Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

Down with Politicians!

 Posted by at 11:44  Down with
Feb 102015
 

 

“My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there’s hardly any difference.” Harry S. Truman

It’s less than a month until the election and I can’t wait until it is over. In California, elections are just like elections in China. It doesn’t really matter how you vote because the Democrats will win. Oh, you will find the occasional Republican but they are just eunuchs kept around just to keep us mindless sheep believing that they have a choice. The only Republicans you see these days are neutered and declawed house pets whose existence is tolerated only because they are powerless and evil. Those few Republicans don’t matter because Democrats run all the governments, government agencies and boards and wield the real power in the State.. California is insolvent, hamstrung by over regulation and irrational as a menopausal woman but since Republicans are universally regarded as dictatorial nut jobs who want to tell everybody else what to do, the good citizen’s of California continue to vote for the ‘nice’ Democrats as the state rushes over the proverbial fiscal cliff.

Nothing much can save California from it’s fate. Wave to us when we go down.

Still the election is annoying. But it’s not the politicians. We don’t get any Presidential campaign ads here because Hell will freeze over before a Republican candidate wins the state. The President only comes here to raise money from the glitterati. There is no need to campaign.  We do have a Senator running this year but she won’t deign to hold a debate with her challenger and she certainly doesn’t need to spend her money on advertising in one-party China—err California. In any other state, she would be in trouble. Heck, she’s 79. She probably can’t hold a thought in her head these days but in the Senate, it hardly matters. She is a grand party hack and we can look forward to seeing her drooling and nodding on C-Span for another six years. At least she used to matter unlike our other Senator who was never brighter than a concrete block.

But it’s not the elections.

http://www.pasadenaweekly.com/cms/story/detail/left_coast/11549/So, it’s not the elections or the candidates that annoy in California. We are spared all that. No, the big annoyance in California is the initiatives. Initiatives are where the people (read big corporations and scions of corporate fat cats) create confusing and emotion-laden amendments to the State constitution. Initiatives have always been big in California but lately it seems that the only important decisions come from this process, not from our highly paid, full time legislature. These folks, who you wouldn’t hire to flip burgers can’t be bothered with making and keeping a budget. They have more important duties to perform- like deciding what our schools ought to teach, what our kids can eat at school and whether we can get plastic bags at the grocery store. They leave the fiscal matters to the voting public. This election we have eleven State measures for consideration- three of them tax increase measures.

Do they think we are stupid?  Hell yes they do.

To me it is ridiculous to even ask Californians to pay more taxes. We already have the highest taxes in the Country and what we get for those taxes is the most arrogant and abusive bureaucrats money can buy. More tax money will only make it worse and if all the money we pour down the rat hole of public education can’t raise the performance of our schools, why should we give them any more?

The other propositions are a mixed bag of feel good overload. They want to repeal the death penalty to mirror the reality of our failing judicial system that prevents us from effectively punishing bad guys. They want to water down three strikes and protect us from genetically engineered foods. I don’t so much mind voting on these measures as I do the criminal misrepresentation in the advertising. Tax increases will always go for schools in the ads whatever the measure actually says. It takes days of analysis to decipher the intent of each since both the for and against explanations are complete fabrications. I generally conclude that the safest action is to vote no. In most cases, it will keep things from getting worse.

Take Warning! California is doomed.

So that’s the election perspective from the land of fruits and nuts on the left coast. Californians still believe that the Golden State is an inspiration for the nation instead of a dead weight anchor and so we continue one-party rule, slow decline into third world status and squandering what is left of our money on idealistic foolishness like the bullet train. I still hope for signs of intelligent life among the voters here but I certainly won’t hold my breath. Unless the voters tell the politicians where to stick their tax increases, I won’t believe that California can come back. But then if the President is reelected, there won’t be anything to come back to. California will have led the way again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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Feb 102015
 

Hail to the Chief.

Photo taken by me as an example of a stay at h...

Stay at home  Dad (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Once a year we honor the creator of Cantankerous Old Coots; the one man responsible for this exercise in extreme folly who has led the way of Cantankerousity for all of us constrained by boring convention and insipid politeness.

Continue reading »

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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Feb 102015
 

Se la vie

Life has a way of slapping you in the face just when you think everything is under control. During our stay in France, for the first time in our foreign travels there wasn’t a Starbucks. Whenever we saw a Starbucks, we asked ourselves why anyone would want to visit Starbucks when there so many good places to get coffee in Buenos Aires or Rome. In France, while there were many places to get coffee, if you wanted a croissant to go with it, it wasn’t so simple.

You needed to visit a boulangerie (bakery) and then take your croissant to the coffee shop. Since everyone (meaning the French) understands that there is no explanation provided to anyone else. You have to figure it out yourself. Somehow it never worked out so smoothly when we tried it. Once in while you would find a lunch type cafe where you could get coffee along with your sandwich or pastry but these were not the norm. Now that I reflect on our French experience it is clear why it wasn’t until we visit France that we missed the Amercan ambience of Starbucks. Continue reading »

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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Dec 232014
 

I don’t know about you but I’m fed up with Search Engine Optimization, Page Rank and kowtowing to the great god Google. What do they want from me? What do they want from the world and can anything stop them?

Google says their mission is ‘to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.’ Did you ever hear anything more like big brother in your life? Even Obama hasn’t suggested doing this as he eliminates the private sector economy. And these clever people at Google have figured out how to make us pay for it without thinking unlike those clumsy and ineffective taxes the government uses to get our money.

But back to the SEO. Have you read the helpful instructions you can find everywhere on the web about how to make Google happy?  Even if you read them, do you have a clue about what Google really wants? You hear all the time that if you create high quality content, the web is a piece of cake but when you begin to study SEO you learn that it is bull crap because Google can’t read and wouldn’t know good writing from from the typing of 10,000 monkeys. If you write good copy but fail to appease the god Google, nobody will ever find you, read you and appreciate your effort. Why bother?

To make Google happy, don’t waste your time refining your prose because writing is old fashioned and irrelevant. Nobody cares because thanks to Google, nobody will know that it even exists. If you want to be successful you have to pack your collection of words (why even call it writing?) with a  word or phrase that somebody might search for. Salt enough of those keywords throughout your word aggregation and Google will send you readers. No muss, no fuss and best of all, no tedious writing effort. Anything will do.

Google has spawned a whole new industry of products and services to help witless people with more money than they can spend to propagate their word aggregations around the web to provide ‘credibility’ (in the form of back links) to your aggregations. Put those mutated word aggregations in enough places and rearrange their words in enough ways and Google will reward you with a higher page rank. Just like the annoying TV ads that finally get etched into your brain and make you mindlessly grab the products when you shop, if you saturate the web with your word aggregations, you overwhelm the competition and achieve value to Google.  After all nothing else matters any more.  And all it took was a few hundred dollars and some software.

So today I say to Google, ‘Do no harm’. If Google can’t read and won’t even try to learn, then stop pretending that Google knows how to find value and content. Call a spade a spade. Google isn’t about writing or content – unless you value keywords. I can’t get too excited about them but then, I’m a Coot. They are probably all that Tweet- addled Gens X and Y can handle. Google doesn’t care a rat’s ass for writing. What Google loves is picture frames for keywords.

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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(Fed) Up With Snow!

 Posted by at 01:38  Up With
Dec 232014
 
California Snow- March 2011

California Snow - March 2011

It's hard to have fun in the snow

“A lot of people like snow. I find it to be an unnecessary freezing of water.” Carl Reiner

Coots don’t expect much!

When you are a Cantankerous Old Coot, you don’t expect the world to do you any favors. Age and experience teach that if it is possible for something to go wrong, then it will go wrong. More likely than not- very, very wrong. One of the excuses people make for living in California is that snow is optional. Unlike most of the rest of America, Californian’s can be sure that the only snow they see is the snow they wish to see. That’s been my story for over 30 years.  Why change t now?

All those years without snow can produce a selective blindness about the reality of snow, a naive innocence encouraged by too many Hallmark Christmas cards and perhaps a touch of senility. As a result, my family decided to vacation in the snow.

And sometimes what they expect is entirely wrong.

The idea was that March would be an ideal time to enjoy the beauty of the high Sierra snow with none of the inconveniences. Typically, the snow holds on at the end of Winter but the snowfall stops keeping roads clear and the air warm for any winter activities..

This year Mother Nature had different ideas. Our plans for ski lessons, snowshoeing, snowmobiling and fishing went awry after the first day. After one day out and about enjoying the beauty and planning the rest of the week, the blizzard hit.   Each day new snow and freezing temperatures kept us cabin bound. We experienced the full impact of winter during the rest of our short 5 day trip. Each day marked another foot of snow on our cars, hot tub and  picnic table. Each day we watched the snowplows block the driveway until the cabin owner arrived to clear our path. Each day we watched the news, hoping for a break in the weather that would free us from confinement.  It didn’t come.

I have renewed respect for Mother Nature.

Finally as we reached the end of our vacation, I was able to shake off the wonder and recognize that snow is a worthy and irrepressible opponent. It had gained control over our lives and would show no mercy.  I rediscovered that even the soft fluffy flakes that looked so beautiful in the palm of my hand were lethal in a pack. I remembered my misadventures driving in snow when I was much younger. I remembered getting stuck and fighting to keep from collisions on icy roads. And I decided that it was time to return to my snow-optional home a mere 70 miles away.

Snow is fine.  I just don’t need to be in it.

Snow is beautiful. Snow makes winter sports possible and quite interesting when you are watching on TV.  Snow is a helpful tool for storing Winter precipitation for Spring and Summer release. But fun in the snow is not a necessary component of my happy life

 


 

Ralph

Ralph is the inspiration for Cantankerous Old Coots and is our Grand Duke of Cantankerousness

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