F*cking Rome

My wife and I like the series Rome on HBO. We watched the first season last year and were quickly caught up by the characters, situations and the actors playing the roles. We have watched the first three episodes of Season Two and all I can say is…what the fuck?

I don't remember Season One using the word fuck as much as I've heard it in these three episodes. I know that HBO series use fuck because it's naughty and they can get away with it. You pay for the "privilege" of watching the same lame movies over and over again on HBO, and many of them use the word fuck. So they have extended that to their homegrown series like The Sopranos, Deadwood, and Rome, etc.

Not only was the word fuck overused to the point of silliness in episode 15 (third episode of Season Two), but other situations were overdone, also. Two incidents of buggery, men on other men. Three bare bums of men; the gangster Carbo, his robe pulled up and raped in his bare butt; Mark Antony, walking into the bath with the sexy Atia, shows the actor nude from the rear, and at the end the actor portraying Brutus is shown nude from the back.

As my coworker Peg might say, "Why do they always show guys nude from the back?" Well, they have shown a penis or two on Rome, just not in Season Two…so far, that is. Keep watching, Peg, they may have a surprise for you later and give you a full monty.

I'm demanding some equal time. More boobies along with the butts! Also, my objections to the word fuck remain. I'm not against using it, just not in every scene. Fuck is a word which should be used for emphasis. At the most maybe twice an episode, if even that. C'mon, writers…you're better than this. Is there a reverse censor at HBO? A guy who sits down and watches these programs before they air and says, "We only have 19 uses of 'fuck.' We need more." Is there a requirement for a certain number of times the word fuck has to be used on HBO?

If you're a big Rome fan, don't get after me for my criticisms. I am a fan also. I just think the show can be made entertaining and be just as interesting without all of the language and shock video--killings, including a throat slashing and beheading, and the aforementioned anal sex--because they've got one of the most talented casts of any HBO series, hands down.

Detachable Dick

Like a few million other Americans I watched the State Of The Union address last night. I didn't expect much and didn't get much from our President. He is still off in some Cloud Cuckooland where progress is being made in Iraq, and life's better all around for everyone. Everyone that isn't getting blown up, that is.

The real treat to me was looking past Bush at Cheney and Nancy Pelosi behind him. Besides the fact that Nancy Pelosi is one fine-looking woman, Cheney is always worth looking at just to see if he gives one of his patented sneers or otherwise makes his usual stone face do something remotely human. Last night he winked at someone in the audience. Maybe his wife, maybe his mistress, maybe one of his buddies.

He also popped something into his mouth. At first I thought, "Nitroglycerin." I thought maybe he was having some chest pains, but whatever it is he popped into his mouth, he appeared to keep sucking on it for a long time. I then thought, "Maybe it's a Lifesaver. Maybe when the speech is over he's going to grab Nancy and lay a big wet one on her, sticking his tongue in, putting the Lifesaver in her mouth." No such luck, buddy. I'm sure Nancy has dodged more kisses than a stud like you has ever given.

They also showed pictures of the audience of dignitaries, occasionally identifying a senator or congressman, or even Supreme Court justice. I saw Hillary sitting behind Barack Obama and was hoping she'd put a V with her fingers behind his head, but she was being dignified. I saw Senator Patrick Leahy give a wolfish grin. Maybe he was thinking about setting up a little meeting with Nancy Pelosi. I didn't see anyone picking their noses or doing anything egregious, but I might have missed something because I had to get up and go to the bathroom a couple of times during the speech. Being able to go to the bathroom was something I thought about. All of those people were packed into the gallery and no one could get up and go pee if they had to. Maybe there is a big run in D.C. on Depends undergarments right before the State Of The Union. That wouldn't help if you had to fart, something I can do in my easy chair, but can't do in public. Just gotta hold it, Senator. Only another hour to go and then you can go to your chambers and cut loose.

*******

After the State Of The Union Sally turned the TV to HBO and we watched the last part of a Wanda Sykes special. Wanda is a black female comedian who is known to me mainly from being on the Larry David show, Curb Your Enthusiasm. Wanda did a hysterically funny and obscene bit about how nice it would be if women had "detachable pussies." They could leave them at home when they went out. That way if a guy jumped out of the bushes while they were jogging they could say, "Sorry, my pussy's not here."

I thought how nice it would be if guys had detachable dicks. You could hand it to a woman you wanted to impress, saying, "Take this home, introduce it to your pussy. If they like each other we can go out." You might want to take some Viagra before handing it to her, though. You wouldn't want her to just drop it and say, "Ewwwww, what's this tiny little limp thing, a worm?"

If I was God, I would've designed people that way.

Wanda used the f-word a lot. I really have nothing against the word fuck. I use it occasionally, though, when I really mean it or really feel a compelling need. Unlike some folks I don't use it in casual conversation. Nowadays when I walk into any school on my route I'm apt to hear it, both from boys and from girls. And that's just the elementary schools! High schools it's all over the yard.

A word loses its power when it's overused like the word fuck. If I fuckin' wanted to fuckin' say fuck I'd better fuckin' say it with a fuckin' reason, otherwise it fuckin' loses its fuckin' intensity.

There have been episodes of The Sopranos where I swear (yuk-yuk, no, they swear, not me) they use the word fuck more times than I heard it in two years of the Army, and when I was in the Army I heard it a lot.

So, fuckin' have a fuckin' great day, you fuckin' fuckers.

Ciao for fuckin' now.

Bunco

Whatever happened to the word "bunco"? We who used to watch Dragnet were used to hearing the word when Jack Webb as Joe Friday would open a show by saying, "…my partner Frank Smith and I were working the day watch out of Bunco…" According to www.dictionary.com a bunco, or bunko (short for bunkum) is a swindle or confidence game.

Does anyone even use the word "swindle" anymore? Nowadays I think the words bunco and swindle have been replaced by the words "scam" and "con."

The Internet is still in its wild and wooly phase, where anything is possible and no one seems to have perfected a way to maintain some sort of control over the cretins who come through your monitor from god-knows-where, trying to extract money illegally from you. Everybody remembers the Nigerian e-mails where some lawyer in Lagos, Nigeria tells you somebody died leaving you $2,000,000, and all you have to do is send him $5,000 and he'll make sure you get it. Are those still being sent? I haven't seen one of those in a few years, although I heard just recently about several people who have fallen for it, losing thousands of dollars in the process.

The other bunco/con/scam is "phishing," where some crooks send you an official looking e-mail supposedly from your bank or Paypal or eBay saying there has been an attempt to get into your account, so send us your password, credit card numbers, etc., and we'll make sure it doesn't happen again. Has anyone fallen for that one?

You don't need the Internet to pull a scam. In 2003 Sally and I got a phone call on a Monday from our credit card company asking if we'd authorized some suspicious payments and we hadn't. The week before our son's wedding someone had wiped out our checking account. We went to our bank and reported it and got our money back immediately. We told them what we thought happened. Sally had gone with a friend to lunch at a Chinese restaurant. The waiter had taken her credit card, kept it for what Sally thought was longer than necessary, and then two days later the charges started hitting our account from other states. At the time we were so glad to get our money back we didn't really think much about what could be done about it. The bank didn't seem all that interested, nor did the credit card company. I'm sure it happens so often that they probably just chalk some of it up to the cost of doing business, and of course they add those charges right back to you in forms of increased service fees. So we get scammed by crooks and no one asks who was at fault, and then we end up paying extra for it.

A couple of weeks ago I heard on the local news about a Salt Lake City Quizno's sandwich shop. About 30 customers complained that after they used their debit cards to buy lunch unauthorized charges showed up on their credit card statements. At least the customers knew where the scam originated. Some employee of that particular Quizno's either sold the credit card numbers or used them himself. You don't need the Internet to get ripped off; you can get it by buying lunch.

I wonder if this has happened to anyone else: Last year before my son's birthday my wife bought him an iPod from Amazon.com. While ordering it she read that if she opened up an Amazon.com Visa account and have them put the items she was buying on that card, she could get free shipping. She signed up for the card, never intending to use it. She thought, "I'll get the card, I won't activate it, then when I pay it off in one lump sum I'll cancel the card." She didn't think much of it until she got a credit card statement showing that someone had placed e-trades to a stock broker in the UK on our card. She made some phone calls, signed a statement that the charges weren't made by her, and we never lost anything, but no one accepted responsibility. Amazon.com said it wasn’t their fault, Visa said it wasn't their fault, so how did someone get the credit card number since except for the initial charge for the iPod, the card was never activated? That's just bunco!Ciao for now.

Four of 24

This is a yearbook picture of my dad, Leon, taken when he was in prep school, circa 1936, which would have made him about 15 or 16. He looks very mature for his age, but some of that is because in those days teenagers weren't a separate breed of human like they are today. The clothes they wore were cut down adult wear, not a completely different wardrobe with matching hairstyles, piercings and accoutrements.

My dad's cousin, Lorna, gave me a print of this picture which I re-photographed some years ago. The details are a little murky but you can see right off that dad was a handsome guy.

Years later, when I first joined the school district where I've worked for the past 30 ½ years, I met a lady named Enid. She recognized my name and said she was from my dad's home town. She told me, "Your dad's family was well off compared to the rest of us. We barely made it through the Depression but your dad and his sisters seemed to have everything they wanted. Your dad even went to a private school."

She added, "That Leon, he was the most handsome guy. I used to think he was the handsomest guy in town."

I waited for her to say, "…and you take after your dad." But she didn't. And I don't.

*******

I watched the first four hours of this season's 24 with Kiefer Sutherland. I watch the show--not always, but occasionally--for different reasons than the usual 24 fans. I think it's more like a comedy. The plots are so overcooked, the characters are so earnest, the bad guys so bad, the good guy (Jack Bauer, played by Sutherland) almost as bad, that it makes for caricature rather than character.

This time out they're chasing Arab terrorists who have suitcase nuclear devices. As episode four ended, one of the suitcase nukes had gone off in Los Angeles, and we could see the mushroom cloud rising over the city in the distance. Oboy. What happens next? Tune in next Monday.

I admit that during the last hour my attention started to drift. There's so much activity on screen that my mind starts looking for relief. I pick up a newspaper or magazine to read while the characters are running around, shouting, racing in cars.

Something I've noticed about 24: The cell phones they use (which they are constantly using) always work. There are no drop outs, no dead areas with no reception. The person they're calling is always able to pick up the phone and talk; no voice mail, no missed calls. They are on the road when no one else is out there. In these episodes they were able to follow a terrorist without traffic problems, then switch over surveillance to a satellite. It can be made to swing over from its position in space and look right down on the terrorist's car with just a few keystrokes on a computer somewhere at hq in Washington. Somehow Jack managed to do all that and still get back to rescue a hostage, all within the hour timetable of the show.

There are so many plot elements like that piling up in the episodes that it adds to the surreal atmosphere. I also like that Jack, who has been tortured by Chinese for 20 months but never talked (according to the Chinese, who gave up this information to the Americans without even being asked!) has had his conscience tweaked, so when he tortures a suspect he feels bad. Of course, sometimes that's hard to tell because Kiefer Sutherland has one expression he uses throughout the show. Except when he's yelling, which he does quite a bit.

In one of the episodes (I can't remember which; sorry, they all start running together in my mind), a guy crashes through a glass coffee table and has a big shard of glass sticking out of his leg. A guy gets shot in the leg. Someone is tied up and gets stabbed in the knee as torture. The writers need some new ideas of which body parts to attack.

In 24 no one seems to ever have to stop for a pee break, or to eat a sandwich or have a cup of coffee. I guess when you're saving the world (or at least, the good ol' U.S. of A.) you don't have time for breaks. Personally, I think it would be better if on the episodes where Jack says, "This takes place between 10:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m.," he would tell someone, "We need to stop at Starbucks and get a cup. Jeez, I'm gonna drop if I don't get some caffeine."

Ciao for now.

Eat My Shorts, Sasquatch

Here are some odds 'n' ends today. My brain is still semi-frozen from being out in the Arctic-like weather all day.

*******

Hey! Someone has found Sasquatch! Any suspicion that the creature known as Bigfoot--or is it Bigbutt?--doesn't exist should be dispelled by this picture.
*******

Is there anyone else out there who likes a Zero Bar? I found this on the Internet. It's a page from a 1940s candy wholesaler's catalogue. Hollywood Candy still makes Zero Bars but they are hard to find. The only place I have seen them in several years is in Wal-Mart. They might be better distributed in other areas of the country than they are here. I worked with a guy once who used to eat two or three Zero Bars every day for lunch. Not with his lunch…they were his lunch. I wonder if he has any teeth left.I also like Hollywood Candy's Payday, which is also in this 60-year-old catalogue. I don't recognize the Hail Bar on the same page as the Zero.

*******

Back in the 1960s Batman was king…for about 15 minutes. Actually, a year and a half. Still, that short period of Batmania is well remembered. No matter what else was going on I used to park myself in front of the tube two nights a week to watch Batman. I still remember the Neil Hefti theme song, and like other TV show themes from the '60s it is still instantly recognizable. I haven't seen an episode of the Adam West Batman show in years. Is it still in syndication? At the time of its popularity the stores were inundated with merchandise with Batman logos. I really like the shirts on these kids in this old picture. It's probably inspired by the TV show, but it isn't the TV show logo, which was more stylized. This is actually the logo from the old Batman comic books I used to read in the 1950s.
*******

This is one of those really embarrassing events this guy will want to forget as soon as possible, but may haunt him until they shovel dirt on him. When busted for drunk driving he tried to eat his underwear to cover up the alcohol in his system.

Sounds like he's been watching Bart Simpson, "Eat my shorts, man."

*******

George Bush is in so much trouble now I am not going to add to the general outcry. It's more fun to watch his fellow Republicans carve him up like a Thanksgiving turkey. I've done a lot of bitching about Gee Dub since I had a letter to the editor published in my local daily newspaper on December 31, 2000, protesting the results of the Presidential "election." But even as I vow to quit dissing Dubya I can't resist this dig:

Ciao for now.

Happy Birthday

Today is Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday. Happy birthday, Dr. King.

Where I live, Utah, was the last state to recognize the King holiday as Martin Luther King Day. Before 2000 it was called Civil Rights Day or some other euphemism. African-Americans make up only about 1% of the population and most Utah natives are still not used to non-white faces amongst the mostly Northern European-type residents.

In the 1960s I saw a huge billboard on State Street in Salt Lake City. It had a picture of Dr. King sitting in a chair, in a classroom setting. The headline on the billboard said, "MARTIN LUTHER KING AT A COMMUNIST CELL MEETING!" The billboard was signed by "TACT--The Truth About Civil Turmoil." There really was no way anyone could tell where the picture was taken or when, or whether it was a commie cell meeting or the social committee in the basement of a church. Even people around here who hated King, who hated everything he stood for, didn't swallow that. I remember talk radio programs with people discussing how untrue the billboard looked to them.

Utah, and particularly Utah County, just south of us, was the hotbed of activity for the John Birch Society. It's still the single largest concentration of conservatives in the state. I assume the organization TACT, which I never heard of before or since, was probably either part of the Birchers, or some guy paying for a billboard and calling himself an organization.

I think it was that billboard that was the catalyst to make me pay attention to the civil rights issues going on at the time. I was a teenager, usually just involved with myself and my friends, letting the world go by without thinking about it much. The billboard's message worked for me, but in exactly the opposite way the person who erected it wanted it to. After seeing the naked and libelous hatred in that message I had much more sympathy for what people were out marching for.

It was about a hundred years from the end of the U.S. Civil War until the first Civil Rights Acts were signed by the President, and it might be a hundred more years before people start judging people by "the content of their character and not the color of their skin." I wonder how long it would have taken had there not been a charismatic leader like Dr. King to remind us we're all in this together.

*******During the 1950s or early '60s this comic booklet came out with the story of Dr. King and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, made famous in the history of the civil rights movement. It was distributed in the South, and was a primer on non-violence, including two pages on the Gandhi story. You can find the whole thing posted at this site. There are also some other interesting educational comic booklets posted there; things I'm sure you've never seen before. I know I hadn't.

This particular comic book is well done with excellent illustrations. Organizations found out that people respond positively to information given in this format, which is why it's always been so successful.

*******

Years ago when Martin Luther King Day was being proposed, then implemented, I heard a lot of grousing and complaining. One guy said, "Who the hell wants a holiday in the middle of January?" I told the guy, "People might not accept it as a holiday until the car dealers and furniture stores start using it as a selling tool." Sure enough, this weekend the ads are out, and the "Martin Luther King Day clearance sales!!!" are bursting out of my local newspaper.

Ciao for now.

Renewing Acquaintanceships

This was a week of interesting surprises.

First surprise, interesting but no fun, is how damn cold it's gotten. It's settled over most of the nation so everyone knows about the teeth-rattling chill, but I have to work in it.

********

My wife, Sally, works for an education foundation, which is headquartered in an elementary school. Said school is on my regular school district mail delivery route. Monday night she told me, "I found out the principal, whose name is now Mandy H--, was once Mandy V--, and she went to school with us."

I did a Danny Thomas spit take. Coffee shot out of my mouth. I said, "Mandy V--? I dated her!"

I don't know what would get a spouse's attention more than words like that, but Sally suddenly became all ears. My advice is, if you want to get your husband's or wife's undivided attention, say something about someone you dated.

It really wasn't much of a date, though, but the story has an interesting twist. I got lined up by a mutual friend. Mandy V-- was really cute. She had/has a pretty face with attention-getting eyes. I was a senior and she was a junior. We went on one date in the fall of 1964. I don't remember what happened on the date, but I remember what happened before the date.

Mandy had told me, "Meet me at the Hires Root Beer stand. I'll be inside waiting." I showed up at 7:00 in my 1957 Chevrolet Bel-Air two-door hardtop like I was supposed to, went inside the Hires stand, but the only person I saw in there was a hard-looking man sitting at the counter. I was disappointed but went back outside and got ready to drive off. I heard my name in a loud whisper. I looked over and behind a light pole was Mandy, trying to get my attention. I drove to the pole and she jumped in and said, "Get out of here, quick!" I did.

When we were clear of the parking lot she said, "That's my boyfriend in Hires. I didn't want him to see me." Alarm bells went off in my head. Boyfriend…? I asked, "How old is your boyfriend?" She said, "Thirty-three."

I don't know how old you are, but consider when you were 17-years-old, and how other people looked to you. Thirty-three looked to me like real old, real grown-up, real dangerous. My balls shriveled in my pants. The last thing in the world I wanted was to be with someone who had a boyfriend who looked like he could pop my head like a grape. So the rest of the evening is wiped from my mind, but I still remember how I felt when I heard that startling bit of news.

My question now would be, why was a 16-year-old girl going out with a 33-year-old man? Well, we all know why the guy was interested in her, don't we? I wonder what ever happened to that relationship but I won't be asking Mandy, because I don't plan on talking to her. I don't renew acquaintanceships like that, nor would there be a reason. She's management now, I'm still a flunky. She probably doesn't remember me or that night, and thank god for that. Like George Costanza, I don't want to be remembered.

*******

When that happened I told my friend Dave in an e-mail, "I don't renew acquaintanceships," and for the most part that's true. However, later in the week my old e-mail buddy Eddie contacted me. He'd been looking for blogs about Harvey Kurtzman, who was the creator of Mad, and came up with me. It'd been several years since we had written to each other. Unlike Mandy, Eddie I welcomed back in my life.He has a really interesting blog called Chicken Fat, which reminds me a lot of my own blog. But then, I could have gotten the idea from Eddie because of his way of making everyday life sound interesting. Maybe Eddie and I hit it off because we are both observers of other humans, who notice things maybe others don't notice. Or it could be that we share the Zodiac sign of Cancer. Or most likely it's that after reading Mad comics our minds are just twisted and bent into the same configuration.

*******

Lots of folks have spent the week commenting on Gee Dubya's latest Iraq speech. Right now there is the unmistakable smell of desperation. I could practically see the flop sweat rolling off his forehead as he knew what was at stake since he has lost most of his audience and his core group of supporters.

When I was in the Army a sergeant told me the story of why the chevrons that indicate the rank of sergeant are pointing up instead of down. "It's because the Army has never lost a major battle," he proclaimed. Nice story, but what about Little Big Horn? Anyway, not only is the U.S. Army having troubles fighting an enemy in Iraq who is gone like smoke, they will probably never be able to say they won this war, unless getting out with at least some respect from the rest of the world could be counted as winning.

Ciao for now.

Factoid or Fictoid?

This morning I got one of those e-mails that your friends send you, things that they received that they pass along. It was titled Did You Know and included "facts" like "Stewardesses is the longest word typed with only the left hand and lollipop with your right." Now who figured that out, and should I believe it? I'm not going to go through the unabridged dictionary typing out words to see if I can make one with my left hand that's longer than the word stewardesses, so it's basically impossible to know if it's true or not.

Suspicious type that I am, I call little factoids like that "fictoids," because I suspect they may be fiction.

I'm willing to accept some things the e-mail says like, "A dime has 118 ridges around the edge," or "Peanuts are one of the ingredients of dynamite," because I believe those facts could be readily checked. I'm not going to go check them by counting the ridges on dimes or blowing myself up with dynamite to see if the taste in my mouth as I die is peanutty, but they sound reasonable. I'm less willing to accept at face value that "the average person's left hand does 56% of the typing," or "women blink twice as much as men." How could I check either of those? Into the suspected fictoid file they go.

One of the lines had a familiar ring to it. "If the population of China walked past you, eight abreast, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction." I heard something similar over 40 years ago when I was in junior high. The teacher who said it to us had a slightly different, more ghoulish, take: "If you lined up all of the Chinese and machine-gunned them as they walked by you you'd never kill them all because they'd reproduce too fast." Those were the years of more open and casual racism. There was the Cold War; China was "Red China," Chairman Mao had his Little Red Book, and fresh in our memories we had the Korean War and thousands of Chinese soldiers coming over the hills in North Korea to engage our guys in battle.My classmate, Richard, who was a smartass like me, piped up: "It'd be hard for them to 'do it' if they were walking." The teacher looked at him for several seconds until the laughter died down. "All right, it would," he conceded, and went on to another subject. I got a mental image of people having sex and babies while lined up, walking, waiting to be machine-gunned to death.

In 2007 I ask, was this fictoid determined before or after the Chinese adopted the one-child to a family rule? They do have a lot of people. According to no less an authority than the CIA China has a population of about 1,300,000,000 people in a land mass a little smaller than the U.S. The U.S. has a population of 300,000,000, or roughly one billion less residents. So would you be able to machine gun all of the residents of America if they'd be so dumb as to march by you and be shot, or would we be reproducing too fast, too?

Whew! That's a lot to think about from one little e-mail.

Here's another factoid that I consider suspicious: "If you are an average American, in your whole life, you will spend an average of six months waiting at red lights." Awww, c'mon. If you live in Utah like I do you just blow through red lights. That could skew the averages. Over a lifetime Utahns probably only wait three months at red lights. People in Utah do not think of a red light as "stop," but more like a challenge to get through an intersection without being t-boned by another car. Into that alleged fictoid file it goes.

I have no way of knowing if this is true or not (it's the first time I've ever read it, and I've read a lot about Prohibition-era gangsters): "Al Capone's business card said he was a used furniture dealer." But I like it. You could sound real smart at a party if you dropped this one into a conversation. "Well, you know," grinning, slowly rotating the ice in your whiskey glass, "Al Capone's business card said that he was a used furniture dealer." Gasps of amazement come from the crowd. Wow, you're suddenly the smartest guy in the room, with the most unusual and arcane trivia. Is it true? They don't care. You don't either.

Ciao for now.

Reverse Resolutions for 2007

If a year had an asshole, it would be January.

*******

We're a week into 2007. How many resolutions did you make, and how many have you broken?

I'm not one to make resolutions, because I know how easily discouraged I can get saying, "I'm going to lose that 20 pounds this year!" or "I'm going to get that better job!" and then end up 10 pounds heavier and in the same crappy job.

What I've decided to do this year is reverse resolutions. That is, I'm going to tell you what resolutions you should have in regard to me.

My first reverse resolution would be to tell you that when driving on the freeway with me make sure you use your turn signals. Also, do not drive on the freeway at 75 mph while talking on your cell phone. This will give me road rage, thereby raising my blood pressure and increasing my anxiety. You resolve to knock off the shit that is pissing me off while you're driving.

Second, you will resolve to treat me with common courtesy. The other day a very elitist and queenly principal in one of the schools I service breezed by me. I was holding the door open for her and she went through it without looking in my direction and without saying, "Thank you." I don't know what Her Majesty was thinking, but if a student did that to her I'm sure she'd have them hung by their thumbs. I'm used to students doing that to me because they're young and dumb, but if an adult does it to me I'm always surprised. So next time I'm holding the door open for you my reverse resolution for you is to at least say "Thanks." You don't even have to be sincere about it, just use common civility.

My third reverse resolution for you is to stop trying to sell me your religion. This past two weeks I've had two attempts by folks to proselytize me on behalf of their churches. To thee I say nay! I'm not interested in religion and I'm especially not interested in your religion. Don't try to convince me by testifying to me that you're convinced of the truth of your faith. I don't care. I don't believe in your testimony any more than I believe in your religion. Don't try to tell me I'm going to hell because I don't accept Christ as my savior. You go ahead and do what you gotta do to make it to heaven, but don't try to make me think I'm going to be punished because I don't believe in your ridiculously strict and baseless dogmatism. My reverse resolution is for you to resolve to leave me alone when you are thumping your bible.

There! I've given my resolutions to you, so let's make sure you make all of them work. We've still got 51 weeks left in this year, lots of time for you to leave me and my atheism alone, don't piss me off on the road, and don't act like I'm your servant when I'm being courteous.

*******

It was my granddaughter Bella's second birthday on December 29. She is such a cutie, as is her little sister, Gabby. I love you, girls.

Ciao for now.