shocked

I am shocked-- SHOCKED I tell you!!! that this blog is still active. Maybe I can safely post all my personal rants here without danger of them being found and disparaged.

Yoopernatural alert!

Shameless plug: visit my Yoopernatural page at www.yoopernatural.com and treat yourself to a cheap download of "Bedderhoff Dead" via Smashwords or Amazon Kindle. That will have to do till I plumb the depths of Print on Demand. (Coming eventually. I hope.)

Election Year Again

I'm at an age where I can look back on election campaigns of the past and remember, seeing ads on TV, thinking: "I like that guy! I want to vote for him!"

(Of course about 90% of the time the guys I see on TV were not in my voting district, hence not on my ballot, so I couldn't vote for them, and the names that were on my ballot were totally unfamiliar to me. But that's another story.)

But for the past few years I have not been able to say, or think, or even consider thinking, "I like that guy! I'm going to vote for him!"

I don't like any of them! I loathe them all, every single one of them. They are vicious, muckraking, lying, cheating, stealing, mother-selling, monomaniacal sociopaths to the last one. We all think we know that negative campaigning doesn't work. But obviously it does. Or if it doesn't, who can tell? It just gets worse every year, and in the end one of the lying, boorish sociopaths eventually wins, and they they can all look back and say "well, our campaign worked!!!" No, it just won by default. Would that there were a way to make them all lose!!! Go home empty-handed, whipped, beaten, chastened, crying for their mothers, and hanging their heads in shame. But unfortunately, someone's always going to "win," and the egomania will feed on itself, and they'll go out and do it again. (Too bad they can't just chalk up victory to wearing the same lucky socks every year.)

It ain't a Republican thing. It ain't a Democratic thing. It's embarrassing. It's a disgrace. And if any one of them had any conscience at all, any sense of propriety or decency, they would just stop. Now. Is there no shame?

Back to Deathe

I think it's time to get back to Deathe, the little village in Michigan's Upper Peninsula where strange things happen. Maybe something new will happen. In the meantime, maybe it's time to report on things that have already happened. The U.P. calls.

A Moment of Silence, please

Today marks the two week commemoration of the passing of my best friend in the world, Boomer. A long and rambling obituary and eulogy will be forthcoming, linked to my website www.markwolfgang.com. We still come home expecting to be met at the door. Saturday morning I dreamed that I opened up the door into the garage, and Boomer dashed in and past Kim and down the hallway, and I said "Boom Boom!" and Kim said, "No..." And I said "Yes, he just went past you down the hall..." and vanished. And Kim said "No...." And I remembered and knew that if I hadn't watched him die I still wouldn't believe it. And this morning Kim woke up at 7:30, thinking how surprised she was that The Cat let her sleep so late.

Classics!

I think it's great that our local Celebration Cinemas is showing classic movies on the big screen, like "Road to Morocco" with Hope and Crosby on March 17. Followed by "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House;" "The African Queen"(!!!); "San Francisco;" and the one I'm anticipating seeing on the big screen: "Frankenstein" on April 14!

So the administration of the college has a new suggestion incentive program: offer up suggestions for cost savings or revenue generation or education quality enhancements and win a designated parking space for a week. So I suggested maybe we could train the educators to turn off the floyding lights in the gym when they're done using it, thereby saving the cost of burning 32,000 watts(!) of lights when the gym sits empty and unused.

This was the first week of the contest, and maybe I was their only entry, because I won! Note the following emails, in chronological order, from the Administrative Assistant to the President(!) to me(!), followed by the Parking Services Director's reply (names X'd out to protect the clueless and the good parts highlighted to make them funnier):

From: Lori xxxxxxx [mailto:xxxxxxx@lcc.edu]
Sent: Friday, March 06, 2009 4:20 PM
To: Eric xxxxxx; Kimberly xxxxx; Mark Wolfgang
Subject: 1-week designated parking space

Hello All,

Mark was this week’s lucky winner of a one-week parking space via the Vision Initiative IdeaLab. Can Mark contact you to make arrangements?

Thank you.

Lori

Lori xxxxxxx
Administrative Assistant to the President
Lansing Community College
Administration Building, room 300

From Eric xxxxx
Sent Fri 3/6/2009 4:48 PM
To Lori xxxxx ; Kimberly xxxxxx ; Mark Wolfgang
Subject RE: 1-week designated parking space

Hi Lori,

Kim and I were not aware that a parking space was going to be given away, as no one consulted us. So we are not currently prepared to reserve a parking space for this Monday. We can have a temporary sign made by Ernie, while we are having a permanent sign made.

Kim, can you have Eric A. take care of the signs as well as the base and pole.

Mark, you can contact Kim to make arrangements. Parking & ID Services will need vehicle info, so this can be passed on to Police & Public Safety in case any enforcement action needs to be taken on other vehicles that may park in the reserved space.

Thanks,

Eric

Go ahead, make me work for it.... On the whole, I'd rather pass up the parking space and just make fun of everyone involved.