GEESE IV

Well, there I was, once again, on the day of rest for some religions, ( Saturday, for those who might not know.), walking through what I shall from now on refer to as Goose Field. However, this time, I was coming from the other direction, having tried to meet Soupeater somewhere on the road, and having missed him. As I came down the hill, I could see my usual flock ( gaggle?, gang?) of geese ahead of me. They were sort of spread out between the two ball fields.

I was late, and decided to cut the corner, and save the time where it curves around. However, I realized that I would end up walking right through them. Now, as I had a wee bit of liquid courage in me, coupled with the fact that I am a human, and felt that we should be in charge here, I would walk right through them.

So once again, I found myself heading for a showdown with this gang, yo. I put on my best strut and just headed right for them. ( They were NOT in takeoff position, and they were on the wrong end of the runway in any case.) There was a bit of an opening between two factions of the gang, and I felt that I had ample room to go right through the group.

As I got closer to them, my steps began to falter a bit, and I thought about going to the side, since I had visions of having my ankles pecked into bloody messes by these hoodlums. However, I thought " this is ridiculous, there is no reason to be afraid of some geese", even if they move around in a pack, and stare at you balefully.

So I kept going, straight for the opening between the two main sections of geese. As I got closer, a few of them ( I guess the lookouts) pick up their heads, give me a stare, and start to honk a bit.
Not to be deterred, I continued on.

As I passed through the opening, the geese closest to me sort of slunk away, shooting me annoyed glances before looking away, and muttering quietly. If I understood Goose, I would assume they were saying "the nerve of this guy, interrupting my meal of grass and constant bathroom time. Why can't he go around like the rest of the pesky humans?" I then safely emerged on the other side, and continued on my way.


Thankful to have both my ankles and my dignity intact.

Hits and Missives

What is our fascination with Hit Counters? I see that here at Dr G we are approaching the next level in the decimal system, and that brings me a wonderful feeling. So I thought to explore the issue a bit.

To continue what Soupy has recently stated with great erudition, it could be that we feel vindicated knowing that people are interested in what we have to say, and they come back to see what new pearls of wisdom have formed in the oysters of our minds?( darn, that is a good one!)

Or in a slightly different vein, it could be a validation of our selves, and the fact that we are relevant ( to some people at least) and they want to keep up with us due to other social ties.

Maybe it goes back to old rivalries of our youth, and the need to be "better" than someone else for ridiculous reasons. ( "MY bedtime is ten minutes later than yours. so there!" " Oh yeah, well I have THREE baseballs, and you only have TWO!") Especially when there are family members with different blogs, and counters on each, then it goes right into sibling rivalry, which, as many of you know, has been SOOO much fun to follow here.

All these reasons could be why some bloggers feel the need to start their counters at an artificial number, either to justify the time before a counter on the site, or to make them feel EVEN better about themselves. (That being said, there is of course the usual potential for abuse, where a blogger hits his or her own site many many times to get the number up. I don't mean checking it to see that a post looks good, if there are old comments, etc, which can be ten times in a row, or something of that nature, I mean just driving up the numbers. )

Either way, thanks for your continued interest and support.

And keep coming back, we have people we need to pass!!!

Speakin , writin, and ....

Us bloggers write as much in order to get our views publicly aired as we do to satisfy our need to create a work of art - a word painting for lack of a better simile. A real neat turn of phrase, a pleasing juxtaposition of long and short words creating a natural rhythm while artistically expressing a thought or concept or criticism or praise. A poem in prose form. That is the true goal; expressing our opinions in style.

Not wishing to adopt false humility, I can state that I think I have this area covered quite well. However, when it comes to speaking in public, I am envious of just about anyone who gets up behind a lectern or a microphone and lets loose a stream of words no matter how banal or inane. The problem is that when I speak, I sound like the word painting I was just talking about. That doesn't go over well at all. The two disciplines don't mix or even come close to each other.

Yes, a speech needs, first of all, to be written out so that the speaker can practice its delivery or sometimes just thought out and with experience the speaker doesn't need to actually see the words on paper. The content is all important, the style less so. A speech must convey a message in the simplest form and catch the listeners' attention from the first moment. Fancy phrases won't do it unless you are really aiming for your speech to be read and understood only 50 years in the future, and even so, it must be relevant and interesting now.

So how do you deliver a speech that will energize your audience, be reasonably erudite and grammatically correct? I don't know and am hoping for some helpful hints from our readers.

A Fool's Game

Things have heated up again, as they do every time a new US president tries to make his mark on history and sends his envoys to beat someone up in order to force a settlement in the middle east. The truth is that it is an unsolvable problem because each side wants the same unique piece of geography.

I recently read an article which mused that Israel someday will be serious about trading land for peace. It seems to me that Israel has very little land left to trade away, especially for some evanescent "peace" which is sometimes nothing more than a temporary lull in the existential threat. The arabs are like the mafia running a protection racket. When you stop paying, they go back to destroying your store or beating you up or worse.

All of history proves that the arabs will never give up their demands for what they want. To them, Israel is a cancer patient and they are the doctors. They say: cut off this limb and you'll live a little longer, cut out this organ and you'll feel better for a while, but we know, and they do as well, that eventually you'll be so weakened from the amputations and operations that you'll die from the treatment. If you give them a State of Palestine, regardless of their promises and international guarantees, they will use it as a platform to rearm for a while and then once again to attack Israel. They want all of the Mediterranean coast and won't stop till they have it.

This isn't a fictive scenario. Germany did the same thing, under far more restrictive conditions than would be imposed in a mideast two state arrangement, during the interregnum between the two world wars. They rearmed and again tried to expand their borders to what they considered their historical ethnic territory.

And now comes Jimmy Carter, private citizen, the most feckless and incompetent US president in history, with a long record of virulent anti-Israel bias,to further muddy the waters. He has meetings with bloodthirsty terrorists and murderers dressed in western style suits to further the impression they wish to convey that they are civilized humans, to plot against Israel and its allies. The US has suffered for 35 years from this bumbling fool, first as a president who brought our country to the nadir of its popularity and then as the poster child for every crackpot cause that took his fancy and made the US look bad. He can best be described by Harry Truman's phrase: "itinerant saboteur."

I think Carter is the last straw. No one is serious and nothing is going to change. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose.

More Anonymous

Truth be told, there is some difference of opinion here at Dr.G on anonymous posts. The Grain seems to be swayed toward allowing anonymous posts, mainly for some of the reasons pointed out in some of your comments. The Soup would like to ban all posts from anyone whom we don't either personally recognize or can't get any information on. That's why we have this half baked policy.

This blog was established by Dr.G in order to present clear and reasoned positions on the issues of the day as well as mutual entertainment for the reading public and the writer. I was asked to join the creative staff to lighten the load on Dr.G who is busy composing for other blogs and rants. While this blog was never envisioned as a social networking site on the order of Facebook or linkedin, neither was its purpose as a public convenience, open to opportunistic barbs by unknown ill-wishers who hide behind their anonymity and then disappear.

The advantage to requiring some sort of identity by which a commenter becomes an individual (by using the same name all the time) is to establish a more meaningful and serious dialog among the participants.

We feel that our comment policy is the best way to establish a community that cries together in distress and laughs together in happiness.

AN OPEN LETTER TO ANONYMOUS

Dear Anonymous,

We love to hear from you hear at the good doctor, but the Grain and the Soup have both decided that there shall be no anonymous comments posted, no matter how on point or pithy, since it is TOO easy to hide behind, and people occasionally get a little too carried away when they are hiding behind complete anonymity. This is the posted policy herein, ( please glance to your right and see the first entry there.)

So I implore you, dear readers and commenters, please pick a name, any name, so long as it is not anonymous.

Specifically you, anonymous commenter to materialism, we liked the comment and want to share your pearl of wisdom with the rest of the greunkern community. So just resend it, just pick a name first.

This post really does not need any comments to it, but know just writing this shall cause a flurry of comments, mostly from you ornery people. ( now I REALLY did it!)

Materialism

People are imprisoned by their desires. Life is good, no real problems and then they want, want, want. What is it they need? Something they don't have, and what they do have suddenly becomes worthless, tasteless, giving little or no satisfaction. They yearn for what they don't have especially if others do have it. And when they finally achieve, at what cost, their current goal, it satisfies for a while but the novelty soon wears off and the next object of desire puts them back into the state they were in before their latest, must-have, acquisition. So why go for the first thing? You know the hunger will return and it costs so much to only diminish the feeling for a small while so why bother?

How many things in life have you acquired that still gives you satisfaction today? The things G-d gives you for free; light, air, springtime, summer, fall, winter, children, cherished spouses, parents, children, grandchildren, give you real satisfaction at little material cost.

To quote a noted religious leader, author and lecturer, " The enemy of good is better."

S day

A previous post by Soupy, who has been real quiet lately, mentioned that he runs into family. I had a similar situation that is so momentous to me that I feel I should share it with all of you (you are indeed lucky people today!).

I spoke to all of my siblings yesterday.

Now this may not be a very big event for most people, and certainly not for some, but it really stood out to me.

I am , of course, not counting family get-togethers or occasions, when there is G-d forbid a family emergency, or when I see them and speak to them in person, I am referring to when we are all busy with our lives.

I am not a real phone person, and I don't just pick up the phone to casually shmooze with people. In fact, I speak to a friend of mine, who I consider to be one of my closest friends, about every six months, and it is usually because I need something from him.

So for me to speak to each of my siblings by phone is really something out of the ordinary for me. Granted, if you have been following the last few posts, you will see that there is probably a good reason for it, in that I seem to be a lightning rod for any and all comments and opinions, usually unsolicited, often pointed. However, they are family and still must be tolerated, since you can't choose them, as the saying goes. (In truth, my friends are no better, but I don't have that many anyhow, and as I said, I rarely speak to them, so they are manageable.)

Maybe I am mellowing at my advanced age, and appreciating them more. Maybe I have found a new talkativeness and feelings of closeness with loved ones, or maybe I enjoy their collective sage advice and opinions.

I'm not sure, but I AM sure THEY will let me know why.

Just Setting the Clock

My Grandfather was an interesting man. Not wishing to eulogize him here, which would not have been his wish, ( and would be almost 19 years too late) I just want to explore one facet of his psyche,

Clocks.

with apologies to anyone who knew him better, these are my recollections.
This was a man who was punctual to a fault and appreciated clocks. His house was LOADED with them, and they all were set to the correct time.

In fact, it was well known that daylight savings time, and the switch back, were momentous occasions in the house, as each clock was reset to the correct time. I remember sitting in the kitchen in Paramus and thinking that I never had to turn my head to see what time it was.

To a degree, I have a similar attachment to time keeping devices. I love clocks. I think there were 17 of them in my first one bedroom apartment, and I have always attempted to relive the experience of never having to turn my head in ANY room to see what time it is. At home we also have projection clocks that shine the time on the ceiling at night. Currently, we have about 25 clocks in the house. ( I counted them last night, a lot fewer than I thought, much to my chagrin. I shall try to gt more, if I can sneak them past Lovey.)

However, I am remiss, ( and I guess the blood has thinned somewhat) in keeping all of my devices set to the same time, or sometimes set at all. I have endured ribbing from Lovey and others that all of the clocks in the house show a different time ( including, incredibly, the atomic clock, until I figured how to set the DST button, so it stopped going back an hour every time I reset it). I also am not so diligent about keeping up with the daylight savings time switches, and sometimes a clock will go ( gasp!) a day or two before I get around to changing it. However, others in the family have kept up the tradition. Let me explain.

I have one cousin who has three oven clocks, and they were ( at the time I was there, might still be) set to all change at THE EXACT SAME SECOND. Now that is dedication, but all this is a prelude to my real reason for this post.

I went to the Yankee game a couple of days ago with one of my favorite cousins. One who was very close to my grandfather and this clock thing must have rubbed off in a big way. We were going home from the game when he looked at the clock on my radio and saw it was off. Now I bought this car second hand, and there was no manual for the car, much less the after market radio. I was off by an hour ten at first,which went down to ten minutes with the DST switch, then I had some battery issues, and each time the battery died, it reset. When I finally changed the battery, it was EXACTLY 47 minutes fast, so I would just do the math.

This would not fly for my dear smiling cousin, so he started trying different combinations to get it to work, finally took off the detachable face, and pulled the model number. (Tinkering to get things to work better was another habit of my Grandfather, and that has been transferred to many members of my family.)

I wasn't home ten minutes when he e-mailed me both the manual and the specific section that covered the clock. ( He also absorbed a tremendous ability to take care of things IMMEDIATELY, which is something I admire, am envious of, and should aspire to).

Well, I got in the car the next day, and promptly SET THE CLOCK. It was at that point that I had this tremendous feeling of elation that I FINALLY had a clock that was correct! I was thrilled, I called my cousin to thank him, not realizing how good it felt to actually be able to look at a clock and have the correct time without doing any math, especially for the timing of the traffic updates, which rule my life twice a day.

I guess there is more of Opa in me than I realized.

If you cut me, I will bleed ( maybe)

This public castigation and critiquing ( see comments to GEESE III) has to be addressed. I can be silent no longer.

Why is it that everyone feels my business is theirs? I have somehow muddled my way through 42 years of life, granted, with alwaysolderthanyou in the picture the entire time, but without the help of FBB for the first 8 years, and I would like to think that I am doing a somewhat decent job of existing.

Now, if the definition of existing means spending $14.00 for a slice of chocolate cake, of course called something like Piéce Magnifique de Chocolat to justify the price, then I will have to beg to differ.

I am a simple man, with simple tastes. Now don't get me wrong, I will enjoy an occasional expensive meal, look forward to it, in fact. I feel what you pay for is the ambiance, the change, of location, and superior food served to you by surly people. However, when it is done, I don't feel that I need to go that extra distance to complete the effect and have the dessert in the same place as well. I like donuts, I like coffee, I like a good deal. Hence, a donut/coffee shop for dessert, in another location, which extends the night out, as well as the dollar, seems like a logical choice, irrespective of the name of the store.

I truly do not know how I managed to survive the first 8 years of life without good advice foisted upon me.

Now moving on to more unsolicited advice. As I have been forced to state, and shall reiterate herein again upon being attacked for my prose, (although I appreciate the over 600 visits thus far, and realize that a word printed and not read may not have been heard in the forest, ( to mix a metaphor)),

this is MY blog.

I will respect all comments and opinions, but it is still my call whether to accept them. For those of you who may or may not have blogs of your own, feel free to use any stylistic devices you wish. I will take any comment under advisement, and proceed accordingly. It is not sibling rivalry, it is free speech and choice.

Nevertheless, I will knock down the fourth wall and allow a peek at the thought process behind the decision to use English. When this blog explodes on the national stage, and the hits come in fast and furious, I do not wish to alienate anyone ( who I haven't already alienated by snarky responses) who is not familiar with certain sectors of the population. Therefore, I keep the language generic.


And Hamayvin Yovin