Slapping current events

For once an idiotic politician has disgraced himself and NOT been from Texas.  Don't you just want to slap that legitimate jerk?

Unfortunately we are living in our own news story, the West Nile Virus. Collin County had its first West Nile death yesterday. Texas has something like 580 cases of West Nile and over twenty deaths. Am I freaking? Nope. I just wish I was better at slapping the mosquito that's in my condo.  It's lurking in wait like Inspector Clouseau's servant Cato Fong  for me to arrive home from work.


Check out West Nile info for your state here. I love USGS maps...

This map does not show the great grey-green greasy Limpopo River where the Elephant's Child went after all his relatives slapped and spanked him for his 'satiable curtiosity.

O, best Beloved, remember how the Elephant's Child kept eating melons and throwing the rinds about?  There I was trapped in the Buick in bad traffic listening to Diane Rehm and her guests discuss contaminated cantaloupes and food safety enforcement.  Listeria...salmonella...ecoli...

And for a D'oh! head slap, I salute the United States Postal Service for its over-estimation of Simpsons stamps demand.

© 2012 Nancy L. Ruder

Alternative news flash

Extra! Extra! Read all about it!  Art teacher discovers petrified giant squid and the Loch Ness monster on the same afternoon hike in Texas.

Evidence that north Texas was once a great ocean inhabited by creatures with sophisticated nervous systems and complex brains astounds current observers.  This petrified and fossilized giant squid specimen was discovered on the Caddo Trail at Oak Point Nature Preserve.  CollageMama has been studying giant squid illustrations since she was just a wee paleontologist wannabe.

The World We Live In, by the editorial staff of LIFE, 1955 was my next favorite as a kid to the book about chairs.  I loved the fold-out illustrations of dinosaurs, Ice Age mammals, and scary deep sea bio luminescent creatures.  Inside the front cover there's a dibbies sticker with my initials:   

Calling dibs is an informal convention to declare a specific right to something that no individual otherwise has any clearly recognized right. Such a declaration is often recognized in certain cultures, or sub-cultures, as a means to avoid arguments over relatively trivial issues.

There are many colloquialisms associated with this concept, and with specific instances of this concept. For example, an individual planning to ride as a passenger in a car may call shotgun as a means to assert the right to ride in the front passenger seat instead of the back seat.

Emerging from the woods with both Yeti and the Abdominal Snowman chasing her, this intrepid art teacher next found evidence that the Loch Ness monster has survived in the pond at the nature preserve. Okay, just squint a little bit, folks...

We are sick and tired of hearing about Iowa and seeing Republican candidates wearing jeans and barn jackets.  Every four years the nation is hit over the head with a cast iron skillet known as the Iowa caucus, and then that state slips from our consciousness.  This is sad, because Iowa is not that horrible a place, yet we all loathe it down to its very folksy mom-and-pop cafes.  We want to drop anvils and pianos on all  the reporters and commentators and anchors.  Not that we totally approve of cartoon violence, of course.  We are Peace-niks.

Yes, peace on Nebraska.  Peace on Iowa.  It's over there to the right.  Choose E:  None of the above.  Get back to normal life.  

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

Mayhem anoles

Ladies always do love outlaws, and I've got a crush on Mayhem, the guy in those AllState Insurance commercials that play on the tv during Dad's suppers.  Sure, he's not as cute, genteel, or wise as the Geico lizard, but he's got that bad boy magnetism.  The Buick wants to film a stunt chase scene with that actor.

I don't have a GPS, but if I did I would name it Bertha.  I would update Bertha regularly, except for when I didn't.  And then I might meet Mayhem, hollering about recalculating.  

That's why I've popped my old Hunt for Red October into the VHS player.  Connery's Ramius is the best possible combination of Geico lizard and AllState mad man when he orders a "recompute".

Captain, we are approaching the first turn. 

Increase speed to 26 knots and recompute. 

Aye, Captain. 

The little lizards were out and about last weekend in the last blast of summer temps.  Crawling on the warm, sunny bricks, they were recomputing and recalculating, upgrading and plotting locations.

© 2011 Nancy L. Ruder

LeachGate

I never played the game, as Howard Coselle would say, but I've found Mike Leach an interesting character. He's provided lots of entertainment on and off the field through Danger Baby's Texas Tech years. It's been depressing to follow the rapid implosion of the Pirate's coaching career this week.

Major family events coincided with round-the-clock coverage of famous demises and faux news all year:

• Michael Jackson died the day we moved my father into assisted living in June.
• The balloon-boy hoax held the nation's attention the weekend of my son's wedding.
• My last trip to see Dad at Thanksgiving was marked by the Tiger Is A Flawed Mortal drama.

None of these stories rocked my world. But, this week as we moved Dad into the skilled care wing, LeachGate pulled me in. I became part of the onlooker delay on the freeway, gaping at the massive collision of celebrity, fame, poor choices, notoriety, and ego. Mike Leach crashed and burned quickly, instead of leading a slow Bronco chase.

I blame it all on O.J. and Kato.

© 2009 Nancy L. Ruder

"Birthers" and other conspiracy theorists

In February I wrote about our childhood fascination with the two pages of presidential portraits in our grocery store encyclopedia.

The presidents were in the middle of volume fourteen, Pil-Raf, of the Golden Home and High School Encyclopedia, copyright 1961. (LCCN 61-13292). Mom began collecting the encyclopedia set for us about the time I began learning about George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in school. Of course, we pronounced it "Worshington". The Safeway grocery store ran this promotion about the same time our Conoco gas station began giving out pastel thermal coffee cups, tumblers, and pitchers.

I don't know what year I finally convinced Mom to get rid of the worn-out plastic tumblers, but it was probably in the late-Eighties. I never would let her get rid of the outdated encyclopedias because of the Great Assassination Conspiracy.

This was not a JFK assassination theory. It was the fascination of children trying to get a handle on cosmic order, destiny, and fate. The presidents who had been assassinated when we got the encyclopedia, Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Harding lined up in one column of the portraits. We did not know why Truman had not been assassinated, but thought it might be due to FDR's four terms.

After November, 1963, we struggled to understand how our president, John F. Kennedy, could have been killed by Lee Harvey Oswald. Unlike the rest of the nation, we felt something had gone horribly wrong because JFK's portrait was not in the "assassination column" of volume fourteen. We worked out a grim reasoning that 16-14=2. Lincoln was the sixteenth president. It was volume 14. That was why Kennedy was two pictures away from the column.

Once in awhile it helps me remember the sort of magical rationalism elementary students do. When the whole world seems out of order, blame it on the encyclopedia. In case you are wondering, Obama would be in the column with FDR and Woodrow Wilson.

I admit trying to sell my neighborhood playmates on my theory, but I was nine at the oldest. After that I didn't go into either politics or broadcasting. Now I wonder what grocery store encyclopedia Lou Dobbs, Fox News, and the other "birther" nuts have been studying. Same for Sarah Palin with her fictitious "Obama death panels". As Timothy Egan writes in today's New York Times, "quit makin' things up." None of their theories make as much sense as 16-14=2.

© 2009 Nancy L. Ruder

Ike warnings

Perhaps it is fortuitous that we are waiting this weekend to see what an Ike will bring. "Ike" should call to mind a warning this election year. A hurricane named "Ike" can remind us that much of tv weathercasting is hype designed to get all of us a tad hysterical. An earlier Ike warning would alert us to look behind the facades and sound bites of both campaigns to examine their real strategies for the serious problems we are facing in our families, communities, nation, and world.

I'm insulted that the campaigns have regressed to pigs and pitbulls, with or without cosmetic products. It's like being trapped in a high school pep rally watching cheerleader skits and the chanting adoration of the jocks. Could we please, as individuals and as a nation, grow up?

The earlier Ike warned us that "only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing" of government and business interests for the security, peace, liberty, and democratic process to flourish. President Eisenhower was speaking about the dangerous influence of the military-industrial complex at his farewell address in January of 1961, but his warning applies to every aspect of our national life today.

The real "change" that must come about in this election is not a buzzword, but an electorate demanding more from it's politicians than it does from the grocery check-out aisle magazines. We must show that we can understand ideas, ask difficult questions, and recognize the difference between a "reality show" and reality. We must show our understanding that we as a nation are playing for keeps.

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

President Dwight D. Eisenhower

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Hockey mom

She's smart, over-worked, over-extended, sarcastic, and from a small, chilly town. Her kids offer challenges to her best parenting techniques, test her patience, push the limits, have special needs, and pull at her heartstrings. She makes great loose-meat sandwiches. But does that really qualify Roseanne Conner to be the vice president of the United States?


© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

1968

Two words on the radio news hit me--Recreate 68. Why would I want to recreate the scariest year I can remember?

Becoming a teenager is a universal acne festival of junior high anxiety. Ask around. If you can find a person who would like to relive being thirteen years old, I'll be amazed. Most people I know believe Hell, if there is one, is being trapped in junior high for all eternity.

Becoming a teenager in 1968 compounded the personal angst and turmoil with a sense that the world was also going straight to Hell. Do not pass Go with your handbasket. Do not collect $200. Only Walter Cronkite kept the whole world from total conflagration.

• From January 1968 on each evening's CBS news about the Tet Offensive was bad.
• In March the appearance of segregationists presidential candidate George Wallace led to rioting in Omaha.
• Three weeks before I turned thirteen, Martin Luther King was assassinated.
• Five weeks after my birthday, Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated.
• Another two months, and Soviet tanks were rolling into Prague.
• Then the next week protests and rioting began at the Chicago Democratic Convention.

The Omaha riots brought racial tension closer to my little world than ever before. When an Omaha Central High School basket ballplayer was arrested just three days before the 1968 state tournament for suspected possession of gasoline bombs, the Nebraska School Activities Association moved the Class A tournament from Omaha to Lincoln. The tournament has remained in Lincoln for forty years. I'm endebted to Prairie Bluestem for the citation confirming my hazy memories of that time.

1968--I hadn't figured out the secret of life. I could barely manage the combination for my hall locker at Millard Lefler Junior High. The whole thing was going up in shattered glass and smoke.

I began attending the youth group supper meetings at my church in the late winter of 1968. In fact, I learned about Martin Luther King's murder from the church custodian who chatted as he mopped the foyer before one of those suppers. Waiting with me was Phoebe. She befriended me, and showed me the routine for the group meetings, for which my shy and nerdy self was grateful. I'd never met anyone like Phoebe. She was different, but nice.

The other church group kids soon informed me that Phoebe was a "feeb," and a "retard," and taught me to shun her. Guilt for my rejection of Phoebe mixed with my desperate need for peer acceptance to amp up my anxiety. In the forty years since, I pray we have all become more tolerant and compassionate, and slower to use insulting labels.

From a different viewpoint, one might understand 1968 as a year full of hope, promise, change, and empowerment. At thirteen I didn't understand the hippies in San Francisco any more than the Soviet tanks in Prague or Mayor Daley's Chicago. I didn't fit in with the youth group kids who could play "Sunshine of Your Love" on the church organ after choir practice.

What of the "Recreate 68" on the radio news? From the Recreate 68 coalition's website:

The 1960s were a time of profound, positives [sic] social and political change in this country. The civil rights movement ended legal segregation and broke down barriers to the full participation of African Americans in American life (still yet to be fully achieved). Other movements followed that achieved the same for women and for other oppressed communities of color. That in 2008 the two leading candidates for the Democratic nomination for President are an African American man and a woman¬something unimaginable at the start of the 60s¬is a direct result of the changes brought about in that decade.

Those changes were eventually codified in law. But they were brought about not by political “leaders,” but by mass movements of people who demanded that America live up to its own democratic rhetoric, by grassroots movements that forced the system to respond to their demands, and opened up new political space for ordinary people to participate in the decisions that affected their lives.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Minty fresh fix-o-mysteries

Caught a few segments of NPR's Crime in the City series interviewing mystery authors and the cities they know and love. Authors have laid claim to a huge range of locations, occupations, and avocations to reel in niche mystery readers: caterers, car-poolers, PTA moms, crossword puzzle addicts, genealogists, sled dog mushers, cat lovers, English teachers...

I've yet to see the beautiful dental hygienist (and amateur sleuth) with her latex gloves, sharp tools, and sharper wit, Floss Dailey, solve perilous periodontic puzzles. With a ghost writer and some technical advisors, I think we could milk this for twenty titles at least:

• Root Canal in which Floss discovers the naughty inspiration for her husband's tooth whitening overdose.
• Can You Feel This? Still numb from the divorce, Floss meets a cute neurologist and dreams of comfortable shoes.
• Baby Teeth Floss's duplex neighbors have teething triplets.
• Bite Down Please A "Shark Week" on cable t.v. inspires Floss to decorate the ceiling of her exam room with National Geographic shark pictures.
• Keep Wiggling Floss's boss, The Great Gummy Bear, a rotund dental softy, finds his personal cause, founding No Baby Tooth Left Behind, to provide cute plastic containers for low income kids whose teeth fall out at school.
• Canines & Molars Floss's ex, "The Glare," nicknamed for his serious overdose on tooth whitener and blazing inability to pay child support on time, gets a pit bull.
• Brush Three Times Floss wins a hygienist's convention door prize, a vacation to Las Vegas to see Tony Orlando and Dawn.
• Grit Your Teeth Floss accompanies her boss, The Great Gummy Bear to a dentists' convention in Atlanta.
• Swish & Spit Floss becomes friends with a gay novacaine sales rep.
• Overbite Floss starts selling her original line of hygienist scrubs on her website--in TRex, Arctic Wolf, Crocodile, Chained Pit Bull, Amazon Piranha, Shark, and Ankle-biter Toddler print fabrics, but finds she has no time left for her children.
• No Cavities Floss's precocious preschool daughter becomes the star of a rainbow sparkle gel toothpaste ad campaign.
• Panoramic X-Rays Floss cleans Tony Hillerman's teeth while taking a well-earned vacation across the American Southwest.
• Waiting Room Fish Floss finds dentures buried in the aquarium gravel.
• No Candy "The Glare" begs Floss to get back together so a sweet someone will pick up his suits from the dry cleaners.
• A Little Sensitive Floss's best friend from high school, a sculptress working in conceptual orthodontic wire, is arrested in a gallery murder case.
• Deep Pits Floss meets a mysterious informant when she calls the PayPal tech support 1-800 help number.
• Gingivitis Floss's ex remarries, but not to Mary Ann.
• Receding Gumshoes Floss cleans the teeth of a former police detective now suffering from Alzheimers.
• Plaque Fights Back Receiving an award from the National Dental Fashion League starts Floss on a race to prevent copycat designs from flooding the scrub market.
• Partial Plates Cleaning the teeth of a geologist leads to a seismic weekend in California with an underscoring tectonic romance. Carole King has signed to write the "I Feel the Earth Move Under My Teeth."
• The Fluoride Treatment Floss has to deal with an unethical, scandal-mongering tv station when she solves her latest mystery.
• Impacted Wisdom Floss communicates by a system of nods and blinks to help an elderly stroke victim solve a dental mystery.
• Caps & Crowns Floss's sullen adolescent son graduates from high school.
• Drilling for Gold Floss learns her ancestors filled cavities in the California Gold Rush and Texas Wildcat oil fields.
• See You In Six Months Soon to be a major motion picture with Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.
• I'll Love You for Efferdent A made-for-tv movie about high-school sweethearts who meet sixty years later in their dentist's waiting room.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder

Eleven never again

At the end of an extremely sad and stressful week, I walked up the sidewalk to the church to attend the visitation and vigil for a student. A young man in a black suit came along behind me and said, "Miss? Miss?" I thought he was going to tell me I had dropped something, or ask me about the baby bird nearby that must have fallen out of its nest on this 104 degree day.

"Did you know the deceased, miss?" Well, yes. That is generally why one goes to funerals.

"Friend or family?" Teacher.

"How would you describe, uh," he checks his Blackberry, then says the child's name.

"Sweet. Excuse me, I have to go now."

"Could you describe her or your reactions to her death for us? We're from Channel 11 News and we just want to get some impressions of her so others will know." A chubby guy with a big camera on a monopod appears from behind a parked car.

"No. I could not do that."

"Are you sure?"

"I absolutely will not do that."

They turned back to set up their approach to the next mourner.

Life isn't fair. My student didn't make it. The baby bird on the hot sidewalk didn't either. Walking back to my car after the service, the baby bird had been covered with a white paper napkin held down around the edges with a border of twigs and pebbles. Maybe you can see it on CBS 11 at ten. I won't.

© 2008 Nancy L. Ruder