Are you having a problem with illegal Canadians? …. NOOOOO! Are you having a problem with illegal Japanese? … NOOOOO! Are you having a problem with illegal Brits? ….. NOOOO!  … Just Mexicans?

Now why do you think that is? What is so different about Mexico? Could it be that life is so bad there that these people will brave all manor of hardship, danger, even death to get out of that country? Do you think dumb, childish, unconstitutional Arizonian laws will stop them after walking hundreds of miles through wilderness, paying shady characters to get them across the boarder and trusting to thieves and murderers to get them to America? …… NOOOOOO! They are telling you, through their actions, that they have nothing to lose. Do you think avoiding the police (something they already do) is much of a deterrent after all they went through just to get out of Mexico? NOOO? …. Me neither!

What we have here is another fine case of a politician doing something really stupid just to get his name in the paper. I hope the people of Arizona will brighten themselves up and oust the fool. I won’t mention his name. He’s already had too much publicity.

Now about Mexico. The immigration will stop only when life in Mexico becomes bearable. If you really want to stem the tide, fix Mexico. I’m not saying it would be easy to fix Mexico. No one has been able to bring real change to Mexico so far. But, that is the only way to solve your problem.

Oh yes, about those American born children of illegal immigrants …. THEY ARE AMERICANS! It says so in the constitution! If you don’t like it …. LEAVE!

The 2003 sequel with Edward James Olmos turned a perfectly fine sci fi into a FRACKING soap opera. Ever since Miami Vice Olmos has been one of my favorite actors …. ever! But the new Battlestar Galactica dragged on and on ….. and on. I only watched a few episodes before total boredom  kicked in and led me off to other, more interesting entertainment.

And now there’s Caprica! What a great idea! Where did the Cylons come from? What started the war? This could be a great story line. Bzzzzzzzt! Wrong! All we got was another FRACKING soap opera. Another good idea gone bad. Sooooo, I’m outta here. I won’t waste any more time on Caprica.

So boys stand up for real science fiction! Let’s go watch Rodan on flash-candy.com

Please go directly to school. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200. Dummy! The size of the jackpot is determined by the odds of winning not the number of players this week. It won’t change. But with a choice of lotteries to play you may reduce the number of players for Mega Millions. So it will take longer for anyone to win. The odds of winning are still 1:175,711,538.

Last night on the local news the headlines of the decade were all bad. You know; 9/11, Iraq, Afganistan, George Bush, illegal government wiretaps, waterboarding and everybody who was anybody in the 20th century died last year. This morning the industry websites I visit were all bad news. Housing market, unemployment, stock market and major retailers folding. It’s kind of like that old HeeHaw song, Gloom despair and agony on me.

I should say something, but I’d like to say something good. But what?

Finally, I found it! It took a few days, but I found some good news about the first decade of this century. You see I’ve been concerned for some years that this country was going down hill. We lost our scientific lead. We lost our manufacturing lead and we lost our moral foundation. But now we have a new chance to reconnect with those American values. Internet TV is bringing back the movies of the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s. Stars like John Wayne, Gary Cooper and Gregory Peck are shining again. I believe that this resurgence of early twentieth century ideals could help to revive the spirit that made America great. You know; Mom’s apple pie, truth, justice and the American way. And maybe with a little luck we can shed our feminine side.

Insurance in healthcare is a really bad idea. Let’s look at the history. We have insurance in healthcare because in WWII Washington froze wages, so industry offered healthcare in order to attract and keep employees. Healthcare costs got out-of-hand. So insurance companies stepped in to control the cost of healthcare. Since then we’ve lost house calls and doctors have been forced to spend less and less time per patient. Now a doctor cannot spend more than 8 minutes with you because that’s all the insurance will pay for. For the last 20 years insurance companies have been refusing coverage for pre-existing conditions. They won’t be able to do that in universal healthcare so ……guess what….. the premium will be going up …. and up. Employers have been offering less and less coverage because the cost keeps going up. And I hope you don’t think things will get better because the government is getting into the healthcare business. Yea right, when did that ever happen?

So what should we do? First outlaw healthcare insurance and malpractice lawsuits. Doctors make mistakes, but that should be handled by a much more efficient arbitration system. Then return doctors billing to a “pay what you can afford” system. It is historically cheaper for the patient and more lucrative for the providers. Insurance companies burn 30% of healthcare premiums as operations and profit. Malpractice insurance is so high in some fields that providers can no longer stay in business. Getting the insurance industry out of healthcare will cut healthcare costs in half, easily. The “pay what you can afford” system will reconnect providers and patients, a relationship that has been severely eroded by the healthcare insurance model.

But I’m just whistling in the wind. Nobody, but nobody will ever challenge the insurance industry. They are the 600 pound canary.

The only national chain left is Westmarine. Certainly the demise of Boater’s World will have a negative effect on the boating industry.

Once again I have to thank you for bringing Vista into our lives. Do you remember that little guy on Laugh In, the one on the tricycle? He’d be riding along and then all of a sudden he would fall over or hit a fire hydrant. So funny, just like Vista. I do so enjoy having the operating system lock up and drop network connectivity forcing me to reboot. That’s when I discover that it’s sitting on five famous Microsoft updates and it is going to take an hour to load them, reboot the system … again and finish loading. I love the messages to, “loading 1 of 5 updates.” What updates? Did I ask for updates? Who wrote them? Where did they come from? Do I want them? Do I need them? Are they really from Microsoft or are they some hacker trying to get into my computer. Why has it been sitting there for a half hour with “Shuting down” on the screen and the hard drive light flashing? What is it doing? Will I still have my stuff when it’s done? Will it ever finish? Can I get paid for my lost time waiting for, waiting for … I don’t know, what is this thing?

Fantastic, it’s rebooting. No Wait, it says, “Windows did not shutdown properly.” Now what? Hmmmm, black screen, that can’t be good! Please come back computer, please, please, please.

Wait, there’s more! It now says, “Configuring updates: Stage 1 of 3.” ….. Logins! It got to logins! It says, “Welcome.” Now it says, “Windows has recovered from an unexpected shutdown.” How can it be unexpected? You did it …. bonehead! “Searching for an answer”, click cancel and get back to work. So I get the wifi reconnected and start working when I get … “Java automated update!” There’s just no end to you clowns, is there?

Now what the hell was I doing an hour ago, before this mess started?

from Marat/Sade a 1963 play by Peter Weiss, music by Richard Peaslee:

Poor old Barack they hunt you down,
The blood-hounds are sniffing all over the town,
Just yesterday your printing press was smashed,
Now they’re asking your home address.

Poor old Barack,
in you we trust,
You work till your eyes turn red as rust.

Barack we’re poor,
and the poor stay poor,
Barack don’t make us wait anymore.

We want our rights and we don’t care how.
We want our Revolution Now!

——————————————————

Hang in there Barack. You haven’t a prayer of being as good as everyone hoped. And you’re not as bad as some would have it.

Barack, I wish you well. I doubt that God could live up to the hype the news media has saddled you with. We all know you have a difficult task ahead. We all know you are just the president. You don’t really have the power to fix things without the help of congress. That’s kinda’ like having the inmates run the asylum.

During these precedings Tom Brokaw just had to make a dumb remark. He said the Woodstock generation, my generation, failed to change the world as promised. Well bonehead, as Barack himself put it 60 years ago his father couldn’t get served in a restaurant, now Barack is president. Is that a change? Who do you think did that? I was drafted in 1968, but that doesn’t happen anymore, does it? Young men no longer have to worry about military service unless that is what they want. Should we talk about women in the military? Is that change? Who did that?

There’s more bonehead, 60’s years ago a young girl’s future was measured by the husband she landed. Her best “job” prospect was to be a secretary. Today we are witnessing the second female Secretary of State and a female speaker of the house. If Obama didn’t win the democratic primary the 44′th president might well have been a woman. Is that a change? Who did that?

And hey Brokaw, in science, did you forget the digital revolution, the personal computer, the Internet. Is that a change? Who?? When I was born TV was black and white and about 9 inches in diameter. Today it’s color, digital and as big as you can afford.  Change? Then there’s the space station, Mars expeditions and so much more.  Change!? Who did that?? Medicine now has treatments and cures for diseases my father’s doctor didn’t even know existed. Change!!Hell Yes!! And we did it, bonehead!

Leave it to a reporter to live through the greatest Renaissance in the history of mankind and totally miss it!

Wall Street, who is that? It’s millions of individuals with a few hundred to a few thousand dollars invested in the American economy. Congressional failure just cost all of those poor people 1 trillion dollars according to a popular TV news show. And you failed because the medicine was unpopular. Some individuals are confused about who created the mess and who would be helped by this bill.

So who created this mess? It wasn’t some Wall Street wizard. It wasn’t some dishonest CEO with a golden parachute. It was congress! You clowns wrote the rules. You are the game’s referees. You filled the troff with slop and then blamed the pigs for eating. Shame on you.

And who are you trying to help. Not some mega-bank, investment firm or insurance company.  As the stock market just pointed out, you have to bail out the boat to keep the crew afloat.

Finally I want to thank Congress for reinforcing my lack of confidence. A plague on both your houses.

I’ve been experimenting with DTV for some time and I’m sorry to say it’s not very good. Don’t get me wrong, when it works the picture is great! It’s actually wasted on us over 50 crowd, we can’t see that well anyway. But! When it doesn’t work it’s terrible. Actually it stops completely, no picture, no sound, nothing. There is no way to adjust your antenna to improve your signal. You are lost, just wave your antenna around aimlessly and hope for the best. Once you get a signal there are all kinds of problems that can interfere with your viewing pleasure. You see the greedy TV industry chose a signal format that is very suseptible to interference and multipath because it allows them to broadcast multiple channels on one channel. (note: the fox is in charge of the henhouse). So if you live in a marina the multipalth from all of those sailboat masts waving about will rip up your signal making the picture start and stop and the sound cut in and out … VERY ANNOYING! It gets worst when an airplane passes overhead.

So, here’s the bottom line. If you live more than 20 miles from the transmitter, sorry about that. If you live in an airport flight plan, bummer. And if you live near a military base or other source of interference, you lose.

Thank God for wifi and hulu.com

This election though trumps all. Obama (is that his name) can’t get away from the race card. Sorry, he’s stuck with it. His choice in V.P. leaves me cold. I lived in Delaware for a while. I am so unimpressed! And I’m sorry, I just don’t think Obama has enough experience. I wouldn’t hire him to run a corporation, I won’t hire him to run a country.

But McCain had to insult the world by playing the SEX card. With all the people that he could have chosen, he went for an unknown just because she was a she. Shame on you. Who is more insulted? Men because she is unknown and untested, women because she was picked because of her gender and not her qualifications.

I think I’ll vote, “NO CONFIDENCE!”

I had to get new flares for both boats last week. Orion has a new money making scheme that I do not appreciate at all. They now sell their flares in packs of four and advertise it as better than Coast Guard requirements. The requirement is three flares and in over 40 years of boating I’ve never used one. So buying four is, in my humble opinion, STUPID! Stop that Orion, bad boy, … bad, bad boy!

What we need is a way to clean the bay itself. But how? Cleaning the whole bay would be a monsterous task. Recently I came across the oyster gardening project. Waterfront home owners can pay a fee to raise oysters and return them when mature to be dumped onto oyster beds on the bay. You can see the problem with this program, can’t you. It will never attract the numbers it needs to make much difference. And that seems to be just what has happened. The program is a good idea, but no where near big enough. We need to expand this program exponentually .

Let’s redesign the program. First we want to get ALL of the commercial property involved. The bay is lined with marinas perfectly designed to raise oysters. But how do you get the marinas involved? How about a tax rebate? A small, token rebate just for the marina owners trouble. It doesn’t have to be much, $10 or $20 per bag of oysters. Then lets give away the seed oysters and bags, free to a good home. Finally let the marinas and home owners keep their oysters. If they don’t want to be bothered with the maintenance they could sell their oyster rights to a waterman. Aquafarmers could expand their operations through agreements with marina owners and private waterfront owners around the bay.

I confess I haven’t spent much time or effort on this idea. The few people I talked with were very interested, but no one knows how to get past the politics. There are currently several interested organizations, all trying to save the oysters and the bay, all doing their own thing. No one seems to know how to get these diverse groups organized, and that’s what we need.

I’d like to see the governor use some of the fourtune in taxes he costs me every year to purchase the seed and bags. I’d like to see The Chesapeake Bay Foundation develope an educational program. Get the word out. Get people signed up for the program. I’d like to see the Oyster Recover program work with the watermen and property owners to monitor the health and abundance of the oysters. I’d like to see the program developed to maximize the oyster’s spawning. Imagine millions of oysters all over the bay, releasing baby oysters into the water, baby oysters that will end up on oyster beds. A small government investment could create a whole new aqua-culture industry, reseed the oyster beds and restore the oyster harvesting industry and oh by the way clean the Chesapeake Bay, improving the ecological health of the entire area.

What is this Global Warming (now in caps) all about. Is it the CO2, is it the sun, is it cosmic rays? No! it’s HEAT!! It doesn’t matter how the heat got here, we just need to lose it. How do we do that, you might ask? Well how about painting all the roads and all the parking lots in the world white? Instead of black top soaking up the sun’s light and converting it to heat we just send the light back into space. It’s simple to test. It’s simple to do.

There are other benefits too. It would reduce urban heating, a known problem. And if cities aren’t quite as hot on quite as many days, there would be fewer summer trips to the mountains and shores. Hmmmm, saving gas, that’s a good thing. White streets would be easier to light. We could dial down the city lighting. Save some electricity. City buildings would be a touch easier to cool, more savings! Walking around town on cooler streets would even mean less wear on our shoes. It just works so many ways and all we have to do is come up with an infrared transparent white coating for our streets and parking lots. We already have white coatings that we use all over that might work as is. Of course we’ll have to change the white road lines to something else. How about green? I like green. You know it might be easier to see a green line on a white background under an inch or two of snow. Yellow lines can stay yellow. That should be alright.

What do you think?

Do you know what I’d like to see? I’d like to see congress do something useful for a change. Instead of blaming global warming on SUV’s and setting impossible fuel milage for the manufactures try something different. How about fixing the traffic lights? Did you ever notice that your gas milage is worst in the city than it is on the highway? All that starting and stoping, idling at redlights, and traffic jams … uses up a lot of fuel. So isn’t it about time the government stepped forward and upgraded the lights. That technology hasn’t changed since World War II. To be fair they did try timing the lights with some success, but even that was never universally deployed. That’s ok, it wouldn’t work anyway. The traffic light system can be improved … alot! Don’t know how to do it? Give me … oh … 3 or 4 engineers and about a year. I know how to do it. I’ll give you a hint, think internet

And another thing! How about telecommuting? There’s an idea that just never got off the starting line. Why? Why should it? Where’s the incentive? Well, how about a tax break for companies that promote telecommuting? I don’t know, something like $20 a day for every employee every day that they work from home. That should help warm corporate america to the idea. Of course, it will never get through congress because they would lose money from corporate taxes and gas taxes. We just can’t have that.

Oh well, just a thought Green green, it’s green they say on the far side of the hill … la la la …

Sunday was another story. We couldn’t get our of our own way and gave up and motored home. Why? Boys … especially Bingman, listen up! When there’s no wind take the start out to Eastern Bay. Starting in Miles River with no air is every bit as dumb as not shortening a race when there’s no air and almost as dumb as destroying ‘B’ fleet … Bingman. I gotta get my digs in where and when I can Even Escapade - way in the lead on Sunday - gave up before she even got out of the river.

Oh and a special thanks to my crew! You were great! You were why we got second on Saturday

Is global warming a problem? I don’t know! The believers say it’s the warmest it has been in 1000 years. So what! Has it ever been warmer? Nobody is saying. Why not? OK, I get it, some places will have a problem. If you are going to buy waterfront property, it better float. My heating bill should go down, but my air conditioning bill should go up. Good farmland will turn to desert, deserts will turn to oceans and new farmland will appear … somewhere. These are big changes, but don’t panic!

If it’s real and a problem, can I fix it? Nope! Not a snowball’s prayer in Hell! Here’s why. In the US there are now 300 million folks of the 6 billion folks world wide. Everyone, EVERYONE!, in this world wants to live the American dream and they are doing their best to do it. And if you don’t let them … forget about it. That means the world needs to find and burn 5 to 6 times the energy we are currently using. That won’t happen, will it? OK, then we have to become 5 to 6 times as efficient as we are now. Oops! That won’t happen either, will it? You know what’s left? We fight over what resources we have. I’m starting to feel better about not having kids.

And then! We are listening to the same folks that wrote the programs that predict next week’s weather. Last Sunday they said this Sunday will be 40 degrees. Today, Wednesday, it’s up to 54 degrees. And they’re not even trying to predict the wind. The media, just this week, apologized (in the weather guy’s name) for predicting a brutal hurricane season in 2006 that didn’t even happen. No one apologized for not predicting the 2005 season.

A final thought! Even if the believers are right about the temperature rising, are they right about carbon dioxide being the problem? I don’t know! That’s another one of those computer program thingys.

Middle River is one of my favorite places to sail. The people are very friendly and it reminds me of so many places I have visited around the world. The sailing is usually great. Unfortunately it’s no longer well attended. Glenmar is a shadow of it’s past glory and it doesn’t draw boats from other clubs like it used to. So next year when you are tired of Oxford and St. Michaels add a Middle River regatta to your schedule. You’ll be glad you did.

Every turning mark should have a gate and committee on station. You go through the gate and the committee takes your time. If you still have air you keep racing. If the air has died the committee fires the gun, blows the horn and everybodygoes home happy. On those really weird days when the air dies between marks you get scored at your last mark. Any questions?

We need six races, I think, to qualify for high point on the chesapeake. We’ve raced eight this year and only 2 finished. Time for a change don’t you think?