seemed like a more verifiable young Reaganite. The young Reaganites are not so young anymore, but they drew their greatest strength after the tenure of St. Ronnie from the ranks of people younger than I am, who became the most dedicated of the antihippies. Many of them were the children of liberals who chose the neocon path as their rebellion against the parental non-yoke.

As the argument goes on it seems like a bunch of people shouting in the dark. No one has more than a second. Nuance is the first casualty. Everyone just yells something pithy, hoping to pith off the other thide. Thus will the entire laudable campaign fall apart, as both sides come to view it as a political liability. It's another no-win situation. "I voted against health care reform, but only after I voted for it."

Substantial reform is highly unlikely, however sorely needed.

This country is like a car speeding toward a jumble of fallen boulders. Half the passengers are screaming to turn right. The other half are screaming to turn left. Only one direction is correct. They will probably compromise by agreeing to plow into the boulders. We may well end up with something too damaged to drive. Let the younger generations build what they can from the wreckage.

The Bottom Line

2009-08-28T09:26:00.000-05:00

As management and labor tussle over dividing the pie, costs keep going up. Each party in a capitalist transaction tries to make the best deal for itself, but everyone can't be a winner. Participants toss the shit end of the stick at each other. Dropping it outright is not an option.

During all of human development, some people have prospered more than others. Sometimes the privileged have won their status by actual merit. Often the favored position has been formalized so that a class of society gets it without a fraction of the original winner's effort.

In modern societies, certain job descriptions come with cushier perks than others.

All this adds up to a staggering imbalance in the use of the planet's resources.

We use economics to justify the imbalance, but our very own cherished system of competition could eventually lead us back to the natural model of subsistence farming. At some point, executive talent will have to win a bidding competition to get a razor's edge of privilege in leadership positions rather than companies courting them with lavish inducements. Life will be that cheap.

In the middle class, in small business, and down in the sweat-stained places where the real work gets done, people already understand subsistence. It hasn't spread enough to be widely recognized. We have a distance to go before it becomes obvious. You have to use your imagination when you look at how products and services are offered on slimmer and slimmer margins. Is profit an illusion? Has it always been? Is it just a loan against the future?

Everything in nature breaks even. We are no exception. If we're uneven, we can expect to be evened up.

When taxpayers insist that their children go to the cheapest possible schools, with the fewest possible amenities, they sense, even if they do not acknowledge, that no one has a right to do more than subsist. They're asking their employees to do little better than break even. It is most visible there, but many in the private sector feel the pinch as well. Small business owners try to match the bidding power of large corporations. Large corporations trim their expenses, often by ruthlessly shedding personnel. The unemployed look for whatever they can find, often fetching up in small business or among the self employed.

Being your own boss doesn't mean you can always get the day off whenever you want. The farm needs to be tended.

States' Rights in a Mobile Society

2009-08-24T11:53:00.004-05:00

The United States was settled on more or less of a free market model. As settlers/invaders fanned out across the middle of North America, they set up shop wherever they could, often united on common philosophical ground. Restless souls kept moving while more settled settlers stuck around to set the tone for those who arrived later. In many cases, especially among religiously-based settlements, they became a known brand that attracted like minds.

As transportation and communication improved, people and ideas could come and go more easily. In a country that considered itself a great and unified nation, this movement of citizens and thoughts seemed like one of its better aspects. But it also diluted the unity of communities that might have lived in happy isolation.

Divisive issues have always stirred up debate in this country. It's only human nature. But now, modern technology gives us the ability to break free of traditional political boundaries.

Say you like the philosophies behind the laws and conventions of one state, but can't live there for any number of valid reasons. You should be able to claim citizenship there anyway, just as you shop for certain brands of product, patronize chain stores, follow a religion or otherwise link your identity to a larger one. Just as a global corporation will have a corporate headquarters somewhere, branded states will continue to hold the territory they now have, at least at first. More popular states will get more tax revenue and may buy land from less popular states that are strapped for cash. We could go from 50 states to 37, but they'd be proven performers with a solid customer base. We could even get down to five, or three, or two. Given people's love of their differences, though, that seems unlikely. We may go the other way, as Thomas Jefferson envisioned, and have a patchwork of numerous, tiny states.

We might even get to the point of individual statehood. Each citizen of majority age would BE a state. The sovereign state of Fred. The sovereign state of Angela. The sovereign state of Cletus. Each would levy taxes and pay for services and infrastructure within arm's reach.

Each state having a population of one, everyone would have to go to Washington (or wherever we'd voted to put the capital by then) or, more likely, vote on line on all major issues. If you didn't like your representative you'd know where to find him.

Okay, individual statehood seems unlikely. But absentee citizenship in branded states has its merits. Form your constituencies from like-minded individuals wherever they may be. We try to do it now with political parties, but that just mucks up the operation of government at state and national levels. Make the states themselves an intellectual construct instead of a physical space. It can't be much more fouled up than what we have. It might be jolly fun.

Panic and Anger Breed Panic and Anger

2009-08-19T05:42:00.002-05:00

How many of the people joining the rage fest against health care reform are doing it just because they see other people getting upset? Whoever started the panic knows that these things take on a life of their own. Something spooks the herd. Once they're running, it takes a lot less to keep them running. Rumors flash among them. Bystanders start to run, too. They're driven by whip cracks and shouts, by imagined attackers in the dust cloud kicked up by their own feet.

Democracy in action. Voting with their feet against their wallets.

Everything is going to be all right. Individuals will suffer. You will be one of them sooner or later. In general, however, life will go on for somebody.

Partisan Pissing Contest Threatens to Drown Health Care Reform

2009-08-17T09:03:00.004-05:00

An election is like a mountain climbing expedition. Funding comes from people who will never see the peak. Equipment is carried and messages are relayed by climbers who know they will never go high enough to be spotted with a telescope, let alone photographed in a triumphant pose beside a flag.

Many porters will labor just for a paycheck to ease their poverty, their lives barely improved by the success of the summit team.

On some of these expeditions, the team members don't even like each other that much. They do what they do so that their team will win. They lift their designated winner as high as they can and hope it's close enough for strength and skill to bridge the last gap. And then they all celebrate.

Most of politics takes place in the lowlands. The summits are metaphorical. The swamp is never far away. Whoever is king of the hill becomes a target for mudballs slung from the weeds where the losers dwell.

The opponents of health care reform have already succeeded in turning it into health insurance reform. The insurance companies know they can't provide quality care to a significant majority of citizens, let alone all of them, and still make a profit. Administrative costs alone must account for a large portion of the double-digit annual inflation of premiums. The paltry few percentage points of profit hardly seem worth it. So reforming that is like trying to wash a turd.

The saddest part is that the losing team in the last presidential election doesn't care one way or the other about health care. They only care about making Barack Obama lose at something. It might as well be this, because the issue is complicated enough to provide lots of entry points for scare tactics. If they can turn a constructive search for the best options into a contentious debate over ridiculous assertions they can befuddle and bore the American public into giving up the pursuit entirely. And then they can claim a Great Victory for their party against that young whippersnapper who managed to get elected strictly on the basis of grand-sounding, empty oratory.

Even if the effort to construct usable legislation continues, the partisans who play politics for points will need to gut it so the resulting product satisfies nearly no one. We've seen it before. We're seeing it now.

Before you get all wound up over this sort of thing, remember that opportunity only comes at a price. A lot of people have to lose for one person to win. If you want a chance to be that winner, you have to accept the possibility of losing. You have to extend that acceptance to your own health and life. Get rich or die trying.

In order for the American culture of opportunity to be truly fair, no one should get a hereditary advantage. Inherited assets not only should be taxed, they should be illegal. Everyone should start at square one. But then how would we maintain any great institutions? If we give a corporate entity a measure of immortality, how do we give it continuity of leadership without making it or another institution more powerful than any accomplished citizen? Whether anyone wanted to tackle that question or not, we have chosen instead to let fortunes pass and an elite tier of society wield power. Parents who bear children in the lower tiers must tell them that they have to take their chances. Get rich or die trying.

Because humans seem to have trouble grasping any value except monetary value, everything gets measured by that standard. Even something aesthetically or spiritually beautiful gets linked to money eventually. A starving artist's works may command far more in the years after the artist's death than their creator ever saw in life. Preachers of various spiritual disciplines receive financial contributions. Some of those preachers spawn institutions that outlive them. These institutions have a financial life. Great musicians hope to pull down a ton of money for gigs. Every thing of beauty or power has a price tag that can be manipulated.

Money can't keep you alive forever, but it can certainly help you put up a good fight. The struggle for money can destroy nature, love and whole societies, but we've made it the fundamental aim of our species.

Get rich or die trying. Give lip service to the value of the common folk, but what you're really grateful for is the fact that they're down there and not you. So the political fight for a victory on points doesn't really matter when we had no intention of doing anything benevolent in the first place. It's not a matter of nuance and detail. It's a fundamental acknowledgment that losers have to suffer. If you happen to be sick and you happen to fall short of a fairly high financial hurdle, something is so basically wrong with you that you will not be missed. Any one of you cheap dirt bags can be easily replaced. So suck it up.

I say this as a cheap dirt bag who has so far been fortunate enough to wiggle through any of the perils presented to me. I don't look forward to the one that does get me, but there's nothing I can do about it. Maybe I'll figure out how to get rich. Then I can live in my hilltop castle and empty my chamberpots down on the filthy dregs crawling up to seek my mercy.

E Pluribus Unum: out of all you dirt bags, ME. I got mine. Go get your own. If I feel nice I can give a little something to charity. Either way, you have to kiss my ass.

Isn't it about time we admitted that?

Cash for Clunkers

2009-08-02T06:03:00.002-05:00

Everyone complains about government spending, but the recent performance by auto dealers and the driving public when given a billion dollars to play with demonstrates what happens when we get to take part in it.

The government offered dealers a chance to give a big boost to drivers trading in gas guzzling junk. This would stimulate auto sales and remove wasteful vehicles from the road.

A billion dollars seems huge to most of us. It seems as big as a million used to. It's so vast you shouldn't be able to see the other side of it. So write those checks. Make those deals. Happy days are here.

The idea behind the program was no better or worse than any idea concocted by our citizen government. The original proposal called for four billion dollars. The senate whacked it back to one billion in an admirable move to conserve taxpayer funds. It was still a billion dollars. How often does the business person on the street get to dip directly into a billion in federal money?

So the auto vendors made deals, deals, deals! Free billion, folks! A billion! A THOUSAND MILLION! Wow! A bi--! Shit! It's almost gone!

In this case the program seems benign. I'd rather see the money go into circulation than into intricate killing machinery we hope we never have to use. It's just an interesting study in the citizen expenditure of public funds.

He's so mature!

2009-07-27T17:28:00.001-05:00

Ninja Nephew or The Elephant Nephew

Practical Matter, Political Process

2009-07-20T09:11:00.003-05:00

A strange creature called health care reform takes shape in the hilltop laboratory of the mad scientist known as the United States Congress.

The problem is simple: how can we make health services effective, affordable and available to our citizens? You'd be doing well to get any two of those. With all the bickering and posturing, we won't get one. And it really only counts as a success with all three.

Costs of health care and health insurance are freaking legislators out. Many of them, and the vast majority of citizens, also have not fully separated the concepts of insurance and care. Therefore, many so-called solutions still cling to the fatal flaw of for-profit insurance on top of for-profit care.

Profit is supposed to provide a more effective motive than compassion to insure that high standards are met in all aspects of health maintenance and repair. Forget caring about the patients. Can I make a bundle off my expensive education and long hours? I suppose it's only fair. Health service providers have to deal with nothing but grody stuff. They are reminded constantly of the frailty of life. A little moolah helps keep them interested in case they lack sufficient dedication to the alleviation of human suffering.

If a new system requires every citizen to purchase private insurance, it does create the giant pool including everyone, which is supposed to spread risk and lower costs, but really all the private companies still face the problems they have with small pools and skewed risk percentages. So insurance costs remain high and insurance companies still have ample motive to deny care.

If a new system falls entirely under governmental control, funded by tax increases, profit motive is eliminated, everyone is included and the associated higher taxes replace the scandalous insurance premiums that used to be the norm.

Legislators opposed to meaningful health care reform claim to have the interests of the taxpayers in mind. Yet by saving the taxpayers from the evil of higher taxes to pay for universal coverage they throw those same taxpayers to the wolves of high private insurance costs.

How about this: Let anyone who can afford it buy health insurance or pay outright for services. Let health service providers refuse service to anyone who does not show proof of ability to pay. A lot of people would remain miserably sick. Many would die. It would cost the least amount of money in premiums or taxes. It would create jobs and stimulate the economy the way mass die-offs always do. Real estate will change hands. Goods and services will be bought and sold. The population will go down, easing strains on the environment, infrastructure and the food supply. Energy consumption will drop. Oil companies would have to learn to deal with it, but they would just jack prices with sound economic excuses.

An increasing death rate would justify attempts to raise the birth rate. Poke away, folks! Life is cheap and easily replicated! Raise your kids strong, clever and ruthless. They will need those qualities to survive and flourish.

To reduce fraud, everyone would have to carry an implanted device that gives health service outlets an instant financial status report. If you're dragged in unconscious from an accident, the hospital should not be expected to waste time on a deadbeat. First responders would have to carry the financial status scanners so the health service industry wasted the fewest resources on a patient with insufficient funds.

In borderline cases a patient might receive treatment until his or her financial status dropped below a certain threshold. At that point the poor loser would be thrown out. Clear that hospital bed for someone who deserves it!

One might think that children deserved special coverage. Debate that if you will, but admit it: aren't the children of the wealthy just that much better than the wretched spawn of the working class and the poor? Any child who manages to rise out of the clutter will appreciate and deserve the status and security earned against long odds. If they never make it, they probably wouldn't have done any better if they had been sucking tax money out of their betters.

When are the United States Congress and the American people going to admit that they feel this way and embrace a true meritocracy? We can't keep flailing around between half-assed socialism and half-assed hard-core money worship created by politicians more concerned with staying in office than with solving problems.

People who have been thrown to the wolves either outrun the bastards or end up as wolf shit. Either way, problem solved.

Oh &^% YEAH! What'd I &^%*-in' tell you?

2009-07-14T09:09:00.002-05:00

Research indicates that cursing lessens the sensation of pain, according to an article on Web MD.

We cursaholics know well the balm of the F-bomb in situations that deal both actual and emotional pain. Admittedly, some of us resort to these painkillers too frequently, but it's no different from abusing over-the-counter or prescription remedies.

Indeed, medical use of profanity may come in with the legitimization of medical marijuana.

"I want you to smoke one doobie every six hours and say $&^$^%#! *&%*&! @$%#&%! once every four hours. If you need to, you can increase the dosage of $&^$^%#! *&%*&! @$%#&%! without too many side effects. Just beware that while marijuana carries no risk of addiction, you may find $&^$^%#! *&%*&! @$%#&%! to be very habit forming."

Sound Financal Advice

2009-07-07T09:12:00.002-05:00

This morning on the Disney Morning News, financial expert Mellody Hobson advised viewers to keep contributing to their retirement accounts in these troubled times. Put savings before purchases. Good, frugal principles.

Thrift is the enemy of economic activity. Money placed in an investment fund for the purpose of generating future income will be invested more or less successfully in profit-pursuing endeavors. That means it won't be spent on the purchase of goods and services now. Investment managers will take their best guess at what will be making money in the future. The companies receiving infusions of capital from investors may purchase materials and hire personnel. Eventually the money invested will make its way back into active circulation in one form or another. Initially, however, it appears to go into storage, like fresh water held in a glacier.

Perhaps this is a great metaphor for how we have abused economic principles to create floods of apparent prosperity at the cost of long-term stability. "Wealth creators" have gone at the glaciers of slow-moving assets with flame throwers and atomic bombs to blast loose big chunks for themselves. With no regard for the balanced processes at work, go-getters have gone and gotten for decades, not only unchecked but praised for their financial skill. Left behind is the wreckage of both economy and ecology. New industries are spawned to try to salvage both. The flaw in this is that we make our way inexorably toward a life of scavenging the dump. Recycling is fine. Sifting refuse for any useful scraps, on the other hand, yields diminishing returns.

Diminishing returns brings us back to saving for retirement. Mellody would have us squirrel away dutifully, hoping that the timing of our withdrawal from the workforce coincides with an upturn in the market. I know people who have had the misfortune to miss that timing completely. Oh well. Nothing's perfect. Sorry, guys.

In one small shop in one small town in one small state in one scratched and dented superpower, I have observed that people are not spending money. Are they investing it or just holding onto it? I can't say. We have seen our seasonal visitors for whom money is not a problem, but even they seem a little subdued. The rainy weather hasn't helped. We will never know what a difference the sun might have made. It wouldn't have hurt things. But the financial climate will remain cloudy even if the weather brightens.

You can't save money that's not coming in. Ten percent of a crappy income is a small sum. If the retirement account goes south, that money could go where lost money goes (no one knows). The idea of saving is good. It can shape a genuinely conservative attitude toward consumption even if you can't scrape up any actual cash to save. Try to remember in the good times how you would have been happy with less when times were bad. That approach does not put floods of wealth into tsunamis of prosperity, but it doesn't leave devastation in its wake, either.

Drink a pot a day, drink a pot a day, YAY!

2009-07-06T06:04:00.001-05:00

New study shows that heavy coffee consumption helps combat Alzheimer's Disease. Jeez, how bad would I be without it?

Check out the details of caffeinated lab mice here. Be better at the rat race! Endorsed by actual rats!

Pretty Things on the Table

2009-06-23T19:47:00.003-05:00

As if the arrangement of yard-grown plants wasn't enough, Tylo, the Spot-Eyed Green Mountain Yard Panther added herself to the display.

The tall cylindrical metal object on the left is the grooviest pepper grinder ever. The cellist spotted the name Vic Firth on the package of this intriguing-looking device next to the pepper bunnies. The ears keep breaking on our pepper bunnies.

Vic Firth branched out from drumsticks to a wide variety of products including items for the gourmet kitchen.

Plucky Environmental Group Seeks Votes to Secure Grant

2009-06-17T20:35:00.000-05:00

The Green Mountain Conservation Group, named for the centerpiece mountain of Effingham, NH, not the famous range in Vermont, has made it to the second round of an Internet popularity contest to secure a $15,000 grant. This money will help fund our programs promoting water protection in the largest stratified drift aquifer in the state. The watershed is a major contributor to the Saco River drainage, so water quality here also has effects through a large swath of Maine.

VOTE HERE, as often as the site will let you, through July 9.

Thanks!

Do the best job you can until you get caught

2009-06-14T06:49:00.004-05:00

My employer called me "anal" again yesterday for my thorough and detailed bike assembly procedures. At least he didn't blow up angrily about it the way he has.

"You have a sign on the wall over there that says, 'It's ready when it's right," he said. "But I've seen everyone here make mistakes. Everyone." He repeated "everyone" slowly and deliberately, looking at me. For some reason my normal human lack of perfection is supposed to undermine my suggestion that we aim for a high standard of accuracy in our work. That is always his counter-argument, as if only a perfect being is worthy to instruct him or anyone else in our organization.

ANYONE CAN DO WHAT I DO. THIS IS NOT ABOUT ME BEING BETTER THAN ANYONE, IT'S ABOUT EVERYONE AIMING FOR A HIGH STANDARD. At least when you miss aiming high your shortfall stands a chance of being better than average. It's only bike mechanics, not anything that hard to master. Why not do it well?

In 2005 I gave up on reforming the organization, but I did not give up on myself or the customers for whom I work. Within limits defined by each situation, such as a customer's budget or desire to have things done really well, I do my best to provide good service.

When I assemble a bicycle I start a the back and work my way to the front, disassembling a lot so I can be sure it is really adjusted as well as its original quality allows. This is NOT the official policy of the shop, because the management feels that certain aspects of the factory assembly are good enough. They believe that the customers don't deserve the best we know how to do, only something that will "probably be good enough."

Let me stress that a thorough assembly barely takes longer than a careless one. Once you accept that you WILL do all the procedures involved in a thorough assembly, you are free to GET ON WITH THEM.

A thoroughly assembled bike takes seconds to prepare for a test ride and a few minutes to prepare for final delivery. It is far less likely to boomerang back within a few days of the sale because something went wrong with it. This assumes the customer actually rides it. Because many customers don't pursue an active cycling program right after purchasing the bike, many slipshod assembles can wander the Earth for years before they show any symptoms. That fact alone excuses a more casual approach.

When I first started this job as a temporary thing to tide me over until unspecified better things came along, I didn't care much about it. A few years into it, though, I saw the value of craftsmanship in self defense, if nothing else. I also see it as a way to make the world a more trustworthy place. I'll do my best. You, please, do yours.

Cynics will say it is pointless and hopeless. On many days I agree with them. But then, I suffer from depression. I try not to let that affect my work. However darkly I might view the general situation, I can't let myself take it out on specific people. The worst aspects of humanity are evolutionary qualities. I don't know if we can talk ourselves out of them or if we simply have to wait and see if we develop beyond them. I try to enjoy the simple things in life and hope I don't encounter any of the ugly people. I feel sorry for those who get caught up in our ugly exercises near and far.

Meanwhile I hunker in the greasy chaos and do the best job I can. No one has yet given me a good reason to do otherwise.

Sonia Sotomayor

2009-05-27T05:54:00.002-05:00

The morning news had a video clip of Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor saying something alarming about the role of the court of appeals as a place where policy is made.

The lesson here is Never Think Out Loud. Anything you say can and will be held against you at some point. And people who don't believe in evolution don't believe a person and their ideas can evolve. Every blurt becomes part of the scriptural record, unalterable and damning for eternity.

This happens in any confirmation process. But some people are worse about it than others.

Despite all the muckraking and finger pointing, ideologues on either side seldom get what they want, which is a vending machine for party-line answers.

This cracks me up

2009-05-16T06:22:00.004-05:00

The Cadillac Escalade, a vehicle that might as well have seats upholstered with endangered species leather and the message "Drill Baby, Drill" permanently etched into the bumper, symbolizes conspicuous consumption and thoughtless disregard for a whole range of environmental, economic and political concerns. But this one has a conservation license plate.

Look at it this way

2009-04-20T20:39:00.003-05:00

If aliens flew up in a space ship and said, "here's 41 trillion of your dollars. Let us destroy your planet," would you think that was a good deal?

How is that different from business leaders from our own planet saying basically the same thing?

Hey, if they've got the money I guess we have to let them do it.

A New Direction in Appearance Consciousness

2009-03-14T21:34:00.003-05:00

Watching some portly individuals outside the ski lodge today, I realized that humans labor at an insurmountable handicap because of their naked skin.

It doesn't take much to make us look unsightly when unclad. A few extra pounds, a few too many years gone by, and suddenly nudity is something to overcome, not celebrate, on the way to attempts at pleasures of the senses.

If humans were covered with lush pelts of soft, thick fur, like big kitties or cuddly bears, a few extra pounds would only add to our appeal. So instead of trying to devise yet another skin moisturizer, wrinkle remover or sure-fire weight-control program, medical research should focus on developing the fur-bearing human.

Likewise, the bony among us could benefit from the fuller figure and smoother contours provided by a furry coat. So there's something for everybody in this idea.

Times are hard! Gut the schools!

2009-03-13T21:21:00.002-05:00

Hey, the financial picture looks bleak. How can we cut some fat out of the budget? I know: whack programs out of the schools!

They sure don't need crap like music and art. There's plenty of recorded music to entertain us in the few short years between now and the environmental destruction of the planet. Seriously: does anyone need much of an education when no one's really got a future anyway?

Interestingly, in a certain school district in Maine, not only is orchestra on the chopping block less than one year after they hired a highly qualified teacher to spiff up the program, but they're also planning to completely dismantle their technical school. Wait a minute. What happened to all that bullshit about math and science education, and educating our work force for the demands of the 21st Century?

Cutting technical programs seems like a none too subtle acknowledgment that our young people really do have nothing to look forward to. Cutting music and art is just gratuitous cruelty. Shove them toward their future with no skills and no aesthetics. How soon will it matter?

If you produce an ignorant enough generation, they won't even know they should complain. Even if they figure it out, they will have no ability to do so. So the system works!

The Incredible Shrinking Billionaires

2009-03-12T05:21:00.003-05:00

Forbes Magazine reports fewer billionaires on its annual list of the richest people in the world, and smaller fortunes among most of the survivors.

Before you cry sarcastic tears or give way to genuine worry that this pool of potential benefactors has lost its ability to trickle down upon us, consider two things.

1. If they truly lost solid wealth based on genuine assets, that means someone else gained it. Find and follow the money trail to find out who has benefited.

2. If this is just shrinkage of perceived value, they never really had it to begin with.

Perceived value drives much of so-called wealth creation. In truth, there is no wealth creation. It's wealth fabrication. Perceived value drives the stock market up and down far more than real disruptions in the flow of actual resources do.

In times of trouble, many traded assets may change hands below their actual value. But some simply stand revealed as having little or no value. A smart money manipulator, seeing that people are paying ridiculous sums for fairy dust, might trade in fairy dust a little. An honest one won't extol the virtues of fairy dust, but simply ride the wave of other people's interest for a while. It is always easier to exploit people's folly than prevent it.

The shrinkage of perceived value is the scariest part of any economic downturn. That's the money that simply disappears. In the case of solid assets temporarily undervalued, it will return. If it was fairy dust, it has simply turned to actual dust and blown away.

The poor billionaires will weather this, if they have lived within their means. It's the same as with any of us, only with more houses, more cars, bigger boats and perhaps an oil company or two.

No Sign of Hell Freezing as Nation Waits for Decent Health Care

2009-03-11T11:00:00.005-05:00

The Obama administration is using the time-honored tactic of fake motion to make it seem like they can come through on their promise of health care reform any time in the next eight years.

This article in the St. Petersburg Times has the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget telling congress it's up to them and all options remain open. That sounds like business as usual and a complete cop out. The insurance industry's lobbyists will continue to work Congress as they always have, dividing the votes enough to insure that nothing changes for the better.

All across America, citizens continue to follow the health plan they've been using: Don't Get Sick, Don't Get Injured.

My dentist subscribes to a service called Care Credit. My doctor might also. I haven't asked. It's a deferred-payment credit card that gives you a year to pay off your balance before a hefty interest charge kicks in, retroactive to the date of purchase. So it's basically a time bomb. Pay off in full before the deadline and you owe no extra fees. Fall short by a dime and you owe all the fees you would have owed at something like 23% interest. That's almost a full quarter of whatever price you needed to finance. The year is definitely some help, but if you get several balances open, each with its year, you'd better keep track of your payments to be sure you discharge each of these obligations before the magic date.

Games like this, as well as John McCain's token tax credit that would not have paid half of what a year's health insurance actually costs, and Mitt Romney's Massachusetts plan requiring people to purchase their own health insurance if it is not provided for them are actually considered viable alternatives to a single-payer system covering everyone without all the arm wrestling with private corporations.

Private insurance companies have a profit-driven motive to deny care. As much as it costs them to employ legions of petty minions to stand between the customer and anyone who might actually approve payment for care, actually paying for care apparently costs more. Otherwise, why the legendary obstructionism? Why the scale of premiums that makes even catastrophic care basically unaffordable for people of moderate means over the age of 50? Yes, friends, as you age and are more likely actually to need care, you must bet more with the corporate casino even to stay in the game.

If we are being told to take our lumps and die of whatever befalls us, do NOT turn around and tell us, as Romney would, that we have to piss away what resources we have, buying fake coverage at scandalous prices. Toss us a token tax credit if you like, but quit trying to make us believe that it does more than half-close the spouting artery opened by health insurance premiums and health care costs. I'm being generous to say it half closes it.

Snide Republicans already lob partisan dung-bombs at Obama administration plans for any kind of spending. The usual opposition to a government of the people, by the people, for the people that actually shares the national resources to provide something useful to the people still wields its unchecked power.

I don't care if it rains or freezes...

2009-03-09T14:07:00.004-05:00

Life in northern New England is a long-term relationship with fire and ice. Winter is when ice dams build up on roofs of houses that could catch fire the next day from a heating system malfunction. And, malfunctioning or not, some form of fire has to provide life-sustaining warmth while water freezes all by itself outside.

That bit about water freezing by itself really seems to freak some southern folk out. If you've only ever encountered the domestic ice cube in its protected habitat, your freezer, a face-to-face encounter with aqua glacialis in the wild can be unsettling. Born and bred Texans and Floridians scare their unruly children with tales of dark and frigid lands north of Dallas or Jacksonville, where the nights are long and all life is frozen to death eight months of the year unless it can find shelter before the first killing frost.

As in any long-term relationship, those in New England's cold embrace do consider divorce. But as long as you're in the relationship you have to work with it. Fire must be built and tended. Ice in its many forms must be moved to more convenient locations if possible while you wait for nature to remove it entirely. Anything you can't move you have to live with, drive over, or stand out from under.

When the snow stops falling today I have to shove some around to get through the next few weeks before we can expect a period of hub-deep mud on the way to what passes for warmer weather. We got a foretaste of it this weekend. Then winter snatched the month back from spring's weak fingers.

Going to work one winter day

2009-02-13T22:02:00.005-05:00

This moose and my fellow motorists and I all had our morning schedules to keep.

Life in Paradise

2009-02-05T09:39:00.002-05:00

As the Obama Administration copes with reality, so do the rest of us deal with the logistics of our given climate and lifestyle.

Last week, the cellist and I, on separate days, reduced the snow load on our roofs in anticipation of more and wetter precipitation. That never arrived, so the roofs sit exposed to changing temperatures without the insulation of 10-24 inches of snow. We didn't think much about this until last night when the temperature dove steadily below zero.

On the northern face of the steep roof, ice had formed in a thick layer below the skylight. More than just a dam along the edge, this armor extends several feet up. The roof does not leak, but the ice and the materials of the roof itself react to the cold at different rates. Every couple of hours, starting at 1:30 a.m., the house thundered with a noise like a gas explosion. Since the living room stove has been acting a bit weird, we've been shutting it off when we go to bed or leave the house. It sat quietly when I got up to investigate.

As always when a noise awakens me, I wondered if I had really heard it. An aftershock sounded like a cat jumping down from a tall piece if furniture. It could actually have been a cat jumping down from a tall piece of furniture.

Two hours later we both woke from a lighter slumber when the house boomed again. I wondered if drifted snow had blocked the wall vent for the Monitor heater in the basement, leading to some sort of ominous backfire. I checked the vent with a flashlight. It was fine. I stoked the wood fire, turned down the Monitor setting so it would not come on, and returned to the nest. More aftershocks vibrated the house, but their exact location remained impossible to pinpoint.

The 5:30 blast clearly came from the section of roof I suspected. I had to get up anyway, so I went around turning on the heaters, feeding the cats and all the other routines of a winter morning. I haven't had much sleep, but that's how it goes. I keep promising to do better.

The temperature dipped close to 11 degrees below zero at dawn. The wind swayed the trees. Another day lay ahead, unexplored country in a familiar land.

Uh oh

2009-01-22T12:42:00.002-05:00

If Barack Obama had to take the oath of office over again because of the mix up at the inauguration ceremony, that means all you people who fumbled your vows on your wedding day aren't really married.

That's it! Your kids are illegitimate! You're living in sin! Break it up!

Out of darkness comes light

2009-01-20T09:04:00.003-05:00

Today the United States makes a significant step forward in cultural evolution with the election of the first chief executive of a race different from the room full of guys who stood together 230-odd years ago and launched this nation on its crazy course. We can all feel rightly uplifted by this acceptance that we should judge each other as human beings, not sorted into some sub-category.

Many factors contributed to bring this nation to the point where enough people would believe this at the same time and have the power to bring it about. Not the least of these is how bad the preceding executive has been. This takes absolutely nothing from Barack Obama. It says more about the sluggish, halting nature of humanity's trudge toward enlightenment. It takes big things to spur the first change in a series of changes long overdue.

If the attacks of September 11, 2001, had not occurred, George W. Bush would probably have been a one-term joke, an embarrassment like a big zit on prom night. The shock and fear the nation felt after the stunning blow delivered by foreign criminals in 2001 panicked enough people into mistaking Bush for an actual president that his reelection in 2004 was nearly guaranteed.

Granted, Bush and his administration were so bad that the election of 2004 was hotly contested and ugly. If he had really been transformed by 9-11-01 into a good choice to lead this country, his reelection in 2004 would have made more sense. But in a way it's a blessing he prevailed. We had to descend deeper into the morass of his creation to be ready to accept a very new choice in national leadership.

Obama emerged as a compelling speaker in the Democrats' losing bid in 2004. His eloquence and thoughtfulness spread the comforting image of a well-spoken leader. Such things were possible, if only we could hang on.

I did not choose Obama initially. He seemed a little young, although he is not the youngest to assume the Presidency. Initially his policies did not appeal to me as much as a little from this candidate and something else from that one. But as the campaign evolved, other candidates fell away. They have returned as advisors and cabinet nominees, which keeps alive the hope that the Obama administration will incorporate their good ideas.

Obama himself probably feels the responsibility of his historical significance as well as the burdens of the office itself. Let us not as a nation heap too much weight on the racial issue when the real duties and challenges of the Presidency will demand so much energy and attention. We did not elect a black man. We elected a person who appears to possess the leadership qualities we need to help us emerge from a tough time made worse by incompetent, corrupt and narrow-minded government. He happens to come from a different racial background than all of the nation's previous choices for more than two centuries. Judged not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character. And that's how it should be.

Another Reason to Question Our Established Conventions

2009-01-14T15:44:00.002-05:00

This news story carried on Reuters reports that high levels of a certain kind of estrogen in women leads them to shop around for better mates even when they're in an established relationship. The suggestion comes from within their body chemistry.

From an animal standpoint it makes sense. A fertile, attractive female can attract better and better males, leading to offspring with theoretically better chances for survival and success.

Many of the conscious decisions humans have made about mating behavior over the years have dealt with known and logical indicators of status and success. This recent study simply provides further proof that the mechanisms are more automatic than many people may realize or wish to admit.

Guys, if you get dumped by that hot chick, remember two things: if you got to be there at all it's a compliment, and she didn't really have control over the decision to move on. Oh, and you're genetically inferior, so try to stay out of the way, okay? The hormones don't lie.

Employee Compensation

2009-01-14T12:16:00.003-05:00

Our pay scales are generally upside down. Why should someone who gets to fly around in a corporate jet or sit in a cushy office make thousands of times as much as someone we ask to clean up the messes in public bathrooms?

Arguments for bloated executive compensation generally rest on the need to make our brilliant business tacticians feel good about themselves. They need to be able to schmooze and compete in the highest social circles. Start paying every one of them $30,000 a year while the custodial staff gets a quarter of a million to start and see if the highest social circles don't change abruptly. Suddenly the prize spot won't be the corner office, it'll be the broom closet.

Maybe our public restrooms will be cleaner. Shorten the shifts, sweeten the pay and watch those fixtures sparkle. Offer bonuses for better performance. We're already paying somebody a lot of money to do something. Maybe we've just been paying the wrong people to do the wrong thing. Re-allocate the budget to fluff up somebody else's account for awhile. Try it for a few years, then shift it again. I bet that will stimulate the economy much more than printing more money and stuffing it into the same holes we've been digging all along.

Drive Report: Pontiac Small Hippo

2009-01-08T10:12:00.002-05:00

Now I understand why people drive so stupidly fast all the time. The soundproofing in the average sensory deprivation SUV is so complete, I thought I'd gone deaf. A smooth, heavy vehicle that feels solid and secure at 70 miles per hour feels like it isn't even moving at 40.

I definitely made the right choice yesterday, driving the little old Toyota Corolla with the good snow tires. All wheel drive does nothing for you when you're driving four cheesy tires.

On a snowy morning I will test the surface right after I pull out of my driveway, by jamming on the brakes and swerving, as long as no one is around. This lets me know what I might expect down the line and gives my reflexes a tune up before I need them. This morning I discovered that the anti-lock brakes in the Hippo feel like a nightclub bouncer throwing you off the brake pedal. "I'll handle this," says the muscly brute, shoving your foot away. "Sit down and shut up, pencil neck!"

It is as harsh and unpleasant as it sounds.

In the quest to make motor vehicles idiot proof, the auto industry has made them highly idiot resistant up to a point. Once that point is passed, all hell will break loose. In my favorite set of turns on the way to work, I decided to push things a little. The skimpy-treaded radials broke loose as I thought they would, causing the massive beast to lurch sideways toward the guardrail that stood between me and a pond. With officious whirring, clicking and grinding noises, computerized controls snapped into action to save me from myself. The result was not a snappy, skillful pullout, but a labored, slithering wallow back onto something resembling the right track.

These SUVs use lots of sophisticated computer equipment to compensate for the fact that they're really just rocket-propelled barges. If the automated systems can't overcome whatever pilot error has just been committed, the pilot has few options remaining. It's really easy to go too far.

Just dropping into the soft snow at the edge of the cleared lane elicited wallowing swerves. They were slight, but unsettling. It's ironic that a car like a Ford Escort or a Toyota Corolla with a weight around 2400 pounds has a more solid road feel than a supposedly capable truck weighing about 1200 pounds more. But think about it: the tires on the smaller car have a relatively larger bite on the road compared to the weight they are trying to keep on track. The little car sits lower and requires much less power to accelerate and much less force to steer or stop.

To help keep drivers aware of the fragile lives outside their cabin, auto makers should put some of that computer power to work on a system to reduce the cabin insulation and the sense of isolation at lower speeds. I thought at first this would be a simple matter of making the vehicles smooth and solid at highway speeds, but complete rattle traps at lower speeds. But this would backfire as people tried to stay at smooth speeds all the time. So the solution will have to be variable insulation or perhaps a constant nagging voice from the dash board.

"Slow down! Watch out for that bike! Hey, people are walking here! Oh god! You'll kill us all!"

"Upgrade"

2009-01-06T15:34:00.004-05:00

Because our spare car has become another casualty, my wife and I decided to rent a car for a week while the Ford is in the hands of the Gilford Guru. If the game runs more than a week we'll pursue other options.

The '95 Toyota unfortunately ended up in the hands of an unimaginative local mechanic who goes by the rate book no matter what. The collapsed strut the Gilford Guru could fix for about $180 got an estimate of about $400 from the guy nearby. And so it goes. The tow to Gilford would be prohibitive, so it may be "game over" for faithful Rusty.

The Gilford Guru did say he'd check out one last option for transporting the Toy before we write the official time of death. If Rusty comes back for another farewell tour it eases things considerably.

Meanwhile, the rental car. We signed up for an econobox, but the rental company upgraded me to a small hippo when I got there.

"Don't you have an econobox?" I asked.

"No," said the very nice rental guy. "We're upgrading you to the small hippo at no extra charge."

Before I could say anything he looked thoughtful. "Oh yeah, it will cost more in gas." Beat. "But it'll be great in the snow!"

He was very nice and I didn't want to be a prick, so I didn't say that I'd seen far too much ditch bait like this on its side with its summer radials in the air, and that I felt a lot more secure in a little econobox. They'd upgraded me, after all. Who wouldn't be tickled?

I remembered 2002, when my in-laws reserved a small SUV for four adults, an 11-year-old and all our luggage on a wedding trip to the Seattle area. That time, the rental company "upgraded" someone who didn't need an SUV with our car and stuck all of us in a Ford Escort. The best joke was that we met the people who got the upgrade at the wedding. They were telling everybody about how they arrived at the airport around mid-day and got such a nice treat from the car rental place.

Whoever got my econobox, wanna trade?

For now, I have to make a big sign to stick on the hippo, saying "Please don't hate me. It's a rental."

When the tranny comes out of the Escort I really want to get a catapult and fire it through the front windows of a certain Ford dealership. The Gilford Guru suggested a trebuchet was more hip, but I want something with a flat trajectory. I want that transmission casing to come in low and level, spewing burned fluid and small parts. I savor the thought of the explosion of glass shards and the sharp "whack" it will make when it hits the nearest display model.

The Guru said, "with a trebuchet, you could throw the whole car." As usual, I like the way he thinks. But the car was basically sound until the botched repair in Niantic. I hate to waste anything useful.

Until next time, kids, remember to get regular oil changes, check your tire pressures and never trust a dealership service department.

Cheerio!

Realities of Small Business

2009-01-06T09:01:00.003-05:00

During periods of heavy tourist activity, the staff at the shops I work for goes without time off for the duration. Because we serve cross-country skiers, we work our hardest when everyone else is out of school or on vacation from work.

My employers tend to panic easily. They demanded from the beginning that I, their very first real full-time grunt, be available straight through the two weeks in February on which Massachusetts and New Hampshire schools close for February vacation.

We all soon realized that Massachusetts people may come to New Hampshire for vacation, but New Hampshire people usually get the hell away. We went back to taking our regular days off during the second vacation week in late February. That still leaves us working a 12-day marathon for the Massachusetts week.

Hell begins on the Friday leading into Presidents' Day Weekend. We run flat out until the end of Sunday the following weekend.

We get a foretaste of hell, ironically, around the holiday many people observe as the birth of the Son of God. If Christmas week is snowy, we're in the trenches. And Christmas can be worse than February, because the holiday falls on a specific date, not a movable three-day weekend. February vacation always runs from weekend to weekend. As eternal as it feels, it has a distinct pattern.

One may wonder why we don't add staff for the heavy periods.

In specialty retail, especially if you really care about your specialty, you need people who can work to a high standard, not just names on a schedule and mouth-breathers on the sales floor. Lord knows we get enough of those as customers. Although the schedule takes an increasing toll as we all get older, it still makes more sense to pay the overtime and work the stretch if we can manage it, than to try to rope in someone far less trained for a short hitch.

Small businesses don't have the luxury of extra personnel. Sometimes a specialty store like a bike or ski shop will develop a group of friends among the more addicted customers. These people can fill in sometimes. More often they can't. They have their own lives, which were well-planned enough to keep them out of a career in retail.

If things get really bad, a small business doesn't lay people off. It folds up. In the specialty arena, where service counts as much as sales, you have to reach a certain size to provide all the functions needed to survive. The next size down may be considerably smaller, like a single person in a tiny store front, doing his or her best to stay above water.

Looking for improvements

2009-01-05T17:13:00.002-05:00

People seem generally hopeful as we approach the inauguration. I hope they will bear in mind that it takes much longer to build or rebuild a strong edifice than it does to smash it with a tornado, burn it down or blow it up.

The outgoing presidential administration could also be compared to a punk kid abusing a car. After eight years of burnouts, drag races and demolition derby the repairs are going to take time and money. Everybody be patient.

Weird things make me laugh sometimes

2008-12-23T20:37:00.002-05:00

My Father

2008-12-23T08:36:00.002-05:00

No one likes to think about losing a loved one, but eventually each of us loses or is lost. Before that happens we have a compulsion to try to tell important people in our lives what we thought of them. Otherwise, regret traditionally follows.

As my father is advancing in years and seems to be toying with the notion of getting diagnosed with something heinous, I turn my attention to him. It never wavers far from him anyway, since we spent so much time together when I was young.

He was not a modern parent who hovers over every moment of an offspring's life in the current mode. Even if portable video had existed, he would not have immortalized my every act and made sure he was there to witness every school play, sports event and booger-eating contest behind the elementary school. Let's be reasonable. Reason is what elevates us above mere vessels of passion. Vessels of passion have a fine time riding their waves of unchecked emotion, but they can make quite a mess.

I shy away from describing life as a gift when it can go so wrong in so many ways, but I am grateful that my parents chose to be as responsible as they were after giving it to me and my siblings. I would rather have had a pool table than a baby brother back in the mid 1960s, but that wasn't my decision to make. We moved a lot and a baby brother was more portable. I've made my peace with that.

My father was a pain in the ass. Above all else he was dedicated to doing the right thing even if it inconvenienced him personally. Because this is a minority view, he was frequently frustrated, depressed and irritable. To a kid this does not look like a good advertisement for that lifestyle. But the value works its insidious way into your mind. Before you know it, you're being self-destructively conscientious as well. It may come out in chaotic and obscure ways at first. It may take a final form very different from the example of the previous generation. Still, it is there. At least the intention is there.

My father's devotion to the ideals of the institutions that raised him made him somewhat unpopular with many of the other inmates and functionaries of those institutions who had looser interpretations of the basic principles under which they were supposed to operate. He questioned authority not in a destructive way, but by insisting that it live up to the code it claimed to. He saw the larger picture in which the restrictions on personal gratification led to an overall higher standard for everyone. Take a little less, give a little more and it all comes around eventually.

Selfish bastards shortstop the part that comes back around, leaving the good guys holding a nearly-empty bag or the stinky end of the stick more often than not. The truly good just keep plugging, because they know that without them there would be nothing at all worth having. Society really would cease to function if everybody just went out and tried to get as much as possible for themselves. Witness it in action even now. So the poor guy with a conscience gets made to look like an idiot time and again. Or he receives hollow accolades from the grateful selfish bastards who pay tribute to the values without any intention of hobbling themselves with them. Only everyone knows at some level that the good guy really is holding everything together for the ones who can't or won't. For the very instant of the tribute, even the most cynical user feels genuine affection and gratitude for the grunt bending under the weight of stone.

My father, badly betrayed and abandoned by those who should have cared for him, was determined not to make the same mistake with his own family. Consequently, he made his own brand new mistakes. I can't think of any just at the moment, since he is omniscient, but he is human. Well, half human, anyway. I came to think he might be from some other race that lives by pure logic. Except when we made him go bullshit crazy mad by being bonehead kids.

For all his hard work and simple virtue, he had a curious attraction to the yachts and homes of the wealthy. He never did what was necessary to have those things, but never ceased to want them. That paradox marked his efforts throughout adulthood. He had an unfulfilled longing for certain personal accomplishments linked to a temperamental compulsion to put his own wants below the needs of others. As decades passed he seems to have developed more satisfaction in the service itself, but for a while he really did seem to be hoping for some recognition and compensation that would not materialize. A battle raged below the surface, sometimes barely below it, between his personal ambitions and what he saw as his higher self.

It was often painful to be his child. We could see that he suffered in ways we could not fix. When we went away to pursue education and work, we took away the family that he loved even as it made him turn purple and make strangling noises with rage. When we came back, we made him turn purple and make strangling noises with rage. At any family gathering we know before it's over we'll probably piss him off. That's how it is with someone who is the living embodiment of a conscience.

In church they say a person's hierarchy of devotion should start with God. Family comes below God. In the United States military forces, family comes below the job, too. I believe the military establishment would be just as happy if service members had no families. At best, service members' families might provide generations of faithful recruits. Short of that they're just a burden and a distraction. While I didn't feel we fell distantly behind the Coast Guard, I knew that when the orders came we would take them and that any relationships I had outside the immediate family had to bend or break accordingly. Work, and doing your job, was the highest calling. It made the family possible and it made one a useful member of society. Find something useful to do and do it devotedly.

All the fumblings and false starts of my father's children have stemmed from the search for that worthwhile thing to do. We saw his treatment at the hands of the service and were not attracted to that avenue, so we sought things that we could enjoy and stand to do, day after day. Everything reflects a gradual convergence with his sense of decency. The usefulness of some of it might be debatable, but it could have been worse. In the meantime, you gotta have a job. Do good where you can. My father squeezed himself into an ideal of service that's hard to match. In a better world, not even a perfect world, enough people would realize the need to pitch in and make lives of the sacrificial few unnecessary. For now, though, everything decent rides on people like him.

Try to remember that if you catch him hanging out in front of the TV in his lounging attire.

Was that a strangling noise I heard?

Looking out for our interests

2008-12-17T12:27:00.002-05:00

In order to keep investors interested in oil companies, OPEC has agreed to cut production by 2.2 million barrels a day, according to news reports. This is an effort to stop plummeting prices for petroleum.

Wiping off the rear view mirror I glance back at mid summer, when prices were spiraling upward and headed for unprecedented heights.

Neither the highs nor the lows are based in what you could call reality. But the highs were probably closer to the truth. So why not let us enjoy our illusion for a while? The market will correct eventually.

I know, I know. Petroleum is already an artificially modulated commodity. Like every other commodity in our economy, its price no longer reflects just the costs associated with bringing it forth from its raw state, shaping it into a usable form and transporting it to users. Everything gets tweaked or nudged if not outright bludgeoned and abducted. Values are manipulated to squeeze out more profit when possible. Does this compensate for the periods of loss or actually create them? A little nudge or a big shove upward seems to invite a countervailing downward motion in prices at some point.

Petroleum producers know they're dealing with addicts as surely as a drug dealer does. For the few of us who go into rehab and make it work, many more just keep on using. Money's just tight right now, okay? Just hook me up this once. Tide me over. I need this stuff, man. You don't understand!

Investors and people who service them will appreciate OPEC's move. People who can afford to pay a little more at the pump will welcome the lift this brings to their portfolios. Everyone else can just pump it and bitch.

Thoughts on the News

2008-12-16T18:56:00.002-05:00

First, why couldn't Mr. Madoff's name be Howie instead of Bernie? Howie Madoff with all that money is anyone's guess. We're told it was a lapse in security by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Speaking of security lapses, where was George Bush's security detail when the shoes started flying? Why didn't we see a Secret Service agent diving across yelling, "Shoe! Shoe!" and taking a brogan to the noggin for POTUS?

To his credit, Georgie did a fine job of dodgin' for himself. I'd bet it wasn't the first time someone had shied something at his head for being an idiot.

Friends of mine have said they'd love to have done the same thing to him. I can't imagine anything satisfying about doing or saying anything to him. I look forward to ignoring him completely once he's no longer in office. We probably can't punish him for anything, so let's just get on with cleaning up after him and deny him the privilege of any more of our attention.

Quick Ford Tie-off

2008-12-16T08:48:00.003-05:00

According to relayed information from the Ford dealer, the repair performed met Ford's current specifications. The flex-hose graft, properly done, is supposed to function as well as the original lines, now no longer available.

Interestingly, my mechanic was able to obtain and install proper lines. These include a flexible section, but not clamped externally.

The cost of transmission repairs rivals the price of a used car of similar vintage. The advantage of repairing this one is that I know its history and condition. I just have to decide which repair procedure to buy: transplant a used one, rebuild the current one or transplant a new (or rebuilt) one.

The transmission wizard likes to rebuild. He sounds like he works to my standard and the Gilford Guru's. I just don't know if I can afford that level of meticulousness in an eleven-year-old car.

Meanwhile, the long-suffering 1995 Toyota Corolla wagon provides daily transportation. Its age and decrepitude keep me from getting frisky. If it goes, I'm screwed.

This experience confirms that automatic transmissions are another example of the expense of laziness. A manual transmission has ONE clutch. Learn to use it. If you fry it, replacement ain't cheap, but it's a damn sight cheaper than anything inside a slushbox. Anything that performs work for you has to have some ability to think for itself. That means more parts working in greater coordination without any input from you. That means more little things that can go "sproing" and complicate your life much more than they were simplifying it while they worked.

At this point, automatic transmissions dominate. More than likely, my next car will have one, too. I'll just roll the dice the way we all do and hope I win the gamble and keep the red juice inside, where it belongs.

I notice transmission puddles along the road now more than I did before. When I see them down at the corner where the hotrod idiots do doughnuts and burn out thirty feet of rubber I just laugh at them. Along the roads and highways they tell a different story. Someone just got bad, bad news. The tow alone from some of these emergency landings would have been a chunk of change. If they didn't get the car stopped soon enough, their troubles have just begun.

And so the economy moves.

The Ford Situation

2008-12-07T06:58:00.002-05:00

I've heard nothing from the Ford dealer that screwed up my car. I don't expect to. From a pure business standpoint, he gains nothing by compensating me.

Consider it clinically. His good customer, my father, is old and unlikely to buy any more cars there, so he's more of a liability than an asset. Ford as a brand gains when people like the cars and keep buying new ones, not when they try to own them for five or ten years. The dealer might make it back in service if the customer takes the car to the dealer for service, but most frugal, long-term car owners probably get tired of dealership service departments pretty quickly.

Long-lived used cars make Ford look good, but their true monetary value is hard to quantify. In each individual case, the car itself and its cheap-ass owner are an annoyance.

The dealer gains nothing by helping me out. I don't live in that town and I don't have money.

Disposing of the financial aspect, consider the moral one. Repairs often carry a warranty, but that is usually measured in days or weeks. While it's undeniable that the botched repair led directly to the breakdown that damaged the transmission, the service department at the Ford dealership can say that subsequent mechanics had ample opportunity to notice the substandard repair and correct it.

I might do damage to the dealership's reputation, but I live far away. And what auto dealership doesn't have a few stories circulating about questionable things they might have done? I single out none of them, distrusting all of them. Hey, prove me wrong, guys. Prove me wrong.

Auto dealerships are not all staffed by crooks and con men. They're just big institutions with all the problems a big institution normally faces when maintaining quality control. Repairs are not like manufacturing. A category of repairs might all be very similar, but they're not all alike. They don't fall perfectly into a time-and-motion model of efficiency. But big institutions have notorious problems dealing with creativity and adaptability. A little bit slower technician might yield much better results but cost the company too much money because they're willing to settle for lower precision for quicker turns. That's only one aspect of the problem.

If the dealer who screwed up my car is the smart business man I take him to be, he will do what he has already done: take the information, pledge to look into it, and do absolutely nothing while he waits for it to go away. Neither my father nor I have enough public relations value to make us a good investment.

Ford dealer owes me a transmission, but I don't expect to get it

2008-12-04T15:19:00.005-05:00

Funny how things happen. The transmission oil cooler lines in my car rusted out and failed when I was on a trip to visit family. The car was repaired by the local Ford dealership. Instead of putting in the real replacement lines, which are steel, they cut the rusted portions away and clamped in short sections of rubber hose. They did not call attention to this fact.

I trusted the repair shop at this facility, where my father has done business faithfully for years. The bill was not cheap, after all. They'd jumped in for a brake job while the car was there.

Rubber grafts are an emergency, short-term repair. I was not told I had received a short-term repair. I was told the lines were repaired.

Oil degenerates the rubber hose. Unlike the metal lines, which rust and develop leaks slowly, the rubber fails catastrophically. Fluid blows out rapidly. As a result, internal parts of the transmission suffer damage from heat and lack of lubrication. According to my car guru's transmission guru, I probably smoked a clutch pack, leading to the strange slippage between second and third gear.

The benefit out of all this is that I got to meet, by phone, yet another cool, down to earth mechanical guy who digs what he does and loves doing good work. It makes me want to round up sick transmissions and send them to him. But such ministrations aren't cheap. Not by a long shot. The ballpark repair estimate for his recommended option, or indeed any of the options he laid out, is around the blue book value for the car.

People complain to me all the time that they've spent more on repairs and upkeep to their bicycles than they paid for the bike itself. I answer that the value of the bike exceeds its cost, which makes it a better bargain. Whenever you have to pay someone to take conscientious care of your stuff, you are buying a portion of their life.

As the dealership demonstrated, a high price tag does not guarantee that the work was well done. Examining the bill in detail now, I could see where the part cost showed a cut corner. Since I did not know the price range for such parts going in, I had no warning flag to tell me to probe more deeply when I first got the bill.

Until I resolve this issue, I cannot drive the car. The conscientious transmission guy is even farther away than the Gilford Guru. He sounds well worth the trip, but do I roll the dice on a drive down there, hoping I won't smoke more tranny parts, or pay huge sums to have it transported there by flatbed truck? No AAA Plus for this boy. It's cha-ching as you go, beyond the first few miles basic motor club courtesy would cover.

This is why I go through all the crap I do to go to the mechanic who always takes good care of me. Between the underhanded and the incompetent, it's too easy to have expensive mistakes made on your behalf in the world of automobiles.

The bill for all this is going to cut deeply, along with the bills already incurred for other things that needed to be done right when they needed to be done. There's nothing frivolous in my economy, yet it is still stretched to the breaking point.

All because of some two-bit hack in a dealership garage.

Whatever you do, do well. Take pride in your work and your integrity. Be honest and give full information. The people who tune you out, who complain that you're boring or make their dumb, thoughtless lives too hard can go get humped by the courteous dudes in the matching blue shirts who call you sir and screw you hard while you're anaesthetized by their marketing.

I'm kind of pissed about this.

I hope no one is surprised

2008-11-22T07:55:00.006-05:00

According to a US intelligence report, the balance of global power is shifting toward Asia. This unintended consequence of outsourcing is grimly amusing. Business and political leaders are learning the hard way that you can't exploit foreign laborers effectively without bringing them into your own country, where you can control the economy more completely.

All that money sent overseas isn't coming back, because we have made our nation a place with nothing to offer except suckers to buy cheap goods. Once our pockets are empty and we've forgotten how to make anything we will just have our real estate to sell. That's underway already.

The full crash will take down people who presently consider themselves wealthy. Only the few wealthiest who have resources to rival those of a small nation will be able to buy themselves a place in a global order where there are no discrete superpowers. You can't really prepare for life in a regime we have only experienced in fiction. All anyone can say for sure is that vast wealth always helps. If you don't have it at this point, you probably don't have time to get it.

The people who plan to build their little forts and live with heavily-armed exuberance will find that their little fantasy depended more on an indulgent government than they realized while they cursed its "intrusiveness."

Is the future democratic? Why should it be? Popular government is not efficient. Since the financial leaders of this country have demonstrated that they really don't care about the average citizen, and our country supposedly led the way in enfranchising Joe Average, why should any government stemming from nations with more heavy-handed traditions take up the burdens of it?

Giving away the farm bought a temporary boom. Any place the United States retains after engineering its own downfall will have to be earned on standards we probably will no longer have the strength to set.

The big change will not happen overnight. Patient nations will simply wait for human nature to take its course. And eventually their turn will come as the unified race grapples unilaterally with our tendency toward slothfulness.

Too bad we can't agree right now that work basically sucks and we should just share the load of necessary tasks and show each other a good time in our off hours.