To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
The former Delta Airline stewardess who doesn’t understand the nature of at-will employment laments her firing and chooses some questionable peers:
That was when I began to hear stories about people like Heather B. Armstrong, of dooce.com, who was fired because of her blog in 2002. Then there was “the Washingtonienne,” who was fired earlier this year because of comments she entered in her blog.
One should not compare oneself to Jessica Cutler, as one always suffers by the mention.
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Perhaps it’s the end of the year and time to just dump old DOC files that I converted from WPS files which I converted from the original LotusWorks files I created in my prolific college period, but since I saw Edmund Spenser’s “One day I wrote her name upon the strand” over at Pejmanesque, I thought it only fitting to present my responses:
A Carved Tree (I)
Copyright 1991 Brian J. Noggle, you illegal poem-sharing rabble
One day I carved her name into a tree
with mine inside a Cupid-arrowed heart.
When I had closed my knife, she checked my art,
and shook her head, and then she looked at me.
“Now why’d you come and maim this oak?” asked she.
“Here in the woods, it lived its life apart,
but now the awful manly meddlings start.
This tree will never have its privacy.”
“I maimed this oak so everyone could see
our names as linked for all Eternity,
and I must admit to you, my deified,
I like our love like this, objectified,
so that it’s not another petty ‘love’,
but like a natural law passed from above.”
A Carved Tree (II)
Also Copyright 1991 Brian J. Noggle,
so don’t repost without permission, Harvey
This quiet spot, beneath this ancient oak,
is where I come to think on brooding days.
The open sky is blue and mocks the strays
that cower underneath the leafy cloak.
I sit and sip my slowly warming Coke,
and stumble through my memory, a maze
of many cul-de-sacs of yesterdays.
I remember how, beneath this tree, we spoke….
Above my head, carved by my careful hand,
the heart and letters of a “Brian and ….”
I remember once, the reckless words I said,
in love’s embrace of sweetly muddled head.
With human eyes, a truth is now revealed:
That higher laws can also be repealed.
UPDATE: This poem, and many others, are available in my 2018 collection Coffee House Memories.
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I wrote the following story 13 years ago, when I was young and in college. Forgive me my youthful exuberance, but since it’s Christmas, I thought I’d post it since it contains a heartwarming message we can all share:
Die Hard MDCXCII: Die Really, Really, REALLY Hard
Copyright 1990 Brian J. Noggle, you hosers
The Christmas Muzak was driving Ryan crazy. There are only so many times you can hear “Good King Wenceslas” before you want to strangle any available customer. And that limit had been passed twice over in the seven hours that Ryan had been on duty.
The snow was not drifting lazily down as it would on an ideal Christmas Eve. It was blizzarding, if there is any such verb. Two feet had fallen in an hour, setting a record that will probably stand until the earth passes through a major galactic dust cloud, or Brian Noggle gets a book published, whichever happens first. Ryan shivered just looking at the two rows of carts inside the store, hoping the supply would not diminish to the point when he would have to go out in THAT.
An eskimo came through the electric doors. White snow clung to his parka up to his shoulders. Gloves lowered the hood, removed two woolen hats, a Sphericky’s cap, and a set of earmuffs. It wasn’t actually an eskimo, Ryan discovered, but “Plaid” Jackson, a delivery man. He must have the last load of cranberries for the season, thought Ryan. But who was going to come in at ten o’clock on a night like this to buy cranberries?
“Is the snow deep and crisp and even?” Ryan asked of the trucker.
“Huh?” replied Plaid. He paused to mull over the question and then the answer. Ryan looked at the clock hung high on the wall over the Deli department. He was supposed to get off at eleven, and the question had eight words in it. Plaid wouldn’t have an answer by then. And ‘even’ had two syllables. Drat, thought Ryan.
“Hey, Ryan, could you get the trash out of here?” asked Ed, the store’s night manager. ‘Here’ referred to the small elevated office. It was surrounded by a four foot high wall topped by a foot and a half of bulletproof glass. Once again Ryan paused to consider the necessity of the glass, as any stick-up man over four foot tall could point the gun over the glass and kill anyone in the office anyway. Never question, he reminded himself.
“Yeah,” Ryan responded, demonstrating the eloquence he had picked up at his year at the local Jesuit-run university’s oratorical classes.
He entered the ultra-secure sanctuary of management and looked at the pile of garbage. It had not been emptied all day and looked like a horn of plenty of cigarette cartons and losing lottery tickets. He sighed and began to redistribute the trash into trash bags.
Ed noticed Plaid and walked over to him. “Do you have a load for us?” he asked, slowly, of the driver. The piped-in Muzak started on the forty-second rendition of “The Wassail Song”.
Ryan looked around furtively. Ed was outside the office proper, and the only other person in it was a checker currently bent over a calculator. She was obviously performing some function above the brain capacity of a utility clerk. The Muzak control panel was right above him. He grinned and hit a button. The Muzak stopped abruptly, replaced by the clicking of the calculator’s printer, as reproduced by the store’s intercom.
Ryan lifted the three bags of refuse and exited the office. Ed was waiting expectantly by Plaid. “Fill the milk shelves while you’re back there,” Ed called. Karen stood alone in her checkout lane and watched the cart. Ryan through the garbage in a cart and started wheeling it toward the back door. Plaid said, “Yeah.” Ryan wondered if he had gone to the same college.
Far off in the back, the door to the back room by the dairy department squeaked. Ed stepped into the office, leaving the door open behind him. Plaid went back to his truck parked behind the store. Outside the front windows, a van attempted to squeal to a stop, but slid past the windows and out of sight. A few seconds later, the van reappeared, traveling in reverse, and halted. Twelve armed terrorists leaped from the back of the truck and entered the store. The last one to enter shut off the electric eyes for the doors. The leader pushed into the office.
“What do you want?” asked Ed.
“The code for the safe,” said the terrorist, brandishing a big automatic pistol. To Ed it appeared to be a VERY big automatic pistol, but it really was just a big automatic pistol.
“Who else is here?” asked another terrorist, speaking to Karen. Eleven automatic rifles caused her a bit of fright and she was unable to answer.
The checker in the office looked up from her calculator only to faint when confronted with the appearance of the evil-doers. She subsequently hit the floor with a thud.
Ten automatic rifles unpointed themselves at Karen and fanned out to search the store.
“I don’t have the code. I’m just the night manager,” said Ed calmly. He had dealt with ten-year-olds shoplifting candy bars. Be calm, yet firm, and intimidating. How different could this be? he wondered.
“Give it to me or I will have to shoot you,” threatened the bad guy. He cocked the big automatic pistol.
Maybe a little different, thought Ed. Calm, yet firm. “I guess you’ll have to shoot me,” said Ed.
“Ok,” said the gunman, and the gun barked.
Too firm, thought Ed. Or so he started to, but the thought was never completed because his brains most uncooly splattered against the cigarette racks on the wall.
“How about some music?” asked the leader, and he turned the switch on the nearby control panel from intercom to Muzak. Then he started humming “Jingle Bell Rock”.
Ryan was standing with a crate hook in one hand and his jaw open. The whole exchange was coming through loud and clear over the intercom. He was now watching through the window in the dairy door. The office and therefore the entire scene was being played out at the other end of aisle eight from where he stood.
“Ok,” said the unfamiliar voice, and Ed’s pretty much headless corpse staggered backwards.
“Great. I’m going to have to clean that up,” muttered Ryan. His musings were interrupted by the appearance of a machine gun bearing hoodlum in the same window. Ryan quickly stepped behind a convenient corner. The gunman walked past, and Ryan extended the hook before the advancing feet and pulled. The gunman fell backwards. “Mama mia!” he exclaimed as his head crunched on the concrete floor.
“Good. No mess,” said Ryan. He picked up the bad guy’s weapon and Official GI Joe Walkie-Talkie.
“Did you hear something over there?” whispered a voice on the radio.
“Luigi? Luigi?” asked a frantic voice.
“Did you see where he was going?” asked another.
“Over by the dairy section,” said another voice. How many was that? wondered Ryan.
“The safe is protected by three super-duper locks,” said the geekiest looking terrorist. “There is one combination lock, one laser intensified multiple pin steel lock, and the code key. Unless we break them all, we can’t get it open,” he continued. He set up a U.S. Army Special Piercing Laser for Military Use Only, available at any surplus store or local K-Mart for $19.95, and its red beam began to work on the safe.
One of the terrorists kicked the dairy door, and then he kicked it again. On the third kick, the door opened with a squeak, and three automatics pointed into the dairy back room. Leaning against a pile of trash against the back door was Luigi. A sign saying “SALE! Nyuck nyuck nyuck, now I have a gun,” was taped to his chest. The first man to reach him, and fortunately not the brightest, read the fine print on the sign — “Look behind you!” Being a crack commando sort of guy, this terrorist crouched, spun, and fired, mortally wounding his two companions.
“Gosh, sorry,” he said to the cadavers. “He’s a tricky one, eh?”
A large Italian-looking terrorist tried to pick up a cash register and dash it to the floor in rage, but found the object too heavy to lift. He grunted and set his gun on the floor. Then, with both hands, he tried to heave the register. He grunted and strained until a sweat broke out on his forehead. He strained some more, took off his jacket, and strained even more. After ten minutes, he gave up and settled for knocking a candy rack over, spilling candy bars and bubble gum to the floor with passion.
“Mario’s pretty hacked off,” said one terrorist.
“The guy in back killed his brother,” replied another.
“I want this guy dead,” said the lead terrorist into his walkie-talkie. “How’s it going?” he asked of the geeky terrorist.
“The combination lock is gone, and I’m working on the laser lock, but without the code key….”
“Find the key,” growled the leader.
The checker in the office gained consciousness, saw Ed, and fainted again.
“Hello Mr. Rogue Good Guy. Do you think of yourself as some big screen star of an action flick? Chuck Norris? Sylvester Stallone?” asked the voice of the guy who killed Ed over the walkie-talkie.
“I was always partial to Leslie Nielson and ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic,” replied Ryan. He lie on the crawlspace above the meat counter. It was crisscrossed with two-by-fours, and a foot’s worth of decorative ledge kept him hidden from view.
“You can’t win. There are too many of us,” said the leader.
Ryan tried to think of a defiant, witty, sarcastic, and/or cynical wisecrack, but none was forthcoming. “Oh, yeah?” was all he managed.
Ryan thought of his options. The snowfall had by now made exit impossible. He hadn’t been able to put out the trash a half hour ago, so by now the snow must be six feet deep. No cops. No help. Just him and ten terrorists. I’d better get overtime for this, he thought.
He cautiously peered over the edge. No terrorists were in sight. He lowered himself down and ran in a crouch for the grocery room, located twenty feet ahead of him in the back of the store. There came a shout as he crossed the wide Produce Department aisle. An echoing sound of gunfire reached his ears as the bullets zipped by. He threw himself through the swinging double doors. Red splattered on his blue vest.
He looked at the red and staggered. He even felt shock coming on until he realized that it was only the remnants of some deceased tomatoes. Relieved by this discovery, he climbed atop the boxes of paper bags and lie down on the large produce cooler.
Three terrorists burst through the double doors. They spread out and searched for him. One climbed a flight of stairs to the employees’ lounge. The other two played hide and seek among the pallets of merchandise. “Peek-a-boo!” said one, leaping from behind a pallet of paper towels. His partner barely restrained himself from perforating the former. They concluded their search, shrugged, and moved toward the produce cooler. Ryan slid back from the edge and hoped he was invisible.
A burst of gunfire came from the lounge. A few seconds later Ryan watched the third of the trio descend the stairs clutching a can of Coke.
“Dang soda machine wouldn’t take dimes,” he explained. Ryan nodded to himself, agreeing with the actions of the terrorist. The heavy door to the produce cooler whooshed open. After a few moments, the double doors on the other side of the cooler opened. Ryan turned and watched on of the terrorists go through a side door into the Deli Department and the other two go out the door leading to the produce aisle.
Ryan wiped a nonexistent bead of sweat from his forehead.
“I can’t find the code key anywhere,” said the geek. The office was now in disarray. Cigarette cartons, books of computer printouts, and other assorted papers littered the floor and almost buried the checker. She opened her eyes, saw the mess, gasped, and fainted.
“Search her,” said the leader, pointing at the checker on the floor.
“What are you guys looking for anyway?” asked Karen, apparently discovering her vocal cords.
“In this safe is a stack of stamp books and over one hundred thousand bonus stamps. With that haul, we would have enough full books to get quite a few Musicfest tickets,” said the leader, laughing heartily.
“You guys aren’t terrorists. You’re just thieves,” Karen said.
“We never said we were terrorists. It was the writer of this story that first implied we were terrorists,” corrected the leader.
A lone THIEF exited the produce cooler below Ryan. As soon as the door closed, Ryan pulled a rope that he had found atop the produce cooler, and a hastily devised trap sprang shut. A stack of the paper bags fell on the bad guy. Ryan slowly climbed down and examined the newly dead body. There was a backpack with a Packers logo on it under a box of bags. Ryan opened it and discovered a few bricks of C-4. He smiled. “It’s about time,” he said with a mischievous and somewhat maniacal grin. He looked around, gathered his rope, and said, “Let’s get busy….”
Big Jim, the store’s power fork, roared out of the double doors of the grocery back room. Its handles was lashed into the “Forward, Full Speed” setting. Two bad guys in the back row of the store looked in surprise. A machine gun was also lashed on board at a level of about three feet above the ground. As the machine plowed forward, the gun fired a continuous stream of bullets toward the front of the store. One of the thieves fired a few bullets at the fork as he and his companion began to run toward the dairy. A scream issued from Aisle One as a bad guy received a helping of bullets. Blood mixed with catsup on the floor, creating a gooey mess that Ryan would probably have to clean up.
The two thieves trotting ahead of machine passed Aisle Eight and turned the corner of the frozen aisle. The machine hit the corner where the dairy cases meet the frozen cases, and the plastic used the occurrence as an excuse to explode. Two horribly mangled corpses flew threw the air and knocked over a Kool-Aid display in the center of the frozen aisle. Torrents of milk, orange juice, and egg spilled onto the floor. Big Jim was now Hundred Thousand Little Jims.
It didn’t take long for three gun-toting crooks to figure out where the power fork had emerged from. They charged through the door with little regard for the possibility that there might be a utility clerk with an automatic rifle waiting for them. There wasn’t, though, because Ryan had planned on the presence of brains in the criminals.
What the hoodlums did find was three cases of banana peels on the floor. They danced a cartoonish jig as they tried to keep their balance. They failed and fell to their backs. A snickering Ryan, after leaning against the produce cooler door and enjoying the show, ended their shame with a barrage of lead.
Ryan then entered the produce cooler and emerged in the produce room. A vicious kick launched his gun into the air. It clattered onto the crawlspace he had so recently occupied. The source was a big mad Italian dude. Mario. He appeared a VERY big, VERY mad Italian dude to Ryan.
“You killed Luigi,” Mario said.
“Er…sorry,” said Ryan with a sheepish smile. He figured the apology had been rejected when Mario hit him with a right hook to the jaw. This was followed by a flurry of blows that made Ryan’s face numb and his head swim. Another kick and Ryan found himself knocked into the produce cooler. He backed to the opposite door and grabbed whatever weapon was handy. The weapon happened to be a case of eggs.
Mario let out a yell and entered the room with a flying kick. Show off, thought Ryan. The first Sphericky Grade A Jumbo caught Mario above the right eye, and the following eggs hit him in the chest and stomach. Mario raised his hands to defend himself from the barrage as he moved closer to Ryan. The U/C gave up his futile attack and turned to open the door, but was stopped by a massive chop to the back of the neck.
Mario stood him up and spun him around. “Now you will pay in full,” Mario said with a horrible smirk. He raised his right fist and Ryan felt the crosshairs on the bridge of his nose.
At that moment, over the speakers, began a familiar sequence of musical notes. The Muzak had faded into the background with this new repeated hard stimulus to Ryan’s face, but there is only so much a man can take before his hidden resources kick in. Only so much can a man take before the hatred, rage, and pain set him off for good. And the ninety-seventh repetition of “Good King Wenceslas” was too much for Ryan.
Ryan’s eyes grew red and his fingers curled. They found the neck of his adversary. “No, no more,” said Ryan. He forced his muscular opponent to the floor and kneeled on his chest. “NO MORE!”
he screamed, and he beat Mario’s head against the floor with a passion. Mario soon grew slack and the back of his head had the consistency of a bruised McIntosh apple, but Ryan did not cease until the song was over. When it finished, he stood up, straightened his blood-stained vest, and searched for his gun. He found it and checked the clip. One bullet left.
“Where is the flamin’ code key?” asked the leader. The gunfire from the back had ceased a long time ago, and none of his men had reappeared. He had never lost his composure before, but he was close now.
“I don’t know!” shouted the geek. He was sweating. He too knew the score, and it was something like Rogue Dude With the Gun 10, Them 0.
“Yeah, Ryan!” shouted Karen. “He’s whipping up on you guys.”
The leader stepped out of the office and grabbed her arm. “You know him?” he asked fiercely.
“Sure. He’s a U/C here.”
At that moment a rifle and blond head of hair appeared from behind the register at Lane 8. “Freeze!” shouted Ryan, aiming the rifle at the leader.
The leader pulled Karen between Ryan and himself. The automatic appeared in his hand, and to Karen it looked like a VERY big automatic. “Lay down your weapon and come here,” said the leader, “or she dies.”
Drat, thought Ryan. The cute checker I’d most like to impress with my brave heroics. “The big Italian dude’s dead. So are the rest,” said Ryan, lying his rifle at the start of the conveyor belt of the checkout counter.
“And you must die,” said the leader, shoving Karen away and aiming with both hands at Ryan. Ryan stomped his foot on the pedal that activated the belt and snatched the automatic rifle. He pulled and held the trigger, and shell after shell pounded into the body of the former leader. After a few seconds he released the trigger.
That’s odd, he thought, removing the clip. One bullet remained. That’s right, he thought, the hero never runs out of bullets.
The geeky bad guy watched the body of his boss slump to the floor in the same manner as Ryan had an hour and a half ago. Newly promoted to leadership of the band of hoods composed of himself, his first decision was simple: retreat. He opened the door to the Manager’s office and passed through it to emerge in the frozen aisle. Ryan’s shot crashed through a door in the frozen case and killed a container of Cool Whip.
“The dairy back door!” shouted Ryan, and he took off in a trot down aisle eight. The last thief spun the corner and headed into the dairy back room. The next shot from Ryan, fired on the run, splooched into a bowl of ricotta cheese.
Displaying athleticism uncommon to the ordinary laser-operating nerd, the crook vaulted over three corpses, a pile of trash, and hit the Emergency Door Unlock bar. The alarm began to whine as he pushed into a seven foot wall of snow and into the night.
Ryan arrived at the back door. He could not see far into the tunnel dug by the guy, but he fired blindly into it. He heard the roar of a diesel engine, and a mountain of snow moved. There was a crashing sound and then a grating sound. This grating continued for a few seconds, then there was a lingering scream quite befitting a geeky criminal, and then silence.
Ryan pulled a nearby stepladder into the snow and climbed it. As he poked his head out of the snow, he saw Plaid’s truck had plowed into the dumpster and shoved it ahead a few feet. He also traced the the collapsed roof of the crook’s tunnel and noted that it ended at the dumpster. As long as they don’t move the dumpster, I won’t have to clean that one up, he thought.
The driver’s side door of the truck opened. “Yeah,” said Plaid. “Deep and crisp and even. Ha. Say are you gonna pull this load or what?”
“Where is the code key?” Karen asked Ryan as he appeared at the front of the store, bleeding, torn, and fatigued. He hoped she was impressed.
“You know Ed. He probably locked it in the safe,” Ryan explained. He dropped the gun to the floor.
“You look pretty messed up,” Karen said. “Let me see if we can find some Band-Aids.” She stepped into the office, and Ryan followed, secretly happy. To him he felt secretly VERY happy. He ignored Ed’s corpse.
The checker on the floor came around again, and this time she managed to stay conscious. “Ryan, get a broom and a mop and clean my office,” she murmured weakly.
Ryan sighed wearily. “And some 409 for the cigarette rack, right?”
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When coupled with a long in-text ad, this Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel story produces a line break that leads to an interesting interpretation of the text:
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In Ohio,Ralph Nader has filed suit to end corporate subsidies:
St. Louis built a $260 million stadium to attract a football team. MasterCard got $41 million of tax incentives to build its technology center here. Ford got $17 million to keep its Hazelwood plant open.
Public officials justified each of those economic development deals as a legitimate investment that created and preserved jobs. But each also could be labeled corporate welfare.
Would we be better off if such subsidies were banned? It’s an enticing thought to many taxpayers, and a chilling thought to politicians and corporate officials. But the debate has been largely theoretical until recently. Now, a court case in Ohio may make some tax incentives illegal.
He’s a better gadfly than commander in chief, that’s for sure.
The government has no business spending tax monies to either perpetrate itself or to aid corporations so that they might indirectly benefit citizens.
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Our European friends again broaden themselves beyond their normal anti-Semitism to demonstrate their ‘superiority’ over blacks:
The IMG/Primus Worldstars tour of Europe was organized as a gesture of goodwill, but not all fans at their 5-4 win against the Russian Stars on Sunday felt the same.
A fan twice threw a banana on the ice when Worldstars forward Anson Carter was playing, once during the first period and again during the third. Carter, who is black, told ESPN The Magazine’s EJ Hradek that he noticed the racist act but did not alert game officials.
A bit of perspective that people are thugs and punks everywhere, not just here in the United States where over 150 years ago, certain sections of the country practiced a barbarism.
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Beavis and Butt-Head — The 2nd Coming.
Somehow, I wonder if Time-Life has any reputation left from which we can deduct respect for this offer.
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Story in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Freeway Web site could have cost less: Rivals say they would cut price in half on $685,000 no-bid job.
That’s the Wisconsin Department of Transportation spending the better part of a million dollars for a Web site explaining how they’re going to rebuild a major interchange in downtown Milwaukee.
The contract, released last week to the Journal Sentinel, also includes $15,600 for 25 flights.
Where in Wisconsin do you need to fly at $624 a pop?
Meanwhile, the people sucking the government teat are pleased:
“We’re damn proud of this Web site,” said Brian Swenson, vice president of HNTB’s Wisconsin operations. “I know we’re taking a lot of heat and a lot of hits for it, but this tool is going to save people time and money when construction comes up here.”
It’s all about serving the public, ainna? At as high of a price possible from funds that the public cannot determine how to spend because it’s been taken from them by their elected and appointed betters for distribution liberally to their unelected, unappointed, and no-bid betters.
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You know, I really hate when advertisements in online papers require an additional download to view. For example, in the stories today on StL Today, the online arm (complete with swinging arm flab) of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, an in-article advertisement needs a plug in and instead of displaying with all its clock-cycle-grabbing beauty, overlays the actual text in the story.
Here’s a quick word to you online marketing types: I am not going to download a plugin to see advertising. What were you thinking? Pinheads.
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A cataclysm 250 million years ago wiped out nearly all life in the Earth’s oceans, and nearly three-quarters of the plants and animals on land vanished too. It was the greatest catastrophe the Earth has ever experienced – – but scientists who study such events are in sharp disagreement over what caused it.
Indeed, scientists in San Francisco are divided: Is it the Bush administration’s environmental policies that rent the space-time continuum to cause a cataclysm in distant the past, or is it a Bush administration policy that has yet to pass? Can good scientists stop the evil Edward H. Haliburton III, who many people don’t realize still plots maniacally in a lair in the Mojave Desert?
Hopefully, a burst of triumphant fanfare will arise from this Science League retreat to save the future and the past!.
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After watching the movie Ocean’s Twelve, do not attempt to compliment your wife or female significant other by telling her, “You’ve got more feminine hands than Catherine Zeta-Jones and are prettier than Julia Roberts,” if she can quickly grasp the implications.
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Last week’s edition of the Riverfront Times, St. Louis’s alternate weekly, provides some damning details about Richard Gephardt’s career:
Gephardt, who turns 64 next month, showed up more than 90 percent of the time to vote in all but 7 of his 28 years in Congress.
Yeowtch. So for 75% of his career, he’s been present 90% of the time to do his job. Although that’s better than my scholastic career, it’s nowhere near my professional behaviour.
The Riverfront Times goes on to enumerate some of the years where he’s fallen short:
The RFT doesn’t cover the last two years, but they don’t have to. It serves to highlight that legislators, of both parties, not just Gephardt and the 2004 senatorial tandem that shamed their consituencies most publicly, receive hundred thousand dollar salaries and then don’t bother to show up for work.
Imagine the jobs you’ve held, gentle reader, where you can take that six figure salary and only show up one day every two weeks. Or the one where you got four day weekends every weekend without working more than eight hours Monday through Thursday. Are you having trouble? So am I.
Of course, if you start to figure in vacation, you might have missed a couple of weeks of work. Certainly, this downs your percentage. But it shouldn’t figure into a position, such as Congressional representative, where the employee has plenty of time to relax when Congress is not in session. Nor do Congressional missed votes come from sick days, for the most part. Instead, they come when the employee takes care of personal business–whether looking for another job or working deals with other employees regarding workload and credit for accomplishments.
No, our legislators have the best of government work. High salaries, long vacations, and less accountability than real people or even other government employees.
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You know, much has been made about the discovery that Viktor Yushchenko, Ukrainian politician and soon-to-be president elect, has been disfigured by a large amount of dioxin introduced to his body. Most people suspect the Russians or political rivals, but I’ve used Occam’s Cosmetological Scalpel to come to a different conclusion.
You know, perhaps he’s studied American politics and has learned that certain American politicians have injected deadly poisons used as devices in 1970s and 1980s suspense novels and movies, such as botulism toxin, directly into their bodies in vain and, well, vain efforts to make themselves more appealing to the public.
Unfortunately, because the Ukraine is not Massachusetts or Beverly Hills, Yushchenko got the dioxin and not the botulism.
It’s just a crackpot theory, so it might be wrong. But that’s what they want you to think.
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I just browsed the latest Consumer Information Catalog from the GSA Federal Consumer Information Center. Certainly, if you’re not a damn kid, you remember the advertisements they used to run for this free catalog, often (it seemed) during Saturday morning cartoons. Well, I picked a copy up at the local library last week and paged through it. A couple things struck me: first, we have a National Institute of Arthritis & Musculoskeletal & Skin Diseases? Second, why do some departments, like Department of Justice and Department of Interior get abbreviated to DOJ and DOI, while Department of Agriculture and Department of Health and Human Services get abbreviated to USDA and HHS?
Finally, as I am paging through, I note most of the USDA (Department of Agriculture) publications don’t deal with growing things. We have:
Contrast this list with the publications offered by the Department of Agriculture that deal with products of agriculture:
Non-agricultural topics outnumber agricultural topics by more than two to one. I know, you’re putting pen to paper right now to ask your congressional representatives how this can be. Are they trying to educate ignorant peasants in the country side to finance? Well, you’re not thinking that because I have few leftist coastal readers who would characterize the family farmers out here that way. But I don’t expect that these documents where designed to instruct farmers and farm hands or even migrant pickers on the topics they cover.
No, friends, these are budget burners if I ever saw them. Some department within the USDA had some money to spend and understood that if it didn’t spend that money, it wouldn’t get it next year. So it commissioned a number of booklets on topics which are undoubtedly useful but which should lie outside the scope of the Department of Agriculture. But since the funds were spent in the fiscal years in which the documents were created, undoubtedly future funds must be spent to keep these documents and to supplement the documents with further useful booklets.
Which leads me to guess why the Department of Agriculture goes by USDA instead of DOA. Because when its funding bills come before Congress, perhaps the department recognizes that the legislators don’t actually read beyond the title of bills for which they plan to bother showing up to vote, and any funding bill stamped DOA might become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Although this would be good for the country, it probably wouldn’t be good for the USDA and its professional communicators.
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It looks like government officials in Madison, Wisconsin, want to return to the glory days of the 1980s, where local governments gave cable companies monopolies in exchange for wiring their communities. Instead of cable, though, Madison wants a single company to provide wireless Internet access to its citizens:
Wireless Internet could be available in downtown Madison and at the Dane County Regional Airport by this spring, said mayoral spokesman George Twigg.
The state Department of Administration is putting out a request for proposals today seeking vendors interested in building the network, said Twigg and Scott McDonell of the state Department of Administration.
… Twigg said the city is trying to strike a balance between imposing user fees and building the cost of using the network onto the property tax.
“It’s a tradeoff,” he said.
Let me project what’s going to happen:
You think I am mad? Look at your cable bill and wonder why you’re beholden to a single company for service.
(Link seen on Boots and Sabers.)
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Yes, Ms. McGovern, they know it’s Christmas. They’re kids, for ding-donging out loud.
(Apologies to Jeff Goldstein for stealing his groove. Well, not really.)
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Whenever I read a story like the one I saw on CNN.com entitled “Bush pressed for more Net security“, I immediately start putting the words crony and capitalist together and start leaving laissez-faire alone. For once we get into the details-that is, the first paragraphs-we see what this group wants:
Computer-security experts, including former government officials, urged the Bush administration on Tuesday to devote more effort to strengthening defenses against viruses, hackers and other online threats.
The Bush administration should spend more on computer-security research, share threat information with private-sector security vendors, and set up an emergency computer network that would remain functional during Internet blackouts, a computer-security trade group said.
It’s a trade group, which represents companies that take money to do computer security services such as researching computer-security, sharing threat information with private sector security vendors (each other), and setting up emergency computer networks to remain functional during Internet blackouts. That is, the trade group wants the government to devote money to pay to the trade group’s members. The call is as relevant as any group of potato farmers or mohair ranchers shrieking that the people of the United States need their product to survive.
I am alarmed, however, with the amount of play and seriousness given to the idea that the government should do something to ensure the security of computer networks. As companies have sacrificed security in developing their infrastructures and network capabilities in favor of cost savings, expediency, and convenience, they should not expect a government bailout now. The government undoubtedly should expend public funds to ensure that its capabilities remain intact during an emergency, but it shouldn’t retrofit, expensively and bureauwastefully, security for any factory or utility that placed its flow controls online on the Internet for convenience and a chance to lay off people who would have to check those controls in person. I don’t want to spend tax money to ensure that my bank is secure nor that my credit card companies can weather an attack, nor to ensure that my power company can continue delivering amperage down my pipes; that’s a cost of business, which the businesses often pass on to me through service fees and surcharges so that those costs don’t come out of the profit margin and the shareholder’s take.
However, since these lobbyists want the best of all worlds: surcharges to charge consumers for the cost of business and the government, and by that I mean us taxpayers, actually paying for the costs of business. Since the customer or taxpayer backlash hasn’t arisen, Willie, it’s go time.
As a taxpayer and a customer, I don’t look forward to the expanding synergy between government security administration and private industry. Let’s take an example from recent history: airports. Airlines, leaky boats which the government frequently bails out with buckets of taxpayer cash, and airport authorities, government bureaucracies in their own right in many cases and not very good at for-profit in others, abdicated their obligation to secure their places of business. First, they took government funds to pay for their own surly security employees, and when that wasn’t enough, the government stepped in and provided its own employees, surly and unaccountable to the private sector, to grope grandma.
So call it a slippery slope if you will, but private/public partnerships do resemble a water park. If a group of lobbyists paid highly by companies, whether profitable or failing, calls for government aid, they often get more than we customers or taxpayers want or deserve. Imagine a decade hence, when companies have pissed away the government funding on efforts to secure further government funding–which is where most government funding goes, even in the government. The private-public partnership has failed, and some legislator who wants to get on television midwifes the Computer Security Administration (CSA). This new authority dictates that computer owners must install the government flavor of McAfee anti-virus and must allow the government to schedule scans twice a week. Anyone who does not let the government perform its security function, loosely defined by Congress and arbitrarily envisioned by a mid-level Homeland Security manager looking forward to a better appointed position, faces a fine or felony charges just like impudent fliers do now. Our leadership class explains that responsible Internet travellers must accept this sacrifice, and the media will find some AOL user to explain that it’s a good idea and doesn’t impair his experience at all (it wouldn’t). The government gets to scan your hard drive every night for the good of the nation, and if you don’t like it, in four years you can vote for a different legislator too timid to agitate for its reversal.
Once the government takes over the security, all customer ill will regarding the inconvenience and the intrusiveness of the practices goes to the government and its employees, and the companies and their trade groups can only shrug their collectivist shoulders and say to their customers, sorry, it’s the government running its fingers over your shapely posterior, not us. All responsibility for irresponsibility successfully shirked, the trade groups can turn their attention to the next government handout–and hand over.
Sound crazy? Imagine what you would have thought about current TSA practices in 1994. Or 1987.
To make a short story long, Internet and corporate network security are not the government’s business. They’re the exclusive burden of companies who choose to participate in networks and of the consortia and standards bodies and organizations, well, organized by private industry. If our “capitalist” industries cede that obligation to the government, they’re putting their short term cost savings ahead of the ultimate best interests of their customers and the interests of the citizens of the Republic.
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Thanks, Jon Dolan, Missouri State Senator from Lake St. Louis and an alleged “Republican,” for cooking up this stupid waste of tax money: “Visitors will know Miss USA is ours“:
Stan Musial hasn’t had one. Neither has Chuck Berry. In fact, no St. Louisan has been honored with his or her name posted on a state highway sign leading into Missouri. But that’s about to change.
Starting next year, motorists driving west over the Poplar, Jefferson Barracks and Interstate 270 bridges into Missouri will be greeted with this: “Welcome to Missouri. Home of Shandi Finnessey Miss USA 2004.”
Not to put too fine a point of it, but by that time, it will be that Miss USA was ours, once, sometime around the turn of the century, like the World’s Fair.
Jumping jesuits, but that’s a lot of money to laud a transitory and ultimately unimportant honor. For the love of peat, why?
“She’s a hottie, and she’s a smarty,” said state Sen. Jon Dolan, R-Lake Saint Louis, whose idea it was to put up the signs.
Dude, next time you try to impress a woman, how about you expend a little of your own money to send flowers?
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Fresh from triumphs in determining whom restaurant and bar owners whom those business owners can serve on their private property, government officials in Philadelphia now want to determine whom theatre owners can serve by limiting children under the age of 6 from some screenings. By law.
Mainly, I suspect, because although the human condition doesn’t change that rapidly, but because legislating is a full time job and computer solitaire can only fill so many hours in the day.
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Whistles do not belong in Christmas carols, ever. Your rendition of “Frosty the Snowman” is in violation.
Please, just rein it in a little bit, or we’ll have to contact Senator John McCain to enact Congressional legislation regulating Christmas Carols to prevent damn kids from destroying the traditional music enjoyed for generations in this great land. Without schnucking whistles.
(McCain’s got enough time if he has the leisure to tackle steroids in baseball, speaking of which, who doesn’t think that there’s enough bipartisan, nationwide sport to just freaking amend the constitution to prohibit steroids and blood doping in all sports?)
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