Horowitz

It was cold but not too bad. I didn't need a hat. Wool gloves were fine. It was early spring of 1977 and the leaves had not yet begun to sprout but there was no snow.

I walked to the bus station, wrote them a check for a few dollars, and was on my way to Fredonia outside Buffalo. I had a ticket to see Valdimir Horowitz the next afternoon, at Kleinhans Music Hall in the big town.

The man was a lion. He was in a second prime period of his career. There had been a number of years, a decade-plus, in which he did not concertize. It was said that for one year-and-a-half period he never even left his apartment in New York, preferring to stay at home with his ever-protective wife, who herself was the daughter of the legendary conductor Toscanini.

There is a story about Toscanini at some famous opera house about to conduct some three-hour-long major work, whatever, let's just say it was Aida for effect, though it well could have been Fidelio for all I know.

Anyways, the story goes that just before the opera, the bassonist of the orchestra madly approached Toscanini and said "Maestro, I'm in a fix. The low E-flat key on my bassoon is broken, and I don't have time to go home and get my other instrument."

Toscanini ruminated for a moment and replied "Don't worry about it. You don't have any low E-flats in Aida."

He knew his stuff, that Toscanini. Good memory. He obviously didn't smoke a lot of reefer.

Anyways, I stayed with a college friend. His mother had corralled me into singing and playing in her church choir, which was the best one by far in my home town. Later I would be best man (but not best shoes,) at his wedding.

The next day we drove to Kleinan's to hear Horowitz, who always played afternoon concerts after eating a meal of Dover sole.

He opened with an obscure Clementi sonata, did some Rachmaninoff etudes-tableax, then the Chopin B-flat-minor Funeral March sonata. My brain was on "wow" the whole time. After the A-flat Polonaise I thought the piano was going to collapse, because somehow Horowitz was able to play very, very loudly, but it held up for three encores, including Mozskowski's "Etincelles" or "Sparks," and Schumann's "Traumerei."

I heard him play that on TV on the "live from Moscow" concert in real time a few years later. Two of my beloved dogs, a red Saluki and a black-and-white Borzoi, died that same morning. I can't stand hearing it anymore. I have the CD but it's dusty.

The next day I found that the Buffalo bus station, unlike the provincial college-town station I came from, did not take checks. Naive was I. Sheesh. I ended up pounding on the door of the local Methodist church, because I assumed they were all as nice a bunch of people as my choir-mates back home.

They just happened to have a bus of hyperactive old ladies heading east out of Buffalo to go to a quilting festival or something, so they gave me a ride. They also gave me doughnuts and cashed a $10-dollar out-of-town check. Bunch of sweetie-pies. No Horowitz fans among them though, but they were impressed I had travelled hundreds of miles to hear him.

I mailed them a thank you note and small church donation a week afterwards.

They turned south before the highway back to college turned north, so I had to do a little hitching. My first and shortest hitch was just to get through the Thruway Exit Booth, because they wouldn't let me just walk out onto the Thruway. That was a ride of about a hundred yards. I continued east after the guy dropped me off on his own way west.

Some guys in a van got me as far as the highway north, where a beer-guzzling mullet-cut wild-and-crazy pothead took me all the way to Watertown. He could drive and moon other cars at the same time. But he didn't kill me and drop my body in a ditch, so it all worked out okay.

Another short hitch got me into town to the Greyhound station, where I paid my three dollars and took a bus for the final stretch.

My friends, almost all pianists themselves, cheered me as I walked into the dining hall. They pawed me. Well, at least Janine did, she was just like that, and they asked me all about Horowitz, and I talked about the absolutely weird electrical thing that spread though the air of the auditorium the moment he walked on stage.

Later we all went to the big concert hall at Crane and heard the Juilliard Quartet play Ravel.

Back in those days, that was a big weekend for me.

Three Days in One

The day before, the patient had gone to radiology specials to have a pocket of fluid drained. Yesterday, the 22nd of November, they got news that the fluid contained malignant cells.

I knew so the minute I knocked gently on the patient's usually-closed hospital room door only to be politely shooed away by the doctor, a guy I really respect. Though I went to the desk to chart, mentally I was preparing a cocktail of p.r.n. medications I was going to offer the patient as soon as the door opened.

Before I had a chance to go get those, the patient's spouse came out and requested some pain medicine for the patient, and they were about due anyways, and I suggested that maybe I'd bring the anti-anxietal too and they thought that was not such a bad idea.

Though the patient, younger than me and just handed a death-sentence, broke my heart, I held it together and they did not shower in my own tears. Much, anyways.

Earlier in the day I had mentioned that it was Saint Cecilia's Day, but we all know it was another day, different from the celebration of music's patron saint.

Some of us nurses discussed where we were on that day. So-and-so was in 7th grade. Another was home sick from school and watched it all unfold on television. I was at school. Many nurses noted that at that time they had not yet been born.

People say I think about death too much. My family says so, and so does my analyst. I protest that I myself think about death just the right amount of time, but that everybody else thinks about it too little.

Long ago when I was attending nursing school I worked as a monitor-tech-slash-nurse-assistant-slash-unit secretary. They had me do things that the nurses were just basically too busy to do. Sometimes I set up sterile fields for Swan insertions, sometimes I did computer order-entry, sometimes I just sat in front of the monitors and watched cardiac rhythms float by like slow minutes on a lazy summer day out-of-doors.

Sometimes I wrapped up people who had passed on.

This one old guy was someone I had worked with several times over the years, first on the medical-surgical floor where I had worked previously, then later in the ICU where he died. I got the shroud kit and closed the door and curtains to the room, and washed his breathless pale corpse.

He had gone quietly, with some family members present who did not want him desperately coded. They had stepped out for me to do my job after they had said final good-byes. For some reason the television in the room was still turned on. I could barely hear it. Once in a while as I worked to prepare his body for the morgue I could not help but look up at the picture.

It was Denise Austin's fitness show. She was doing a rodeo with her legs and performing a soft-core wide-open split when the door to the room opened.

It was a family member who had not yet gotten the news that the patient had died. They must have just walked into the ICU without going through the usual process of calling in from the waiting area, and they missed the relatives who had just gone home. They gave me a shocked and disgusted look and abruptly left.

At least I had the patient somewhat covered at that point. But spread-eagled Denise on the television must have seemed quite inappropriate to them.

I tried to chase them down to see how they were doing, but they had disappeared out of the unit. Then I explained to the nurses what had happened. They seemed unconcerned about the emotional state of the family member who had just found out, in a peculiarly bad way, that their loved one had died. The nurses were more alarmed that their perimeter had been broken and that the person had just strolled into the unit without proper announcement.

Me too.

That's one dead body story. Nurses have those.

Anyways, back to the day at hand. The patient and their family kept telling me how much they appreciated the comfort I was providing for their grimly-diagnosed loved one. They were one-and-all a very gracious and lovely bunch of people, and I made sure to tell them that a lot. But the patient's news of the day changed things.

Like that day changed us all back in 1963. We struggle still to regain what we lost then.

And like the voice of Saint Cecilia resounding with comforting music we can all hear and feel.

How we need that music. How we need to change back, in some mysterious way that I cannot begin to explain.

Be Somebody's Thanksgiving

In some states it's as simple as checking a box on the back of your driver's license card. But in practical terms, the process is a little more complex, and upon your demise your family will be asked about it and some simple paperwork will need to be processed.

One of the best movies that you will probably never get a chance to see is Jesus of Montreal. I was lucky enough to see it with a devoutly Catholic friend when it first came out back in 1990 or so. A great retelling of the story we all think we know anyways, it's worth hunting down.

In it, a struggling actor is asked to perform the yearly re-enactment of the Stations of the Cross outdoors on the hill that signifies the beautiful city of Montreal. There are many scenes in the movie that are synonymous with events from the story as told in the Bible, such as the trashing of the money-changers. Near the end, in the play-within-the-film atop Mount Royal, the lead character of the film is injured while upon the cross.

He dies. One of the memorable closing scenes of the movie includes a woman whose eye bandages are removed, and who can then see because of tissues donated from the body of the lead character. Another person receives the heart.

I think you know what I'm getting at here.

And you know what they say. "Donate Life."

Hey, it's free.

Does anybody out there recall the old Doonesbury sequence in which a conservative character gets a heart transplant and the donor was a liberal? If I had a few hours I'd search their archives for the correct link, but then I'd just get lost reading all the old strips. It's amazing what you find there.

Rhymes With Fall

In Gilbert, Arizona, this is what they do for fun on weekends. They wrestle cows. No, they don't buy them dinner first. No movie afterwards.

Deep in my mind's recesses, somewhere under a pile of old Herman's Hermits vinyl records, is an early memory I have of going to Gilbert. I was a little kid, and dad piled the family into the 1960 Ford Falcon station-wagon, then only a couple-few years old, and we went for a Sunday afternoon drive.

Such a thing will soon be indeed a thing of the past, as fuel prices inhibit purely recreational motoring.

Anyways, we went to Gilbert and there was nothing there really except a ditch alongside some railroad tracks which passed by an old water tower. It's all still there, but now within the midst of about a couple hundred thousand people. People who weren't there a few decades ago. A town that was open fields those few decades ago.

Textbook Examples

Another shiny nugget from the mother of all lodes, the Arizona Republic Letters-to-the-Editor page, don't you know. These come out on such a regular basis that somebody should start a blog just for the sake of dismantling these things for frequent fun, education, and entertainment.

A letter full of fallacies indeed. Well, not full full, just a little full. Just two fallacies are cited for, but then also perpetrated on, the reader.

In criticism of a previous letter-to-the-editor, this writer asserts the following:

(snip)

"He says Rosa Parks has done more to change the U.S. than many other famous persons. He also argued that she is one of the only people who symbolized the true meaning of our Constitution."

On the face of it those are two perfectly logical and acceptable statements. Rosa Parks is all that. I think the letter-writer is assuming, note assuming, that the original statement was a fallacy of the all-instead-of-some variety. Unfortunately the wording defies the argument. "Some" and "one of the only" are not "all." So the writer of the letter sees a fallacy where there is none.

Rosa Parks has done more to change the U.S. than many other famous people, like Kevin Bacon, for example, or Cindy Lauper, who are both very widely known.

And Parks is one of the only people who symbolized the true meaning of our Constitution. Of course she's not the "only" person to have done so. Many people have, and she is one of them. She is an icon for many of us who value civil rights for all, myself included.

Then the young student of logic continues with these observations:

"The fallacies I found here are overgeneralization and pity. Steve overgeneralizes when he writes that Rosa Parks has done more than any other individual since Martin Luther King. Katz also uses pity in his letter. But if Katz wants to catch the reader appropriately, he should lay down facts and avoid pity. "

Maybe the first letter, to which the young writer refers, does make the rather overgeneral claim that Parks "has done more" than so-and-so, but without an actual citation from the original we will not know. (My albeit brief search could not exhume the original LTTE by Steve Katz from the Republic's archives, so I can do no better that the young writer herself.)

Likewise, the critic herself includes no citation of the "pity" she says should be avoided in logical argument.

By injecting such an emotion-laden word, though, isn't she herself committing just that fallacy, the use of emotionally-charged words? Especially in light of her neglect to provide of an example of such, ignoring her own admonishment to "lay down facts."

Hey, there's another thing. The young critic has tried to apply two logical fallacies to Katz's letter, and these just happen to be the first two listed in one of the most-commonly cited texts on this subject, "Straight and Crooked Thinking" put out by Robert H. Thouless back in 1930, but a popular college standard still for those who study such things. Hmmm. The first two. Well now.

Mere coincidence? I do NOT think so!

And maybe I should not be so rough on a young and perhaps impressionable high school student, but the very fact that she chose Rosa Parks to pick on just scares the hell right out of me. Maybe she could start like someplace here and do a philosophical analysis of the people who attacked the freedom marchers on Bloody Sunday back in 1965, continuing to mix a little modern American history in with her studies of the principles of logic.

There are better targets on which young cubs can sharpen their logical claws, like Virginia Abernethy, for example, who perhaps actually deserves some criticism for her views, which straddle the line between "separatism" and "segregation."

Maybe that's it. Maybe that's the real problem here.

Facts Are Stupid Things

Some people may be surprised to find out that Arizona has a State Legislature. Yes, this is apparently so, and it turns out that the people elected to that political body actually do things sometimes, which is why, I suppose, they are paid. Not much. I hear it's about $20K a year. They must make up the rest of their income on tips, I guess. Who, besides say a freshman Phoenix policeman, can live on such a paltry salary?

You may be thinking that perhaps there is a reason why the people of the Grand Canyon state are so frugal with their compensation for their political representatives, or whatever they are. Well, there is. You see, some of those representatives appear to be sometimes quite stupid, in my humble opinion.

For example, take this "My Turn" column appearing in the local paper of record, the Arizona Republic. It was written by legislature member Steve Tully, who I am sure is a very good and adequately groomed person, despite obvious errors. In this piece he wrote:

"I wish to respond to Talton's comments by paraphrasing Ronald Reagan. It is not that Talton knows so little, it is that he knows so much that isn't true. "

Well, Ronald Reagan said a lot of things but he never said that. Mr. Tully gets it absolutely reversed, and a little twisted up, to boot. I think he, like Reagan himself, was struggling with his memory, because it was Mondale who said this in response to Reagan in their first presidential debate way back in the B.I.B.P. (Before Ipods Became Popular) Era:

"Well, I guess I'm reminded a little bit of what Will Rogers once said about Hoover. He said it's not what he doesn't know that bothers me, it's what he knows for sure just ain't so."

This was in response to Reagan's absurd claims regarding the social "safety net" when he had proposed, as he had done for almost his entire political career, to cut Social Security. I recall watching this on television, and this was the crux of the debate. How Mr. Tully could mess this up is something I will never know, and perhaps I fear knowing.

Now here are some examples of some things that Reagan did actually say:

"My name is Ronald Reagan. What's yours?" –introducing himself after delivering a prep school commencement address. The individual responded, "I'm your son, Mike," to which Reagan replied, "Oh, I didn't recognize you."

"What does an actor know about politics?" –criticizing Ed Asner for opposing American foreign policy.

"Trees cause more pollution than automobiles."

"All the waste in a year from a nuclear power plant can be stored under a desk."

Maybe that was part of his problem.

And of course, Reagan said this:

"Facts are stupid things." –at the 1988 Republican National Convention, attempting to quote John Adams, who said, "Facts are stubborn things"

You know, everybody make mistakes. There is an entire industry, for example, that profits from the tongue-slips of our current brain-deficient president. But then Mr. Tully ends his words with this admonishment:

"Talton closed his diatribe with three suggestions. I have three for Talton: Soften your heart, open your mind and do your research."

"Rut-ro," as Astro would say.

I think that Mr. Talton, whose article here was the spark for Mr. Tully's rubber-tire-fire, will be preparing a follow-up of some kind. The guy's just asking for it.

Popcorn anyone?

Big Things

Most of these places, that is to say, "urban-density" in-building, condo/loft-style homes, have yet to be actually put up. There are many currently under construction, a few that are new and ready for occupation, and some that have been around for quite awhile.

I do not think it is too soon to abandon the suburbs to return to town or city living. When the era of cheap carbon fuel begins to wind down, like right now, shorter commutes and smaller living spaces will become premium and unless somebody decides to build a giant pharmaceutical factory requiring five thousand highly-paid employees out in Queen Creek, nobody will be able to sustain a home there. Same goes for Estrella, Fountain Hills, and those knock-up fake towns north of Peoria, for example.

No, we are not going to go Japanese.

By Western standards, the typical Japanese home is very small. In the major cities, most families live in tiny apartments. One third of the housing in Tokyo averages only 121 square feet while the average Japanese home is 650 square feet.

That's small. Consider this:

In recent years, the trend on Long Island certainly has been toward larger, aggressively un-claustrophobic houses. In Nassau County, planners say, new and renovated housing is typically in the 2,800- to 3,500- square-foot range -- with luxury homes of 4,000 square feet and more becoming ever more common. In the Northeast, the median new house size in 1973 was 1,450 square feet, according to annual U.S. Census housing surveys. Last year, that figure was 2,361 square feet.

That's big. Probably too big for most double-income families (and what family isn't these days?) to clean and maintain, so such tasks become "out-sourced" to the not-so-merry-maids, handymen, and the like.

A few posts back I commented on a LTTE found in a Northeastern newspaper, written by a woman bemoaning her high heating bills. Those, of course, are only going to get much much worse. Another writer submitted his own comments in a LTTE which appeared a day or two later:

A 2,500-square-foot house in Rensselaer is not average. That Bonny Parsons decided to buy a 2,500-square-foot house that is heated by oil shows her poor judgment. Everyone knows oil is the most expensive form of energy around. Now she wants to heat up her bedrooms with electric heaters, thinking her bill will not top $1,000 a month. Yes, she's average -- in her own mind.

Well, that's a bit harsh. I am more sympathetic, and concerned. It's the math. Math, and the economy.

Heating (or in the case of the Valley of the Sun, cooling) a 2,500-square-foot home is simply a lot more expensive than heating a 200-square-foot Tokyo flat. That's one part of the formula.

Then multiply the cost of heating a large home by the total number of such big domiciles, and subtract that total cost from other areas of consumer spending. Voila: recession. A big long no-end-in-sight hit on consumer spending.

It's like gasoline. Every three bucks you put in your gas tank is one less vanilla latte. So to speak. It's just more money sucked out of the economy and sacrificed on the glowing funeral pyres of Exxon/Mobil.

So I am stuck asking myself if it's just too late.

For the suburbs, probably yes, it is too late. Like, way.

Big mortgages, big commutes, big homes, big yards, big fuel bills, big plasma televisions, big car payments, big credit card bills...

No money for Barbie and Ken at Christmastime, no money going anywhere except to Uncle Sam and Uncle Halliburton and cousin Big Oil, who, by the way is a Saudi prince. Did you know you owed him money? Your Chinese cousin gets a piece of your mortgage, too, you know.

Yes. You have a Chinese cousin. Lots of them, actually, and if they need oil, they can walk to the Middle East to get it.

But can you walk to work, or to get a gallon of milk?

Can you even sell a gallon of milk to a family that has no money left over after paying their home heating bills this winter?

We should have paid more attention to President Carter's energy plan back when we actually had the chance. And maybe thought about living in a smaller place a little closer to work.

Cullyforneeyah

Bahia mi rumba.

Me personally, I like firefighters, teachers, nurses, prison guards, and public employees. Generally speaking, they help people. You might not think so if you are an arsonist or inmate, or even perhaps a delinquent junior highschool student. But me, I like 'em.

And I want them to be able to have some say over their work, for they know it best.

Take firefighting, for example. You would never stop a fireman in mid-task, say for example, rushing into a burning home to retrieve a trapped toddler, to criticize his work style, promotion structures, and union politicking. Yet many people (beware the link) rail on and on about teachers, as if they know as much about the work as teachers themselves.

Then such people might even riff upon the term "trapped toddler" with scathing remarks about the so-called indoctrination of school students. As if that would be funnier this time than the last eight million times some libertarian griped about public schools.

Anyways, bravo for the people of California, for rejecting the Anuhld's many propositions in the recent special voting.

It must have been some party:

Dogging the governor, as it has for months, was the California Nurses Assn., which organized a luau at the Trader Vic's in the same hotel. As Schwarzenegger's defeats mounted, giddy nurses formed a conga line and danced around the room, singing, "We're the mighty, mighty nurses."

When you're sick in a hospital bed, you will not be able to petiton your government for redress.

The nurse-staffing law, signed by former Gov. Gray Davis, was the first in the nation to require hospitals to have a certain number of nurses for each patient on all wards. The regulations took effect in 2004. This past January, ratios on busy medical and surgical units were scheduled to increase. But in November Schwarzenegger blocked those new increases, causing tensions with nurses to rise.

The California Nurses Association immediately took the matter to state court, arguing that Schwarzenegger could not halt the law by using an emergency regulation, a little-used rule that allows the governor to suspend state laws during emergencies, such as an earthquake. The judge ultimately ruled that the nursing shortage did not constitute a dire emergency and the administration had therefore overstepped its bounds.

Old news, but good news.

That Arnie is so clever. As the article from Women's e-News shows, he tried to declare the nursing shortage an "emergency" so he could suspend laws that mandated safer hospital nurse-patient ratios. Brilliant, that.

In the face of rising floodwaters, he would attempt to halt the deluge by drooling.

Propositions that would affect union politics and teacher tenure were defeated in this special election, and Scharzenegger was made lame. As if he weren't lame enough already.

Thank goodness for the nurses of California, as well as many other people, for their principled opposition to this lug. It gives hope to all of us who move and shake, make the coffee, transfuse the blood, grade the homework, mind the convicts, and get the stuck cats out of the trees.

Come Again?

This shows up probably on a monthly basis over in the Eschaton comments, and I've always liked Yeats, so here it is in its entirety:


The Second Coming   
       
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight; somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?  
 
William Butler Yeats
   
Printings: The Dial (Chicago), November 1920; The Nation (London), 6 November 1920; Michael Robartes and the Dancer (Dundrum: Cuala, 1921); Later Poems (London: Macmillan, 1922; 1924; 1926; 1931).

For those that may be further interested there is some useful commentary here and some insights down in the posted comments, here.

Lines 7 and 8 seem to see the most action these days.

I will leave with one observation of my own about the poem: falcons have no need for falconers.

Another Proud Bush Supporter Speaks Out

Can somebody translate this into plain English for me, please?

(snip)

"Of course liberals never need a rationale for cowardice. Few leaders have ever been called to task for showing their yellow streak in the face of terror and tyranny. "

Really? I guess all those stories about Clinton avoiding the draft by winning a prestigious scholarship to study in England were examples of "liberal media bias." then, eh? Well, the writer did say "few."

Let us refresh our memories regarding those who have served in their country's proud military forces:

Prominent Democrats

* Representative Richard Gephardt, former House Minority Leader - Missouri Air National Guard, 1965-71. (1, 2)
* Representative David Bonior - Staff Sgt., United States Air Force 1968-72 (1, 2)
* Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle - 1st Lt., U.S. Air Force SAC 1969-72 (1, 2)
* Former Vice President Al Gore - enlisted August 1969; sent to Vietnam January 1971 as an army journalist, assigned to the 20th Engineer Brigade headquartered at Bien Hoa, an airbase twenty miles northeast of Saigon. More facts about Gore's Service

* Former Senator Bob Kerrey... Democrat... Lt. j.g., U.S. Navy 1966-69; Medal of Honor, Vietnam (1, 2)
* Senator Daniel Inouye, US Army 1943-'47; Medal of Honor, World War Two (1, 2)
* Senator John Kerry, Lt., U.S. Navy 1966-70; Silver Star, Bronze Star with Combat V, and three awards of the Purple Heart for his service in combat (1)
* Representative Charles Rangel, Staff Sgt., U.S. Army 1948-52; Bronze Star, Korea (1, 2)
* Former Senator Max Cleland, Captain, U.S. Army 1965-68; Silver Star & Bronze Star, Vietnam (1, 2)

* Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) - U.S. Army, 1951-1953. (1)
* Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) - Lt., U.S. Navy, 1962-67; Naval Reserve, 1968-74. (1, 2)
* Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) - U.S. Army Ranger, 1971-1979; Captain, Army Reserve 1979-91 (1)
* Senator Fritz Hollings (D-SC) - served as a U.S. Army officer in World War II, receiving the Bronze Star and seven campaign ribbons. (1)

To cite just a few.

In interest of fairness, let us also name some from the other side of the aisle:

Prominent Republicans


* Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert - avoided the draft, did not serve.
* Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey - avoided the draft, did not serve.
* House Majority Leader Tom Delay - avoided the draft, did not serve (1). "So many minority youths had volunteered ... that there was literally no room for patriotic folks like himself."
* House Majority Whip Roy Blunt - did not serve
* Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist - did not serve. (An impressive medical resume, but not such a friend to cats in Boston.)
* Majority Whip Mitch McConnell, R-KY - did not serve (1)
* Rick Santorum, R-PA, third ranking Republican in the Senate - did not serve. (1)
* Former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott - avoided the draft, did not serve.

Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld - served in the U.S. Navy (1954-57) as an aviator and flight instructor. (1) Served as President Reagan's Special Envoy to the Middle East and met with Saddam Hussein twice in 1983 and 1984.


* GW Bush - decided that a six-year Nat'l Guard commitment really means four years. Still says that he's "been to war." Huh?
* VP Cheney - several deferments (1, 2), the last by marriage (in his own words, "had other priorities than military service") (1)
* Att'y Gen. John Ashcroft - did not serve (1, 2); received seven deferment to teach business ed at SW Missouri State
* Jeb Bush, Florida Governor - did not serve. (1)

* Karl Rove - avoided the draft, did not serve (1), too busy being a Republican.

There's this and a lot more over at that real blog, AWOLBush.com. Required reading, which I guess explains why the guy who wrote the LTTE to the Arizona Republic which I snipped above is so bloody unfamiliar with the simple facts of the matter.

He said another little thing, too:

(snip)

"I love how the liberal media turn everything, including Scooter Libby's lying, into a convoluted attack on our president's "rationale for war."

Somehow having every intelligence agency in the world reporting exactly the same condemning information is not rationale enough."

Apparently he has never heard of Hans Blix nor Scott Ritter. You know, a couple people who were actually there on the ground in Iraq looking around for themselves, instead of home listening to hate radio and drinking cheap fizzy urine-colored watery plonk, which some devout Republicans call "beer."

The letter-writer flatly concedes that Libby has lied, though. Funny, that.

BYOH

It must have been something like twenty years ago, back when it was "The McNeill-Lehrer News Hour" weeknights on PBS. As a political junkie even before the explosion of the number of cable networks (CNN was just a baby at that time,) this was the best source of political information on television for me then.

I recall an episode that featured a story on "the nursing shortage." Funny that. Did you know that there was a nursing shortage twenty years ago?

But now, decades later and thanks to the Sacred, Wondrous, and Infallible Free-Market Laws of Supply and Demand, we still have a nursing shortage.

A couple of keys notions snipped from a Consumer Reports article, now two years old:

"(snip)... The shortage of nurses--particularly registered nurses--and other staff at the nation's hospitals has reached critical proportions. On average, 13 percent of nursing positions at U.S. hospitals are unfilled, with some hospitals reporting vacancy rates of more than 20 percent. And the pressures of working in understaffed units is making hospital jobs less desirable. Hospital administrators report that despite strenuous recruiting efforts, higher salaries, and sign-on bonuses of up to $10,000, they are having more and more trouble filling their nursing positions."

If a hospital offers you $10K to take a job there, I assure you that you will regret it. That's another story, though. Remind me to tell it someday.

Any ways, this talking head on the News Hour had apparently studied the amount of time it takes a hospital nurse to respond to a patients' call, and the number they came up with was twelve minutes, which they described as some kind of statistical average for U.S. hospitals in general.

You can die in twelve minutes.

And that was decades ago, during the old, not-so-bad-as-it-is-now nursing shortage.

It doesn't take me that long, but I count myself as fortunate as one is likely to be as a staff nurse. My nurse-patient ratio is very good, considering the current political climate regarding health care in this god-forsaken mess of a country, and in a political "red state," at that, with certain problems in health care relating to undocumented workers, among other issues.

As a result, the costs of medical care for immigrants are staggering. The estimated cost of unreimbursed medical care in 2004 in California was about $1.4 billion per year. In Texas, the estimated cost was about $.85 billion, and in Arizona the comparable estimate was $.4 billion per year.

Personal note of criticism: the article that I snipped that from appears on the Federation for American Immigration Reform website, and from what little I know, those numbers, namely $400 million a year here in Arizona, seem reliable. But I do not think that all undocumented immigrants bring with them the risk of tapeworm, so don't lay that on me, if you please.

I have my own ideas about border control. Like just stop it. Open the borders completely and let the free market allow people to decide for themselves where they want to live and work. I am sure there is a nursing shortage in Cancun as well as here. Let us address that urgent need promptly. Oh, the humanity.

Immigration is a very good thing for The Great SouthWest, but politically we just do not know how to handle it, because we are governed at the federal level by idiots, morons, and gangsters.

Anyways, there's a nursing shortage and it takes a while for a nurse to get to you as a sick and nearly helpless hospital patient, so what do you do? Consumer Reports has this radical suggestion:

Bring your own help. Patients, nurses, and national quality experts concur: Given the shortage of nurses, the most important thing to bring with you to the hospital is a reliable family member or friend to run interference for you.

"No one who is basically helpless--a child, a person with a cognitive impairment, a person who cannot ambulate, a person who is sedated--should be left alone in the hospital unless they are in intensive care," says Kathleen Maynard, a Florida nurse who saw her Alzheimer's-afflicted father through four hospital stays in three years. "I am speaking as both an R.N. and a family caregiver. Hospital staffing is so strained that patients do not get the care they need."

Bring your own help.

Well doesn't that just sock it to me, a registered nurse in a hospital setting, right in the old codependent gut. Oh well.

I am supposed to be able answer all the needs of all my patients all the time. This is like having many jobs all at once, and I simply cannot be in more than one place at a time. That is the most difficult thing about hospital nursing, by the way: Juggling multiple tasks.

You must hyper-task at all times. No single one of those tasks need be clinically difficult nor even interesting, really. But for example, if two patients call for pain medicine at the same time, then one of them isn't going to get their medication as soon as the other. Ah... the laws of physics apply to nursing, too. Who would have ever considered that seriously?

Tales From the Northeast

The following was snipped out of a LTTE in a recent edition of the Times Union, the newspaper of record in Albany, the capitol city of New York State:

This past May, I totaled up our first year's home heating oil usage. Between September 2004 and May, we purchased 2,400 gallons of home heating oil at a total cost of almost $5,800. We saw the price of our heating oil go up from $1.549 to $1.959 at our last fill-up.

The woman goes on to write that she kept her thermostat between 60 and 68 degrees all winter, and she "bundled up" a lot. Double socks and fleece on all the time.

Fleece. How romantic. Like... winter camping trips.

During the really hot summer months here in the Valley our cooling bills, as reflected in our electricity usage, top out at about $180 monthly. We bought a more efficient refridgerator so this past summer our usage was actually down a little from the summer before. But even at that maximal rate (the cost of which is sure to increase, perhaps dramatically, per kilowatt-hours,) our total energy bills would "only" be $2160 for the year, and in reality it's probably a good bit under $2000.

We are both frugal and lucky, I know. I do the laundry at night.

And if we had to cut back on energy use even more, we wouldn't freeze. Sweat some, yes, hypothermia, no.

Comparisons can be interesting.

Thursday, ExxonMobil became the most stark example yet of how much big oil companies benefited from the huge run-up in oil prices during the third quarter even as two major hurricanes ripped through the industry's Gulf Coast infrastructure. Exxon reported:

Net income up 75 percent to $9.92 billion. That is the most a U.S. company has earned from operations in a three-month period and greater than the annual gross domestic product of entire nations including Cameroon and Zimbabwe.

Snipped from the Free Press from Burlington, Vermont, another pretty cold place in the winter.

They'll be doing some complaining about their heating bills too, as soon as their electricity is restored after their recent big storm. No electricity, no whining e-mails to editors.

When we lived up that aways we heated our home mostly with wood, with electricity back-up. Of course, if we were away for a few days and the woodstove smoldered out, and the electricity had failed, I suppose in that kind of situation the parakeets would not have done well.

Five cords of wood cost $165 then, ($33 per cord) and we went through about twice that in a typical winter, which begins in late August there. Sheesh. No kidding, though.

Some years, in the spring before the thaw, I'd stack up 15 cords if we had scant little left over. A friend of mine who still gets wood from the same guy up there now pays $55 per cord, or $275 for a 5-cord truckload. That's still a lot cheaper than what the Albany letter-writer will pay to stay warm this year.

Small communities tucked deeply away in thick forests will somehow manage to stay warm. I guess. But there's a tipping point to the number of trees a community can sacrifice to the Great Buddha of Being Warm in The House. Call that theory the "Peak Cordwood" effect curve.

The Albany woman concludes with:

This year, we are cutting back our estimated heating oil usage by 400 gallons and will be keeping our thermostats set at a base of 50 degrees. We are buying three cords of wood and will be using our fireplace to heat the first floor, and electric space heaters to warm our bedrooms at night.

Fireplaces are notoriously wasteful of good heat. I would recommend that they buy a fireplace woodstove insert with all the money they are going to save by freezing their butts off this winter.

Yeah. Right on.

We will start to see the stories trickle out soon. Homes demolished by chimney fires. Frozen old maids dead alone in their rural farmhouses. Children sick from the cold. Unhappy chilly homeowners like the woman above.

But hey, profits are up.

Harriet Who?

Such a beautiful and mild sunny morning, the coffee's good, the child and spouse are with me, Sunday Baroque is on the radio, and I'm doing a little light reading.

Buried well into the Supreme Court nomination questionaire that Harriet Miers filled out for the Senate judicial committee was this:

I was lead counsel for Interstate Fire & Casualty Company (an excess insurance carrier) in this suit that the Catholic Church in Dallas filed seeking to obtain indemnification from liability and defense costs from its insurers. The Catholic Church was seeking coverage after a jury returned a $101.6 million verdict against the Church based upon eleven separate incidents of sexual abuse and child molestation by Father Kos, who had been an active member of the Diocese of Dallas. (Father Kos was also indicted and convicted for his acts). The jury had found that Father Kos committed his acts while acting in the course and scope of his employment. The jury also found, among other things, the Diocese committed fraud and intentionally concealed facts relating to Father Kos. Interstate Fire & Casualty, as well as the other insurers, denied coverage because Father Kos's actions were intentional acts that were not covered by the Catholic Church's insurance policies.

There were numerous issues raised in this litigation, including whether sexual abuse and child molestation are intentional acts that are not covered by insurance and whether the insurance companies had a duty to defend the Diocese in the lawsuits filed against it. The case also involved questions of whether Texas public policy precluded insurance coverage for acts of sexual abuse and child molestation. The case settled prior to trial.

Well, isn't that special.

I supppose somebody has to protect large insurance carriers from the predations of the Catholic Church, so that payouts to molested children will have to come from somewhere else. Lawyers do that.

But if Miers is being sold on her "character," then why didn't she work on behalf of the victims themselves, rather than a corporation? That, I suppose, is just what she does. So now, that settles that. We all have our own values, now don't we?

Maybe I've read too many Alice Miller books. If a person or policy does not support children (and we all carry childhood in ourselves throughout our lives,) then I do not assign value to them or that.

Of course I do not support Harriet Miers. I'm not a total "moran." She's no Erin Brockovich. And no, I do not much like what I've heard about one of Miers' real estate deals, either.

Since Miers really has no judicial experience, the White House is playing up her religious conviction and her character. So much for her character, so that leaves us with... what?

A vote against Roe, and a vote against any and all future rulings that may affect Bush himself. Rulings that may involve, say just for example, treason.

342 Bras in Greenwich

I'll bet this guy has a lot of very interesting friends.

The story itself is just begging for a punchline.

Another Four Hundred Dollars

About two-thirds of homes in the Midwest use natural gas for heating, and the price of that resource has gone up quite a bit. The Energy Information Administration estimates that it will cost the average household another $146 over last years' heating season prices, and this is $408 more than the average cost of the 2002-2003 cold months.

So what's another $400? Just skip a few dinners out, maybe miss an opera or a couple ball games.

Don't worry, be happy.

Well, I'm a worrier. My spouse says I should be on something. And she's probably not incorrect.

I could stop worrying. But worrisome issues would not go away. I just wouldn't care as much. I'd put the opera tickets on a charge card.

Weak production - although production increased by 0.5 percent in 2003, it was not sufficient to offset the 3 percent decline in production during 2002. The industry in 2003 drilled the second highest number of gas wells in a single year, however production has not increased proportionally.

(Snipped from the EIA report linked above.)

So they drilled more natural gas wells, but production has not increased proportionally. That is to say, production for each well is not the same. It is declining for some wells.

This is the time of year in which our home energy bills decline, because we don't need the air-conditioner during the cooler months. We are lucky, in that respect. But if you own a natural-gas-heated home in the Midwest, your luck is slowly running out. Sell and move to the Valley of the Sun. Everybody else is doing it.

Then I won't worry about you all so much.

Instead, I will worry about inflation. When the price of fuel goes up, so does the price of everything else.

Eventually this effect will make everything change. We ain't seen nuthin yet.

I should repeat that.

Ohrwurm

Anatomy of a Non Sequitur

It was shift change time when I went to the kitchenette to get a cup of water (we are allowed to do that,) and I was just standing there zoning out when "Annie" came in. She's one of the night shift aides, and she was going to load up a cart full of fresh water-pitcher containers for the patients, and I was in her way.

"Oh," I said, "I'm just spaced out a little," as I stepped out of the narrow area.

"Flashing back to the sixties?" she asked, jokingly, and I said "well, more like the seventies, really."

I've passed shifts with Annie a hundred times but I've never really chatted with her much, so I don't know what she's all about, but I think punk happened for her, despite her relatively young age.

A moment later I was just standing by the door leaning on the kitchenette counter, still processing my fatigue and spacing out, when Annie asked "Do you ever see blue cars?"

Do I ever see blue cars?

I smiled wide while I considered the question for a bit.

"Why yes," I eventually replied, as if I were proud or something, "Yes I do."

She chuckled with satisfaction a little and continued at the ice machine. I then had to go out and give report to the oncoming nurses. I related the story to them, and I told my spouse about it when I got home.

I saw her again the next night at shift change and I asked her about it, and she said it was just a non sequitur and I wasn't supposed to "get it." You could really just hang out with a person like that.

She said "Blue Volkswagen beetles," and I said that was actually the image that had come to my mind the night before when she originally tossed out that weird question about blue cars. Then she asked me sincerely if I ever did "see blue cars" and I said that I wasn't seeing them right then and there but that I did see them sometimes, out and about.

"Like when you're driving around," she acknowledged.

I was glad to have that clarified.

Then she asked "You know Jimmy Eat World?," and I had to begrudgingly admit that I don't know their music all that well except one of their more wildly popular songs. She said the "blue cars" thing was from one of their songs, but I could only hazily recollect "Counting Blue Cars" by Dishwalla and then I started to space out again.

Too much at the end of a shift. I needed to conserve my energies for finishing up and getting home, and I felt that by trying to remember bands and songs and such and then straighten up somebody else on the subject, well, that was just too much for me to expect from myself at the end of a long day. Now opera, if that had been the subject, I would have merrily refreshed her memory right then and there, but not rock music, about which I have scant expertise.

Anyways, I suppose now that Annie had been suffering from an ear worm. I figure she had been replaying "Counting Blue Cars " in her head the night before when she came out with the non sequitur, but she had incorrectly attributed this song to Jimmy Eat World instead of Dishwalla.

Easy mistake to make, I guess.

So the next time I see her at shift change, I will just say "Dishwalla," preferably completely out of context, and that should keep things deep enough in the flow for awhile.

Why Bother?

This was snipped from the Letters section of Newsday, and you have to admit, the guy has a point:

True lies

When the Bush administration was selling us the Iraq war, we were told that Iraq was a major terrorist base. It wasn't then; it is now. They told us that attacking Iraq was the same thing as attacking Islamic fundamentalists. It wasn't true under Saddam Hussein, but the most powerful political force in post-Hussein Iraq seems to be - you guessed it - Islamic fundamentalism.

Of course, they also told us that Iraq was threatening to attack Americans with weapons of mass destruction, and that wasn't true either. So what's happening now? A month or two ago there was a report that American soldiers had discovered a secret lab where the insurgents were trying to manufacture chemical weapons, presumably for use against American soldiers. Memo to the Bush administration: Be careful what you lie about. It just might come true.

Wayne Karol
Levittown

But for every letter-to-the-editor like the one above, there are those of opposing views. I suppose this has to do with newspapers attempting to justify the presentation of "balance" of opinion.

For example, a couple key paragraphs from a letter in the renowned Arizona Republic:

We can't stop fighting

Oct. 15, 2005 12:00 AM
So many letters "sing" the same sour note, tune varies, lyrics don't. "Bush lied, bring the troops home, stop sacrificing our soldiers, Iraq war is based on lies, let Iraq heal, let us live in peace." Distinctions without a difference. Quit, surrender, give up, peace.

Terrorists tested us with bombs and several attacks during Clinton's years in office with no response. The Twin Towers destruction would prove to them our lack of resolve prior to their totally wiping us out.

(snip)

Thomas Ward
Mesa

Gee, think much? Iraq was never involved in any attacks against us. That is, until we sent our own youth there to serve as target practice for their resistance to our war of aggression.

That letter writer concludes with an unfounded assertion that the terrorists have not attacked us again but they will as soon as we stop the Iraq fiasco (my words.) The old "we are fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here" fallacy.

Right. That'll work.

I have an immigration corollary for that: Let's send all of our Border Patrol agents to Acapulco so we can fight illegal immigration there instead of here.

Propaganda works... on stupid people, of which there are a great many, in my humble opinion. So many still believe the lies, probably because it is just too uncomfortable to face the god-awful truth.

We cannot continue to force our children to pay for the mistakes made by our generation. We must stop insisting that they die for Halliburton profits in a war initiated on lies.

We cannot continue to run up debt so vast that it will roll back the lifestyle advances made during the progressive years, causing our children to live with far less comfort than ourselves.

Well, we could, but that would be stupid.

We Fish and See

It's called an automated medication dispensing system, and on rare occasions it actually does dispense meds. Most of the time, however, it just keeps the medications quixotically locked up so that nobody can get them.

That can be a real time-waster. Suppose you have a patient who complains of a mild headache and requests some tylenol, which they sometimes take at home for fever or mild ailments. Easy, that. I can just go get some out of a medicine cabinet, right?

Not exactly.

If it had not already been specified as an as-needed med by the doctors, then technically I would be required to call a doctor or resident and get an order for acetaminophen. Then I would fax the order to the pharmacy, where some poor drone would copy it into the computer database that controls the automatic medication dispenser, which of course hasn't yet dispensed a freaking thing.

After all that I would then give the patient the med, assuming that I did not have to wait in line while other nurses removed items from the automatic dispensing machine. Ten nurses, two machines.

In many cases I feel I could simply leave The Great Southwestern Muffin Factory and walk to a local pharmacy, buy the stuff over-the-counter myself, walk back and give it to the patient in less time.

But ironically, that would be inefficient.

It's probably a lot safer than leaving things in cabinets, though.

Once in a great while you hear or see some kind of "angel of death" story involving an errant (completely bat-crap wacko) nurse who kills their patients. Charles Cullen was probably one of the recent worst cases, but history is full of them.

Generally speaking, hospitals are very meticulous about record-keeping and statistics, and it is through such that these killers are found out and prosecuted. I cannot help but think that someday such a person will be apprehended because they get caught trying to fake out a Pyxis machine.

Actually this is the first time I have considered this possibility, because usually I am just plain annoyed at the machine for slowing me down. But I saw an interesting movie after I came home from work last night and everyone else was in bed.

Charming Billy, an independent 1999 film, was on one of those groovy three-digit cable stations. It was a rather disturbing but excellently acted and scripted story about a twenty-something man who climbs a rural water-tower and starts shooting people and cars. The movie unfolds in poetic flashbacks.

While watching it I thought that it is amazingly sad how much devastation and ire can be manifested by just one person.

I was going through my blogroll while watching this film, and among the links I read about the trouble Head Nurse has recently had with some likely dangerous student nurses.

There are only a very few bad nurses, but they come from somewhere, now don't they? And thanks to at least Head Nurse and others like her, they now come from one less place.

Myself, I have never had the pleasure of canning a nurse or student who I deemed dangerous, but someday that kind of luck could run out, and I will.

I have known three nurses who lost their jobs for either diverting drugs (a nurse supervisor who took demerol for himself) or for using on the job, like coming out of the bathroom sniffling and giggling. That was back before freebase and crack became prevalent . I suppose crystal meth would be more suspect these days.

Nurses need all the help we can get from one another, and killers and drug addicts do not make dependable coworkers. We tend to shove out personalities we do not like on the team. These people go from job to job, or they get promoted out to specialty ICU jobs with exposure to more critical and therefore more vulnerable patients.

I like the team of nurses I currently work with, and I openly brag about them in non-anonymous situations. I know that if difficulty arises they "have my back," and I in return pledge, sometimes outloud, that I too have their backs covered.

Literally, sometimes, like while waiting in line at the Pyxis machine to get some tylenol for a warmish head-achy patient.

Hard-to-See Crazy Hand

Paraphrasing and elaborating on something I recently heard on NPR while pushing the station wagon back from the grocery store:

The best way to get rid of weapons-grade nuclear material is to dilute it down to reactor grade and then burn it up in a power-plant. We had a program in which we bought old Russian warheads and used the good stuff in American reactors, and the program paid for itself. Thousands of warheads were thusly destroyed. Electricity was produced.

I do not like nuclear waste any more than the next guy but seems to me that was not an all-bad program.

The radio talkers implied that the program was no longer in use.

Also, I heard two local guys on this area's Air America AM station (1010 KXXT Phoenix) discussing the way things would probably have turned out had we been wise enough to follow the energy plan laid out by Jimmy Carter way back when.

Interesting in itself, that.

Of course, because his brain was covered with aluminum plaque, Reagan rolled back development of all of Carter's progressive ideas that would have saved us, well, probably a war or two, and several trillions of dollars.

But the real point the M & M radio guys were making was that the market is just plain stupid. After we've wasted half of the petroleum on the planet, after we have soiled the enviroment, after we have enriched Madrassas full of religiously insane future suicide-bombers, after we have initiated a war of aggression to secure a distant oilfield, after, after, after all that... the market responds.

Voila! A few people are buying smaller cars.

The invisible hand of free market capitalism is guided by madness.

Layers of love

Roast a duck and then strip the meat from the bones. Usually I stick a skinned orange and an onion in the carcass while it cooks. Afterwards I remove these and puree them in a processor or blender along with the drippings to start a sauce.

We almost never settle for just a gravy or bechamel of some sort. Because really, it's just too easy to knock things up to a simple veloute. But that is quite beside the point. A jar of salsa will do as well as a nifty duck l'orange veloute here.

Stuff the shreds of succulent oily duck meat between various tortillas: green spinach flour tortillas, bright orange tomato tortillas, and plain white flour ones. Layer in some spinach leaves or other young greens, some sauce, shredded Jack or cheddar of choice (the sharper the better, as I like my cheese the way I like my women, that is to say SHARP) and whatever you like for color and spice.

Roasted red peppers are so nice. Or artichokes. You can stack the layers too. More layers, more love. Warm to melt the cheese.

Divide. Cut each as you would a pie or pizza, after having been chilled, and serve as finger foods. Arranged in their different tortilla colors around a festive plate, with a bowl for the sauce, makes a stunner.

Duck quesadillas. When Vincent's on Camelback started serving things like this here, the French-Southwest fusion movement was born. Things happened then. Those were the days. It has since gotten only better.

Phoenix is the best food town on the entire planet. We even have the best pizza. No kidding.

Dip the quesadillas in the veloute or other sauce you have fashioned from the lovely pan drippings. Or save the drippings for your dog, who will then love you beyond forever.

It works with enchiladas, too, so well it will scare you. You can soak the corn tortillas in a white sauce or duck gravy instead of the traditional red/salsa type and go way fusion with it.

When you think of "American" food, what comes to mind? Burgers? Pizza? Obvious European derivatives.

But alas, the tortilla was here before Eric the Red. When you think "American," you had better be thinking tortilla or good old-fashioned mammoth-meat. And you can't get that anymore, not even at Vincent's.

An Observacation

Surfing is a bit like skiing or snowboarding on a large moving mogul. But you start out in a lying position. And the weather's nicer.

Seems to me that Delay and this modern crop of Republicans in general would be very good at anything that begins with one in a lying position. Just sayin'.

9/24/05 24th Street and Camelback Road

We settled in on the northwest corner to be in the shade. That's one of the really nice things about tall buildings, and it's why I think we need a lot more here: they make shade, of which we have too little.

The Code Pink ladies were there, some of whom are apparently of highschool age. Generally speaking most of the crowd was what you might call "older," but all ages were represented. My favorite sign, carried by a young lad, read "Kindergartners for Peace."

You have to stop and let that sink in.

A reporter from the local Fox affiliate (I think I linked the right one, but I did see a lot of faces,) asked to interview me on camera and I quickly and politely got in all my talking points, assuring that my image will be left on the floor of the editing room. I mentioned how the cost of the war would personally come to bear on her, and she said "Wow. And I just bought a house."

My spouse was also interviewed. A Code Pink lady tapped my shoulder to tell me she thought I "did really well" and I thanked her very much.

Everybody got a laugh out of the Billionaires for Bush. Some looked a little warm in their black tuxedos. They had funny signs and slogans like "Corporations Are People Too" and "Leave No Billionaire Behind."

Their humorous street theatre contrasted with the profound impression made by the Women in Black and the people carrying white crosses, one cross for each Arizonan who has so far died on the field of Bush's crazy dreams of war.

Hats off to the Phoenix Police. The city's finest cleared the curb lanes of 24th Street and Camelback west of the Biltmore as a safety precaution while we strolled down to Senator Kyl's office. (No link for Kyl, because he won't respond to any of your e-mail anyway. Well, maybe if you give him cash, but I have never done that.)

One of the bicycle policemen said "Next year!" as we walked by. "I have to retire, then I'll be with you next year."

There was a reading of the names of Arizona's war dead, and a presentation of a letter to Kyl. Can that guy even read? Or is he dyslexic like Bush?

People honked their car horns and made peace signs. The crowd stretched, in a very well-organized and efficient manner thanks to The People With Bullhorns, to the 22nd Street intersection and crossed over to the south side of Camelback, stopping between the corporate steakhouse and 24th. There a car blocked that loading-area drive (why did she stop there? I wondered. It doesn't go anywhere,) and the woman in it dared us to "touch her car." A policeman politely said she could not block the drive, and she left. In a huff.

There were still protestors waiting to leave the original corner. Both sides of Camelback for two whole blocks were lined three-deep with people and their signs.

A driver gave a one-fingered salute that seemed to just glance off me, as it looked like he was aiming it more towards the two highschool girls next to us. Weirdo. There was very little of that, actually, and when it did occur the crowd immediately responded with a loud chant of "Enlist! Enlist!"

It was all very normal. About the wierdest thing I saw, aside from the pink-tutu guy (every party has to have at least one of those!) was a Prius driver who gave us the finger. Beemers and Jags, I could expect that maybe, though most drivers of those models honked and waved peace signs too. But a Hybrid driver? That I did not get.

Many thanks to all the groups and individuals who I have failed to mention.

Veterans for Peace
Arizona Alliance for Peaceful Justice
Cost of War

And many, many others.

Necessary Rumors

The Navy Times reports that members of Congress are considering cuts in healthcare services provided to members of the military, among other things such as cuts to CDC funding (brilliant,) to "offset" money to help pay for rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina.

Well, that's one way of looking at it. It's all spin, of course, because the real reason behind these cuts is to maintain the exhorbitant, unnecessary, and counter-productive tax cuts given to the richest one-percent of wealthiest people among us.

These tax cuts are also supported by the Chinese, who purchase U.S. debt. They loan us money which we use to buy cheap Chinese-made stuff, increasing their production to "bubble economy" levels of growth.

At one time, China's autarkic economy protected it from outside influence. But along with this week's figures on economic growth came another ominous big number. From once being nearly self-sufficient in oil, China is now the second biggest oil importer in the world - and is on the verge of needing massive coal imports as well. The China Bubble has expanded to a point where it will soon reach the sharp edges of infrastructural capacity and reckless over-investment to the point of over-production. That is when bubbles burst.

(snip)

American companies may have forgotten what Henry Ford propounded when he first built his Model T: If you do not pay high enough wages to your workers, they can't afford to buy your product. One simple basis for that Bush boom is that China is recycling its US$100 billion-plus trade surplus with the US back into dollars, and especially into US Treasury bonds. Almost half of the US Treasury bonds are now owned in Asia. So China is financing Bush's bold economic experiment: running two or more wars simultaneously with a huge budget and trade deficit, and equally huge tax handouts for the richest Americans.

The poor get poorer and the rich get richer. Meanwhile the perfect storms, both meteorlogical and economic, gather strength. Storms that do not discriminate, as do United States tax policies, according to one's social and economic class.

Tell me again why it is said that the majority of our service people support the Bush administration, even as it again cuts support for them? It must be some blind ideological cult-of-personality thing, which I do not understand.

So why is all this occuring? Why does our debt pile up, while our soldiers die endlessly, while our leaders let down those they are sworn to support?

Well, maybe it's because our President is a drunk.

We would not need rumors if the mainstream media were doing its job. Unfortunately, Bush has never been thoroughly confronted about his admitted problems with alcohol and cocaine, among perhaps other things. And it is not known that he has ever sought treatment for these dysfunctions. The press remains codependent on this matter.

Lunch

A friend at work loaned me a copy of Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. I'm up to the part where she's working in WalMart, and she just had her shift changed. She's wondering if she should take one or both of her closely-monitored 15-minute breaks before the dinner hour, or afterwards.

Do I take both before dinner, which is usually about 7:30, leaving an unbroken two-and-a-half-hour stretch when I'm weariest, between 8:30 and 11:00? Or do I try to go two-and-a-half hours without a break in the afternoon, followed by a nearly three-hour marathon before I can get away for dinner? (Page 163 of the paperback.)

She wonders. I laugh. Hah! I say to your break dilemma.

I get a "lunch" break sometime during my 12-hour shift (which often stretches to 13 or 14 hours,) if I am lucky, and if I only take three or four phone calls during "lunch" I consider myself luckier still.

Usually I go from a little before 7 a.m. until about 2 p.m. (7 ceaseless hours of incredible stress,) before I am able to report off to some other starving entity and slip into the back room, still on the unit at which I work, and cram down a quick meal. Then I'm off for another 5 hours of being in four places at once until the next shift arrives.

The "covering nurse" does nothing for my patients while I am away shoving food down my gullet while fielding calls to radiology and the cath lab, because they are busy enough with their own assignment. But if one of my patients throws an embolism and codes, they come get me. That is what is meant by "coverage."

Often I am called from my pleasant repast to medicate a patient for pain, send one off to a procedure, or otherwise interrupt my unpaid meal time.

I come back from lunch with 20 minutes of tall fresh weeds growing up around me.

After reading Ehrenreich, briefly I ponder the sheer luck of WalMart associates, for they get breaks.

(On later edit: the link expired, but originally it was to a story about Wal-Mart workers bringing a legal case against the company for making them work through breaks and also making them perform unpaid overtime work.)

Then I pause to consider that they make $7 an hour, and I make something like $30 before calculating the value of my various benefits. It's a math thing.

What a depressing book. How I wish I could do more for my fellow working-class Americans, but to chastise them for their stupid and timid political leanings. But to tip well, which I do unerringly. But to treat them with utmost linguistic respect under all circumstances.

Sigh. But to mourn my working-class college-deprived parents. (They met in their freshman year, got married, dropped out, and bought 4 or 5 houses on 1960's wages, back when we as an affluent society actually rewarded people for their work.)

I am so glad that I am not a Republican.

Clamming Question

Imagine that you are an 82-year-old man and you once lost one of the things that is most important in your life.

Then you go to dig clams.

You find the treasure that you lost. A shrimplate moment.

Question: do you continue digging clams, or do you go home immediately?

Menthols On Belay

Let's say his name is "Trevor." Nice distinguished name, that. Like a character on that television show Frasier or something.

He was in his fifties and only the Great Buddha of Aging Homeless Alcoholics knows how he got to be even that age without succumbing to personal disaster or disease. They say he basically lived on the streets because he either had no family or had no family that would admit to knowing him anymore.

He had fallen and broken a hip. Probably due to inebriation, but as he had an episode of rapid atrial fibrillation while with us, treated by a cardizem drip, I suppose it's possible he fell during a syncopal episode brought on by such an arrythmia. Such a story sure worked out to benefit Joe Scarborough after the death in his office of his aide Lori Klausutis a while back. So why not a drunk who fell down using this defense also? See? I am such a patient advocate.

Then again maybe the sun got in his eyes. Maybe he choked on a pretzel.

I liked Trevor. He did his incentive spirometry all by himself. Usually us nurses have to brandish whips to persuade patients to do that. He was polite and behaved decently most of the time.

Usually. Good thing I have my nurse-spider-sense, otherwise known as rank cynicism, to assist in those times when "usually" does not apply.

Something told me (see above) to walk by his room before going upstairs to return the patient-controlled-anelgesia key I borrowed from another unit. I had promised to "bring it right back." So they weren't expecting me for another few hours anyways. Hospital time.

Trevor had an abductor pillow strapped between his legs and sequential compression devices strapped on, too. Plus had had an IV line running and an oxygen nasal cannula.

All those things are belaying devices that are commonly used to provide safety for bedridden hospital patients.

Anyways, Trevor had to go to the bathroom and decided that the nurse call light button that was lying annoyingly on his belly wasn't necessary, as he could easily just climb over the bedrails and drag all the belaying equipment with him without the help of nursing staff.

I caught him just in time. Pure luck. Help arrived and we got everything undone and used a wheeled walker to get him into the water-closet. He was tired after that and dozed off when we settled him back into bed.

Later he wanted to do the same thing only to go out to smoke a cigarette. That was during a blood transfusion. He was down a couple pints after the hip replacement surgery. I didn't let him go out to smoke, naturally, and he said he wanted a different nurse and told me I was "too strict."

As if I expected him to listen to reason, I politely explained to Trevor that as he had just had his hip fracture repaired, and was getting a blood transfusion, as well as a run of intravenous antibiotics, and supplemental oxygen therapy for his wheezy lungs, (one of which had just been drained of fluid during a CAT-scan guided thoracentesis, incidentally,) and along with the mobility limitations that occur subsequent to hip damage and surgical repair, (also one must note that because he was uninsured all this was paid for by your insurance premiums and tax dollars,) that going outside to smoke was just mathematically impossible.

He laughed. I had meant for him to do so.

We served up his meal, and later I saw him using his incentive spirometry device again.

These should come tobacco-flavored. Menthol, too. Then maybe somebody besides Trevor would use them voluntarily.

What Isn't There

For some reason the television was turned on. Usually we listen to radio in the morning. Typically I am in front of the computer. Whatever. It was switched on and we saw the first tower burning. I recall wondering where the Air Force was hiding when we watched the second plane smash into the other tower.

Something else I remember thinking was "where are the engines?" when the smoking hole in the Pentagon was shown. It's so easy to say that, but I recall this distinctly. I said it out loud. And the Pentagon hole looked too small to me. I know nothing about engines but that these are quite big. I thought they would have made their own holes.

I didn't have to work that day. My spouse did. I do not remember whether or not my young one stayed home. Did we take her to her Children's Academy thinking that the television would be on for much of the day? Or did she stay home with me? I vaguely recall that we swam in the pool that day, to get out, but I could be wrong. I think that is right because of the relative quietness around the apartment complex.

When the towers fell we said to one another that it so resembled a controlled demolition. A little later we turned it off and my spouse drove to work.

For a few weeks the young one had fears, and she would say "the lights" and point up. Only after probing with questions did we come to realize how much she understood of what she had seen of it. Because we "come from New York" she somehow identified with the place, even though we were not from the city.

We lived less than a mile north of the approach path of the north runway for the airport. So we were accustomed to hearing jets going in and out all day. The quiet of Sky Harbor was itself a notable presence for those few days. That is why I think we swam that day. Because later there were no jets. And nobody else at the pool.

That's what I noticed the most. The lack of noise, the absence of defensive measures, juxtaposed with the sudden elevation of a flailing Bush presidency in the polls.

We still don't know where the heck Kennedy's brain is. Speaking of a conspicuous absence.

Reverse Star

The story, just a rumor, really, but reliable, goes like this: their dog got sick, so they took him to the veterinarian. The doctor found that the poor canine had been bitten, probably by a roof rat, because these have recently been seen around the apartment complex in which the family lives.

Because the dog was so sick, and also because the infectious disease that was causing the dog to suffer can be spread perhaps too easily from animals to humans, they destroyed the pet. It had bubonic plague.

In light of the recent storms, those of you who think of yourselves as optimistic glass-half-full types may consider investing in companies that make things like these. Though there was a mandatory evacuation of the drowned city under Lake George, it was after all only an evacuation of (warning: links to a News Corporation site) people. Pets were left behind, unraptured. So were the rats. That cannot be good. It can be assumed that a large percentage of their population died during the hurricane and the floods that came afterwards, but their reproductive rate would appear to make that a moot point.

Rats have litters of 6 to 12 young, which are born 21 to 23 days after mating. Young rats are sexually mature in about 3 months. Breeding occurs mostly in spring and fall. The average female has 4 to 6 litters per year. Individuals usually live 12 to 18 months.

Do the math. On second thought, do not. It might just spoil your beautiful mind.

It must be assumed that any part of a building above the level of the waters could now have these new occupants. But we can surely sleep peacefully tonight knowing in our hearts that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, blessed with our tax dollars, has truckloads of pest control experts poised to eradicate this problem, before it even becomes one.

That is, after all, what FEMA is for, isn't it?

Thanks, Bob

"She related that she had urged Bush at the White House on Tuesday to fire Michael Brown.

''He said 'Why would I do that?''' Pelosi said.

'''I said because of all that went wrong, of all that didn't go right last week.' And he said 'What didn't go right?''"

There are several other quotes available. Bush thinks Brown did just fine. If you think he was incompetent, well, you are not his boss.

I saw this in a video clip played out on Faux or CNN a couple days ago. As I do not wish to spin their hit counters I am quite satisfied to have lifted this written transcript from the comments over at a real blog by a real blogger. The note was made by one "bob mcmanus" which is so plain a moniker one must assume he uses his real name.

I recall the video clip well, and Mr. McManus distorts not. Funny how I cannot specifically recall nor give a fig just which network on which I saw the Pelosi video, though. Like it matters. Faux? CNN? E!TV? The Comedy Network? Whatever.

Pelosi nailed it, and then, amazingly, went public with such comments. You see, regarding the absolute destruction of one of the most historic cities in America, Bush thinks things are going rather well.

Can they kill her for that? I do not know. But I would advise Madame Pelosi to avoid travel in small aircraft.

A familiar psychological theme emerges here. It has to do with death. When Bush was young, seven years old, his beloved little sister Robin died of leukemia at age three. He was said to have been very fond of her. Very fond of her. Who wouldn't be? My god, there is nothing on this fair earth more lovely than any three-year-old girl.

Just ask the father of any daughter. You will see.

Bush was not immediately told of her death. His parents, Robin's parents, played golf the next day. To mourn was not a family priority.
Damn them to hell. A three-year-old daughter JUST DIED. Let's play golf, eh? Bastards. Bitches. Monsters. Defend them, if you wish. Please excuse my emotional response. On second thought, if you should think my emotional response here inappropriate, well then too bad. In any hypothetical situation I will side with the child. I know me.

I know me.

Young Bush spent some time at a friend's house then, at which it was recorded that he had terrible nightmares. Christ, his little sister had just died. Damn. Of course he may have had a few childhood trauma-related calls to make. Of course. But he couldn't.

He was not allowed to grieve. His parents, though absent for long intervals caring for Robin in far away hospitals, basically hid her illness as best they could, and Bush, learning disabled as he already was, became emotionally stunted. To say the least.

He cannot grieve. He never learned how. Actually, he was taught otherwise, like his mother, to snicker at the misfortune of others.

Bush is unable to see things that go wrong. He is blinded by his own ideology; a blindness which is amplified by the blind men he has chosen to advise him. What are we to to?

We know what to do, as we are not losers, like our Republican leaders. Leaders. What a word. What a word. Losers. That's more like it.

Evacuees. What a word.

God bless the refugees. God damn those who witheld our help which we laboured to send to them. God help the refugees, for Bush knows them NOT. He knows them not a bit.

No More Cheap Energy

The blogging sometimes goes unattended due to work or travel, but lately I've just been spending a little more time practicing. The storm and its catastrophic aftermath have me considering that energy-consuming pastimes such as television and web-surfing may become not only much more expensive but also may sometimes become completely unavailable.

That is, if one is allowed to survive.

We here in this great dry city have much to be thankful for. We are not Drusilla. And we have meaningful work to do for those who have come to us from the storms.

In Turbato Mare Irato Naufragatur Alma Pax

Of course the Bush administration was slow to respond to the great tragedy still unfolding in New Orleans and surrounding areas. They do not believe it is their charge to respond to such things. They do not believe that is what government is supposed to do.

They believe that government is supposed to make rich people even richer; that is, if those people happen to be Republicans. Sometimes incidentally some Hollywood liberal type will also benefit greatly from Bush governmental policies, but this is certainly not the hoped-for result and the usual right-wing radio screamers decry this on a regular basis.

Would you be taken aback in the least bit if tomorrow Bush were to say that the rebuilding of the Gulf coast would be done in a faith-based manner, free from government interference, and free from government money?

Probably not.

And the great so-called-liberal-media would then treat us to another round of memes and trendy adjectives and adverbs would abound, all supporting the great genius of such an abysmally bad idea.

Faith-based rescue efforts. Faith-based corpses piling up in hospital stairwells. Faith-based gangs of looters shooting it out with faith-based paramilitary private-sector sub-contractors. Faith-based levees. Oh. Right. We already had those in place, didn't we?

Those of us who had done a little reading about Bush before he ran for president knew this was coming. A lot of us tried to tell you just how awful this man would be for this country, like Molly Ivins for a good; no, excellent example. And we are still trying to get the word out. Steve Gilliard has said it better today than I can, even if he does hold back a little, so please click and read.

Things are bad, and many people are now beginning to see that Bush and his policies have a big part in this. Sadly, the worst is yet to come. Bush isn't done yet. There is more damage on the way.

In the turbulent wrath-torn sea goodly peace is wrecked.

Four Times Lucky

He owned a popular restaurant on the south side of town not too far from the highway that ran north from New York to Montreal. Sometimes my parents went there, back in the day, perhaps to finish off an afternoon at the racetrack. Not my kind of place though. My Datsun 240Z did not go so well in a parking lot full of white Cadillacs, one might say.

The word was that he had gotten somewhat behind on his gambling debts.

Because such a dire financial situation can be quite stressful, the police explained, this patient had become depressed. So depressed, in fact, that he took a small-caliber automatic weapon and delivered a line of four bullets into his own chest, but thankfully he survived. A miracle really.

Each bullet entered his torso at about nipple level, one between his right nipple and his armpit and clean through, another medial to this and just right of the sternum, another just left of the sternum hit a rib, and the fourth between the left nipple and armpit.

"Warning shots," I thought to myself as I washed him up.

He kept telling me to jump out the window. Two stories up, and my shift was nowhere near over, so I stayed. "You're not safe, they're gonna come through the door right now," he said. For a moment I worried.

Four bullets straight on into the ribcage, and no chest tubes, no myocardial trauma, no lung resections, no aortic damage. Just bandaids. With luck like that, he had gambling debts?

Who's Lying Now

"Not everybody thinks the way you do," I have recently been told, by the likes of local columnist Dick Foreman, and though I cannot quote him with such exactitude, one Doug MacEachern.

Projection and desperation, I say. Of course not everyone thinks like me. They certainly don't, and that is to be expected. Their paychecks, columnists and editorial writers as they are, probably depend on the fact that they think a certain way, or at least pretend that they do, I would guess.

But I can say this: MOST people think the way I do, at least regarding the way Bush has mishandled this war. The looting, the bombing of civilians, the Abu Ghraib scandals, the lack of guarding major weapons dumps, the lack of diplomacy, the loosing of the Iraqi army, the deaths of our servicepeople, and on and on. Most Americans hate this crap, despite the inane pleadings of media lackeys.

I have been told, in apparent honesty, that "we" are fighting and killing the bad guys over there, and that this is good and well. Apparently there are just enough bad guys in the world to engage our poor sitting-duck troops in Iraq and the forgotten Afghanistan, with absolutely none, not even maybe a little over a dozen (like the number involved in the 9/11 attacks on us, for example,) left over to secretly plan to attack again, right under our noses. No, they wouldn't do that, would they?

"We're fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them here," is what out brainless leaders tell us, and so many columnists apparently believe that.

But do our enemies believe that?

I will tell you "no."

I will tell you that Bush has played into the hands of bin Laden, according to his own manifesto. But Bush doesn't read, except the headlines once in a while. He has people read for him. Great.

Bin Laden has declared "Your problem will be how to convince your troops to fight, while our problem will be how to restrain our youths to wait for their turn in fighting and in operations." Unfortunately, that is true. Our military enlistments fall below even the revised-down numbers.

In 1998 bin Laden wrote:

"The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula".

Bin Laden told us that Bush was going to attack Iraq, and well, unfortunately, that was also true.

Bush on the other hand has fed us one lie after another. This is not right. Our leaders are supposed to be more dependable than our sworn enemies. But they aren't. So we are in trouble.

Condoleeza Rice warned of mushroom clouds over American cities. Let's just hope she was lying about that.