The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I was just ordained as a minister. I can now legally perform marriages, funerals, exorcisms and the like. I know what you’re thinking: I’ve turned over a New Leaf, decided to clean up the mess that’s my life and now I’ll probably become a sanctimonious and self-righteous proselytizer of you sinners. And of course I just might once I get my little Church of the Profane up and running.

Actually, becoming a minister isn’t as hard as you might suspect. I went on the internet and signed up for an online ordination, nothing to it once you get past the scams and the oaths to Jesus and the request for additional money for everything from wedding certifications to ceremonial instructions. Me, I just wanted to jump right to reverend. Seminary school, no thanks. Pope, takes too long. Rabbi, doubt if they’d let me. Buddhist priest, okay, maybe. But minister? Oh yeah, anybody can be a minister. Check out your religious stations on cable if you think it takes any kind of training or intelligence. You wonder how folks can elect Donald president, take a gander at the people these folks give money to who seem as phony as a 3 dollar bill or a Trump tax return. Trust me, even YOU could be a religious leader in this America. We don’t believe in science or facts or the truth, but we believe these hucksters. And I’m happy to report, I’m now one of them.

And no, stop worrying, I’m not hitting you up with a request for money to convert the poor Crackers in Mississippi or the skinheads in Idaho to my banjo based belief system. Although, if you need a charitable tax write-off, I’m your man. Actually, I’m your Church. Your Rock. Your, if you’ll let me, your Salvation. Least I can do to pay back the internet site that sponsored my Holy Conversion. A man of good deeds, like yours truly here, is like the Lone Ranger, just save the day and leave a silver bullet on the table. No need for thanks, the fight for truth and justice is plenty.

I know I have a lot to live up to. I don’t have my disciples lined up just yet and the South End String Band, my first choice, seems hesitant to cleanse and oil my feet. A miracle would surely help, but I haven’t got any up my robed sleeve. And of course I need to write down some rules, commandments maybe, that followers can adhere to. A lot of work ahead of me, but like I said, getting to BE a minister was the easy part.

I got a little wedding in about two months down in California, a lesbian matrimony where I will be officiating in the very heart of Sodom and Gomorrah. Could be a niche market, these gay matrimonies. The Path is narrow, my friends, but follow me, for I Know the Way. Or at least I’ll try to find it. Blessings on you, my children!

Well, when you corner a feral animal, you need to expect it will show some fangs when you close in on it. The new NRA president, Ollie North, the pardoned criminal of the Iran/Contra scandal, came out swinging when the public outcry pointed accusatory fingers at the hallowed National Rifle Association. Not us, he bellowed, not guns! Ritalin, that’s the culprit. A society that’s drugged its kids and made killers of them.

Ollie’s not alone feeling cornered, snarling at the suggestion their guns will be confiscated by an enraged elitist mob of liberals. Bad school design, some are shouting back. Unarmed teachers in the classrooms! Violent video games and a culture of violence and mayhem! Poor school architecture! Trench coats! Too many doors, too many windows! The answer for most of these cringing curs is more guns. Always more guns. If we only had more, we could stop the bad guys.

Okay, boys, here’s the bad news. We do have more guns. More than any other so-called civilized country in the world, probably more than most of them added together. And in case you haven’t noticed, it doesn’t really seem to quell the violence. The argument that video games are causative, sounds good until you figure kids watch these all over the globe, Canada, Britain, France, Italy, and they don’t seem to run out and shoot up a school every other week. Unarmed teachers? Give me a break. No sane person outside of Texas wants to holster up their elementary school teachers. School architecture? Build concrete and steel schools the way we built Iraq Green Zones blast zones. C’mon, why not just put tractor trailers underground, lock the kids in until 3 PM. Ban trench coats? Wow, why not? Maybe ban long pants and winter jackets too while we’re stripping the children down to their bras and BVD’s.

And Ritalin? Maybe Ollie is on to something here. All those hyperactive Attention Deficit kids mellowed out on Ritalin most of their lives, that must be the answer. Earth to Doctor North, Earth to Doctor North, please come back down here. We promise to take the kids off Ritalin if you’ll do one thing for us. Tell us how a yahoo who waged a secret war in Central America with money from arms sales to Iran has any right whatsoever to lecture us about a culture of violence. Talk about prying a gun out of your cold dead head…. Maybe an IQ test should be required to buy a weapon.

There’s a bar in Seattle that planned to open its doors at 4 am so patrons can watch a live feed of the royal wedding this morning. Oh sure, I thought about staying up and driving down to catch the marvelous matrimony, but then I decided it’s been, oh, nearly 250 years since we declared independence from the Mother Country, probably enough time to have moved beyond fealty to the Crown. Not that I wouldn’t love to know what the royal couple wore and watch the play by play pageantry live on TV.

I’ve never understood the fascination some of us have for the Royals. I don’t even understand why the Brits still keep them on their payroll. Princess Di, Prince Charles and Whats-her-name, the whole inbred bunch all endlessly under the microscope not only in their home turf but here in the land that declared independence. Every wedding, every birth, every scandal. They can knock the latest mass shooting at another high school right off the headline. They can even outshout Trump. Blimey, limey, what’s up with that?

Kings and queens and a joker that’s wild. I gotta thank George Washington for preventing us from reinstating royalty into the American body politic. He could see the national passion for a monarchy and he wanted no part in it, not after fighting the British all those hard years with farmer soldiers who went shoeless in the snows of winter. These were our overlords, our masters, the folks who taxed us without representation, who ran the colonies for their profit. These were our Romans. These were the good folks who waged genocide on the Irish.

Oh, they seem benign now, not the ruthless bastards who made serfs of their minions, who conquered lands near and far, who ruled with a whip hand half the earth. Cute princesses and dashing princes, the telegenic offspring of slave traders and treasure pillagers and outright murderers. What’s not to like? Me, I prefer not to worship our leaders. Trump, of course, thinks he’s King and his family all royalty. And of course there are plenty of us who think a coronation might be in order. Maybe we should teach history again in our schools.

Seattle, like a lot of large cities, has a homeless problem. Not too surprising, really, when you consider that the average price of a house in the Emerald City is somewhere above the rainbow, well over half a million dollars. Rents are skyrocketing accordingly and if you aren’t employed or if you work at minimum wage jobs, chances are good you can’t afford to live in a house or an apartment. If you own a car, running or not, you can park it and call it a home. If not, the options are not real good for you. Check out the freeway overpasses and bring a tent.

Seattle’s City Council decided it might be time to address this situation and so they floated a plan to tax the largest companies and corporations a head tax on each of their employees, the money to be used to house the homeless. I guess the idea was that these folks had benefited from Seattle’s attractive work environment, the one before traffic gridlock and income disparity had created a model for the Have – Have Not society, and that taxing them would begin to address some of these discrepancies. Might even keep Seattle an attractive city for corporations.

Amazon, that posterboy for corporate bully, the Godzilla in the Godzilla vs. Bambi movie, weighed in and promptly stopped construction of two projects in the downtown area. The steel worker’s union literally shouted down the councilwoman they have who is a socialist and probably their most ardent supporter for fear their jobs on the Amazon towers would be lost. So much for worker solidarity, comrades. It should be noted that Amazon’s objection to being taxed to help support the folks they bear some responsibility for comes at the same time they pay zero federal taxes. Zero, as in none, nada, zip, zilch. I know, it boggles the mind, at least mine. I pay more federal tax than Amazon. The folks under the freeway overpass probably pay about the same.

In the end Amazon forced a compromise, cutting the head tax in half. I guess this was a victory for the Job Creator, one small step for Godzilla, one helluva toejam for Bambi. If you’re poor, it’s time to leave Seattle. Kind of why I left 40 years ago.

Your Master’s voice may be the next voice you hear. Google just announced it has developed a robot that can mimic to perfection the quirks, halts, slang and cadence of us humans. To prove it they had their automaton call up a restaurant to make a reservation. The machine responded to the restaurant’s questions, asked a few of its own and if you didn’t know who was on the line, you’d never guess the caller wasn’t part of our species. Another machine called for a hair appointment, same drill, different gender for the voice, same result. You just listened to the future.

Siri, Alexi, roll over, let Beethoven give you the news. Now when you get a phone call, that pleasant voice without the Pakistani drawl will sound as familiar as your Uncle John’s. I know, this is comforting news. No more garbled conversations with outsourced help lines in India, just clear enunciated solicitations, surveys, scams and advertisements from companies utilizing robotic ventriloquy. Google thought enough of the technology to parade it out for the listening public even in the midst of an outcry concerning fake news, Russian bots, Artificial Intelligence warnings and robotic outsourcing of human jobs. Wring your hands if you want, the overlords of android production could care less.

This week another corporation, Boston Dynamics, trotted out a video showing their robot running and jumping through what looks like Terminator or a Star Wars storm trooper traversing a field next to a suburb, nothing to get alarmed by if you were picking up the Sunday paper on your front porch and this mechanoid was jogging by. Just a cute robot sprinting across your lawn. Wait a few weeks and it will holler out a greeting with a southern accent, how y’all this mawning?

Once future shock has abated enough for you to accustom yourself to sharing the planet with artificial inhabitants, maybe then I’ll let you in on who is really writing these blogs. Have a nice day, y’all.