Chicago. Day One

Giordano’s Pizza is famous in Chicago. I had some yesterday. Wow. Then I was forced to return to the hotel and hit the treadmill for 3 miles out of fear that had I not, I would have been dead by sundown. It’s the sort of food that you instinctively know is terribly bad for you, but it tastes so danged good, you can’t stop yourself. Our waiter reminded us that, “We deliver our pizza’s frozen anywhere in the world in 24 hours. Just pop it in the oven for an hour and it’s done.” I resisted the urge to join the “Pizza-A-Week” club.

So far I haven’t seen much of Chicago. I took a long walk down Michigan Avenue but the fog was so thick I could only see 10 stories or so of each 50 story building. The view from my 22^nd floor window is of the lovely air-conditioners on the roof of the Chicago Harley Davidson building. Last night at the welcome cocktail party/dinner I stood in various long lines for ten minutes each to be treated to tiny plates full of appetizers. There was a Greek salad station, an egg roll station, a pasta station, and a station that featured tiny, half dollar sized pizzas. Giordano’s need not worry about the competition.

Then it was off to watch the Presidential debate. I spent the entire time texting back and forth with my son, no Romney fan he. According to the Twitter chatter from his decidedly liberal buddies, Obama got schooled. The best part was watching the pundit class afterwards. From their expressions you would have thought that all of their children had been abducted at the same exact moment that they received word that their mothers had all passed away. Over on PBS poor David Brooks was positively pail at the shock of having just seen the man with the best pants crease in history get mauled by someone named Mitt. George Stephanopoulos looked as though he was ten seconds away from the first live vomit in the history of television news. Chris Matthews was reduced to blaming Obama’s dismal performance on the fact that he doesn’t watch enough MSNBC. Haven’t seen the news this morning but I’m sure at some point today some liberal will remind us that the near unanimous conclusion that Romney won the debate is more proof of how irredeemably racist America remains.

OK, now it’s time to get down to business. From 8:30 to 12:30 I will listen to the wise men at Cambridge tell me how great it is to be in Chicago at a hotel that charges me $14.95 per day for internet. Which explains why I am typing this at 6:30 in the bar of the lobby. Free WiFi. Are you kidding, I could buy half of a medium Giordano’s pepperoni and sausage for that. Psshht!

My Annual Compliance Meeting. Boredom On Stilts.

Early tomorrow morning I will fly to Chicago to attend the annual compliance meeting for my Broker-Dealer. Ahh, Chicago. The Windy City, Chi-Town, hog butcher for the world. Stormy, husky, brawling, city of the big shoulders, Frank Sinatra’s kind of town, Chicago is. The weather forecast seems straight out of central casting, windy with some rain, high temperature in the middle fifties by Friday.

The Cubs and the White Sox will have closed up shop by the time I arrive, another year without October baseball. There’s a big college football game at Soldier Field between Notre Dame and Miami Saturday, so maybe I’ll pick up a scalped ticket for that. There’s a dinner at the House of Blues one night. There’s the magnificent mile of Michigan Avenue and the incredible architecture along the Chicago River. But basically I’ll be there for four days and nights to punch my compliance ticket for 2012. I’ll sit through five or six mind-numbingly boring presentations by various BD functionaries, after which I will have my name tag swiped by some computer gizmo that proves to the FINRA crowd that I have completed my Firm Element. The fact that you can’t understand I word I just said, dear reader, tells you everything you need to know about what kind of trip this will be.

To pass the time and preserve my sanity, I will be aided immeasurably by the recently departed Steve Jobs, may he rest in peace. My iPhone will allow me to communicate to the outside world, and to record my quirky insights and pithy observations. I will then include them in a series of blog posts designed not only to make you laugh, but more importantly, to steer me away from the more dangerous outposts of my fevered imagination. I have found through the years that whenever I am forced to sit through long meetings, my mind tends to wander into the bad neighborhoods of the mind, the fever-swamps of boredom, where all of the residents are diseased and all of the buildings are government housing. Satire and sarcasm, for me, is a defense mechanism against boredom, and ladies and gentlemen, an annual compliance meeting with Cambridge Investment Resource is boredom on stilts.

So, tomorrow morning, wheels up at 8:05. You can read all about it right here, safely protected from the Chicago Marriot and speakers who use words like “new paradigm”.

My weekend in West Virginia

Pam and I spent the weekend in a cabin in West Virginia where the leaves were already bright orange and where the temperature forced us to wear long sleeves all day. Somebody else prepared all of our meals for us, and the entire three days didn’t cost us a penny. Oh, and we shared the cabin with 23 high school seniors from Burke Community Church, and Matt Watson was in charge.

Matt invited us to come along on his “senior retreat” weekend and to lead this group of kids in a Bible study. At first, I was hesitant. It’s been quite a while since I spent a weekend with teenagers. I’m so glad I agreed to go. A few observations:

I’m not sure what the cause is, whether it’s a result of so many of the students being from military families maybe, but these were 23 of the most well-mannered teenagers I have ever been around. I never heard one rude put down, never saw one example of the insensitivity that teenagers are so famous for. Indeed, there was almost an atmosphere of tenderness about these kids. Whatever the cause, it certainly speaks well of their parents, and for them as individual human beings. Very impressed. The Bible study went well. The kids seemed totally engaged with the topic ( grace ), and volunteered many amazing insights that had me half convinced that I could have learned a thing or two if one of them had taught the subject. Amazing.

The most gratifying aspect of the weekend was seeing Matt Watson interacting with his students. When Matt was part of the youth group here at Grove all those years ago, I could sense that there was something unique about him, that he was destined to do great things. Now, he’s the father of two little ones, and hip deep in teenagers at a vibrant church in northern Virginia. One would have to travel far and wide to find someone so happy in his work. Matt found his calling in youth ministry, and it radiates from his face. To see a young man so committed, so fulfilled in such vital work was an inexpressible blessing. He serves along side another equally impressive young man, Kenneth, who teaches the college kids at Burke, as well as an amazingly hard working volunteer, Doris, who was in charge of feeding us all. With that kind of quality help, even I could have pulled off such a weekend! To see one of my favorite kids of all time so happy, so effective, and so squarely in the center of God’s will was something to behold.

Thanks for the invite Matt!

A Useful Idiot

Nothing is more valuable to the New York Times than a conservative opinion writer who constantly rags on conservatives. For this purpose, David Brooks is ideally suited. The “conservative voice” at the Times is constantly distancing himself from the rubes from his side of the ideological aisle, when he’s not displaying his man-crush on the President. This works beautifully for the Times and David Brooks. The Times gets to respond to people who complain about their liberal bias by pointing to Brooks and saying, “Look, there. We have a conservative opinion writer on our staff!!” Brooks on the other hand gets to enjoy the celebrity that comes with being every liberal’s favorite conservative, and the cocktail party invitations that come with that distinction.

The other day, Brooks was in full-throated, hand-wringing mode about the latest shortcomings of his conservative brethren, when he came up with this jewel:

“There are very few Republicans willing to use government to actively intervene in chaotic neighborhoods, even when 40% of American kids are born out of wedlock”

　

Can I ask you a question David? Why, when you see destitute inner city neighborhoods where 40% of all births are to unwed mothers, do you instantly look to the federal government as the fount of all solutions? Does it ever occur to you, that this scandal might be the result OF 40 years of government policy? Does not the well intentioned welfare regime of the Great Society bear SOME of the responsibility for what has become of these neighborhoods? From food stamps to aid to mothers with dependant children programs, these neighborhoods are already the victims of active government intervention. Instead of instinctively assuming that the only possible solutions to poverty come from Washington, does it ever occur to you that maybe we should look to institutions that are a bit closer to the problem? What role might the churches in these neighborhoods play in combating the problem of out of wedlock births? And what about the governments that are closer to the problem: city councils, and State governments. Would giving the parents of kids in these neighborhoods the opportunity to remove their kids from the failing government run schools help turn the tide?

No, David, for you, the only possible remedy for societies ills is to double down on the 40 year strategy of throwing money at the problem with programs conceived and run by the federal government, regardless of the record of failure they have wracked up. Since 1964 and the onset of the War On Poverty, this nation has thrown 15 TRILLION dollars at the inner cities. Today, the poverty rate is virtually unchanged from what it was then. But despite that dismal record, you chastise your fellow republicans for being unwilling to promote yet more “active intervention”.

Enjoy your status and those lovely Manhattan cocktail parties David, but sorry, you’re a tool.

How About THIS Idea??

   " The Mystery of Government is not how Washington works, but how to make it stop."
                                 
                                                                                                     P.J. O'Rourke
　

　
When our founding fathers wrote our constitution, they identified only three federal crimes: treason, piracy, and counterfeiting. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the total number of federal crimes numbered in the dozens. Today, there is literally no reliable, definitive number, since the federal code is over 27,000 pages long. In 2011 alone, 40,000 additional federal laws were placed on the books by our elected officials. Ignorance of the law may not be an excuse, but it sure ought to be a mitigating factor! The best guess that I could find while researching this business was 1,298,000 federal laws…give or take a million.

When Moses descended from Mount Sinai all those years ago, he brought with him the Ten Commandments. Soon, the Levitical laws and rules had ballooned the original ten to over 600. By the time Jesus came along, that number had been blown up by a torrent of rules and regulations handed down by the Pharisees, prompting our Savior to say this:

“ …Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”
                       
                                                                                Matthew 22:37-40

It is claimed by apologists for the present system that our politicians are simply responding to the demands of the citizenry for protection against bad men with bad intent. We are to blame for the ponderous size of our federal code. We the people have demanded rules and rules we now have, rules that cover every possible activity of daily living from the size of our toilet paper to the size of our Big Gulps. So how come the existence of over a million rules has not brought with it safety, consensus, and the pursuit of happiness?

Here’s an idea. How about we declare a one year moratorium on the passage of any more laws? How about we give every elected official a year off, with pay? They all work so hard. I know because every one of their commercials tell me so: “ Eric Cantor. Working hard for working families.” “ Tim Kaine has been working for Virginia for years, creating well-paying jobs for Virginia families.” It sounds exhausting! Why don’t we give all of them some well-deserved R&R? Let’s see what would happen if we went 12 months without passing any more laws. Could the Republic survive 12 months if our Senators and Congressmen, Assemblymen and City Council members stayed home? We could put everything on auto-pilot. Keep funding levels where they are. Of course the bureaucrats would still have to come to work to keep the government functioning, but how about we give our law-makers a year off from all that law making?

It would be weird hearing no speeches on C-SPAN. Meet The Press would probably have to shut down. Fox News and MSNBC would have to find something else to scream about. Poor lobbyists would be out of work too, since there wouldn’t be anyone to lobby. Imagine. Maybe after a whole year apart, our elected officials might actually miss each other. Republicans and Democrats might discover that the other guys weren’t all that bad after all. Maybe absence would make the political heart grow fonder and perhaps less rude and obnoxious. And maybe after a year without our government trying to pass laws to help us, we will all relearn how to help ourselves, and each other. Maybe. Maybe not. Either way, the cooling off period will do us all some good. Harry Reid will finally have time to work on his stamp collection. Mitch McConnell can devote some time to his passion for oil painting. Hillary Clinton will have the time to hit up the gym to lose that fifty pounds she’s packed on traveling the world. A year without campaign commercials might just be the tonic America needs.

We Are All Replacement Refs

Awesome photograph. This picture perfectly encapsulates where we are as a nation in 2012. Two overwhelmed people looking at the same event, the same set of facts, and coming to wildly different conclusions.

Last night, the final play of the Packers-Seahawks game came down to this photograph. The splendid rookie quarterback, Russell Wilson, lofted a last second, Hail Mary towards the corner of the end zone with no time on the clock and his team down 12-7. The intended receiver, Golden Tate shoves a defender in the back just before leaping in the air to catch the ball. However, the football lands in the waiting hands not of Tate, but of Packers safety M.D. Jennings. They tumble to the ground and these two replacement officials, standing directly over the pile of players make their calls simultaneously...one ref signals touchdown, the other a touch back. Replays seemed to show rather conclusively that Jennings had, in fact, intercepted Wilson's pass. But after a 10 minute delay, the terrified referee touched the button on his microphone and told a deliriously happy home crowd that the horrible call he had just made would stand. End of game, but not the end  of story.

The twitter universe that I am contemplating joining went apoplectic with rage and indignation. The replacement officials were making a mockery of the game, Roger Goddell should be executed, this was the biggest miscarriage of justice since the acquittal of OJ Simpson, these Division II referees were totally overwhelmed by the speed of the professional game, completely out of their depth and had lost control of the game. Actually, I feel for these guys...because everyday that I wake up and go to work and try to live my modern life, I feel an awful lot like a replacement ref.

I often feel overwhelmed with the speed of life in 2012. I too, feel completely out of my depth, and everyday it's a struggle to maintain control of my slice of the world. Replacement officials...I feel your pain. One minute, you're a perfectly happy and contented Division II referee getting psyched up for the big Randolph Macon v. Hampden Sydney tilt coming up in Ashland next Saturday. Suddenly, you get a call from some really nice man from the NFL asking you if you would be interested in becoming a referee at the highest level of the game. It would be great and you would be doing the NFL a big favor, says the nice man. Plus, they promise to pay you ten grand per game! It's a dream come true, the opportunity of a life time. The next thing you know, you're standing over a pile of yellow and blue uniforms with 65,000 intoxicated, fanatical lunatics screaming their lungs out at you with the outcome of a game hanging on your decision. For a slow-motion instant, silent and dreamlike, you're back in Ashland throwing a flag on the Yellow Jackets for having too many men on the field. You wonder what you possibly could have been thinking when you said "yes" to that nice man from the NFL.

Did the refs blow the call last night? Yes. Did they call too many penalties during the game? Yes. Will the fiasco at the end of the game distract from the amazing grit and determination of a rookie QB driving his team to victory in just his third NFL start? Unfortunately, yes. Do these replacements deserve all the blame for the horrible situation in which they find themselves? No, no...a thousand times ..NO! Mr. Goddell, pay the real refs, and stop being the story. The players, and the fans deserve better.

My Great Day At The Ballpark

In a fit of generosity, my brother decided a while back to buy me a ticket to see a Nationals game. We are both stubborn, rabid baseball fans, the kind who illicit lots of eye-rolling from our friends and family when we get started quoting the starting lineup on opening day for the 1955 Yankees, or when we hold forth on the various theories concerning the philosophical underpinnings of the sacrifice bunt. So, I have been totally geeked up about this game for weeks now. The plan was for my best friend, my brother-in-law and me to meet Donnie at the centerfield gate around noon yesterday. This would involve us riding the infamous D.C. Metro from Franconia to the Pentagon, switching from the blue line to the yellow line, then switching once again to the green line at some place called “L’enfant Plaza” and then cruising into the Navy yard station that drops you off a mere 200 yards from the center field fence. To my amazement this potentially disastrous trek came off without incident, so at roughly 12:15 I spotted Donnie’s waving hand amongst the sea of red curly W’s. The sky was bright blue, the sun was out and it was 65 degrees.

We spent an hour or so enjoying the beautiful ballpark. Not only is National’s Park gorgeous, the atmosphere was buzzing with the enthusiasm that only comes with being a contender. The Nats have the best record in the big leagues. I’ve watched at least parts of all of their games on MASN and now I was finally getting the opportunity to see them in person. The magic number was 6 at start of play on September 23. All year I have watched the dominant pitching staff make National League hitters look silly. Stephen Strasburg, Gio Gonzales, Jordan Zimmerman, And Edwin Jackson make up a rotation that has been the envy of baseball. So who do we get to see towing the rubber on this beautiful day??? Some guy named Chien-Ming Wang. I should have viewed it as an omen of things to come, but, lost in the moment, I celebrated the diversity that is big league baseball in 2012. It was time for lunch.

We settled on Hebrew National hot dogs, a side of nachos and a Sam Adams Oktoberfest draft. Then it was time to go find our seats. Donnie had told me that we would be sitting on the second level between home plate and first base. I naturally conjured up images of myself catching numerous fowl balls off the bats of fooled Brewer right handed hitters. What I hadn’t counted on was A. the inability of Chien-Ming Wang to fool hitters, and B. the physical impossibility for a baseball to travel from the field of play to the location of our seats. See, my brother is not able to buy baseball tickets or anything else on-line. He says that this is because he is afraid someone will steal his identity. What that actually means is…he doesn’t know how. If he did he could have gotten on the Nationals’ fine, easy-to-use website and picked out a seat that in fact WAS on the second level between home plate and first base. No, Donnie prefers talking to a real person, the human interaction crucial to our well-being. So, he bought our tickets from “Flo” in promotions.

We began our climb at roughly 12:55. We were in section 321. The signs were confusing. There were rumors of an escalator, but we couldn’t find it. Instead, we took the winding switchback walkways and followed the arrows pointed upward. After twenty minutes or so, and after passing the disturbing skeletal remains of a long dead Senators fan, we finally arrived at our seats. We were on the front rail of the nose-bleed section roughly a thousand feet from the first base bag. Bob Uecker was making fun of our seats. But, it didn’t matter. We were at a big league baseball game, and I was having a blast. Then it got ….weird.

Suddenly for no apparent reason a whole section of fans in section 450 burst into hysterically raucous applause. The four of us immediately began to squint down at the field to see what we had missed, but there was no one on base and nothing of import had transpired. However, two batters later the Nationals turned one of the most amazing, exciting double plays in the history of the game that ignited the crowd into a frenzy. Later, from an usher, we learned that the fans in section 450 were a group in town for the National Association of Psychic Mediums convention ( NAPM ). A couple of innings later, the NAPM crowd let out an ominously deflated groan. We watched Bryce Harper lose a ball in the sun two batters later. These people were spoiling the game for us! It should be against the law for the clairvoyant to attend baseball games Meanwhile, our man Wang, displaying the most laborious windup in history, did not impress. During the long delays between him getting the sign and actually pitching the ball, I found time to Google this mysterious man from Taiwan. I discovered that late in 2006 Wang revealed that he had discovered that he was the biological son of a man who he had always thought was his uncle. The Taiwanese press apparently had a field day with this revelation. Mysteriously, Wang has struggled to get hitters out ever since.

By the fifth inning I was ready for more food. I laid down $20 for a chili covered bratwurst with cheese and onions drizzled over the top just because. As I was settling back into my seat, the psychics were exasperated by some soon to be revealed catastrophy. Sure enough, Jayson Werth proceeds to lose a ball in the sun and two more runs score for the Brewers. The good news was, Donnie was slowly but surely getting over his altitude sickness, and was reporting that feeling had returned to his extremities.

Yes, the Nationals lost the game 6-2. And yes, our four seats just happened to be the only seats in the stadium that remained in the shade the entire game, and yes, the high winds whipping off of the Anacosta river did enter into the stadium through section 321, and said winds were responsible for most of our nose bleeds and head aches, the bottom line was simple…we had a great day at the ballpark.