Seemingly Insignificant Events

I have had a few people tell me recently how I have impacted their lives for the better. Simple things like handing them a book that I liked or thanking them in public for a job well done at work. I think the simple things that happen around us have the greatest impact on our lives, not the large newsworthy events. I have been thinking about how several seemingly insignificant events can group together to focus our perspective of the world and how we decide to act as a part of it.
Early in life I developed a strong opinion of racism. I hated it. My opinion came from what little information I gleaned from TV, from listening to the Vietnam War veteran who taught me to write my name, and from racist jokes. I remember hearing a joke about a black person and seeing how all the adults laughed. Soon after that someone told the same joke, but instead of a black person, the target of the joke was a polish person. No one laughed and the teller was admonished because a family friend was Polish and besides, the joke was “just mean”. That stuck with me. Then there was a final event was the catalyst that fused everything else together.
It happened in the sixth grade. We had a teacher that was new to the school system. She came into class with an energy that was infectious. I loved it when she’d play her violin. I don’t think there was a single kid in the first months of the school year who dreaded coming to class. Ms. Zeigler was that special kind of teacher. One day she passed out paperbacks to the entire class. She told us it was a book about a boy and his dog and how hard it was to grow up poor. That struck a chord with me. I was wearing patched hand-me-down blue jeans, and my family hadn’t been able to afford to replace our TV after a lightening strike blew out the picture tube. Our family also had a dog. Many of the kids moaned, but I was exited. And not just because I was poor and reading was my major form of entertainment, either. On the cover was an emblem that declared the book was a Newbery Medal winner. I knew that winning the award was a big deal. Another Newbery winner was my favorite book at the time. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle is the book that got me interested in reading for fun, and the book that started me down the path of being a lifelong Science Fiction and Fantasy fan; more on that in another post. I was looking forward to reading this new book. I don’t remember if I read any of it that first night. What I do remember is the next morning at school. Ms. Zeigler was crying. She quietly asked us all to lay the paperbacks on our desks. The school principal came in with a few other people and they collected all the books. Before he left the principal told us it was a bad book, and that we should never read it. The book was Sounder by William H. Armstrong.
At different times during that day, Ms. Zeigler talked quietly to some of us when we asked about Sounder. She started crying again when she whispered to me that Sounder was a good book and that a parent had complained to a school board member, and that the only reason it was taken from us because the family in the story was black. All the insignificant racist events from earlier in my life fused together and I realized at that moment how despicable racism really was. I knew at that moment I hated it.
A few years later I finally read Sounder. The story moved me, and I finally truly understood why Ms. Zeigler had cried. I have not read the book for over thirty years, but every time I run across the movie adaptation of it on TV, I watch it. I regret never telling Ms. Zeigler how much that little event, her taking me into her confidence that day, meant to me. It is the earliest memory I have of my decision that my life would be better if I were kind to everyone around me, no matter who or what or how they were.

Jennifer Zeigler, who taught for a while in Pike County, Ohio, Thank You!

Walking Glasses

A lot of people my age have eyes that are getting tired. Recently a co-worker complained about needing reading glasses. Me? I’ve needed reading glasses for years now. I am sitting here wearing no-line trifocals. Distance on top, reading on the bottom and arm’s length for staring at a computer monitor all day in the middle. It is important for you to know that my middle prescription starts at about eighteen inches and is good up to about three feet away. If I need to clearly see anything farther than three feet away, I have to look out of the top part of my glasses.

I didn’t need glasses until I hit college. I was originally diagnosed with a bad astigmatism, but that eye doctor was wrong. The correct diagnosis should have been that I am near sighted in one eye, and far sighted in the other. Well, except for the past six years or so. It seems my farsighted eye is losing focus at great distances, and it is now just a middle distance sighted eye. I can function well without my glasses. I can read close up, and I can see far away enough to read road signs before I pass them and to be safe driving on the freeways. Yet if I don’t wear my glasses, I get horrendous headaches. For everyday life, my trifocals are great! What they are not good for is hiking.

I like to look at the scenery around me when I hike. To me that is one of the best things about hiking. And I can see the scenery with my trifocals. What I can not see when I have my head held up are my feet; or the trail, or that rock on the trail. I stumbled a lot. I turned my ankle a few times. I’d even given myself a stiff neck because I was constantly bending it down at an unnatural angle in order for the distance part of the lens to bring the trail into focus. Walking with my head bent down meant I wasn’t able to enjoy the scenery. I hiked a few times without my glasses and got horrendous headaches. Arrrgh!

Then a simple solution occurred to me. Why not get a pair of Walking Glasses? People have reading glasses and driving glasses, right? I could get a pair that was only the distance prescription. If I need to read a map, I could pull the glasses off for the few minutes that I’d be reading with my near sighted eye. Perfect plan!

Except the eye doctor didn’t want to do it. You see, she wanted to give me a driving glasses prescription that would allow me to keep a dashboard in focus and still have enough distance to be safe on the road. I had to explain a few times that what I needed was not to be able to see from three feet to one hundred yards, but to be able to see from six feet to infinity, or as close to infinity as my tired eyes will allow. She finally agreed to write the prescription, but she was upset with me because I questioned her authority. She even used the eye doctor cliche that even though they were my eyes, they were her responsiblity. Sheesh.

The glasses work beautifully. And since the simple prescription lowered the cost I was able to take advantage of getting transition lenses without any additional expense to me. (They had a buy one get one free sale going on… like always.) Hiking has become even more fun now, imagine that!

I want a “Do Not Mail” list

Dinnertime has been pleasant since I signed up on the National Do Not Call Registry. I was never torn about the violation free speech issue that some telemarketers complained about. They are free to contact me in public if they so wish. I consider my phone to be part of my home and as such it is not public. No one is allowed to enter my home or wiretap my phone without just cause, and a warrant approved by a judge. I scrambled to sign up, and except during election cycles, l am content. Non-profits are exempt from the “do not call” rules. I guess a partisan politician is non-profit, go figure…
What I want now is a “Do not Mail” registry to do the same thing for my personal, private, US Mail. I don’t even think it has to be a law, just a large movement. If enough people sign up for such a service the junk-mailers will see it as a profit point. These companies are all about profit, right? They will voluntarily subtract our addresses in an effort to get a higher percentage of mail to the target audience, i.e. anyone that does not trash junk mail instantly upon pulling it out of their mailbox. Me, I shred it. I don’t want to hassle figuring out what junk mail could be potential Identity Theft opportunities. So I shred it all.

I want this “do not mail” list because of the amount of junk I get. I counted my junk mail. I have received 41 junk mail items in the past two weeks. That is nearly three and a half junk mail items in my mailbox each and every day. I get more junk mail than everything else combined. This count does not include the newsprint or postcard ads. This is only the official looking envelope style junk mail. One company has the largest share of mailings. They send so much junk to me I have taken to saying “what’s in your mailbox?” as joke to counter point their TV ads that claim they do not hassle people. I am being hassled. And because I feel hassled I am also in favor of eliminating the bulk-rate postage for non-media mail. Junk mailers are the only ones that seem to use first class bulk rate anymore. (Non-profits should be allowed to keep their rate…I guess.)

And on the environmental side, I shudder at the number of trees that are used to support the junk mail industry’s shotgun approach to advertising. Will future generations wonder why we defoliated the planet only to fill holes in the earth with paper? Or will they wonder why great-great-great grandpop didn’t take the opportunity to get a loan where you only have to pay the monthly interest charge, thus reducing the amount of his payment each month? Hopefully our future generations will be smart enough not to fall for junk mail schemes.

Hold it. They won’t be using snail-mail, will they? Perhaps I should focus my attention on eliminating junk e-mail, huh?

Kindness is Rewarding

In an earlier entry I mentioned that kindness is rewarding. Even if the only reward was that good feeling you get from being kind it is well worth the effort. But trust me, that is not all the reward you can get. People respond to kindness and sometimes… well sometimes it pays off big. I lived through the perfect example.

About a decade ago, (wow, how time flies) I was heading home from a business trip to Washington DC; home at the time was still in the Chicago area. A nasty thunderstorm had ripped through Chicago and was headed for the east coast. The airports in Chicago were shut completely down for a while. When one of the major hub airports like Chicago or Atlanta get shut down all varieties of havoc are unleashed upon flight schedules. When I got to Washington National Airport (as it was named then) the calm early afternoon skies were clear and blue. The flight departure signs were cluttered with “delayed” and “canceled” flights, and the televisions hanging from the ceiling spouted gloom and doom news about the bad weather. I checked in, and settled into an uncomfortable seat with a book, prepared for a long afternoon. My flight was merely delayed as were two or three other flights to Chicago that should have departed before noon. The airport started to fill up. They switched our departure gate and I lost my uncomfortable seat and ended up leaning against a wall with my nearly finished book.

The world is full of grouchy people. Most just like to complain or be gruff for a bit and then they are happy and can accept what is going on around them. There are some that are just nasty people. The unfortuanate thing is that often in pressure situations the grouchy people feed off the energy of the nasty people and you get a nasty mob. That was what was beginning to happen that afternoon at Washington National Airport.

They changed our departure gate again, and I spent too much money on a skimpy airport sandwich for dinner. Soon after I’d propped my self up against another wall the sandwich and the book were finished. I began chatting with a few people around me. We were all headed to Chicago, but we were from several different flights. They were herding us all together because nothing was going to Chicago it seemed. I began wondering if the hotel I had stayed at would have room for me for another night. They skies outside the floor to ceiling windows had turned grey and the wind had picked up.

Then the departure gate was changed for one of the morning flights. Weary people gathered their belongings and headed out once again. It was evident that there would be at least one flight that would make it to Chicago that evening. Not me. Not any of those around me. Someone commented about how lucky those folk were. The grouches started offering reasons why they should have been selected for the flight instead of those who had been waiting the longest. One particularly arrogant nasty guy stated that they should take the first class passengers from every flight, and leave the rest of us to rot.

It was not long before an airline employee came into the area and announced that there were no more flights going to Chicago that evening. All remaining flights were canceled. We were free to find alternate transportation, or lodging, and that they had set up a special ticket counter just for the Chicago flights to deal with transfers, new tickets for morning flights, whatever. The news was bad, granted. Four or five flights worth of people were stuck in DC. Some yelling started then, but for the most part folks just picked up their belongings and headed for the ticket counter. I was in no rush. I had already resigned myself to sleeping on the airport floor. I’d even picked out a spot behind a potted palm tree.

I was second from the end of the line when I got there. It was a very, very long line. I could hear people shouting at the ticket agents. Soon the lady in front of me, and the gentleman behind me started talking about the nasty people, and how they just didn’t understand that kind of attitude. I added my two cents worth and soon we were in a pleasant discussion about the weather, the hard floors and how the rock and mortar walls would be echoing snores all night long. We laughed as the afternoon slipped into evening.

Then the real nastiness began. The grouches were becoming nasty, the nasties even nastier. People that had finished their turn at the ticket counter were yelling even as they exited the area. And right in the middle of it all was a lone airline employee who valiantly answered questions and tried to sooth frustrated souls. She was really earning her paycheck. Another particularly arrogant nasty guy got into her face and screamed at her. He was literally two inches from her nose. Others chimed in. The nastiness grew. She made her way, eventually, to the end of the line. She had a deer in the headlights look about her, and a tight painful smile. She asked if we had any questions. I asked why some of the people in line thought she controlled the weather. The gentleman asked if he could get her a drink before the concessions closed. The lady asked if she needed a hug. She started to cry and we just kept talking to her. We asked about her family. If she rode the Metro or drove. Did she want a tissue. What her favorite area restaurant was. I was so happy to be standing there helping to make another person feel better. Soon she wiped at her face one last time, thanked us for being kind, and returned to her job of dealing with nasty people and soothing frustrations. The same people yelled at her on her return trip back to the ticket counter.

About twenty minutes later the airline employee appeared behind us in line. She made shushing noises when we started to greet her. She mouthed, “follow me” and put a finger to her lips with the universal “shush, be quiet” sign. When we were out of sight of the people in the line, she explained that there were exactly three empty seats left on the 10am flight (that was now departing at 6:15pm). She told us that the shift manager had decided to leave them empty, but that she had talked him into letting her find three deserving people. She thanked us again for being kind, gave us all a hug, and shoved us toward the departure gate with a “hurry, they are holding the door for you.”

My reading shelf

This post is going to list the contents of the book shelf where I keep the books and magazines that I plan on reading. Being a computer geek, I think of it as my reading queue. I have other shelves filled with books that I plan on reading soon. I think of these other shelves as my secondary queue. When the main shelf has an empty spot I select a book off the secondary queue shelves and put it at the back of the reading queue. I try to alternate between fiction and something else, (non-fiction, humor, science, etc.). If I buy a book or get one as a gift, I allow myself to insert it into the reading queue, especially if I paid full price. Most used book purchases automatically go on the second shelf. Periodicals always jump to the front of the queue, and I have a list of e-zines that rotate into the periodicals mix. I am reading a lot of e-zine back issues, and will only be reviewing current issues once I catch up.

I have seen these types of lists on a few other blogs and I figured it would be a good way to give folks that might be interested a heads up on what is on tap for future reviews on Blogtide Rising. My apologies if I bored you with my method for setting my reading order.

• Asimov’s SF, August 2007 (currently reading)
• Ohio Genealogical Quarterly, June 2007
• North Star (North Country Trail magazine), April-June 2007
• Flashing Swords, #3-7 (no reviews)
• Ohio Genealogy News, Summer 2007
• People of the Black Circle (novella collection)- Robert E. Howard
• The Shawnee Prophet- R. David Edmunds
• The Runes of the Earth- Stephen R. Donaldson
• In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction- Kitchen and Jones, ed.
• ChronoSpace- Allen Steele
• Origins of the Crash- Roger Lowenstein
• Becoming Alien- Rebecca Ore
• The Letters of JRR Tolkien- Carpenter, ed.
• The Broken Sword- Poul Anderson
• Atom- Isaac Asimov
• Clarke County, Space- Allen Steele
• The War Within- G.B. Trudeau
• The Hour of the Dragon- Robert E. Howard

I am deciding which non-fiction goes into the list next. I am leaning towards Asimov’s Biographical Encyclopedia of Science & Technology since I have two of them on secondary queue shelves. Yes, I read encyclopedia’s and other reference books from time to time.

Also on my secondary shelves I have Howard’s Red Nails, several books from Card’s Ender series, Robinson’s Mars trilogy, Le Guin’s The Disposessed, Orwell’s 1984, a few Asimov SF short story collections, a Donna Andrews mystery, a lot of Asimov science and non-fiction, and much, much more. Items that will jump to the front of the queue are magazines/newsletters that will be arriving from the Ohio Historical Society and the Buckeye Trail Association among others. I am also buying back issues of a few fantasy and sf small press magazines. I plan on reading at least some back issues of Down in the Cellar, Dragons, Knights and Angels, Electric Spec and Sword’s Edge e-zines. Baen’s Universe beckons as well.

I am always open to suggestions of a “must read” book or magazine.

Abused Pets

Living next to a dog pound is worse than living next to an airport. And while the barking of the dogs can be annoying, that is not the reason it is bad living near a dog pound. You see, the hours that animals can be left at the pound are clearly posted, yet people still drop off animals when the pound is not open. Some tie the dog up with easily chewed through string, others just shove the dog out and drive away. In most cases the dogs end up at my house. I get to escort them back to the pound. Cats dropped off in this manner rarely survive the marauding packs of wild dogs and/or coyotes that tour the area. I buried two last winter that the coyotes just killed and left in our yard. Those cats that do survive become feral. There is one wild orange tomcat in the neighborhood that outweighs small children. The first time I saw him I thought Bobcats were making a comeback in the area.

Yesterday I had to escort a large pup back to the pound. Every single time I have to do this it breaks my heart. I am not a mean person, and I really am not eager to condemn innocent animals to death. I am sure that yesterday’s pup will not make it through today. I am sure the warden will put him down. This dog was abused. It has mange over 95 percent of its body and has open and weeping sores. Still when it was sitting in our driveway, it wagged its tail at me. It wanted a home.

I am not mean, but I can not give a home to every stray that arrives at my doorstep. The people who are mean are the ones that are responsible for condemning this poor innocent: its original owners. No animal should be treated the way this pup obviously had been treated. Perhaps that is why they tied it to the dog pound fence with string yesterday. Maybe they were afraid that if they dropped it off during normal hours the Dog Warden would call the County Sheriff on them, and maybe he would have. I know he should have.

The thing that really galls me is that there is a free mobile vet clinic that has been in our area ten or more times in the past year. They spay and neuter dogs and cats for free. Free. This means that these abusive owners can’t find the time to keep the pups from being born, but they can find the time to sneak to the dog pound when no one is watching and drop them off.

I woke up this morning because of a nightmare about that poor pup. It looked up at me with those soft brownish green eyes, and said “I want to live with you.” (I won’t be able to laugh at “Duke” on the Bush’s Baked Beans commercials or watch that “Ain’t no bugs on me” singing puppy commercial for a long time without feeling upset.) I feel guilty even though it is not my fault. It angers me that the original owners probably haven’t given the pup a second thought since they dropped it off yesterday, and yet I am having nightmares about it. They obviously didn’t give it any thought while they owned it, or it would not have been as sick as it was. Simple, clean bedding can keep the mange away.

I feel like I am a mean person. I feel guilty. I can not keep they strays that show up from the dog pound. I am afraid that if I keep even one, I will no longer be able to turn away any of them. The guilt would just be too great. I can’t open that door. This breaks my heart.

Review: Before You Leap by Kermit The Frog

“Before You Leap: A Frog’s Eye View of Life’s Greatest Lessons”

How to describe this book? Hmmm…

Fozzie Bear might say, “Kermit has a three foot tongue and except for catching flies, everything he does is tongue in cheek. Wocka! Wocka!”

The book is part Muppet history, part tongue in cheek self-help and part coffee table book. For all three parts, it is really suited only for the die hard Muppet fan. I am a fan, and I struggled to finish reading some chapters.

The book starts out promising enough with a Kermit view of the Muppet’s history. There are some interesting things here, and frankly I wound up wishing that the entire book had been an in depth history of Muppetdom.

But, alas… The majority of the book was self-help with a lot of silly and useless things thrown in. I did chuckle a few times, like when we find out that Animal’s answer to every question is “Want woman!” (I’m a sucker for running gags.) I guess if you desperately need help with life, and you only trust a Muppet to give you sound advice, then this is your book.

It shines as a coffee table book. When I first got it, I’d pick it up, look a random page, laugh at the joke or silly picture, and put it back down. I was really looking forward to reading it. The pages are of a heavy slick paper stock. The binding is tight. The layout and typeface are easy on the eye.

Would I recommend this book? As a gift to a Muppet fan? Yes. To someone that needs a self-help book? No way. As a conversation piece to lay out during a party or other get together? Why not. If you just want to look at it, borrow my copy or try interlibrary loan.

The last chuckle I had was a post script on an otherwise blank last page. Kermit writes, “Hi there! This is the end of the book. You can put it down now.”

Well this is the end of the review, you can stop reading now.

The President Said What?

What power words hold. The president gave a short speech on the White House lawn during a congressional picnic that featured the music of Kermit Ruffins and The Barbeque Swingers, a band from New Orleans. A snippet of that speech is causing a stir in the blogosphere. Let me quote it for you.

THE PRESIDENT: … Kermit, we’re proud to have you.

MR. RUFFINS: Well, thanks for having us.

THE PRESIDENT: Kermit Ruffins and the Barbeque Swingers, right out of New Orleans, Louisiana. (Applause.)

MR. RUFFINS: Thank you. Thanks for having us. We’re glad to be here.

THE PRESIDENT: Proud you’re here. Thanks for coming. You all enjoy yourself. Make sure you pick up all the trash after it’s over. (Laughter.)

Did he really ask the band, a group of black men, to clean up after the congressional picnic? Is he really a racist? I am by no definition a fan of our current president. At times I have felt that the man is quite…not so smart. I never thought he would be this stupid. Still I thought it would make a great topic for a blog entry. Well, I was correct, but not for the racist comment the rest of the blogosphere is talking about. Let me dirgress.

My friend Steve is a journalist. When we were roommates in college we had lots of fun discussions, and at least several serious talks. When it came to his profession he was adamant, nearly rabid at times, about fact checking. I still have a draft version of a creative writing class assignment from those college years. Steve reviewed the assignment for me and placed a big fat FE (fact error) on a section where I had spun the truth a tad bit. It stuck with me. To this day I don’t trust much of what I read from unknown sources. If I am personally curious or otherwise think I should share the information, I try to do independent fact checking on my own. This has become incredibly important in the world of the internet where a small child is still collecting matchbooks trying to break the Guinness Book of World Records before he dies, and that poor soul in Nigeria still can’t get his family fortune out of the country. Snopes.com has become a favorite site of mine. Check it out.

So I started fact checking. I wanted to get this morning’s blog accurate after all. I was planning on having fun with this!! This was going to be nearly as good as when the president started giving German Chancellor Angela Merkel an unwanted shoulder rub!

I found the above quote on more blogs, some that I have come to admire. One page in particular jumped out at me when I googled as part of my research. The White House press release web page had the same quote!! Now we are cooking! It is right there on the White House’s own page! It is true! He asked the band to pick up the trash!
But still there was that little voice that said “is someone in the White House trying to sabotage the president, or is something else going on?” I was curious.
I found a link to a video clip of the speech on the White House page, and it all became clear to me. (You’ll have to click on the video link yourself if you are interested. It seems the White House will let you link to text and audio, but not video.)

In the video, it is clear that Kermit Ruffins leaves the podium, and that the president turns back to the congress-critters and tells THEM to pick up the trash, not the band as the quoted text would leave us to believe.

Whomever transcribed the speech should have included more words. Descriptive words of what was happening. For example:

MR. RUFFINS: Thank you. Thanks for having us. We’re glad to be here.

THE PRESIDENT: Proud you’re here. Thanks for coming. (To the audience.) You all enjoy yourself. Make sure you pick up all the trash after it’s over. (Laughter.)

This wasn’t the blog entry I had envisioned when I started out this morning. But perhaps it is a better entry that just another voice on the “pick up all the trash” bandwagon.

This is not about the US president. This is about words and the power they have. A few uplifting words at the right place and time and we end up with men walking on the moon in 1969. A few words left out of a innocuous speech, and a president is labeled a racist. A few words that spin the truth a tad bit, and we end up surging the death count of American soldiers and Iraqi soldiers and civilians. Words have power. When used to entertain they have the power to make us laugh and cry. Whether they are used in lies or in truths, they have power. We should all demand that there be no fact errors in the words used by our president, politicians, corporations, media and fellow bloggers.

Words have power. Use them wisely. Use them for truth.

Bureaucrats at the Gates

Devenbert here.

I had another shining example yesterday of bureaucrats at play. They like to make things up, just because they want to show they can. One of the bad things about bureaucrats is that most of the time they have no idea what they are doing when they make things up.

My biggest peeve about work lately has been the flood of unofficial policies and edicts that have been issued. Flood is too mild a word… torrent, tsunami, tidal surge… yeah, tidal surge fits. I would have no problem if these were signed official policies, but we still have bosses that are afraid to put pen to paper and take responsibility for anything. Which is another bureaucratic trait that I may rant about in a future entry.

The bosses know that there are enough people in the workforce that will take hearsay as gospel or that are boot lickers, naive or just simply burned out, and will docilely accept whatever unofficial edict they send our way. Work gets mired down because these folks will not budge if they are confronted with conflicting information as they mindlessly follow unsigned policies. It is becoming impossible to get any software released these days.

I am sure I didn’t score points with the pointy haired bosses yesterday. They passed another edict that we had to start including internal software development team statistics and other information in the public and external descriptions for patches and software releases. This does serve two purposes for them. First, if anything gets questioned by higher-up pointy haired bosses they get to point at the nearly meaningless data and say “<my ass is covered> Look at the data I brung you!! It is not my fault! </my ass is covered>.” Second, the one group of computer savvy folk they have not been able to repress are the fine folk that work at all the VA Medical Centers. This edict would have the effect of burying these folk with information that is useless for them to do their jobs efficiently. The only purpose of this edict is to create a paper(less) trail that will prove that the pointy haired bosses did nothing wrong while sitting on their thumbs, covering their asses. I does not do anything to improve patient care, which is the business we are in.

The bureaucrats insist that this internal information must be documented in the patching system, and therefore must be in the public description. I guess the one good things about bureaucrats is that most of the time they don’t know what they are doing when they make things up. This does open small windows of opportunity from time to time.

You see, the patching system has a little used data field named “INTERNAL COMMENTS”. It is where we’d put internal statistics and other information for those rare occasions when it was really necessary (and in my opinion putting information there just to cover some bureaucrat’s ass does not fit my definition of necessary.)

I pointed this out, publicly. Very publicly. The part about there already being a non-public place to put this data, a place that will not impact the fine computer folk at the VA Medical Centers. Not the part about bosses asses. A few of my fellow malcontents spoke up in support. The pointy haired bosses twisted their own words around to make it sound as if they were insulted that we would assume that this edict was in any way official. (That is how bureaucrats retract things, they fake being insulted.)

Regardless, the edict was quashed, which is the important thing. Yes, we developers will still have to regurgitate nearly meaningless statistics, but at least the good folks that maintain the computers that directly support patient care have been protected for another day.

Signing statements

One of the most bizarre things our current sitting president does is issue signing statements for any (every?) bill he signs into law. Don’t know what a signing statement is? Well here is a Washington Post article that covers the bases fairly well and goes on to say that the Government Accounting Office is investigating them. Some signing statements have included things like the office of the president is exempt and is allowed to wire-tap or open the mail if US residents without a warrant.

I say if Congress was not clear enough on a bill, a president should ask for clarity before signing it. This practice of giving one’s own spin on the law, and claiming that it is legal to do so, just pisses me off. It is just another example of how this president, and our government in general, feel they don’t have to follow the same rules we do. The best example that I can give to show what I mean is: I’d end up in prison if I ran up a debt proportional to the one the US federal government has.

I’d like to be issuing signing statements of my own. Just a few months back it would have been nice when signing a Parent Plus student loan if I could have written in the margin that I didn’t have to start paying the loan back until after my kid graduated. And how about a statement on the electric bill that states they will refund me for every minute my home goes without electricity. Or that cellular phone plan… I would love to have changed the hours which are free, how the “rollover” minutes work, what “roaming” means, etc., etc.. I bet if I did issue my own signing statements, and followed through on them, that I’d get arrested or sued.

But what if I could? I think the best signing statement of all would be one that I’d place beside my signature on election day. A statement that all of our government officials; federal, state and local–elected, appointed or hired; would be required to follow all the laws of the land as if they were Francis Q. Citizen. There would be no need to have a special “balanced budget amendment”, they would get the debt under control or go to jail. Wiretap without a warrant? Jail. Drive drunk? Jail. Jaywalk? Ticket. Falsify documents? Jail. Perjury? Jail.
I am not just talking the talk. I am a hired government official, and I would have to walk the walk as well. Wait! I’m already doing that.