Category: Elon Musk Week

A Texas Church, Aesop, and the Future of Freedom

“I’m the plumber.  I’m just hanging around in case something goes wrong with her pipes.  (to audience) That’s the first time I’ve used that joke in twenty years.” – Horsefeathers

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“Why a four-year-old child could understand this report.  Run out and find me a four-year-old child.  I can’t make head or tail out of it.”

In a Texas church this weekend, the worst nightmare of the Left happened.  The only thing that could have been worse for the Left would have been a video of Bernie Sanders spending his own money.  A good guy with a gun (Jack Wilson) stopped a bad guy with a gun.  Part of what made it bad for the Left:  clear video evidence showed a good guy taking down a bad guy with a single shot.  To make it even worse for the Left:  the bad guy was a killer, shooting a pair of grandfatherly looking men in a room filled with grandma and grandpa types.

It was quick.  From the time the bad guy pulled his gun to the time the bad guy ceasing to . . . be was five seconds.  Five short seconds.  This was, perhaps, a final blow for the Left.  The idea that the police, who arrived very quickly (four minutes or less) should be the only ones with guns evaporated, especially since two church members were dead within three seconds.  A very well-trained citizen saved lives – how many we’ll thankfully not know, since he acted.

Not a cop.  A citizen.

Every Leftist commenter on the web that was trying to justify gun control in the wake of this tragedy couldn’t do so without defending the shooter as being somehow justified in wanting to rob the church.  The biggest problem in the eyes of the Left, perhaps, is that the churchgoers weren’t sufficiently Christian enough to quietly line up to be shot.  Texas is probably not the state for that.

What made the difference is that the good guy was able to ignore disbelief at the situation occurring right in front of him, and was able to react.  How could Jack Wilson do this?  He didn’t know exactly what threat he was going to face.  He didn’t even know if there ever was even going to be a threat.  But yet, he trained.  Dare I say it?  He was prepped.

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Ok, Zoomer.  (For the record, I’m neither.  I just like stirring things up.)

Jack Wilson scanned the churchgoers.  He was looking for data points.  He saw them and acted.

This week, Aesop over at The Raconteur Report posted his 2019 Quincy Adams Wagstaff Lecture.  It’s here (LINK).  RTWT.  As usual, Aesop writes excellent material – not only to ponder upon, but to act upon.  There are many wonderful points in it, and here is the opening:

Wherever you’re reading this, you’ve had unmistakable evidence that things aren’t going to go all rosy.  Perhaps ever again.  Perhaps just for a long dark winter of the soul, and/or of the entire civilization. There has been more than one Dark Age period in human history, and they will happen again.  You may very well get to see this firsthand, and experience life amidst it.  Howsoever long or briefly.

You’ve had a respite of some 37 months to get your metaphysical crap together in one bag, and use the time prudently.

If you’ve squandered that lead time, woe unto you.

This post made me think, which is dangerous.  At least that’s what my therapist says.  My therapist who says I’m “mentally creative” and “reality impaired.”  Thankfully, she’s imaginary, which really lowers her billing rate.  But what that post made me think most about was:

Mindset.

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This is what would happen if my imaginary therapist talked to The Mrs.  It’s funnier if you read the whole thing in a pirate voice, really.

Aesop mentions mental readiness, and that’s key.  The last 37 months have been, to put it mildly, an indication that we are headed towards a very uncertain future as the culture around us continues to polarize, as the monetary debt we face (all over the world) continues to mount, as soccer is still taken seriously as an international sport rather than a game for attention challenged three-year-olds, and as the international stability that was so hard won with the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War dissolves.

I’m not trying to sell you on any one future, on any one fate, unless there’s money in it.  But I am trying to emphasize the start of your salvation:  your mindset.  If you believe that the world will continue in an unbroken, linear stream, I can assure you that you’re wrong.  We’ve had the precursor warnings of 9/11 and the Great Recession.  If I am correct, this decade will bring tumult of a similar, if not greater magnitude.

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Evacuate the women and children first!  Then we can solve this in silence.

You should believe this, too.  Not on a surface level.  This is a mindset.  Your daily decisions should take these future unknown and unknowable calamities into account.  Why?

Because if I’m right, and you’re prepared a week, a month, or five years before you need to be, you win.  Also?  Society wins, because the more people that are prepared, the better we come through the next crisis/shock.  If we were all prepared, a hurricane could hit the shore and the stores would still be full.  When we prepare, we manage to make sure there will be less stress on the system during an emergency.

The other way to help is with skills, and the longer the crisis, the more important those skills will be.  And, no, your experience in saving the Princess® in Super Mario Brothers™ doesn’t count.  At least my therapist says it won’t.  Real skills provide for a basic human need, like food.  During the Great Depression, people gardened and farms weren’t big factory affairs – they were much smaller Mom and Pop style farms.  Even though there was significant malnutrition, starvation deaths in the United States were minimal.

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He said his New Year’s resolution was 1920×1080.

More evidence?

One of the biggest enemies of seeing reality is seeing the world you think should be, not the world as it really is.  People look at Antifa® rioting and think, “They should be arrested.”  They aren’t.  What does that data point tell you?

The government of Virginia is threatening to take semi-automatic guns, dedicate a team to confiscating guns and the government should allow honest, law abiding citizens to exercise the right to self-protection.  But the government wants to take it away and make honest people felons.  What does that data point tell you?

Government debt today is at 106% of GDP.  During the worst of the Great Depression, debt was less than 50% of the GDP.  During the height of the Vietnam War?  Debt was less than 40%.  What does that data point tell you?

I can’t promise the cause of the next crisis.  But I can promise that it’s coming.  Cultivate the mindset.  It’s the first step.

The key is to avoid despair even though you see the world as it really is.

“I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today.  I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn’t arrived yet.  I have just one day, today, and I’m going to be happy in it.” – Marcus Aurelius Groucho Marx

I have been accused of being too cheerful from time to time throughout my life.  And I plead guilty – with a smile on my face.  Why?

First – I’m naturally an optimist.  I want to achieve the best, but I also know that there’s no fixed way the world should be.  There is just the way that the world really is today.  If I don’t let myself get upset at the difference between an ideal and reality, I sleep a lot better.  Does that mean I’m satisfied?  No.  I work with every fiber to change some things for the better, but I don’t let it wreck my life like a pink-hatted blue-haired creature of fluid gender when confronted with a person who had to ask what their gender pronouns are.

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The first two hours are rough.  Caffeine is my best morning friend.

Second – Life has been awesome for me.  I can think of a LOT of times that I thought it was ruined.  But each of those times resulted in a situation that was pretty good for me.  Am I worth $30 million dollars?  No.  But that’s probably for the better.  If I had that kind of scratch I’d probably make Elon Musk look like the model of public restraint.

Third – I’ll admit, there was a time (about a year ago) where I got a little gloomy myself. But as I looked around me, I looked at what we have done.  I realized that freedom has won here in the United States for hundreds of years against all odds.

There were 2.5 million people living in the 13 colonies in 1776.  That’s less than the population of Utah.  In that 2.5 million we had a Washington, a Franklin, a Jefferson.  Sure, Franklin in 1789 might have drank more than the state of Utah in 1989 all by himself, but there are men that are the equal to our founders, and they exist in every state.  You know they exist, too.  The tricorn hats and powdered wigs are a dead giveaway.

Always remember that there is a line.  If you look at them standing along the church pews, scanning the congregation to keep them safe, they look nice.

Heck, they are nice.  Until they cross the line.

Then they’re not nice.  Then they become good men.

So, to gently change Groucho:  The past we wish to cling to is dead.  The present that we have is generally not so bad.  And we have a future, even if we can only see it dimly now, even if its golden age is years or decades away.

Let us go and make it.

I predict: these are the funniest predictions for 2020 you will read in 2020.

“Predictions are hard.  Especially about the future.” – Yogi Berra

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Okay, some people do pretty good predictions.

Once upon a time I tried to do real predictions.  The big downside of real predictions is being wrong sometimes.  I’d much rather be wrong all of the time, like last year (Silly Predictions for 2019. Bonus? Golden Bikini Force.), so here are my stunningly incorrect predictions for 2020:

January

  • The Senate takes over the impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump. Because of poor ticket sales, the trial is cancelled, but people who had reserved tickets were given a 20% off voucher for the Nirvana® reunion tour.  I’d love to bum a ride with you guys – I’d call shotgun, but Kurt beat me to it.
  • Joe Biden suspends his presidential campaign for Black History Month© so small black children across the nation can have the opportunity to pet his wet leg hair. When informed that Black History Month is in February, Biden suggests to the reporter that they bare knuckle box, because he’s “tired of your stupid malarkey, 23 skidoo, Tippecanoe and Tyler too!  Cockroaches!”  Biden calms down later after getting some tapioca pudding and watching Price is Right®.
  • Hillary Clinton asks the question, “Do you want to play a game?”

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Chelsea calls Chardonnay “Mommy’s Monica Juice.”

February

  • Ruth Bader Ginsburg sees her shadow on Supreme Court day, assuring us of six more weeks of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
  • Tom Brady’s body reconfigures itself into a new form on national television during Super Bowl® LIV. His new body appears like a low slung muscular tank, and Brady “throws” passes by expelling the football explosively downfield from a brand new fleshy orifice designed by Bill Belichick, based on the anatomy of a platypus.  Sadly, this doesn’t help the Patriots© at all, since they were eliminated earlier in the playoffs and are not even playing in the Super Bowl™.
  • The New Hampshire Democratic primary is won by Kim Jong Un. Unfortunately, it was actually Hillary Clinton being mistaken for Kim Jong Un after her next round of plastic surgery.  Rumor is she was secretly pleased to be called Dear Leader instead of the usual nautical term, “Seaward.”
  • Brexit happens on schedule, but Boris Johnson’s hair stages its own Borexit and joins the Labour Party.

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I guess technically we’re all undead, but Ruth takes it to the next level.

March

  • Super Tuesday, a collection of 13 primaries is held on March 3rd. The top three Democratic finishers are Johnny Depp, Harvey Weinstein, and a resurgent O.J. Simpson.  Nancy Pelosi states, “We are so proud to have our Democratic values and inclusivity on display in these results.”
  • Patrick’s Day replaced by a new gender and religion inclusive holiday: “Buy Expensive Green Things and Drink if You’re Not a Muslim Day.”
  • Joe Biden again suspends his presidential campaign, noting that he needs to focus on saving lives by using his true talent – being able to detect diseases in women by holding their shoulders and sniffing their hair while standing behind them.

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“Don’t thank me . . . now.  Thank me later.  Want to play with my leg hair?”

April

  • Ralph Northam, governor of Virginia, is discovered eating living children on the front lawn of the governor’s mansion while in blackface. After calls for his resignation, he noted that it was, at most, a “youthful indiscretion.”
  • Ruth Bader Ginsberg develops a desire for human flesh much like Tom Cruise or Keanu Reeves, and soon appears to be no older than about 30.
  • A vortex connecting our dimension to another dimension containing hellish beasts is accidently opened by Pentagon scientists. This is almost exactly like the plot to the Stephen King novella The Mist, though not in a legally actionable way, at least according to my lawyer, Lazlo.

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“How could I make this worse?  Oh, yeah, I’ll go after the guns.”

May

  • Beto O’Rourke, while no longer a presidential candidate, decides to create an anti-gun organization, PistolsMakeScared (PMS®). He noted, “I really needed something to do while my wife has quality time with her boyfriends.”
  • France declares war on Canada on Tuesday morning. France surrenders to Germany later that afternoon, declaring Paris an open city.  The Germans refuse the surrender, indicating they can’t determine the number of troops required to defend France, since that’s never been tried before.
  • Australians will discover a spider that is the size of a cat, is as fast as a mongoose, has a diet of eagles and crocodiles, and is as poisonous as a middle school girl’s Instagram®. They name it “Dave.”

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Pictured:  Australian infant’s crib mobile.

June

  • LGBT Pride Month (June) officially replaced with LGBT Smug Condescension Months (June, July, August).
  • Elon Musk unveils a Kleenex® dispenser that automatically pops up a new Kleenex© every time you take one out at a base price of only $45,000. 25,000 people place a deposit, even though there’s a two year wait.
  • Chick-Fil-A® decides to start serving food on Sunday, adding hamburgers to their menu, and encouraging the worship of Satan as part of a new marketing campaign. “We’ve got to change with the times,” said their new spokesman, Lena Dunham.

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I mean if you have to choose between values and a tasty sandwich . . .

July

  • The Democratic Convention is moved from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Malmo, Sweden as the Democratic Committee considers it unfair that people outside the United States have been denied a vote. Greta Thunberg, noted school dropout, is nominated.  Her vice presidential nominee, Joe Biden, is quoted as saying, “I’m thrilled to be behind her.”
  • The Republican Convention is held in a hollowed out volcano somewhere in the South Pacific. Donald Trump is nominated as the presidential candidate, and in a surprise move, he is also nominated to be vice president.  “Job’s too easy.  And I need someone whose I can trust to be vice president.”  Trump also adopts a pure white Persian cat with a diamond collar.
  • The 2020 Summer Olympics® open in Tokyo. Bingo is not an approved Olympic sport, primarily because the Japanese are still a bit superstitious about “B-29.”

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We now know what Paul Tibbets would do for a Klondike Bar®.

August

  • Google® is found to be censoring ______, ______ and _____, and working with Facebook™ and Twitter© to also censor _____. It is feared that the election might be impacted because ____ ____ ____, ____ and ____.
  • Elon Musk unveils an electric reusable coffee mug – he calls it Teasla©. Initial claims are that it is autonomous and can be used for both hot and cold liquids.  It also requires the new Teasla™ Supercharger, which can recharge it in 70 minutes using a 50’ by 50’ solar power array costing only $25,000.  The mug weighs 43 pounds.

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(Pssst – it’s in the trunk.)

September

  • For the second straight year, September is again cancelled by general consensus.

October

  • Two televised presidential debates and one televised arm wrestling contest are held. The planned presidential MMA bout is cancelled when Greta Thunberg tests positive for high levels of testosterone.  She is furious, “How dare you assume my gender?  You have ruined my fight plan.”  She then proceeds to spend all of her campaign funds on a live commercial showing her eating seven pounds of mashed potatoes (no gravy) in one sitting while scowling at the camera.
  • Gormongous, Ruler of the Dark Empire, emerges as a dark horse third party candidate after having emerged from the Pentagon’s dimensional experiment earlier in the year. “Everyone can be an American,” he hissed through clouds of sulfurous vapor.  The Ninth Circuit Court ruled that his alternate universe was “technically America” so he was a valid candidate for president, despite him being seven stories tall and covered in an exoskeleton made of material from neutron stars.

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Never take potatoes from a testosterone-raging Swede with fetal alcohol syndrome.  It’s a rule I live by.

November

  • The 2020 presidential election is held on the third. California immediately protests because the Electoral College now has fraternities, and no one asked California to join one so she could go to that cool Kappa Sig kegger and maybe hook up with Montana.
  • Donald Trump wins both the popular vote and the Electoral College. Democratic candidate Greta Thunberg says, “That is not enough – it makes a mockery of our democracy.  You must also defeat me in a best-of-seven game of Jarts®.”
  • Joe Biden celebrates his 78th birthday.  His hair and teeth turn 22.

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Many a G.I. Joe® experienced a fatal chest wound to Jarts™.

December

  • Santa Claus is now required by the 9Th Circuit Court of Appeals to be race, gender, and species neutral when used in any public school setting. Ironically, this has the effect of making most kindergarten pictures of NuSanta™ highly accurate.
  • Gormongous, Ruler of the Dark Empire, decides that he will use the fame from his presidential run to launch a top tier tequila as well as a chain of animal shelter/fast Asian restaurants in the Midwest.
  • Ruth Bader Ginsberg looks down on the lights of the city at night from her perch at the top of the Washington Monument. She smells, senses, and sees the life below her.  The life that she drains, person by person, to prolong hers.  Then . . . a target.  She aims her bat-like wings to take her quickly down the side of the monument, and then to strike.  Ahhh, fresh blood.  Ruth feels the gravity drawing her down as she leaps . . . .
  • National Park Ranger Report, 12/22/20: Bat killed by hawk near Washington Monument.

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To all:  Happy New Year!

Christmas 2019 – Complete With Asian Stereo Type

“Merry Christmas, Argyle.” – Die Hard

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So, true story – Pugsley came home from school, handed me this painting.  “What do you think?”  My response:  “Looks like Frosty is coming to kill me.”  Pugsley:  “Yup, that’s it.”  That’s my boy!

STATELY WILDER MANOR, Christmas Eve, 2019

Yesterday was a quiet Christmas Eve.  About the time I was ten years old, my brother (also named John Wilder*) and I got the ultimate concession a kid could get:  we convinced Ma and Pa Wilder that we should open our presents not on Christmas morning, but instead on Christmas Eve.  At a certain point, this becomes an easy sell.  Get up at 5:30 AM and groggily watch children ripping wrapping paper through the gauze of pain and regret of a Christmas Eve hangover, or have a nice, calm Christmas morning that involves sleeping somewhere beyond dawn?

Yeah, that’s easier than selling life insurance to people connected to Hillary Clinton.

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After leaving the Department of State, Hillary Clinton’s Secret Service code name was “Video.”  Since he was connected to so many high ranking political figures, Jeff Epstein’s code name was “Radio Star.”

Since I’m not a hypocrite, we Wilder’s have done the same on my watch as soon as my kids figure out that Santa Claus and functional socialism aren’t real.  It makes sense.  Christmas has a charm that, like an open jar of mayonnaise left on the counter for a week, evolves.  As you age, the very essence of Christmas changes.

It’s easy to surprise and delight a five-year-old at Christmas.  When they open a present they didn’t even know existed, getting to amazement is easy.  Walkie-talkies in 2019?  What sort of sorcery is this?  I have seen a five year old that regularly uses an iPad® that can access thousands of movies look amazed when confronted with a simple walkie-talkie.  When young, Christmas was a wonder – it was like the rules were suspended for a day.  Ma Wilder even let me out of the cage under the stairs.

But when you have older children, say, teenagers, they have a list.  A long list.  And they know your limits – they know exactly how much you’re going to spend on them at Christmas and they pick their presents to maximize cash consumption.  This year The Boy asked for video game thing.  Since he claims he got a 4.0 at Big State U, we indulged him.  What Pugsley asked for was surprising to me:  he wanted a record player turntable and a stereo amplifier.

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Pugsley’s amplifier was on sale – it was missing a volume knob – I couldn’t turn it down.

When I was near Pugsley’s age, this was exactly the gift I wanted.  I bought him the stereo and turntable he was looking for – honestly, in this day and age I was surprised they even made either of those devices anymore except in backwards stone-age places like Cairo, Calcutta, or Chicago.  Between cell phones and computers being able to instantly access tens of millions of songs and then flawlessly play an endless string of them, why would someone want to own a device that plays a maximum of 22 minutes before you physically have to get up to flip the record over?  Hell, I’m so lazy that if I won an award for being lazy I’d have The Mrs. go pick it up for me.

But Pugsley was certain that was what he wanted.

Pugsley opened up the box with the turntable and then I realized he had no idea what he was doing – no idea at all.  I’m pretty sure he’d never even seen a record played before in real life.  Nevertheless, he set it up the turntable.  Then he pulled out an old album – Queen’s A Night At The Opera.  I hadn’t seen this album in years, not since it had been packed up before Pugsley was born when The Mrs., The Boy and I moved to Alaska.  The Mrs. never even looked in the box – she had asked me when we were dating if I had a police record.

“No, just one by Sting.”

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I’ll admit it wasn’t fair.  But he got even:  one time got me a Cisformer® for my birthday – it’s a car that starts out as a car and stays a car.

My brother had originally bought A Night At The Opera, and in a fit of religiosity had abandoned it along with several other records (Rolling Stones®, Thin Lizzy©, and Sweet™ come to mind) when he moved out to make his way in the big world.  Or maybe I stole them liberated them.  Little brothers do that, you know.  Regardless, I have a dozen or so albums that originated from him.  Or, to make that statement more accurate, Pugsley has the albums now.  As I reflect, I realize even the word “album” is as antiquated as Nancy Pelosi’s virginity.  Heck, it even predates her senility.

Regardless, I realized that Pugsley had no understanding of how to even hold a record.  I stopped him as he began to pull A Night At The Opera out of the sleeve.  After all, an original 1975 pressing of that album might cost all of $8.00, plus shipping and handling off of VinylDan69’s store on Ebay®.

“Stop!  Here, you hold it like this, by the edges.  And then,” putting my thumb on one edge while putting my fingers on the label to stabilize the album, “you slide it into the sleeve like this.  Don’t let it drop – it will cut through the paper sleeve.”  I then showed him how I put the album and sleeve back into the cover – with the opening to the sleeve pointed up so the album didn’t slide out.

I might have left my clothes on the floor, I might have used the same bath towel until it dried as stiff as concrete in the Hoover Dam, and my refrigerator might have resembled a biological weapon experiment prohibited by the Korean Armistice Agreement of 1953, but I always took care of my albums.  Nobody likes to hear “The boys are ba-The boys are ba-The boys are ba” for forty straight minutes.  No.  You want to hear that they’re back, and there’s gonna be trouble.  And you can forget about the old trick of taping two pennies to the tonearm, given inflation I’d have to put about $0.50 up there.

Pugsley caught on quickly, and put the record on the player.  He picked up the tonearm, and gently placed it on the record.  It started to slide immediately across the face of the record, quickly, towards the center.

“It’s skating!  Did you take the cover off of the needle?”  The answer, of course, was no.  Soon enough the needle cover was removed, and Pugsley had a fully functional stereo.

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I even hear that the band Europe has a new record out – The Vinyl Countdown.

He took the turntable and amplifier into his room and connected them to a set of Sony® speakers old enough that the rubber around the speaker cones had cracked and deteriorated to a fine black powder.  As I rubbed powder grains between my fingers, I thought that if the powder was hydrated it might reanimate into my ex-wife’s soul, and nobody wants that.

But those Sony® speakers were old:  I think they once belonged to Pa Wilder.  He gave them to me sometime after Sinatra passed on.  It’s at Christmas that I reflect on what kind of a father Frank Sinatra was – if you were bad, no ice in your drink.

I followed Pugsley back and watched as he put an old 45rpm single of mine on the turntable.  He gently set the tonearm down on the edge of the record.  It hissed and popped – a sound I hadn’t heard in decades.  Then this mighty classic of Western Civilization started playing:

Yes, that’s Eddie Murphy singing the “Norton” parts.

Pugsley looked at me, puzzled, as if waiting for some explanation for the audible abomination emanating from his Christmas present.  Yes, A Night At The Opera was my brother’s record.  But this fine Joe Piscopo song?  Yeah.  I spent actual cash money to buy it.  I checked to see if maybe this was the B-side.  Nope.  On either side was the same song:  The Honeymooner’s Rap.  I had spent money, intentionally, to buy this song.

I was at a loss.  How do you explain to a middle school kid that the song was a 34 year old parody of a television show that was cancelled 64 years ago?  And, a television show (The Honeymooners) that I’d only seen one episode of, ever?

Nah, too much backstory.  Plus I’m trying to get him to be wise with his money.  I shut up.

Pugsley:  “Dad . . . this song is so,” he paused, and I imagined him looking for an adjective that wouldn’t be offensive to me on Christmas Eve.  “90’s,” he concluded.

John Wilder:  “80’s.”

Pugsley:  “Whatever.”

I left him to discover music written by obscure musicians who had long since developed careers in real estate or the food service industry.  Oh, Steven Tyler, who now plays a lesbian aunt on the Big Bang Theory®.  I think.

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Well, at least Aerosmith® taught me how to cook Chinese food.  I can now wok this way.

Christmas 2020 is decidedly anti-frenetic.  Yes, Pugsley was attempting to get everyone into the room earlier in the day on Christmas Eve so we could open presents, but he was calm about it – not uncontrollably shaking like a Chihuahua on a chalupa.

The rule is that the youngest Wilder distribute the presents from under the tree.  Pugsley did so.  It’s also been the rule that the youngest Wilder gets to open presents first.  Not this year.  “Okay, Dad, you go first,” ordered Pugsley.

I did.

It wasn’t exactly a surprise when I opened a box filled with roasted coffee beans from Alaska that The Mrs. ordered from Alaska.  For whatever reason, my favorite coffee is still Musher’s Blend© from the North Pole Coffee Company™ in Fairbanks, Alaska (LINK).  I have two pounds, thanks to The Mrs.  I had, of course, known this before I asked The Boy to wrap the box.  Disclosure:  I get no money from them.  Just coffee.  And then just when I pay for it.  (Guys at North Pole Coffee:  I’m completely willing to take free coffee.  I have ethics, but, you know, this is coffee.)

So, no real surprises.

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They did a brain scan of her:  “Coffee.  Coffee.  Coffeecoffeecoffeecoffeecoffee.  Coffee.”

Christmas day will be calm, too.  We’ll have turkey, mashed potatoes, and gravy.  I’m pretty sure that we don’t have any plans at all.  Not having little ones, we’ll get up when we get up, check the news, have some coffee, and turn the oven on to cook the turkey.  The Mrs. already made George Washington’s egg nog (Washington: Musk, Patton, and Jack Daniels all Rolled into . . . the ONE), so I don’t even have anything to complain about.

Where’s the Christmas wine?  I’m not getting up anytime soon.

Merry Christmas, one and all!

*Yes.  My brother and I have the same first name, for reals.  As we were born seven years apart, my parents had apparently forgotten they had another child when I arrived eleven years later, so I stole his name.  That’s okay.  I also managed to ruin several of his dates, end one of his relationships, wreck his car, and throw up on his school clothes one night.  So I guess that makes us even.

A.I., Health Care, Google, and Elon Musk

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go home and have a heart attack.” – Pulp Fiction

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I wanted to get a doctor appointment to treat my invisibility, but he said he couldn’t see me right now.

A computer can predict who will die using medical data better than a doctor.  As of today, like science has no answer as to how California copes with the landfill requirements of Kardashian body hair, science has no understanding of how the computer is doing it.

A gentleman by the name of Dr. Brian Formwalt led a study where approximately 1,770,000 electrocardiogram records were fed into a computer.  An electrocardiogram is also known as an ECG, for obvious reasons.  For less obvious reasons, it’s also known as an EKG.  EKG stands for elektrokardiographie, which is exactly the same thing as an electrocardiogram, but in German.  If your doctor calls it an EKG, he just might be thinking about expanding his living room.

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Always be careful when Germans research expanding anything.

But back to the study.  So, there were 1,770,000 records, but only 400,000 people in the study, so the average person had more than four records.  Obviously, these weren’t all healthy people, since I have had (I believe) exactly one ECG in my life, and it was for a pre-employment physical as an astronaut for Wal-Mart®.  At least the recruiter told me Wal-Mart© needed astronauts, before Wal-Mart™ cancelled the program when China accidentally delivered 50,000 small space shuttle toys rather than one life-size one.  I guess that’s what happens when you buy space shuttles by the pound.

But what is an ECG?

Electrocardiograms are the little machine light that makes the beep sound every time your heart beats.  The beat is measured by injecting elves into your body that send radio signals to the machine every time that your heart muscle squeezes them.  Okay, the technical side might be a bit off, but it doesn’t really matter if you or I know exactly how the machine gets the data.  It’s just the device that goes beep-beep-beep-beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep to let you know that John Wick’s® dog died.

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Cardiac surgeons are the guys you want to see for a change of heart.

Okay, so now you know everything that you might need to know about technology invented in 1895.  But it now produces an electronic file rather than the old method, where the heart rhythm was tattooed on the backs of ill-tempered Chihuahuas.  The 1,770,000 records were then fed into a computer that had been previously taught to read ECGs.  The simple question was asked – which of these patients will be dead in a year?  I mean it used to make me feel better when my doctor told me, “that’s normal for your age,” but then I realized that at some point being dead will be normal for my age.

Since all of the records were over a year old, it was known which of the patients were alive and which were dead.  Essentially, the doctors were (with very little data) asking the computer to predict the future.  It did.  And it did it better than human doctors.  Some of the ECGs looked absolutely fine to human doctors – they detected no abnormality, yet the computer was able to see something that accurately allowed it to predict the death of the patient.

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Then the next doctor told me it looked like I was pregnant.  I said, “But I’m a guy.”  He replied, “But it looks like you’re pregnant.”

It doesn’t surprise me.  Computers are powerful tools that are great at taking lots of data and being able to compare it quickly.  The reason that they can do this is they:

  • Have 100% focus, and if they get a sore throat you can give them Robo-tussin®.
  • Don’t need to make payments on second wife’s Mercedes® and third wife’s Lexusâ„¢.
  • Can retain every previous ECG reading ever seen and instantly recall the pattern if needed, much like I can retain the plot of every one of the episodes of Gilligan’s Island.
  • Don’t get distracted by how healthy a patient looks or how much kale he eats.

These are great advantages.  In the future, machines will be able to do things where we may never understand how they made a correlation, or, as in this case, even what the correlation is.  Arthur C. Clarke Third Law states that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, and he’s right.  Health care generates amazing amounts of data, and also outcomes.  It’s only a matter of time until some big corporation gets evil . . .

Oh, yeah, Google®.  It bought Fitbit®.  Now it knows what you’re searching for, and it also has a treasure-trove of heartbeat and fitness data.

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Google® is female.  It won’t let me finish a sentence without giving suggestions.

Well, I guess that’s kind of scary.  But at least Google© doesn’t have access to medical records.  Oh, Google™ has patient names, diagnoses, prescription data, and records from 2,600 hospitals.  Millions, perhaps tens of millions of patients?  In (possibly) all of these states:  Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, Rhode Island, Maryland, D.C., Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida?

Nah, that should work out fine.  There isn’t a record of Google® ruthlessly monetizing every corner of the Internet not already inhabited by Facebook™, Amazon® and Microsoft©.

I think the case is clear for someone to go through this data.  With only a few records and outcomes fed into it, a computer is better at predicting medical outcomes than a very good doctor.  If all of the data could be available?  I think we’d have a legitimate revolution in health care.

Frankly, if we don’t descend into civil chaos, I think that this health care revolution is certain.

But Google®?  Google™ has proven itself untrustworthy.

I’d suggest that we give control of the initiative to a leader that’s more trustworthy than Google®, like Bernie Madoff, but he seems to be otherwise, um, detained.  And I’m sure that Jeffery Epstein has better morals, but, um, he seems to have accepted a unique opportunity with the Clinton Foundation.

Heck, let’s give the job to Elon Musk.

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Life is Struggle. Struggle is Easier with Panzers. Especially if You’re Struggling with France.

“Your death will stand as a landmark in the continuing struggle to liberate the parent land from the hands of the Roman imperialist aggressors, excluding those concerned with drainage, medicine, roads, housing, education, viniculture and any other Romans contributing to the welfare of Jews of both sexes and hermaphrodites.” – Life of Brian

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Fun fact:  the first winner of the Tour de France was a Panzerkampfwagen III.

A few years back I worked with a friend named Will.  Will was one of the more creative people I’d ever worked with.  One particular week, I knew he had a deadline to finish a rather significant project for our boss that Friday.  It was Tuesday and I asked him if he had finished it, since he was goofing off enough to make George R.R. Martin’s writing progress look like a cocaine-snorting crotch-weasel.  And cocaine-snorting crotch-weasels move pretty fast.

Will responded, “No.  I think I’ll start on Thursday afternoon.”

In the conversation that followed Will admitted that work was pretty easy for him.  “But if I wait until I have some important deadline, until I’m not sure that I have enough time to finish, then work gets pretty interesting.”  He was completely serious.  He didn’t really care if he got fired or in trouble – he just wanted life to be interesting.  I thought about it, and, looking back, had noticed that I had done much the same thing.  In fact, it’s so common, there are thousands of posters and jokes about it.  I mean, if they threatened to kill one of my friends each hour I procrastinated, I could probably be pretty productive.  But, you know that depends, too:  which friend?

In retrospect, this points out that winning doesn’t make people happy, in and of itself.  If that was the case, Will would have done his work in advance and goofed off later rather than earlier.  That’s simply not the case.  Most people do the same and procrastinate in some fashion.  Statistics show anywhere from 25% to 95% of people procrastinate.

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Procrastination will be my downfall.  Emphasis on “will”.   

That’s a wide enough range to be utterly meaningless.  And since social scientists did the study, I trust it about as much as I trust drunken toddlers run the legislative branch of our government.  Congressmen probably would agree with me, since I know that they generally really hate that kind of competition from intellectually superior people who are at least attempting to be potty trained.

Why procrastination?

I think there’s a lot of stress today in the workplace because the work is no longer optimized for the worker, it’s optimized for the lowest common denominator.  Most companies want most processes to be able to be done by someone of limited *ahem* intellectual means.  That makes the pool of qualified workers so much bigger, and they can pay lower wages.  Keep in mind, this doesn’t mean that everyone who’s working a job that’s designed for an I.Q. of 85 has an I.Q. of 85 – far from it.  But take someone of average (100) I.Q. and dump them in an 85 I.Q. job?  There is more than a little potential for boredom.

And with that boredom can come mischief.

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Horseplay?  Quit foaling around.

The best possible job for anyone has certain characteristics – you know what’s expected of you.  You have the tools to do it.  Crucially, the job can’t be so easy that it’s trivial.  The job should also not be so hard as to be frustrating.  There’s that middle road, where you’re learning, where there’s enough challenge to keep you fully engaged in the work.  Thankfully, many jobs have a ladder where as you increase your competence, you get increased responsibilities.

The downside, of course, is that the most skilled carpenter might make a really crappy carpenter foreman.  The skill set from one spot in the organizational hierarchy to the next step up may not even be remotely related.  The idea and general practice of promoting the best carpenter to foreman at least has one advantage – at least we know that the foreman is good at something.  That something may not be leading people, but worst case, his people know he’s good with a hammer.

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H.P. Lovecraft loved getting hickies, but would only get them from neck romancers.

I’ve mentioned the following story more than once, but I keep bringing it up because it was one of my “a-ha!” moments of understanding in life.  In the very old HBO® series Dream On the protagonist was a literary agent.  He had a secretary named Toby, who specialized in being unhelpful.  In one episode, Toby was at work, playing a supermarket simulator on the company computer.  She started as a bag boy.

“Cleanup in Aisle 9!” she screamed at one point in the episode.  She showed an intensity playing the game that she never showed on her job.  “I’ve been moved to cashier!”  She was thrilled at the promotion.

Finally, her crowning achievement.  Toby had won the game.

“I did it!  I did it!  I’m the manager!” she yelled, with excitement.

A long pause.

“Of a supermarket . . .”

Now her voice had dropped into a questioning tone.

“that doesn’t exist.”  The last line was delivered with profound sadness and self-awareness that her day had been wasted.

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Me:  What’s up, glitches?

Toby, the secretary had been thoroughly engaged in the game in a way that was never available to her in real life.  I’ve played a few video games since seeing that episode, but for the most part that one line stripped them bare to me:  “Manager . . . of a supermarket . . . that doesn’t exist.”  It showed that her victory was as hollow to her as the skull of a congresswoman from New York.

Since many jobs have been defined downward in so many ways, I can certainly see the rise of gaming.  Gaming sells the experience people want and need.  Good games provide a tutorial system to show you how to use the controls.  They then run you through a series of challenges that teach you to be more competent with the in-game systems and controls, and provide tools that are in many cases only barely adequate for the job, requiring focus and concentration for you to succeed.  Winning the game requires an investment of work, study, concentration, focus, and control.  And $60.

Games provide the challenges that work really should be providing to the younger generation.  They often have tools and abilities that far exceed what their job should provide.  How do they cope?  Killing cops, stealing cars, shooting radioactive zombie cowboys.  But eventually you have to go home so you can play your game that you paid $60 for.

Gaming is popular because humans are machines built to compete.  If life offers sufficient competition to keep us interested?  Fine.  But if living standards are great and everything is going well, but the people aren’t challenged?  Hello, World War One.  There was simply no reason for Europe to descend into that madness other than things were going well and the people were rich and bored.

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If you survive assault, pepper spray, and mustard gas, are you a seasoned veteran?

Easy success is boredom.  What happens to a society, a world, where success is set on easy?  It breeds discontent.  We see that in Europe now.  Germany was nice and happy and reunited and things were going well.  Boring.

Here’s an idea!  Let’s import a bunch of foreigners.  That should spice things up!  Foreigners now make up 12.8% of the population, but commit 34.7% of the crimes, according to the Wall Street Journal®.  Why do they commit the crimes?  I’m pretty sure I don’t care.  But why would Germany want to import a population that commits 30% of the murders and over 41% of the burglaries?  They were bored.  Things were going too well.

Normally, when things were going too well, Germany would fire up the panzers and take a trip west, but that turned out just to be too easy.  And I like giving the French a hard time – I get more visitors from Malta (Want Some Short Term Gain and Long Term Pain? Also, Malta.) than from France.  And the Germans certainly couldn’t take over Malta, mainly because the distance to Malta isn’t measured in panzers per baguette.

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I recently read a book about French war heroes.  That was an inspiring six pages.

But if you have the difficulty of your society set too hard?  Riots and revolution and turning into a tyrannical dictatorship.  The difficulty is no easier, but at least you get brainwashing and random executions, so there’s that.

Western Civilization has been fairly stable is that it’s built on two fairly strong foundations – capitalism and hierarchy.

Crony capitalism is inevitable.  If I were to say “in a properly functioning capitalist society” I’d be no better than the Leftist weasels that lament that their particular brand of Hell on Earth has never been tried.  No.  Capitalism in the United States isn’t fair, and the rich get to make a lot of the rules and restrict competition.  But you have the ability to join them.  The system isn’t so rigged that mobility is impossible.  And you can certainly trace out a comfortable life, especially if you’re born rich.

But capitalism really does provide competition – it’s hard to dominate a system (unless your name is Bezos) that is so huge, just like Jeff’s mistresses butt.  It’s a game of nearly infinite complexity.  You can play as hard and as long as you want on so many different angles.  That leads to stability.

The other factor leading to stability is hierarchy.  Men, left alone, will soon develop a hierarchy.  They want the hierarchy.  It gives them a place.  It creates (generally) healthy competition to reach the top, unless your name is Macbeth.  That hierarchy is often replicated in structures across the country – from homeowners associations at the very bottom, to Elon Musk at the very top.

Sure, there is only one Elon, but you can live in the middle to upper half of the hierarchy without having to even have a job.  There are many activities that pay nothing and lead to huge amounts of mojo.  Musician.  Biker.  Actor waiter.

Blogger.

And, yes, there are days when I put off things, too.  I’ve had this one project I need to do at work.  I’ve had it since July.  It’s due next Friday.

Guess I should be starting that one pretty soon . . . .

Success, Fight Club, Strippers and Socialists

“We have just lost cabin pressure.” – Fight Club

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The second rule of Wilder Club is if this is your first visit, you have to comment.

I had a conversation with a friend today.  Oh, sure, I hear you say, what would an iconoclastic iron-jawed individualist with a body odor redolent of medium rare ribeye (with just a hint of pepper) like John Wilder need with a friend?  I guess we all have our little weaknesses.  And dogs follow me.  Because I smell like steak.

In this particular case as with most of my friends, I’ve known this friend for years.  I’ve known most of my close friends longer than The Boy has been alive, and he’s in college now.  It’s nice.  If a day, a week, a month or a year goes by, so what?  We can still restart the conversation where we left off.  It’s as comfortable as watching a movie you’ve seen a dozen times.

I’ll make the observation that the only place where the character of people change is in a movie – almost all of my close friends have the same sense of humor and the same sense of values that they had when our friendships were forming.  Absent a significant emotional event, people are a constant.

And I like that.

There is a corresponding trust that comes with being a close friend – honesty.  That’s why when talking with my friend, I really enjoyed the chance to be honest.  Honesty is difficult because it requires that trust, because really honest criticism is hard to take, even when it comes from a friend.  Or a co-worker.  Or a relative.  Or someone you just met.  Or your UPS® delivery guy.  Oh, wait.  Most people don’t like honest.  But my friends do.

This particular friend is really in a good position in life, which seems to be a common pattern with my friends.  He has a spouse that makes more money than he does, and, in general, the household probably brings in enough cash each month so that Nigerian princes send emails to them asking for money.  They’re wealthy enough that they donate to the homeless.  This appears to be a more socially acceptable donation strategy than my “donation to the topless,” scheme.

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Yes, this is the only joke that I’ve ever seen that involves both the Greco-Roman philosophy of stoicism and stripping.  I’m sure that Seneca would be proud.

But lest ye want to class my friend as the evil, selfish, wealthy type, he’s not.  The family has a huge number of kids, and it’s a close family.  My friend is constantly taking time off to go to athletic events, and when we catch up, I can sense that the relationship he has with his kids isn’t a surface relationship – it’s genuine and deep.  I can tell, because I know people who understand genuine relationships, who listen to both sides of a family argument – my neighbors.

And yet . . . despite the wealth, despite the great family, my friend feels that there’s something missing.  He is as high as he wants to go in the company he works at – any higher and the travel demands would pull him away from family.  He’s long since mastered his job – there is little that can be thrown at him that he hasn’t seen in the last fifteen or so years.  So, his condition is one of high pay, mastery of work, and, improbably, discontent.

John Wilder:  “You realize you have an advantage that 99% of people would die for.  You’re financially secure.  You can quit your job anytime.  Literally, you could walk in to your boss this afternoon and quit.  Your lifestyle wouldn’t change a bit.”

Not Elon Musk:  “Yes.”

Unlikely Voice of Wisdom John Wilder:  “So, what is it you want to do?”

Really, I Promise It Isn’t Elon Musk:  “I need to think about it.”

Channeling Tyler Durden From Fight Club® John Wilder:  “No.  If you think about it, you’ll end up doing nothing but thinking about it.  You have to do something.  Physically start it.  This weekend.  I’ll check back on Monday to see how you did.”

There is a scene in the movie Fight Club™ where Tyler Durden holds a gun to the head of a liquor store clerk.  If you haven’t seen the movie, I strongly suggest it.  I probably watch it once a month while I write – I think there are few movies that communicate the human condition in modern life so well.

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Pugsley doesn’t miss many school days.

JACK, in voiceover:  On a long enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.

CLERK:  Please… don’t…

TYLER DURDEN: Give me your wallet.

Tyler pulls out the driver’s license.

TYLER:  Raymond K. Hessel. 1320 SE Benning, apartment A.  A small, cramped basement apartment.

RAYMOND:  How’d you know?

TYLER:  They give basement apartments letters instead of numbers.  Raymond, you’re going to die.  Is this a picture of Mom and Dad?

RAYMOND:  Yes.

TYLER:  Your mom and dad will have to call kindly doctor so-and-so to dig up your dental records, because there won’t be much left of your face.

RAYMOND:  Please, God, no!                            

JACK: Tyler…

TYLER:  An expired community college student ID card.  What did you used to study, Raymond K. Hessel?

RAYMOND:  S-S-Stuff.

TYLER:  “Stuff.”  Were the mid-terms hard?  I asked you what you studied.

JACK:  Tell him!

RAYMOND:  Biology, mostly.

TYLER:  Why?

RAYMOND:  I… I don’t know…

TYLER:  What did you want to be, Raymond K. Hessel?

Tyler cocks the .357 magnum Colt© Python™ pointed at Raymond’s head.

TYLER:  The question, Raymond, was “what did you want to be?”

JACK:  Answer him!

RAYMOND:  A veterinarian!

TYLER:  Animals.

RAYMOND:  Yeah … animals and s-s-s —

TYLER:  Stuff.  That means you have to get more schooling.

RAYMOND:  Too much school.

TYLER:  Would you rather be dead?

RAYMOND:  No, please, no, God, no!

Tyler uncocks the gun, lowers it.

TYLER:  I’m keeping your license.  I know where you live.  I’m going to check on you.  If you aren’t back in school and on your way to being a veterinarian in six weeks, you will be dead.  Get the hell out of here.

JACK:  I feel sick.

TYLER:  Imagine how he feels.

Tyler brings the gun to his own head, pulls the trigger — click.  It’s empty.

JACK:  I don’t care, that was horrible.

TYLER:  Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessell’s life.  His breakfast will taste better than any meal he has ever eaten.

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How dare you . . . make Greta uncomfortable.

And it’s true.  I tend to think that everyone’s life would be a little better if they had Tyler Durden to be a life coach, to ever so gently coax them to be the best they can be while holding a .357 magnum Colt® Python™ to their head.  That seems to be a bit frowned upon, so that leaves my friends with me.  See how lucky you are?

In my role as Dr. Durden, I’ve noticed that there’s a problem some people have.  It’s being too clever.  It’s thinking.  How do I know?  It’s my problem that I try to compensate for by writing and doing.  If I think about doing something, it will never get done.  I keep thinking about fixing the bannister that broke when we moved in to the house a decade ago.  It’s never been high on my list, since people falling down stairs is funny, with extra points if they are really old.  But thinking about doing something never accomplishes anything.

If I plan to do it, it will get done.  Half of my time driving to and from work on a day I’m going to write a post, I’m writing it in my head, selecting jokes, thinking of themes.  It’s also spent thinking of how I’m going to connect the idea I want to share with students who might be forced to read this post when Mrs. Grundy tells them to compare and contrast my work with that poseur, Mark Twain, in high school in the year 2248 (that’s when Kirk will be a sophomore).

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Okay, generally on my drive to work I have about five or ten minutes between cars, so it would take several hours to get a group of cars behind me like that.  But a man has to have goals!

It may look like I’m driving to work, but I’m really plotting out what I’m going to write about.  To be honest, it sometimes takes both lanes to do that.  I wish the State Patrol® would be a little more understanding to artists like me.

Thankfully, The Mrs. is.

The Mrs. and I had a conversation the other night.  It may or may not have involved wine – I’m not telling unless I’ve been subpoenaed and am under oath to a House subcommittee.  Actually, it wasn’t so much a conversation as The Mrs. describing to me how she felt about this little project I publish three times a week.

I don’t make any money on this blog, though I’ve made clear since day one that can change at any time.  I have plans for several (eventual) ways to do that including adding subliminal messages causing you to want to pay for my health insurance.  It looks like it’s already worked for Bernie Sanders.

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In a socialist paradise all bloggers make $450,000 a year, right?  But I worry that for this Christmas we won’t have an Elf on a Shelf, we’ll have a Bernie on a Gurney.

No, at this point, writing is a hobby.  But it’s a hobby that takes over 20 hours a week, sometimes closer to 30 hours.  I still have a job, and I won’t stop interacting my family, so most nights I won’t even start writing before 9pm.  A lot of that time comes from time I’d normally be selfishly engaged in what you mortals call “sleep”, but a chunk of that time comes directly from time I’d be spending with The Mrs.

When I’m writing, I’m simply not available.  I’m writing.

The Mrs.:  “You know, I would certainly have an issue with the time that you spend writing, if it weren’t important.”  There was more to this, where she detailed the number of hours I spend.  But I keyed in on the word “Important.”

I was a little surprised by that.  “Important?”

The Mrs.:  “Yes.  I can see that what you’re writing about is important.  People need to hear it.  So keep doing it.”

Okay, that proves she never reads this stuff.

But as I talked more with my friend, the concept of “meaning” came up.

My Friend Who is Really Most Certainly Not Elon Musk:  “So, it’s about meaning?”

Suddenly as Wise as the Roman Philosopher Seneca John Wilder:  “That’s silly.  You don’t go off chasing ‘meaning’ in your life.  Pick out something you like to do, and do it.  But figure out how to make it important to other people.  You like to woodwork, right?  You say you never have time to do it.  Do it this weekend.  Film it.  Put it up on YouTube®.  I’ll be checking up with you on Monday.”

I asked myself, why is my friend working at all?  I think because he feels he’s supposed to work.  That having a job is a rule, it’s what he’s always done.  The problem that many of us have is that we tend to create rules where there aren’t any rules.  I’m not sure why.  Perhaps we need to justify what we do.  Perhaps it’s like my two important rules for life:

  1. Don’t tell everything you know.

Success?  My friend is already successful in most ways a person can be successful.  Their life is really good.  I told them, directly, “You’ve been given so many gifts.  If you don’t make something special of your life, you’re wasting it.”

Interestingly, this applies to you, too.

And me.

How will your breakfast taste tomorrow?

The Funniest Post You Will Ever Read About Meat Being Murder

“All normal people love meat.  If I went to a barbeque and there was no meat, I would say ‘Yo Goober!  Where’s the meat?’  I’m trying to impress people here, Lisa. You don’t win friends with salad.” – The Simpsons

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Oh, sorry.  I meant a double BACON cheesemurder.

When we lived in Alaska, we got tickets to drive into Denali National Park one year.  On that particular weekend, The Mrs. was feeling under the weather so she decided to send The Boy (then a freshly-minted kindergartner) and I instead while she stayed home with Pugsley, who had yet to be grounded, being all of 16 . . . months.  I stopped for gas, and decided to get some road food for us since this was our first “just the guys” trip.

I grabbed some beverages, some chips, some candy, and, on the wall behind the cash register I saw some jerky.  The brand name was Alaska Jack’s®.  It was a clear plastic package of jerky with a gold foil label.  The picture on the label was of an old Alaska gold miner, a grizzled old timer wearing buckskin, with a beard and a fur hat.  I bought it.

The Boy had never seen jerky before.  He stood alongside me at the cash register and looked at the stringy dried pieces of meat in the plastic bag and turned it over.  He looked up at me.

“What is it?”  He was clearly puzzled.

“Meat.  Dried meat,” I responded.

He took another look at the picture of Alaska Jack™, “What kind?”

A long pause.

“Human?”

I bring this (very true) story up  because a recent study indicates that a food that mankind has been eating for nearly all of its existence is . . . wait for it . . . not bad for you.  Meat has been a staple food for mankind since our grimy, dim ancestors with questionable hygiene first took a bite out of a dead critter and asked, “hey, Ugg, this is pretty good, but do you have any ketchup or A-1®?”

Not only have we been eating meat forever, there is evidence that we have been cooking meat for perhaps a million years, which is almost enough time to make a brisket tender.  It is certain we’ve been cooking meat for 400,000 years, and man has been having backyard BBQ’s on a regular basis for 250,000 years.   So, color me shocked that science shows that the cooked meat we’ve been eating for at least 20,000 generations of people is . . . good for you.

The next part will be really shocking:  meat has changed less in human history than nearly any other food we eat today.  Broccoli looks nothing like broccoli 3,000 years in the past.  Corn?  You wouldn’t recognize it even 1,000 years ago.   The wild spaghetti plant?  Yup.  Similar – wild spaghetti looks just like rice.  Heck wild elbow macaroni wasn’t grown until Benjamin Franklin first cross-pollinated a piece of fettucine with a water pipe in 1321.

Yeah, a cow is different today – it’s bigger and juicier, but the meat is the same.  Sweet, sweet, cow meat.  Heck, I’m making me hungry now.

Given that science is advancing so quickly, I’ll expect to see these headlines soon:  “Water is Wet, New Studies Show” and “Scientists Say:  Possible Link Between Sex and Babies Showing Up Nine Months Later” and “New Research Says Ben Shapiro’s Voice Makes 95% of All People Want to Choke Him Until He Passes Out, Take His Money, Buy Themselves Something Nice.”  If you have any money left over, I’m looking for some cool PEZ® dispensers.

I’ll admit science has some mysteries.  I can’t understand how a cat got a taste for tuna, since I’ve yet to see a deep sea fleet of cats in the wild fishing for them.

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Why do people always say they’re having a tuna fish sandwich?  Is there a tuna bird or tuna cow I’m unaware of?

What may amuse me the most is that several of the headlines noted that this finding was “controversial” and that you needed to read another article to see “What the Meat Study Didn’t Say.”  The old conventional view that Meat is Bad® simply cannot be allowed to be refuted.

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I heard about a new Emo pizza – it cuts itself.  Okay, on that train to hell, I’ll take an aisle seat, please.

The sad truth is this emo-angst-fest is another example of how science, once perverted via either large corporate interests or by Leftist indoctrination, becomes an instrument not of knowledge but of propaganda.  Case in point – in one of the articles about the incredibly shocking finding that meat is both tasty and healthy, the New York Times® said, “An extensive study confirms that red meat might not be that bad for you.  But it is bad for the planet, with chicken and pork less harmful than beef.”

I guess the New York Times© can’t figure out that t-a-s-t-y isn’t spelled h-a-r-m-f-u-l.  Silly New York Times™.  I’ll throw some real controversy out there:  ribeye kicks bacon’s butt.  There.  I said it.  And I stand by it.

But what is this nonsense all about?  In the immortal words of Joe Bob Briggs (LINK),

This means they’ll do anything to avoid simply putting together a bunch of plants and vegetables in a healthy stew/salad/whatever and labeling it as “Healthy Stew/Salad/Whatever.” They want you to think it’s meat. The vegetarians want to consume it as a meat. You don’t need to go to those lengths, though, because we already have a food group that satisfies that need. It’s called, uh, meat.

That’s in response to Impossible Burgers®, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Meat©, Soylent Meat™ or whatever.  The push is to take meat and replace it with either:

  • Mutant cow stem cells cultured in a vat of despair, or
  • A “plant based protein” mixture which I resent on principle because when you eat plants, you’re eating what my food eats, and that’s just not right, or
  • Bug burgers.   Bug burgers. or,
  • The food that will turn us all into Wendigos.

Okay, a Wendigo is a Native American term for what happens to a person when they cultivate a taste for human flesh, it’s based on the tale of a lost hunter who, in a moment of intense hunger, eats his dead buddy.  After that?  He turns into a giant emaciated partially human creature, whose greed knows no bounds.  Sure this sounds like Miley Cyrus or Johnny Depp, but in the Native American tale it was probably a little less scary.

This explains a lot.

The War on Meat brings together the Global Warming™ Cultists, PETA® zombies, and, well, the Leftist Cannibal Brigade©.  Okay, I made the Cannibal Brigade™ up, but it’s not far from being true (LINK):

Stockholm School of Economics professor and researcher Magnus Söderlund reportedly said he believes eating human meat, derived from dead bodies, might be able to help save the human race if only a world society were to “awaken [sic] the idea.”

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Greta loves eating people to save the planet, but she draws the line at clowns.  She says they taste funny.

I’m pretty sure that calling anyone from Sweden a scientist anymore is stretching the definition of scientist to its breaking point.  Magnus Söderlund might have a cool first name, but he’s not a scientist, he’s a political hack who is deluded to such an extent that he thinks eating people is a good idea that he can share.  In public.  He has that opinion, and he’s not worried about people with large nets taking him off to a padded room where he can’t hurt anyone anymore.

Hey, at least he’s not the only one.  At the recent town hall of Super Genius Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, C-NY, at last we got a level-headed answer on what we have to do to save the climate:

The hilarious part when I watched this clip was that Super Genius Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, C-NY had the opportunity to say what 99.999999% of people on the planet would have said: “No, that’s clearly insane,” missed her chance.  She simply said that there are a lot of different ideas on how to save the planet.  This is the equivalent of her pulling a three year old up on stage to protect her from a cream pie in the face.

All of this is based on the ideas of eating plants (Ewww®), bugs (Still Better Than Plants©), cultured cells (Still Better Than Plants©), or human jerky (only good if it it’s the kind from the Alaskan convenience store) is better than having a steak or a burger.  The Left is trying to infringe on the Zero Amendment, so an unrestrained and over-the-top response is required.  What is the Zero Amendment?

“A meatless People being a Danger to a Free State; Congreth thall maketh no law to infringe on the Rights of the People to have great gobbets of meat, with rivers of grease running down their chins after a great feast, with the meat done preferably medium rare.”

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Okay, if even plants aren’t completely vegan, why are people?  Oh, because of the Prius®-smug factor.  Sorry.  My bad.

My solution to the whole problem is rather easy.  Since meat is now healthy, I suggest this modest proposal:

Trans-Meat.

Meat shall now be identified as a plant, so vegetarians can eat it.  Cows shall now be identified as bugs, so hippies can eat it.  Meat shall now be identified as a collection of cells, so Elon Musk can eat it.  Cows, pigs and chickens shall now be identified as human, so the Swedes can eat them.  And so they can vote for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, C-NY.

Thankfully, Alaska Jack© has already shown us the way.

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I once heard that a woman from New York went into a store and was upset about wool sweaters.  “We shouldn’t kill sheep for their wool!”

The salesman responded:  “Ma’am, nobody kills sheep for their wool.”

Clintoncide, John Bolton’s Waifu, and October Market Crashes: Knock on Wood

“Well, if you want to knock on wood, there’s plenty of that about.” – Space: 1999

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And astrology teaches us that 9 planets and thousands of stars have spent billions of years lining themselves up just to let me know that “my energy will flourish in quieter surroundings” today.

I remember sitting in the classroom – the window faced to the south, and it was a cold winter morning.  It was sixth grade and I was covered with more insulation than a flamingo in Canada, since the eighty-year-old steam heating system in the school was as reliable as Bernie Sander’s heart.  For whatever reason, the teacher was talking about the phrase, “knock on wood.”  I think she was doing what she referred to it as “teaching” but I guess we all have our quirks.  Regardless, I remember it well.  She said that the origin of the phrase “knock on wood” came from the Greeks.

Apparently, the teacher said, the gods really liked to mess with people’s hopes and dreams.  If they heard that something was going well for you they would go out of their way to stop you, much like the Clintons if you know about Jeffery Epstein . . . maybe I should just stop there.  The idea of saying “knock on wood” was to confuse that practical joker Zeus or make one of him think you were crazy, so that Zeus would just ignore the gibberish that you were saying.

I liked that explanation, at least enough that it stuck with me this far.

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I hope she’s not offended.  Knock on wood.

When I looked on the Internet, I wasn’t able to find a confirmation of that story.  Wikipedia® says that the most likely explanation was ancient German folklore about touching wood to appease the druid tree-spirits.  When I looked a little deeper into the Wikipedia© debate page where the nerds discussed what should be on the page, there was more than a bit of confusion among the editors, including one who just kept talking about his imaginary Japanese anime pillow-wife and whether or not you were still a virgin if you had kissed someone who was not a virgin.

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You leave Isemi Kukikemi alone!  If we had listened to her and John Bolton-san, we would be attacking Iran right now instead of trying to bring our troops home.

The concept and phrase of “knock on wood” or “touch wood” is widespread enough that it appears in cultures from Iran to Brazil, but is mainly centered in European nations.  I’ll admit – I use the phrase to this day, probably weekly.  In a pinch I’ll use a plastic countertop to replace actual wood.  It’s covering particle board, right?

I think that “knock on wood” is just part of a wider body of superstition that’s deeply rooted inside our collective consciousness, and if we didn’t have superstitions, we’d invent them, like I invented that clever superstition to never to shave off all of my body hair and drive backwards naked with a cat while drinking plastic-bottle scotch – unless it’s on vinyl bench seats, then it seems to work out okay.

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I made fun of trees once, I guess that was a knock on wood.

I think the reason for this is that life is complex, and so much of the future is uncertain.  When I watch the financial talking heads, they exhibit the same behavior.  “The market is down 2% on news that Elon Musk had creamed corn as a side dish for lunch.”  The market is sometimes down because . . . the market is down.  It doesn’t need an actual reason since the pressure on the stock market is made up on many days of an essentially random mix of buying and selling.  Sometimes a bit up, sometimes a bit down.

But no one would watch the financial news if they said, “The market is down 2% because the market is down 2%.”  In many cases, until the market gets built up so high that it can’t sustain itself anymore (The Funniest Post You Will Ever Read About Angles of Repose, Virgin Physicists, Economics, and Population), the market just fluctuates.

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This just in, the market is down because of (shakes Magic 8-Ball®) trade problems with Greenland.

When I was in college I was chatting with a friend about economics lecture he had just seen.  A student getting his doctorate in economics was presenting his dissertation to the class.  The student was excited when he explained that he had taken the Dow Jones Industrial Average® since 1929.  He had removed all of the variation from the market.

“When you remove the all variation from the market data, it turns out it’s . . . constant!”  According to my friend the economist seemed very pleased with himself.

My friend raised his hand and asked, “Umm, isn’t everything a constant if you remove all variation?”

Oops.  My friend was right – my weight has been absolutely constant if you remove all of the weight I’ve lost and all of the weight I’ve gained.  Heck, using that statistical analysis, I’m still at my birth weight.  My friend reported that the expression on the grad student’s face looked like he had just swallowed a whole frog after it had been rolled in Johnny Depp’s dryer lint after Johnny dried the cotton diaper he wore when he oil wrestled Nicolas Cage.

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I was at dinner last night with Nic Cage.  We had steak.  The waitress came by – asked him if he wanted garlic bread.  He said no.  I was shocked – I heard he never turned down a roll.

So, we’re in the middle of October, the ultimate time of superstition.  Oddly enough, some of the greatest stock market crashes have happened in October, from the Panic of 1907, the Crash of 1929, Black Monday in 1987, and the Crash of 2002.  October was pretty bleak in 2008 as well, as you might remember.  Overall, the stock market has gone up about 0.2% (on average) in October since 1950.

As I’ve noted before, markets are systems, and periodic crashes are actually helpful – they lead to removal of inefficient and failed companies that are producing products that can’t compete.  The longer and higher the market goes, in general, the greater the correction when it comes.  It’s been over a decade since there has been a significant market pullback.  It’s up 325% since then.

But like housing prices, markets never go down, right?

Knock on wood.

I’ll leave you with this:  It’s the Mighty, Mighty Bosstones, and it’s relevant.  Also relevant?  It’s not “I never had to knock on wood,” it’s “I never had to; knock on wood.”  This song was playing on the radio the night I picked up The Mrs. for our first date, and was playing when I dropped her off after the date.  A good omen.  Knock on wood.

 

Bad Bosses, Part 2: Action Heroes, Guns, and Explosions

“Your boss is a woman?  Now this is a strange bank.” – It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

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In order to dress for success they tell you to dress for the job you want, not the job you have.  So I found out where my boss shopped for clothes.  I’d see what they wore, and then wear the exact same outfit the next day.  My boss at the time, Marji, thought that was just a little weird since horizontal stripes weren’t at all flattering on me. 

It’s both a blessing and a curse to get to the end of writing your post and finding . . . it’s too long.  It’s a blessing because if I can break it into two posts, hey, I’ve already got my next post written, which might get me to bed by 2AM instead of the usual.  The curse part is that the post has to have a natural break between part one and part two – thankfully this one did.  The other curse part is that I actually look forward to writing a post – and the one I had planned for Friday will have to wait a week.  But it’s gonna be funny.  Part 1 is here: Bad Bosses, Part I, Including Garfield as Written by H.P. Lovecraft, and part 2 is below.

It’s been my experience that all good bosses look the same, since they are all clones of me, or at least the “me” in that first performance review (JW note: it was described in the last post, and it was a really good performance review).  And I’ve had plenty of bosses in my career – in one two-year period I went through five bosses, and I am averaging a new boss every sixteen months over the years of my career.

Based on my experiences, the traits of good bosses that I’ve had are listed below.  Good bosses are:

  • Concerned about doing their duty for their company. They display loyalty – they do their job.
  • Good at setting clear expectations on behavior and expected work outcome. You know what you’re supposed to be doing.
  • Never smelling of grilled onions.
  • Able to create an environment where honest questions are encouraged.
  • Good at providing the tools, time, and space the employee needs to get work done.
  • Available to do children’s magic shows for birthday parties.
  • Honest with employees, and give clear feedback meant to help them improve.
  • Quick to recognize that mayonnaise is not a French musical instrument.
  • Courageous – the truth is the truth, and they’ll share that up and down the line and damn the consequences.
  • Reluctant hold a knife to the secretary’s administrative assistant’s neck.
  • Genuinely concerned about the employee.
  • Treat people (generally) fairly.

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It’s always a shame when you have a great boss and he breaks a leg and has to be put down.

There are times I’ve managed to screw up most of the rules I’ve listed above when I was a boss – that’s why I was able to list them off the top of my head – you remember your mistakes.  But you learn from them, too:  One of the biggest compliments I got was when I was leaving a job for a new company.  The Chief Operating Officer came in to say goodbye and told me, “I hope you’re going to be supervising people at your new job.”  Maybe he wanted the new company I was leaving to join to fail, but I took it that he appreciated my efforts to learn and be better as a boss and wanted to pass that legacy on to other companies through people like me.  You’re right.  He wanted me to mess up that other company.

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I imagine this every time I walk into work and use the remote to lock the doors to my car without looking.

Notice I didn’t mention charisma as a requirement to be a good boss.  You don’t need to be an Elon Musk to be a great boss – and I’ve heard he’s not a particularly good boss unless you’re his weed dealer.  Notice that I didn’t mention intelligence – in some instances really high intelligence works against you as a supervisor since it can make it more difficult for you to communicate well.  Would I rather have a smart boss or an honest one?  Would I rather have a smart boss or a courageous one?  Would I rather have a smart boss or one that didn’t constantly smell of grilled onions?

Most of the time, the cause of a really bad boss is due to their fear, namely fear of getting fired or fear of missing a promotion or fear of missing a rung on the corporate ladder.  If that were to happen?  He couldn’t afford to pay for the “hot stone massages” his wife was getting from Günter, her “masseuse.”  However, sometimes you get bosses that are so strange they remind you of Cousin Eddie®:

One boss I had actually lived in his office, as in slept there every night five or six nights a week.  He claimed to be a member of a biker gang, and told stories of holding a person upside down from a bridge as the gang gently convinced him to be out of state so he couldn’t testify at an upcoming trial.  He told about buying a girlfriend a “little car” to convince her to have an abortion.  And the time he broke a bottle to use as a weapon because “The Indian” was trying to knife him.

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This might not be a completely faithful adaptation from the original story.

And as a boss, whenever I needed help, or a risky event was about to occur, you could count on him to be three states away.  As bad bosses go, he wasn’t horrible, since after I convinced him that if I looked bad, he looked bad, he had my back when we talked to corporate.  Working for him was a really weird nine months.  Normally I throw in a joke or an exaggeration in my descriptions – but in describing this boss?  Nope.  That all happened.

To be clear, with the exceptions listed above, almost all of the rest of my bosses have been great people who were of good character and really interested in helping me develop as a person and as an employee.  But where all good bosses are similar, bad bosses are often unique:

  • The Seagull – The Seagull is a boss that gets a new job every year or two. Why?  Because he flies in, makes a mess, and stays until he’s kicked out.  Miller was a Seagull.  Keep good notes for the aftermath.
  • The Shadow – Whenever anything important happens, they’re gone. Whenever you have a question?  They deflect.  Literally, it’s like not having a boss at all, or at least a boss that will make a decision.  You will have a boss if one of your choices goes wrong, however, because the Shadow will quickly (and correctly) point out that he never told you to do such a thing!
  • The Burnout – The Burnout peaked twenty years ago, and is mad and bitter. His back hurts.  You make too much money.  He wants to retire, but has to wait another year for Medicare™ to kick in.  Until then?  He wants to inflict as much pain as possible on the office because he wants everyone to hurt as much as his back does.
  • Captain Ahab – Captain Ahab is great because he has a vision. Companies love Captain Ahab leaders because they become obsessed with obtaining a vision.  The upside?  Your mission is clear, Ahab makes sure you have everything you need.  And you will work 80 hours a week to accomplish it.  These aren’t 80 hour weeks of playing Minesweeper®, no, every minute is fully used because (Spoiler Alert) that Moby Dick isn’t gonna spear itself.  Ahab doesn’t care about your family, at least during work hours.

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He then tried to hypnotize the people in the meeting using a pocket watch.  The work was rough – 90 hour weeks for months on end, but we got free coffee and he’d buy us catered dinner if we had to work past 9pm.  On a Saturday.   

  • The Sphinx – You’re always guessing. The Shadow won’t give you any sort of answer, but The Sphinx won’t tell you what he wants, but you can be sure that The Sphinx will tell you if it’s wrong.  Generally loudly and when other people are around.
  • The Politician – The Politician cares about only one thing – does it look good? If it looks good and is immoral or illegal?  Who cares?  The Politician is most commonly heard saying “perception is reality.”  The Politician always dresses carefully – almost as good as his boss.  The Politician seeks constant movement.  They can avoid being blamed for messes they make, but will loudly point out the mess they inherited in their new job.  Your value to a Politician begins and ends with you being useful to them.  Otherwise?  You don’t exist.

Your defense if you have a bad boss in almost every case if you want to keep your job is the same:  do your best at work.  Work hard, and don’t break the rules or the law.  Be nice.  And if it sucks too much?  Get a new one.

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While traditionally thought of as a good boss, Washington had a few buttons you didn’t want to press, although he did light up Ye Olde Twitter® to piss of Adams:  “King George . . . Washington.  Verily that soundeth goode.”

One other note:  if every boss working at a company is a Bad Boss, one of two things is going on:

  1. The Bad Boss is what they really want. Unless you can make it work, you have to leave.  Sooner or later, the messes a Bad Boss makes will stick to you.
  2. It may be you. I know that there have been times in my career when my attitude wasn’t optimal.  It’s probably the boss.  But always leave room and examine that the real problem isn’t you.

Okay, I’m now officially sick of Mack the Knife.  But I still don’t feel bad.  And if you’d like to share a bad boss below, feel free.

Bad Bosses, Part I, Including Garfield as Written by H.P. Lovecraft

“Michael, we don’t have a lot of time on this earth!  We weren’t meant to spend it this way.  Human beings were not meant to sit in little cubicles staring at computer screens all day, filling out useless forms and listening to eight different bosses drone on about mission statements.” – Office Space

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“That’s what she said.”

I had just gotten the greatest performance review of my life.  It was outstanding in every way.  My boss (let’s call him Miller, it goes with the song) went on and on about how I was a stunning example of every possible good quality a person could have, and how I was universally loved, admired, and generally made women fertile just through a fleeting glance, and made men better than they thought they could be through the slightest example.  If the company needed someone to walk across a pond, on the top of the water, John Wilder was your guy.

For about a second, I bought it.  Flattery works because your mind really wants to believe all those nice things.  It’s like a horoscope, keep using nice adjectives, and you’ll find one that the person is already predisposed to agree with.

Then I thought about it – this guy Miller, my new boss, has been with the company about a month.  He barely knows where his office is and he’d only visited my office once.  For him to write a performance review like this?  I didn’t believe it.  As much as I’d like to think of myself in such glowing terms, I rejected his flattery.

Beyond mentally rejecting his praise as an attempt at manipulation, I also made the mental note never to trust Miller.

Why?

Anyone who will be quick to praise will be quick to condemn.  Besides, when I looked at him while he was smiling, he only smiled with his mouth – never with his whole face.  He was smiling because he was “supposed” to be smiling, not because the smile was genuine.  During those smiles Miller had the dead, flat eyes of a predator, like he was attempting to see if you were fooled and really believed the smile.

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I never did meet Miller’s wife – I think her invisibility suit worked pretty well.

I was careful to document every conversation with him.  Always trust your gut, people, unless your gut says socialism is a good deal.  If your gut says that, remember:  never go full Bernie.

I worked pretty far away from the company headquarters, where Miller’s office was.  I set up weekly calls to keep him informed on what I and my team were doing.  I’d done this in the past for my previous bosses.   These calls allowed them to understand what we were doing, and digest it for top management if they needed to.

Except.

Except I found out from a colleague that during these meetings, most of the time Miller was shopping for things online, teaching himself to play the banjo, translating Garfield® into cuneiform (did they even have lasagna in ancient Sumeria?) or, in general, not paying any attention to what I was saying.  My colleague noted that Miller generally wasn’t listening at all.

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If you get the cuneiform wrong and accidentally translate a passage from the Necronomicon© this is what you get.

Normally, that’s not a problem, I ran had been running my end of things for years, and after a few years you get used to the usual problems – and are expected just to handle them.  But my boss had a boss – call him my Grandboss.  When my Grandboss wanted to know about some aspect of what I was doing, he’d ask my boss, Miller.  Since Miller had literally no idea (despite weekly written reports and the phone call mentioned above) what I was doing, he did the simple thing:  he made it up.

Most of the time, it worked fine.  My Grandboss generally had an idea of what was going on, even if the specifics were a bit off.  But when the results my boss made up promised didn’t happen?  The Grandboss got mad.  Very mad.

So mad, in fact, that my Grandboss called me up one day and was yelling.  I explained, calmly, the real situation and the plan, and that seemed to calm him down.  He checked up a few more times to make sure what I said was really happening, and then went away.  But the troubles with Miller continued.  Our conversations became a random affair – one day he would be polite.  The next day, he would be literally yelling over the phone.  What had started out as a bad feeling based on that too-good-to-be-true performance review had morphed into a full-blown sitcom level bad boss.

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I mean, can you imagine such micromanaging?

I had one or two advantages – first, I had been at the company much longer and had several well-placed friends, and second, I wasn’t a deceitful sack of weasel meat.  I’m certain that my boss was lying based on my informants at headquarters, and I’m equally certain that the things Miller was saying weren’t very positive. It’s been several years, and my career is still recovering from his “help.”

I’m ashamed to admit it, but one of the happiest days of my life was when Miller got fired.  “But, you can’t fire me!  You don’t even know what I do!” were his comments as they took away his keys and allowed him to pop his personal possessions in a box and gave him a complementary cement bag (for the weight, dear).  And, he’s right – the Internet sure won’t surf itself.

As near as I can tell, the company didn’t skip a beat in his absence.  I’ll also admit that on the day he got fired, I had one of the best workouts of my life.  The entire time I worked out that lunch, I just listened to Mack the Knife on a loop for 45 minutes of the best treadmill time I’ve ever put in.  I smiled every second.  Why Mack the Knife?  I have no idea.  I rarely listened to it before, and haven’t listened to it even one time since that day until tonight.  As I write this, it’s on a loop in the background.

It may be a song from a Marxist play written by a Leftist, but it makes me happy that it made so much money – after the Marxist author died.  Also?  The most upbeat song about multiple murders.  Bonus trivia:  Lotte Lenya, mentioned in the song, played Rosa Klebb in the James Bond movie From Russia with Love.

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As you can see, she’s the perfect Bond® girl for 2019.

I’ve tried to feel bad about feeling so good because Miller was fired.  Even years later, it’s still a pleasant memory.  Yeah.  I shouldn’t feel good about that, but I do.

Okay, the choice was a single post that was twice as long as this, or this broken into two parts.  I chose two parts.  Next part is on Friday.