Bitch and Moan

Rhode Island General Laws 31-18-5. Crossing other than at crosswalks:

Every pedestrian crossing a roadway at any point other than within a marked crosswalk or within an unmarked crosswalk at an intersection shall yield the right-of-way to all vehicles upon the roadway.

*****

This will be a rant.

I know this has happened to you. You are driving down the road when someone will just cross the road in front of you without stopping, looking or taking any defensive measures. They expect you to stop. I still possess some values still and I do stop. I don't relish the idea of running anyone over. My stopping, you stopping...only rewards this behavior.

I began to see this about fifteen years ago with teens. They'd cross over the road most times without bothering to look at you. I'd be stopped in my car with a look of disbelief on my face when it started happening to me. I began to wonder if the Generation X,Y or Z's “Everyone gets an A” attitude began to infect their common sense of self preservation.

Two years ago I was driving down Newport Ave in Pawtucket. This is a four land road that has high traffic and can reach 40mph if the cops aren't around. I saw up ahead two kids, about 12, begin to cross the road as I approached and wondered when they'd notice me and the other cars coming at them. They didn't bother to look. I finally had to slow down so fast and turn toward the curb just to make sure I wasn't going to smack them. A women driving her family SUV on the side lane of me had to slam on her brakes and slide a good 20 feet, but luckily missed those kids.

I sat in my car just staring through the window at these dullards when she hops out of her vehicle and starts yelling at them for being morons. The kids just laughed, hopped on the sidewalk and moved on like it was noting at all.

Am I wrong or is this generation, that was raised with such parental protection, stupid enough to think this supposed safeguard stops 2000lbs of steel? Do they think this armor will follow them into their adults lives?

When I was a kid, a teen and even now, I was leery of crossing any busy street. Do you want to know why? I don't trust the drivers! I know the law says they must stop for me when I am in a crosswalk but the law means nothing to a mid afternoon drunk flying down the road. The law means nothing if someone's brakes fail. The law means nothing if they're too busy texting.

What am I going to do if I get hit? Sue them? I guess I can enjoy my million dollars while I lie in bed and forever stare at the ceiling of Zambrano State hospital. Hey, three times a day I can have an overworked CNA spoon feed me cold pureed peas into my mouth. Yum!

If you have kids, sure, you do want to protect them. But how about this? How about making them aware that there are real dangers out there and teaching them to avoid them might help? All the bike helmets, the knee pads, the parental releases are there for kids who don't always remember to watch out. But, when does it end? When do the parents hand over the responsibility of self preservation to the child? I would hope by the time they're sixteen!

You know, it's a disservice to protect kids from any harm that may befall them. Not all harm will destroy a kid or forever put them in a wheelchair. The funny thing about making your own mistakes is that mistakes are better instructors than fifty people advising you about something you haven't learned yet. When you screw up on your own, you now own that mistake and usually you never forget it.

I know a Mom, who had at times, a horrible time raising her oldest son. He had the proven ability to do well in school, behave and act like a normal person. But, for whatever reasons, he would dart off down the wrong path and act like a jerk. Nine times out of ten he wanted to do things he wanted and to hell with the world's expectations. I know it's not “all his fault” but don't tell me a 17 year old is fully innocent either.

One of the reasons why he tore off on his own was that he well understood that no matter what, the courts couldn't really touch him and he had a home without having to pay for it. There was free food, heat, clothing and a roof over his head. He knew the score. He could make mistake after mistake and not be harmed by them at all.

“Kate, the day he turns 18, toss his ass out. Let him find out how tiny and weak he is when he tries this very same bullshit with the world at large. He'll last a week or two in summer and not even three days in winter.” This was my advice.

“I can't. He's my son.”

I say, “And boy, does he know this.”

*****

Years ago, we knew a kid like the one I'm talking about. He was selfish, a one way road and he did whatever the hell he wanted with little regard to anyone elses wishes. He managed to get away with this for two weeks past his 18^th birthday.

When you don't work, you still need money. He shows up at the park one day with pockets full of coins saying he just ripped off his Mom's change jar that was on the top of the fridge. We just shook our heads.

Three days later, his Mom told him, “You have two days to pack and leave. I don't care where. You leave or I’ll have the cops escort you out this house.”

John left. The only place he had to go was the one relative that had about one month's worth of sympathy for him.  John lived above his shop in some attic space. He'd hang out, sell some weed for pocket money and still didn't bother to find a job. The relative eventually showed him his shipping orders as well.

John finally ended up in an apartment that he could afford. Cheap housing in Pawtucket was still too much for him so he had to hop over the line to Dexter Street in Central Falls.

We visited him there a few times and gave up because the place was a crime ridden, dirty ditch filled with some of the weirdest people you ever met. It wasn't something anyone would enjoy.

John then had to walk across the city to our old neighborhood to hang out. He fancied himself as a tough guy and was pretty much tight lipped till he surprised us one night by opening up. He had grown to fear Dexter Street. He added that financial worries bothered him because he could barely afford the minimal rent and food.

No one had any sympathy for him. In my mind, I told myself, “You made your bed, kid. You weren't stupid, just selfish and stubborn and you LOST.”

The world got ahold of him in it's mouth. He found out living alone without decent means was a major struggle. Did he have a conversion that turned his entire life around? No. He split one day to another state, scraped by and managed something of a life. He, I'm told, still harbors incredible hatred towards his Mom for kicking him out.

*****

Forever protect? Forever sweep away obstacles in these kid's paths? Instill in them a belief that a protective bubble surrounds them? Sure, do that, till one day they're free in the world and it will surely respect that bubble...won't it?

I know I'm going to read about it again. A not so young teen will get run over like a pancake by thinking, “They'll stop.” The last person I read about being smacked was in Warwick a few years back. She was hit and sent flying 40 feet into the air. She didn't survive. The AG's office refused to charge the driver as no laws were broken.

I know I'll still stop when I see these kids amble in front of my car. I also know, they're headed for a huge wake up call they're not going to like in the least when the world can legally ignore their self important status.

Ok, I'm done...till the next one pisses me off.

Crude, Crude, Crude...

One night long ago, my brother and I were lying on the carpet watching The Waltons when he grabbed one of the many Dennis the Menace books I owned. He was flipping through it when he grabbed a Flair pen and scratched out the original caption and wrote his own. When he showed it to me I bust out laughing to the point our Dad suspected something was up and shouted out, “Whatever you're doing in there...cut it out!”

The picture in the book showed Dennis's friend, Joey, holding a sling shot. The original caption had Dennis saying, “Oh, I wouldn't use one of those on cats, birds, windows, cars, mailmen, Margaret...” The implication was that he used it on all of them.

My brother had Dennis say instead to Joey, “Now, shove it up your ass.” 

Yes, it was sophomoric, crude and typical humor of a fourteen year old. But to me at nine years of age, it was hilarious. This was the very first Dennis the Menace panel he had rewritten. There were six other books he would eventually redo.

My brother once said it was too easy to do. Hank Ketchum, the originator of the Dennis character, was one to draw very active scenes. These scenes easily lent themselves to other, rather disgusting, but screamingly funny, interpretations. Only on a rare occasion would he draw something else into the cartoon to expand on it.

Another cartoon panel had Dennis sitting in his rocking chair that faced the corner whenever he misbehaved. The scene showed Mom, in exasperation, telling her husband Henry as he came in the door from work, what a day she had with him.

My brother then drew a kid's “Li'l Doctor” toy kit on the floor next to Dennis. He rewrote the caption with his Mom complaining to Henry, “...and then he took out his little doctor kit and performed an abortion on Margaret!!!”

We had a scare once. My Dad once picked up one of the rewritten copies to take with him into the bathroom (aka: The Library) with him to read. My brother and I just stared at one another thinking we were dead meat.

About twenty minutes later, my Dad had returned the book to the coffee table and I shot a sidelong glance at him to discover his mood, if any.

He made no sound at all, not a peep.

I still wonder just what he must have thought of his two sons after reading it.

Years later, I showed them to my then college friends who guffawed over the jokes. I had to warn them in advance the my brother attacked every single racial group there was. He made fun of every sexual orientation, religion and whatever was deemed Holy in our culture. He left no survivors.

Those rewrites started in 1975 and I still have most of them to this day.

 

An Old Man Beats Me Like a Rented Mule

A while back, I knew an engineer who worked at Hasbro. I'm not sure what kind of engineers a toy maker would hire, but there you go. I guess you do need to know about plastic injection and how to transform some artists creation into the latest hot toy to rush to Schwartz's for Christmas.

He did sort of look like a Santa Claus, a very health conscious one. He was skinny, wiry skinny and tan. A pile of white hair was on his head with the addition of a longish white beard as well. His smile looked like any other smile you'd see on any Santa, with those reddish cheeks and elfish eyes. The movements his body made were deliberate and almost graceful. That came from his lifelong adherence to Buddhism and the Martial Arts.

I told him my closest brush with Buddhism came from the David Carradine TV show Kung Fu and a short, very short spell of watching, not trying, Tai Chi. We would talk of the seemingly bizarre quotes of that Buddhism will throw at you to crack your own ossified thinking of how you perceive the world. Also, he showed me a few Tai Chi moves.

The first time I saw Tai Chi in person was in Slater Park a few years ago. A group of mainly women were following the movements of an old Asian instructor. To watch it from afar looks like watching ballet. It's fluid, slow and seems “easy.” You could overhear the instructor call out the next moves, whose names sound completely benign.

“Do the 'Separating Clouds' now.” He'd say. Then the whole group would move in slow motion unison into some position then stop, like thirty statues. There were others I remember, “Gazing at the Moon” and “Scooping the Sea.” Again, the whole crowd would slowly transform into another position and stop.

My engineering friend decided to show me a few simple moves. He would stand beside me and then slide effortlessly into some stance, with his arms making wide swoops and his body shifting up then down. When I tried it, I was surprised at how a very simple looking shift could make my legs shake and I’d feel every tendon in my ankles wanting to untie themselves. The few other positions he showed me had the same effect. Tai Chi is NOT easy in any sense, though it certainly looks so from afar.

I was curious about his Martial Arts training too. I wanted to see him defend himself from a punch. I promised him, again and again, that I would throw a slow motion punch to his face and he would, at the same speed, defend that attack so I could see what he was doing.

So, I do just as I promised, I throw a slow motion punch straight at his face and his arm reaches up a bit quicker than I thought we agreed upon and grabs my wrist and starts to twist it toward an angle no wrist was meant to go. I could feel the pressure rise in my hand and forearm fairly fast.

“Ok, I say, let's speed it up, I'll swing faster at you, but I PROMISE I won't make contact with your face, and you react at the same speed I'm moving at now.”

“OK” he says

So, I toss a punch at him quicker. The next thing I notice I have to drop to my knees as he grabbed my wrist in a very fast and quick movement. As he applied God awful amounts of pressure in my arm, my only way to relieve it was to by drop myself to the floor. Once down, he shifted the movement to something else and the pressure moved from my wrist straight up into my shoulder.

“If I move your arm 'this way' (and he does, to which I'm falling backward again relieve the pressure) I can have you flat on your back in one second!”

I get up, and very respectful of this older man's abilities. You wouldn't think someone above the age of 60 can move this fast.

It's odd, seeing someone so quiet, benign and peaceful, have the ability to dislocate my shoulder in seconds.

"It may take half a lifetime, to master one system." Click to Watch.

T&A and $

I've said before I find finance the best ESPN around. My sports pages include financial blogs and like most sports pages and channels, they sell 'em with SEX.

You used to get grizzled, old men on the field trying to snag an interview or opine about the team's chance. Now you have barely 22 year old girls with perfect skin down on the field doing the interviews.  She's a slight more prettier than a 55 year old ex coach from Notre Dame.

There's little difference in the world of finance either. You can watch CNBC's Margaret Brennan tell you of a 600 point drop in the DOW and you won't care as you look into her eyes.

 

“Huh? What did she say? Did she say Exxon just collapsed?” is all your reaction will be.

The financial blogs are no better really. Though, the don't put pretty girls on them to “sell” as the blogs are private. But these writers, as guys will do, will toss up a picture of some girl they find attractive and others will chime in about the choice.

The conversation can go from discussing the latest T-Bill auction to a longer discussion about the color of hair on a girl.

“Yes! Auburn hair is the best!”

“Are you nuts? Blondes! Blondes are the prettiest!”

“Aahh, you're wrong! Blondes are a dime a dozen!”

This can go on for some time as Bernanke is in the background droning on about bond rates.

One blog I read, Jesse's Cafe Americain is mostly about gold prices (which I could care less about) and a few other well written articles on economics. His blog is populated with everything French. The other day I'm reading it and he posts this long forgotten 60's chanson singing mournful French love songs. The girl fell on the Earth pretty back in 1963 and you know why he posted it...he's entranced by her. She has nothing to do with the CAC-40 trading floor in Paris. She does, however, have everything to do with being pretty. Once the flutter around her is done, the talk returns to dry financial subjects.

 

Is it Live or Is it Memorex

From the News:

It is one thing for tungsten-filled gold bars to appear in the UK, or in Germany. However, when a 10 ounce 999.99% gold bar bearing the stamp of the reputable Swiss Produits Artistiques Métaux Précieux PAMP and a serial number #038892, (likely rehypothecated in at least 10 gold ETFs across the world), mysteriously emerges in the heart of the world's jewelry district located on 47th street in Manhattan, things get real quick. Moments ago, Myfoxny reported that a 10-ounce gold bar costing nearly $18,000 turned out to be a counterfeit. The discovery was made by the dealer Ibrahim Fadl, who bought the PAMP bar in question from a merchant who has sold him real gold before. "But he heard counterfeit gold bars were going around, so he drilled into several of his gold bars worth $100,000 and saw gray tungsten -- not gold. The bar was filled with tungsten, which weighs nearly the same as gold but costs just over a dollar an ounce."

What makes it so devious is a real gold bar is purchased with the serial numbers and papers, then hollowed out.   The hollowed bar is filled with tungsten and is neatly closed up. That is a sophisticated operation.

MTB, the Swiss manufacturer of the gold bars, said customers should only buy from a reputable merchant. The problem, they admit, is that Ibrahim Fadl is a very reputable merchant.

Raymond Nessim, CEO of Manfra, Tordell & Brookes, said he has reported the situation to the FBI and Secret Service.

The Secret Service, which deals with counterfeits, said it is investigating.
 

***** 

 

My old friend constantly laments that “...it's all a sham now, you can't trust anything, it's all a scam. Cans of tuna weigh 5oz, coffee isn't a pound, it's 10.5 ounces, stock...mortgages..nothing's real anymore.”

“All they do is find a way of digging deeper into you pocket.”

I'd hate to be the one who laid out $100,000 for a pile of tungsten.

 

 

Whataya Wanna Do Today?

Click To See The Clip

I've spoken before of where and who I grew up with. Looking back on it all we were a might bit young to be partying like adults, but we did. We weren't pre-criminals (well, a couple of us were) but mostly middle class kids looking to have fun.

The movie Over the Edge was based on an actual event in Foster City, CA where a planned neighborhood was built w/o any thought to the fact there would be kids there. Foster City was built on reclaimed marshland that was at the time, somewhat isolated from the more fun areas of San Francisco. Add to that, the entire suburb had no place for the kids to go but each others homes or a rec center that sat on a playground. Other than that, there was little else for the kids to do.

So, it being the '70's, they smoked pot, drank, ate 'ludes and acid to pass away the time and try to find what fun that could be had in that. The parents of the time, who I found accurately depicted, either were too busy with their careers or didn't give a rat's ass what their kids did. They had no idea just what little Johnny was up to every night he went “out.”

So, as these kids were left unattended, they became worse. They started to engage in petty vandalism out of boredom and finally one night, en masse, assaulted their own school. The San Francisco Examiner wrote a piece entitled, ““Mouse Packs: Kids on a Crime Spree.”

Here's a bit of that article.

--Mousepacks. Gangs of youngsters, some as young as nine, on a rampage through a suburban town. One on a bike pours gasoline from a gallon can and sets it afire. Lead pipe bombs explode in park restrooms. Spray paint and obscenities smear a shopping center wall. Two homes are set ablaze. Antennas by the hundreds are snapped off parked cars in a single night. Liquid cement clogs public sinks and water fountains. Street lights are snuffed out with BB guns so often they are no longer replaced. It sounds like the scenario for an underage Clockwork Orange, a futuristic nightmare fantasy. But all the incidents are true. They happened in Foster City where pre-teenage gangs—mousepacks—constitute one of the city’s major crime problems.

--Last summer the Foster City parks department sponsored ‘drop-ins’ at a junior high gymnasium. “Within two months the gym had been destroyed—pool tables ripped, ping-pong tables broken,” said Juvenile Officer Rick Rivera. “The program had to be canceled.”

--“Foster City was supposed to be an ideal bedroom community. The designers built it with a master plan; it was threaded with little man-made canals and waterways. Outside of some houses were docks that people could use to boat to the grocery store. But there was nothing for the large percentage of teenage kids to do in that town — 25 percent of the population was below the age of 18. It had the highest percentage of juvenile crime of any comparable city in the country.

--“These kids were bored out of their minds. There was literally nothing for them to do. It was like a theme park without the fun — you’d have these developments called ‘Whaler’s Cove’ and these fake pilings and these lame rec centers, with ropes and an airplane and a slide and a sculpture of a whale. Everything was brand new. Nothing was older than the kids themselves. The place made everyone feel a little disposable.”   

I saw this flick when the just then new cable TV was wired up in our neighborhood. I sat there with my mouth half open because it looked like, in some ways, exactly what we did as kids. Not only that, the clothing and hair styles were what we wore then too. It could have been Darlington where I grew up. Though we didn't set fire to the school.

It got bad here once. Bad in that no one, not even the cops, were stopping us. In Slater Park, there was a simple parking lot we dubbed “The One Way.” Here is where we all hung out. Sunday through Saturday, you'd find someone there getting stoned or drunk. After that, the defenseless woods, park buildings and what not was prime game to take out any anger, boredom or whatever you could to them. I saw kids plow down young trees with their cars for God's sake.

As word spread of this place, more and more teens showed up. It became the largest open air pharmacy you'd see. Cars would pull in and dealers, competing with one another, would run up to the car, nearly begging the buyer to purchase their weed and not the others. On some nights there must have been 100 kids in that lot, doing whatever the hell they wanted.

It did finally all end and luckily I wasn't there for it. The police, after nearly nine months, finally acted and came crawling out of the woods, up the street in their cars and brought along a prison bus to handle the myriad arrests they made that night. I was told half of the kids scattered and escaped through the marshlands by the creek that feeds the duckpond.

Out of the 60 or so arrests, the cops let most of them go, as most didn't have enough pot on them to satisfy the Attorney General's office to push that many through the court system. Even the AG's office has a budget that must be used for cases that provide enough bang for the buck and processing a bunch of punky teens wasn't in the policy.

A week went by and all of a sudden there was a new place to hang at, Pascale's Lot. It was situated inside a zoned industrial area directly across from McCoy stadium. The festivities began anew.

A Perfect Shit Storm

Bernanke is panicking. The latest QE “3” he released today, is an attempt to suppress the interest rates on longer term bonds. That will in turn suppress rates all over in order to spur borrowing. I don't think can last long. To be fair though, he has few tools left in his magic bag that work now and I believe that was his last. The real tools reside in Congress. But they cannot come together to implement any of them due to ideological differences. Bernanke is out of bullets and now he'll have to hand this albatross to Congress...during an election cycle.

See where this will lead? Nowhere.

The GOP will never allow a tax hike on the rich and the Dems will never allow Social Security or Medicare to be axed. Both sides have their electorate ready to scream Holy Murder if the opposing team even tries it.

And fast approaching is the Fiscal Cliff come January.

Remember the Super Committee? The one that was supposed to come to some sort of agreement on how to deal with the deficit? Well, if you recall, it failed wonderfully for the same reasons I stated above. In order to make some “success” out of it they put a sunset clause in it stipulating that if by Jan 2013, if nothing was done, then the tax hikes on the rich will go up and budget cuts to the ENTIRE US budget would automatically ensue. If this were to happen say hello to Recession #2.

In finance circles they're calling this the “Perfect Storm.”

1	If Congress fails to act on the Sunset Clause or comes down too heavily in favor of one side vs. the other. It's Recession Time once again.
2	China and the Emerging Markets are slowing down and might be headed for a hard landing.
3	Iran and the Middle East may flare. This is a Wild Card. Say hello to high oil prices and that drags on your wallet.
4	The Euro Union has GDP larger than the entire United States.  Right now across the pond they are throwing up as we speak.

Finance jokingly called the past few years, “kicking the can down the road.” That is to say, all these policy interventions just are putting off the inevitable.  They did hold out hope that it could work. The can may have become too heavy and big to kick any longer. Now what do you think of our rich elite, our best and brightest?

Advice? Get the hell out of all debt if you can. If not, pay down what you can. If it's too large, blow it off then, forget it. Why worry now?