Wow I'm old!

...and "Archie's was the quiet bar"

So I get home from work at 5:30. I'm all hopped up because it's Saint Paddy's day and downtown will be jumping. I'm definitely jonesing big time for corned beef and cabbage. (Hey, I just post this stuff, that doesn't mean I have the time to actually cook any of it.) That should have been the tip off. Some young folk might enjoy corned beef and cabbage, most young folk might even eat some politely while making plans to get pizza later, but no one under the age of 40 "Joneses" for boiled dinner. I feel like the Shac O'Neil of partying, I can do it old style for short spurts but I can't keep up the rhythm for an extended period. (Hey that sounds like my sex life too, I really am getting old)

I go to Archie's around 6 to meet friends. Nice night, nice walk from the condo. I haven't seen this many 

drunks in Haverhill since last Friday and the weather was way worse then. I'm behind the curve though. Totally sober, hungry and tired. My friends, subscribing to the American axiom that nothing succeeds like excess, were already obliterated. Now in my youth I might, only "might" mind you, have tried to play catch-up, but even as I hit the door my older more boring brain was reminding my older less elastic body that we both had to get up at 5:30 tomorrow and go to work. Yeah, but I could still enjoy a few drinks and dinner right?

Well there was no place to sit and little kids were trying to step dance where I was standing and the waitresses were cranky cause the crowd was so big and woman that were not longer girls were doing the Unicorn moves while a guitar guy played the unicorn song and I know that men paint themselves for sports event but so do women and then they paint themselves for all other holidays as well and why does anyone want to wear green deely boppers on their head and I wish the tv was off cause the news was showing footage from Japan plus footage from the aftermath of Hiroshima because those two things are exactly the same if you are lazy, and have scary file footage you want to show instead of doing actual reporting and it made me queazy thinking about it cause somehow it was way worse with the Unicorn song playing in the background and people were pushing me did I mention there was no place to sit but that didn't mater because they were already out of boiled dinner so I had a corned beef sandwich and a Guinness but it came out of a can but it still tasted good so now I was feeling a little tipsy which would have been a good thing if I was going to stay but it was a bad thing because I have to work tomorrow so I resisted the 2 women with the big shamrocks painted on their cheeks even though the had an extra seat which my friend who by now had a giant tomato head from all the alcohol he had consumed which the shamrock girls though was hilarious even though he was slurring his attempts at seduction then Two and A Half Men came on the tv and everyone cheered so loud for Charlie Sheen that you couldn't hear the guitar guy playing a mighty rebel song... 

It must be true, I won an award!

The Academy Awards were last night, all is now clear. The King's Speech must be a better movie than the Black Swan or Inception. Natalie Portman is now a better actress than Annette Bening. Hey it must be true. Our society is a meritocracy after all, we are all about the merit. Reward the achievers, the rest of us can bask in their reflected glow. How could that ever go wrong?

Wait a minute, didn't I say achievers? We honor achievers, we elect, well you know.

So consider this list of achievements...

Awards and honors

• Anti-Defamation League – Torch of Liberty Award
• Beta Theta Pi (Zeta Phi Chapter) – Wall of Fame
• Brunel University (London) – Honorary Doctor of Social Sciences
• Child Advocates – Super Hero Honoree Award
• Episcopal High School – Campaign Fundraiser Award
• Gas Daily – Man of the Year Award
• Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans – Annual Membership Award
• Houston Area Women’s Center – Honoree
• Houston Children’s Chorus – Honoree
• Houston Community Partners – Father of The Year
• Kenneth Lay Day – Proclaimed by Kathryn J. Whitmire, Mayor of Houston, Texas
• Kiwanis Club of Houston and the Greater Houston Partnership – International Executive of the Year
• March of Dimes – Award of Distinction
• NAACP Freedom Fund Banquet – Mickey Leland Humanitarian Award
• National Conference of Christians and Jews – Brotherhood Award
• Oswego State University – Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters Degree
• Phi Beta Kappa – Outstanding Alumnus Award
• Private Sector Council – Annual Leadership Award
• Stanford Business School Alumni Associations – Houston Business Man of the Year
• Texans For Lawsuit Reform – Award
• Texas Association of Minority Business Enterprises – Texas Corporate Partnering Award
• Texas Business Hall of Fame – Inductee
• Texas Navy Admiral – Commissioned by William P. Clements, Jr., Governor of Texas
• Texas Society To Prevent Blindness – Man of Vision Award
• The Brookwood Community – Honoree Award
• The Rotary Club of Houston – Distinguished Citizen Award
• The Wall Street Transcript – Chief Executive Officer Award
• United States Energy Association – United States Energy Award
• U.S. Navy – Navy Commendation Medal & National Defense Service Medal
• University of Colorado, College of Business and Administration – Ben K. Miller Memorial, International Business Award
• University of Houston – Distinguished Alumnus Award
• University of Houston – Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters Degree
• University of Missouri – Honorary Doctor of Law Degree; The Hebert J. Davenport Society Benefactor Award
• Volunteer Houston – Honoree Award

...what an amazing guy with a pile of awards like that. It certainly is good living in a meritocracy where the cream rises to the top and if you don't become wealthy or famous it is probably your own fault. Thank god there are plenty of  awards so we know what we like? Who was good? What qualifies as art? Consider  an America without American Idol? How would we ever know who is a great singer? Why we might be fooled by...

The Rules Matter.

When you cook stuff the rules matter. Put a piece of chicken in a pot of boiling water for 20 minutes and it will be cooked and it will be edible, but you're not going to want to eat it. That's because of the rules. The rules of physics actually. No matter how much you want say "screw the rules" if you put that piece of chicken in that pot of boiling water you are going to have some nasty, gnarly, dried-out, tough chicken. So just change the rules, right? You can't dumb-ass! Physics is above your pay grade. There are rules that can be changed though.

Wisconsin wants to change the rules for state employee unions. They want to take away the right to collective bargaining. So what, you say. " I think unions need a good spanking. We need to balance our budgets, why do they have stuff I don't have?" The thing is you don't need to strip away a right in order to balance a budget. Your church would probably suggest that hating on someone because they have a good deal is a bad thing. I might even concede that unions need a good spanking, I might if they hadn't been getting spanked ever since Ronny Ray-gun told the air traffic controllers to take a walk. We can go round and round on that, but can we agree that if they take away a "right" we all lose the use of that right. Hey, maybe we might need that "right" down the line.



You'll have to wait until the end of the clip before you get to my point, but it might be worth your time. Old George could really nail things when he wanted to.

Us? We have to deal with the rules of physics. Namely important stuff like how heat caramelizes sugar, starch is water soluble,  and butter, Mmmm butter!, brings on the goodness.

This is Where it Started.

People seem wonder how things got so out of control. Why is everyone so mean and short sighted all of a sudden? Maybe you just spent $100 (Really?) so your girl could get roses at her work("in your face co-workers')  place for Valentines Day ("Someone loves me spinster bitches. I got mine. Woohoo!" Girly fist pump!) Maybe you just came from a parent teacher meeting where a solemn pack of education experts (looking for easy solutions) just told you that your rambunctious 10 year old needs to be loaded up with adderall so he can learn like the other drugged up zombies in his class. Maybe you got laid off, crunched the numbers, and realized that there are worse things than being dead. Maybe you actually tried those recipes I gave you last week and you are going to need to scrape down the kitchen, just as soon as the smoke alarm stops going off (you could try muffling it with a chocolate covered pillow case.) Maybe... well it does seem like there is something wrong, even corrupt about our society. You know why? Because working hard and playing fair is for chumps, and it started right here.



The moment in popular culture when "The ends justify the means" went mainstream. If you are under 35 you don't even know how corrupt this is. The Duke would have never done this. Gary Cooper, not a chance! You young'uns don't even know how shocking this was at the time. It was a genuine surprise. Hell this film didn't come out until 1981. Maybe the 70's, disco, cocaine, and Nixon/Ford/Carter were enough to turn America's soul sour but suddenly the easy way was the smart way.

It's like Obama and Bonher. Got to do that federal budget or the whole country shuts down in March. What to cut? What to cut?...hmmmm.

If you are a democrat and push comes to shove you can certainly count on kicking your base in the teeth,  after all where are they going to go?

If you are a republican and push comes to shove you can certainly count on kicking your base in the teeth, after all where are they going to go?

What a pair. Speaking of pears we never cooked our pears from Monday.

                                             (Luigi Chiesa)

Let's make it about us!

So what do we know? Well our boy Honsi resigned a couple of hours ago. Lots of people in Egypt are really happy. There are supposed to be free elections. That's pretty much it. Oh yeah, Honsi was a big fat dictator, but not the biggest fattest dictator in the middle east... so good riddance..... right? Wait, he was our personal big fat dictator.




In America everybody is at a loss. How do we take something that caught us by surprise, has almost nothing to do with us, and should be seen as an affirmation that people want to control their own lives and turn it into something that easily fits into our self absorbed red/blue 24 hour news cycle narrative?

If you are a democrat you tip toe around this whole development like it's a land-mine. Democracy is good, but there are scary muslims over there and if we aren't careful it will be like Iran, and then we'll get blamed, and it will be Jimmy Carter all over again, and we'll get croaked in 2012, and.... shut-up!

If you are a republican you tip toe around this whole development like it is a land-mine. Democracy is good, but there are scary muslims over there, and even though Bush's whole war in Iraq was about bringing democracy to the middle east if we aren't careful it will be like Iran, and that's a bad thing if we take credit too early, but it would be an even worse thing if it turns out well and the democrats get the credit, and it is definitely a bad thing if we don't get the Egyptian people to create a government the we want them to, and It will be Obama's 3AM call that he blew, which is good for us in 2012, and maybe it will turn out alright after all, which means Bush's vision... shut-up!

Thank God the people that read this blog  know that "Democracy is a good thing".  Let it happen.

Solidarity people of Egypt.