Amazing crap persists

"I'm tired of being amazed." Seth Jayson, The Motley Fool.

Anyone observing for any length of time the legislative process at the federal, state or local level will eventually figure out most major government actions have flaws or unintended consequences. Anyone listening long enough to politicians knows they daily engage in mendacity of one form or another.

But.

Rather than seeking out those flaws and suggesting they be deleted, amended or voted down, those opposing health care reform just make stuff up. As in a guest editorial in our local paper, for example. Here's the letter I wrote in response.

"I find it puzzling that Trish Castaldi advises 'all Americans' to read HR3200 Section 1233, without reading it herself. If she had she would see it promotes the use of a document that 'effectively communicates the individual's preferences regarding life sustaining treatment, including an indication of the treatment and care desired by the individual.' Living wills and advance directives (I get them mixed up myself) take the extremely painful burden off your family of trying to decide what to do when you are beyond being able to state those decisions yourself. If you wish to be kept alive as long as medically possible, then you can say so in such a document. If you believe that at some point enough’s enough, then you can say that.

On the other hand, perhaps out of consideration for her 'two children and three grandchildren,' so someday they don’t have to stand outside her hospital room and have a painful debate, she’s already drawn up the documents. It is possible she’s done that in spite of her stated objections to Section 1233, since she clearly doesn’t know what it says."

I could have put in a p.s., reacting to this sentence: "I know death is imminent for us all, but it's not up to our government to decide when and how." If it's imminent, why are we even bothering? Let's party while we can, say our goodbyes.

How Ben Learned to Write

It only took nine weeks, but I finally finished H.W. Brands' The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin. I have knocked off books twice the length in half the time. But this one I took a teaspoon at a time because there's just too much detail to digest. Nine weeks is too long though. Sprinting to the end I came on a passing mention, on page 689, of Franklin's learning to write by imitating English essayist Richard Steele. Always curious about how people learn to write, I flipped to the end notes and there was no source listed (Yes, I'm a footnote junkie). Annoyance turned to embarrassment -- even though no one was looking -- when I found in my notes "p. 24-Spectator exercises." So here's Brands' description of how this Boston teenager taught himself to write.

"He had recently encountered an early issue of the Spectator, the London journal soon to be famous for the essays of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. Ben read this number in front to back, then back to front and all over again. Entranced by the authors' ease of exposition, he adopted the Spectator's style as a model for his own. He devised elaborate exercises to absorb all that underlay its phrases. He would read passages and try to recapitulate them from memory. On the reasoning that poetry demands a larger vocabulary than prose -- and given the meaning must also fit the pattern of rhyme and meter -- he reworked the Spectator essays into verse, and subsequently back into prose again. He took notes on the essays, then deliberately scrambled the notes before attempting to reconstruct the original order, the better to appreciate the art of rhetorical organization."

By the middle of the 20th century, imitation as a means of learning how to write had fallen out of favor. But all but the most innovative teachers were still conflicted about it. To hedge their bets they assigned "readers" from which students were supposed to learn something, exactly what was unclear. Students of course sniffed out this ambivalence and did their best to ignore the readers. Perhaps both teachers and students would have been better off with a clear shot at what they were going to do and how they were going to do it.

On the other hand, Franklin taught himself, without the interference of teachers. Maybe he was on to something.

When I'm gone and dead

"...An explanation by the practitioner of advance directives, including living wills and durable powers of attorney, and their uses..." From the stupidistically* called euthanasia section of the health reform bill.

I've checked out some forms for living wills and advance directives, and I may need some help filling them out. In the meantime, I couldn't help but notice they are completely lacking in the human touch, providing mostly checkoffs for decision making. I may add a paragraph or two to mine to make my wishes perfectly clear. Here goes:

How to decide if I'm dead (By this time you've respected my previous wish and wheeled me under the nearest pine tree). First, ask me. "Mr. Sullivan, you still alive?" If there's no response, play the recording of Yo Yo Ma playing Bach's Unaccompanied Cello Sonatas. If I don't go "Ah. Yo Yo Ma" then I'm definitely going, if not gone. In which case, have somebody play or hum the first 11 notes of "Salt Peanuts" (Dizzy will explain). If I don't respond by humming the correct response, tap out those notes on my wrist, and if I don't tap a finger six times, then I'm definitely not having fun any more, so unplug me. I don't want to waste any more time than I have to.

Then, I want the works: Irish wake, Viking funeral, bagpipes, my ashes scattered from the top of Mt. Everest, or maybe burial at sea... Hey, I'm dead. The rest is up to youse guys.

(*Stupidism: the refusal to accept any information that might bring one closer to the truth. Pure, fact-free opinion.)

Soylence of the Lambs

All the blah-blah about euthanasia reminds me to put "living will" on my to-do list. Then all of a sudden "Soylent Green" pops into my head. That 1973 dystopia flick described a world that had turned into an urban industrial wasteland where overcrowding and other human predations had all but snuffed out normal agriculture, the population surviving on various synthetic foods.

In this ugly unhappy state, people were free to decide when life was no longer worth living. All they had to do was show up at a facility where they would be taken care of painlessly. As an enticement, they were led to a theater which was the only place they could watch films of what life was like before. Edward G.
Robinson's character sat in rapture as giraffes, zebras and gazelles strut across the savannah, and flocks of bird migrate over lush forests and lakes....

Animal Planet, anyone?

In the heat of the night

These are indoor days. And nights. I have in my career written press releases advising the elderly and people with breathing disorders, such as asthma, to stay out of the sun and keep cool, preferably indoors. I am not that "eld," and my asthma is not severe, but it doesn't take long for me to feel miserable when the temperature approaches 90. So I stay indoors puttering around trying to do something useful. Like remembering what life was like before air conditioning.

Growing up in Jersey City, I didn't really notice how hot it was. Perhaps kids are immune to the heat, perhaps it was early training in stoicism. But this time of year, as long as I didn't have to go to school, I just didn't care much about anything else. But the old people in our neighborhood, perhaps as old as I am now, had to deal with the heat as well as they could, in an era when owning even an electric fan was a luxury. After the sun went down, practically every house had a cluster of people sitting on the front steps -- or stoops as they were called -- and some would be sitting in dining chairs that had been carried from inside the house. They also carried out pitchers of lemonade, real lemonade with the rinds of the lemons still floating among the ice cubes. As darkness came, so did the mosquitoes. Every household had a large bottle of citronella, which they applied generously to the children. Also for the children were punks, sticks that looked and smoked like incense that we could light and wave around. They supposedly kept away the mosquitoes, but perhaps their real purpose was to allow us the pleasure of waving the smoldering sticks in the dark, making figure eights and being happy, because we playing with fire.

(The photo was taken in Manhattan in 1930 by John Muller. It's in the Museum of the City of New York.)

Go ahead! I'll bleed all over ya'!

A New Jersey law (39:4-36) says drivers are supposed to stop for pedestrians in a crosswalk. Knowing that can cause me to overthink at critical moments, but I have three strategies:

1) If the driver stops at a respectable distance and seems to have no problem with that, I speed up for the remaining distance with appreciative alacrity, sending a smile and a thank-you wave in transit. Even if there is a law.

2) If the driver jams it and seems to get huffy about it, I fake an old man shuffle. Or if I'm in a younger mood, I turn on the slow bop only urban-bred males know how to execute with maximum annoyance.

3) If I can see from the speed there's no way that car's going to stop, I'll pull up just close enough so I don't get clipped by the sideview mirror. I get that primal impulse to shout something and give the finger, but I don't give in to it. Dignity, always dignity.

The NJ Division of Traffic Safety has announced a program to enforce the law. "Known as 'Cops in Crosswalks,' the initiative will be run by 17 police agencies in Atlantic, Burlington, Camden, Cape May, Cumberland, and Gloucester Counties, August 17 through September 13, 2009. Undercover police officers, acting as pedestrians, are placed at crosswalks throughout a community. Motorists who fail to yield to the undercover officers crossing the street are stopped and either warned or ticketed by uniformed officers a short distance away."

As a part-time pedestrian, I think this is great, even if it is tainted by the $4,000 grant to each participating police department. The have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife question is why can't the law be enforced without the grant? I'm not a medium so I can't speak for the 100 or so dead pedestrians annually who may have benefited from an assumption of strict enforcement.

Back to my three basic strategies. A dozen legislators want to put an end to this game of chicken. They've sponsored bills requiring drivers to stop when pedestrians are at a crosswalk, even if they're still on the curb waiting to cross. That's not as impossible as it sounds. When we visited Annapolis it took us a few hours to get used to the idea that practically every car stopped as soon as we thought about crossing. That was nice. Civilized. But the bills in the NJ Legislature seem to be going nowhere.

In the meantime, I wish the program success.

As long as the undercovers aren't texting while crossing. That's different.

My "FB" friend Miles Winder -- multitalented attorney in Bernardsville, N.J. -- posted a real question on Facebook: What should health care be like in the perfect world?

Unfortunately he only got two answers. The first was a widecrack, the second mine. My imagination doesn't venture far into the future, so I suggested some tinkering. It's somewhat telegraphic, to fit into a Facebook entry:

1) Workers should get out of the mindset that says the company "pays for everything." The cost of premiums or self-insurance is part of their payroll budget which could have been used for salaries (or a new yacht for the boss). That leads to...

2) Knowing that the costs actually do, however indirectly, come out of their pockets they'd take better care of their health.

3) Then we could get serious about preventive medicine, such as quitting smoking, exercising, eating better, caring about air and water quality, going for checkups, etc. (The UAW took a stab a this, probably too late.)

4) Get more people insured to expand the risk pool. Young people think they don't need it because they don't get sick. False.

5) I don't care that much who owns the system, but 1 through 4 might get people to at least consider a system at in which the govt is one of the players. I do not think the govt should pick up the tab for the uninsured; that would allow the companies to cherry pick.

Talk about re-defining success...

I was stunned when I heard former transportation commissioner Jamie Fox came on board as uber-advisor to Jon Corzine's campaign for re-election as governor of New Jersey. I hope, and suspect, Jon Corzine is considerably wiser than former Sen. Bob Torricelli and former Gov. Jim McGreevey. I hope for his sake -- as a person. I haven't declared yet, and I live in PA anyway -- he has someone in his office and another someone in his campaign who can say, "Jon, don't do it."

He might not get that kind of advice from Fox. Unless he's grown up and now knows it's part of his role to protect the boss even if means protecting the boss from himself. As chief of staff for Torricelli, then McGreevey, in another culture he would have fallen on his sword after their political downfalls.

For "full disclosure" as they say, I worked for the Department of Transportation when he came along with the McGreevey crew. One day I passed along a couple of potentially confusing things he ought to know before he set up a certain event. They were very minor things and could readily have been worked around. In my judgment it was basic media relations that he should just know about them before some reporter blind-sided him. But he didn't like what he heard so he gave my supervisor hell. I don't know whether that was a direct cause of our being let go, and I think that was going to happen anyway. I just want to pre-empt the counterpunch that I'm a disgruntled ex-employee (How come nobody's ever "gruntled"?).

I clearly have a grudge. It's a free country so I'm allowed. But the question this little story brings up is, if he treats underlings that way, managing by tantrum, is that his approach to superiors? Never tell them something that might get them upset, even if the truer loyalty is to do so?

But if I'd never even met the guy, if I were an objective observer, I'd have to wonder why someone who advised two men as they marched straight into their political graves becomes the savior of anybody's campaign.

Turbidity, schmurbidity

I'm picking on the local newspaper again. I'm not trying to, I'm really not. It's just hard to get through it sometimes. This time it's about our local water. Which I think is important enough to warrant a decent story. It seems that either the Delaware overran the water plant or some filter stopped functioning. Or both. The Bucks County Courier Times took three stabs at it, but apparently just parroted the guy who runs the plant. Here's the note I wrote to the reporter who did two out of three of the stories, followed by his astonishing reply.

Danny:

Your Friday story, "Authority lifts boil water advisory"
still doesn't answer the basic questions about the event, even though the Courier Times had four working days to figure it out. The word "turbidity" is used four times and is defined with the the parentheses: (cloudiness). But re-read this sentence in your story:

"Authority customers in Morrisville and parts of Falls and Lower Makefield were told Monday to boil their water before drinking because of unusually high levels of turbidity following heavy rain storms Sunday and a mechanical problem at the water plant."

I don't know whether you're an old-timer or a summer intern, but the Courier Times has been around long enough that someone there must have noticed that the Delaware River is a significant geographical and environmental feature of the region, and a couple times a year it does something newsworthy. How can the Courier Times not have the phone numbers of a couple of water experts to call to get a better explanation of its behavior, in this case, turbidity? While you were waiting for them to return your call, you could have looked at the U.S. Geological Survey's water data site. You would see turbidity spikes after every heavy rain, and on the week of June 13, it was as high as it was last week. So, you ask the water company, what's "unusual" if the same thing happened less than two months ago and there wasn't a boil water advisory?

You should have asked the water company: What mechanical failure? As opposed to the four turbidities, that was only mentioned once in the story, with not even a parenthetical attempt to explain. It would seem to any local reading the paper it must be the plant, not the river. Or was it?

Was it?

"Dana,

Thanks for the e-mail. The real issue here was not that the turbidity levels of the Delaware River were high, it was the fact that the water got into Morrisville Municipal Authority's public water system because of a mechanical failure with one of the lime feeders for about 12 hours (Sunday night into Monday morning.) Hope that helps."

Maybe I slept on it wrong

Woke up with this pain in my left wrist. I know for a fact I didn't overdo anything with it yesterday, or whack something with it. After consulting my Anatomy Coloring Book I can report it's somewhere around the distal radioulnar joint cavity, perhaps on the ulna itself or the dorsal ulnocarpal ligament.

These details remind me of a movie I'll bet most of you are lucky enough to have never seen: The Beast With Five Fingers, a 1946 beast that ended up in the late 50's as the second feature in a Saturday afternoon special at the State Theater on Journal Square. People visiting a mansion (of course it's a mansion; there are no 3 BR 2 BTH Capes in horror movies) are being mysteriously strangled and some nights somebody plays the piano, quite professionally. The house used to belong to a piano player and to cut a very long story short, it was his hand that was strangling everybody and playing the piano in its spare time. It even strangles its faithful attendant, Peter Lorre.

This was resoundingly laughed at by Jersey City's pre-teen horror aficionados. Even a 10-year-old can tell you anybody can easily outrun a severed hand pulling itself along with its fingers.

They don't make 'em like they used to, this and Mr. Sardonicus. Good thing.

My wrist? It feels a little better now. I still can't do any heavy lifting around the house. But I can play the piano.

With one hand.

How come you didn't.....?

Who doesn't employ a good quotation now and then? Something someone said sets off something in our heads and puts a previously fluttering thought into a clear glass jar. Then we turn it around and display it as needed. There are books and web sites full of pithy, profound or pleasant quotations for all occasions. It's much cooler to acquire statements the old fashioned way, by reading the work they come from. But that's principle. In practice talus from the bigger rock often lies at our feet waiting to be picked up.

Here's one from Eric Hoffer, the late longshoreman-philosopher. I forgot where I found it.

"There are many who find a good alibi far more attractive than an achievement. For an achievement does not settle anything permanently. We still have to prove our worth anew each day: we have to prove that we are as good today as we were yesterday. But when we have a valid alibi for not achieving anything we are fixed, so to speak, for life. Moreover, when we have an alibi for not writing a book, painting a picture, and so on, we have an alibi for not writing the greatest book and not painting the greatest picture. Small wonder that the effort expended and the punishment endured in obtaining a good alibi often exceed the effort and grief requisite for the attainment of a most marked achievement."

Thus spake Hoffer. Now, as we reach our later years do we polish the alibi? Proceed to make up for lost time? Examine the possibility that all along there were Mitty daydreams of glory, or Houdini boxes we locked ourselves into but didn't have the skill to get out of? Or perhaps do we re-define "achievement" to include the work we showed up for every day, the families we raised, the homes we tended, those occasional worst-ever days and weeks we managed to survive?

The Blond Corroborator: Exercise Note #2

I'm not the first over-60 guy of course to more or less suddenly realize there are indeed some things are too heavy to lift. Let me introduce Dave Draper. He bills himself as the Blond Bomber, nicknamed thus when he was a serious contender for bodybuilding championships, and he won several major titles before Ah-nold eclipsed everybody. He's sticking with his life's passion and along the way he developed a writing style to match his intensity. Whether or not you have any interest at all in working out with weights, it's possible you might enjoy his bombastic yet self-deprecating prose:
www.davedraper.com

Interview with Douchebag #1

I was walking our spaniel in the park the other day, and I wondered how Jay Louis was doing. So when I got home I checked his web site. By psychic coincidence at that moment his was on his way to a NYC hospital to get patched up after a taxi crash. Louis, at first glance an unlikely First Amendment champion, is the over-the-top author of “Hot Chicks with Douchebags” and master of a web site of that name. I interviewed him by e-mail a few months ago after a suit against him was thrown out. What follows is a mutation of the story published in the no-longer publishing NJEsq. It's kinda long for this blog format, but gives a flavor of his writing and thinking styles:

A Bergen County judge with the great name of Menelaos W. Toskos dismissed the defamation claims of three women who appear in Louis’s book, who though unnamed in the text, appear with men whose style he mocks. Toskos said “the book must be treated as protected expression of opinion. Consequently, it is absolutely privileged under the First Amendment.” If anyone’s looking for what else Toskos said about the book, his decision is posted on the web site that spawned the book: www.hotchickswithdouchebags.com. While there is an FAQ definition of douchebag, it’s clear Louis is talking about males who overdo the mousse, bare chests and abs, fake tans, bandanas and – worst of all, guys who look a little like celebrities and then go all out to be lookalikes. The other half of the phenomenon is one that has been puzzling some young men probably forever: “hot chicks” falling for such profoundly superficial jerks.

BylineSullivan: Why did you decide to start this site?
Jay Louis: I live in Los Angeles, and after years of watching way too many hotties fall for the same old sleazy douchebuckets, I decided to take matters into my own hands. By critiquing them from afar on the internet.
BS: Do you catch yourself being tempted into douchebag tendencies (mousse, pirate bandanas, grinning if someone says you look like a D-list celebrity. Or A-list for that matter)?
JL: My book elaborates at length on a concept I call "The 'Bag Within," which states that every male has, at some point or another, douched out in service of scoring The Hott. The goal is to rise above this strategy and help create a better tomorrow.
BS:Other than back-at-you name-calling, does anyone try to fit you into that category? How would you categorize yourself?
JL: On my website I go by "douchebag1," so you can conclude from that as you will.
BS: You offer to take pics down. How many takedowns do you do? Do you get more requests from guys or from women?
JL: Strangely, I get far more take-down requests from women, either in the pic or girlfriends of the douche in question. The 'Bags seem intent on pretending they're too tough to care if they're on my site or not. BS: How did you decide to do a book?
JL: There is a natural literature component to the study of hot-tie/douchey commingling, so it was an organic development.
BS: Is the publicity helping sales?
JL: So far, the publicity has been a big help, but I was also getting plenty of press before the lawsuits. The website has been featured in a number of publications, including a Yahoo Pick of the Week in 2007, and was named "Best of the Web" in Playboy, FHM and Rolling Stone magazine.
BS: Have you worried that you could be sued for the website as well?
JL: I'm not worried at all, the First Amendment protects my right to critique photographs, and I never publish real information about the people in the pics. It's clear that I don't know them personally, so I'm not doing anything more than critiquing a picture.
BS: Do you have any advice for someone running a site that gets really down and critical, and on the personal level?
JL: I don't think I'm very personal at all, since I don't say anything about who they are as people. I just say that, in this pic, they look like a douche. Judging by the pictorial evidence, I'd say I have a strong argument. But I always shoot for comedy and silliness, first and foremost, not meanness.
BS: How does it feel now that the suit was dismissed?
JL: My scrotum is vibrating.