Alternate Realities

Alternate Reality 1:  February 13, 2014.   At Cibolo Creek Ranch in Shafter, Texas John B. Poindexter, owner of the ranch, discovers Antonin Scalia unconscious in his room. He calls paramedics and they arrive quickly to transport him to Tripler Army Medical Center where it is determined that he has had a heart attack.  He undergoes a triple bypass and recovers completely, returning to the Supreme Court bench in April.   Meanwhile, in November, the election turnout  is unusually high for an off year election, allowing the Democrats to retain control of the Senate by defeating incumbent Republicans in close races in Alaska, Virginia, Louisiana and Georgia.

(Borderline) Boomer

I have been watching a LOT of YouTube videos lately, mostly music, music commentaries and art documentaries.   One of the channels I watch a lot is Rick Beato, especially his What Makes This Song Great? series.  According to EverybodyWiki, Rick Beato is an American YouTuber, record producer, songwriter, musician, and educator whose career in the music industry and in education has spanned several decades and brought him numerous awards and much recognition professionally.   You can read more about him here if you are interested.  To be honest, his commentaries are beyond me musically but I still enjoy hearing an expert dissect the songs I’ve listened to for year.

A Lost Art

As far back as I can remember, I had opinions about things and I was very fond of my opinions. I was a smart little boy raised by two opinionated parents which started me down that path. By high school, I was considered a brain. I was also 4 foot ten my Freshman year. I know there is debate as to whether Short Man Syndrome is a real thing but I am sure that I overcompensated for my stature though my intelligence. Fortunately for me and the world I had grown to five foot eight by my junior year, but the damage was done … I was an arrogant, opinionated young man. An undergraduate degree and two graduate degrees only made me more so. In my thirties and early forties, if someone had tried to end an argument by telling me, Let’s agree to disagree, I’d have thought they were out of their minds. I’m right and we’ll argue until I convince you or we walk away mad. The latter happened a lot. At work it was my way or the highway.

Veterans Day 2018

I have never served in the U.S. military.   In the late sixties, when young men my age were staring the draft in the eye … with horrible images of the Vietnam War staring back at us from our TVs every night … I was working for a defense company that designed equipment for the Navy’s submarines, at that time considered a major deterrent against attack by Russian submarines.   I filed for a deferment with the support of my employer who was willing to state that my work was critical to national security and … four months later … I received a letter stating that my request had been denied.  I was officially draftable.  Recently married and not wanting to spend two years of my life in the jungles of Vietnam, I applied and was accepted to the Air Force Officer Candidate School.  A few days before I was ready to accept my commission, I got a second letter saying my deferment had been granted.

Earth? Flat.

I was a bit astounded, even in this age of alternate facts and pseudo-science, to hear Kyrie Irving express his belief that the earth is flat.  My first reaction was what my Dad used to say when someone said or did something that was ridiculous …. What and idiot!   But of course, I know Irving isn’t an idiot or is he dumb.  He attended Duke University, for Pete’s sake, even if it was to play basketball.  I wondered if he was joking or trying to make a subtle point about fake news, but given a chance to retreat, he stood by his assertion.  Several other players, including LeBron James, defended his right to believe that the earth is flat.   It is certainly his right but why would he … or his friends … want him to look incredibly uninformed in front of the world, especially when there are so many simple ways to see that the earth is indeed round?

Hello President Trump …

… Goodbye Social Media.

I did not sleep well on election night.  A man I would not allow in my home is now the president-elect of the United States. My feelings about Donald Trump were clearly stated in my election eve post, Enough.  But now the election is over and he has won, fair and square, in spite of his carping about rigged elections.  If you look at the voting demographics it looks like certain parts of the Democratic base didn’t turn out for Hillary and it is likely that the third party candidates hurt her as well.   Let me say this … if you didn’t vote or voted for a no-show in protest, you don’t get to complain.

This is the point at which, in most years, I would try to accept the will of the people and hope for the best from the winner.  But I find Trump so reprehensible that hope is difficult to come by.  Last night, before I went to bed, I said a prayer for our country, which is the best I can do for now. Perhaps the man will turn out to have a conscience after all, or as several people have told me, his theatrics reflect the salesman he is … once the presidency weighs upon him, he will be a better leader. Perhaps the Republican leadership or VP Pence will help him find a steadier course, in spite of their failure to do so during the campaign.  I can look back to voting for Romney four years ago and hope for rightward movement in some of the areas in which I am conservative.  And I will keep on praying.

Candidates and Trolls

I love the internet.   I make use of it extensively in my vocation, engineering, and my avocation, writing.   I have several blogs, a Facebook account with a page for my blog, Oldereyes, and a Twitter account (OK, I do absolutely nothing with that but it sounds good).  I play games on the internet, communicate with faraway friends via email, and use it as my primary source of news.  But I don’t love everything about the internet.   I don’t like the way young people seem to substitute online experience for real life.  I don’t like the way the click-driven culture causes material to be posted just to create controversy.   The amount of inaccurate information on the internet … and the number of people who believe anything they read there … make me crazy.   But what bothers me most is the emergence of Trolls, people who stalk the message boards and comment pages posting vitriolic, bigoted and crude commentary on just about anything.   Much of it is political, over the top liberal-conservative name calling but some of it goes beyond the bounds of a civilized society.  It didn’t worry me, though, because I tended to think of it as harmless … I regarded Trolls as pathetic recluses hiding in the anonymity of the internet.  Now I’m worried.  Why?  Things like this:

I love the old days, you know? You know what I hate? There’s a guy totally disruptive, throwing punches, we’re not allowed punch back anymore. … I’d like to punch him in the face, I’ll tell ya.

Dry

You have probably heard by now that Southern California is in the midst of a severe drought.   How severe?   It depends who you listen to and the degree of hysteria they choose for their particular brand of reporting.   It has been going on for at least three years, while some sources see it as part of a 15 year mega-drought and others say it has been proceeding for decades.   California governor, Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown, never one to shy away from hyperbole for politics’s sake, has called it epochal.   This is for certain … reservoirs are historically low, some virtually empty.  The state has mandated a 20% reduction in water use, with individual counties and cities determining how to enforce the reduction.   In most places, hosing down driveways and patios or using a hose to wash a car can result in $500 fine.  Most cities have also instituted a twice a week watering rule that also limits how long you can water on each sprinkler station.   Here in Anaheim Hills, even numbered homes water on Thursday and Sunday and odd ones water on Wednesday and Saturday for a maximum of 8 minutes each station.  I have read that in Socal’s warm summer climate, lawns can not survive that level of watering.

Balls

I am a football fan.  I am often a reluctant football fan for a variety of reasons.  As much as I enjoy the games, I dislike the degree of importance we give them and the way we idolize athletes because they can throw or catch a ball … or knock another man to the ground.  While I don’t idolize the players, I do enjoy watching the sometimes amazing athletic feats the games bring into our family room.   But I have to say I’d enjoy them a lot more if I didn’t have to listen to the constant chatter of announcers explaining every play as if it were rocket science.   That’s probably because I don’t have something they call football intelligence.  Then there’s sports-talk, twenty-four hours a day, the place I go for information on the teams I follow and the games I’ve missed.  Unfortunately, the media, aiming for a younger demographic than Older Eyes favors smack-talking announcers and ex-jocks who’d rather create artificial sports controversies and offer sophomoric social commentary than actual report on sports.

To Vote or Not to Vote

It would be easy for me not to vote here in the California elections.   I live in an enclave of conservatism in a state that is resoundingly Democratic.  Our electorate continues to send an assortment of clowns to Sacramento, our state capital, where they continue to drive this once prosperous state toward bankruptcy.  My vote is like straw in the wind.  It is absolutely certain where our electoral votes will go in any presidential election regardless of how I vote, and congressional elections are pretty much predetermined, too.   The barrage of soundbite political ads on TV, one-liner political mail and phone calls at the dinner hour do nothing to increase the likelihood that I’ll vote.  The initiative system, which supposedly gives anyone an opportunity to put an issue on the ballot in recent years has been about bond issues (which always seem to pass, regardless of how much and how ridiculous the cause given the state of the State) and initiatives hiding under organizational names like Citizens Against Medical Abuse.  If I just dig a bit and see who’s paying for the process of getting the initiative on the ballot, I can figure out which special interest group has co-opted the initiative process.