Month: November 2023

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Republicans are spreading the rumor that Barack Obama is actually running the country while old Joe Biden is sitting on the White House veranda drooling and soaking up the sun under a pile of warm blankets waiting to die. While there is no evidence that this is true, and I am convinced that Biden is presently up to the duties of his office and infinitely better president than that wastrel Donald Trump, I find Biden’s age worrisome. So when I hear these whispers about Obama being in charge, it comforts me.

Not because I believe it to be true but because it reminds me that the American system of government prevents the most powerful person in the world from having too much power. As we have witnessed in the past 20 years of partisan warfare, the President can do very little without the support of Congress and the approval of the Supreme Court. Biden doesn’t have either and thus little is being done right now. The only unchecked power he has, and it is mighty, is to send missiles flying in the event of a sneak attack. So who are the Republicans trying to scare here?

Not me. I like Obama and he also is popular with a large segment of the American Electorate. He is a young man particularly in comparison to both Biden and Trump. He is a recent president so he is up on the latest issues. Obama is a Democrat, Biden is a Democrat — is there much of a chance that Obama would be doing anything differently from Biden? Why should this concern me?

The Republicans spread this lie as if this should be upsetting. All I can say is good then. There is someone stable at the helm. And, if given the choice between a senile old man that is being manipulated by a younger known politician and a mad man who doesn’t take anyone’s advice but his own and who’s understanding of the bigger world stopped somewhere in middle school. I am going with the senior citizen.

The Republicans can continue to spread this vicious piece of gossip for however long they want to but I don’t think many people are gasping from the shock. They are undermining their strongest argument against Biden for no good reason. The only thing I can come up with is that they think the general public hates Obama as much as they do. They must have forgotten that Obama handily defeated the Republicans twice. I am happy to see them fumble around with this issue as I think a stronger and potentially more damaging case can be made regarding Biden’s age. Fortunately the Republicans aren’t able to grasp what that is.

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I been struggling with this blog. One day, two weeks ago I had this brilliant idea about gender identity which I immediately wrote down. I read it as soon as I finished because I thought I was being brilliant, and you always want to see that brilliant light shining. But, soon after I reread what I wrote, I realized that wasn’t what I meant to say it all. It’s really quite amazing how quickly your brilliant idea turns into dust.

Not to be defeated by a temporary memory problem. I kept coming back to this blog thinking the brilliant idea would return to me. What I wrote was close, just not quite right. If I spent enough time coming back to what I wrote I would, at some point, remember the idea and put these thoughts down. It hasn’t happened. I still am kind of murky on the great idea but I am getting closer.

I finally decided I can’t wait any longer and I am just going to do the best I can. Brace yourself because it isn’t going to be pretty but I think I can give you an idea of what I was thinking about.

I will get the rough stuff out of the way first. I don’t have much patience anymore for the right pronouns crowd. I will use your correct pronouns if you tell me. But I also am telling you that for now and the foreseeable future, I going to risk eyeballing it and make my own determination on pronouns. This means if I meet someone with a beard, I am going to assume that he identifies as a male because there is a pretty darn good chance that I am right which means I avoid a potentially awkward conversation with someone who I may have just met.

Social interactions are all about comfort and moving things along with a minimum of tension and awkwardness. You want to get their names right and not much else. Getting into a discussion about the appropriate pronouns could lead to messy conversations that I don’t want to have. Transgenderism is a relatively new and isolated phenomena. Yes, there have been people in the past, and there are past cultures open to different ways of looking at gender. Got it. But I happen to live in a culture heavily dominated by Western European thought. This thinking is, to say the least, entrenched into the society I live. If you expect to turn around 6,000 years of Western Civilization on a dime, you are in for some disappointment and, like I said before, I don’t want to have unnecessary messy conversations.

Western Culture strongly leans on the male/female gender identities. I have grown up in it as have almost everyone I know. It works for the vast majority of the population which includes Gay and Bisexual individuals. A very small percentage of the population suffer because of it. Society should do everything we can to lessen their suffering within reason. But to reorganize a society from top to bottom to protect the feelings of a small number of people is ludicrous and, more importantly, impossible to change without the acceptance of the society at large.

This hasn’t happened yet and how do we do it is important. Forcing shit down people’s throats is a horrible way to move forward and should be avoided if at all possible. Look at Western notions of beauty which I would argue are much more damaging to large swaths of the population and are still very much adhered to. If you ask 50 people from across the world to pick the most beautiful people in the world, I am betting that there will be an awful lot of overlap with who they select and it would look similar to what people thought over a 100 years ago. Which is my way of saying, don’t yell at Grandpa when he doesn’t know what you are talking about when you ask his pronoun preferences. Culture is difficult to change.

On the other hand, I am pretty excited about what I am seeing and hearing. I don’t know what it means and how far reaching it is but I think we could be entering a potentially culture changing epoch. I came face to face with this change this summer when I was at a restaurant in upstate New York where the host at a restaurant I was in was a young man wearing a dress. This is the first time I had seen a man in a dress outsides of a drag show.

It startled me. I am gay and live in California, if anyone should have encountered this before, I should have. But I hadn’t. It was completely new to me. I had to sit with it for a moment but soon enough I had forgotten about it and was enjoying an evening out with friends. It became none of my business awfully quick.

Then I remember hearing parents, almost always mothers but still parents, talking about their children, and I hear something I never heard when I was growing up. Parents who talk about their gay, lesbian and bisexual children and their experiences openly. Not as a secret to reveal but as little Sally has a girlfriend isn’t that sweet kind of conversation. The woman was talking about her high school aged daughter as a regular teenager and not as some kind of freak. I remember hearing a woman talking about her son dressing up as a girl character from Frozen without angst about his future. Something that was unlikely to have occurred in my childhood where one of my most traumatic memories is my father explaining to me why I shouldn’t be playing with dolls and the horrors my life would encounter if I continued on this path.

These are subtle changes that hint at a larger change going on which makes me a little hopeful about the future. The last 100 years or so we have seen a revolutionary image change of gender. The biggest changes has come in how society views women. In such a simple thing as what a woman can wear. There are no strict rules as far as I can tell for a women’s wardrobe. Slacks, men’s jeans, no bra, stiletto heals, a gun holster. Anything goes. A woman can run for president or be a housewife. There is still a long way to go but it is moving and in the right direction.

Our idea of what a man can wear might be next. Or even better how a man should act or what a real man is. The old rigid ideas about manhood might as last be falling.. If society finally opens up to a less rigid ideal, you might start seeing some pretty exciting developments regarding how straight men behave. You might see men comfortable enough to wear a dress when they feel like it. If there is no stigma any longer to sex with another men, you might see men opening themselves to experiences that society frowned upon and the ever present male fear of not being man enough broken down to something more human and manageable. I would never believed this was possible until I saw a man in a dress.

Once men can imagine themselves in different ways, it then might be important to inquire about someone’s preferences of persona pronouns and this is might very well be happening now.

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By the time I finish writing this blog, I might have changed my mind but right now I have to say Peter Falk as Columbo is my favorite television character. The show dates from the 1970’s and has aged surprisingly well. Unlike most detective shows where the trick is to figure out who the murderer is, the audience knows who the murderer is but how Columbo figures out who the murderer is.

The murderer is almost always some rich and powerful person who thinks they are smarter than the bumbling appearing Columbo who stumbles into their lives . Because they think they are smarter than Columbo, they fall into his trap of giving too much information that they inadvertently give away important details, seemingly innocuous information, that seals their fate later in the show.

Falk and the writers gives Columbo an array of distinctive quirks. His rumbled rain coat that he is always wearing and he can’t bring himself to rid himself of even after his wife buys him a snazzy new one, his ever present cigar, his scratching head when confused, his car — a barely functional vintage Peugeot convertible, his sad sack and barely functional pet dog, his never on screen wife who he calls Mrs. Columbo and who is full of good advice, and his saying “just one more thing” as he his leaving the suspect which tricks a usually exasperated person into giving some seemingly unimportant detail that really is at the heart of what Columbo is looking for.

You can’t help but root for Columbo as he manages to manipulate these arrogant assholes into prison. He plays into their egos, letting them think he is a bumbler while finding out everything he needs to know. Part of Falk’s charm is he manages to ingratiate his suspects into helping him and working with him to help him catch the killer while actually setting a trap for the unsuspecting guilty party. It is particularly fun when the suspect catches on to Columbo’s game but have gone too far to save themselves from falling into one of his traps. Their disdain for him throughout the show and their disbelief that this idiot outwitted them is the best revenge.

So if you are looking for a good detective show and you have exhausted everything you know, you might revisit Columbo as I think you will find it a rewarding experience.

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Texas A and M is buying out their head football coach for 75 million. Talk about your golden parachute. The amount is staggering because Texas A and M is a public institution. How does this amount of money go to one individual working at a public university. And this isn’t even a successful coach, the university wants to fire because him for his poor performance and because the coach has such a favorable contract, this unwanted employee has to be paid off to the tune of $75 million. The school helpfully reported that no public funds were used to pay him off.

Well, that certainly makes me feel better nonetheless it is still an irritating waste of money through the auspices of a public institution. Why is there private financing for a football team at a public university? Because it matters so much to the alumni to have a good football team?

This is a bad investment of money. But it is private money. Well, yes it is. These people, who have too much money and not enough sense, are willing to spend outrageous sums of money to get a winning football coach and when he fails to win, they are also willing to pay him off to get rid of him. Keep in mind, they still have to hire a new winning football coach so probably another $75 million will be spent on him because why would a coach come in for anything less that what the previous coach got. This is after all how capitalism works.

It wouldn’t sting so much if the rich weren’t so damn hypocritical about wanting people to work for their money. This coach, that they don’t want to coach, is getting paid to walk away from work and do nothing. He could, at the very least, be a towel boy or a concession stand hawker to earn back some of the money he is taking with him. Every time you hear complaints about how we can’t afford higher wages for average people, remember that they can pay $75 million to pay a football coach to do nothing.

It gets more irritating. Anyone who contributes to this Texas A&M fund gets a tax deduction. You see Texas A&M is a public institution. So it looks like a charitable donations to cover improvements in the sports program. Unfortunately, they are also paying for the exorbitant wages to a man who is, in their eyes, failing at his job.

The tax deduction needs to end. The Texas A&M football team is a business separated from the state university. This is another shameful example of the rich wasting money. They are all for the best football teams while balking at paying workers better wages. Perhaps, if they had less money and needed to watch where their money went, they would make better choices. Taxing them more is a way to encourage the discipline that they so badly need.

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Mike Johnson, the new Speaker of the House, in case you can’t keep track with the rapid turnaround in that position, revealed that he and his 16 year old son have a porn accountability device on their electronic devices. So what? Is this really anybody’s business? He made a deal with his son about keeping themselves honest about viewing pornography. I don’t think this is in any way controversial or, for that matter, news worthy.

Yet some how this made the headlines. It is an incredible waste of space. It adds nothing to what we know about Mike Johnson as we already knew he was a fundamentalist Christian. It isn’t particularly surprising for him to have such a device and that he monitors his son’s viewing. It is his business.

So why the headlines. Now I would hate to say anything bad about the media but I think the only reason this is here is that it involves pornography and a public figure. It makes for a catchy headline. Speaker of the House, Pornography. The boys and girls in the Fourth Estate must have already had this typed and published before realizing what a snooze fest this was.

But given that there isn’t much going on now, what with the war in the Middle East, the war in the Ukraine, the Trump trials, questions about the economy and Taylor Swift’s dating Travis Kelce they had so much space that they had to fill it with something and this is what they decided to fill it. Empty space filling more empty space.

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When describing a good salesman people often refer to the adage that this guy is so good that he could sell refrigerators/air conditioning to the Eskimos. Which is generally considered a complement to the salesman’s ability. But why? Is it really a talent to brag about — convincing people to buy something that they didn’t want, don’t need and can’t use. Why would you brag about being a conman? But people do. They in fact admire it.

What is forgotten is that there is another person involved in this story — the Eskimo. He, however, is a chump. The mark, the person who it is all right to take advantage of because they should be smarter and more careful when talking to a fast talking salesman. Someone who deserves to get taken. The salesman, on the other hand, is the hero of the story. He is clever, a smooth talker, someone who gets what he wants, someone who doesn’t let a little thing as selling something unnecessary to a gullible customer get in his way. The salesman has the abilities people want. Who wants to be the chump.

It is sad that the whole salesman relationship is based on the notion that all he wants from you is your money and doesn’t care about whether you need or want what he is selling. The salesman is perfectly within his rights to sell whatever useless item he has to any gullible buyer willing to buy. It’s not the con man’s fault if the Eskimo is so gullible and bought the refrigerator. Buyer beware and all that crap but it isn’t an honest transaction.

Aren’t we suppose to value honesty above good salesman ship. Would it be so wrong for the salesman to tell the Eskimo that he doesn’t really need refrigeration? I am afraid there are an awful lot of people who would say yes. Why pass up an opportunity to separate a fool from his money. Someone is going to do it, right. And it is all perfectly legal which this tells you everything you need to know — we prefer the conman to the chump.

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Apparently it is a problem if someone, particularly some you know, or even worse, a close family member names their child the name you were going to give your future baby. Some people believe that their unique names for babies (see here and here here) are their’s and their’s alone. And, if you told someone the name you like and then that person uses that name before you can have your child, it is an act of personal betrayal that requires, at least, a shouting match and, at worst, permanently exiling the offending friend from your presence.

I find it difficult to have much sympathy for these parents. Perhaps it is because I grew up during a time when everyone basically rotated the same names generation to generation. Having a couple of Tom’s in my class was never a big worry because there was always another Tom in my class. My parents didn’t think that they were going to be the only ones to use Tom, so when they heard that other parent’s named their child Tom, their reaction was more good name, we liked it too and not how dare you use a name that I was destined to give my child and you have ruined my life and the life of my child by using my name for your child.

Now names are carefully guarded secrets because there are uncreative people out there who will steal your baby name if you give them a chance. Never give them that chance, people will tell you they can’t give you the name of their impeding child even though they know the name because You might reveal it to their cousin Amelia who is due a month earlier than you and would think nothing of poaching your name if she liked it. This, even though, you don’t know anybody in her circle of friends and would probably never talk about baby names again for a very long time to come. The worst case scenario here is that there might be two kids with the name Aloysius. Is that really so bad?

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Ron DeSantis is running for president. There are a lot of reasons he isn’t going to get my vote, but being short isn’t one of them. The press is having a field day about him wearing lifts in his shoes. I really don’t care one bit about this. The media, however, want to know. This is a ridiculous waste of space. It doesn’t matter. If he is lying about it or telling the truth, it is irrelevant to his campaign and a pointless distraction. So we are going to have reporters chasing down information about how tall DeSantis is? Why? More importantly, why is the media stirring up this particular pot when there are numerous other pots which are significantly more important. Any way, great, carry on, let’s find out how tall Ron DeSantis really is.