HUMOR ON TV ISN'T AS FUNNY AS IT USED TO BE

There have been very funny men and women, sadly we have little record of them. Thnks to modern ways of storing film and images, YouTube has saved wonderful things for us. Recently Father Sarducci was replayed for me. Or you might try Sarducci on Vita Est Lavorum.

One of my favorites was Bill Cosby who chose subjects we all understood. His routine on drinking was well understood by anyone who had ever imbibed more than they could handle at least once in their life. (This includes everyone but Muslims, Seventh Day Adventists, Baptists, some Lutherans, and those in AA as well as Temperance Movement members and me.)

I'VE JUST BEEN TOO BUSY

Do you ever tire of hearing people give the excuse, "I just didn't have time." when you know that it is just not on their priority list because it never rises above goofing off, watching tv, resting, and any excuse will do if you will believe it!

Posted by blogger Balancenoosa was How to Set Priorities in Your Life. Read it, it is interestingly done. Translated, it is a restatement of 'eat your dinner before your dessert', or, tackle the least desired task first. Once the most distasteful task is out of the way, the suggestion is to tackle the hardest next. His third reference, Dr. Steven Covey, waws unknown to me. Since I don't have religious reading high on my personal priority list, I missed the third one. However, access to Google allowed me to look him up. Below are his suggestions.


My personal views for setting up priorities is quite different:

1. Take care of your body first…eat, bathe, exercise and dress, etc (You get older exponentially doing this as it now takes so long. You may eat less but there is more body to attend.)
2. Tackle the noxious tasks first. Take care of deadlines that will cost you money, failing to be met.
3. Reward yourself with something you like doing.
4. Return phone calls in order of interest, boring ones first
5. Reward yourself with something enjoyable to the eyes, ears, or tummy
6. Turn on the TV to make sure the news of the world does not let you miss anything. Relax, you can be sure it all news of concern will be beyond your control to fix..
7. Make sure that living things that might expire without attention (like plants or animals), are attended,
8. Check your living space and make a minimal amount of effort to keep it hygienically acceptable.
9. Practice blivet control (for those who have forgotten: a blivet is trying to put three pounds of manure in a two pound bag) by trying to maintain only a reasonable amount of clutter …(meaning you have to keep enough path clear to allow passage through every room, anticipating there may be an emergency need at some future point.)..
10. Reward your self with an activity or hobby you enjoy. (This should not exceed 95% of your day)
11. Repeat nightly ablutions
12. Go to bed peacefully in the knowledge that whatever didn’t get done will not go away and will be there for you tomorrow…and the day after that…and the day after that!

WHY CAN'T OTHERS THINK AND DO AS I DO?

When putting something in a plastic bag in the refrigerator, why do people not squeeze out all the extra air to slow down the growth of mold and rot that hastens amidst oxygen? When stacking a dishwasher, why don't people ever look to see where other dishes have been placed and put like with like, making it easier to unload? Why do people put forks with tines down and knife blades up?

These things are in the category of cooperation. cooperation: Function: noun Date: 14th century

1 : the action of cooperating : common effort 2 : association of persons for common benefit
One reason: Passive aggressiveness: The Wise Geek says: "The term passive-aggressive is used to describe someone who exhibits manipulative behavior within their personality. On the surface, the traits may appear as stubbornness or a polite unwillingness to agree with a situation." The end result is that the person is manipulating you to turn to their way of thinking or to avoid having to turn to yours.

The term passive-aggressive is thought to have originated during World War II. Soldiers were found to be shirking their duties, but in ways that were not openly disobedient. The army used the term passive-aggressive in a bulletin sent to soldiers regarding this behavior. Many soldiers saw this behavior as a simple response in order to keep from being killed during the war."

It is unlikely that someone has never behaved that way nor knows people who do. Another way to make someone's life difficult is to make their priorities the lowest of yours. The bumper sticker which reads: Commit Random Acts of Kindness would make us all live more happily in this painful world if people could just realize that everyone benefits when someone is made happier.

CHOICES

There are many interpretations to the concept of choice. One that is not mentioned in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is that choice often requires a decision to be made. decision: a determination after much consideration. Thus, I began to deliberate on the effects and reasons needed to consider when a choice is made. One must always remember that a decision/choice made should never be followed by the words, "I should have." 'Should have' may be used only in service of avoiding the same wrong choice in the future.

There are few un-ambivalent choices. There is usually a pro and a con to all. When I offer to do someone a favor, involving what I assume is merely a bit of my time, it never fails for that time to expand as soon as I agree. Murphy's law states, "Anything that can happen, will!" If you choose take someone to a doctor for a routine, 'brief appointment', you may quickly learn the doctor was bitten by a patient while examining her throat and is on his way for a tetanus or rabies shot. You are then told appointments are behind by an hour, and all the while you are seated in the only empty seat in the entire waiting room, next to a patient who is sneezing without a hanky, nose dripping, coughing all over the only magazine in the room you might have read. Even though you scheduled a brief trip, time flows into your committed time, on which your entire future depends on your being there on time.

Choice should be given as a course early in life. Wait a minute, it is!
Having, for years, fallen for the line, "This will only take a minute." I have come to know that these people are using a different clock...more like the one Christians use when they claim that the world was created in 8 days. I have chosen to divide my day up to things I have to do and things I'd like to do. Procrastination seems to straddle both. Then the war between the two factions starts. The only carrot that allows me to pay my bills on time (when I can find them) is that paying late fees and service charges equates to flushing my money down the toilet. I do not choose to do that.

Fixing someone's computer generally falls into a category of my choice gone wrong because anyone who would ask me must, by definition, know little about computers, what they are about, and how much time is involved in cleaning them out, updating stuff, and fixing minor problems. These are often the same people who insist they have brown thumbs and plants always die in their house. They somehow fail to understand that plants are living things that need to breathe, drink water, have enough space to live in, seek light as befitting their station in life, and occasionally get some food with the water. Why people insist on putting plants in direct sunlight whose natural habitat is on the floor of the rain forest, escapes me. More bad choices, also known as innocently uniformed. All people who choose to adopt plants should pass a horticultural competency test.

Choices come in two flavors: informed and uniformed. People who choose divorce as a first option to solving a problem seem to prefer the ' jump from the frying pan into the fire' method of problem solving. Those men who are in mid-life crisis and choose to marry a woman of childbearing years, start a new family, also fall in the poorly informed group since no man in that predicament would ever dare to tell another they had made a mistake. It is not a better experience the second time, especially when you overhear grandmothers wishing their husbands would push the little angel grandchildren like that one on a proud stroll.

So you see, we all make choices, some good and others not so good. It would be nice to think that those who chose to vote for Bush have now come to realize it was a bad choice. However, some do not even recognize a bad choice when they make a very obvious one. Apparently denial also makes one think they made a good choice when it was a bad choice. Those into projection make the bad choice YOUR bad choice, though you may not have had any part of it. Voting is a choice that more resembles gambling....but that is another long esssy.

THE AMPLE SUPPLY OF PRIDE AND PREJUDICE SEQUELS...NOT BY AUSTEN

Linda Berdoll's second book, Darcy and Elizabeth: nights and days at Pemberley, had fewer pages of detailed, erotic sessions than her first book, Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife. However, within the 429 pages, like the first one, no opportunity for danger and excitement was missed. The book is a good read but one can hardly describe it as written in the style of Austen, who saw a far kinder and more benign world than probably existed at the time. This novel contains murder, deceit, kidnapping, attempted rape, bankrupcsy, deaths, misunderstandings galore, and more coincidences than chance meetings in Nature between a dog and bitch in heat.

Berdoll's style of writing makes following the characters interesting in that she gives every subject a chapter of its own, a cameo no more than 1 to 3 pages long. It sometimes takes a moment for the reader to understand that events in several chapters are happening simultaneously rather than sequentially. The many characters require some intense concentration, especially when characters new to the life of Elizabeth and Darcy are introduced. Darcy and Elizabeth remain the same as do the members of their immediate families but the additional, extraneous roles of the new characters become complicated. The interpretation offered deviates somewhat from the original book, also, in terms of behaviors during the original novel which were never included.

Interestingly, the price of the sequel books seems to get by their popularity. That seems odd because it is quite separate from readability, cohesiveness, development of characters, and probably other criteria of which I too little notice. Nevertheless, if you liked Austen's Pride and Prejudice and are not too rigid to wade through someone's imaginative sequel, I highly recommend this one as well as the 17 other sequels to it I have now read.

QUESTIONS NOT ANSWERED

Today I heard a Republican pundit say that unemployment is at a low at 5.5%. Many questions immediately came to mind. How are the statistics arrived at since the government takes years to properly process the national census? As I examine that question I am at loss to find the refinement that would point out that payrolls make a distinction whether someone is employed at the rate previously earned or has just taken a subsistence job.

The employment situation of veterans seems to be up to date only as of 2007. Are the disabled counted out of the employment pool because they are no longer eligible for jobs? What makes up the employment pool current in the census statistics since they can't even count the number of illegal aliens here. Are they counting them?

A statistic I would like to have is how many people are employed by national and local governments. One-third of employed veterans with a service-connected disability worked in the public sector; 16 percent were employed by the federal government. We are told: THE EMPLOYMENT SITUATION: JUNE 2008 Nonfarm payroll employment continued to trend down in June (-62,000), while the unemployment rate held at 5.5 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Employment continued to fall in construction, manufacturing, and employment services, while health care and mining added jobs. Average hourly earnings rose by 6 cents, or 0.3 percent, over the month. Another question is how many people have gone into dangerous jobs like mining because it was the only job they could get that would cover their bills, regardless of what it may do to their life and health?

The Middle East (and probably most of the rest of the world) has given up any major negotitation with the United States until George Bush is out of office. Our infrastructure is on hold, our breath is on hold, waiting to find out our fate in November.

When Laurence Peters wrote the Peter Principle, it read that people got promoted to their level of incompetence. It does not mention that, with the help of Rove and Cheney, one could keep getting promoted to greater and greater levels of incompetency! Nor was the price of that incompetency measured for the cost to human life and suffering. George Bush will retire to Crawford, Texas to live a protected, wealthy life while the rest of us will try to survive picking up the pieces of the devastation he leaves behind and asking questions that will be unanswered forever.

SHOWING SENSITIVITY

In all that I have read about China, its leaders have never struck me with awe about their sensitivities to the feelings of others. However, China has put a ban on the 112 restaurants servicing the Olympics. Dog meat, known as 'fragrant meat' is a preference by many for medicinal purposes.

The Associated Press prints: BEIJING - Canine cuisine is being sent to the doghouse during next month’s Beijing Olympic Games.


The Asian Animal Protection Network writes that St. Bernards are a particular favorite. One plant slaughters 100,000 dogs for food meat a year. Dogs are being bred to produce meat more palatable for human consumption. How long will it be before PETA upsets those facilities?