Be still my beating heart

I love Liam Neeson. No, scratch that. I LOVE Liam Neeson. My love for Mr. Neeson started with Rob Roy which at the time of its release was overshadowed by a very similar Braveheart. Now Braveheart was a good movie and I certainly know that at the time Mr. Gibson was adored by many women. But Mel is no Liam. Never has been and never will be. Not to mention that the more I’ve learned about Mr. Gibson over the years the less use I have for him, can’t abide bigots or chauvinists.

I could watch Rob Roy over and over again. I think it has something to do with Liam’s accent and that boyish smile. He’s ruggedly handsome and nobody has ever made a kilt look so good.

Two of his most recent films were also genres that I particularly love: Star Wars Episode 1 – science fiction and Kingdom of Heaven – historical drama. Seeing that Liam was starring in both of them got me to the box office on or near opening day. I was disappointed at both of them since he was killed off very early in both films. Heart-breaking and false advertising to boot. Don’t give him headline billing if you’re just going to kill him off.

But today Mr. Neeson has a premier. In "Taken" he is “the” star so I doubt he will be killed off. My husband doesn’t know it yet but we will be going to the theater tonight so I can get a Liam fix, sigh.

The Last Straw

My routine in the morning is to drag myself out of bed, let the dogs out the back door, start the coffee, turn on the local news, let the dogs back in and lay down on the couch for another half an hour. I am a night person so my entry into the waking world at 6am is a slow process, even after all these years.

I turn the TV onto the local news not because I like it but because it is usually annoying enough to keep me from falling asleep again. How can anybody be so fricking cheerful so early in the morning?

One particular segment that drives me crazy is their “Gas Prices to Drive For”. This little public service is a daily spot where they give you the name and location of a gas station that is selling gas for about $0.05 less per gallon than average. Let’s do the math. If you have a 14 gallon tank then you will be saving a whopping 70 cents. At $2.00 a gallon this is about 35% of one gallon. At fuel economy of 26 mpg you are gaining an extra 9 miles. When gas was $4.00 a gallon this drops down to 4.5 miles. You better not be driving too far for these “Gas Prices to Drive For” or you will actually be losing money. So, whatever, if they think they are doing us some service with this little segment, good for them.

Every Friday I watch them ooh and aah over puppies and kittens brought in by local animal shelter people. They report on stores that are having shoe clearances and the women newscasters giggle like schoolgirls. Yesterday they actually did a 2 minute segment, complete with camera panning, about how the traffic lady and the anchor lady both were wearing red suits with beige knee high boots. To call any of this news is blatantly ridiculous. This is useless fluff.

But this morning they went too far. They were reporting on a new set of octuplets that were born yesterday. Just to make sure we understood what octuplets meant, the reporter was actually holding eight dolls. She then proceeded to pass them around to the other “news” people. They looked like idiots, pretending to cradle their dolls. I am now forced to find an alternative station because what I saw this morning has convinced me that these newscasters have no dignity. There is no end to the ridiculous things they will do. Much like a car wreck, at some point you just have to turn away.

Blah!

I added a Hello Kitty picture to this post just because she makes me happy. I can't explain why, she just does. The winter doldrums have hit. That's the time right after Christmas when we have a good 2 1/2 to 3 months of winter left. Even those with naturally sunny and optimistic dispositions start to grumble and frown. I think it is especially bad this year because the economy sucks. Not only are you stuck in your house, you're stuck in a house that has lost 25-40% of its value in the last two years.

I'm also crabby because I took a pretty bad fall on Friday. It was in the parking lot at work. My epic clumsiness was witnessed by four of my co-workers who, to their credit, were extremely helpful and understanding as they waited for me to catch my breath. With their assistance I was able to scrape myself up off the ground. Well the pain got worse and worse until I finally went to the clinic. I would have bet money that I had broken a rib but X-rays showed that I had not. Diagnosis is bruised ribs and sprained sternum.

I'm not a sissy. I don't complain or usually even discuss my health with others. My high tolerance for pain allowed me to deliver my two children by natural childbirth. I come from good German stock. We are tough. But, man oh man this hurts like hell and now I have some nice muscle spasms to go along with the pain. Number one on my list of things to be thankful for when I get back to normal is going to be my health.

So, I am focusing on the things I have to look forward to, which include: 1) This pain going away. 2) Springtime, which usually starts out being wet, cold and smelling like worms but it's a sign that summer is coming. 3) My trip to Vegas in February with my cousins, aunt and sister. We get together every year or two and the towns we visit are usually never the same once we leave. Vegas may have met its match with us.

Sing it sweetheart!

A lot of ground has been lost over the last eight years in our relations with other free nations of the world. When I say ground I mean leadership, respect, confidence and even just basic collaboration. Good old George wasn’t going to let anybody and I mean anybody, tell him what to do. (Except for maybe Cheney and Rumsfeld.)

Makes you stand up a little straighter as you watch the President re-establishing the rule of law in our country. He stood before the State Department diplomats and declared that cowboy diplomacy is over. The following excerpt is from an article I posted a few days ago which shows what the Bush administration thought about partnerships.

Joschka Fischer, German foreign minister and vice-chancellor: During the Kosovo war we had developed a format which was, I think, one of the cheapest models for policy coordinating in the interests of the U.S. [Secretary of State] Madeleine Albright was in the driver’s seat, and the four European foreign ministers discussed with her on a daily basis how the war develops and so on. This was U.K., France, Italy, and Germany, together with the U.S., on the phone. We continued after the war, not every day, but this was the format, to discuss problems and understand the positions. And suddenly it stopped. We had very, very few—I don’t know, two or three times. Only for a very short period when Colin came in, and then it stopped, because the new administration was not interested any longer in a multilateral coordination. (Published in Vanity Fair)


We are taking our first steps down the road to earning back a little bit of the respect we have lost over the years. So I offer up Ms. Aretha Franklin, Detroit Native and hat-wearer extraordinaire in the hopes that the United States of America can once again earn “just a little respect”.

Save a tree, read a screen.

The amount of paper on my desk at work is astounding. The whole notion of anything being “paperless” is a farce. I actually think that the digital age has created more papers. Documents used to be first dictated, then typed up, proofread, retyped, edited, retyped, copied and distributed. This was quite a lengthy and involved process. Distribution lists were considered with some care since creating and then distributing the document was at least a little bit labor intensive.

What it takes to create a document today is much less cumbersome than it used to be. Everybody types things up themselves and proofreading is done as you go with handy little red and green squigglies underneath your typos. For instance, I now know that squigglies is not spelled correctly according to MS Word but unexplainably squiggly is recognized as correct. Try it… squigglies gets the red squiggly and squiggly does not. Isn’t squiggly a noun? If it’s a noun shouldn’t you be able it make it plural? Is it squigglys? Nope that got the red squiggly too. Well, I’m off on a tangent now. Let me get back to my point. The computer checks my work to some degree which is a time saver. But does it save paper?

No it doesn't save any paper. I ususally e-mail my document to somebody to check it over. What do they do with it? They print it out, mark it up, scan their marked up copy and send it back to me. I print the edited version out to read and put in my files. No paper saving going on here.

Now it's time to distribute my final document so I attach it to an email and with the click of a button send it to interested and uninterested parties alike. Seems like a paper saver but most interested parties will print the document out. (The uninterested ones think to themselves, "Why in the hell did they send this to me?" and then keep it just in case.) Why, if I wanted to I could easily send my document to the thousands of people who work for my company across the globe. Imagine the paper wasted if even just a small portion of them print it out.

Other paper wasters include printer errors which for some mysterious reason turn a 5 page document into a 1,967 page document that you don't discover until you have printed 37 pages of gibberish And countless pages of paper are wasted because somebody forgot to clear the copy quanity on the photocopier and your single copy turns into five.

I believe the biggest paper waster of the electronic age is e-mail. Which is ironic because the whole purpose of e-mail is .... electronic mail.... not paper mail. But what happens is an e-mail is created, everybody and their brother is carbon copied. Then the e-mail gets forwarded and responses fly back and forth and before you know it your e-mail chain is the length of "War and Peace" when you print it out. Oh and make no mistake about it, you'll print a good number of them out. Just to be safe, or to cover your butt or to include in the project file so you can keep your e-mail box manageable.

I think this aversion to the pixelated word is the same reason it's taken so long for electronic books to take off. Great idea, but personally, each good book is like a gem to me. After I finish reading them I put them up on my shelf and then take pleasure in scanning them over to remind myself of all the things I learned and the places I visited by reading them. How am I going to do that with a book reading "device"?

I hope for the sake of all the trees out there this is all just a generational thing. Maybe the younger generations raised completely during the digital age will be more willing to let go of the paper in favor of the screen.

Good Riddance

Happy Day Before Inauguration Day.

The link below is an article in Vanity Fair about the Bush presidency. It is based on multiple interviews. I warn you that it is pretty long but well worth the time if you are looking for even more reasons to be happy about tomorrow.

Farewell to All That: An Oral History of the Bush White House

The ironic thing is Bush truly believes he is a man of ideals who governed by his priciples. He mistook decisiveness and stubbornness for conviction and purpose. He surrounded himself with ambitious and manipulative people who used his idealism against him and ultimately us.

I continue to be astounded that he was re-elected in 2004. This is the saddest and scariest part for me. We didn't boot him out or elect him out of office. He is a two term President who never should have been seated in the first place and that is the fault of the American public. Those who voted for him truly did get what they deserved over the last eight years.

Oh and Happy MLK Day. He was truly a man of conviction. A man with determination that saw a future much different than his reality and did something about it. With a sense of purpose and self sacrifice that should be an example to all.

They did what to that sandwich?

Went out to dinner tonight and my husband ordered a Monte Cristo sandwich. Have you ever had a Monte Cristo sandwich? Well let me tell you about them in case you haven't. It is a turkey, ham and cheese sandwich on wheat bread. Sounds good huh? But do you know what they do to that sandwich? They dip it in batter and then deep fry it. It's sprinkled with powdered sugar and comes with raspberry sauce for dipping. Seriously.

Now my husband tends from light to medium meals. He eats a lot of fish, pasta and sandwiches. He's a little persnickety about his food. I blame his mother. So he orders his MCSW sans powdered sugar and raspberry sauce. I think my jaw must have dropped because after the waitress leaves the following conversation ensues:

Him: "What?"
Me: "Have you ever eaten a MCSW?"
Him: "No"
Me: "Well it's kind of like a cross between a waffle and a sandwich" (I described it in detail for him)
Him: "It said wheat bread"
Me: "Oh, there's wheat bread in there, somewhere. Didn't you wonder why it came with powdered sugar and raspberry sauce?"
Him: "Yeah kinda, but deep fried, really? Maybe I should cancel it."
Me: "Who knows, maybe you'll like it." (I admit to giving it about 20/80 odds in my head).

Now there is a dispute as to how that last statement he made was punctuated. He claims that last sentence had a question mark after it. Like he was seeking my counsel on whether to cancel his order. I distinctly heard a period at the end of that sentence. Either way, he doesn't listen to me half the time anyway so the blame for this one lies squarely at his doorstep.

He didn't like it at all. He scraped the deep fried breading off and ate half an oil soaked turkey and ham sandwich. It was very funny and now the dogs have a treat coming their way today.