Mark Knows It All

We have a problem. I got home from work yesterday and found out that the United States had launched a Connecticut Military Operation. The television dude the reason they did this is that Congress would never approve a Declaration of War. I would hope not. What’s wrong with Connecticut? President Obama says that this operation is necessary to protect the civilian population. From whom do they need protecting? Supposedly its against the leader of the state. I looked it up. Her name is M. Jodi Rell. She must be pretty bad because even the Arab League is upset with her. Maybe she had snow removal issues this past winter. Or maybe they want her to wear a burqa. Gee, I hope she doesn’t get caught by any Egyptians. The Drudge Report said the army was given protesting women virginity tests. Yikes. I don’t think Obama is really into this Connecticut invasion. He is looking to hand it off to somebody else. I am guessing that New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island aren’t interested in taking ov...

I usually try to vary topics for the Mark Knows It All blog. I know I wrote a local arts column last week, which for people not from this area, and some that are, is probably B-O-R-I-N-G! But sometimes things just need to be said, and this is one of those of times. The Oakland Theater is among my favorite venues in the area for live theater. Its intimate space lends itself to smaller, edgier pieces. Many of them are controversial dealing with subjects that would make some feel uncomfortable. But the productions are ALWAYS top notch quality, well conceived and well produced. Some of the productions don’t appeal to me, and I don’t go to see them. But many do, and they just keep getting better and better. Those of us who enjoy theater are fortunate to have these kinds of offerings available to this area. Over the past two weekends, the Oakland hit a home run with its production of the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award winning play by Doug Wright “I Am My Own Wife.” Not only was the Oakland s...

Tonight I experienced again why this is a great place to live. Stambaugh Auditorium, a local treasure in its own right, showed off its own masterpiece: the newly renovated 3600 plus pipes Skinner organ. The renovation literally was finished this morning, and a dry run free concert was offered by Organist Dr. Edward Moore, originally from Girard, and now a world renowned organist and professor at Catholic University of America. It was a stunner. Like most of you, my experience with organs has mostly been in churches. Those organs range from barely working old pipe organs, to newly installed new fangled pipe organs, to electric organs that sound like pipe organs. We semi listen to a church prelude, and then sing a couple of versus of Rock of Ages, with the pipes of the organ decoratively gracing the rear wall of the church balcony. That isn’t what this is. It was build in 1926 as an integral part of the newly constructed Stambaugh Auditorium. Pipes range from pencil thin to 32 feet tall....

My choir director teaches as an adjunct music professor at a local college. At a recent rehearsal, he told us a story about one of his students whose assignment was to read an article about music outreach. The young lady came across a magazine article about community choruses such as the one I sing in and my director directs!! In her comments about the article, the young lady opined that she would not want to be involved with one of those old people choruses. My director said he let the young lady know in no uncertain terms that her comments were inappropriate, and that sooner or later we all end up at the far end of life. He then listed the virtues of the old people’s chorus, the loyalty of the members, their work ethic, and their dedication…those things that sometimes seem lacking in the young folks of today. She should be so lucky to be involved with an old people’s chorus. But even with our director’s kind words, it still gave me pause, and brought a tear to my eye. When did I beco...

We bought our house 12 years ago from my ninety year old aunt as she entered the nursing home. It is a nice house; a three bedroom ranch. It was built in 1972, the year my wife and I were married, by my aunt who was then in her seventies, and her husband who was in his eighties. It was built by old people for old people, excuse me: senior people for senior people. It has no steps, except a very tiny one to get into the kitchen from the garage. It has an abundance of closet space, always a nice feature. We bought it because we thought we could grow "senior" in it over the years, and not have to move. The only problem was that the last improvement to the house was in 1972. So for the past 12 years, the house has been a work in progress as we got rid of the dial telephones, installed cable television, got rid of the 1951 oven that that was brought over from their previous house, and the companion refrigerator!!!! Replaced the roof! Replaced the kitchen counters! Upgraded the bat...

Riding high on the top of State of Ohio news is the pending bill in the state senate that would gut Ohio’s collective bargaining laws for public employees and neuter teacher unions. It is sponsored by Senator Shannon Jones from Springboro, Ohio. It has drawn the wrath of the Ohio Education Association, the Ohio Federation of Teachers, the Ohio Public School Employees Union, and just about every other union that exists in the great State of Ohio. It is a dangerous bill with ramifications which will destroy education in Ohio. By way of full disclosure, both my wife and son are public employees. My wife is a teacher retiring at 35 years in 2013. My son is employed by the Mahoning County Board of Elections as its financial dude. If my remarks seem sympathetic to the cause, it’s not because I disagree with the basic premise of Governor Kasich's goals. It’s because I have seen with my own eyes what goes in the public sector. What they are contemplating in Columbus will not fix the probl...

This year’s Super Bowl commercial highlight was the Imported From Detroit; Chrysler’s two minute homage to the rebirth of the American auto indusrty. If you haven’t seen it, it is the embedded video at the top of the MKIA page. Starring Eminem, it takes us on a gritty tour of Detroit with the message saying the hardest steel is forged from the hottest fire. Given our own history in Youngstown, it was ultra appealing to me, even giving a serious tear to my eye. We get it! The question is does the rest of the nation? Detroit comes to us with a lot of baggage. Ford is experiencing resurgence with numerous top notch auto entries, and gets kudos for not needing a government bailout. It is a long way from “Fix Or Repair Daily” days. General Motors has a hit with the Cruze. The efficacy of the Volt has yet to be proven, but Buick is breaking out as a major brand, especially in China. For the first time in its history, GM has made more money overseas than in the United States. Chrysler is maki...

If you were born between the years 1946 and 1964, congratulations! You are a baby boomer just like me. There is some question as to whom coined the term. But popular consensus gives credit to one Sylvia Porter, who was a financial columnist with 40 million followers, who in 1951 wrote: "Take the 3,548,000 babies born in 1950. Bundle them into a batch, bounce them all over the bountiful land that is America. What do you get? Boom. The biggest, boomiest boom ever known in history." Well, there you are. Us members of the Baby Boom generation have been both blessed and cursed. Because of the demographic bulge in the population, most boomers faced a shortage of just about everything. For example, as the boomers entered grade school, there was a shortage of classrooms as well as a shortage of teachers and books. In what would be a nightmare to today’s education do-gooders, boomer class sizes usually ranged from 35 per class in public schools, to between 50-60 in a class in paroch...

My mother loved catalogues. In fact, she was addicted to them. Beginning in August, she would get stacks of catalogues delivered daily much to the chagrin of the post office. On a light day, she would get ten in the mail. I won’t tell you how many on a heavy day. And she would buy something from almost all of them, which in turn resulted in more catalogues sent to her. As she got older, I would stop to visit her and literally move the catalogues from her mail box to my car to my trash can at home. It was a little scary. I am not a catalogue shopper except for food. I love food. But what is delivered never matches what is pictured and very expensive. So I threw what few catalogues I got out…except for one. Tucked midst the naked, writhing bodies of Abercrombie and Fitch and the glitz of the Neiman Marcus Christmas was an innocuous little catalogue with a different print and paper quality. Sometimes it would even be in black and white. It came from the Vermont Country Store and rapidly b...

So I was having lunch with a friend of mine the other day who is a non-Catholic. Stories abounded on television about the beatification of John Paul II, one of the most popular popes in my lifetime, if not for hundreds of years. My friend asked me: “Why would people pray to a dead pope?” I was taken aback. I am a lapsed Catholic who considers himself to be an Episcopalian while currently attending a Lutheran church…don’t ask. I just assumed everybody knew why people would pray to a dead pope…or any of the saints for that matter. “What is it that you expect him to do?” he queried further. Being raised Catholic, I never questioned the saints. I explained to my friend that we don’t pray to the saints for a direct act. We pray to the saints to intercede on our behalf with God. “Can’t you do that directly yourself?” he further inquired. He got me there. The Lutheran in me began to come out. A few days later, I talked to another Catholic friend about the conversation. My friend said that I n...

Every now and then I come across a magazine article that is just too good to pass up. George Will wrote an editorial in last week’s edition of Newsweek giving us a snapshot of America in 2010. Here are some of the interesting facts contained in the article, but tweaked with my sparkling commentary. 1) Democrats compared Republicans to Neanderthals, which was probably close to the truth. In 2010 we learned that 4% of the human genome of modern non-Africans comes from the extinct Neanderthals who mated with our migrating forefathers in Europe. Quick, find me a woman to drag by the hair. 2) 52% of American adults are married in 2010 compared to 72% in 1960. And you wonder whatever happened to family values!!!! 3) The government owns General Motors. General Motors is building the electric Volt to quell government global warmers. The government is giving a $7500.00 tax credit to anyone who buys a $42,000.00 Volt. The government has to borrow the money from China in order to give the tax cre...

It could have happened to anyone. It was an ordinary day. My wife and I had a major celebratory event occur in our lives and I wanted to commemorate it with a piece of jewelry. I had picked something out a month ago. I even put it in layaway and had been making weekly payments on it getting it down to a balance that I could afford to pay off. I owed $x,xxx.00 on the balance of the bauble, and this weekend marked the event. Would she be surprised! Being the pseudo computer geek that I am, I paid the balance owed to my credit card company on line the day before I went to pick up the little sparkly so I wouldn’t have to write a check. On Friday, off to the jewelers to get my shiny gift out of hock. It was soooo pretty, all laid out in the leather bound folder. “Do you want it gift wrapped?” asked the lady. “Of course I do!” I responded. The owner of the store is a friend of mine. We belong to the same club. He runs a hell of a business. The store, as usual, was filled with customers. Bill...

My New Year’s resolutions for 2011: I resolve to lose fifty pounds. I resolve to work out at least three times per week. I resolve not to swear. I resolve to get things done when they are supposed to be done. I resolve to be nice to ALL of my relatives. I resolve to clean out my drawers and my closet. I resolve to save money and not use my credit cards. I resolve not to drink so much on Friday nights. And if you believe that, let me talk to you about some land I own in Las Vegas. Are we nuts or what? On the list of holidays, Thanksgiving, Easter and Christmas are my top three. The bottom three on my list are the Fourth of July, New Year’s, New Year’s, and New Year’s again. I know that is four, but I must have forgotten to resolve last year to learn how to count. As you can tell, I dislike New Year’s as a holiday intensely. They don’t come much more depressing. All of those glittering Christmas decorations all of a sudden look sad and shabby. The hoopla of the holiday season is over as ...

I have been writing my blog since June, 2005. Every Christmas I have been fortunate enough to have some transcendent experience that has given some insight or meaning to the holiday to me in a personal way. Those experiences, in turn, became the subject of my Christmas blog and some of my most read essays. Everybody loves Christmas. So this year, I anxiously awaited my transcendent experience. I looked for it in the snow events we have had the past couple of weeks. I have searched in my choral activities, both in my church choir and Seraphim. I have looked for a meaningful Christmas movie or television program. I have listened to untold hours of Christmas music, even breaking my proverbial rule of “no dead people” Christmas recordings. (It really is time to bury Perry Como and Bing Crosby!!!) But this year, I got nothin’. No revelations. No warm and cuddly feelings. No inspiration. No life epiphanies. Plain and simple, I got Christmas bupkis. I haven’t bought myself my Christmas presen...

And the winner of the most fascinating story of the decade goes to Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks leaks!! You couldn’t make this story up if you tried. So Mr. Assange is an avowed leftist with support from socialists and libertarians…an interesting combination if there ever was one. At any rate, his goal is to destroy the security of the United States by leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the public allegedly provided to him by one Private First Class Bradley Manning who downloaded the stuff on a laptop in the middle of the Iraq desert. The peachy faced Bradley Manning is now in jail, which hasn't prevented the City Council in Berkley from honoring him as a great American. Assange releases the first group of classified documents, and the Obama administration ignores him. Then he releases the second group of classified documents, and the Obama administration ignores him again; but this time there is trouble. This group wasn’t mundane and listed a whole bunch ...

Every now and then you come across something that is just to good to pass up. This past week’s Business Week magazine contained a story about the massive amounts of manure in Stephenville, Texas, home to a plethora of Texas dairy farms. An equally massive fiberglass bovine named Moola the Cow is plopped right down in the middle of the square in tribute to the area’s primary agricultural product. Of course, downwind of Stephenville is another story altogether. Those of you who yearn for an idyllic life in the country most likely haven’t lived there. Life on the farm has many advantages. Fresh air isn’t one of them. But do not run away, green technology will save the day. A company named Microgy came riding into town with a holster full of federally backed green dollars to build a poop to gas plant (technical name: anaerobic digesters). Huzzah!!! The town was thrilled that this green upstart outfit was going to take the cow manure off of their hands and boots, and turn it into pipeline ...

The other day while sitting in a bar having a drink to calm my holiday rattled nerves, the big screen television was showing the Oprah Winfrey Show…the Oprah Favorite Things 2010 edition!!! For those of you in the minority who don’t know what that is…everyone in the audience gets all of Oprah’s Favorite Things to take home. Now I am not an Oprah fan, and have only rarely watched even a part of her show. But this big screen television was in my face…and what I saw was both frightening and fascinating at the same time. It was a greed frenzy of the third kind. Begin with she “gave away” a whole lot of stuff, from food to lingerie to fragrance to food to I-Pads to more food to jewelry to a Volkswagon…cars for everybody. Of course we all know that in reality, she gives away nothing. It’s the product manufacturer that gives the stuff away in return for a major plug on her show to her vast audience. But a Volkswagaon? Really? The people in the audience were whooping and hollering. They were s...

Here we go, folks. It’s time for my annual Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) rant. Those who suffer from this unfortunate malady really, really hate winter. How we handle it, however, varies from person to person. For those of you who don’t know, SAD is a depressive disorder directly related to the amount of daylight. As summer flows into autumn, and autumn into winter, the decreased amount of daylight has an adverse psychological affect on sufferers such as me. Individuals handle the situation differently. The most severe sufferers should consult a physician and take proper medication. Moderate sufferers, such as me, can use other alternatives. One popular method is to sit under a specially designed light that mimics sunlight. My house is fortunate enough to have ample mercury vapor lighting in our backyard which helps a lot. My SAD operates differently than most. The problem kicks in with the anticipation of less daylight rather than actually experiencing it, usually right around Jun...

I have come to the conclusion that Vivaldi must have been a Democrat. He has planted an earworm in my head, and I can’t get it out. I have done everything to get this horrendous gavotte out of my head, but Domine Dei Unigenite keeps be-bopping around between my ears. I even tried banging my head against the wall, and all this Republican stuff came flowing out all available orifices leaving Domine Dei Unigenite ba ba-ba ba-baing over and over and over again in the caverns of my brain. I dare you to play it more than once, and you will be humming it forever and ever and ever and ever…and I don’t mean the Hallelujah Chorus. You can listen to it here. Let’s start with the basics. Wikipedia defines an“earworm” as “a portion of a song or other music that repeats compulsively within one's mind, put colloquially as "music being stuck in one's head." If you fancy yourself to be a half baked musician like myself, it happens over and over again. My last earworm was a song my c...

I did it. I moved the dark side. I crossed over into the land to techies and “text-ies.” I bought a smart phone. More specifically, my new best friend is now a Blackberry Curve. It slices. It dices. It will even wipe my nose. We are, quite literally, joined at the hip….with this really neat belt loop black leather carrying case for $19.99!!!! How did I live without it? Seriously, folks, I use my computer all the time for just about everything. I bought a net book to take on vacations, and it is a tad on the slow side. But I have always been behind in the mobile device area. I had this five year old LG flip phone which I had difficulty hearing while talking on it. It was a bit frayed around the ages. And to be honest, it was humiliating to pull it out. My son, who is on our family plan, had the identical phone and seemed to get by with it fine. He could text on the number key pad, a skill I that was way beyond me. He could hear. He could talk on in it. And he told me he would never get...