More Hypocrisy

Senate Majority leader, Harry Reid is a hypocrite.

He calls the people protesting against the socialistic healthcare bill as evil-mongers.

He said nothing, in the past, about all the protesters against the Iraq war, against G7, against anything that differed from his political point of view.

Here is the article:

Reid: Protesters are 'evil-mongers'

@ 1:19 pm by Eric Zimmermann

Town hall protesters are "evil-mongers," says Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.)

Reid coined the term in a speech to an energy conference in Las Vegas this week and repeated it in an interview with Politics Daily.

Such "evil-mongers" are using "lies, innuendo and rumor," to drown out rational debate, Reid said.

"It was an original with me," Reid said of the term. "I maybe could have been less descriptive," he said, adding that "I doubt you'll hear it from me again."

Nevertheless, Reid worked in the word one more time during the interview.

"I feel I haven't done anything to embarrass [my children]," Reid joked. "Except maybe call somebody an evil-monger."

Harry Reid is despicable.

Road User Study

The US Government, heretofore known as 'gummint' wants to tax you on the amount of miles you drive in the course of a year.

As the gummint has been pushing and pushing for more fuel efficient vehicles, ostensibly to solve that unproven bugaboo known as global warming, it has found its coffers depleted due to dwindling gasoline taxes. You see, people are spending less on a tank of gas when they switch from their 3/4-ton Ford pickup to a Honda Civic. It doesn't take as much fuel to fill up the smaller car, so fewer gallons equals less tax revenue for the tax-and-spend whores in the gummint.

So now, they are advertising a road user study on the radio with the promise to pay over $800 to each person who takes part in the study. For more information, go here: roaduserstudy.org.

They will install a computer - most likely a GPS system - onto the subject's car and then track how many miles the person drives in a given time period.

You shouldn't allow this to happen. Here's why.

When the gummint finally decides to tax you by the mile, they will most likely require that you have a tracking device installed on your vehicle. If they can track your mileage, they can also track where you go.

This should be especially loathsome to all those folks who complained about invasion of privacy with the Patriot Act. But somehow, I don't think we'll get any complaints from them.

I just don't.

Is it Me? Or is it Them?

Having been on poetry sites for most of about three years now, I have read a lot of verse written by armchair scrawlers, some of it good, some of it quite bad. It has gotten to the point, though, where it's all starting to read the same to me.

I'm not sure why this is. Maybe there's a certain homogenizing that takes place as everyone tries to describe how sad they feel from lost love in free verse. Maybe it's because the topics all seem to distill down to about five common themes with most everyone.

All I know is that my mind and eyes are tired from either trying to make sense of what's been written or trying to find some particular verse that really stirs something deep inside.

The odd thing about it all is there are so many people on these sites that continuously praise (with high praise, I must say) these same folks I am reading. It's as if they all see something I can't seem to see, or feel something I can't seem to feel. So it makes me wonder if I've just gotten a bit too jaded to be able to experience the same things they do when reading these pieces.

Is it all really that good? What am I missing?

You see, there is poetry that does to me what I described earlier. It touches something inside me, makes me think or experience it in ways that have a deeper meaning. Some examples I have pulled from poems include:

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean
Speaks, and in accents disconsolate answers the wail of the forest.

**************************
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

**************************
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

**************************
they speak whatever's on their mind
they do whatever's in their pants
the boys i mean are not refined
they shake the mountains when they dance

**************************
Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders;

Of course, these were written a long time ago by some well known names in the world of poetic literature. So I guess there's a good reason why they stand out. But you would think that with everyone being a poet these days, someone would rise above the ground-level clutter with something that soars free from the shackles of cliche, doggerel and just plain dull poetry.

Some have.

Blaze by Carol Brandt
Winter in Waiting by Emil Donatello
Nightscapes by Keith Bickerstaffe

These are a few that stand out in my mind. You won't find any of these people on the pages of any books on the shelves of Borders, but they have produced fine work. There are others as well, but they are too few and far between to remember.

Maybe that's the way it's always been. Only a small percentage of the whole will have any real merit.

If that's the case, then, once again, why are all these people being praised by others on the sites?

It's gotta be me. I guess I'm just too dense to "get it."

Yes, But Does it Rhyme?

One of the more irritating things about poetry review sites is the number of people who absolutely have to have perfect rhymes in the poems they review, if they rhyme at all. These people are ignoring a whole different aspect of rhyme that has been used by famous poets who write far better than they do. Here is some information that I copied from another website with regard to rhyme.

---

(From Wikipedia, but only because they have the most complete information that I've found on it)

The word "Rhyme" can be used in a specific and a general sense. In the specific sense, two words rhyme if their final stressed vowel and all following sounds are identical; two lines of poetry rhyme if their final strong positions are filled with rhyming words. A rhyme in the strict sense is also called a perfect rhyme. Examples are sight and flight, deign and gain, madness and sadness.

Perfect rhymes can be classified according to the number of syllables included in the rhyme

• masculine: a rhyme in which the stress is on the final syllable of the words. (rhyme, sublime)
• feminine: a rhyme in which the stress is on the penultimate (second from last) syllable of the words. (picky, tricky)
• dactylic: a rhyme in which the stress is on the antepenultimate (third from last) syllable ('cacophonies", "Aristophanes")

In the general sense, "rhyme" can refer to various kinds of phonetic similarity between words, and to the use of such similar-sounding words in organizing verse. Rhymes in this general sense are classified according to the degree and manner of the phonetic similarity:

• syllabic: a rhyme in which the last syllable of each word sounds the same but does not necessarily contain vowels. (cleaver, silver, or pitter, patter)
• imperfect: a rhyme between a stressed and an unstressed syllable. (wing, caring)
• semirhyme: a rhyme with an extra syllable on one word. (bend, ending)
• oblique (or slant/forced): a rhyme with an imperfect match in sound. (green, fiend; one, thumb)
• assonance: matching vowels. (shake, hate) Assonance is sometimes used to refer to slant rhymes.
• consonance: matching consonants. (rabies, robbers)
• half rhyme (or sprung rhyme): matching final consonants. (bent, ant)
• alliteration (or head rhyme): matching initial consonants. (short,ship)

It has already been remarked that in a perfect rhyme the last stressed vowel and all following sounds are identical in both words. If this identity of sound extends further to the left, the rhyme becomes more than perfect. An example of such a "super-rhyme" is the "identical rhyme", in which not only the vowels but also the onsets of the rhyming syllables are identical, as in gun and begun. Punning rhymes such are "bare" and "bear" are also identical rhymes. The rhyme may of course extend even further to the left than the last stressed vowel. If it extends all the way to the beginning of the line, so that we have two lines that sound identical, then it is called "holorhyme" ("For I scream/For ice cream").

The last type of rhyme is the sight (or eye), or similarity in spelling but not in sound, as with cough, bough, or love, move. These are not rhymes in the strict sense, but often were formerly. For example, "sea" and "grey" rhymed in the early eighteenth century, though now they would make at best an eye rhyme.

The preceding classification has been based on the nature of the rhyme; but we may also classify rhymes according to their position in the verse:

• tail rhyme (also called end rhyme or rime couée): a rhyme in the final syllable(s) of a verse (the most common kind)
• When a word at the end of the line rhymes with a word in the interior of the line, it is called an internal rhyme.
• Holorhyme has already been mentioned, by which not just two individual words, but two entire lines rhyme.

A rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhyming lines in a poem. Internal rhyme is rhyme which occurs within a single line of verse.

---

In the scope of the poetic word, there is a lot of room for play and nuance. I usually ignore those who insist that it has to be just one way, and one way only to be right. Once someone starts harping on rhyme in this manner, I see them as, oh, perhaps, less than competent with verse. And I really don' t want their opinion.

Rambling

Lakers are up 3 to 1 against the Magic in the championship series. When I heard that this morning on the radio sports news, I just said to myself, "I don't care if LA wins it." Back in the 80s, I would have hated to see the Lakers on top. But then again, the 70s and 80s Celtics were my team. I haven't really followed professional basketball since 1988.

Which got me thinking about Major League Baseball. I loved the Red Sox in the 70s. I like them now and feel somewhat disappointed when they don't make it all the way. But I'm not devastated. I don't know... I just have a hard time getting to wrapped up in fandom of any sports team these days. They are fun to watch now and then, fun to talk about. I just can't get to the level of worship of these overpaid game players that some people do, though.

It's unfortunate, but the skyrocketing payrolls of professional sports teams have made the sports inaccessible to me. I can't afford to take the family to Fenway Park to catch a game, though my son keeps bugging me to. Back in the 70s, a box seat went for $5. Even in the 80s when I was in college in the greater Boston area, seating was affordable. Now, they start at $125 - if you can get them.

We don't have cable TV, so we can't watch any of the games as almost all of them are broadcast on NESN. I tried a month of MLB-TV which is streamed over the internet, but all live Red Sox games are blacked out.

I don't mean to sound like I'm living in the past, but I miss those days when you could catch a game on network television or just go to the ticket counter at Fenway Park and buy tickets the day of the game.

Speaking of the past, whatever happened to curb feelers? You know, those springy metal things people clipped to their car bodies to warn them when they got to close to the curb when parking? I wonder how the curb feeler industry ended up going out of business - lack of interest?

I see Obama wants to drive this country into the ground with his seemingly popular brand of fascism. I think it's getting time to hunker in the bunker.

Later.

How Time Slips by Unnoticed

Been almost a month since the last entry. Too busy here, with work and other things - not a satisfying labor, but a kind of crazy work demanded by others.

No idea when the next blog entry will be.

Say What?

I used to think writing was a good thing - you know, a way to express some creativity. But now I wonder. It has stirred up some sort of pot which was bubbling away in the background. Or I think it has. Maybe that pot would have stirred on its own with the passage of time.

I am 48, going on 49. For the last three years, or so, I have experienced middle age. Some would call it a crisis. I wouldn't go that far, for there is no real danger of anything beyond losing my mind. An argument can be made that that happened a long time ago (yes, self-deprecating sarcasm, sorry about that).

Despite there being no danger, there has been a hammering realization that aging is a reality. That the past is the past, separate from us, yet still attached. The future is no comfort because we now actually get a feeling of what it may be like with the degradation of certain bodily functions. The present is no friend as we use that time to consider both the future and the past. Middle age is a vortex, a desperate grab to hold on to what was and a furtive attempt to avoid heading down the dreaded hill.

I thought writing would benefit my attempts to record the past, to somehow rebreathe life back into it. I don't want to live in the past; just simply experience it again from time to time. Unfortunately, it's left me frustrated more than anything. It seems that I can't capture any of it in a manner which is realistic and fulfilling. I've tried with poetry. I've tried with fiction. I get glimpses of it now and then, but the sum totality of it all is missing.

I keep thinking that I just need the right combination of words to act as a key to unlock the chambers that hold the essence of what I seek. The search for the right combination has been fruitless, though, to a large extent. Additionally, there seems to be an attention deficit disorder lurking in the shadows that robs me of my will to keep searching. It's as if I sense a futility in the trying. It's also as if the task seems so daunting that I just can't see the point of attempting it.

Maybe there's a spot of laziness as well.

Now, I look back over what I have written here, and I see the ADD has taken over again. This has missed the mark of what I was attempting to do, and I have lost that thread already.

Just a part of getting older, I guess.

New Email Scam

Received this email today. It is obviously a phishing scam, but oh, so clever.

Hello.

My name is Dennis Platt I am the representative of Internet Fidelity Bureau. We were based in 2001 and have a seven year experience fighting against internet criminals. The main aim of our activity is to help victims of a scam. If you`ve become a victim of internet scam, let us know immediately and we will help you to get your money back. If you or your friend have got scammed of a home based job, were a money mule, cashed out fake checks, transferred the funds overseas, sent parcels and were cheated or just suspect your company a fraud - let us know urgently! We will make our best to get your money back and solveyour doubts about your strange employer. We cooperate with the biggest National Safety agencies, fraud departments of Western Union and MoneyGram and internet providers from US,Africa and Europe.

Contact me today.

Regards,
Dennis Platt, IFB Team..

Given how poorly this email was written (I've made some corrections), it smacks of scam. Still, it's a clever approach.

Watch yourselves out there.

Manny Happy Returns (in 50 games)

So Manny Ramirez has tested positive for a banned substance, and Major League Baseball has suspended him for 50 games.

He stated that the drug was presribed for a medical condition. Unofficial reports are saying that the drug was Human Chorionic Gonadotropin (HCG).

Wikipedia has this to say about HCG:

Human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) is a glycoprotein hormone produced in pregnancy that is made by the developing embryo soon after conception and later by the syncytiotrophoblast (part of the placenta). Its role is to prevent the disintegration of the corpus luteum of the ovary and thereby maintain progesterone production that is critical for a pregnancy in humans. hCG may have additional functions; for instance, it is thought that hCG affects the immune tolerance of the pregnancy.

Assuming Manny isn't pregnant, then why would he take HCG, a female hormone?

I knew someone many years ago who had to take HCG. His testacles didn't descend, and he had to receive HCG injections, I believe, to stimulate the production of testosterone.

And there lies a possible clue. Steroid users apparently take HCG after going through the steroid cycle to restimulate the production of testosterone which is apparently suppressed by steroid usage.

There are people who have stated that HCG can have a performance-enhancing affect as it does increase testosterone production. But I have to wonder if Ramirez took steroids some time in 2008, for his numbers shot into the stratosphere during the second half of the season after being sent to the Dodgers.

I don't know that there is much anecdotal evidence for steroid usage beyond that and the HCG. However, it wouldn't surprise me at all if Manny thought he could get away with using steroids in this day and age.

There seems to be a serious disconnect between common sense and Manny Ramirez.

Of Trains and Other Things, Kindle Edition

Of Trains and Other Things, Kindle Edition,
is now available.

You can find it here: Amazon.com

Get yours now!

24 is 22 too much?

So, I've been watching the television show 24 this year for the first time from beginning to end.

Having watched the '18th hour' of the show last night, I have a few thoughts.

First, I have to say that the concept of the show is brilliant, and the writing ensures that each episode of the serial is filled with tension, action, and all sorts of twists and turns. It makes it difficult to quit watching the show because you have to see how the latest unforeseen twist plays out the following week. Kudos to the writers and actors for this effect.

On the other hand, I told my son last night that I just wanted to flip ahead to the end now and see how it all turns out. You see, as a 24-episode serial, it is really a movie marathon. And as movies are wrapped up in 2 to 3 hours, 24 feels overly long to me.

Earlier in ths season, it seemed that the episodes all had some sort of resolution that answered questions raised by the previous episode. That was good.

But lately, it seems like the resolutions have grown rather thin, and actually nonexistent, and I find I really don't want to continue to invest the time in the show.

I'm not sure if I'm tired of the show or what. It feels like it has been on too long now, and the amount of action that takes place in a 24 hour period is starting to seem silly.

I will, of course, watch it to its conclusion. After all, what would be the point of quitting now?

2 Wins, 4 Losses

OK, so it's only 6 games into a 162-game season. That's fewer than 5% of the games played. It is a marathon as opposed to a sprint....

However!

The Boston Red Sox have not looked good at the start of the 2009 season.

Beckett pitched really well in the opener, but didn't seem as sharp in his game against the Angels. Lester and Dice-K were nothing to brag about, both having a lapse of acumen during an inning which cost them the game.
Brad Penny was OK. Tim Wakefield was standard Wakefield - he kept his outing to three runs.

From the bullpen, Okajima is off to a rough start. Masterson, who was terrific last year, is showing some cracks. Papelbon had a 37-pitch outing the other day, loading up the bases, but managing to get out of it.

On the offensive side, Ellsbury is still doing his darndest to prove he shouldn't lead off. Pedroia has been cold at the plate. Big Papi has turned into Big Floppy, and I wonder if we'll ever see the Manny-era Ortiz. I tend to think not. I think he got a lot of protection from Manny and now pitchers aren't as concerned about him any more.

Youkilis has been THE bright spot. He's hot hitting right now. J Bay has included a couple home runs to the mix. Lowell and JD Drew have had some contact, and Varitek has surprised with a couple long balls of his own.

Lowrie is continuing his non-hitting streak from last year.

While it's too early to make pronouncements on this team, I have to say that when Plan A failed in the off-season (acquiring Texiera), one could conceivably say that there's reason to be concerned. It remains to be seen if Plan B (loading up on pitching) will carry the team in ways that offense was supposed to. But if the first six games are any indicator, it looks to be a long season.

Early prognostications - Red Sox end up third in their division.

Subject to change, if they change.