traffic, weather and guns....

The world is falling apart and everyone is blaming the other guy, nobody wants to look in the mirror and point at themselves. Bumper stickers abound talking trash about everything, and the pundits on the airwaves have it all figured out. The conservatives blame the liberals and visa-versa. I don't have all the answers, I will leave some of that to the people who are way smarter than me, but I know some things, and I feel that I need to say something. Here is what I see:

In my local city, (Rochester) they are getting government money to install red-light cameras at particularly troublesome intersections. These cameras are designed to snap pictures of the license plates and drivers of vehicles passing through intersections that have red lights. Duh! "The great Orwellian society is taking over." "It is the age of big brother." This is the cry of the public now. Um... Guess what? There are cameras everywhere you go these days waiting to catch you doing something wrong. In the parking lots, in the malls and the stores. In the gas stations, and in the restaurants. Anywhere that people congregate there are cameras watching. The biggest difference is that, MORE PEOPLE BREAK TRAFFIC LAW THAN ANY OTHER LAW. Sad sack sumbitches think that now they will get caught doing something that they shouldn't. Mostly because they have been doing it for so long that they figure that they will forget the cameras are there and get nailed. I'm sure they will. I don't like it, but people have proven for generations that they can't be trusted. When I was a child someone once said to me, " A lock will only keep an honest man honest." I think that is probably one of the truest things I have ever heard in my life. There is something in a human being that makes them wish to "get away" with something. Whether it is extra dessert when nobody else gets it, or finding an open door or slipping through a red light when no one is coming. Even the most Honest person in the world will eventually slip up and let nature goad them into something. Maybe they peek in a window and see a naked lady, or snitch the last donut. IT happens. It's human nature, like fighting and arguing. Sadly traffic cameras are more about generating income for a city than they are about traffic enforcement. It's a newer and sneakier tax. There is another things that the police are using now to catch scofflaws too called a traffic scanner. It's a highspeed camera attached to a computer that scans plates and stickers for validity and warrants. Lazy cops! Whatever happend to knowing your people? Get out and walk around the neighborhoods! Get off the bbicycles and out of the patrol cars and walk. Get to know the people again.

Guns are in the news and in a big way. People dieing and people killing. Whole families wiped out because of the despair factor. Insanity and instability making people go out with a bang. (pun intended) But there is another thing that I know the Pro-gun and the anti-gun crowd haven't considered as a contributing factor here. It was dramatically pointed out in the Pittsburgh Police officers deaths. The Pro-gun people have been harping constantly on how President Obama is going to take away our guns. The truth is that he has so much more to concentrate on, that it is highly unlikely that it is up at the top of his to-do list. Yet as long as the NRA and others keep pushing the buttons it will spur idiots to do stupid things, and this only adds fuel to the Anti-gun fires. Everytime a child dies or a family is torn apart or a maniac goes on a killing spree, the drums beat louder to take away our 2nd amendment rights. This will literally take a LOT of doing and no one president or congress will be able to do it. It will take most of a generation to get that kind of change enacted and it just isn't gonna happen yet. Sadly, the despair brought on by the economic situation in this country makes it more likely that people who were borderline stable to begin with will go off the deep end and do something to hurt themselves and those that they "love". Selfish bastards! Still, look at the overall statistics and you will see that more people die on Americas highways than at the end of a gun. And now here in Rochester we have a new problem...

Last Saturday morning (3 am) a man shot and killed a 17 year old kid who was breaking into cars. The basics of the story are this; A man heard noise and looked outside to see people moving from driveway to driveway. Being a leaglly licensed gun owner he grabbed his gun and told his girlfriend to call 911 and get the police coming. He went outside and yelled to the people to stop what they were doing, he warned them that he had a gun and he was calling the police. He found that it was three young men, and two of them took off running. The third one charged him despite his continued warnings. He fired two shots stopping the young man. He immediately ran back into his house and relayed to the police via the 911 operator that he had fired his gun and was afraid that he had killed the young man. He laid down his gun and put his permit with it as instructed by the police. He was arrested and put in jail and indicted by a grand jury. The young man's family has spoken out that their little angle could not have possibly been doing anything wrong. If he wasn't doing anything wrong, why was he out at 3 am? Why was he breaking into unlocked cars? Why did his cousins run and not look back? They are as culpable in his death as the man who pulled the trigger, and they should be charged as well. If they had stood still and kept their cousin from charging a man with a gun, they would all be alive and most likely on probation. Now a good man is going to stand trial and probably lose his job and half of what he has worked his whole life for, because he tried to do the right thing. To much to discuss here, but it's another example of neither side willing to see the middle ground where real life happens.

Scientists wish to put reflective particles into the atmosphere to cool the earth. Idiots!! I can't even believe that they are truly considering this act! The planet will fix itself if we give it the chance to come back into balance. Stuff in the atmosphere is the reason for our problems. I have watched enough of the History channel and Discovery to know that they are talking about Carbon Black. It's a very fine powder that when released in the atmosphere will cause cooling over large areas because it will block the suns rays and reflect them back into space. Uh huh. In small scale, earthbound, laboratory expriments it has proven to work, yet I truly fear putting this dust into the air. In 1980 when Mount St. Helens exploded, there was a decided cooling in the atmosphere and the summer was particularly mild. This was a natural phenomenon, and we had no control over it. The dust eventually settled and the atmosphere warmed back up the following year. Carbon black is FINE stuff and it could actually stay airborn in the atmosphere indefinitely. How long do we really want it up there and what would be the effect if it stayed there for a few years? How much crop loss would there be? How much crop loss could the world stand? We are near the edges of production capability on many things and even one year of significant crop loss could be plenty hurtful to many economies, but 2 or 3 years? That would be utter devastation and probably the beginning of the apocolypse. Screwing with the atmosphere in a deliberate way is worse than all the damgae that we have already done. We could easily bring the planet back into balance in a generation with some minor fixes. Messing with the atmosphere is too dangerous. It is the atmosphere that keeps us alive. We must have it to live. Without it we are done for. No question about it. The magnetosphere keeps out the excess solar ratiation and the atmosphere gives us life. Carbon is what got us into this mess and Carbon is NOT going to get us out, unless it is used as a way to gather solar energy and convert it into electricity. Solar power and wind power are the two things we need to develope in order to stave off the disaster that is looming in the future of humanity if we don't change our ways.

There I got that off of my chest! I feel BETTER, but still not very powerful!

Sick of Advertising!!!

I love TV and Radio, and I Hate Commercials!!! It's not that I dislike the fact that people need to advertise, I understand the needs of business and the want for more traffic. What gets on my nerves is the Idiotic commercials that so many people find cute or funny. Once or twice they are cute or funny, but when you listen to the radio for the entire workday you hear these commercials 10 or 15 times in a day (depending on how much the advertiser spends)and they begin to sound extremely annoying. It wouldn't be so much of a problem if changing the station would change the commercials, but it doesn't.

Especially the national campaigns, like McDonald's, BK, or ( gods Help me!) Geico. I long for the day that that dumbass gekko gets run over by a car or made into a grease smear on a windshield! I have come to the conclusion that Micky D's is geared towards the biggest idiots in the country, and BK commercials are made by Biggest idiots in the country! As much as I enjoy my DirecTV, I wish that idot would kick his "friends" out of his house when they won't let him watch his game on cable, whether it is in HD or NOT!!! IT"S HIS GOD DAMN HOUSE!!!! Kick those Idiots out, it's not an intervention when your are not being harmed, and if they want to change your programming so bad, they can pay for it!!! If they are so offended at the lack of HD they can go watch the Game at their own house!!! Take away the chips and salsa and give them no beer!

The kid who won't keep his rollover minutes is another idiot!!! His mother is such an idiot that she should just take his phone away and make him pay for his own plan. Simple people!!! What other ones are getting on my nerves lately? Hmm, let me think.... I'm sure that something will come to mind. OH yes!! I remember now...

The Whopper Jr. commercials..... I would like to see someone come around to the drive through with a shotgun when that punk starts screaming about the buck. And when he is at the therapists office with his dad, that boy need a swift kick right in the nuts (sesame seeds?) to remind him that he is jr. and not the boss. I wouldn't buy a whopper jr. if they were ¢10 each, just because I hate the ad campaigns so much.

I am sure that there are millions of people who are led to the products that are being advertised by these insane, inane and decidedly stupid campaigns, but because they have gotten on my nerves so much I am sure to avoid the products no matter how great they are. Think with your dipstick Jimmy! Not this boy, I'm never gonna buy the product, EVER! That little Scotsman ever came up and whipped me on the back of the legs with a dipstick, you can guarantee that he will fall to the floor with brains leaking out of his ears and a 9mm bullet hole in his forehead. Entirely too much money is spent trying to get us to buy crap. If the stuff was really worth it, we would be buying it. Not because we saw the ad, but because everyone who had it was happy and talking about it. If that money was put into making the stuff better? We might actually want to buy it without the blitz krieg advertising.

You know that Americans are Sheeple and will follow any fad. If the neighbor is in love with it, then soon you will have to have it too!!! You know it's true!

Over Population

This is one of those issues that has so many sides that you will go insane thinking about it, but it is also a very important issue. The world is suffering from population pressure and I have noticed that it seems to be getting worse. In biology we learn that in nature, animals will control their populations based on availability of resources such as food and living space. In the wild, they will stop giving birth when there is a lack of food, or the population density gets too high. Pretty smart for critters who supposedly can't reason.

Humans on the other hand, are completely different. They will continue to breed and add to the population density to the point of disaster. Humanity is a cancer on the planet. If you don't believe me, think about it this way: Cancer is unregulated growth of cells that will eventually overwhelm and kill the host body. Humanity grows on the planet, apparently unregulated, and without some regard to the future, will soon overwhelm our host and kill it. We have been killing it slowly for some years now. Of course the planet will recover, it doesn't need us, we do however need it and we need to keep it healthy.


The human population is growing at an ever faster rate. In 1800, the worlds population was estimated to be 978 million, yes, Million. 100 years later this figure grew to 1.65 billion! That time it's a B as in One Thousand Million. Let us jump 1 more century, and now the population in the year 2000 is known to be 5.99 Billion! And 9 years later, according to the U.S. Census Bureau,

04/01/09 --- 6,770,332,394

Of course huge portions of these people are concentrated in certain parts of the world, India and China come to mind immediately, and these places show the extremes of life in a place where the population really exceeds the resources of the area. India is known for its' slums and the quick way that disease spreads in these areas. It was recently brought to the fore of the world consciousness in the movie Slumdog Millionaire. Children abandoned by their families, because the family can't feed them. They live from garbage cans and survive by the force of will. Too many of them die. In China it has been long known that the government tries to control the population growth by limiting families to one child. So the Families will often abort a healthy child or in even worse cases kill a healthy baby girl at birth so that they can try to have a boy child. Boys are more likely to be able to get a better job in the future and perhaps make a better living. This is the story we are told anyway. But what does this give us? A HUGELY disproportionate ratio of men to women in the general population. That's sure not a good thing. Men with no jobs and no women end up making an army, and armies make nothing but trouble.

This is not the only worry about this population pressure, what about energy? This many people will need energy resources, electrical, motor fuel, raw materials for building structures and products, as well as food and water. Where does all this energy needed come from? Ever expanding power grids and distribution channels. Sooner or later something will not stretch any farther and things will begin to cascade out of control. There are many ways to make electricity, but the most common are currently, coal fired steam, hydro, and nuclear. Coal is the worst for the environment, it puts so much carbon in the air and contributes to the problem of global warming. Not to mention it is also responsible for additional smog , resperatory problems and Beautiful sunsets. One good thing just doesn't outweigh the bad stuff there. Hydro power has the advantage of not needing to pollute the atmosphere, but it takes it's toll in other ways. It can destroy huge tracks of land as well as wildlife habitats. The Earth is made to have certain balances and losing one population of crittes can have a domino effect that may be unpredictable. Suddenly an invasive species may run out of control, or a preditory species will lose a food supply and begin hunting something else. When messing with wildlife habitats, you can never fully predict what will happen by losing a species. Nuclear power is generally considered to be safe overall, but the problem is what to do with the spent nuclear fuel. It's a radioactive substance that needs to be locked away for a thousand years or so. We all know that there has never been a country that lasted for 1000 years. Regions, and cities, have kept their names while regimes and ideologies change. I don't know how many crazy ideologies I would trust with Nuclear waste!!

What about food? As population increases so does the need for food. In South America the rainforests are disappearing so that they can be used as farmland for the ever growing populations. The rainforests are the lungs of the Planet, and by losing this lung tissue the planet breathes harder. The conversion capacity for processing the CO2 in the atmosphere back into oxygen is taking a huge hit. So while the increasing need of electricity pumps CO2 into the air, the razing of the Rainforests takes away the planets' ability to reclaim the Oxygen, and keep the planet balanced. But back to the food, populations grow and they spread out, the cities grow and the farms move ever farther from the population centers. Transportation needs increase. The tillable land areas shrink and the need to get ever greater yields from ever smaller plots increases the need for more tillable land. Forests are cleared, mountains are terraced, and technology gives us hydroponics and greenhouse abilities. Food is produced year round in places where it never could be before. Storage Technology learns to store food better and longer so that we may survive a bad season. But what about 2 or 3 in a row? Increased scale of global warming makes it much more likely that areas that have long been the bread baskets of the world will become untenable as farmland within the next 100 years, and if the population growth continues on the scale that it has been going, there will be some hard times ahead. When people are worried about where they are going to sleep and get something to eat, education takes a back seat.

Large under- and uneducated masses of people are good places to foment rebellion and plant the seeds of war and destruction. Hungry people are easy to anger, and uneducated people are easy to convince and guide. The smart and ruthless will use this knowledge to their advantage and it will be some big wars that end some of the population presure. I just hope that they stick to killng great numbers of each other with conventional weapons. If there really is a nuclear war, I doubt that there will be enough of the planet left usable to sustain any population for very long. I really fear for the future of the children, not only the ones already here, but also for the ones born in the next few decades. As I have gotten older I have found that I would like to raise a few rugrats of my own, but I can honestly say that it scares the hell out of me to add to the problems that the world already has. But then again, what if it turns out to be my child or my grandchild that saves humanity? Highly unlikely, but you never know do you?

I guess I need to have someone in my life to actually breed with, before I should worry about the decision, but there is still a lot there that affects me and that I wonder about!

random thoughts and ramblings

The war on drugs is a fraud. There is no war on drugs, it is a war on American mindset. Americans have been the subject of intended brainwashing by their government for most of a century. The interesting thing about this, is that even as they have continued sending piles of money to the incinerator of "drug interdiction" they have done nothing to actually hurt the giant drug lords and traffickers. The drug business itself takes it's toll on the people who make the most money. It is a business of greed, and greed is the biggest motivator in it. When there is no longer huge profits to be made, it will begin to diminish. Drug lords are killed by their rivals. new drug lords take their place. They make tons of money and live like kings. They get killed in the next coup. The drug trade in America is the modern equivalent of slavery, and just like in Africa the black man enslaves his own race as does the white man and the yellow man and the brown man. Take what little money that your fellow man has, and get him addicted to your product. Then make him work for it when he can't afford it. Eventually he will never have a chance to have anything that is his own, and then he is no more than a slave, either to the dealer or to the product. The saddest part of the cycle is that eventually the user dies, or with a little bit of luck, kicks the habit, and then the dealers must find new clients or he will go out of business. What is the solution? I am not smart enough to say for certain, but one thing I do know is that drugs should be treated like alcohol, regulated and taxed. The United States government learned over the decade of the 1920's that prohibition is useless and only makes the criminals rich. The real change needs to be in the public perception, of course that won't happen over night, and the crazy conservatives will scream that "their money" will be supporting drug addicts. Guess what? It already does in a myriad of ways, but by ending the criminalization of most drugs and their users, the money being wasted now on the "war" can be funneled into education and rehabilitation. This is the only way to break the cycle. And eventually the need for less money to be spent in this field.

I recently read an article in the newspaper about the the loss of religion in the United States. This was followed a few days later by a flurry of letters to the editor from both sides of the coin. On the pro religion side was the general status quo, that without God in our lives we are destined to be worthless and useless people who will never amount to anything and at the same time will suffer for eternity because they have not been "saved". One writer even went so far as to blame all crime and discontent in the world on the lack of God in the lives of the perpetrators. How in the world do they make this connection? Keep drinking the Kool-Aid! I see it as quite the other way around. It continually fascinates me when these knuckleheads really believe this crap that they are fed. Just because I do not subscribe to the same belief system that these poor freaks do, I do live in the same society and live by the same rules of conduct as these religious nuts, but I have the decency to let them go about their business without continually thrusting my distaste for their life choices in their faces and I truly wish that they could quit doing it to me. I was raised in a manner that taught me to reason and think about the consequences of my actions. Every boater is taught that they are responsible for their wake. It is a great metaphor for life. We are all responsible for our wakes. In life we create a wake wherever we go and the things that we do all have consequences. Because I don't subscribe to a specific set of written down beliefs, I am able to take each action as it happens and apply the result to my next action. It is called reason and logic. The definition of insanity, in the popular saying, is to repeat an action over and over again expecting a different result. To me, this describes Religion. More and more it looks like the followers are insane, they repeat the actions that they have been repeating for the last millenia and still expect different results. A small sidebar of this same original article was a bit of research that showed that the more religious a person was, the more likely they were to be afraid of dying, or letting anyone near them die. These are the people who keep loved one on life support for years after their brains have died, on the hope of a "miracle". They keep pets alive while they suffer the pain and indignity of osteo-arthritis and incontinence, GI problems and the loss of their teeth. Animals can't tell us that they don't want to suffer this way, but because they are our pets and they love them they try extraordinary means to keep them with us long after they should have moved on. They deserve a dignified passing as much as a human does. Meanwhile those of us who consider themselves to be agnostic or atheist, we'll have no or little problem when our time comes, we are more curious than scared, because we haven't been living a hypocritical existence. We live as we feel life should be lived, we don't hate people for arbitrary reason and we don't believe that we know all the answers to the questions of life and death. I am sure that I will hit this subject again some day.

Again on the recent news front, there has been much about the drug toxin levels in fish. Anti-depressants getting into the water tables and being absorbed by the critters living in the water. SO now the fish are Happy!! Now I am not against the use of anti-depressants. I understand that there are people who truly need these beneficial drugs. It keeps them balanced and in many cases alive. I am however against the OVERUSE of these drugs. In far too many cases they are prescribed by doctors too lazy or inept to find the real cause of the depression. I do know that there are some cases where there is a chemical problem in a persons brain and they just don't make the right chemicals to find happiness. I don't believe that this is as prevalent as the doctors and drug companies would have us believe. I think that it is often much more inherent in the western lifestyle. The TV shows us people who are deliriously happy. We expect that we will be deliriously happy. When we aren't we think that there is something wrong with us. We worry. Then the TV shows us people who are depressed and they get deliriously happy with drugs. They are walking on the beach, laughing at parties and holding hands with their great looking, happy spouse. If we don't have the happy spouse, the beach vacation, and the party invitations, well there must be something wrong with us and we don't feel happy about it. Are we depressed or are we just chronically unhappy that we aren't the greatest people on the planet? Westerners spend their life wired and plugged into everything and wanting everything. In the last half of the last century, Americans especially, elevated their overall way of life above just about every other nation in the world, and in doing so they set standards of living that they expected their children and grandchildren to at least achieve and in many cases to exceed our parents standards. In most of the world parents expect that their children may be lucky to do the same that they do. The same job, in the same place and for the same pay.They will live in the same town, and maybe even in the same house. They don't expect so much out of life, but to live it the best that they can, the same as their parents. There is not the pressure to achieve. ( I said in MUCH of the world, now all we all know a few over-achieving Asians!) Even in the Asian countries it is mostly true, but the citified masses always have their educated elite, and they are expected to achieve just like western kids, and they show the same signs of stress that the western people show. They have their heart attacks, and their ulcers, and their suicide rates too. But the truth is that they are far fewer in those places per capita, because the pressured portions of society are much smaller than in America. Our own competitiveness is our biggest downfall, and the obsessive need to have all the same stuff that our friends and neighbors have is where our insane depression rates come from. If we lost TV and Madison Ave. for a generation I bet we would see a steady decline in them. Sure I want my MTV, but it's gonna kill me just like them Marlboros will too. There is a whole industry that is dedicated to making us want what we can't afford or don't need , but we are sure willing to try and do whatever it takes to get it. Then we instill this same mindset in our children and wonder why they aren't happy. Add to that the "everybody wins" method of child-rearing that has become so popular and it is like pouring battery acid on a paint job. It just eats away at the mind and happiness is the first thing to go.

That's all I got today. I am sure that I will have more soon. Enjoy your day and don't spend it all wishing for what you don't need. Live the life you have and don't worry about what everyone else has.

A picture is worth a thousand words...

Sunlit birch against threatening sky
















sunset trees against purple sky














Glowing cloud














Nature is the best artist ever.

The Big Box Dilemma

Yep, The Big Box. You know what I mean, Wal-Mart, the store that so many people love to hate. It has become the symbol of the homogenization of American culture. 25 years ago it was McDonald's, before that? I really can't say because I only really began paying attention somewhere in my late teens. Howard Johnson's maybe? It really doesn't matter, I guess, the point is that sometimes the things that make our lives easier or more convenient, are the same things that we resent for taking away the individuality of the landscape.

It seems that no matter where we go in America these days there is a Wal-Mart, and more and more of them are billed as "Supercenters." But let's be real, just because you can buy food and drugs and clothes in the same store doesn't really make it a supercenter, because you can do the same at most Walgreens, Kenny Drugs, Rite-Aids and even grocery stores. The Marketing department of the Wal-Mart Company knows that by billing the store as a supercenter, it gets them more community support,( if they have any to start with, there is a serious backlash going on with Walmart) so even though it may not be a full supercenter they will still call it such. I live where I can drive to three different Wal-Mart "supercenters" in less than an hour. The smallest one is in my own hometown. It has all the bells and whistles to get the label, but the bells are much smaller, and the whistles are more like tweeters. Each one offers all the same services, but the population that each caters to is different so the stock reflects this. So does the size. The one in the college town is the biggest store I have been in to date. It is the newest incarnation in the same town, they pretty much outgrew the first one that was built 15 years ago. Now the old building sits empty waiting for a new tenant or someone to doze it over and build something new. This also is a common occurance when it comes to this megalithic retailer.

The dilemma is this, do you go to Wal-mart with it's low prices and continued market dominance, or do you patronize the little stores where you know the owners and have been shopping for years? Wal-Mart has what you need, and in the style you want and at a low price. The little store knows exaclty what you want, but doesn't have the style in stock, ( but can have it in a day or two) and the price is a couple dollars more. What do you do? America is a country that has no use for anything less than instant gratification, Wal-Mart wins, today. What happens tomorrow? Do you even bother looking at the little store? Maybe you do, maybe you don't. The more times you choose Wal-Mart the more you hurt the little store, and the more likely it is that they will go out of business. When they go out of business, the irony is that they will be shopping at Wal-Mart, because the low prices will be all that they can afford!

Now don't get me wrong, I am not a Wal-Mart basher in general. I shop there, for the exact reasons that I have specified above. Low prices and selection. When you have a company that can buy an entire production run of a product, you know they will have the lowest price on a product. In fact, they can pretty much control the market price on most things. They can undercut any local competitor and drive them out of business. Then they hire at least a portion of that competitors labor force to staff their ever bigger stores. Meanwhile they buy cheaper products made in foriegn factories, meaning that Unemployed Americans will continue to shop for the lowest prices thereby making them the winners again. How's that for dominating the market?

I love to travel and road trips are one of my favorite things to do. Generally due to time constraints I usually travel by Interstate Highway. It's a great way to get from city to city and to cover ground fast. Contrary to the popular belief when they were built, they really do provide some wondeful views and vistas. They cut through some of the most beautiful places in the country, and some of the most desolate as well. Anyone who has ever followed I-15 between Los Angeles and Las Vegas knows that. Who hasn't stopped at the Mad Greeks in Baker, CA just because it is the biggest piece of civilization between them? When you drive through most suburbs these days, you can pretty much count on seeing the same string of franchise eateries, motels, stores, muffler shops, and auto parts stores. Whether you drive through Atlantic City, New Jersey, Cleveland, Ohio, Wichita, Kansas, Durango, Colorado, Flagstaff, Arizona , or any other city you can think of, you will find the line up of strip malls somewhere along the road into town. Sooner or later you will spot a Ken-tac-hut, next door to a Monro Muffler, across the street from an Applebee's that is across the parking lot from the IHOP. Down near the exit will be the Super 8 motel, next door to the Motel 6, the Red Roof Inn and the Holiday Inn Express. Of all that I have mentioned above only one is a single location, one-of-a-kind place, The Mad Greek's in Baker, CA. If you have ever been there you know what I am talking about. If you haven't I highly recommend it. When you get to these parts of any city, you literally could be in any city in the USA. Sure, if you are west of the Mississippi river you are much more liklely to find a Carl's Jr. or a Jack in The Box than a Hardee's, or a Sonic, but still and all, it is a pretty homogenous thing.

There is the benefit of knowing that you will always get the same product by the same name wherever you go in the country, but at the same time where is the adventure of the journey? What is the use of leaving home if you will only continue to visit the same places expecting the same services and products wherever you go? Isn't the point of traveling to be able to try new things and to have new experiences? To me, it is useless to travel if I will have the same thing in Utah and Colorado, and Kansas and Memphis and I can have in Rochester and Buffalo. When I am in Kansas City I want KC Barbecue, I'm going to Jack Stacks, when I am in Chicago I want Deep Dish Pizza. When I am in New Orleans I want crawdads and Jambalaya, I'm gonna find the place where the locals go for them. When I am in Texas, I want some Texas Beef, slow cooked over a mesquite flame. If I am in Maine I am gonna have Lobster at every meal, and shrimp and maybe even clams! But sad to say, when I need a new pair of pants, in Billings, Montana?

Yeah I'm going to look for a Wal-Mart. I can't help it, I know they will have what I want and in the size I need. I promise I won't buy a new pair of cowboy boots there or a hat, but for the pants and shirt, yeah I'm going there.

Pluses and minuses of everything. There is a benefit to knowing what you are gonna get sometimes, but other times there is a need for the adventure, and when you have a chance to have an adventure, don't waste it on a Big Box, adventure-ize yourself and maybe learn something about your own tastes. You never know when you will find something new that you really like.

4 months later

So it has been 4 months since my favorite radio geek has come back on the air. Wease is Wease and now that the show has gelled and everyone has begun to get used to each other, I can give an honest critique of the show. I still love the show, but there are somethings that get to me.

One thing that I have noticed is that I am not impressed with the executive producer, Anthony. As I have said before, I am aware that I don't actually know these people, but the persona that they present on the air each day, that being said, the producer seems to me to be a nice guy, but not the brightest bulb on the tree. I hope that it is a persona, because I trust that Wease will surround himself with competent people, but sometimes I wonder about this guy. He believed that his daughter was born with Vick's Vapo-rub™on her head, because his wife ate the stuff when she was pregnant! Not the sharpest knife in the drawer! That is just one example, but there are many others where his beliefs seem to trump his visions of the truth.

I enjoy his producer Nick. He seems a genuine guy, but a little too conservative or right wing for the person he is working for. To be honest he is the main producer for the right-wing talk show host on the AM station, so he has a little bias coming into the show. I like his way of injecting his view when he disagrees with Wease. He likes to remind the show and Wease in particular, that not all the world is as liberal as he is. In fact, Nick has occasionally made some good points that I even agree with. Especially when he speaks of the money that has been wasted by local governments in the multitude of snafus over the years, and how that money would have been better used for education, infrastructure and law enforcement, rather than just "cool stuff."

The male sidekick, Jamie Lissow, he is a stand-up comedian who has been on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, he has been on Fox News show Red-Eye, and he has his own 1/2 hour comedy special on Comedy Central. He is funny in a dry sort of way. His humor reminds me very much a the kid in the back of the class making stupid jokes at the teachers expense. He is a jock and a health nut. He likes his healthfood snack and he reminds everyone just how unhealthy they really are! He has his own little segment where he gets some of the local news items that are pretty stupid. They make us laugh, and everyone comments on the items so it takes a good half hour to get through the bit. I like him over all and I hope he gets better, he is good now, but I think he has some development room.

The female sidekick is Lilly, she is a complex little girl. Interesting in some ways and infuriating as all hell in other ways. One day I like her and I would love to have a conversation with her, then she says something later and I hope I never have to talk to her. Who knows the mind of a woman? Not even a woman!! Oh well, it's not like I want to date her or anything, she's just a voice on the radidio! I am curious about her though, She is a first generation American, as her parents are Albanian born. She was raised in Jersey, and has a decent education. I wonder if she speaks Albanian? If so, does she speak any other languages? I would really like to talk to her on the informational level just for my own curiosity. She has said that she finds religion silly. A great thought to me, but a strange wording. Silly? Maybe frightening, morbid, insane... but silly? I guess, but as long as she isn't a freak about following some ancient useless cult, I give her points for intelligence.

All in all the show has come together pretty well. I'm sure that there will be changes and adjustments to come, but so far, it's good. Could be better, and it sure could be worse. Right now I give it a 3 out of 5 stars. The interactivity of the show now is great with the webcams and the chat room, and the accessibility of the show is the best it has ever been. I can email the show and be acknowledged on air in a few minutes. That is great. The content hasn't been stellar. Some of the guests have left a little to be desired, but last week with Bobby Slayton! That was batting 1000. The various interns have provided some great radio, for sure, and they are learning from a true master of the medium. The phone screener Leah and the computer chick Colleen are great to chat with occasionally. I hope it gets better, because it is already good, but it still can be great!!