Fast Forwarding

 

Patience has never been one of my virtues.  I continue to work on it and have gotten better with age.  But I still don’t do well standing in long-lines or being stuck in a traffic jam or waiting for some dawdling gate attendant to move the ramp up to the plane so I can move on to the baggage claim area and wait some more. I also have no patience for boring speeches.  If you have something important to say, get to the point.  And if it’s not important, don’t waste my time.

 

I have come to believe that my lack of patience and overall sense of urgency are the result of being an only child as well as genetics.  An only child tends to march to the beat of their own drum. And if left alone and given enough personal freedom, they often grow up to have little patience when things don’t go their way.  Mea Culpa.

 

At one point back in the day, I pretty much gave up on watching television. The commercials were just too much of an interruption and waste of time.  If it was a really good 30-minute sit-com, I might suffer through the commercials.  Other shows might get recorded and played back later.  I could watch sports if it was an important game or my favorite team was playing.  But most of my television time was spent watching movie rentals from Blockbuster. 

 

And then came digital recording and streaming services.  It’s just too easy to record a football game and then watch it in less than an hour by fast forwarding through the commercials and half time. And if one is willing to fast forward between plays, rewinding if something big happens, one can watch a game in less than 30 minutes.  It’s even better with the sound off so one isn’t forced to listen to the play-by-play and those annoying comments by some former player or coach. With Prime, Netflix and Apple TV, I have even more choices.  I can watch what I want, when I want and how I want.  I don’t even have to fast forward through it.  And then there is You Tube which has something for everyone and it all moves along at a good pace.  If not, you can just fast forward through it or switch to something else. 

 

Now I find myself spending too much time watching television or on the internet. These days I seldom read a book until bedtime. Then I get sleepy.  So, it can take a month or more for me to get through a book. I have started listening to audiobooks while walking the dog, but it’s not the same as reading. I miss reading books.  Maybe I’ll try fast forward reading.  Read the first and last sentence of a paragraph. If it doesn’t seem to be consequential to the story, just move on to the next paragraph. I’m sure the author would not appreciate someone skipping over their thoughtful, well-crafted words.  But they will just have to settle for the fact that I did buy their book.

 

One of these days perhaps I will stop fast forwarding.  Maybe I will come to realize that I’m just rushing to the end and so much of what I’ve seen and done since the beginning didn’t really matter all that much.

Gone, Gone the Damage Done

The financial costs of hurricanes Helene and Milton will exceed anything we’ve experienced in a single hurricane season.  The loss of lives is also significant and still counting. For many survivors, their world has been turned upside down and may never recover.  This would certainly be the case in many mountain communities in Western North Carolina.  The devastation there is almost unimaginable.  Parts of the Florida Gulf Coast have been transformed.  Some residents have had enough and will move inland or out of the state.  Hurricanes are a reality for Florida and there will be more.

 

The politics of hurricanes and hurricane relief are in full swing.  The Right is pointing fingers at what they claim is a poor response.  That poor response being the result of federal agency incompetence along with too much money spent on immigrants and other nations.  The Left’s response is they are doing a good job and those who claim otherwise are misinformed or worse, spreading that misinformation.  The Left is also seizing on these disasters to once again make their case that human caused global warming, largely caused by fossil fuel, is the real problem.

 

At the risk of being labeled a “climate change denier”, it’s worth pointing to the data. This is a link to some very interesting data from the NOAA National Hurricane Center U.S. Hurricane Strikes by Decade (noaa.gov).  You can read it for yourself and reach your own conclusions, but I would draw your attention to the note just below the data records.

There are two sides to the hurricane story.  The mainstream version claims that even IF we are not having more hurricanes, we are having more major hurricanes. Again, the data to support that claim is questionable at best.  One thing is certain. Hurricanes are doing more damage now than in the past.  The same can be said of tornadoes and hailstorms and wildfires. Today there are simply more people and more structures in places where hurricanes (and tornadoes and hailstorms and wildfires) are most likely to hit.

The questions we must answer:

_1 How much has human activity contributed to climate change?

_2 How much can humans do now to change the climate to something more favorable?

_3 Should we spend more money trying to change the earth’s climate or spend more money preparing to live with the earth’s climate?

_4 And of course the most pressing question: What can we do for the folks who lost so much to Helene and Milton?

                                                             Galveston, Texas 1900

The Experts Can Be Wrong. (Perhaps more often than not).

 

A lot has been said and written about how the “experts” got things wrong about Covid.  Experts being wrong is not all that unusual.  In recent history the “experts” have been wrong about quite a few things.  For over 100 years the experts have been saying the world would soon run out of oil.  Eventually, we will…but it’s yet to happen “soon”.  The experts gave us the “food pyramid” back in the 1950’s and now the new experts are saying the old experts were wrong.  In the early 20^th century the experts were confident that eugenics was the path to a better, healthier, more intelligent human race.  That path only ended up in global war and genocide.  For over 100 years the experts have come up with various ideas on how to “fix” the Middle East.  Thus far they’ve only made it worse.  And I can remember when the experts just knew it was bad for players to drink water during August two-a-day football practices.

 

As one grows older one is likely to deal with a more “medical experts”.  Fortunately, they tend to be right most of the time.  Unfortunately, when they are wrong it can really hurt.  A case in point, in the summer of 2022 I was having some pain in my right hip.  We were looking forward to a trip to Italy in September, so I decided to go to my orthopedic doctor and get it checked out.  Maybe he could give me a shot.  Or perhaps he would tell me the hip was arthritic and would most likely need to be replaced within a year or two.  I was prepared for the worst but then got good news. After he X-rayed my hip, he concluded that I just had tight hamstrings and glutes.  So, he sent me to another expert, a Physical Therapist, who gave me a stretching routine and some tips on improving my posture.  Go now and be well.

 

Dutifully I did the stretching and worked on posture.  My hip responded by getting worse.  So, I doubled down on the stretching and good posture discipline.  My hip got worse and soon my entire leg started to hurt.  A week before we were to leave for Italy I could no longer stand or walk for more than 5 minutes.  So that trip was cancelled, at no small expense.

 

I went back to my ortho doctor and he took X-rays of my back this time and said there was a problem.  So, I ended up with a back and spine specialist.  More X-rays and an MRI revealed a slipped disc in my lower back along with stenosis.  Serious but not necessarily serious enough to justify surgery just yet.  So back to the Physical Therapist and some new exercises.  With rest and some light exercises there was improvement.  We added more exercises and it immediately got worse.

 

My wife criticizes me for going to the internet for medical advice, but sometimes it pays off.  I discovered that one of the exercises the PT had me doing was exactly what I should not be doing with a slipped disc.  So, I stopped going to the PT.  I continued with some of the other exercises avoiding the bad one or anything that resembled the bad one and quickly got better.

 

For two years I’ve been ok and continued with the stretching that the “experts”, including those on the internet, recommended.  But recently after two weeks in Alaska, my hip and leg began hurting again.  So, I did even more stretching of the leg and hip muscles.  And it got worse. 

 

Then I stumbled across another internet “expert”.   Based on his information, it just confirmed that this was sciatica caused by the back problem, even though my back did not hurt.  NO surprise there.  But, to my surprise, this “expert” advised that stretching the hamstring and hip muscles was a bad idea.  The stretches might feel good in the moment, but only served to irritate the sciatic nerve.  He advised a different routine focused more on strengthening the glutes and lower abs.  Within a week, my pain eased up considerably and I am back on the road to recovery.

 

Bottom line, for over two years I have been doing what the experts advised.  And after some adjustments I was doing ok, until I wasn’t.  I’m pretty sure some of our Alaskan adventures fired up the sciatica and all my efforts to calm it down only made it worse.  At some point I may need surgery to fix the slipped disc.  But for the time being I have found a better way to deal with it.  The experts might know a lot about what has worked or could work, but remember they can just as easily be wrong.   

Another Installment of My Two Cents Worth…Election Edition

_J.D. Vance clearly won the debate vs Tim Walz but count on Trump to undo whatever positive momentum Vance’s performance may have generated.

 

_Democrats have been in full reset mode since the Biden debate meltdown. Tighten up the borders, increase support for Israel, cut interest rates, release more oil from critical reserves, keep Joe Biden out of the public spotlight as much as possible and promote Kamala Harris as an Obama-like transformational leader who will bring joy and good tidings along with hope and change.

 

_Whatever the real story is about Lt. Gov Mark Robinson’s alleged porn posts, North Carolina has gone from a toss-up or slightly red, to leaning blue.  Trump needs to win North Carolina and that might not happen now.  The election comes down to AZ, NV, GA, WI, MI, PA and North Carolina.  These represent 93 electoral votes.  Trump needs at least 51 of those.  But PA is the key.  Assuming he wins AZ, NV, GA and NC he’s still 2 votes short of the necessary 270 to win.  If he were to lose NC, but capture PA, he could still win. 

 

_The economy, the border, the Middle East and Russia/Ukraine are all negatives for the Democrats. And depending how long it goes on; the East Coast Longshoremen’s Strike could turn things against them.  But the Democrats have two big things in their favor: Trump and abortion.  Trump-hate alone may be enough to push them over the line.  Throw in the abortion issue which is probably 60-40 in the Democrats favor and it’s likely enough to keep them in the White House.

 

_The sad truth is when you look at Trump/Vance, Harris/Wolz; three of those four could not even fill a high-level leadership role in a major corporation.  Vance is probably the only competent one in the bunch.  America must do better when it comes to developing and selecting government leaders.