Ed is Gone

A friend of mine died this past week. He was a few years older.

I met him in a local chat room in the early 90's. In fact, he was well known amongst the women who frequented the room for being the fellow who attended group lunches, and if you were the lucky girl that day sitting next to him, he'd have his hand on your knee. I called and told a friend about seeing the obituary and she reminded me of this habit of his. I recalled it was true!

This was that brief time when AOL was the a friendly internet service, before Google or Facebook. People had profiles that could be searched for age and location. Local chat rooms were popular. The way you check into Facebook now, you once checked in with your local chat room and your habits became known by your other chat buddies so much that if you did not check in people worried about your health!

When I became widowed and when I finally disentangled myself from the train wreck that was Roger, I met and made all my friends through the local AOL chat. Ed was a fixture there.

The obituary mentioned a loving wife and a herd of children with an even bigger herd of grandchildren. He had been a good provider and retired from a good job at a plant that went out of business a decade ago. These facts about his "real' life were news to me, proving that it is possible to live a virtual life completely removed from your real one.

I know both parts were real, come on!

We AOL buddies won't attend the visitation nor the funeral. We have the memory of Ed and that's quite enough.

Criminals, Thieves, and Accounting Time.

The first half of April always brings for me another birthday and tax filing. I can't be the only one who always pays taxes and always waits until close to the deadline to do so.

This year I have a new tax guy and unlike the old tax guy the forms are complete and I'm going to have them in on time. I think the new guy is good evidenced by having done Reggie's taxes for a long time without problem. He's a bit more expensive but after loosing sleep worrying about late taxes, it's worth it!

On the front page of the New York Times this morning was an article that analyzed how Wall Street, mortgage and bank executives ran the businesses they were hired to run for personal profit cheating their investors and now are getting away with it.  In Financial Crisis, No Prosecutions of Top Figures by Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story it's all laid out before us.

Looking at the article you will be tempted not to read it. It's a big one, and takes about 20 minutes to read. But if you are one of the people who has or had investments or deposits in a bank, stocks traded on the exchanges, treasury bills or other financial instruments and have been confused about where all that money you lost went, it's worth your time. I'm talking about people like you and me, who got what education they could get, went to work and worked in whatever job we could get or chose, have always dealt fairly with employers, employees, local and national governments, and paid our bills, saved our money and expected to and did play by the rules.

As one of those people I want an accounting.

In the late 1980's after the savings and loan crisis over 1100 cases of fraud and wrong doing were referred to prosecutors and more than 800 bank officials went to jail. Today more than two years after the beginning of the recession and a financial mess huge in comparison, very few people are being held accountable.

The S.E.C. extracted a $550 million settlement from Goldman Sachs for a mortgage security the bank built, though the S.E.C. did not name executives in that case. The security was known by the top people to be slimy and their traders were told to push it at the same time with the company's money they bet against it.

Another exception is a civil lawsuit filed last month against top executives of Washington Mutual, the failed bank now owned by JPMorgan Chase. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation sued Kerry K. Killinger, the company’s former chief executive, and two other officials, accusing them of piling on risky loans to grow faster and increase their compensation. The outcome is not known as the suit is in its early stages.

I ask, how are all these thieves getting away with their crimes?

Unlike in the time of the S&L crisis, budgets for regulators to investigate and prosecute are small. The lessons of financial crises in the past were ignored again and in the aftermath no one is being held accountable. To me it seems those charged with regulation and prosecution are set up to fail by people we trust to represent us in Congress. The influence cultivated by big money firms has resulted in those in power being unwilling to proceed. Why have any rule or regulation to hold Wall Street and the Financial Markets accountable at all if regulators do not have the ability to actually do the job. That's a rhetorical question, obviously.

Red flags were flying high and straight prior to the crash. Efforts to investigate Countrywide, the nation's largest mortgage originator were stopped before any action could be taken.

"After the crisis had subsided, another opportunity to investigate Countrywide and its executives yielded little. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, created by Congress to investigate the origins of the disaster, decided not to make an in-depth examination of the company — though some staff members felt strongly that it should. It was canceled because Republican members of the commission did not want any more hearings."

Sub-prime mortgages as well as fiscally inept ones being bundled and sold as securities, was without a doubt the reason for the eventual collapse of markets.

I suspect one thing the heads of these companies did learn is how to create marketable instruments so complicated no one knew what they were investing in. They further covered their tracks and in buying influence with Congress, manipulated what was investigated and what was not. This hid their crimes and made the fight to prosecute so expensive it was impossible to practically do.

In this halcyon time of early spring with the awakening of flowers and allergies we are again filling out tax returns. I do not hate paying taxes as I must make money to do so. I do hate having seen my meager savings become decimated in the past decade because of crooks who use their skills and access to cheat their investors, make huge personal income and get away with it.

It's a time for an accounting.

Personal freedom

Last week it was announced that the Supreme Court ruled for Westboro church people, that they do have the right to make asses of themselves standing outside funerals for our fallen military with hate filled signs.
I refuse to call them their official name because although I was born Baptist and converted to Catholicism, I don't think they are any kind of Baptist I can recognize. I'll call them church people for Lord knows lots of ignorance is alive and well in churches.

Anyway, five of their members came to Kentucky this past Sunday. They protested at a Protestant and Catholic Church in Owensboro. They protested at a Catholic Church in Louisville. An article about the day and the five people from the Westboro group as well as the local response was on the front page of the Courier-Journal Monday morning. According to the newspaper they chose the small Louisville church because it was on the way from Owensboro to the airport. That makes me wonder how they transport their hate signs. Do they go through the TSA checks with the signs and fold them up to fit in the overhead bin, or do they get folded into luggage that is checked?

A local man, a veteran, organized a group of about 200 people to stand on the other side of the road. These people were students from Bellarmine University and other school groups. Some of the students spoke to the reporter saying they had been debating freedom of speech issues and the Supreme Court's ruling in their classes. The signs the local group held said things like, "God is Love."

Wonderful. I think that is a fitting response to hate and often while believing that freedom of speech is important in America; we have to speak out but not with hate.

Another ruling by the Court last week had to do with AT&T and their belief they had the right to personal privacy when they didn't want information held by the government from a federal investigation of their billing practices, released under the Freedom of Information rules. This was a unanimous decision for the Court.

In the brief written by Chief Justice Roberts he spent several paragraphs discussing grammar and personal adjectives. To quote CJ Roberts: "The ordinary meaning of 'personal' does not refer to an impersonal company." I'm hopeful he has a sense of humor is isn't using this as a political device after the egregious ruing last year that gave corporations the right of free speech.

On another note, the Kentucky Legislature is in the last week of their session. Not much has been accomplished. The Senate brought up such bills as a law that would require people who need cold medicine to go to their doctors for a prescription. If that had been passed, instead of buying a box of 12 cold capsules for $12, you'd need to make an appointment with your doctor, so to the office, wait in there with 15 other sick people, meet with the doctor, get a prescription, pay the co-pay and your insurance company would have to pay what they do for the visit. That's making the assumption you have health insurance.

They did pass a bill allowing sale of previously banned fireworks. Now if you want to sell fireworks in Kentucky you get an annual license for $500 and pay sales taxes. The guy who sponsored the bill was mad because he saw Tennessee making all that money from Kentuckians who crossed the border each summer for fireworks.

Of course this is the same legislature that won't allow Kentuckians to legally gamble on anything but horses at race tracks. If we want to play slots or blackjack, we have to cross a river. According to all the Protestant preachers some of whom seem to be legislators, gambling is immoral and a sin. Fireworks on the other hand are ways to make tax money.

The Legislature also tried to pass a law that would allow every public school in the state to create a class to teach the Bible. The state would contribute funds for these classes and of course they would be voluntary. This didn't pass, but it sure got time on the floor in debate and was covered in every small town newspaper for the Christians to see.

Meanwhile Medicaid is unfunded by over $150 million and cuts are being made to any social safety net around. I guess it could be worse. We could live in Florida where Gov. Rick Scott, the former criminal health industry CEO whose company was sued by the federal government for cheating on their billing of Medicare and paid a billion dollar fine, has cut over $150 million from that state's education funding and gave it to his corporate buddies in tax cuts.

Or we could be like Wisconsin and have a governor devoting our time voters to destroy one of the hardest fought rights of the American worker, collective bargaining.

I worked at a company for ten years that got a union voted in. There were 12 employees and everyone was an office worker. You might wonder why this happened. It happened because the boss started having an affair with the head of one of the two departments. No one cared who he screwed but when she was promoted and people were being fired and laid off because they didn't give her the respect she felt she deserved, the remaining employees went through the process and got a union shop voted in.

It didn't last long but it got the attention of the boss and the board of directors! There's a whole story in that which does not need to be told here.

Unions are the reason we have 5-day 40 hour work weeks and there is overtime and paid vacations and benefit packages. The whole idea of safe working conditions and worker's comp and health insurance were negotiated by unions until they became part of the fabric of jobs in America. The reason people like the Koch brothers and corporate America fund elections of wack jobs like these new governors and such, is they want to get rid of their competition and face it, unions are the yang to the ying or corporations when it comes to laws and enforcement of laws in the country.

Oh, and don't let anyone get away with saying the reason American jobs went overseas is unions. The reason they went away is people like KFC wanted to sell chicken in China so they and others in the American consumer products corporations worked for free trade and before you knew it everyone was taking advantage of tax breaks to move production to cheap labor places.

You don't get benefits? You don't have a wage high enough to live on and have to work two or three jobs to pay your bills? Maybe it's time to vote and work for unionizing your work group.

Restoration and Redemption

I have to confess that I have recently become fascinated with makeover shows. No, not the ones where you walk into the studio dressed in paint splattered holey jeans and sweatshirt then come out fifty minutes later looking like a runway model. When I say a makeover show I mean the shows where a young struggling newly joined couple is living in their recently deceased Aunt Betsy's old fashioned house. The furniture was bought in 1950 and the appliances are the version that came out ten years after the invention of refrigeration and indoor cooking. The couple is being unnecessarily stunted by the house. They would be able to finally finish that master's thesis or have that first child or succeed in their high powered entry level careers if only the house was more up to date and worthy of who they aspire to become in twenty years. The house is dark and depressing. The house is holding them back.

A perky decorator and her friend the dependable and creative general contractor use $1000 to completely update the house. By the way, I can believe the perky decorator much more than I can visualize a dependable contractor.

This process takes three days and the fabulous new home is revealed in thirty minutes.

One thing I've noticed. Even though the young couple are in ripped jeans and dark or even black clothing during the initial consultation with the decorator, they show up for the big reveal in neat clothes that have color accents which match the new paint or pillows.

My good friend Anne told me about these shows several years ago but somehow I did not get addicted to watching them until one week end this winter when we had snow, ice and 15 degree temperatures.

I've decided this is like last year when I first discovered food blogs. I subscribe to quite a few on Blogger.com and am fascinated by the pictures and recipes. I've probably saved a hundred of these beautiful pictures and preparation methods.

You might ask "How many dishes have you prepared from these?"

I have gone so far as to buy the oddly named spice and the refined sanding sugar, but I have prepared none. Not the beautiful cookies in unique shapes with meticulous frosting and complicated designs. Not the fifteen versions of apple pie and home made pastry. Not the magnificent ten inch round eighteen inch tall four layer cakes prepared for that three year old's birthday party.

I look at the page, read the recipe along with supporting copy describing the reason the blogger's son Sean likes dark chocolate and cowboys on horses vs. milk chocolate and space men. I then copy it all to a word processing document, and save it in a catalogued file on my hard drive; cookies, biscuits, pies, cakes, meat, side dishes, etc.

I can loose myself in that activity realizing hours later I have accomplished nothing else.

When do foodies have time to make the dishes? Do they entertain every week where a group of victims, err friends taste everything and gratefully acknowledge the talent of the cook?

While I might have the inclination to make the cakes and roast the meat, I don’t have time. I'm watching how to retile my downstairs bathroom, paint three bedrooms, plant annuals at the front of the house and insulate the basement.

A flower grows out of concrete.

Almost every week someone is shot and killed in Louisville. There isn't a single scenario for these deaths. They are couples where one party, usually the man, shoots his wife or girlfriend and then shoots himself. A woman shoots her husband or boyfriend after years of abuse. One young man shoots another over a dispute in a bar. A group of young men drive around and shoot into homes killing the intended or unintended resident. An armed robbery is stopped by a clerk shooting the robber.

Recently I wrote about a home owner shooting at a group of young men running away, killing one.

The common element here is the gun.

Someone said the other day that although it is true that guns don't kill people, people do. How many people would have died Saturday in Tucson if the shooter had not had a gun?

I once worked for a company doing support for the data processing department second shift. It was a small department of five people. I was the only woman and about a decade older than the fellas. One man was a little tightly wound. He was a college educated smart married man with two kids. He was the guy who carried drama with him and when I walked into the office in the afternoon I would have a happier day if he was not at work. I wouldn't have said he was crazy. Evidently he was though, as he was a diagnosed manic depressive but not symptomatic, medicated.

A lot of perfectly "normal" people are mentally ill and medicated.

America is not a perfect place. America is my country and I love my country.

Much has been said about the cable and radio talking heads who lead a slavish audience tuning in to learn what to think. I guess I am somewhat surprised to not hear vitriolic speech this morning from all the usual mind makers. One reason things were strangely quiet however might be that the Leader of the Pack Roger Ailes instructed his minions to "shut up, tone it down and make your argument intellectually. You don't have to do it with bombast. I hope the other side does that." Although I don't see the same emotional effort to stir up followers of liberal thought, I look forward to the change of tone.

For people who love this country we must use our small influence and not accept those who will say anything for political fame. It is not sport to stir up your neighbor. A good citizen does not take on the demeanor of a two year old by shouting and saying anything to get attention. Little is ever accomplished by shouts. Much is by calm debate and thoughtful words.

In all this chaos I point out the heroes in the story. Just as those people who overtook the terrorists on the plane September 11 2001 and stopping it from crashing in Washington, there were people in Tucson Saturday who saved lives and stopped further victims, how many of us would go toward the danger instead of away from it? I am just so proud of those who did.

Heroes in America are teachers, clerks, students, nurses, retired generals, doctors, neighbors. Heroes are the people who do the right thing without any thought of personal danger. They stand up against evil and the self-serving whether it is popular or not.

Living with Santa Claus.

The exact chronology of how Dennis became Santa is something I can't be certain I remember but it seems it started the year John Y. Brown became Governor of Kentucky. Dennis had some friends who were related to a man who was responsible for putting on the parade for Gov. Brown's inauguration. Since the Inauguration was December 11th they wanted a Santa for one of the floats. Dennis being somewhat rotund and having played Santa at the company party the previous year, was recruited to be Santa.

Dennis as Santa in Governor John Y. Brown's Inauguration Parade 1979

Dennis asked a friend of ours Regina Mudd to make the suit and she got the fabric and fake white fur at Behr's, a big now closed, fabric store in downtown Louisville. He ordered a nice beard, wig and boots from Caufield's and she custom made a beautiful red velveteen Santa suit with fur trim.

On Inauguration Day Dennis and Regina went to the event. He was in the parade and she was taking pictures. I was working and took a small television to work so everyone could watch parts of the parade between working. They got to go to the Governor's mansion for a private after party and he handed out gifts to those attending and got to stand with the new Governor and his wife Phyllis George Brown. He told me the Governor had his hand on her ass as she was speaking at the microphone!

The appearance was quite the success and the next year we put an ad in the Courier-Journal advertising that Santa could attend your Christmas party for a small fee. This ran Thanksgiving and the next Sunday after that. I was the booking agent and kept his calendar and was his driver. Then almost every day after work Santa and I headed out with a carefully plotted route to visit private homes.

Santa always took a candy cane for every child. He would ask the children if they knew how to sing "Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer". Then he would lead them in a group sing. If he wasn't delivering gifts that night, he would have each child sit on his lap and ask them what they wanted for Christmas. The time he spent in the home was about 15 to 30 minutes and if he took longer I'd say, "We have to get to the next stop!" Sometimes he said they wouldn't let Santa leave!

The first year we did this we made about $300 at $15 for each visit. It was enough to buy Christmas presents and we both really enjoyed it. We were either paid in advance by a mailed check or someone followed Santa out and handed him the fee. Tips were not unusual! Only once did someone refuse to pay. It was a woman who lived in a very nice part of town. Dennis went in and did the whole routine. When he left she followed him and told him she was not paying him. He was hurt. He told me, "I told her that she was wrong to stiff Santa." We figured if she needed that $15 enough to do that she could keep it!

A friend of his was a photographer and he wanted Dennis to work at his studio two Saturdays being Santa for family photos. In trade for this he took pictures of Dennis as Santa. We used one on a post card which we mailed in late November each year to remind those who had hired him the previous year that it was time to book a visit for the following month! We developed a regular following this way.

The third year we got a big corporation party at a private home in the rich part of town and they paid Dennis $100. Those people had him back every year and every year they paid a bit more. He had several business parties with bigh crowds.  This went on for a decade.

Dennis died December 5, 1991. We had stopped using a newspaper ad years before but lots of repeat visits were already lined up. His Santa suit was at the cleaners and a beautician friend has his wig and beard, getting it ready to go. I had to call those expecting visits again that year and tell them Santa was gone.

I was married to Santa for twenty-one years and was his agent and driver for ten. What a wonderful life.

One marshmallow immediately eaten will change your life!

It was announced here Wednesday that Walter Mischel, a psychology professor and the Niven Professor of Humane Letters at Columbia will receive the Grawemeyer Award for Psychology. He is well known for his decades-long research in the area of delayed gratification and will-power.

I'm sure you are aware of the well known "marshmallow experiment".  From Wikipedia I quote:

The "marshmallow experiment" is a well known test of this concept conducted by Walter Mischel at Stanford University and discussed by Goleman in his popular work. In the 1960s, a group of four-year-olds were given one marshmallow and promised a second one on the condition that they wait twenty minutes before eating the first one. Some children were able to wait and others could not. The researchers then followed the progress of each child into adolescence and demonstrated that those with the ability to wait were better adjusted and more dependable (determined via surveys of their parents and teachers), and scored significantly higher on the Scholastic Aptitude Test years later

As a kid I was taught by my Mother and Grandmother's example and words that when I wanted some thing they thought too expensive to buy and give me, I should save my allowance and buy it myself. To reinforce this one Saturday my sister and I went to the building and loan and got social security numbers and opened passbook savings accounts. This was in 1958 when they gave you actual books about the size of a passport. Deposits and withdrawals were recorded by the teller at the building and loan office.

I began saving $1 a week from my $2.50 a week allowance. On Saturday when we came to town to buy groceries and do banking I would deposit my $1 into that savings account. When I began baby sitting for neighbors, I put that money in the account. That June I worked for a week to help Mrs. Prall clean her house and earned $10. I put the money in the account. It felt good to accumulate money in a savings account. When I started high school I had $350 saved.

This process of saving a little of our income for future larger purchases or in my case for paying taxes at the end of the year, is called delayed gratification. I'm not sure how paying taxes is gratification but if I were to be kicked out of my home for not paying them I might understand it a little better.

The motivation to work hard and save for purchases you cannot afford today, or save for future expenses is described as a Protestant or Calvinistic thing. We Catholics are told we must do good works to be saved. The Protestants say you are destined to be saved and you do good work as a result of that salvation. Now with this study the experiment was verified through scientific research. That doesn't mean we Catholics can't save for future gratification but there is some evidence that through biology we choose to eat the marshmallow immediately more than the other kids. That's for cradle Catholics I would assume.

Prof. Mischel began his work in 1960 and yesterday the award was announced. The Grawemeyer prize is accompanied by a cash payment of $100,000. This pretty much proves in at least an antidotal way that in addition to scientific results, fifty years later the gratification of the second marshmallow was realized for Prof. Mischel.

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The first reaction to the buttercup yellow paint soon to cover the Clark Memorial Bridge that spans the Ohio River at Louisville has been published in Letters to the Editor of the Courier-Journal newspaper this week. A local man Rick Thomas has this to say about the color:

I am surprised that citizens are not already complaining about the upcoming color chosen to paint the Second Street Bridge. Should anyone wish to see a sample of this paint color, they need only to drive to Second and Main Street and look at the newly painted railings next to the new KFC Yum! Center leading to the bridge. Please voice your concerns before they begin painting the entire bridge. It is awful.