Road Apples, #42

Work...I am actually working in Scranton...as in not traveling...for the next week and a half. Truth be told, while I have a lot of travel yet to come, there is only one more 4 day "stint" of left between now and the end of October (barring something unexpected). I have a lot that I want to do at home, so the time here will be welcome. Lots of cleaning.

The Fall...Fall is my absolute favorite season. More on this in another post.

Car Speakers...When I returned from a trip a week ago, I discovered that my right front car stereo speaker has blown-out. "Blown-out" is a technical term for "no longer sounds right", or something like that. I need to see if I can buy a replacement for it, as it now sounds pretty bad no matter what I do.

"You Might Be A Redneck If..."...Yes, I am going to the "Flea Market" this morning. I like to go every once in a while for a few reasons, including...

...I can find interesting junk from time to time
...It's not a bad little walk
...It makes for interesting people observing

For $0.50 parking fee you get a lot of entertainment. Plus they have these really good hamburgers.

Yesterday...I went grocery shopping and then went out on the great quest for new boxer shorts. About two years ago I decided to make the "leap" from wearing white cotton briefs to wearing boxer shorts. Something about how I bought one pair of boxers, put them on, and realized that for the preceding 43 years I had been wearing underwear that really was uncomfortable; but another way, I didn't know what I was missing in not wearing boxers. Well it was time to throw out everything I had and get some new ones. My first thought was "I'll get some from Eddie Bauer", as I really dig Eddie Bauer's clothing. Well, Eddie no longer carries boxer shorts, so it was off to Kmart where I found some Fruit of the Loom. I am very particular about the boxer:

...they must be made from 100% cotton (except for the elastic)
...the waist-band must be covered in fabric
...solid colors only

Yes, I know, so many rules. I sound like Monk. Anyway, I found some at Kmart, and am wearing a new pair as I write this. Just another spoiled American I guess.

Pennsylvania's Budget Crisis...Pennsylvania still does not have a budget. Personally I think every last one of them in Harrisburg needs to be fired. They do not deserve their jobs, Democrats and Republicans alike. All are more interested in the preservation of power and the status quo than they are in actually governing the Commonwealth in an effective manner.

Spiraling Towards the Legal Blackhole

They say that when a super-massive star ends it's life, it can become a blackhole, which is an object so massive that it literally collapses in upon itself. Any matter or energy going near the blackhole will eventually be sucked up into it, all be it potentially after spiraling around the edge of the blackhole (known as an Event Horizon) for what seems like forever.

On a related note, in this past Thursday (the 10th), this little ditty was published in The Scranton Times (and Citizen's Voice in "Hayna Gulch"). While the road may take a while to travel, I have no doubt that in the end, the nation's most infamous crooked judges, Ciavarella & Conahan, will end up spending the rest of their lives in a hole of another sort.

Think of Ciavarella & Conahan as being like chunks of matter spiraling around a blackhole...doomed to eventually be consumed by a giant nothing. It may seem maddening that justice is taking so long to be served, but I like think of it this way: every day they get to see what's left of their lives (and their money) slowly spiraling away. Justice? Nope...nothing could undue what these two have done to others, but the fact that their fate is inevitable is of some comfort.

Enjoy the view guys.

10 Reasons Why Business Travel Is Over-Rated

In no particular order (for no particular reason):

1. It's almost impossible to find truly good pizza.
2. I am, for all intensive purposes, working 24 hours a day.
3. I get guilting "but you are not here" calls and text messages.
4. Others mistakenly think that I'm having fun, when in reality it's just the opposite.
5. I tend to over-eat.
6. There is nothing glamorous about sitting in a hotel room at 9pm waiting for time to pass so that I can go to bed.
7. Hotel inconveniences suck...be they showers without enough water pressure, "high-speed" Internet access that has about the same bandwidth as as 24kps modem, or air conditioning that will not go any lower than 65 degrees.
8. You get disturbed by creepy noises from people in the room(s) next to you.
9. Plastic room door keeps that seem to only selectively work (nothing worse than standing outside your room, carrying tons of crap, trying to open your door and only seeing that yellow LED flash at you).
10. 3am fire alarms.
    

Remembering September 11th

9-11 seems so long ago, but yet I still remember the morning that it all happened. Lori Carson, someone who reported to me at the time, first told me that something was going on in New York City. Before long we had groups of people watching TV monitors throughout the building, all trying to figure out what happened.

I remember the videos...those scenes of the planes just ramming the towers, seeming just melding with the structures like a knife cutting into a cake.

I remember Sue Unvarsky from our office calling everyone together to try and disseminate some news on what was going on.

I remember going home early and picking up my kids from middle school. We just didn't know what was going on.

I remember shortly after it happened thinking to myself "I really should cry...the sheer horror of it should rightfully bring me to tears...the sights of people jumping out windows...the replay again and again of the video...all of it just should have made be break down into tears. I never did cry.

I remember the anger at it all. "F&^%ing nuke them all!" was uttered from my (and others) lips. That's the problem with anger though: it makes you do things in response that really don't provide any real satisfaction. In the case of 911, we lost far more lives in the "response" than we did in the attack.

I remember being in Newark a month or so later, looking out from an upper floor window of the Plaza building and seeing Manhattan in the distance, smoke still rising from the remains of the structures.

Most of all, I remember at that moment the world changed forever.

Zombie Kids

For the record, I didn't hear reports of any zombie kids wandering around the nation, muttering "must have socialized medicine". Not even on Faux News. Yes, our nation's school children...at least the ones that were allowed to listen to it...managed to survive the Obama address. Amazing stuff.

Well this isn't so amazing, as I suspect some of those that questioned the President's speaking to school children also probably question...

...the President's citizenship
...fluoride in drinking water
...the role of Jews in the banking system
...[insert your favorite wild-assed conspiracy here]


By the way, the nuts on the extreme Right don't have a monopoly on stupidity, as equally ridiculous spew has come from the extreme left during the presidency of George W. Bush.

Yes, in United States we have BOTH the right to criticize the actions of government AND to be a complete and utter IDIOT at the same time.

Gotta love freedom.

Six Years Ago...

...Warren Zevon died from lung cancer. One of the last songs he recorded was "Keep Me In Your Heart", which is as fitting as any tribute to him could ever be.





Shadows are falling and I'm running out of breath
Keep me in your heart for awhile

If I leave you it doesn't mean I love you any less
Keep me in your heart for awhile

When you get up in the morning and you see that crazy sun
Keep me in your heart for while

There's a train leaving nightly called
when all is said and done
Keep me in your heart for while

Sha-la-la-la-la-la-la-li-li-lo
Keep me in your heart for while

Sha-la-la-la-la-la-la-li-li-lo
Keep me in your heart for while

Sometimes when you're doing simple
things around the house
Maybe you'll think of me and smile

You know I'm tied to you like the buttons on your blouse
Keep me in your heart for while

Hold me in your thoughts, take me to your dreams
Touch me as I fall into view
When the winter comes keep the fires lit
And I will be right next to you

Engine drivers headed north to Pleasant Stream
Keep me in your heart for while

These wheels keep turning but
they're running out of steam
Keep me in your heart for while

Sha-la-la-la-la-la-la-li-li-lo
Keep me in your heart for while

Sha-la-la-la-la-la-la-li-li-lo
Keep me in your heart for while

Keep me in your heart for while

The Body Ages at a Different Rate than the Mind

The body does age at a different rate than the mind.

The above is something I am absolutely, positively certain of, period. At age 45 I think I am finally (well over the past few years) started to become mentally mature. Of course there are times when I think my body is aging far too fast, but then I remember that there are times in the past when the average life expectancy was something like 45, so the issues I have seem minor in comparison.

It is all so very, very cruel in a lot of ways: We are given this physical hardware but when it is at peak efficiency (when we are in our, say early 20's) the software we have inside our heads isn't powerful enough to run it right. How's that one for a geek analogy?

There are ways of dealing with this stuff. I can make the choice to eat healthier. I can choose to exercise more. It's all about what you want I suppose. I want to be very active in my older years. I don't want to be some person who sits in front of a TV screen day after day after day, waiting for the next CSI re-run and ultimately just waiting to die. I know, we all die in the end. Well we all do die, it's just that we don't - and shouldn't - spend all of our time thinking about that constantly. That would be a waste of life.

Maybe the trick in life is to constantly try and strike this balance. When we are younger and have peak efficiency bodies, we work on improving our minds (going to school, starting careers, etc.); when we are older, we have to work on getting our bodies more in lines with the cumulative efficiency that our minds achieve through age and experience.

No one ever said that this life stuff was going to be easy.

In The "This will not make me friends" Department...

I saw this posting on Facebook from a morning radio talk show...

"Sen. Bob Casey on live at 7:45am...right wing wackos who are taking their kids out of class because the President is addressing students next week... on the Morning News right now on WILK"

To which I just had to respond...

Stephen Albert

I find it humorously ironic that this topic was started with the phrase "right wing wackos who are..." when it's WILK that profits from "right wing wackos" via programming. Isn't this kind of like a Preacher giving a sermon about the evils of pornography while at the same time running a pornographic website?

I just couldn't help it. This is the same radio station that has a line-up that consists of almost nothing but "right wing wackos", from Limbaugh to Hannity to Savage. Now I can respect people with differing political views, but come on it's hard to believe any measure of disgust from a radio Programming Director who does well via these same 'wackos".

It's 4:45AM, Why Am I Even Typing?

Yes, I am sitting here in a hotel room at about a quarter to five in the morning. I made the enormous mistake of laying down at about 9:45pm last night, which meant that I fell asleep pretty quickly, which also meant that I ended up getting up far too early.

I do have this love/hate relationship with sleeping.

Anyway, when faced with situations like this, I'm always left with the dilemma as to whether or not I should lay back down for a while, useless in bed, or try and stay up, get some work done and just get the day going. I despise the former alternative, although I will also confess to acting on it once or twice. For today, I'm sticking with choice #2. Now come 9pm tonight I'll probably pay the price for my insolence via sheer exhaustion, reducing me to drinking caffeinated drinks about 7pm just so that I don't collapse early and breed this cycle even more.

I could blame this on the Olive Garden I suppose. Between salad, breadsticks, lasagna and desert, my digestive system probably shunted every once of energy in my body just for digestive purposes, making me the functional equivalent of a silver-back gorilla for the night. Yes, but I know better, don't I?

Knowing better.

I've often wondered if I have the bizarre compulsion to commit suicide via over-eating. I eat far too much, and the only thing standing between me and morbid obesity is the fact that I run around like a maniac all day (until I manage to lay down and then normally collapse into sleep). I know that I should be eating better, I feel better when I am eating better, I've lost a ton of weight by eating better, yet I still eat like crap. This is complicated stuff. Maybe it has more to do with growing up (than growing...out). A few years ago I lost a ton of weight and I did it the right way, by working with a nutritionist, counting calories, exercising, etc. Also in the mix was the fact that someone in my immediate family was very, very ill at the time; I think part of my devotion of a better lifestyle was a combination of:

1. I want to be healthy (not like this other person)
2. That is out of my control, so I need to have something important in my life that I can control

More heavily weighted towards #2 by the way.

Control.

Control is a big issue with me. It's my drug of choice. It's not that I am a true "control freak" in the classical sense of the word. For example, I have ABSOLUTELY NO desire to control the actions of anyone around me, family included. As far as I am concerned, it's strictly "live and let live". I do, however, have an absolutely need to be in control of those things that impact just me. This makes the situation all the more bizarre, in that I don't control what I put into my body in terms of food. Or maybe I do.

Okay, this is far too weighty stuff for so early a time in the morning. God help my class today, as I may end up comparing salesforce.com to Romanesque architecture.

On The Turning Away

I've been doing a lot of reading about/listening to Pink Floyd lately. In fact, at at 45 , I finally bought a copy of "The Dark Side of the Moon". Anyway, from a much later album (1987's "A Momentary Lapse of Reason") there is a song called "On The Turning Away". From what I gather, the song talks about the tendency of people to turn their heads away from people who are suffering. That's something we all need to be careful about.


On The Turning Away
Gilmour/Moore

On the turning away
from the pale and downtrodden
and the words they say
which we won't understand
"don't accept that what's happening
is just a case of others' suffering
or you'll find that you're joining in
the turning away"

It's a sin that somehow
light is changing to shadow
and casting it's shroud
over all we have known
unaware how the ranks have grown
driven on by a heart of stone
we could find that we're all alone
in the dream of the proud

On the wings of the night
as the daytime is stirring
where the speechless unite
in a silent accord
using words you will find are strange
and mesmerised as they light the flame
feel the new wind of change
on the wings of the night

No more turning away
from the weak and the weary
no more turning away
from the coldness inside
just a world that we all must share
it's not enough just to stand and stare
is it only a dream that there'll be
no more turning away?