nobody asked…

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Step right up and flash your cash, ladies and gentlemen. Prepare to believe. Open seven days a week (no strict observance of the Sabbath here), the newly opened Creation Museum near Cincinnati in northern Kentucky will prove to you that the Bible is the supreme authority in all matters of faith and practice, and in every area it touches upon.

Their advertising hype is centered around proving the inerrancy of the Bible. They claim that … guests will learn how to answer the attacks on the Bible’s authority in geology, biology, anthropology, cosmology, etc., and they will discover how science actually confirms biblical history.

Then why do we waste all that money on text books if all we need is the Bible? Think of the millions of dollars that could be diverted to some really important projects, like research grants for studying the effects of the goatherders’ deodorants on the mating habits of pygmy goats in Zimbabwe.

A couple of caveats before you plan your trip: first, leave your guns at home since they are not allowed on the premises, and second, the place is not particularly twin-friendly. No tandem, side-by-side strollers allowed. Oh, I almost forgot — be very wary of serpents offering forbidden fruit.

[Flip of the fedora to Elrod up at Knox Views.]

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I choose to be cremated, not preserved and planted in the ground. I will not have a tombstone. Ashes will be temporarily stored in an urn, or empty mayonaisse jar — whatever is convenient, before being dumped into the Tennessee River at the south end of UT’s Neyland Stadium in Knoxville. The Tennessee to the Ohio to the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, and from there to the four corners. Once again I will be one with the planet. Cremation is a much cleaner and less expensive way to check out of here. If I have an epitaph, it will be on the urn and should say nothing more than…

He was a pretty good guy.

That is also the short answer to the fifth and final question in Em’ s interview:

What do you want people to learn about you from reading your blog?

Actually that was Em’s second question, but it seems to be a good way to bring closure to the interview. My Who? Why? page includes this remark: Perhaps [my writing] will bring some focus to who I am, what I have become, and what I might be IF I choose to grow up.

To flesh out that statement a bit, I add these random thoughts on what I hope and/or expect you learn about me from reading my posts:

• If you have paid attention and read my answers to the previous four interview quesitons, you’ve already learned it.
• I am a complex guy made up of very simple pieces.
• I know some stuff, but nowhere near enough.
• My life has been a stream of constant interruptions.
• If it wasn’t for my failures and successes, I would have nothing to report.
• I have a strange, curious, wry sense of humor that manages to show its face regardless of the topic or context.
• I have vast, unrealized potential to be a great failure.
• I am a very simple guy made up of baffling complexities.
• Like Al Capp, I am an expert on nothing, but have opinions on everything.
• I have potential to be a decent writer with nothing to say.
• Your opinions genuinely matter to me.
• Patience and gentleness triumph over quick and harsh in most endeavors.
• I see humor and absurdity in almost all things.
• George W. Bush and his many failures are not funny.
• I am honest to a fault, sometimes to my own detriment.
• Above all else, I constantly strive to be fair.

I thank Em for the stimulus that initiated this public self-abuse. He did a marvelous job of pulling together a set of interview questions that probed my depths, made me think, and in many ways hurt like hell. Hopefully, I have not fallen too far short of his expectations.

My skills in assembling such an inquisition have never been tested, but I can almost assure you the result would not be pretty. Nevertheless, if there is one among you who would like to be abused interviewed by me, please let me know either by comment below or email, address shown on my Contact page.

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One of your earliest One Liners postings featured this quote by Laurence J. Peter… “If you don’t know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else”. In your childhood dreams, what did you want to be when you grew up? Did you know where you were going…or did you end up somewhere else?

Em did not slide any easy ones past me with his five question interview. You know, something simple and quick like What is your favorite NFL team? or What is your favorite flavor of chocolate? No, no breaks for Winston. Just all these deep, searching inquisitions that force me to mine my core for answers. But I will admit it has been as much fun as it has been revealing. Getting to the question at hand…

I think we all end up somewhere else. Life these days is far too complicated for most of us to be able to predict with any accuracy where we are going or where we will end up. External influences abound. Change is constant. Life is uncertain. Life is short.

At 5 I wanted to be a cowboy. Didn’t we all?

At 10 I wanted to be a professional speller. Not much demand.

At 12 I wanted to be jet test pilot. Didn’t we all want to fly?

At 17 I wanted to be an electrical engineer. I became one.

At 27 I wanted an MBA and to climb the corporate ladder. Did those.

At 45 I thought I would put in my 30 years or so and retire from the company with a big pension, lots of money in the bank, and the proverbial gold watch. At 45.5 I was out of the company, a sweet golden parachute deal in hand, and heading back to Tennessee where I was originally hatched.

At 47 I had designed and built my dream house where I would spend the rest of my years.

At 49 I was divorced. She got the house and most of what I had. At 49 I just wanted peace and quiet.

At 51 I got married again. I still wanted peace and quiet.

Now, at 64, I want to be a cowboy. Sorry, a temporal regression to childhood…

Like so many Americans who have achieved a modest level of success and a comfortable lifestyle, I am stuck with it. Be careful what you wish for, you might get it! To maintain a lifestyle of contentment, and it does not take much for me, I cannot afford to quit or retire or make a major life shift just now. In many ways I have it good, and in most ways I have no complaints or regrets.

I had envisioned a life in retirement by now, one that might include some travel, some wood shop work, lots of time for reading and writing, tending my stamp collection, tennis, photography, and several other activities that have been enjoyable pastimes or hobbies over the years.

Instead, I find myself having to continue to work to make the money to pay the bills for a comfortable life that I have no time to enjoy because I find myself having to continue to work to… Like the hamster in the circular spinning cage, running faster and faster just to stand still. Now if my bad knee will just hold together until I get to where I’m going… wherever that might be…

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Nashville sports fans are somewhere between disappointed and totally pissed-off today as Craig Leipold has announced he is selling the NHL Predators Hockey Team to a Canadian billionaire, Jim Balsillie, for $220 million. Balsillie, who is Co-CEO of RIM, the Blackberry folks, was previously thwarted in his attempt to buy the Pittsburgh Penguins and move them to Canada. Naturally, it is assumed he will grab the Predators, take his puck and stick and go home to Ontario.

I am a sports fan, football primarily, but have never been a big hockey fan. I don’t understand enough of the nuances of the game to really enjoy it. But since the NFL Titans moved to Nashville and the NHL Predators took to the ice 10 years ago, major league sports have become an important component of the Nashville culture. Without the Predators, there will be an important piece missing. As the Predators have continued to improve over the last few years, the fan base has expanded, and this year I even felt myself being pulled to follow them as they made a run to the playoffs. This is good for the city in many ways.

After reading the stories and listening to news conferences and sports talk radio today, I have developed a conviction on the question of who is to blame. I point two fingers.

Look at successful major league sports franchises in cities around the country and they have many things in common, including fan support, media coverage, political support, and corporate endorsement. Nashville’s fan support is strong and growing, and left alone, would probably exceed the NHL mandate of 14,000 per game within a year or so. Local media coverage has been great. But on the other two scores, there are serious problems.

Governor Bredesen, then Mayor of Nashville, had the vision and energy to help bring the NFL and NHL to town. He understood the economic and cultural value of major league sports. The present Mayor, Bill Purcell, is not so inclined. Failure of the project to build a new baseball park for the Sounds was not his doing, but I believe could have been achieved at little or no cost to the city if he had wanted it. He does not seem to care whether there are sports in Nashville or not. No argument that health, education, and protection of the citizenry is far more important than sports. But for a sizeable portion of the population, sports make it worth living here in the first place.

Corporate sponsorship for the Predators has paled in comparison to their support for the Titans, the symphony, the arts, etc. The many companies that have moved headquarters and/or operations to the Nashville area over the last few years are heavily influenced by numerous factors important to their business and their employees. The overall cultural landscape is very much one of the key factors in site selection. So why do the existing corporate citizens not step up to help preserve what we already have? Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

There is still an opportunity for everyone to do their part to keep the Predators here. It ain’t over till the fat lady sings. Or perhaps until the Canadian smiles because he was able to turn a bad situation into a win-win for all.

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The third probing question in Em’s interview was…

On your “Who? Why?” page, you mention that you’ve always felt you had a book in you and the ability to write it. What would that book be about? Fiction? Non-fiction? If you finally started writing it today, what would it be?

During the final years of my incarceration with the Great Northern Saltmine Corporation, I began making notes of all the things that I felt were slightly askew, inhumane, blatently screwed up, illegal, unethical, immoral, funny strange, funny ha-ha, horribly annoying, wasteful, mean spirited, or just flat-out wrong. In a short time, the list had grown to a size and severity that I became nervous at the thought of being found out. Slowly, an idea emerged: write a book. The working title was Confessions of a Corporate Pervert. For obvious reasons, this would have to be done under the cover of night using a pseudonym and a team of good lawyers, or after my departure from the company, which was not in my plans.

Though I had risen to a highly visible position of corporate-level responsibility, my personality, ambitions, and moral fiber did not meet the accepted definitions during that decade as the company had undergone upheaval at all levels. Between the inmates that had risen to or past their levels of incompetence and the ousider cowboys brought in to whip the bottom-line into shape, with no regard to the value of human lives and loyalty, the place had become a living hell for those of us who believed in working hard, being honest, and playing fair. I no longer belonged. I was a pervert. A corporate pervert.

Following my pardon, I grabbed my golden parachute pay and headed back South where I belonged. From time to time I tried to collect and organize my thoughts, to actually start putting together a manuscript. In retrospect, it was probably too soon. My wounds were still fresh and raw. Just thinking of the hell from which I had escaped sprinkled new salt into those open gashes and I recoiled quickly from the task. Perhaps it could still happen these many years later, but I’ve lost my zeal for the mission.

On moving to the Nashville area in 1986 I bought a house sitting on about six acres outside of town. The house was small but big enough, my style (open, rustic contemporary, lots of glass), and was secluded enough that I could not see another house, nor could they see me. If I wanted to tiptoe through the tulips nekkid, no problem. ‘Cept I had no tulips. I loved it. It was me. I soon discovered that on the backside of the property there was a well known cave. Every now and then there would be a couple of genuine spelunkers knock on the door wanting permission to enter the cave. They always took garbage bags and brought out the refuse left behind by previous visitors who were not so considerate. As enthralled as I was with owning a cave, I never ventured further than the opening, which was a twelve foot vertical shaft about three to four feet in diameter reaching down to the first shelf where it met a horizontal crawl space that took you to the big room. Once I was scheduled to go with some friends but decided to have the flu instead.

Being an avid sci-fi buff all my life, I started conjuring up a story based on the cave. It would be set in current time, and all of time, since it involved multiple, interacting parallel universes. Unlimited, onion skin layers of existence in time, held together, yet separated by, the smallest fractions of a second.

I’ve been thinking about this for nearly twenty years now, and have a great deal of the detail worked out in my head, but nothing committed to paper. Could I write it? Perhaps. Will I write it? Probably not. As I said in that same Who? Why? page that gave Em the impetus for the question, …not enough time, not enough money, and too distracted with getting from one end of this bitchin’ life to the other. But if I were to write a book, that would be it. The writing I do here is therapeutic, a cathartic cerebral disgorgement. It affords me the opportunity to exercise the small amount of creative talent I may have without absorbing me for extended periods of time. This is my book…

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Continuing the interview started here a couple of days ago, I am jumping to question five since it is probably the easiest for me to answer, and I am huge on paths of least resistance.

If you had a time machine and the option of traveling to two different times to live, would you choose 1900…or 2100? And why?

2100. No hesitation.

I never studied history in high school or college. The only history I ever read was future-history, called science fiction by most. My aptitude, my education and training and experience, and my fantasies all fit more easily and comfortably in a future, unknown scenario, than in the past.

Yes, a trip back to 1900 to test my survival skills, to a time of simpler and in some ways easier living, has a certain romantic allure. To live in the cities and wade knee-deep in horse-shit in the streets (yep, they did!), or to live Little House style out on the edge of the wilderness, waiting for the next lawless band of heathens to attack, and to live to a ripe old actuarial table age of 47… Yeah, those things converge to really draw me in…

No, thanks. I’ll take my chances on a future where I will likely be the most backward and least educated, but will be able to use whatever innate abilities I have, along with my survival skills, to learn how to survive in a brave new world.

Oops… I shudda asked this before answering. Will there still be a Bush ruining the country in 2100? If so, then I would rather wade knee-deep in horse shit and take my chances in 1900.

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My friend Em has submitted five interview questions to be answered blog fashion. You’ve probably seen this exercise before, perhaps even participated. It is much more personalized, thought provoking, and self revealing than your typical meme. And I must say, Em has done a magnificent job of constructing questions that stretch me. My one hope is that the responses I offer are half as intelligent as the questions.

1. This month is the two year anniversary of your blog. How have your thoughts about blogging changed in that time as you’ve shared your thoughts, read comments, and read other people’s blogs?

2. What do you want people to learn about you from reading your blog?

3. On your “Who? Why?” page, you mention that you’ve always felt you had a book in you and the ability to write it. What would that book be about? Fiction? Non-fiction? If you finally started writing it today, what would it be?

4. One of your earliest One Liners postings featured this quote by Laurence J. Peter… “If you don’t know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else”. In your childhood dreams, what did you want to be when you grew up? Did you know where you were going…or did you end up somewhere else?

5. If you had a time machine and the option of traveling to two different times to live, would you choose 1900…or 2100? And why?

Having never been one to do things like everybody else, because that’s what’s expected, I will not disappoint you this time. I plan to milk this assignment for all it’s worth, stretching it out over days and weeks and months and … well, days anyway. So this time I will tackle the first question. Read more

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Did you know that the olfactory nerves in your nostrils regenerate every 30 to 40 days. These are the only nerves in the the human body that continually regenerate. Unless, of course, we count the nerves that get frazzled by small kids running and yelling and raising general hell in our vicinity.

Why does our sense of smell get such a break? If only our optic and aural nerves could learn from their up-your-nose cousins, there would be a lot of out-of-work opticians, optometrists, and audiology folks. Got your optic nerve fried by staring at the sun during a drug induced stupor? No problem. Just give it a month and all will be back to normal.

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[This is one of my favorite posts, recycled from September 21, 2005. It is as valid for me now as it was then. My brother reminded me of the four rules last weekend. Many years ago I gave him a card with the rules printed; he still carries it in his wallet but rarely looks at it since he has them committed to memory, and proudly cites them to anyone who will listen. I hope you, dear readers, like them, even if some of you may have a deja vu moment.]

Years ago I developed several new friends and acquaintances after moving to a new condo. One of the most interesting was the one people jokingly referred to as “the bird lady.” She sauntered around the loop of the Versailles complex every evening, with a cigarette in one hand, a drink, usually scotch-on-the-rocks or coffee, in the other, and a beautiful parrot sitting untethered on her shoulder. She smiled and nodded and spoke to all she passed but never became engaged in conversation. The neighbors just rolled their eyes knowingly, smiled secretly, muffled their laughter, and continued what they were doing.

On a particularly pleasant Sunday afternoon I decided to wash the crud off my car. Washing and rinsing and chamois drying at a leisurely pace, paying no attention to my surroundings, lost deep in thought about some mysterious subject like “why cauliflower?”, I was startled when a nearby voice said “When you’re done there you can wash mine.” There was “bird lady” right behind me, not ten feet away, smiling, then cackling at my surprised look. That was good for a couple of laughs and the start of a conversation and friendship.

Volumes could be written about her and that relationship — but maybe another time. This is about the four rules she lived by and passed on to me. I found them to be quite adequate, neatly summarizing in few words the complexity that had over the years become my own personal philosophy of life and code of conduct. Originally intended for interpersonal relationships, the four rules needed enhancement or expansion for application to business and worklife. So I added my own four rules to make a total of eight. They have served me well over the years and I recommend them here for your consideration.

Show Up
Pay Attention
Be Honest
Play Fair

Work Hard
Take Responsibility
Honor Commitments
Mind Your Own Business

I have no idea what ever happened to “the bird lady of Versailles,” but I am grateful for having known her and for her simple but elegant rules for living.

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No matter how rich you become, how famous or powerful, when you die the size of your funeral will still pretty much depend on the weather. — Michael Pritchard

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I grew up listening to Carlin, and over the years have greatly appreciated his humorous reflection of life. George just turned 70 and still has that tremendous ability to make us think as well as laugh, and laugh at ourselves. See the story and links at Jazz from Hell. He is still crankin’, doing Vegas 12 weeks a year, tours, books, etc., etc.

Happy 70th, George, you ornery old fart!

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Arriving on-site to apply mouth-to-mouse resuscitation to a computer reported to be running ver-r-r-r-y slow (lot of that going around these days) I donned my bio-chem hazard suit, checked the oxygen level in my tanks, and went at it mano a mano. The first thing I noted was that the antivirus software license had expired two months ago. The program was merrily chugging along, scanning incoming email realtime and the entire drive every night just the way I taught it to, but with virus definitions that were two months old. Not good. I got the user’s attention and pointed to a warning box that had just popped up above the clock. The dialog went approximately like this…

ME: Have you noticed this little warning box before?

HER: Oh, yeah, all the time. That thing has been driving me nuts for weeks.

ME: What have you done when it popped up?

HER: Oh, I just click it off. But it keeps coming back. Do you think it is the problem?

ME: Did you ever read the message?

HER: Yeah, but I didn’t know what it meant, so I just clicked it off.

ME: Come over here and let’s read it together. It says… Read more

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Hat tip to Teressa at Daisy’s Place

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