Say What?

It’s been a few days since I last pondered the meanderings of life and put the result of my journey through the quantum mystery of reality into words.  Mostly, I’ve been observing the decline of the American version of the English language, both spoken and written flavors.  I’ve been recalling my high school English teachers, a trio of dedicated dispensers of didactic discourse, each from a very different angle.

I’m not certain how much my tenth grade teacher taught me.  I had too much of a crush on her to see beyond the cute blond hair, big blue eyes, short skirt so fashionable and acceptable in those days, and the shapely legs it contained.

The eleventh grade teacher presented a very different manifestation of my bumbling rite of passage through life, high school, and the English Language.  In fact, when I made it abundantly clear that I wasn’t going to like her at all, and threw down the gauntlet of idiomatic challenge, she proceeded to retrieve said gauntlet and pulverize me with it, linguistically speaking.  Determined creature that she was, no such inferior subset of the human species as a marble mouthed transplanted jersey boy was going to blemish her record.  She would, and in fact, did, not only equip me with a king’s ransom in stylistic vocabulary, she formed the focal point of my determination to lose my uniquely ‘joisey’ idiomatic expression.

It’s difficult to explore the effect of my senior year mistress d’linguistic art, because I spent very little time actually in her classroom.  To be sure, all I did was report for attendance and test days.  I spent the rest of that hour in the teacher’s lounge working for the eleventh grade teacher.  No, this woman’s influence was of a different order entirely.  Where the junior year teacher equipped me with words to use, the senior year teacher’s contribution was in the art of putting the words together, and that occurred more by virtue of her being the sponsor of the forensic club and debate team than from any time spent in he classroom.

Now, on to the matter at hand.  After the exemplary education I assumed everyone else was also receiving, it has come to my attention that sadly, this is not the case.

The other week I listened as a local television reporter uttered a simple six word sentence in which the first and last words were “you know”.  I don’t even remember what the middle two words were.  All that resounds even now was beginning a live report with the  opening sentence of “You know blah blah you know.”

I expect that from jocks.  Last night a one minute, thirty second interview with a local professional athlete contained the words “you know” eleven times in the jock’s answer.

But a reporter?  What’s that all about?  It just got me thinking of the number of individuals who put their face and voice in front of others who slaughter the spoken word!  From the dynamic trainer I worked with who ended every bold, explosive instruction with a quiet, mousy, introverted and insecure “OK?” to the union representative who thinks every statement requires the use of an obscenity, and that after each expletive filled announcement, must proclaim “that’s what it’s all about” to all the “um’s”, “uh’s”, and imbecilic addition of the word “and” before the final digit of every year since 2000 AD, talking heads march on in their never-ending battle to stupidize the English language!  Nor does the venue matter.  Whether it’s NPR, PBS, ABC or FOX; a talk show, a news broadcast, a commentator, or a politician, the end result is the same.  One is left with the impression that the spoken word was not a part of their education and training experience.

And it gets worse when you reduce the spoken word to the written word, and believe me – it is a sad reduction, indeed.

There was a time in our national development when speech, whether written or spoken, was both elegant and eloquent.  When diction was a key to being understood, when February had two ‘R’s, and the year was not 20and11 (two thousand and eleven).

Reduce it all even further, and you are left with LOL, OMG, and C U L8R!

Where is ‘Enry ‘Iggins when you need him?

Read a Good Label Lately?

When I’m between novels (currently reading For Sale in Palm Springs, a mediocre murder mystery from the pen of Albert Simon not quite fast paced enough to be a thriller – I’ll post a review later) I read whatever is available.  Street signs, T-shirts, cereal boxes, license plates, billboards, whatever.

It’s amazing what you find boldly set in writing if you just look.

For example, last night one of the ingredients for the supper I prepared was Pillsbury Cheesy Scalloped Potatoes.  In with the cheddar cheese powder and blue cheese powder was FDA Red #40 food coloring.  I couldn’t see anything red in the item as I prepared it according to package directions, but it’s there none-the-less.  In fact, a whole bunch of things on our shelves have FDA Red #40 in them.  It causes big time headaches in my wife.  It’s also in Ranch Wheat Thins, Cherry Twizzlers, and hummingbird nectar (red colored sugar water).  Red #40, also known as Allura Red AC (disodium 6-hydroxy-5-((2-methoxy-5-methyl-4-sulfophenyl)azo)-2-naphthalenesulfonate), is an azo dye once made from coal tar. These days it’s a petroleum byproduct.  Yum!

MiO is a ‘liquid water enhancer’ I saw on the shelf in our grocery store yesterday.  I presume ‘liquid’ to refer to the state of the enhancer product, and not the ‘water,’ which I think is usually assumed to be in liquid form.  I ‘Googled’ it (interesting how nouns make their way into our vocabulary as verbs, isn’t it?) and found a number of links for the product, and a very badly written review by a guy named Steve who got a free sample in the mail.  One of the primary ingredients is Propylene Glycol (HO-CH2-CHOH-CH).  You know it’s a primary ingredient because they list them in order of content, and this is third on the list after water and malic acid, whatever that is.  It’s even in front of the FDA Red #40.  Oh yeah – it’s a primary ingredient in automobile engine coolant.  I guess it means if you add this stuff to your drinking water, you can run all summer without overheating.  Think about it.  Not only have advertisers convinced us to buy water in bottles (Evian is naïve spelled backwards) but not they’re trying to sell us more water infused with refined petroleum to ‘enhance’ it.

Do you have any clue what reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate, sodium aluminum phosphate and invert sugar are?   Me either, but they’re all in Sam’s Club Member’s Mark Snickerdoodle Cookies.  And their Member’s Mark Super Sweet Corn is labeled ‘product of China’.   You remember China?  They’re the guys who brought us lead paint (poison) in children’s toys, asbestos (poison) in dry wall, Propylene Glycol (anti-freeze) in toothpaste, and who hold the markers on most of our liquid wealth (money).

For some reason I’m having flashbacks to an old episode of WKRP in Cincinnati in which Howardf Hessman’s character (Doctor Johnny Fever) sets up a commercial by telling his listeners to brush their teeth, and remember to rinse with a nice, refreshing glass of “CHEMICALS!”  WKRP aired over 30 years ago.  Almost prophetic, and more accurate than recent Doomsday predictions.

 I was going to tell you what’s on the label for the rotisserie chicken at many food chains, but I think I’ve read enough labels for one day.  Back to the almost a novel but not quite a thriller.

No! Seriously?!?!?

I lived in the Netherlands for a little over a year.  I needed a job.  To get a job, I needed a work permit since I was technically an immigrant.  To get the work permit I needed a visa (We call them green cards in America, except the American system is more like friends with privileges) and to get a 1 year visa, I had to bring the foreign police written proof that I was already enrolled in a Dutch language class.  To get a longer one, I would have had to pass both written and oral language and culture exams.  When I asked about this, the officer assigned to me said “Americans are the only people in the world stupid enough to throw their culture away to make room for foreigners.  We love foreigners here, but this is our country and our language.  If you want to stay, you have to learn them, not the other way around.”  Makes perfectly good sense to me.

Am I the only one to notice that he sassy, rude, impolite culture of instant messaging has worked its way into general conversation, and that entitlement is now a way of life for the majority of Americans?  I walk with a cane, but that doesn’t mean I’m not risking my life to walk in the marked cross-walk area of a grocery store parking lot when someone in their gas guzzling SUV with a cell phone glued to their ear doesn’t think stop signs are intended for them too.

I was in Walmart a couple of weeks ago.  In the health and beauty section there was an empty box on a baby formula shelf that had some time previously held K-Y His and Hers and a free rainbow colored twist ribbed condom.  Apart from the humor of the location of this empty box (baby formula section right under a security camera) I couldn’t help wondering, doesn’t using the prophylactic pretty much cancel out the advertised effect of the His & Hers product?  Which probably explains why the axel grease was missing but the free condom was still in the box.

When did it become appropriate public attire for a 16 year old kid to wear a T-shirt with the words “Wake up Drunk” on the front and the words “Go to bed Fu**ed” on the back?  In big capitalized letters?  Call me old fashioned, but I wouldn’t wear that now! And I’ve got over 40 years on the kid!  I wonder if his mother knows.  I wonder if she cares?  I wonder if she bought the thing for him?!?!?

My grandson has a nicer cell phone than I do.  How did I survive middle school without a cell phone?

I’m not certain which is more of an embarrassment to me – that my high school’s graduating class of 2011 will only include just over half the students who entered high school there four years ago, or that students who went through the same county wide system I went through didn’t learn enough to properly complete a ballot in the 2000 presidential election?  The county in which I currently live will be laying off most 1^st and 2^nd year teachers and cutting arts programs.  That should help.

I reads an article yesterday that said last year seventy BILLION dollars were spent in this country to purchase lottery tickets.  The payout for that $70,000,000,000 was less than half what was spent.  Most of the tickets were sold to individuals who bought lottery tickets instead of food, shelter and clothing,  and by doing things like walking up to a complete stranger at a grocery store and saying “I’ll pay for your groceries with my food stamps if you’ll give me the cash so I can buy lottery tickets, smokes, booze or drugs.”  Let me spell it out to you.  Our taxes are paying for impoverished families living on welfare to gamble, drink and get stoned.  Ain’t America great?

I spoke with the owner of the company that did our attic insulation and duct repair.  I had some questions about why no two of the people from his company who either inspected, quoted, or performed the work were on the same page about what need to be done and what it would cost, and my concern that if they overlooked something I could see from the middle of the garage, how can I be assured that the places I can’t easily see were done?  The big topic of discussion, however, was his employee who offered to under-cut his boss’s price by about 75% and include the materials at no cost.  I’m not pointing fingers over how he could do the work for his price, let alone do it materials included.  Well, yeah, I am.  I have a feeling I know where the materials were coming from.  The guy, of course denied it.  I asked for someone different to come out and recheck the work.

But wait – there’s more.  At least two night a week there’s a break in our local news to “go live to Universal Studios in Orlando” to watch lotto and powerball numbers being drawn, and at least in our market, the news anchors, between bouts of being cute with each other, wish the local gamblers good luck.  And that’s after they’ve brought us the big breaking news stories of the week:  “Make sure to use cash at your local bar so you can leave a better tip”, “Here are the best local drag queen bars”, and “Did you hear the one about the idiot Christian Preacher and the end of the world?”

Seriously?  That’s the local news?

Boy, do I miss Walter Cronkite.

End of the World OOPS

I’m a little late getting this out.  Sorry.  I was at an End of the World party that fizzled because, well, the thing is, the world didn’t end.  I’m kinda of upset about the whole think, frankly.  I mean, it was on the internet and all, so it had to be real, right?  But just like back in 1994, this guy had the wrong date.  Again.  And before him, Jack Van Impe had the wrong date.   And before him Hal Lindsey had the wrong date.  And Herbert W. Armstrong.  And before him, Jim Jones, and before him that guy with the white beard and sandwich sign walking up and down Sunset Boulevard.  Or is Rodeo Drive?  I always get them mixed up.  The street, not the guy with the sign.  Him, I got right.

He’s been faithfully marching back and forth ever since Adam and Eve got their eviction notice from the Garden of Eden, which, strangely enough, based on the latest satellite images looks a lot like Jeter’s place.

And if you look closely, he’s right there on the right hand side, down by the water, calmly walking back and forth in his Fakeley’s and Birkenstocks, and that ancient sign: “REPENT: FOR THE END OF THE WORLD IS AT HAND” on one side and “Genießen Sie den Blick, Baby” which is the last thing Maria Schriver said when she showed Arnie the door.

It’s an old schtick, you know what I mean?  Between God telling people what He was going to do (but not when, if you’ll take the Great Flood as an exception to the rule – he gave humanity lots of warning for that) and people creating their own gods to do their dirty work for them (worship my god my or he says I have to kill you, because the voices in my head the voices in your head are full of …of wait – family show.  Sorry)  But the point is ever since there have been humans on this planet, and especially since they divided up into groups, someone from one group has always been telling everyone else he –or she – has secret inside information, a special calendar, gold tablets written in an unknown language, and a secret decoder ring (presumable for the secret language) that gives away the big secret of when the world is gonna end.  From Adam to Noah to Daniel to the disciples to John to the Bible Scholars and false scholars of today.

The Disciples asked Jesus point blank in Matthew 24:3: “Now as He sat on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to Him privately, saying, “Tell us, when will these things be? And what will be the sign of Your coming, and of the end of the age?”

The answer Jesus gives is three pages long, but can be summarized with this single statement (verse 36):

“But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but My Father only.”

Not Adam, not Noah, not Daniel, not the Twelve, not Jesus when he walked this earth, not the angels, not Hal Lindsey, Jack Van Impe, Jim Jones, Herbert W.  Armstrong, not this latest guy who got it wrong 17 years ago too, and not the Mayans either, so you probably don’t need to sweat the December 2012 thing either.

There is a problem inherent to all of this, and it’s sort of like selective memory or selective hearing.  It’s selectively believing the Bible.  The Bible says Jesus is going to come again and there is a time when the world will be destroyed.  However (that PC for ‘but’) that’s not all the Bible says.  The Bible also says there are a bunch of things that are going to happen before all those end times things happen.  Some of them will be concurrent.  That’s OK, we believe that part.  The Bible also says people who believe in Jesus as their savior are the ONLY ones who will go to heaven.  EVERYONE ELSE is going to go to hell, and hell is a real place, and once you die no one can pray you in or out of either one or the other.  The Bible also says there will be false teachers in the end times. That’s a nice word for LIARS.  Who are these liars?  The ones with national television programs telling you that all roads lead to God.  The ones telling us Allah and YhWh are the same.  Oh yeah – the ones telling you the world is gonna end on May 21^st.  He’s a liar too.  He’s not mistaken.  He didn’t misinterpret a calendar.  God said “No one knows but me.”  This preacher said “Me too.  I know too.”  He is a false teacher/false prophet.  HE IS A LIAR.  Yeah.  A liar.  Yes, there are absolutes.  That’s one of them.  God is Who He said He is, and does and knows what He says does and  knows or God is a liar.  Those are really the only options.

That’s your choice.  Who are you going to believe?

God who said “I’m not gonna tell you” or a preacher who said “Nu-huh – He told me”.  If you’ve lost your score card, the Preacher is still 0 for 2.  That makes him a false prophet.  A Liar.  In the old Testament, God’s people would have executed him for being. A false prophet.  Bet he’ laying real low today and being very thankful he didn’t make that claim when Moses was around.

Here’s the thing.  If I’m still alive when that time does come, I won’t be here to say I told you so, or to join in on the post rapture looting.  I’ll be part of that group of which Paul says “For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of an archangel, and with the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And thus we shall always be with the Lord.”  1 Thessalonians 4 :16-17.  Right after this part, Paul says ‘oh, by the way – watch for it, because you ain’t gonna see it coming.  It will sneak up on you like a thief in the night.  Lots of people will tell you they have it figured out, but they’re all lying through their teeth.  Don’t let them fool you.’

That’s my paraphrase.  Paul words were far more eloquent.

So if you’re thinking you missed the big event and can skip church tomorrow?  Nope.  Sorry to disappoint you.  The event didn’t happen.  But just in case – find a church for tomorrow where you can get the low down on how you can be ready when it does happen, and my friend, it is going to happen, and if you’re not ready for it, I promise you won’t be attending looting parties or laughing.