Collections

We’ve all seen the pictures of the homes of the hoarders, the out of control individuals swallowed by the mountains of garbage that they have accumulated, but were unable to dispose of, teetering piles of rubbish concealing walls that have not seen the light of day in years.  We all agree that no, that’s not us, no way, unh uh; just keep your nose out of my garage.

Some people are compulsive sorters, labelers and shelvers in their attempts to bring their hoarding under control. My father was one such, and I have inherited those tendencies, but I like to think they are under control.  When he passed on, I looked in his garage and found shelves full of labeled compartmented trays for nuts, bolts, screws, springs, washers, set screws, cotter pins, you name it.  As a small boy I remember going to McLendon’s with him every Saturday, and every time he needed one, he bought two, just in case. I still regret sending the pop rivets off to auction.

Half the battle of collecting stuff is being able to lay your hands on it when you need it, a battle that is lost when you spend hours or days digging through your pile looking for something you knew you had, but don’t quite remember where you put it.  With tools, it’s who you loaned them to.

Half the reward you get when you sell or give away some little gubbin you’ve been sitting on all these years, like those clear yellowed Lucite Stanley replacement plastic mallet tips in the original box that have lived in my toolbox for twenty years or so, comes from the justification that you were right, see?  Let the significant others of the world roll their eyes as they will, one successful placement of a part back in the tool to which it belongs, or one new home found for the odd Harley part, even if it means transportation from one pile to another, means all the rest of them could do the same, right?  It’s even better when you make a profit on the deal!

Beyond that, though, we also benefit society when we scoop up others’ discards and preserve them for the moment they regain their value.  Each finished part represents a certain amount of labor on someone’s part, which takes energy, which can neither be lost nor destroyed as long as the part avoids the landfill or the smelter.  The trick is in knowing where to draw the line.

Every swap meet I ever attended as a seller always winds up with the pack-up-and-head-for-the-barn load, and there is always a small pile of stuff there that just doesn’t deserve to go back in my pile; I’m tired of looking at it, and nobody is ever going to want that anyway, so where’s the nearest garbage can?  One of my favorite tricks was to go to one of the other sellers and say, “Hey, I gotta go, but I want to leave this pile here in my booth as freebies that anyone who wants can take.  Would you do me a favor and toss the remainders in that garbage can over there for me when you leave?”  They’d always say, “Sure, no problem!”, but they’d also have that look on their face that said, “Yeah, sure, after I dig through it first and see how much I want!”  Either way, the stuff would be gone and I’d be happy.

But the thing to remember is that everything you keep in your house or garage has a story, and everything has a hook that latches on and drags you down.  Some things, like your favorite motorcycle, have big hooks in deep while others, like the spare part for a tool you no longer own, have small ones that are easily dislodged.  When you pick up  a thing and consider it, and can’t remember where you got it and why you kept it, that’s a sign that you kept it too long, or never needed it in the first place, and an invitation to send it on down the road.  The beauty of Ebay and Craigslist and all their competitors is that they give people ways to get rid of stuff the best way, by turning them into cash.  The problem is when you can’t quite figure out how to do that. 

It is also true that, even if you give stuff away or send a load to the scrap metal yard, it feels almost as good as if you had sold it, because the hooks pulling out of your shoulders lighten your load an infinitesimal but noticeable amount.  Giving something to a friend who needs it returns double the pleasure to you as you do good and feel good about it.  That’s better than money.

We are marked by the things we collect as we become known by them.  Just let one Singing Bass show up on your wall, and the avalanche of beer bongs, fishing plaquards, NASCAR posters and cutesy country sayings on softwood is inevitable.  It’s like clickbait on Facebook.

And then there’s the problem of what happens to your collection after you die.  That old saw about “I want to live long enough to become a problem for my kids” takes its meaning posthumously.  The real difference, I suspect, is that one departed person’s pile is dealt with by use of an auctioneer, while another one requires a dumpster.  It could be considered a measure of success in your accumulation, an affirmation, if you will, of your judgement and discriminating taste if the auction catalog is larger than the dump load.

So the wisdom nuggeted here, if any, is that collections are nice, when they bring you pleasure and increase in value (hah!), but it is also nice to thin them from time to time.  There was a guy, who made a good living hauling garbage in Portland for many years and accumulated a collection of motorcycles, mostly Harleys, that he rode for around 500 miles each before stashing them in his collection in original unmolested condition.  As you can imagine, the auction when he died drew a lot of attention and brought many high prices for the bikes when they sold.  You could also imagine the costs associated with storage of that many bikes in a way to preserve them, and how that alone would force the heirs to dispose of the collection, let alone the buildings that housed them.  You can imagine what will happen to Jay Leno’s Garage when he passes on.
There’s a collection of cars down in Punta Gorda, Florida, on display in a museum euphemistically called the Muscle Car Museum, even though it’s mostly GM cars, few Fords or Mopars.  It’s one man’s collection that outlived him by becoming large enough to draw a crowd in its own right, like the LeMay Collection in South Tacoma.

But it’s probably safe to say that most of our collections are not going to wind up in a museum.  It’s also probably safe to say that most of our collections are too large, and could stand to be thinned a bit.  I tell my kids that, if they’re lucky, I’ll get the dump run done in advance.  The rest is up to them.  He who dies with the most toys wins, right?

Toll Lanes

Having driven I-405 a few times now since the implementation of the new "Express Toll" lanes, I have formed a perception about this new idea, who it benefits, and how it is being received.
And, as a wise woman taught me, you can't deny anyone's perception - they own it!
I just got my first toll bill, inadvertently, when the two of us were traveling south through Bellevue, in the fast lane because our former car pool lane has been taken from us when the minimum number was raised to three. We waited until we thought we were safe and crossed into the car pool lane just under the first underpass in Downtown Bellevue by the sign that said that the Express Toll lanes were ending. Apparently, we were still too soon, and got a bill for $.75 plus $2 for failing to open an account and give them the money in advance.
I had already decided that it was clear that the new fast lanes were created, with public funding, for one reason: to ease the passage of Society's Elites through traffic. As the income gap between rich and poor in this country has widened, we are slowly and inexorably being molded into a society of Lords and Ladies, in their sequestered, gated communities and their Ivory Towers, and the rabble clustered around the bases of the towers in their festering, teeming slums where only the strong survive, fairness and justice have been abandoned, and the police are the enemies of the poor.
You can see the start of that attitude in the new "Express Toll" lanes. As we crawled northbound in heavy traffic, while the rich people in their BMWs and Audis flew by on the left, it occurred to me that the reason there were so few people in that lane was not the cost - it was only $.75, after all -, it was a form of protest! The vast majority of the commuters and travelers in the other lanes were just like me, hunched behind the wheel and fuming as those arrogant jerks swept by in the the former car pool lane that we used to be able to use, but damned if we were going to go along with the obvious ripoff and accept the injustice of our elected government hiring faceless bureaucrats who then decided to take our rights away and give them to anyone willing to pay the toll.
Adding insult to injury was the introduction of computerized cameras operated by for - profit companies to rake money out of the pockets of the public, first through school zone and intersection tickets, and now tolling the people to pay for driving on roads they already paid for the construction of. The latest word is that the system is going to be expanded across the country! Think about that! You can drive across the country throwing dollar bills out the window, electronically. How soon before there is a border tax every time you cross a state line, or a county?
I just wonder, sometimes, how long we are going to continue to put up with this? Fortunately, the Seahawks will be playing again this Sunday, and there's lots of new shows on TV... :-{)}

Vengeance is whose?

I have an interesting book I picked up one day at a thrift store.  It’s called “Wars of National Liberation”, by Daniel Moran.  Here is just one tidbit from the Introduction:

Wars of National Liberation are disproportionately associated with irregular warfare, guerilla insurgency, and terrorism, … Such methods testify … to military weakness.

In other words, until the revolutionaries are successful in gaining control over a population and an area, they are terrorists.  Once they succeed, they are a country.  North Korea is one example of this, Israel is another.  Viet Nam is a little different; they had their own country, but the white folks kept making decisions for them, and they had to kick out several versions of imperialists before they got their own country back.  As Americans, we were the imperialists, and the fallout of those historical mistakes are part of what’s haunting us today.  We are the Great Satan to much of the Mideast, and part of the reason why that is has to do with oil.  Part of it has to do with weaponry.

So these ISIS guys are terrorists right now, and they certainly have the world’s attention.  Like everyone else, I have been following the news reports, wondering where they are going to hit next, and what is going to happen when they do.

But it seems to me that there are questions that should be asked, and I’m not seeing them on the internet.  Maybe they are out there, but I haven’t seen them, or their answers.  Maybe you have, which is why I’m putting these questions out and asking for answers if anyone has them.  Questions like these:

How many people were killed in Paris, including the members of the strike teams that did most of the killing?    Whatever the final number turns out to be, we do know one thing – that most of them were innocent bystanders who had nothing to do with causing the grievances which were used as an excuse to kill them.

How many people have already been killed in response to the Paris atrocities, and how many more will be killed by the French in direct response to the attacks?  How many more will die before somebody figures enough is enough?  And how many of them will be able to be found to be innocent bystanders who had nothing to do with causing the grievances which were used as an excuse to kill them?

It appears the ISIS idiots killed some Russians, too, in the name of God.  How many will the Russians kill to make up for their own folks?  How many of those will be innocent?

What do you think the families of those unfortunate victims in Paris, or Moscow, or Egypt, or Raqqa will think of the perpetrators of the violence against them?  How long do you think it will take for the damage to be repaired, the memories to die, and the resentment to be forgotten?  How many generations will it take for the stories to fade away?

How long has this been going on?  Who profits, no matter who wins or who loses?

How many rounds of ammunition were expended by all sides in Paris?  What private company will make money when those expended rounds are replaced?  What about the rockets and bombs dropped on Raqqa by the French Air Force?  Who made them, and will make their replacements?  Whose guns were used in France, by both sides?  Were they American, French, Israeli, Russian or Chinese weapons?  Who sold them?  Who bought them, and what did they use to pay for them?

I see ISIS uses lots of Toyota pickups, but Toyota has no idea how they got their hands on whole fleets of identical white trucks with machine guns mounted in the beds.

What if you looked at all the international cashflow generated by people killing each other for all their various reasons, and followed all the trails laid down by the flow of materials and labor and money to see where they lead, would it surprise you to find, at the root of it all, some gross ugly toad of a monster bureaucracy whose sole function is to profit from death and destruction?

I believe this monster exists.  It encompasses all governments all over the world, and operates outside their controls.  It uses lobbyists, bribes, murder, torture and force to get what it wants, and what it wants is for people to keep on dying, the more the merrier.  Expend that ammunition.  Ukraine, Syria, Egypt, Darfur, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, there are truly no end to the locations where the toad operates.  If you dig deep you will find corporations with no fixed addresses, offshore holdings, and anonymous boards of directors.  You will also find well-known names of public corporations operating all over the world:  Boeing, General Dynamics, Halliburton, Raytheon, and all their Russian, Chinese and European equivalents.  You’ll find the CIA, and the KGB, Mossad, and the Red Army.

I suspect if you look around the world and see which places are relatively unscathed by the killings, that’s where the members of the bureaucracy live, mostly in gated, secured communities with private security teams.  There are lots of those in Russia and America, but it’s a universal phenomenon.  The more blood they have on their hands the more security-conscious they become.

What are we, the rest of us, the vast majority of the inhabitants of this planet, the ones who are doing the majority of the dying and the paying, going to do about that toad?  At what point do we finally say, “That’s it, we’re done!  No More!”?  When are we going to do something about it?

One thing for certain:  When we do, we will start out in the minority of people who are ready to sacrifice their lives if necessary to get this monstrous toad off our backs once and for all.  We’ll probably have to become terrorists out of necessity, until the rest of the people come around to our way of thinking on this.  I’d like you to think about that.   :-{)}

Missed Connections

Hey, You!  Yeah, you, the guy in the MGB GT cruising down Park Avenue about 11:30 this morning!  I wanted to talk to you.  I had a story for you.

You pulled a U-turn without warning into the curbside spot outside Panera Bread, and, by the time I took a left and tried to find a way around the block in that labyrinthine mess that is the Renton Landing, you had already bought a sandwich and left.

I wanted to tell you about my friend, who had accumulated over the years a 1976 MGB, along with the usual pile of parts, spares and stuff that accumulates around British sports cars.  Any old sports car, especially the British ones, brings with it a shared responsibility to keep it up and running like any old classic automobile.  The common problems with SU carburetors, electric overdrive transmissions, Lucas Prince of Darkness wiring systems and the overcomplicated way British engineers liked to do things also pushes the owners into groups of like-minded individuals commiserating and kvetching and sharing parts and know-how, which is why I figured if you didn’t want a look at this pile, you might know someone who would.

I wanted to tell you how I went out there last week and wandered around the back yard and in the shop, and gazed at the piles of bodies and fenders and wheels and tires, and how there was part of an old horse trailer out there, inside of which were drivelines and grilles and bumpers and seats and tops and door panels and this and that kind of related stuff.  How in the shop there was more interesting stuff, including some engines under the bench, and a stack of transmissions, with rear ends out in the yard.

I could have told you that most of the pile appeared to be MG stuff, but there was some Triumph goodies in there, too, and even some Chevrolet stuff in the pile, the surface of which was all I saw, the rest being buried under stuff.

I wanted to say that the car has a title, but has not been licensed since 1998, and somewhere along the line someone replaced the power train with a Nissan engine and a five-speed transmission, which probably would be considered an upgrade among all but the most diehard aficionados of the marque.

I could have told you that all she wants is for everything to go away, including the horse trailer itself and all the junk tires, and that a guy could probably get the whole pile including the car for a very nominal sum and a crew to come out and turn that part of the back yard back into something you can mow.

I was gonna tell you that I have pictures, if you were interested.

But none of that is going to happen.  You got away.  Now you’ll never know how close you came to a score.  Maybe you should be relieved.  Maybe not.  Maybe next time.  Drive careful in that old beauty.  There’s only so many of them left out there.  Next one I see, I’ve got a story for them.  :-{)}

Speed Traps

I went for a motorcycle ride on a Tuesday in October.  It was a beautiful fall day- bright sunshine, crisp clean air, leaves still on the trees and not the road; in short, a perfect riding day.  The two of us used the back roads as much as possible as we circumnavigated Mount Rainier in the widershins direction, counter-clockwise.  The only downers we encountered were police vehicles, lots of them, all doing the same thing: raising revenue in the name of traffic safety.

To understand how pervasive this practice has become, we must consider the implications of the speed traps, where they are set up and why and how they operate.  In order to protect the officers who take on the risk of traffic stops, it is necessary to factor in the weather, the location, and the likelihood that enough speeders will drive by that location to make economic sense to the police departments.

So, on that Tuesday, the weather was perfect for a speed trap.  The first location we stumbled on was just past Orting on the Orville road cutoff to Kapowsin and Electron, where a county Sheriff SUV was parked on a wide spot in the road headed back the way we came, just far enough around the bend that the oncoming speeders would not see the cop until it was too late, and the radar had them in its sights.  That’s rule number one for a successful speed trap: hide in plain sight.

Just past the cop the road widened out for quite a ways, leaving plenty of room on the side for them to pull over their victims safely, which illuminates rule number two:  have a convenient wide spot to pull them over.  That is why, even though we blew past the cop at approximately 10 over the posted 45mph zone, he ignored us, as did his backup who was waiting a little further along in a yard off the road to our right.  We were headed into a winding narrow stretch of the road with no shoulders to speak of, leaving the police rigs exposed to traffic if they pulled someone over.  Whew, missed the hook that time!

The old unwritten rule used to be: Six you’re fine, seven you’re mine, referring to the number of miles above the speed limit that they caught you doing.  I’ve recently read a post from a police officer online that said that the new rule is: twelve you’re fine, thirteen you’re mine, which explains most of California and large stretches of I-5 through Seattle.  I know from unfortunate experience that seven over on a photo-op ticketing camera is worth $125, where 15 over is more like $265 in this state, so that also helps explain the rules.  Follow the money…

There is also an interesting phenomenon apparent these days, in that entrepreneurial Law firms have adopted a new business model in reaction to the increasing prevalence of speeding tickets.  It goes like this, at least at Heidi Hunt’s law offices, which I have used:  If you get a radar speeding ticket, just send us your paperwork and $250 for the first instance, $200 for any subsequent tickets, and we will guarantee dismissal of your ticket.  If we do not win the case, we will pay your fine out of the money you sent us.  Furthermore, in most local courts, if you are represented by an attorney you are not required to show up in court for your own contested hearing, we’ll be there for you. 

The way it works out, the lawyers send in discovery requests for the officer, the maintenance records on the radar gun, the car, anything that might help the case, which also lets the jurisdiction know that there is a lawyer involved.  Typically, and I have not heard one single instance where it worked out otherwise, the prosecutors fail to respond to the discovery and the officer fails to show up at the hearing, so the attorney moves to suppress the evidence and the judge tosses the ticket.  The fact that this happens every time is further evidence that the police are being used to extract revenue on the false pretense of highway safety, that the fact that it would cost more to prosecute the offender than it would return in revenue is the deciding factor in the case.  That is what passes for justice these days.

So if you get a ticket, and send the money to the lawyers, you are almost guaranteed to get a call from a young attorney informing you that your case has been won.  You’re still out the same amount of money, more or less, but your driving record stays clean, and the City, County or State is denied the revenue.  The downside of this is that, in order to meet their budget assumptions for “other” revenue, they have to send the police out to issue even more tickets!  I mentioned this to the Renton police Captain in charge of traffic, and he made it clear that they were well aware of those law firms and how they work.

The second speed trap we encountered on the road around the Mountain was in beautiful downtown Greenwater.  We had pulled in to the Greenwater store for a water and candy bar break.  As I stood outside the store on the covered porch, I saw a new SUV pull up on the side of the road across from the parking lot.  The rig was completely unmarked, and even the lights were hidden.  The only clue that it was a WSP rig was the heavy duty push bar attached to the front bumper.

That particular stretch of road, if you haven’t been on it, is perfect for a speed trap.  Not only does it have plenty of parking space on both sides, but it is on Highway 410, where the speed limit is 55 mph all the way from Enumclaw through the Federation Forest, then drops to 35 as you come around the corner and into Greenwater itself.  Most people have drifted down to the low 50s by then, meaning they are doing at least 15 over, good money for little effort on the cops’ parts.  Then the road curves again on the way out and the speed limit goes back up to 55, meaning the pigeons are coming in fast from both directions.

Within seconds, the officer nailed his first victim, pulling a dangerous U-turn in the middle of the street to chase them down into the gas station parking lot.  While we watched, he wrote them up quickly, then immediately nabbed another one going the other direction, with another unsafe U-turn across two lanes of speeding vehicles.  We chose that moment to depart, while he was tied up, and got the hell out of town, with one eye out for confederates and the other on the speedometer.

Why, you might ask, would you not just ride the speed limit all the time, and not have to worry about speeding tickets?  We followed a line of cars doing just that out of Greenwater, about a dozen of them bunched up behind a single motorcycle who was scrupulously keeping at the limit, until they got so close behind him that he pulled over at a wide spot on the road and let everybody get by.  The speed naturally went right up to the usual real limit, which is about 10 over the posted one.  If you can’t keep up with traffic on a motorcycle you are risking your life, and forcing others to risk theirs as they desperately get around you any way they can.

And so to anyone who defends speeding tickets as a way to control traffic and reduce average speeds, I say, “Who do you think you’re fooling?  If that old saying - the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again when you already know how it is going to work out - applies to speeding tickets, how can you stand there with your bare face hanging out and try to pretend it’s not all about the money?”  If all you wanted was to slow people down, why not put up a big sign that says, “Speed Trap ahead, slow down!” and station an empty marked patrol car in the parking lot?  No money in that, eh?

Another fact that supports my contention that speeding tickets are about revenue generation is the number of private companies that have figured out a way to milk this public cow for all it’s worth.  Every school zone or intersection photo-op ticket machine that you see out there gets something like $3500 a month rent off the top, plus 20% of any excess revenue generated at each location.  For a school zone at $125 a pop, that means they have to write 28 tickets a month before the City sees a nickel, yet the City of Renton website claims that 11,990 tickets were written from 2008, when they started the program, until the end of the study, at one location alone!  Do the math.  That’s a cool $1.5 million.  Most of it went to American Traffic Solutions, Inc., out of Phoenix, AZ.

They also hasten to assure us, the general public from whom this revenue has been generated, that any ticket you get in a speeding zone or for running a red light at an intersection will not go on your driving record.  Gee, thanks, that’s nice to hear.  Now tell me the answer to this, if you can:

How many kids have been run over by cars in those school zones you are so zealously protecting?  Are you sure you’re not a solution in search of a problem?  How many of the people to whom you issued those tickets would have been the one to run over the occasional child?

It seems to me that society begins to break down when we find it necessary to punish people, not for what they did, but for what might have happened, but did not.  That decay accelerates when we outsource the revenue extraction to private companies, and pay them on a piecework basis, thus giving them incentive to steal money from as many people as possible.

And when we take our force of police officers, who are sworn to protect and defend the public from criminals, and assign them to do much of the direct revenue extraction personally, how do you think those officers will be regarded by that same public?  Just how dumb do you think we are?

I could go on and on about this issue, and there is much more to be said, like why the City of Renton abruptly removed the hugely money-making photo-enforcement camera from in front of Renton High School, but started the summer school cameras in front of some, but not all of the elementary schools a full hour before school started all last summer.  Think about why an obscure little Christian school along Carr Road between Valley Medical Center and Benson has a 20 mph flashing light that slows traffic on a major 4 lane road twice a day at a location that you never, ever see a kid on the street.

I think any rational person looking at this situation would conclude that there is a problem or problems that need to be addressed.  The question is, “Who is going to step up and take this on for the benefit of all the neighbors who have paid those tickets, and will pay those tickets in the future?”  Is that you?  We’d sure be grateful if you did.  :-{)}

The Washington Redskins

The world of sports gives us many different ways for individuals to compete, to strive to be the best, to attack the other guy and declare victory over the defeated foe.  The games are kind of fun, too, but the real conflict happens on the radio and the tv set as the various commentators, talking heads (by the way, have you noticed that Joe Buck’s head is larger than his shoulders?), gasbags, signal callers, color commentators and play-by-play guys in the press box and on the sidelines and in studios carry on for days about stupid inconsequentiae or take something obvious and turn it into a cause.  A good example of this is the current controversy to force the Washington Redskins football team to change their name.

You’d think it would be crystal clear to the most cretinously accelerated slob from the suburbs that, if the Natives tell you the Redskin name as applied in supposed homage to the noble savages is offensive, it’s offensive!  Duh!  What more do you need to hear?  You can’t deny anyone’s perception, they own it!

People being people, they get set in their ways and don’t like for things to change.  I like to think there’s always a way to solve a problem if you can just agree on what it is.  In that light, I believe I have stumbled upon a possible solution to the controversy:  They can rename the team the Washington Redskin Potatoes!  Talk about having your French fries and eating them!  Think about the possibilities!  The fans could gather in the stadium and root for their team!  The club mascot would be Spud, and the dancing girls would be the Yammers!  The logo would be a big laughing tuber!  Fans could smuggle in potatos in their pockets to throw at the ref when he blows a call, or at the receiver when he drops a pass.  The stadium could sell Rally Fries, Bangers and Mash, Shake and Bake Russets, and Cleveland Hash Browns.  During the off-season the field could be converted to a P-patch!  When they played the Rams or the Bears it would be considered a food fight!  Back to back games with the Dolphins and the Broncos would be Surf and Turf!

See how easy it is to solve problems when you put your heads together?   Don’t thank me, thank you!  We should do this again soon!  :-{)}

Inertia

Inertia:  The tendency for an object at rest to stay at rest, and an object in motion to stay in motion.

For purposes of this discussion, a body at rest can be approximated for a fat ass sitting on the couch sucking down beers and watching football.  And as we know from our study of physical principles, a body at rest will remain so until acted upon by external forces, such as a spouse.  Furthermore, a careful review of mathematical theory will show that the amount of such force is directly proportional to the volume with which said force is delivered, plus the sum of the number of times it was previously delivered, without effect.

Thus, we can say that force times volume times repetition equals mass plus n, where mass equals scale weight plus 1.2 times the number of beers consumed previous to the final application of said force that results in motion, and n equals the amount of energy expended in leveraging the motionless body to a standing position.

But wait, it’s not that simple!  A body at rest can also be put into motion by internal forces, as well!  This is a bit more complicated, because the internal forces can be generated by multiple sources, and can also combine with external forces to provoke motion that would otherwise have been unobtainable.

Through much data gathering and analysis, we have been able to define most of the important internal forces and weigh their value in combination with external forces.  This list is as follows, ranked in order of importance:

1.       Need to pee – This internal force has a geometric progression included where time plus number of beers consumed equals stress that always results in motion of one sort or another.

2.       Out of Beer – This condition is modified by the next force, which is:

3.       Presence of commercial – this factor can reduce the force needed to achieve motion by half, and is only modified if the commercial is one that has not been seen before (rare), or involves scantily clad women or Richard Sherman’s Mother.

4:       A noise sounding like spouse coming – This factor, in combination with any of all of the above forces, will automatically result in motion.  The speed of said motion is affected by the location of said spouse, proximity to refrigerator and location of bathroom.

When all forces are balanced, a symmetrical motion is observed, as where spouse appears in the doorway just as body rolls into kitchen, grabs beer out of fridge, then slips down the hall as spouse enters the kitchen, and into the bathroom where inertia is restored while body sits on toilet while drinking beer and watching game on smart watch.  Thusly is stability achieved...  :-{)}

Viet Nam

My participation in the extended debate in the 60’s over why we were in Viet Nam consisted mostly of attending anti-war demonstrations in Seattle.  I had been lucky enough to score a relatively high draft lottery score, 256, so I was pretty sure I would not be getting one of those “Greetings” letters from Uncle Sam, and could live my life without fear of having to go to basic training and learn how to kill people, let alone having to go to some far-off land and actually do it.

Of the kids I grew up with, many were not so lucky.  I remember one in particular, Steve, who not only got drafted and sent to Viet Nam as an infantryman, but lived to come back to his old neighborhood and tell the story.  Another, my future brother-in-law, was assigned to a helicopter maintenance operation at the air base in Da Nang as a welder/fabricator.

Steve was one of the dominant group in our band of delinquents who hung out at a park in White Center in the late ‘60s.  When he disappeared in ’69, and we heard he had been drafted, he faded from our consciousness until he reappeared in the summer of ’71.  He had saved much of his pay for the two years he was on active duty, and rewarded himself after he mustered out with a brand new Ford Galaxie XL, the one with the hidden headlights, so when he showed up back at the lake with a fancy brand new ride he was received as royalty, and we hung on his every word about the wide world out there and what it was like.

He told us how his platoon would be rounded up in the morning and remanded to expend a certain amount of ammunition every patrol, and how important the body count was, so they would hide behind a tree and fire off their M-16s, even though there was nothing out there, nobody was shooting back, and report anything that might possibly have been a dead body.  He explained that the 2^nd lieutenants were assholes who would bust any grunt caught smoking Thai stick, and that everyone was high on something as much of the time as possible, and you could get anything you wanted in the local markets.  Remember that our forces were mostly draftees in those days.

JB confirmed that with his story of the puppy dogs of Da Nang.  It seems that, every so often, a scrawny, shivering puppy would appear inside the gated secured compound that housed the maintenance wing of the repair facility attached to the airbase, and would promptly be adopted by some homesick American GI and soon become the mascot for the entire barracks.  In a few short weeks the rescued puppy would thrive, and put on weight on a diet based on the table scraps and orts from the entire company.  Then, suddenly, the puppy would disappear, and within a few days another shivering scrawny waif would take his place, while at the same time one of the local restaurants featured a dish made with young dog.

Ramparts magazine back in the day had uncovered a document showing how all the major oil companies back then had parceled out the entire offshore of Viet Nam, both north and south, into a series of leased areas for oil exploration that went a long way towards a reasonable explanation of why the U.S. was sending troops over there to die in increasing numbers.  The official explanation, that we somehow were “preventing the spread of Communism” throughout Southeast Asia, was the same kind of bullshit that is used to justify air strikes and boots on the ground in the Middle East to attack ISIL.  In both cases, the only winners are the multinational arms corporations and the military-industrial complex in this country and the result of their profit taking is the same:  death and destruction.  There are only two kinds of people in the countries that are currently being used to expend our ammunition, those who are making money off us and those who are suffering because of it, and who hate us in return.  I offer you one simple example that shows exactly what is going on:

Every band of “terrorists”, or “partisans”, or “rebels” or “freedom fighters” has one thing in common.  In their midst is always an imam, a preacher by any other name, a sky pilot who is there to exhort them to action, promise them the eternal rewards they will earn by their actions, and teach them that it is the will of God, or Allah, or Buddha or whoever that they take those actions.  God is on their side, and they cannot lose.

All it would take to put a stop to all of it is to hold the individual imams responsible for inciting the crowds.  If every fatwa declaring Jihad was immediately followed by an aerial bombardment that destroyed the mosque from which the fatwa was issued, along with the imam who issued it, the faithful would soon begin to marvel that God is not responding to this challenge, and wonder if maybe the imams were lying through their teeth, and sending them off to die for nothing, which they are.  Just as those politicians who think America has to be the world’s policeman are lying when they make up bullshit excuses for sending our own men and women off to die.  One thing you will notice is it is never their own children, always the children of the poor working class, the expendables, who are chosen to make the ultimate sacrifice.

You’ll notice we don’t do that, hunt down the imams and destroy their mosques.  We don’t have our Secretary of State stand up and shout, “That story about the 72 virgins if you die a jihadi is bullshit!  And any preacher that says so is lying!”  We don’t want to disrespect their religion, I guess, or maybe we just want to expend some more ammunition.

But if you spend any time reading history, you can find the real stories about what we did in the world as a country to make so many people hate us.  Read up on how we replaced the elected president of Iran with the Shah, or how we participated in the murder of the elected president of Chile, or of South Viet Nam, or the many times we tried to kill Castro, not to mention the Sandinistas, and you will eventually catch on that, in this world in this year 2015, the United States of America is no longer the beacon of hope for the rest of the world.  Instead, for most of them, we are the bad guys.  It’s pretty clear that for all those years our foreign policies were designed to result in protection of private property all over the world and the successful exploitation of other countries’ resources for the profit of the multinational corporations that control our government, and many of theirs, as well.

That is why I am continually puzzled by people who proclaim their pride in being an American, who adopt that old line, “My country, right or wrong, but My Country”.  Those are the folks who cannot see into the future with enough clarity to realize that we will be defeated one day, without a shot being fired, other than our lunatic fringe being executed by the police.  We will be defeated because we no longer will produce anything of value to the rest of the world at a price they are willing to pay, and our working class will no longer be able to afford their products.

And that, as they say, is when the shit will hit the fan.

“Ah, but,” you say, “What about all those sharp young people who are out there making things happen in the world?  Are they not also the future?”  Why, so they are.  But why do you think they can be successful, ultimately, without your help?  

Don’t you see, this is all about you!  You have to step up, in your community, in your neighborhood, in this society!  You have to take the time to attend your community meetings, your caucuses, your get-togethers and your events.  You have to show your face.  You have to put your money on the line.  You have to look in the mirror, and ask, “Am I all about me and my family, or am I putting some effort into my community as well?”

And what are the principals upon which you choose to operate?  Do you believe that all people are equal, and that all of them deserve a share in the world’s resources?  Or are you more of the “All for me, none for you” persuasion?  It doesn’t matter which, it only matters that you think about such issues, and take a stand one way or another.  When too many of us are content to sit on the sidelines and let someone else do our suffering for us, everything falls apart.  And the one thing we all can share, misery, is always waiting out there for us.  It’s up to you to make that not happen. : –{)}}

How was your dinner?

How was your dinner?

Did you have the steak?  Or the burger?  Good stuff, huh?!

How about the shame?  You know, of course, that you’re getting a heapin’ helpin’ of shame along with every bite of your commercially raised, fed, fattened, slaughtered, butchered and packaged beef you take in, right?  You do know that, right?  Because of all the methane coming out of the assholes of all those cows,  not to mention the diesel and the fertilizer used to grow the feed for them, nearly matched in production by the hot gaseous eructions emitting from the pieholes of most of the politicians out there who are not named Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, that steak was good for you, bad for the environment.

Let me hasten to add that, contrary to what you might be asking, no, I have not gone all Vegan on us, not yet anyway.  I still eat my red meat.  I’ve just cultivated a taste for shame.  It’s like a guilty pleasure, the kind you get when you smoke a cigarette, knowing full well that, within a few years, they will be illegal and marijuana will be legal, go figure that.

It’s a tossup whether shame tastes better than crow.  I’ve eaten both, you can be sure of that, and I think it depends on the recipe.  When you have to eat some crow because you said something about someone else that was bullshit, and they call you on it, that kind of crow’s not so bad, with enough catsup and soy sauce.  After all, you did deserve it, right?  It’s a lot better than the kind of aged, stinky crow you have to eat when you get up in public and try to deny global warming, or pretend that Republicans are the friends of the working man.  If you truly believe the drivel you spout, then there’s no shame attached, though.  That comes when you spout your drivel knowing it is bullshit, but you’re making money doing it, so you don’t care.  Shameful crow is the equivalent of flattened three day old armadillo off a highway in East Texas or somewhere just as hot, and there’s no amount of Sriracha that will blunt the flavor of that snack.  The aftertaste alone is a mortal sin.

So what about chicken, or fish?  Is there less shame attached to them?  I don’t think so.  The only chicken you can eat shame-free is free range, uncaged chickens that have been fed only organic chicken feed and bugs, but even then somebody has to kill them, and a certain portion of the karmic shame that comes with that act is attached to the meat whether you like it or not.  If the chicken comes from a factory farm where they’re caged by the millions and fattened in three months the shame quotient goes way up, of course.  The only thing that brings it back down some is if you eat the chicken in Chinese or Mexican food, where the pieces are small and the sauces strong enough to allow you to pretend they’re tofu or eggplant.  And don’t even start on fish, unless you also want to talk about farmed salmon, net by-catch and factory trawlers.

The real problem is, if you’re looking for shame-free food, where are you gonna start?  Corn?  I don’t think so, let’s talk about fertilizer and water consumption, not to mention feed corn and gasohol.  Wheat?  Sorry, gluten is bad now, as are carbs in general.

The inconvenient truth is that if everyone only ate food that was ethically and cleanly grown, processed and packaged, we’d all starve.  There’s not enough land out there to make room for all those chickens.  So we better just get used to the taste of shame.  It probably tastes like Soylent Green.  :-{)}

The Thrill of The Score

It was one of those days in Monroe at the Fairgrounds when the sun would peek out behind the clouds just enough to give one hope, then dash it with a blast of rain.  The overflow crowd trudged through the sprinkles from the far parking lot through the underpass into the main lot, even then full of cars for sale.  It was the annual Automotive Swap meet on Saturday morning, and the underground economy was in full swing.  All the indoor spots were taken up, as usual, by the long-timers with the same old stuff, the trinkets and gubbins and gewgaws, so the action was out in the parking lots and the grassy areas along the fence where the newbies and the latecomers are sent.  That’s where you’ll find the guy who just wants to get rid of stuff, as opposed to the inside guy who’s trying to make a living.

The thing is, when you stumble across something worthwhile you have to recognize it and bite down hard and fast, because, if you look away, it will be gone.  So it was with the matching fender set off an early ‘90s Harley Davidson Heritage Softail that I spotted laying in the grass alongside some yard tools and other junk.  I could see they were in pretty good shape, even had the Heritage script intact on one side of the front fender, so I asked the guy who was on the spot, “How much you want for them fenders?”, pointing.  He got a big ol’ grin on his face and said, “Ten Dollars!”  “Each?” says I.  “Nah, that’s for both of them.” He says.  “I told that son-of-a-bitch they weren’t coming back this time, no way, nohow.  Ten dollars!”  ”Done!”, I said.

I peeled 10 dollars out of my wallet in record time and scooped up the fenders and beat feet out of there, in case the son-of-a-bitch was anywhere on the grounds.  Just for the record, I sold them later on EBay, quickly, for $285 with free shipping.  It turned out they were a matching pair, in Vivid Black, and all the trim was in place including the lights on both tips, along with the factory paint and hand pin striping, and it was all in excellent shape!  And that, my friends, is a score.  That’s why we play the swap meet game, and the Craigslist game, just searching for that oh-so-sweet moment when the adrenaline rush lets you know you’re on to something and your fingers start to twitch as you reach for your pocket.  It’s the payoff, for all the years of mistakes and lost money, and learning about the subtle differences between the various years and models, and what fits what.  It’s what Carl Sandburg was talking about when he said, “I seek to make my vocation my avocation.”  For most of us, we have to “retire” to do that, so, when you find yourself in that position, count your blessings.  Pity the one who doesn’t recognize the point of departure when it comes, and continues to slog away in harness until he drops to the earth, spent.

But for those of us who have freed ourselves to enjoy the pursuit of the score, be it on a gaming table, an ad in the Little Nickel, or on the ground at the swap meet in the rain, the undeniable thrill of the occasional unexpected single item score pales when compared with the one you get when you stumble across a pile.

And that’s the second thing.  Every pile has a story attached, for good or bad, and sometimes the story lingers long after the pile is gone.  One in particular remains fresh in my memory.

It was early Saturday morning, and I was cruising Craigslist’s motorcycle section as usual.  I have learned that you need to check in every day to catch the hot ones, the earlier the better.  This one read, “Harley shop going out of business, leftover stock for sale today.”, with an address in Tacoma.  I hemmed and hawed for a few minutes, then gathered up any loose cash I could find in the house and headed for Tacoma from Renton.  I even hit the cash machine for $300, just in case.  When I got there, at a strip mall on the road to McNeil Island, I found chaos.  The building was newly constructed, and consisted of bare concrete floors inside a steel and glass building that could be upfitted to be a Chinese restaurant, a massage parlor, or a Shucks Auto Parts, depending on your needs.  In this case, the space was occupied by a church.  They were raising funds to turn their space into a sanctuary by selling off a number of donated piles of stuff that one of their members, who ran a storage lot, it appeared, gave them.  I looked one way, past the two nice ladies at the picnic table with the cash box and receipt book, and saw a pile of flooring, another way a pile of household goods, over there a bunch of TVs, and there, on the floor surrounding the center post of the room, a large pile of Harley parts.

I saw a hardtail frame, a couple of front ends, I saw wheels and tires and boxes of new stuff.  I saw gas tanks and carburetor parts, lots of S&S stuff.  I saw bins full of odds and ends, the type that accumulates when you run a shop and you need an axle spacer, say, so you order a dozen of them in various widths, or those special bolts you need to mount a starter on an open belt drive on a Shovelhead, and then you need a system to keep track of all that stuff, plus takeoff parts and mistakes and spares, lots of spares.  It was all there.  I went looking for the person in charge.  I found him near the back, harried and hurried, with several people demanding attention at the same time, and maneuvered him over to the pile.  “How much would you like to get for all this stuff at once?” I asked.  He looked over at the pile, his face betraying the obvious fact that he had no idea what Harley stuff was worth in those days, and said, “I don’t know, you think it’s worth $500?”  I gave him the spiel I have used successfully in the past:  Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out all the cash I had on me at the time, which was around $385, held it out to him and said, “Easily.  It’s worth a lot more than that, I’m sure, but all I have on me right now is this, and I’ll give it all to you for this pile right now.”  He hesitated, and I added, “and if I do real good on this pile I’d be happy to make a donation to your church later.”  That turned out to be the magic words, and the deal was sealed.  I asked him, before I stuffed my Chevrolet Astro Van with the seats removed to the gills with all the plunder, what happened to the shop in question, and he didn’t know too much.  After I broke $1500 on that pile of parts I sent the church a $200 donation, upon which they hounded me for years afterward, just in case.  It was only later, after most of the pile had been sold, that I heard the rest of the story. 

I knew the name of the shop that had gone out of business from paperwork that was in with the pile of parts, and one day, a couple of years later, I saw an ad on Craigslist for one of the custom choppers that this particular shop had intended to build and sell as part of their business plan.  I sent an email asking if there was any connection to that shop, and it turned out the seller was the guy who had owned the shop!  As I learned, this guy was an Army Ranger, a Special Ops guy, and the shop was his own retirement avocation.  But in the heat of Iraq, the guy got called back for one more tour of duty, so off he went, even though he was supposed to be retired soon.  He told the landlord about the callup, and was promised that, no matter what, that shop would be there waiting for him when he got back from Iraq.

But then he got injured, bad, a roadside bomb or something, and wound up spending the next year or so in rehab and recovery.  And the dirty bastard of a landlord evicted the business from the shop and turned whatever survived over to the church for disposal while the soldier was in the hospital in Germany.  By the time he got back it was all gone, and I had made a pile off the last of it.  I felt kinda shitty about that, as you would imagine.  I gathered up most of what was left, bins and gubbins and paperwork and stuff, and took it back to him as a token recovery, and told him what happened, and how it went down.  I hope he sued the shit outta that landlord.  I can’t think of too many animals lower than a landlord who would screw over an injured Ranger who put his life on the line for the powers that be, and I hope he gets what’s coming to him.

And I hope there’s another pile out there with my name on it, with another good story attached.  The one is worth as much as the other. :-{)}

Triumph T100C

2/5/13                    T100C on Craigslist

On March 25, 1966, a young axeman walked into Dewey’s Cycle in Seattle and rode out on a brand new Triumph T100C motorcycle.  Paperwork in those simpler days consisted of a warranty certificate, a copy of the factory owner’s handbook and a Tyre manual from Avon.  Later an official letter arrived from Johnson Motors congratulating him on his purchase. All of those original documents survive to this day along with the original motorcycle, which has only managed to accumulate 2200 miles in over 50 years of pampered storage!

The reason for this rare turn of events is that the original owner, the young man who rode off on it that day, still owns the bike on this day. He may not have had time to ride it much, but he loved it and kept it in the condition you see here.

The young man has now concluded that his riding days are over, and has created this opportunity for you.

The bike itself is in wonderful condition.  A few years back (like, 15…) he had it converted to 12 Volt battery ignition from the original Energy Transfer ignition system, the source of the infamous “Prince of Darkness” label.  Now the lights are bright, and it works like a modern bike.  The job included new alternator, regulator, coils, ignition switch and battery along with the bulbs, brackets, fuses and other stuff needed.  It’s all on the receipt folded into the owner’s handbook.

More recently the gas tank was repainted by an expert restoration painter, and the aluminum and chrome bits were breathed on by the polishing guru, which returned it to near original condition, as the pictures show.  There’s a bit of scuffing on the muffler and the front fender from a parking lot tipover, but the resulting marks are character.  You can see Marlon Brando sitting on this thing.

For the serious motorcycle collector, the chance to pick up an original Triumph with complete history documented like this one is something you don’t see every day.  Now is your chance to put your name in the book as the second owner of this classic Triumph motorcycle.  Call Chris at 253-852-4019 to arrange a viewing.  :-{)}

Sold in 5 days for $6500.00

Restaurant review, Paragon Brewing, CDA Idaho

We went to Coeur d’ Alene for the dog show, and part of my assignment was to scout the area for interesting places to eat, of which there were many, one in particular that was so good it generated this review.

Government Way is a north-south road that connects CDA, as the locals call it, with Hayden Lake to the north as it parallels, and later crosses US 95 on the way to Sandpoint.  95 is the multi-laned main drag, and, as such, has become the location of choice for all the big chain restaurants and stores, which had the effect of putting many local establishments out of business and forcing the rest of them to survive by appealing to the local people who will know where to find them, and providing good food at reasonable prices, which makes the best of them into lucky finds for the inquisitive traveler who wants to get off the beaten track.  Paragon Brewing on Government Way between CDA and Hayden is one of those.

I had driven by and marked the spot mentally because of two things:  It was a brewpub featuring their own products, as well as other local microbrews, and it billed itself as an British style pub, which is just enough of an oddity in northern Idaho to call for a visit.  We came back on a Tuesday night after the dog show crowd had departed.

It’s a small place, log cabin style, with a gravel parking lot in back and stairs up to the outdoor seating area with rickety metal furniture and a great view of the vacant lot next door and the various auto shops and storage yards across the street.  Inside, the single room with much wood paneling was full of people, mostly families with children there for dinner, something we usually count as a good sign.  Typical of Idaho, the sign said, “If you are under 21, please do not sit at the bar”.  They were happy to let our dog sit with us on the outside patio, though I had to go back inside to read the beer list, which is written in chalk on a board above the bar, and changes every time a keg runs dry.

We started with a What the Helles Maibock for me and a Trickster’s Druid Stout for her, served with an appetizer of Scotch Eggs($8), two soft boiled eggs wrapped in sausage and deep fried, then served split on a plate with the yokes perfectly done.  The Maibock is a very nice bitter with a hint of IPA in the bite and and an ESB aftertaste that perfectly complemented the scotch eggs.  My only complaint was that the dog got too many treats that should have come to me instead.

Her Druid Stout was a leathery mocha influenced brown ale with perfect creamy head and wonderful quaffing ability served in a large stemmed oval glass that reflected the nose back at you with each hoist.  Then it was on to dinner.

I wiped out the Maibock, and chose a glass of Orlison’s Underground to accompany the main course. Orlison, it turns out, is the name of a brewery in Airway Heights, outside of Spokane.  Their motto is “Brew No Evil”.  The beer was a sublime brown ale, the type that, when it is first poured, entertains you for several minutes as you watch the cascading waves of creamy head fill the glass with golden bubbles that sink to the bottom and raise back up to reveal the black lager behind and below them as they resolve into a creamy head on top of your glass that still remains after the beer is gone.  Wonderful stuff.

The menu changes regularly, and each change Is reflected in a three course special offered in addition to the regular menu, from which you can pick and choose at will.

We regretfully passed on the Potted Trout appetizer and the Cornish Hen entrée, but could not pass up the Dessert Flight($10), of which more will be said later.  She chose the Pork Chop ($13), which came beer brined and Parmesan-panko breaded, accompanied by some delicious Pear Butter and a hefty pile of braised Brussels sprouts on a bed of barley risotto.  I had the Bangers($13), two smallish but excellent British style house-made fine grained sausages served on a scalloped potato galette covered with mushrooms and Scotch ale demi-glace, with a small metal pot of mushy peas on the side.  We both dove into our meals and came up in Nirvana, or some kind of foody heaven equivalent.  The mushy peas, which I had not previously encountered, were wonderful, seasoned with thyme and sage and whipped into a pudding that melts in your mouth, and the potato was just solid enough to hold its shape until my fork revealed its mashed intentions, as the sauce made my taste buds sing a song.

The pork chop was likewise perfectly done, and the combination of the risotto and the pear butter raised the overall experience to one you would expect at one of the finest French restaurants in Paris, or New York, but maybe not in Coeur d’ Alene, Idaho.  We asked our Chef, who dropped by to see how we liked his work, where he learned his licks, and it turns out he is a veteran of a well known French restaurant in Pend Orielle.  Their loss was definitely our gain on this night.

And then we got to dessert, or, as they call it, Afters.  The flight came on a narrow plate with a small bowl of Urfa Biber spiced chocolate ice cream on one end.  In the middle was a beer-battered white chocolate and cardamom tablet, and on the end, half of a Mick Duff’s Pale Ale-poached Forelle pear.  Words cannot adequately express the feeling of joy that your taste buds impart when you cut off a chunk of the pear, add a nibble of the white chocolate and top that with a spoon of the ice cream.  I swear you can actually taste the individual grains of brown sugar as they melt into the ice cream while the pear adds cadence to the chocolate.  It was very close to a mystical experience. The dog got none of this.

Perhaps the best part of the meal was the thought that the two entrees were the most expensive items on the two-page menu.  That fits my definition of Local and Reasonable, indeed.  So if you find yourself in Coeur d’Alene one day, I urge you to go out on Government Way and look these folks up.  Your taste buds will be glad you did.  :-{)}

Feel Good when you do good

One of the fun things I like to do on Ebay is give out refunds.  If it seems counter-intuitive to pay money to someone and call that fun, here’s how it works.

When I list an item, such as a parts catalog for a given model Harley, on Ebay I always estimate the weight on the high side a bit.  I've learned to do that because, when it sells to a domestic customer, shipping is free.  Of course, that’s a joke, “free shipping”.  Somebody has to pay.  In this country, thanks to some obscure law, a book ships via media mail, which is about $3.00 if it weighs less than a pound, so that much comes off the top when it is sold with an ad that says “free shipping”.  In China, the government pays for export shipping, meaning the taxpayers of China subsidize it, which partly explains why stuff is so cheap at Harbor Freight, and MOR, and Amazon, and so many other companies.  I find the cost of shipping in advance by using the weight and size, and two zip codes from opposite corners of the country, like 98058 and 33301, on the “Calculate a Price” option on the Postal Service website.

But foreign sales, on the other hand, are always done with calculated shipping, because the cost can vary so much from country to country.  I’ve repatriated Norton owner’s manuals to Britain, sold Harley parts to many folks in Australia, and camera equipment all over Europe, and I’ve taken a bath on the shipping enough times to not even bother to offer free shipping outside our borders.  Puerto Rico, Alaska and Hawaii will even cost you money if you’re not careful, so that’s why the shipping weight is a bit high and foreign shipments are calculated on every item, to provide that wiggle room.

I don’t mention it in the ads, but any time I sell something with calculated shipping, and the extra weight brings in a bit of extra cash, I always shoot the buyer a small refund of the difference between that and what it would have cost me to send it domestically, out of the blue.  I get some amusing replies when that happens, and great feedback, of course, enough to make it clear that refunds like these don’t normally happen on Ebay.  When you buy a ten dollar item for five bucks, but see he wants seven more for shipping, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to add up them numbers.

I’ve been doing this for years now, every so often, and I’m just now starting to pick up on a pattern of behavior followed by reward that is self-reinforcing and accumulative.  It goes like this:

I sell a book for $20, with free shipping.  The cover price is $52, so the buyer sees that and feels good about getting it for $20, even if he’s in New Zealand and Ebay tells him that $20 book is going to cost him $36.95 with shipping.  So he sends me the $36.95, but, much to his surprise, he gets a message back saying, “Hey, the shipping was a bit less than estimated, so you get a $5 refund.  Thanks!”  That’s known in the business as a Pleasant Surprise, also known as a Positive Memorable Customer Experience in the lingo of college trained experts whose job it is to complicate things.  So the buyer gets a smile on his or her face.  Often, I get immediate feedback in the form of a message saying, “Hey, thanks for the refund!  You’re all right!” which puts a smile on my face, too.  So the good feeling bounces from Renton, Washington to Aukland, New Zealand and back in a few electronic seconds, and puts smiles on two faces at once.  And what I realized was that, in my case, the anticipation of the good feeling preceded the actual refund.  I got that warm glow inside and a smile on my face just thinking about what a surprise it is going to be for this buyer when he sees that refund.  It’s like chopping mental firewood:  You get a warm glow thinking about it, then again when you actually do it, and yet again when the buyer responds!  That is well worth the $5 in my mind.

I guess that’s what the whole “Pay it Forward” thing is all about.  Unexpected good deeds reward the giver as well as the receiver of those deeds.  And if you accept that thoughts as well as deeds are energy that cannot be lost or destroyed then all our good thoughts and deeds become karma or grace or whatever you want to call it, and float out there to join all the others to help fight off all the negative crap that’s out there, too.

So get out there and do good deeds, and feel good about yourself.  What’s not to like about that idea?  :-{)}

Empathy

Let me tell you a story about privilege and profiling that might help with your understanding of what’s going down in Baltimore, and so many other places.

I used to work downtown.  I was the acting Director of Vehicle Maintenance for the City of Seattle, and my office was on the 52^nd floor of the Seattle Municipal Tower, known in those days as Key Tower from the previous owner, Herman Sarkowsky, who sold it to the city but kept the penthouse for himself.  From my sealed window I could look out to the south over the International District and Sodo, and when the wind blew the building rocked and rolled.

My daughter had a back office job for the Bank of America at that time, working on the 10^th floor of an office tower just two blocks north of me on 5^th Avenue.  We had a regular habit of meeting for lunch every Wednesday in front of her building, which was controlled access with a large customer service counter just inside the main entrance with security people on duty.  You had to pass by them to get to the elevators, and you needed a badge to use them.  Typical of many downtown office buildings, the ground floor extends off to one side to meet up with an underground tunnel across the street, with a deli on the main floor and a small waiting area with seats under the direct gaze of the counter.

Outside, the front plaza is connected to an outdoor mezzanine on the south side, which includes a covered area for employees to take their lunch breaks and a smoking section - before such criminality was outlawed in Seattle - by an escalator moving in both directions along a stairway favored by the younger athletic types.  I quickly found it amusing to wait for her by riding the escalator up and down for a few minutes, and she learned to look for me there first when her elevator disgorged a flock of her and her co-workers.

Those of you who know me would not be too surprised to imagine me in business casual attire, which was expected of a bureaucrat of my level with 15 supervisors and 125 employees, and typically would include Dockers or similar slacks, nice shoes and a button collar shirt with a nice jacket or sport coat and a tie (!), unlike my usual attire of jeans and biker t-shirts if not riding gear or slacker shorts and Tevas.  I still have those work clothes.  I pull them out every now and then and spit on them.  But I admit they were enough to detract from the big guy look with the full beard so that I was never bothered by the security types after I stopped in the first time and told them who I was waiting for.

So one day, when the wind blew and the rain came down sideways, I was out there like usual, riding the escalator up and down, killing time.  The difference was, on this day I was wearing an Aussie Duster coat in deference to the weather, one of those full length coats in leather or heavy waxed outdoor fabric and a built-in cape that, along with the waist belt, shoulder epaulets and trim look like something out of the wild west (which indeed it is) and, on me, with a black leather hat on top, could possibly be considered, ahem, intimidating.

So there I am, about to turn at the top and head back down the escalator, when suddenly appeared a young, earnest Security Guard in full uniform complete with radio and mace on his belt, asking if he can be of any assistance.

I smiled at him and said, “I come here every Wednesday to meet my daughter for lunch, who works on the 10^th floor.  I've been doing this regularly for the last six months or so, but only now do you want to know if you can help me?  Tell me, what is it that made you decide to talk to me now?  Was it the coat?”  He stammered and blushed and assured me that it was just a random coincidence, nothing to be concerned about, and beat a hasty retreat.  I had just been profiled.  Some security person had noticed me riding the escalator, and, strictly because of my appearance, assigned me potential threat status and pushed an alarm button.  The weather improved, and the next week I was back out there in my normal getup, and nothing was said or done.

So what does this have to do with Baltimore, or Ferguson, or Brooklyn?  Nothing, and everything.  My experience on the escalators of the Bank of America Building on 5^th and Marion in downtown Seattle is a simple experiment that any of you can perform any time you want.  Just show up there looking like some kind of a lowlife, or a bum, or a pickpocket, or, heaven help us, a biker, and see how quick you draw a response.  That’s the security people’s job, to identify threats and respond.  Take two kids and ride the escalator all day, and you’ll not get challenged.

Now, imagine how it would feel if changing your clothes made no difference.  What if, no matter what you did, or wore, the minute you started riding up and down that escalator the security guard was going to be right there, wanting to know what you’re up to?  What if it was the color of your skin that set off alarm bells in the security guard brains?  And that simple question, my friends, is the essence of white privilege.  Us white folks know, in the back of our minds at all times, that any cop or security guard that looks at us will assume the best, unless we’re dressed like a beggar or a biker and look the part.  Even then, the last thing we would expect an officer to do, and the most shocking thing they could do, would be to pull a weapon on us.  What if that was the most likely thing to expect in any encounter?  What if it happened over and over again, every single time?  How would you feel about that?  What if, every time you turned around, somebody just like you got killed by the police?  Can you imagine living in a society where that would ever happen?  Like the old guy who was walking down the road on a charity errand the other day, swinging a golf club.  He got arrested for being a black man with an obvious weapon.  How many of us white folks would stop for one second to think, “Gee, maybe I better not take my golf club with me, some cop might decide it’s a weapon”, before heading out for a walk in the park?

Now, imagine you’re a young black man, and you've grown up in the inner city where life is hard all the time and nobody wants to hire you, and your history and the history of all your people is a history of slavery, lynching, Jim Crow, and discrimination, and you know, deep down inside, just like the white folks know that the cops will assume they are the good guys, you will be assumed to be the bad guy.  Imagine living under that, if you can, and it might start to make sense that every now and then people who live like that tend to explode.  It’s called, “don’t give a fuck”, and people adopt it when their backs are on the wall.  It’s not your fault, directly, but you still have to pay the bill.  So what can any of us do?  Got any ideas? :-{)}

A Solution to America's Immigration problem

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

                                    Emma Lazarus

I guess this had to happen, someday.  These stirring words, that for years summarized America’s attitude towards immigrants, even to the point of having the last few lines etched into the base of the Statue of Liberty, don’t mean the same thing anymore.

Not that they ever did, of course.  What they meant at the time was, “Hey, Europe”, or “Hey, China!”  “We see you’re getting kinda crowded over there, and it’s causing some problems for ya.  Well, we got the opposite problem here, so maybe we can help out some.  We got a lot of wide open spaces that we are in the process of expropriating from the ignorant savages who lived here when we showed up, and we need cheap labor, lots of it.  We’ll take anyone you have that wants to go.  We’ll treat ‘em like shit, of course, but they’ll have a better chance to make it here than they ever would back home, so send em on over, we’ll take ‘em.”  And on that basis, we populated the West and spread from Sea to Shining Sea.  The potato famine in Ireland alone brought millions.

Now, however, the descendants of those huddled masses are starting to wake up and look around and realize there are no more wide open spaces in America, anymore, at least not where anyone wants to live.  Now, the problem is how we can slam the door on all the huddled masses, they’re starting to cost us real money!

Of course, if you have money, immigration laws and quotas mean nothing to you.  I think the current price is around $250k and you can waltz in here any time you like and do whatever you can get away with, just like the rest of us.  And of course they’re handing out Green Cards right and left if you are the type of skilled worker that America can’t seem to produce in sufficient quantities these days, and some Microsoft spinoff wants you.  We supply the whole world with football players; doctors and engineers we have to import.  But the huddled masses, especially the illegal ones, they’re becoming a problem.

If you look at family histories of former immigrants, you will see the same story of hard work, education and diligence leading to greater and greater success as the children grew up here and became Americans.  Sure, you will find lots of stories of those who lost their way to crime and drugs, and they died in our factories and sawmills in droves, but the survivors have made this a better country in many ways.  So it’s easy to conclude that those immigrants, especially the illegal ones who have risked the most and taken the most difficult path to get here, are really the ones we need the most, not only for them but for their children’s children, and that they should not be sent away in chains for making the effort, but rewarded for their success. 

The underlying question in any person’s decision to emigrate to a foreign country is why is it worth the effort?  Why would someone leave the only home they’ve known to come to America?  Either things are real bad at home, or things are that much better here.  It probably doesn’t matter, since they show up every night at the border whatever the reason.  So how to we get them to stop?  Here’s one idea:

Accept the fact that physically coming to America is the goal for all the illegal immigrants, the reward they seek.  So, here’s how you fix the problem.  First, you interview each person you catch, in their language.  You want to know why they made the effort to get here, and why they were willing to leave home.  Then you make them this offer:

We’d like you back some day, maybe, as a legal immigrant, so here’s what we’re gonna do.  We’re gonna send you home on the bus, back to the town you grew up in, and we’re gonna pay you so much a month to stay there until we call you.  It might be the rest of your life, so stay busy.

This achieves two things, it repatriates the immigrant, and they go away happy.  The small amount of money it would cost to keep them home is less than what we are now spending to keep them out, when you look at all the related costs to society, both financial and political.  We can keep track of them individually as well, and, when we need a particular skill, say, picking fruit or crunching algorithms, we know who to call.  It also eliminates the drain of valuable individuals from those countries, and leaves them home to stay involved in their own communities.

You would set up the payment system to only pay them in person, and in that town, and toss in any other restrictions you’d need to keep the local sharks at bay.  Of course, if the reason they fled was violence, you’d want to work with the local government to solve that problem, and part of the deal would be that they would talk to the police.  One way or another, it is in our best interests as a country to keep people in other countries away and happy with us when we don’t want them here.  There’s less likelihood that they will show up with guns some day.  Anyone who thinks that can’t happen is an ostrich on a beach.

So think about the idea of America as a vast fountain of wealth for people all over the world.  All they have to do to get it is successfully run a gauntlet to get here, a gauntlet that will be carefully designed to spot the highly skilled individuals, weed out the criminals, keep families together, and provide American companies the help they need when American citizens are unable or unwilling to provide it.

We already have a budget for this operation.  It’s called Foreign Aid, and we give billions of dollars out every year in cash and in weaponry to individuals in every country.  The difference is that the individuals to whom we currently give the money are the ones who are running the country, and not necessarily the ones it would most benefit.  So every time we set up an account for a successful émigré from, say, Somalia, we simply deduct that amount from the aid to that country.  We just cut out the middlemen and go right to the source.  And, of course, we’re giving cash, not tools with which to go out and kill someone, so we feel better about it, too.

Think of all the money we save in our current immigration process, as we eliminate Green Cards and quotas and all the related bureaucratic nonsense and reduce it down to the same question for everyone.  You want to come to America?  No, problem, run the gauntlet like everyone else, and we’ll see how you do.  No exemptions for wealth, or poverty, you have to show that you’re tough and resourceful and willing to work for it, and then if we need you, we’ll call you.  Thanks for trying.

It would be fair, because you could design fairness into the gauntlet, and apply the same standards to everyone.  It would be effective, because you would always know who to call when a given company needed help and couldn’t find it.  It would be economical when we compare all those payments with the amounts we currently spend on welfare, child care, medical care, foreign aid and border patrols, not to mention a huge part of the State department.  It wouldn't surprise me that we save a pile of money in the process.  Think about how hard it will be to call for death to America when many of your parishioners are getting a check from the Great Satan each month.  You could eliminate the Border Patrol and the fence, because you could have a gauntlet in a room at every American embassy in the world.  There would be no reason to come to the border any more.  Just the reality show income alone in all countries would make “The Running Man” seem like an afterthought.

For some of you, I know an outside context solution like this raises several red flags, chiefly among which is the Biblical admonition that “from the sweat of your brow you shall earn your bread”, from which directly springs the concepts that “they don’t deserve it”, or “they didn't earn it”, or “I don’t want to pay for it”.  The point is, you are already paying for it, over and over again, and all your other objections are irrelevant.  This proposal is based on nothing but a practical solution to a financial problem in this country:  How do we keep out unwanted immigrants at the lowest possible cost and in such a way as to keep them favorable to us, even when they can’t get in the country?  If your objections boil down to “I’m willing to do whatever it takes to keep the bastards out, no matter what it costs”, just be up front about it, and maybe spend a little time thinking about how the future looks when we do it your way.  Who knows, maybe my way might start to sound pretty reasonable if you think about it.

And maybe we ought to change that sign on the statue.  :-{)}

The Last Run to Castle Rock

It started out as a simple three day campout for the guys, the destination being the Flat Track Races at Castle Rock, Washington, on their half mile dirt track outside of town on the Toutle River.  We didn’t know it then, of course, but it was the last race ever to be held at that track.  Mt. St. Helens blew up the next spring and wiped out the track, the river, a bunch of trees and quite a few people.

It was a mostly Harley crowd on this run, Dude on his ’69 Sportster, me on my purple ’71 FLH, Jerry on his knucklehead chopper, Bill on his 45 trike and Butch on his Toms’ Cycle Yamaha 650 chopper.  In those days, we always had a chase truck along, in this case Bill’s old ‘52 Dodge pickup, driven by Magoo, a good thing, as it turned out. You could become a biker pretty cheaply back then, but the price was the lack of dependability that comes from running used, worn-out parts because it was all we could afford.

We jumped off from Jerry’s place on the plateau above Graham, which is a short skip to the Orting-Kapowsin Highway that leads south past Lake Ohop to Eatonville.  From there, you have a choice of the Eatonville cutoff or the long way through LaGrande, both of which lead to Highway 7, the Mountain Highway.  From there, all roads lead to Morton, as it should be.

You can leave Morton in 4 directions.  Take a right on Main Street and you will find yourself on State Highway 508, a lovely winding country road (after you get past the pig farm) that rolls into Chehalis on the south side by way of Onalaska.  Or you can go back the way you came on Highway 7, which stops at Morton, as if to say, “I’ve got you this far, you’re on your own now.”  But we try to never go back.

The other two ways out are east or west on Highway 12.  East takes you up the hill through Randle and Packwood to White Pass and the road to Yakama.  West, the way we went that day, heads toward the distant ocean via another fine country road.  Two lane blacktop is where it’s at.  We turned off and headed south on what is now called the Jackson Memorial Highway, named after a Senator who was not dead yet then, but now nobody remembers the original name of the road.  Still, that is where we turned, because it leads to Toutle, and thence to Castle Rock, our destination.

We had made reservations at the Weyerhaeuser primitive campground somewhere out by Silver Lake.  We had planned to be there by early afternoon, but the Harley Gods frowned down on us, specifically the Knucklehead, which popped, sputtered and died on the side of 12 outside Morton.  The curse of the Milwaukee Vibrator caused the points to loosen up inside the distributor until the gap widened all the way.  It took us a while to find the problem and fix it by resetting the points with a matchbook cover (.018” thick) and back on the road we went.  So we rolled into camp late, as usual, set up in the dark, and then rode back to the nearest country tavern for dinner and beer, lots of beer.

There’s a task, a quest, if you will, to which I set myself years ago, that continues to this day.  That is the search for the best biscuits and gravy in the country.  So far, I think it’s the Tastee Freeze in Laurel, Montana, and Marty says there’s a place in Missouri that fills the bill, but you can’t rightly say until you’ve ate at them all, now, can you?  So the next morning we took the quest into Castle Rock on our Harleys, with disappointing results.  For one thing, the town was packed to the gills for the event, an AMA sponsored national short track event that drew the likes of Jay Springsteen and all the good local boys who came out to take him on that day.  There were exactly two bars in downtown Castle Rock in those days.  In one of them, one of the 1%er clubs placed a large prospect at the door who informed all comers that patch holders got in free, but anyone else had to pay a joint at the door cover charge.  Needless to say, the 50 or so patch holders for the various clubs who were in town and not at war with each other at the time had a pleasant, relaxing day in uncrowded surroundings, while the landlord cried in his beer and the other place in town was jammed, standing room only and hope for a drink.  That got old fast and we headed for the track.

There’s something about the noise at a flat track race.  Most of the bikes in the top classes were Harley XR 750s, with the occasional Norton and the Honda copy of the XR that wasn’t ready for prime time yet, so the sound was a hornet’s nest of short stroke Sportsters at full song.  As the pack hits the turn, the volume goes up as they pitch the bikes sideways and spin the rear wheel while jamming the steel shoe into the ground to form the tripod, and drops as they straighten up and fling themselves onto the seat to get the tire to bite and throw them at the century mark again.  Oh, yeah, and the track sold beer by the large plastic cup.  By the time the Finals come around, the crowd was roaring.  The smell of testosterone competes with the smell of the Castrol in the fuel tanks.

Then, suddenly, it’s dark, the race is over, and the grassy field that surrounds the stands is full of motorcycles, thousands of them, the owners of which are streaming out the doors full of beer, with that noise echoing in their heads.

I’m standing by my bike, looking around at chaos.  Over there, a man is using a Bowie Knife blade tip to scoop large doses of either cocaine or methamphetamine out of a plastic bag and hold them under the noses of all in their party, spilling visible amounts on the ground in the process.  Over there a woman is screaming, a man is trapped under a fallen bike while around them swerve a steady stream of sportbikes all jammed together as twelve lanes form two on the only road to the freeway, visible in the distance.  All you see in any direction is headlights on chrome, all you hear is engines and all you smell is exhaust.

The promoters of the event, knowing full well what they have unleashed on the highways, and experienced in the crowd control needed for it, have arranged a little scenario on the side of the onramp in a well lit location that every single rider must pass on the way out.  A motorcycle, a four cylinder Japanese sportbike, lays on its side on the shoulder.  Parallel to it, but a few feet further on, is a figure in racing leathers and helmet lying flat on his back, apparently dead.  A few people are standing around, their faces betraying their helplessness to do anything for the poor guy, but they approach anyone who attempts to stop and render aid and urgently send them on their way.  The figure on the ground is a mannequin, and the intent is to penetrate the testosterone with a splash of cold water before the racing fans hit the freeway.  It certainly worked on me.

Our group had run into several of the Zudmen, and were yacking and telling stories while we waited for the zoomie bikes to get out of the lot first.  It’s always better to have the wheelie boys in front of you far enough so you have time to avoid the chaff.  It was only after they fired up and left, while we waited for stragglers, that Dude noticed that Dragon Lady had dropped her purse on the ground on the way out.  That put us in the position, of course, that we had to catch up with them, and all we knew was they were going to form up at the next rest area to the south.  So off we flew, into the dark night with our dim headlights and no real idea where this was gonna end and how, with a belly full of beer for courage.  Magoo and Bill took the truck and the trike back to camp, knowing better than to try to keep up with us, which turned out to be bad, because the Knucklehead finally died on the side of the road somewhere near Woodland, and refused to be revived this time.

JB and I wound up sitting in a raised brick flower bed outside a closed restaurant off some nameless off ramp for hours while we waited for the rest of them to go back to camp, wake Bill, and send him along in the truck to pick up the Knuck.

The morning cook came along in the wee hours and took pity on us and gave us some coffee.    We ran out of cigarettes about half way through.  Then we watched Bill drive by on the freeway twice before he figured out we had to be this way.  By the time we got back to camp, they had drunk all the beer, so we hit the hay.  We never did find that rest area.

The next morning we headed back the way we came, with the knucklehead, which had a long wide glide front end with a 21” wheel and no front brake, sandwiched into the back of the 1952 Dodge stepside pickup with the frame resting on the tailgate and the front tire down by the bumper, tied in with rope.

About 15 miles outside Toutle the frame on the Yamaha broke at the front motor mount.  It turns out the boys at Toms Cycle just butted the frame tubes together at the bracket with no slugs or fillets to give it the strength needed in that critical area, so it broke.  Mr. Murphy said it broke on the side of the road.  So into the back of the Dodge went the Yamaha, stuffed in next to the Harley with more rope.  Good thing we had lots of rope.

A few miles further up the road, the 45 trike burned a hole in a piston.  That poor little thing, which I later took over and restored back to stock, had been struggling all day to keep up with the big boys.  A flathead 45 trike puts out about 9.44 SAE net horsepower at the rear wheel in stock form, and this one had big meats on the back because they looked cool.  When I took that rear end apart, the extra weight and inertia of the big tires had been wearing away at the end of the axle inside the differential and when those little C-rings fail the axle, wheel and brake drum squirt out the side as you go around a corner and drop you on your ass.  Good thing it only holed a piston.

Fortunately, the trike also had a long front end, which we simply lifted over the tailgate and stuffed it in between the two prior residents, held in with even more rope.  It turned out the trike did fine like that, just a little squirrely in the corners and don’t stop too fast.

So there we were, three bikes in the back of a ’52 Dodge, and four guys to fit into the cab of a truck made for two.  We rested in the long grass on the side of the highway and debated how to choose who got to ride passenger with me and who got to ride in the back with the bikes.  Then, wonder of wonders, who should show up but the girls!  Three of them, in fact, mine, JBs and Magoos, in Barbs car.  They had decided to trace our route and see if they could catch up with us on the return trip, and it worked.  Not only that, but they brought us a picnic lunch, and more beer!

And so it was that another memorable adventure ended up on the side of the road, this time with sweethearts, sandwiches and beer to wash down another good one.  Somewhere, I’ve got pictures.  :-{)}