The Myth of Santa

Aidan with Santa

“You’re not going to light a fire on Christmas Eve are you?”

Aidan, our oldest, asked with genuine trepidation as we corralled him into going to bed early. It was 2007 when he was four years old. He was a kindergartener betrayed only by his height since his clear articulation made many people think he was much older. I explained that a man who had the superpower to get through such a small flue could surely manage a little fire in the hearth. I imagined finding Santa, overcome by smoke, smoldering at the base of our Christmas tree. Performing life saving CPR on the Fat Man would guarantee top billing on The Nice List. My wife, Christine, continued the charade,

“Santa will still come even if there is a fire because some kids don’t have fireplaces, but Santa still leaves presents for them.”

This reassured Aidan who went off to bed, certain he was on the proper list, especially since he left milk and cookies. Like most fabricated stories additional embellishment is necessary to keep the ruse going. Some parents take the more honest approach by telling their children the truth about Santa. Hollywood couple, Dax Shepard and Kristen Bell, told their two daughters, age five and three, that Santa “is just a fun thing we pretend while it’s Christmas.” Like many parents they prefer not to lie to their children.


William with the Christmas Box

When it comes to holiday traditions, Christine and I are consummate storytellers. We do The Easter Bunny and Santa Claus. We even made up our own falsehoods to extend the already elaborate bullshit associated with Christmas. Some time ago a friend of mine, who is a particularly skilled woodworker, made several Christmas boxes which he gave as gifts. The box contains twenty-four decorated drawers which Santa fills each night right up to Christmas as if he doesn’t have enough to do already. For school, Willy, our youngest wrote up the morning ritual of discovering the contents of the box as one of our family traditions. He’s in fourth grade and still believes mostly because his school is shutdown and the subsequent isolation prevents alternative points of view from entering our bubble. We are approaching the edge of skepticism as he poses logistical questions like,

“Does Santa carry everything on his sleigh or does he go back and forth to the North Pole to resupply?”

I usually rely on Special Relativity to answer these questions, drawing on my formal education in engineering to further the misinformation. I've explained that Santa travels very near the speed of light so time slows down for him and lengths are foreshortened, allowing more room for the many presents hauled on his sleigh.

Each year William watches The Polar Express which combines his youthful excitement for Christmas with his love of trains. He cherishes a silver bell that he received when we rode a local steam engine at a holiday event, mimicking the movie which likely legally borders on copyright infringement. Each year before hanging his bell on the tree, William shakes it vigorously while asking,

“Dad, can you hear this bell?”

I always tell him that I can’t. He has me hold the bell and recite,

“I believe! I believe! I believe!”

Then I tell him that I can hear the sweet sound, emanating from the silver ornament. The truth is I never believed. When I was three years old, my oldest sister took it upon herself to come clean with me about Santa Claus. She explained,

“Santa is not real, but you get presents anyway.”

She crushed The Easter Bunny as well along with The Tooth Fairy. I never believed in any children’s fables. Later in life she tried to introduce me to other things like cigarettes, alcohol and pot. Throughout the 70's when she was high, she was fond of an occasional smack down that surpassed normal sibling rivalry. My distain for her groovy, hippy lifestyle kept me off drugs, and puberty put an end to most of the abuse. The fact is the common horrible influences in life often originate from within one's own family. In it all, I was luckier that most having another sister, Jeannine, closer to my age. Any sense of family I recall from my childhood always involved her.

When Christine and I finally told Aidan the truth about Santa, he was coming off two years of homeschooling and entering the public school system in our town. His limited exposure to other kids allowed us to continue the tale of Christmas longer than we thought was wise. Now as he was entering middle school, we surmised his classmates would eat him alive if he expressed a belief in Santa. When we finally revealed the truth, Aidan exclaimed,

“Why did you have to do that? Let me be a kid already!”

Turns out Aidan knew for quite some time and was just going along with the notion of Santa because it was his way of hanging onto a time in his life that he cherished. Childhood is all so very fleeting. Aidan wanted to believe in Santa even in the face of middle school torment. I thought that it it was very astute of him to appreciate something in the moment instead of much later when it's gone.

Today, my son is taller than me, has a deep voice and sharp mind. He’s an honor roll student and accomplished musician who writes musical arrangements as easily as algorithms in Java. He’s interested in artificial intelligence and cyber security. He sounds Taps on his bugle at military funerals as a Petty Officer in the Naval SeaCadets. Aidan is very busy now with his studies and the college application process. He doesn't decorate the Christmas tree anymore preferring to spend his free time blasting away bad guys with his horde of online friends. I guess that was a time I used to cherish.

The other day William retrieved his silver bell, and as he shook it in his hand he asked Aidan if he could hear the sound. Aidan bent down and embraced his little brother. His eyes were fixed off in the distance as if he was watching a passenger train pull away, then he answered,

“No William. I can’t.”

I couldn’t help but think that he was saying his final farewell to childhood. William told him to recite the declaration that he believed three times while holding the bell. Aidan complied. Upon the final assertion, Aidan shook the bell then looked to William with astonishment. Willy smiled.

Eventually when William is older all of us will no longer hear the sound of the bell. The myth of Santa will fade from our home, debunked by adult sensibilities and logic, and as I often suspected, the truth does not always set you free.

Editor's Note: Originally posted on December 25, 2018.

Thanksgiving Dysfunctia

When I was a kid, Thanksgiving at my house was an opportunity for me to mess with my sister's boyfriends. Once at the holiday meal, I launched into a seemingly meaningful story explaining to the guy a family tradition in which my mother would put an almond or something in the indian pudding. He listened thoughtfully as I explained that whoever drew the special something in the pudding would win a prize, then I gave a rundown of who won over the past ten years after which I said,

"This year my mother put in the pudding a toenail."

My sister would roar with laughter. My mother was suitably disgusted. My father usually wasn't paying much attention. He had the paper folded on the table so that a crossword puzzle or the word jumble was visible.

My mother always cooked a wonderful Thanksgiving meal, except as she got older she started burning the turkey because "undercooked turkey will give you worms." My wife, Christine, loves to cook. She tried to jump in and help out, but my mother always regarded everyone as incompetent. After five years Christine hadn't made it past preparing a few minor vegetables as the main course was deemed out of her range of cooking ability. So my wife would whip out the corn and beat potatoes into a mash while my mother roasted the turkey into a tiny, dried, dense ball of chalk.

My mother had a lot of good traits. She was an accomplished artist and could be very helpful when you needed to know how to do something like remove a stain from a porcelain sink or sew a complicated stitch. I always found my mother to be a little like the female lead in a Rogers and Hammerstein musical, one part dingbat, two parts well meaning. She had friends who were just like her. They all mostly stayed at home, inside. Women from the 1950's kept their worlds well organized. They never wore jeans, preferring polyester pantsuits. They had "house coats." They talked incessantly, rarely absorbing anything anyone said. In my youth I learned not to bother to tell my mother what was going on in my life. I once confided in her about something that was troubling me when she tilted her head back to look through her bifocals. I knew she wasn't paying any attention to my lamentations, but I continued with my story anyway. When I finished, she said,

"How long have you had that blackhead on your nose?'

I just explained how I was struggling with a stressful situation, and my mother's sage advice involved when to pop a zit. What do you expect from a generation who slept in separate beds by age fifty?

For my entire life, I've hated lima beans. Some people have tried to convince me that they were just not prepared correctly, but it's not that. I hate them. Every Thanksgiving for decades my mother made lima beans, and when she noticed I didn't have any on my plate she inevitably commanded,

 "Have some lima beans."

"I don't like them," I answered.

She asked incredulously as if this was new information,

"You don't like lima beans?"

"No, I don't. Going on forty years now."

Lima beans weren't the only vegetable that was an issue. Corn caused a lot of problems too. I like corn, but only so much. On Thanksgiving we loaded up our plates, then we all pretended like we were religious by reciting some immutable, incantation of a prayer, approved by the Second Vatican Council. I learned not to eat all my corn on my plate, but instead to leave a few kernels behind. My father picked up the newspaper looking for a four letter word that began with "d" for "opposite of Jane."

"You want corn?" my mother asked.

"I had some," I answered.

My father looked up, grabbed his pencil and said, "That's easy. Dick."

Then the heat came on and the baseboard hot water radiators began to expand. My mother issued,

"We need to get the water out of those pipes."

"It's a baseboard hot water system. It's supposed to have water in it," I explained.

"There has never been water in those pipes," she insisted.

I had a four year college degree in mechanical engineering and a masters in the same that I earned all with high honors, but somehow my mother never thought I knew what I was talking about when it came to a forced hot water system. It probably didn't matter much had I explained that if air was in those diminutive copper pipes, there wouldn't be enough mass to transfer sufficient energy to heat the house. Then my mother asked,

"Aren't you gonna have some corn?"

"I had corn, and I ate it," I answered.

"The sink in the kitchen is leaking," she then announced.

Every Thanksgiving since 1994 I had to sit through the Kitchen Sink Affair which happened in the summer of that year. On a warm day in July my mother had lifted the handle to the kitchen faucet to turn on the water. It broke off in her hand. Water shot to the ceiling. I dove under the cabinet for the shutoff value. It was behind a can of Easy-Off and a slew of products to remove pet odors. My mother was in a complete disarray. She sat in a rocking chair with the faucet handle still in hand and shouted profanity at the people who built her house in 1951.

Earlier that year she had called her plumber, Tony, to fix a drip in her kitchen sink. Tony, being the master plumber from the old country, replaced the stem in her sink with one that didn't fit correctly. You had to push up on the handle unusually hard to get it to work. Eventually the mechanism broke which led to the Fountain of Trevi in my mother's kitchen.

After inspecting the faucet I said, "This can't be the right stem."

"Tony knows what he's doing!" my mother exclaimed.

Christine is also a mechanical engineer with a masters specializing in thermodynamics. She looked the faucet over as well. Being a more diplomatic problem solver, she focused less on who did what and more on the task at hand.

"Let's go to Home Depot and get a whole new faucet," Christine declared.

She's smart like that. This wasn't a court of law in which blame was to be assigned. She just wanted to fix the faucet. So off we went. When we jumped into the car, Christine said,

"Don't say it."

We purchased a chrome faucet and hoses and installed it in under an hour. It worked beautifully. Shortly afterwards my mother had the faucet inspected by Tony the Plumber, and every Thanksgiving thereafter the story surfaced over dinner. Often she started with,

"Remember that faucet you installed?"

How could I forget the outpouring of gratitude?

"Well, I had Tony look at it, and he said that you installed the wrong stem."

"I installed the whole faucet. The stem was the one that came with it."

"No, Tony had to installed the right one," she insisted.

"And it leaks now right?"

"That's because you don't know what you're doing. Just like the baseboard."

"It didn't leak after we put it in," I professed.

"If you had put the right one in the first place, it would've never leaked!"

My father stirred as I mused that he was looking for a seven letter word that begins with "a" for "unpleasant person." My mother had no need for logic. She just pushed through life espousing her baseless assertions as facts. She was a free thinker in that she didn't let not knowing what she was talking about stop her from expressing her opinions. She never let faith in good intentions lead her astray as she recalled the sordid side of any story. She looked to my plate.

"Have some corn."

"I've had some corn. I don't want anymore. If I did, I would just get some more corn," I said in an overtly condescending tone.

I got up to use the bathroom before my head boiled off like the turkey. When I returned, my mother asked,

"Did you jiggle the handle?"

"What handle?"

"The toilet!" she shouted, "You need to jiggle the handle or the toilet will keep running. I thought you were an engineer?"

"We should replace the valve," Christine chimed.

"Home Depot is closed on Thanksgiving," I gladly offered.

"Tony will to do it. He knows what he's doing," my mother said.

Sure he does. Tony installed a used stem in my mother's kitchen sink which eventually broke, then he pulled out the guts to the faucet I installed and replaced it with another old stem that he just yanked out of someone else's house. I'm sure he was waiting for another call from my mother to fix her kitchen sink yet again. The wind rattled the old single pane storm windows.

"I need to get NewPro windows for the whole house."

My mother had one window replaced in the family room with a NewPro window. She called them incessantly about every little issue including a spot on the outside. Their lifetime warrantee came to an end shortly after a year.

"They're guaranteed for life, you know," she said.

"Or a year, which ever comes first," I added.

My mother looked about the table then asked, "You want some corn?"

As I stirred, I caught a glimpse of Christine communicating the nonverbal message,

"Don't say it."

I looked to my mother then my father who I assumed just got a seven letter word that began with "f" and ended with "g" which I wanted to use to describe the corn. Christine reached over and scooped a small pile of corn onto my plate. My father mumbled as he peered at the paper in the low light,

"Five letters, ends in 's' for 'fermented mare's milk.'"

"Kumis," Christine offered.

"That fits," my father exclaimed as he eagerly scrawled the word down.

When dessert was served, I drew the almond from the indian pudding. I buried it in the remains of my corn. We left shortly afterwards. Everyone hugged like we were a close family, but the reality was we were as close as we were religious. On the drive home I asked Christine,

"Why did you put that corn on my plate?"

"Because I'm sure it tasted better than your tongue," she answered.

More recently at our house we started a tradition on Thanksgiving to go around the dinner table and say what we are thankful for. Often the answers from younger family and friends involve gratitude for the support they received from their parents. I usually say something about my wife and our two boys then fan out from there to relatives and friends. Often I'm thinking of how lucky I am to be part of such a loving family given my experiences in my youth. People exposed to terrible things like drugs, physical abuse or racism often perpetuate the worst aspects of their upbringing. On Thanksgiving I'm thankful for not what I experienced but for what I avoided.

Come to think of it, I'm thankful of that everyday.

Editor's Note: Originally posted on November 23, 2016.

Ode to the Otoscope

 

The otoscope was invented in 1363 by Guy de Chauliac, a French physician and barber. Today, medical professionals embrace this optical tool used to look into patient's orifices, most notably the ear. The secrets of the otoscope are held firmly by medical practitioners who make their bread and butter off this finely tuned instrument. As part of the Hippocratic Oath, doctors all over the world recite this pledge popularized in the movie Full Metal Jacket.

This is my otoscope.

There are many like it, but this one is mine.

My otoscope is my best friend.

It is my life.

Without me, my otoscope is useless.

Without my otoscope I am useless.

My friend Roger, a Yale educated emergency room physician, travels on family vacations with many medical instruments, the tools of his trade. Roger is the guy who is a legitimate keeper of the otoscope. He says it comes in handy. Every time he’s on an airplane, the captain invariably announces,

“Is there a doctor onboard who has one of those otoscope things?”

Roger is the guy you want in the ER should you wipe out on the highway or choke on a chicken bone since his expertise and skill are the only things that will get you on a bus ride home in lieu of brunch with Jesus. We travelled with Roger and his family many times. Once on vacation my ear was killing me. Roger pulled out his otoscope then told me I had an “effusion.” When I got back home, I went to my doctor and told him, 

“I have a contusion.”

“In your ear?”

“No, I mean an emulsion.”

“You mean an effusion?”

“Yeah, that.”

Anyway my wife, Christine, was so impressed she thought,

“I need to get me one of those otoscope things.”

And so she did.

A few months ago she purchased an otoscope from Amazon to assist with her mom diagnoses. Christine is a very do it yourself, get it done alpha type. Like the professor on Gilligan’s Island, she subscribes to the notion that if you want something done right, then do it yourself. She said,

“In twenty years everyone will have an otoscope thing.”

She might be onto something. The otoscope just might become the tweezers of tomorrow. Christine’s instrument came with a little chart complete with pictures, indicating a particular ear malady, perforation, infection, fluid, insect etc. She wasn’t sure what any of the structures were that she was looking at in the pictures or her otoscope, but she knew that if the blob to the lower left was pink and swollen, then your ear was infected. Armed with her finely tuned optical instrument, Christine embarked upon the rest of life diagnosing ear infections sans the time, money and bother all associated with an actual medical degree. Give a mom an otoscope, and she'll see the world as ears.

Against my advice our youngest, Willy, was probed first. Christine arrived at the conclusion that he had an ear infection in his left ear. After hauling Willy to the pediatrician, waiting an hour surrounded by coughing, puking kids, and parting with a $30 copay, she finally got Willy in to see his doctor. On the way home she called me to say,

“Ear infection just like I said.”

It’s a good thing she can’t write prescriptions. The other day, Willy wiped out on his bicycle. Christine was bandaging up his scrapes as I passed by the bathroom. When she finished patching him up, she whipped out her otoscope and checked his ears.

“What do you expect to find in there, the handlebars?”

“Just being thorough,” she explained.

She stuck the scope in my ear once and pulled so hard on my earlobe, I was sure that the light would emerge from the other side of my head. As she looked through the otoscope, she said,

"Ah, huh."

"What?"

"Looks like you got..."

"Scurvy?"

"No."

"A blown eardrum?"

"No."

"An above the knee effusion?"

Then it came in all its glory. The diagnosis that relays the important piece of information that may very well save my life. This is likely what Christine admires most about the otoscope, being in the know.

"Ear infection," she confidently decreed.

"Really? You don't even have to check the chart that came with that thing?"

"I know an ear infection when I see one.”

It didn't matter that I was not in secondary school nor prone to sticking things in my ears. Even though I was not surrounded by a cadre of nose picking tactile friends, Christine’s expert medical opinion was that I had an ear infection. She was so sure of herself. That’s how it happens. Doctor’s learn something in medical school and then confidently espouse that advice as fact for the rest of their life. They hate it when mere mortals like us read something on the internet that we offer during an exam.

“You know I read on WebMD that memory loss is associated with a turmeric deficiency.”

Truth is I hate that thing. Having someone who didn't take gross anatomy in college diagnose my maladies doesn't sit well with me. A tool is only as good as its user. Sure, Christine was right 100% of the time with her ear infection diagnoses even though she doesn’t have a medical degree and never stayed in a Holiday Inn Express.

In the end, she's just pre-screening our kids to help decide if we should schlep them in and part with the ever increasing copay. That's what the copay is for, you know, to dissuade you from using your health insurance. Insurance companies should, as a matter of policy, issue otoscopes as a means of avoiding the use of healthcare.

I suppose the otoscope thing can stay, but I'm putting my foot down if she wants a colonoscope.

Editor’s Note: Originally posted on November 7, 2017.

Ok Spartacus

After Biden declared victory on Saturday night, I received my first text message from a liberal friend. Others soon followed. Mind you, these are the folks who said that under no circumstances were we to talk about politics. I obliged even though they occasionally expressed oblique remarks which any reasonable person would deem political nowadays. For example, one friend said,

"How can anyone deny science?"

It doesn't matter that my progressive buddies mostly avoided science in college, they are all willing to go to their rooms and wait for the scientists to tell them when it's safe to come out. If I could get a word in, I would explain that science involves the meaningful exchange of ideas, not a decree of veracity based on a degree of concurrence.

Most concepts which were once widely acceptance by the scientific community turned out to be altogether wrong. Just look at germ theory. In the past most medical experts believed disease spread by miasma, noxious foul air consisting of rotting organic matter. One got cholera or the Black Death from breathing "bad air." The idea was around since ancient times and persisted through to the late 19th century. It was so widespread that it was believed inhaling the odors of food caused obesity. Most Western cultures regarded "night air" as dangerous. Throughout the 1800's, the medical braintrust were split on the cause and spread of disease. Half believed that physical contact or contagion was necessary while the other half subscribed to miasma theory.

My liberal friends are certain that if we all strapped on masks and maintained six feet separation millions of lives would be spared because that's what scientist say. Biden said that he will follow the science, but a leader must assess input from scientists, economists, industry leaders and experts from academia and then make an informed decision. Some scientists ring the alarm bells to ensure funding as they know federal money is more likely granted to quell a pending catastrophe than it is to simply investigate a merely interesting phenomena.

When my progressive friends announced that we were not to discuss politics what they really meant was that I was not to discuss politics. It doesn't matter that I am a registered Democrat who voted for Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama. They can't imagine why I just don't hate Donald Trump like they do. I called foul on some of the things done to the President before he even took office. I actually read the Steele dossier which FBI Directory James Comey brought to Trump on his first day in the Oval Office. When I scrutinized the largely unverifiable document, it sounded like barroom bullshit to me. Recently we learned though handwritten notes of former CIA Director John Brennan that the whole Russian collusion narrative was cooked up by Hillary Clinton to deflect attention from her email server debacle.

In 2016, everyone thought Hillary was going to win with news outlets declaring a landslide and polls reporting favorable numbers. Comey must have figured he was ingratiating himself with the incoming president by investigating the Trump campaign. He probably soiled his Hanes when Trump won in 2016. The media went into overdrive pushing Russian interference as the main reason Hillary lost. Putin's misinformation campaign orchestrated on social media was nothing compared to voter's distain for Clinton. She repeatedly expressed that the election was stolen and that Trump was an "illegitimate president" because she simply can't accept the fact that she lost on her own demerits.

People in this country form opinions based on very little information. They don't research issues in depth by scouring multiple sources to separate fact from fiction. This is why social media is so good at spreading conspiracy theories. Even so, I am against censorship by Twitter and Facebook. I'll assess the veracity of the information myself. I don't need someone to do it for me. And in doing so and occasionally writing about it, I have drew the wrath of progressive woke crusaders who wield the sharpest weapon in their quivers, that is, the power to cancel.

At the moment more than half the ads for my blog for which I pay Google to run have been taken down for "Destination not working." Since I use Blogger, Google's blogging software, there is no legitimate reason as to why my posts shouldn't load on all platforms. One of my ads was rejected because the mobile version font was set too small even thought I use all the default settings in Blogger for all of my posts. I tried to get help from Google Support, but they just appealed the decision and sent it back into the policy management system which arrived at the same conclusions.

Sadly, all the ads for the political pieces I wrote were rejected on October 27 just before the election on the grounds that they contained "inappropriate content" under the "Sensitive events policy." The policy states that Google "will restrict content which references the candidates, the election, or its outcome." A year ago I wrote a comic piece entitled, "Trump's Greatest Weakness," in which I railed on OJ Simpson, David Hasselhoff, Neil Diamond and Donald Trump. The article was widely read until Google determined that it contained inappropriate material given the upcoming election.

I set out to write this blog to hone my skills as a humorist. Initially, I posted twice a week for a year, then settled on every Tuesday. I vowed not to accept ads in the text as I hate reading articles that require one to repeatedly dismiss popups for a George Foreman grill. When I started, I wrote mostly whatever I found to be funny, current events, celebrity news, and occasionally medical procedures my doctor insisted I undergo. I often wrote about my wife and our two sons. I have been advised to pull or sanitized some of my funniest posts as our culture collectively becomes more easily offended.

It's hard to be a humorist while always contending with righteous indignation. That's why a lot of professional comedians like Jerry Seinfeld refuse to perform on college campuses. If Michelangelo was worried about being cancelled, all the figures on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel would be wearing clothes. Likewise while all the anti-bullying efforts have made the younger generations much nicer people, it does tend to dull the wit. For example, if Stanley Kubrick's iconic 1960 film was rewritten today the line,

"I am Spartacus!"

would be replaced with,

"Ok boomer."

My friends texted me in regards to the election to see if the declaration of Biden's impending victory somehow troubled me in some way. A few refer to me as a Trump apologist as Ben Stein was to Nixon, but like Alan Dershowitz, I believe in the Constitution and the rule of law. Too bad the distinguished Harvard law professor was dispatched by an accusation of sordid behavior associated with Jeffrey Epstien. As I believed before, I still believe now. We must rally in support of whoever is elected even if we don't agree with all their policies. And it doesn't matter if they use awkward words or exhibit absurd mannerisms anymore than it is a concern as to the color of their skin.

Even if orange.

Same Candidate, Different Election Day

Back in 2016, I wrote about the candidates that we were to select from in the upcoming election. I was especially interested in the third party nominees because I wasn't so sure about who the Republican and Democrat parties were pushing. Of course Donald Trump and Mike Pence beat out Hillary Clinton and some white guy she picked for a running mate. This past summer, I penned a guide to the 25 Democrat candidates vying for the White House. As all the people of color and women fell by the wayside, the last two standing were too old white guys. In the fall Bernie Sanders was almost fitted for a pine box as he was introduced to the words "myocardial infraction." Doctors slapped two stents into his clogged coronary artery, propped him up, then shoved him back into the fight. All Bernie's socialists ideas proved too radical for voters who settled on Joe Biden because he was widely regarded as an experienced centrist.

No one was more surprised than Biden when they told him that he had won. The first thing he said was,

"I call the Lincoln bedroom!"

His campaign advisers had to explain to him that he had just won his parties nomination, not the presidency and that the next step was to select a running mate who had to be a woke women. Later they further qualified the choice to a Black woke women which really pissed off Elizabeth Warren. She used to be a person of color until the results of her DNA test refuted her mammaw's family lore that although her grandfather had high cheekbones "like all of the Indians do," Warren is, in fact, not Native American.

The short list included California Representative Karen Bass, former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, Florida Representative Val Demmings and Senator Kamala Harris. All except Rice played significant roles in the House impeachment of Trump which made them look like they could take on the President. Rice had a role in the Russian collusion shit storm, the origins of which are being investigated by United States Attorney John Durham. Durham is known to be fair, impartial and unbiased, but I'm sure the mainstream media will describe him as "one of Trump's hired thugs" if his investigation implicates the Obama Administration for approving a plan to vilify Trump "by stirring up a scandal claiming interference by Russian security service" in attempts to deflect attention away from Hillary's private email debacle. 

Clinton repeatedly referred to Trump as an “illegitimate president” who colluded with the Russians to steal the election. She never exactly said what the Russians did except some vague remarks about false ads on social media. The Russians can’t make a car in which you can roll up the window, and we’re supposed to believe they used Facebook to change the outcome of the election? Now it’s Trump’s turn to claim the election was stolen and fraudulent.

Kamala Harris seemed like she'd be on the bottom of that short list since apart from backing Tara Reid's sexual assault allegation, she called out Biden during the debates for his stance on busing. Back in the 70's, Biden was vocally against the policy. Even though Harris recalled the story that she was bused to school as a little girl, desegregating schools by shuffling kids to other counties was very unpopular in Black communities. Many parents felt sending kids outside of their neighborhood left them feeling disconnected. In 1977, the Supreme Court determined that busing across district lines was unconstitutional.

In 2010, a little known Kamala Harris was running for District Attorney in California against three-term incumbent Steve Cooley. Ballot harvesting was not widely employed back then, but rumors circulated that Harris's team conducted mail ballot operations. The morning after the election, Cooley had won by a razor thin margin of less than a percentage point. Harris refused to concede. In the following weeks mail-in ballots were counted and contested in counties that were favorable to Harris. The final tally had Harris in the lead by 0.8% giving her the victory.

This election will see 80 million mail-in votes cast with ballot harvesting efforts underway in full force. Hillary Clinton publicly advised Biden "not to concede under any circumstance." She urged teams of supporters to work the polls and declared that eventually Biden will win. Unless the results are a landslide, the outcome will likely be contested for weeks, maybe months. Perhaps Kamala Harris was picked for her expertise and experience with data mining ballots for votes.

Harris certainly was not selected for her stellar knowledge of American history. During the vice presidential debates, she recalled a story that Abe Lincoln opted not to fill a seat on the Supreme Court prior to the election. Quoting Lincoln, Harris said,

"The American people deserve to make the decision about who will be the next president of the United States, and then that person will be able to select who will serve on the highest court of the land.”

Harris's history lesson was a fitting cautionary tale for the rushed appointment of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, just eight days before the election. The only problem with this anecdote is that it's completely false. Lincoln couldn't have filled the vacancy on the court prior to the election since Congress was in recess until December. I’m surprised that Kamala didn’t mention all the other things Honest Abe did along with waiting until after the election to submit his nominee. Lincoln also wanted to get rid of the filibuster, pack the court, and spring for college and healthcare for people who walked into the country from Guatemala. He was an advocate for limiting the clip size in automatic weapons as well as spoke out about Global Warming in the Gettysburg Address which he delivered while wearing a mask.

As the election neared, the polls consistently showed Biden leading Trump, sometimes by double digits, even though Biden sometimes says incoherent things reminiscent of Ralphie's father wrestling with the furnace in A Christmas Story. The news media by and large refuses to pose any real questions to Biden even though it is unlikely that as the Leader of the Free World the foreign press and other heads of state will treat him so tenderly.

The other day Biden was buying ice cream at a local stand. Instead of quizzing the former vice president on the email which refers to the "big guy" receiving $10 million from a Chinese investment firm, a reporter asked him,

"Mr. Biden! What flavor did you get?"

Biden briefly studied his cup before he summoned,

"We got one vanilla, one chocolate. I wanted to get what we call a black and white."

A this point one of Biden's handlers can be heard saying,

"Oh, please no."

Biden continued,

"We're gonna move it, you know split it."

Thank God he didn't say that he puts the chocolate on the bottom and the vanilla on the top because that’s the way they always did it in Scranton.

I know Trump says far worse things, and his tweets make even his ardent supporters cringe with anticipation, but at least he's intelligible. Michael Moore gets it better than all of those who can't seem to get past the President’s orange hue. Sure, when Trump dances to the Village People’s YMCA, he looks like he’s flossing his head, but that doesn’t make him a white supremacist. Moore states that "Biden is pretty much doing what Hillary did" while referring to Trump as "smarter than all of us." The Democrats expect a different outcome after moving further left of the lessons learned in 2016 when people didn’t actually vote for Trump; they voted against Hillary.

How will history recall these events? It takes time but eventually an investigative journalist will unearth the truth. That’s how we know that the Civil War was really fought over women's reproductive rights.

Editor’s Note: People did not vote for Biden either; they voted against Trump. As in 2016, hate won out.

A Sure Thing

Throughout the 90's I was working at a defense contractor that made submarines. One of the employees at the company invested with a guy named Sam DelPresto. Sam worked for the now defunct New York City based brokerage firm L.C. Wegard & Co. Inc.

DelPresto must have convinced someone at my company to part with an employee directory because he was cold calling everyone with a job title that sounded like they had some coin. Sam eventually called me. He was full of optimism about all sorts of investments like business machines in Canada and earth moving equipment in Alaska. After a brief pitch, Sam asked exuberantly,

"So how much money do you think you would like to invest to risk a relationship?"

Large Impressive Buildings

Sam mentioned two things I didn't like to hear in the same sentence, my money and risk. I asked him to call later. He offered to send me a prospectus on L.C. Wegard. He tried to get my home phone number, but I declined. When the mail from Sam arrived, I looked through the glossy folder containing a seemingly inordinate amount of pictures of large impressive buildings and espousing the many great investment opportunities that were just waiting for me to risk a relationship. There were also a lot of intricate charts with heavy black lines, rising spikily from left to right. Sam eventually called back.

"Sam, my boss is at my desk right now. I can't talk," I explained.

"Bob, I have something you would have to move on right away."

Investment Graphic

"Sam, my boss is standing right over me."

"I have a warehouse full of office machines in Canada!"

"I really can’t talk right now."


"And the deal is we can't lose on this one because companies can't go bankrupt in Canada!" Sam explained with a confident laugh.

"That's fascinating, but my boss is right here."

"This is a sure thing we're offering only to a select few. You'll have to move on this right away Bob."

My boss left to chat with someone else. Sam's urgency as well as his complete disregard of what I was saying really put me off so I followed up with,

"Sam, you're like an old woman. You don't listen, and you keep talking."

There was a long pause as Sam absorbed my observation that he was similar to a feminine senior citizen. This may seem misogynistically ageist, but back then there wasn't any social media platforms to express anonymous rudeness so we were openly rude to each other. I was thinking more about my mother and her friends who all spoke in soliloquy when they gathered for tea and biscuits. They would carry on individual unrelated conversations at various volumes in between sips of tea. One of my mother's friends, Nancy, was so adept at steamrolling over the conversation that when she spoke I would mime a clenched fist holding an auger in front of my chest as I spun my other fist in a circle. My sister would laugh as I whispered, "corkscrew,” conveying the idea that when Nancy talked, it was like a corkscrew drilling through your torso.

"When you want to make money, you call me!" Sam angrily recited as he hung up.

Charles Ponzi

At least I got rid of him, and my boss left too so it was an all round win for me. A coworker explained that Sam was likely greatly exaggerating investment opportunities or running Ponzi schemes. He explained guys like him take money from a bunch of investors and give half back as a windfall. Some people lose their shirt while the winners throw even more coin into the sure thing. Sam then works on replacing the losers with even more suckers. I began posting notices in the office warning my colleagues about Sam DelPresto and L.C. Wegard. My boss saw me pinning the message onto the bulletin board.

"I made a lot of money with Sam DelPresto. He's brilliant," my boss exclaimed.

Another coworker's boss said the same thing. We theorized that they figured supervisors earned more money and might be more influential so they made up the first round investment winners. Eventually when the Ponzi scheme folds everyone loses. A few months later, I got a call from a guy named Jerry. He was not as exuberant as Sam. He spoke calmly about a great many investment opportunities.

"Jerry, you work with that idiot Sam DelPresto, right?" I asked.

Jerry respectfully defended Sam and L.C. Wegard. He concluded with,

"The world would be a better place if more people were like Sam DelPresto."

"What does 'L.C.' stand for anyway?" I asked.

"What? Huh? I don't know," Jerry fumbled.

Probably "Losing Chumps."

Recently I googled Sam, and this is what I learned. First of all, that was his real name. I know because 18 years ago he was busted on what was described as a "penny stock scam." Sam DelPresto swindled $3 million from investors in a "boiler room operation" before the Security Exchange Commission caught up with him. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three years probation, six months home confinement and barred from the industry for two years. In 2015 he pleaded guilty to a "massive stock manipulation scheme" that netted him $13 million. He was also convicted of paying kickbacks to a Las Vegas investment advisor. This time he faces federal prison.

I also found Sam's blog dating back to 2010. In one post, entitled "Slow Wheels of Justice," he chronicles the fall of Bernie Madoff and asks why so many people never questioned the lack of any reported losses in Madoff's investment portfolio. He writes,

"I admit to a fascination that borders on awe of the enormity of the fraud."

Looks like Sam will be playing backgammon with his idol for the next few years. His light sentence on the first offense didn’t scare him straight. He committed a worse crime a few years later. By the time he gets out of the pen, he'll probably pick up a real education from the Madoff School of Embezzlement.

Jerry was wrong. The world is not a better place with people like Sam DelPresto.

Editor's Note: Originally posted on March 7, 2017.

Midway

In 2012, my son, Aidan and I were researching the remains of a historic building associated with the Central Vermont (CV) railroad in New London, Connecticut. I last saw the roundhouse used to store steam locomotives when I lived in the city in the late 80's. The Central Vermont Roundhouse burned down in 2002, just before Aidan was born. Years later he was homeschooled, and part of his history lesson involved what a friend calls "urban exploration."



Central Vermont Rail Yard                           Edward J. Ozog

Searching the site Aidan and I found tracks, railroad spikes, coal, a lot of what we affectionately called "train junk." In the picture above on the left, Aidan is standing in front of a brick structure known as the "flammable paint shed." The right image from 1956 is from the same angle and shows the turntable, steam engine CV467 (2-8-0) and a coal hopper in the distance. The crumbling brick building is the last structure standing at the site. Online searching led us to a gentleman named, John Paganoni, who built an extraordinarily detailed model of the New London CV Roundhouse. We exchanged many emails about railroad history. One day, Mr. Paganoni asked,

"Do you know where the Midway Roundhouse is located? I read in a book that it was near the town of Groton."

Midway Engine House Circa 1911

Groton is mostly known for submarines due to the defense contractor Electric Boat and the Naval Submarine Base. I wasn't aware that there was anything associated with the railroad industry in Groton. I knew of Midway Pizza, a local Italian restaurant. There was also a neighborhood circled by a road called Midway Oval. Electric Boat had a facility called "Midway" in the same area.

Aidan and I dove into an online search which unearthed a lot of information about the Midway rail yard. It was build in 1904 as a refueling stop for steam engines. The location and name was derived from the fact that it was mid way between Boston and New York City. The large facility had a 20 stall roundhouse with a 95 foot turntable, a coal hopper, and sand depot. Sand is still used today for traction on the rails. The facility closed after a decade of decline. The buildings were razed in 1939 after more powerful steam engines made the stop in Midway unnecessary.



Map of Midway

Although we found a lot of information online, we didn't discover any maps that would have helped us locate the facility. Aidan and I visited the public library in Groton to look for any information on railroads in the area. A very helpful person found a 1981 article about the Midway rail yard in the Shoreliner, a magazine about the history of the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. The article included a hand drawn map from 1935 which yielded only one key geographic feature, a body of water called Poquonnock River.

Aidan and I returned to the internet to orientate our copy of the map to any of the number of available online charts. Before long we determined that the Midway facility was located at Bluff Point State Park. We also discovered that a small land bridge that led to nowhere near the parking lot at the state park was the original railroad bed dating back to 1858. It was rerouted to its present position when the Groton Airport was built in 1929.

Old Rail Bed at Groton Airport

In the image above the land bridge is marked by the left arrow. Midway is located at the lower left, just below Bluff Point State Park. The blue line across the airport is the old railroad bed. The arrow on the right identifies the existing rail line. We discovered an aerial view online which clearly showed the remains of the Midway facility. In the image below the arrow marks the outline of the Midway roundhouse.

Remains of the Midway Roundhouse

My wife, Christine, and I recalled exploring the area years earlier and found many of the features identified on the map. At the time we hadn't a clue what any of the structures were.

Tracks Inside the Roundhouse

Now, my son and I had unearthed an answer for Mr. Paganoni. A few days later we explored the site and discovered rails that were once inside the roundhouse and piles of fine sand dotted with lumps of coal which were destined to power steam engines plying the east coast in the 1920's.



Sand and Coal

In a newspaper article from 1939, we read that when a roundhouse was demolished workers often left tools in the pits, used by mechanics to access the underside of the engines. It was an act of respect as they laid the implements of their trade to rest. Aidan and I spent three summers excavating a pit by hand, hoping to find those tools left so many years ago. We found numerous artifacts including, bottles, boots, bits of newspaper, plates and eating utensils. We got down three feet before the pit flooded. The smallest things that Aidan and I discovered were historically significant to us. One of the interesting things we unearthed was a bottle embossed with the following inscription,

FEDERAL LAW FORBIDS THE SALE OR RE-USE OF THIS BOTTLE

Markings on the bottom of the bottle indicate that it was made by the Brockway Glass Company in 1942 at the plant located in Ada, Oklahoma. After the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, some legislators wanted to hamper bootlegging by making it illegal to reuse empty glass bottles. The inscription appeared on all liquor bottles sold in the United States between 1935 and 1964.

In 2015 Midway was designated a State Archaeological Preserve which halted any further investigation on our part. I'm glad someone is looking into the site for historical significance. Aidan is a senior in high school now so he no longer has time for urban exploration. Occasionally, I visit Midway and wander among the ruins and think of the time when I stumbled upon the site with my wife while we were dating, when I rediscovered it with our boys years later, and when people lived and loved a life long ago working for the railroad.

Editor’s Note: Originally published on February 9, 2017, this post marked the halfway point for the Year of the Blog.