Monday, April 4, 2011
Friday, April 1, 2011
And sometimes gets serious......
l
The train tracks along Broad St split the city like a rusty zipper. The wide right of way on the west side of the tracks is a mild rage of bottles, cans, paper trash and rudely discarded hopes. You have to cross Broad, though, to get the park from where I live. This morning I was going on a quick little walk to the park by lake and the zipper split open a bit of life fell out.
I'll tell you about it. I was there.
The stuff here, the politics, the teabaggers, the Governor, the protests...... I needed a break..... so this morning I took a stroll down to the lake. The ice is still pretty solid. The gulls like stoic prophets glide around hoping for a little wisdom or a dead fish.
But it was too chilly to stay down by the lake for too long so I decided to head back down Parkway St. and get a cup of Joe at the New Moon cafe. Well, sure enough, when I got to the intersection of Broad and Parkway the rail gates started coming down b ut before they could totally close and ambulance sped through, just missing the gate. Now, and here is where the morning got interesting, that sucker was hitting such a speed that the back door momentarily flapped open and a small styrofoam box the size of a six pack cam tumbling out!
Now, being the nice guy that I am, I picked that sucker up, figured it was supplies of some sort and I would make the phone call and have the company come and pick it up. The kicker was, there were no labels on the box. Well I lugged it down to the cafe, got my cup, and proceded to open the box. Certainly there would be something inside, give me a clue, on who owned this box.
Well, it was taped shut. Maria at the counter gives me a knife, I cut the tape...... and inside, all packed in frozen ice packs....... is a severed toe.... human.
Maria is now in on this and she gasps, "oh my God!!! What ....!!!" Her face has gone blank and her mouth is wide open. I tell her to get me a phone book....the best I can figure is that this toe was headed to it's rightful owner for a stitch and sew and we needed to get on this right away.
Now the ambulance was headed East, where the hospital USED to be... but it is a short hop up the Lake Road to Theda Clark Med Center where they do do all sorts of miracle medicine thingees. And so that was the first phone call. After getting passed around a few times.... no one knows anything... but I get numbers to Sta Agnes Hospital in Appleton and they also rattle off some numbers for me of different ambulance companies in the valley. Maria fills my cup again and I start dialing. I call Aurora Health... Mercy Medical... and then onto the ambulance companies. I am on my third cup of coffee. Keisha has joined Maria and I and we are going nuts.....somebody must know this toe!! Now Keisha has he laptop out and we know have numbers for Milwaukee hospitals, Fond du Lac ambulances... Stacy has joined in and we now have four of us on the phone. The toe has been repacked with fresh ice and Aaron has gone back to Broad St to see if anyone down there is looking for this box.
Two hours into this... the whole cafe is now clustered around my table.... I am just about out of ideas when finally Maria asks" "What can WE DO!"
Well... finally, when all was said and done... it came to me that there really was only one thing left.....
..............................I called ..... for.... a ....Tow Truck.
hehehehe
The train tracks along Broad St split the city like a rusty zipper. The wide right of way on the west side of the tracks is a mild rage of bottles, cans, paper trash and rudely discarded hopes. You have to cross Broad, though, to get the park from where I live. This morning I was going on a quick little walk to the park by lake and the zipper split open a bit of life fell out.
I'll tell you about it. I was there.
The stuff here, the politics, the teabaggers, the Governor, the protests...... I needed a break..... so this morning I took a stroll down to the lake. The ice is still pretty solid. The gulls like stoic prophets glide around hoping for a little wisdom or a dead fish.
But it was too chilly to stay down by the lake for too long so I decided to head back down Parkway St. and get a cup of Joe at the New Moon cafe. Well, sure enough, when I got to the intersection of Broad and Parkway the rail gates started coming down b ut before they could totally close and ambulance sped through, just missing the gate. Now, and here is where the morning got interesting, that sucker was hitting such a speed that the back door momentarily flapped open and a small styrofoam box the size of a six pack cam tumbling out!
Now, being the nice guy that I am, I picked that sucker up, figured it was supplies of some sort and I would make the phone call and have the company come and pick it up. The kicker was, there were no labels on the box. Well I lugged it down to the cafe, got my cup, and proceded to open the box. Certainly there would be something inside, give me a clue, on who owned this box.
Well, it was taped shut. Maria at the counter gives me a knife, I cut the tape...... and inside, all packed in frozen ice packs....... is a severed toe.... human.
Maria is now in on this and she gasps, "oh my God!!! What ....!!!" Her face has gone blank and her mouth is wide open. I tell her to get me a phone book....the best I can figure is that this toe was headed to it's rightful owner for a stitch and sew and we needed to get on this right away.
Now the ambulance was headed East, where the hospital USED to be... but it is a short hop up the Lake Road to Theda Clark Med Center where they do do all sorts of miracle medicine thingees. And so that was the first phone call. After getting passed around a few times.... no one knows anything... but I get numbers to Sta Agnes Hospital in Appleton and they also rattle off some numbers for me of different ambulance companies in the valley. Maria fills my cup again and I start dialing. I call Aurora Health... Mercy Medical... and then onto the ambulance companies. I am on my third cup of coffee. Keisha has joined Maria and I and we are going nuts.....somebody must know this toe!! Now Keisha has he laptop out and we know have numbers for Milwaukee hospitals, Fond du Lac ambulances... Stacy has joined in and we now have four of us on the phone. The toe has been repacked with fresh ice and Aaron has gone back to Broad St to see if anyone down there is looking for this box.
Two hours into this... the whole cafe is now clustered around my table.... I am just about out of ideas when finally Maria asks" "What can WE DO!"
Well... finally, when all was said and done... it came to me that there really was only one thing left.....
..............................I called ..... for.... a ....Tow Truck.
hehehehe
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Poor Exxon Mobile went to bed hungry last night.....
"Maybe we have to reduce that deficit not simply on the backs of working families, low-income people, the children, the sick, the elderly. Maybe, maybe we might want to call for shared sacrifice. Maybe Exxon-Mobil and some of the large oil companies might be asked to pay something in taxes."
talking about my b....b....b....budget.....
Sen. Sanders' 10 worst corporate income tax avoiders.
1) Exxon Mobil made $19 billion in profits in 2009. Exxon not only paid no federal income taxes, it actually received a $156 million rebate from the IRS, according to its SEC filings.
2) Bank of America received a $1.9 billion tax refund from the IRS last year, although it made $4.4 billion in profits and received a bailout from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department of nearly $1 trillion.
3) Over the past five years, while General Electric made $26 billion in profits in the United States, it received a $4.1 billion refund from the IRS.
4) Chevron received a $19 million refund from the IRS last year after it made $10 billion in profits in 2009.
5) Boeing, which received a $30 billion contract from the Pentagon to build 179 airborne tankers, got a $124 million refund from the IRS last year.
6) Valero Energy, the 25th largest company in America with $68 billion in sales last year received a $157 million tax refund check from the IRS and, over the past three years, it received a $134 million tax break from the oil and gas manufacturing tax deduction.
7) Goldman Sachs in 2008 only paid 1.1 percent of its income in taxes even though it earned a profit of $2.3 billion and received an almost $800 billion from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury Department.
8) Citigroup last year made more than $4 billion in profits but paid no federal income taxes. It received a $2.5 trillion bailout from the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury.
9) ConocoPhillips, the fifth largest oil company in the United States, made $16 billion in profits from 2007 through 2009, but received $451 million in tax breaks through the oil and gas manufacturing deduction.
10) Over the past five years, Carnival Cruise Lines made more than $11 billion in profits, but its federal income tax rate during those years was just 1.1 percent.
yesirree, Bob.... we'za broke.... and it is the goddam Union Teachers what done it!!
Saturday, March 26, 2011
The Years
.
Backtracking a week....St Patrick's Day.... it was a good night... Love them Irish.... finished about 4 Imperial pints of Stout (that 19.21 fluid ounces! each) plus a goodly amount of corned beef and cabbage... topped it off with a shot of Jameson. AND... found my own way home, thank you very much!
It was a good respite from all the politics ..... and I have pages and pages and bookmarks and notes.... but I just had to quit... for awhile. Still making some phone calls....and such.
But what I got today is something I didn't expect. I mean, I have evolved lately to a point where nothing unexpected surprises me, but once in a while there is the unexpected occurrence that just knocks you outa your socks. See, there are bunches of things that happen everyday that we do not expect, but when then happen, you know that they could have happened at any time so they really do not set your mind reeling. You slip on an icy step and sprain your ankle badly.... or you get your hand deep into the dish water and cut your hand on a sharp knife lying there under the soap suds, deep enough to require a few stitches. Maybe a phone call from some one you had not heard from in a long while. They just aren't such unusual events that, when they come your way, you just deal with them and move on. They just are what they are
Then there are the rare scary events that grab your attention and hold them for hours or days. You don't
expect to wake in the middle of the night with an electric shock, a jolt, and have a clear memory of Sharon sitting naked atop you on the wistful hot July night,so long ago, naked as the moon shone across that little breakwater island and how she purred, " I'll love you forever...forever...forever." When something like that happens, truly unexpectedly, you are surprised and need to get out of bed, light a cigarette and muse how it was those thirty years ago, how it was that when you went to her apartment just weeks later... how it was bare and cleaned out.... no note. You did expect a note, at least.
But what happened the other morning was even beyond that.... I saw eyes in the mirror ... that were not mine.
Now I have seen my father's eyes in the past, appearing like a memory.... sometimes while I am driving, or reading, or watching TV, and they seem to materialize out of thin air just as if you had turned a corner and run into a old friend. And these were not his eyes as they appeared that last day of his life, cloudy and dim. The ones I see in those moments are the dark black beads that seemed to go back to all the things he had seen and still wondered about.... the things he still worried over. He once told me about when WWII was winding down and his artillery unit was pulled off the line and he became a guard at a German POW camp in southern Germany. The camp itself had been a small satellite Concentration Camp now converted to hold captive Germans. He told me how they would make the POW swhistle and sing for cigarettes, trading chocolate for war souvenirs, and how he would think, then, that he was only a generation away from having been one of them instead of an American. I remember asking him what the camps had been like, did they have gas chambers? Was he there when the Camp was liberated? No, he said, by the time he got there, there were just German POWs... and the eyes would get far away again as if there were questions that he couldn't answer but still asked himself. He told other 'War Stories' but they were always about spending a Christmas night bivouacked in a cemetery or when he and his buddies found a stash of wine in a old cellar. Never the stories about how he felt. Those were rare. It was if he did not want his eyes to wander roads he found unsettling. But those were not the eyes I saw.
Nor were they eyes of his that would wait up for me after football when he would want to know all about the game from my perspective. What happened then? On third down in the third quarter and "I saw you just level that guy.." or " "gees, you coulda had that interception, how come you dropped it?" Those eyes sparkled, like a clear creek running over rocks. I always remember those nights. No matter how late I came home, he would be waiting, the glow of the TV in the dark living room, the glow of his smoke as he waited. And we would go to the kitchen and he would fry me a venison steak and some potatoes. Truth be told.... I hated venison then because he would always over cook them and I would have to make excuses for not eating the whole thing. And, truth be told... I had already forgotten most of the game because I had just spent the intervening time holding hands with Nancy and trying to fumble around with her softer body parts, with little success, so mostly, truth be told, I just made up stuff to tell him that would make his eyes sparkle and smile until finally he would say, "you must be tired," and himself shuffle off to bed. I see those eyes often... and I still like them.
I remember the eyes that looked at me that time my friends and I rolled a car off a bluff Thanksgiving night in 1969 and how they sparked with anger that I had fucked up and almost got killed, how they had a depth behind that anger so filled with relief that I hadn't died, how there was also a bit of sorrow for the pain I was in as they stitched my face back together. When he left the hospital that night both his eyes and his deep bottom gravely voice growled, "and you are grounded for the rest of your live." which really only lasted three days..... there just was too much relief and love in those eyes to stay mad.
I knew the old man's stories...... most he told over and over and by now I can recall them and hear them, in his voice, just as if he were standing next to me. But it is his eyes that told more stories than whatever came out of his mouth. And those were long road stories in those eyes.. The sorrow of where he had been and the promises he didn't keep ... and the ones he did. I could look into them and see his regrets, his joys, days, echoes, ..... I can look into them, even now, and smell the sweet rolls he would make on Sunday mornings. Seeing his eyes are never totally unexpected. Not totally. They are the unexpected that I expect.
The other day, though, I looked into the mirror as I was about to shave....and I wiped the shower steam off ..... and as I concentrated for the first stroke of the razor.... I saw myself looking straight into my son's eyes........... I did not expect that, at all....... and as I looked at his eyes in the mirror I could only hope that he would see.... in mine... the love I see in my father's
the years..... they hurry so......
Backtracking a week....St Patrick's Day.... it was a good night... Love them Irish.... finished about 4 Imperial pints of Stout (that 19.21 fluid ounces! each) plus a goodly amount of corned beef and cabbage... topped it off with a shot of Jameson. AND... found my own way home, thank you very much!
It was a good respite from all the politics ..... and I have pages and pages and bookmarks and notes.... but I just had to quit... for awhile. Still making some phone calls....and such.
But what I got today is something I didn't expect. I mean, I have evolved lately to a point where nothing unexpected surprises me, but once in a while there is the unexpected occurrence that just knocks you outa your socks. See, there are bunches of things that happen everyday that we do not expect, but when then happen, you know that they could have happened at any time so they really do not set your mind reeling. You slip on an icy step and sprain your ankle badly.... or you get your hand deep into the dish water and cut your hand on a sharp knife lying there under the soap suds, deep enough to require a few stitches. Maybe a phone call from some one you had not heard from in a long while. They just aren't such unusual events that, when they come your way, you just deal with them and move on. They just are what they are
Then there are the rare scary events that grab your attention and hold them for hours or days. You don't
expect to wake in the middle of the night with an electric shock, a jolt, and have a clear memory of Sharon sitting naked atop you on the wistful hot July night,so long ago, naked as the moon shone across that little breakwater island and how she purred, " I'll love you forever...forever...forever." When something like that happens, truly unexpectedly, you are surprised and need to get out of bed, light a cigarette and muse how it was those thirty years ago, how it was that when you went to her apartment just weeks later... how it was bare and cleaned out.... no note. You did expect a note, at least.
But what happened the other morning was even beyond that.... I saw eyes in the mirror ... that were not mine.
Nor were they eyes of his that would wait up for me after football when he would want to know all about the game from my perspective. What happened then? On third down in the third quarter and "I saw you just level that guy.." or " "gees, you coulda had that interception, how come you dropped it?" Those eyes sparkled, like a clear creek running over rocks. I always remember those nights. No matter how late I came home, he would be waiting, the glow of the TV in the dark living room, the glow of his smoke as he waited. And we would go to the kitchen and he would fry me a venison steak and some potatoes. Truth be told.... I hated venison then because he would always over cook them and I would have to make excuses for not eating the whole thing. And, truth be told... I had already forgotten most of the game because I had just spent the intervening time holding hands with Nancy and trying to fumble around with her softer body parts, with little success, so mostly, truth be told, I just made up stuff to tell him that would make his eyes sparkle and smile until finally he would say, "you must be tired," and himself shuffle off to bed. I see those eyes often... and I still like them.
I remember the eyes that looked at me that time my friends and I rolled a car off a bluff Thanksgiving night in 1969 and how they sparked with anger that I had fucked up and almost got killed, how they had a depth behind that anger so filled with relief that I hadn't died, how there was also a bit of sorrow for the pain I was in as they stitched my face back together. When he left the hospital that night both his eyes and his deep bottom gravely voice growled, "and you are grounded for the rest of your live." which really only lasted three days..... there just was too much relief and love in those eyes to stay mad.
I knew the old man's stories...... most he told over and over and by now I can recall them and hear them, in his voice, just as if he were standing next to me. But it is his eyes that told more stories than whatever came out of his mouth. And those were long road stories in those eyes.. The sorrow of where he had been and the promises he didn't keep ... and the ones he did. I could look into them and see his regrets, his joys, days, echoes, ..... I can look into them, even now, and smell the sweet rolls he would make on Sunday mornings. Seeing his eyes are never totally unexpected. Not totally. They are the unexpected that I expect.
The other day, though, I looked into the mirror as I was about to shave....and I wiped the shower steam off ..... and as I concentrated for the first stroke of the razor.... I saw myself looking straight into my son's eyes........... I did not expect that, at all....... and as I looked at his eyes in the mirror I could only hope that he would see.... in mine... the love I see in my father's
Friday, March 25, 2011
American Gangsters.... or Indiana Jones unplugged
An Indiana prosecutor said one of his deputies resigned Thursday after admitting that he sent an e-mail to Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker suggesting the Republican fake an attack on himself to discredit public
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Nipple Tape and other funnies
The Wonderful World Of Nipple Tape
Nipple tape is a cheap effective tool to cover the nipples for topless costumes or costumes that at risk for the dreaded nipple slip.
Tourist: Look at that bunch of cows. Farmer: Not bunch, herd.
Tourist: Heard what?
Farmer: Of cows.
Tourist: Sure I’ve heard of cows. Farmer: No, I mean a cowherd.
Tourist: So what? I have no secrets from cows!
Newt Gingrich addressed his past infidelities by saying, “There’s no question at times in my life, partially driven by how passionately I felt about this country, that I worked too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate.”
''You all know St. Patrick is credited with banishing snakes from Ireland. But you guys know the truth, sometimes. There were never any snakes in Ireland. St. Patrick just made that up. Which explains why he's the patron saint of FOX News.''
—Vice President Joe BidenTwo Illinois tourists were driving through Wisconsin. As they approached Oconomowoc they started arguing about the pronunciation of the town. This went on until they stopped for lunch. As they stood at the counter, one tourist said to the cute blonde behind the counter "Can you settle an argument for us? Would you pronounce where we are, very slowly?"
The blonde leaned forward and said "Burrrr-gerrrr Kiiiing".
Ole died. So Lena went to the local paper to put a notice in the obituaries. The gentleman at the counter, after offering his condolences, asked Lena what she would like to say about Ole.
Lena replied, "You yust put 'Ole died'."
The gentleman, somewhat perplexed, said, "That's it? Just 'Ole died?' Surely, there must be something more you'd like to say about Ole. If its money you're concerned about, the first five words are free. We must say something more."
So Lena pondered for a few minutes and finally said, "O.K. You put 'Ole died. Boat for sale.' "
well, I thought they were funny
Saturday, March 19, 2011
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