March 5, 2004

           What’s this that the original charges against Martha Stewart have been dropped, but not the obstruction of justice? When a person has to defend themselves against false charges, what is really being obstructed, I ask. Justice is not blocked when it was somewhere it did not belong in the first place. Everyone one of us with an imperfect memory is now a step closer to the prison cell.
           [Author’s note: this was a comment on the distorted practice of “questioning” suspects. If you don’t respond, you are presumed guilty of hiding something. If you do respond, it is used against you. If you give partial answers, you are dubbed a liar. It is a sad situation for a modern society.]
           The database [progress] went okay, however. The milestone is that I was able to do the entire new set of links in my head, and that only took thirty years to arrive. There are three sets of records, all suffering the same problem of at least two kinds of information on each of the one-page forms. No wonder they arrived in a three month old pile. Without going too deep into it, no matter how many courses a student takes, he receives one monthly attendance rating. Isn’t is twice as easy to attend one course than two? What about the courses that are more than a month long? Somebody did not think it through.

           [The following refers to a database I developed to track employee training to produce a report that never seemed to get done at site level.] So I spent the day entering the last entire semester of data. The results will be very impressive, not to mention rapid. That is mainly because the core tables are there to link it all up. This entire process is, I suspect, worth a fortune in saved effort, but also in the new capabilities. Things got behind, I see, over the sheer volume of work that had to be done manually to produce simple reports, such as an OTJ (On the Job) training report. Just add up the hours? Not so fast, you haven’t seen the forms. The school must know there is a huge problem, for their report cards contain a whole section for tracking and asking for these same missing reports. It would seem the school took it for granted the problem was unfixable, an odd behavior for a school if you as me. Certainly, no person in that academy ever solved the problem.
           The garage didn’t work on my car. The new management is strange and do not let the mechanics go ahead as before, especially with their long-term customers. I called there, and even asked Dyami for a ride over, because she works late like I do. That’s another story, but I would normally never ask her for a favor because she turns it into a crippling cause, always assuming you are wrong if you don’t do things like she does. She must have asked me five times if I’d called the garage yet. Lady, I call them the correct number of times, don’t worry about it, I just asked you for a lift over there. Dyami is a divorce looking for a place to happen. [Dyami is a lady from work who lived near El Mago, where my car was being repaired.]

           Now the Internet business investigation is on hold. The only thing certain is that they are out there to steal as much of your money as they can before you wise up. Unless you approach it very slowly and obliquely, they are a dangerous crowd. The scams are heavily layered, seeking to take you for a few hundred dollars at a time without every stating the true price or the final step. Like a telephone bill, they try to force you into their way of thinking about the costs, so if you disagree it can only be because you don’t yet understand. When studying the beast, don’t give them your real name, for as soon as you ask a dumb question, every place you go for a second opinion has already been tipped off. It’s like a small town with only two used car lots, owned by twin brothers.
           [No, I didn’t discover the Internet web page rip-offs. I was just among the first to write it down.]

           I thumbed through a woman’s magazine in the checkout line. Roughly 75% ads for products to make them more beautiful, at least in their own minds. I notice this new foundation garment meant to shape over midsection rolls of fat. It must hurt terribly. All striving toward that single goal, a Barbie doll look in her mid-twenties. The implication is that this will assure her of a steady stream of world-class bachelors begging to marry her. Not to pick her up on Saturday night (as is the usual case), but to marry her, the magazine assures.
           I recently read that the real Barbie is dropping Ken after 43 years of dating. The issue being avoided by Mattel is that a married Barbie would not sell. (The company blames Ken’s “inability” to make a commitment.) Ask yourself, why would a married Barbie just not sell? If what women say about themselves is true, there would be a stop at nothing demand for a married Barbie. Either way, no mercy from me, I see nothing wrong with natural wholesome good looks. It is Nature’s way of keeping score. Ugly people don’t breed less, it is still supply and demand.

           The article on Barbie perked my interest because it was a result of reading another article on the Internet yesterday morning. The article was about why some men never marry. It was obviously written by a spurned woman. Such women perceive unwillingness as incapacity; you get that a lot among the jilted. She failed to understand that some men have higher standards (in wives than they do in girlfriends), and the process of selection takes longer. Where did that women, who was busy waxing her legs, shaving her underarms, plucking her eyebrows, dying her roots, painting her nails and massaging her cellulite ever find time to write about men? It’s a mystery for the ages.