He Was Right

It’s generally acknowledged that Mark Twain popularized the phrase, “Lies, damned lies, and statistics.”  Those words are often used to bolster weak arguments through the use of statistics.

The reason this phrase came to my mind is because I recently lost another person on my list of acquaintances, friends, relatives, lovers, and enemies.  This list is getting shorter and shorter by the day, and I needed a bit of sane analysis for this trend.

Nothing says "class" like a camouflage-lined casket

Recalling some of the television and radio programs I regularly tune-in, many have been fixated on health matters, lately.

In recent years, America has been flooded with professional National Anthem kneelers donning pink socks, decals, and uniform patches, for specially-designated months to make people aware of women’s breast cancer.

Magnetic pink ribbons and nearly non-stop public service announcements repeatedly blast public America about finding a cure for this killer disease.

Just a few short years prior, we were inundated with the socially conscious of us wearing cheesy rubber bracelets, whose sale money went toward financing that ever-elusive cure.

Those causes included too many to mention here, but incorporated cancer, heart disease, spousal abuse, and clean water.

But to get back to those statistical mistruths from Mr. Twain, I thought it would be prudent to visit the interweb.  (Yep, I just conjured that word up.)

I quickly located many sites willing to help me get to the basics of why people die.

I queried “Number one killer in America.”

Oddly enough, boredom from watching Alec Baldwin movies was not one of them.

The answer from the U.S. Center for Disease Control was heart disease.  There were all sorts of varying qualifiers, though.  “In 2003, over 1,000,000 American men died of heart disease or one of nine other leading causes of death.”

Huh?

“Men are more likely than women to die from most of these causes.”

So what are those other nine?  Cancer, unintentional injuries, stroke, COPD, diabetes, influenza and pneumonia, suicide, kidney disease, and Alzheimer’s disease, is the list the CDC provided, in that order.

So I checked on the number one cause of death among women in America.

It seems as though heart disease is also numero uno in killing women.

 

But, but, but…

Yes, heart disease, not breast cancer, not poor parallel parking skills, not spending too much on purses; heart disease is the number one killer of women in America.

So armed with this newly acquired powerful information I set out to get to something definitive.

Men’s Health states “men are victims in 4 out of 5 homicides.  For African American men, who are victims 7 times more often than European American men, homicide is the fourth leading cause of death, and the number one killer for those ages 15 to 24.”

I read and reread this above paragraph seven times and now I’m only 40% sure about half of what I could comprehend.  There’s nothing like twisting the “facts.”

It just seems smarmy when statisticians need to include not only sex, but race in their formulae to justify making a point.

After all this combing the interweb, I discovered Mr. Twain was correct in his evaluation of number data. And, I now realize everyone is going to die regardless of the cause.

Bottom line: Just enjoy life while you can and hope you’re not a friend or acquaintance of mine, otherwise your days appear to be numbered.

Keep Out

In the event you’re reading this and never go to the beach, you may stop reading now.  Otherwise, this may be terribly significant to your rights and well-being when visiting The Shore.

This morning’s newspaper, AKA: fish wrapping paper, published an addendum to stories all summer long about area beaches.

During the summer months, inland folks look forward to visiting The Shore to not only buy salt water taffy and cheesy t-shirts, goofy hats, over-priced food truck fixin’s, and bug repellent, but also enjoy some time on the beach.

The beach is one of those places that is bittersweet, in nature.  It’s a place where you can relax with a book or magazine, get toasty warm, catch a nap, go fishing, and especially people-watch.

People-watching is an activity that involves relativity.  One sits at the edge of the water wearing sunglasses.  As strangers pass by, the viewer critiques the viewee’s posture, gait, size, cellulose, bathing attire, and overall appearance.

Once these less-than-perfect specimens pass, we mentally store that gathered information to use as fodder for one of those over-priced food truck dinners.  But I digress.

As children, we were warned to not sit in the sun without sunscreen, lest we eventually get skin cancer.  Some years ago, we were inundated with public service announcements regarding the dangers of melanoma.  We were shown pictures of oddly shaped freckles and things that were once called “beauty marks.”

We were carefully instructed to monitor and regularly measure these deformities to better enjoy long lives rather than succumb to this semi-preventable form of cancer.

So it was with interest that I closely followed the fish wrapping paper stories of the “Summer of ’17 Battle of the Minds.”  This is my term for this overreaching grab of liberties of working-class people.

I say “working-class people” because I feel that reflects the blue collar workers who annually schlep the family, along with inflatable rafts, toy trucks, plastic pails and shovels, blankets, aluminum folding chairs, plus a giant tote bag full of necessities that Lawrence of Arabia would have died for.

They drive for hours to pay too much for mediocre motel rooms, eat over-priced food, drive through bumper-to-bumper traffic to get to the beach, and one day into their vacation have to deal with five more days of sunburns.

To alleviate this preventable curse is a pretty simple solution: a beach umbrella. 

For generations, people - like my Dad – dragged a multi-colored canvass umbrella to and from the beach for roughly fifteen years.  I was well into my teen years before I realized an umbrella was an option for beach entry.

Dutifully, Dad would meticulously wipe down all our toys, chairs, and umbrella down to prevent that beach sand from making the trip home with us.  Alas, nearly seven pounds of it did, each and every time.  You would think we would be able to stay home and enjoy the beach in our backyard after a mere couple of years.  But I digress.

Still, the brain trust of varying Shore towns has been focused on a mission to improve the annual vacation pilgrimage to the beach by taking away your liberties.

Suddenly, umbrellas are forbidden from use because they may fly away and injure a fellow beach-goer.  Also outlawed are those popup canopies because too many fair-skinned visitors set up enough to be eligible for their own zip code.  Now the geniuses in Bethany Beach, Delaware, want to make your beach vacation more enjoyable via semi-tenable statements.

These cancer preventers, according to Bethany Beach officials with too much time on their hands, block the view of the water and create an overly cumbersome path to the water, itself.

It would serve Bethany Beach; Ocean City, Maryland; and Assateague Island, Maryland and Virginia, to lose the vacationers because of these overly intrusive laws that curtail the average family from actually enjoying their beach stay.

Q:  Why not focus on flying footballs and Frisbees© rather than sun protection? 

A:  Vacation elsewhere.

I’m just saying.

A Bunch of Phonies

The 1980’s were a hot decade which gave birth to the “global warming” movement.  Then the temperatures fell and the name was altered to “climate change.”

These same people who mocked me and laughed at religious individuals for believing in an unseen entity I call God, are now kneeling at the altar of Mother Earth.  They emphatically contend non-believers are heretics and uneducated. 

Today, with sub-freezing temps across much of the country, that “climate change” thing is the result of some inane excuse by some non-science scientist with a large guvment grant to prove a theory.  An aside: that is not how science works.  Cry crocodile tears.

Socially conscience individuals in the NFL have to have their own crisis.  Not to be left out, this multimillionaire club has been carping about the injustices in racist America. 

Rather than doing something about their “concerns”, they would rather poke their fingers at others.  How time flies.  And how time heals all wounds, sometimes.

It was nearly 11 moons ago – American Indian-speak for “months” – when the overly-sensitive in America were rabidly marching upon history-laden towns to demand removal of Civil War statues.

Protesters were shivering from fright and discomfort because static granite and bronze figures of Confederate generals and other historic figures were prominently on display for all to remember the tragedy of literally brother-versus-brother fighting.

If only we could remove those offensive reminders of a time when America was truly divided, we would never think of conducting another deadly battle with neighbors and family.  Cry crocodile tears.

Fast forward 11 moons.  Our biggest new crisis is the throngs of illegal aliens currently residing in America.  This neo-mess is being exacerbated by do-gooders wanting to reunite families who originally broke our laws by trespassing and stealing our resources.

This is called the DACA program which is very much desired by the Left who fully expect votes once these criminals are allowed to vote in America’s elections.  Just what honest, law-abiding Americans need and want are more people who refuse to obey laws.  Cry crocodile tears.

in the eyes of fans by demanding something nebulous from me.  This is the typical response from ignorant individuals who try to act intelligent.  Cry crocodile tears.

Then the anti-Trumpers latched on to a word that was new to them: Collusion.  It sounds so good and they sound so smart when saying words like “Russian collusion.” 

We have been hearing this stuff from, again, from the Left, for 12 moons. 

For your information, collusion is a synonym for conspiracy, knowledge, approval, and consent.

It seems the good news is that after nearly a year of special prosecutors, investigators, and devoted committees, nothing has been discovered except more money to continue this bureaucratic boondoggle.

The bad news, though, is that collusion is a word that will soon be applied to former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton.  There is currently an investigation ongoing for their pay-to-play scheme with their Clinton Foundation.  They would look good in striped outfits in the exercise yard.  Cry crocodile tears.

Finally, this last year had an overabundance of news regarding Russia’s possible hijacking of America’s 2016 Presidential Election.  There were accusations bandied about of President Putin stealing the election for Hillary Clinton, then for Donald Trump.

In any case, the masses claimed shenanigans were somehow involved.  Republicans, in a pro-active measure to prevent this from occurring again in 2018 and 2020, have resurrected the Voter ID law.

This was an effort to stymie illegal voting, trying to keep domestic elections as pure and clean as possible.  Unfortunately, the Left now feel those efforts to require valid identification in order to vote are racist.  Cry crocodile tears.

Phonies.

Unintended Consequences

Fads can best be described as ‘quaint, little diversions that eventually succumb to the next new thing.’

As a kid I remember my sister fiddling with most of the fads du jour.  Some of those included playing with the Hula Hoop, pogo stick jumping, and making straight A’s in school.

I also partook in the frenzies with a Frisbee.

Of course these were not of the modern variety fads that incorporate scads of money – something of which we had little, at that time.

Modern fads run in the vein of Beanie Babies, baseball cards, playing video games, smoking weed and spice, and annoying the public-at-large with their cell phones.

Not to be outdone, Gen-Xer’s and Millenials are desperately trying to one-up my group, the Dinosauruser’s.  (Yeah, I just made that last word up.)

Once upon a time, a girl and boy got together because of raging hormones.  There was usually a dance of social boogying involved that began with a lame movie followed by an inexpensive dinner, climaxing in necking.

Rarely was there any further physical activity involved – other than, perhaps, the girl pushing the boy away with some martial art-style moves, while explaining how she couldn’t get pregnant lest her father kill her.  This was called a reality check that usually worked, and worked well.

But today’s fad is a bit more public.  Sure, occasionally, boys and girls get together for some hormone readjustment.  Unfortunately, today’s fad includes Gen-xer’s and Millenials publicly airing their dirty laundry about how weak those groups’ women are.

It seems as though today’s women and girls have lost several skills over time, much as our predecessors lost their gills when they began walking on land.

Suddenly, girls became unable to say, “NO!” when telling their boss, boyfriend, or fellow actor they didn’t want to have sex.  It would appear that they wanted both a job and attention from so many men with extraordinary libidos.

Yes, they had sex to obtain employment, an entertainment industry role, or a more prominent position in the company.  These women call this overaggressive behavior “sexual harassment.”  The words, “By any means necessary,” come to mind.

Then there is something called the “Law of unintended consequences” that may solve the immediate sexual harassment claims, but create another dilemma.

I consider myself a quick learner; if I burn myself on the stove, I become especially conscious of any stove.

With any modern female crying ‘sexual harassment’ at the drop of a hat, men such as myself will more likely be stove-shy and pretty well avoid most male-female situations.

This seems as though it would be a good thing until we discover that procreation requires male-female contact.  (The lesbian connection will have to wait for another time.)  That might be more palatable if that social chastising were not a critical part of dating.

This sexual harassment fad is probably going to chase men away from the dating/marriage market.  To prove my point, a Japanese robot company is generating great international interest by marketing something the company calls “sexbots.”

Now you know as much as I do about sexbots.  Their name alone is guiding my mind through many avenues of functions and results, without lame movies, expensive dinners, and public humiliation.

The best part of having a sexbot would be not having to put the toilet seat down.

I’m just saying…