A Punk is a Punk is a Punk

Today's multiple choice news quiz question:

Who is this guy?

A:  The student teacher for your granddaughter's high-school English literature class. In his comments on her written papers, he misspelled the words "foreshadow" and "ensure."

B. The guy who just registered in your neighborhood as a level-one sex offender, who now works at the Starbucks four blocks from your house. The fact that he memorized your name the very first time you ordered an iced coffee with skim, and now greets you by name every morning, is exceedingly disconcerting.

C. Martin Shkreli, hedge fund shark and CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals. After raising the price of the drug Daraprim (used to treat certain infections) from $13.00 to $750.00 per tablet, Shkreli backed away under criticism, then peevishly said his company would no longer be doing critical research into new medications. So there. Immediately afterwards, he grabbed his soccer ball and announced he wasn't playing with the other kids anymore.

Weekly News for Cynics

It's been rough couple of weeks for cynical greed in this country. Not that you can be shocked by this, ever—not if you're a citizen with even minimal consciousness—but the prominent stories in the last fortnight are enough to sober even the most hardened realist.

• A quiet side-bar story in the NYT observed that Nestle corporation, among others, has been flagged as a company that maintains a fishing fleet in Pacific waters in which slaves—SLAVES!—man the nets on many of the boats that produce sardines and other food fish for canning. Some of these people have apparently landed on these fishing fleets through purchase from human traffickers, and have been enslaved for years, while Nestle looked the other way. Nestle, for those of you who don't recall, cooly weathered a scandal some years back in which they sold off defective infant-feeding formula to third world countries, arguing that although the formula was a health risk to American infants, it was just fine for the third world, where the predominant standard of living was already so bad that they'd barely be affected by their awful product. The corporation continues to thrive.

• The corporate cynicism was not just American. VW corporation, it turns out, has created automobiles which lie about their emissions output. Initially when this story broke, I thought it might be one of those things where test results during product development were overlooked or slightly doctored—the kind of thing that happens so often now that you can barely blink an eye when it occurs.  But it turns out to be much, much more conniving than that. VW installed software in their automobiles that correctly identifies when an emission test is underway, as is still often conducted in places like California, and for that moment alone changes the fuel burning procedure so as to give low emissions results that will become 40 times larger the moment the car drives out of the test bay and into the real world.  It is almost impossible to imagine the greedy duplicity that goes into a corporate decision to do something like this—until you remember Ford Motor company's handling of the Exploding Pinto era.

• Europe is in the throes of what can be argued to be the worst human refugee disaster since WW2. By most estimates, at least 8 million, and perhaps as many as 10 million, Syrians have been displaced from their homeland and are desperately seeking a place to live. Virtually half the entire population. The vast majority are still in camps in the nations immediately adjoining Syria. There are some people in Turkish refugee camps that have already been living in squalor for 2 years or more, with no end in sight. Other nations are attempting to help in lukewarm ways, but with efforts that are in no way commensurate with the size of the horror. The UK, it's estimated, will take as many as 20,000 by end of year; France, 24,000; Sweden, 50,000; Germany, 100,000 (though to be accurate this is because they admit to needing the cheap labor). Any way you look at it, these are paltry numbers from wealthy counties, akin to emptying a bathtub with spoonfuls of water.

From the Western hemisphere, Venezuela will accept 20,000 refugees by the end of the year. Mexico has agreed to accept 10,000.

The US?  Thus far,  fewer than 1500 Syrian refugees have landed in our open arms, though the Obama administration, in the face of heated opposition from the fear-mongering faction, wants next year to allow as many as a whopping 10,000 victims of the Syrian civil war into what was once the land of opportunity. That means that the most affluent nation on earth, which has built its wealth upon the efforts of those taking us up on  "give us your homeless" offer, will help about 1/10 of 1% of the Syrian homeless. By way of comparison, remember that more than 1 million Irish refugees landed in America around the turn of the century. Following WW2, we accepted 95,000 Germans. It's estimated that we have 1.2 million Vietnamese immigrants living here quite successfully. In Minnesota alone, we have 30,000 African refugees already.

I am just slightly ashamed. 10,000 Syrian refugees? Surely we could do better than this.

If Donald Trump is considered a serious candidate, then why not?

––Welcome back to these pages our most recent guest Geezer, "Since George Shaw".  The editors are not at all sure that George is not serious about the following suggestion. Stranger things have happened.  ––

Except for the haircut, as a presidential candidate, this is no more
preposterous than four or five of the current hopefuls. 

As the list of "serious" presidential candidates surpasses 20, I would like to be the first to formally endorse Tom Hanks as a third-party candidate for President. Yes, that Tom Hanks. His credentials? He is not a politician, and to my knowledge* is not associated with major parties or major political issues. 

People instinctively, and justifiably, hate politicians. Hilary and Jeb already have high, well-deserved, disapproval ratings, and by Nov 2016, every American with a TV, a radio, a newspaper or access to the internet will hate them both. A well-known and likable (sorry Donald Trump) non-politician running as a third-party candidate in all 50 states, could easily win.

And if you don't believe me, remember Jesse Ventura. Jesse did not get elected Governor of MN because people loved Jesse; we elected him because we hated Republicans and Democrats. And speaking of Jesse, he was a much under-rated Governor. Sure, he was a thin-skinned, blow-hard, but tri-partisan government actually worked better than bi-partisan government ever has. And besides cutting ribbons and touring tornado-sites, the Chief Executive's real role is to appoint a cabinet to run the government.

Playing a slightly different role, Hanks might well
be a better choice than the hacks offered by
either party. 

Mostly, Governors and Presidents appoint their unemployed cronies, and not only are these guys politicians, they are generally out of office because they aren't even good at that. Jesse, not having any friends, appointed a commission who hired cabinet officers based on actual merit. What a concept? So aside from being the butt of jokes, MN under Jesse was the best government we ever had. No reason Tom Hanks couldn't achieve the same success on a national level. He was a war hero, he understands the Chinese (from all that ping pong), piracy, the prison system - the list goes on.

But if I am mistaken about Hanks' political history, then somebody like Tom Hanks. Anybody with max name-recogniton and likability and no known political connections. Peyton Manning, maybe, or Garth Brooks. I've got no problem with a woman, but I don't think Lindsey Whalen is well-known outside of MN, and I don't think Katy Perry is old enough. Other suggestions?

A Geezer History of the Internet

When I was starting out in the publishing business, the Internet did not exist. Literally. If you wanted to research something like 'residential electrical codes in Georgia' the process involved going to a big public library, finding a yellow-pages phone book from Atlanta, copying down the names of electrical contractors in the city, then making a series of cold calls until you found a talkative fellow willing to speak with you. Then you added his name to a Rolodex as a expert source you could call in the future when you needed information.

It was not until about 1989 that the Internet entered business usage for me. I remember installing the first 1200 baud modem in my computer—a IBM 286 PC with a whopping 40 megs of hard-drive space. This was the pre-Windows days where computers used a DOS-base interface. The modem would crackle, then beep, and then I could connect to university data-bases, where I could easily access technical information like span charts for wooden framing members in residential decks. It seemed quite magical at the time, and I knew then that this thing would have big potential.

But the sheer speed of that revolution surprised even the most forward-thinking people. Within a few years, Windows operating systems had become part-and-parcel of all PC's, and shortly thereafter a fairly usable graphic interface was added to basic Internet operating programs, and we were off to the races. "Internet" became "World-Wide-Web". And within barely 15 years, it became a primary method of most of the world's communication, and a main platform for commerce and entertainment.

If the speed with which the technology of information transmittal was prodigious, it was no more prodigious than the speed with with language itself changed. It was as though users, intoxicated with how fast e-mails could zip through cyberspace to one another, also felt compelled to compose those messages with increasing speed. A variety of written language shortcuts appeared. At first, it was simply the normalization of certain abbreviations of language. I remember an editor who worked for me who had gone through college with the graphic-based Internet already solidly in place, who did not realize that "thru" was a somewhat informal and, in most business usage, slightly improper shortening of "through."  This kind of thing was pretty common among young adults in the early time the Internet had become widespread. For awhile, I tolerated this among young editors, believing as I did that language should be allowed to evolve. I was savvy enough to understand that linguistic drift was a normal part of language evolution—we are still in process, for example, of seeing irregular verbs like "dive" and "leap" making their historical transition from the past-tense of "dove" and "leapt" to a more regular "dived" and "leaped." I began to put my foot down, though, when another editor in a position paper started a sentence with "U can B sure that investment in marketing, 2,  will translate to greater $ in gross book sales."

Soon we began to see emoticons give way to other such linguistic shortcuts. Very quickly there appeared emoticons—the usage of combined letters and punctuation to represent emotional states.  :) as a smiley face; :( as a frowning face, etc.

Then came the use of emoji language—all those little variations of yellow smiley faces and other graphic symbols to represent emotional statements. One editor, after bemoaning that doing good work in publishing proved to harder than she expected, decided to pursue instead a career in selling cosmetics. In her written resignation letter, she ended with a frowning yellow face with a tear running down its cheek.

Recently, as the NY Times reported yesterday, the coming wave of shorcuts in on-line communication is GIF.  Those old timers among us will remember a day when GIF (the acronym stands for Graphic Interchange Format) was the principle format for transmitting and viewing static, still photos and other images on the internet. If you found that an editor, especially a young male, had a stash of GIF files on his computer directory, you could be pretty sure he was downloading nude girlie pictures on company time.

Today, though, GIF  is used for small looping video action clips, which are pasted into web postings and even emails to serve as ultra-emoji's.  They are often small funny segments of movie or tv clips, and are again used to convey various emotional messages from the composer of the message.

There is a tendency among some Geezers to bemoan this rapid change in the sanctity of written language, to wail and gnash their teeth at what feels like corruption of a noble art form. These Geezers aren't all that difference from the 7th grade grammar teacher who wailed about the fact that infinitives were being routinely split before her very eyes.  Such complaints are utterly useless. The language, culture, the human species itself will change as it will change. You can't fight evolution. A good deal more peace of mind will be yours if you simply practice observation and description rather than try to prescribe adherence to some kind of quality status quo, or seek to return to some kind of golden, classic era. It ain't gonna happen.

Besides, change being what it is, all things come around again.  In a center for linguistic study at Oxford University in England, researchers are discovering that a certain group among the precocious young adults is beginning to uncover, and probably will eventually popularize, a concept they find revolutionary. They are learning that there is another means of communication that sacrifices speed of dialogue for a precision and level of artistic expression that is achievable no other way.

They are called words.

One young man interviewed put it thusly:  "Me and my mates, we started finding that if you spell out words fully, and learn lots of new words, you can put them together in really interesting ways that are quite stylistic. There's almost no limit to what you can say if you know a lot of words, and experiment with how to put them together in sentences.

"And even more than that," he says excitedly in the filmed interview. "You can also put those sentence together in different ways to form incredible paragraphs, and even whole books.

Another young woman from Liverpool said "My last few boyfriends used to end letters with little red hearts.  That was very nice, and I loved it.   But my new boyfriend ended his last letter by saying he woke up thinking about me, fell asleep thinking about me, and that he was constantly seeing my face whenever he saw a pretty girl on the streets.

"It must have taken him many seconds to put that idea together and write it. Bu who knew that actual words were so great? she said with a sigh. "

Here We Go Again

I almost always read two newspapers a day, and sometimes as many as four. Among them are the NY Times and WS Journal. Both are very excellent newspapers, renowned for their degree of objectivity—though of course being who they are, the selections of stories does seem sometimes to support their relative political stances—NYT a more  liberal view, the WSJ, a more fiscally conservative stance. But I regularly read them both feeling that somewhere in the middle I'll get a sense of the real story on a particular world or domestic event.

In today's Wall Street Journal, though was a story that appalled me, both for what it said about a major international corporation, as well as for the fact that a respected newspaper dodged meaningful discussion of ethical problems inherent in the story.

Diageo PLC, the world's largest manufacturer of spirit liquors, in an effort to expand their business, has now created and is offering for sale dirt-cheap variations of whiskey and other spirits aimed specifically at making money from the poorest citizens of Africa. Small shops have been set up in neighborhood African slums that offer liquor that costs roughly $.10 a shot, entire bottles for $2.00. These products are held back from stores in the more affluent neighborhoods, where educated and well employed citizens can afford more expensive liquor. It is only the poor that get the gut-rot.

The article is a profile piece presented as an example of corporate ingenuity in seeking expansion in the third world, and runs almost 80 column inches. Yet the ethical problems with such business practice is confined to two small paragraphs, barely 60 words in an article that runs at least 2,500. One paragraph merely acknowledges that there are detractors to the strategy of fostering excessive drinking in poor neighborhoods.  The impact of the piece is primarily a celebration of the cleverness of Diageo and other liquor manufacturers as they find ways to expand business in the African continent.

Says Charles Ireland, chief executive of the East Africa branch of London-based Diageo:  "It's our turf, and we fight hard to protect it."

The whole thing smacks a little of the immorality that caused Nestle corporation to sell substandard infant formulas in Africa in the 1970's, until the World Health Organization called them on it.  Or the same twisted logic by which drug manufacturers dispose of drugs banned in the West  to third world nations. Or that causes Dupont to erect unsafe chemical processing plants in India, proclaiming their benevolence to the local labor force.  The concept of white man's burden and privilege seems to be alive and well in the international corporate landscape.  It's not like Dupont ever built a death-trap chemical factory in Ontario.

By the way, within its arsenal, Diageo produces Guinness, Johnny Walker scotch, Smirnoff, and Captain Bailey's.

I may think twice about buying these in the future.  It also means I'll likely have to give up a favorite smokey Scotch, Craggenmore, as it is a prime component of the JW blends. I haven't yet decided on the Wall Street Journal.

Meet "Since George Shaw." Intimately.

Today I'm pleased to introduce a new guest Geezer, who will be writing here under the cryptic name "Since George Shaw."  The only hint I can give you is to say that it is not a reference to the author of Pygmalion, and that our new Geezer has been an obsessed Minnesota sports fan since...well, practically since football helmets were made of leather. 

Mr. Shaw, a longtime acquaintance of your editor, is an astute, amateur movie critic as well as a a writer of his own screenplays. He is a former rabble-rouser who came of age in the late 1960's, back when rabble activity was truly rousing. He retains a good measure of the contentiousness of that long-ago period, though is now notably softened by grandfatherhood. 

When asked to provide a profile, Mr. Shaw chose to describe himself with a bullet list that harkens back to the format in which centerfolds in Playboy magazine once described themselves: 

• Favorite Author: John Updike

• Favorite Poet: Bob Dylan

• Favorite Contemporary Musical Group: Old Crow Medical Show

• Favorite Musical Group from Back-in-the Day: The Amazing Rhythm Aces

• Favorite Movie: The Big Lebowski

• Dream Date (if I wasn't married): Penelope Cruz

• Favorite Activity (when not dating Penelope Cruz): Playing in the lake with the grandkids.

Please welcome "Since George Shaw" for what we hope is the first of many essays on these pages—the editor. 

A couple of years ago, I turned 65 and went on Medicare. I chose Medica as my supplement plan, and shortly after, in the mail, I received a lengthy questionnaire (6 -8 pages regarding my health status (not sure if this was from Medicare or Medica). Among the 60 questions were roughly 8 different questions related to whether or not I was depressed —not an unreasonable line of inquiry for a 65 year-old man. But there was not one question even remotely related to my sex-life. I am not an expert here, but I think there might be a relationship between the health of one's sex-life, and depression, especially for an old man.

Last fall, I had a pinched nerve which eventually led to surgery and lots of physical therapy at Park Nicollet clinic in Minneapolis.  At every PT appointment, I was required to fill out a form. One of the sections on this form asks questions related to difficulty, from "severe" to "not a problem," with about a dozen "basic life activities." None of these activities involve sex. 

I asked my PT why not. He explained that the list focuses on the "most common" activities. The list includes opening a jar of pickles and tying a necktie. I gave up ties when I retired, and I like pickles as much as the next guy, but....seriously?

"Attractive young woman" is in the eye of the beholder.
Meet Eva Braun, all-star of proctology. 

At my annual physical, my primary-care doc, an attractive young woman who carefully examines my scrotum and anus, asks me all kinds of questions about alcohol, drugs, and whether I "feel safe at home," but none about my sex-life. One time I asked her if she was at all curious about my sex-life (which, by the way, is perfectly "normal" for a guy who has been married 45 years man, i.e., a couple times a week when my wife isn't pissed off at me for not taking out the garbage or something). My doc didn't answer yes or no, but was clearly uncomfortable with my question and quickly changed the subject.

I doubt that my experience, with Medica & Park Nicollet is uncommon. But given the close relationship between sexual health and overall health I think it is indicative of a huge gap in our health care system. It amazes me that my health care professionals are so squeamish about a basic life function. 

Mad Marvin, Episode 3

After his last essay, Mad Marvin fell silent for quite awhile, and I had hope that he'd perhaps gone back to his deep woods cabin to work on his manifesto once again. But late last week this piece arrived, which we now present to you in edited form—the editor


I'm Mad Marvin, dammit.

After two previous articles, each time you guys who read this site have implied, sort of, that I'm an out-of-control (rectum). And I have to tell you I've been hurt by that. Throwing hot coffee on a right-wing, Christian fundamentalist, gay-hating, stinky douche-bag? What's the big deal?  One or two occasional outbursts—which were really goddamn warranted, if you ask me—and you get labeled as some kind of psychotic anarchist. (Excrement).

It hurts for you guys think of me like that. Am I not human?  Do I not bleed? (Actually, because of the blood-thinners my dork-of-a-doctor makes me take, I bleed MORE than the rest of you). Yeah, I'm a little impulsive at times. And I bet you're jealous.

But I'm not the  out-of-control fellow, full of Tourettes-barking episodes, that you all think I am. (I now have a drug that helps that.)  To prove to you that I have much more self-control than you give me credit for, I'm going to tell you a bunch of things that I DID NOT say and do over the last few weeks.

• When some jerk waiting at the stop light threw his cigarette butt out of the window of his car, rather than into his car's ashtray, I DID NOT:   get out of my car, pick up the smoldering cigarette butt, and toss through his open car window, into his lap, with the words "Cigarette butts are not biodegradable, you stupid (euphemism for penis). What gives you the (fornicating) right to litter our streets with the trash from your filthy (fornicating) habit?"

• When a big blubbery man walking ahead of me out at Tractor Supply hit the automatic door-opener at the exit door—the one REAL disabled people are supposed to use— I DID NOT SAY "Hey lard-ass. Too hard to open the door yourself? If you did things for yourself rather than taking the easy way out, you maybe wouldn't be so (fornicating) fat.

• When a  woman passed by me on the street wearing skin-tight black spandex pants and apparently no underwear, I DID NOT SAY: "Christ lady, do you want me to take up a collection to buy you a mirror so you can see what you look like before you leave the house? Nobody in the this world wants to see your goodies."

• When my 75-year old neighbor mows the lawn in his bright red Speedo and wearing nothing else but a gold chain around his sweaty, wrinkled neck, I DO NOT SAY: "It's time to die, Fred."

• When trying to eat my Magnificent Seven breakfast at the Perkins restaurant off of highway 36 last month,  and the couple next to me began to change the shitty diaper on their slack-jawed two year old—on the table. I DID NOT: get up, open my fly and begin urinating in their orange juice. And I DID NOT SAY to the father:  "Christ almighty, you in-bred barbarians. Why the (fornication) don't you and your sister/wife pack up your 1993 mini-van and go the (fornication) back that Podunk in Arkansas where baby shit on the dining room table is normal?

See, I am perfectly capable of restraint.