Jul 292014
 
Cute Skaterboy and Girl - Nike Shoot
Image by vanessa_hutd via Flickr

The arrogance of youth

You know the ones I mean. Those skinny high school and college kids you see working at the supermarket or fast food place. The ones with the skinny asses barely big enough for one back pocket, let alone two. They can hardly keep their pants up because there is nothing to hang them on. These guys can and will eat anything and never gain a pound. With the arrogance of youth, these guys believe that they will never let themselves get out of control. They will never get fat.  They look at old guys with bellies as failures. You can see it in their eyes, drawn to your bulging belly when you order a tasteless salad and diet coke. They are thinking “Fat loser.” A pox on those guys.

Getting big is inevitable

As the years pile on it seems like just looking at something tasty adds a pound or two. There is always another temptation to resist and even when you apply all the will power you can muster you keep having to buy bigger pants . Worse, even those bigger pants can’t contain a belly you can’t suck in anymore. In fact it it is starting to lop over an over-stressed belt. Even with starving and denying yourself the pleasures of desert or a second helping of lasagna, the truth is hard to hide. You are fat!

It wouldn’t be so bad being fat so long as it meant that you could eat what you like. The reality is in the vain hope of getting back to skinny, you cut back and eat what is supposed to be healthy stuff and give up eating what you really want; ice cream, french fries, hamburgers and pasta. Even with all that deprivation, you are still fat. The consolation is that if you indulged your appetite and ate what you crave, you would be even fatter – a double-wide instead of a mere wide body.

Remember the good old days

It wasn’t always like this. Back in high school, and even college, 32 inch jeans would hang on your hipbones and three or four burgers would be an evening snack. Cheesecake? Ice cream? It was all good. Well, times change and one day you notice that you aren’t skinny any more. Those hipbones have some padding and you actually celebrate no longer being a wimp. Then a year or so later you develop bulges. Your cheeks are fuller, you sport a definite belly. Those 32 inch jeans are a distant memory. You are getting fat. Maybe it is time for a diet.

That is when it gets crazy because you still think of yourself as the skinny kid who can eat anything. You are in denial and imagine that with a little diet you can get back to your old self. You starve. You diet. Maybe you even take up exercise – running or weights but the sad truth is that you are never getting your skinny body back. Your metabolism has moved on, slowed down and is prepared to turn anything you eat into beautiful, bulging fat. You have a choice. You can be an unhappy fat man, eating rabbit food feeling deprived as you try to maintain your current level of overweight or a happy obese man eating what you like and getting bigger every day. It is a curse.

Their day will come

So I say down with those skinny guys. Those kids working at the supermarket or the fast food places, flaunting their lean bodies and gratifying their young appetites with whatever food takes their fancy. Each skinny ass just mocks your ample one billowing inside your elastic waist fat boy jeans. A pox on the lean waisted guy at the deli counter eying your big belly with disgust as you drool over the hefty sandwiches and rich potato salad and finally turn away, belly rumbling. Some days it is too much and you give in, flaunting your belly as you step up and and order a hefty sandwich, both potato and macaroni salad and a big wedge of cheesecake with cream soda to wash it down. Let him smirk at the shameless fat guy eating like a hog, you think as you stuff your gut happily. Let him feel superior with his youthful metabolism. His day will come.

I’ve come to accept that my skinny days are gone and never to return. I can live with eating tasteless , healthy food and still getting bigger. But I also have a way to handle those skinny guys with an attitude. Now I like to look at those skinny guys and see the future fat guys they are destined to be. I watch them fixing my lunch and imagine 50 pounds packed on their skinny frames. I smile at their double chins and flabby bellies. Let them feel superior. Time will put them in their place. Thirty years from now they will be where I am now, fat and hungry longing for something good to eat but longing to be the skinny guy they used to be. I know that I will pay for this lapse after eating a fattening snack and discovering when I let out my belt  that my pants are already stretched to capacity. Time to move up to bigger ones again. Skinny young guys will learn that lesson soon enough.

Ralph

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

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Jul 292014
 

Polls are everywhere these days.

Everywhere you look there are polls telling you what other people think and suggesting that you do likewise. They always look so trustworthy and reliable. But how good are they really and why should I care what they say? What am I? A lemming!

I’ve always been suspicious of poll numbers. It’s not that I don’t understand how numbers work. I’ve studied sampling and statistics and I believe that the theories pan out, so long as they really do what they are supposed to. But how can you really know?

What I’m suspicious of is who the polling companies actually call and whether the people they finally talk to bear any resemblance to the general population. There are many ways to cook the books and steer the conclusions your way by manipulating the sample. But even if the polling company is honest and unbiased, I still was uncomfortable with polls. What really gave me pause was that with all the polls being conducted over my lifetime, never did one of them call me.

Sure the sample numbers are small and it’s a big country we live in but not only have I never received a call from a pollster, I don’t know anybody who ever received a call from a pollster. Despite seeing representatives of polling organization on TV from time to time, I have no evidence that proves to my satisfaction that polls are real. For all I know they may be just as phony as the moon landing. From my perspective it is just as likely that polls are nothing but an elaborate hoax on the general public, intended not to inform but to manipulate behavior.

I think its a scam!

I can’t help wondering if polls are nothing more than a subversive scam on the general public. Behind the facade of statistical theory and polling questions is there nothing more complicated than hard core marketing designed to manipulate the minds and hearts of the unsuspecting public. Inquiring minds want to know.

After all, who can really know for sure that 37% of right handed voters in southern North Carolina really prefer candidate X? And what happens if 15% of those right handed voters in southern North Carolina lie? Supposedly from statistical theory this all washes out so long as you ask enough people but I still wonder how rigorously the machinery works in the back room- or if it is working at all. Who would know?

I used to be more tolerant.

In my youth, I was more respectful about our institutions. They were good enough for my parents generation, surely they would be good enough for mine. Something happens when you get old, however. I find myself more suspicious and less charitable. Part of it may be that I am now older than the people running these institutions. I can no longer make the excuse that they have more life experience or even wisdom. I flat our don’t trust those young whippersnappers. It’s pretty clear that they don”t have any mysterious wisdom and maturity.  And nothing suggests that they have my well-being in mind.

So I’m just not willing to grant any respect to polling numbers anymore. I don’t believe them. I don’t trust the integrity of the people running them and I absolutely and categorically hate the organizations that hire the pollsters to create lies, confusion and misdirection for the voters. So much for credibility.

There are liars, damned liars and statisticians but worst of all there are pollsters.

Ralph

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

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Jul 292014
 
Modern Day Hobos sleeping at the Hobo Jungle o...

Image via Wikipedia

I was watching TV last night.

Yeah, I know that it makes my brain rot but sometimes after a hard day trying to make my computer behave and write coherent sentences, it’s great to throw off the mental activity and watch a mindless crime show. This one started off simply enough but it soon got more complicated. It was about some evil middle class home owners who murder homeless people and their law student enabler.  This enabler who took time from his law classes to work at a homeless soup kitchen (in Malibu, where else) was suing the homeowners because they were mean to the homeless . (Naturally it is mean to expect the homeless to obey the laws and, of course it annoys the law enforcement community no end to be expected to enforce them.)   Everybody loves sweet homeless people and hates the money grubbing middle class. Right? Naturally the poor homeless people were just trying to get by. It was a hard life because once they finished eating at their ocean front food kitchen, they had to climb the hill to their sylvan homeless camp and darn if there wasn’t a small subdivision in the way.

Bummer!

No matter that they were breaking the laws by camping in the woods without permits. They have rights , you know. They were just doing what God made them to do. Rousseau would be proud. It was the homeowners who were evil. It made me realize that this whole country is going down the tubes when the popular media glorifies lawless, irresponsible behavior and demonizes hardworking people who actually work to earn a living, own property, pay taxes and raise their kids to do the same. What are they thinking?

Nobody rewards responsibility these days.

According to this TV show , those of us with money should pay $50k a year to send our kids to law school so that they can make the world safe for free spirits who take responsibility for nothing. My wife was incensed and excused herself to read in bed. “Stick around ,” I urged her. “You know its only fiction.” At this point the district attorney was emotional as he described the rage of ordinary middle class people seeing someone defecate on their yard. His condescension was unmistakable. “How dare they expect homeless people to behave responsibly?” he seemed to say. Elected public servants demonizing the people that pay them to maintain civilization. That has to be fiction, right?

Well I’m not so sure.

California is bankrupt, spending way more money than it takes in. The tax burden in California is one of the highest in the nation. You would think that this would provide plenty of money for government services but our elected leaders tell us it’s not true. It turns out that we spend too much money on law enforcement and public safety so to balance the budget, we either need to pay more taxes or wait two days for a fire truck or the 911 operator to answer. It seems that public safety is expendable. Government’s real function of to take care of people who can’t or won’t take care of themselves and demean the folks who do. The little secret is out. The state is run to make life pleasant for homeless people and other folks who refuse to take responsibility for their lives.

Responsibility: the new silent minority.

The only people making any effort to solve this problem are the ever shrinking minority of people who actually earn a living . And what do they get for this selfless act? They get the pleasure of being taxed into poverty just so the irresponsible can live the lifestyle they want. I don’t get it. Why do we bother? We are still living in the past, remembering the old days of responsible government, working hard and getting ahead. We can still remember when taxes were only 20% instead of the 60% today and the world was safe, the schools were good and you never saw homeless people defecating in public spaces or in your own yard.

Why be responsible?  It doesn’t make any sense.

There is no reason for a reasonable person to behave responsibly today. Private property is a burden with few benefits and many problems. Working is slavery and then you get most of your income taxed away. When you complain, the government tells you that you are heartless. Who is the government to tell us anything? In the old days they did what we told them to do and the Constitution wasn’t a living document to be rewritten by mealy mouthed statist judges. This isn’t the America that offered endless opportunity and freedom to be whoever you want to be. This is a gulag where people who try to be responsible are beat up and sucked dry so that the free and irresponsible can live without making any effort.

I didn’t sleep very well last night.

Maybe those computer problems weren’t so bad.

 

Ralph

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

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Jul 292014
 

George Carlin was an inconvenient nudge. Never constrained by conventional wisdom and most often delightfully sane in a crazy world. We need a truthteller like George who died in 2008. Here is his take on the environment and the planet.

” The planet is just fine- the people are f*****.”

Ralph

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

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Down with flying!

 Posted by at 18:09  Down with
Jul 292014
 

It’s not the airlines‘ fault that air travel is so demeaning and degrading. Blame it on the public for demanding cheap transportation. Think about the degrading humiliation that air travel inflicts on every traveler these days. It violates every tenant of customer service. What organization would go out of their way to insult and demean their customers as a business plan for success? Unthinkable, isn’t it? It is a formula for failure in every market except one – transportation.  In transportation we will accept any torture so long as you get us there cheap.

A recent trip reminded me just what humiliation we accept in exchange for cheap transportation. Young folks have no idea what air travel was like a mere twenty years ago when flying was civilized, passengers were treated like welcome guests and airlines competed by the amenities they offered. The new 747’s allowed airlines to offer passenger lounges – some with piano bars on trans-continental flights. Meals were offered on most long flights and though they were never much better than TV dinners, it was hot food, served with style and professionalism. TWA baked bread during the flights. Many airlines brought hot towels to refresh passengers at the end of the flight. Blankets and pillows were always available just by pushing the stewardess call button. Boarding was civilized as well because passengers checked baggage and carried only what they might need during the flight. You dressed up to fly because civilized people cared about their appearance and, of course, in those days you didn’t have to undress to get through security.  And this was flying coach.

In those days, people flew because they wanted to get from one place to another fast and they were willing to pay for the privilege. People that weren’t, rode the bus or the train. Those were wonderful days. Flying wasn’t cheap but it was civilized.

Contrast those days with my trip this week. Start with the luggage. Most airlines now penalize customers for checking bags with the natural result that every passenger boards the plane with all their worldly possessions in hand. Without baggage, you never have to check in and can go directly to security, easing the burden of providing service by the airlines but upping the burden on TSA. This makes you a nuisance if you do want to free yourself from lugging your bag through security to the gate and on the plane. Most airlines now charge you for that service. They want to have as little to do with you as possible. And if they must deal with you personally, you will pay for that privilege.

Boarding is shear hell. You stand in line waiting for your boarding call, then lug your baggage down the boarding tunnel and wait while all the people ahead of you stuff the compartments with their luggage and squeeze into their seats. Dante must be smiling as he watches this modern day hell. Arriving you just reverse the process until you reach the relative comfort and civilization of the terminal,  And we accept this! When we used to expect this.

What has brought us to this total breakdown of civilization we call flying? I think we asked for it. You ask how? Well come back on Monday to see what I think.

Ralph

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

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