Snoring

If you snore, I highly suggest you get yourself tested for sleep apnea. Finally, after all these years I'll be hitting my sleep test next week which is more a formality for the insurance company as I feel 100% I suffer from sleep apnea.

So, what was the tipping point for going to see the ENT? Memory loss. Over the last 6 months or so I've found an increasing inability to focus and would find myself entering a room forgetting what I was going in there to do or get.

At 42, I went on both cholesterol and high blood pressure medicine. The cholesterol I had at least noticed could be controlled by exercise. However, I also found that no matter how hard I tried, I just seemed to lack the energy to get started which is both another consequence of sleep apnea and a wonderful conundrum: need to exercise in order to get my energy up but couldn't get the energy to start exercising.

I had a huge problem accepting the blood pressure issue. I felt my father's stroke 12 yrs ago was self inflicted with eating unhealthy, smoking and drinking since he was a teenager. My PC physician, after monitoring determined it's probably hereditary. However, now that I know more about sleep apnea perhaps it's not hereditary after all.

Now, I've recently read about the memory loss issue. Not cool. So, if you snore...get checked out....

Jim Cramer's A Jackass

Jim Cramer on Today Show with Matt Lauer. About 1:33 minutes in he gets all huffy about "nationalization". First, no one even wants nationalization. Second, he needs to look up exactly what it means. It isn't just the Soviet Union that has "nationalized" at times. Even the USA has "nationalized" at times.

So, here he is with his indignant rant in one breath but yet with the other side of his face, he wants the socialization of the government paying off the banks, Wall Street, the auto makers, and mortgagors.

So, his no call for nationalization is, "give us your money but leave us alone"....bullshit, Jim Cramer.

Hell, I can't even understand why the Today show uses him, as he admits to manipulating the stock market. So, yeah, he's a trust worthy fellow I guess because he told the truth about being a liar.

Credit Crisis

If it all seems confusing, check out this website which does a great job explaining in simple visuals how it all happened.

Deepest Desires

Deep down, I think we all have this secret deep desire of what we wish we could do or be. Maybe we daydream about it and many times these are desires that just aren't going to happen due to any number of real limitations, not limitations such as laziness, fear etc...

Here's mine:
I wish I could be a rock singer and guitar player/multi-instrumentalist and had a band made up of great friends, men and women, and we played all the songs I like to a crowd full of other people I know. And one of the members of the band is a beautiful woman who is my wife.

Ah, well, I can't sing a lick, don't have a very good ear but do have a sense of rhythm and played drums for a number of years...until the kids came. I'll probably get another set after they leave the roost. But, I do have a beautiful wife.

What's your deepest desire?

Music: Vocalists

In no particular order, here are my favorite rock vocalists because I just love the sound of their voice:

Paul Rodgers (Bad Co.)
Chris Thompson (Manfred Mann's Earth Band)
Eddie Vedder (Pearl Jam)
Amy Lee (Evanescence)
Lenny Zakatek (Alan Parsons Project)
Brad Delp (Boston)
Donnie Iris
James Taylor
Steve Walsh (Kansas)
Ritchie Havens
Sarah McLachlan
Glenn Shorrock (Little River Band)
Chris Cornell (Soundgarden)
David Clayton-Thomas (Blood, Sweat & Tears)
Michael McDonald (Doobie Bros.)
Enya
Burton Cummings (Guess Who)
Roger Daltry (The Who)
Steve Perry and Gregg Rolie (Journey--only when they share vocals on the same songs)
Leo Sayer

Rick Santelli's a Jackass

Let's take a complicated issue and reduce it to soundbites....and a great number of Americans as well. It's OK to bail out Wall Street, auto companies, insurance companies and let them still give themselves bonuses....yet when you're neighbor is in trouble, regardless of the reasons, fuck 'em.

Hey, give everyone money....that's his call to arms...but where was he when we were giving money to Wall Street?

Santelli must be running for office as he tries to appeal to the mass' fear and once again it all comes down to "where's my share?"

I guess just fuck everyone....every man, woman and child for himself....

Bi-Partisanship

Our politicians:
Republicans want the Democrats to fail in order for them to gain power and the Democrats want the Republicans to fail in order for them to gain power. This is the problem with a two party system. It's all about winning the control of power.

This is what our elected public servants care about. Not interested in you or me, but in themselves and how to gain the upper hand on each other in order to be in the "ruling" class. And whom do they serve, really? Read Kevin Phillips.

What can be expected in a society based on a culture of spending? The current situation tends to blame the consumer for living beyond their means. But isn't this the definition of being American, to live beyond ones means. We are a culture of wanting bigger, more, better. Well, when 85% of all the wealth is in the hands of 15% of the population, how can you have anyone live in any other way and continue to spend? Even tax refunds are all about spending; the government doesn't expect you to save that money or pay off debt. They expect you to spread it around to help the economy. Well, when you get a government that represents only the rich, you end up in the situation we all find ourselves in--with us bailing everyone else out. So, your and my money go to help Merrill Lynch, but what will you or I get back from them?

So, the solution: raise the income tax by a very large % on the 15% wealthiest and close the loop holes.

V-Day

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

Bertrand Russell (1872 - 1970), Marriage and Morals (1929) ch. 19

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

Carl Jung (1875 - 1961)

To love and be loved is to feel the sun from both sides.

David Viscott, How to Live with Another Person, 1974

Love is everything it's cracked up to be…It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for.

Erica Jong,

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844 - 1900), "On Reading and Writing"

There is no remedy for love but to love more.

Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862), Journal, July 25, 1839

Love is, above all else, the gift of oneself.

Jean Anouilh (1910 - 1987)

Age does not protect you from love. But love, to some extent, protects you from age.

Jeanne Moreau

Real love is a permanently self-enlarging experience.

M. Scott Peck,

Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come.

Matt Groening (1954 - ), "Life in Hell"

For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926)

He who is in love is wise and is becoming wiser, sees newly every time he looks at the object beloved, drawing from it with his eyes and his mind those virtues which it possesses.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882), Address on The Method of Nature, 1841

Learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all.

Michael Masser and Linda Creed

Think about a woman. Doesn't know you're thinking about her. Doesn't care you're thinking about her. Makes you think about her even more.

Martin Sage and Sybil Adelman, Northern Exposure, The Bumpy Road to Love, 1991

One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life: That word is love.

Sophocles (496 BC - 406 BC)

The important thing was to love rather than to be loved.

W. Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965), 'Of Human Bondage', 1915

But love is blind and lovers cannot see
The pretty follies that themselves commit;
For if they could, Cupid himself would blush
To see me thus transformed to a boy.

William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), The Merchant of Venice, Act II Scene 6

Role Models (The A-Rod Tragedy)

My old friend Pete has an entry on heroes and role models at his blog and I posted asking him and his readers:

What I'd like to know is everyone's view on what they think someone should get FROM a role model. Why should we have, why should there be role models?

And Pete took up the question in his follow up entry. And I agree with him that, to some degree, it's natural for kids to look up to "stars". But kids like to look up to people who can do things they themselves would like to do; to be like people they are not. Now, this is understandable growing up as we look for many examples of what people are like.

But once we are grown...what happens? Why do we still feel the need to have heroes or role models?

I admit to having only one true hero in my adult life but ultimately felt ashamed that I wasn't doing what this person was doing (meaning his political activities) and so my hero was a sign of my personal failure.

Now, all this came about on the heels of the A-Rod admission. In Pete's article for the Poughkeepsie Journal he writes:

Come on, A-Rod! I speak for legions of Yankee fans when I say this: We want to trust you. We want to like you. We've got you for nine more years. You can do better than that; you have to do better than that.

Until you do, how can we trust you? How can we unequivocally support your relentless pursuit of history? The sad truth is, until you tell us more, we cannot. Please, A-Rod. Come through in the clutch for us. Just one time.

Integrity is what we want most from our heroes/role models. We want to know that they are better than us, why else admire them so? But the reality is that, really, they aren't and we have to ask ourselves why we value them more then ourselves? Why do we feel they are some how better than us?

This is why we, as a culture, like to see our heroes fall as well...it brings them down to our perceived level.

Now, in the case of A-Rod, I can't agree with my old friend...as far as I'm concerned, A-Rod, and those like him, should be written off, cut loose. It isn't that he deserves a second chance or that we all make mistakes. If he had come clean the first time he was asked, we'd be more forgiving because, yes, at that point we all agree we make mistakes and deserve a second chance. But he didn't take this avenue. He lied. Lied when he thought he could get away with it.

So, knowing this, how can anyone support him, what more can he say that would change anything now?

Idolatry: Part 2

Two things made me think to add this addition to the subject matter. First, at work, an avid AZ fan had gone to the Super Bowl. His explanation of how he felt when his team lost mirrors this line from Jack Lemmon in one of his movies, "I want to be in love with something."

The AZ fan lived a serious part of his life through his football team. The character Jack Lemmon played wanted the exact same thing--something; a pet, a team, a person, a thing to live a serious part of his life through. It's the same thing you see on American Idol for those who do not make it--they feel their lives are over.

I wonder to what degree this is a natural part of our life. After all, we've all experienced the ups or downs (the pulling of our heart strings, as it were) when something we like fails or succeeds. Or is this filling a gap in our modern world?

Ernest Becker, in his book, Denial of Death, reviews this exact subject matter. He covers art, passion for another person, religion all as ways of handling the fact that we know we are going to die and that we don't want to think about it. We want to deny our mortality. An interesting question here is, how does this tie into Julian Jaynes' theory of the origin of consciousness? Did we "know" we were going to die before consciousness "came about"?

I'm not going too deep here, the books are out there for further exploration if one chooses. So, let's tie this all back to the original point. I believe that a fully mature, mentally healthy adult realizes and lives his life knowing life comes from within, not from without (I am not, unfortunately, one of these individuals, nor do I know very many--perhaps one or two in my lifetime). While I may enjoy watching my team win, the win shouldn't feed something missing in my life, after all, I, me didn't DO anything. I achieved nothing. It was an outside entity that achieved that win. Conversely, I shouldn't feel bad inside that my team lost because I didnt' lose anything.

The same is true of "wanting to love something"--we should love ourselves (not narcissism here). We shouldn't need something or someone to fill us up.

As for love, Erich Fromm's book is a good source for those interested in exploring further. Here's a great quote from from that is appropriate:

There is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives to his life by the unfolding of his powers.

Super Bowl 2 Cents

The Arizona Cardinals played the first half like 14 yr old boys on a first date. The second half, they played like they received their first kiss...but at the end, they just failed to score.

Someone Once Told Me...

The world is full of assholes, it's unequivocal. About one in three people is an asshole. Now that being said, you really have to stop and think. When we're born we're not given a manual on how to “be”. We don't know how to go through this thing called life. The thing about humans is we know we're gonna die; don't know when or how but we know that life will come to an end, so we're all just trying to figure out how to get through life. So, the next time your talking with three people, one of whom is an asshole, and you've probably already decide which one, ask yourself this: Is he an asshole due to genetic reasons, which is completely possible, or is it just that this is the only way he knows how to get through life? And do you really know how to get through it any better than anyone else? No, you say, but at least I'm not an asshole. But consider this, each of those three people you're talking to is also talking to three people and each has decided which is the asshole, so chances are good at least one of those three people you're talking to thinks you're an asshole.

Why We're Here or...Idolatry

Was reading an interview with prog-rock musician Neal Morse and he said something that made me stop a moment because I think he's come to the wrong conclusion for the wrong reasons.

He said,
"One is that God made us to worship. He created us to worship him but since we in large in part don’t worship him then we have to worship something, because we’re made to worship [laughing]. So we find people and stuff that we can see, and in a way it makes sense. You find somebody that you can see whether its a musician or a movie star. It can be good things that we idolize, or a pretty girl that sings well like Britney Spears...The problem is we were made for that and idolatry kills you know? It’s bad for the people that do it and it’s bad for the people that are idolized too. It’s just not how God made us so we suffer."

I don't think we were made to worship. I, for one, would not wish to have anything to do with a "god" who made me to worship him/her. That need is an inherent weakness and thus, "god" cannot be perfect as we are always told, at least in the Christian faith.

What I think is that people get caught up in all the mess Neal mentions because as a species Man is basically class oriented. We, like other simians, live in a hierarchy. From early on, Man's societies have always had a ruling class, be it religious, political or militaristic in nature. In our society, people want prestige and prominence, they want to feel special, above others...in one way or another...this explains why American Idol is such a huge hit.

We idolize what we want to be...thus, if we idolize a movie star it's because we want to be like that movie star and thus if we idolize a "god" it also is because we want to be like that "god".

Free Books at Feedbooks

Checkout this website, if you don't already know about it. It has free books for download, and covers all the e-platform electronic devices (i.e. Kindle, iPhone, other smartphones, etc..). But you can also download in PDF for those who don't use these devices and read it on your computer or print out.

What's great is covers all kinds of popular titles of oldies (books that have gone out of copyright like Jules Verne or Charles Dickens) as well as other books that newer authors have released to the public domain.

The really cool part is discovering authors/books you never knew existed....a good example is Elizabeth Nesbit (which you can find by checking out Authors or Subjects>Young Readers).

Or for those who have seen the movie ("The Curious Case of Benjamin Button") you can now read the Fitzgerald short story it was based on for free.

Definitely worth checking out for those who love to read.