The American Pile

• My New Year’s Day Prayer is that during 2005 somebody will make Sandy Berger explain under oath what he was doing with all those classified documents stuffed in his socks and underwear. (January 1, 2005)
• And on the second day, my prayer is that Johnny Damon of the Boston Red Sox will get a bath, a shave, and a haircut during 2005. (January 2, 2005)
• Early January brought serious flood and ice storm damage to southern and central Indiana. The Indianapolis Star sent a reporter to Alexandria, where thousands of people and businesses were still without electricity four days after an ice storm tore down power lines and tree limbs. There were found people coping in the same determined, Quixotelike way people everywhere do. Among those interviewed was Mike May, who was found in his front yard with a chainsaw. May’s comment was a classic, revealing how men over millennia have connived not only to clean up the mess and rebuild, but to get away from their wives, their children, neighbors, enemies, pets, bosses and, indeed, from civilization: “It ain’t no big deal,” he chirped, of the huge mess to be cleaned up. “I’ll cut some, then go back to my garage and have a few beers. Then I’ll come back out and cut some more tomorrow.” (January 8, 2005)

Yeah, And It Has The Po-nential To Get Even Worse!

• The Fox Network’s January 8 morning chit-chat show, Fox and Friends, took up the topic of the Indian Ocean tsunami and its still-emerging toll. I was bearing down on my morning bowl of gruel and so missed the speaker’s identity, but I know it was a male voice which commented that the death toll and damage seemed to be going up “expotentially” as the days pass.

Last Minute Packing Tip: Don't Forget Those Extra Clips Of Ammo!

• Time to report one of the most heartwarming stories of our era. This comes from a correspondent, one Melvin Gohard, in remotest rural Washington State. Several years ago he purchased a personal computer from Gateway. Problems ensued: frozen screens, crashes, “fatal error” messages, invading pestilences.  Or, as a normal human being would put it: “The goddamn thing won’t work.” Gohard made numerous calls to the customer service people. Fixes, patches, downloads, adjustments, angry calls and letters, exorcism—no solution lasted. The company refused Melvin’s pleas to replace the product—by then, of course, its warranty had expired. Finally, one morning in his remote Rattlesnake Creek aerie, Gohard entered the room where the offending demon was housed, calmly unplugged the machine, carried it out to the bed of his pickup truck, and drove about a mile into deep wilderness, where no one could hear it scream.  He set the computer carefully on the stump of a fallen tree, wedged it in securely. His wife, Frigga, meanwhile, had hunkered nearby in a camouflaged bunker, and was filming the entire spectacle through heavy lenses. Then, from various combat positions and outfitted with heavy gloves and blast-proof goggles, Gohard blasted the vile thing with a shotgun, a high-powered rifle, and several pistols, including a .357 magnum and “King,” his giant Ruger .44 magnum 6-shot, double-action revolver. He fired until the barrels were dangerously hot, the ground carpeted with spent shell casings, the air acrid with gunsmoke, and all the ammo—over 65 rounds of it—gone. He put the blasted remains back in his truck, drove them home, packed them in a box, and shipped it to Gateway’s headquarters with a note saying the computer was being returned because it didn’t work.  At this writing he has had no reply. But Gohard is a supremely happy human being now. Supremely happy. He has won the universal fantasy lottery. He has lived the dream.  (January 10, 2005)

• William F. Buckley, Jr. has re-submitted an idea he first advanced around 1990 in his book, Gratitude: the concept of universal national service.  He brought it up in a January column in the context of whether it’s a theme the Democrats might adopt on their way out of their self-imposed wilderness. Simple, really:  everyone should give a year of service to his country. Buckley would make it voluntary, something every self-respecting citizen assumed as a civic duty.  Afraid he’s too idealistic. We live in an age of me, me, me.  Sacrifice is not on our personal radar.  Perhaps a future generation will go for it. I hope the Democrats don’t. It’s a no-brain winner for whoever picks up the banner.

Hoosier ‘Darwin’ Candidate!

• The State of Indiana has forwarded its own Daniel Wright to the 2005 Darwin Award Competition.  Wright, age 20, died February 10 from gunshot wounds incurred when he and three friends drove into the countryside near Hobart, Wright donned what he believed was a bullet-proof vest, and talked one of his cohorts into shooting him so he could experience “what a 20-gauge shotgun would do,” in the words of one of them.  But alas, the flak jacket was not designed to stop bullets and the blast proved fatal.  Hobart police said Wright had recently joined the military and wanted “some battlefield experience” beforehand. (February 13, 2005)

• Eugene White, superintendent of the Washington Township Schools in Marion County, Indiana, on February 10 called Mitch Daniels, the newly-elected Republican governor of Indiana, a liar.  White’s slur, in reference to the governor’s recent critical comments about the status of education in Hoosier schools, came in a meeting White had with Indianapolis Star reporters and editors, and so immediately was a front-page story. The ensuing heat was sufficient for the township school board to call an emergency meeting with White. Following an hour-and-a-half closed-door meeting, White and board emerged and White, who is black, issued a public apology to Daniels and to the district’s students, saying that he wouldn’t allow the youngsters to engage in personal attacks and so should hold himself to a similar standard.  Fair enough.  Many will doubt, however, that had the races been reversed, the white guy would have been let off so easily.  Jimmy The Greek, to cite one example, certainly wasn’t. The left would have been screaming bloody murder and demanding a resignation.  They were utterly silent this time. (February 13, 2005)

• The parade of notable nicknames continues in the central Indiana press: Darrell “Beanie Man” Graham, James L. “Pluke” Dalton, Jack C. “Duby” Dubow, James A. “Birdeye” Murrell, Junior Dallas “Squirt” Etchison, Donald “Bird” Strange, Anthony F. “T-Bone” Klee, Jacquetta “Heavy” Woods, Loletha “Big Mamma” Kilcrease, Andy “Uncle Dude” Spaeth, Jeffrey “Goob” Woessner, Daniel “Zippy” Kelly, Patricia June “Punky Dink” Ratts, Raymond “Hawkeye” Bannon, Jr., Kevin "Junebug" Reed, Jr., Carolyn Ann "Bitty" Barnes Johnson, Clyde Lee "Bootie" Brownen, Doyle S. "Dog" Disser, Reginald "Bumpkin" Jordan, Sr., Blanche "The Queen" Beasley, Donald "Grey Fox" Courtney, Jr., Lawrence "Big Baby" Hurley, Lloyd "Lobo" Duncan, and Salvatore Bumps" Rene.

Things For Which I Can Never Atone Department

• In the late 1960s I worked part-time at a small central Indiana daily newspaper, the Vile Gorge Meddler, while completing a college degree. I put out the Saturday morning sports page. Reporters would leave their overnight stories on a spike. I’d read the wire copy early in the morning, write headlines, and do short re-writes from a copy of a nearby rival newspaper, The Dorktown Ledger. The rewrites always mentioned the names of the game’s stars and top scorers. Occasionally, however, the Ledger’s story would not include a player’s first name. I began making them up.  Soon, I began changing the first names of the athletes from schools and towns at the nether regions of the Meddler’s circulation area, reasoning that those alterations would be less likely to be spotted by friends, family, or acquaintances of the youngsters. Readers—presuming there were any—were thus treated Saturday after Saturday for a year or so, to a dizzying, lunatic litany of unusual first names. Thus it was that teen-age prepsters, cagers, gridders,  flyhawks, portsiders, netters, linksmen, southpaws, hoopsters, and the like—we were running an insiders’ hackneyed cliché contest, too--came to grace the Meddler’s pages with names like Thor, Attila, Khubla, Genghis,  Milo, Jim Bob, Joe Don, Wiley, Felix, Kermit, Lamar Gene, Jim Jack, Jomo, Bubba, Menno, Raul, Judah Ben, Rollo, Frigga, Lemuel, Lonzo, Gordo, Levi, Jor-el, Fleenoil, Beowulf, Primpa, Vlad, Sid, Thurman, Domino, Shelton, Detroit, Clearmoneas, Cleveland, Buffalo, Krakow, and so on and so forth, ad nauseum, actually. There might be as many as a dozen such names in a single issue. Sometimes, if things got the better of me, I’d use two or three Jor-els or Bubbas on the same page. Later, I would cut out the sports page, circle the names in red ink, and mail them to compatriots at other newspapers. They’d call periodically, and we’d howl ourselves sick over how cute it was. Not a single reader ever called or wrote a letter, or even noticed, to the best of my knowledge.  The thing with names extended into photo captions, too.  Pictures of animals which came in from United Press International or Associated Press had the creature’s name changed to Clevie. Another shameful episode occurred on the sports desk late one morning and close to deadline when the shop foreman informed me he’d run out of several letters in a certain type size. In those days, in 36-point and larger type, the letters were cast individually, set on blocks of metal. When the makeup man was given a headline, he’d pick up the individual letters and slide them into a slotted tray to spell out the words.  Well, there in front of me was Fibbish, the foreman. I’d sent out some headlines they couldn’t complete, he said. They were out of lower case “e” and “b.” What did I want him to do? The smartass in me, never far from the surface, broke through again. I told him to replace all the small e’s with r’s, all the b’s with w’s, and to use q’s and x’s for anything else he ran out of. I had to repeat it several times before it sank in.  He shook his head and went back to the shop. That afternoon, Meddler readers puzzled over such trickies as: Yankrrs Brat Clrvland, 8-3; Mxrws Slwms Tro and Grfwrp Wins Eightrrnth With Txo-Hiqqbx.  I don’t recall much public reaction to that, either, except from the guys in the newsroom, who gave me a standing ovation.  So you see there were clues, even years ago, to my makeup--indeed, to my destiny. But no answer, then or now, to the cosmic question: Who do I think I am, anyhow?

 A Peek At What They Do While The Rest Of Us Are Sleeping

• “One leasing executive, who testified behind a curtain because of fear of retaliation. . .” –From the February 17, 2005 issue of  Commerce Clearing House Federal Tax Weekly, a newsletter for tax professionals, in an article referring to 2003 Senate Finance Committee hearings on lease transactions which the IRS and Congress have finally designated as  “abusive” transactions, meaning they were bogus transactions designed to cheat the government out of taxes. That a witness chose to testify from behind the equivalent of a bulletproof shield gives a brief idea of how lucrative the scam—known as a Sale In, Lease Out (SILO) transaction—was.

• English, its second or third language, continued to plague the efforts of the Scorched Corners Daily Peeper to put out a coherent newspaper as winter lurched into spring. The February 17, 2005, edition carried a front-page story about state approval finally being received for an $8 million drainage ditch project. It ran beneath the headline. . .Project Receives Thumps Up.

Surely, Surely, This Cannot Be True

• “Warren Buffet rightly has said that if the bill becomes law it “could cause the mathematical lunacy record to move east from Indiana.” That’s where, famously—and somewhat apocryphally—the Indiana state legislature voted to simplify the value of Pi to 3.2 to make the life of schoolchildren easier.”--Jesse Eisinger, a writer for the Wall Street Journal, in an article July 21, 2004, about pending legislation in the U.S. Congress.  This is such a precious story! How I wish Eisinger had told us what year this occurred, and other details. 

• Dave Hyde, a columnist for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, could smell a  prize-winning column a mile away, so he showed up in early March at a Fort Lauderdale beachside bar to get the interview  America hungered for: Tonya Harding.  It seems so long ago. The 1990s? 80s? Tonya and Nancy Kerrigan were involved in some sort of Olympics dust-up. . .Tonya was expelled in disgrace. The details are so murky. But Tonya hasn’t gone away. In her latest self-reinvention, she’s a “celebrity boxer,” and on this day she was promoting her upcoming bout with Daisy D, a transvestite who showed up in fishnet and high heels. Hyde had a field day with this, and admitted to his readers that he would roast in hell for covering this story, and they would for reading his column.  A Sun-Sentinel photographer provided a close-up photo of the two, and it was not far from Garden of Earthly Delights material.  The Chicago Tribune, which owns the Sun-Sentinel, printed the column March 9. It was a Kodak Moment. If the Jerry Springer Show doesn’t headline these two soon, I’ll eat my socks.  (March 10, 2005)

No, He Wasn’t, And Only Someone Like You Would Believe He Was

• "He’s like all of us. . .”--Sick Willie, the alley cat, commenting on the life of the late Pope John Paul II. (April 8, 2005)

Nailing It

• “Clear Channel does not offer what people want, it makes them want what it has to sell, which is distraction. It broadcasts, not to arouse the public, but to keep them preoccupied.”--Helen Kaszeta, of North Haven, Connecticut , in a letter to the editor in the March, 2004, issue of Harper’s magazine. She was commenting on an article in the magazine about Clear Channel Communications, a media conglomerate.  You’ll rarely hear it said more accurately and succinctly than this.

And  Bureaucrats Wonder Why They Are Ridiculed. . .

• Airlines have begun enforcing a new policy which prohibits cigarette lighters aboard planes. However, smokers will be allowed to carry up to four books of safety matches into the cabin, though smoking has not been allowed for decades.  –News Item.  (April 14, 2005)

• Dithering in the kitchen the other day, I fixed myself a toasted cheese sandwich. While disassembling it to install pickles and banana peppers, I noticed, staring (rather blankly, I thought) up at me from the melted cheese, an eerie likeness of Kato Kaelin. I immediately called Bombastic Bushkin, my financial adviser. He said I may have struck gold. The sandwich is now hermetically sealed and under guard at an undisclosed location. It will be offered at auction soon on the Internet. (April 17, 2005)

Hieronymous Bosch-Howard Dean-Michael Moore Collaboration?

• The Indianapolis International Film Festival got big billing in the Sunday Star’s Arts & Entertainment section. Fifty films will be shown in a tight three-day period. Among the sparklers is one Mogo and I wouldn’t miss for the world. “Better Housekeeping,” it’s called.  Frank Novak of the United States is the director. Chicago Sun-Times movie critic Roger Ebert took a peek, and wrote, “Bad haircuts, and the story of people without education, style, taste, hygiene, and shame are found here in a documentary.”   (April 17, 2005)

Frank’s Outta Here

• Take off those silly baseball caps, people, and observe a moment’s respectful silence: The legendary impressionist, Frank Gorshin, has expired (the Big C) at age 72. Best known for his portrayal of the villainous Riddler in a Batman movie, Gorshin was popular on the variety and talk show circuit in the days of my youth on the plains of central Indiana. He was a frequent guest on Johnny Carson’s Tonight show, and among others did Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster impressions which were so good they were utterly eerie. He also played George Burns in a Broadway show called “Say Goodnight, Gracie,” in 2002.

• A first-ever excursion to Churchill Downs in Louisville found me trying out a “catchy names” betting theory. I plunked down $2 bets on such whimsicals as Independent Cat, Relentless Red, Ima Hogg, Swing The Cat, Earth’s Vain Shadow, Chaotic Achiever, Our Little Affair, and Spit Shine.  For the day I lost  $10.60, but poor Independent Cat lost its life—the horse was involved in a nasty backstretch collision and had to be “put down,” as the euphemism goes. The jockey--miraculously, I thought--was uninjured.  (May 12, 2005)

Nihilist Option Gives Rooskies Another Reason To Go On Living

• In the early 1990s a friend and I posed in front of a wall in Dublin on which some night lurker had spray-painted the words “Vote No.”  He and I thought that a fine rule for living—embellished it just slightly, in fact, to “Vote No On Everything!”--and smugly mugged our very best as one of our brides clicked away with a Brownie Hawkeye. Imagine my delight slightly more than a decade later to run across, in the Spring, 2005, issue of the Claremont Review of Books, a review of a new book (Russia In Search of Itself, by James H. Billington) on Russia in which the reviewer noted that, “Historically, Russia is the only country in which nihilism became an actual popular movement and now, 150 years later, it has returned: Russian ballots feature the option “Against All.”  And in a March presidential poll, it placed second.”  If such a choice were available on American ballots it might well, from time to time, thunder to triumph.  (May 19, 2005)

• CNN has announced that the Friday (June 3, 2005) edition of its irrelevant screeching yapfest, Crossfire, will be the last. The program is being retired. Good!  (June 1, 2005)

Peaches Kratchlow It Is!!

• My wife, Mogo, has filed court papers changing her name to Peaches. She is convinced that the name change will make her feel better about herself, raise her self-esteem, promote self-actualization, that sort of thing. She likes the long e sound of the new name, likes the perkiness and lilt of it.  Who am I to stand in her way? We both like the alliteration, as well—Peaches ‘n Paul!!   (June 13, 2005)
• Six murders have been committed since September of 2001 by assorted criminals freed by Marion County judges concerned about jail overcrowding. That’s the latest tally, according to the Indianapolis Star.  The jail is under a federal court order capping the number of inmates who may be held. Local judges select those to be freed when the cap is reached. There will be no justice until the freed inmates are required by law to live in the home of the judge who freed them.  (June 13, 2005)

• More good news: CNN’s long-running (17 years) political debate show, The Capital Gang, was canceled June 25th. It was better than most such programs, but the five-person crew typically ran 3-2 or 4-1 liberal (columnist Robert Novak the only conservative worthy of the label). Chicago Tribune cultural critic Julia Keller speculated that CNN is in a state of near-panic at the weakness of its ratings against rival Fox News
• The end of June brought us the saddening departure of one of our greatest storytellers, author and historian Shelby Foote. He died June 27 at age 88. His wonderfully rich voice graced numerous episodes of Ken Burns’ epic television documentary, The Civil War, when it first aired on PBS in 1990.  He wrote many of his books in longhand, using a fountain pen dipped in ink.  (June 30, 2005)

• PETA is demanding that a Long Beach, California, public aquarium remove all fish items from its cafeteria menu. Time for the lemon meringue pies. (July 7, 2005)

This Guy Deserved Better From Us

• Time for an apologetic goodbye to Retired Vice Admiral  James Stockdale, who died at age 81 on July 5th.  Stockdale, a Navy fighter pilot, was shot down over Vietnam in 1965 and spent over seven years in captivity, where he was repeatedly tortured. He spent over four years in solitary confinement in a North Vietnamese prison. He was best known for serving as Ross Perot’s vice-presidential running mate in the 1992 presidential election. Stockdale was frightfully uncomfortable in public life and admitted it. His public appearances were often painful to watch, and he was widely mocked. I’m ashamed to confess that I joined in the jokes and sniggering. Reading his obituary, which includes mention of a Medal of Honor among other achievements, it is evident he was a far better human being than most of us who ridiculed him in a political campaign.  (July 7, 2005)

Inching Closer

• “Boy, 13, Guilty of Killing 15-Year-Old At Ballpark,” read the headline on a Lancaster, California-datelined story about a lad who’d bashed another in the head with an aluminum baseball bat after an April, PONY League baseball game, after the older player (the dead one) taunted the younger one about losing the game. The juvenile court judge noted, in a moment of piercing insight worthy of Newton’s when he saw the apple fall (down, not up) from the tree, that the assailee had declined “the opportunity” to “avoid further confrontation.”  The story indicated that the teen killer may—just may, mind you—be confined to a state youth facility for a while as punishment.  That’ll teach him! (July 9, 2008)

A World-Class Exit. . .

• Meantime, out in Pennsylvania, the family of a dead Steelers fan, had his corpse propped up in a recliner in the funeral home, with a six-pack of cold beer at hand, in front of a TV set playing video clips of a Steelers game. Relatives swore he’d have wanted it that way, and there no was finer way for him to make a dignified exit. I'll bet they were right.

• Mail from the far frontier of human conduct can be long-delayed, but I’ve found the wait often worth it. Two days ago there arrived in my suburban Hard Cheese mailbox a simple envelope postmarked Nashville, Tennessee. Inside was one sheet of paper, on which was photocopied an obituary from the November 7, 2002, edition of the Youngstown (Ohio) Vindicator. It was enough to get anything from this wonderfully-named newspaper, but the obit features one of the all-time greats in nickname annals: the also-late Mr. Donald Jerome “Maggotbrain” Doward, then age 43.  He played football at Youngstown North High School as a lad, later worked at Republic Steel, Dallas Power & Light, and GM Lear Seating. He was lead guitarist in the 1970s  in a now-defunct band, and most recently was founder, lead and bass guitarist and lead singer in the We Funk All Starz Band in the Youngstown area. Maggotbrain’s friends and family dined, according to the  Vindicator’s report,  “at the rear of Larry’s Lounge in the dining area, after leaving the (Tod Homestead) Cemetery.”  (July 9, 2005)

Wait Till The ACLU Hears About  This!

• Indiana prison officials have announced a program based on the radical  and dangerous notion that religion may actually help convicts turn their lives around. The program involves housing units comprised solely of prisoners volunteering to take part in religious training. (July 27, 2005)

• I found myself walking a city block’s distance behind a grown (but not necessarily an adult) man on my way to work on a recent morning. He was wearing a business suit, shirt, and tie. . .and a baseball cap, pulled down tightly on his gourd, its lower edge practically touching his ears. He kept the cap on all the way inside, up the elevator and down the hall (he works on the same floor as I) and into his department’s offices. For all I know, he wears the cap all day at his desk.

A Little Something They Slipped In When We Weren’t Looking. . .

• The Motor Voter Act, passed during Sick’s second term, requires employees at state driver’s licensing agencies to ask applicants if they would like to register to vote. The Act forbids asking applicants if they are U.S. Citizens, however.

• Buried deep inside the Sunday Indianapolis Star in the “Behind Closed Doors” section was a brief report that state officials have discovered that in Marion County, the state’s largest, the Bureau of Motor Vehicles has issued 151,000 more drivers licenses and state ID’s than there are residents.  Twenty-three other counties (there are 92 in Indiana) have issued more licenses and IDs than they have residents.  Wonderful news for terrorists and illegals.  Lousy news for the rest of us.  (July 17, 2005)

Hanoi Jane Returns

• Jane Fonda has announced plans to return to the protest trail. She says she’ll drive across the country in a bus powered by vegetable oil and demand that the U.S. get out of Iraq. My guess is this time she’ll be dogged every step of the way by veterans and others who are wise to her act by now.  (July 27, 2005)

• Seems to have been a really spooky Saturday night in the barrel for the writers and editors down at the Indianapolis Star. Perusing the Sunday edition over my bowl of breakfast gruel, I encountered these groaners: the sometimes indescribably dopey Ruth Holladay, in a column about the debate over Indiana’s white-tailed deer population, implying that perhaps the state’s Department of Natural Resources has a hidden agenda of letting fawns die instead of doing something  to save them (Ruth did not volunteer to take a fawn into her own home to raise it, I noticed); an announcement that henceforth the paper will bring us a weekly column about poker-playing; a letter-to-the-editor writer claiming it was more important for the city to heat the water to a comfortable degree at a swimming pool his daughter visits than for the city to build a new Colts stadium and expand the downtown convention center; The Associated Press giving America another lecture in a story noting that only Australia and the United States among industrialized nations have not adopted a national policy of paid maternity leave for workers; an article reprinted from the Washington Post reporting in accusatory tones that only 8 percent of the guests on TV’s Sunday morning talk shows over the past 18 months were black; thundering buffoon and former president Jimmy Carter continuing his anti-American rants, this time saying it’s “wrong” for the U.S. to hold terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and that whatever is going on there “does not represent the will of the American people,” and the invasion of Iraq was  “unnecessary and unjust.”  And, finally, Associated Press told us that there are still plenty of people at large (and marching angrily around and stamping their little feet, too—AP did not say this—I surmised it) who believe that Japan has not expressed sufficient remorse for its part in World War II. I would pay large sums of money to get all these creatures, particularly Jimmy Carter, to stop hectoring us and go away to another planet and stay there.  (July 31, 2005)

• All 309 passengers escaped without serious injury from a burning Air France airplane which ran off the end of a runway in Toronto the other day. Wire service reports said “some of the passengers criticized (the cabin crew) for not being attentive enough” during the crisis. I am not making this up.  (August 3, 2005)

Isn’t It Curious That The Koreans, Who Eat Dogs, Are The First To Clone One?

• South Korean scientists report they’ve created the world’s first cloned dog (and named him Snuppy)—Front-page story in the Chicago Tribune.  (August  4, 2005)

• It’s been a rough past year for the film industry. Movie attendance has gone down and stayed down, month after month. Industry moguls remain in denial.  USA Today quoted Nikki Rocco, Universal Pictures’ head of distribution, in a typical response: “You hear about how it’s all about the product. But we have an excellent movie that people just aren’t turning out for. It’s something bigger.”  The article then cited numerous recent surveys which show that while movie attendance is going down, DVD sales are going up, and confirming that moviegoers for some time have been telling pollsters that rising ticket prices, rising concession prices, rude and noisy theater audiences, and crappy films are the reasons they are staying away from theaters. How much clearer does it have to be?  (August 8, 2005)

• The lead story in the August 11 Indianapolis Star was headlined, “Blacks Helping to Fuel Boom in Indy Suburbs” and was based on Census Bureau statistics for the central Indiana area. That same morning I bought a Chicago Tribune enroute to work. Its main front-page story was about Hispanics mainly accounting for booming growth in the Chicago suburbs.  What do you suppose the odds are that two front-page editors in separate Midwestern cities on the same day would decide that a Census statistics-inspired story would be the most important story in the entire world for their readers? It’s possible they were right, too. I thought it was a remarkable coincidence, in any case. (August 11, 2005)

• The state opened a new 105-bed institution in Logansport this summer. A news release announced that the facility is for the care and treatment of forensic mentally ill patients (formerly known as the criminally insane).  A correspondent from that region reports that the use of this description “makes these people less dangerous to the rest of us.”  My test for “dangerous” would be: how many of them wear hockey masks and are strapped to 2X10 boards?

Why? Because The ACLU Would Sue To Prevent Him From Wearing His Chest Protector

• “Ted ‘Double Duty’ Radcliffe, baseball great of the Negro leagues, died last week at the age of 103. When catching, he had sewn on his chest protector, “Thou Shalt Not Steal.”  Why don’t we have players like Double Duty today?” –Question submitted by a left-tilting correspondent. (August 15, 2005) 

• Indianapolis got an unavoidable look at the “immigration problem” in August.  Rosalio Pedraza, the legally-drunk driver of a vehicle which smashed into an  SUV carrying five members of a wedding party, killing two of them, appeared in court and admitted he was in the U.S. illegally. He has two prior drunken driving convictions and was using an Indiana drivers license he obtained in Indianapolis without being required to show any identification papers and while using a fake Social Security number. The city, like many others across the country, has a huge and mushrooming “immigrant” population and, if recent scandals involving local auto license bureaus are any clue, an out-of-control market in illegally-acquired drivers licenses and other government-issued documents. There is scant evidence state or local government officials are willing to do anything to stop it, and local media are diligently avoiding the subject.  (August 18, 2005)

• The next Bill Gates-style  success story in American entrepreneurship will be the person who invents and markets a device you can clip to your own telephone which will send a small thermonuclear device down the line to detonate at the answering machine which is mindlessly telling you to “Listen to the following options” and "Please press 1 for. . . ” (September 1, 2005)

• I’m trying to decide: Is Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi the twin brother of Jack Palance or Richard Gere?  The resemblances are eerie. September 12, 2005)

• Word leaks north that the Dallas County, Texas, school board has voted (by a one-vote margin on August 25) to require its principals to learn to speak Spanish within three years or be fired from their jobs.  The board described its action as a reaching out, a “bridge to the many Dallas parents and children who speak only Spanish.” The requirement is said to be intended only for “schools with predominantly Spanish-speaking populations.” No word on whether the board in its wisdom every considered the self-esteem destroying alternative of requiring the school children to learn to speak English.  (Excerpted from page 89 of the September, 2005 issue of Child Protection Law Report.)

• A late-September vacation trip to northern Michigan was marked by an encounter with The Cat From Hell.  It appeared as the owner’s pet at Tatum Studios Art Gallery on East Mitchell Street in downtown Petoskey, Michigan.  The creature was completely hairless, and utterly grotesque in appearance. I can think of no better way to describe it than this: imagine Golum, the memorable creature from the Lord of The Rings trilogy, but tiny, and in the form of a cat. The creature’s owner, who in my fevered imagination could easily have belonged to a local coven, said the thing “ate all the time,” had a constant body temperature of about 104 degrees, had been “bred that way” (no hair) and came from Canada.  Edgar Allen Poe could vividly have described the hideous thing’s appearance; I cannot.  I can say only that while in its presence I felt distinctly uneasy, as though I had slipped into some parallel dimension in a most alarming sci-fi movie. Even today an image of the thing stays in my mind.  Seeing one of these is enough for a lifetime. (October 2, 2005)

• Chicago Tribune feature writer Charles Storch drove many readers crazy in an otherwise highly entertaining story about this year’s Chicago-based Poetry Foundation competition. The winner was a fellow who stopped writing poetry for 43 years but got back in the game in 2004.  It was in the account of another winner, William Logan, 54, that Storch went off the beam. He quoted a poetry editor as saying that Logan has been called “the most hated man in American poetry,” but never offered readers the tiniest clue as to what poor Logan had done to merit the label. No editor should have let a writer get away with such an omission.  I’ve written Storch and begged for a sequel on Logan.  (October 7, 2005)

• Do the signals bouncing back and forth between satellites and earth have physical mass?  If they do, then isn’t it theoretically possible that the day will come when there’ll be so many signals going back and forth that the air we breathe will become thickened like mayonnaise?  Couldn’t it reach that point, if we keep buying and using our electronic gadgets?  (October 18, 2005)

Surely, Turnabout Is Fair Play. . .   

• A YMCA youth league football coach in Montgomery, Alabama, has been accused of shooting the boyfriend of the mother of one of the star players on the team. The “boyfriend” made the lad quit the football team as punishment for some unspecified trouble he’d gotten into.  The coach got his gun, confronted and argued with the boyfriend, and shot him in the back, authorities said. The victim is expected to survive. Recent years have seen a rising number of violent episodes involving so-called “adults” involved in youth sports, but most have featured parents or others attacking coaches or players. Apparently the coaches are tired of it, and have begun arming themselves.  Good!  (October 19, 2005)

• I kept my appointment with Grinelda Thurmer at the local Social Security office. I produced the necessary documents and appropriate (how novel!) answers (nope, no outstanding felony warrants; yep, I believe I know what I’m doing). Grinelda says my first check will arrive the fourth Wednesday of January and monthly thereafter, over and over and over and over again, until I am dead, and perhaps long after. It was a Kodak Moment. I left with that old familiar spring in my step, reminiscent of that wonderful feeling I’ve had when hitting the elevator around five o’clock every day for the last few decades. (October 24, 2005)

• Mid-October we were told by Mr. Goodwrench that we needed new tires for our car. We looked at the tire evaluations in Consumer Reports. We called several dealers for quotes. Michelins were top-rated. We had a heckuva deal nailed down at Sam’s Club. Then we remembered: Michelin is not only a French company, but it’s the one that crapped all over thousands of fans at last summer’s F-1 race in Indianapolis. That sealed it. We bought Goodyear tires at a higher price.   Michelin surely won’t miss the sale. But casting our one small vote made us feel mighty good. (October 25, 2005)

Wretched Excess

• Number of rooms and number of toilets, respectively, in the home of the Haji Hassanal Bolkiah Mu’izzaddin Waddaulah—“Big Wad,” they call him—the sultan of Brunei:  1,800, and 250.  (from a 2005 article--except the nickname-- by Patrick Barta in the Wall Street Journal)

Funny, This Sounds So French. . .

• The Internet overflows with reports so bizarre you can barely imagine they’re true. MSNBC.com printed one near summer’s end which seems a stretch. But maybe not.  According to the British newspaper, the Daily Mail, a school in the British town of Wellingborough has adopted a policy which permits students to swear—use the “f-word”--at teachers up to five times in any class before any attempt at punishment. What punishment? The children would be “spoken to” at the end of the class. The Daily Mail quoted from a school letter it said was sent to all parents, noting that although the “f-word” would be allowed up to five times, the school was certainly not “condoning” it. The school also plans to send “praise postcards” to the parents of children who do not swear in class and who arrive in class on time. (October 31, 2005)
• Breathlessly promising us The Inside Story of The Cocaine, The Boyfriend, The Shattered Career, the December, 2005, issue of Vanity Fair features actress and freshly rehabbed druggie Kate Moss on its cover. She is all pouty and sullen and—not that it matters—almost bare-chested. Vanity Fair ought to be ashamed of itself. And Kate Moss, when approached by the magazine with its cover story and photo request, should have said, as Jonathan Winters so famously did in his skit about an utterly worthless presidential candidate, Daniel Douglas Diddle, “Good Lord, what do you people have in mind? I wouldn’t make a decent paperweight.”  But we don’t live in such a time, and so Vanity Fair wasn’t, and Kate Moss didn’t.  And thus the whorehouse that is American public life roars on.  (November 12, 2005)

Bad News--But Still Hope--For The Honky Conspiracy Crowd

• The Government Accountability Office, whatever that is, has released more bad news for the wacko Left: the majority of soldiers and Marines killed or wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan have been whiteys. The figures were through the end of May, 2005, and were released at the end of September.  Whites made up 67 percent of the forces and 71 percent of the casualties. Blacks comprised 17 percent of the forces and 9 percent of the fatalities; Hispanics were 9 percent of the forces and 10 percent of the casualties. The report was requested by two Democrats on the House Armed Services Committee: Ike Skelton of Missouri and Charles Rangel of New York.  Charges of disproportionalism, conspiracy, or racism have not yet been leveled, but there’s still plenty of time. The best hope for conspiracy-mongers is that the percentage of whites has declined: in Korea, 80 percent of the fatalities were white; In Vietnam, 86 percent, in the Persian Gulf War, 76 percent. (November 13, 2005)

• Semi-trucks should be designed at the factory so that whenever two of them block passenger car traffic by driving side-by-side on an interstate for longer than, say, 30 seconds, one of them explodes--and no driver could ever know whether his was the one so rigged.  (November 25, 2005)

• Microsoft’s new wonder product, the Xbox 360 video game system, is reported by angry buyers, only days after its ballyhooed debut, to be having certain glitches: screens freezing, crashes, weird stuff like that. Microsoft spokescritters were playing down the problems, according to news reports. Will any of us live to see the day when a new computer product has all the bugs ironed out before it’s rushed to market?  I think not.  (November 26, 2005)

• The latest issue of Time magazine arrived this week with a cover story about the apparently endless post-Hurricane Katrina suffering: pages and pages about the stalled recovery efforts, the mountain ranges of unhauled trash and garbage, the dazed angst, confusion, and inertia of the refugees and locals months after the disaster. This morning’s Indianapolis Star carried a story about a tornado which tore through Montgomery, Indiana, mid-month and how, within hours, Amish and Mennonite men and their families swarmed into the area to join in hauling away trash and rebuilding. Granted, the scope of the devastation was far different, but the contrast between the human response to it was instructive, and inescapable:  There is no recorded instance of anyone in the Montgomery mess blaming it on Dubya, Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Big Republicans, Big Fast Food, Big Pharmaceuticals, Big Racism, Big Religious Right, or Big Unbridled Capitalist Greed. (November 26, 2005)

• Answer:  Robert  “Mail In Your Danged Head If You Don’t Like Me” Mugabe.  Question: Under what president who is the darling of the world’s Left has the life expectancy in Zimbabwe dropped from 68 to 33 in the last generation? (Source: Jim Morris, executive director of the UN’s World Food Program, speaking in Indianapolis last week.)  (November  27, 2005)

• One of every six school children in Florida is deemed “English-deficient.”  Lesley Miller, the state’s Senate minority leader, has proposed this problem be resolved by legislation he has introduced which requires all children who understand English to learn Spanish. Miller’s bill would begin mandatory instruction in 2007. (Source: John McCaslin’s “Inside The Beltway” column in the November 21 issue of the Washington Times.)

• New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd’s new book, Are Men Necessary, is said to reveal that Maureen believes she has been rejected by men because they won’t marry a powerful woman.  She is 53 years ago and a childless spinster.  More likely it’s  the shrill, shrieking, angry, wacko leftwing harridan they’re not interested in. Just a guess.  (November 27, 2005)

Jammin’ With The Zigster

• I remember a March 2003 workday trip downtown when traffic was stunningly dense. The interstates and I-465 were clotted, and all the main streets dumping into downtown were jammed as drivers bullied for position, fought to squeeze through to glory. I learned later that the cause was a big Motivational Seminar at the Fieldhouse, led by Zig Zigler and his band of hysterically happy flacks and support staff. The only way I’ve ever want to go see Zig, I thought at the time, is if he could motivate me to quit work and board the next freight out for the Van Oort Cloud. And here it is a couple of years later and I found a way to do it without Zig’s help. Amazing.  (November 30, 2005)

A Crumb for The Hoi Polloi

• Savvy citizens were not dancing in the streets in mid-September when two Tyco poohbahs, Dennis Kozlowski and Mark Swartz, were sentenced to “up to 25 years (italics mine) in prison” for their lead roles in a hundreds-of-millions of dollars scam. The words “up to” mean anything from one hour up to 25 years, not 25 years.  So once we get done with the “show” of sentencing them and leading them out of the courtroom in carefully scripted disgrace, and once the publicity dies down and we’re lured back to shopping, expect the boys to be out lickety split, skating free. The poor dumb bastard who stuck up the liquor store or got caught with a bag of heroin will spend his full 25 in the lockup, though.

Still Another Domestic Spying Outrage

• “A compelling case can be made that the American system is a hugely artful scam perpetrated on the masses--a system erected and maintained for the powerful, the elites, with enough decoration, smoke and mirrors and big-breasted sirens dispensing lotus flowers to convince the rabble that fairness, equity, and justice prevail. An attentive citizen could readily determine the untruth of this, and so the all-important task for their keepers is to at all costs maintain the illusion. Vast artifices have been concocted toward that end—a legal and tax code impossible for an ordinary citizen to comprehend, a shaman class (lawyers and marketing and public relations artists)) who write and manipulate the rules to favor the plunderers and whose smog machine then keeps the rabble anesthetized, dizzy, hoodwinked, distracted, trapped. It’s the Wizard of Oz—the guy behind the curtain laughing, howling, pulling the levers and pushing buttons, and everything on the other side of the curtain an illusion, a shell game, the cruelest of all jokes on Mr. and Mrs. Front Porch.”—excerpted from an e-mail intercepted by gub’mint agents shortly after the Kozlowski-Swartz verdicts were announced.

Number of Illegals Smarter Than We Are: 68,629 (And Counting. . .)

• As of the end of October, 2005, the number of illegals who had failed to show up after being captured by U.S. Immigration Service officials, released and given a date to appear in court had reached 68,629, according to a report in the October 31-November 6 issue of The Washington Times. 

A Glance At Dennis Kucinich Seals The Deal, Too

• “Those who promote the theory of intelligent design should take a close look at the sad state of the earth.”—Henry Manger, of Midlothian, Virginia, in a letter to the editor of Time magazine’s September 5, 2005 issue.

• Peaches and I found ourselves huddled near the rear of a suburban Atlanta church on Christmas Eve, praying for deliverance from the Religious Left. It was a typical modern non-denominational church, big as a basketball fieldhouse, crammed with banks of stage lights, huge suspended film screens, a big stage packed with musical instruments, a couple of control booth crow’s nests in back for the sound and lighting engineers, and here and there a religious symbol. Three buff youngsters—youth ministers?—led a packed house in lengthy rounds of singing, mostly of the hysterically happy tenor/soprano pop-rock religious genre, with a couple of traditional Christmas carols thrown in to cater to the fuddy-duddies. The ushers wore tuxedos or black suits. The crowd was clean-scrubbed, bright-eyed, earnest. Pots of fresh, steaming Starbucks coffee and plates of cookies were served in the lobby afterward. The only thing missing was a pastor’s call for Death to the Infidels at the close of the service. (December 24, 2005)

• Just in time for Christmas, the federal government announced relaxed rules which permit aircraft passengers to bring aboard scissors (as long as the blades don’t exceed four inches) and other items such as screwdrivers, pliers, wrenches, nail clippers and nail files, corkscrews and matches. If you find anyone in America who thinks this improves security, let me know.

• I worked overtime being an obnoxious troublemaker during December.  I used the word “Christmas” as often as possible, correcting store clerks and others when they called it the “holiday” season. One brief but pleasing encounter in a Bath and Body Works store in Georgia revealed that store management had forbidden employees to wish customers a “Merry Christmas” but were allowed, as a clerk cautiously whispered to me, to use the word only if a customer uttered the dreaded phrase first.  I pointed out—officiously, you can be sure—that this was America and it was Christ’s birth we were celebrating and it was therefore the “Christmas Season,” not the “winter holidays” or some other leftwing baloney.  The mid-month mail brought a solicitation from the ACLU. (One of my lefty friends has given them my name, thinking it would irritate me to get their mail—but, oh, far from it!).  I shredded it, added some cut-up cardboard and other debris to their thoughtfully-provided postage-paid return envelope, moronically scrawled “Merry Christmas” across the front, and sent it back to ACLU headquarters, where it will cost them well over a dollar in postage. (I have a hunch this is only the first escalation, and that soon, I will begin taping their business reply envelopes to cardboard boxes filled with dirt and rocks and sending those with hearty season’s greetings.)  The night before Christmas, I knelt beside my bed and gave thanks for the many blessings showered on my life. Then I wished the very worst for the Left in the eons ahead, and fell into sweet and dreamless sleep. (December 31, 2005)

Norm Crosby Would Have Liked This

• Wasn’t “Taco Bell’s Cannon” the main theme music from the movie Ordinary People?

Just A Hunch--Bureaucrats At Work

• During 2005 I received an envelope in the mail which included a Styrofoam cube and this note:  ATTENTION: The Styrofoam cube enclosed in this envelope is being included by the sender to meet a United States Postal Service regulation.  This regulation requires a first-class letter or flat using the Delivery or Signature Confirmation service to become a parcel and that it “is in a box or, if not in a box, is more than ¾ of an inch to its thickest point. The cube has no other purpose and may be disposed of upon opening this correspondence.”

Celebrity Left-Overs From 2005           

• Dick Butkus, former linebacker for the Chicago Bears and not known for subtlety or half-efforts, walked out with two games left in the season on a Montour, Pennsylvania, high school team he’d agreed to coach as part of an ESPN television “reality show.” The team had a 1-6 record and Butkus had chided the players for poor attitudes and lackadaisical play. He’d apparently seen all he could stand. The MSNBC cable network canceled The Dennis Miller Show. And Louis Nye, a comedian who became famous playing the role of Gordon Hathaway on the Steve Allen Show in the early 1950s, died late in the year at age 92.  The country is poorer with all three offstage. Butkus and Miller, at least, can still mount comebacks.  (December 31, 2005)

Turning In My Chips

• Easily my Year 2005 highlight was retirement December 2.  Peaches and I stayed up late the night before, watching About Schmidt, starring Jack Nicholson in one of his finest roles as a retiring actuary at the Woodmen Accident and Life Insurance Company. I imagined myself down at Universal Export in the same final hour as the Nicholson character in the movie, sitting in an empty room, blank-faced, staring at the clock as it ticked toward five o’clock.  My last day was quite ordinary, though. I kept busy till a few minutes after five, then sprinted for the elevator, re-living my own Chariot of Fire. Peaches and a couple of co-conspirators secretly arranged a small party for me a couple of days later, in spite of my repeated requests that no fuss be made. It was carried off under the guise of going out for supper with two other couples. I was caught totally off-guard. About 30 people showed up. Peaches perfectly captured the spirit of buffoonery which has animated my life. The room was decorated with posters of some of the more bizarre, semi-deranged photographs I’ve posed for over the years.  Each table was supplied with pairs of “Groucho glasses,” lifelike pig and elephant noses, silly hats, antlers, and masks. Guests were urged to suit up and join in the mummery. Most did.  A delightful meal was served. Half a dozen or so people supplied a “roast.” One guy, in what I took to be a supreme compliment, said he’d known a lot of crazy bastards in his life, but no one quite as goofy as me. When my turn came, I took inspiration from Jonathan Winters and said to them, “Good Lord, what’d you people have in mind? I wouldn’t make a decent paperweight. . .”  I told them the hard-boiled truth: that I had lived a truly blessed life and been graced with the most wonderful friends, parents, mentors and wife anyone could ask for, and that, given my fairly modest level of ambition and drive, I was the luckiest guy currently at large on this planet.  I told them I was deeply touched that they would come out on a winter’s night and make fools of themselves like this, and that I loved each and every one of them and would never forget this moment.  I paraphrased the Harrison Ford character in the cult sci-fi classic, Blade Runner, who, at the end of the film, mused on his existence by saying that we all were seeking only the answers to four basic questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going? How long do I have?  We closed with a group singing of Man of Constant Sorrow. Then everyone got on their donkeys and rode home. (December 31, 2005)     

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