Rocky Road Recipe

Despite the advent of those little GPS travel boxes, I still love the romance of maps. I can stare at them for hours and run my fingers along roads, rivers, and CREASES imagining the countless places I can go when people tell me to ‘Get Lost’. I love seeing rare oddities in mirrors and discovering unusual places like a ‘full serve’ GAS station or a Polish hot dog shop, which apparently in some communities, is the exact SAME PLACE!

I have no need for my usual ‘puddy tat’ toys, fancy entertainment or complex puzzles whenever a map needs re-folding. I can literally spend hours trying to get a 4 X 5 foot map back into its flattened glove-box ready state. More often than not, un-folded maps will never again escape the size equivalency of a crumpled basketball and therefore are more suited to be recycled as a lumbar support, or for those really long road trips – ultra absorbent seat pads.

For some odd reason the street signs in the Midwest U.S. all have the same standard street names like First, State, and Main. The only difference is that each sign will have a varied suffix tacked on the end of the name like Road, Circle, Drive, or Way, though I always seem to end up in COURT? To make matters worse, even neighboring communities in short proximity to different U.S. States will have the EXACT SAME named cities in addition to those common stock street names as well. What is the problem - along with steel, cars, and VCR’s, are we now so lazy and incapable that we can’t even invent original names for our own streets and cities either?

Now this map clap-trap is clearly an untenable recipe for taxi hacks, street-people and perpetually confused kettle-heads like myself. Why is it so hard to mix up a few random Romanic letters with a dash of hyphen and add some flavorful expressions to make-up an easily memorable, half-baked yet original street name? My family happily looks forward to the day when I will be able to sanely drive my pickled brain to the intersection of ‘FIRST light’ & ‘STATE-of-mind’ without the need for a wrinkled map or a straight jacket. The goal of course is to eventually navigate, and hopefully legally parallel park, with NORMAL people, along a very busy but narrow ROCKY road called ‘MAINstream’.

Crooked Cookie

Though I am better at making little girls cry, with the Girl Scout cookie season upon us, I of course try to do my caloric duty and buy a few boxes to help the little ‘lasses keep their sashes’. Now except for the shortbread cookies, there are about 20 cookies to a box, so that works out to a cool 17 cents plus a cookie. Geez at that rate, I am not sure how I can maintain my road-hugging girth without a loan from a Chinese investment banker or at least a ‘fur-ball’ from a fat-cat?

To supplement my cookie habit, I have to resort to roaming the dollar stores in search of those off-brand bagged and bulk varietals. No they are not nearly as quality as the Girl Scout offerings but when any cookie is dunked in milk or coffee it magically ‘mushifies’ and takes on the delightful flavoring of the surrounding liquid. Tempting as it is, I have never dunked any of the Scouts – they are just too fragile and their parents would probably complain.

My one problem with cheapo cookies may appear superficial but it still bothers me. For some reason when making a sandwich cookie, often one side of the cookie will be crookedly mounted on the cream center. Is it too much to ask to have a perfectly apolitical cookie that is not too left or too right of center? It also frustrates me when the decorative embossed cookie’s topside is turned upside down on the cream.

How hard can it be to get a nice n’ orderly cookie that lines up on an axis right side up - after all, a bunch of green girly scouts seem to do it flawlessly every time? Oh I know, that’s why we all give up 350 pretty pennies to the Scout-ettes to treat our taste buds to a box of their top-drawer fat pills. Just like the U.S. government, I guess the Chinese will have to keep financing my good fortune and bad habits. I’ll have to learn to tolerate the occasional crooked cookie after dinner – it’ll be OK as long as it has a piece of paper with good news inside it!

You Dim Some you lose some

You know I can accept that the world is not flat and eggs actually DID come before chickens ( or is it the other way around?), but one fact I cannot grasp is that the light bulb as I once knew it is CHANGING??? Oh sure those freaky squiggle and LED bulbs may save some energy but I am not sure that they are either better or less costly in the long run? All I know is they sure look dumb sticking out of the ‘in the door’ lighted refrigerator water and ice dispenser.

I like my old fashioned bulbs. It was the one constant in my life that worked just as well when I was a kid as it does now. To this day I never tire of switching between all three levels of a 3-way bulb and basking in their warm glow as I am trying to spy through the neighbor’s mail. Now those squiggle lights start-up a little dim and then burn hot and glaringly stark for my taste.

I am also not a big fan of having to evacuate the premises if I drop one of the loopy lights due to the poisonous gas prize inside. LED lights are safe but always have a kind of cold bluish tint to them and can’t cast a wide beam. Why would ANY wife need something other than their husbands, when having to put up with something that is ‘dim’ and emits killer gas when treated improperly?

I hate buying light bulbs that are made in China over good ol’ fashioned globular American bulbs. We Yanks still love wall to wall carpeting and our space program is more mature than the Chinese, so logically we should know more about vacuums than anyone right? Now even though these new bulbs last longer and use a few cents less energy every day, when they do burn out they cost $5 to replace paid to a foreign manufacturer over a traditional 50 cent light bulb built domestically.

If this losing ‘False economy’ thinking continues to catch on, I expect we can export chopsticks to China at ten times what they are paying now (assuming we leave out the costly poison gas). Sadly I forgot though, the world is still not flat AND the Chinese are not 'dim' enough to ‘see the light’ my way - who would have 'thunk' it!

Barefoot Bandit needs clown shoes

Well justice finally caught up with that scoff-law, the so called “Barefoot Bandit”. I actually resent using his media moniker because in some odd way I feel it validates his criminality. The simple truth is the guy was a petty low-life thief and I was ecstatic that the Bahamian authorities paraded him down the streets like a little puppet-monkey, before extraditing him back to the US. It seems the Swiss could have learned this lesson too if they would have pulled their finger out of their chocolate, and quickly Fed-Exed Polanski, the “Namby-Pamby Pedofile” back Stateside.

Though I have no compassion for villa-bound Polanski, there was a liberal part of me that felt concern for the poor barefoot kid’s damage - TO THE EARTH! Who wants this dumb dude’s dirty feet walking unprotected on any of our precious soil? I wondered, had this loser’s ‘Gigantor’ feet made it impossible to find properly-fitted footwear, possibly spurring on his antisocial life of crime? I shudder at the thought of the magnitude of the bandit’s crime spree, if big-boy ‘pants and panties’ had been as hard to come-by as apparently his shoes were.

Understanding this relationship between crime and footwear caused me to take preventative STEPS with my own daughter. She won’t mind me telling you that she has really big feet. Actually they are more like bridge abutments with toes. This obviously concerned us when she was young for fear that her future career was limited to two choices . . . Clown or Criminal.

So with a ‘life on the run’ out (tripping hazard), and Ronald McDonald’s refusal to retire gracefully to let a real GIRL do a clown’s job, my wife and I had to act to save my daughter’s future. For her birthday, we broke into our bacon money and covered the cost for our daughter to buy some custom designed shoes. Since the Chinese have nothing better to do than mold rubber for freakishly large American feet, they also give you free reign to choose colors, laces, imprint, styles, height etc.

Yes it’s high time for the Barefoot Bandit to reach down in his ‘sole’ to declare ‘Carpe Feetum’ and embrace law-abiding footwear. I have linked the NIKEiD site here if you too are blessed with the Monitor and Merrimack instead of feet at the end of your legs. Now there’s no reason to skulk around barefoot and live a life on the lamb or any other farm animal. Because with today’s technology, it’s a simple feat to confidently KICK crime to the curb, and make your very own pair of custom clown shoes!

Brave GUTterances

Now like all parents I have a basic understanding of typical body chemistry and functions. It is kind of pre-requisite training if you are going to endure the pleasures of having children. The problem for me is that once my kid was grown and off to college, I thought most of my educational internship in all things organic and gastro-intestinal had ended.

But no, it is clear my Chinese calendar animal was not born under the lucky side of the placemat. Because even now at nineteen, almost anytime I am out with my daughter, she will find some new gurgle, burp, cough, or snort to make me wince and categorically repulse all innocent passers-by.

It does not matter if we are in a store, doctor’s office, restaurant or even a mortuary, the kid has some kind of weird stomach that either makes noise or convulses so violently as to wake the dead with her sonic-boom hiccups. These ‘barks’ of legend are actually a combination of a hiccup, cough, and belch all together and nobody on earth, except terrorists, should be subjected to one, much less her own parents.

The really odd thing is the kid’s own response to her demonstrative gastro-cannon is to simply laugh which exacerbates the problem. No embarrassment or loss of pride – just a short chopped chortle which invariably will cause her to gulp air at the EXACT wrong moment as her diaphragm contracts. This out-of-phase hiccup progressively gets louder and more pronounced, which in turns causes more laughs – more air … well you get the idea.

Within a few minutes, everyone within a 25 yard radius is subjected to a demented body chorus that they will not soon forget, but wish they could. And you thought I was the ‘special’ freak in the family, brave enough to face my problems in a public arena. At least my issues are all mental so people only THINK there is something wrong with me. No the truly brave one is my spasmodic spawn who dares public disgust every day – ‘cause it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to know ‘ she’s really GOT GUTS!’

Obama’s Not So Foreign-feeling Policy

I remember looking back to over a year ago to when President Obama was in the final throws of his campaign. “Change” was the word of the day and a seemingly endless parade of nations the world-over, were downright ‘giddy’ at the prospects for a ‘New and Improved’ US foreign policy (whatever that meant?). Well its 2010 and the same old actors are STILL seething with contempt for the U.S. and its way of life. Oddly, with all of our President’s perceived charm offensive, we have even added a few new global grumps like Israel – and they used to actually like us?

Now honestly, unlike the President and some of his ‘super-fans’ I am not surprised by the world’s lack of attitude change or adulation. Except for handing the keys to Whitehouse and the Presidential limo, the world will ALWAYS complain about America’s foreign policy because, to put it bluntly, they’re JEALOUS.

Oh boy, now I have done it. Talk about the arrogance – who would make such unfair recriminations against the motive’s of other the countries of the world? Shouldn’t America consider the ‘feelings’ of all – not just its own people? Well as warm and cuddly as that all sounds and ‘feels’ the answer is a resounding ‘NO!’ and the President’s foreign policy team would serve themselves better if they understand why.

You can never make everyone happy. For many nations, their foreign policy objectives are exactly polar opposites of our own so there is no need to apologize or complain. Our nation should simply follow OUR best path which best fits OUR long term goals. This would equate to China’s recent frustration with U.S. arm sales to Taiwan. Obviously China someday wants to absorb Taiwan back into mainland China. It is counter to the United State’s best interests for this to happen and therefore we ‘risk confrontation’ with China but maintain our principles and relationship with Taiwan.

Policy decisions like this may seem to provoke China or other nations who disagree with America’s overseas objectives, however I think it is FAR BETTER to set clear principles for both allies and enemies and act accordingly.It's kind of like a RATIONAL parent when you were a child. You knew if you set your toys on fire there would be BAD consequences. You weren’t quite exactly sure what ‘BAD’ meant really, to your personal health and freedom, but you were smart enough NOT to light a match to find out. In other words, your parent’s reputation preceded them. You did not always understand the intimate details of their reward/punishment plan, but for the big stuff – you knew where the line was and in a funny way – that was comforting. Our friends and enemies don't have to always 'love' our methods BUT if they can consistently understand them, then foreign policy STABILITY is almost as helpful.

America’s foreign policy by definition should be of unapologetic motive to benefit AMERICANS! Why is this so hard for not only our own people to grasp, but for everyone else outside the borders as well? I think it is noble for nations to cooperate and come together in principle on how to behave. However, at the end of the day, the truth is, that it’s ‘every man (or nation) for himself’. Yes, I know you are recoiling at my abrupt cave-man grunt, devoid of convolution (oh great – its back again …). The point is that America can have high goals and ambitions which INCLUDE other nations. However, our foreign policy team should NEVER FORGET that our nation’s desires must always come FIRST. Yes, the United States makes errors in foreign policy decisions from time to time just like EVERY political entity has done since the beginning of time. But the difference is you don’t see other nations constantly falling over backwards apologizing, rejecting their nationalism, and putting off long term interests to quell the temporary criticism.

So I continue to be hopeful too that ‘Change’ is still on the horizon for Obama’s foreign policy. But my hope will NOT BE for more world cooperation and self-flagellation but conversely it will be for more SELF-RESPECT and blatant SELF-INTEREST. America is the strongest, richest and most generous nation on earth and we should not be ashamed or apologetic of our heritage of success. It’s understandable that the world is jealous – and it is America’s job to ensure they CONTINUE to feel that way!

Is Apple's IPAD buzz groundbreaking?

Now never doubt Apple’s ability to create buzz. The introduction of the magazine-sized tablet computers a couple of months ago already has generated the flattery of functional copycats. HP has introduced its own version – the “Slate”; Dell will market a “mini-Dell”; and the Chinese are literally drooling at the opportunity to reverse engineer a cheaper tablet that will do more, at less cost, than ANY of the innovators.

But while all this follows the normal technological cycle, I kind of am at a loss as to what’s the BIG innovation here? I guess lower power displays give us longer battery life, and yes, a compact flat tablet IS marginally more convenient to cuddle up with at those ‘last resort’ tiny table in cramped Starbucks. But other than that, aren't IPADS just technologically handsome, GIANT oversized IPODS?

As convenient as they are, any touch screen device has kind of turned me off anyway. I hate all of those greasy fingerprints on the face of the GPS or IPhone display. As laptops have gotten smaller and lighter, they also sport a GREAT benefit – they have screens that TILT. These new IPAD devices and the wannabe’s make you either hunch over their flat screens with chin in chest, or hold it up with your hands? I know that feels MORE like handling a magazine in practice, but bearing the weight on ones wrists is probably the LEAST ATTRACTIVE benefit of reading a magazine?

Even in the fast-paced, high-tech world of Apple, I know every new thing is not going to be revolutionary. I guess I had unrealistically hoped that their new ideas for the IPAD would be just a tad more interesting than … uh well, let’s say - AN APPLE? Is that the sound of a muffled BUZZ I’m hearing or maybe it’s just that I’m REALLY hungry for some more MEAT with my fruit?