I Keep Trying, I Keep Failing
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Author: Brian J. Noggle
On the Belated Advice of My Attorney, Lance Burri, Esq…
When we bought our Packers stock, we couldn’t load download the stock owners’ agreement prior to our purchase because of the overwhelming Web traffic to the site.
Now Trog tells me what’s in it:
If the Commissioner of the NFL (the “Commissioner”) decides that a shareholder of an NFL member club has been guilty of conduct detrimental to the welfare of the NFL then, among other things, the Commissioner has the authority to fine such shareholder in an amount not in excess of $500,000 and/or require such shareholder to sell his or her stock.
Oh, boy. So I cannot say “The Bears suck” any more, even though I know it to be true.
And there’s more.
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Convenient Synonyms?
Reading this Wikipedia article on Benito Juárez and the various revolutions and reforms in the nineteenth century, I can’t help but notice that the word “liberal” is spread pretty thick to mean Good Guys and “conservative” means “bad guys.”
I don’t know that an evenhanded treatment of the this period in history would merit those modern, politically charged terms. But I was on Wikipedia, you know.
Says the man who was reading the article because he was thinking about writing something about how the progressive reforms of the liberal Juárez over one hundred years ago turned Mexico into the productive world leader it is today, and drawing some parallels to what the United States might look like in a couple generations if our political leaders manage to make those same reforms in the United States today.
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Covetousness and that 1% of the 99%
On Facebook, a friend posted this billboard:
That’s an abridged version of the King James version of the tenth commandment from Exodus. The full commandment:
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s.
The New International Version looks like this:
You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.
His photo posting brought a number of rabid responses in disagreement, some of which are along the lines of:
I’ll try to stop coveting a modest job at somewhat reasonable pay. I also covet health insurance, so I’d better watch out for that. I crunched some numbers lately and I guess I’m looking at coveting a home of my own in the not-too-distant future as well.
Note that this is a subordinate, looser definition of the word “covet” where “covet” simply means “want.” There is a difference between “covet” and “want” that you find in the complete commandment:
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is thy neighbor’s.
In this sense, covet does not mean merely want something like what your neighbor has. It means you want that thing that belongs to your neighbor, and you want to take it. An awful lot of people have been brought up to believe that Keeping up with the Joneses, that is, working hard to earn and buy the accoutrements of the comfortable life or status symbols therein is a rat race and immoral, but that taking it from the Joneses is morally superior.
At the very base, this key difference is at the heart of the current differences. Whether it is right for the government to take from certain citizens to give to other citizens.
Obscuring the argument in the rubric of “fairness” (where the metrics of “fairness” are not consensual but are instead determined by either the people who will be receiving the redistribution or by those who will be doing the redistribution and taking their cut from the top, naturally) doesn’t do anything but try to build an inchoate moral base for the thievery.
Focusing on how Jones got that wealth also hides the key moral issue. If Jones didn’t rob a bank or do something outright illegal, his earnings are his. Whether Jones made more profit than some people think is, again, “fair” by producing or selling a product or service to willing consumers is irrelevant. Even if Jones was selling risky derivatives to people who did not fully understand them, it’s not Jones’s responsibility to completely educate each of his customers. Taking Jones’s earnings ex post facto is theft.
We have a President who actively plays into this covetousness when he says:
Look at the statistics. In the last few decades, the average income of the top 1 percent has gone up by more than 250 percent to $1.2 million per year. I’m not talking about millionaires, people who have a million dollars. I’m saying people who make a million dollars every single year. For the top one hundredth of 1 percent, the average income is now $27 million per year.
This is the covetousness prohibited in the Bible. It is not merely wanting things like the rich have. It is wanting, and taking away, the things the rich have. Since the morally superior rabble can’t take it away from the rich on based on the strength of their sword arms, they want the government to sack on their behalf, and unfortunately the government is currently eager to help out.
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Fred Worth Is A Bad, Bad Man
In October, I finished Fred Worth’s Incredible Super Trivia, and I found at least one error in it. I said about the book:
Incredible, as in you cannot believe any of it. Quick, what’s wrong with that entry?
Apparently, Fred Worth purposefully inserted incorrect information into his books and eventually sued the makers of Trivial Pursuit for violating the copyright on his creative writing endeavors:
In October 1984, Fred L. Worth, author of The Trivia Encyclopedia, Super Trivia, and Super Trivia II, filed a $300 million lawsuit against the distributors of Trivial Pursuit. He claimed that more than a quarter of the questions in the game’s Genus Edition had been taken from his books, even to the point of reproducing typographical errors and deliberately placed misinformation. One of the questions in Trivial Pursuit was “What was Columbo’s first name?” with the answer “Philip”. That information had been fabricated to catch anyone who might try to violate his copyright.
Wow. Just, wow. It wasn’t a mistake. It was a purposeful attempt to snooker his readers.
I know this sort of thing is not uncommon in out-of-copyright reprints and translations, but in a book of erstwhile facts to find such willful mendacity really further erodes my belief in human integrity.
But, on the other hand, I have an excuse if I get the chance to blow my turn on Jeopardy!: Fred Worth made me do it.
(Tidbit originally seen in Mystery Scene magazine, but it doesn’t provide its tidbits sections on the Internet, apparently.)
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Unfortunately, The Breakfast Part Is Bangers ‘n Mash
Between the ostentatious watch ads and emaciated models displaying fashions from an H.P. Lovecraft story in WSJ Magazine, this month we find an article about English manors run like bed-and-breakfasts:
Some of England’s peers have found more creative solutions. They not only inhabit their ancestral piles, but run them as businesses too, dangling their glittery goods like fishing lures to attract much-needed cash. “In the United States, we tend to have a romantic view of owning a great British estate,” says Tom Savage, the director of museum affairs at Winterthur, the 175-room Delaware estate of the late chemical heir Henry Francis du Pont, which houses the foremost collection of American furniture and decorative objects. “But often the veil falls when you see inheritors to whom collecting is not a choice but an encumbering obligation: Out of economic necessity, they’re doing everything in their power to hold on to what they’ve got.”
For more than 20 years, Savage has been hooking up connoisseurs of the decorative arts with the owners of England’s great estates, where most of the finest antiques are to be found. He regularly takes groups of 12 to 16 Americans on private tours of British homes and country houses, even having them stay (as paying guests) for a night or two. Not in the old laundry or the converted stables, but in the mansion itself while the owners look on, content in the knowledge that the visiting Yank is helping to keep their homestead humming.
If I’m going to England for a vacation, I’m going to have to consider staying overnight with nobility, werd.
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Predicting the Unintended Consequences
Sometime in the next five years, sellers’ disclosure forms for real estate will include a question about whether a fluorescent bulb has ever broken on the premises, and/or mercury tests will be required or at least requested before you can sell your house.
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Surviving 80s Sci-Fi/Fantasy Week
As we entered the Christmas season, the “one-for-someone-else, one-for-me” buying protocol took effect. I was startled at how much streaming media and Blu-Ray have driven down the price of new mere DVDs. Under ten dollars for most, and like five bucks for many. Suddenly, I had Amazon-Primed myself a collection of remembered films to watch. And I did this last week, one at a time.
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Monday. The Last Starfighter Hey, you already can guess what I think about this. |
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Tuesday. Krull I had never seen this film before, but it was a recommended purchase for The Last Starfighter, and I’d seen the pinball game at the National in Fenton, Missouri, in the era in question, and who could forget the Glaive? It was the Chinese star (a staple of 80s films) smart bomb. Well, it’s got a science fiction vibe, as the invaders have bladed weapons that shoot lasers out of the butts and whenever the good guys strike with their bladed weapons, red electricity tingles. But. I thought the film might be trying to capture some of the surreality of Legend, but Krull precedes it. I dunno. There’s a poorly seen Beast ruling the aliens who come down to defile the planet Krull and a damsel captured by it who wanders its surreal castle. Strange that Legend got this right, but this film did not. At any rate, the film has a lot of similar tropes from 80s films that just sort of miss. It also features an early appearance by Liam Neeson and a scene where the protagonists who have to capture some firemounts, horses that can travel 1000 leagues in a day, and they do so by driving them into a canyon–much like in the Western book I’m currently reading. So I appreciated that. If I had watched this film over and over in the 1980s on Showtime, I would have a greater affection for it, I think; however, even in this late date in the next century, I’m happy to know I have watched it. But it won’t be in regular, semi-decadical rotation. |
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Wednesday. Conan the Barbarian
On a recent time-killing trip to Barnes and Noble, I saw a volume of the Complete Chronicles of Conan by Robert E. Howard, so I took a look at the films on Amazon, and I saw they proffered as a recommendation Red Sonja, so I told my wife she was lucky I didn’t order the films. She said something along the lines of that it would be okay, I hope, because I did. Which explains the latter bit of my week. I’d never seen Conan the Barbarian except for bits, and I’ve quoted parts of it, so I watched it (finally) to restore my credibility. And, wow. Where Krull had a story, it lacked the framework of epic. Conan the Barbarian has that, from the frame story to the score to the scenes of riding horses. Oh, yeah, it has James Earl Jones as the bad guy, and a lot of bastard swords being swung. I understand the remake is just gore poured into a template. I have to wonder if, as our culture becomes less literate in the sense of books and only whatever in the terms of films (a la Quentin Tarantino) we lose a depth that makes the splatter relevant. |
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Thursday. Conan the Destroyer
This film picks another Conan adventure, wherein he goes out to… Erm…. Excuse me, I’ve written this after the whole week, so it’s a bit swirled. Conan is promised by a queen that she’ll resurrect his love, Valeria, if he accompanies a virgin on a quest to get a mystical horn. Conan agrees and gathers his band together, and they retrieve the horn which the queen then uses to reanimate an evil god. It’s a pretty good piece of epic filmmaking. |
 
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Friday. Red Sonja
This film features Brigitte Nielsen as Red Sonja, a woman whose family are killed by an evil warrior queen. A priestess sister tasks Sonja with finding and destroying a talisman that might be powerful enough to destroy the world. The film was produced by Dino De Laurentiis, the guy behind the Conan films, so it stars a number of the same people (Schwarzeneggar and Sandahl Bergman) and hits a lot of the same themes. Still, I liked it a lot, although it gets a lot of negative reviews on the Internet. Perhaps it’s because this was one of the films I watched over and over on Showtime. The film also features Ernie Reyes, Jr., the karate kid from the Gil Gerard television program Sidekicks. It seems like I’ve seen a number of things with him in it, but maybe I just saw commercials for Sidekicks and this film over and over to make him seem more ubiquitous in the 1980s than he really was. Also, he’s older than I am. That didn’t seem the way back in the day, but Ralph Macchio is 50, so I guess the time warp of older actors playing younger characters explains it. |
So that’s how I spent my week: immersed in old timey films, and enjoying them for the most part. I’ve promised my wife this won’t become a regular occurrence, though: she loses me enough to football on Sundays.
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Where Do You Go When You Need A Gun Sales Anecdote?
Black Friday Best-Seller: Guns:
The numbers, first reported in USA Today, reflect the experience of gun-sellers on the ground. “It was the biggest rush we ever had. Some of the people at the gate sent their kid running to the gun counter to get in line,” said Tom Ritzer, store manager at MC Sports in Springfield, Mo., which opened its doors at 5 a.m. on Black Friday. Gun buyers had to wait until NICS opened at 7 before they could leave with their purchases, he said.
The store sold 70 guns, a mix of rifles and handguns, with big sellers including an $85 World War I replica rifle that is a collector’s item and a$219 Smith &Wesson .22 handgun. Last year the store, which only started carrying guns in 2009, sold 41 on Black Friday.
Not to mention there’s a gun show at the Ozark Empire Fairgrounds this weekend.
This….is….SPRINGFIELD!
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Brainstorm of the Day
Hey, you know what NASA should do? If it’s planning on a Martian mission but it’s concerned about the conditions in small enclosed spaces for long periods of time and the effect on a person, NASA should just recruit young Manhattanites who might even pay for the privilege of doubling the size of their apartments to 300 square feet.
They’re used to the cramped conditions. Also, it would be a lot of Manhattanites blasted into space. A win for everyone involved.
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Freedom Update: Slaughtering Horses Now Okay, 100 Watt Incandescent Bulbs Not So Much
Obama, Congress restore horse-slaughter industry:
President Obama last month quietly signed into law a spending bill that restores the American horse-slaughter industry, just a few months after a government investigation said the ban on slaughtering was backfiring.
The domestic ban didn’t end horse slaughter but instead shifted the site of butchery to Mexico and Canada – which meant increased abuse or neglect as the horses were shipped out of the country and beyond the reach of U.S. law.
The ban had been imposed in 2006 when Congress defunded the government’s ability to inspect plants that butchered horses for consumption. Without inspections, the meat couldn’t be sold, and the industry withered.
But the Agriculture spending bill Mr. Obama signed the week before Thanksgiving dropped the prohibition on inspections, and the administration said it now stands ready to conduct them should anyone open a horse-slaughter plant.
Congress is in the pockets of Big Horsemeat!
Actually, not so much. On the whole, I don’t see why horses differ from other livestock that prompted this ban except some people like horses as more than an animal.
But Congress managed to restore a freedom opposed by PETA and the HSUS through and signed by the President. A bit of how it really happened:
This year, the House version of the Agriculture spending bill maintained the slaughter-ban language, but the Senate did not. When the two chambers reconciled their bills, the language was not in the final version.
Mr. Obama signed the spending bill by autopen on Nov. 18. He was traveling in Asia at the time the bill was presented to him, so he used the automated signature machine for the second time in his presidency.
Make no mistake: this restoration of freedom was not brought to you by the Republican-controlled House, but by the Democrat-controlled Senate.
Cynically, one could posit that the Republicans in the House are not that eager to start restoring freedoms and overturning bans, whether they’re esoteric issues like slaughtering horses or more everyday-life-affecting decisions to compel usage of little glass mercury bombs throughout your home. Maybe that’s a good question for your Republican Congressman if you have one.
(Link to the Washington Times story seen on Instapundit.)
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2012 Prediction
On January 1, 2012, I will receive my first spam email about purchasing imported Canadian 100-watt incandescent light bulbs.
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Reasons Why The Last Starfighter Is Better Than Star Wars
I’m going to shock and offend a full 60% of the Internet, but I’ll say it loudly: The Last Starfighter is better than Star Wars.
In the interest of full disclosure, The Last Starfighter might have some additional resonance for me, since I was a precocious teenager living in a trailer park with a little brother with an extensive Playboy collection when I first saw it on videocassette. So now you know where I’m coming from.
Both stories follow a similar arc: a boy is called from a backwater to go into space, show off his skill at martial arts, and then save the worlds from an evil menace. However, the main character in The Last Starfighter comes from the common man and works with a highly democratic society on Rylos, whereas in Star Wars, the main characters (Luke and Leia) come from high birth and one even bears the title “Princess.”
Let’s just stack up the characters:
| The Hero |  Alex Rogan is a kid from the trailer park who loves his mother, dreams of going to far away places (the university, mainly). Rogan has useful skills as a handyman and electrician–too much so as he has to forego partying with his friends because someone needs a 30-year-old fuse box patched. |
 Luke Skywalker is special from birth because he’s the product of a lineage with lots of mito-pseudoscience-deusexmachinians in his blood. Sure, he’s a decent droid cleaner, but he’s a whiny little snit who would rather run off with his friends than tend to his duties. |
The Love Interest |  Mags, played by Mary Catherine Stewart. Her affection for Alex is constant, and she’s ready to leave the trailer park for the stars with him at the end. Also, she’s cuter than Carrie Fisher and has aged better. |
 Princess Leia, portrayed by Carrie Fisher, is a high maintenance princess who is an action hero, but vacillates among the available men. |
The Mentor |  Centauri, a universe-wise wily operator who invents a game, merchandises it, gets it into the stores before Christmas, and is unafraid to recruit Starfighters from planets not officially in the Star League. He’s doing it for the greater good, but it never hurts to be rich, my boy. Capitalism working for the betterment of all. |
 Obi Wan Kenobi, a Jedi whose last project turned out pretty poorly after his Padawan slaughtered and scattered the Jedi, including the younglings. Instead of working for his own profit, he serves some hokey, nebulous religious order and spouts off recursive and reflective “wisdom” like the Sphynx from Mystery Men (the latter is supposed to spoof Obi Wan, but come on, in retrospect it’s pretty straight up homage, ainna?) |
The Alien Sidekick |  Grigg, the lizard. He’s a good navigator, he can bypass electrical circuits to use power from the life support systems to start the engines in the nick of time, and he’s got a sense of humor. Oh, yeah, and everyone can understand him. |
 Chewbacca. He’s a good navigator, he can make ship repairs, but only Han Solo can understand him. He’s big and can handle a bowcaster, so those are positives. But he was in The Star Wars Christmas Special. |
Now, then, what do we have? A democratic society with capitalist principles leading to personal growth, public gain, and whatnot versus a theocracy or at the very least some sort of aristocracy posited as the highest goal–although the Empire is somehow worse than a system relying on the Jedi to maintain order.
Also, in the 25th anniversary edition, they cleaned up and crisped up some special effects in The Last Starfighter, but left the movie intact. I don’t think Star Wars has gone a whole decade without George Lucas doing something to it to tamper with it, to throw in a Wall of Sight aesthetic into it, and to extract money from the dwindling number of die hard fans.
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Book Report: Home for Christmas by Lloyd C. Douglas (1937)
If you like Holiday Inn, White Christmas, or The Bishop’s Wife, you’ll probably like this book.
Written by a Lutheran minister in the heart of the depression, it recounts the story of a sister who retained the old farm when her parents died and her efforts to get her reluctant siblings–cosmopolitan and successful people now–to return to the farm to have a Christmas like they used to when they were children. She asks them to leave their children at home so they can do things the old fashioned way.
It’s a nice little story, short at 118 pages, but a nice pseudo-Dickens. As it was written when and where it was, particularly dealing with rural Michigan instead of the big city, you have the residents driving cars, but some residents still with buggies. As you might recall, that was the way with rural communities even into the 1940s. Strange to think how late the complete changeover was, and how it happened without government bans.
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Book Report: Kill Me Tomorrow by Richard S. Prather (1969)
You would think that since I have chased poor Rob Prather around the Internet for a decade, from his old blog Insults Unpunished to his guest time on Outside the Beltway to social media outlets telling him “I love your Shell Scott novels!” that I would have read more than two in that time period. You would be mistaken. I’ve read Kill Him Twice in 2008 and this book in 2011. I have read more than that, anyway, since I have at least one other paperback on my read shelves and might have gotten some from the Community Library back in the day.
Shell Scott goes to an Arizona resort to rest up and recouperate after being shot in a disagreement with some mob types, but shortly into his stay, movie star and Sophie Loren proxy Lucrezia Brizante seeks his help. Her father is in some kind of trouble, so Scott goes down to the Arizona retirement community to find out if the old man is really in danger. And he finds the mafia moving in, looking for some government money that’s coming to the retirement community.
The style of the book blends some lighthearted, irreverant humor with complicate plots endemic of Ross MacDonald or Raymond Chandler. It’s not quite as campy as the Dean Martin Matt Helm films, but Scott doesn’t take himself seriously, and one expects that Prather doesn’t take him entirely seriously either as some realism is sacrificed for spectacle. I think I was a little more down on it in 2008, as the review isn’t without reservations, but I guess if you’re in the mood for this particular style of book, it’s better than if you’re not.
So it’s worth a look if you’re in that mood.
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I Don’t Want To Make You Feel Old, Old Man…
But as J. Christian Adams points out, the U2 album Achtung Baby is 20 years old this month. Which would make The Joshua Tree, what, 25? You remember the olden days, when bands had comeback albums after their initial success, and that time period was like five years? And it seemed like a long time?
Here’s my favorite U2 song, “One”, which is from the album:
Like all good U2 songs, and by which I mean “both,” (“I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” being the other), the song starts out highly personal, where the listener can relate in a very raw fashion, and then all of a sudden we take an Automan-like left turn and Bono is singing about Universal Harmony and Feeding Africa (but not manufacturing there). Strangely, I spent most of my youth thinking the song was about a man and a woman rehashing, again, their broken relationship, but apparently I was enjoying a meaning at odds with the song’s real meaning. So it’s my failure as a listener that makes this song my favorite from U2.
So I posted on Facebook about the age of Achtung Baby, and a contemporaneous friend said, “And the album hasn’t aged one bit, I still listen to it all the time.”
To which I replied, “You tell yourself that. To an eighteen-year-old today, you might as well be listening to Pat Boone.”
And not the metal Pat Boone:
What? No More Mr. Nice Guy is fifteen years old?
But he was just on Letterman the other day promoting the album.
Now I’ve made myself feel old, old man.
UPDATE: Welcome, VftP readers. Hey, if you’ve got a buck, I’ve got a comedy to sell you. The Courtship of Barbara Holt is now available for the Kindle. It, like Achtung Baby is about 20 years old, but I’ve stripped most of the dated pop culture references from it except a reference to the Spin Doctors.
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Book Report: Ghost Radio by Leopoldo Gout (2008)
I have an advanced reader’s edition of this book, and, blimey, I wouldn’t send this out for review. It contains misspellings and improperly formated sections. As some of you know, I’m working over another book presently, and I’m gnashing my teeth about every last missing comma and whatnot. But the difference between me and a professional is that this ARC contains those errors, but the pros will weed them out by the time the book has gone to press, whereas I’ll publish something with typos in it. And it drives me crazy.
Oh, right, we weren’t talking about me. We were talking about Ghost Radio.
This is a story about a young man with a radio program about the paranormal who has to deal with a ghostly sound pattern communicating with him. He suspects it’s the ghost of his friend Gabriel, who like Joaquin (the narrator) survived an automobile accident that orphaned them both (maybe). Gabriel died during an electrical storm as the duo, rockers and sound engineers, commandeered an abandoned radio station for an impromptu performance.
You know, I can’t really some up the plot for you because it bends and twists reality a bit, and you can’t be sure how sane Joaquin is and what’s going on. The book moves among flashbacks and the present as well as shifting from the first person narrators of Joaquin and his girlfriend/radio partner Alondra. So it moves along, keeps you guessing, and, if you’re like me, you eventually worry that the thing is going to go all Lost and end up sucking. Well, it’s not that bad, although I was a bit disappointed in the resolution. The book’s ending reminded me a lot of Douglas Coupland’s Girlfriend in a Coma (which I must have read before I was blogging since I can’t find a book review for it–did I read before I blogged? What was that world like?).
Still, it’s a pretty good book. And Gout has not published anything since. I hope he’s working on something.
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Appropriate Gratitude
another year on the right side of the dirt. Everything else is gravy.
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Now Available for the Kindle: The Courtship of Barbara Holt
As you might have heard, I’ve been working to prepare another book for publication. This book is The Courtship of Barbara Holt with Dennis Thompson Goes On Strike, a five-act play followed by a short one act play. Here’s the back matter/summary:
The Courtship of Barbara Holt:
Mark Dever, English major, has trouble talking to women. It’s worse than being speechless: When Mark is interested, he speaks in blank verse, like some Shakespearean courtier. When he meets Barbara Holt, his inadvertent poetry goes into overdrive. But Barbara is not interested in some wishy-washy English major, unlike her friend Jenn, who is an English major herself. Can his friends help Mark woo Barbara successfully and, more importantly, woo Jenn?Dennis Thompson Goes On Strike:
Dennis Thompson has had enough. All his life, some nameless author has been writing the book that is Dennis’s life, and Dennis has decided that he’s not going to play along any more. If The Author says, “Jump!”, Dennis is going to say, “No.” It’s like Six Characters in Search of an Author, but with a twist.
They’re definitely the summation of all the things I thought were awesomely funny 20 years ago, and they still crack me up.
The book is available for Kindle now at the low, low price of 99 cents.
I hope it looks all right; as you know, I don’t have a Kindle proper, and I had to rely on the Kindle for PC reader and the online Amazon Kindle emulator to see how it laid out, and in the process I found bugs in both Microsoft Word and the online Amazon emulator which led to a lot of frustration and hours upon hours of trying to lay it out properly (a play is different from a novel in that its layout is more complicated and depends upon more than a couple page breaks here and there). So if you see something egregiously wrong with it, let me know.
The book form is working its way through the channels (my proofreading and parlaying with the POD solution), so it might be available on Lulu in a couple of days and on Amazon.com by the New Year. It will be $6.99 for the paperback edition with the handsome cover I designed aw by mysewf.
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White House Thanksgiving Turkey Update
Although in years past, the President has traditionally pardoned the annual White House Thanksgiving Turkey, this year an independent panel created on page 2,408 of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, calculated that the quality of life for the bird, when compared to the costs of ongoing health care and maintenance for the fowl, would not be cost-effective and recommended its immediate termination.
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