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I was driving to work this morning when I looked to my left in a grassy area. There appeared to be a figure in a black hooded robe with a scythe in his hand. I did a double take and looked again hoping it was not DEATH. It turned out to a maintenance worker in a black hoodie working on a weed-eater.
Dodged the bullet for one more day.
Love comes in many forms.
Anymore I generally just eat because my body needs food. When I was single I would eat the same thing for breakfast for months on end. Lunch was much the same way. In Memphis I would come home for lunch which usually consisted of ramen noodles with vegetables. I was fine with that. I was fine with my bowl of Shredded Wheat each and every morning.
Robin is retired and I still work. She is still getting up and fixing my breakfast each weekday morning. I just want something light to knock the edge off my hunger. I like a little protein also. What we have settled is a breakfast sandwich with cheese and egg. Frequently the bread takes the form of a tortilla. If I was preparing the meal it would vary only slightly from day to day. Robin likes to change it up. She likes to try to surprise me a little with the combinations she puts together. This morning it was a tortilla, cream cheese with chives, soy sausage and egg. It was quite tasty and opened my eyes with pleasure when I first bit into it.
Sometimes love comes wrapped in a tortilla.
Oscar Wilde is best known for his quips, quotes and aphorisms, at least to me. The Importance of Being Ernest gave to me my first real appreciation of plays. It is a light, comic romp full of misdirection and subtle and not so subtle puns. For various reasons I have seen the play three times over the years. The Picture of Dorian Gray is a classic of this epoch. The novel also in many ways led to his downfall. While he wrote the book before his fall from grace I found The Picture of Dorian Gray metaphorically autobiographical of his entire life. In the end Oscar Wilde ended up destroying himself. The book raised the rancor of puritanical 1890 England due to its homoerotic theme, and allusions of an underworld of what was then considered deviant behavior.
I knew Oscar was gay(in the modern sense of the word) and had gone to jail for two years for this “crime”. However, I had always pictured him as this bon vivant, a social gadfly. The Oscar I discovered in this book Continue reading “Oscar Wilde – His Life and Confessions by Frank Harris”
…yeah I know you did not ask!
Some folks have proposed to peg the minimum wage to the CPI. I propose that it be pegged as an unwavering factor of Congressional salaries. Current Congressional salary is $174,000 per year. Assuming a work year of 2080 hours, that is $83.65 per hour. Set the factor 8.25 and we would have minimum was of $10.13.
From “Henry Ford’s Own Story” by Rose Wilder Lane
Ford settled every problem by his own simple rule,”Do what is fundamentally best for everybody. It will work out for our interests in the end.” And always he was pondering the big problem of putting back into active use the millions that were accumulating to his credit. Every year the price was lowered on his cars, following his original policy of making the automobile cheap. Still the sales increased by leaps and bounds, and his margin of profit on each car mounted into a greater total.
“The whole system is wrong”, he says. Continue reading “Henry Ford a Socialist?”
Wal-Mart heirs occupy slots 11, 14, 16 and 17 of the richest people on the Planet! Yet many of its employees are forced into public welfare programs due to low wages and their HR policies. If you work and are willing to work full-time should not have to get public assistance to make ends meet. That is the real Black Friday…a day of mourning for the American retail worker.
There is an unknown person at work who obviously has a garden. Occasionally they will bring in product of the 
aforementioned agricultural endeavor. Some of it is rather strange, a single banana pepper, a half a cucumber, a grossly misshaped tomato.
Last week this incognito agronomic benefactor brought in a small, yellow bucket of tomatoes. Next day there was a sign on the table in the break indicating that the tomatoes were gratis and to be taken, but please return the bucket. I laughed.
This morning there were a few “maters” and two stalks of okra on the break room table. I commented to a young lady in there, “That is rather strange, what do you do with just two stalks of okra?”
Her rejoinder was, “You eat it raw.”
“Raw”, I said, “I’ve eaten okra fried, boiled and pickled, but never raw.”
The lady replied, “They are crunchy like potato chips, but healthier.”
I had nothing to say after that. Anyone else ever eat okra raw?
As an outsider looking in at the situation in Egypt it is very confusing. I am going to explore my thoughts via this piece. It would be appreciated if anyone who had thoughts on this would comment. It just seems like awful conflict with both sides wrong.First allow me to admit that most of my news comes from NPR. While many folks rant about NPR’s “Liberal” slant I find it one of the few news sources without a large bias. So many of the news sources of our time are more opinion than news and/or have a definite bias. Since I almost never watch TV news, my other source of news is the Internet, so much of which must be taken with a grain of salt. I do tend to browse the more liberal news/opinion sites. To counterbalance this I do browse the BBC site almost daily to get a point of view from outside the United States. On very rare occasions I will look at Al Jazeera site. Like most folks I am stuck in my bias silo, but I do attempt to make the occasional foray into other arenas of thought.
I have a love/hate relationship with my country. Continue reading “Egypt – The Withering of the Arab Spring”
From Gulliver’s Travelers
(Apologies to my daughter, the attorney. She does do good work via working with the state DHS)
Amazing how little things have changed in the 300 years.
I assured his honour, “that the law was a science in which I had not much conversed, further than by employing advocates, in vain, upon some injustices that had been done me: however, I would give him all the satisfaction I was able.”
I said, “there was a society of men among us, bred up from their youth in the art of proving, by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are slaves. For example, if my neighbour has a mind to my cow, he has a lawyer to prove that he ought to have my cow from me. I must then hire another to defend my right, it being against all rules of law that any man should be allowed to speak for himself. Now, in this case, I, who am the right owner, lie under two great disadvantages: first, my lawyer, being practised almost from his cradle in defending falsehood, is quite out of his element when he would be an advocate for justice, which is an unnatural office he always attempts with great awkwardness, if not with ill-will. The second disadvantage is, that my lawyer must proceed with great caution, or else he will be reprimanded by the judges, and abhorred by his Continue reading “Jonathan Swift on Lawyers”
I referenced this same article in a previous blog, but I think it is important enough to pull out by itself.
“Raising the pay of Wal-Mart’s U.S. workers to a minimum of $12 an hour would lift many out of poverty, reduce their reliance on public assistance, and cost the average consumer, at most, $12.49 a year.
That’s the conclusion of a new study published by the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education. The study is primarily concerned with the question of how raising Wal-Mart’s wages would affect poor families, including both those who work at its stores and those who shop at them. The benefits to poor families, the study concludes, would far exceed the costs. “
Read the whole article at Wal-Mart Could Easily Pay $12 an Hour