Went to AJ’s Memorial service yesterday.

His older brother spoke.

He said whenever they went to the beach from the time he was five years old AJ was out all day long. His mom would bring him out a sandwich at lunchtime. He wouldn’t come in until the sun set.

His brother also told a story that AJ was working for a caterer in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit. They got a call asking if they could feed 30,000 people at the Houston Astrodome. The people would start arriving in five hours. It was three o’clock in the morning. Two thousand of those coming would be babies and they’d need formula. Where do you get baby formula at three in the morning for two thousand babies?

AJ got the local appliance store guy who promised “Same Day Delivery” to not only buy the formula from Wal Mart but deliver it to the Astro Dome.

Wow,

Dear Hank,

Sorry to do this but I just gotta.

Okay, two things I’ve been stewing over for quite a while and I gotta get them off my chest. But let me digress briefly to football. Last night the Bears got stomped by the Lions. Brian Urlacher, middle linebacker for the Chicago Bears, commented, “we can’t stop the run, we can’t stope the pass,” and on an 88 yard touchdown run against the Bears he said (and I’m paraphrasing), “the quarterback got the snap, handed it off, and the guy ran for 88 yards untouched. Did you see anything different?”

I’d like, with politicians and commentators, to be able to confront them over their blatant misrepresentations of basic facts, as much as I’ve always wanted a coach to say after the game, “Well, the reason we lost was the other team put up more points than we did.” Come to think of it I may have heard that.

Okay, gripe number one, Bill O’Reilly was on The Daily Show last week and he was complaining about the government wasting money. He said he’d be willing to pay more in taxes when they stopped wasting his money. (Yeah, okay Bill, who’s the judge of that? How about those pacifists who don’t want to pay their portion of taxes that go toward war? - But I digress once again.) Bill’s examples of wasting money? The $16 muffin and the bankrupt solar firm Solyndra.

Well, the $16 muffin is about some government folks who had a meeting in a hotel and the hotel charged them $16 per muffin. Well, I don’t have all the details but if you’ve ever seen the prices at those little minibars in a hotel room you’d know hotels charge excessively for food and apparently many people have mentioned this but Bill ignored all this. What really gets me about the bully O’Reilly’s comments (and he is a bully) is that do you remember the news story about Bill demanding fresher croissants for him to eat at an early morning radio show appearance in LA? Billy had to have his muffins by god (or rathar his croissant.) Then when April Winchell, daughter of Paul, blogged about it O’reilly got her banned from the am radio station for life! Oh, and there’s the little detail that he demanded a helicopter to fly him to his next appointment because he didn’t want to spend an hour in a limo they had provided. I think all that probably came to what would you guess, five or ten grand? For a croissant, ten grand?

Then Billy was upset over the government wasting his tax dollars on Solyndra, the solar panel maker that went bankrupt. Now, I’d like to ask Bill when did he start carrying water for the Chinese? Obviously, he’s been doing it for all kind of goofy right wing nutty things but to sell out to someone overseas? Wouldn’t you think he’d want to wave the flag and stand up for America? Why if this was a white Republican president do you think he’d point out that while this company failed there are many that the government has helped and the President has visited that are doing quite well? Don’t you think he’d say something about the fact that the Chinese government spent at least twenty times more on propping up their solar panel makers because they realize it will become a trillion dollar industry within the decade? Don’t you think he’d have complained about the fact that the Chinese manipulated the price of their panels to drive Solyndra out of business? Don’t you think he would have pointed out that most experts in the field believe the technology that Solyndra was using is acknowledged to be the coming thing in solar? Don’t you think he would have called for Washington to do more to help this struggling company that is fighting an economic global war for jobs here in the U S of A?

Nope, let’s blame big government and especially the President.

Whew,

That felt good.

Carry on.

Bryce

Dear Hank,

Re: Meteor Shower of October 8, 2011

Okay, let’s get right to it. I saw hundreds, if not thousands, of meteors raining down in a veritable shower of light.

Not!

I saw two.

And that over three sightings times. I had to keep coming in to warm up. Standing on the deck in October in only shorts and a tee shirt didn’t quite hack it.

When I came in to warm up I caught up on news and opinion stuff. Peggy Noonan, the Reagan speechwriter, had a piece that wasn’t her usual snarky thing. It was actually informative. She talked about “The Wal-Mart Moms.” At first I thought she went to Wal-Mart and talked to people but that was not the case. She was reading from a survey. Guess what? Women who are trying to make ends meet are tired of Congress not doing anything. They don’t care about the Republican candidates for president and they think Obama is trying but he’s only one man and Congress is blocking him at every turn.

Then I read George Will. Now there’s snarky with big words and it says nothing. Well, that’s not quite right, he was saying that Elizabeth Warren’s comment “that nobody got rich in this country by themselves” was a statement about socialism and government having a right to your money. I wondered if anyone else thought he was way off base. Lo and behold there was a link to the Plum line saying not only was Will off base he misquoted Warren and missed the whole point of her argument.

Then I saw an interview with Bill Clinton asking what he would do to fix the economy. When you hear what he has to say you realize why he’s so good: insightful, pragmatic and to the point. One thing I’ll mention here. I had recently read that there’s a glut on the housing market (duh?) and one solution, offered by multiple economists and ready to be enacted by one mayor, is to tear down houses. This seems dumb to me, but I couldn’t think of anything else. Clinton’s idea? Let people occupy the houses if they can pay the utilities and taxes. Brilliant.

I also find it astonishing how so many conservatives, tea-bagers, Fox news casters and the like are vilifying the occupy Wall Street crowd. They have put themselves on the side of Marie Antoinette and “let em eat cake” crowd.

It’s going to be a very interesting time.

I gotta go.

Bryce