Picking My Brain 06-10-30

Now at 83% Customer Satisfaction in the latest JD Powers and Associates survey! Thanks, folks! I couldn't have done it without five out of six of you!

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“To announce there must be no criticism of the President, and to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, it is morally treasonous to the American public.”
– President Theodore Roosevelt

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I think I know why there are so many bad drivers out there. It's very simple. You don't have to know how to drive in order to get a license. And once you get your license, you don't have to learn how to drive in order to keep it. (It seems you mainly have to learn how not to get caught.) And those who do learn, look who's teaching them - their parents! Their parents aren't the best drivers in the world either, you know. Their parents are the bad drivers you see and do your best to avoid every day. And it looks like their multiplying! And teaching their kids to drive!!

I went to high school with a kid who was tall for his age, grew up on a farm, and drove tractors and pickups since he was, like, 12. When he went to get his license and the examiner told him to start the road test, he put his left hand on the roof of the car and palmed the steering wheel to pull out. The examiner said, "Stop! You failed." He was pretty pissed about that. But what other bad habits did he develop? The thing is, he re-scheduled his test, performed on his best behavior for the duration of the road test, and then started driving the way he had been (apparently for years, at the age of 16) once he got his license.

One of the things that I didn't like was that if you failed your road test you got a copy of the examiner's score sheet, so you can see why you failed and what you have to learn to do correctly. Makes sense. But if you passed (as I did), you don't get that sheet in the mail. You just get told that you passed and your license will be arriving in the mail within six weeks. You don't even get told how you scored, so if you did some things wrong and didn't realize it, you might just keep on doing those things wrong until you get into or cause an accident. I hope they've changed that in the almost thirty years since I got my license. Making progress sounds, I don't know, "progressive"?

I was lucky. My senior class was (at the time) the last one that would get Driver's Ed. And I was also fortunate to have a very good instructor (whose exact name escapes me, and I wouldn't want to get it wrong). To this day, I remember something he taught us that hit me in such a way that it became almost a mantra to me. He said, "When you look in your rearview mirror, just glance at it. Don't study it. If you're going to study it, you might as well turn around and look out the back window." I always think of that whenever I catch myself taking too much interest in what's going on behind me, instead of in front of me (where I'm headed.)

While stationed at Ramstein AB in West Germany, I discovered a whole different attitude toward driving, and a great deal of it makes sense. [Quick side note: Whenever I think about the fact that while I was there from '86-'88, it was still called "West" Germany (the Good Guys!). There was that Simpsons episode where Homer was thinking of buying a new car (a Yugo, perhaps?) and he asked where the car was made. The salesman said, "The country no longer exists." That's how I think of where I was last stationed in the Air Force. "The country no longer exists."] Anyway, their testing system to get a license is a hell of a lot harder than ours, and they have a lot of other great ideas, which I plan to talk about another time. Moving on...

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I'm still a little "miffed", shall we say, about what happened over the weekend with the blog host people who make this wonderful blog possible, when possible. It would be unfair to be "pissed" about being unable to publish anything or work on it for a day or so, because it is free and they handle a lot of things that beginners like me would be lost at having to do on our own. But it came back up right before I was about to give up and go home from the office yesterday, so I was able to post a few more things. I hope you like the new song parody. And that was Tippy as a little kitten, several years ago. I used that one because he still acts that way. And the blog seems to be working now, so happy days are here again. (Not counting Iraq; Afghanistan; Darfur; voting districts using electronic voting machines that produce no verifiable paper trail; climate change; stagnant wages; sexual predators in Congress; New Orleans still suffering; miners still unsafe; O'Reilly's still lying; habeas corpus eviscerated; no-bid-cost-plus contractors poisoning our troops; more than eight billion dollars under CPA control unaccounted for with impunity; over two trillion dollars unaccounted for but uninvestigated because it was it was announced September, 10, 2001 and by the next day it was "so September 10th"; hundreds of thousands of people fleeing economic hardship and a corrupt government into a neighboring country only to be put to work at pitiful wages doing jobs the local citizens don't like to do themselves; Republican chairs of committees and Democrats taking bribes, and who knows how many others there are since they decided not to investigate themselves much due to someone's ego; this has been the deadlist month for our troops in Iraq all year so it can't be getting better; that even I could have struck out looking with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth in Game 7; and there's a pathological liar with his finger on the button who thinks the voice in his head that told him to invade Iraq was God's and not Satan's). But my blog works again.

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So John Boehner thinks Donald Rumsfeld is the right man for the job. What job would that be, destroying the finest, best-equipped, best-trained fighting force in the history of the world? How can anyone find him unaccountable for his complete failure to achieve results? Virtually every pre-war assumption they made (except swiftly defeating the Iraqi Army, of which there ws never any doubt in anyone's mind, especially mine) turned out to be false, and he just acted like that was to be expected. Hey, Rummy! It's time to put your resignation in writing, hand it in, and walk out the door. You have long over-stayed your effectiveness. There is no other reason to stay. Your resignation is the only way you have left to serve your country.

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So, Congressman Roy Blount (Ferengi Party - MO, In charge of a Majority of the House's Whips), says that the survey saying 54% of Americsns have a negative view of the economy must be the media's fault. Why do these assholes equate a strong Dow Jones average with every American having a better life?

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If the Republicans somehow come out keeping both Houses of Congress this year, that alone would be proof that the vote was rigged. WE need to go back to paper ballots. Despite what some people may think, it is entirely possible to do it. It's not like one person has to count all 100,000,000+ votes cast. Each district will count a few thousand votes, and the election supervisors (whatever their titles) can hir enough people to do the counting in the larger districts. By the way, why are some voting districts so much larger than others? Paper ballots is the first step, but there is a great deal more to do about Election Reform, a topic I hope to be covering soon. I want to research this one, and nothing I write could do anything about this year's elections, but I would like to feel like I'm doing something about 2008. If you would like to learn more about the dangers of these new electronic voting machines, visit Black Box Voting.

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What is Rush Limbaugh's mental malfunction?

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I remember in the early days of HBO we used to get a guide with our cable bill. This was when I was in college living off-campus. When it came to decide what movies to watch, we had our own ratings system. A movie got one star for each warning they gave about the movie. So, a "four-star movie" was always one that contained violence, profanity, nudity, and sexual situations. They tended to be the ones we chose. You have to remember, this was around 1980. Regular TV fare was still pretty tame by today's standards. "Dynasty" was about the raciest thing on TV. Ah, those were the days.

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That's all for now. And don't forget to turn your clocks back if you haven't done so already. It's no coincidence there was no one on the highway when you left for work this morning.