Little Eddy

Blog # 157: Better Late Than Never

2010-09-06T09:16:00.000-07:00

John Paczkowski who writes a column called "All Things Digital" for the Wall St. Journal, uncovered a fascinating video of Steve Jobs laying out Apple's philosophy shortly after his return to Apple. This video ushered in the Think Different advertising campaign, and as Jobs introduced it he made the statement that both Albert Einstein and John Lennon, if they had been alive at the present time, would have used a Mac.

Steve Jobs in a turtleneck and shorts?

What a great bit of history this is. In the video embedded below, the Apple (AAPL) CEO introduces the company’s 1997 Think Different campaign. A key quote: “[Our new ad campaign] honors those people who have changed the world. Some of them are living, some of them are not. But the ones that aren’t – you know that if they ever used a computer it would have been a Mac.”

And another: “This is a very complicated world. This is a very noisy world and we’re not going to get a chance… to get people to remember much about us. No company is. And so we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.”

Crowds watch a horse trader ride through the streets during the Ould Lammas Fair in Ballycastle, Northern Ireland. Photo: Cathal Mcnaughton-Reuters

Roger Federer of Switzerland during play against Brian Dabul of Argentina at the U.S. Open in New York. The second-seeded Federer went on to win the opening-day match. Photo: Henny Ray Abrams-AP

Republican candidate for U.S. Senate Carly Fiorina, right, debates with Democratic incumbent Barbara Boxer (Calif.) at St. Mary's College in Moraga, Calif. Photo: Jeff Chiu-AP

And so another edition of Little Eddy's Blog runs out. We apologize for being two days late putting up this week's, and also the sleeziness of this week's blog. We hope you'll join us again next week, when hopefully you'll be able to download that week's edition at the proper time.

Meantime, hang in their, get your act together, and join us again for next week's edition. Meantime, bye bye. Come back and visit us again next week.

The Real Little Eddy § eddybad@gmail.com

Blog # 156: Apple's Mystery Meeting, etc.

2010-08-28T05:57:00.000-07:00

Apple’s Mystery Meeting?

Guesses galore as to the subject of an upcoming meeting called by Apple to exhibit a new product. As usual it is shrouded in secrecy, hottest rumors swirl around a newly priced AppleTv, renamed iTv, linked to the iTunes store and boasting tv program rentals for .99 cents. But why would Apple link such a product with so distinctive a guitar? What could possibly cause Apple to feature a guitar in its runup to the announcement? Maybe the Beatles are finally coming to the iTunes Store? Well, we can dream, can’t we?

While we’re being open and honest, here’s the real reason why we’ve been retreading our early writings these past few weeks. We have been living through a heat wave, our air conditioning unit has just barely made the indoor air liveable, and the only way we could produce was to explore early writings, and bringing them to a second life, as it were. There is no way we could be creative with new materials under those unholy conditions.

Most Irritating Current TV Ads

Speaking of ads, what are the most irritating television ads we’re seeing these days? Well, in my book it’s those incessant bp advertisements where good, ordinary people dripping with heavy Louisiana accents are telling the world how concerned they are about the damage to the Gulf of Mexico bp’s blown out well has done, and how bp is going to foot the entire cleanup bill, and so not to worry. bp is wasting tons of money just bringing these ads to television, money they should be spending on the actual clean up of the Gulf, not in telling us how well they are planning to clean up the Gulf. Get real, bpeople.

Favorite Commercial?

Of the current crop of commercials my absolute favorite belongs to Subaru. But then again Subaru has always been a very special and beautifully made automobile, designed with the owner in mind. One would expect that their selling powers would be superior, and with their newest offering one is not destined to be disappointed.

At any rate the ad shows a little girl curled up in the driver’s seat of a Subaru, she doesn’t look a day over nine or ten, curled up on the driver’s seat of the automobile. Her concerned father is standing outside the automobile, questioning her through the window, concerned that she can see (she does not seem to be tall enough to properly steer the automobile). Finally, seemingly convinced, he tosses her the keys. It is at that point that we see an entirely different girl, this one fully tall enough to steer the automobile. She waves to her dad as she drives off, and suddenly it became clear that the father had been seeing the girl through younger eyes, and as the commercial ends he is heard very quietly saying to himself, “we knew this day was coming, that’s why we bought a Subaru.”

– ☯ –

Where There’re Signs of Life . . .

There Must be Basketball in Our Future!

Houston Rockets center Yao Ming talks to reporters after a basketball workout in Houston. The smile that lights up his face is caused by the medical evaluation he had just undergone Monday, one which revealed that the hairline fracture in his surgically repaired left foot has fully healed. He has been cleared to take part in normal basketball activities, causing Rockets’ fans the city over to once again dream of playoff runs and championships. Denver’s Carmello Anthony is the latest NBA star to wish for a trade to the Rockets, so that he can play alongside Yao. Unfortunately no deal will be possible until Denver gets itself a new director of Basketball Operations, a position that is needed to be filled before any talk of a trade becomes possible. But it’s an intriguing thought, isn’t it? Photo: David J. Phillip-AP

”Seeing a Whole Lot of Red . . .”

People pelted one another with tomatoes during the Tomatina Festival in Spain's Valencia region. Tens of thousands of revelers from around the world participated in this year's mushy festivities. A bloody mess prevailed, for sure. Photo: Biel Alino-AFP/Getty Images

If you’re a boy, one of the many forces driving your world this time of year is the World Series of Little Leagues.

Waipahu, Hawaii's, Matthew Campos rounds third after hitting a three-run home run off Hamilton, Ohio, pitcher Brooks Robinson in the fourth inning of a game at the Little League World Series in South Williamsport, Pa. Hawaii won 6-4. Photo: Gene J. Puskar-AP

Ed a "no show" during Hurricane Katrina

During the actual appearance of Hurricane Katrina at the end of August, 2005, I was having my own internal hurricane. I awoke that morning with bloody diahrea, I was weak and scared enough to allow my housemates to call 911. and I spent the next few days coming in and out of consciousness in Spring Branch Hospital. In fact, my condition was serious enough in the eyes of those around me that son Daniel was encouraged to fly down for what might have been a last visit.

And so it came to pass that I missed Hurricane Katrina as it was happening live, so to speak. Joel tried to bring it to life by later describing the television reports of the dead bodies rotting away in the flooded streets of New Orleans after the fact. And nothing speaks to the eloquence of failure like that photograph of George Bush looking down at the devastation of Hurricane Katrina through the window of Air Force One.

Now, five years down the pike, I am finally getting an idea of Hurricane Katrina’s enormity thanks to msnbc’s five year’s after coverage.

Katrina spoke eloquently to George W.'s failure as a steward to the federal government. Should the vast resources of the federal government be used to humor the foreign policy whims of the regime in power, or should our nation's resources be used to come to the aid of Americans who are wiped out in a real tragedy. Bush was obsesseds with Iraq and Sadam Hussein. Many failures dogged the Bush/Cheney administration. Iraq, Afghanistan, the "Donut Hole," but none spoke the word failure louder than Katrina. It ended up defining a Presidency.

Getting into Heaven with the help of a Cow

A child dressed as a cow participates in the Cow Festival "Gai Jatra" procession in Kathmandu, Nepal. During the festival, families who have lost a relative during the year parade a cow through the city. The cow, a sacred animal in Nepal, is supposed to help the departed soul to enter the afterlife. Photo: Prakash Mathema-AFP/Getty Images

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With the exception of the Apple Mystery Guitar, this week’s photographs have come from the Washington Post, and appeared on Wednesday of this week. I found it interesting that Yao Ming, who is a Houston phenemonen was featured in the Post’s photos, as if a nation, as well as the city of Houston, was interested in the state of Yao Ming’s playing health.

– ☯ –

This week’s doctor report continues with the idea of less equals more. Dr. Rakkhit reports that my white count is down, and consequently at the present time he is ordering no special treatment for my condition. In fact my next visit is set for 2 months, with the middle of November in my sights.

And so does this edition of Little Eddy’s Blog, seeking to prove “less equals more,” mercifully comes to an end. It was a thrill to relive Katrina five years after the fact. However five years have passed and only a fraction of Katrina's devastation has been rebuilt. Five years have passed, and we're nowhere near to rebuilding. And we as Americans are still faced with the problems Katrina raised. What kind of country are we? Are we going to support a federal government which comes to the aid of its citizens, as the Democrats support? Or are we going to run our federal bureaucracy in the interests of the very rich, as the Republicans would have us do? November will tell a most important tale, I guess. I can think of nothing that makes the current issues more clearly drawn.

Meantime we've run another of Little Eddy's Blog aground. We hope you’ll find your way back to these parts anytime next week, for an idea of what next week’s edition will bring. Meantime, bye now, and don’t forget to sell your Republican friends short. The shorter the better.

The Real Little Eddy § eddybad@gmail.com

Blog # 155: Peace in the World . . .

2010-08-21T07:13:00.000-07:00

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We began last week’s blog with a photograph showing a female soldier having an unforgettable homecoming experience as she greets her daughter. No sooner had that “gone to press” than we ran across the ultimate homecoming video. So we decided to begin this week’s blog with it. As they would say on 4chan, if you tear up you lose.

In recent weeks we have run some very pro-Apple Face Time iPhone commercials, designed to sell the iPhone’s capability in videotaping phone calls, a technology invented by Dick Tracy in the 1930's. Now is the time for a glance on the other side. FunnyorDie presents perhaps a more realistic iPhone commercial. It worked for us, we laughed rather than expired, and we’d suggest you do it anytime or anyplace. Enjoy.

iphone 4 commercial - Dad - watch more funny videos

For our lookback into yesteryear we have elected to revisit Blog # 119, which was published on January 12. 2007: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were still in power in those feckless days, Peace in the World, or the World in Pieces was only the lyrics of a song (and perhaps an unattainable dream.)

Blog #19 Peace in the World, or the World in Pieces . .

Lord Have Mercy, did you read what George McGovern, that old peace monger from the Nixon era, proposed. He must have paid a visit to the ghost of fabled monkey glands surgeon Dr. Brinkley for he seems to have grown a set of rejuvenated gonads.

George McGovern

This usually quiet spoken minister’s son published an opinion piece in the Outlook section of the Washington Post the other day entitled “Why I Believe Bush-Cheney Must Go. Nixon Was Bad. These Guys Are Worse,” in which he respectfully suggested that Bush-Cheney have committed acts far more impeachable than Richard Nixon ever did, and asks why the current Democratic leadership is so opposed to beginning proceedings against them, noting how the Republicans put together proceedings against Bill Clinton during the waning years of his presidency for a lot less than the high crimes and misdemeanors which Bush-Cheney have committed.

Among other things he listed as among the high crimes, misleading the country about weapons of mass destruction, running the war on the cheap resulting in many casualties, widespread torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo in violation of Geneva Conventions, and on and on.

Of course it will never happen. Unlike Republicans who seem to love investigations more than sex (and thereby life) itself, and who seem to find lies and slander the spice of their lives (look at the harassing of Bill Clinton during both of his terms, and the lies bellowed by Swift Boat Liars for Defamation.com) Democrats seem to be uncomfortable spewing negative vibes. They would much rather get something positive done, but unfortunately their majority is too thin, and on most issues the Republicans have closed ranks.

Still the positive thing about McGovern’s suggestion is the joining of both Bush and Cheney in the indictment, it would never do to have Bush impeached alone thereby leaving a fox like Cheney in charge of our national chicken coop. The other interesting possibility, should the Dems ever have the audacity to make an actual impeachment happen, would be in the person to whom the Presidency would be handed. As best we can remember from our high school Civics class the third in line is the Speaker of the House of Representatives, a position presently held by Nancy Pelosi. Wouldn’t that sell one helluva lot of Alka Seltzers to those of a Republican persuasion?

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Bush Embarks on “so-called” peace mission

As our revered leader embarked to the Middle East on his long overdue “so called” peace mission (perhaps “legacy” would be the more descriptive term), reverberations from the intrusion onto some of our Persian Gulf naval fleet by supposed Iranian Revolutionary Guard vessels in the Strait of Hormuz were causing ominous threats to spew from said presidential orifice. Iran first dismissed U.S. concerns about the incident, saying it was a routine contact, and then denied doing anything. And lately even the Navy is questioning the authenticity of the bomb threats.

Of course our nation’s eyes are primarily focussed on the race to succeed His Supreme Irrelevancy, for in all honesty those who care about the comings and goings of our country’s last and greatest mistake are few and far between. And just because our Navy has an ongoing history of this kind of trumped up confrontation that is no excuse for Iran claiming this latest confrontation was faked. How many of you out there can remember the Tonkin Bay incident, the fictional naval encounter which Lyndon Johnson used as his excuse to officially interfere militarily in Vietnam, a permission which was later rescinded by the U. S. Congress after belatedly discovering the inherent falsity of the so-called encounter? But of course by then it was too late. Once you get in a war, you play hell getting out again unless one side or the other is vanquished completely.

Is the Iranian “incident” being used by that whitest of houses in a desperate attempt to call attention to our much ignored leader, giving him one last shot at garnering some positive scrutiny while pretending relevance as he attempts to exude strength and purpose? Or is this yet another nail in the coffin leading to a military conflict with Iran? With Tonkin Bay in mind what in the world could possibly make some of us think, “here we go again?” Keep your ears open and if the war drums continue maybe it’s time to seriously consider the McGovern alternative.

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New Hampshire goes to the polls

Last Tuesday brought New Hampshire voters to the polls. It was a very surprising day from start to finish. All afternoon CNN was broadcasting polls which showed Barack Obama running ten points ahead of Hilary Clinton in New Hampshire. And time and time again they replayed a video of Bill Clinton berating the news media for going soft on questioning Obama about his stance on the war.

If you were for Hillary things looked really bleak. After all, the polls seemed to have been accurate in Iowa, so why wouldn’t they be accurate in New Hampshire? It was more than a little depressing as I tuned away from CNN at six to watch the Houston Rockets win their game 92-84 against the Washington Wizards, and that soon buoyed my spirits.

At game’s end I turned back to CNN just in time to find out that John McCain had been declared the winner in the Republican contest, no great surprise there as that had been the prediction for days on end. But there was no winner yet in the Democratic race, although Hillary was ahead with Obama running second. About an hour later the Associated Press was the first to declare Hillary the winner, then thirty or so minutes later CNN finally declared her the winner.

The media, in my case CNN, was near apoplectic trying to understand and explain to the rest of us the complete turn around from an afternoon of total Obama dominance to the stark reality check the late evening brought. How could this have happened? one pundit after another mused. I hate to tell them, but maybe they should have all shut up until the polls had closed, after which time they might have some real facts to pass along instead of the ego fed malarkey that passed in lieu of information. Because as we discover time and time again, much of the speculation before the fact is simply ungrounded fantasy. And obviously those highly inaccurate p0lls didn’t do a thing to shape the election in New Hampshire, for if voters there had been listening to CNN and probably the other news channels they would undoubtedly have turned the election in the direction the pundits were predicting, human nature being what it is dictates that most people want to vote for a winner.

It is for this reason that the courts have forbidden announcing election results until all of the polls have closed. The deciding case was from an election in Houston, Texas in the 1940’s. Former Harris County Judge Roy Hoffeinz owned tv station KTRK, channel 13, in Houston. He was very much the politician (He also built, with Harris County’s assistance, the Astrodome in Houston, the nation’s first domed stadium.) and all day during a local election in which he had an interest, his channel broadcast results from precincts favoring his point of view, and suppressed reporting precincts which didn’t support his position. All in hopes of swaying late voters to support the position he was trying to sell.

The other side ended up winning in spite of Hoffeinz’s attempted manipulation, and they brought the case to the courts which ultimately ruled in the favor of the plaintiffs and ended by invoking the rule that prevails to this day, the rule preventing radio and tv stations from announcing any election results until all polling stations have closed.

And so these days while the polls are still open all the media can report on are pre election polls and other iffy data, data which obviously can be wrong. And just how non useful this can be was proven last Tuesday as the people of New Hampshire voted.

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And from the wire services comes this: It was such a girlish question, Marianne Pernold Young wasn't sure she should ask it. There she was, within touching distance of a very smart Hillary Rodham Clinton at a little New Hampshire coffee shop where a handful of other very smart women had spent an hour asking very smart questions about immigration and national security — and the only thing she could think to ask, the only thing she really wanted to know, was: How do you do it?

So when the microphone came around one last time, she asked the question that helped to steady the listing campaign of the first woman with a real shot at the White House: "As a woman, I know it's hard to get out of the house and get ready. My question is very personal: How do you do it?"

Hillary Rodham Clinton

For all the grilling by the news media, Clinton's response to that one girlish question was what the Clinton high command later would call a eureka moment, eliciting a glimpse of humanity from the famously self-controlled senator from New York. It was just one of several factors that led to her close New Hampshire victory, but it already has entered the realm of political legend.

In interviews later, Pernold Young said she admires Clinton and was delighted to have evoked a side of her that could "help her with future press conferences and rallies." But she couldn't help noticing that after the famous question was answered, Clinton "turned to the right and went right into political rhetoric again." Which she went on to explain is why she ended up voting for Barack Obama.

– ☯ –

Charles Gibson who hosted the Friday night debate sponsored by ABC News, Facebook and WMUR, a local tv outlet, for both Republican and Democratic presidential candidates did a clever thing. The Republican hopefuls led off and as their debate ended Gibson urged the candidates who were on stage to greet their Democratic rivals who were coming onstage for their debate. There followed a convivial few moments of backslapping as these more or less bitter partisan enemies pretended affection for one another.

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Apple’s chief honcho, Steven P. Jobs, can rest easy and sleep nightmare free these days, for according to a Reuters report quoting retiring Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, the software company that some see as a monopolistic force in the software industry will not try and put out an imitation iPhone, as it has with its iPod “busting” Zune.

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Microsoft will not launch a product that competes directly with Apple's iPhone, Chairman Bill Gates said in an interview with Germany's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. "No, we won't do that. In the so-called smart phone business we will concentrate solely on software with our Windows Mobile program," Gates was quoted as saying in the interview published on Wednesday. "We have partnerships with a lot of device manufacturers from Samsung to Motorola and this variety brings us significantly more than if we would make our own mobile phone," he added.

According to Reuters, Apple's iPhone, which also plays music and lets users browse the internet, has been a big hit. Recent reports indicate that in only one quarter, the iPhone already owns 27% of the smart phone market, far ahead of the combined offerings Windows Mobile, Symbian, and Palm, and second only to the Blackberries of Research In Motion. And for a most incisive story on the birth and development of the iPhone, go here!

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Shades of Abbie Hoffman and his famous “Steal This Book”, a movie called Steal This Film 2 produced by a group calling itself The League of Noble Peers, is already a huge success, with over 150,000 downloads in 4 days. But what is most intriguing, is that people are being very generous and the movie has raised over $5,000 in its first 4 days. When Steal This Film 1 was released the Nobles asked each down loader to donate $1 and most did just that. However, this time around the majority have donated $15 or more. Why is that, you might well ask? Well Torrent Freak says it could be the that down loaders have been motivated by a mystery gift that was offered if they donated $15 or more.

On his blog Jamie King, the producer of the film says, “Over 90% of people donating are deciding to go over the artificial $15 threshold we set. But I don’t think people literally ‘want that gift’; I think they want an excuse to be generous!” I guess we could label this tactic “radioheading.” It’s a shame that Radiohead, the band, elected to keep the figures that their fans voluntarily paid for downloading their latest album a secret. If the record companies could get a clear picture of the tactic’s effectiveness maybe they would try it themselves, since nothing else they are doing these days seems to be working worth a tinker’s damn.

However, on second thought I’m pretty sure they don’t have the faith in their customers to exercise such genuine trust. Obviously they feel more comfortable suing the lovers of their music.

– ☯ –

Imagine buying a video recorder with this message accompanying it: “HACKERS, welcome! Here are detailed circuit diagrams of our products — modify them as you wish.” Most of us think of the word hack in terms of illegality, combining the web and the term hack convey thoughts of criminality to most of us. However that’s exactly what the manufacturers of a new device, the Neuros OSD want you to do. While most electronic gadget manufacturers tend to keep information about the innards of their products as secret as they can, Neuros Technology International, creator of the new afore mentioned video recorder, has decided to take matters in a different direction.

The company, based in Chicago, is providing full documentation of the hardware platform for its recorder, the Neuros OSD (stands for open source device), so that skilled users can customize or “hack” the device — and then pass along the improvements to others. The OSD is a versatile recorder. Using a memory card or a U.S.B. storage device, it saves copies of DVDs, VHS tapes and television programs from satellite receivers, cable boxes, TVs and any other device with standard video output. Because the OSD saves the recordings in the popular compressed video format MPEG-4 (pronounced EM-peg), the programs can be watched on a host of devices, including iPods and smart phones. The OSD is for sale at Fry’s, Micro Center, J&R Electronics and other locations for about $230.

The OSD not only has open hardware, but also has open software: it is based on the Linux operating system. Neuros Technology encourages hacking of the device; and has contests with cash rewards for new applications for the OSD. One winner, for instance, designed a program that lets people use it to watch YouTube on their televisions. The OSD’s capabilities will grow to suit changing times, said Joe Born, founder and chief executive of the company. “Digital video is a fast-moving space,” he said, “and many consumers don’t want to buy a new piece of hardware every time a media company comes out with a new way to watch its shows. The best way to address this problem was to make the product open source, allowing our smartest developers and users to modify it.” To read more go here!

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In a blog called A VC, Musings of a VC in NYC, the author muses over a chart showing the usage of various media, which inspired him to begin studying the way his own teenagers were using the media. In doing so he came up an interesting observation. “When they walk into a DVD store, they rarely walk out with a movie. It’s almost always the first season of a TV show they’ve heard is good. They’ll go see a movie in the theater but don’t really enjoy watching movies at home or on their computers. They feel that TV shows are better written and more interesting. And the entertainment value is certainly more compelling.

For roughly $40 they got something like 25 episodes of Brothers and Sisters. That's almost 17 hours of entertainment for $40. That's hard to beat. And they get the bonus of being able to start watching the show on TV once they've caught up. It makes me wonder where this is headed. I don’t know enough about the economics of TV shows versus films, but it may be that digital technology is changing the way the younger generation will consume filmed entertainment in some important ways. Something to think about. And maybe why the writers are striking.”

Louise Lasser as Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman

Reading that piece I couldn’t help agreeing with that man’s teenagers. I recently bought a DVD of the first 25 episodes of Mary Hartman-Mary Hartman (Sony Pictures, $18 from Amazon.com). I found this a wonderful value. The 25 episodes are on three separate disks, and together they hold 564 commercial free minutes.

It was wonderful getting a chance to see MH2 once again, I had been curious to know if it would be as habit forming in 2008 as it had been when I first saw the series in 1976-77. And it probably won’t come to you as much of a surprise that I did find it to be every bit as addictive this time around, with the added bonus that the images appeared sharp and clear on my lcd computer screen, not filled with the tv ghosts that marred the original broadcast image.

The discs had a catalogue of other available Sony TV shows accompanying them, but none of the other shows appealed to me. My only regret is that Sony hasn’t made the next 25 MHMH2 episodes available. And the ones after that. To me MH2 was truly one of a kind. Since receiving it I have seen the first 25 episodes two times through and am in the middle of my third go around. I’ll know more after I’ve seen a few more episodes, but after just watching episode one again, I think I have a clue as to the why of its addictive qualities.

I attribute Mh2/s addictiveness to the fact that it was the first television program to honestly portray a truly dysfunctional American family to a television audience of dysfunctional families. (Aren’t we all dysfunctional in one way or another?) Mary was sexually frustrated, husband Tom was impotent, at least as far as Mary was concerned, although he managed to get it up with Mae Olson from the plant before he began wallowing in guilt over it. Mary’s sister slept with a different boy each week. Her neighbor Loretta Haggars was a would-be country singer who turned the neighborhood murder of the Lombardy family of five and two goats and six chickens into a weird tear jerking country song, and then there was Mary’s grandpa Larkin, who liked to exhibit his god given endowments for the Fernwood female population to admire and in so doing earned himself the title of Fernw0od Flasher.

One of the most indelible characterizations was Dody Goodman’s portrayal of Martha Shumway as Mary’s mother, who was always in a cloud of confusion and on the edge of fainting as she was desperately trying to comprehend the actions of the people around her, and for compensation she had long conversations with her plants.

The show was a parody of the real daytime soaps, the main difference being that instead of its character’s quirks being labeled in euphemisms, the show called a spade a spade. Norman Lear explained that Mary Hartman Mary Hartman appeared twice because everything it soap operas was repeated twice. Appearing five days a week and using close ups and other filming techniques characteristic of the real soaps, the program soon crept into the heart of its audience. The characters were very human and although quirky they were plainly lovable, who could not help but get caught up in such epic drama?

The writing staff consisted of Gail Parent, Ann Marcus, Jerry Adelman, and Daniel Gregory Browne, Marcus being also known for her work on the daytime soap Search for Tomorrow. The opening episode told of the mass murder of a neighborhood family, the Lombardy family, it soon turned out that Mary’s daughter Heather (didn’t you just know that Mary Hartman would have a daughter named Heather?) had seen the murderer of the Lombardy family, and would be followed by the him. It was also in that first episode that we learned that Mary’s grandpa Larkin had a fondness for going trouserless while opening his raincoat at strategic moments.

Meantime the Psychiatric Social worker assigned by the courts to counsel grandpa Larkin proceeds to fall in love with him. Now I realize that such a plot line sounds a bit thin when stated so baldly, but if you stop and think about it most any plot line will sound thin when distilled into a few words. What made the show come alive for many of us was the skill of the actors, and the intimate way they were photographed.

As unique as MH2 was in it’s casting and structure, the way the show was presented to the world was equally one of a kind. The networks, or course, wouldn’t get anywhere near such a bundle of outspoken honesty, there was no cable back then, so as a result the show was sold in syndication to independent stations throughout the country. They were presented with five episodes a week. Fearful of its outspokenness some stations would not air the show until after the late evening news. However a few stations, since they had nothing else of such interest, would play the entire week’s episodes, one after the other, every night of the week. The cast, and particularly Louise Lasser, were under a serious strain, having to rehearse the next day’s episode in the morning, and then tape that day’s episode in the afternoon. Every day, five days a week.

As a result of the strain of the schedule Mary Hartman had a nationally televised nervous breakdown on The David Susskind Show at the end of the first season. Mary then opened the second season in a psychiatric ward, and she was delighted to be part of their selected Nielsen Ratings “family.” By its second season many Americans were thoroughly addicted to MH2, and this group included the author Gore Vidal, who was enamored with it enough that he appeared as himself in it’s later days. Among the actors who were propelled to greater heights were Dabney Coleman who played the somewhat devious mayor of Fernwood, and Martin Mull who played two characters on the program, one the wife beater Garth Gimble who committed suicide, and the other, his brother who was talk show host Barth Gimble. Mull also emceed the program’s summer replacement, a pseudo talk show called Fernwood 2Night (which very likely was the first instance of the number 2 being used as a substitute for the prefix to, a process common these days, especially on the web. p2p, etc.)

When Louise Lasser exited the show by running off with her policeman boyfriend, the show continued for a time as Forever Fernwood, following the trials and tribulations of Mary's family and friends. The series finally ended in 1978, after only 26 weeks on the air, along with the talk show parody spin-off Fernwood 2-Night. A total of 130 half-hour episodes were produced.

As a postscript Mary Kay Place was nominated for a Grammy award on the strength of the album Tonite! At the Capri Lounge, Loretta Haggars on which she sang as her MH2 character. One of the songs Place wrote for the album, “Baby Boy,” climbed to the Top 60 on Billboard's Pop Charts, and #3 on the country charts, in 1976. Place also won an Emmy for her performance on the show.

The show's writers realized Loretta Haggars' newfound fame made it harder to keep her character in Fernwood, so they devised a story line wherein the country and western star makes an anti-semitic, career-shattering remark on the Dinah Shore talk show.

According to the Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman Wikipedia page the series was again syndicated on local stations briefly in 1982, and enjoyed some short-lived air time on the television channel TV Land in 2002. Aside from the two-volume videocassette issued in the 1980s and bootlegged videos, the show has been difficult to find on any format. With the exception of the first 25 episodes which are available on DVD, many fans have been unable to watch most of the episodes from this series.

In the year 2000 many of the original cast appeared on a panel for a Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman retrospective at the Museum of Television and Radio in Beverly Hills, CA. The panel discussion was taped for the museum's archives. It is the wish of MH2 fans the world over, and most especially this one, that this discussion be either aired on the channel’s website (if it has one), or at the very least be issued on DVD. Also many of us plead for as many as possible of MH2’s other 105 episodes be issued on DVD. And a note to Sony: If some enterprising entity would put the entire series on blue-ray disks I know at least one person who would take the plunge and buy a player just to be able to watch the series in its entirety.

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And here’s a tale of bureaucratic incompetence to brighten your day. Would you believe? The FBI routinely failed to pay telecom companies promptly for providing phone and internet lines to the FBI's impressive domestic surveillance architecture – resulting in at least one phone company cutting off a foreign intelligence wiretap until the FBI paid up. Damn, those greedy phone companies want to get paid for their wires.

Former FBI agent and now ACLU national security policy counsel Mike German directed his ire at the telecoms who happily played along with the government's warrantless spying and let the FBI illegally get customer records following requests to get surveillance today with false promises to pay with a court order tomorrow. "To put it bluntly it sounds as though the telecoms believe it when FBI says warrant is in the mail but not when they say the check is in the mail," German said. For the complete story go here!

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And finally, mydamnchannel.com has begun enabling the embedding of its videos onto other websites, and so it is our distinct pleasure to be able to offer you the video of Harry Shearer rendering his well known ode to the Bush administration’s interrogation policies, “Waterboarding U.S.A.”

Keep America number one indeed! Bless you, Harry Shearer, for that most delightful parody of a Beach Boys type song. And for keeping up with Harry’s latest, check out his story of Katrina and New Orleans, which is playing one night only, on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina.

May we invite you to join us again next week, same spot in your browser’s window, sporting our woefully misspelled web address, with its double t’s, double l’s, double e’s, and double d’s. Put all together it takes you to: http://littlleeddy.blogspot.com where we hope to meet you once again next week. We post on Saturday mornings. Bye bye!

The Real Little Eddy § eddybad@gmail.com

Blog #154: Unforgettable Moments

2010-08-14T07:21:00.000-07:00

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Unforgettable Homecoming – Photo from 4chan.org.

This week’s photographs come to us from an unlikely source, 4chan.org. You can tell from their skewered humor and their lack of boundaries.

Incidentally, we need to list a warning for the 5th photograph in today’s collection. It shows an impressive set of uncovered female mammaries being held up by a toy replica of the Incredible Hulk.

Now, I have read that uncovered female mammaries are verboten on Facebook. New mothers trying to post photos of themselves nursing their newborns have had their photos arbitrarily taken down. Facebook seems to classify the female breasts as either obscene or titillating, neither of which is allowed on Facebook.

We could never in a thousand years classify those blessed female appendages which are a baby’s first source of food as obscene. And though they could easily be onomatopoeically deemed titillating, we feel sure that the ones the Hulk is holding up are too skewered to be so classified.

At any rate we present the photograph for your amusement. If you are indeed offended by uncovered female mammaries or are too young for such a sighting as deemed by political leaders of your city or state, please avoid that photo like the plague. And as for the rest of you, enjoy! §

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Oracle’s Ellison on H.P. CEO’s firing

Larry Elison, the outspoken CEO of Oracle, has a way with words, and a firm grasp on reality. In an impassioned e-mail sent to The New York Times, Mr. Ellison chided H.P.’s board for what he said was a grave mistake.

“The H.P. board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple board fired Steve Jobs many years ago,” Mr. Ellison wrote. “That decision nearly destroyed Apple and would have if Steve hadn’t come back and saved them.

“In losing Mark Hurd, the H.P. board failed to act in the best interest of H.P.’s employees, shareholders, customers and partners,” Mr. Ellison wrote. “The H.P. board admits that it fully investigated the sexual harassment claims against Mark and found them to be utterly false.”

The San Francisco’s Technology Blog dug further into the H.P. board’s action, and decided that the board had been looking for an excuse to rid themselves of Hurd, as he who straightened out the company’s stock value was not popular with employees of the company, or so the Chronicle’s Tech Blog reported.

Personally I have never been interested in owning HP computers, because they run the Windows operating system, which I rate far below Apple’s OS X. I do buy HP printers, and presently have one which is fully operational. These present day printers also operate as copiers and Fax machines. However, in the history of Silicon Valley, H.P. is not your ordinary company, as it too began in a garage, and it once employed the two Steves, Wozniak and Jobs, who later went on to form Apple computer. §

Playing the South Tower Game – Photo from 4chan.org

My Days and Nights with the Professional Left

As one who spends his day these days with my television tuned to msnbc, from Morning Joe through the Daily Rundown, the Andrea Mitchell show, and evenings with Hardball with Chris Matthews, Countdown with Keith Olberman, and ending my day with the Rachel Maddow Show, I am what could easily be labeled a “news junkie.” And the latest public freakout was held by presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs, who publicly railed about what he termed the Professional Left not giving the President the time of day.

And of course, the Professional Left has a genuine beef. In spite of the fact that it has supported the president from the very beginning, the president has usually begun each project by watering it down in hopes of getting at least a few Republicans to support it.

Of course, Republicans play along with him so as to influence the shape of the legislation as much as possible, but deep in their hearts they are absolutely convinced that the best way for the GOP to regain majorities in the House and Senate is to refuse to cooperate with the Dems no matter what. And talk about your lock step, Republicans are nothing if not disciplined. In the Senate the most GOP that he has been able to get to cross over the line are the two female Senators from Maine, and on one or two occasions, the Massachusetts Senator who replaced the long serving Ted Kennedy, Senator Brown.

And so instead of railing against the administration’s true enemies, the Republican minority which is trying to trash its every accomplishment, Gibbs turns on the Professional Left. ‘Tis true the ProLeft has criticized the administration when it came up short of expectations, but they would be quick to point out, they are coming from the same page, reading from the same playbook. At least until the administration waters one of the projects down to the point where the Professional Left can’t recognize it any more.

At which point they just might have to raise a voice or two in criticism. §

We’re not really serious with this one, but it sure looks awesome, don’t it? Wouldn’t we love to be high on what that baby is high on. However, being a baby, chances are he was simply high on life. Photo from, where else? – 4chan.org.

Watching the Country Turn on the Presidents Projects

We’re still reeling from polls showing the country turning against President Obama’s policies, on the war, on the economy, on the direction the country is going, you name it, the polls indicate that the voters are turning against it. The only good element of the polls is that Republicans are in deeper doo doo than are the Dems.

At least the Democrats have been active, doing every thing they can to turn the economy around. They saved Chrysler and General Motors, both of which nearly went belly up a year ago, and both of which were saved as President Obama gave each short term loans and instructions to make their product more relevant. Republicans and dog eat dog libertarians screamed to high heaven, in their idea a pure capitalist society would let such troubled companies go under. But if Obama had done that the ever profitable Ford would have probably gone under too as the parts suppliers which supply all three would have probably been forced to shut down.

The most ludicrous aspect of the current situation is the idea that the Republicans, who ran our economy into the ditch in the first place by giving the wealthy a pass go on taxes, and then starting two wars, and finally giving seniors much needed help with prescription drugs without either properly funding it, or at least negotiating lower prices from the drug companies. And these same Republicans have done nothing but obstruct since Obama has come into office, and yet they seem to be favored by the so-called professional political pundits on TV.

Are the American people really that stupid, that they would reward the party that has done nothing over the party that is breaking their testicles trying to pull the country out of the ditch Bush and his GOP cohorts drove us into. If this is true I for one see no reason to go on living in this country. It will be interesting to see what really happens come November. Are these TV Pundits speaking from knowledge, or talking through their hats.

Stay tuned. §

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Blues Brother in Relief

Image from 4chan.org

Looking Back in Awe

Two weeks ago we presented a slightly rewritten version of our Blog #4, Nothing Can Stop the Army Air Corps. I have since decided to troll some of my early blogs, to liberate the writing, for even though it is theoretically possible to access those early blogs, when you try to access them your computer more often than not it times out. There are simply too many blogs to allow easy access.

For this week’s flashback we went all the way back to Blog #1. What follows are my first writings for my blog. After an introductory paragraph we recited a true anecdote from my radio announcing days. How many people do you know who have talked to the mute Marx Brother, Harpo Marx, on the telephone. Well, I for one have. Read on for our very first blogging words.

–†•†–

It occurs to me that I have been selfishly living in my own little world, having not near enough to do with family and/or friends. It's not that I am hopelessly selfish, although that's probably a good part of it. But time races by, and I'll not be here forever, and there really are things I should remember and share with my family and friends. And so I am beginning what I hope will be a weekly blog, at first at least without the web and consequently a log with no b in front of it. If I can write a weekly fantasy for mrdouble I should be able to write down some of my reminiscences, and as number one son Daniel pointed out some time back, I owe it to all to do it. Particularly to grandchildren, Cedar and Sol.

–†•†–
I think I would like to start my reminiscences with a tale from my radio days. At one point I was working for a sports oriented station called KATL, and one Saturday afternoon I was the only person at the station and was preparing to get a feed from Lee Hedrick, our sports announcer who was preparing to broadcast a Harlem Globetrotter's game from Hoffeinz Pavilion, a well known Houston basketball pavilion.

All of a sudden the phone rang and when I picked it up the voice on the other end identified himself as Harpo Marx. Harpo, you might remember, was the mute Marx brother. He never said a word in their films and stage shows. I wasn’t thinking clearly, I should have made him do his characteristic honk to authenticate himself. However he must be used to people not believing he can talk since he had gone to great lengths to keep his illusion of muteness in his stage and screen personas. However, he soon managed to convince me of his true identity, pointing out that he and Chico were playing an engagement at the Shamrock Hotel, and reading about the game in the morning paper made him think of putting a call into the station that was broadcasting the game. He had an interesting proposition for the producers of the Globetrotters game. Harpo volunteered himself and Chico for a free halftime show if they would let them in to watch the game.

I got Lee Hedrick on the phone from the stadium, and had him relay Harpo’s proposition to the management there. Hedrick hung up to pursue the matter with the producers. A couple of minutes later Lee was back on the phone with word that the game was totally sold out, there was not even standing room, but if Harpo and Chico would agree to watch the game from the lighting booth up in the rafters they could come on down. I relayed the message to Harpo and he squealed with delight.

From the overwhelming laughter at halftime I could only guess that Harpo and Chico gave the Globe Trotters one helluva halftime show. Unfortunately this was radio, television was in its beginnings, but was a ways down the road. And Lee had prepared recorded material for halftime, and so there was no way I could have seen the show or even gotten a description of what was going on in that halftime show that I had a small part in making happen.

Incidentally, Harpo sounded not unlike brother Chico on the telephone, but he would never spoil the illusion of muteness he had created by saying a word on stage or on camera, no matter how much money he was offered to do so.

For me his segments always were a welcome interlude in Marx Brothers movies, for his comedy was completely visual, and it contrasted well with Groucho’s verbal routines, and Harpo always ended up playing the harp, moments which for me were the definite high points of the Marx Brothers movies. In fact, thanks to Harpo I formed a lifelong fondness for music played on the harp, a fondness I developed long before that afternoon I happened to talk to Harpo on the telephone. §

The Hulk’s Heaviest Load – Photo from 4chan.org

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And so a breathless and exhausted HULK brings us to the end of yet another Little Eddy Blog. Next Friday will bring a return visit to the doctors, and on next Saturday’s upload we will hopefully have some indication of the medication and treatment for my white corpuscle uprising, which thankfully is not cml, popularly known as leukemia.

What we will have in next week’s blog is more of the same, new gems laced with golden oldies. We hope you will find your way back anytime next week, we post on Saturday mornings, and keep our post up for an entire week, until the following Saturday reels in our new one.

Anyway, this week’s tape is all played out. Hopefully we’ll see you again. Meantime don’t take any wooden Republicans, though I’m not sure there’s any other kind. Bye now.

The Real Little Eddy § eddybad@gmail.com

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Blog # 153: Looking back in horror!

2010-08-07T05:29:00.000-07:00

Joe Bad X Rides Again!!!

If you clicked on the arrow above you heard Joe Bad X’s newest video, his cover of Ozzy Osbourne’s Revelation (Mother Earth). Joe Bad X is the stage name of Joel Alan Badeaux, m.d., psychiatrist, #2 son, and some might say, chip off the old block. It was like three weeks ago that Joel flew to Houston for a weekend, rounded up his old friend Keith Silverstein to hold the camera, and together they shot video in front of the BP headquarters building here in Houston, and in Galveston and Louisiana, as they were looking for visual evidence of BP’s negligent incompetence.

YouTube brought him other images, of an oil covered pelican, of the explosion at the drilling platform, he even superimposed images of the mass of oil wells burning in Kuwait, during the first gulf war. Three weeks later the first of the two videos he hopes to get from the trip is up on YouTube. Joel has been on vacation since his graduation from residency in June. Now he is back and hard at work as a much higher paid staff psychiatrist at the hospital where he did his residency. §

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US Finally Joins Hiroshima’s 65th Anniversary

Paper lanterns float in the Motoyasu River in front of the Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima to mark the 65th anniversary of the World War II atomic bombing. For the first time, representatives from the U.S. joined others from more than 70 nations at the emotional event. Photo: Toru Yamanaka-AFP/Getty Images

An elderly couple burns incense to mourn victims of the 1945 bombing, which killed roughly 140,000 people, at Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima. Photo: Toru Yamanaka-AFP/Getty Images

Shuji Kajiyama-ATsuyuko Nakao, 92, right, and Kinuyo Ikegami, 77, who both lost family members in the Hiroshima bombing, console each other at Peace Memorial Park. Photo: Shuji Kajiyama-AP

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LIFE Magazine’s Photos of Hiroshima,

Nagasaki Finally Seen

As proof yet again of why we need an entity like Wikileaks to publish documents your government or your businesses don’t want you to see, we offer the five photographs below. They were taken by three of LIFE Magazine’s finest photographers, but the magazine never published them at the time.

In fact, they have not been seen until this week, when they finally got published by the Washington Post in its web edition. Why did we have to wait 65 years before people could see them?

Chances are the Military and the government convinced LIFE not to publish these images at the time, for fear they might have turned some Americans against the military’s dropping of the two atomic bombs, which the military hurried to drop as the Japanese sent out peace feelers, in order to test the bomb's efficacy as a weapon before the Japanese surrendered, after which such tests would have been impossible.

What do you think? Should LIFE have held these photographs back for fear of ticking off the military and the government? Even 65 years after the fact they are moving. §

Bernard Hoffman • LIFE • Hiroshima, 1945

Bernard Hoffman • LIFE • Nagasaki, 1945

Alfred Eisenstaedt • LIFE • Nagasaki, 1945

Bernard Hoffman • LIFE • Nagasaki, 1945

J.R. Eyerman • LIFE • Hiroshima, 1945

One night several months ago I was googling John Hersey’s Hiroshima, and I got a Google reproduction of Hersey’s New Yorker article. Thinking it would be the perfect reading material to accompany the LIFE Hiroshima and Nagasaki photos, I once again Googled Hersey Hiroshima. This time I again got the article scanned from the pages of The New Yorker. An excellent way to compliment the experience of those LIFE Magazine photographs would be for you to google John Hersey Hiroshima, and read the article which filled an entire issue of The New Yorker for yourself, which you can do by pointing your cursor and clicking here!.

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The GOP’s Arrogant Assumptions

Monumental is one of the many descriptive phrases you can use to describe the arrogant assumptions of the Republican right. They have been locksteppingly consistent in their opposition to anything Obama or Democratic. And in their mountainous arrogance, they think, or say they think, that the voters of this country think their way, and are going to reward them (Republicans) in the fall elections by putting GOP candidates in power, casting out their democratic forebears.

Is this really true? Or are the Mitch McConnells, John Boehners and their like whistling Dixie? In a Political Graveyard?

Take one Obama talking point, for example. When Obama lent money to GM and Chrysler because to let them go out of business as the capitalist purists and the dog eat dog libertarians would have had us do, such negligence would have also killed all of the parts providers, which would have also brought down the profitable Ford Motor Co.

Well, to make a long story interminable, these days both GM and Chrysler are showing profits, the American taxpayers have been, or are in the process of being paid back, and yet another Obama decision is seen in hindsight as having been absolutely right in his decision to use the power of the presidency to save two of America’s leading homegrown automakers, and more importantly saving the jobs of their workers in the car companies, and in the many suppliers which would have gone under had Obama decided to let the Big Two go under.

Obama is quite right using the analogy that Republicans want Americans to put them back into power, thereby giving the GOP the “keys” to run the country once again. But what would they do if given the keys again? Exactly what they did to run the economy into the ditch in the first place, starting with those famous Bush tax cuts for the very wealthy, which gave our most wealthy few a free pass past go in the funding of our two wars, and the not paid for drug relief for our seniors. Is the American voter really seriously thinking about putting Republicans back in charge? My god, I hope not! Don’t we ever learn? Stay tuned. §

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Two Mac Programs I Can’t Live Without

There are two small application programs that I don’t think I could live without. iKey, which is a program that allows you to open applications or documents with key combinations, which saves you having to click on its icon in the dock to open them. iKey saves all kinds of time and eases frustration.

When I first considered iKey I was afraid I’d not be able to remember the key combinations. And so I standardized them. I used the Mac’s control key plus the letter key standing for the app. Control+P opens Photoshop, control+g opens graphic converter, etc. For combinations requiring two actions (opening a web browser, then opening an URL, I use the option key+shift key.

And iKey can also be controlled by the clock embedded in your computer. For instance, every morning at exactly six a.m. iKey wakes up my iMac from its nightly nap. Then at ten past six it opens up my primary web browser Camino (which comes from Mozilla, but unlike Firefox, which was made for Windows, Camino was developed specifically for the Mac). At ten after six iKey not only opens Camino but not stopping there, it goes on to open the Houston Chronicle online.

But the other program, which is even more useful when you’re writing or being creative, is called CopyPaste, and it allows you to both assemble a clip archive of your choosing (each item available in what you are working on with a single click), and another of its creations keeps track of every save you make to your clipboard, compiling a kind of history of your clipboarding experience. Each item in History is also available with a single click.

My main clip archive holds all of my html symbols, I keep the archive open, and as I begin a paragraph I click on the paragraph symbol, and it magically appears on the document I’m using to write out this week’s blog. I write my blog using Apple’s newest word processing program, Pages. At the paragraph’s end I click on the symbol which announces the end of the paragraph, and lo and behold it too appears.

If you have written in html you can instantly see how useful such a program could be. Having all of the html symbols that you need a mouse clock away rather than having to fill them in as you write, that is something that would indeed be a gift from the Gods.

However, lately writing with CopyPaste has been riddled with frustration. The problem, the program has been updated several times, but although I’m sure Peter Hoerster, who codes the program, is fine tuning it for both Leopard and Snow Leopard, the latest two incarnations of Mac OS X, the program has been playing a disappearing game in Tiger, the OS X that came with my iMac, and which I’m still using. And not once in awhile did it disappear, but again and again as I would be using it to write my blog.

Clicking on its icon in the dock would bring it back, no problem, but it stretched the hell out of your patience as it would take two to three minutes to make its comeback. And before you turned around it was gone again.

A couple of weeks ago my son Joel sent me an earlier version of CopyPaste, which is the version he uses. Of course I had to do over my html clip archive, this ancient version wasn’t about to recognize the clip archive I had made with my newer version. I played around with that ancient version for several hours, but finally threw in the towel when I could not get the early version to recognize that I had registered the newer version. And if I couldn’t register that earlier version my carefully crafted clip archive would disappear at the next restart.

To make a long story interminable, I went back to my disappearing C/P baby, dragging it off of my extra drive, and putting it back in my app. folder. I emailed Julian, who is Hoerster’s stateside rep, and he evidently sent my complaint on to Peter. Well, two weeks have passed by, and I got an email from Julian telling me Peter had done a new, beta version of CopyPaste, but one which should be more stable.

I downloaded and unzipped the beta version, removed my present copy, parking it on my backup disk, then I put this new version in my app. folder, and an alias of it in the dock. I pretty well forgot about it until a night later, when I spent three hours writing on my blog. And miracle upon miracles, not once during this three hour period did the app disappear.

What a lovely evening it has been, and can we dare believe that like the Gulf of Mexico, which BP has evidently quit fouling, the new improved CopyPaste is no longer the delicate, disappearing flower it once was, and Julian cared enough to think of me after Peter came up with his new version. And bless them both, the new version seems to be as stable as Plymouth Rock.

Moral, if you use a Mac, both iKey and CopyPaste will greatly enhance your computing experience. I don’t know what I would do if I had to be without either one.

And this goes double in the case of CopyPaste which used to play that most frustrating game of “see me now, see me not,” but now stays in position just like the faithful assistant it had been programmed to be.

Thanks Peter, and Julian, for taking such good care of one of your faithful users. You made our day, week, month! §

– ☯ –

And so another weakly edition of the Little Eddy Blog spins out of control just before running off the rails. Nothing new to report on my health horizon, my next appointment with Dr. Rakkhit is August 20, and I’ll report anything he suggests in that week’s blog.

Meantime, with that tooth under control I’m feeling reasonably good these days. I am interested in what Dr. Rakkhit chooses to treat my condition, since I don’t have cml I don’t have to worry about that $3,000 a month Gleevec. But surely there’s something that will tone down my white corpuscles. I mean, take a rest fellas.

Thanks to the Washington Post as usual for our photographs. How ironic is it that LIFE Magazine's Hiroshima and Nagasaki photographs finally see the light of publication 65 years after the fact.

At any rate, we’ll be back again next week with a brand new blog which we will upload to Google on Saturday morning along with my coffee. Until then, bye bye, and don’t take any wooden Republicans.

The Real Little Eddy • eddybad@gmail.com

Blog # 152: Nothing Can Stop the Army Air Corps

2010-07-31T06:45:00.000-07:00

from Little Eddy #4

Written and first published September 29, 2007

The Lockeed B-24 Bomber, was known affectionately by many of those who flew in it as the “Flying Coffin,” required a crew of ten to fly it. The resemblance to a coffin is obvious just by looking at it.

This week's post requires a language warning as it is impossible to write
about the army of the 1940's honestly without using a certain obscenity

The most life altering experience of my young life came at age 17 when I enlisted, and a year later was called up to serve in the United States Army Air Corps. World War II had begun when I had been a sophomore in Mirabeau B. Lamar High School in Houston, Texas.

I'll never forget the morning of Dec. 8, 1941 when F.D.R.'s voice rang forth over the school intercom system, to announce in that compelling oratorical style of his, “Sunday, December 7th, 1941, is a day that will live in infamy.” (It sure as hell will in my book) He was addressing a joint session of both houses of Congress, and he went on to announce our entrance into World War II. The miracle of radio brought his voice into our High School, and the school’s intercom system brought it into every classroom as he was speaking.

Three years later I graduated from Lamar at age sixteen (It was an 11 year curriculum back then.) They graduated us at midterm so that we could squeeze some college in before we trundled off to war. I chose to enlist in the Army Air Corps rather than letting myself get drafted into the infantry. I figured being flown was preferable to slogging on the ground using my own steam. What the hell did I know?

Return with us to those chilling days of yesteryear

Anyway, we would like to invite you to return with us to those rather naive days of yesteryear, as we do our best to give an honest look back at our time in the United States Army Air Corps, a branch of the Army which after World War II became the U.S. Air Force and was made into an equal branch of service. I was 17 when I enlisted in the Army Air Corps, figuring that riding around in airplanes beat the hell out of walking all over Europe on foot (Much less swimming from island to island in the Pacific Ocean).

After a lonely overnight Pullman ride to San Antonio, Texas, I entered into the service in October 1944 at the tender age of 18, inducted in the Army Air Corps (serial #: 18228386) at Ft. Sam Houston, in San Antonio, Texas. I immediately got shipped to the Air Corps basic training facility at Amarillo, Texas. There we were assigned to whatever our specialty was going to be for the rest of our term of service.

To receive our basic assignments, as for everything in the service, we formed a long line. “Hurry up and wait,” If you want to know the truth, that seemed to be the motto of the army. The man in the line ahead of me was in his early thirties and had been a truck driver all of his civilian life. When he got his job assignment he found himself assigned to the kitchen detail as a baker. He looked shocked and surprised, whispering to me he didn’t know how to boil water, much less bake anything. A corporal standing nearby explained, “that’s the way the army prefers it. They get to teach you their way.

As for me, I had two eyes and a trigger finger and was too young to know better, and so naturally I was assigned to be a Sperry Ball Gunner on a B-24 aircraft. And as soon as I completed basic training I would be shipped off to join an air crew.

The man in the line behind me was also in his thirties, and had been a chef for all of his working life. He was assigned to: what else? To drive a truck. It might not sound believable, but believe me, it happened just as I have described it.

We referred to ourselves as GI’s (which stood for Government Issue) and we even had a phrase for what happened in that assignment line, a phrase whose initials were S.N.A.F.U., which stood for: situation normal, all fucked up.

One of the strangest things about my time in the service was the transformation of language. It was as if all constraints had been lifted from polite society’s speech, and the verb fucking suddenly quit its verbiness and became an adjective, one which was often used many times during a typical sentence. And one strange after effect came after the war was over, and authors trying to write honestly about the service found they could not use the word fuck in the literature of that time. Imagine, not being able to write GI speech without using the word fuck. The substitutes, of which fugg was one of the most frequently used ones, just didn’t cut it. It took Grove Press some years later, publishing books by Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence, and James Joyce, to finally liberate the language, including the public’s word for making love.

The PX’s machine made unforgettable plain cake doughnuts

It is strange what we remember most about basic training. For me it was the plain cake doughnuts that the PX vending machine made from scratch, doughnuts which were completely machine made, but which to me tasted incredibly delicious served with the PX coffee, and I have been chasing plain cake doughnuts ever since. I even made my own plain cake doughnuts for awhile from an old Vermont recipe which I got off of the internet, but strangely none I have ever made or bought have come near to matching my memory of those Air Corps vending machine doughnuts of basic training. Strange what you remember sometimes, isn’t it? They were unforgettable.

My First Supreme Blockage

My dear late mother had a thing about bowel movements, in fact she lived in constant fear of missing a daily movement herself, and she often consumed laxatives to help “keep herself regular,” and she administered every kind of laxative known to civilized man/woman to me, all the while espousing that not moving one’s bowels for as much as three days was sure to lead to a grave infirmity, if not my actual demise. ExLax, Milk of Magnesia, Oil of Citrinella, you name it, she dispensed it, those were just a few of the concoctions she would serve at the slightest hint of congestion. If it moved ones bowels she was all for it.

Well, when I went into basic training my system went into a kind of shock, and I did not have a bowel movement for 16 days. Really, I counted. I ended up having one mighty jam up down there when finally things started moving again, but that incident rather punctured Ma's myth about the necessity of daily or semi-daily excretion. I have never since worried about missing a day, nor have I ever taken a laxative since. Nor have I ever had a problem with constipation. It’s all in your mind after all? What was it FDR used to say, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. He said it about something else, true, but it applies.

The One Skill I Learned

Memories of basic training have now become blurred, but I ended up learning one thing that has served me well throughout the ensuing years of my life. It happened during gunnery practice, and it was how to correctly fire an M-16 rifle.

According to what we were told, you take a normal breath, exhale half of it, then gently squeeze the trigger while sighting down the cross-hairs before exhaling the rest of your breath, making sure to follow through your squeeze as your weapon fires.

I have not fired a rifle since basic training, but I found that formula essential in the taking of good, sharp photographs. Sighting through the view finder framing what you want to appear in your photograph and then carefully focusing the lens. Bracing yourself against something if possible, or else make yourself as steady as possible, take in a breath, let half of it out, then gently squeeze the camera's trigger, not forgetting to follow through after the lens is tripped. This is a formula which if adopted is guaranteed to help you make clear, razor sharp photographs, providing of course you also got your subject in sharp focus and exposed properly.

Legend had barbed-wire fence

Only Thing Between Amarillo and North Pole

Legend has it that the only thing between Amarillo and the North Pole is a barbed-wire fence. I was stationed there in the fall, and you couldn't prove that statement by me, but from what permanent party told it, it was probably true. We did take an overnight camping trip while I was there where the weather turned cold giving a hint of its potential. It was on that trip that I learned that the less clothes you wore in your sleeping bag, the warmer you were. That is because your bare skin keeps sending heat waves back and forth with the sleeping bag. And to speed the warming process you needed only to breathe inside the sleeping. The permanent party there claimed that it was truly so, and after that one camp out I believed them.

Fortunately by winter the gods of the Army Air Corps had sent me about as far south as I could go and still be in Texas. I was to be assigned to a B-24 air crew as a Sperry Ball turret gunner and was sent to Harlingen, Texas for crew assignment and initial training. Ah, the sun soaked Rio Grande valley, the only Air Corps base I'm sure with an active fully functioning, fruit bearing orange grove taking up much of its real estate.

In telling you about Harlingen I could tell you about Rosita, the famed exotic dancer from across the Rio Grande in Matamoros, Mexico, a young lady who used muscles most females never even dreamed they had, which she used to extract fruits and vegetables from her most private areas. But, alas, this is not that kind of post. Besides, I was a good boy, I never actually saw Rosita myself, only heard about her from others more curious than myself. From all accounts, though, she really was the stuff legends are made of.

Sperry Ball Turret Explained

I should say a few words about the Sperry Ball turret along about here. It was round, literally a ball, and when the plane was in the air the ball sat completely outside of the airplane. For landing and take off it was cranked up inside the aircraft so as not to scrape the ground.

Once you entered the turret you lay on your back in a near fetal position, you rotated the turret by way of the two machine gun triggers, and you sighted and tracked your target through the gun sight between your legs.

The turret was heavily armored, and the gunsight itself was about 8” square, and was an analog computer reputed to be able to accurately mathematically figure the speed of your aircraft, and by your tracking of the attacking plane, the speed of the attacking aircraft. You controlled the turret with to two 50 caliber machine gun triggers, which like game controllers also controlled the turret. And supposedly the gunsight computed the correct lead for hitting the attacking aircraft you were tracking, as you fired at your enemy. Fortunately I was never in a position to be able to test the accuracy of the computer’s gunsight.

At Harldingen they told us that in the European theater of operations B-24 crews pulled the turret out of the aircraft, replacing it with a ring which held a machine gun on a track with which you could try and shoot at planes coming up at you from below. No fancy computer to compute your lead however, you had to guess what lead to give the approaching aircraft.

Also at Harlingen we were told the story of a Sperry Ball gunner who while on a gunnery training mission, his crew's B-24 had dipped a little low on the gunnery range, slightly scraping the ball turret along the ground. When the crew got back to the base, and cranked up the turret so they could land the plane, they found the gunner inside covered with sand. His hair had turned white, and he had lost the power of speech and the ability to walk. Stories like that really prepared us well for the big war which lay ahead. Right.

The Sperry Ball Turret lay completely out of the airplane when it was in use. The gunner was stuffed into the ball in a fetal position, controlling the turret from the machine gun triggers, and sighting his target through the analogue computer which figured the aircraft’s speed, and the target you are tracking, and computing a lead for the target.

The Sperry Ball Turret was fairly heavily armored, and the gunsight itself was about 8” square, and was an analog computer, and was reputed to be able to accurately mathematically figure the speed of your aircraft, and by your tracking of the attacking plane, the speed of the attacking aircraft. And supposedly it computed the correct lead for hitting the attacking aircraft you were tracking firing with the two 50 caliber machine guns you had at your fingertips. Fortunately I was never in a position to be able to test the accuracy of the computer gunsight.

Things Not to Do: Ditch the Aircraft

B-24's were large, bulky aircraft which when crash landed in water had a floating time of about a minute and a half (compared to a Boeing B-17 which had been known to float for up to thirty minutes upon a sea landing (in the vernacular it was called ditching the aircraft.) B-24's were known not so affectionately by those that flew in them as Flying Coffins, and were the gift of the Lockeed Aircraft Co. They stank of aviation fuel, were drafty, and were extremely conducive to air sickness. I didn't throw up during every flight, but it was pretty close, probably six or seven out of each ten flights.

We got paired into crews at Harlingen Army Air Corps Base, probably the only Air Corps base with a full fledged fruit bearing orange grove on it.

What I remember best about Harlingen was the orange grove on the base which took up quite a bit of the base real estate. On many mornings when we were to be assigned duty I was very much in luck, my last name being Badeaux, it's prounciation seemed to lie beyond the skill of the average detail sergeant, and so in their embarrassment they would either skip over my name altogether, or else mangle it so badly it wasn’t recognizable. For quite a few mornings that enabled me to disappear into the orange grove when the sergeant wasn't looking, where I would pick oranges and eat oranges for awhile, before ending up in the PX getting coffee and those incredible cake doughnuts. In any case because of my French sounding name I was able to miss many an army work detail, and so ever since I have been so thankful for my name.

Shooting Skeets from the back of a pickup truck

We practiced shooting at moving targets on the ground at Harlingen by shooting at skeets flying through the air using shotguns mounted in the back of moving pickup trucks. No fancy computational gunsight, in order to hit the skeets you had to gauge the proper amount of lead to give the target yourself. It was a little weird, but kind of fun. We also fired at real targets from our airplane turrets with our 50 caliber machine guns. The targets were hauled alongside us by airplanes which pulled the targets on very long leashes.

One day a farmer's cow was machine gunned (not by me I am quick to point out), for sport I presume, or perhaps, just because it was there. And all of a sudden all hell broke use. Soon afterwards our entire training program was shut down and all of our units were shipped to Muroc, California for continuation of crew training. The base is now named Edwards Air Force Base (and these days acts as an alternate landing field for the space shuttle), back then it was known as Muroc Army Air Field and was primarily used at that time for testing new types of aircraft.

The most unusual aircraft I saw there was called the Flying Wing, and that is exactly what it was, a huge wing painted black with the crew quarters, the bomb bay, everything, inside this gigantic wing. It was a four engine plane as I remember, it looked just like some gigantic flying bat, and I had always thought that if the Air Force had built a hundred of these apparitions and flown them over Japan the Japanese would have been so terrified they would have given up the war on the spot. The air force eventually came up with an alternate way to scare the Japanese into surrendering, dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. My way would have been far less traumatic and injurious to the health of fellow human beings. But armies always seem to prefer overkill, and besides they were dying to test that awe inspiring weapon which the scientific community have given them.

While we were stationed in Muroc we saw a couple of other test planes. The first one flew alongside our formation of B-24's while we were heading for gunnery range practice. The plane flew alongside us for about ten minutes, then suddenly pulled away, making us look like we were standing still. It turned out to be the XP-59, the very first jet fighter plane developed in the U.S. for the air force. The XP-59 never was put into service, and therefore never had the X (which stood for experimental) removed from its name.

One day all the flags on the base were flying at half staff. I asked one of our officers what happened, and he said President Roosevelt had died. A short time later the flags were also flying at half staff and this time I was told they signaled the end of the war in Europe. Germany and Italy had surrendered.

A couple of weeks later our crew was on a photography mission (our turrets were loaded with cameras loaded with film, and when we reached our target we were to use the cameras to photograph our target. The film would later be processed and our accuracy determined by the processed film.) At any rate on that day another strange looking aircraft flew alongside us. This plane was really sleek looking, and after flying alongside us long enough to attract our attention, it too flew away, this time at a speed so great it made us look like we were flying backwards.

Some damned fool, which as I remember was me, but don’t tell a soul, took pictures of that mysterious apparition with the film destined to be used on our targets. (This plane turned out to be the highly secret XP80 which did later get the X dropped from its name, and did get put into service late in the World War II), and that night when our film was developed the base notified the Inspector General's office in Washington that pictures of the Air Corps newest secret weapon had been developed in their darkrooms, and a couple of days later we had several FBI types disguised in Army Air Corps uniforms trying to find out what lout had had the gall to photograph this highly secret aircraft.

Paranoia was the order of the day, the rumor mill had some Japanese agent riding rampant over America's secrets (he would probably have been German had not the war in Europe recently ended). As far as I know they never found the culprit (me), and if you ask me it was the usual complete waste of the army's money. Don't fly strange exotic airplanes by us when we have loaded cameras if you don't want some damn fool like me to take pictures of it. We never heard anything more about it, and they never caught up with me. I don't know if that incident had anything to do with what came next (I very much suspect it did), however a few days later all of our crews were transferred to Tonopah Army Air Force Base near Tonopah, Nevada.

If there was one geographic characteristic you could count on it was this, next to every large mountain the air force would build an airfield. I suppose the rationale was to keep the pilots sharp and on their toes. And it put the Fear of God is those of us non flyers who were reluctantly along for the ride. Tonopah, like Muroc before it, was desert. Pure desert. On other bases when they wanted to manufacture pointless work they formed grass cutting details. At Tonopah there was no grass, we whitewashed the rocks that lined the pathways white.

The two bases were nothing alike. Muroc was all air force, and it was an important cog in the wheels of the air force. Virtually every plane that was developed for the Air Corps was tested there. Still is. Tonopah, on the other hand, had an old Calvary General as its commanding officer, and the Air Corps be damned, he was bound and determined to run the base as a traditional Army Cavalry base.

A formation of B-24s flew into the Pacific sky.

The usual missions we flew from Tonopah were called Navigation missions, and they consisted of virtually the exact same mission, where the navigator plots the course and the pilots fly it under his direction. The usual course never changed, and consisted of flying north to Reno, then due west to San Francisco, then turning south to Los Angeles, after which we turned east to Las Vegas, and finally North once again to Tonopah. Since we flew the same course every damn time I failed to see how the Navigator got much hands-on experience by charting an identical course ad infinitum.

The trips were interesting, though. Especially when we got near the ocean near San Francisco. One of the sights I will never forget on those missions was seeing the giant fog banks off in the ocean rolling into San Francisco in the late afternoon. If the fog had already rolled in, which happened once or twice, you couldn't see San Francisco at all except for a few tall buildings poking through the haze.

We flew at around 30,000 feet, and either by some miracle, or some bureaucratic oversight, I had actually made corporal by this time, but one day when the automatic heated gloves and shoes on my flight suit didn't work, I was so cold and miserable I unplugged my oxygen mask and elected to pass out. And I got busted for my trouble. Actually there were two of us back in the waist who had passed out. We had oxygen checks every five minutes while flying, and when our station didn't answer they sent the engineer back to find out what was what. We both got busted. I like to think that that oxygen deprivation had no long term effect on my brain, but come to think of it that might explain a thing or two, here and there.

I managed to pull off one other real gaff which would have also gotten me busted if I hadn't been busted already. When an officer came in the barracks the first person to spot him was supposed to jump to his feet shouting, "ATTENCHUT!" Well, one day our captain came into the barracks, and I looked at him, and he looked at me, and not a word did I utter. Much less shout. In truth I was philosophically opposed to calling a barracks full of tired crewman who had risen at 4:30, been briefed at six, and flown from 7 until 1:30 to attention just because an officer happened to come into the room. I'm not sure who was more embarrassed, the captain or me.

At any rate, the sergeant in the top bunk across from me happened to look up, saw the officer, and shouted "ATTENNCHUT!!!" on his way down as his feet hit the floor. The men of the baracks, as one man, hit the attention stance, me included. I didn't object to standing at attention, only to calling the others to attention. Needless to say my time off hours for the next few weeks were occupied in white washing the rocks that lined the walkways. Such did I serve my country? However, a short time later I did some job for another Captain, and he was so pleased with my work that he insisted on inserting a letter of commendation into my official record. That must have confused the hell out of them over at command central.

I ended up flying 256 hours in the Air Corps. It wasn't much fun. The planes were cold and drafty and reeked of gasoline. I got air sick on most flights. I'll never forget the day I ate a pint of strawberry ice cream just before take off, and not 30 minutes later at 20,000 feet I threw every last ounce of it up again, and it had refrozen onto my oxygen mask, looking exactly as it had looked before I had eaten it. The only difference was now it reeked of the odor of bile.

Another thing that was unnerving was when the engines torched in flight. An engine torching meant that it was playing like it was a comet and shooting a tail of fire out it's exhaust, and because all of the gasoline for the flight is stored in that same same wing with the torching engine, the whole event managed to be just a wee bit unnerving. B-24 engines would torch frequently, but I remember the worst torching incident happening after dark when we were on a night Navigation mission.

The engine was not only torching, but orange flickering flames were licking their way across the very wing in which all of our gasoline was stored. The tail gunner and I were both scared out of our minds and we had our parachutes on, and we were standing beside the bomb bay in case there was an evacuation in our future. The Tail gunner was praying, and I was trying my best to remember how to.

How did the pilots put out the torching engines, you might well ask? They did it by blowing out the fire, which meant revving the engine up to its maximum capacity in hopes the ensuing wind would blow out the fire before it ignited the wing tanks. Fortunately on that night blowing out the fire worked, allowing me to keep my parachute jumping record at Zero!

In Tonapah Every 3rd Establishment a Gambling Joint

In the town of Tonopah virtually every third establishment was a gambling joint. There was one three day period while I was there when a blizzard prevented all means of transportation into or out of the town. As a result the Friday night base payroll would not be able to be met. You might not believe this, but when it became evident that the army's payroll wasn't going to be able to be met the town's gaming establishments all got together and put up the entire payroll for the base. They weren't exactly being altruistic or patriotic, they did it so that the men could come into town that night and lose a great deal of their pay back to their benefactors. Ain't free enterprise great?

The war with Japan ended the night we graduated from crew training. We were given a delay in route on the way to where else, the east coast for deployment to Europe? The war in Europe had ended months earlier, but there's army logic for you. I spent VJ night in Las Vegas, Nevada, waiting up all night to catch a morning flight to Houston. I could not buy my ticket in advance, so I had to spend that entire night surrounded by crap tables and slot machines, all crying out loudly for my flight money. I gingerly fed a slot machine here and there, and went to an all night movie theater to kill a few hours. And when the next morning finally rolled around I managed to make it safely to the Las Vegas airport and I was only a few dollars short for my ticket, but luckily they had a fund to help GI's pay for tickets home when they were short of money. They are realists in Las Vegas.

After my delay in route home I took a bus to Greensboro, N. C. for the ORD (Overseas Replacement Depot) which was to send us to Europe. When you came into the town of Greensboro your duffle bags were confiscated by the Air Corps base, no matter what branch of the military you were in. Every duffle bag, whether it be soldier, sailor, marine, or air force, it mattered not, wound up at the base. It was government thievery pure and simple. To reclaim your gear you had to go out to the base and look through moutains of duffles. Well to make a long story interminable my bags were nowhere to be found, and I had to get all new issue, and at that point the army was winding down, and all they had in the way of clothes were terrible fits.

I was skinny, I went into the army weighing 118 and came out one year, ten months and twenty one days later weighing 128. The waists on the clothes I was issued were huge, they were for soldiers much fatter than I. I wore them anyway, of course, I had nothing else, and I would repeatedly get stopped by officers who asked me where the hell I had gotten my uniforms. I explained how my bags had been confiscated when I had arrived in town, and had been subsequently lost, and these clothes I was wearing were what I had been issued.

They asked me why I hadn't gotten them altered, and I told them I couldn't afford it on my private's pay. They tsked, tsked, but not a one offered any government assistance in the costs of alteration.

Once we had gotten to the base the army figured out our points and decided we had too many of them to be dispatched to Europe. So they made us what was called permanent party in Greensboro.

Free enterprise lives on even in the oppressive throes of the USAAC. Greensboro was an Overseas Replacement Depot, the men there were restricted to quarters at night, they weren’t given passes to town because of a fear that they would take off and not return. And so a buddy and I would go into town, buy much bread, mayonese, mustard, lettuce, lunchmeat and cheese, and we would make sandwiches which we went through the barracks selling to the men who were restricted to their barracks.

It was quite a little business, the men appreciated our freshly made sandwiches, our bread and meat much fresher and more generously applied with dressing. We weren’t the only permanent party doing this however, and the PX ended up complaining to the MP’s that some soldiers were free lancing and ruining their business (our sandwiches were freshly made and consequently a lot better than those dry, stale ones the PX sold), and so one night, catching sight of roving bands of M.P.’s my friend and I decided to bring our little bit of free enterprise to a screeching halt.

Several months later after a furlough and another trip home, the army added up my points again and decided to give me an honorable discharge. They sent a whole train load of us dischargees back to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. Our troop train had an overnight layover in New Orleans. We were allowed to go out on leave for the night, and for what was probably the first time in history of the army, not one soldier missed getting back to that train on time the next morning. They staggered back in all stages of inebriation, many in the company of their connubial partners of the night, but come back they all did. Not a single one missed that discharge train.

I was discharged from the A.A.C. on August 11, 1946 at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, the very base at which I had entered the service. I served 1 year, 10 months and 21 days. My service number had been 18228386, a number which I remember to this day. However my story has two postscripts.

I would have you know that 10 years later, in 1956, an army vehicle pulled up in front of 1608 Haver St. in Houston, TX where I was living with my parents, and a young soldier brought two mostly empty duffle bags to the front door. Every bit of the GI issue had been removed, not one sock or pair of olive drab boxer shorts remained therein, all that was left were a few musty possessions of long ago, an electric razor, a long dried out fountain pen, a box of yellowed stationary, and what not.

I have often wondered how much money had gone into tracking me down 10 years later so that the army could return those few mostly worthless personal effects which they had arbitrarily deprived me of in the first place. And gee, wasn't that a super idea in the first place, confiscating all of that G.I. luggage?

There is a second ending to my story. In 2003 I was diagnosed as having Chronic Myeloid Lukemia. There is one drug for this, Gleevec, which costs $3,000 for a monthly dose. When it became evident that Texas HealthSpring was quite understandably not going to pay for the drug, my youngest son, Joel, who just completed his residency as a doctor, got me to enroll in the VA. When the clerk accessed the VA computer, there I was. Alive and well on his computer. It was all true. I really had been in the Army Air Corps just like I had said. And I was eligible for health care via the Veteran's Administration. As part of their treatment the VA oncologist did another bone marrow scan and found that I had been misdiagnosed the first time around, and that I did NOT have cml

I never found out whether the VA would have paid for that $3,000 a month medication, but I strongly suspect that it would not have. But it is nice to know that at 84 years of age I now have only two conditions to worry about, type 2 diabetes and osteoporosis. With just a touch of Acid Reflux on the side, of course.
When I stop and think back on it, there is nothing quite like the army. We had a saying, there was a Right way, a Wrong way, and the Army Way. And as we reported earlier, SNAFU was a term used universally, and stood for Situation Normal, all Fucked Up. And it always was. Every day and in every way.

The book "Catch-22" by Joseph Heller, published in 1961, summed up life in the Army Air Corps in Europe during World War II more lucidly than any other account I have read. In my mind Catch 22 should be required reading for everyone, and from all I can gather from the current news media, things haven't changed an awful lot, military wise. Read the book. It's an education. Never before has so much truth been written so lucidly.

Catch 22 should be taught in the schools. Having it compulsive reading in our High Schools might even save our country from future disasters like Vietnam and Iraq. However, the gentlemen who really need to read it are the Senators and Legislators in Congress. Peace in the world, or the world in pieces.

The Man Watching Our Back. Julian Assange, the Australian who stands behind the website Wikileaks, a very important resource which brings us materials leaked by both governments and corporations, materials that we need to know about. Our Government hates Wikileaks, but that is exactly how it should be. To access Wikileaks for yourself, go here!">here!

And so we have come to the end of yet another Little Eddy Blog. This week’s blog was first published as Blog #4, but this reprise appearance brings it illustrated with photos to help bring the words to life. We slog along each week with a new, or sometimes a revisited work. We invite you to join us again next week for our next effort. We upload on Saturday morning as I am having my breakfast coffee. See you next time. Bye Now.

The Real Little Eddy § eddybad@gmail.com

Blog # 151: GOP, Cancer Conspiracy Theory

2010-07-24T06:16:00.000-07:00

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Ganging Up to Repeal Health Reform

Republican Senators McCain and DaMint were among the senators who according to theONION announced the joining of the GOP with the disease Leukemia in a joint effort to bring down President Obama’s Health Care Reform legislation.

Speaking Truth to Politics

Republicans, Leukemia Join Forces to Defeat Obama’s Health Care

From the irrepressible theONION comes news that Republicans and the disease Leukemia have joined forces to team up to seek the repeal Obama’s Health Care Law.

WASHINGTON—Citing a mutually shared vision of health care in America, congressional Republicans and the deadly bone-marrow cancer Leukemia announced a joint effort Wednesday to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the historic new bill that extends health benefits to 32 million Americans nationwide.

"Republicans have no greater ally in this fight than Leukemia," said Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), who was flanked by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), and the abnormal increase in White Blood Cells.

"Denying insurance to Americans with preexisting conditions and ensuring that low-income Americans stand no chance of receiving quality health care are just a few of the core beliefs that the GOP and Leukemia share,” the disease’s spokesperson announced.

"And believe me, if anyone is angrier than the Republican Party that children can no longer be denied coverage for having preexisting conditions, it's Leukemia," DeMint countered. "We're a match made in heaven."

It is no secret these days that parody news sites like Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show and Stephen Colbert’s the Colbert Report, are looked upon by the younger generation as being more to the core of truth than news reported by legitimate news sources like NBC News or CNN. They dare to say out loud what legitimate news sites withhold as not provable fact.

For instance, the line of exaggeration between the truth and theONION’s account of the Republican battle to undo Obama’s Health Care Reform, is small indeed. In real life a disease like cancer can’t join forces with Republican lawmakers to fight Obama’s Health Care Reform, but we all know if it could, it would. To read theONION’s entire article go here! §

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Graham Stands Tall on Principle

While dissing Republican attempts to undo some of the good of the Obama administration, we would like to take this opportunity to commend Senator Lindsey Graham, who stands five foot 7 with his shoes on, but who stood tall as the only Republican on the Judiciary Committee to vote for the confirmation of Elena Kagan, President Obama’s choice for the Supreme Court. Graham not only voted for the nomination, but he gave his fellow Republicans a lecture as to why.

"I think there's a good reason for a conservative to vote yes, and that's provided in the Constitution itself," Graham told his peers before reading to them from Federalist No. 6, by Alexander Hamilton. "The Senate should have a special and strong reason for the denial of confirmation," he read, such as "to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from family connection, from personal attachment and from a view to popularity."

Graham said Kagan "has passed all those tests" envisioned by the Framers, then he challenged his colleagues: "Are we taking the language of the Constitution that stood the test of time and basically putting a political standard in the place of a constitutional standard? That's for each senator to ask and answer themselves."

According to Dana Milbank in his Washington Post column, Senator Cornyn (he was still in the room) studied his cuticles. Senator Coburn stroked his chin. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) raised a hand to cover a yawn. And no other Republican stepped up to Graham’s challenge. §

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This week’s photos from the Washington Post appeared Wednesday, 7-21-2010, and consisted of baby animals born in the zoo.

Kibibi (above) was born in January 2009 to 26-year-old female gorilla Mandara and 16-year-old Baraka. Kibibi, a female, represents the seventh successful gorilla birth for the zoo since 1991. Photo: Murphy-Smithsonian Institution

GOP’s Politics “as clear as mud”

Republican reasoning, as we used to say as kids, is “as clear as mud.” Workers unemployment insurance is about to expire and the President and the Democrats want to extend it to keep America’s jobless workers afloat for the time being. Republicans refuse to go along, in spite of the fact that unemployment insurance is paid out of a fund that workers pay into. And without one or two GOP votes the Dems do not have the necessary majority to bring the bill to the floor for a vote.

Republican reasoning? Well our debt is a few trillion too large, and a line must be drawn somewhere to keep our economy from going “belly up.” This sounds all nice and good, with Republicans drawing the line to help our grandkids and theirs from being taxed to death.

But then the Republicans talk about extending George W.’s tax cuts to the ultra wealthy, tax cuts which are about to run out, and which many see as having driven us off the economic cliffs in the first place. But won’t extending the Bush tax cuts add to the deficit, you might ask a Republican? What about all that high minded talk about protecting our grandchildren from endless debt? In short, in spite of their high sounding talk Republicans never saw a tax cut they didn’t like, even if it bankrupts our children and theirs.

Although inheriting a surplus from President Clinton, the Bush administration managed to outspend all of the administrations which preceded it combined, handing over a sky high national debt to go along with a broken economy to the Obama administration.

Bush’s tax cuts were one of the major reasons the nation is up to its ears in debt at this time, and that added to the Bush administration’s starting two wars, giving the elderly medication relief (without leveraging lower prices from drug companies), and the cleanup connected with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, none of these major programs being paid for, each and every one of them adding to our mountainous national debt. And the Republicans continue to shamelessly cast votes for Obama’s failure by opposing every policy he proffers to try and jump start the economy.

All of this while trying to cajole Democrats into extending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, which will continue to significantly boost the deficit, while the GOP continues to oppose extending help to those who have lost their jobs and whose unemployment insurance has run out.

Why should Democrats care about and support the unemployed? Because if they can be tided over until the economy improves, they will become tax paying members of our society once again. Look at it as an investment in our work force.

Renewing Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy makes the rich richer, but does nothing for the economy in spite of Republican claims to the contrary. For none know better than the rich as to the tricks for holding onto their money. Extending unemployment benefits for the unemployed, however, directly helps the economy as it gives unemployed workers a lifeline which allows them to buy food and otherwise support the economy. §

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Two newborn Przewalski's foals explore their pasture at the Conservation and Research Center. Both foals were sired by a 9-year-old stallion named Frog, the most genetically valuable Przewalski's horse in the North American breeding program. The Przewalski's horse is native to China and Mongolia; the species was declared extinct in the wild in 1970. Photo: Mehgan Murphy-Smithsonian Institution

Is There a Jobs’ “Reality Distortion” field?

A lot has been written about Steve Jobs’ and his famous “reality distortion field,” that mysterious malady which hovers over Apple and “twists its victims’ perceptions beyond recognition.”

This is pure bullshit, of course. There is no reality distortion field. There is simply Steve Jobs’ unmatched enthusiasm combined with an unparalleled degree of persuasion. But the reason that the “distortion field” is bullshit is that the products that Apple’ manufactures are every bit as good as their hype would indicate. And more so. (Mac computers, iPods, iPhones, and the newly hatched iPad.) There are Apple products. And then there are the products of every other vendor. Do Apple’s measure up? That’s the question each purchaser must ask him or herself.

But what is perfectly clear is the amount of skill and care Apple puts into their products. And as a result, Apple products “just work.” Seamlessly, out the the box, and not only with one another, but with virtually every other manufacturers products. Not everyone is likely to prefer Apple products. People have different tastes after all. Some people might actually prefer an OS that makes them constantly aware of it, and makes them fight their way through their computing experience every step of the way. It appeals to their Geekiness.

Then there is the matter of taste in design. Apple’s products are organically designed by arguably the most talented industrial design artist in the business, Jonathan Ive. However, there may be some out there who don’t respect lean, organically designed products. That’s fine, we all come with different tastes.

What is silly is having the blog Gizmodo beating the “antenna-gate” drum on the iPhone 4, sounding the beat for much of the blogsphere in revenge for Apple raising hell about that test model iPhone 4 which they reportedly paid $5,000 for, and which they subsequently returned to Apple at Steve Jobs’ request.

As a side effect of the sideshow the spectacle showed how truly irrelevant Consumer’s Reports really is. In spite of CR’s announcing that iPhone 4 is a truly exceptional smartphone which excelled in virtually every smartphone category, and admitting there was no other smartphone that could touch it in many areas, C.R. could not bring itself to recommend the phone unless and until Apple admitted some kind of antenna problem, and fixed same.

Really? iPhone 4 has flown off of the shelves in numbers like none of its previous incarnations, 3 million in 22 days. And its return rate is also lower by far than all of its predecessors. So just where is all that that consumer discontent the Consumer Reports is so diligently guarding its readers from? Don’t the other smartphone companies just wish they had a return record of 0.55 per hundred on a supposedly flawed product.

So who gives a tinkers damn about whether or not Consumer Reports can recommend what they themselves admit is far and away the best smartphone money can buy? Obviously consumers at large aren’t listening to them or reading their recommendations. Sorry fellas, good try, but marching to Gizmodo’s drum does not make you relevant. And uncompromisingly holding onto a fiction like “antenna gate” only leaves you with egg on your face. Being uncompromising will work only when you are uncompromising about reality.

Dilbert creator on his Scott Adams Blog, appreciates the true heights Jobs reached in his non apology. Adams quotes Jobs famous nineteen words.

In a press conference on the subject, Steve Jobs said, "We're not perfect. Phones are not perfect. We all know that. But we want to make our users happy."

Jobs got a lot of heat about his response. Where was the apology? Where was the part where he acknowledged that the buck stops with him, and that Apple made a big mistake that never should have happened? That's public relations 101, right?

I'm a student of how language influences people. Apple's response to the iPhone 4 problem didn't follow the public relations playbook because Jobs decided to rewrite the playbook. (I pause now to insert the necessary phrase Magnificent Bastard.) If you want to know what genius looks like, study Jobs' words: "We're not perfect. Phones are not perfect. We all know that. But we want to make our users happy."

Jobs changed the entire argument with nineteen words. He was brief. He spoke indisputable truth. And later in his press conference, he offered clear fixes.

Scott Adams’ complete blog post makes fascinating reading, and can be accessed here! §

– ☯ –

A tammar wallaby joey peeks out from its mother's pouch. The marsupial baby will nurse and develop in the pouch for several months. Photo: Mehgan Murphy-Smithsonian Institution

Borowitz Again on Out Radar

It has been awhile since we have brought you an Andy Borowitz
Report. We will endeavor to make amends now:

WASILLA (The Borowitz Report) – Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin today defended her use of the word “refudiate,” telling her critics, “Look it up in the fictionary.”

While claiming that “refudiate” is a real word, she reserved her right to make up new words in the future.

Sarah Palin

“Everyone makes up words – Shakespeare, George W. Bush, Levi Johnston,” she said. “The only person I know who doesn’t do it is my husband Todd, who doesn’t sp
eak.”

Gov. Palin also lashed out at those who criticized her use the word “refudiate,” calling them “incohecent.”

In a related story, Gov. Palin would defeat President Barack Obama if she ran in 2012, according to a poll published in Mayan Prophecy Weekly.

The L.A. Times recommends Andy’s Twitter feed. A few of its recent entries are: “When the Incredible Hulk gets even angrier, he turns into Mel Gibson.” “I'm nostalgic for the days when Mel Gibson was just an alcoholic anti-Semite.” “BP denies involvement in Lockerbie bomber's release: "We release oil, not people." To access the Borowitz Twitter feed yourself go here!"a>! §

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It was the experience of my year getting to watch the PBS Masters program on Pete Seeger last Wednesday night. I had missed it in its original incarnation, but the nice thing about PBS is that most things float by again and again. It was a real experience to see his children, Dan, Mika, and Tinya, who I knew as children, in their grown up personas. And of course, Pete and Toshi looked great (if forty years older), as did Pete’s brother John Seeger, who I worked for for six summers at his children’s camp in Vermont, Camp Killooleet, and who unfortunately passed away in January of this year.

Pete is the most extraordinary individual I have ever had the honor of knowing, his wife Toshi I think of as equally extraordinary, and I really believe (as brother John expressed on the program) that Toshi was the reason Pete has been able to achieve all he has. And seeing his three children all grown up was a mind altering experience. By program’s end neither of my eyes was dry, and I must check out Amazon to see if the DVD is available, and if so, for how much.

–†•†–

Friday, August 23 was D Day (Dread Day) when I was due to get my cml (chronic myeloid leukemia)
scorecard, and guess what? I do not have cml.
I do have something, a malady that is causing my white corpuscles to try overrunning my red cells. My oncologist says is a dna mutation, or that’s how I understood him. Shades of the Cold War, take that you commie red cells.

Dr. Rakkhit said he would give me no medication for the condition at the present time. He did say he wanted to do an ultrasound on my, I think he said my spleen, but my heart was beating so loudly as those magic words, no cml reverberated through the room, that I couldn’t hear straight. He also said he wanted to write a paper on my case.

And so I guess when is all said and done we will see what we will see. Of course, this brings up another problem, which I am going to have to put my nose to the proverbial grindstone with in the immediate future, but that is yet another story, one which I will share with you at a later date. Meantime no cml is good news. Let Heavens’ bells ring from the mountains to the prairies, and from sea to shining sea.

– ☯ –

And so we have reluctantly swum to the end of another stream of real sense and nonsense, a blend we attempt to brew each week on our Little Eddy Blog. We would like to thank son Daniel Badeaux of Seattle, WA. for sending us the link to theONION article which once and for all nailed the GOP’s Health Care Repeal campaign to a tee.

We offer our vision of the world each Saturday morning, uploading our weekly missive as we are having our breakfast coffee. Each day of the week brings me a different flavored coffee. On Saturday mornings we grind a flavor called Dark Chocolate Almodine, a twitteresque bit of information which I’m sure you were just dying to know.

At any rate this week seemed to fly by somewhat faster than previous weeks. My teeth and jaw are still not without problems, but have improved by leaps and bounds since my tooth abscess experience of a few weeks back. During the coming week we’ll do more of this rooting around for things that are interesting, and we do hope you’ll drop by again sometime next week to find out just what we’ve come up with.

Meantime, take our Republican friends with a gigantic grain of salt, or whatever you favorite credibility seasoning may be. A group that has so consistently voted against everything the President has tried to do for us does not deserve the time of day, much less our precious vote. They are not to be trusted, much less voted for. And have yourself the very best kind of a good week. Bye now.

The Real Little Eddy § eddybad@gmail.com

Blog # 151:
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Ganging Up to Repeal Health Reform

Speaking Truth to Politics

Republicans, Leukemia Join Forces to Defeat Obama’s Health Care

From the irrepressible theONION comes news that Republicans and the disease Leukemia have joined forces to team up to seek the repeal Obama’s Health Care Law.

WASHINGTON—Citing a mutually shared vision of health care in America, congressional Republicans and the deadly bone-marrow cancer Leukemia announced a joint effort Wednesday to repeal the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the historic new bill that extends health benefits to 32 million Americans nationwide.

"Republicans have no greater ally in this fight than Leukemia," said Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC), who was flanked by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH), and the abnormal increase in White Blood Cells.

"Denying insurance to Americans with preexisting conditions and ensuring that low-income Americans stand no chance of receiving quality health care are just a few of the core beliefs that the GOP and Leukemia share,” the disease’s spokesperson announced.

"And believe me, if anyone is angrier than the Republican Party that children can no longer be denied coverage for having preexisting conditions, it's Leukemia," DeMint countered. "We're a match made in heaven."

–†•†–
Graham Stands Tall on Principle

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This week’s photos from the Washington Post appeared Wednesday, 7-21-2010, and consisted of baby animals born in the zoo.

GOP’s Politics “as clear as mud”

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Is There a Jobs’ “Reality Distortion” field?

Dilbert creator on his Scott Adams Blog, appreciates the true heights Jobs reached in his non apology. Adams quotes Jobs famous nineteen words.

In a press conference on the subject, Steve Jobs said, "We're not perfect. Phones are not perfect. We all know that. But we want to make our users happy."

Jobs got a lot of heat about his response. Where was the apology? Where was the part where he acknowledged that the buck stops with him, and that Apple made a big mistake that never should have happened? That's public relations 101, right?

I'm a student of how language influences people. Apple's response to the iPhone 4 problem didn't follow the public relations playbook because Jobs decided to rewrite the playbook. (I pause now to insert the necessary phrase Magnificent Bastard.) If you want to know what genius looks like, study Jobs' words: "We're not perfect. Phones are not perfect. We all know that. But we want to make our users happy."

Jobs changed the entire argument with nineteen words. He was brief. He spoke indisputable truth. And later in his press conference, he offered clear fixes.

Scott Adams’ complete blog post makes fascinating reading, and can be accessed here! §

– ☯ –

A tammar wallaby joey peeks out from its mother's pouch. The marsupial baby will nurse and develop in the pouch for several months. Photo: Mehgan Murphy-Smithsonian Institution

Borowitz Again on Out Radar

It has been awhile since we have brought you an Andy Borowitz
Report. We will endeavor to make amends now:

WASILLA (The Borowitz Report) – Former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin today defended her use of the word “refudiate,” telling her critics, “Look it up in the fictionary.”

While claiming that “refudiate” is a real word, she reserved her right to make up new words in the future.

Sarah Palin, Shakespeare Reincarnated?

“Everyone makes up words – Shakespeare, George W. Bush, Levi Johnston,” she said. “The only person I know who doesn’t do it is my husband Todd, who doesn’t speak.”

Gov. Palin also lashed out at those who criticized her use the word “refudiate,” calling them “incohecent.”

In a related story, Gov. Palin would defeat President Barack Obama if she ran in 2012, according to a poll published in Mayan Prophecy Weekly.

– ☯ –

–†•†–

Friday, August 23 was D Day (Dread Day) when I was due to get my cml (chronic myeloid leukemia)
scorecard, and guess what? I do not have cml. I do have something, a malady that is causing my white corpuscles to try overrunning my red cells. My oncologist says is a dna mutation, or that’s how I understood him. Shades of the Cold War, take that you commie red cells.

Dr. Rakkhit said he would give me no medication for the condition at the present time. He did say he wanted to do an ultrasound on my, I think he said my spleen, but my heart was beating so loudly as those magic words, no cml
reverberated through the room, that I couldn’t hear straight. He also said he wanted to write a paper on my case.

– ☯ –

The Real Little Eddy § eddybad@gmail.com

Blog # 150: Reality Distortion? Hah!

2010-07-17T06:08:00.000-07:00

Toddler Tossing During Mass Baptism

Playing catch with babies as they are being baptized during a mass ceremony in Mtskheta, Georgia establishes the Priests authority with the faithful at an early age. Photo: David Mdzinarishvili-Reuters

– ☯ –

L.E.’s Health Care Prognosis Looking Up

However with what I would term a middling amount of squeamishness, and what my Good Doctor would undoubtedly term agitation at a near intolerable level, I did manage to get through Friday's bone marrow procedure. I should get the results a week from today (Friday), and if the result is clear I will report on my status in my next week’s blog.

At the moment I feel the closest thing to good as I have felt in awhile, and as a result I have higher hopes for this week’s blog. And so let us take off our shoes and socks, and dip out feet into the blogging pool.

Real Social Network Trailer Appears

The first real trailer for the up coming Aaron Sorkin film tracing the birth and development of Facebook has appeared. A few weeks ago we brought you the teaser, and it is with pleasure that this week we can bring you a trailer which features content from the up coming film. Aaron Sorkin is perhaps best known for his creation and sole writing for several years of the NBC White House dramaseries, the West Wing.

My own Facebook experiences are mixed to say the least. Son Joel sent me an invitation to his Facebook page to check out the pictures of his recent graduation. I attempted to join Facebook, with several other family members sending me encouragement and invitations to their own photo pages.

Alas, my attempt failed. I got no further than the section where you are supposed to upload your picture. I found a recent photo of myself captured by my in-computer camera, but for some reason or other, in spite of the fact that it was lovingly processed in Photoshop, when I put it out on my desktop, and highlighted it for the Facebook program to upload, the picture must have broken a lens or two along the internet, because for the longest time nothing at all happened. And after awhile I gave up the attempt. Joel eventually sent me the photos attached to two emails.

Forgive me, DeAnna and Cedar and you other family members who were so quick to welcome me into Facebook. I might make it in one of these days, and I’ll be your friend from now until then. Meantime, Little Eddy’s image leaves yet another internet server array shattered beyond repair. §

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Sunbather’s Swan Song

A swan waddles past a sunbather in Vienna, Austria. Herwig Prammer-Reuters

Apple reworks the commercial again

First off, I would like to show you a video advertisement which I think is the most effective piece in its genre I have seen in quite awhile. And being originally in radio with its focus on advertising, and having thereafter been a lifetime observer of the medium, I consider myself somewhat of a connoisseur of commercials, if there be such a thing. And if there isn’t let us create one post haste.

First off, I must confess that it is from Apple, in whose corner I am enormously positioned. It is yet another in the long line of ground breaking commercials that began with the now famous 1984 Superbowl commercial introducing the Macintosh computer, continuing with the “Think Different” commercials which were introduced after Steve Jobs had returned to the job of running Apple and was endeavoring to set the company on the right path, and culminating with those nifty little iPhone commercials which helped make Apple’s brand new entry in the smart phone market an established part of the industry within its first year.

The new commercial is for a newly enabled iPhone 4 feature, called Face Time, in which the iPhone 4 has made simple the task of using two phones as picture phones. Although it would mostly be between iPhone 4 users these days, surely Apple is aiming for a world where many phones would have a front-facing camera, and seamless Face Time possibilities.

Tech Crunch’s M.G. Siegler wrote the original article which pointed out the excellence of the commercial. Originally likening it to a 3 yr old episode of the tv show Mad Men, he then explains how the new Face Time commercial also covers this territory. Here is an excerpt of what he wrote.

As we’re all well aware, video chat, even on phones, is nothing new. Sure, Apple has simplified it, but they’re not really showcasing that here. Instead they’re going right for the heart strings. They’re doing something rather incredible. They’re conveying how you’ll feel if you use the product, by making you feel alongside those in the commercial. They’re creating this sentimental bond.

I would like to lead off by reporting my personal reaction to the viewing of the commercial. It brought on a huge personal Louis Armstrong concert courtesy my iTunes collection. I started with the full version of “When You’re Smiling,” and it was so infectious I spent the rest of the morning listening to the delightful music of the incomparable Satchmo. What a remarkably talented singer and jazz improviser he was. And how fortunate those of us who had had a chance to hear him live were for having had that experience. I’ll tell more about Armstrong, and an incident I had interviewing his remarkable clarinet player, Barney Bigard at a later date.

But back to the commercial, as Siegler so astutely points out, the video adroitly manages to help you feel and share in the pleasure these people are having with their video calling. It is particularly eloquent in the example of the final couple, the male of which is obviously hearing impaired, and without this technology there would have been no phone call at all.

Apple followed this commercial with four other commercials showcasing elements of Face Time, but they are all also rans, lacking the breath and luster of the original. All of them can be accessed here!§

– ☯ –

A work boat operates near the Q4000 drilling rig in the area of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Present indications are the leak in the Gulf has stopped.

Retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said on a conference call that pressure readings from the cap have not reached the level that would show there are no new leaks in the well.

Allen said BP's test of the cap, which started 24 hours previously by shutting three valves and stopping the flow of oil into the water, would continue for at least 6 hours. It was scheduled to last up to 48 hours. Photo: Dave Martin-AP

– ☯ –

More on Apple’s History

For years the computer industry has been divided into two camps. Apple, which did not invent the GUI (Xerox PARC invented it, but when it became obvious that the mother company was not interested in doing anything with the many innovations its development arm had developed, gui, email, etc., the head of PARC invited Steve Jobs over to see what they had developed and later allowed a return visit by Jobs who brought along many Apple engineers.)

As a result Apple was the first company to bring a workable version of the Xerox Parc innovation to the computer market. The Mac made its debut in 1984, and it was 11 years before Microsoft was able to bring a workable version of a GUI to the rest of the computer industry with Windows 95. After the debut of the Mac, Apple subsequently lost its way by firing Steve Jobs, and later trying to license its operating system to other computer manufacturers.

Jobs in the meantime bought a computer animation studio named Pixar from StarWars creator George Lucas, and also formed a computer manufacturing company called NeXTSTEP. (As a footnote to history Sir Tim Berners-Lee developed the world wide web on the NeXTSTEP operating system on which he developed the first browser and html editor. The first www server was a NeXTSTEP computer.) §

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A state marine biologist displays shrimp, fish and other marine life caught during a test trawl near Dauphin Island, Ala. Officials say they are finding normal numbers of healthy shrimp and other marine life in Alabama coastal waters despite the huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Photo: Jay Reeves-AP

As our final Apple item we take note of Steve Jobs’ response over what he termed the iPhone 4’s “antenna-gate” problem. He promised a fix, a free cover from Apple or other vendor, to any dissatisfied iPhone 4 purchaser, or a full refund should they prefer to go that route.

But Mr. Jobs took note of several things: thanks to Gizmodo, and other bloggers looking to be critical of Apple’s success, he is getting a mountain of free publicity stretching well out of the tech arena, and into the arena where the American buying public lives.

This product has been flying out of the stores well ahead of any and all preceding iPhone rollouts. And requests for returns have been few and far between. In short, even those self-important engineers at that dinosaur of the Magazine Age, Consumer Reports, do they think that they know what the buying public does not? That’s why they covered their asses with the phrase below.

The signal problem is the reason that we did not cite the iPhone 4 as a "recommended" model, even though its score in our other tests placed it atop the latest Ratings of smart phones that were released today.

The iPhone scored high, in part because it sports the sharpest display and best video camera we've seen on any phone, and even outshines its high-scoring predecessors with improved battery life and such new features as a front-facing camera for video chats and a built-in gyroscope that turns the phone into a super-responsive game controller. But Apple needs to come up with a permanent — and free — fix for the antenna problem before we can recommend the iPhone 4.

In our book it was Gizmodo who was beating the drum for the blogosphere’s reaction to “antennagate,” in revenge for Apple barring them for having paid $5,000 for that lost (stolen?) iPhone 4. And in a desperate bid to prove its relevance Consumer Reports joined the bandwagon. When consumers (with a small letter) begin to shun Apple, Jobs and company will have something to worry about. But the Consumer Reports (with the capital C) is only a magazine with its own relatively small following in these days of establishment irrelevance. Anyway, while adroitly admitting no fault, Mr. Jobs fully satisfied C.R.’s qualifications. Take that Google, RIM, and Nokia. And as for you, Steve Ballmer, your company is no longer a player in the mobile field, in spite of your big words upon the iPhone’s introduction. §

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Revelers run with bulls on the treacherous Estafeta corner in Pamplona, Spain. Photo: Alvaro Barrientos-AP.

All of our photographs today were previously published in Thursday’s Washington Post online, which daily offers an incomparable collection of meaningful photographs. We respectfully urge you to check them out daily on the web.

– ☯ –

A Few Thoughts as We Trot Off

As we brace ourselves for learning the outcome of last weeks bone marrow biopsy, and what it will mean in the treatment of cml if indeed we have it, I have trundled together some random thoughts regarding the state of the nation as I see it. Most troubling is the downsizing the office of the Presidency is receiving at the hands, mouths, and minds of lots of people. The president is given short shrift by several groups of people, including the most important group of independents which helped put him in office in the first place.

And it seems to us to be so undeserved. For instance, he entered office with the economy in the tanks as it had not been since the Great Depression of the 1930’s. But by using imaginative and forceful tactics he has managed, if not to return the economy to its pre Bush Administration state, at least return it to a point where it is no longer threatening our way of life.

In addition he was able to get what no other president, Democrat or Republican had been able to do, enact a Health Care Reform that , among other things, would police the private insurance companies so that they would no longer be able to drop their policy holders the minute they got sick.

There is more, and all of this was done with little or no Republican assistance. Republicans have consistently fought every Obama initiative tooth and fang, and by doing it seemed to be hoping that by doing their best to have Obama fail, a grateful voting public would steamroll them back into the leadership in both houses of Congress.

Such is the result of their “whatthehellcouldtheybesmoking” dreams. Will the public further turn from the Democratic leadership, and stampede an unruly band of screaming naysayers back into the leadership of either or both houses of Congress? A leadership that led from OUR pocketbooks, spending without bringing in money to pay for its expenditures. Reactivate a bunch of screeching non-activists who not only have contributed nothing to the country’s well being during these past two years, but have mostly done their damndest to throw roadblocks in the way of those trying to make things right.

We certainly hope this will not be the case. We dearly hope that the American voter is too smart to turn the country back over to the party that got us into this economic mess in the first place. What do you think? Are you satisfied, or better still happy in the direction the Dems are taking us in? Or are you waiting to ride the GOP fantasy tide back to the future.§

The moon moves in front of the sun during the solar eclipse in Easter Island. Photo: Victor Rojas-AP

Tourists watch the solar eclipse from a beach on Easter Island. Photo: Martin Bernetti-AFP/Getty Images

Little Eddy was fortunate enough to experience a solar eclipse in Maine during the first summer I worked for Blueberry Cove. And BBC director Henry Haskell gave me the day off because I exposed and blackened film so that counselors and campers one and all could see and follow the eclipse.

A complete solar eclipse is a rare thing to experience, we ended up driving many miles to be able to witness a cloudless display. But it was well worth the experience, as you can probably tell by noting the expressions of dedication on the faces of the people watching it below.

To anyone who has read Mark Twain’s A Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Twain’s description of the solar eclipse which climaxed the story was unforgettable. We told of our own experiences while watching the Maine solar eclipse on our Blog #113, A Few Things Considered, in our Blog Entry entitled, Pursuing a Mark Twain Moment in Maine. You can access it by pointing your cursor here and scrolling down.

– ☯ –

And so consider this as being another of our weekly blogs as having reached its natural conclusion. We are going to drop in the url for son Dr. Joel’s “Payday” YouTube video again, for any of you out there who might have missed it the first time around, or who might enjoy seeing it again. Simply by clicking here! you are practically guaranteed to bring forth a myriad of vocal and visual delights. Bye now. §

The Real Little Eddy § eddybad@gmail.com

Blog #149: One Poke Over the Line

2010-07-10T07:32:00.000-07:00

Jadyn Olivia Gonce, 4, and other children play in a sprinkler in a playground in New York City. Photo: Tina Fineberg-AP §

– ☯ –

Well Wimbledon tennis has come and gone, and Rafael Nadal is the champion once again, after sitting out last year’s match recovering from injuries. This year’s finals must have taken a great deal out of Nadal, though, for after the match he managed to find the time to take a quick snooze. §

– ☯ –

Bone Marrow biopsy delayed. absessed tooth guilty

Well, July 2nd has come and gone, and I don’t know a bit more about the state of my health, i.e. my cml than I did July 1. It seems that all last week I had a tooth that was killing me, and so as July 2nd crept upon me, I checked with son Joel about whether I should go on as scheduled for a trip to have my bone marrow scanned, or instead schedule a trip to the dentists. Joel agreed with me that an infected tooth would likely throw Dr. Rakkhit’s readings off, and so I elected cancel the bone marrow, instead going to a long delayed trip to the dentists.

And so I did, and it turned out to be the right choice after all. The dentist’s fee was $15, and the cost of the two drugs, both the pain killer and the antibiotic together totaled $1.64. And so the total costs for curing my condition was well under eighteen dollars.

Unbelievable, I know, but this dentists office is priced for families, and consequently an individual visit was cheap. And since I did not particularly want a tooth pulled, I wanted primarily the pills, I got what I wanted. For neither the dentist nor his assistant could tell which tooth was causing me the problem, and for that matter neither could I. So he wrote out my prescriptions in his own illegible manner, and within forty five minutes I was out of there.

Strange drugs, those two. The antibiotic called for 8 hour intervals, 3 times a day, for 7 days. On the other hand the pain killer wanted to be chased every four hours, day and night, until it ran out. And so my lost weekend was complete, but by Sunday night I had no pain killers left, though I had four to five days of antibiotics ahead of me. Final note, I finished the aitibiotic Friday morning at 8 a.m. §

– ☯ –

Plane flies 23 hours on solar charge

In what hopes to portend to the future, an airplane flew for over 24 hours on one charge of solar power. In addition to setting a new record in length of flight, the aircraft also set new parameters in altitude.

Andrew Borschberg, chief executive of Solar Impulse, takes off in the solar-powered HB-SIA prototype airplane for its first night flight at Payerne airport, Switzerland. A Swiss team planning to eventually circle the globe in a solar-powered plane has started a 24-hour test flight that aims to keep the aircraft operating through the night on stored energy collected from the sun. Photo: Denis Balibouse-AP §

LeBron Goes to: Who Cares?

NBA Basketball super star LeBron James took the easy way out in announcing his new team Thursday night. On what turned out to be a one hour infomercial on ESPN2, Mr. James announced that he was joining Pat Riley, Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh down in Miami.

When the Cavs owner complained that James never called him to tell him of the deal before deciding on his new team, NBA sources quickly came to James’ aid, giving figures on the amount of money James had pumped into Ohio’s economy during his 7 year stint there.

Meantime, ESPN2 reminded us, as if we didn’t already know it, that air time is for sale on the #2 sports channel. Some of us think LeBron’s destination was not worthy of an hour of air time, 3 minutes would have been more than enough. Meantime, Miami basketball fans are probably close to hysterical, while the rest of the nation’s fans could care less. Chris Bosh was the free agent prize the Houston Rockets were coming on to, now it’s back to the drawing board, and hoping you can get by with what you’ve got, plus whatever is left that you can lay your grubby hands on.

– ☯ –

I had my bonemarrow biopsy today

This week's title, One Poke Over the Line, refers to the bone marrow biopsy which got postponed for a week because of my errant tooth, but which happened yesterday, July 7.

I am such a twit, and a baby. My right foot ailed me as I lay there for 20-30 minutes, my rear end getting aired out, before the grand poke began. I am such a baby, I'm sure I behaved as badly as any patient Dr. Rakkhit has had, yet I got through it, and on July 23 I will get the word on my fate. Stay tuned.

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And so we sign off on yet another Little Eddy Blog. It was short and not very sweet, plus not very inventive, and we apologize for that, but it's very hard to be inventive, and funny, or even honest when you are in pain. We'll see if July 23 brings any relief. Preferably one of those miracle cures. Yeah, right?

Meantime, join us again each Saturday morning, or any time during the coming week, for the latest installment of this soap opera which has become my life. Meantime, son Joel is here (in Galveston actually) to make a video including our famous Gulf Oil spill. BP, would you like to make another gigantic mess, this time off of Alaska. And what's with these federal judges refusing to grant the administration a moratorium on new, deepwater drilling? At least until the powers that be discover why this current disaster happened, and takes steps towards seeing to it that it does not happen again? Oh well, its none of our business anyway, is it? Hang in there, see you next time.

The Real Little Eddy § eddybad@gmail.com

Blog #148: A Whale of a Skimmer

2010-07-03T06:09:00.000-07:00

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"A Whale," the world's largest oil skimmer, collects oily water through special vents on its side. Anchored on the Mississippi River in Boothville, La., the ship is designed to collect up to 500,000 barrels of oily water a day through 12 vents on either side of its bow. Photo: Patrick Semansky-AP

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X-Ray of a Famous Chest

Marilyn Monroe’s beauty must have actually been deeper than skin deep. The above chest X-Ray, along with two others, last week sold in auction for $45,000. The images of the mid twentieth century’s legendary pinup were taken in a hospital in 1954. Julien's Auctions sold the X-rays and even it underestimated the length to which fans would go for Monroe related stuff. It had guessed the films would only fetch about $3,000.

Little Eddy’s note: those mammaries are there, or rather their outline is there, but you really have to use your imagination to see them. One wonders how the lucky buyer is going to exhibit the X-Rays in his home? Perhaps he will put them on light boxes and mount them on his dining room walls. Wouldn’t that be a turn on, to eat your meals with images of Marilyn Monroe’s skeleton overlooking your every bite.

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Croons of a Loon

John Boehner, who is the Republican minority leader in the House and one of two official spokespersons for the Republican Party (the other being Mitch McConnell minority leader in the Senate.) is virtually unmitigated in his arrogant public musings. His latest garish piece of fantasy, in describing the Democrats bill to protect us from predatory banks Boehner likened it to "fighting an ant with a nuclear weapon."

That was a little much for President Obama to overlook, and in a campaign style town meeting in Wisconsin the next day he ridiculed Boehner for comparing the financial meltdown which cost the economy many jobs, to an ant. The next day Boehner came back accusing President Obama of whining, in his criticisms of the President’s criticisms of his enduring wit. Enduring wit nor not, Boehner and his Republican nay sayers, never saw a bank or corporation they wouldn't support over the likes of you and me.

Although it has yet to come out just what kind of tea they are smoking, or the leaves of which they are reading, but Republicans seemed to have convinced themselves that by bringing down the Obama administration, by preventing it from accomplishing anything to fix the economy, that the American people are going to be so grateful to them they are going to throw Democrats out of office in this fall’s elections. They seem to have forgotten that this land is not just Obama's land, but to quote Woody Guthrie, "this land belongs to you and me." Fellas, this is our country, our economy you are working full time to make fail. If this should actually happen, the American people will have forgotten the 8 years of wild, unaccounted for spending by our Republican friends at Bush Lite. And if that happens we will get exactly what we deserve.

However, is this true? In spite of the fantasy speculations of Messrs Boehner and McConnell, certainly voting up to now has not indicated any gigantic backlash against the Obama administration and the Democratic Party. So far elections have been pretty evenly balanced between the new and the incumbent, the Republican and the Democrat.

Maybe Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are onto something? Or maybe they are playing out the hand they have talked themselves into believing is the best of their ability. What is impressive is the lock they seem to have on the entire party. Hardly a defection here or there. Considering the mess they made of the economy during the last 8 years of their rule, their sudden concern for money spent without it being balanced with cuts somewhere else is, to our ears, hollow as the hell.

If the country swallows the Republican line and votes the Democrats out next fall, then perhaps P.T.Barnum was right, “there really is one born every minute.” My nightly prayer:

Lord won’t you buy me a Mercedes Binz,

My friends all drive Porches, I must make amends,

Boehner belts a wild one, while Mitch nods and grins,

Lord help our nation, vote Obama and friends.

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We follow Boehner’s puffed up bravado with an image of a real lion doing what most anyone would do following Boehner’s wild assertions, yawn. It happened at a nature reserve on the outskirts of Pretoria, South Africa. Photo: Enrique Marcarian-Reuters

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Bathing the Transportation

While Republican politicians prattle on a young boy makes himself useful by washing buffaloes in a river in Larkana, Pakistan.

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A Hijackers Endgame

As a followup to the story several weeks ago about my G-mail account having been hijacked, and as a result I not only could not access my g-mail, but also couldn’t access my blog account, as it is also Google, and opened with the password which no longer worked. It took me three days to regain my gmail account, Google sent me a notice to the edbad84@excite.com account I had especially set up to get communications from Google (and others) giving me a link which would allow me to set a new password, and I went to the link and reset it, and I was back in business. I could once again access both my g-mail and blogger accounts, and was able to post my blog the following week.

However, several weeks went by, I was feeling the effects of my inner battle with my over loaded white corpuscles, and didn’t notice that my g-mail account was dead. Nothing had come in later than June 7. Weird, that hacker that hijacked my account must have redirected my mail to himself.

Well, I spent a couple of hours going over the settings, but even in good health I doubt that I am computer savy enough to solve my problem. But son Joel solved it in a matter of minutes Monday night. I sent my new password so he could get in the account, and he found that my dear hacker gentleman had directed my incoming mail to an account he had set up, using eddyybad (double y's) as the code link. No wonder I was getting no mail. I used to get about eight to twelve emails a day to things I had subscribed to, like the Borowitz Report, thedailybeast, the Washington Post, and the like.

Well, Joel got rid of that, redirecting my mail back to me, and sent a test message to see if his fix had indeed worked. The test came through, and I went to bed happy that night. Checking the next morning only one message other than Joel’s test has come in, a note from Imprimis (a right wing publication my father used to subscribe to, which I never cancelled as I figured my getting a file 13 edition would keep someone else from getting it.) Anyway, so far none of my regulars have checked in, which makes me wonder if they have jettisoned my account when it was hijacked. I guess time will most assuredly tell, as it always does. A check on Thursday indicated there was no Daily Beast or Washington Post, but most of my other regulars are back.

Theme park workers walk in front of a life-size model of a Tyrannosaurus at a dinosaur theme park in Beijing, China, which gave us the idea of changing the G.O.P.’s symbol from the elephant to Tyrannosaurus Rex. It would be symbolic as to how up to date Republican takes are on the state of the economy and other pressing issues. Photo: Bobby Yip-Reuters

The State of my Health

In the ongoing soap opera which is the story of my life these day, I had to cancel the bone marrow procedure I had scheduled for Friday, due to an abscessed tooth in my lower right jaw. I've had these things before and they usually were gone in a day or two, but this one dragged on for a week, getting a little worse every day. Consulting with son Joel (the doctor) I speculated that the infection might make the bone marrow thing inaccurate, and he agreed and told me to cancel the bone marrow and get the hell to a dentist. I did. Score.

I'm now taking some sort of super pain killer medication every four hours, plus three antibiotics a day. I'm not exactly pain free (I can barely sense pain lurking in a corner just out of the range of feeling) but I am one to three thousand percent better, at least I will be if I ever quit flogging myself for waiting all week before going to the dentist.

Giraffe calf "Manya," bottom, inspects its enclosure with its family at a zoo in Cologne, Germany. Photo: Hermann J. Knippertz-AP

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And so we wind our way to the end of yet another Little Eddy post. Not much happened this week, but if constant and intensifying pain truly builds character, I got myself a face full of it this week. I suspect it doesn't do much, but what the hell? That's the way it went down.

We do this (write a new blog, upload it to Google) every week, so if you want more do surf our way again anytime next week. Meantime, hang in there, check in with other sites which democratically tell it like it truly is, and if you see mischief coming your way, hop on board. Bye now.

The Real Little Eddy § eddybad@gmail.com

Blog # 147: Wrapping Gov. Palin in Oil

2010-06-26T06:15:00.000-07:00

BP, A Mountain of Incompetence

The most troubling aspect of BP’s gigantic and ongoing oiling of the Gulf of Mexico, is the extent that incompetence guided BP’s actions. The list of BP’s citations in it’s refinery incidents is far greater than any other oil refinery company. Below we quote from a report a Washington based watchdog group, Center for Public Integrity, entitled, "Renegade Refiner: OSHA Says BP Has Systemic Safety Problem."

BP received a total of 862 citations between June 2007 and February 2010 for alleged violations at its refineries in Texas City and Toledo, Ohio. Of those, 760 were classified as "egregious willful" and 69 were classified as "willful." Thirty of the BP citations were deemed "serious" and three were unclassified.

Virtually all of the citations were for alleged violations of OSHA's process safety management standard, a sweeping rule governing everything from storage of flammable liquids to emergency shutdown systems. BP accounted for 829 of the 851 willful violations among all refiners cited by OSHA during the period analyzed by the Center.

What’s with this industry favoring system which allows oil and coal mining companies to contest regulatory fines in court, and then if they lose pay the fines rather than correct the conditions which brought on the fines? To any sensible observer such a system bolsters the power of the industry at the expense of the safety of its workers, and in the case of BP’s latest faux pas, the health of the entire Gulf of Mexico.

The occasional mine explosion testifies as to the ongoing danger of this policy, which in the case of BP, has its safety record coming under intense scrutiny ever since the blowout and resulting explosion at its Deepwater Horizon offshore oil rig which led to the deaths of 11 workers, injuries to others, and the still uncontrolled spewing of tens of thousands of barrels of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico every minute of every day and night with no end in sight.

Any person looking beyond the surface could not help but ask the inevitable question: how could an oil company with such a contemptuous attitude toward the safety of its employees ever be allowed to drill a well 500 miles below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico?

What kind of regulations control this industry, and what records do the regulators look in the approval process to allow an oil company to drill in the Gulf of Mexico? BP’s well ingrained penchant for cutting corners on safety procedures was well known. Why this did not raise flags in the approval process is unimaginable? And when the Obama administration takes the scientifically logical step of putting a moratorium on new deepwater wells being drilled until a study has been made for why BP’s well malfunctioned, a federal judge whose stock portfolio is filled with energy stocks, arbitrarily brings and end to the moratorium.

Poor nation. How can we possibly have success in solving our many basic problems when Republican appointed judges, and Republican legislators are working full time against doing what is necessary to solve these basic problems? We certainly identify with President Obama’s problems, and wish him the very best of luck, for the country’s and your’s and our sake, in solving them.

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Preparing for Dressing Down

Gen. Stanley McChrystal arrives at the White House to meet with President Obama. Obama removed McChrystal as commander of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan and replaced him with Gen. David H. Petraeus, saying he was acting to maintain cohesion in the war effort and civilian control over the military after McChrystal and his top aides disparaged administration officials. Photo: Nicholas Kamm-AFP/Getty Images

Wednesday, 12:00 CDT. The fate of General McChrystal was still unknown officially at 10:41, although the fact that the President had met with Gen. McChrystal for only 30 minutes, and the General subsequently left before the Situation Room meeting on the Afghanistan war was pretty telling. The President is expected to make an announcement some time during the noon hour about his decision in the McChrystal case.

Of course, it does not help that the war in Afghanistan is going poorly. However, in military tradition an officer surviving such a high level criticism of his civilian superiors is unprecedented. And so any outcome other than relieving the good General of his position as leader of American forces in Afghanistan would be pretty much out of the question.

Meantime the Rolling Stone article which has brought on this firestorm is a really compelling read. It paints an indelible portrait of the General, not all of which is negative, but there is certainly enough negativity in it, and particularly among McChristal’s advisors, with which to get him in what George H.W. 41 might have described as “deep doo doo.” The article, which can be read in its entirety, may be found here!

Andrea Mitchell ended up hitting the jackpot, on this entire McChristal, Petraeus take over. Killing time with her were Hardball’s Chris Matthews as well as former Congressman and Defense Department head under Clinton, William Cohen. Plus White House correspondents Chuck Todd and Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski.

The big question of the hour was whether General McChristal would survive the Rolling Stone article. Of course, the fact that Gen. McChristal had a 30 minute meeting with the President, after which he left before the strategy meeting on Afghanistan was to be held was a pretty good indication that the good General was undoubtedly dead meat.

By 12:08 CDT Chuck Todd had confirmed the General’s firing, and within minutes Miklaszewski announced that General David Petraeus was to be his replacement. All of those lined up to fill the time did well with interesting speculations and observations.

It was 12:42 before President Obama opened the door to the Oval Office and stepped up to the microphone surrounded by Vice President Biden, General Petraeus, Defense Department head Robert M. Gates, and Joint Chief of Staff Head Admiral Mike Mullen, all privy to the Situation Room meeting on Afghanistan.

Obama minced no words. He said that McChristal’s words as reported in the Rolling Stone article had created a situation that was untenable, pitting military leadership against its civilian counterpart. Announcing that General Petraeus had agreed to take over the leadership from General McChristal seemed to win approval from experts of every stripe, from Senators McCain and Leiberman to the experts that Ms. Mitchell had lined up to help her fill the delay before the President finally made his announcement.

Obama’s remarks were short and to the point, and most of the assembled pundits agreed he had handled a terrible situation in the best possible way. McChristal’s resignation read as follows: “This morning the President accepted my resignation as Commander of U.S. and NATO Coalition Forces in Afghanistan. I strongly support the President’s strategy in Afghanistan and am deeply committed to our coalition forces, our partner nations, and the Afghan people. It was out of respect for this commitment –– and a desire to see the mission succeed –– that I tendered my resignation. It has been my privilege and honor to lead our nation’s finest.

The anchor who followed Mitchell’s hour was interviewing NBC’s correspondent in Afghanistan, who announced that he had talked by phone with Michael Hastings. Hastings was the Rolling Stone writer who had written the article which had brought down the General. Asking him why he had written the article Hastings told him that his motive had been to shine the spotlight on the war in Afghanistan. Asked if he felt any sympathy for General McChristal, he said the General was old enough to know what he was saying, and Hastings further noted that in his opinion his article had been largely successful, truly turning the nation’s attention back onto the war in Afghanistan. You sure got that right, buster!

Unfortunately, candidate Barack Obama who ran against both of George W.’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is nowhere to be found these days. He is winding down Iraq, as promised, but as the Russian communists found out the hard way, Afghanistan is a situation that is simply not winnable. It’s too bad we didn’t use this bump in the road to question why the hell we are there? and when in hell we’re planning to get out?

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The Tennis Match Which Wouldn’t End

American Tennis Player John Isner celebrates winning what turned out to be the longest match in tennis history, lasting in excess of 11 hours, and stretching over three days. Pool photo by Suzanne Plunkett

’Tis the first week of Wimbledon. Tennis freaks will already be aware of this. The rest of you probably won’t give much of a damn. At my age I don’t do sports, never have except a tall hill or small mountain now and again.

But in my more sedentary age I have become quite addicted to watching sports on television. My favorite, of course, is NBA basketball. NBA basketball represents in my mind the ultimate in a team sport relying primarily on skill rather than brute force. But in spite of its being played in air conditioned gymnasiums professional basketball is notably dead in the torrid months of summer.

June, however, does bring us Wimbledon tennis, which I find interesting to watch as a background. And once in awhile I might stop long enough to follow a particular match if it indeed proves compelling.

Why tennis you might well ask? Well, it’s one of the few sports which pits one individual against another. Boxing does that too, of course, except that boxing is much too savage for an empathic milquetoast like me. I can feel the pain. Of course, doubles and mixed doubles feature multiple players battling it out, but singles is the combat I prefer to watch, matching individual against individual. And depending on their respective skills perhaps offering a memorable battle as well..

I don’t really follow the sport these days, so as a rule I have no idea who’s playing. I do know who Roger Federer is, of course, and so was surprised to read how in his opening match which because he is the reigning champion was held on centre court, he lost the first two sets and won the third by a hair, before returning to his old self and putting his opponent away in the final two sets.

However, it turned out that the most interesting match was the one between American John Isner and Frenchmen Nicolas Mahut. It was a first round match that went more than 11 hours stretched out over three days. Isner finally won the contest 70-68. The fifth set alone went over 8 hours. Isner finished with a total of 112 aces and Muhat 103. Sadly Mr. Isner lost his 2nd round match, scheduled hours after his marathon finally ended. But not before he and Mssr Mahut carved themselves quite a unique place in the lore of tennis history.

America’s Williams Sisters Take to the Court

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American sisters Venus (left) and Serena Williams play their first-round Wimbledon doubles match against American Julie Ditty and Renata Voracova of the Czech Republic. The Williams sisters won the match, by the way. Photo: Hamish Blair-Getty Images

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What to Do When the Floods Come

While our transportation stalls out in high water, in more primitive lands natives ride animals which don’t stall out in high water.

A man rides his ox along a flooded street in China's Jiangxi province. Photo: Aly Song-Reuters

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The World’s Other Sport of the Moment

Argentina's coach Diego Maradona watches the Group B first round 2010 World Cup football (soccer) match against Greece in Polokwane, South Africa. Argentina defeated Greece 2-0. Photo: Daniel Garcia-AFP/Getty Images

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In Your Face(book)

Columbia Pictures has just released its very first trailer for its upcoming film The Social Network. Based in part on the book The Accidental Billionaire, it chronicles the formative days of Facebook, from its founding in Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room, through its early rise to success. The film is written by West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin, and is directed by David Fincher. The trailer has the intriguing tag line, “You don’t get to 500,000 friends without making a few enemies.” More information may be found here!

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And that was a sliver of the week that was. Like last week, this was another bad health week, one which limited our time and resources in our blog preparation. However, time marches on, and hopefully with each passing day we move closer to finding out what the hell is really wrong with us, with our upcoming bone marrow experience #3 scheduled for July 2nd at 3 o’clock in the afternoon.

Because the most effective drug to treat chronic myeloid leukemia (afterwards to be referred to as cml) is Gleevec, and it’s monthly dose runs $3,000, my sons have reunited me with the Veteran’s Administration as well as my regular health care provider, Texas HealthSpring, which does not list Gleevec among the drugs which it covers. The VA doesn’t list Gleevec by name either, but Joel assures me that it is listed by its generic name.

Anyway, we will take what comes and see what we will see. And if you return to http://littlleeddy.blogspot.com/ anytime after next Saturday morning you will be treated to a brand new edition of our blog. We’re sorry we haven’t been more entertaining recently, but it’s hard to be entertaining when you are feeling lousy. Let’s everybody wish me luck after July 2nd, and hope one way or another I can get something to put this white corpuscle mutiny into its proper place, which is in remission. Meantime, have a good week, and remember not to give a Republican or Tea Party-er the time of day. They are just liable to strip your watch right off of your arm. Bye now.

The Real Little Eddy § eddybad@gmail.com

Blog # 146: Have a Blog Lite

2010-06-19T06:47:00.000-07:00

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Hearing from the Top of the Line?

ExxonMobil Chairman and chief executive Rex Tillerson, left, Chevron Chairman and chief executive John Watson, ConocoPhillips Chairman and chief executive James Mulva, Shell Oil President Marvin Odum and BP America President and Chairman Lamar McKay testify on the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, during a House Energy and Commerce hearing on Capitol Hill. Photo: Larry Downing-Reuters

Rep. Joe Burton Apologizes to CEO of BP for President Obama “shaking down” oil giant for a $20 billion “slush” fund to compensate victims of the Gulf Oil spill.

Joe Barton Spills the Beans!

It’s not very often that a professional politician will come right out and say what he feels deep down inside. On Thursday our own Texas good old country boy, Republican Representative Joe Barton, did just that. Peeling back layers usually well hidden from the voters, he put up the true face of the GOP as he apologized to the CEO of BP for President Obama’s “reckless shakedown” of BP of it’s 20 billion dollar escrow fund to pay victims of BP’s oil disaster. Since we have started this blog we have been trying our best to show the voters of this country the difference between Democrats and Republicans. Well, good old Joe just did our work for us, and far better than we ever could have.

"I'm not speaking for anybody in the House of Representatives but myself," Barton explained, "but I'm ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday. I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown. In this case a $20 billion shakedown."

Tightening the noose, Barton went on: "I apologize. I do not want to live in a country where any time a citizen or a corporation does something that is legitimately wrong, is subject to some sort of political pressure that is, again, in my words — amounts to a shakedown, so I apologize."

Well, we too think it’s a damn shame that Rep. Barton has to live in a country so despicable, that it would expect a business which causes an extreme amount of damage to have to be responsible and pay for the damage it has caused. Obviously Barton identifies with the oil company, and not the people of the Gulf States that BP savaged. Would he be more comfortable living in BP’s home country, providing they would let him in?

And you better believe that Republicans were running like hell from Barton’s apology. And before the day was over even Barton himself was half-heartedly taking back his morning statement, but his original apology to BP still stands tall, and it sure as hell casts the spotlight of truth on what Republicans really, in their hearts, stand for. Look no further. The Good Ole’ Boy with the Big Mouth from Texas Spoke the Truth! What more is there to say?

As we prepare to upload our blog to Google we might note that according to the Associated Press Rep. Barton seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth. Telephone calls to his office weren’t being answered, and no further peep has been heard out of him. In Houston Chronicle letters one supported him, while four other decried his tirade, though they were grateful for the true face his outburst put on the Republican Party. We agree, it was a one of a kind happening.

Another Face of Republican Righteousness

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer – Would you buy a used State from this woman?

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Fans celebrate after Brazil scored its first goal against North Korea during a World Cup soccer match, while watching the game on a giant screen at Copacabana beach, in Rio de Janeiro. Photo: Silvia Izquierdo-AP

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Pardon Our Blog Lite

We apologize for posting mostly a group of photographs for this week’s blog. By the way, the photographs, and even the captions, are from the Washington Post’s collection as published Thursday, June 17. The Washington Post publishes an excellent collection of newsworthy photos daily, a collection not to be missed by anyone appreciating fine news photography. It is our pleasure to be able to call them to your attention.

Healthwise . . . (What kind of word it healthwise, anyway?) On the frontier of my health it was not a good week. The naps which follow each of my three meals are no longer optional, they are mandatory with a capital M! And they last at least an hour, sometimes much longer. I cannot even stay awake for the NBA championship games, and anyone who knows me knows how serious a malady that is.

Even though I plan to continue posting this blog until health does me in, on some weeks, like this one, the writing is likely to be lite. It is July 2nd, or sometime thereafter, that once again I get to find out whether or not I truly have chronic myeloid leukemia, hereafter to be known as cml. For at 3:00 pm on that day I am scheduled to have yet another bone marrow, whatever. Of course, I had this before. The first round found I had cml, the second, conducted by the VA, found I did not have cml. All had been going well since that VA finding that I was free of cml until a recent blood test indicated a untoward number of white corpuscles. Here we go again.

But I’ll tell you the truth, after spending much of this week following the BP hearings on msnbc, I am appalled at the level of incompetence exhibited by the distinguished gentlemen pictured at the hearing above. The level of recklessness and incompetence in the oil industry is unbelievable, and most of this incompetence seems to be centered right here in Houston.

May we dare to hope that Houston’s healthcare community is of a slightly higher quality than its oil industry. I mean, it is enough to make one ashamed to be from Houston, to think of these oil types running amuck all through River Oaks and Memorial.

But our favorite oil polluter, Exxon-Mobile, is no longer the world’s biggest polluter, thank you very much. British Petroleum has taken over that honor, you’re very welcome, and it seems to be laying to waste the entire Gulf of Mexico to prove its ascendancy. And BP’s CEO, Tony Hayward, seems to have broken the record for the CEO who knew the least and said even less.

You know, it’s a drag being in ill health, and if I ever have an audience with our Creator, be assured I’ll issue a complaint as to the way we are sometimes forced to leave this life. But, just getting up every day, and reading what goes on for news these days, this matter of death is beginning to seem less of a problem and more of an ultimate solution, the final turning of the page so to speak.

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A secretary bird acts up in his enclosure at the Tierpark Friedrichsfelde zoo in Berlin. The raptor birds are native to the open landscapes of Africa. Photo: Barbara Sax-AFP/Getty Images

Lakers Finally Triumph Over Celtics

In one of the most evenly balanced NBA finals since I have been watching professional basketball, the Los Angeles Lakers won their 16th NBA championship, their second in a row, defeating their arch enemies, the Boston Celtics, 83 to 79. Although the Celtics led the final game during much of it, their legs finally gave out and their age showed. And in the final minutes the Lakers had their way with the game. And so ends another year of professional basketball. Talk about a long, hot summer. We’ll miss you, guys.

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Kaylea Neal fires a fistful of mud at her friend Heather Lueck at Gehrmann Park in Springfield, Ill. The girls began playing in a puddle, progressed to a mud fight and ended back in the water to clean up. Photo: Ted Schurter-AP

Mud it taking it to a high level. More common is the water the child in the next picture is playing in. As we experience an almost heat wave here in Houston which is taxing our air conditioning unit, looking at the photograph below can almost be cooling.

Three-year-old Felicity Cornwell of Paducah, Ky., plays at a spray park in Paducah. Photo: Stephen Lance Dennee-AP

And finally how about a photograph extolling the virtues of parenthood? Not of the human variety, but in the world of birds.

A stork leaves the nest to find food for its young in Jablonne v Podjestedi, Czech Republic. According to city records, the nest dates from 1864 and is likely to be the oldest in the country. Photo: Petr Josek-Reuters

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And so mercifully this week’s Blog Lite comes to an end. Hoping to feel better and be more productive in the coming week, we will immediately post, and then turn our attention towards assembling next week’s blog. However, next Friday I have another trip to the VA hospital, which shatters time like no other invention known to man.

Why submit myself to the VA experience, you might ask? Well, my son the doctor, Joel, assures me that the VA dispenses Gleevec, one of three drugs which is known to tame cml, although the VA lists the drug under its generic name. Gleevec under its name costs $3000 a month, which certainly puts it out of reach for most of us. Kareem Abdul Jabbar is taking the drug it was announced recently, but he is acting as a spokesman for the drug company, which is undoubtedly how he is affording it. We’ll see what we’ll see.

Each week we try to be creative, if not witty, in our closing comments, but this being the week that was, this week we are making an exception. We invite you back anytime next week if you so desire, and will try a little harder to make up for this week. Meantime, bye now. Sleep well, and dream nice thoughts.

The Real Little Eddy § eddybad@gmail.com

Blog # 145: Our House Hacked

2010-06-12T06:08:00.000-07:00

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Gregory da Silva, who calls himself the Eggman, smiles during a fans' party in Cape Town, one day prior to the start of the 2010 World Cup. Photo: Paul Hanna-Reuters

The Hi-Jacking of my Gmail Account

Monday, June 7. Guess what? I was eating breakfast this morning when my phone rang. It was my son Joel, who had just gotten an email from me saying that I was traveling in the UK and had my wallet stolen, and I would hate to inconvenience him, but could he please send me, three thousand dollars.

Welcome to the world of cyberscum. I immediately tried to access my gmail account, but no luck. Somebody has hijacked it, changed the password, and is busy sending out fake requests for money in my name. I can no longer get access to my own email account. And since it is also Google, I won’t be able to access my Little Eddy blog either. What to do? I filled out a Google page to reclaim your gmail account several times, but it rejected my complaint, particularly the URL for my blog, which happens to be: http://www.littlleeddy.blogspot.com/ It turned out that what the page rejected was the www, when I took it out the complaint was gone. However, for the record your favorite browser will access my page with or without the www.

Tuesday, June 8. Still locked out from my gmail account, and since all Google accounts are related, I’ll have to clear this up before Saturday, otherwise I won’t be able to update my blog. More frustration. I filled out Google’s form for resetting my password three or four more times, but the guy must have changed my question, for the way I entered it, it asked for the name of my elementary school. My elementary school had been Woodrow Wilson, but that answer came up wrong, time and time again.

However the page did ask me for an alternate email address where Google could contact me. I went back to Excite, which I had really not used since I first began using gmail in January 2007, but rather than reactivate my original eddybad@excite.com, I opened a brand new account there, combining my age with my original screen name edbad: edbad84@excite.com.

Then came lots more filling out the Google page with lots of frustration and no discernible progress. I finally gave up for the day, turning my attention to game 3 of the NBA finals between the Lakers and the Celtics, scheduled for Tuesday night at 8 on ABC. Boston put up a good fight, and got within 3 near the end, but the Lakers were too much for them that night, overpowering them down the stretch.

At any rate, have no fear. Google’s here. Google’s instruction are to leave your gmail account inactive for 24 hours, then follow the instructions to reset your password. However, this scammer has been busy alerting my entire email list that I (He) needs $3,000. Hopefully no one who knows me will fall for that line. No one I know has $3,000 to lend me, and if they did I seriously doubt that they would.

However, what to do if that doesn’t work? I decided that I will just keep googling that someone has stolen my account until I get someone’s attention. Will it work? Who knows? Just for the record I googled: “someone hijacked my gmail account,” and a page came up claiming 65,500 results, and the page listed the first ten stories, all similar to my own.

In one of the stories that I Googled the author told how he joined twitter and announced his problem, and someone from Google read of his plight and came to his aid. And so I attempted to join twitter. Everything worked out fine except my temporary email address, edbad84@excite.com was rejected because it was being used already. 84 refers to my age, and edbad was my original screen name before one of the entities I belonged to had me change it to eddybad. How could edbad84 be taken up by anybody else is beyond me, but twitter insisted that it was. Just about then the twitter servers conked out, and my twitter membership went up in electronic dust.

It is Wednesday, and I’m still locked out of my gmail account. However, perusing my brand new excite account I discover a couple of communications from Google. One of them takes me to a page where I could reset my password without having to answer that question that kept telling me I was wrong. I followed Google’s instruction, clicked on a link, and found myself at a page which would allow me to create an entirely new password. I did that, making up an entirely new password four or five characters longer than my original, and Viola! Damned if my gmail page didn’t open. For the first time since Sunday I was able to check into my gmail account with it. Gmail, oh gmail, how I had missed thee, let me count the ways.

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A villager looks over his fields while plowing for rice planting in Kob Srov, Cambodia. Photo: Heng Sinith-AP

Few Readers Means No Flack

White House correspondent icon Helen Thomas, dean of the White House correspondents, had to resign her position after saying on YouTube that Israel should “get the hell out of Palestine.” Generally speaking, if you know what’s good for you you will make no comments the least bit critical of “It can do no wrong” Israel.

Last week our lead article decried Israel’s attack on the flotilla carrying aid to the Gaza Palestinians that Israel is attempting to starve as punishment for electing Israel hating Hamas. We called the murder of eight Turks and one Turkish-American piracy on the high seas. No backlash whipped around us, as we have too few readers, and evidently the ones we do have don’t buy the Israel line.

Chris Matthews take note, it’s the Israeli mafia who really plays hardball. No criticism of Israel, no matter how arbitrary it’s actions, is allowed in the public media. Anything even hinting that the right wing Likud government is being somehow unreasonable is met by unending public ridicule.

However, there are two or more sides to every issue facing mankind. And so there is another side to the flotilla story. A side that was lucidly told by the Swedish best selling author, Henning Mankell, in his Diary of Being Aboard the Flotilla, as translated to English and published by TheDailyBeast. Henning begins by giving the reasons for his participation:

Our destination can be read in its point of departure, I think as I wait for the taxi. As instructed, I’ve limited my luggage to a rucksack weighing no more than 10 kilos. “Ship to Gaza” has a clear, and clearly defined, goal: to break the illegal blockade that Israel is imposing on the Gaza region. After the war a year ago, life has become more and more unbearable for the Palestinians who live there. There is a huge shortage of the bare necessities for living any sort of decent life.

But the aim of the voyage is of course more explicit than that. Deeds, not words, I think. It’s easy to say you support or defend or oppose this, that, and the other. But only action can provide proof of your words. The Palestinians who have been forced by the Israelis to live in this misery need to know that they are not alone, not forgotten. The surrounding world has got to be reminded of their existence. And we can do that by loading some ships with what they need most of all: medicines, desalination plants for drinking water, cement.

Henning goes on to tell his story in a straightforward manner, including telling after their captivity by the Iraelies how a man who preceded him in a line allowed himself to be photographed, but claiming he had done nothing wrong refused to allow fingerprints to be taken. According to Henning’s diary he was beaten to the ground by his Israeli captors and carried off.

When Henning was discovered to be a best selling author a man familiar with his writings was assigned to him to make sure he was not mistreated. However, he said his disgust at the treatment of the Flotilla people at the hands of the Israel is causing him to rethink having his books translated into Hebrew.

For Henning’s complete diary, which was translated into English and published in it entirety by TheDailyBeast, go here! •

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For me TheDailyBeast continues to be an online treasure. Another gem in the current edition is an interview with former Apple CEO John Scully, on why he fired Steve Jobs. Of course, Scully blamed the firing on the Apple board of directors, and with many years to think back on it, and watching Apple’s meteoric rise under Jobs stewardship since his return, Scully expressed a wish that at the time of his firing he could have talked Jobs into returning.

John Scully – Fired Steve Jobs

But this expressed wish comes well after the fact, there was no action taken by Scully at that time, and Apple continued to flounder first under Scully, then under Michael Spindler and finally under Gil Amelio. Apple turned itself around only after it’s board bought Jobs’ NeXT to form the basis for a re-worked Mac OS, and then made Jobs interim CEO at a salary of a dollar a year. Jobs has since had the i removed from his title of CEO although he still earns a dollar a year (although he seems to be putting small i’s in front of most all of its current product line.) For the full story go here! For another view of the Apple story you can check out Wikipedia’s version of the Apple saga here! •

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Frustrated with your browser?

Destroy the Web

Well, here’s what you impatient frustrated web hounds have been waiting for. Destroy the Web is a game add-on for Firefox, built specifically to take advantage of the new features introduced in Firefox 3.5. A first of its kind, the goal in the game is to destroy each and every Web page, competing for the high score against players around the world! For a list of scores around the league go here! For an example of how the game works, click the arrow below.

A Portrait in Oil

A dead crab sits in oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill on a beach in Grand Terre Island, La. Photo: Lee Celano-Reuters

Good News for Frustrated Composers

Are you a frustrated music composer? Do you have melodies running through your head, which eventually spin away into nothingness? Well, if you have a Mac there’s (to quote the iPhone) “an app for that.” The Mac application for burgeoning musicians is called Garage Band, and it allows you to make loops of drum rhythms, piano lines, etc. and have them play as a whole. Garage Band comes as a free app with all new Macs, and you can even create podcasts with the program using digital music from your record collection.

However, a new website gives pc owners the ability to make your own music. It is called Aviary, and it can be accessed here! Good luck, and have fun with it.

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And so we come to the end of Blog # 145. This was the week that was, as we lost access to our gmail account and blog for three days, while some merry hacker pretending to be me sent out messages asking for money to my entire email list. What a crock? He had me traveling in England, whereas I’m scheduled for another bone marrow scan to determine if I have chronic myeloid leukemia on July 2nd. I truly hope no one fell for that line and sent him one red cent, much less the $3,000 he was asking for. Imagine, me needing $3,000 if my wallet got stolen? Imagine anybody on my email list sucker enough to send that hacker one copper penny?

Well, as we said that was the week that was. And is no more. We are back united with our Google account once again, which you can see when Blog # 145 gets uploaded in a few minutes. Meantime, we hope you’ll come back any time after next Saturday to see what we’ve come up with by then. Meantime, bye bye, and don’t let any wooden hackers take over your password and lock you out of your email account.

The Real Little Eddy § eddybad@gmail.com

Blog # 144: A State of Pirates?

2010-06-05T05:58:00.000-07:00

Palestinians on boats protest at the Gaza Seaport against Israel's interception of of Gaza-bound ships. Israel, deflecting a U.N. demand for an international investigation, proposed an Israeli inquiry with the participation of outside observers. For our reaction see . . . Piracy is Piracy . . . below. Photo: Mohammed Salem-Reuters

Piracy is Piracy . . .

. . . is Piracy . . . is Piracy . . . is

Congratulation Bibi. You have managed to turn the world’s view of an Israeli citizen into that of a hard headed monster, rather than a bright creative mind seeking peace. You have managed to prove yet again, that when a tactic (the use of force) doesn’t work, rather than seek out a new tactic your simple mind simply increases the degree of force the next time around.

Your election after Rabin’s unfortunate assassination told the world that peace in the Middle East was entombed alongside of Rabin. As you have said quietly time and time again, peace with the Palestinians will come over your, and each of your fellow Likud members’, dead bodies.

What a sorry situation, attacking the Free Gaza flotilla, an unarmed flotilla in international waters that was trying to bring food, medicines, and construction materials to Gaza. Aren’t you proud of yourselves, Israel, dropping your paratroopers from helicopters to prevent food, medicines, and building materials from reaching the people of Gaza which you are in the process of starving to punish them for electing Hamas?

That Israeli nonsense may get you by with your US Aye Sayers, but it’s not going to fly in the rest of the world. The flotilla passengers may have attacked your invaders from the sky with what they had handy, chairs, clubs, as any people would after being attacked by paratroopers lowered from helicopters, and your troops answered them with bullets.

And as happened so many times in the past, one or two Israeli injured are avenged by killing Palestinians, or in this case Turks, by the dozens. Not that there were any real victims on the Israeli side. As usual the casualties were all on the other side. Still Israel, in its unholy self-righteousness, releases a video purporting to show poor Israeli paratroopers being attacked with metal chairs, clubs, and the like. Let us all shed a tear for the poor, abused, and horribly misused invading Israeli paratroopers.

Always keep in mind that it was Israel which invaded the flotilla, and in international waters to boot. Armed paratroopers dropped from helicopters onto the flotilla deck. That is piracy on the high seas, state sponsored piracy is no less piracy than the free-wheeling kind. Israeli apologists are going to find this one a tough swallow.

When I was young Israel was a bright spot in the world. With Pete Seeger singing Hava Nagila, and his audience wildly dancing to the words and music, we felt that Israel was a beacon light of goodness and rationality in a clouded and threatening Middle East.

But no longer. First with the assassination of Yitzak Rabin, the slain Israeli general and prime minister who had signed the Oslo peace accords and who had been the leader most likely on course to solve the Palestinian problem and lead the region into peace. And this was followed by the election of Benyamin Netanyahu, the man least likely to broker accord with their Palestinian neighbors and bring true peace to the region. It would be difficult to find an Israeli leader in deeper opposition to anything which might further the peace process, than the man the people of the so-called democracy of Israel elected to succeed the slain Rabin.

I say so-called, for make no mistake, Israel is no democracy. It is a religious state, a state for Jews, Palestinians need not apply. Yet Palestinians have lived on this land for an eternity, until in the wake of World War II, the British government rather arbitrarily and with Jewish terrorism assisting it, decided to take Palestine from the Palestinians and turn it over to Israel, forcing Palestinians into refugee camps throughout the region. To be perfectly fair, our president Harry Truman enthusiastically backed the British in this. This relieved us from the guilt we all had felt at the fate of Jews under Hitler.

To race from the historical to the present, the blockade of Gaza was and is purely a political act, enacted solely to punish the Palestinians in the Gaza for electing Hamas, and is legal only in the eyes of the most dedicated, right wing, “we can do no wrong!”, Israeli zealot.

Attacking a peaceful flotilla in international waters with armed para-troopers dropped from helicopters will fly in no court aside from a blindly Pro Israeli one. Even large segments of the Israeli population are angry at the botched raid, and many probably hope that the incident will bring down the Netanyahu government once and for all, replacing it with one more attuned to seeking peace in the area.

Little Eddy does not bring any expertise to the conflict, other than his opinion as a human being. But how ironic it is that a people who suffered as the Jews suffered under Nazi Germany in World War II, would in turn use the mind set of the Nazis in their own political maneuvering against the Palestinians, a people they uprooted with the establishment of the Jewish State.

For the Israeli people we would wish that they would change their “we can do no wrong” mindset to one of “do unto Palestinians as we would wish them to do unto us.” It is long past time that Israel abandoned it’s opposition to Hamas and wake up to the reality that it, and it alone, is responsible for first putting Hamas in power, and their mindless, arbitrary power will be keeping them in power, with the only real solution is for an 180° change of direction with Israel once again returning to the negotiating table.

We hope President Obama has the courage and temerity to steer clear of continuing blind US support for the concept that Israel can do no wrong. Israel has long since proved that it can do as much wrong as it damn pleases, and considers it has the power to do anything it pleases, no matter how arbitrary, all the while invoking it’s security as its cover. It is a big world out there. Even Israel’s staunchest European supporters have found this one hard to swallow. Piracy on the High Seas, whether practiced by bandits off the coast of Somalia or in international waters by the Israeli regime, is unlawful and in a just world it will be deemed so and duly condemned and prosecuted.

If the roles had been reversed and it had been unarmed peace loving Israelis lining the deck of that ship, and armed Turkish paratroopers had rained down from the skies, don’t you think those Israelis would have grabbed chairs and clubs and anything else they could find to defend themselves with? But Netanyahu is empathy deprived, empathetically brain dead, you might say. And he only sees in colors of black and white, no shades of gray. Anything Israeli is white, all else is black.

What had begun the decimation of the Soviet Union was it’s arbitrary shooting down of an American airliner which had happened to stray into its air space, a flight which was cryptically labeled 101. Other things happened that helped bring down the behemoth, but that act of arrogance certainly began the process. If our civilization is to succeed we must all live together as nations of laws. The Soviet Union cannot start shooting down commercial airliners because they happen to wander into its air space.

And by the same token Israel has no right to violate the human rights of the Palestinians. And yet under the mantle of Israeli Security it has done this since its inception. and it has been particularly rampant under the various Likud regimes. It is about damn time that Israelis invite themselves back into the human community.

The law is the law, and Piracy on the High Seas is still a violation of international law, and as our dear friend Walter used to say, “and that is the way it is.” Period. Case closed.

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Exciting Playground for AppleNuts

Have a computer? Want an afternoon of fun and knowledge? Open your favorite browser and go here!

What this URL brings you is a page devoted to the primary speaker at Tuesday’s All Things Digital 8 conference, sponsored by the Wall St. Journal and chaired by Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. And there for your perusal, are the words of Apple’s C.E.O., Steve Jobs. His questions and answers are broken up into many parts; his thoughts on ATT, on television, on Gizmodo, on iAds, on Apple’s relation with Google, on Foxcom’s string of suicides, on the iPhone’s origins, and Jobs’ reasons for writing his famous essay on Flash, among others.

Apple C.E.O. Steve Jobs

Kara Swisher even came up in an interview with Steve Case, former CEO of A.O.L. who was instrumental in arranging its ill-fated merger with Time Warner. Case recalled that in 2002 he had made a suggestion at a Time Warner board meeting for AOL-TimeWarner to buy Apple Computer and put Steve Jobs in charge of the entire TimeWarner operation. Nothing came of it, of course, but it was an interesting idea.

In addition to the complete videos from Jobs’ appearance at the D-8 convention, his complete appearances at D1, D2, D3, D4 and his complete joint appearance with Bill Gates at D5 are also available with simply a click. We can almost guarantee that no matter how deep your interest in All Things Apple, your interests will be likely be fully saturated after sampling this collection. We have gone through Jobs’ D8 appearance several times, and even got through his D1, D2, and part of his D3 appearances before running out of time and patience.

Below we bring you one video from D-8 which may or may not play. It is Mr. Jobs explaining the iPhone prototype left in a bar, and eventually bought by the blogger Gizmodo for $5,000. Gizmodo’s head honcho Nick Benton’s comment after seeing the interview was that it was good to see Mr. Jobs so animated.

When Mossberg tried to get Jobs to express a tiny bit of guilt at depriving iPad users from seeing Flash videos, Jobs went into an animated lecture about how Apple had been the first technology company to switch from 5” floppies to 3.5” discs, and then with the emergence of its all in one iMac computer it discontinued the use of floppies altogether. He spoke of using technologies in the “spring” of their lifespan, not the fall or winter. Jobs wound up his argument saying, “if our customers feel deprived they will stop buying our products.” Then he went on to suggest that “customers don’t seem to be expressing much frustration as they have been buying iPads at a rate of 1 every 3 tenths of a second since they went on sale, over a month ago.” Case closed.

An ironic footnote of note: All of the video are Flash powered, and all have many stops, where the video needs to buffer before it continues. All would seem to prove Steve Jobs’ point when it comes to the inferiority of Adobe’s Flash.

Other interesting speakers at D8 included included Steve Ballmer and Ray Ozzie, of Microsoft, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook defining Facebooks’ evolving ideas on privacy, and film director James Cameron, who tells about how he assembled underwater cameras to film the Gulf spill, and who told Kara Swisher that he is re-releasing Titanic in 2013 in 3D.

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A polar bear cub, born Nov. 30, plays with its mother at the Saint-Felicien Wildlife Zoo in Quebec. Photo: Mathieu Belanger-Reuters

Capping the Well by August?

And Other Dreams
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What a fiasco the great oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is becoming, with statistics changing almost hourly, and all for the worst. Although nothing like it had ever happened before, the industry was entirely unprepared to handle and close a leak at that depth. And while James Carville and other Louisiana lovers of nature and area seafood scream and holler at the region’s fate being left to the hands of BP, gigantic plumes of oil threaten all of the Gulf’s marine life, and many a fisherman’s livelihood is threatened, and visions of supertankers in the Gulf sucking up the oil and water, separating it, and returning the water, seems an option far into the future, if at all. But nothing else seems capable of solving the enormous problems the spill is creating.

The disaster, like the regulators relationship with the industry is pure Bush/Cheney, with the particular onus on Cheney as the policy, or lack thereof, was done by him in cahoots with the oil industry barons themselves, all in complete secrecy, and thanks to the courts it has remained secret until this day. Notice how quiet the Cheneys’ have been since the day the leak started. It’s been what, well over a month, and not a word out of any of them about how in danger the country is in thanks to Obama’s not having a clue about handling the terrorists. Well, thanks to Bush/Cheney’s oil policies which President Obama didn’t change fast enough, we now know the measure of real devastation.

Oil floats on the surface of the Gulf of Mexico around a work boat at the site of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Tar balls and other oil debris from the giant, fragmented slick have reached Alabama's Dauphin Island, parts of Mississippi and are now less than 10 miles from Florida's northwest Panhandle. Photo: Sean Gardner-Reuters

Congress will of course have to investigate this disaster after the fact, and armed with proper subpoenas hopefully the country will finally learn just who added what to the Bush/Cheney top secret vision of the nation’s energy policy. And hopefully the Congress will finally ask, just why Cheney’s energy policy was labeled top secret in the first place; just what parts of it Dick Cheney was ashamed of, what parts he didn’t want people to know about? And why does a Democratic nation like ours accept secrecy in the formation of public policy in the first place?

Meantime, a fellow with the unlikely name of Leroy Stick set up a Twitter account pretending to be BP’s public relations department: Here are a few of his posts:

• Can we just start calling it the oilcean and move on please? #bpcares

• We've created something that will affect your children's children. Can YOU say the same about YOUR life? #nailedit #bpcares

• Think about it this way, the ocean is like rootbeer and oil is like ice cream. We just made America a giant rootbeer float!

• Just got the concession call from Exxon Valdez. They were great competitors and remarkably evil about everything. #bpwins!

• Lots of people blaming this on Bush or Obama. Pph, we wish. The truth is Presidents don't have any control over what we do. #bpcares

• A bird just stole my sandwich! You deserve everything you get, nature!!! #bpcares

• If Top Kill doesn't work, we're just gonna toss a giant “Get Well Soon” card into the gulf and hope for the best. #bpcares

• New solution: Everybody drive your cars into the gulf with your gas caps open! You'll get a full tank and we'll only charge $20 cash!

• Please help us with rebranding. We're not calling it an “oil spill” anymore, now it's a “Southern Fun Party.” #bpcares

• I'm sorry, are people mad at us for drilling in the ocean?!? Maybe God shouldn't have put oil there in the first place. DUH. #bpcares

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What this country needs is an ombudsman. A person with the power to question things like regulators relations with the companies they regulate. A person with the power to call persons to the witness chair before a disaster like the Gulf spill happens, not just conduct an inquiry after the fact. What’s the chance of having such an ombudsman put into place? None to zero. No president, Obama included, would willingly allow such a usurpation of the powers of the president and of the congress. However that in no way negates our pressing need for one.

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Ex-Beatle McCartney Wins Gershwin Award

Singer Paul McCartney accepts the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song from President Obama in the East Room of the White House. Photo: Alex Brandon-AP
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And with echoes of “Yesterday” running through our ears we bring another Little Eddy blog to a close. We apologize if we offended any Israelis with our comments on the raid, no scrap that. We will apologize to Israel right after she apologizes for attempting a blockade of Gaza aimed at starving its citizens to punish them for electing Hamas. As long as Israel refuses to recognize its own role in electing and keeping Hamas in power, peace in the middle east remains entombed along with Yitzak Rabin. What a crying shame.

Anyway to return to a positive note, it was good to hear McCartney reliving his Beatles hits. How sad that the other major Beatle lost his life at an assassin’s hand. One can only dream of which might have been had Mark David Chapman had kept his sorry ass in Hawaii.

A medical note as we close. Saw my new Oncologist Friday, he plans to do another bone marrow in July. He was hopeful that I possibly don’t have cml (chronic myeloid leukemia), but of course that will depend on the results of the bone marrow. He reports that there are now three drugs used in the treatment, and although all are expensive, it is possible to obtain them through plans. We will see what we will see.

At any rate, we’ve played out our hand for this week. Join us again next week for more of this irrelevant irreverence. Meantime, bye bye, keep your guard up and your chin down.

The Real Little Eddy § eddybad@gmail.com

Blog # 143: A New King of Technology

2010-05-29T05:31:00.000-07:00

A Supersized World

Calories With Those Fries?

Stop the Presses! There is a brand new King of Technology! The New York Times reports:

New King of Technology: Apple Overtakes Microsoft By MIGUEL HELFT and ASHLEE VANCE Published: May 26, 2010

SAN FRANCISCO — Apple, the maker of iPods, iPhones and iPads, overtook Microsoft, the computer software giant, on Wednesday to become the world’s most valuable technology company.

In intraday trading shortly after 2:30 p.m., Apple shares rose 1.8 percent, which gave the company a value of $227.1 billion. Shares of Microsoft declined about 1 percent, giving the company a market capitalization of $226.3 billion.

Technology’s New King!

The only American company valued higher is Exxon Mobil, with a market capitalization of $282 billion.

This changing of the guard caps one of the most stunning turnarounds in business history, as Apple had been given up for dead only a decade earlier. But the rapidly rising value attached to Apple by investors also heralds a cultural shift: Consumer tastes have overtaken the needs of business as the leading force shaping technology.

Microsoft, with its Windows and Office software franchises, has dominated the relationship most people had with their computers for almost two decades and that was reflected in its stock market capitalization. But the click-clack of the keyboard has ceded ground to the swoosh of a finger across a smartphone’s touch-screen.

“It is the single most important turnaround that I have seen in Silicon Valley,” said Jim Breyer, a venture capitalist who has invested in some of the most successful technology companies.

”Microsoft depends more on maintaining the status quo, while Apple is in a constant battle to one-up itself and create something new,” said Peter A. Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook. “Apple is a bet on technology,” he said. “And Apple beating Microsoft is a very significant thing.”

“The battle has shifted from Microsoft against Apple to Apple against Google,” said Tim Bajarin, a technology analyst who has been following Apple since 1981. “Apple has a significant lead. But Google is going to be a powerful competitor.”

Apple and Microsoft initiated the personal computing revolution in the late 1970s, but Microsoft quickly outflanked Apple and grew to be one of the most profitable businesses ever created.

A little more than a decade ago, Apple, which had pushed out Mr. Jobs in 1985, was widely believed to be on the path to extinction. Michael S. Dell, the founder and chief executive of Dell computer, went so far as to suggest that Apple should shut down and return any money to shareholders. (The computer maker is now worth about a tenth of Apple.) Around the same time, Microsoft’s chief technology officer called Apple “already dead.”

But with the return of Mr. Jobs to Apple in 1996 — and an investment by Microsoft of $150 million — the company began a slow path to recovery. Apple’s rebirth began in earnest with the introduction of the iPod music players, and Mr. Jobs began to gain a reputation for anticipating what consumers want. The company elbowed aside Sony and came to dominate the music distribution business with the iTunes online music store.

It later upstaged Nokia, the dominant brand in mobile phones, by introducing the iPhone in 2007. And this year, Mr. Jobs shook things up again, with the introduction of the iPad, a tablet computer that has the potential to create a new category of computers and once again reshape the way people interact with their devices.

Mr. Jobs helped create “the best desktop computer, the best portable music device, the best smartphone and also now the best tablet,” said Steve Perlman, a serial entrepreneur who was an executive at both Apple and Microsoft and is now the chief executive of OnLive, an online gaming company.

Still, Microsoft is a hugely powerful and profitable company in the tech world. . . But Apple has the momentum. “Steve saw way early on, and way before Microsoft, that hardware and software needed to be married into something that did not require effort from the user,” said Scott G. McNealy, the co-founder and longtime chief executive of Sun Microsystems.
“Apple’s products are shrink-wrapped and ready to go. The full story may be found here! •

And as for Apple finally overtaking Microsoft in value, this is no surprise to those of us who are characterized by Microsofties world wide as Apple Fan Boys. In truth, we knew there was more value in an ounce of an Apple products as in a ton of Microsoft vapor ware. Microsoft seemed to require controlling the pc industry to flourish, and when it belatedly discovered the web and decided to try and extend its os domination to the world wide web, it killed Netscape by offering its web browser, Internet Explorer, for free (in Microsoft’s own words) to cut off Netscape’s air supply. Ultimately this brought the government’s antimonopoly forces down on it, which considered forcing the company’s breakup. And the European Union has fined Microsoft megabucks and forced it to offer competitor’s web browsers in the European Union sales.

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Word is the government is investigating Apple’s almost complete domination of the music business. However, when all is said and done I think they will find that Apple did nothing more to dominate the music player business than build a better player, and then work out a system for buying music that was only competitive with the sources of stealing music. If the iTunes store is easier to use than Amazon’s mp3 store, there is nothing anti-competitive about that.

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Anyone around here sentimental? The “I’m a P.C., I’m a Mac ads are finally history. But someone has cleverly strung pieces of each one together into one whole. Taking a cue from Steve Jobs famous line at Apple product introductions, it’s called, “One More Thing,” of course starring John Hodgeman and Justin Long. •

Mark Twain Autobiography Finally Coming

As we head into week number 143 of our blog, there are several headlines of interest. The 100th anniversary of the death of Mark Twain has passed, and to celebrate it the institution which houses his autobiography will begin its publication. Twain devoted the last ten years of his life to its writing, but directed that it be withheld from publication for 100 years from his death. The 100 aniversary of his death occurred on April 21st, and according to the publishers his long awaited autobiography will be released in 3 volumes, the first coming out this fall. The full story may be accessed here!

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Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain

And someone name Michael Jordon reports at BlackBook.com that:

Every year at the end of May, Mark Twain pushes aside the lid on his coffin, claws his way out of the fetid soil, and tries to anoint a new recipient of The Mark Twain Prize For American Humor, the prize granted to the funniest people in the world! This year, the deserving winner is Tina Fey, comedienne extraordinaire and my and every other comedy geek's future girlfriend if there is any justice in this world. Fey's career highlights include a nine year stint on Saturday Night Live, six Emmys and two Golden Globes for her TV series "30 Rock" (which she stars in, writes, and produces), and a successful movie career that's included such hits as Mean Girls and Date Night. Fey is only the third woman to win the award, after Whoopi Goldberg and Lily Tomlin won it in 2001 and 2003 respectively.

Tina Fey wins the 2010 Mark Twain Award

At 40, Fey is also the youngest person to ever receive the award— I’m going to assume it comes in the shape of a solid gold vibrating sex toy— which will be handed out on November 13 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. The ceremony will include “a night of humor featuring other comic stars.” Other comic stars? Count me in!

Previous winners of The Mark Twain Prize For American Humor include Richard Pryor, Steve Martin, and George Carlin. No word yet on whether Twain specifically requested Fey in his 100 year old diary that will finally be released this year, or if the marching orders are coming from zombie Twain. Either way, all the 30 Rock geeks should be pretty excited.

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Spectators in Phoenix hold signs protesting Arizona's controversial new immigration law during Telemundo's morning show broadcast of "Levántate," which featured an interview with Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon. Photo: Mark Henle-AP

With the uproar over Arizona’s new racial profiling immigration law resounding all over the nation, most people are forgetting one rather important fact. Although people of Mexican descent who were not born in Arizona are called illegal, the fact is that ten years after the successful Texas revolution in 1836, in its first action after Texas joined the union the United States dispatched its army and invaded Mexico, and after conquering the country, forced Mexico to cede not only Texas but all of Mexico’s territories west of Texas to the United States. From Wikipedia:

The Mexican–American War was an armed conflict between the United States and Mexico from 1846 to 1848 in the wake of the 1845 U.S. annexation of Texas, which Mexico considered part of its territory despite the 1836 Texas Revolution.

In addition to a naval blockade of the Mexican coast, American forces invaded and conquered New Mexico, California and parts of northern Mexico. Another American army captured Mexico City, forcing Mexico to agree to the sale of its northern territories to the U.S.

Territories which included New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and California, were paid for, but under terms under which Mexico was given no choice other than accept. Houston Federal Judge Woodrow Seals, who ruled that the State of Texas must educate the children of those in Texas illegally reflected this knowledge of the original ursurpation of Mexican lands in making his ruling.

Many of the nation’s “gringos,” English only white protestants, who would wish to pack “illegals” off to their country of origin and making them to go to the back of the line to apply for legal re-admittance, support this point of view making no mention of the way the United States wrested Texas and all states to its west from Mexico, all the while decrying totalitarian states which annex their neighbors territory by force.

Whatever form the solution of America’s illegal immigrant problem might finally take, somewhere within it should be an acknowledgment of the true origins of states like Arizona, and why Mexican nationals deserve special treatment in their quest for citizenship. And under no condition should racial profiling be used by law enforcement agencies to single out suspected illegals.

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A roseate spoonbill passes a gull over an island in the Barataria Bay on the Gulf Coast of Louisiana. The island is home to thousands of brown pelicans, egrets and roseate spoonbills, many of which are now stained by oil. Officials say that it might be impossible to clean the hundreds of miles of coastal wetlands and islands affected by the massive Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which continues gushing into the Gulf of Mexico. Photo: John Moore-Getty Images

And from out It’s About Damn Time! Department, the FDA announced that it is considering a product known as “viagra” for women. Rob Stein writing in the Washington Post reports:

A panel of federal advisers will soon wrestle with a question that has bedeviled poets, philosophers and generations of frustrated men: What do women want?

That enigma will be part of a Food and Drug Administration committee's deliberations next month when it considers endorsing the first pill designed to do for women what Viagra did for men: boost their sex lives. A German pharmaceutical giant wants to sell a drug with the decidedly unsexy name "flibanserin," which has shown prowess for sparking a woman's sexual desire by fiddling with her brain chemicals.

For the full story go here!

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Here We Go Again!

My appointment with my new oncologist is Friday, June 4 at 3:30. Here we go again.

Several years ago I was sent to a different oncologist, who did a bone marrow test and declared I had chronic myloid leukemia. He began a treatment which damn near killed me, it made me drive my car off the road, and got me so I couldn’t eat food.

I took myself off of that medication and enrolled in the VA hospital, where they did a bone marrow test which found I did not have c.m.l. and I breathed easier. Several years have gone by since then, but thanks to a recent blood test guess what? My white corpuscles are once again raging out of control. And so I have scheduled an appointment with yet another oncologist. Next week’s blog should have an update on that visit.

Meantime here is what I learned from my last experience with chronic myeloid leukemia. At that time there was only one drug which controlled the condition. It was called Gleevec and it’s monthly dose was priced back then at $3,000. At the time of my original diagnosis my son Joel, who is a licensed medical doctor and psychiatrist, got me enrolled in the Veteran’s Administration under the assumption that the V.A. would furnish Gleevec if required; although the V.A. does not list Gleevec as a drug it provides, it does point out occasional use of special drugs.

It was funny, after the recent diagnosis I said to myself, how could this be as I don’t seem to have any symptoms? Then it slowly sank in to me that I most certainly do have symptoms. For once thing I bruise and bleed easily, and am frequently covered with bruise like discolorations on my arms, bruises which I have no memory of getting.

And of course my newest symptom which consists of very intense naps, three a day following meals. And on some days even more. Worst thing is I usually sleep through the first three quarters of the NBA regional finals, waking up just in time to see the last quarter.

The Heart and Soul nebulae is displayed in this infrared mosaic from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. The image covers an area of the sky in the constellation Cassiopeia over 10 times as wide as the full moon and eight times as high. Located about 6,000 light-years from Earth, the Heart and Soul nebulae form a vast star-forming complex that makes up part of the Perseus spiral arm of our Milky Way galaxy. Photo: NASA-AP

And so as our space cruiser banks around the Heart and Soul Nebulae and heads on track for a return to the third planet from the sun, we find it’s time to once again take leave of our little blog.

We put up a new one every Saturday morning after breakfast, and it stays up the entire week, except for those rare occasions where we slip something in after the original post. We hope you’ll come back again next week, same URL, for our next edition. Meantime, bye now, be good, and if you can’t be good, have fun being bad. Bye, bye.

The Real Little Eddy § eddybad@gmail.com

Blog # 142: Tea Party Smoking, Not!

2010-05-22T05:25:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Arizona!

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Political Goulash

If you’re into politics chances are you had your eyes on several races last Tuesday. Pundits the tube over claimed explanations as to what it all meant, but the simple truth is, even the experts are confused. The only thing they mostly agree on is if the November elections were held today incumbents would be in deep trouble.

But even this is more than likely to change as November is still months away, and the electorate is as fluid as the ocean. Jobs will most likely be the big influence come November, plus the public’s approval or disapproval of health care reform and the new bill regulating the banking industry.

As for last Tuesday, the most interesting race was the Democratic Primary in Pennsylvania where recently switched Republican to Democrat Arlen Specter ran neck to neck with an ex-Navy retired admiral Joe Sestak. The Democrats in the region who had voted against Republican Specter for many years, continued their tradition Tuesday making Sestak the winner in spite of ringing Specter endorsements from Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendel and the entire Democratic hierarchy. So much for a president’s coattails and party influence.

The Republicans didn’t do a damn bit better, as GOP minority Senate leader, Mitch McConnell watched Tea Party endorsed Rand Paul defeat his hand-picked Senate candidate, Republican Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson. Dr. Paul, son of Texas Congressman and Libertarian darling Ron Paul, declared his victory a landmark defeat of the establishment and declared the new rising of the Tea Party. And he exposed the Tea Party’s real agenda as he initially expressed his desire to take back the civil rights act, Social Security, and Medicare, positions he quickly denied at political wags pointed out the implications of such stances in relation to the general election.

And so it went. A final surprise was Democrat candidate, Mark Critz, winning the remainder of the term of the Congressional seat held for many years by the late Jack Murtha. Republicans had held hope and poured money into the campaign because the district was one of the few in Pennsylvania which had voted for John McCain in 2008. But Critz was victorious in the end.

"The voters of this district won a great victory tonight. But it's ... bittersweet," Critz said in remarks prepared to address his supporters at a Johnstown victory party, "because we wouldn't be here right now if Jack Murtha hadn't left us too soon."

And Republicans desperately hoping to see a rising tide of backlash against President Obama and the Democrats, ended up seeing nothing of the kind. Tsk, tsk. §

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Giving BP its Due

A protester holds a sign behind BP America President Lamar McKay, who was testifying about the gulf oil spill before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Photo: Kevin Lamarque-Reuters

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Real Story of Gulf Leak

60 Minutes reclaimed much of its glory of old Sunday as it broadcast the true story of the disaster which killed the workers and kicked off the largest oil leak in the history of the planet.

The 60 Minutes testimony plus the New Orleans Time-Picayune story cited in the Daily Beast rundown below, casts gigantic suspicions on the way oil companies are regulated.

The famous Bush/Cheney Energy policy, determined by the oil industry itself in cahoots with vice-president Cheney, was developed in complete secrecy, and remains secret to this very day. The courts have refused to even release records of who Cheney met with, much less who came up with what.

This horrific spill is the result, and the disaster cries for some entity to reopen America’s offshore drilling rules and go over them with a fine tooth comb. Isn’t it interesting that Halliburton, Cheney’s former company, was one of the three entities involved in this mess, the other two being BP and Deepwater Horizon, which evidently owned the rig?

When all is said and done, and the last bit of tar and petroleum remains has finally disintegrated let us hope that future offshore oil contracts are dispensed under careful supervision, with the entities involved held strictly accountable. §

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A Beast of an Aggregator

One of our favorite sources of news is the Daily Beast, edited by the legendary Tina Brown. The Beast is primarily a news aggregator, although it also has a sterling roster of original contributors. It assembles its news in a way that is truly unlike other aggregators. It’s primary aggregation column is called the Cheat Sheet, which has brief summaries of other paper's stories, with a link to the original source at the bottom should you wish to pursue the matter further. We have picked out several items which appeared on Thursday and which piqued our interest.

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As if we needed any more evidence of BP’s culpability in the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster: The company expelled a safety crew from the Deepwater Horizon oil rig before it had a chance to perform a crucial test just hours before the rig actually exploded. BP never asked the crew to perform the so-called acoustic test, which a cementing company executive calls “the only test that can really determine the actual effectiveness” of the well’s seal. It is believed that the explosion was caused by failed cement seals, which were installed by Halliburton and which allowed for an explosive build-up of natural gas. Read it at the New Orleans Time-Pacayune! §

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Sister Margaret McBride – Defrocked

She’d have been better off molesting children, apparently: The Catholic Church, whose reluctance to punish pedophile priests is much publicized, has excommunicated a nun from Phoenix who allowed a woman under her care to receive a life-saving abortion. The woman, who was 11-weeks pregnant with her fifth child, had “right heart failure” and the odds of her dying if she continued the pregnancy were “close to 100 percent.”

So Sister Margaret McBride, the administrator of the Catholic hospital, allowed doctors to perform an abortion. The woman survived, but Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted excommunicated McBride for allowing the procedure.

“She consented in the murder of an unborn child,” says the medical-ethics director for the Diocese of Phoenix. McBride remains at the hospital in another position. Read it at NPR! §

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Wikileaks, the website which has gained a following for exposing secrets, is keeping plenty of its own. There's no address, phone number, or formal list of employees. But the site has become a leading destination for anonymous whistleblowers who want to expose government malfeasance or corruption.

Just last month, Wikileaks made headlines for releasing a U.S. military video of a helicopter attack on Iraqis. Secrecy is part of Wikileaks' strategy as it allows the site to continue without threat of government interference.

"The message of WikiLeaks to the controllers of information is this: You can either be transparent, or transparency will be brought to you," one of the site's directors told The Washington Post. Read it at the Washington Post! §

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This will either end greatly or horribly: American scientists announced on Thursday that they have created the “first synthetic living cell.” Dr. Craig Venter and a team of scientists created a synthetic genome that can be transplanted into a host cell; the cell then behaves according to what is “dictated” by the synthetic DNA.

Venter explained, "As soon as this new software goes into the cell, the cell reads [it] and converts into the species specified in that genetic code." Scientists hope that such cells will one day produce medicines and fuels and absorb greenhouse gases.

Some scientists worry though that the cells could be dangerous: "If you release new organisms into the environment, you can do more harm than good," said Dr. Helen Wallace of GeneWatch UK. "By releasing them into areas of pollution, you're releasing a new kind of pollution.” Read it at BBC! §

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Celebrities don’t always get off easy: TMZ reports that a judge has issued a bench warrant for Lindsay Lohan’s arrest after she skipped a court date on Thursday morning.

Lohan claims that she couldn’t fly back from France to make the date because her passport was stolen, though French police say she never reported a stolen passport.

A source at U.S. Customs and Border Protection says Lohan will be arrested when she returns to the country. Read it at TMZ!

Might we suggest Ms Lohan consider joining Roman Polanski in his Swiss chalet. Perhaps it could become a gathering place for all future American celebrity fugitives.

And isn’t it interesting how much more the Catholic Church hierarchy seems to value the unborn over the living? Or maybe it’s just women that they don’t value very highly. §

Women walk past a billboard for the film "Gulliver's Travels" in front of the Carlton Hotel during the 63rd Cannes Film Festival in France. Photo: Christian Hartmann-Reuters

”Me” and “We” – We are Both

Sick and Tired of “Balanced” News

After faithfully returning to CNN after the Democratic wins of 2006 and 2008, lately I have drifted away, to msnbc of all places. I didn’t think about it or try to justify it, I just did it. Once in awhile I’ll track back to Wolf’s Situation Room, and weekends I won’t go anywhere near msnbc because of those weird documentaries, so I’m back at CNN. But most all of every weekday is divided between msnbc, and in the evening whichever station is broadcasting an NBA game.

In writing this week’s blog I finally figured out why it is that I switched. I got sick and tired of the way CNN would dig up these tired dinosaurs of Republicanism every time a political story came up, just so their news would be balanced. Unconsciously, inwardly, I seemed to have made a decision; I no longer wanted my news to be “balanced,” I wanted it to offer a point of view.

And strangely enough, although the nerd in me has heretofore caused me to shy away from everything with ms (Microsoft) in its title, I finally put aside my prejudice and drank the coffee. And Morning Joe has since become my morning addiction, as has the Daily Rundown after Morning Joe, and Andrea Mitchell’s show which comes on in Houston at noon.

Don’t get me wrong, I think every side of every issue should get a full airing. I just don’t want the Republican and Conservative line dutifully shoved down my throat. Let Fox and Rush cover that side of things, enough of it will seep over so that I know what’s what without having that nonsense shoveled into my psyche.

However, when you boil down the two areas to their essence the truth of the matter is that most of us contain both points of view and flit from one side of the conflict to the other, because parties like Democrat and Republican and splinter groups like the Tea Party, are all expressions of one of the two sentiments we all carry within us, the “me” and the “we.”

The “me” side is ever looking out for Number One, and wants laws that tax and restrict the least. That selfish side of us is certainly and violently against a tax code being used to attempt to even the disparity between the rich and the poor. In other words, they are are against the income tax which taxes the rich at a higher rate than the middle classes and the poor.

Even the word tax is abhorrent to the “me” extremists, their favorite tax, if indeed there has to be one, is what they call a “value added” tax, that which the rest of us know as a sales tax. Since under this you only pay for what you use, the no-tax freaks feel this is the way to go, whereas the realists among us realize that this method of taxation would put a disproportionate high level of taxation on the poor and the middle class.

The problem with this system came to the forefront when under Bush/Cheney Republicans put through those tax cuts for the very rich, and followed that starting two major wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and on top of that, not willing to reengage a national draft which would have adequately staffed the military, had corporations take over the feeding, maintenance and security of the troops and diplomats at a cost considerably higher than if the chores had been handled by the military itself.

As if that was not enough they then passed what we’ll grant was a much needed prescription drug relief for seniors, but again without allotting funds to pay for it, and finally they belatedly cleaned up after Hurricane Katrina also without paying for it.

After coming into office with a Bill Clinton surplus, in eight years Bush/Cheney had more than doubled the national debt, and bowed out leaving the nation’s economy in a mess. And Republicans have fought every Obama attempt to clean up the nation’s fiscal mess, leaving intelligent people to realize that they are working not for our country’s success, but for it to fail. Rush Limbaugh, who proclaims himself a GOP leader, has said as much, making that plain and clear.

Those of us whose “we” side is dominant over the “me”, look at things somewhat differently. We realize that government is expensive and has to be paid for, but we think of our society as a community, one that needs to take care of those who are in need. And so we feel a method of taxation which has people pay as a percentage of their wealth is the only fair method. Our system of government should require that we put into the tax coffers a percentage of what we have gotten out of the government, with those taking more out putting a higher percentage in.

The other thing the “me” crowd can’t stand is regulations. These are the rules that businesses, banks and industry are required to play by that keep greed from driving our economy into the ditch. Republicans fight regulations tooth and nail, never mind that they aren’t capricious, but were inserted to correct a past imbalance or deficiency in our system which allowed a particular situation to happen. The Republicans will never admit this as they merrily go on their way trying to deregulate banking and business, but government is very necessary to oversee business to prevent it from taking advantage of its customers or abusing its wage earners. §

A pelican, looking like he’s in need of the First Lady’s Obesity program, crouches in an outdoor enclosure of the Hagenbeck zoo in Hamburg. Photo: Axel Heimken-AP

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Facebook’s Transparent Attempt to Own Us

I recently got an email from someone I don’t know inviting me to join Facebook so I could check out his photos and videos. I must admit, I have been very skeptical of Facebook for a number of reasons. I am emphatically against joining something everyone else has joined on general principle. Plus, Facebook seems to be ignoring its members privacy concerns by every now and then by opening more of their private data to ever widening groups. Also legitimate charges have been brought against Mark Zuckerberg, its founder, including the fact that he seems to secretly wants to rule the web.

The person trying to get me to join is named Sean McCarthy, who announces he has 46 friends, and who then says, “I set up a Facebook profile where I can post my pictures, videos and events and I want to add you as a friend so you can see it. First, you need to join Facebook! Once you join, you can also create your own profile.”

Then came an ad from something called Crosstown News, which I suppose is a Facebook app which then thanks me for joining Facebook and invites me to use its service.

The coup de grace lay below, where Mr. McCarthy listed some of his friends that I might know, and the list included both of my sons, Daniel and Joel, plus a friend of Daniel’s named Peter, and one of my ex-wife’s sisters, Christy.

Viola! It suddenly becomes clear why Facebook has had such explosive growth. Any normal person would certainly be moved by such a compelling invitation to immediately take a few simple steps to join the thing. Especially when joining is completely free and the invitation includes the names of relatives who have supposedly joined Facebook and are on this person’s list of friends.

But when I checked with Joel, he reported never having heard of the guy. In other words, somehow the guy had claimed a list of names of people who I might know, but at least in Joel’s case it was a lie. He had never heard of the guy. I didn’t bother checking with the others.

But it is also beginning to become apparent why the query “how do I – delete my Facebook account” which Google reports is now fifth on its “how do I” list, is so ranked. And each time Zuckerberg & Company pull yet another stunt indicating that once you join, it is THEY, not you, that own your data, yet another round of withdrawals begins. However, whether or not this will slow Facebook in its quest to obtain its stated goal of 500 million members by the end of this year is unknown.

Joel denying knowing Sean McCarthy throws an entirely different light on the subject. How that person got my name, and those of my sons and wife’s sister, I have no idea. I don’t even know if this is a real person, or a persona on Facebook’s staff paid to solicit new members. Joel, who has a MySpace page, and is leaning towards getting a Facebook page of his own, has a good reason for wanting one. In addition to his psychiatry, after he graduates late next month, he is also pursuing a singing career, as Joe Bad X, and he had the digital equivalents of three CD’s for people to buy, should they so desire.

And so Sean McCarthy, if you are a real person, and not a Facebook recruiter, email me again and explain yourself further, including how you came across my sons’ and wife’s sister’s name. It won’t entice me to join but it sure will clear up a lot of my questions. §

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Apple C.E.O. Steve Jobs with iPad

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Apple’s Not Intractable, Always

For all of you Apple detractors out there who love to harp on Steve Jobs’ intractability we have news for you. Aside from the fact that Jobs is the only CEO to reply directly to customer emails, even when they are from bloggers who live off stolen rumors, Apple, admittedly arbitrary on many issue, will change its mind. ABC News found that out when it reported on the story of a woman who had saved up her money to buy an iPad, only to find out the Apple store wouldn’t sell it to her. They only sell iPads with credit or debit cards. However after ABC news ran the story the Apple store relented, and not only reversed the rule, but hand delivered the lady’s iPad.

Three More iPad Stories

Three other Apple iPad stories floated up in the news on Friday morning. John Paczkowski reports in his All Things Digital column that Apple is selling more iPads than Macs here! Gregg Keizer in Computer World reports that iPad owners report satisfaction numbers in the “nose bleed” range says pollster, and predicts that 1 in 5 will buy an iPad. You can read it here! And finally, iPads all the rage in the halls of Congress, which you can read about here! §

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And so we hereby wind down this week’s Little Eddy blog. We keep ourselves out of mischief by spending much of our week by first gathering material, and then writing it up in html. And finally at breakfast time on Saturday mornings we upload the fruit of our week’s endeavors to Google Blogger.

In all likelihood this is what will happen all over again next week, and you can confirm this for yourself by coming back any time after Saturday (but before the following Saturday.) Meantime on occasions we slip things into our blog after our initial upload, as happened last week when on Sunday we added Bill Mayers take on getting Steve Jobs to run the country.

Anyway, enough is enough, if not way too much. Come back when you can. And until we meet again, bye bye, and watch what you wish for. §

The Real Little Eddy § eddybad@gmail.com
Blog # 142: Tea Party Smoking, Not!Blog # 142: Tea Party Smoking, Not!

Blog 141: Sticks, Stones, & Sandbags

2010-05-15T05:37:00.000-07:00

Sandbagging an Oil Slick

A National Guard helicopter drops sandbags to fill a breach in the beach just west of Grand Isle, La. Officials hope to protect the fragile marshland from an approaching oil slick. Photo: Ted Jackson-AP

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Like Father, Like Son?

In my guitar picking years I very much admired the finger picking styles of first Josh White, then as I got further into real folk music, the guitar styles of the likes of Libba Cotton, Mance Lipscomb, and most especially the intricate finger picking of Mississippi John Hurt.

It seemed to me their distinctive picking styles made the guitar a fuller, more complex and complete instrument, offering not only rhythmic chording for the song, but also a hypnotically compelling bass pattern, against which complex treble patterns are rendered.

Plus the styles led to more interaction between singer and guitar, as the instrument would frequently take over mid line from the singer, complimenting his mood, or laughing at him as he is crying out his pain.

Mississippi John Hurt first surfaced at about the same time as the Carter Family of country music fame, the late twenties and early thirties. Then many years went by before he again resurfaced, having been rediscovered living comfortably in the Mississippi town of Avalon, which he had sung about during his early recording years. He was rediscovered just in time for the great folk music revival of the mid-sixties. Like the others I mentioned above, Mississippi John Hurt was re-recorded in full fidelity and got to perform in several Folk Festivals, including the grand daddy of all folk festivals, the Newport Festival.

My son, Joel Alan Badeaux, who these days mixes psychiatry with equal helpings of music as Joe Bad X, has a new video out. It features one of one of Mississippi John Hurt’s finest songs, Payday. Joel, who was born months after Hurt’s death, didn’t have the privilege of overlapping his life with that of Hurt’s, but he has been a faithful student of Hurt’s unique guitar style, as is quite evident in the throbbing guitar bass pattern which meters his performance of Payday. Also, as with his inspiration, Joel frequently lets his guitar take over the singing for him.

In this day and age of the YouTube video, and the ease with which its data can be embedded onto our websites, we at the Little Eddy Blog take great pleasure in bringing you Joel’s latest video, his cover of Mississippi John Hurt’s Payday. As you who click on the arrow below are due to find out, Hurt’s groundbreaking guitar style is in good hands, or fingers, as it were.

What a world this is, where the tools for recording your own music are abundant and within the means of most anybody wishing to use them. Even video cameras are cheap, and tools for crafting YouTube videos and then uploading them, are easily within most anyone’s reach.

However, I should point out that although Joel’s first video, the Public Enemy cover, “You’re Gonna Get Yours” was completely self produced, his new one, Payday, was produced and realized by a professional videographer, leaving the important things, the music and the performance, to Joel. The video was directed by David C. Snyder and co-produced by David C. Snyder and Jess B. Rankin for Command Pictures and SLAMjamz Records.

As an ironic footnote to Joel’s story, he is scheduled to graduate his residency in June, and plans to practice Psychiatry in Arizona, which is probably an excellent decision, for after the Arizona governor signed the nation’s first law making racial profiling a way of life, and the rest of the nation begins to cut its ties and boycotts the state, the few people left are going to need a whopping amount of psychiatry. And a lament about Payday sounds like it just might be signaling a new way of life. Perhaps the singer can tote the governor back to her mama by next payday. §

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Bill Mayer FLASH – America Needs Jobs

FOR PRESIDENT!

While surfing for embed data that would take you to Joe Bad X 5’s site, we came across this delightful video by Bill Mayer, which we could not resist bringing you. This shows you why it sometimes pay to check out L. E.’s Blog more than once during the week.

Returning the Wild to the Wild

Charlie Pelizza and Sharon Taylor of the U.S.Fish and Wildlife Service return a black gannet to the Gulf of Mexico near Vero Beach, Fla. Photo: Rick Silva-AP

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President Obama’s Job Rating Okay With Us

There seems to be a roiling dissatisfaction on the part of a certain segment of the U.S. electorate over the job performance of President Barack Obama. Tea Party types seem to twisted their underwear over the present level of our taxes, even though thanks to Obama’s new tax roll back, we are currently paying taxes equal to the 1950’s. Tea Partyiers also seemed to have joined right wingers om lamenting the President’s foreign policy which tends to be apologetic for U. S. excesses during the Bush/Cheney years. Myself, I am happy that our president is apologizing for the many overreaches of Bush/Cheney, and is conducting a foreign policy which listens to others as well as dictates to them. It’s about damned time, as the saying goes.

One of the more influential things a president can do is to give the commencement address at one of our various institutions of higher learning. And who more capable inspiring the next generation of academics than that most unlikely victor of the 2008 elections, your president and ours, Barack Obama. However, Obama did attempt to steer today’s generation away from Apple’s iPhones, iPods, and iPads, and Microsoft’s XBoxes and Sony’s Play Stations, much to the horror of today’s technologically savy. The president admits not having the skills to properly work any of the above, this from the first President which would not allow himself to be separated from his Beloved Blackberry.

Below is Barack Obama’s commencement address to the graduating class at Hampton University. §

An Apple a Day . . .

The technology company which has made secrecy a Way of Life, formerly known as Apple computers, now simply Apple, Inc., has an entire industry of websites bringing rumors about its products to the web. And people do have lots of feelings about the company, and its partners. One of the most compelling come from would-be iPhone owners who cannot stand AT&T and hope for their carrier of choice, Verizon, making a deal with Apple.

The latest rumor spreader is gadget blog CrunchGear, one of whose writer’s, John Biggs, has written that an agency called Landor Associates “is working on an advertising campaign” for a Verizon upcoming iPhone release. According to CrunchGear Ladnor has been working on Verizon branding since 2007 and is, according to a tipster, now hard at work preparing for the iPhone HD launch. The Verizon team there is led by Brad Scott.

Is there a grain of truth in the rumor? That’s the beauty of the entire ecosystem that lives off of Apple. It really doesn’t seem to matter whether you get it right all, or even most of the time. Nobody’s keeping score. Just feed the rumor mill with regularity, preferably spreading rumors that people want to read, and some anonymous tipster will start feeding you rumors too. Or, even if they don’t, you can always say they are, and nobody’s going to call you on it.

As for the rumor of the iPhone coming to Verizon, who knows? Probably it will eventually, if and when AT&T’s exclusive contract runs out. Apple, whose dedication is to furnish as large a segment of the world’s population as possible with an iPhone, will certainly be amenable to broadening their distribution base once contractual obligations have run their course. As for CrunchGear’s prediction on the matter: “Because Landor focuses a bit more on branding – they, for example, created the dual-B logo for Blackberry – don’t expect TBWA, Apple’s current iPhone agency, to get pushed out when it comes to TV advertisements.”

”More important, however, this rumor very nearly confirms a Verizon launch of the iPhone at the end of the summer. More information as we get it.” TechCrunch §

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Two Eyes on the World

A boreal owl looks out from a tree hollow near Minsk, Belarus. Photo: Vasily Fedosenko-Reuters
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YouTube Quests Lead I-Know-Not-Where

Next up comes a story of a strange quest. Last week I came across a neat dance video featuring seven or so seven year olds. I made note of the embed data to include it on this week’s Little Eddy. But when I got around to calling it up, YouTube announced that it had gone private, and the embed data would no longer play. What was the problem? You’ve got me, it was as charming a dance video as I have seen of that age group. And I had even seen parts of it on the msnbc cable channel. But the video would no longer play for me.

As usual Google offered some other material, which I kept trying out until I ran into the video below. If you are a Conan O’Brien fan you will eat this video alive. Even if you are not Conan literate, but are merely an interested observer of the media, I think you will enjoy this video. It is sponsored by Google and YouTube, and offers the full visit by Conan to the Google campus during his exile from being funny.

To see the video in more of a relevant light I previewed it reading Lloyd Grove’s article in the Daily Beast on Saturday Night Live’s creator, Lorne Michaels. Of the O’Brien, Leno incident, Michaels’ reveals:

“The whole thing just makes me sad,” says Michaels, who was advising NBC/Universal Chief Executive Jeff Zucker through much of the unpleasantness. “The network was trying to make an orderly transition because of all the chaos of the Letterman-Leno thing, and they planned it five years in advance, and I don’t think Jay felt like he was ready to go. From what I gather, he got a big offer from ABC which would’ve been against Conan and Letterman. So everything made sense when the decision was made. The network did not want him coming against Conan. You know, there was no grand Machiavellian scheme. My experience with the network is that nothing is that well organized.”

He’s noncommittal about O’Brien’s decision to leave broadcast television for the cable network TBS. “I think the whole landscape will change again,” he says. “I think he’s opposite Jon Stewart, and I think that’s going to be an interesting battle to watch.”

Yet Michaels passionately defends NBC management. “Through the early days of SNL, through that last week of Conan, I can’t think of another corporate culture in which all of that could’ve happened,” he says. “I cannot imagine someone knocking the company the way Conan went after the people at NBC and everything else; I cannot imagine that at Disney. I definitely cannot imagine it at Fox. There has just been a level of creative freedom…I’ve worked there for most of my life, and things go wrong and occasionally things go right, but it has always been an incredibly, oddly tolerant culture—or else Saturday Night Live never would’ve been allowed on there.”

And here, for the amusement of brainy Google engineers, is Conan O’Brien’s side of the story:

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An Icon Passes

My tenure as managing editor of Sing Out! The Folksong Magazine was littered by the cover of issue after issue announcing the passing of yet another folk singer. Some of these were young, and were due to accidents or drug overdoses or an occasional suicide. Most were elderly songsters whose deaths qualified as being from natural causes. I was reminded of this while writing the introduction to my son Joel’s cover of Mississippi John Hurt’s Payday.

Unfortunately, deaths are not relegated to the folk music community. This past week saw the passing of Lena Horne, who with her beauty and her singing talent did more towards opening up the entertainment business to black people than just about anyone. I first ran into Ms Horne’s singing on the NBC program, the Chamber Music Society of Lower Basin Street. It was presented as a spoof of a classical music program drowning in self-seriousness. In addition to Ms. Horne, the program also introduced Dinah Shore to the world, and the music was played by the Dixieland stylings of Henry Levine and his band, and Paul Lavalle’s woodwind stylings.

Last week Lena Horne, who went on to make meaningful inroads to opening up movies to blacks, died at the age of 92, We feel the photo below captures the essence of her spirit as well as anything we’ve seen. Thank you, L. H., for passing our way and leaving us generous helpings of your talent along the way. You done good, and we will miss you.

The Incomparable Lena Horne Leaves Us

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Speaking of leaving, that magic time seems to have rolled around again. Time to turn in our word processor and video player, pack our digital bags and trot off into the sunset. I find it fun putting each week’s blog together, but this week’s was especially fun as I got to bring you my son Joel’s latest video. In my guitar picking days I slaved many an hour getting my fingers to run a bass pattern while improvising a treble line, and I am proud to note how conscientiously Joel has studied and disciplined himself to continue the Mississippi John Hurt tradition of guitar picking.

We post Saturday morning’s along with our breakfast, and it stays up all week so you can have continuous access to it. And simply by scrolling down you have access to the preceding four weeks posts. Plus all of our posts, since our blog’s inception, are available by date and title to the right of our blog.

We hope you can come back again next week. Meantime, hang in there, and everybody consider opening your hearts and pocketbooks and donate to our fund to furnish genuine iPhones, iPods and iPads to the children of the Gates’ and Ballmer families of Redmond, Wash. We know of not a single reason why the children from two of our nation’s wealthiest families should be deprived of knowing the feel and sound of real quality for one minute more. Bye now!

The Real Little Eddy § eddybad@gmail.com

Blog # 140: the World a Mess and a Half

2010-05-08T05:59:00.000-07:00

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Nesting birds including brown pelicans inhabit Louisiana's Breton Island, which has been surrounded with protective booms in an effort to save the fragile habitat from possible approaching oil from the spill at the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. Carol Guzy-The Washington Post

The World Is a Mess

So What Else is New?
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What an absolute mess the world is, if you look at it objectively. The first ever explosion at an oil drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico is dumping an unbelievable amount of oil into the Gulf of Mexico. This kind of accident, the first ever, exposed just how unprepared the oil industry really is in preparing to handle such a disaster. How could these offshore rigs not have some way to shut off the flow of oil in the case of a disaster, one can’t help but ask?

A chamber that will be used to help contain oil leaking from the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling platform is being readied at a construction site in Port Fourchon, La. Patrick Semansky-AP

The oil slick, getting larger by the minute, is slowly making its way landward. Good luck Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. And we in Texas thank the Good Lord for tides that hopefully will carry this mess to the east. §

So What Else is New II

Meantime as per usual Republicans are holding back on their support for Barack Obama’s Banking Reform Bill during the initial votes. They dare not side with Wall Street over Main Street, but they are giving a pretty good indication that they are not as yet ready to break with their God Given Right to Oppose Everything President Obama Chooses to Do.

If the Republican Party finds itself on most people’s irrelevant list, keep in mind that it will be their own fault. Without a doubt the nation’s indifference is well earned. §

So What Else is New III

53 hours and 20 minutes, now that has to be some kind of record. It was exactly 53/20 from when a street peddler in Times Square noticed smoke coming out of a parked Nissan Pathfinder, and reported it to a mounted policeman, that the perpetrator was removed from a flight out of the country and arrested.

While we’re about it, let’s give law enforcement credit for an exceptional job, exceptionally done. And speaking of drama, stopping perpetrator’s plane and requiring it to return so the FBI could remove the suspect was stretching the timing just about to the breaking point. However, you know what they say about the nick of time saving nine, or is it ninety, or nine thousand?

You would think all Americans would be impressed with the speed and efficiency of the police work required to identify, then find, and finally apprehend the guilty party.

But not our Republican friends. They are evidently unable to comment favorably on any investigation initiated under the Obama administration. And so they carp and nit-pick.

The man should have never been allowed on the airplane, never mind that the flight was stopped and the man was taken in custody.

And would somebody whose major language is English please explain to me the right wing’s hysterical opposition to reading a terrorist his Miranda rights. This comes up again every time a would-be terrorist is taken into custody, never mind that this policy originated with the Bush administration. There was no criticism of the policy when the Bushies were in charge, it was only after the Obama team continued the practice that Right Wing NutJobs have become obsessed. §

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Our Best Advice to Apple

Get a Life, and a Sense of Humor
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This week we come up with yet another example of Apple taking itself and its products way too seriously. According to the Wall Street Journal’s technology blog, Ellen Degeneris, comedian and talk show host extraordinaire, did a parody of an iPhone commercial on her show, and the next day the poor thing felt the need to apologize for it.

The ad shows Ms. Degeneres struggling to use her phone, mistakenly going to a mapping application when she tries to text. Later, when she attempts to type on the phone’s touch screen, she remarks, “My fingers are so much thicker than I remembered.”

The spoof must have touched a sore spot with Apple; for although the iPhone is a huge hit for the company, it has faced questions about its lack of a physical keyboard, which some heavy text users seem to prefer. Ms. Degeneres said Apple thought she made the iPhone look difficult to use. Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment or even confirmation that they had complained about the ad. But Ms Degeneres evidently felt the need to issue the following apology the very next day.

“I am sorry if I made it look like the iPhone is hard to use,” she said. “I love it. I love my iPad. I love my iPod .… I love IHOP. … So everybody at Apple — Steve Jobs, Mr. Macintosh — I apologize.”

You have absolutely nothing to be sorry about, Ms Degeneres. Your piece was very funny, among your best. These days Apple has a paranoid streak a mile wide and a mountain high. Pay no attention to them, one of these days they will wake up and smell the coffee, and perhaps even rejoin the human race. And a piece like yours will be instrumental in helping them get there. §

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Meet the World’s Most Expensive Painting

A visitor at Christie's eyes Picasso's "Nude, Green Leaves and Bust." It sold for $106.5 million, a record for a work of art. Photo: Ramin Talaie/bloomberg

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Nashville’s High Water Mark

High Water in Nashville. Truck cabs poke out of floodwaters in Nashville, Tennessee. The water was starting to ebb Tuesday after heavy weekend rain caused the Cumberland River, which winds through Nashville, to overflow its banks, flooding part of downtown and other areas across the city. Jeff Roberson-AP

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Camping Didn’t Come Easy

For some strange reason, my camp memories of this week don’t particularly concern the children I worked with. Rather they consist of a few of my memories of what really turned me on in addition to the children.

As I’ve said repeatedly, my favorite part of working in a children’s camp was in the sleep-over trips away from camp. I liked the climbs, the bike trips, the canoe trips, and the freedom of camping in the outdoors, washing up our kitchen utensils, and ourselves, in a rapidly flowing streams or brooks, and on cool nights sleeping snuggled like a cocoon in a sleeping bag, under the protective cover of a tarpaulin.

Camping didn’t come naturally to me, I had to work at it. My first problem was getting to sleep at night. Back in those days I was skinny, boney, and sleeping on an unbending section of terra firma was no easy task. But then I discovered the air mattress, thereby solving my comfort problem, while at the same time helping build my lung power, as in blowing up the bag. I’ll admit that a purist would take camping as it was, rather than collect gadgets which helped make camping cool. But that was not for me, I am an unabashed collector.

For me and many other counselors a high point for each Blueberry Cove summer consisted of driving down to L.L. Bean in Freeport, Maine, to check out the latest in camping gear, as well as getting a new piece of hiking footwear for the summer. L.L. Bean is a store that unconditionally backed up all of the products they sold.

As an example, for two years in a row I had bought a small alcohol stove which had proceeded to burn up on a trip. In each case L.L. Bean offered my money back or to replace the stoves, no questions asked. In each case I replaced the stove, as I found an alcohol stove excellent for heating the coffee water, etc. The quality of the merchandise sold in the store has made them into a nationally known mail order store, and their catalog is known throughout the country, if not the world.

Our particular corner of Maine, Tenants Harbor, had another particularly enjoyable experience not too far away. It was an ice cream parlor run by the Ames family. The front two rooms were parlors with tables upon which to rest your ice cream between bites.

The ice cream was made on the premises every day starting in the early morning. Several local teenage girls were hired for the summer, and under the direction of Louise Ames they milked the cows, picked the fruit and berries, mixed the ice cream, and loaded it in gallon containers in the large freezer. The same freezer also made jars of delicious clear ice, which seem to bring out the flavor of the ice cream. If you have never tasted ice cream made from freshly drawn milk, you have a real treat ahead of you, providing you can find an ice cream store which operates this way.

Ames Ice Cream was a treat for off duty counselors, and hardly a week would pass without one group or another making a visit. But we weren’t about to deprive the campers of this culinary delight, and usually at least once a summer on the return from a successful camping trip we would reward the campers by stopping by Ames Ice Cream to give them a treat.

Towards the end of my time there camp was buying enough ice cream to make a special meal’s dessert, although Ames did not have the facility in which to make ice cream for both their ice cream parlor and a relatively large facility like Blueberry Cove Camp. But for us they gave it a real try.

One of Maine’s really unique breeds were the lobstermen who spent long days taking their boats to their favorite fishing grounds and checking their traps. The lobstermen are our society's last true free wheelers, resembling not a little the cowboys of the mythical west of old. Many of the men came from many walks of life including the corporate world, but at some point each one threw off the wraps of civilization for the free wheeling life of the independent lobsterman. Their day was long, their life revolved around their boats and checking their traps, and selling their product. In case you’ve never had them Maine lobsters are crustaceans with a unique taste, and the meat is usually eaten after being dipped in pure melted butter.

An 8 year old camper named Pierra gingerly holds her lobster just before dunking it into a pot of boiling water. – photo by Ed Badeaux

The Maine lobster was really one of my favorite treats in the world of eating, and one of the more important treats for any summer’s eating experience was Lobster Feast, which camp managed to have once a summer no matter how expensive lobsters were that summer. Each camper was assigned his/her own lobster, which they could play with until the time came to dunk it into the pot of boiling water.

I don’t recall any children having a problem with dunking their lobster in boiling water. If a child was bothered it was explained that crustaceans were cold blooded and did not feel pain as did you and I. Most of the kids probably bought that line of reasoning, though the quivering of the lobster as it hit the boiling water didn’t do a thing to fortify the myth.

My favorite memories of camp other than trips, are wrapped around the all camp activities like the Lobster Feast mentioned above, and Feast Day, in which children were introduce to all kinds of exotic sea fare, like clams, mussels, periwinkles, etc. City children who would never stray far from hot dogs or spaghetti and meatballs, would get caught up in the mayhem of the moment, and try, and enjoy all kinds of dishes. Truly feast day was an ingenious idea which taught many children the delights of trying something new.

Another day for an all camp celebration was the Fourth of July. Fireworks is the traditional medium for celebrating the birthday of our country. But at Blueberry Cove we celebrated the occasion with a large bonfire. Since the bonfire was built below the tide line, the actual day of the celebration would depend on the tide.

Collecting the wood was an all morning experience. Groups were dispatched all over Hart’s Neck to gather up dead wood. This was trucked back to camp and gathered down on the beach. The bonfire itself was constructed by counselors experienced in bonfire making in the late afternoon, and it consisted of a large stack of wood eight to ten feet high.

After dinner at twilight the entire camp would assemble on the dock to watch lighting of the bonfire, which having been very cleverly built below the tide line, it meant that after the fire burned itself out, the outgoing tide would wash its remains out to sea, no human intervention necessary. Watching the flames was indeed an hypnotic experience. There is no denying the fascination that we humans of all ages have when staring into the face of a raging conflagration.

The 4th of July Bonfire

The entire Blueberry Cove Camp lines up on the dock to watch the annual BBC bonfire. – photo by Ed Badeaux

Little Eddy’s Health – Is No News Really Good?

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There’s nothing new by way of information on the state of my health. However, it was interesting, when the import of the doctor’s telling me my white blood count was way over the top, it suddenly dawned on me that although I had no identifiable symptons, all of a sudden that awful chronic cough of mine could probably be explained as an ongoing sympton, not to mention those inevitable intensive naps I’m forced to take after meals.

And since those naps just seem to get longer with each passing meal and day, I guess my system is practicing for the Big One, the one after which I won’t wake up.

My immediate goal is to gauge whether this new diabetes medication, glimepiride 2 mg. will bring down my blood sugar readings, or whether Dr. Troyan will have to increase the pill’s dosage. It hasn’t really been long enough to tell me anything, but it does seem to be having some effect.

My biggest problem, whereas gylburide needed to be taken a half hour before breakfast, glimepiride needs to be taken during the meal. This requires a marked change in my habit, unfortunately, and for the second day in a row I missed not only breakfast, but lunch too, and I ended up taking the pill along with dinner.

This morning it was back to breakfast, and hopefully I will get on top of this change. For some strange reason I seem to have a devil of a time getting used to any change in my regular routine.

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And so yet another edition of the Little Eddy Blog burns itself out. We enjoy ferreting out news, photos, videos and whatever, a concoction which we put together during the week, and which we upload to Google on Saturday mornings right after our breakfast.

You have a long standing invitation to join us again anytime next week for yet another edition. Meantime, keep a sharp eye out for misinformation laced with possible fraud. And take Tea Party and Republican claims with the gigantic grain of salt they so well deserve. Bye bye, take care.

The Real Little Eddy § eddybad@gmail.com
Blog # 140:Blog # 140:

Blog #139: Some "ifs and buts"

2010-05-01T06:55:00.000-07:00

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Say What?!!!

Claire McCaskill, Senator for Missouri, casts a jaundiced eye during testimony by executives for Goldman Sachs earlier this week. "You are the bookie. You are the house. You have less oversight and less regulation ... than a pit boss in Las Vegas," she said. Later, she added, "You think you're so smart. Any street gambler would never place a bet with a bookie or with the house with the record that is revealed in the documents that this committee has gathered."

Photo Melina Mara-The Washington Post

Why there’s no Flash on iPhone, iPad

It has been estimated that as much 75 % of the video available on the web uses a technology from Adobe Systems called Flash. Apple’s venerable C.E.O. Steve Jobs, has riled up much of the tech community by refusing to allow Adobe’s flash to work on iPhones and iPads. Finally, for the record he has stated his reasons for what seems on the surface like an arbitrary decision.

Reason one: Flash is proprietary, not open. While Adobe’s Flash products are widely available, this does not mean they are open, since they are controlled entirely by Adobe and available only from Adobe. By almost any definition, Flash is a closed system.

Second there’s the full web. Adobe has repeatedly said that Apple mobile devices cannot access “the full web” because 75% of video on the web is in Flash. What they don’t say is that almost all this video is also available in a more modern format, H.264, and viewable on iPhones, iPods and iPads.

YouTube, with an estimated 40% of the web’s video, shines in an app bundled on all Apple mobile devices, with the iPad offering perhaps the best YouTube discovery and viewing experience ever. Add to this video from Vimeo, Netflix, Facebook, ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, ESPN, NPR, Time, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, People, National Geographic, and many, many others. iPhone, iPod and iPad users aren’t missing much video.

Third, there’s reliability, security and performance. Symantec recently highlighted Flash for having one of the worst security records in 2009. We also know first hand that Flash is the number one reason Macs crash. In addition, Flash has not performed well on mobile devices. We have routinely asked Adobe to show us Flash performing well on a mobile device, any mobile device, for a few years now. We have never seen it. Adobe publicly said that Flash would ship on a smartphone in early 2009, then the second half of 2009, then the first half of 2010, and now they say the second half of 2010. We think it will eventually ship, but we’re glad we didn’t hold our breath. Who knows how it will perform?

Fourth, there’s battery life. To achieve long battery life when playing video, mobile devices must decode the video in hardware; decoding it in software uses too much power. Many of the chips used in modern mobile devices contain a decoder called H.264 – an industry standard that is used in every Blu-ray DVD player and has been adopted by Apple, Google (YouTube), Vimeo, Netflix and many other companies.

Although Flash has recently added support for H.264, the video on almost all Flash websites currently requires an older generation decoder that is not implemented in mobile chips and must be run in software. The difference is striking: on an iPhone, for example, H.264 videos play for up to 10 hours, while videos decoded in software play for less than 5 hours before the battery is fully drained.

When websites re-encode their videos using H.264, they can offer them without using Flash at all. They play perfectly in browsers like Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome without any plugins whatsoever, and look great on iPhones, iPods and iPads.

Fifth, there’s Touch. Flash was designed for PCs using mice, not for touch screens using fingers. For example, many Flash websites rely on “rollovers”, which pop up menus or other elements when the mouse arrow hovers over a specific spot. Apple’s revolutionary multi-touch interface doesn’t use a mouse, and there is no concept of a rollover. Most Flash websites will need to be rewritten to support touch-based devices. If developers need to rewrite their Flash websites, why not use modern technologies like HTML5, CSS and JavaScript?

And so the Jobs reasoning winds down. Although a lot of websites took exception to his reasons, none can truly challenge his reasons for banning Flash. If you are interested in the entirety of his points you can access his article by pointing your cursor and clicking here!

Although those with the technological expertise to question Jobs’ reasoning are few and far between, it is good that he put his thinking out in the open for all to peruse. And by stressing the issue of battery life, and the fact that software rendering which flash requires, shortens a device’s battery life by fifty percent over hardware rendering, is certainly something even non technological types should be able to understand.

However, Apple’s operations have of late more and more resembled those monstrous monopolies’ of yesteryear we knew and loved to hate, entities like Microsoft and IBM. It is no secret that today’s younger generation believes Comedy Central’s Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert more than they believe dyed-in-the-wool news organizations like those of CNN, NBC, and CBS.

It is because Stewart and Colbert will wade into areas where the big news boys fear to tread that has caught the attention of the young, and they will turn the spotlight of truth on the most sacred of industry taboos. Apple is growing “too big for its britches” as we used to say when I was a kid. And in it’s quest for secrecy and in its paranoia over real and imagined “leaks,” the mighty Apple is beginning to show many of the obnoxiousness of you know who.

The individuals who would speak to truth to Apple and Steve Jobs are few and far between. And so enter Jon Stewart shining a light on areas of tech where nary an ordinary mortal would fear to tread, all the while endeavoring to be non judgmental as he exhibits a love for Apple’s products. We now bring you Jon Stewart’s skewering of Steve Jobs and Apple, while in the end whispering could Apple send him one of those new phones with a camera in the front.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Appholes

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor

Tea Party

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A winged politician feeds a worm to a political constituent in Chicago. David Carson-AP

Also from the Huffington Post, world renowned scientist Stephen Hawking believes extraterrestrial life almost certainly exists – and humans should be extremely cautious about interacting with it.

"To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational," Hawking says in a new Discovery Channel series called Stephen Hawking's Universe. "The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like."

He suggests that aliens might simply raid Earth for its resources and then move on: "We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet. I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach."

He concludes that trying to make contact with alien races is "a little too risky". He said: "If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

Stephen W. Hawking

Although the voice narrating the Discovery Channel series is not his own computer generated voice, on one video, available here Hawking answers questions put to him in that voice. The first episode of Hawking’s new Discovery Channel series, Fear the Aliens, can be accessed here! §

A goat, distantly related to the Flying Wallendas, performs wire-walking with a monkey on its back at a zoo in Fuzhou, China. Photo Reuters

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I’ve got good news to report in regards to the I.R.S. request which I reported on last week, which had suggested I take the next step in the paying of my back taxes, which would begin with getting the proper 1099 forms for the year 2008.

I had the form for one of my income providers of that year, Wells Fargo Investments, but I needed forms from Social Security and The Hartford for my annuity to complete my needs. Well, as I laboriously documented in last week’s blog, I put in the calls on Tuesday, and I’m happy to report that 1099 forms from both entities arrived in Saturday’s mail.

(I guess Saturday mail deliveries will soon be a thing of the past since latest reports indicate that the Postal Service wants to do away with them.) Now all I need is for some entity to fill out the proper form and email it into the I.R.S. At least, as they say, the “Show is On the Road.” §

The Daily Beast Honors the Simpsons

Lisa Simpson Image: Fox Broadcasting Yes, the Simpsons are an astonishingly dysfunctional brood, but white sheep of the family, Lisa Simpson, has always remained a paragon of hard work and wholesome values. In the past two decades, her character has won a Genesis and Environmental Media Award for her environmentalist beliefs, including crusades against animal cruelty and support for vegetarianism. Bart and Homer may laugh at her goody-two-shoes persona, but the rest of us know she's right.

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The Mexican government is notably upset (as well it should be) about Arizona’s new law discriminating against undocumented Mexican workers which will allow police officers to ask for their documentation just on suspicion of their being illegal. As a result it has issued a travel notice warning Mexican citizens against travel through the U. S. state of Arizona. The law newly signed into law, for the first time will make racial profiling by police an approved, state sanctioned activity. And what in the past was usually a penalty of deportation accompanying being unmasked as an undocumented worker, under the new law suspects can be jailed for extended periods of time.

Hispanics are understandably upset over the bill, as are civil libertarians the country over, and they are suggesting such measures as putting in place a ban on travel to the state and economically boycotting it as punishment for the signing into law of the legislation. Perhaps if the state suffered economically Arizonians would think twice about enacting discriminating legislation in the future. §

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Arizona police wait in the weeds to challenge brown skin types with an accent, with the words, “What the hell do you think you’re doing here?!” Photo Alan Diaz-AP

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I.R.S. Forms Arrive

Trips to two doctors this week limited the time I had to prepare this week’s blog. One visit, to Surgical Eye Associates, who in 2002 replaced my cataract covered lenses with ones I can now see through. My eye exam went well, I had skipped last year altogether, but my readings were not that different from those of two years ago. Good news in that the old bogeyman diabetes has yet to rear it’s ugly head in my vision.

My visit with Dr. Barry Troyan, my internal medicine guy, did not turn out so well. My blood sugar readings have been high lately, which was the reason he had me come in. He wanted to give me a new prescription to lower my blood sugar readings. But more worrisome was my white blood cell count. He pointed out that it was way too high, as it had been several years ago when I was first diagnosed as having Chronic Myeloid Leukemia, a diagnosis I later found out from the V.A. oncologist was incorrect. And so I have sailed on through these years, happily writing my weekly blog, but doing little else. Now once again the threat of leukemia is rearing its white corpuscular head over my relatively peaceful horizon.

And what does the future hold for this soap opera which is my life? Who knows? In ten days I am to call back and report whether this new drug has brought down my blood sugar readings. So far it looks good, Friday’s reading of 184 dropped to 134 Saturday morning. He wants to see me in his office again in a month, at which time he will probably want to hook me up with yet another oncologist. At which time here we go again. But you know, it’s not so bad knowing that little bug that’s liable to do you in. It would be nice to be supplied with a script, perhaps with a time line. But since that’s not likely to happen, I get to savor the mystery. Perhaps our last mystery I’ll get to savor. §

A pack of riders manages to pass through a field without pushing up daisies during the first stage of the Tour de Romandie cycling race near Porrentruy, Switzerland. Photo Denis Balibouse-Reuters
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And so once again we’ve managed to fritter away another edition of the weakly Little Eddy Blog. Sorry we didn't get any camp memories in this week, the week’s doctor visits meant there was less time for preparation, which meant we added more photographs to fill the space. But we'll be back into camp next week for sure.

We do this little thing every week, writing, collecting photos, videos, etc., and we’ll be back at it next week providing our computer starts up, and our white corpuscles don’t start acting up. We hope you’ll find your way back just in case we stumble across something worth reading about or seeing. Meantime, bye now, don’t take any wooden tea party-ers. Tin ones would probably be alright, just no wooden ones.

The Real Little Eddy § eddybad@gmail.com

Blog # 138: Adventures in Slip-Sliding

2010-04-24T06:35:00.000-07:00

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U. of Colorado Smoke Out

April 20, 2010 A mass exhale of marijuana smoke at the University of Colorado campus was timed to 4:20 p.m. as about 12,000 people rallied for legalizing the drug's use. Photo: Mark Leffingwell-Reuters

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Letting Things Slip-Slide Away

Isn’t it wonderful how easily you can let things slide? Why it’s no trouble at all. I have an embarrassing confession to make. I am not the most organized person on my block. In fact I might well be the most disorganized, I can’t say that for sure since I have not gone house to house asking my neighbors if I’m the most disorganized, or if perchance they are.

However, if I’m not the most disorganized, well I’m right up there with the best of them. For instance, in the year 2009 I somehow managed to misplace my IRS 1099 forms for two of my three sources of income for the year 2008. And I managed to let week after week go by in 2009, putting off calling the Hartford which pays me my monthly annuity, and the US Social Security, which provides the basis of my income. I was writing my blog during each of those weeks, an endeavor which manages to fill my time nicely and which brings me a lot of satisfaction, but which unfortunately does nothing to advance my income.

And then suddenly, before you know it, it is 2010. In fact it is blushingly April 2010, to be precise, and I got a letter from the IRS reminding me that I did not file a tax return for the year 2008, which was due in April 15, 2009.

It was a surprisingly polite, almost respectful letter, this ode alerting me of my delinquency, and telling me “What Should You Do?” (1) Prepare your tax return. (2) Sign the return. (3) Attach your payment for any tax due, etc.

Now I must say the aura of politeness surrounding the letter was a complete shock. I am sure this is a reflection of the Obama administration, for I cannot imagine the Bush/Cheney IRS operating with much respect for a delinquent citizen who is also a pauper. Only if the citizen was extremely wealthy did I expect the delinquent to merit Bush/Cheney respect.

What did the extremely polite Obama IRS letter get them, you might well ask? Well, it got me off of my nearly dead rear end, and had me finally contacting those two sources of income that I was delinquent with, the Social Security Administration and the Hartford which pays me a monthly annuity.

Guess what? Every company these days seems to have an automated telephone system which requires you to answer a number of questions before the system will put you in touch with a breathing, thinking human being. And computers seem to have a helluva hard time understanding me as I attempted to answer its questions. I kept wanting to tell them, what do you mean, you didn’t understand me? I used to be a radio announcer, for heaven’s sake. My enunciation is second to none.

The Social Security computer had a particularly difficult time with my answers, and repeatedly after the second or third try it would say something to the tune of, “well, we’ll let that one pass, and go on to the next question.” There must have been at least ten questions in all and it took more than five minutes to wade through them all, however when I was finally put on line with a human being I was able to conduct my business in far less time than it had taken me to reach the person in the first place.

The Hartford’s computer asked far fewer questions, however it took two human beings before I was able to reach the person who could access my files and send me the required 1099 forms. For good measure I had both send me the 1099 forms for the year 2009 also, and I just might well surprise the IRS by getting my 09 tax form in before 2011 rolls around. At any rate by the time I was finished with both calls I was ready for a long, uninterrupted nap.

Not that this morning’s effort will produce immediate results. Both 1099’s will have to be mailed to me, taking between five to ten working days I’m told. After I receive them I will have to get my tax forms prepared. But at the very least I have set things in motion, and hopefully within a week or so I can begin taking the steps that the most polite IRS suggested I take.

And just between you and me, I don’t mind paying taxes to the Obama administration. They are conducting the government in a manor in which I think it should be conducted, courageously plunging ahead with health care reform, and with much needed banking regulation, as they do their best to tone down the wars and seek to use diplomacy, rather than threats of the use of force, in foreign affairs. Unfortunately though, much of the negativity of Bush/Cheney has not changed. Nevertheless I see a glimmer of hope for our government.§

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A Good Old-fashioned Pie Toss

Saint Martin's University student Jennifer Hatfield volunteers as a practice target before a group of professors participated in a pie toss to raise money for Haiti earthquake relief. The event at the Lacey, Wash., campus brought in $2,300 and was organized by the school's engineering department. Photo: Steve Bloom-AP

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Regulating Wall Street

Different song, regulate the financial industry so that Goldman Sachs cannot make millions off of fractured derivatives again. What happened to the regulations which were put in place after the Great Depression of the 1930’s, you might ask? Well, as a Senator in the 1990’s that former economics professor from Texas A&M college, Phil Gramm managed to deregulate many of them after which he took a cushy job with the world’s biggest bank, U.B.S. It happened during the post Reagan era when Republican’s were crooning anti regulation songs, and even though Bill Clinton was president, he reluctantly signed them into law, which he admits these days was a mistake.

What the Republicans’ won’t tell you is that all of those regulations which were so carefully put in place after the Great Depression, were what has kept us from sinking into another economic hole like that. Regulations are not arbitrary rules put into place to frustrate budding capitalism. Regulations were put into place to keep bankers honest, and to prevent another Great Depression.

And so, after the bruising near depression of 2008-9, the Obama Administration, having succeeding in covering the American populace with a thin and torn health care blanket, finally turns its attention to curbing what amounts to actual fraud in banking.

And what do you know? Mitch McConnell is singing the same old tune. He meets with the bankers of the world, those gentlemen who paid, and rewarded Gramm for getting rid of certain regulations which were keeping them on the straight and narrow, and then Mitch returns to Washington singing that lovely Republican aria which sings of a multi-keyed “NO.”

His excuse this time, the Obama bill would guarantee continued tax payer “bank bailouts.” Even though he knows this isn’t true, McConnell’s real talent is in his ability to keep saying this or some other wild misrepresentation over and over again until some out there begin to believe him.

Think about it. If the bill truly called for tax payer funded bank bailouts in perpetuity Wall Street’s elite couldn’t be happier, and would support the bill in an instant. The bill does provide for banks to be funded if they are on the edge of bankruptcy, but their help would come from a fund monetized by the banks’ themselves. That’s why they oppose the bill, and McConnell is attempting to feed off the disgust of the nation’s taxpayers by claiming the bill funds bank bailouts with taxpayer funds.

The lesson to be learned from all of this, take Mitch McConnell’s declarations with a gigantic grain of salt. Sea salt preferred, but any old salt will do.§

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Mary Tyler Moore

At this point I would like to take my hat off to one of the most valuable tools in television, that visual introduction featuring several scenes from the drama, whose job it is to immediately catapult you from your seat on the sofa into the story line of the television series.

These intros are generally taken for granted by the viewer, although they are well thought out by the show’s creators. For an effective introduction is necessary to transport the viewer into the context of the story line. When they are at their best they are able to deliver you into the story with a few typical images. Two of the very best that I remember from my television watching days come to mind, both from many years back.

One of the more effective ones was the introduction to the Mary Tyler Moore show which showed Mary (above), the single working girl, doing a series of things typical of single women of the time. Particularly memorable was the clip in which she was shown holding up a package of meat in a super market, making a face at its price and tossing it back, and the intro ended with the view of her holding her arm on high as she smiled her way into yet another episode. (See above.)

One of the more involved introductions was that prelude to M*A*S*H, the tv series based on the film, which in turn was based on a novel, of doctors and support personnel in a mobile army hospital during the Korean war. It was a very involved lead-in which opened with helicopters flying wounded into the area, and nurses and medical personnel rushing to receive the wounded on a nearby hillside, ending with the doctors bending over their patients. All to the tune of Johnny Mandell’s haunting, Suicide is Painless, being played instrumentally.

However visual intros are also necessary for talk show programs as well. Used to begin, transition segments, and end the program they take the place of a curtain’s opening and closing during a stage presentation. And one compelling visual is that of msnbc’s Morning Joe represented above.

The picture above is not of the actual visual, for in the real one the coffee cup is seen from above, as it is being lifted up and a ring of coffee drippings becomes the o in Morning Joe. But the picture above does give you the idea, as the o in Joe looks like the stain of a coffee cup. All in all, a clever way to transition from one segment to another, and quite addicting since an overwhelming majority of their listeners are doing the same thing while they watch morning Joe while drinking their morning joe.§

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Celtic’s Paul Pierce Into the Game

Boston Celtics forward Paul Pierce celebrates as his team pulls ahead of the Miami Heat during the third quarter. The Celtics won in Boston, 106-77, to take a two-game lead in the first round of the NBA playoff series. Photo Charles Krupa-AP

Life is Barren

Without a Team in the Playoffs
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Well, the Rockets’ season is over. There are NBA playoffs all over cable this week, but the Rockets didn’t make the cut. They had a reasonably good season, with spurts of being really effective matched with occasional lapses of them just being there. However a brief spell which saw almost the entire starting team benched due to injuries for several games, is what really put them out of the playoffs. Ironically, if they had been in the East with their record they would have made the playoffs.

Aaron Brooks, NBA’s Most Improved Player

The team is well-poised for next year, however, with some players filling their positions very well. Aaron Brooks, the young point guard that general manager Darrell Morey relied on when he traded Rafer Alston, has more than delivered and will probably be an all star next year. As it is he won Most Improved Player of the Year Award after the season was over. And new shooting guard Kevin Martin joined Brooks in averaging 20 points per game. And there for every game was Argentinian Luis Scola who also averaged 19 points a game, come what may, and in one game he managed 44. Essential for defensive purposes were Shane Battier and Chuck Hayes, although when Yao Ming comes back next year Hayes will undoubtedly go back to coming off the bench.

And the Rockets’ bench has been particularly strong this year. Kyle Lowry came in to turn many a game around with his brilliant play. And Chase Budinger, and his recently added buddy from Arizona, Jordon Hill made positive additions coming off the bench.

But what I can’t understand is how we can get so attached to our professional sports teams, where players are bought and sold much like slaves used to be in earlier times or cattle these days. I admit I can’t explain it, but it is absolutely true.

In an earlier age when I was living in New York at the University Settlement House at Rivington and Eldridge Streets, I once knew a young man of Russian Jewish ancestry who was a dyed in the wool communist. He could talk for hours about the corruption of the capitalist system, and how it enslaved the working class. But simultaneously he was a completely unmitigated New York Yankees baseball fan. In spite of the way baseball teams, and particularly the Yankees bought and sold players like cattle, he actually came to life when discussing the nation’s favorite pastime.

I picked up my Rockets’ addiction one year when the Rockets were going to the finals and my son Joel was going to Europe for a summer to travel and see the sights. I told him I would watch the playoffs for him, and let him know how the Rockets did. It was the first time I had ever followed a sports team on television, and I hate to say it, but even though the Rockets lost that finals to Larry Bird and the Boston Celtics, after a few short weeks I had become hopelessly addicted, and have remained so ever since.

What is strange about this addiction is how closely your own spirit can be affected by the teams’ ups and downs. After a really bad loss your mood is dark indeed, and people who know you had best avoid you. On the other hand, after a solid win, especially over a team which was much better than the Rockets and which the Rockets should have lost, your spirits are very high, and basically you would have thought that you were on the team the way you celebrate the victory.

And so the playoffs press on, although having no dog in the hunt means my interest is strictly academic. And for us Rocket fans, it is dreams, not about what might have been this year, but what might be for next season that gets us by. General manager Darrell Morey is the man who puts the team together. Yao Ming should be back, and hopefully be well for the season. And new players, Trevor Ariza and Kevin Martin, plus future all star point guard Aaron Brooks should make for a high scoring team which should be able to easily make the playoffs as is. But will Morey be able to snag a major free agent like Chris Bosh over the summer? Such an addition would once again make the Rockets championship contenders.§

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99 Year Old Loves Her iPad

A 99-year-old Lake Oswego woman stars in a YouTube video that's gone viral. — Virginia Campbell sits on a sofa in her apartment in Mary's Woods Retirement Community. — She is so captivated by her new toy she never even looks up at the camera.§

Mt. Katahdin – Teen Camp’s Ultimate Trip

This week as I turn back to my memories of children’s camps I want to describe what was the crowning trip of the Blueberry Cove Teen Camp season, the hike along twenty-five miles of the Appalachian Trail in Maine’s Baxter State Park ending with a climb up Mt. Katahdin, Maine’s tallest mountain.

As seen below, from a distance Mt. Katahdin is a very impressive sight. But seeing it head on gives little indication of it unique properties. For from the south it slopes up at a fairly normal angle, but from the north side it slopes at a stark angle, its backside having been shaved off eons ago by some ice age glacier.

Mt. Katahdin from a distance

Our Katahdin trip actually began with a twenty-five mile hike down the Appalachian Trail. From the National Park Service comes this description: the Appalachian Trail is a 2,175-mile long public footpath. Conceived in 1921 and completed in 1937, private citizens built the trail and thousands each year volunteer to maintain its footprint.

From Maine’s Mount Katahdin to Georgia’s Springer Mountain, this footpath traverses scenic, wooded, pastoral, wild and culturally resonant lands through 14 of the eastern United States. There is a spritely YouTube video celebrating one hiker’s walk of the entire trail. Clicking on the arrow below will bring you the video.

Of course to traverse the entire trail would take many, many months and would be completely impractical from a camp’s point of view. But we thought that taking the campers along a twenty-five mile long section of the trail would give them a useful introduction to following a trail’s blazes, as well as make a nice prelude to the climb itself.

Our group was split into two parts for the trail walking part of the trip. Half of our group was ferried across a lake by boat, so they could walk away from the trail’s end. Two days later they would cross paths will the rest of our group, which would be walking towards the trail’s end. This group would end up at the lake the other group left from, and arrangements had been made for them to be picked up by the very boat that left our other group on the trail side of the lake.

Meanwhile when they reached the truck, the group walking away from the mountain would load up and be driven to the point where the boat would deliver the rest of our troop. Then it was motoring on to the campground, where we would set up our camp and have a nice, hot meal and a good night’s rest. The following day we would make the climb, which we would do altogether as one group.

The first part of the climb was in woods which was shaded, breezy and made for comfortable climbing. But the views were few and far between. Occasionally we would come across a small clearing with a view which offered a good place for a short rest. Below the tree line but demanding attention was a waterfall which you encounter as you climb the Cathedral Trail. But soon we were past the tree line and the spectacular views began.

A waterfall as seen from the Cathedral trail up Mt. Katahdin

At this point there is something I ought to explain. I am afraid of heights. So what business have I climbing mountains, you might well ask? None, I would answer, except that the climb remains much more of a challenge when you make it with a major handicap like an inherent fear of heights.

However, on my first Katahdin trip, made with older campers from the children’s camp, we climbed the mountain but avoided coming down by way of what is called the Knife’s Edge, a trail which is from four to six feet wide, but with sharp drop offs either side.

On that trip I talked to a park ranger about the knife’s edge, and he said it should be no problem for campers of most any age. So on the trips with Teen Camp we decided to take the Knife’s Edge down. And the ranger was right, if you look straight ahead and refrain from looking down on either side, the walk was a piece of cake, perfectly safe and easy. But it is a scary sight when look at it for the first time, and especially if you have an ingrown fear of heights.

The Knife’s Edge on Mt. Kathdin. An alternate trail down the mountain after experiencing the summit. Although it looks menacing from a distance, the trail itself is never less than four feet, and is usually at least six feet wide.

You find that the summit of any mountain, and particularly one as high as Katahdin, weather can be markedly different from what it was as you left for the climb up. On one of our trips I photographed the sign at the mountain’s summit as it was ringed with snow. And this was in late August. Large mountains have characteristically different weather than the surrounding countryside as large mountains have been known to make their own weather. In fact Park Rangers discourage mountain climbs after September unless the climbers are equipped with the proper cold weather gear as blizzards can come up with little or no warning.

The day of the climb is a long and physically taxing one, and we usually would only eat a light meal after coming down. An after dark soap off in a stream, and then it’s time to snuggle into our sleeping bags for a bit of R & R, rest and recuperation.

We would spend the morning after the climb at the Sliding Rock, a local phenomenon which consisted of a slide on a water smoothed rock over forty feet in length, the slope was at a 45º angle, and the slide ended up in a pool five to six feet deep. Usually the rock was deserted which meant we could spend the entire morning skinny dipping to our heart’s content, as time and time again we would each slide down what was one of nature’s true wonders.

On our last trip to the Sliding Rock evidently a bridge to the outside world had been replaced by Baxter State Park, and the place was filled with the local people spending the morning. They came armed with all of the accruements of today’s picnickers, barbecue grills smoking away, coolers stocked with beer, and boom boxes turned up loud. And what was worse, trash including many empty beer cans and bottles, littered the area.

Reluctantly we donned bathing suits and took a few slides down, but somehow the activity had lost much of its appeal. However, before we left our campers on their own initiative picked up much of the trash scattered around, trash which we deposited at a trash station next the park’s exit. We left the slide that day noticeably dejected by the locals’ cavalier treatment of what should be characterized as a true national treasure. What should have been a high point of the trip ended up as a real downer.

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And so another Little Eddy Blog spins out of control, and runs off of its rails. Our feet are still hurting after our climb of Katahdin, but at least we managed to stay on the knife’s edge, rather than slip, sliding our way into oblivion.

We’ll spend next week thinking, writing, and collecting, and come Saturday morning, Google willing, we’ll upload another blog. We hope you’ll join us any day next week. And until then, as the union movement used to counsel us, take it easy, but take it. Bye, bye.

The Real Little Eddy § eddybad@gmail.com