On The Blink
Hello World,
Just when you think that September can't possibly have anything more to throw at us - after all, we're already past Labor Day and Grandparents Day, the 9/11 observances have come and gone, along with the end of Ramadan, and even the Jewish holidays have packed up their tents and spirited away in the night - here comes Mexican Independence Day, for our amigos y amigas south of the border, and don't spare the tequila. I'm sure the day is fraught with historical significance and cultural gravitas, but personally, I can't seem to get the Mexican Hat Dance out of my head, so it's a little hard to be serious about anything, with the clattering of castanets reverberating through my poor addled brain cells (both of them) who I have renamed Pancho and Ricardo in honor of the occasion. The month is barely half over, and we've already had a welter of red-letter days, and at this rate, we're bound to run out of confetti long before the festivities wind down. Pancho and Ricardo recommend tossing arroz con pollo instead, but even I don't need more than two brain cells to recognize that as a bad idea, by golly.
In sports news, the football season has finally gotten underway, and not a moment too soon for its desperate legions of clamoring fans all over the country and beyond. On the local scene, the Giants won their home opener at the brand new stadium at the Meadowlands, to the delight of the hometown faithful, by beating the Carolina Panthers, a team that had victimized them in the past, by ruining their playoff chances or the last home game at their old stadium. The next day, the highly touted Jets lost their home opener at the very same new stadium to the Baltimore Ravens, without even scoring a touchdown, which was certainly not the start that they hoped for. Even the poor stadium has yet to hit its stride, as it still has no name, and while every other team is battling it out at the likes of Minute Maid Park or Corel Centre or U.S. Cellular Field, everyone around here basically still calls this place "the new stadium at the Meadowlands," which is certainly not going to win any awards for originality, much less street cred in the cut-throat world of sports stadiums, that's for sure. Meanwhile in baseball, the Yankees and Tampa Bay Rays are neck-and-neck in the race for the pennant, with their season records so close that they're a mere half-game apart in the standings after 140 games. Of course, tight pennant races can be highly entertaining to people who don't care who wins, but extremely nerve-wracking to the fans who live and die with every pitch. My advice would be to move the Tampa Bay franchise out of the American League East altogether, to a different division where they could make their own way without the Yankees dogging their heels at every turn. Pancho and Ricardo tell me that Guadalajara is very nice this time of year.
There seems to be no end to the hijinks at the local newspaper, and here again, these leaped right out at me, as they were one on top of the other, so there was no avoiding them. The first one painted this intriguing picture -
==================
Lesbian Air Force
nurse trial to begin
==================
Now, for anyone who didn't already know anything about this particular story, like me, I'm thinking that you just really wouldn't know where to start with this. It certainly packs a wallop in 7 small words, and seems to be going in a lot of different directions all at once. We have not just your average garden-variety lesbian, which might not be very newsworthy, but a military lesbian, and one in the Air Force on top of that. And not just any old flying military lesbian, but also a nurse, so there's already a lot going on in this story. But it doesn't even stop there, my friends, because our very special flying military lesbian nurse is apparently on trial as well, which would seem to violate some rule of too many objects trying to occupy the same space at the same time, and the Quantum Physics Police would have stepped in long before now. I suppose it's only a good thing that she's not also handicapped or a woman of color, or we'd have to call out the headline stretchers to make enough room for all the modifiers and adjectives they'd need to describe the situation. Pancho and Ricardo want to point out that at least she's not also blonde, but I'm not sure that's not just the tequila talking.
It was the one right under that which really got my attention -
=====================
Burning elevator
called suspicious
=====================
Believe it or not, that story was reported right here in the Queen City on the Sound, New Rochelle, so it hit pretty close to home. I have to admit that I feel truly fortunate to live in a place where burning elevators are considered suspicious, instead of some hotbed of post-apocalyptic wasteland, where a burning elevator would be so routine as to excite no comment, much less appear in the newspaper. I know that everyone will be relieved to hear that the article ends by saying that the Police are "continuing to investigate," so the elevator burners should be on notice that their actions will not be tolerated obliviously by the authorities, as if this were some sort of far-flung frontier outpost where anything goes. Frankly, my money is on the lesbian Air Force nurse.
And what may be new and exciting in the wonderful wide world of politics, you may be wondering, and well may you wonder. Last week, the Westchester County Board of Elections rolled out their brand new Optical Scan Voting Machines, with the plan to use them in the primaries for the first time. Now, I had nothing against the old mechanical voting machines with the levers, but they certainly had been using them ever since I started to vote in 1972, and probably for decades before that as well. With society developing ever more high-tech gadgets everywhere you turn, and at a dizzying pace, it seemed only logical for the democratic process to jump right on board that futuristic bandwagon too, and leap into the forefront of the digital revolution, leaving behind the trappings of auld lang syne. I would have expected something along the lines of an ATM, with a touch screen showing the various candidates or propositions that you could vote on, which would also incorporate some sort of identification device that would make sure that the voters were legally eligible to vote, and only voted once. So the ImageCast arrived at long last, and with plenty of fanfare, as they kept sending out mailings to the yearning electorate letting us know what we had to look forward to. Finally they sent out an elaborate brochure on how to use the new equipment, and it was certainly an eye-opening tutorial, although probably not in the way they would have expected. First of all, you still have to stand on line to go register at the district table, just like always, and then - believe this or don't - they actually hand you a paper ballot, which you have to mark like an SAT exam, by filling in the little circles. At that point, you feed it into the ImageScan, and it displays an image on the screen of what you voted for, and then you press the Enter button for your ballot to be accepted. I know people may complain about their tax dollars at work here, but I think it's good to know that Westchester County has joined the ranks of modern civilizations dating to at least the time of the ancient Phoenicians, who I believe invented the process of putting pigment on parchment, and taken a giant leap into the era of paper ballots, that would seem archaic even by medieval standards. Even Pancho and Ricardo would regard this process as laughably quaint, and don't forget, they invented the idea of arroz con pollo tossing, so they ought to know.
Speaking of airborne elements, at an intersection near the hospital, there has historically been a blinking yellow traffic light, on the road that leads to the Emergency Room, presumably to clear the way for emergency vehicles racing to our doors on their life-saving missions of mercy, although I personally have to say that I have never seen anyone pay the slightest bit of attention to it in all the years that it has been there, blinking happily away in its unsung safety efforts nonetheless. I have always found this light to be very helpful, not necessarily from a traffic standpoint, but in terms of giving directions to visitors trying to find the hospital, which you would think would be pretty easy for a sprawling campus of 10 buildings that has been on the same spot for over a hundred years, but you'd be surprised. The biggest obstacle to the potential first-time guest, obviously, is that the hospital's official address is on an imaginary street that doesn't exist, and perhaps never has existed except in the hypothetical realms of bygone city planners, and even if it did, there are certainly no street signs for it. A determined search through the archives of fusty old city maps of yesteryear might identify which street it should be, however, even that would not solve the problem for the searcher, since that is now the back of the hospital where the Receiving dock is located, and not the front entrance, and you literally have to walk around two other buildings to find your way to the front. Now, it's true that the front of the hospital is actually located on a real street, which even has a street sign, but in their continuing efforts to repel the public, the hospital designers have very cleverly hidden the entrance at the end of a courtyard between a tall building and the backyard of a house with an unsightly large and overgrown fence, so that countless hordes of people go past it on a daily basis and have no idea that it's even there. At least the blinking light was a landmark that could be used to orient someone in their quest to find the hospital, or leave the hospital and get back to the highway, and I found it extremely useful for this purpose. In fact, I was still doing that recently, when Jean, our irrepressible bookkeeper - with unassailable proof of just how true it is that no one pays any attention to that light - pointed out to me that there is no longer any blinking light in that intersection, and in fact, there hasn't been one for over a year. I always say that they didn't invent the Federal Witness Protection Program to protect anyone from me, since I never notice what's right in front of my face, but even I found that a little hard to swallow, until I went back outside and verified for myself that not only is there no blinking light there anymore, but there aren't even any poles or wires to hang one on, even if they wanted to. Normally, I would find this type of mental lapse rather embarrassing, but frankly, Pancho and Ricardo have been drinking an awful lot of tequila lately, and I'm finding it increasingly hard to get their attention over the incessant din of castanets.
Elle
Just when you think that September can't possibly have anything more to throw at us - after all, we're already past Labor Day and Grandparents Day, the 9/11 observances have come and gone, along with the end of Ramadan, and even the Jewish holidays have packed up their tents and spirited away in the night - here comes Mexican Independence Day, for our amigos y amigas south of the border, and don't spare the tequila. I'm sure the day is fraught with historical significance and cultural gravitas, but personally, I can't seem to get the Mexican Hat Dance out of my head, so it's a little hard to be serious about anything, with the clattering of castanets reverberating through my poor addled brain cells (both of them) who I have renamed Pancho and Ricardo in honor of the occasion. The month is barely half over, and we've already had a welter of red-letter days, and at this rate, we're bound to run out of confetti long before the festivities wind down. Pancho and Ricardo recommend tossing arroz con pollo instead, but even I don't need more than two brain cells to recognize that as a bad idea, by golly.
In sports news, the football season has finally gotten underway, and not a moment too soon for its desperate legions of clamoring fans all over the country and beyond. On the local scene, the Giants won their home opener at the brand new stadium at the Meadowlands, to the delight of the hometown faithful, by beating the Carolina Panthers, a team that had victimized them in the past, by ruining their playoff chances or the last home game at their old stadium. The next day, the highly touted Jets lost their home opener at the very same new stadium to the Baltimore Ravens, without even scoring a touchdown, which was certainly not the start that they hoped for. Even the poor stadium has yet to hit its stride, as it still has no name, and while every other team is battling it out at the likes of Minute Maid Park or Corel Centre or U.S. Cellular Field, everyone around here basically still calls this place "the new stadium at the Meadowlands," which is certainly not going to win any awards for originality, much less street cred in the cut-throat world of sports stadiums, that's for sure. Meanwhile in baseball, the Yankees and Tampa Bay Rays are neck-and-neck in the race for the pennant, with their season records so close that they're a mere half-game apart in the standings after 140 games. Of course, tight pennant races can be highly entertaining to people who don't care who wins, but extremely nerve-wracking to the fans who live and die with every pitch. My advice would be to move the Tampa Bay franchise out of the American League East altogether, to a different division where they could make their own way without the Yankees dogging their heels at every turn. Pancho and Ricardo tell me that Guadalajara is very nice this time of year.
There seems to be no end to the hijinks at the local newspaper, and here again, these leaped right out at me, as they were one on top of the other, so there was no avoiding them. The first one painted this intriguing picture -
==================
Lesbian Air Force
nurse trial to begin
==================
Now, for anyone who didn't already know anything about this particular story, like me, I'm thinking that you just really wouldn't know where to start with this. It certainly packs a wallop in 7 small words, and seems to be going in a lot of different directions all at once. We have not just your average garden-variety lesbian, which might not be very newsworthy, but a military lesbian, and one in the Air Force on top of that. And not just any old flying military lesbian, but also a nurse, so there's already a lot going on in this story. But it doesn't even stop there, my friends, because our very special flying military lesbian nurse is apparently on trial as well, which would seem to violate some rule of too many objects trying to occupy the same space at the same time, and the Quantum Physics Police would have stepped in long before now. I suppose it's only a good thing that she's not also handicapped or a woman of color, or we'd have to call out the headline stretchers to make enough room for all the modifiers and adjectives they'd need to describe the situation. Pancho and Ricardo want to point out that at least she's not also blonde, but I'm not sure that's not just the tequila talking.
It was the one right under that which really got my attention -
=====================
Burning elevator
called suspicious
=====================
Believe it or not, that story was reported right here in the Queen City on the Sound, New Rochelle, so it hit pretty close to home. I have to admit that I feel truly fortunate to live in a place where burning elevators are considered suspicious, instead of some hotbed of post-apocalyptic wasteland, where a burning elevator would be so routine as to excite no comment, much less appear in the newspaper. I know that everyone will be relieved to hear that the article ends by saying that the Police are "continuing to investigate," so the elevator burners should be on notice that their actions will not be tolerated obliviously by the authorities, as if this were some sort of far-flung frontier outpost where anything goes. Frankly, my money is on the lesbian Air Force nurse.
And what may be new and exciting in the wonderful wide world of politics, you may be wondering, and well may you wonder. Last week, the Westchester County Board of Elections rolled out their brand new Optical Scan Voting Machines, with the plan to use them in the primaries for the first time. Now, I had nothing against the old mechanical voting machines with the levers, but they certainly had been using them ever since I started to vote in 1972, and probably for decades before that as well. With society developing ever more high-tech gadgets everywhere you turn, and at a dizzying pace, it seemed only logical for the democratic process to jump right on board that futuristic bandwagon too, and leap into the forefront of the digital revolution, leaving behind the trappings of auld lang syne. I would have expected something along the lines of an ATM, with a touch screen showing the various candidates or propositions that you could vote on, which would also incorporate some sort of identification device that would make sure that the voters were legally eligible to vote, and only voted once. So the ImageCast arrived at long last, and with plenty of fanfare, as they kept sending out mailings to the yearning electorate letting us know what we had to look forward to. Finally they sent out an elaborate brochure on how to use the new equipment, and it was certainly an eye-opening tutorial, although probably not in the way they would have expected. First of all, you still have to stand on line to go register at the district table, just like always, and then - believe this or don't - they actually hand you a paper ballot, which you have to mark like an SAT exam, by filling in the little circles. At that point, you feed it into the ImageScan, and it displays an image on the screen of what you voted for, and then you press the Enter button for your ballot to be accepted. I know people may complain about their tax dollars at work here, but I think it's good to know that Westchester County has joined the ranks of modern civilizations dating to at least the time of the ancient Phoenicians, who I believe invented the process of putting pigment on parchment, and taken a giant leap into the era of paper ballots, that would seem archaic even by medieval standards. Even Pancho and Ricardo would regard this process as laughably quaint, and don't forget, they invented the idea of arroz con pollo tossing, so they ought to know.
Speaking of airborne elements, at an intersection near the hospital, there has historically been a blinking yellow traffic light, on the road that leads to the Emergency Room, presumably to clear the way for emergency vehicles racing to our doors on their life-saving missions of mercy, although I personally have to say that I have never seen anyone pay the slightest bit of attention to it in all the years that it has been there, blinking happily away in its unsung safety efforts nonetheless. I have always found this light to be very helpful, not necessarily from a traffic standpoint, but in terms of giving directions to visitors trying to find the hospital, which you would think would be pretty easy for a sprawling campus of 10 buildings that has been on the same spot for over a hundred years, but you'd be surprised. The biggest obstacle to the potential first-time guest, obviously, is that the hospital's official address is on an imaginary street that doesn't exist, and perhaps never has existed except in the hypothetical realms of bygone city planners, and even if it did, there are certainly no street signs for it. A determined search through the archives of fusty old city maps of yesteryear might identify which street it should be, however, even that would not solve the problem for the searcher, since that is now the back of the hospital where the Receiving dock is located, and not the front entrance, and you literally have to walk around two other buildings to find your way to the front. Now, it's true that the front of the hospital is actually located on a real street, which even has a street sign, but in their continuing efforts to repel the public, the hospital designers have very cleverly hidden the entrance at the end of a courtyard between a tall building and the backyard of a house with an unsightly large and overgrown fence, so that countless hordes of people go past it on a daily basis and have no idea that it's even there. At least the blinking light was a landmark that could be used to orient someone in their quest to find the hospital, or leave the hospital and get back to the highway, and I found it extremely useful for this purpose. In fact, I was still doing that recently, when Jean, our irrepressible bookkeeper - with unassailable proof of just how true it is that no one pays any attention to that light - pointed out to me that there is no longer any blinking light in that intersection, and in fact, there hasn't been one for over a year. I always say that they didn't invent the Federal Witness Protection Program to protect anyone from me, since I never notice what's right in front of my face, but even I found that a little hard to swallow, until I went back outside and verified for myself that not only is there no blinking light there anymore, but there aren't even any poles or wires to hang one on, even if they wanted to. Normally, I would find this type of mental lapse rather embarrassing, but frankly, Pancho and Ricardo have been drinking an awful lot of tequila lately, and I'm finding it increasingly hard to get their attention over the incessant din of castanets.
Elle
posted by El Tango Fandango @ 8:13 PM
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