Help Line

 A first grade girl called 911 from a phone in a classroom of her after school program at our school. It wasn't a freak accident, but rather entirely reminiscent of all the times that boys and girls had used one of the school's phones to dial the number they have heard about since they were tiny. 

What would happen?

Well, on this particular day, her little friends ratted her out almost immediately in addition to the internal response call we get in the office when an emergency is called in from one of our extensions. She was not going to get away with it, and it was then up to us to let her know what a potentially bad thing it was that she had been messing with a system put in place to keep her safe. 

Then came the abrupt left turn when, upon interviewing her, she tearfully explained why it was that she had made the call. "I wanted my mommy to be safe," she sobbed. She explained that over the Thanksgiving break there had been trouble at her house, with her older teenaged sister attacking their mom. "I wanted someone to help." 

Suddenly the adults involved switched their tone and became infinitely more sympathetic. We rallied around her and assured her that she only needed to reach out to one of us to get her the help she and her mom needed. The incident she described was not out of character for her family, and the decision was made almost immediately to trust the child. 

Right up until mom was called to let her in on what had been happening at the school. She rushed down to pick up her daughter, and on the way in stopped to let us all know that she was sorry for the large but totally believable fabrication. Her teenaged daughter had not been living with them for the past several weeks. The building blocks were certainly there, with trauma inflicted on everyone involved. 

Several weeks ago. 

Then the path switched quickly back to the first grader mimicking the funny thing she had seen her classmates do several months ago. On a dare. We left mom and daughter with the stern reminder that 911 was for emergencies only and we were there to help but making that call was something else. 

Then they left. 

A few minutes later, my principal and I wondered together if we still knew the complete story. Would mom smooth things over for appearances and maybe daughter felt threatened still and was making some sort of desperate call. For help. 

We couldn't be sure. But we will keep our collective eyes and ears open. 

The Real Thing

 Coca-Cola, or as we have come to know it, "America's Favorite Liquid," is getting criticism for what consumers refer to as "soulless" holiday commercials to commemorate the Holiday Season. Wait a moment, strike that, nobody is silly enough to believe that Coca-Cola or its many subsidiaries need to shade anything more woke than rubbing our collective noses in Christmas. Because we love it so.

But back to that "soulless" issue. The concern is based primarily on the use of Artificial Intelligence to generate these self-referential red and green advertisements pointed directly at our limbic system, specifically that part that breeds nostalgia. But they didn't bother to hire animators or actors to do it. They just poured a two liter bottle of America's favorite beverage into the processor and let the bots do their work. The result, "Holidays are Coming" is filled with references to previous wintry ad campaigns for the soft drink that goes well with anything. All the time. Forever. 

You may not remember a time when Coca-Cola ran afoul of the world's sensitivities by promoting their elixir with polar bears. They've been doing that for more than one hundred years, but it wasn't until 1993 that they truly got behind these endangered carnivores and pushed. That's when the Coke behemoth unleashed "Northern Lights" on a parched public. State of the art computer graphics were employed to bring a sloth of polar bears together to have a Coke and a smile while they take in the Aurora Borealis. Each one of those commercials took twelve weeks to create. 

Fast forward to 2012 when the King of All Things Soda decreed that they would be helping support their nominal mascot by selling cans of Coke decorated with the animals they picked to represent them who were dying by the hundreds on ice floes in a diminishing arctic. They campaign raised two million dollars to save polar bears. I leave you to figure out the percentage of Coke's eleven billion dollars in profit that works out to be, but at least they were doing it in some manner of good faith. 

Which brings us back to the hastily manufactured images presented in this year's ad. All those good vibes created by making donations to the World Wildlife Fund start to fade into the Artificial Intelligence maelstrom. Consider this: Generating one thousand images using AI creates as much carbon dioxide as driving a gas-powered car four miles, and a study found that data centers may require the same amount of electricity needed to power a small nation by 2027. "Real Magic" is the tagline being bounced around at the end of Coca-Cola ads. What do the Coke Powers That Be have to say about it? "The Coca-Cola Company has celebrated a long history of capturing the magic of the holidays in content, film, events, and retail activations for decades around the globe. We are always exploring new ways to connect with consumers and experiment with different approaches."

In the interest of being completely transparent, I used to drink a lot of Coca-Cola. Kidney stones put the kibosh on that addiction. I wonder if AI could create that experience for me? 

Beg Your Pardon?

 There is a moderate furor going around currently about how President Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter. 

There are those who will insist that President Joe broke his promise when he excused his boy from facing federal charges over any crimes he possibly could have committed over the past decade. I suppose we might all benefit from this kind of insulation, but this is essentially the parting shot of a man who has given his country and party for more than fifty years. 

To which I say, "So?"

Coming from a man who served the United States faithfully and honorably as a senator, a vice president, and most importantly a palate-cleansing sorbet between the first and second Trumpreich, this feels like a very fitting parting gift for all his efforts. 

There are those who compare Hunter's pardon to that of Richard Nixon. Primarily because of the length and breadth of the document. The Nixon pardon was handed down by consolation president Gerald Ford, who believed that the country needed to move on from the unseemly mess that was Watergate and its attendant malfeasance. Much in the same way the Biden family feels like their black sheep deserves a break after ten years of being the Republican whipping post. 

Does it worry me that Hunter Biden now has a freedom that only a former president who resigned in shame was afforded? From a precedent standpoint, I suppose I could work up a hissy fit, but that will already be taken care of by all the rabid MAGAts who have been after his laptop and presenting lewd photos of him to Congress. Will this be the Biden legacy? Perhaps in another twenty years we will look back on this moment as the height of the skullduggery in this period of time. 

Check me on this though: When did the pardon for those thirty-four felony convictions come down for the "president" elect?

In Their Own Way

  "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."

These are Tolstoy's words, just so there is no confusion, but I do agree with them. They were the words that came into my mind as I finished reading Mary Trump's book,  Who Could Ever Love You: A Family Memoir. It comes fast on the heels of her previous tome, Too Much And Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man. My wife gave me the sequel, of sorts, just a few weeks before the election. As I tore my way through the accounts of dysfunction, I truly believed that I was watching history unravel. Until the results were in. 

The progress I had made stopped. For a couple weeks as the thought of this Dangerous Man becoming "president" once again made me unwilling to finish the story of Mary's traumatic childhood among some of the creepiest people this side of Anna Karenina. 

Then, after the reality of a second Trumpreich began to settle in, I picked put the book again, anxious to discover if the poor little girl found a way to usurp her wicked uncle's power. 

Spoiler Alert: Nope. Cheated out of her inheritance and kicked to the curb for trying to connect with a family that had all but disowned her, Mary has spent the past eight years trying to find the off switch to the machine that keeps the evil flowing. 

Then I thought about Tolstoy's quote. I thought about all those unhappy families that continue to promulgate and send their unhappiness out into the world to generate still more wickedness. For a moment I thought to insert the notion that money is somehow the root of all evil, but then again, so is the lack of money. Money can't buy me love, after all. Sometimes it creates a facsimile, something akin to comfort without any real understanding. You can buy comfort, or at least the trappings of it. Once you have all the stuff, you still want more because you're empty inside. 

I finished Mary's book, and let it go. Nothing could stop the unhappiness from spilling out into the world. All that sadness. All that pain. Painted over in bright orange. 

Not a happy orange, either. 

Funny Man

 The thought of telling jokes for a living stalls out with the memory of standing in front of a couch full of stoned Arby's employees. I was the new guy, but I was definitely the funniest one at the party. 

Or so I was lead to believe. By the voices inside my head. I was always making people laugh at work. Certainly my reputation as a class clown was cemented during my senior year in high school. Why wouldn't that continue on into my twenties? 

The lesson I learned that night was about being on stage. When you are presenting to a crowd, even a half dozen wrecked fast food workers, the expectations are different. I was not clear on that when I took my position in front of the coffee table to deliver what I assumed would be a killer set about being wasted on the job. It could have been that the material wasn't that good. I had not spent an adequate amount of time working up my routine beforehand. Like no time at all. I was making it up on the spot. I was, as the pros say, "riffing." To a couch full of blank stares. 

What I had not taken into account, but I realize now some forty years later, was the intrinsic difference between standing next to someone in a classroom or at the counter of a roast beef sandwich emporium gives you an anti-authority edge. The funny bits are coming from an unexpected angle. Who talks back to their Elementary Functions teacher? Who takes sarcastic glee in someone ordering two Beef 'n' Cheddars, potato cakes, a cherry turnover and a large Diet Pepsi? Who cracks wise when the situation is not specifically designed for such japery? 

Me. Me and a whole slew of funny people throughout history who were never able to make it past open mic night, or get their own sit-com. Or make a bunch of stoned Arby's employees crack a smile. 

Every few years my wife will wonder aloud why I never became a professional comedian. The simplest answer comes from just how sour those grapes turned out to be. The longer version has something to do with that story I just related along with my lack of understand of the gulf between being a wiseacre and a comedian. 

Or a guy who writes a daily blog. 

Used To It

 So there are those who knew me when I would never have imagined that I would allow a cat in my house. Then I got married. And I moved to California where many of the strictures and regulations that kept me and the pets around me shifted. My wife was an equal opportunity employer. She encouraged us to board a few different dogs and cats when friends and relatives found us as a place for their dogs and cats to hang out while they vacationed. Dagwood the dog and Max the cat were two visitors back in those days. As was my way back then, I connected immediately with Dagwood, while the time Max spent with me was limited primarily to cautious glances across the room. By both of us. 

I will confess some vague antipathy for the feline, highlighted in the Age of Maddie.Maddie was the dog we adopted when our son was still fresh and new. We raised them together, and Maddie was our doggie daughter. And one of the things she loved to do was chase the gray feral cat who would periodically creep into our yard. Much to the delight of our son, and the the everlasting dismay of my wife. 

Fast forward a decade and a half, when karma was served by the coincidence of that same gray cat coming to live with us while he rehabbed from having all his teeth removed. Maddie was sent to her eternal rest, so we had room. One day, that gray feral cat came sauntering out to our livng room like he owned the place. Because somewhere in the rehabilitation process Fluffy, as he became to be known, had become a part of the family. He had found a spot on our couch. 

And eventually into our bed. Now I am regularly awakened by a kitty paw on my forearm or forehead. It's time to begin another day. Another day with a cat in our house. 

And I don't mind. 

An Important Message

 So, apparently there are no new ideas. 

The Second Trumpreich is not only gearing up for mass deportations, inspired by Dwight Eisenhower's "Operation Wetback" (the actual name given to the 1954 action), but is also hard at work trying to find just the right tone for their ad campaign created to keep Americans from using Fentanyl. The felon-elect spouted this on his social media platform named without irony "Truth," “I will be working on a large-scale United States Advertising Campaign explaining how bad fentanyl is for people to use. Millions of lives being so needlessly destroyed. “By the time the campaign is over, everyone will know how really bad the horror of this drug is.”

If you were alive in the 1980s, and certainly the former game show host was while he was busy suggesting innocent young black men should be executed for crimes they did not commit and being a slumlord's slumlord, you might remember when Nancy Reagan came up with the brilliant "Just Say No" campaign. Yes, boys and girls, everything old is new again, and while it's a pretty sure bet that Melania will be unavailable to give the new version the punch that Nancy did once upon a time, I'll be there are plenty of folks who are staring at that big bag of fentanyl even as you read this and wondering, "Hey. There's a big fat white guy who's addicted to McDonalds who doesn't want me to ruin my life with this stuff." And that will be, as they say, that. 

Of course now might be the time to open up that can of worms in which we find all the reasons for drug abuse. One that tops a lot of lists is mental health concerns. Which might be the target of its own ad campaign, since mental health services have had their budgets cut by millions over the past over the past decade or so. So making a few TV spots that no one will see because no one watches commercial TV anymore sounds like a much better plan than trying to solve the problem at its source. "Feel bad? Don't take drugs. You should try buying something you don't need instead. But not drugs." 

Which might come as a shock to newly ordained Czar of Government Efficiency Elon Musk, who insists that his prescription for Ketamine is to helpful :for getting one out of the negative frame of mind." which might also come as a surprise to TV funnyman Matthew Perry, god rest his soul. And to all those people in Mexico and China who are going to be tariffed into submission by a new administration that doesn't understand who tariffs work. Or drug dependency. Or windmills. Or solar eclipses. Or health care. Or a free and independent press. Or how toasters work. 

Sleep tight, America. 

Don't do drugs.