Colorful writing.

I have a brilliant idea for a one-act play, a drama of romance with four characters. I have only gotten to the notes stage of fleshing out the idea, but I hoped you'd be interested. Maybe you have a billion dollars hanging around and have always dreamed of producing a great play. Well, dream no more! 

This one's got it all -- drama, pathos, comedy, and babes. You couldn't ask for more colorful characters. I call it...

Toner: A Love Story 

Curtain up, and we meet our four players:

🖶 Black, tall, dark, and handsome

🖶 Cyan, a young man with sky-high optimism

🖶 Yellow, pretty but shy and retiring

🖶 Magenta, one hot chick

Cyan and Magenta have been dating for a while, but Magenta is trouble. They met at a Deep Purple concert, and seemed to hit it off. But now she's always running out. He doesn't want to try to control her, and knows he can't, but she doesn't seem to care about his needs. Meanwhile, Black (called Big K) is a little tired of his girl Yellow, who dotes on him but is not exciting. They've gone so far as to ink a prenup, but no wedding date is in sight.  

As the play progresses, we see they are all in one jam or other. Big K is having trouble at work; Cyan is blue because he thinks Magenta is cheating. 

One day Big K meets Magenta and is totally imprinted. "Hey, baby, I'd love to get your portrait," he says. 

"I think you want me in landscape, big boy," she teases.

"Yeah, girl, once you've had Black you never go back." 

“Ooh, baby, you can drive my cartridge.”

Yellow is scared that her boyfriend might be straying, especially when she gets a call from her friend Dot that Big K was seen collating with some floozie. 

Cyan, meanwhile, goes looking for Magenta with laser-focused intensity. He hears about Big K, and goes to the man's apartment, only to find Yellow all alone. 

Cyan and Yellow talk, and realize their romantic partners are probably cheating on both of them. They are green with jealousy. Suddenly Big K arrives. Cyan accuses him of stealing his girl. Big K tries to throw him out. Black and Cyan fight until they are black and blue. 

Suddenly Magenta shows up. She says she's had it with both of these men, and runs off. Yellow scoffs: “Who shot her out of a cannon?” Big K calls after her, saying "Black loves matter!" Cyan storms away in anger and Yellow follows him. 

Cyan and Yellow cool off in the park. She says he should get some Epsom salts on his bruises. He says maybe they should hook up to spite the cheaters. They go back to his apartment. He makes some food (steak with HP sauce), but she's a vegetarian. She turns on some romantic music -- but it's Michael Bolton (Cyan: "I hate that guy!"). Nothing works -- they just have no chemistry. 

Meanwhile Big K finds Magenta, drowning her sorrows at the Copycat Lounge. She confesses that she really loves Cyan, but she knows she's no good for him. She's a bloody mess. He sees there's no future with her, so he leaves. Everybody is low. 

The next day, Big K goes to Yellow's place, begging her to take him back. She agrees, but she's more bold now and demands respect. Meanwhile, Magenta goes to Cyan's place to tell him she loves him, but it can never come out right. They have nothing in common. He points out that they're both in love, both enjoy classic rock, and both people of color, and he believes they can make it work, even if the margins are slim. 

At the end, in a real Kodak moment, everyone embraces. Curtain! 

Pretty awesome, right? I think we can get some backing and a theater to give this a go. And if not, see how long Playbill lasts with only blank pages. Mwah ah ah!

Yippie dippie dippie!

You know the feeling you get when you have an assignment or another type of job to do that you're really dreading, and you put it off because you despise or are actually afraid of it, and then you're told never mind, they don't need it after all? Great feeling! 

Well, here is another: 

I thought the loan for my wife's car was a six-year loan, but after this month's payment they sent the lien release. It was a five-year loan! We're done! Five hundred bucks a month back in our pockets! WOOO!!

all ours!

Now, you can—and probably should—point out that this so-called found money is entirely the fault of my stupidity or forgetfulness or both. If I had bothered to check the account or had remembered the terms set out in 2019, paying off the car would be pleasant but not a surprise. And you would be correct.

On the other hand, my stupidity and forgetfulness usually bring me bad surprises. “That was TODAY?” “I agreed to this?” “We still owe six grand?” So to have a good surprise instead of a bad one is like Christmas morning.

Next week I am planning to take a drive to visit old friends, and my wife will probably tell me to take her car, which is newer and less likely to have trouble. And I will refuse. Because bad surprises still lurk out there, and I am not going to tempt fate by driving the just-paid-off vehicle through Jersey. Besides, I just dropped a grand on tires and repairs to my car. It owes me. 

And I have AAA, because life is full of bad surprises.

Friday night fights.

The Olympics had not even begun when the fighting started. 

Morocco fans stormed the field in a pre-Opening Ceremony match between their country and Argentina. 

Objects were thrown and invading Morocco fans were tackled by security on the field at Stade Geoffroy-Guichard in Saint-Etienne after Argentina tied it 2-2 with a goal from Cristian Medina the 16th minute of added time.

Well, the rioters got what they wanted. The tying goal was disallowed, and Morocco won the game 2-1. 

Were the Morocco fans right about the goal being offside? Maybe, but that's not the point. We know it and the Moroccan hooligans certainly know it. The point is, and we see it again and again in Western nations, if you riot, you get your way -- as long as you're protected by the weenies running the show. Otherwise you get hunted down and disappeared into prison for years. 

I'm not saying that the Moroccans were free to act up because they are Muslim, although Paris is home to the annual Carbeque, the cookout of vehicles and other destruction of property in the city's no-police zones. Soccer (I will not call it football) thugs can be found in any country but America and maybe Canada, and Morocco is an ocean closer to Paris than Buenos Aires. If there'd been an equal number of fans from both countries in the stands, it could have been a much bigger brawl. 

But were the "invading" fans really all Morocco supporters, or were they just local Religion of Peace™ adherents looking for an excuse to cause trouble? To ask the question is to commit a hate crime. 

I'll be grateful if the French authorities get through the next couple of weeks without serious bloodshed. The way things have been going, though, I have strong doubts. 

Comedy and shame.

So what does this 1984 film have to do with our current moment?

Eh, I don't know. 

No, seriously, hold on. First, I want to say that I have never seen any of the Police Academy movies, which is strange because when I was a teenager it was exactly the kind of movie that I would have been coerced into seeing, most certainly on video, on some random summer day when none of my friends had any better ideas. But somehow I dodged that bullet. Not to pick on the movie -- some actors and comics I respect were in it -- but I had always heard it was about a lowbrow as you could get. 

Here I am, writing about it all the same. What happened was, I was reading through some cinema history and found out -- which I don't think I knew -- that Alan Ladd's son, Alan Ladd Jr., was a movie producer. He produced Police Academy. Then he won an Oscar as a producer on Braveheart. He also produced The Brady Bunch Movie. Cinema is the weirdest business on earth.

That made me curious enough about the original Police Academy to go to Wikipedia and the entry on the movie. I also discovered that in 2016, Bill Clinton copped to loving the series, saying of his marriage: 

“We rarely disagreed on parenting, although she did believe that I had gone a little over the top when I took a couple days off with Chelsea to watch all six Police Academy movies back-to-back.”

I don't know how I missed this quote in 2016, but it might have gone over my head because I hadn't seen the movies. I just figured they were dumb fun. 

But it was Bill, so I should have known better. 

I knew full well that it was movie law in the early 1980s that every comedy had to have a hooker in it. So of course Bill Clinton would love those movies. In the first picture the Mandatory Hooker commits fellatio from inside a lectern on a man giving a speech before a large crowd. Twice.

And he watched this with his daughter? 

Picturing the heartfelt lesson there: "Remember, sweetheart, this is how a woman gets ahead. And the man she loves, too, come to think of it." 

Do you think those scenes were ever on Bill Clinton's mind when he was doing one of his heartfelt addresses to the American public? 

This was the man who turned the Oval Office into the Oral Office, let us not forget.

Which brings us to the present moment. 

First, I learned that the inspiration for the film came from an actual event in San Francisco, where a motley crew of academy cadets were trying and failing to secure a film site. Producer Paul Maslansky was told that the police academy had to accept all applicants, however ludicrous, and keep them until they quit or officially washed out. And that made me think of the current lawlessness in San Francisco and the desperation of our cities to get anyone to join the police force after so many experienced cops quit or retired during the Defund Police nonsense of recent memory. 

Also in San Francisco, although not as mayor until 1996, was Willie Brown, without whose help and guidance none of us would have ever heard the name Kamala Harris. And indeed, Ms. Harris seemed to take the role of Mandatory Hooker in this little comedy, using her wiles to advance her career as a prosecutor in the state of California. Ferocious ambition and courtesan skills are an odd but not unheard of combination. But even Willie thinks she's out of her depth. I say she's in so far over her head she'll need a bathysphere to speak at the convention next month. 

Anyway, there it is -- sex, politicians, hookers, poor parenting choices, bad police recruiting, and comedy. Many people have been saying that the 80's movie that we should be scared of seeing in real life is The Terminator, with all the AI stuff around. But it actually turned out to be Police Academy. 

Fluff lies bleeding.

I haven't seen all the Toy Story movies, but if they wanted to do a real horror show, they should make one from the vantage of dog toys. 

Izzy does enjoy ripping the fluff out of toys. If it's got a squeaker, he's going to get it out -- and then the squeaker must be carefully removed from his mouth, or he will keep munching it until it stops making noise. Die, squeaky heart! He might swallow it, which would be bad.

We really don't want the dog to swallow the squeaker, but it's instinct. He's a retriever by breeding and nature, so his job is to go get the duck and, if the duck still shows signs of life, to break or chomp its neck and put it out of its misery. Since I'm not a hunter, he only gets to do this to his toys. And do it he does. 

He's not as bad as his late uncle, Nipper, the legendary destroyer of toys. Nipper was once known as the Alexander the Great of dogs by tackling his personal Gordian Knot the same way Alexander did his -- direct action and ruthless efficiency.  

Tralfaz was less of a menace to toys. He would destroy them, but just incidentally because he was so big and strong. A few he did not wreck; he was a bit attached to a crunchy Mickey Mouse toy that he would groom, licking and pawing it. Gotta clean up Mickey's act. We had to keep Mickey away from Nipper or he would rip up his brother's favorite toy. 

Izzy has the Nipper instincts, and most toys don't last long around him unless he doesn't like them. Still, I would hate to see what would happen to Woody and Buzz if Izzy got hold of them. It would make the weird neighbor kid's bedroom of toy horrors in the first picture look like a day at the beach. 

Mission: Forgotten.

Mr. Philbin inquired whether I was intending to comment on last week’s failed attempt to murder the former president. I believe everyone on the planet has already done so, and as more information comes out and the Secret Service looks worse and worse, more will comment again (and ought to). Feet must be held to fires; swords must be fallen upon. Justice demands it.

And yet, I suppose we’ve come to expect that justice’s claims will go unanswered. As is typical now. The government is loaded with people who not only don’t accept the buck when passed, they also use buck-repellent on their gold-plated rears to prevent the buck ever arriving—however properly it should. Harry Truman is long absent. 

It’s of a piece with a blog entry I posted earlier this month about our supposed elites and their stupidity. As has been pointed out with appropriate vigor in many quarters, the Secret Service has opted to show its stupidity by forgetting its mission and picking up lesser missions instead. Instead of protecting the presidents and other key figures, they seek to indulge in social justice and social engineering, hiring candidates based on their potential to be girlboss action figures rather than their capacity to do the job. We have seen some results of this mission misdirection.

A similar situation has been going on in reverse in women’s competitions, where men dressed as women are pulverizing girls at sports and even winning beauty competitions. The mission—giving women an arena in which they can achieve greatness—has been thrown aside for silly concerns.

This has been going on in fire departments for decades. It became more important to get women in the firehouse than to have firefighters who could handle the often extreme physical challenges of the job. To enable social change, physical requirements had to be lowered. 

I asked a buddy who retired from a Manhattan NYFD firehouse if one of the highly touted female recruits had ever wound up in his unit. He said they were never assigned any, but he worked with some when he was on temporary loan to other houses. And no, they couldn’t do the job—they were just not strong enough, however fit. So the department would shuffle them into desk jobs. They will get the same cushy pension and Cadillac health plans as guys who'd spent 30 years dragging adults out of burning buildings. The situation is worse now under Mayor Eric Adams’s highly politicized fire chief, but that’s a long story.

It seems like way too many people believe the fish-out-of-water stories in which totally unqualified persons are put in difficult positions or authority, but succeed because they are clever and mean well. This assumes no job requires any knowledge or expertise. Anyone can do it with the right attitude, so why give it to some old white dude who’s spent his life in the field? The mission will be accomplished. And if not, we tried real hard!

I'm not just blaming the women involved, mind you -- I'm blaming everyone for forgetting the purpose of the job. And having an all-men squad is definitely no guarantee of getting these jobs done. It was only in 2012 that Secret Service agents were found to be spending more time getting loaded and banging prostitutes overseas than focusing on their duties (“Wheels up, rings off”). And again, that’s forgetting the mission, just for different priorities. 

This is where we are in America right now: Everyone wants to do everything but the damn job that he's supposed to be doing. You'd think that wouldn't be too much to ask for any job, let alone one that prides itself on duty and honor, but apparently we're choosing to be too stupid -- not to mention too selfish -- to live. 

Finding common ground.

 

Meloncholy baby.

I look forward to the produce section in summer. I really do. Excellent berries, sweet corn, peaches, plums, and nectarines. What a delight! 

And every year I fall for the watermelon. 

I love watermelon, I really do. But it is the TARDIS of fruit, I swear. You come home with a baby five-pound watermelon and by the time you finish cutting it up you have eighteen pounds, not counting the rind. I don't understand how it works, but I know that if watermelon had more solid nutrition in it, no one would ever starve. 

No one's starving at my house, which is why, no matter how small a watermelon I buy, I always wind up throwing some out. Because despite claims that others enjoy the fruit, only I wind up eating it. One normal man can only eat so many pounds of watermelon a day. It’s great but not super versatile. And no one liked the grilled watermelon when I tried it.

I was better positioned to consume the whole fruit before it rotted when we had Tralfaz and Nipper, our previous dogs. Tralfaz liked a nice bowl of cold watermelon on a hot day, but Nipper absolutely adored it. Nipper, mind you, would pick individual blueberries off a treat and spit them out, but he was a devotee to Citrullus lanatus and would tear through a bowl like Sherman through Georgia. Izzy, however, Nipper's actual nephew, spurns fruits and vegetables as much as any dog ever, except for chewing grass like a freaking sheep. Dogs are unpredictable. 

Really, if I'm to be so foolish as to buy an entire watermelon again, I ought to enlist the help of "Buffalo" Jim Reeves of Western New York, a professional competitive eater who holds the watermelon-eating record: 13.22 pounds in 15 minutes at an event in 2005. Now, that was some years ago, but I'll bet he still has enough left of his A-game to help me dispose of a petite melon, however large it is inside. 

Mark your calendar for National Watermelon Day on August 3. Who knows what magical thing may happen? Maybe Izzy will eat a minuscule chunk of watermelon. Or maybe I'll wise up and stick to blueberries. At least you can make other things from blueberries. 

Offices.

Everyone hates offices. I don't know anyone who gets excited about offices in general. No one is thrilled because of the office. Everyone complains about them. You'd think they were sheer torture. 

They're mostly just dull and designed poorly.  

meh

I remember -- but have been unable to locate -- a picture of a big magazine subscription department from more than a century ago. I think it was Ladies' Home Journal, then based in Philadelphia, which advertised itself as "The Magazine with a Million," meaning a million subscribers in 1903 -- a towering achievement at the time, something no other U.S. magazine had done. The subscription office was a huge floor with tiny little desks laid out like a vast bingo card. Each worker had his or her little desk to process subscriptions. It must have been hot, boring as hell, and I don't know how anyone could have stayed awake. No one was rushing to the bathroom to check TikTok or play Wordscapes. It probably paid peanuts, too. 

On the other hand, it was not expected to be a career in and of itself. A man working the tiny desk might be going to business school at night -- a perfectly acceptable alternative to college then. A woman doing the job would probably be expected to leave to get married at some point, unless she was supporting her sickly old mom. But it was desirable work, in that you were not being run off your feet like a waitress or digging ditches like a slob.

Bad and boring as it may be, office jobs were considered superior to other kinds of work. In many regards, they still are, although the way we krex and moan about them you'd think we were getting surgery without anesthesia every day. To be fair, in 1903 there were no overweening tin-pot HR dictators, no "team building" exercises, and no mandatory training to tell you to respect one another's pronouns. 

Did offices ever really have this kind of thing?  

No place I ever worked, at least that I know of. Yes, folks, this is a genuine book from 1962, and this is what guys used to do before X-rated movies and OnlyFans. See why Americans were more literate in those days? We even had to read to get our naughty thrills. 

Things have changed so much since 1962, let alone 1903. Automation and computers have been eating away at jobs for decades, and guys like Elon Musk say they'll even take over the "creative" businesses like advertising. The Internet has devastated the magazine business as much as any other. Ladies' Home Journal closed up shop almost ten years ago. Rival Good Housekeeping is still alive as a magazine, but I've heard that in the 2010s, LHJ had lots of boneheaded management hastening its end. 

Except for those who program and feed the computers, office jobs may be on the way out entirely. We may complain about them, but we'll miss them when they're gone. 

Bartleby the scrivener was an office worker, you know. 

Ah, office! Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!  

Bleary in the morning.

Been kind of wiped out this week, and for good reason.

For days I've been covering for someone who's on vacation, minding the desk from my perch at home. Which is good, in that it means billable hours for me, but the other clients I have still need tending. Fortunately, there have not been many explosions and freakouts. Some, but not many. 

This has also coincided with some hot and humid weather, though, and while we are blessed to have air conditioning, the dog still needs to be outside a good bit. That's the way of his people. However, then he gets overheated, comes inside, and drinks a gallon of water, which sets off the Circle of Pee, and we have to go out again. 

I'm glad he's staying hydrated -- his uncle, the late Nipper, was not good about it, and once had to have a Quasimodo-esque lump of water injected into his back. Strangest thing. Can you imagine humans being treated like that for dehydration? 

"What's that big lump, Maggie? Third breast implant?"

"Nah, just neglected my Gatorade."

The big downside is that Izzy, America's Sweetheart (currently America's Sweatheart), has to go out a couple of times in the night. It's made the week more difficult to navigate, let's put it that way. 

In my career I've been paid salaries and hourlies, and anyone who needs to learn the value of a dollar needs to work for hourly wages. That's a cold fact. Every kid should do it. When you get paid by the hour, whenever an expense comes up -- say, you have to part with $700 for a car repair, I did this month -- your mind immediately goes to the most annoying, frustrating, diabolical project that you had recently, and you factor that into the money spent. I worked hour after hour cleaning the sewer backup into that guy's basement, and it didn't even pay half of what it cost me for the car repair, an expense I didn't expect. I didn't get a dime's worth of fun out of the money. 

I always think of the most crappy job I had to do to get the dough. I don't think I'm unusual in this. 

I'd say I've been doing the editorial equivalent of cleaning sewage, but there is no equivalent of cleaning sewage. I will say it's been very little fun, and the money isn't going toward anything fun either, and I'm exhausted. 

Added to all this is worry's little side hustle, the sleeplessness. This worrying is exhausting! Fortunately, it's also keeping me awake at night! So when the dog wakes me up, I'm up for hours. 

Next week may be better, but it certainly won't be well. Life is tough. I'm tired. I sometimes wonder how any of us get by. 

We Print the Truth.

When I was a youth I read a lot of science fiction short stories, and fantasy too, some dating back to the earliest days of the genres. One of my all-time favorite stories is Anthony Boucher's novella "We Print the Truth," published in 1944.

It has an absolutely terrific setup and really works the premise out well. In the story, John McVeagh, the editor of a small city paper, is granted one wish -- and his wish is that his newspaper live up to its proud and lofty slogan, "We Print the Truth." Back in those days, children, newspapers really prided themselves for genuine (not pretend) objectivity, desiring to actually tell the public the facts. Our hero's wish reflects well on his character and dedication.

That's how the trouble starts. 

He envisions the wish being a preventive against the paper printing anything false, but it doesn't work out that way. When a 77-year-old resident passes away, a typo in the obituary lists the man's age as 17. Thus, the coroner and McVeagh are shocked to find in the casket the body of a teenager. 

As he begin to realize what this magic power means for the paper, McVeagh decides to change the world. He goes for broke and runs a story that World War II is over! The Allies have won! And the whole town reads the news with great joy.

Except the war is not over. Everyone within the paper's circulation district believes the war is over, but it's true nowhere else. When the FBI sends a man to find out why the factory has stopped fulfilling munitions orders and the draft board stopped sending men, he too believes the war is over when he enters the town. All over the world, however, the war continues. 

And that's just one crazy issue caused by the power of this particular press. 

I've given away enough of the plot; you can read the story at the Internet Archive. Just look for the collection of Boucher stories entitled The Compleat Werewolf, and Other Stories of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It's worth the time. 

I guess I was thinking of it because, while few journalists really seem to care about the truth today, they sure want to change the world. But, as with McVeagh, they really have far less power over the world than they think, even if they're willing to run the truth into the ground and spit on it to make it what they want. Of late we've been given a very good look at what they mean by "truth," and whatever they mean by it, it sure isn't true. 

The one thing that gave them legitimacy, honesty, is the currency they paid for power, and now they find themselves with much less of both. 

P.S.: My favorite science fiction short story is “Happy Ending“ by Henry Kuttner, if you’re curious. There are spoilers, so don’t look for plot summaries.

Yoo-Hoo or boo-hoo?

One of the interesting things about shopping at Tractor Supply is that they have candy you don't see elsewhere. Your average gas station has to make room for the 98,000 varieties of Reese's, so they don't have space for Big Hunk Bar or Mallo Cup. Or this.  

As an adult who remembers Yoo-Hoo chocolate drinks fondly, I felt compelled to purchase this candy bar. I'm not sure Yoo-Hoo is well known outside the northeast, where it originated in 1928 (in New Jersey, to be specific). Yogi Berra was a pitchman for it for decades. In the eighties it was still considered a regional favorite.

Yoo-Hoo is not exactly chocolate milk, as its unusual composition allows it to stay fresh at room temperature, and its more watery consistency puts some folks off. But there's no denying it has a very particular type of chocolate flavor that most people enjoy. 

It that way it is like Hershey milk chocolate, and for the same reason -- bizarre American inventiveness. Milton Hershey was already rich from his caramel business when he decided to get in on the ground floor of the milk chocolate craze that was sweeping Europe. He went to Switzerland to learn the secret -- making milk chocolate is a lot more complicated than you'd think -- but the Swiss wouldn't tell him. So Milton just invented his own process, resulting in that unique sour-milk tang that sets Hershey's apart from all the other milk chocolate to this day. 

Similarly, juice bottler Natale Olivieri set out to make a chocolate beverage and just worked it out on his own, using canning methods to make a shelf-stable chocolate drink. Thus, nothing else tastes quite like a Yoo-Hoo.

Or does it? Does this Yoo-Hoo branded chocolate bar have the same taste? That is what I set out to discover. 

And the answer is -- not really. I kind of thought it did, and then maybe it didn't, so I bought a bottle of Yoo-Hoo to compare it directly. I have to say no; it's similar but not the same as the unusual Yoo-Hoo flavor. 

Here's why:  

Yes, the Easter candy giant Palmer of Reading, Pennsylvania, manufactures the Yoo-Hoo chocolate bar under license. Palmer chocolate is the sort that you give to kids, because they don't know enough to be discriminating in the least. It's fine -- but it's not great. And I think they failed to really capture the Yoo-Hoo taste. So while there's nothing wrong with it -- hey, even so-so chocolate is still chocolate -- I fear it does not live up to its label. But it’s still a break from the 98,000 Reese’s varieties.

So that's my report for today. It's been a while since I did one of these, taking a caloric hit for the team to help you spend your candy allowance wisely. You're welcome! 

Motivation.

The older you get, the more you value every day in which you do not have to interact with the Medical-American community. 

It's discouraging in so many ways. The medical community wants us to eat nothing but water, really -- flavorless vegetables, flavorless fish, and that's about all. They call it the Mediterranean Diet or the DASH diet or the MIND diet or whatever—we always know it will mean no fat, no salt, no flavor. They may sell this as stuff that Greeks and Japanese eat, but I really wonder if the recipes they recommend are authentic. The people in the so-called "blue zones" wouldn't live that long if so. The food would bring them to despair. 

Of course, exercise is at least as important, or maybe more important, than diet. We seem to be broken into two sections in our society -- a small group that LOVES exercise and can't wait to get that cardio going for hours, biking or hiking or kickboxing or just running like a crazy person. And then there's everyone else, who wonders why we invented all the great machines if we have to make ourselves do work anyway. First we make machines to save labor, and then we make machines to do labor on? 

Well, to be fair, for most of the latter machines are used to hang clothes. 

You just need to get motivated, I know. For years I was into morning exercise. Made me feel awake. But I think I accumulated a variety of injuries that are starting to show up now, in the Check Engine era of life. 

Everyone needs something to motivate them. 

And that brings me around to this weekend's project: replacing a toilet bowl seat. The old seat looks like it has a horrible stain, but it doesn't -- there's a spot on the seat that has been worn through, exposing a brown surface underneath. Well, you know I cannot allow anyone in the house until this is fixed, so I stopped at Lowe's and seized some precious Moments. 

Yes, Moments by American Standard. I think the name comes not from those magical times of tranquility, alone with your thoughts on the can. I think it refers to this being one of those slow-close seats, that take a moment to drop. Not like the regular seats, that could slam the lid down on your Little Friend. The slow seat gives you time to get everything in the clear. 

Replacing a toilet seat is a job so easy that even I can handle it without worry. Of course, I will have to clean the toilet too -- putting a new seat on a filthy toilet is like trying on shoes with filthy feet. But cleaning sounds a lot like "exercise" as well, so I guess that brings me full circle -- like the circle of a toilet seat. Or the circle of diet and what becomes of the food you ate. It's all connected, my friends. Just like your digestive system, your toilet, and the plumbing. The circle of pipes.

Going Fourth!

I often opine on Independence Day as an inspiring holiday for our nation, but today I found myself thinking about it as the thing itself and how it's been in my life. Like Christmas -- we all know the difference between the story of Christmas (awesome) and the actual celebration with loved ones (dicey). Every holiday has that kind of dichotomy -- the thing for what it celebrates and the thing for how it is. 

And I have to tell you, my Fourths of July have been a mixed bag. 

Never works out exactly as I would like.

I don't remember doing much at all when I was a kid. When I was little more than a toddler, I think I was at a parade, a big town deal with floats and stuff, but it was so far back I can barely remember anything. Later my family really didn't do anything. No parades, no fireworks. We visited relatives because it was a day off and Mom could go see her family. Then, as adults do, they sat around and talked. BORING! 

Later on there were some winners. I went to a Mets game one year, and while I don't even remember if they won the game (I think they won), the fireworks show at Shea afterward was spectacular. In 2002, my wife and I went to the local kaboomery show and it was great -- the patriotism was still thick on the ground here in the lower Hudson Valley, where many locals had been lost on 9/11. 

One July 4, after my first year in junior high, my family spent the day with a family that had enough fireworks to invade Canada. I shot off more bottle rockets in one evening than I have the entire rest of my life. Almost burned down their house, but not quite (a bottle tipped backward after I lit the fuse). In fact, it was a miracle that with alcohol-consuming adults and explosive-armed children there were no major disasters. 

For a few years the Fourth was spent at a relative's cabin in the country, something I would enjoy much, much more now than I did as a kid. Very quiet.

One year, as the Fourth loomed, I convinced a friend to get a party going at his house -- and then my parents informed me that we were going out of town for the holiday. I have never lived that down. But my friends all got even a year or so later, when I threw a party in my parents' backyard and all the guys decided to bug out because they wanted to play basketball in the park. So my parents were looking at me like Don't you have any friends anymore? It was humiliating. The guys returned later out of pity, or hunger.

More recent years have found our family unit with dogs, and we usually spend the holiday making sure no canine freaks out and goes running wild. Usually it's okay, but about five years back the idiots up the street were blowing up enough stuff to -- well, invade Canada. Poor Nipper took it hard. And it sparked an argument between my wife and Mrs. "Deuce" Baggio nearby, which my wife decidedly, comprehensively won. I could have warned the Baggios not to argue with my wife, especially when she's defending one of our dogs. 

There were other summer parties that were eventful, and even near terrible, but I think they did not land on the Fourth, so I'll leave them for another time, if at all. This year I just want to make some decent food and distract the dog when the bombs go off. I love you, America, but your birthday is not always my favorite day. 

Top-down stupidity.

Note: I wrote a draft of this post on Sunday, planning to put it up Monday, but got to wondering if I was too harsh. So I held off and looked at it again Monday. 

No, events of the last week convince me I was probably not harsh enough, if anything. 

So, here we go:

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The irreplaceable Instapundit often notes that we have the dumbest elites in the history of our nation. I actually am starting to think he's understating the problem. 

I take my impressions from the section of the culture in which I toil the most -- books. As a youth I would have found it difficult to believe that people could be both smart and stupid at the same time, but modern books have me convinced this is not only possible, but exactly what is going on now. 

duh.

Don't get me wrong -- a lot of the books I'm thinking of are well written, with great command of the language, deft use of literary themes, and great craft in metaphor, character, and sometimes even plot. But there is a willful stupidity that contaminates many of them, and I hope to make the case for some of the reasons why.

1) Gullibility. 

I probably do not need to say that these writers believe every single solitary word printed in the New York Times, which is why apostates like Senator Cotton must not be allowed to appear in that holy writ. I'm not kidding -- Biblical scholars are much more aware of and understanding of contradictions and conflicts in the Holy Book than Times fans are of their word of god. Times true believers are willing to argue that the Times is always right, even when the paper itself reports that it was wrong (as in Walter Duranty's famous coverage of the Holodomor, let alone more recent scandals -- the Hunter Biden laptop, or so-called Russian collusion, or Fauci and Cuomo as heroes of the pandemic, just to name a few). Not that the paper ever admits error; it just runs the new information as if it was never their fault for screwing up. 

Being wrong when you're Times means never having to give back your Pulitzer.  

2) Obsession with factoids. 

Another side of this gullibility is a love of factoids. Not that there's anything wrong with enjoying and amassing information, but the "facts" must be entirely Times approved. Mostly, though, the facts must contain some supposed insight that makes the intellectual look smarter, more worldly, and that will be the golden ticket to success. This is how we get lying books like Three Cups of Tea, which supposedly held the magic to dealing successfully with the intractable Taliban and became a huge seller. Our stupid Department of State could not buy enough copies, the morons. 

Remove all the garbage books like that from our publishing houses and there'd be a lot fewer trees giving their lives for book paper. 

3) Dead hearts.

Modern celebrated writers hate everyone, especially their own Western countries. The hate for them is pristine. There's never an understanding or excuse for why this or that Western nation did something in the past. Pure evil is the only explanation. Every statement must be phrased in a way that makes the people involved look as selfish, craven, and cruel as possible, even if the historical evidence actually shows beneficence. Such kneejerk hatred, for persons and populations, is the sign of a dead heart.

On that note, every character in their novels is dead inside as well; some may put on a good face, but they really love no one. It reflects the feelings of the loveless readers. If you found yourself transported into one of these novels, you'd think you'd gone into some kind of hell. Because dead hearts lead to... 

4) Empty souls. 

They believe nothing but the worst. They cannot write a genuine book about a character of faith, because they don't know what that's like. They think it's a kind of mental failing. And I don't mean religion so much as real ideals, the kind people will willingly die for. 

I've found no heroes of genuine selfless nobility in any novel celebrated by the intelligentsia written this century. I haven't read them all, of course. Prove me wrong!  

5) Racism, sexism, and all the other -isms.

Advancing the wrong people for the right reasons, the right people for the wrong reasons, and of course, the wrong people for the wrong reasons. The "right people for the wrong reasons" suffer for being stuck with the same affirmative action label. 

Is this payback for discrimination of the past? Fair point. Do two wrongs make a right? Try reading some of this stuff and tell me what you think. 

6) Lack of focus. 

No one can just do the job anymore; they have to do the messaging about the thing. In fact, that's what they truly want to do. They want to talk it all to death. Life as an endless undergrad bull session.

This is way beyond just books. If your company has to release an operations manual, for example, and hires some former English majors to do the job, watch for the opening sections to be about diversity, equity, and inclusion, before suddenly turning into serious data and instructions. The English majors really just want to do the DEI stuff. It'd be like buying a coffeemaker and finding the first three pages dedicated to the company's policies of inclusion. WHO CARES? I JUST WANT COFFEE. 

But the folly is not limited to virtue signaling. Companies that ought to be run by people who know how to do the things (cough, Boeing) are instead run by stock market weasels who sacrifice quality and even lives to increase stock value. Anyone could see that it's a short-sighted policy -- anyone but our crop of intellectual morons. Companies are unfocused; workers are self-indulgent; fortunes are being squandered because no one is really working on the actual job. 

7) Inadequate punishments for stupidity.

Only dissent gets punished in this universe, not stupid actions centered in foolish criteria. There seems to be no comeuppance for the dumdums ruining our society. They just fail upward.

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The only corrective that works in these cases is one that comes from those the perpetrators fear. It doesn't matter how much value the company loses, how disastrous the policy is, how lousy the books are; unless people who can make a difference get angry and start throwing bums out, nothing will change. Certainly I can be of no help. Nobody is afraid of me.