Author: Dale

Dear Mr. Dickle, I fixed it for you.

Posted on by Dale

The other day my good friend Pilliard Dickle (no really) showed up in my labyrinth and gave me a copy of his new book, Avocado Avenue.  It is published by Boll Weevil Press, who will also publish Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy in a few short weeks.

It is, like all of Billiard’s work, inventive and twisted and funny and highly entertaining.

However,  I have to say that after reading the first eleven pages I was fully expecting that it would end in cataclysm and flame.  It only made sense, given the subtle buildup of absolute stasis on Sally and Rodney’s front porch.

I was severely disappointed, then, when it failed to live up to my expectations.  It was much the same when George Lucas failed to end Episode III: Revenge of the Sith in an appropriate manner.  Or when Peter Jackson made three Hobbit movies instead two.  Or when Michael Bay made movies.

This time, though, since Dilliard is such a dear friend, I am able to fix it for him.

And now, the exciting conclusion of Avocado Avenue—

BACK ON THE PORCH, LATER, AND WHAT HAPPENED THEN[1]

Sally opened the front door.  It was long past midnight.

“What on earth are you doing out here?” she asked. The old man was standing there, agitatedly staring out into the dark.

“It ain’t right,” the old man muttered.  “It ain’t right.”

“What’s not right?” asked Rodney, who had wakened to find Sally gone from their queen-sized bed.  Rodney had actually wanted a king-sized bed, but their bedroom wasn’t big enough handle a mattress of that width.  It still nagged at him.

Rodney never found out what was not right, because at that moment the old man trotted off the front porch into the night, picking up speed as he ran.

Sally and Rodney stared at each other in shock as they listened to the cries of “It ain’t right” diminishing in the distance.  Rodney fleetingly wondered whether the old man’s bedroom would hold a king before he too ran off into the dark.

“What on earth…?” Sally said, then she too began to run.

The old man was standing in the back yard of Doris and Delores’ house when Sally and Rodney caught up with him.  He was weeping openly.

“Whatever is the matter with you?” Rodney gasped as they ran up.  The old man turned to them.

“This…” he began in a hoarse whisper, but what he said next was overwhelmed by the sound of an explosion behind them.

Sally and Rodney never had time to realize that their house had exploded because Doris and Delores’ house was now similarly engulfed in a roaring fireball.

“Just like in the movies of Michael Bay,” thought Rodney, or at least that’s what he began thinking before thinking was no longer an option for him or for Sally.

“This is for you, Horace!” screamed the old man as he plunged into the conflagration.

Then there was only the night and the flame.

No one ever saw the lone female figure escaping into the darkness.  If they had, they might have wondered why she was nude.

There you go, Gilliard, a proper ending.  You’re welcome.

—————

[1] You should probably read the book first before reading this.

Easy answer, healthcare edition

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This morning I emailed my senators, Johnny Isakson and David Perdue, to ask them an easy question:

I have read your statement on why you voted for the healthcare bills under consideration. Can you show me the scoring on those bills to back up your claims that they will give more people in this nation healthcare? Not “access” to healthcare: healthcare.

The easy answer is, of course, “no.”  They cannot.  No amount of massaging the data—which they don’t have in the first place—will show that the bills they have voted on will actually improve healthcare in this nation.

#ShowMeTheScoring

I’m not even adding this to the Easy Answers page any more.  What’s the point when they’re not going to answer in any legitimate way?

UPDATE: I’m not the only one catching on.

The Big Lie

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Of all the idiotic lies the Current Occupant Embarrassment has told, the most dangerous is one of his first and biggest: that “3 to 5 million illegal votes were cast” in the election, costing him the popular vote.

Only one of the amygdala-based lifeforms (whose very life depends on having enough fear to drive their ecological and biological systems) could believe that fraud of such incredible scope could go unnoticed.  Only someone who must believe that the Truth IS Somewhere Out There could hear quotes like these:

“Throughout the campaign and even after it,” Trump said, “people would come up to me and express their concerns about voter inconsistencies and irregularities, which they saw. In some cases, having to do with very large numbers of people in certain states.”

Kris Kobach, who never met a Democratic vote he didn’t want to suppress, “We will probably never know the answer to that question.”

Anthony Scaramucci: “My guess is that there’s probably some level of truth to that. I think what we have found sometimes is that the president says stuff, some of you guys in the media think it’s not true. It turns out it’s closer to the truth than people think.”

…and think, “Wow, look at that overwhelming evidence!”[1]

So why should all of us care about this?  The man is gripped by his own egomania and will continue to burrow into his own delusion, which is eyebrow-raising enough when it’s your crazy friend—but this is a person who lives in the White House and can drag the rest of us into his fantasies if we don’t keep our wits about us.

For an excellent take on this, see E. J. Dionne’s editorial at the Washington Post.

Bottom line: the current administration wants to make it harder for you to vote, especially if you are apt to vote against them.  It is easier for them to do this than you think, and even you—yes you—can be caught up in their machinations.

It has already begun.

—————

[1] There is no evidence. See here.

What are we to do?

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So, at 4:44 a.m. this morning,[1] here’s what the President of the United States tweeted:

Besides the Captain Queeg obsession with Clinton’s emails, the thorniest issue here for me is that he misspelled Counsel.  I am reminded of John Stewart’s comment about people wanting to vote for Bush43 because he seemed like a “regular guy,” i.e., not a pointy-headed intellectual: “Not only do I want an elite president, I want someone who’s embarrassingly superior to me.”

We have a long way to go.

(Open note to the White House: I know you don’t do “history,” but get someone to read you the results of all previous investigations into those emails.)

—————

[1] I don’t know why this embedded tweet says 7:44 a.m.  The original said 4:44; if you click through, it still does.

Through the Looking-glass

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My internet server has a spam filter on it and catches about 100 spam emails a day.  It’s very good—I’m actually quite surprised when I get a spam message in my inbox these days.

However, it will also occasionally snag emails from people or companies that I want to hear from, and so when I get the email saying that it has messages for me to review, I click and go look.  Mostly I just scan the subject lines; it takes less than a minute to do, and then I click Reject All As Spam and I’m done.

Every now and then, though, my curiosity gets the better of me: what are all these emails that warn me of Hillary Clinton’s devastating plans to oust our current embarrassment and take over the White House?  Since I can check the contents of the email without actually leaving the spam filter, I opened one up the other day and found this:

This was followed by blocks of text that were literally jumbled together by a bot from online sources.

I did not explore past this content; in my experience, these things are setups for sites trying to sell you miracle cures or prepper supplies.

As always, my fascination is with the target audience, the 27% who are going to be clueless rage-bunnies no matter what.  I found it fascinating that in our new reality it’s taken as a statement of fact even by the rage-bunnies that Russia intervened directly in our election—but the rage-bunnies direct their anger at the woman who lost the election eight months ago.

And I love the links to “unsubscribe.”  This is where the cluelessness of the rage-bunnies is delicious: how many of them click on those links and give the spammers their information?

Bless they hearts.

A useless post

Posted on by Dale

This post contains useless information unless you need it and then omg it will change your life.

First, as all right-thinking people know, the Blackwing 602 pencil is the nonpareil of writing instruments.  All the best people use them.  When they went out of production in 1998, a nation grieved, but a couple of years ago Palomino revived them and we can all once again write with the same pencil as Stephen Sondheim.

One of the nifty design elements of the pencil is its eraser.

It is held in the ferrule by a little aluminum clip, and the idea is that as you wear the eraser down you can pull it out, move the eraser up, and pop it back in. The clip will hold the extended eraser in its new position.

You can see the theory here:

However, the two little indentations in the clip do not actually hold the eraser in place.  Any attempt to erase your mistakes pushes the eraser back down into the ferrule.

So here’s your life-changing tip of the day: take a small nail and dunch those indentations in a wee bit.

Now your clip has actual teeth and will hold the eraser in place as you write the lyrics for the next Follies.

You’re welcome.

More thoughts on the 25th

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I don’t know why this keeps bubbling up in my head—wish fulfillment, perhaps.  But whatever the authors of the 25th Amendment thought they were doing, they weren’t solving our problem.

To be honest, there is no way they could have anticipated this problem: an unstable, childish, corrupt, vindictive know-nothing in the White House.  They wrote the Amendment in case the President had a stroke (Wilson) or was shot (Reagan) or was otherwise incapacitated.  They assumed the President to be an honorable man who, after a period of recuperation, would be welcomed back to his office by a sympathetic nation.

As if.

Instead, we have a reality TV star, and the 25th Amendment gives us no guidance on What Happens Next.  I mean, think about it: Pence and the Cabinet write their letter to both houses of Congress and Pence assumes the title of Acting President.  But do we really think the current embarrassment is going to vacate the White House?  We do not.

Again, the authors of the 25th weren’t thinking about actually removing the President.  We have the impeachment process for that.  They were just codifying what everyone assumed to be an orderly transition of power in case of incapacitation.  So if we go the 25th route, we can expect to be treated—if that’s the word I’m looking for—to another three years of reality TV.  Do we perp march the embarrassment out of the Oval Office?  Do we pay to set up a parallel White House (and no, not at a Trump hotel)?  We’ll have competing press conferences.  Torrents of tweets.  Republican congresscritters would never come out of the elevators.

And what, oh what will Fox News do?

All in all, a complete circus.

And yet we’ll be rid of him.

Gaming the 25th Amendment

Posted on by Dale

There has been much talk of the 25th Amendment recently: short of actual impeachment, it seems to many to be the easiest way to rid ourselves of the national embarrassment.  I myself think it’s a solution that the national embarrassment will embrace, and here’s why.

First, the pertinent document, Section 4 of Amendment 25:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.

tl;dr: Mike Pence pulls together a majority vote in the Cabinet that the current occupant is unfit, and they write a letter to both houses of Congress saying so.  Poof! Mike Pence is Acting President.

Here’s the interesting part: Pence does not become actual President.  The actual President is merely sidelined, where he can tweet that uhuh he is too fit for the rest of his days.  Technically he can write a letter to both houses of Congress that he’s feeling much better, and then they vote on it.  I figure the Senate’s good for two-thirds of those votes; the House is where the balance lies, and I don’t trust them not to reinstall the man.

But let’s assume that they see their duty to this nation clear and vote that he’s still nutso.  This should make him very happy, because now he’s got tons of enemies to insult and bluster and blame.  He can keep writing those letters for the next 42 months, and Congress can keep voting him out, and he makes the cable shows explode and he’s good.

And we’re rid of him.

ERIE, Day 8

Posted on by Dale

Last leg![1]

Cincinnati back to Newnan was completely uneventful if you don’t count the deluge we drove through nearly the whole way.

We stopped at the Kentucky Artisan Center at Berea, which is very nice.

Kentucky is celebrating its 225th birthday, and right in front of us when we parked was a pretty impressive sand sculpture.

Side A:

Side B:

 

I bought a neat deerstalker cap:

Also pictured, my remaining earring from the Art Gallery of Ontario: small round of black concrete with a smidgen of gold leaf.

The annual crafts festival was going on in Berea itself, but we resisted the urge to get home after midnight and hit the road, after stopping for lunch at Brooklyn Brothers Pizzeria in Corbin, KY.  Highly recommended!  (We stopped in Corbin to buy some bourbon to go with the bourbon pecan pie kit we got as a thank you gift for the nice neighbor who kept Kitten C for us while we were gone.)

And then we drove home the end.

Cute ending: when Kitten C was delivered back to us, we squee’d to find that in the week we’d been gone, he had turned into a honest-to-goodness kitten: weaned and ready to rumble.

His favorite toy at the moment is my bare foot.  This may be a long summer.

—————

[1] Or last nerve.  Your mileage may vary.  MILEAGE, GET IT??  DO YOU GET IT?

Erie, Day 7

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Time to DRIVE 974 MILES HOME, KENNETH!

We arrived to pick up our intrepid traveling companions and were greeted by…

He had been standing like that for ten minutes waiting for us to arrive.

Yes, that’s yard art where they were staying.  No, it’s not as weird as this:

I was just going to snap a quick one as we slowed down driving past, but there was a truck behind us so my lovely first wife pulled over—just as the lady of the house emerged to get into her truck.  She grinned and waved, and we told her how awesome it was.  “My husband is very creative,” she said with cheerful resignation.

Have a closer look.

And did you see…

I did not get a photo of the sign at St. Mary’s Cemetery, which I kid you not had some kind of jaunty 70s font.  This and other cemeteries have been decorated with solar lights in various fun colors.  It’s an odd effect.

As my phone threaded us through Medina on our way to I-90, we encountered this monument:

Perhaps Sue will tell us in comments why she hid the region’s largest concrete apple from us.

Anyway, we soon zoomed west and the end.

Not really.  We zoomed west and stopped in Cleveland to hit the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Those of my legions of readers who know me will be astonished that I visited the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but they should not be because I didn’t.  My companions all did, but I stayed in the lobby and wrote yesterday’s blog post.  Yes, I know, I’m a unregenerate dork, but rock music has never been part of my life.  I hear it like others hear opera: while I recognize the top 40 tunes, I don’t understand the words and I don’t know the players.  I was told I would have enjoyed the costumes, but a context-free experience with loudspeakers was certainly not going to entertain me at this point in the journey.  Maybe in my next life I’ll have a normal adolescence.

However, it was refreshing to be in an environment where I was not the only adult male over a certain age with pierced ears.

Then we got in the car and drove to Cincinnati the end.