The Democrat Debate

So, I didn't watch the first Democratic debate live because, well...baseball. But, yesterday I waded through a dozen or so highlight videos and read a handful of analysis pieces about the event. So, just like I did for the first two Republican debates, I will now offer up my take. It can be summarized with this statement...If anybody out there actually believes that someone besides Hillary Rodham Clinton will be the next President of the United States, think again.

There she was on a stage surrounded by Bernie Sanders and the three dwarves. The Bern looked every single day of his 74 years, literally yelling at everyone, as if he assumes that everyone is as hard of hearing as he is. His message hasn't changed for fifty years and it's the sort of political world view that one would expect from someone who chose the old Soviet Union for his honeymoon destination. He seemed to be running for President of Denmark, so fond is he of small Scandnavian Socialist countries. But I knew he wasn't going to be a serious rival to Hillary the very second he rushed to her defense over her "damned e-mails." He is just another vanity candidate, albeit a lovable one. Sanders has one thing that no other candidate has...the courage of his convictions. But he ain't winning the nomination, not after that kid's glove treatment of the only democrat currently standing in his way.

Then there was Martin O'Malley, the buff, handsome former Maryland governor who finally got his chance in the national spotlight. It was clear fifteen minutes in that he is running for Vice-President, practically screaming,"Pick me! pick me!!" He was polished and well spoken, and he seemed to think that his number one job as President would be to take everybody's guns away except for a handful of hunters in western Maryland. But he too treated Hillary Clinton like you treat someone who possesses explicit photographs of you having sex with farm animals, and knows how to use them.

Jim Webb, former Senator from the Old Dominion, is the kind of democrat candidate who could really have given Harry Truman a run for his money in 1948. This guy sounded more Republican than half of the Republicans candidates. My son made the pithy observation that he half expected Webb to pull out a 38 caliber handgun from his vest pocket to demonstrate the virtues of conceal carry laws! But I never much cared for Webb when he was my senator, he seemed too brutish, carried around too many grudges for my taste. By all accounts he is a smart, brave patriot, but what the heck was he doing on that stage?

Whatever he was doing, it made more sense than anything that Lincoln Chaffee was up to. Ahh yes, good old Lincoln, former Republican, former Independent, now nascent Democrat, running for the highest office in the land so he can usher the country safely into the bosom of the metric system...or something.

Which brings me back to Mrs. Clinton. She was the winner, or so I am constantly being told by the gushing coverage at CNN. She famously never sweats, and you wouldn't sweat either if you had the Clinton machine at your disposal. She looks for all the world to see like a woman who knows that she is going to be the first woman President of the United States, Benghazi or no Benghazi. She knows everyone's secrets, knows where all the bodies are buried, and thanks to an extremely weak democrat bench, her nomination is a lock. She also knows that there isn't a Republican who can beat her, despite what all these generic polls are saying. When it's time to actually vote, with the northeast and California already in the bag, she will ride the same coalition that swept Barack Obama into office...blacks, Hispanics, and women, and thanks to our newly minted immigration capitulation, there will be plenty of them to pad her margin of victory.

Generally speaking, the democrat party on display in Las Vegas wants:

1. Gun control

2. More immigration, lots more.

3. Free college education for all

4. Higher taxes on the rich

5. Nationalization of big banks, or something...

6. Get money out of politics, ( but not until after Hillary wins)

7. A new pledge of allegiance that acknowledges that only Black Lives Matter

8. Cabinet status for Planned Parenthood

This debate was Hillary's show and the next one will be too. All of us better get used to it.

My Shoe Buying Adventure

I bought these shoes from Shoe Carnival a little over two years ago. I liked them because they were discretely black, and therefore could be safely worn with anything, and they were only $65.99. The bright orange box they came in said that they were running shoes. In two years I've put close to a thousand miles on them either on the road or the treadmill, so it was time for some new ones. And since lately my feet have started to hurt the morning after a run at the gym, I thought perhaps I should consider some real running shoes. In other words, maybe it was time to stop buying my footwear at a store with the word Carnival in the name.

So, a couple days ago I set out to buy my first pair of legitimate running shoes at a store called Fleet Feet.I was the only customer in the place, so I had the undivided attention of the blade-thin marathon runner type who bounded from behind the counter to tell me the fascinating story of the evolutionary journey of the tennis shoe. After the history lesson, he guided me towards two tall racks of fluorescent colored running shoes, all of which seemed to have been painted by Jackson Pollock on a very bad day. Lots of blaze orange, lime greens and electric yellow. I owned not one piece of clothing that these shoes would work with except black work out shorts. Perhaps this is intentional on the part of the manufacturers. Maybe they only want the consumer to use their product for its intended purpose, so they make them so hideously ugly that you would never dream of doing any such thing. I stared at the tower of shoes before me searching for even the smallest patch of grey, hoping to find one without a giant angry slash splashed across the side. I finally settled on the least provocative pair...

For $126.99 I was the ambivalent new owner of the very latest in running shoe technology manufactured, no doubt, by a factory full of Chinese middle schoolers. The good part is, they are light as a feather. The bad part is, after my maiden voyage, a four-miler, my feet hurt every bit as much the next morning as they used to when I wore my old, boring black ones from Shoe Carnival. Maybe it's like the salesman said, that the souls of my feet needed to "get to know the cushion of the shoe" first before I will notice any improvement. Whatever. All I know is, for what I paid for these babies, I could have bought two pair from the Carnival and had money left over for a Pumpkin Spice Frappaccino from Starbucks.

Can You Google an Education?

Thanks to search engines like Google, there's no point in wondering about anything anymore. If a question pops into your head..."I wonder why there's a loop sewn into the back of my dress shirt," you can just Google it, and in less than thirty seconds, you'll find the answer. This raises the question, have search engines rendered traditional education obsolete? I suppose I could Google that too.

Younger people have become especially enamored with this fascinating technology, as you will discover if you ever get into an Internet argument with one of them. Suddenly, a kid who under normal circumstances couldn't write a single sentence without three grammar mistakes is suddenly pummeling you with brilliant paragraphs of information making your views on the designated hitter seem woefully ill-informed. You marvel at the speed and grace with which this generation has learned to cut and paste. Who knew that opposable thumbs would not only be the key to our dexterity as humans, but our ability to access information as well?

When I was getting my formal education, the place where all of this accessing information business took place was at the library. Now it's done at the local Buffalo Wild Wings on your cell phone between beers. The lucky kids when I was growing up were the ones who's parents had bought the complete set of encyclopedias from that door-to-door salesman from Brittanica. Now, they gather dust on the bookshelf, their leather bindings in perfect condition and the gold leaf paper still shiny and new like some sort of ornamental relic.

Lest anyone think that I believe this is all a bad thing, think again. Search engines have made my professional life so much easier. I benefit greatly from having information instantly available, and would hate to have to function without this awesome technology that we all now take for granted. But I'm troubled by my reliance on it nonetheless. Are human beings educated when they learn and know things that have been burned into their memory, or are they educated simply by knowing where to find information? Is reading Dostoevsky the same thing as Googling The Brothers Karamazov? Is having your father show you how to tie a Windsor knot better than Googling "How to tie a tie?"

How's this for a dystopian nightmare? Thirty years from now after an entire generation of humanity has been educated by search engines, a freak solar storm fries every circuit on Earth, wiping out the Internet. Will the knowledge base of humanity also be wiped out? How much will our collective memory be able to reliably recall? Since rote memorization went the way of the dinosaur, will humanity, after having its umbilical chord to the Internet severed, be rendered intellectually impotent? In the new internet-free world, will all of those dusty encyclopedias become the new Holy Books? What would become of civilization if we woke up one morning and there was no longer...an app for that?

Hopefully there will still be some folks around who went to the trouble of memorizing poetry. And that weird guy back in college who memorized the entire book of John...in Hebrew? He'll be the only employable religion professor on the east coast.

Ten Days and Counting

Waking up to 45 degrees is quite the beautiful thing. When what follows is clear, blue skies with the high topping out at 72, well, it doesn't get any better. This is the kind of weather that makes you want to hit the ground running, eager to discover what's in store. For me, it's a lot. In less than two weeks I'll be in a cabin in Gatlinburg, Tennessee with all of my kids for three days. The name of the place is "It's All Good." Indeed.

Preparations must be made. For Pam that means planning out the menus, buying as many of the ingredients as possible here, mixing together pancake mix ahead of time and putting it in clearly marked ziplock bags for assembly later, that sort of thing. That's just how she rolls. For me it means, planning out the itinerary. When will be the best time to go zip-lining? Go-Carts? The toboggan ride? Then, I have to get things at work to a place where it can be left for a while without any ensuing chaos.

This year, our Smokie Mountain getaway will feature two dogs, neither of which will be named Lucy. Our cabin is pet friendly, but allows only two dogs. Considering Lucy's rather poor performance a few months ago at the beach, she has been benched in favor of Jackson and Oliver. Jackson is Kaitlin and Jon's adorable English Cream Golden Retriever puppy. Oliver is Patrick's loaner dog, a ginormous brute of a Golden Retriever who he has been keeping for the past six months or so while his owner is doing lights on tour with Taylor Swift.( ahhh, Nashville life!) We've never met him, only seen pictures and videos. Patrick is smitten with the big guy and I believe it will be a difficult day when Oliver's owner comes back home to claim him.

So, we are all looking forward to three days together in this big honkin' cabin. The television won't get turned on the entire time unless we want to watch a movie, which means I won't have to listen to either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton running their pie-holes...always a good thing.

Ten days and counting!

My Family

This is my family. Every other summer all of us vacation at the beach together, and this is the picture we took from this past summer's trip. This isn't all of my family. My brother and all of his kids and all of their kids weren't there, which would have added another eight people to this picture. The family photographer is Matt, the guy standing all the way to the left. Great photographer, really slooow sharer of photographs, which explains why I'm just now getting this picture, three months after the fact. 

The first year we did one of these family beach vacations was the year when my son Patrick was about the size of Evelyn, the adorable red-haired baby in this picture. It seems astonishing to me that it was 26 years ago. I had two good shoulders back then. 

Oh yeah, in case you haven't heard, I've been scheduled for surgery on my right shoulder for November 4th. That's a classic good news/bad news thing. The bad news is that I'll have to endure a second shoulder operation and all of the wretchedness that such a procedure visits upon its victims. The good news is that Anthem will be presented with the bill and will not be able to hide behind my deductible as their excuse not to pay, and, I will not be able to rake leaves this fall. That job will fall to my son and his able assistant, my son-in-law when they are here for Thanksgiving. I'll be the one taking pictures and posting them on this blog along with snide comments. If Patrick brings his girlfriend, maybe I'll put her out there too since I wouldn't want to be accused of sexism. What about my daughter Kaitlin, you ask? No, she's a teacher. She'll be grading papers.

The Knife Awaits

The Doctor swaggered into the examining room glancing down at a chart, shutting the door behind him. "How you feeling, partner?" 

"Better, actually." I answered. "The shoulder hasn't been as painful for the past couple of weeks. That's good, right?"

"It's always good when it stops hurting." 

My shoulder surgeon is my kind of doctor, direct and to the point and doesn't seem to like hearing himself talk. "Ok, your MRI shows two small tears in the same tendon, one on top and one under the bottom, and several bone spurs. The good news is that it doesn't look as bad as your left shoulder was two years ago, but the bad news is, at some point you're going to have to have it fixed. I would suggest you getting this done before the end of the year. That way you won't have to have another MRI and since you've probably met your annual deductible by now, your insurance will pay for all of it."

"But, I might could just live with it for a while if it's not hurting, right?"

"You can live with it as long as you like partner, even if it's hurting. I'm just telling you that those tears aren't going to fix themselves, and if unattended will probably become bigger and harder to fix the longer you wait. But, hey...suit yourself."

That's about as high pressure as this guy gets. Another reason why I like him.

Driving home, memories of my last shoulder surgery came back in vivid black and white, since color would have been too optimistic, the pain, the ice packs, but mostly the torturous rehab. By the time I got home, I was feeling pretty sorry for myself.

But this morning has brought with it a new perspective. In this I have been aided by this girl, who decided to come downstairs to sit with me while I write this. Perhaps she has sensed that I was troubled by something and couldn't be trusted downstairs all alone!

       "OK, what are you whining about now??"

With Lucy's help I have realized that things could be much worse. It's not like I was given a cancer diagnosis, for goodness sakes. Yes, it's shoulder surgery, my second in three years, but you know why? Because I live an "active lifestyle" which means I'm not a couch potato. I do stuff, physical stuff and that's very good. But sometimes when you work out a lot and do things like swing golf clubs, lift weights and take out the occasional frustrations with a trip to the batting cage, it messes with your joints once you reach a certain age. So what am I going to do...give up having fun? Not a chance. So, if this sort of thing is the price I must pay in order to stay in shape, then so be it. I'm a long way from being ready for a sedentary lifestyle.

So, sometime over the next 90 days or so, I will submit to going under the knife. Being right handed, this one will seem more inconvenient, but hopefully since I fully know what to expect it won't seem as difficult.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it!

1000 Posts??

My Blogger stats inform me that this is my 1000th post. Somehow, since I started the Tempest nearly five years ago, I have come up with something to write about 1000 times. That's not the same thing as saying I came up with something interesting to write about 1000 times, rather that I wrote...something. The stats also tell me that I have written slightly over 600,000 words, or about 3000 more than can be found in War and Peace, only without all of those miserable Russian peasants. Before the Tempest, I kept handwritten journals, fourteen years worth of them. So, I think it safe to say that I'm obsessive about writing and perhaps a little crazy on the subject of having an opinion and sharing it.

One advantage of writing down every cock-eyed idea that crosses your mind is that there's a record of your idiotic ramblings. To some of you that might sound like a liability, but for me it's more like a history book, a manual that allows you a place to look up your mistakes. It's humbling but very instructive to read something you said four years ago that ended up being very wrong. It reminds me of my limitations. Of course, a journal or a blog also documents your prescience, a more rare phenomenon.

This blog has also served as a place I have come to argue with myself, to flesh out what I think about things and why. Sometimes, I'm sure, that is a source of frustration to the reader, since a writer who contradicts himself isn't always reliable. But, there's nothing I can really do about that. I'm an inconsistent thinker, when I think at all!

But 1000 posts? How did that happen?