Web Log Archive December 26th, 2004 through January 8th, 2005
Saturday, January 8, 2005 Elvis Presley was born seventy years ago today.
Says Nicholas Kristoff, "Mosquitoes kill 20 times more people each year than the tsunami did..." Now...I didn't realize that the State Bird of New Jersey (my home state) was such a scourge!
Friday, January 7, 2005 (the day I gave My Blog a name)
Sometimes, as I type the date for these Blog entries, I experience a sense of (fwoabw) "dread". Think of the many dates throughout history which have become synonymous with disaster...synonymous with world-altering events, as if the days before and the days after are separated by more than the hours in between: October 29, 1929, December 7, 1941, November 22, 1963 and September 11, 2001. Each of us has a personal date (or two, or three) to add to these. It's not, in fact, a pleasant thing to ponder: not pleasant to accept our vulnerabilities nor to realize how very little, in the long view, is within our control. We didn't even ask to be born.
Whatever may be your opinion of John Ashcroft (and mine is not high), he is not without gravitas. I mean, if you don't listen to him for content...only for mood and demeanor (like if you tune in a radio station while he's speaking and are unaware, at first, whom you're hearing)...you hear a self-assured, independent man (if also a lunatic). John Ashcroft does seem like a natural leader. Alberto Gonzales, by contrast, is an obsequious individual: one who owes his high position, neither to his leadership nor his legal expertise (nor even to his family's influence), but rather to his well-honed skills of followship. It was all-the-way-to embarrassing ("Thank you, Senator, for the question.") to listen to this varsity yes-man ingratiate himself to the members (some of whom had to avert their eyes) of the Senate Judiciary Committee (before which he is testifying during his own confirmation hearings to succeed Ashcroft as US Attorney General).
Thursday, January 6, 2005 The Feast of The Epiphany of Our Lord
It is also the 37th anniversary of my first marriage...to a beautiful woman who now lives in Mexico...and whom I haven't seen in five years...and whom I'm gonna try to call today...if I can only figure out how. :-0)) Some day I'll blog about how she and I lived in the same building...in an apartment right next door to Theodore Kaczynski...for about three months in the spring and early summer of 1967. And neither of us, until his arrest nearly thirty years later...had any reason to remember him or believe that he was anything other than the quiet, gray-suited guy who walked himself and his briefcase back and forth each day along Telegraph Avenue to the Berkeley campus.
I didn't realize that anyone had invented the Bundt pan! I thought they just grew somewhere in Indiana and then were gathered, painted and boxed for shipment and delivery!
Wednesday, January 5, 2005
The more you do for someone, the less they'll notice it. I have spent most of the last three or four days cleaning, painting and rearranging. Not much time for blogging. But what an improvement in my workspace!
Tuesday, January 4, 2005
When the rain stops, the temperature drops.
The following paragraph is not easy to understand on first reading, I know. "In the paper, titled "Activation and sedation in fluoxetine clinical trials," the authors said that the drug may produce nervousness, anxiety, agitation or insomnia in 19 percent of patients, and sedation in 13 percent of patients. The paper, apparently produced by the drug company's marketing department, said "several suggestions may be helpful in presenting this information to physicians," including emphasizing that more patients on another class of antidepressants stopped taking their drugs than did those on Prozac." I copied it from http://www.cnn.com/2005/HEALTH/01/03/prozac.documents/index.html Got it? It's not earthshaking, really, to learn that Eli Lilly is in business to make money. Please read on:
During my time at the BHC, no-cause drug testing
in the workplace came of age. I was quite stridently opposed to it and even got
my mug in the paper for the noise I was making. Of course, my protests were
futile. Bye and bye, I came to see that my company did not institute such
testing for the officially stated (and quite unsupported) reasons of safety in
the workplace. No. My company instituted such testing simply because they were
forced to! They were (quite literally) shamed into it! It got so to where, if
they didn't, they would be on the defensive...ever having to explain
"why not". There was no business reason to explain "why
not"! Ya see, the people who stood to gain (and who are now gaining) from
this dirty (and counterproductive) business of collecting
urine samples had orchestrated a quite effective campaign to "educate the
public" about the "evils of drugs in the workplace". And so, of
course, it wasn't long (with so much money to be made) before their well-paid
lobbyists in Washington D.C. succeeded in getting Congress (members bought, sold
and traded) to pass legislation favorable to their business interests. And talk
about "lies,
damned lies and statistics". [Interesting...this site (http://www.drugfreeworkplace.com/),
set up by the drug-testing industry but made to look like a public service Web
site, has been abandoned. "Hey people! We won! Abandon battle
stations!"]
I'm here to tell you what I know: where I worked,
there was not and (to my knowledge) had never been any evidence that
drugs in the workplace were a problem. Click here
for the obvious exception.
To make my point: my company never (even) bothered to say that there was
a problem that this Program was going to solve. Yes, you could call it "a
solution in search of a problem". It was certainly NOT possible to find
even one manager, one-on-one, to argue that there was a drug problem in our
company. Shhh! Here's what I learned with a little persistence (very
little...I'm lazy!): In a patently unethical "experiment", conducted
over several months, which the higher-ups at the time were loathe to discuss
(and the higher-ups now might even deny, by Jesus...if
they remember it), they actually went so far as to conduct secret (though
no names were recorded) drug testing ("screens") on all employees who
availed themselves of a free physical, generously offered by the company. But
they might as well have not bothered to do this furtive testing...because if
that testing had shown that nobody was on drugs, the hawkers from the
drug-testing firms would counsel that, by implementing the Program, things would
be sure to stay that way and...if the testing showed that lots of
people were on drugs, then the pitch became, "See, that's why you need our
program!" Now, as it turned out, slightly fewer than one-in-four tested
positive for a substance-of-interest...and almost all of those for metabolites
of marijuana (but with no threshold defined, meaning that the test did not
discriminate between actual smokers and those exposed to "second hand
smoke"). Some of the other "positives" might have been for
legally prescribed medications, but I digress...the "experiment" was
flawed in so many other ways, that no meaningful conclusions could have been
drawn. And, like I say, it never mattered anyway. The Program was going to be
implemented for reasons that had nothing to do with drugs in the workplace but
had everything to do with fattening the wallets of the people in the
business of drug testing. BTW, I call it "no-cause" drug testing
because that's what it is. The hawkers insist on calling it "random"
drug testing because that word connotes fairness and even benignity.
Monday, January 3, 2005
"Such is the disconnect between the country and the war that there is no national outrage when the president awards the Medal of Freedom to the clowns who undermined the troops by bungling intelligence (George Tenet) and Iraqi support (Paul Bremer). Such is the disconnect that Washington and the news media react with slack-jawed shock when one of those good soldiers we support so much speaks up at a town hall meeting in Kuwait and asks the secretary of defense why vehicles that take him and his brothers into battle lack proper armor. When Mr. Rumsfeld told Specialist Thomas Wilson in Kuwait that the only reason the troops lacked armor was "a matter of production and capability," he was lying. The manufacturers that supply the armor were quick to respond that they had been telling the Pentagon for months that they could increase production, in the case of one company (ArmorWorks in Arizona) by as much as 100 percent. But that news was quickly drowned out by cable and talk radio arguments over whether Mr. Wilson should or should not have consulted with an embedded reporter about the phrasing of his question. The truth is that for all the lip service paid to supporting the troops, out of sight is often out of mind. Even the minority that remains gung-ho about the war in Iraq is quick to blame the grunts for anything that goes wrong. Specialist Wilson, Rush Limbaugh said, was guilty of "near insubordination" for his question in Kuwait; the poor defense secretary "was set up," whined The New York Post." Frank Rich, The New York Times.
Sunday, January 2, 2005
In Bushspeak now: I am catastrophically relieved that December is past and will not return for at least six months!
And...last night, I experienced a breakthrough in my struggle to learn Pro Tools! And it now seems that to learn this new stuff (Pro Tools, MIDI and Cubase) I will simply have to "hang with it". I must be patient and keep the faith that I will, ultimately, arrive at an understanding. I approach any new subject with the expectation that I will find an "intuitive path" to its absorption. In other words, I expect to learn it quickly and effortlessly. Now I don't think I'm unusual in this regard. In fact, don't we all reflexively evaluate any new situation in terms of what we already know? I mean, when you think about it, how can we do otherwise? And, so far for me, with these three musical-niche subjects, my expectations for some quick and easy learning have not materialized. I don't feel that I have made any progress except by "hanging with it" and by being willing to feel confused. Confidence is a form of faith and faith is a form of confidence. Said Einstein, "It's not that I'm so smart, "it's just that I stay with problems longer."
Now I must find a drawing
(Lin...help!) of that famous
donkey ever moving forward in hopes of eating a carrot dangling from a stick
tied to his own head
...and ever just beyond his bite: 
! 
Picture
courtesy of Kirsten. I was surprised to learn that this donkey-carrot-stick
dealie has been the subject of so much discussion and so many disparate
interpretations. The cartoon shown here is but one "take" of many.
Sooner or later, everything that can happen will!
Talk
about a guy who's coloring outside the lines: 
<===click here to check it out, Eduard!
Saturday, January 1, 2005 First Day of The Year
When I was a kid (maybe ten...eleven years old), a prank me and my juvenile delinquent friends liked to play was to (after dark) knock on someone's (a neighbor's) door (or ring their doorbell) and then run away and hide where we could giggle and watch 'em come to the door and look around. Not a complex thrill, I admit, but what else were a bunch of energetic little f**kers supposed to do after dark in Shrewsbury, New Jersey on a balmy summer evening in 1957 when all the adults were in their cups? 'Course, this had to be in the days when people would actually open their door to a knock or a ring (without expecting to find a machete-wielding psycho killer on their porch)! [It was also before the days of answering machines and telemarketers. Most people actually did answer their phones and say "hello". But that's another story for another day.]
The Internet analogue of such quasi-adolescent behavior is to initiate contact with someone (whom you maybe haven't seen, written nor talked to in a while) by 1) sending them a friendly email (knocking on their door), 2) waiting for them to respond in a friendly manner (watching as they open their door) and then...3) simply not writing back to (even) acknowledge the receipt of their reply to your initiation of contact (giggling in the bushes)! This course of action, not surprisingly, leads the recipient-turned-respondent to wonder...to wonder if you actually received the reply or (worse) if, perhaps, the reply (when received) reminded you why you hadn't seen, written nor talked to the recipient-turned-respondent lately, anyway. :-( Color me weird (or 'so last year', as the kids say), but when there's someone I really don't want anything to do with...and I haven't seen 'em in a while anyway...then I don't contact 'em!
Friday, December 31, 2005 Last Day of The Year
"When I was a zoo, there wasn't a town in the boy where I lived." Or was it, "When I was a town, there wasn't a boy in the zoo where I lived."(?) Somethin' like that. Anyway, when my kids were little, I got to watch a buncha kids' shows: Mr. Rogers...Sesame Street...Size Small. Size Small? What? That was a show out of Canada (for which I presently find no Web link) featuring "Miss Helen". God, I loved her! There couldn't a been more than ten episodes and she started each one with the theme song:
Size Small
Not too tall
We love you just as you are!
And aren't you glad it's true
God made just one of you
'Cuz being different makes you a little a**hole
La la la la la la la lu.
Well...OK...so I modified the lyrics a bit. I think she sang something like "makes you very special". :-) 'Course, both my kids had the words to this and hundreds of other TV songs fixed in their brains by age two. One of my simple pleasures was to sing "alternate lyrics" and wait for the correction that was sure to follow. In stentorian fashion, my son would declare, "Those are not the words!"
Thursday, December 30, 2004
A fool and his money are soon parted. I wonder how many people (assuming there's any who) have fallen for the Internet version of this money-out-of-Africa theme/scheme. You would imagine that anyone smart enough to have large sums of ready cash might also be smart enough to not believe a something-for-nothing pitch. I mean, I suppose you can 'forgive' the tens of thousands of people who thought that Microsoft was gonna send 'em (how much was it?) $540 if they just helped circulate an email. At least those people were only wasting their time!
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
It's done. I had Arlene put to sleep this morning. The appointment was at 10:00 but I called the vet and asked if I could bring her in early and I did. Maggie knew it was coming today and was accepting of the inevitability...but I wanted it to be over before she woke up. I can handle my own sadness better than hers. So now I try to turn my thoughts to...like man!, the euthanasia cost $116! Outrageous! And that was the no-frills package! A larger distraction for me might be the unimaginable devastation all around the Indian Ocean. At least, I console myself, I'm only dealing with the loss of an old, sick cat. It's hard to be a wise-guy this morning.
Tuesday, December 28, 2004
On my first day on the job at the BHC where I was confined for all those many years (beginning in the '80's), I was treated to a new-employee 'tour' of the facility's new Word Processing Center. It would enable wet secretaries (they were in a pool, after all) to send their finished work to a printer that they couldn't even see because...be seated for this one...it was in another room! And also guess what? No more gettin' high on White-Out! Correction ribbons/cartridges? Huh? File it? Nope! Just name it! This Center did not have CRT's (yet). Rather, the individual work stations featured something closer to a teletype, where the user could actually see a paper document being created...on paper! Hardly two years later, this modern marvel (from Xerox) was gone...in pieces...in the dumpster. Even to describe it now to people born after 1984 makes it sound silly...almost absurd! But it was not silly to someone in 1982. It was this opco's first (expensive and, ultimately, ineffective) foray into "paperless files". Many of us have now lived long enough to see things that were once cutting-edge become anachronistic. Pagers might be the most lightning everyday example. That transition (from hip to what?) didn't even take five years. And remember the term "Desktop Publishing"?
Monday, December 27, 2004
Ran outa Lipton so hadda coupla cupsa some left-over hippie tea and it must notta had any caffeine. That's (my excuse as to) why I'm even more boring than usual this morning.
Maggie and I had, sometime yesterday, decided that this was probably gonna be the day to pull the plug on Arlene. She hadn't eaten in days but we were still of two minds about it 'cuz the animal is responsive and doesn't seem to be in pain. Her eyes are clear and she can still scamper about, even. Anyway...to my surprise, she just ate some Meow Mix (ya know, the stuff cats ask for by name?) and drank some water. So it's still not an easy call. Like Maggie says..."if she would only go one way or the other!"
But enough about Arlene. My right leg is still not 100%. Not a day to go running or walking anyway. It be pouring outside! But hey...even if I wind up like that poor bastard (Jean-Dominique Bauby) with LIS in that book somebody gave me who hadn't actually read it herself (yet), at least Christmas is over! And I can be really optimistic (no?) and hope that I'm not around for the next one! It could happen!
Remember:
What you are, I was. What I am, you will be.
And:
Here lies Martin Elginbrod.
Have mercy on my soul, Oh God!
As I would do if I were God
and thee were Martin Elginbrod.
Sunday, December 26th, 2004 Ah! Boxing Day!
Now...some folks down there in Houston certainly figured out how to have a good time at Christmas! Heartwarming! And can you say, "hoax"? I mean, how else are you gonna get anyone to give a rat's rear end about another coupla stupid Nintendo Games on Ebay?
Yesterday, even apart from its being Christmas and all, did not start well. Leaving out some messy details, I got one of those (I guess you call 'em) "muscle spasms" in my lower back, right side. This is something I've had precisely twice before in my lengthening life. For the first hour or so, I could barely move. Kinda fun, though! Sorta fires the imagination, if you know what I mean. If it had never happened to me before, I'm sure I woulda been hecka worried, especially after visiting some of these Web sites on the topic, with all this talk about brain tumors and strokes! Anyway, by last night things had much improved and today, although I'm still not back up to going running, I was able to walk about a mile. I have a fresh appreciation for people with disabilities. Being able to walk is something that most of us take for granted...until we can't.
60 Minutes has run some pretty lame segments before, but tonight's (on the "Echo Boomers") has set a new standard. With the aid of a pants-peddling bimbo "marketing consultant", a blow-dried Toyota pitch man (hawking the Scion...a car almost as ugly as a Honda Element) and a pediatrician ("one of the foremost authorities...on how children learn"), the segment concludes that most people born in 1984 will be twenty-one years old in 2005. The piece is hosted by Steve Kroft (who struggles to pay attention).
