I'm Losing My Patience

With the intellectual laziness that abounds in America. The Big Picture Irony here is that in an age where we have more information available to us than at any other time in human history, we, as a nation, seem to think that we can absorb, by some kind of pop culture osmosis, everything we need to know about an event, an issue or a candidate by only reading headlines or only listening to sound bites.

Why do reporters even bother asking questions anymore? Rarely is an actual response to the question posited ever given; rather, the interviewee pounces on the first keyword they hear and proceed to paraphrase or, more often, regurgitate an oft rehearsed tangental self serving essay that digs about as deep as a spork would into permafrost.

John McCain should be ashamed of himself. He has traded the lives and memories of his fellow POW's, those who returned from Southeast Asia and especially those who did not, for a non-responsive and increasingly foolish sounding 'get out of interview free card'.

On The Tonight Show tonight, Jay Leno and McCain traded softballs and semi-updated takes on Henny Youngman's act in a pre-taped segment until Leno, the good little sychophant, told McCain that he'd give him $1,000,000 dollars if McCain could tell him how many houses he actually owns, to which McCain replied....wait for it when I was a POW for five years, I didn't have a home, I didn't have a kitchen table. Because that's the answer we were all hoping he'd give, right?

Just as Guiliani and Bush became incapable of uttering a statement in public that didn't include the words 'terrorism' and '9/11', so has McCain achieved the same level of moronic and malicious betrayal of the American public's respect for those who have served and sacrificed for their country, by now constructing each sentence, for which does not have a campaign worthy approved vomit point, with POW at it's core.

Here is an example of McCain directly sticking it to a fellow veteran while directly avoiding that dreaded Republican kryptonite--The Truth.



Please watch this entire video and ask yourself this: Why should McCain's former POW status matter to us, since it seems to mean so little him?

Oh Dear.

The idea of karaoke at a Hudson's doesn't seem quite as bad. Now...

Ruth Buzzi Would Be Proud

School's In

Today my beautiful, brilliant daughter enrolled in her new, public school out in God's Country.



It's one of her mother's alma mater's, kind of. Squirt is in 8th grade, but the junior high building there is the former high school building. She has a brand new, state of the art, ginormous high school to look forward to in a couple of years.

Her principal is an old classmate and friend of her mother, and I've already had to point out to her that his first name is Mister, not Dee.

She called me and gave me her list of classes: AP Literature and AP Language (natch), (regular) Math, Earth Science, American History, Life Skills (new millenium Home Ec) and P.E.

She chose the regular math as opposed to the AP Math because "it could be hard, Daddy!"

So...I gave her one of those talks with her...

Plus, she's going to find out that lockers, changing classes, a 10 point grading system (90-100, not 93-100), school dances and drug tests aren't the only differences between private and public school. She's going to be a bit ahead of her classmates. The teacher to student ration is good at the new school, but not nearly what she has been used to.

She'll be fine. She'll be the same kind of social hybrid anomoly that both her mother and I were in school. Her mom was the drop dead gorgeous, smart as a whip popular girl that everyone wanted to be near. I was everybody's favorite goofball genius who got along with everyone, from jocks to the socially off-the-radar 'freaks' (I was, and am, I suppose) a combination of all of them.

She's already made the cheerleading squad and qualified for a national award through summer cheer camp. So, she's starting off with a leg up than I did when we moved around with the wind thanks to the oil field back in the day.

I may discuss my transition to her move here soon. I'm still deep in the middle of a combination of stark denial and stark-raving freakout.

I'll keep you posted.

My Life As An Apartment

Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.

~ Leo Buscaglia