The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/CLICK-TO-HEAR-autobahn-to-stanwoodopolis.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR — autobahn to stanwoodopolis

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We been watching a new trend developing lately down here on the South End:  Biodiesel.  Taking farmlands and using them to grow fuel instead of food.   Now, I don’t know what YOUR rig gets per gallon, but I guess most of us Americans want a Bradley Fighting Vehicle to go shopping in war-torn Stanwoodopolis, don’t care WHAT it costs in gas so long as it’s cheaper per gallon than designer bottled water.

I hear a lot of complaining now that gas prices are at an all time high.  I guess we thought a democratic Iraq would be so grateful they’d give us free oil and we’d ALL be driving full size Hummers.  I even heard an oil company last week complaining they didn’t have the money for any more cleanup penalties from the Valdez spill.  Tough times for all of us, I guess.

So maybe it IS the right time to take food and turn it into fuel.  Gas stations’ll look more like a fast food drive-up.  Tomato diesel, hi octane fryer fat, corn on the cob unleaded, you want to supersize that fill-up, ma’am?

The burger chains are already teamed up with the gas stations on this.  Way ahead of us.  Pump the deep fat fryers into you AND your car.  A full service station means they got a health clinic in back to handle clogged arteries, get you back on the road in no time flat.

Cutting down on the driving or cutting down on the car size or cutting down on the calories just isn’t the South End way, I guess.  If it means cutting down our old growth nettle forests to make biodiesel, by god, we’re gonna do it.  Might as well —  we’ll need the acreage for the new autobahn into Stanwood.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/CLICK-TO-HEAR-obits-made-e-z.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR —obits made e-z

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Some of us old codgers here on the South End Shangri-La are starting to cash in our chips.  After a lifetime of skimming the surface of sinning, it’s finally time, I guess, to face the music.  Oh, a few of us will probably make it to heaven but we’re in no great rush, although this lifestyle of excess and bad habits might make you think we’re on the Fast Track to hell.
Other places, you see folks buying their cemetery plots or ordering fancy marble headstones with a pithy Bible verse as a hedge against being denied entry into the Gated Community in the sky.  They make living wills and put their estates in order, plan the funeral service ahead of time with their favorite music and slides, sort of an MTV for the soon-to-be-departed.  Probably working even now on the special Facebook update and that final Tweet :  Bye, I’m dead.
Down here the boyz have our own mortuarial customs.  We like to put an obituary photo in the local newspaper stating date of birth, date of death, who got left behind and something about going now to be with Jesus.  The grieving missuz writes this.  What we do is pick the obit photograph ahead of time.  Custom dictates that it is at least 30 years old when we still had our hair and didn’t have that beergut, and most importantly it shows us proudly holding a trophy size fish.  Salmon’s good, halibut’s better.  Anything that takes both hands to hold up for the camera is best.  If necessary, a string of trout or a mess of panfish works, but only as a last resort.  The Deceased As Sportsman is the idea here, even if the sportsman’s features are blurry (the photographer was drinking and celebrating too, you see).
No, I don’t know where this custom originated, we just follow the dictums.  Most of us haven’t fished in the last 30 years.  I suppose we all hope Heaven is just one big lake, fully stocked with whopper Chinook and 150 pound halibut.  Hell, I figure, might be the same …. Only we have to clean the catch ourselves.  Until  the missuz shows up.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/CLICK-TO-HEAR-brownie-to-digital-in-60-seconds.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR —- brownie to digital in 60 seconds

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I bought a camera the other day.  It had an instruction manual that might as well have been a syllabus for a college course.  150 pages.  Technical?  Daunting?  Oh yeah, you bet.
I remember my first camera, a Brownie.  Had to crank the film to take the next picture.  I remember my first Polaroid.  You could watch the picture develop right before your eyes in 60 seconds.   Magic in a box.  Instamatics came next.  You have to admit, we could all take nice pictures.
My family had a movie camera.  8mm I think — we watched those home movies like they were made by Cecil B. DeMille.  About 3 minutes long, each one, but we’d wait for the next installment,  rewind the little reels,  splice them when they broke, change the projector light, all the nuisances worth the trouble.  I loved the soundlessness of them, just the whir of the projector and the old man talking over it.  I still love that.
I got myself a single lens reflex when I got out of school.  Got myself lenses and the whole rigamarole.  Took the film in to the drugstore to have it developed.  Nice photos.  Real nice photos.  Later on I got a profession I needed photos AND slides.  I’d drag along two cameras, shoot a million shots, keep maybe 6.  Carry filters, lenses, lighting equipment, tripods, light meters.  Looked like Ansel Adams on safari.
Now we got digital.  I had a little bitty camera.  Weighed about what a hummingbird weighs and did everything but stand on its head.  Dropped the images in a computer and manipulated em til they looked great   …. Or at least a whole lot better.
My new Bad Boy is digital with exchangeable lenses.  It can be programmed, it can tell time, it can compensate for fluorescent lights, it can shoot landscapes or action movies, it could run for President and probably win on the GOP ticket this year.
Photography has been one of those things in my lifetime — like aviation — that makes me shake my head in wonder.  If I ever figure out my new camera, the one that comes with an honorary PhD, I’ll probably sit back with no little pride that our generation dreamed this up and made it possible for me to actually learn how to use the thing. Well, at least til the next generation makes all of it obsolete….

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/CLICK-TO-HEAR-privatizeTHIS.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR — privatizeTHIS

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You know, I grew up hearing it repeated as Gospel that government was way less efficient than the private sector.  I guess that’s why we’re hiring private contractors to fight our wars.  Why we want to pay corporations to run our schools, run our jails, maybe even  ramrod our fire and police departments.  They’ll naturally do a better job for way less money.
I’m no economist, but I need more than mantras to make me want to dismantle half of society by gutting and cutting government like it was a sacrificial cow on the altar of unbridled capitalism.  Wasn’t it GM and Ford and Chrysler, bastions, capitol B, of capitalism that just got bailed out by the federal government?  Not just bailed out, propped up, given CPR, put on life support,  brought back to life ….Oh, and brought back to profitability.
And maybe my memory is slipping, but wasn’t it the banks, the mortgage companies, the credit firms who drove this country into the worst recession in more than half a century?  Maybe they were what?  Too efficient?  Too something, that’s for sure.
We complain about government but I don’t see the heads of  government agencies or departments pulling down multi-million dollar salaries with huge mega-bonuses and sweetdeal stock options.  I guess if we ran them like businesses, we’d inflate that executive pay by, oh, a hundred times or so.  See how that helps efficiency.  Sort of like paying military contractors way more than our military men and women — maybe why we take 10 years to lose wars now.
So before I wrapped myself in the American flag and started dismantling all our government departments and offer them up like railroad right of ways to the corporations, I’d follow the money a ways and see who exactly is going to profit from that supposed increased performance.  Call me cynical and paint a bullseye on my be-hind, but I suspect it’s some of the fellows in corner suites at the top of Wall Street skyscrapers.  Even if profits don’t  go up, they’ll get a nice bloated package, you bet.  Efficiently wrapped.

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