Zebra Mussels Save Detroit

"She can shift more gold than the king of Peru."
Worse Than Detroit – Robert Plant

Here is California we are in the midst of a gubernatorial campaign. Why it’s called a gubernatorial contest and not a governatorial one is something I may ask one of my English professor brothers some day. And since we’re on the subject, can I call the winner Goober instead of Governor?

One of the candidates is billionaire –billionairess?- Meg Whitman. Ms. Whitman is worth around 1.3 billion bucks and has spent, the last time I looked, $119 million on her campaign, but spending that much doesn’t make her any more qualified for the post, just like it doesn’t make her any less qualified. It just makes her someone who really, really, really wants the job. Personally, if I had enough money that I could spare $119 million, you would never see me. I would change my name to Awesome Powerman, get hair implants, and move to Samoa or AT&T Park. But Meg wants to be Goobernor and that is what this blog is about, kind of.

Today in the paper there is a quote from her where she compares the California city of Fresno to Detroit, Michigan. The quote, out of context, is, “Fresno looks like Detroit. It's awful." Now first of all, Fresno looks nothing like Detroit. Google “ruins of Detroit” and you’ll get photo after photo of elegant and majestic houses, office buildings, theaters, schools, factories, hotels, and concert halls that look as if after the last concert was played, the last guest checked out, the last move credits rolled, and the final student went home for the day, the doors were shut and everyone just walked away, never to come back . Fresno has nothing like that.

The closest thing Fresno has to those ruins is the Fresno Hotel. Built in 1923, the brick hotel is done in what is called the Beaux-Arts architecture style, and sits empty. That’s one building compared to bunches, and despite the French architectural pedigree, it is rather plain. At first I thought sure, Fresno ain’t no Bakersfield or Glendale when it comes to true beauty, but Detroit? Come on. I looked at Detroit online. Detroit sits next to Lake Erie, which I understand was so polluted at one time it caught fire. I figured okay, burning water is a bad thing, but then I read where a critter called the zebra mussel, which can filter water, was introduced to that lake and now it is a lot cleaner. So if Detroit is cleaning up her act, and water, why is being compared to her so bad?

Besides, Detroit is just next to Canada? It’s like being next to a foreign country. Fresno? Fresno is next to Clovis, which is like being next to a suburb of Fresno.

The Whitman talking heads have suggested that their candidate was speaking about Fresno’s economic woes and not her looks. But the beauty, or lack thereof, of Fresno or her unemployment rate is not the issue here as I see it. The issue is that none of the folks that are upset about the Goober hopeful’s comment, nor any of the gang that are shrugging it off have any problem with Ted Nugent’s hometown being held up as the standard for what a lousy city is like.

I’ve only met one person from Detroit in my life. He was in boot camp with me and if I’m remembering correctly, he finished first in our company and as such, had first choice from the list of available units for his first assignment. He chose a tugboat in Detroit. I was tenth and got Honolulu.

So from a Fresno boy to those who love the Motor City, please accept my most humble apology and let me say that I do not judge Detroit for her lost beauty. I do not filter the ugliness of any assemblage of buildings and streets through a Detroit filter before judgment. Let Detroit be Detroit in all her glory or condemnation and let Fresno be the same.

Signed Awesome Powerman, future king of Pago Pago.

Only Mostly Red

As he fell slowly into sleep, Pippin had a strange feeling: he and Gandalf were still as stone, seated upon the statue of a running horse, while the world rolled away beneath his feet with a great noise of wind.
-The Two Towers, J.R.R. Tolkien




I am a lousy driver, but unlike most of my fellow Americans, who are pretty much all lousy drivers, I know I’m a lousy driver and that makes me an excellent driver. At least that’s the way I see it.

You see, we are taught defensive driving; to look out for the other guy. But that’s only half the job. I do look out for the other guy but I also look out for yet another guy who while driving has little use for lane management and an attention span shorter than Michael Jackson’s restraint at a Cub Scout swim party. (Too soon?) This other guy I look out for is me. So I’m doing twice the work out there and I think that makes me a better driver. It certainly makes me a snobbish driver. Yes, I’m a lousy driver but I good at it.

I’m writing about driving because I think about it a lot, especially when I’m driving. I wonder why there is traffic. Why do we group together like packs of wandering, colliding dogs who weave back and forth from one dumpster to the next, from one odor to the next, instead of like school of fish who move in perfect synchronicity without so much as touching, just inches from one another? Why is it that on the highway we change from a smooth-as-silk flock of starlings into a mosh pit as soon as someone puts out an orange cone? And of course I wonder why is it that the last guy to see the red light turn green is the guy at the front of the line?

My commute is 22 miles. About 13%, just under 3 miles, of it is urban. The rest is rural. The urban part, the part with traffic lights, is on one road in a straight line. There are 14 traffic lights along this 13%. I can’t remember ever hitting two green ones in a row. I’d bet good money that I hit at least 10 of them red every day. I can get to work in 25 minutes, but 10 of those minutes are spent on lucky 13.

Then one day something changed. One morning I was rolling along, fully expecting to be brought to a halt at the first of my 14 intersections where a blackjack dealer traffic light would be dishing out reds, yellow, greens, and LED arrows like cards from the bottom of the deck. I expected to be sitting at the limit line of the crosswalk seeing red and seeing red. But when I got to the light it was only mostly red. What I mean is it was flashing red.

Suddenly the place that up until that moment had every morning been a noisy, helter-skelter, mishmash of steel and exhaust, brake lights and turn signals, and angry, frustrated drivers, had turned into quite, self-organized, self-governed crossroads. You stop first, you go first. What could be more democratic, more just plain fair than that? I waited my turn and then went.

I made my way to the next intersection refreshed and with a renewed faith in my fellow man. Then surprise number two reared up. The next light was flashing red too, and the next, and the next, and so on for eight lights. Gone were the malevolent traffic dictators, hanging over each junction like Wells’ Martian tripods, judging who will stop and who will go. Banished to a dull memory was the technology that enslaved us to the rule of the painted line and the clicking workings of the steel box on the corner that held the antiquated computer system. Released into the wild were the wolf packs. Erased were the short attention span exploiting mash of static reds, greens, and yellows that held prisoner those unlucky enough to be caught third, forth, or worse in line.

Every intersection had magically become a four way stop but the magic didn’t stop there. Through this same magic I became the sleepy 7-year-old in the third seat of my father's Bel Air station wagon, rolling through flashing red lights, as all lights became after midnight back then, coming home from the drive-in after seeing Ice Station Zebra.

Like a teen-aged virgin with his new license, alone behind the wheel for the first time, the world was open for me through my windshield and all possibilities presented themselves with abandon. I had no past as a motorists, only a future. The road became a faint, smooth black river without rapids or rocks, flowing out behind me.

The Taco Bells, McDonald’s, IHOPs, bus stops, and motorcycle shops blurred into a Monet’s Lilies pastel slurry of colors and streaks across my side windows. My grip on the wheel became loose and comfortable, like a batter just before he hits a solid single just over third base, allowing my knuckles to regain some of their color. I had reached the Zen of the commute. A place I only dared conjure up in my most fog-addled dreams. A place that has no place in the California Vehicle Code.

But alas, my Shangri La was gone on the return commute. The immortality it brings only lasting for a short while. When I got back to what now was the final 13% of my drive, all the lights had been “repaired” and everything was too large, too loud, and too much. Had anyone else seen what I had seen? Were the people locked in their “shiny metal boxes” all around me feeling as violated as I from having that all too brief glimpse of paradise stolen from them while they toiled away the work day?

The row of flashing reds has not returned. Whatever work was being done that necessitated their existence has most likely been completed. Now it’s back to a stressful commute that kills me a little every day. Now I am detained at nearly every intersection like I’m a traveler in a totalitarian regime where at any moment there might be a knocking on my window and a dark and shady man saying, “Papers please.” Now the radio seems to only play lousy Aerosmith elevator songs and the CD player only plays the soft beep that alerts me that it isn’t working.

Please bring back the flashing reds. Please return me to the mystical land of stress free driving and a surprise Jeff Beck song on the radio. Tear out the skulking traffic lights and replace them with zero-energy stop signs, not just on my 13% but around town, up and down the State, and across the country. Let us rule ourselves, for we have seen the promise land and it is Shaw Avenue from Fruit to Golden State.

Opium Den 2010

"Which is it to-day," Watson asked, "morphine or cocaine?"
Holmes raised his eyes languidly from the old black-letter volume which he had opened.
"It is cocaine," he said, "a seven-per-cent solution. Would you care to try it?"
-The Sign of the Four, Authur Conan Doyle




I woke up when the blood pressure monitor, which carries the heavy-lifting scientific name sphygmomanometer, started beeping in my right ear. You see, unlike the olden days when a person with the sphygo-whatever would listen to your pulse with a stethoscope and look at a dial to take your blood pressure, today’s sphygo-thingies are attached to a monitor, complete with battery backup, blinking lights, and of course an unpleasant beep to alert whomever needs to know that something is amiss. What was amiss was my elbow pinching the cuff of the sphygo-man-eater against the arm of my chair, rendering it unable to take a proper reading. So the machine beeps, the nurse troubleshoots the problem, and blood pressure is again taken and recorded.

Every eight weeks I go into the hospital for an infusion of a wonderful drug called Remicade. I say wonderful drug because I know it has eased the pain I was feeling from rheumatoid arthritis. I can tell that because I no longer wake up with my feet feeling like they were both broken, my hands feeling like I had splints on all my fingers, and my body generally feeling like I fell down a flight of cement stairs, carrying a box of broken and jagged bricks, and landed on Legos. (I tried to find a Lego opium den but couldn't. I'm thinking the carpet in this graphic looks a little Lego-ish).

During this treatment, which lasts about 4 hours, I usually read, watch a little daytime TV (gag), and snooze. This time the only chair available didn’t have a working TV so it was just snoozing and reading for me. I read a few chapters of my book and dozed; for two and a half hours. Had the Sphygo-lama-ding-dong not beeped I might have slept the entire four hours, or if the nurses didn’t need the chair even longer.

So I woke up, my book safely on the arm of the chair, and thankfully no drool on my collar. I looked around the room which consists of 10 chairs like mine arranged in a semicircle. Each chair was occupied and each occupant had an IV and a sphygo-you-know-what attached to them.

The book I’m reading is a novel about Isaac Newton and his assistant investigating a series of grisly murders in the late 1600’s. And aren’t the best murders grisly? They are basically filtered through a Holmes/Watson template where Newton figures out everything by noticing a red hair here or evidence of mercury poisoning there and I’m guessing solves the crime(s) somewhere near the end of the book.

I guess this comparison must have put Holmes’ London on my mind as I drifted off because looking around at my fellow Infusioneers when I woke up, it occured to me that there is a similarity between us lying down attached to medicine to make us feel better, and the patrons of opium dens that featured in Victorian England literature, if you take away the bright lights, the 21st century technology, and the general cleanliness of course. Those people went to those dens to feel better, maybe some of them even tried the drug to remove a little of the discomfort of the very condition which currently occupies my temple. Remember, opium was legal in the 19th century. I wonder what an opium den would look like if it were still legal. Probably a lot like an infusion center except the TVs would probably showing Fantasia on a loop.

As a side note, the infusion center is also the office for infectious disease. In the front office there is usually a person sitting behind the reception desk, ready to log you in. On days when there is no receptionists there is a phone provided with instructions to dial a specific extension to let them know you are there. I’ve used this phone probably four times before finally realizing that it is the same phone used by patients who are there for the infectious disease side of the office.

Ten Little...

Oh I wish I were...


When I roll into the parking lot at the hospital, and after I turn off my car, I don’t get out right away. What I do is place my hands on the wheel, not at ten and two like I’m supposed to do when I’m driving, but at eleven and one, closer together both geographically and chronologically I suppose. I put my palms against the wheel and point my fingers up like pickets made from pale little sausages. Then I lightly put my Oscar Myers together and see how they line up. I perform these little surprise inspections each time I visit my rheumatologist. Yes, I have a rheumatologist, as if it is the most natural thing there can be, like having an accountant or a barber. At some point after I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis I was given a pamphlet that explained some of the possible symptoms of living with this condition. The one that caught my attention was the deformity of the fingers, and I decided that it was the progress, or lack of progress, of this particular symptom that I would use as a watermark to determine how I was getting on and how well my treatments were working.

So I sit in my car outside his office and see which of my fingers have remained loyal and which finger’s loyalty has come into question.

Starting on my right hand with the pinky, I see that he is as straight and true as a wiener dog that spends his days patrolling under the kitchen table of a large, sloppy family. Next comes the ring finger, who looks fine until I get to the second knuckle, where he leans away from his neighbor finger as if it had knocked on his door and shoved a copy of The Watchtower at him; still not too bad. That neighbor finger, sometimes called the “driving finger”, seems pretty strait although it does look to be rolled slightly to toward the ring finger, maybe inquiring how the Watchtower pamphlet was working out. The index finger is rolled over even more toward the “driving finger” and it is bowed so it only touches it at the knuckle and the nail. There is some daylight between the two.

On my left hand the index finger is behaving pretty much like his twin on the right; rolled and bowed. The driving finger on the left hand looks wiener dog straight if that wiener dog were saddled-backed from being ridden too much, perhaps by a small monkey. And by the way, is there anything funnier than a monkey riding a dog? The ring finger is straighter than his doppelganger but underneath there is a bump over which my wedding ring use to slide. I had to take it off before it had to be cut off. The ring, not the bump. The pinky on the left has abandoned all dog-loyal pretense and juts away from his brothers as if I were getting ready to properly hold a cup of tea.

I’ve been inspecting the sausage brothers for a few years now and I think I can safely say that none have wandered too much further afield since I began. Although I don’t entirely trust the teacup pinky so I’m keeping an eye on him.

You may be wondering about my thumbs. Well my thumbs have been loyal little fireplugs since they were installed. They’re there every morning like little drill sergeants, providing an example to the rest of the regiment, and always ready to give movie reviews or catch me a free ride.

Just so you don’t think my finger inspections are all I use to chart the progress of my condition and its treatment my rheumatologist looks at blood tests and examines my fingers, hands, toes, feet, elbows, and knees, and he says I’m doing very well thank you.

But if the continued, albeit slow, drifting of my digits is inevitable I suppose I’ll figure a way to live with it. It reminds me of a story I heard while listening to baseball on the radio, probably during a rain delay. As the story goes there was this catcher who at the end of his career, and at the end of thousands of balls fouled off his hands and hundreds of base runners motoring around third, was never asked for directions, because by that time he couldn’t point just one way.

I was Only Gone for a Minute

I know God is supposed to see everything. I've heard how He sees the smallest sparrow fall and the insincere man fake piety. But what if He doesn’t? What if He checks in once in awhile just to see if the water is boiling or whether the toast has burned? What if He goes out to feed the meter right when I take His name in vain? What if He misses a sparrow falling and when He gets back, there it is, dead right in the middle of His living room? What if God is out for a minute, and a minute to Him might be a millennia to us? He could leave just as Pilot is washing his hands and come back this Tuesday. Think of all we’ve done since then; we've had two wars that were so big we had to call them World Wars, we killed of entire species of some of His animals, we’ve invented music videos, and we’ve dirtied His water and His air to the point where we have warnings when the air is too dangerous to breathe, and birds are washing up on His beaches wearing a suit of tar.

Have you ever seen The Odd Couple? Not the TV show but the movie with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon? There is a scene in that movie, and I believe the play, where Felix and Oscar are entertaining two women over at their apartment, most likely hoping to get laid. Everything is going fine when Oscar steps into the kitchen to make some drinks or something. While he is out of the room Felix starts pining for his ex-wife and his old life, and eventually starts crying. The two women start crying too. It’s at this point when Oscar bursts out of the kitchen and in the bandleader-at-the-nightclub voice says, “Is everybody happy.” He sees the three of them there, Niagara Falls spilling out onto the sofa, and he yells, “What the hell happened?”

What if that happens to God? What if he goes out into the kitchen to mix us up something really nice? “Here everybody, a brand new Tahiti,” or “I just made a new color! It’s kind of like blue and kind of like sparklers.” So he comes bursting out of the kitchen, just like Oscar, only instead of drinks he has a second Tahiti on his tray, and his tray is blue/sparkler colored, and He says, “Laissez les bons temps rouler.” He is expecting to see everything as he left it but instead his pet parrot is missing and we’ve got feathers on our lips, He is coughing because the air is toxic, and he slips on an oily harp seal and falls on His ass?

If I remember correctly, it was at this point in the movie that Oscar kicked Felix out.

Photoshop 'Till you Drop

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The Lord is my shepherd
He leadeth me in pastures green
He gave us this day
Our daily bread and gasoline.

-Mark Knopfler, Balony Again

If location, location, location is the mantra of the business and real estate world, then timing, timing, timing should probably serve the same purpose for the world of corporate damage control. Yes, you want a home in a nice neighborhood or a business where your target customers will find it, but you probably also want your good news, that comes after 85 unrelenting days of bad news, to come at a time when it can stand on its own, strong and tough, and perhaps just as importantly, unsullied.

Just when BP got a plug in the massive oil leak at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, when they finally got a finger in the dike, when for just a moment it looked like no more oil would be added to the country-sized turtle-killing glob that has already escaped, when the hero strode in and said, “everything is going to be okay,” another example of their corporate cut-and-paste mindset walked in and barfed on his shoes. Remember the Caribbean walrus they were worried about?

This weekend BP posted on their website a photo of workers diligently staring at 10 screens that monitor underwater images of the leaking oil well. Inasmuch as you and stare diligently. That image had been altered to show more workers than were actually in the room when the photo was taken, and images had been pasted on two screens that were blank in the original photo.

BP took down the image and said it was just a company photographer showing off his Photoshop skills, and that they were not trying to fool anyone. I hope they weren’t trying to fool anyone, because how could it matter? I don’t have the skill set to decide that there were too few technicians in that room or that too few monitors were lit. Who does? Hell, eight screens pointing at one spot on the ocean floor seems like overkill to me already. Look, I really believe there are people currently working for BP who are trying everything they can think of to stop this leak, and that it really bothers those same people that they haven’t been able to.

I also understand that oil, or our need for oil, is not going away any time soon. Aside from fueling our cars we need oil for a million other uses. Let's just try not too spill so much and have a plan for cleaning it up if we do.

I don’t believe, however, the line about the company photographer showing off is Photoshop skills any more than I believe people actually pay to watch Adam Sandler movies. If you take a look, not a long look either, at the photo it’s easy to see it has been altered, and altered poorly. If those skills allow you to get and keep a photographer job with BP, perhaps I should send them a resume because dude, your “Photoshop skills” suck. What I think is they have guys whose job it is to stomp out fires and it’s like the saying, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” So I guess when you’re a clueless corporate fire stomper-outer, you see fires everywhere, and you just start a-stompin’.

So BP, we’re all behind you on your efforts to stop the oil leaking and we don’t need “proof” that you’re working on it. But please stop pissing in our coffee and telling us it's cream.

The Dickens

"There must be something in books, things we can't imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't stay for nothing." — Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451



I always have a book with me. From the disappearing library, from the used book store, or borrowed. I read at home, during lunch at work, and defiantly at the doctor’s office. Yes I know that there are magazines that the doctor very generously lays out, but how anyone can read Golf Magazine is beyond my understanding. How much can continue to be written about golf anyway? They might as well publish Get Off The Sofa And Walk Into The Kitchen Magazine. I understand how to play golf; hit the ball with the club, walk a bit and hit it again, then hit it into the hole. You explain to me how to get from the living room to the kitchen once, twice tops, and I’ve got it down. I don’t need a magazine telling my how once a month.

I have a reoccurring appointment for a treatment that takes an average of four hours. Can you imagine being stuck in a chair for four hours with no book and only Golf, or worst yet CEO Magazine to read? Really, there was a copy of CEO magazine on the table in the waiting room of a doctor’s office I visited once. Really, there is a magazine named CEO. How many CEOs are out there, yearning for a magazine that would cater to their special needs? “Oh, did you see the article in CEO Magazine about how to pick which of your 10 garages to park your Mercedes Benz fleet ?”

But I digress, which probably should have been the name of this blog. I was talking about books. I read, mostly fiction, for entertainment. If a little knowledge seeps in, well that’s just a bonus. When choosing a book to read I usually use two criteria; has the author written something else I liked or is the idea interesting? That doesn’t exclude other ways of finding new books like recommendations and a cool looking cover.

When searching by author I may not always choose to read what I find, but I’ll look at books by Stephen King, Denise Lehane, Jasper Fforde (Thanks Ken), Dan Simmons and Philip Kerr, to name a few. I used to have Alistair MacLean, James Michener, Ray Bradbury, and Clive Cussler on this list but one of those guys doesn’t write any more, one has fallen into boilerplate plots, and two up and died. But just because someone has passed on or stopped writing doesn’t mean I’ll not read them anymore. After all, I’ve read Something Wicked This Way Comes about four times.

I'm not proud. I'll tell you straight up who I read. Dickens be damned, I'm going to read a Michael Crichton book.

When someone has an interesting idea, like Mr. Corley’s unusable bombs in my previous post, I can’t wait to see how the author works it out. Some interesting ideas that worked on me in the past; what if we absolutely needed to raise the Titanic (Cussler), what if everyone who had a cell phone suddenly turned into a semi-cannibalistic maniac (King), or what if a good man was forced to take on the identity of a known Nazi criminal in order to get the help he needed to escape from Germany in 1949? (Kerr). So there are many other authors I will read and sometimes the cover of a book gets me in the showroom, but it’s the story that gets me to buy the car.

The last two books I’ve read are Under the Dome by Stephen King and Poland by James Michener. Between the two it’s a total of about 1,500 pages, Stephen King’s book totaling over 1,000. But I like a thick, heavy book now and then. I meal if you will. I like the weight of it, the rough edges of the pages, and the how the corners of the cover get worn from its weight.

Mr. King’s book, although maybe his longest, was not his best. My sister once told me she doesn’t read Stephen King because she was tired of just when you began to care about a character, “snakes would come shooting out of their eyes” or something. I’d be okay with the snakes, but in this book they didn’t make an appearance. But snakes, or the lack of snakes, is not why I was disappointed in this book. I didn’t care too much for it, although I did finish it, because after all was said and done, and a lot was said in 1,00 pages, not much was done. Hopefully I won’t be spoiling this for anyone, at least I know I won’t be for my sister, but the hero of this book really doesn’t do anything.

Poland while long, but not nearly as long, was much more interesting. First off, James Michener doesn’t write short books. I gave up on Hawaii after the 400th page about the asshole missionary. Not that all missionaries are assholes but if you've read the book, you know who I'm talking about. I think I may have stopped reading 3 or 4 books in my life and I’m sure that if James Michener took phone messages for an afternoon, all of those scribbling on Post-It Notes would have been far superior to the other 2 or 3 books I abandoned. So I felt I owed Mr. Michener. So I picked up Poland and I loved it. How the Polish people’s ability to screw in light bulbs ever came into question is a mystery to me.

But while I love books, and with a couple of exceptions the longer the better, I find that many people around me, and I assume many people everywhere, seldom read. When I was at my long medical appointment with the 1,000 page Under the Dome, a block of wood really, a nurse said, “That’s a big book. How long does that take to read?” And when I was at another appointment with Poland, my doctor said pretty much the same thing. Neither asked me what the book was about nor if I was enjoying it. I felt a little sad for them. They see a large book, and probably any book, as a chore; something that has to be slogged through. I doubt either has read a book for the simple enjoyment in years. Maybe that fear of reading is where Scare the Dickens comes from. Well, I guess someone has to keep Golf Magazine in business.

Right now I’m reading Drood by Dan Simmons. It clocks in at just over 700 pages. I was sitting in the little patio area at lunch reading it and two different coworkers passed by, saw the book and said, “How long to read that?” Luckily for me, neither would most likely be reading CEO.