I don’t watch a lot of football although Jo believes I do. UCLA is the only team I follow and that’s because I went to film school there and recently they have been fun to watch. Dartmouth– my undergraduate college –doesn’t play football that’s fun to watch and pro football doesn’t interest me at all. I’ll watch the Super Bowl if it’s an opportunity to eat guacamole.
Football has become as much a part of the Holidays in America as Santa Claus and eggnog and there are now so many college bowl games that recently, even a few teams with losing records for their seasons have been getting to play in them.
This year there will be more than 80 teams in bowls with names like the Union Home Mortgage Gasparilla Bowl and the Bad Boy Mowers Pinstripe Bowl. And if you don’t need to refinance or cut your lawn, there is plenty to feast on beyond the Orange Bowl offered by Capital One and the Peach provided by Chick-Fil-A. Cheeze-It is sponsoring two bowls and you can dip them in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl or the Wasabi Fenway Bowl although this Wasabi is actually the name of a tech company and not the sushi condiment.
In 1950 there were a total of nine bowl games including one called the Salad Bowl in which Miami of Ohio beat Arizona State 34-21. Unfortunately, the Salad Bowl only lasted a few years but it sure had the best name.
This year there are 43 games and if you watch all of them you will have spent over five days in front of your television. I’m willing to bet that somebody has.
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Previewing today’s show which we can assume
will be performed before a full House…
Will it be scenario #1?
Or scenario #2?
And we’d be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge
an important sponsor of today’s event…
Thanks Gerry!
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So, you think you know American history! You may be surprised when I tell you, you don’t know the half of it. Or at least the tiny bit that has taken place behind the scenes during moments of great consequence for our nation and that somehow escaped historians’ recording.
Take the signing of the Declaration of Independence…
And the Gettysburg Address…
And just yesterday in Washington…
Some might think what’s been taking place in the House the past two days is comic but the Republicans have been playing with fire for decades. Now, some of the arsonists they have enabled wish to set the people’s House ablaze. Comedies are supposed to have a happy ending. When they don’t we realize that we were watching a tragedy all along.
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First, let’s get this out of the way… Did an imposter actually cast the deciding vote to elect Kevin McCarthy the 55th Speaker of the House of Representatives?
I’m still not altogether clear about why voting “present” changes the calculus of how many votes someone needs to win the position– and apparently at one point so were the GOP members themselves –but it seems to me that George Santos’ resume is now likely to be updated to include a line about how he single handedly was responsible for the final outcome of the unruly process that elected McCarthy and thereby has now cemented his place in American history– his own, not McCarthy’s.
Perhaps one new piece of legislation that should be proposed is that no member of Congress be elected under false pretenses… Wait a minute. That would bring down the House. But maybe there could be something that might target the most outrageous pretenders. Call it the Santos Claus(e).
Some will contend what we witnessed from Washington this past week was democracy in action. Well, if democracy is one person, one vote I guess it was. But other words popped into my head as I followed our Representatives’ dope opera, including sausage, pyrrhic, extortion and cowardice.
And what’s next? Will there be chaos? Gridlock? Will anything really change? Will U.S. 1 through Rockland, ME actually get repaved? Will the “Sabbath Gas Bags” as Callin Trillin called the Sunday news show gabfest participants have a clue what the next two years of American governance hold? I doubt it. Does anybody?
So, I was curious to learn who was the first person to be elected Speaker of the House and to my surprise when I looked it up I was familiar with the name. Frederick Muhlenberg from Pennsylvania was that man and served three terms from 1789 to 1797. I don’t remember ever learning about him in school where I grew up but in Berks County, PA I drank milk out of a glass bottle from the Muhlenberg Dairy and played basketball against Muhlenberg High School. Muhlenberg College is in the county adjacent to mine.
A descendant of Speaker Muhlenberg was the architect who designed my grandfather’s store in Reading, PA. It opened in 1929 and when the stock market crashed a few months later my father’s family lost nearly everything. The building is gone but it was quite nice.
And here are a few other things I just learned about Frederick Muhlenberg. He was the first signer of the Bill of Rights. He cast the deciding vote on where to locate the nation’s new capital and during his tenure as speaker in 1794 there was a bitter ratification battle over the Jay Treaty that was intended to cool tensions between the U.S. and Great Britain. It passed and a few days afterward Muhlenberg was stabbed by his brother-in-law who had opposed it.
Muhlenberg recovered from his wound but lost his seat in the next election. At least we haven’t seen any knives out yet on the House floor although we did see a woman representative armed with a dog.
So Kevin McCarthy has gained what appears to have been his highest goal and stooped so low to achieve it that he seems to have neutered himself and weakened the office he sought. To put it another way, if McCarthy had been a contestant on Let’s Make a Deal, I think he would have been disqualified for simultaneously opening what was behind doors number one, two and three and allowing the studio audience to ransack the stage.
What’s next? Sing it Bob…
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Jo gets the credit for today’s cartoon idea…
Florida Legislature considering changing state’s name to Elba
and motto from “The Sunshine State” to “Home of the Deposed”
Jair Bolsonaro’s wife says her husband was admitted to the hospital in Orlando with abdominal pain. The fact that he was admitted to the United States a couple weeks ago surprised me until I read that as a head of state of a foreign country he’s entitled to a special U.S. visa that permitted him to enter here with just two days to spare before his term ended. Now, it’s Biden headache or maybe stomach ache too.
This will undoubtedly provoke America’s divide over who gets allowed into our country and who doesn’t. The Left will say “Kick him out” and the Right maybe won’t vocalize it but might oppose Bolsanaro’s expulsion because “Any disciple of Donald Trump is a friend of ours.”
But I was curious who and how many leaders of foreign countries, whether despicable persons or not, have historically lived in exile in America? The very first one I discovered made my head spin.
Remember Davy Crockett, the “King of the Wild Frontier”? When Disney broadcast a series of television shows about him in the 1950s, the coonskin hat that the actor playing him wore was so popular its manufacturers sold the equivalent of $2.6 billion of them in today’s dollars adjusting for inflation to kids like me along with other Davy Crockett merchandise. I’m surprised racoons didn’t become an endangered species.
The real Davy Crockett was killed in 1836 at the Battle of the Alamo by Mexican soldiers led by Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. That same Santa Anna also served as the president of Mexico an astounding 11 times during the 1800s and to my further amazement sought and received exile in the United States on three separate occasions over the course of four decades.
I’ve counted nearly two dozen other countries whose leaders have come here and been granted exile permanently or for periods of time and from a handful of countries– Venezuela, Haiti, Mexico –rather more frequently than I would have imagined. Some of the names of the individuals you’ll remember– President Thieu of South Vietnam, the Shah of Iran, Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines –but the one that interested me the most was a Russian named Alexander Kerensky.
Kerensky was a leader of the first phase of the Russian Revolution and headed the provisional Russian government for three months in 1917 until he was ousted by the Bolsheviks and replaced by Vladimir Lenin. Kerensky outlived nearly all the other Russian figures of that era and died in New York City in 1970.
But back to the present and our guest would-be despot Jair Bolsonaro. President Biden can revoke the former Brazilian leader’s visa anytime at this point. Will he, especially after that country’s own recent reenactment of our insurrection of January 6, 2020 that Bolsonaro certainly help inspire? Pressure is building for that to happen. If it does, will unsavory characters take it to mean that the United States may be a less welcoming landing spot for them to flee seeking sanctuary?
If that indeed is the case, I can think of a song that was a hit over half a century ago with which to turn them away. You might remember it and the late Eydie Gorme. It’s even Brazilian inspired and with a slight tweak they can “Blame it on the Bolsonaro!”
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You can try to make this stuff up but why bother?”
–Peter Imber
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This past September Jo and I took a train from London to Edinburgh. We bought first class tickets which provided us with enough room in our seats to enjoy the four hour journey. We sat opposite two personable American sisters who were traveling to Scotland to join a knitting tour.
Me: “So, you’re going to investigate Scotland yarn?”
Both sisters tilted their heads with uncomprehending expressions. I get that a lot from strangers.
One of the sisters was a passionate monarchist and subscribed to a bunch of magazines about the Royals that I hadn’t known existed. Near the end of the trip she gasped as she was looking at her phone…
She: “The family has been called to Balmoral!”
And yes, a few hours after our arrival in Edinburgh it was announced that Queen Elizabeth had died. So, in addition to being comfortable our train ride became a memorable one as well.
Jo and I also returned to London nine days later by first class train and, unlike our coach flight to the UK, alighted again impressed and not compressed. But I bet a study might reveal that the unpleasantness of air travel today is right up there with the angst felt about visits to the dentist and animus toward cable companies.
Of course it wasn’t always that way! Traveling in America when I was young seemed more like a privilege and not a punishment; more a pleasure and less an ordeal. And we dressed up for it. Do we dress up for anything anymore? Ok, weddings and funerals maybe.
But what really jump started my notch below a diatribe today was an article from a few years back I just ran across. And here’s the headline or the meat of it if you will…
“Research published by Loco2, the only search and booking engine for train tickets in the UK and Europe, has highlighted how both trains and planes allocate less space to the passenger than given by law to cattle on their way to slaughter.”
–Global Railway Review
Yes, a steer must have approximately 5 square feet of space in Europe while those of us in steerage on an aircraft or seats in a less than first class rail car get about 4. Of course that’s actually better than a passenger car which allows only 3 square feet per person but then you can’t stop at any point and really stretch out at 30,000 feet. In fact in the air you only get to walk to use the torture chamber that is still somehow entitled to be called a toliet.
The situation has only gotten worse as the major United States airlines have reduced both the depth and the width of their seats in the past couple decades. In that time Americans have gotten substantially broader and taller. Nearly three-quarters of us– mea culpa –are obese. The increasingly expanding American body and the incredibly shrinking airplane seat conjure up an image for me of a vice being tightened. This is probably why you will never be served as a meal a sardine anything in flight.
So, why has the airlines adding passenger capacity at the expense of passenger comfort been allowed to happen? The FAA only requires that we be able to evacuate from a plane within 90 seconds under simulated emergency conditions and apparently makes no provision for having those drills include children, the elderly or disabled.
In 2018 Congress addressed the safety/comfort issue and ordered the FAA to establish minimum seating dimension requirements but no action has been taken yet by the agency. And now, there has been a survey to take the pulse of airline travelers to determine how they feel about their current onboard experiences.
This past summer the FAA actually asked for public feedback on seat size and leg room but I wasn’t aware of it. Were you? Over 25,000 people responded and unless you were someone who can afford to pay a premium for more room, it would be a shock if the rest of today’s jet set wasn’t upset to the point of hypertension. From reading a few of the comments made public so far flying is now right up there with root canal as a thing one dreads but endures when necessary.
But hey, at least one person we all knew had a hell of a seat in coach…
Of course it wasn’t always that way! Traveling in America when I was young seemed more like a privilege and not a punishment; more a pleasure and less an ordeal. And we dressed up for it. Do we dress up for anything anymore? Ok, weddings and funerals maybe.
But what really jump started my notch below a diatribe today was an article from a few years back I just ran across. And here’s the headline or the meat of it if you will…
“Research published by Loco2, the only search and booking engine for train tickets in the UK and Europe, has highlighted how both trains and planes allocate less space to the passenger than given by law to cattle on their way to slaughter.”
–Global Railway Review
Yes, a steer must have approximately 5 square feet of space in Europe while those of us in steerage on an aircraft or seats in a less than first class rail car get about 4. Of course that’s actually better than a passenger car which allows only 3 square feet per person but then you can’t stop at any point and really stretch out at 30,000 feet. In fact in the air you only get to walk to use the torture chamber that is still somehow entitled to be called a toliet.
The situation has only gotten worse as the major United States airlines have reduced both the depth and the width of their seats in the past couple decades. In that time Americans have gotten substantially broader and taller. Nearly three-quarters of us– mea culpa –are obese. The increasingly expanding American body and the incredibly shrinking airplane seat conjure up an image for me of a vice being tightened. This is probably why you will never be served as a meal a sardine anything in flight.
So, why has the airlines adding passenger capacity at the expense of passenger comfort been allowed to happen? The FAA only requires that we be able to evacuate from a plane within 90 seconds under simulated emergency conditions and apparently makes no provision for having those drills include children, the elderly or disabled.
In 2018 Congress addressed the safety/comfort issue and ordered the FAA to establish minimum seating dimension requirements but no action has been taken yet by the agency. And now, there has been a survey to take the pulse of airline travelers to determine how they feel about their current onboard experiences.
This past summer the FAA actually asked for public feedback on seat size and leg room but I wasn’t aware of it. Were you? Over 25,000 people responded and unless you were someone who can afford to pay a premium for more room, it would be a shock if the rest of today’s jet set wasn’t upset to the point of hypertension. From reading a few of the comments made public so far flying is now right up there with root canal as a thing one dreads but endures when necessary.
But hey, at least one person we all knew had a hell of a seat in coach…
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Hi,
If you know anyone who you think might enjoy receiving my Homemade Cartoons please give them my email address. If you yourself no longer wish to receive them, let me know and I’ll stop sending them to you.
Peter
It’s a day to have stayed indoors in Maine. Our weather event started yesterday afternoon and here on the coast we’ve had what seems to have been continuous wind and freezing rain.
Compared to what’s been going on in California and other parts of the country and the planet I’m not complaining. The toughest part of winter weather for Jo and me is getting out of our driveway if we want to go anywhere. The roads are cleared and sanded promptly. In fact one of the first signs of winter every year is seeing that trucks have been adorned with snow plows. Often the guy who mows your lawn also plows your driveway.
When we lived in Los Angeles I believed the easiest high paying job there was being a TV weatherman. On many if not most days the forecast that aired could have been four words and pre recorded– “Sunny and warm today.”
I guess that’s changed and it’s never been applicable here. But despite knowing full well that a 10 day weather forecast for Maine seems as perishable as unrefrigerated seafood, I look at them anyway and want to believe. And why shouldn’t I? Hasn’t weather forecasting gotten better. Here’s what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) claims:
A seven-day forecast can accurately predict the weather about 80 percent of the time and a five-day forecast can accurately predict the weather approximately 90 percent of the time. However, a 10-day—or longer—forecast is only right about half the time.
I’m sure there’s plenty of research attempting to improve knowing when all types of natural events are going to occur. Working toward predicting them from avalanches to wildfires sounds like a much more beneficial use of artificial intelligence than cribbing college term papers. I imagine that it may be possible some day to know well ahead of time when and where there is going to be a tornado or an earthquake. There are plenty of types of natural disasters that would be nice to have an early warning for.
On the other hand our species seems to have known about the biggest one for decades. Climate change is occurring and picking up steam among other and others’ things and apparently our awareness of this hasn’t yet really proved to be the mother of intervention. As Walt Kelly’s Pogo character uttered 50 years ago “We have met the enemy and it are us.”
Recently, I came across a website that I guess should be one more thing to worry about but which oddly enough gives me solace in a time when there are so many things I really worry about. NASA provides a daily report on how close asteroids are actually coming to striking the earth. The comfort I get from this is knowing how incredibly far away they are. We name hurricanes and now have begun to name blizzards. When we start naming asteroids, I’ll start worrying.
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Some days I can’t think of anything to write to accompany a cartoon so I keep composing them until I might. I’ve been zero for three the past few days…
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Sung to the tune of On the Street Where You Live and dedicated to… well, you figure it out.
I have sometimes been indiscreet before
But sneaking what I’m seeking
Never caused uproar
All at once do I need an alibi
Knowing I am the source of the leak
Are there felonies when they end this probe
But if detected I’m protected
Because I wear this robe
Have I overreached? Will I be impeached?
Not if I am the source of the leak
Oh, the empowering feeling
Just to know I’m still in the clear
Forget about underlings squealing
If connected it will end up ending their careers
Justice Roberts seems like an honest man
But some others are like brothers and won’t take the stand
Let the time go by
I’ll stay high and dry
Sitting on the same seat where I leaked
With apologies to Alan Jay Lerner (lyrics) and Frederick Loewe (music). On the Street Where You Live is famously from the 1956 Broadway musical My Fair Lady.
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A.I. scares me. Human knowledge accumulated over our species’ history stored in libraries where it can be sought, considered and applied seems to be one thing. Now, when that knowledge is being aggregated in total into computers to churn, it appears to be resulting in something else.
Take chatbots for example. Recently, I had an online chat where instead of addressing the question I had, I kept getting questions about my day, my satisfaction with the product I was asking about, offers to subscribe to and buy stuff but no answer to my question. Finally, I inquired if I was actually typing back and forth with a real person. My chat partner said he or she was a real person but I’m not convinced that was the case.
A.I. turned loose and being used to converse, create content and make decisions for us without our knowing who or what the wizard might be behind the curtain scares me. Will we humans soon just hang up a sign that reads “Gone Fishing?” What happens when most jobs and even the more crucial decisions that we make are outsourced at the point when they can pass Alan Turing’s 1950 test of whether a machine or a computer can exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human? Oh, it already happened a long time ago and I just haven’t been paying attention. Sorry.
There are certainly jobs that automation, robots and artificial intelligence can and should replace us having to do. And It’s likely there is always going to be crummy if not dreadful work for only humans to perform no matter what. I had what I felt was one of these jobs when I was living on a kibbutz in Israel during the 1970s and I wrote about it two years ago during the pandemic.
The job was working in a wood products factory and the task was operating a machine that made handles for pickaxes– you know, the tool you see prisoners wielding to split rocks in the movies. I knew exactly how many handles I could make every day if there were no unforeseen problems. There was an absolute maximum number that was possible and no more than that. It was my personal Groundhog Day but more mind numbing than the movie version.
I would expect making pickaxe handles a half century later is devoid of the same amount of human participation and if that’s true, I say hallelujah! On the other hand I’ll add another story from that time in my life about actually being humbled when I was told I was to be, as they say in the UK, made redundant.
My job in my combat unit in the Israeli Army was to help put my artillery battery on the battlefield grid in relation to the unit’s command center. That sounds way more complicated than the task I performed called triangulation and my tools reflected that– a compass, a couple flags and a long piece of radio wire which I always had to procure in the field wherever and whenever we did maneuvers.
Getting the necessary amount of radio wire was easy enough but finding a stick to wrap it around in the sands of the Negev and Sinai deserts was usually a challenge. Unwinding and rewinding the crudely wrapped wire took way more time than it needed to and after a few years of doing this I finally realized I had a much more efficient way to accomplish this task that all along was right in front of my face.
Among the things made at the kibbutz wood products factory were wooden reels. I drilled a hole through three of them– one for each of the batteries in my unit– got cord normally used to tie straw and hay bales and wrapped it around the reels, cut some short wooden rods with which to spin them and couldn’t wait (that’s an exaggeration for effect) for my next reserve duty. Not surprisingly when it came time for the roll out (literally) and test run (literally) of my simple innovation, it proved a real time saver and we could accomplish our triangulations in seconds instead of minutes.
That news traveled fast and one night during those exercises a jeep appeared out of the darkness and headed my way. In Israel high ranking officers have leaf shaped patches on their epaulets. The more of them on a shoulder the higher the rank. The leafs look similar to falafel balls and to those in the army and the Israeli public as well that’s what they’re called– falafels.
When a passenger got out of the jeep I saw he was wearing three falafels– a general’s rank.
Him: “Are you the soldier from Kibbutz Gat who came up with this idea?”
Me: “Yes.”
Him: “Very clever. I congratulate you.”
Me: “Thank you.”
Him: “Nice idea but you’re going to be replaced by a laser within a year.”
Yes, I was told that the historic procedure employed in artillery positioning was going to no longer be in need of soldiers running with flags, compasses and baling cord.
You by now have heard about chatGPT which became publicly available only a few months ago and appears to be as powerful as it is controversial. I haven’t been able to get access to try it and get a message that it’s “at capacity” along with this limerick on my screen that chatGPT created…
ChatGPT is surely the best But its servers are put to the test With so many users chatting It’s no wonder they’re lagging But they’ll fix it soon, no need to fret!
Hey, chatting and lagging don’t work as a rhyme for me! So, the chatGPT in the spat needs a little work even though it already can write proficient high school and college term papers that might cause teachers and professors to bring back blue books and perhaps even revive the lost skill of cursive handwriting to be certain to know what’s “live” and not “Memorex.”
But chatGPT has a limitation that we humans don’t. It can only provide responses based on the data that has been inputted and it has been trained to retrieve. What it can’t know (at least not yet) are my or your life experiences and memories. It wouldn’t be able to share my stories with you and for now and hopefully forever the human mind is too beautiful a thing to be replaced.
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Riffed from the Headlines
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Just got off the phone with my investment firm. One of my tax forms emailed to me won’t print correctly here at home so I asked for it to be put in that other mail. I was told it could take two weeks for me to receive it. I guess it really is coming by snail. But before I could make that request I was asked a bunch of security questions which I had no problem with until this…
Investment Firm Guy: “What was the high school you attended?”
Me: “I went to two.”
I gave him both names…
Investment Firm Guy: “What is your final answer?”
I guessed right and wondered what the hell would have happened if I hadn’t!
Afterward I thought about the quiz show where that “final answer” line was made famous. It was of course Who Wants to be a Millionaire and the late Regis Philbin owned it or something close to it.
Today, it seems we live in a world where we are asked to identify ourselves constantly in some way or another and to coin another famous phrase made famous by TV and a guy who I once worked for “And that’s the way it is.”
We’re often admonished that these rites of identification are for our own protection and I get messages sometimes when I log onto a website warning me that my password is weak– that my identity needs to be spruced up to be more of an entity. If I could actually respond which I can’t, I’d answer, “My memory is weaker than my passwords so I’m going to keep them!”
But attitudes change and recently, Jo and I decided we needed to actually do something about the 100 or so passwords I’m aware of that we have. It seemed a reasonable goal. We’d classify passwords by subject… shopping, entertainment, healthcare, travel. Make the groupings coherent and easier to remember.
I’m over halfway through the 100 and maybe things will be better but getting this far has not been easy and even less fun. Every website seems to require a different way to accomplish the goal. Instead of all hands on deck it’s all devices on desk as I get sent codes to my iPhone that I must plug in through my computer keyboard so I can continue my journey through password hell.
Forget about password heaven. I’m now at OpenTable. Will I make it to Zappos without a prescription for a stronger antidepressant? The process for changing a password has made me long for the time before there were home computers and smartphones and the internet; when turning on a television was a knob and finding a channel a dial. Yeah, I’m just a whining Babyboomer who only remembers his social security number at this point.
By the way did you know that there is an annual World Password Day? It’s observed on the first Thursday in May which this year falls on May 4. I’m not kidding. Some cybersecurity professionals started it 10 years ago. But I would like to know if you have to prove that you’re not a robot to get into their party.
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