Too old to wear socks, too young to die

This summer quite a milestone was reached at El Estado del Rey. An entire summer went by without wearing socks. Not one day, not one half day. No socks all summer.

We all know how important it is to set goals. College students often have summertime goals. It could be to learn a trade or a foreign language, prepare for the LSAT, assist the meek to inheriting the earth, traveling to Budapest, learn to play the ehru, or just get a real cool tan.

It’s been the same goal every year for some time: Go the entire summer without wearing socks.

Something always gets in the way. It might be a family wedding or a funeral, a baptism of a small King, some sort of important meeting with a Congressman or Hollywood studio boss, or a trip to San Francisco. Whatever it is, the goal always falls short.

When summer ended last week the realization hit: no socks.

The fact was driven home when in the laundry room for the third and final summer laundry and no socks started or ended in the laundry.

In a closet on the King Estate there are 30 hangers, used by 30 different formerly pampered Aloha Shirts. These shirts used to periodically go to a nice Haitian couple in Hialeah who ran a dry cleaner. This place was a resort for Hawaiian shirts. They were dry cleaned, perfectly starched, and beautifully folded with tissue paper between each shirt, ready for another trip into the rotation.

As money stopped coming into the King Estate, one of the niceties that had to go was the pampering of the Aloha shirts. It was off to the rough and tumble life of Maytag. To avoid over-shocking these delicate shirts, laundry day has been reduced to a dozen times a year. Old friends can even tell how close it is to laundry day by what shirt makes it through the rotation.

But this isn’t a tale of Aloha shirts or the hard times at El Estado del Rey. It’s about socks, or to be more exact: non-socks.

As goals go many may scoff at the idea of not wearing socks for a season as a goal.

But what is the point of life goals? As you get older and realize goals have been attempted, and reasonably often met, the need for life goals looses their importance.

Why scoff at the idea of a life well led, ready for the relaxation earned? What would be wrong with dolce far niente?

Still goals are good. As some life coach said once, goals help you to choose where you want to go in life.

If the objective is to relax and have a stress-free summer, not wearing socks can be a way of achieving the more nebulous goal of relaxing.

Streaks end. Cal Ripken took a day off. Joe DiMaggio didn't get a hit one day. Sugar Ray Robinson was knocked out by Jake LaMotta. At some point the temperature will drop and toes will get cold.

It isn’t clear how long this sock-free summer goal has been a motivation, but when the realization hit that socks hadn’t been worn for three straight summertime laundry cycles, it builds motivation for more goals to be set and reached.

Is there anything beyond the realm of goal setting and achievement?

Bring on the ehru!

Just say ‘No’ to welfare queens; yes to E.T.

In the 1976 election then-Presidential-candidate Ronald Reagan warned us about welfare queens. They were never going to stop milking the system as long as we continued to enable them. Some claimed they were costing us millions of dollars (with no proof, likely it was more like thousands of dollars.)

The current Republican Administration and Democratic Congress now talks about turning over $700 billion to the Wall Street welfare queens, much more than ever given to any welfare queens in Harlem, Detroit or South Chicago.

Just think what that $700 billion could do in giving a kick-start to the U.S. Energy Technology (ET) industry. This is our future, not enabling Wall Street welfare queens.

As the late Sen. Everett Dirksen once said, “A billion here, a billion there, and soon you are talking about real money.”

According to an article in the San Jose Mercury News, the Head Start Program’s budget is $7 billion dollars, which is used to help 900,000 disadvantages students pay for their education. The $700 billion gift to the Wall Street welfare queens could be used to fund Head Start for 100 years.

Every expert has told us the world economy (not just the U.S. economy) will collapse if we don’t socialize Wall Street losses. But they are also concerned that we won’t allow them to capitalize profits after we finish bailing them out. Wall Street isn’t really all that different than the hyperbolic welfare queens of the 1980s.

They are just numerous orders of magnitude more expensive.

Do we really lack choice? Is there no other option than throwing $700 billion at the problem without any accountability?

If we do not bail out Wall Street what is “The Ripple of Evil” that will result?

The investment banks will collapse. Many people will lose their savings, with many pension plans tied up in these investments. Also investors from China, Saudi Arabia and Dubai will lose their shirts (or at least a sleeve) and be much less willing to lend us money or invest in our corporations in the future.

This will cause considerable instability in other banking institutions.

Houses will drop significantly in value. People will walk away from their homes when they don’t see quickly getting back to their mortgage value. It will become fairly common to walk away from your house valued at $200,000 when you have a million dollar mortgage.

Housing prices will drop more, leading to more walking away from mortgages. The housing market Ponzi scheme will end just as Ponzi schemes always end, with the late investors left holding worthless notes.

The housing market will eventually be priced as their value as shelter, rather than investments. Homebuyers will ask themselves, how much is it worth to have a roof over my head not how much can I make when I flip this house.

With so many banks failing, so many foreign investors leery of U.S. investments, credit will become difficult to obtain meaning buying fewer new cars, fewer jet skis and less crap from Walmart.

Americans, whose only remaining super power is our spending power, will stop spending. People will live within their means. We will lose out status as a super power, in the short term probably replaced by a vacuum, but if we don’t make the right moves, replaced by petro-dictators.

It could be a very tough next ten years. The country might actually have to make sacrifices for their crazy behavior over the last few decades.

All nasty stuff, maybe nothing like it since the Great Depression.

The good news is the government can respond. Apparently they have $700 billion laying around Washington D.C. that they didn’t use to bail out Wall Street (it really doesn’t exist, but it can be available.)

Rather than bailing out the Wall Street welfare queens, we use some portion of the $700 billion stake to invest in thousands of different Energy Technology initiatives. We use some to retrain the unemployed, so they are equipped to handle the future energy technology.

We try a huge number of different ideas; $700 billion can buy lots of buckshot. Some will work, most will not. That’s okay, that is what government can do is try things that might not be worth the gamble for someone looking for profit motives.

When there is a world without a hegemony, eventually some nation steps into the vacuum. The next hegemony will be the nation that can answer the oncoming energy dilemma. A country that can supply the world with cheap and renewable energy will make the world decisions.

The World Bank estimate one out of every four people, 1.6 billion people on Earth are off the energy grid, no access to power. Hooking them up to the dirty energy grid will be expensive and bad for the planet. Bringing them a solar generator will be expensive today, but will become cheaper as the technology improves and the scale increases, all made possible with the U.S. finding the right use for $700 billion.

Can you imagine living on a small farm in central Africa that has relied on human and animal energy? Someone from America comes to you with a reasonable priced solar energy generator to power both your farm and your house, no reason to chant “Death to America.”

With petro-dictators no longer having the money to repress their people or invest in terrorism, we truly get to see democracy sprout in parts of the world it has never had a chance to gestate without sending in troops.

We become the world leader by leading at what we can do best. Not spending or invading other countries, but by investments.

The first step is to stop being enablers for the Wall Street welfare queens and tell them the free market is working just as it should.

Loosin' my freak flag

There is a movement in the air. For lack of a better name, let’s call it Barely Hairy for Barry or perhap Sheered Locks for Barrack. We'll need to focusgroup the names to see which one works better.

The original plan for this week was to continue looking at 2008 through acid-flashback eyes by writing about how the Barack Obama campaign is the Clean for Gene crowd of 40 years ago finally having their shot at the brass ring. But the story needs a bit more gestation and perhaps a bit of investigative reporting.

To get started on the investigation process, the first step was have brownish-grey locks sheered.

As mentioned last week, for the first time in many Presidential votes this reporter is supporting a major candidate who actually has a shot at winning.

In 1968 Eugene McCarthy ran for the Democratic nomination for President against the sitting Democratic President, Lyndon Johnson. Plenty of kids pissed off at LBJ about the Vietnam War jumped to the chance to oppose the hawk Johnson and supported the dove McCarthy. They cleaned up their act so they could canvas for McCarthy, hence the catchy phrase, Get Clean for Gene.

Additionally, Mom turned 75 on Friday and she claimed all she wanted for her birthday from her loving son was to cut his hair. Not just the usual haircut of pulling out the scissors or razor and doing self-inflicted surgery, but one done by a professional.

Barbers are about as important a part of life as tax accounts are for many college students. They have a place on the trust ladder a rung or two below lawyers and arms dealers.

Growing up in the sixty, barbers were the enemy. The hierarchy was:

Spiro Agnew
Tie between LBJ and Tricky Dicky
Barbers
The Cops
Sellers of skunkweed

Back in the day, barbershop visits had to happen. In a career as a member of the military industrial complex, no way freak flags could fly. Getting locks trimmed then was something that had to happen at least yearly, regardless if needed or not.

Luckily there was a barber in the family, a father-in-law, generally a nice guy despite his chosen profession. The divorce brought an end to that relationship and the closest ever gotten to a bond between barber and barberee was ended with the marriage. Who knows how different life would have turned out had that relationship been allowed to proceed?

After NASA, it was off to start Internet businesses. Hard to say if it was to get away from the military industrial complex or just to have the freak flag freedom.

Now in retirement, why worry about this barber-phobia. It’s all in the process of falling out anyway.

But whatever Mom wants, Mom gets, especially on her 75th birthday.

Driving around Sacramento looking for the telltale red and white barber pole is a hopeless endeavor.

While walking through a mall there was a sign $15.99 for a haircut.

The last time this reporter stepped inside a barbershop, haircuts were around $4.50, or the price of about three gallons of gas. The current price of a haircut was closer to four gallons of gas. Since so many are complaining about the price of gas, $15.99 must be reasonable for a haircut.

Better to pay $15.99 than $6.66.

No time to peruse old Playboys, Car and Driver, or Old Scratch Quarterly. The hair butcher didn’t look too scary. She looked like she might be pregnant, but one thing learned over many years, don’t ever make that assumption.

No evil smile or smell of sulphur.

She sat me down in a chair, asked what was to be done and then hardly spoke again. Barbers back in the day were famed for talking all sorts of garbage, generally obnoxious political ideas. They knew you weren’t going to argue with them since they held the sharp instruments.

The only concern sitting in the high chair was if blood pressure meds were taken that morning as prescribed.

A mere 10 minutes later out of the chair. Even tipped the gal a double fin for her troubles. What the heck, what’s a tenner when haircuts only happen every few years.

Mom loved it, blood pressure remained out of the danger zone, and as they say, it’s the thought that counts…

How do we go from one person getting a haircut for his Mom to a movement? The warrior-poet Arlo Guthrie once said exactly how to start a movement.

If one person does it, they’ll think he is sick.

If two people do it, they’ll think they are faggots (Arlo’s words, not mine. It was much less politically correct age then.)

If three people do it, they’ll think it is an organization.

And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day, I said fifty people a day walking in getting a haircut and walking out. And friends they may thinks it's a movement.

And that is what this could become, the Barely Hairy for Barry Movement.

Money for nothing and chicks for free

The novelist Edward Dahlberg wrote, “What men desire is a virgin who is a whore.”

Natalie Dylan is proving Dahlberg right by combining the two of men’s desires along with a healthy dose of capitalism and good-old American work ethic.

The Sacramento State Hornet is treating Dylan as if it is a real story. It is fairly safe to assume it is a bogus story concocted by radio DJ Howard Stern and/or Bunny Ranch owner Dennis Hof. Still it is interesting to look at the story because of the tremendous amount of interest that it has generated.

Dylan is using the Internet to sell a service, her deflowering, to the highest bidder. According to Hof, the bids are about $250,000.

Good old supply and demand at work. Milton Friedman should be proud.

Much of the attention has been on the supply. How dare this young woman supply this as a service. The bigger question is the demand side.

Generally, when we want services, we look for experience. Nobody would spend more to get a plumber who is unclogging pipes for the first time. Better to get a plumber who has seen plenty of pipes in their career.

Services all seem to work that way, experience ranks higher than newness.

Yet when it comes to men (let’s assume it is all men bidding on Dylan’s sexual services) bidding for sex, newness matters. Can you imagine the bidding that would take place for a woman looking for her centennial partner, bogus or otherwise.

There is a reasonable chance the woman looking for that lucky 100th partner will be much better at sex than a virgin, but still she isn’t going to get nearly the demand generated by Ms. Dylan.

Men have fragile egos when it comes to sexual prowess. Women are always telling us we are the best they ever had, but we know in our hearts that’s bullshit.

With a virgin, at least for some period of time, you are the best she ever had. That period might only be fifteen minutes, until she figures out who is No. 2 (at a considerably discounted rate) but still during that time, you know you are the best she ever had.

But why don’t we feel that way with a plumber? Wouldn’t we be proud if we had the finest pipes the plumber has ever seen? Shouldn’t we be looking for that plumber ripe for deflowering?

Perhaps men just don’t see sexual relations with a woman as a service, but as a product.

It is much easier to understand a willingness to spend for a new product over a used one. We understand how products devalue as they are used.

It still doesn’t make sense. Paying for sex is more about a service than a product. You would think you are paying more for what she can do rather than what she is.

Perhaps it is just a prehistoric urge built into men. Regardless if it is sexual or companionship, we still want and need a specific type of woman.

Even though Dylan isn’t the woman you are going to take home to Mom, or showoff at the next company Christmas party, we still can’t get over looking for the woman who fits some ancient idea of womanhood.

The relationship only lasts until the Bunny Ranch buzzer goes off, but we still are more concerned with the woman rather than her skills.

Last week Cody K wrote a blog about robotic sexual partners. Will people want the new robot, fresh off the assembly line, or the one that has been broken in and lost some of the new robot sharp edges?

My September Rant

Lipstick on a pig? You gotta be kidding me! All the critical issues we could be talking about and we have gone mad over a tired old cliché.

What else is off limits? Casting pearls before swine? Paying lip service? Come and put a lip lock on my love pork chop?

Apparently Sarah Palin now owns lipstick references, just like Rudy Giuliani owns 911. How about we just pay her a royalty every time we reference pigs or lips? I think I owe her about a quarter so far, but maybe I’ll send her a couple bucks just so I got some credit in the piggy bank.

Unbelievably they call lipstick references sexist. Telling women they are baby incubators isn’t sexist, but lipstick on a pig… String him up! (But not in a racist, lynching fashion.)

This is an election that should be about ideas. Obama and McCain have as dynamically opposite views on the future of America as LBJ and Barry Goldwater.

Forget the reform crap. Hiring politicians to change the system will never work. They are successful politicians thanks to the system. They are as likely to bite the political hand that feeds them as our own President Gonzales is going to move into a cubicle after spending a quarter of a mil on remodeling his digs.

We’ll get something like McCain-Feingold, full of enough loop holes the politicians will have no trouble backing up the armored truck through them.

We got real problems in America. We are on our way to Banana Republic status, and the Bushies have been busy speeding up the process for eight years.

We are borrowing money at shylock rates like a Las Vegas high-roller told he only has six months to live. Our politicians don’t care. They’ll have cush jobs on Fox or MSNBNC when the bills come due.

Our energy policy was to ask the oil companies what we should do. Surprise, surprise, they can’t think of any reason to change our policy of filling up their pockets.

McCain says ignore all that stuff. We owe him the presidency for his honorable behavior after being captured and tortured by the North Vietnamese.

Yes people behaved honorably in the dishonorable war in Vietnam. We should not blame the men and women fighting for their country for leaders sending them were they have no business going. But still when discussing McCain’s service, lets not forget what he was doing in Southeast Asia.

This wasn’t Francis Gary Powers taking photos. This was McCain flying bombing missions in his A-4 Skyhawk. We can make the argument American sorties tried to reduce civilian casualties, but reducing isn’t the same as eliminating. Folks died.

When innocent civilians were killed on September 11, 2001, Americans were ready for revenge. There were calls for bombing just about every country that began with an A or an I. If we had the technology to kill every person in a country, many Americans would have gladly pushed the button.

Does it really matter to the Afghani or Vietnamese farmer who gave the order to kill his wife and children? Is he perhaps missing the fine point of an order coming from an Islamic fanatic hiding in a cave, a Commie despot in his palace, or a Democratically-elected Christian fanatic from his well-guarded mansion in Washington D.C.?

Yet we are shocked when told Vietnamese civilians beat up McCain when he crashed during his 23rd bombing mission. What would you do when face to face with someone who dropped bombs on your neighborhoods, schools, and homes?

John McCain wants us to remember his sacrifice for us in North Vietnam. Yet John McCain has forgotten. At one time McCain opposed Americans torturing their enemies. He cited his experiences in the Hanoi Hilton as why he opposed torture. McCain has forgotten his experience in that box and now supports torture.

We have always tortured. But now, instead of the Colonel who allowed the torture being prosecuted when he was found out, he is now patted on the back and told, “Heck of a job, Brownie.”

The torture McCain went through and his service in our name can and should be honored. But since he has clearly put it behind him then it is time we did also.


We need a leader who believes in prudence and empathy, virtues that have fallen out of favor in the U.S.

Use either word in a Bushie meeting and you have to go stand in the corner. If we have any desire to slow America’s slide into third-rate power, these are virtues we will need to embrace. I have doubts about Obama’s ability to make either a national policy, but I know both virtues would be just as repugnant to McCain as to the Bushies.

Democratic or Republican politicians – they are just two sides of the same coin. Neither will do much beyond advancing their own base and repaying their campaign contributors. Voting for either party was always throwing your vote away. That last thing either party needs is yet another vote, especially in California where it is obvious long before election day which party will win. It has always been better to give your vote to a third party who could actually make use of every vote they receive.

However, this year, we need to hold our noses and vote for Barrack Obama. Regardless of how we believe he might do as a president, it is time we make amends for the disaster of the last eight years. We need to send a clear message to the rest of the world that the Bushie era is over.

Simple, fair, and brutal

My friends and I occasionally play a game called simple golf. The basic rules of the game are keep your hands off the golf ball and leave the golf course as you found it.

We developed this game in response to what we saw as the over-complication of standard golf. The United States Golf Association developed their game by trying to apply rules to every possible situation and apply America’s idea of fairness to an inherently un-American game.

Much like the game of Russian Roulette, our game is simple, fair, and brutal. Every one starts the game with identical chance of winning and the same odds of ending up dealing with the brutal part of the game. It is hardly the golfer’s fault if his ball ends up unplayable in a gopher hole, just as it's not the Roulette player’s fault if they end up with the occupied chamber.

Every time I tell people who play golf about our one-rule golf game, they play the “what if” game.
“What if someone cheats?”
“What if someone uses illegal equipment?”
“ What if a player kneels on a towel to make a stroke?” (Covered in USGA decision 13-3/2.)

We just don’t worry about the “what ifs” in our simple game.

We are all honorable people, and would not use unfair techniques to gain advantages. We all rather play with honor than win. The “what if?” people will always follow this up with “what if someone would rather win than play with honor?” We would pay up the gambling debts and then never invite them for a return engagement.

Trying to take our simple golf game out to the bigger world doesn’t entirely work. It is easy enough to vote someone who behaves dishonorably off the island in our small group, much harder to do in a big old goofy world.

The idea behind our simple game – just as it could be with the larger society – is heaping more and more rules onto our activity does not increase the chance of honorable behavior.

Honor actually decreases with all the rules.

Society – just as in golf – people now associate legal and illegal with right and wrong. Often times golfers will behave in all sorts of dishonorable ways on the golf course, defending themselves by saying: “It's not against the rules.”

Same with society.

Society decides legal and illegal on all sorts of behavior, often arbitrarily defining right and wrong.

A subject near and dear to my heart is recreational drugs.

The government at some point arbitrarily decided marijuana was illegal and alcohol was legal. In many people’s minds this means:

Alcohol	=	good
Marijuana	=	bad

There is no way from a societal viewpoint to justify this arbitrary decision.

For some people alcohol would be bad and marijuana would be good. For others, both might be bad, and for some lucky ones, both might be good.

Some would call me an anarchist.

Even in our simple golf game we have our two rules. The game couldn’t work without those rules, just as society couldn’t work without some minimal set of rules.

That is the key: a minimal set.

Laws need to be designed so that society can function, individual rights are protected, and the needs and desires of the society can be met. Government needs to get out of the right and wrong definition business.

I may disagree with someone’s choices, whether it is to lug around 30 clubs or marry 30 spouses. It is okay to disagree. Matter of fact, allowing others to do things I disagree with gives me the opportunity to feel superior to that person.

We let them decide for themselves, and then can poke fun at their choices.