Comparing apples and oranges

In two recent columns at the online edition of the Daily Mail, John Humphrys wrote about two seemingly unrelated topics:
(1) conditions in today’s China and (2) the appalling way English teenagers speak their language.

The second article says the young folk are not using their “full linguistic potential.”

I think they’ll be just fine. Eventually they will grow up and become contributing members of society. Not all of them, of course, but enough. Happens every generation.

But the phrase “not using their full linguistic potential” could be put to better use in the other article to describe the plight of the 1.3 billion persons living in the People’s Republic of China, where there is a decided lack of true freedom of speech despite their own protestations to the contrary. Things have greatly improved, they insist.

Great gains have been made in recent years, granted, but the authoritarian Communist rulers remain firmly in control.

For example, this world-famous photograph from 1989 is still banned in China, as is any mention of the events that occurred in and around Tiananmen Square, Beijing.

All things considered, English teenagers have things pretty good. Our Chinese friends, not so much.

[Editor's note: I created this post about a week ago, before the recent riots by young people in London and before the release of Aung San Suu Kyi after seven years of house arrest in Myanmar, but those events just underscore what I'm saying, I think. -- RWP]

X'32', X'45', what’s a few years among friends?

Last Friday, Mrs. RWP and I were invited to lunch at Greenwood’s, a great restaurant located in an old house in Roswell, next door to a restaurant/bar/live music venue called The Swallow in the Hollow, which is just down the street from a city hall that makes the town look as though it could be the capital of a small country. I’m not kidding. Out in front of Greenwood’s, along the street, were multitudinous strawberry pots filled with blossoming flowers and odoriferous garlic plants (next one to use the words multitudinous and odoriferous in the same blogpost wins a years supply of tompoezen or Jaffa cake, take your pick). In the entrance courtyard I spotted a bust of Elvis. A small lizard ran up a brick wall, pausing halfway. We are a strange bunch in Georgia, but it simply can’t be helped. I blame it on the fact that the Yankees won The War.

An old friend and former manager, Jim R., was in town on his yearly trip back east from his retirement home along the Pacific Ocean in northern California. Another old friend and former manager, Linda S., had gathered a small group together for a small celebration.

It turned out great. Tim R. was there, who was 24 when he came to our group and is now 48, and Larry A. and his wife Diane, along with Mrs. RWP and me. A few years back, Larry was diagnosed with ankylosing spondylitis but appears to be doing well. Another friend, Pat T., wasn’t able to attend because of a long-scheduled dental appointment that simply couldn’t be put off.

Mrs. RWP and I both had shrimp and grits, a dish that makes people in other parts of the world and even other parts of our own country go “Eeeewwwww!” but is really quite tasty. Then we shared a huge slice of coconut cream pie. Don’t make a face at the combination; some of the others at the table had catfish and blackeyed-peas and blackberry pie.

I told you we were a strange bunch.

We reminisced about old times and old friends for nearly three hours at our table in the back room. We laughed and laughed. In the end, Jim R. paid for the whole shebang even though we all protested, and he said we must get together again next year.

About this post’s title, when I turned 50 I was presented at the office with a cake that was decorated to look like an open grave in a cemetery. The epitaph on the headstone said R.I.P., X'32' (50 in decimal is 32 in hexadecimal, a base-16 numbering system that computer professionals understand; 16 times 3 equals 48, plus 2 more make 50. Get it?). Now I am X'45' (I bet you can figure it out for yourself). In case you were wondering, the hexadecimal digits are
0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, A, B, C, D, E, and F.

I joined that group of what is now called IT professionals in 1980, three weeks before I turned 39 (X'27'). Some had been together in Western Electric Company (WECo for short) since the mid-sixties, and most of the group stayed intact through thick and thin, expansions and contractions, divestitures (thank you, AT&T), spinoffs (thank you, Lucent Technologies), and outsourcings (thank you, IBM Global Services) until retirement caught up with us all.

I repeat, what’s a few years among friends?

Unforgettable, that’s what.

It was a one-eyed, one-horned, flying purple people eater

November is Jacaranda time in Brisbane, Australia. Check it out.

November is also Jacaranda time in Grafton, New South Wales, Australia. Check it out.

(The two links above take you to the blog of a woman named Helsie who lives in Australia.)

And November is Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month. Check it out.

In November 1966, my dad underwent exploratory abdominal surgery and was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It had already metastasized. On March 3, 1967, he succumbed to the disease.

Over forty years later, the statistics have not improved, according to actor Patrick Swayze’s widow. She said on Good Morning, America this week that the life expectancy of someone after having been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer is three to six months. Patrick, who had the disease, lived for 22 months after diagnosis because he was an extraordinary human being.

Here’s hoping that an emphasis on wearing purple ribbons each November will result in the same sort of attention and funding increase for pancreatic cancer research that an emphasis on wearing pink ribbons each October has done for funding for breast cancer research.

I’m going to do my part.

I apologize if the title of this post offends you. I don’t mean to be insensitive, but it was one way of getting your attention. The more I think about it, though, it describes the monster that is pancreatic cancer very well. And I bet you’ll never think about purple in quite the same way ever again.

Separated at birth?

Actor Woody Harrelson:

Casey Cagle, Lieutenant Governor of the State of Georgia:

What we have here is a fail-yah to communicate.

[start semi-rant mode]

We have just come through the American election of 2010.

The liberals think the conservatives don’t get the message. The conservatives think the liberals don’t get the message. The president thinks the American people don’t get the message. The American people think the president doesn’t get the message. The Democrats think the Republicans don’t get the message. The Republicans think the Democrats don’t get the message. The Libertarians and Tea Party members think no one else gets the message. Everyone thinks he or she is right. It’s the other person, obviously, who is wrong.

Clearly, in the words of Strother Martin in the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke, what we have here is a fail-yah to communicate.

President Obama now says (in an interview aired on November 7, 2010, on the CBS-TV program 60 Minutes) that he doesn’t plan to change his agenda but will attempt to communicate better because people failed to understand his message. My own opinion is that people now understand his message very clearly. Perhaps they didn’t two years ago, but now they do, based not on what he has said but on what he has done. And a very clear majority of the American voting public have firmly rejected it (except in a few apparently very liberal places where people like Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and Barbara Boxer and Barney Frank managed, astoundingly, to get themselves re-elected). The president, however, seems to care more about what people in other countries think than what the majority of Americans think. We are expected to follow like sheep and accept whatever he has decided is best for us.

I have an announcement, folks: The American system doesn’t work that way. In fact, it works just the other way; he is supposed to do what the American voters want. In what used to be America (that is, according to the U.S. Constitution), the people were in charge. Abraham Lincoln probably phrased it best as “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” (and just so you know, Abraham Lincoln was not a Democrat; he was the first Republican president.) But right now President Obama does not appear very Abraham Lincolnesque. Instead, he seems to be Strother Martin and the rest of us have become Paul Newman.

Denial, my friends, is not a river in Egypt.

[end semi-rant mode]

If you are a U.S. citizen, whether you agree or disagree with me, I’d love to hear from you. But for this one post, if you are not a U.S. citizen, please follow Archie Bunker’s advice to his wife, Edith, and stifle yourself.

However, if you want to move here and become a citizen of the United States and vote in our elections, I say, in the words of Edith Bunker herself: “I welcome you with open arms.”

Mrs. RWP tried something new for Halloween...

She made a pumpkin cake! Well, actually she didn’t. She made a chocolate cake that looks like a pumpkin, which is different. Isn’t it? A pumpkin cake would be made out of pumpkin. Wouldn’t it?

Discuss amongst yourselves.

Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away...

Yesterday, for the first time in my life, my nearly 70 years, my almost 840 months, my over 25,000 days of living on this planet of ours, I was a poll worker at an election precinct. I was not, as alleged by my daughter-in-law’s mother, a poll dancer. It’s a play on words, get it? Poll dancer/pole dancer? I think she was joking. I pray to God (with apologies to Snowbrush) that she was joking.

To become a poll worker, all I had to do was fill out an application back in August, submit it to our county’s Board of Elections, be accepted, be assigned to one of the county’s 44 precincts, and attend a half-day of training at the county office building in October. I was fortunate enough to be assigned to the precinct in which I vote, so I didn’t have far to drive on election day.

It turned out to be a long day. I had set my alarm for 4:50 a.m. because 6:00 a.m. was the time we had been told to arrive at the precinct. However, I awoke awaked awakened woke up opened my eyes at 3:15 a.m. and never shut them again. Shortly after 6:00 a.m., we raised our right hands and swore or affirmed certain things and went right to work following the laminated procedures so that the polls could open at 7:00 a.m. for the voters waiting in line. And all over Georgia, in 159 counties and over 2900 precincts, other people were doing the same things. In all 50 states, lots of other people were doing the same things.

Nearly 1150 persons voted in our precinct on Tuesday, and I knew only about 25 of them personally. The rest were complete strangers to me. The county provided us with various 21st-century electronic devices (scanners, computer data bases, touch screens) to help us carry out our assigned tasks. By “us” I mean two groups, the seven persons who were assigned to our precinct and all of the poll workers in all of the other precincts. During the day I had the pleasure of helping four new U.S. citizens who hailed from Brazil, Australia, Ireland, and Vietnam vote in an American election.

The polls closed at 7:00 p.m. and our work ended around 8:00 p.m., 14 hours after we had raised our right hands and 17 hours after I had started my day. I drove home and slept the sleep of the just.

It was a wonderful day. It was a memorable day. I would do it again in a heartbeat, and I plan to. For once, I had served my community instead of expecting my community to serve me. Some of us are old enough to remember having heard President John F. Kennedy say something about that at the end of his inaugural address in 1961.

Don’t tell anybody, but I actually felt like dancing.