Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba has just found out that, since April 2009 in the Untied States of America, about 4,000 people have died, and about 98,000 have been hospitalized, from influenza virus 2009 H1N1 (“swine flu”) and related illnesses.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released the figures, I read, at least partly out of concern that too few of We the People are seeking to be vaccinated against this flu virus. Of course, a lot of those people aren’t seeking to be vaccinated because they’ve already tried, discovered that there was no vaccine to be had, and have given up …

Yo. People. Don’t quit on us, OK? We’ve got to keep a certain level of hysteria going on this swine flu business, or we’re going to lose the vaccine makers we’ve got to more lucrative pursuits, like making Viagra knockoffs, and we won’t have any vaccine for anybody. You gotta help us out here, gotta keep standing in line for this stuff.

Well, folks, I hate to be quoting fairy tales at you, but this swine flu story has been at the top of the news for, like, a year now, and while there’s nothing pleasant about 4,000 dead, there’s something of a gap between that figure and the decimation of the population that was forecast in the first reports.

After all, in that same time period (extrapolating from 2005 figures), approximately 27,000 people lost their lives on the nation’s highways, and another 1.4 million were injured.

And I have seen no calls from the CDC for a vaccine against stupid drivers.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

She: “But I took the ibuprofen!”

He: “The question is, where did you take it?”

She: “Ew.”

He: “On second thought, don’t answer that. So the fever hasn’t gone down?”

She: “No.”

He: “No relief from the cramps?”

She: “No.”

He: “Did you at least take a nap?”

She: “I tried, but everything that isn’t too hot or too cold hurts. And when I did doze off, somebody kept waking me up. Which is weird, because I’ve been alone in the house all day.”

He: “Hon, you’re a great cook and all, but you really shouldn’t try to make s’nores in bed. Let me see that bottle, will you?”

She: “OK …”

He: “No wonder!“

She: “What?”

He: “This is a cheap store brand. The ‘not-ready-for-prime-time’ stuff. The ibuamateurfen. We’ve gotta upgrade your pills to the first team …”

In case you haven’t already, go visit Quilly and wish her a speedy recovery.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

DISCLAIMER: A work of fiction. Resemblances to living persons, or extant organizations, are for satirical purposes, or are coincidental.

=================

The threat level, as determined by the Department of Homeland Security, is orange. Please report all suspicious activity to airport personnel immediately.

“Doesn’t that blasted recording ever wear out?”

“It’s digital, Damitri. You’d wear out faster, if I took you off the scanning team and put you on announcements. Trust me on this.”

“Oh. Hi, Jack.”

“No jokes, damn you. You’re in uniform, and we’ve got to keep these airline passengers in line.”

“Seventeen rows deep and out the front door, as usual.”

“Right. That does it. Soon as this shift is over, I’m changing my name to Sigmund.”

“Good choice, Jack. Has a nice ring to it. Sigmund. Sigmund Fraud!“

“That’s Freud, Damitri.”

“I know what I said, dammit. How many years has that ‘orange alert’ been up, huh? Four years straight? Five? Six?? We got enough jackknives in the box to bankrupt the Swiss, enough toothpaste to put Procter & Gamble out of business. How much more shakedown do we need?!?“

“Enough to get the body scanners in place.”

“The body scanners?”

“Didn’t you get that memo? Look here. With these things, passengers won’t have to spend half their lives in the scanning queue stripping, and the other half putting it all back together again. They’ll just walk through this gate, and we’ll see everything. And, heh heh, I do mean everything. We’ll get plenty of material for the flesh rags, and they’re buyin’.”

“Not with pictures like that, they won’t be. Resolution’s terrible.”

“Since when have we reported all of what we know about our equipment? They want better pictures, we can deliver. And you’d be surprised, Damitri, at just how many folks have placed orders for the lower quality stuff already. This is big money just waiting to fall into our laps.”

“I dunno, Jack …”

“Damitri, you’re a good man, and we can’t afford to lose you. Tell you what. Take some vacation. Two weeks starting tomorrow. I’ll make it good with HR. Find a nice quiet spot, bring the family. The organization will cover the costs. Come back rested and refreshed and ready to Protect and Serve.”

“Protect our profits and Serve ourselves. OK, Jack. But I gotta tell you, I’m far from being the only one in the line asking questions. Angel, for instance. He was one of the first, before he vanished. What happened to him, anyway?”

“He waited too long to take his vacation. Don’t you make the same mistake.”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

On the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of the year 1918 of the Common Era (there having been precious little evidence of the presence of “Our Lord” in the muddy trenches of western Europe), the shooting stopped in Flanders fields, bringing an end to the First World War.

The War To End All Wars, Adolph.

It rearranged empires. It begot massive personal and national fortunes and then callously broke them on the anvils of hyperinflation and economic depression. It dropped men and women (25 out of every 100 or even more) on bread lines, and bred demagogues, Mr. Limbaugh, to feed them on a diet of anger.

And in a mere 21 years, the shooting started again. A war thought so horrific that no sane person would ever risk war again, a war that blasted millions of lives in mere days, led to another that blasted millions of lives in mere seconds. Despite which, no one proclaimed at its end that “now we have seen the worst.”

Some historians, I understand, argue that what we call the First World War ended, not in 1918, but (maybe) in 1989, with the destruction of the Berlin Wall and the empire that constructed it. When the focus of war changed, from the grapplings of European titans to the efforts to bring down the last titan standing by pecking at it and watching it slap itself silly.

A quarter of a million Iraqis, or rather their loved ones, regret being in the path of the flying elbows.

On this Veterans Day, I have not seen any poppies. There used to be poppies, handed out by men in uniform in remembrance of those who lie under the poppies of Belgium, in their own personal trenches in Flanders fields.

Perhaps We the People have read the poem, and are resisting the lemming call to enlist, to follow the dead into the carnage, into the wastage of persons and treasure that is war.

Or perhaps it’s just too much of a nuisance to have to deal with a gnarled old soldier who’s working the mall when you want to go shopping.

After all, Christmas is coming.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“Hey, dude!”

“Who you calling a scarecrow, dude?”

“You’d rather I called you a stuffed shirt?”

“Sure, dude. That way, when I’m feeling insufficiently padded, I can fix it by knocking the stuffing out of you.”

“Hey!!“

“No, dude, that belly’s foam padding. Lot better than hay. Doesn’t itch so much.”

“Sheesh, dude. You remind me of my gym teacher.”

“But, dude, I thought you liked your gym teacher. Even if he did call you Junket. He didn’t make you take any tests.”

“Not on paper, anyway – but he was one mean dude with a stopwatch. Remember how we used to pass tests by complaining that they were unfair? Like, when they asked questions that weren’t in the book?”

“Too hard, you mean, dude. Especially for those who didn’t read the book.”

“Same as you, dude. You got as many do-over tests as I did, and we passed ‘em ’cause they were easier.”

“Simple economics, dude. Why work when you don’t have to?”

“Well, dude, we really must have been on to something. Says here that now whole states are doing it.”

“So I see, dude. Uncle Sam says to your State, ‘you don’t get any of my money unless Junior can read’. So the State makes the test so easy that a monkey’s nephew could pass it. He does, of course. That way, the State gets Uncle Sam’s money and gets to furlough teachers all at the same time. It’s brilliant!“

“And because it was my idea, that means I’m brilliant!”

“No, dude, it means you’re a scarecrow.”

“Hey!!“

“I don’t really care what you’re stuffed with. You can join all the other scarecrows who can’t read their high school diplomas, flopping down the yellow brick road and singing their theme song.”

“Which is?”

“If I only had a brain, dude. What else?

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

As Quilly has already pointed out, there’s currently (5 November 2009) a “blogblast for peace” going on. A relict from the days when Baby Boomers were young, and everything could be solved by carrying picket signs and burning scrap paper draft cards.

Quilly’s take is that peace among humans is impossible unless everybody is truly created – and kept – equal in the materials of life (food, clothing, shelter, luxuries like transportation beyond foot power). To which she expects the response, ‘Ridiculous! Impossible!’ Well, it may or may not be ridiculous, but it most certainly is impossible. Because if we tried it, we’d probably all starve …

This post is excerpted from an earlier one presented on the late Felloffatruck Publications blog on 7 May 2006.

=================

Yes, you heard me. It bothers me, all this peace talk. I’m a scientist. I study biology. The interactions among creatures, and the history of those interactions. Evolution, if you’ll permit me. And those studies tell me that if we think we can get and keep peace just by praying about it, or by carrying around a pack of banners or bumper stickers, then we don’t know Jack.

Charles Darwin – yes, that Darwin – saw that all living things are in competition with each other for the necessities of life: food, water, shelter, mates. He saw plainly that, in most cases, the necessities are scarce. There ain’t enough to go around, and the individuals who can’t successfully compete for them will perish.

This idea wasn’t original with Darwin. Thomas Malthus saw it in human populations a generation previously – though he interpreted his observations in terms of “divine wisdom”.

What’s more, all the good farmers saw it. And they showed Darwin. In every crop of cattle, or sheep, or corn, or even pigeons, there were some who were fatter, or grew faster, or were prettier. These individuals were kept, and allowed to breed. All the others went to the dinner table, or if they were inedible, they were burned. Not enough feed, or land, or space to keep all the less desirable offspring along with the more desirable ones.

It really wasn’t much of a jump for Darwin to make, from artificial selection, where humans drive the evolution of species by choosing those individuals who will be granted access to scarce resources, to natural selection, where it’s the combination of all the “forces of nature” that does the choosing.

So resources are scarce, and you wish to keep people from fighting over them. You wish for peace. What can you do? There are really only two choices. You can make more resources, or you can learn to share what resources there are.

The world has spent the entire last half-century trying, with some success, to make the pot bigger – and in this effort, the United States has taken the lead. It is the impulse that has driven the green revolution in agriculture – up to and including “frankenfood”. Our leadership in the green revolution, I think, played a major role in keeping We the People in good standing with the rest of the world despite our greedy sucking up of most of the new resources we were generating. At least, it did until 2003.

But there are problems.

First, the pot stretching is entirely dependent on stored energy: the fossil fuels, which not only power our machines but also provide the parts and lubricants for them and the fertilizers for the crops. The revolution will last only as long as the oil does.

Second, it is a paradigm of biology that, when the resources available to a species increase, the population of that species will increase to use and abuse them. Humans are different – but only because the human population has increased since 1950 at a rate greater than that thought possible for a species on Earth. You think people are going hungry now? Let there be a major glitch in the infrastructure enabling the global food economy, and the Katrina disaster will seem like the last flowering of Paradise.

Oh – and dare I mention all the contributions that the “green revolution” is making to anthropogenic global warming?

So, let’s try sharing. Um, let’s see. The wholesale price of gasoline has tripled since April of 2005. There has been, so far as I can tell, no measurable curtailment of American driving habits, even during the worst of the recent financial meltdown. And it’s universally recognized that any politician who suggests such a curtailment may as well apply to flip hamburgers at Mickey D’s. We the People are not interested in sharing. Please don’t try to tell me otherwise.

In fact, I’ll have to ask your forgiveness if an SUV with a Peace bumper sticker goes by, and you see me laugh, or cry, or flip the bird, depending on my mood of the moment. Because I see a phony. Worse, I see a phony using a guilt trip to protect the status quo. To keep the “have nots” in their places. “No war allowed; you will keep your hands off my stuff”. Can you say “elitist”? Can you say “arrogance”?

================

In her post, Quilly objected to a “Blogger for Peace” who quoted the opinion, the object of war is peace. Not only do I agree with Quilly’s objection, I venture to take it one step further – and in so doing, I claim the authority of Ambrose Bierce (see “War”), who, in turn, cited the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Peace (of the style called for by comfortable middle-class bloggers) is war.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2006, 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

OK, out there, hands up? How many of you hear “Hawai‘i” and think “pineapples”?

Think again.

For the best part of a century, pineapples and sugar cane were the cash crops of the Hawai‘ian Islands. At one point, the entire island of Lana‘i was one large pineapple plantation. Many (most?) of the peoples of Hawai‘i who are not of Polynesian or European descent (in particular the Japanese and the Filipinos) came to the islands to harvest the cane or the pineapples.

Those days are done. With today’s announcement that the Maui Land Company is ending pineapple operations, only one plantation remains, on the island of O‘ahu. And that plantation exists primarily for the tourists. The Honolulu building that used to house the principal cannery for Hawai‘ian pineapple is now a commercial complex with some museum-like displays recounting its past.

That more-or-less fresh pineapple in your supermarket fruit-and-vegetables section probably came from Thailand, or the Philippines, or Brazil, not Hawai‘i.

Why?

Why else?

Brazil, Thailand, and the Philippines all produce pineapples far more cheaply than Hawai‘i can.

In fact, the Hawai‘ian Islands now have very little agriculture. It simply costs too much for labor, fertilizer, feed. Far cheaper to bring in the finished products from places that don’t have (or ignore) minimum wage laws.

In the current economic downturn, which has affected Hawai‘i less than most of the rest of the Untied States of America (its current 7.2% unemployment rate would be gratefully accepted as a world-changing improvement by Michigan, California, Oregon and most of the Southeast), folk are wrangling over furloughs, pay cuts, and other things that may impact their standard of living a few points. Not realizing, perhaps, that if the cargo planes were ever to stop flying, Hawai‘ians would, almost immediately, have something truly substantial to worry about.

Starvation.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“Dude?”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t get it.”

“You called me over for that? I thought you wanted to talk about something new.”

“I don’t get it, dude, but I can pass it on to you. Here. Let me sneeze in your face … ah …”

“Nice try, dude. Y’wanna talk about somethin’, or can I go back to what I was doin’?”

“It’s about these furloughs.”

“What about ‘em?”

“Well, the teachers negotiated ‘em more than a month ago now. And it wasn’t exactly a secret that they were coming. But nobody said or did anything about ‘em until they actually happened. And now everybody’s in a uproar. How come?”

“Because, dude, being graduates of the public schools themselves, people didn’t figure out the high cost of babysitting until they actually had to pay it. Now, of course, they’re all chanting “education” when all they really want is to get their kids out of their kitchens.”

“And now it says here that the state’s Republican party wants to end them by renegotiating the teacher’s contract.”

“So they can fire some people instead of giving them all short time. Which just happens to be what they wanted to do in the first place. Lovely negotiating tactics.”

“But in the meantime, the rest of the state’s workers got contracts with furloughs too. So if the teachers go back to school on Fridays, they won’t have any schools to go to ’cause all the other workers are out on furlough.”

“Same answer, dude. They renegotiate that contract so they can fire people like they wanted to in the first place. Bottom line remains the same. Except that state employees will join the parents who got sacked from their jobs because they had to stay home with their kids.”

“But, dude! The money guys are saying that the recession’s over. Couldn’t they just raise taxes just a little bit to keep these folk working?”

“Republicans raise taxes to keep a pack of Democrats in jobs? Dude, are you getting enough sleep?“

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of its characters to persons living or dead is for satirical purposes, or is coincidental. Apologies to Jean-Paul Sartre.

===================================

Alan Baldwin: “OK, so where’s the torturer?”

Seizen Shigeta: “Shut up! You bring him in here, I’ll wring your neck.”

Kimo Kalakaua (to Shigeta): “Be still, brah. You forget where we stay?”

Shigeta: “A locked room in hell. In this heat, how could I forget?“

Kalakaua: “So you wring da haole’s neck. Where he wen go?“

Baldwin: “I never dreamed that hell would be a room in a huge Waikiki hotel, but one without even a city view. I suppose that minor amenities like toilets and bar fridges are superfluous in our condition, and A/C is too much to hope for.”

Kalakaua (to Baldwin): “What fo you stay dis place?”

Baldwin: “Damned if I … oh, shit. You?”

Kalakaua: “Dunno.”

Shigeta: “Me either. One minute, I’m leading a crucial meeting of the Hawai‘i Teachers Association, and the next …”

Kalakaua: “You one teacher union guy den!”

Shigeta: “Yeah …?”

Kalakaua: “You how come my keiki no can read!“

Shigeta: “Well, maybe if you parents actually sent us kids who were ready to learn to read, instead of spending all of their time disrupting classroom order …”

Kalakaua: “But that your job, to teach, not to be bumboss! An not fo go surf Wednesdays, neither. Teach is fo why we pay you da big bucks!“

Shigeta: “Big bucks?!? Hell made you lolo already? What’re you calling ‘big bucks’?”

Kalakaua: “You no stay in tent in Nanakuli, you make da big bucks.”

Shigeta: “Well, maybe if you people would get off the damned ice, you could get out of those tents. For your information, brah, teachers make less than just about any other field that requires a bachelor’s degree for entry. In Hawai‘i, teachers make maybe half of what they make anywhere else, when you factor in the cost of living on this rockpile. And that was before the damned furloughs. Teachers are hard to get. And if we didn’t have these little perks here and there for our members, and protect them against the likes of you, we wouldn’t have the teachers we have now!“

Baldwin (to Shigeta): “Do those ‘little perks’ include the bloated teaching bureaucracy?“

Shigeta: “Look, none of us asked to have reams of paperwork jammed down our throats! If we gotta have it, then we gotta have someone to do it!”

Baldwin: “Maybe if you did your jobs right, we wouldn’t have to have those reams of data to keep tabs on you.”

Shigeta: “And maybe if we had some resources with which to do our jobs, instead of trying to teach classes in science with chewing gum and baling wire, we’d have a chance to do those jobs and get out from under the paper pile!”

Baldwin: “And just where do you think we’re going to get those resources?”

Shigeta: “Taxes, of course.”

Baldwin: “‘Taxes, of course’. Get in line! You and everyone else on these bumps in the middle of the Pacific. Who’s going to pay them? The tax burden’s already sky-high. Between high taxes, high prices, and strangling regulations, just about every business in this state has gone broke except tourism, and the tourists are sick of getting gouged.”

Shigeta: “And how do you know this, haole? You a Baldwin, or something?”

Baldwin: “As a matter of fact …”

Kalakaua: “A Big Five bumboss?!?”

Shigeta: “Running working people into the ground for the sake of your swollen profits?!? How’s your buddy Bernie Madoff doing?”

Baldwin: “Listen up, commie. Like it or not, profits are what make it possible for society to pay teachers to surf on Wednesdays. If businesses aren’t allowed to make the kinds of money that will keep both their executives and their stockholders happy, they’re going to move or fold. And when they do, there won’t be anything left in Hawai‘i but coconuts and government. And you don’t want the government running things.”

Shigeta: “Damned right. All they do is tie us up with rules and threaten to fire us if we don’t dance to their tune.”

Kalakaua: “Government don’t do nothin’ fo us ‘cept rip up our tents and throw us in shelters. An it no even is ours!“

Baldwin: “And it taxes us to death for nothing! How come we don’t have anyone from government in here?”

Valet: (opening door) “None of them are in this hotel. The Adversary – the one you call (ptui) God – took one look at how they had to try to meet the mutually-impossible demands of the people they were supposed to govern, and decided they’d had their hell on earth. So they’re in that other place.

“Speaking of demands. The other cells are sick and tired of your bickering. If you don’t shut up and learn to get along, all hell’s going to break loose in here. Your only warning.”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

He and She were on their way home from a local sport-motif eatery, where the food was good but the noise … well, let’s just say that they were grateful for a table on the lanai by the water.

He: “You do know what they call a TV that’s hooked to a really loud sound system, don’t you?”

She: “What?”

He: “Hi-Def.”

She: “What??“

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

OK. I am curious.

No. Not Yellow. Or Blue. Or even George.

I’m curious about this fad that’s shown up in a lot of online (and, I presume, TV and print) advertising lately. The fad for running single words into two or more lines. I’d like to know where it came from and, if I step on it hard enough, can I kill it?

Like in the ads for the energy drink (not the most potent one, water):

TH
AT’S
G

Or the ones for the latest exercise in useless environmental handwaving:

HOPE
NHA
GEN

I can only assume that, late one fine 11th hour before a deadline on Madison Avenue, a stressed graphic artist tried to run too many letters into too small a text box, thereby:

A. Revisiting the joke about planning ahead that has to be at least as old as the wooly mammoth;

B. Reliving the experiences of a gazillion ten-year-old kids and their first experiments with fonts in The Software That Shall Not Be Named®.

The graphic artist, being desperate, pitched his broken-word “design” to the client – who bought it.

And now it’s spreading faster than H1N1.

It has to be stopped. Has to be, I say. Before it catches on in the blogosphere.

I mean,

CAN
YOU
IMA
G
INE
IF
SOM
EON
E
TRI
ED
TO
WRI
TE
A
WH
OLE
POS
T
LIK
E
THI
S?

Hey. Let’s try this out on Twitter …

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“Dude! Did you see that?“

“Of course I didn’t see it, dude. I had my head in the fridge, getting your beer. It’s baseball, y’know. I could go to the fridge six times between plays and miss nothing. And if by some chance something did happen while I was doing something useful, they’ll still be replaying it when I get back.”

“How come everybody’s got instant replays but the umpires? They’re the ones who need it most, the way they keep blowin’ calls. How come they don’t get instant replay?”

“Because they’re not playing a video game?“

“Huh?“

“It’s a live game, played by live people. And live people make mistakes. If the ump’s making mistakes deliberately, I wanna know about it. Otherwise, welcome to the human race. You want everything to be perfect, you want to watch a video game. And when that day comes that you can’t tell a video game on your hi-def TV from a real one, I’m goin’ to be real scared. And you should be too.”

“But don’t you want the umpires to get it right?“

“Yeah. Which is why you train them to be super attentive. You tell them that they don’t have to be super attentive, ’cause the Big Umpire In The Sky is watchin’ over them, they start relying on that Big Ump more and more. And pretty soon, they’ll get rid of the humans altogether, and you’ll have robot umpires. And after that, robot players. And, eventually, just virtual players.”

“Football’s got instant replay.”

“Yeah. And what are you watching while they’ve stopped the game to stare at video screens?”

“Um … commercials?”

“Right the first time, dude. The games already last four hours thanks to TV times out, and they need more? The umpires and referees are ‘getting it right’, all right. Right out of our pockets.”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

“So, Reg, I’ve been thinking.”

“Ah. That explains it, Syd.”

“Explains what?”

“Why all these salesmen have been wandering around looking like they’ve just been furloughed. They couldn’t get you to stop thinking, so they couldn’t sell you anything.”

“Actually, it’s furloughs that I’ve been thinking about. You know that story that’s been making the rounds about the couple who couldn’t work out the price of avocados?”

“Yes, I know the one.”

“And how that’s used as a reason why we can’t afford to be losing teaching days out of the school year here in Honolulu?”

“That does seem to be the popular opinion.”

“Well, riddle me this, then. Our avocado-buying hero graduated from a public high school, right?”

“Presumably, yes.”

“Twelve years in the classroom at our expense.”

“Surely, by now, …”

“Let’s say the public’s expense, then. Twelve years, and he still doesn’t get simple arithmetic. How much more time in school does he need?“

“Syd, I can’t tell you how glad I am that you understand this. Ever read The Hobbit?“

“Ages ago. I like to think I’ve outgrown the need for hobgoblins. Except when they come to the door at Hallowe’en. That’s this weekend, isn’t it?”

“It is. Then you won’t be surprised when I tell you for what age group Tolkien wrote the book.”

“What age group was that?”

“The British equivalent of American fifth grade.”

“Fifth grade?? You’re joking, Reg! My son was telling me that it was on the reading list for a literature course in college. And many of the students found it too tough.”

“Exactly, Syd. We keep getting told we have to keep kids in school, get them more days in school, get them into college. The rest of the world is doing it so we have to as well, to keep up. But what good does it do if all that the bachelor’s degree certifies is the ability to do grade school work?“

“Maybe.”

“Oh, right, you once hired a college football player. Didn’t work out well, did it?”

“I’d rather not talk about it.”

“Your son doing better in the job?”

“He gets by. I only intervene when I have to.”

“Which is just about every day. Like me and my daughter. They’ll learn.”

“I hope so. But what can anybody do about this education thing? We can’t keep throwing good money after bad.”

“The whole system has to get more efficient. Set the standards and stick to them. No more excuses, no more court cases, no more 9-to-5. Everybody has to buy in, teachers, parents, kids, the lot. You have to meet the need of the nation with this much time and this much money. And if you don’t make the grade, you’re out.”

“The private schools can do that, of course. But the public schools?”

“Why not? Look, there are some people who are never going to learn algebra no matter how hard they try. Why force it on them? Design programs that get them to do what they can do the best they can, and let them go do it. Wait tables, if that’s what they prefer. How much time do you have to spend in school to wait tables?”

“There are people who prefer to wait tables?”

“There sure are. ‘Dependent natures’ and all that.”

“Who said that?”

“Abraham Lincoln, no less. And who am I to argue with a god?”

“Speaking of gods, the accountants aren’t going to be very happy with this scenario. Not those who’re selling college courses to students, for sure, however useless you think those courses are.”

“The accountants get it. They’ll cope. They’re the only ones I know of who do college right. ‘Cause they worked out long ago that their path to riches is by keeping us happy and their labor scarce. So you’d best believe that they have standards, and you, student, will meet them or else. The biologists keep complaining that nobody pays them what they’re worth. Well, dammit, if they had a guild that set strict standards of admission and performance like the accountants have, there’d be fewer biologists, but they’d all be millionaires.

“And you know as well as I do; somebody who tries to cheat the system and run his business with a non-certified accountant usually gets what he deserves.”

“Chapter eleven?”

“Chapter seven. Really, Syd. You sound like somebody who needs more wine.”

“I have to admit, that Château Mouton Rothschild was a nice drop. But the bottle’s empty.”

“Indeed it is. I’ll order another. Boy! Boy!! Shiftless lazy white coon! Git your ass over here!”

“Yes, massuh.”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

She: “Another hot day in Paradise!”

He: “Yeah. But don’t yell it out too loud, ok? People in hats and mittens might not take too kindly to it.”

She: “It’s a lot easier to get warm than it is to get cool.”

He: “It is. Assuming you can pay for the clothes or the heat. Still. The trade winds can come back any time now.”

She: “Pour you some ice water?”

He: “Yes please. The ultimate power beverage.”

She: “What?”

He: “Exactly.”

She: “What exactly?”

He: “Exactly right.”

She: “Will you tell me what you’re talking about?!?“

He: “Watt.”

She: “No fair. I asked you first.”

He: “You didn’t ask me anything. I was agreeing with you. Why are you hassling me?”

She: “So I can get an explanation. Before I pour this water down your neck.”

He: “I said, ‘the ultimate power beverage’. You said ‘watt’. I agreed with you. But it’s not just ‘watt’, it’s ‘watter‘. I told you, it’s really powerful stuff. Not to be spilt by pouring down people’s necks.”

She: “Why not? It would energize you. But I suppose, if it’s a power aid, that’s how come they sell it in the vending machines at $2 a pop.”

He: “Well, you’re correct, they do sell it alongside the soft drinks. But the stuff in the bottles is properly called ‘wattest‘. ‘Cause nothing’s more powerful than profits.”

She: “La la la, I can’t hear you …”

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

We were making spaghetti sauce, and had gotten to the point of adding the seasonings when we discovered that we didn’t have all the herbs we needed. It was late and the stores were closed, so I went next door to try and borrow some …

Well, no.

What I’m really borrowing is the time since around 9 HST on the morning of 26 October, when Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba came within inches of becoming a somewhat large and rather messy hood ornament. That car pretty much had me dead to rights. And I don’t mean the 300-pages-and-a-book-deal, Kim Harrison / Charlaine Harris kind of dead, either.

If you live in southeast O‘ahu and wish to get to Chaminade University or the University of Hawai‘i at Mânoa by bicycle, you have a choice of routes.

You can take Waialae Avenue. Or …

You can take Waialae Avenue.

That’s because, between the mountains of southeastern O‘ahu and the deep blue sea, there is room for exactly one east-west road, the Kalaniana‘ole Highway. Which is almost as wide as its name. That one road morphs abruptly into the eastern end of O‘ahu’s (ahem) Interstate Highway System, from which bicycles are verboten. From this trap, there is but a single escape.

Waialae Avenue.

Which passes through a shopping mall, then rises 160 feet in two stages to the crest of a hill, which marks the beginning of a mile-long business district, at the end of which are the Chaminade and UH-Mânoa campuses along with two private high schools.

City planners, of course, recognized the needs of the bike riders who had no choice but to take this route to some of the busiest places in town, and designed the road with wide berms for the required riding lanes. Right?

Silly malihini.

The berms, where they exist at all, are narrow and full of potholes, drains, and other obstacles. Bicycles are, according to the rules of the road, vehicles just like buses, semis, and Hummers, so the sidewalks are legally off-limits. Not that it matters, because, at several places along Waialae Avenue, there are no sidewalks. Including one location, with neither berm nor sidewalk, in which traffic coming from the left (me) must merge with traffic coming from the right – at 60 mph straight off the (ahem) Interstate. All of this at a 10% grade going uphill.

The sidewalks that are in place are frequently narrow, even rougher than the street pavement (sometimes, they are mere dirt tracks) and are full of pedestrians and cyclists who either have never heard of the road rules or choose to ignore them. Pedestrians have died from being run over by bicyclists on sidewalks. Crede expertum: I lost a scientific colleague in precisely this way.

I am told that, in the vicinity of the UH-Mânoa campus, special road rules legalize bicycle operation on the sidewalks. See “pedestrians have died”, supra. My bike remains on the street, riding with the flow of traffic, like the vehicle it is in law and in fact. And where I am safer among the cars than among the heedless riders and wanderers on the sidewalks.

At least, that’s what I thought I was.

Have I mentioned yet that Honolulu is officially acknowledged to have the worst rush-hour traffic in the United States?

Which probably made the driver of the car Koko Head (east)-bound late for class. He – I know it was a ‘he’, I saw the whites of his eyes – saw a tiny gap in ‘Ewa (west)-bound car traffic, and gunned his blue sedan into a left turn across that traffic, into the Chaminade University access road.

And straight at Your Friendly Neighborhood Amoeba, who had already entered the intersection and was legally entitled to the right of way.

I believe the ‘defensive driving’ program instructors call this kind of thing “dead right”.

I still don’t know how we avoided contact. Some combination of me pedaling for dear life (duh) and his fancy wheel turning. Whatever it was, he’s not having to defend himself against a charge of vehicular homicide.

And I’m writing this blog entry on borrowed time.

I suppose somebody will ask what I’m doing on a bicycle at all, never mind on such a hazardous route as Waialae Avenue. Can’t I afford to drive?

Well, no, I can’t. On a practical level or a philosophical one. You may remember, I once figured out it would cost me around US$14 a day to own a car if it never left the driveway. Last I knew, Hawai‘i was in a recession so bad, the state has had to close the public schools. So how is it that all these people can afford to drive?

And I have written that all efforts to thwart anthropogenic global warming are futile unless we start by slashing our use of resources, not by some token Hopen Hagen handwaving amount, but by three-fourths of present-day levels. I wonder if my blue sedan driver is one of those young people who enthusiastically attends “save the planet” rallies, then gets into his car – by himself – and drives home.

Besides. We keep hearing about how fat and unfit We the People are. It has always bothered me that people of a certain lifestyle – including many folk with whom I have worked – drive themselves back and forth from their jobs and then go off to some fancy gym or club “for exercise”. If I need exercise, I get as much of it as possible as part of the job or the commute. Anything else is rubbing it into the faces of those who have no choice about the “exercise” bit; they do it if they wish to eat.

So, in the morning, I will be back on the bicycle, back on Waialae Avenue. If I’m going to be on borrowed time anyway, I may as well see how much my credit will stand.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.