Mark Knows It All

Seraphim, the community chorus in which I sing, performed last night for a small but appreciative crowd made up of members of the National Guild of Organists. Although we sang well at the performance, the rehearsal beforehand was magnificent. The venue was a big, modern Catholic Church with acoustics that made the music soar. It was the best we have ever sounded. Outside, the edge of the Nor’easter that has plagued the east coast, was blowing wind, rain, and snow. It was probably the most extended period of bad weather this area has had in a long time. The weather people said the winds were gusting at about 48 mph. Not where I was. It was much, much worse. At times I thought my car was going to flip over. It was difficult to open the car door to get out, and when I did, I thought it was going to blow off the hinges. When the show was over, we had to go out into the blowing rain. Driving home I thought how wonderful it is that in the of midst this really bad weather, I had been given th...

The Don Imus controversy has raised the issue of racism up a notch in the national debate. It's clear from watching the media coverage and listening to ordinary conversation, that there is frustration in the white community stemming from political correctness, hypocrisy, and the fear of being called racist if anyone speaks his/her mind. So now I am going to speak mine, and if it makes me racist, so be it. My undergraduate degree is in Political Science. While attending Ohio State University, one of the courses in my curriculum was Urban Studies. I signed up for the course that suited my schedule, and walked into a lecture hall filled with 200 blacks, a black professor, and myself. Our first assignment was to write a paper stating how we would define the issue of racism in the United States. I cited Edward Banfield, a noted conservative political scientist, known for his book The Unheavenly City, Revisited . His thesis states that while racism in its purist form does exist in the US...

I have never been a fan of Don Imus. I think he is obnoxious, and wonder where I can get a job consisting of sitting around for a couple of hours every day, smugly looking down one’s nose at everyone else and criticizing and belittling their every move. But this is America, and I know some of you are fans. Mr. Imus is known for his crude and irreverent remarks. He has made a career out of being outrageous. I would be surprised if Imus didn't make these types of provocative statements It is ironic that the biggest defenders of Imus are coming from the right. A caller into the Rush Limbaugh program the other day said it best. At the end of the day, who did Imus hurt? Sure, he hurt the feelings of great female basketball players on a great basketball team. But get real. Life is tough, and it won’t be the last time these folks are faced with these types of disparaging comments that we all experience from time to time. They need to toughen up a little bit, and continue to work hard and ...

A note to my readers: This article was written several days before the Virginia Tech massacre. Several news reports have stated that the shooter was bullied throughout his elementary school years. Obviously, that is not an excuse. But it certainly is worth thinking about. Several years ago, when my son was in 7th grade, he had an encounter with an internet bully. His classmate, who was somewhat of a computer whiz, had developed his own web page long before “My Space” had become popular. In addition to making unflattering remarks, he enjoyed posting unflattering pictures of his fellow students on his site, much to the delight of those who weren’t the object of his scrutiny, and to the chagrin of those who were. My son was among the latter. A confrontation finally developed in school. One thing led to another, and my son deposited this “Bill Gates” wannabe into a school locker. Within short order, I got a telephone call at work asking me to go the school immediately, and informing me my...

Joyous Easter and Blessed Passover Peace on Earth. Now More Than Ever.

Today is Palm Sunday, and the first day of Holy Week. The Judeo/Christian tradition treats spring as a time for reflection, renewal, and repentance. It is a time to make peace with your God, and to celebrate man’s deliverance from the evils that lurk in the shadows of men’s souls. The trouble is, where does one find God? These past several years it has become more difficult. 9/11 has reshaped our view of our country. We are prosperous, but we have to work harder than we ever worked before to maintain that prosperity. The divide between rich and poor, the computer literate and the computer illiterate, those with education and those without, is growing daily. Political rancor is at an all time high. The media is untrustworthy. We want to live moral lives, but it is a growing struggle. I saw an ad for the A&E Channel on television the other day for a new reality series that will air next week. It is called Sons of Hollywood . Its promo reads: “Our lives are better than yours. Drugs, s...

As if anyone cares, lately I have had “issues” with the Academy Awards. Here is another one. The Departed won the Best Picture award this year, and it won Martin Scorsese the Oscar for Best Director. Its loaded cast includes Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Martin Sheen, Matt Damon, Alec Baldwin, and Mark Wahlberg. So I spent my 20 bucks to buy the movie, and settled in last night to watch this fine entertainment. American Beauty , the award winner for 1999, has met its match in the Mark Knows It All “How did it win the Oscar” turkey of the year contest. The plot is simple. The Irish Mafia places an informant in the Boston Police Department as the Boston Police Department simultaneously places an informant in the Irish Mafia. The tension centers on who is going to discover whom first. Even knowing the premise of the movie, it took me 45 minutes of this 2 ½ hour slog to begin to figure out who was whom. I spent a large part of the movie trying to explain it to my wife. Who?? What??...

Everytime I drive east, as I did last weekend, I complain to whomever is in the car with me how much I dislike driving on the Pennslvania Turnpike and the mountains. Even worse is the West Virginia Turnpike, which positively gives you motion sickness even if you watch your speed…curvy, twisty, hilly, and get me the paper bag in the back seat….quick!! Midst the twists and the turns, however, my inner history buff gets the best of me. Could somebody please tell me how our forefathers found their way through those dang mountains? How did John Young get to Youngstown? These guys had to have major league cojones to load up their families in mule drawn wagons and trek through the wilderness, through God knows what, to set up settlements in the west. How did they do it? Where did they get the guts? At the Breezewood exit on the PA Turnpike, there is a sign to Gettysburg. Why would Robert E. Lee decide to fight the union army…there? I can imagine the confederate and the union troops marching t...

I visited Washington, DC, this weekend with my son, who is looking at DC based graduate schools. This morning we visited George Washington University, and we heard a commotion while walking around the campus. Following the sound of a very noisy loud speaker, we walked down 23rd Street, past the State Department, and ended up on the National Mall nearby the Lincoln Memorial. Standing around us were droves of war protestors, there to protest US involvement in Iraq. It was supposed to be a march of a 100,000 plus people, originating on the Mall and ending at the Pentagon. In reality, there were about 10,000 protestors. These ideologues apparently don’t like the cold weather. It was obviously well financed. Tour buses were dropping their loads of protestors. People lined the street handing out stacks of pre-printed protest signs. There were shirt salesmen and button salesmen. There were people dressed in costume like the grim reaper wearing an American flag, and George Bush masks worn by p...

Last night, while attending a “formal” affair downtown, I managed to get a bad case of “foot in mouth” disease. There we were, seated at a table for 8, with good folks that I have known for years, and I kept calling my friend by his wife’s name. Not that I called him Shirley or anything. His wife’s name could swing both ways, so to speak. As valiantly as I tried, I could not stop doing it. I kept correcting myself, and apologizing to my friend. Nevertheless, John is probably wondering today why I kept calling him Bobbi. (The names have been changed to protect the innocent). What was the problem? Perhaps it was the din of the crowd. Among my plethora of phobias is claustrophobia, and I do have a degree of difficulty with large crowds. Or perhaps I have early onset Alzheimer’s, in which case get me the Aricept. Or maybe it was the 2 Martinis and subsequent wine that I guzzled (I mean sipped), which is my wife’s opinion. As for me, I think my mind is just too cluttered, and the synapses a...

The father of a close acquaintance of mine passed away on Thursday. Pat is an “acquaintance” because although I have known him for years, he lives out of town and I see him at most, maybe once each year. Lives often cross and then go different directions. This was a particularly busy week for me. My office was installing a computer network, and I was having difficulty in purchasing a computer that worked. My choral group’s concert was this weekend and I was responsible for the church serving as the venue. That meant 3 hour rehearsals every night, plus extra time to make sure the church was open and then closed. So I was somewhat irritated when I got the call on Thursday about the passing of Pat’s father and the funeral arrangements. I simply could not handle one more thing, and I decided not to go. My office associate also knows Pat, and when I described to him the conflict with the rehearsals and the Friday night wake and asked him to make my apologies, he told me that skipping the wa...

My officemates have all of a sudden gotten religion, and decided that it was time that we went broadband. For those of you not computer savvy, that means fast internet service, not the Sweet Sue’s Society Syncopators A ll Girl Band from Some Like It Hot . Words like wireless cards, servers, security codes, and routers (pronounced like the word Ouch) have entered the lexicon. Of course, I have been sitting with a dial up modem for a number of years just waiting for these guys and gals to come to their senses and realize how much time we spend downloading online stuff, but I digress. The long and the short of it is I had to buy a new computer for my office. As I write this, my wife has left town and my son has left the house, both seeking shelter from the stormy blast of my computer buying. $2,000.00 and 15 hours later of attempting to set the dang thing up , I am right back where I started. I'm not sure, but I think I was intimate with the service guys from Circuit City and Armst...

I have been hearing a lot of commentary as of late relating to global warming. It certainly has been interesting to contemplate global warming in the middle of a cold snap with temperatures hovering around zero, and snow up to the proverbial whazzoo. AlGore is apparently going to win an Academy Award for his political documentary An Inconvenient Truth . He has been nominated for a Nobel prize for his environmental work. The United States has been chastised for our greenhouse gas emissions and failure to ratify the Kyoto Accords. How thoughtless of us. I think Bill O’Reilly got it right on his program a few weeks ago when he said we ought to clean up the gunk in the air just because we should. I don’t like living in a dirty house, and I do my best to try to keep my office in relative good order, although that is open to debate by some. Burning less oil means less dependence on energy supplies from extremely volatile parts of the world. That is where George Bush dropped the ball. That sh...

It’s tough these days to figure out what is important, and what is not. It’s fairly clear the news media hasn’t figured it out. 24/7 saturation coverage of the death of Anna Nicole Smith shows that titillation (no pun intended) trumps more serious news any day of the week. But does the news media actually have it right…..at least as to what our culture deems important? After all, they wouldn’t show it if we didn’t watch it, and ratings is the name of the game. The death of Anna Nicole and the subsequent media coverage clearly demonstrates our culture’s priorities. If the media is the message, the message is clear: we are in trouble. Here we have someone who was a stripper and a gold digger, whose claims to fame were her implanted bust size, Playboy layouts, and pole dancing. By marrying a rich, dirty old man, she stood to inherit a ½ billion dollars. She contributed nothing to our society; not one life was saved nor one child fed or educated because she came this way. She represented c...

I don’t know about you, but my mail has become increasingly more voluminous. Each day I find my mail box filled with all sorts of things, most of which I haven’t asked for nor do I want. I generally stick the pile on the desk in the kitchen, and by the end of the week, or month sometimes, the pile becomes unmanageable and I have to clean it. That becomes almost an imperative if we have company coming. So last week, prior to my choir party, my wife gently suggested that I “get all of that s_____” (c’mon, you know she said “stuff”) off of the kitchen desk so people don’t think that we live like slobs. I dutifully got out a 40 gallon garbage bag and went to work. What a treasure trove of “stuff”. Here is what I found. Did you know that there are at least three companies that will allow you to lock in your natural gas prices for the next three years so you don’t have to worry about increasing natural gas prices? I made some inquiries as to how this works, and I was told that if natural gas...

Well, it’s that time of year again. The Academy Award nominations are out, and I don’t know half the people that have been nominated, let alone know much about the movies nominated for best picture. Click on this link, Academy Awards , and it will take you to the full nomination list. There was a time when I would make it a point to see all of the nominated films. This year, I have only seen one: The Queen , and it was terrific. My sister in law saw another, Little Miss Sunshine , and she reports it was terrific also. Let’s see what this year’s best movie nominees have to offer. The Queen: After playing Elizabeth I on HBO, Helen Mirren gets a shot at playing Elizabeth II on the big screen, and does a boffo job. This movie examines the behavior of the Royal Family immediately after the death of Princess Diana. I was never a Diana fan, so I can understand their less than emotional reaction to the death of the Prince of Wales’ ex-wife who attempted to bring down the British Monarchy. Sto...

Anyone who has gone to law school, or studied accounting, can tell you the most prolific product manufactured in the United States is widgets. Continually produced and never outsourced, widgets are the basis of our economy. In Contract Law, Rodney would sell to Rowena all the widgets he could produce, and she would buy the same, until something like a shipwreck occurred and widgets ended up in the drink, and the case ended up in every law school Contracts class. The same goes for accounting, every accounting student knows that for determining the cost basis of an item, the IRS wants the cost of the first widget in deducted from the cost of the first widget out in order to determine what the profit is. That is FIFO for you bean counters. But here's the problem, what's a widget? Being from Youngstown, I always visualized a widget as something akin to a ball bearing, manufactured locally at Commercial Shearing, now Parker Hannifin (which has been a fairly good stock to own as of l...

I have no problem with legitimate, political discourse. After all, we are a political nation. It is our great democracy that allows a thorough vetting of our important issues. But what happens when the issues take a back seat to a separate agenda? I contend that the continual barrage of criticism regarding the Iraq War directed towards George Bush is based on a domestic agenda that has nothing at all to do with foreign policy, and that is dangerous. George Bush is bad. He is evil. He is a cowboy. He is Hitler. He is the worst President...EVER!! He has perpetuated an illegal and immoral war. Congress, cut the funding. That is the mantra of the left and the left wing press. But after the rant, the left offers no alternative whatsoever to the Iraq issue other than cut and run. That is because they don't care about Iraq. What they care about is abortion, gun control, feminism, stem cell research, rights for illegal aliens, socialized medicine and wealth redistribution. And oh yes, the ...

I don’t want to say that I wasn’t upset by the outcome of the Ohio State game on Monday night. It certainly wasn’t fun watching the debacle. But I didn’t lose any sleep over it. By the end of this week, it will be ancient history. I have learned the 5 most important words all Ohio State fans should know: there is always next year. That being said, I still feel that on December 1, 2006, Ohio State was the best college team in the nation. And that is where it ended. College football has become an abomination and the biggest fraud perpetrated on the American public in a long time. Let’s take a look at the situation on January 8. Fox Sports made a lot of money. The Arizona tourist industry made a lot of money. The BCS made a lot of money. The NCAA made a lot of money. Ohio State and Florida made a lot of money. The coaches made a lot of money. The bookies made a lot of money. The shirt printers made a lot of money. And the football players….well…made butkus. Why is anyone surprised that th...

When my wife and I bought our house from my extremely elderly aunt, we also bought much of the furniture that was in it. Included in this 1970's style home was a Magnavox television set in a walnut cabinet. Not like the high tech widescreens of today, the televisions of that era were as much a piece of furniture as a television. After all, there were only three stations to watch, four if you included a very grainy PBS, and they all quit broadcasting at 1:00 AM. Your living room looked like a living room, not a "meedchyu center". To make a long story short, my aunt rarely watched television, and this glorious piece of television furniture was practically brand new. We put it in our bedroom, and it was like back to the future. On the back of the television were three different sets of antenna attachments (input connectors for those of you under 30). You could follow the progression from roof antenna, which was still on the roof when we bought the house, to the initial two p...