The Town is Burning, All Right

To those who read nuance in things people say, President Obama's recent use of a metaphor to sell his gigantic spending bill was a telling one. While he was on his recent Bipartisan Support of My Trillion Dollar "Stimulus" Promotion Tour, he uttered the passionate statement, "When the town is burning, everybody needs to grab a hose!"

Well, as a practical sort of fellow, I would have thought to use a different word. I would have said, "...everyone needs to grab a bucket." There is an important distinction between a hose and a bucket. Use of the word, "hose," presupposes that there is an unlimited supply of water at the other end of any hose you grab. But, to carry the metaphor further, there isn't always an unlimited supply of water, when there is a fire; or real money, when there is a financial crisis. From literal experience, I can tell you, that assumption is a naive one. If you grab a bucket, you can see just how much water you can dip into, to put out the fire. If you grab a hose and expect unlimited water to be supplied to the nozzle, you can be severely disillusioned. I am afraid President Obama is going learn this lesson the hard way -- an even harder way than I did. And in the process, we are all going to get burned -- or hosed.

Happy Friday

Top Ten Disadvantages of Being an Atheist:

10. If you want to celebrate Christmas, you have to at least tacitly acknowledge a preposterous story about how one particular woman got pregnant, a long time ago.

9. When you are angry, you tell an imaginary power to damn something indeterminate. Pretty unsatisfying.

8. When you do something wrong, or bad, you have to take the blame for it yourself, and feel bad about it for as long as you remember.

7. You have only your parents to thank for the massive talent and/or good looks that allowed you to win that boxing match, football game, or beauty pageant.

6. You'll never "speak in tongues," unless you contract malaria, or go insane.

5. You have no ostensible, inherent goodness with which to misdirect gullible people from your evil nature.

4. You have at least one seemingly impenetrable barrier between you and the Republican Party.

3. You have to live your life knowing that it will end forever, in an alarmingly short time; and yet live it well, just for the sake of being a good person.

2. There's no good place to go and get free wine and wafers.

1. You don't really have a catchy, celebratory phrase to say on Fridays.

The Best Grammar Tip Most Remedial English Failures Will Ever Get, For Free!

I am no English expert, but compared to the average American citizen, I am apparently a freakin' genius. Forget my most recent annoyance, an epidemic of verb tenses that do not match their subjects ("There's students and teachers violating this rule."). That is not quite as easy-squeezy to solve. No, I am talking about a different epidemic of grammatical idiocy:

"Happy birthday, from Tom and I."

Okay, class, can anyone tell me what is wrong with this sentence? These are the most frequently spoken grammatical errors, and the most easily fixed. Just strike the proper noun from the statement, and say it to yourself in your mind, before you utter the sentence. Would you say, "Happy birthday, from I."? NO! You would say, "Happy birthday, from me." So, say, "Happy birthday, from Tom and me." That simple.

"Her and me went to the mall." Her went to the mall?? Me went to the mall? NO! She went to the mall. I went to the mall. She and I went to the mall.

It only takes a fraction of a second to say these things to yourself before you say them out loud. So, if you don't want to sound like an idiot, do just that.

Despite the simplicity of the solution, such ridiculous grammatical errors are memorialized forever in published works; mostly in popular music. I would hereby like to offer my services to any singers or songwriters who are confused or unsure. Please, ask me, or someone more knowledgeable than I, before you write a hit song that will remain in the public domain for the foreseeable future, perpetuating ignorance.

Examples? Well, I live in Hawaii, so I will offer up an "IZ" (the renowned, beloved, deceased Hawaiian artist, Israel Kamakawiwo'ole) song as my first example. In his song, Henehene Kou 'Aka, he ends every stanza with the expression, "...for you and I." Over and over and over, he sings, "...for you and I." Oh, except for the stanza in which he switches it up and sings, "...for I and you." While most of his songs are music to my ears, that one strikes a sour note. If someone gave you a present, would you ask, "For I?"

NO! You would ask, "For me?"

I hate to dump on Jessica Simpson while she seems to be going through a rough patch, but she sang a song, Between You & I. Need I write more?

I'm sure there are more examples, but I will stop there.

It makes my brain figuratively explode

Okay, how hard is this? Especially for people who use words to make a living??? When you say, "Literally," you mean, uh......literally. That is to say, according to wordnetweb.princeton.edu you mean, "in a literal sense; literally translated." Or, according to en.wiktionary.org you mean, "In the direct, word for word sense."


So why do idiotic talking heads say stupid things like, "I literally flew across the room to change channels," or, "My brain literally exploded"? Of course, neither of those things literally happened. Yet, too many imbeciles feel the need to emphasize their stories by throwing in the adverb, "literally." The proper adverb would be, "figuratively," but of course that wouldn't emphasize anything. "My brain figuratively exploded." Nope. No emphasis. Maybe the sentence doesn't need emphasis, after all.

A Personal Glimpse into Wealth Redistribution

I ordinarily try to ignore the little social and political injustices that happen every day, because I live in Hawaii, and I am outnumbered, by at least 3-to-1. Fiscally conservative Libertarians are a mighty small, lonely contingent here. But sometimes, things are just impossible to ignore.

Today, at Safeway, there was a woman with her son in the checkout line ahead of us. First off, the boy was a little 5#!+, grabbing gum, mints, and candy, and trying to add them to the conveyor belt. His mother kept telling him, "No," but her tone must not have been very convincing. He continued his shenanigans while she continued her ineffective refusals. (Hey, come to think of it, maybe this is why some guys never learn to take "No" for an answer, ladies.) In the meantime, he was blocking our way, so we could not begin placing the contents of our basket onto the belt behind his mother's groceries. But Momma wasn't concerned about anyone else.

When he finally got out of the way, we began unloading our basket. After we had gotten too far to change our minds and change checkout lanes, we realized that there was a delay. The woman had wanted to get frozen apple juice that was on sale, but it was sold out. So, she brought another brand to the register and tried to get the sale price on it. The checker told her that she was not allowed to do that. So, the woman said she would take the frozen orange juice that was on sale, instead, and then she just stood there. The very nice checker took the hint and hurried off to take the woman's apple juice back to the freezer section and get the sale orange juice; while we, and the line that had now formed behind us, all stood there and waited. Maybe I am just too damned considerate for my own good, but I would never have tried to pull that stunt in the first place; and if I had, I would have either just bought the non-sale-priced apple juice, or gone and gotten the OJ, myself, when my stunt failed.

While the checker was away, I noticed that the woman had her items segregated into two batches on the belt. The first batch included a gallon of milk, a bag of Lima beans, two boxes of cereal, and (eventually) the two cans of frozen orange juice. Among the items in the second group were two nice bottles of wine (approximately $12 and $16), a twelve-pack of premium, micro-brew beer (which, in Hawaii, goes for about $16 a twelve-pack), and some sort of fancy chocolates.

Behind the next divider on the belt were our items, which included a small jug of on-sale Carlo Rossi Burgundy. (You can hear this coming, I am sure.) Well, of course, it turned out that the woman was buying the first batch of real food with a welfare voucher, because those were the items legally allowed. She paid cold, hard, untraceable (and most probably untaxed and unreported) cash for the second batch.

So, while we, taxpaying citizens, bought necessities and a jug of inexpensive (yet eminently drinkable) wine with our own money, Welfare Momma was buying premium micro-brew, premium wines, and fancy chocolates. This experience (pardon the expression) distills the problem of wealth redistribution down to a personal level.

Now, before anyone gets their panties in a bunch, I am not blaming anyone who is having trouble and needs a hand up - a temporary hand up, if they are able-bodied. There are lots of honest, hardworking people who have had to seek assistance, I am sure. But to all of you who think that wealth redistribution is a good thing - even the answer to all of our country's woes - let me give you a little warning. The rest of us will not put up with this B.S. much longer.

When the incentive is to work less, pay fewer taxes, and have more, then that is the result more and more people will aim for. Eventually, the lazy cheaters will outnumber the working taxpayers, and then who will pay the bills? To quote Margaret Thatcher, “The trouble with Socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” That time is soon coming, leeches.