The JackB

"When you're in jail, a good friend will be trying to bail you out. A best friend will be in the cell next to you saying, 'Damn, that was fun'." Groucho Marx

Archives for December 2005

Things That Keep Me Awake At Night

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Some of the things that keep me up at night are serious and some are not so serious. Here is a brief sample. By no means are they in order of importance.

It is 1987 and I am on my high school swim team. We are at City Finals and I am competing in the 100 yard breast stroke. I swim in two different heats and end up tied for 24 in the city. Don’t ask me how many because I don’t remember and I know that there were a bunch who weren’t able to qualify for the finals.

I underwent Lasik five years ago but back then I was half blind. I sometimes wonder if I would have been able to really see what I was doing if I couldn’t have moved up closer to the top ten. I missed out on being part of the top twenty by around a second.

Public school versus private school. This is one that I agonize over. All I want to do is give my children the best in everything. I want them to have all of the advantages that I didn’t have, but it is so very hard. I roll around in bed from side to side and pace the halls wondering what the right decision is.

I still wonder if I could be a gold medalist in the Olympics. Sometimes I sit and review the various events and wonder if I am good enough to make the team in something. Is there some obscure event that fewer people compete in and if so how do I match up.

Or maybe I have a connection that I could leverage. Maybe I could be the representative for the Grand Republic of Mastorinstan. I’d be happy to carry the flag and march in by myself during the Opening Ceremonies. I’d even create a national anthem.

Alternatively I sometimes try and create some kind of sport that I could introduce to the world. As the inventor/creator I just might be able to be good enough to make the team that way. You never know, it could happen. Look at the Jamaican bobsledding team.

Am I the man I want to and should be? This is another one of those things that I sometimes consider. It started around 24 or 25. I hadn’t been out of school all that long and I found myself working with a bunch of people who just seemed to have no moral compass and I wondered what they got out of life.

And then I asked myself if I was who I want to be. Now the question is what do you want to be when you grow up.

What invention is the world in desperate need of and how can I create it? I have a pretty good imagination. Sometimes I think that if I just really let go of my grounded personality and walked in the clouds I’d stumble over or onto some amazing idea. Actually it doesn’t have to be amazing, just interesting enough to become a useful product. I could have been the guy that invented Post-it notes.

At one point in time I thought about taking the old edible underwear idea and expanding it so that all of your clothes would be edible. They could even have different flavors. Your shirt could be chocolate, belt vanilla and your socks could taste like pumpkin pie. Who knows, the possibilities would be virtually endless.

If someone told you to “eat his shorts” you might just consider it, or maybe not.

Mexico Promises to Block Border Wall Plan

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“MEXICO CITY Dec 20, 2005 — The Mexican government, angered by a U.S. proposal to extend a wall along the border to keep out migrants, pledged Tuesday to block the plan and organize an international campaign against it.

Facing a growing tide of anti-immigrant sentiment north of the border, the Mexican government has taken out ads urging Mexican workers to denounce rights violations in the United States. It also is hiring an American public relations firm to improve its image and counter growing U.S. concerns about immigration.

Mexican President Vicente Fox denounced the U.S. measures, passed by the House of Representatives on Friday, as “shameful” and his foreign secretary, Luis Ernesto Derbez, echoed his complaints on Tuesday.

“Mexico is not going to bear, it is not going to permit, and it will not allow a stupid thing like this wall,” Derbez said.

“What has to be done is to raise a storm of criticism, as is already happening, against this,” he said, promising to turn the international community against the plan.

Some stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border are already marked by fences, but in some heavily-trafficked sections walls have already been erected by the United States, often using 10-foot-high sections of military surplus steel. Those sections, which typically run several miles, can be found in southern Arizona and California.

It’s hard to underestimate the ill-feeling the proposal has generated in Mexico, where editorial pages are dominated by cartoons of Uncle Sam putting up walls bearing anti-Mexican messages.

Many Mexicans, especially those who have spent time working in the U.S., feel the proposal is a slap in the face to those who work hard and contribute to the U.S. economy.”

Is it just me or is there something very very wrong with Vincente Fox. Maybe I am crazy, maybe he is not the president of of Mexico. Oy.

I have mixed feelings about the border issue and immigration but given the current situation I think that we need to establish more security so that we know who is going in and out of here.

I was rather disturbed by some of the following comments, specifically the final quote.

“Many Mexicans, especially those who have spent time working in the U.S., feel the proposal is a slap in the face to those who work hard and contribute to the U.S. economy.

Fernando Robledo, 42, of the western state of Zacatecas, says the proposals could stem migration and disrupt families by breaking cross-border ties.

“When people heard this, it worried everybody, because this will affect everybody in some way, and their families,” Robledo said. “They were incredulous. How could they do this, propose something like this?”

Robledo, whose son and mother are U.S. citizens, predicted the measure “would unleash conflict within the United States” as small businesses fail for lack of workers.

He said many Mexicans felt betrayed by the anti-immigrant sentiment.

“We learned to believe in the United States. We have a binational life,” he said of Zacatecas, a state that has been sending migrants north for more than a century. “It isn’t just a feeling of rejection. It’s against what we see as part of our life, our culture, our territory.”

Ultimately I think that a pluralistic multicultural society is a good thing. There are many hard working immigrants who have helped to make this country what it is, but I am not going to agree with a sentiment in which the US is referred to as Mexican territory as it was by Robledo.

This is just the height of chutzpah.

Fall in love and risk a police thrashing

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“NEW DELHI (Reuters) – Outrage and protests mounted in India Wednesday after TV channels showed police officers repeatedly slapping, punching and pulling the hair of young women on a date in a public park in a north Indian city. Indian media reported one couple was so humiliated by the police action in front of TV crews they have not returned home.

“Is falling in love wrong? Who gave the police the right to beat and hit people and misbehave in such a manner,” a woman in Meerut city in Uttar Pradesh state told Aaj Tak television news.

Since Tuesday, shocked TV viewers in India have been watching images of female officers pummelling and abusing crying young women in Meerut in what the media is calling “moral policing.”

TV footage also showed male policemen with sticks surrounding the scared women and taking them to women officers who beat them. Several of their male companions were beaten also.

The police operation, termed “operation Romeo,” in a popular park in Meerut Monday was touted by police as a move to prevent sexual harassment of women.

It turned out to be something very different.

In Meerut, students shouting “Down with police dictatorship” have staged demonstrations and burned effigies of police officers.

The outcry, including from women groups, has forced the police to suspend two women officers and probe the incident.’

There is something very wrong with this.

Floating on a Raft

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I used to live in an old apartment building in Encino. Good old number 19 on the second floor was worn out inside and somewhat rundown. It was located behind a car wash off of one of the main streets in town. One of the great pleasures living there was listening to the guy at the carwash use his loudspeaker . You haven’t lived until you wake up hung over to the dulcet tones of “Jim, yellow ’78 Gremlin ready for pick up now!”

The interior of the place was a little old. It was an older building so it was a larger one bedroom that included a real living room that I divided in half so that I would have a dining room off of the kitchen.

Speaking of the kitchen the yellow laminate on the counter was peeling and the stove looked as if it could have been used by an angry group of Hells Angels. In the living room there was a big wood panel on the wall was in need of paint and the bathroom looked like it should have been part of some cheesy 1970’s porno movie.

The bedroom was rather nondescript. White walls and a window that overlooked the neighbors below me. They had a small dog that yapped all of the time. The neighbor to the left of them also had a little dog that yapped its little head off. It wasn’t uncommon to be serenaded by these little rodent dogs, nor was it pleasant.

During the summer in the Valley it is not uncommon for the temperature to exceed 90 and not altogether unexpected for it to push past 100. My little hideaway had an old and decrepit air conditioner that looked like it should have sitting in the back of the red truck Lamont on Sanford and Son used to drive.

Consequently the temperature inside the unit was three degrees short of a bazillion. And on one particular day in July it hit about 117 inside or so the internal thermometer showed. All I know is that this was the day that Lucifer handed me his pitchfork and a letter saying that he quit.

Part of the charm of this place was that during Winter my unit stopped trying to pretend to be a sauna and became part igloo. There were days where it was just slightly above forty degrees in there and for this native Californian that is freaking cold.

The tenants of this particular building made for kind of an odd collection. I was a 24 year old single male who was busy trying to make a name for himself at the office. The two units to the left of me were populated by some very colorful characters.

There was R, who worked for Paramount building sets for the various shows that they produced. For a while he shared it with M and three pit bulls. Eventually M and one of the dogs moved out leaving just R and the two remaining dogs.

Thanks to the proximity of those dogs to my apartment I never bothered to lock my door. Whenever someone would start to walk up the stairs to the second floor they would begin barking furiously. If you didn’t know better it sounded as if it was coming from inside my unit and consequently there were times when my own visitors wanted to know if I had dogs living with me.

B and E lived to the left of R. They worked in the music industry and had all sorts of interesting guests come by their place. One night we split a bottle of tequila with one of Stevie Nick’s backup singers. Somewhere there are some silly pictures of me in a cloak doing my little spoof of Stevie spinning in one of her dresses.

I spent a lot of time with all of those guys. During the evenings you could find us wandering back and forth between apartments. They were all between five to seven years older than I was. At the time that seemed like quite a bit, not to mention that their lives had been so very different from my own.

That building holds so many memories for me, I may yet blog about them. But foremost among them are the memories of floating away the days and the evenings on a raft in the pool. We would grab a cooler full of drinks and share the contents of our refrigerators.

Now so very many years later I work just down the street from there. Sometimes when I am stopped at a red light I’ll turn my head and remember warm summer nights listening to the Eagles. There is a cold beer in my hand and my raft is gently rocking me into the evening.