I uh have a uh problem with the uh President

I knew a speech teacher once who had a cardinal rule. He absolutely did NOT allow "pause words" as he called them. He detested the unintelligent vocalizations made by people who had forgotten or lost track of what they were going to say. He would, in fact, tally up the number of times you said "er," "um," "uh," or any other similar sound and would take that many points off of your score for your presentation. He felt that should you lose your place or the flow of your speech that silence was preferable to anything else.

I must say that I agree with him on this point. It is distracting to me when I hear someone say "uh" over and over in their speech. I find that it detracts from the message as I fixate on the faltering as much as the speech.

I watched a news clip of President Obama today. It showed him in a fairly informal meeting discussing his economic stimulus plan. The clip was 1 minute 43 seconds long. I wasn't 20 seconds into it when I lost the flow of what he was saying and started fixating on the number of times he said "uh." You see, he said "uh" no less than 20 times in a 103 second clip. There were a couple where "uh" followed or preceeded "a" so I didn't count those and I may have missed one or two that piggybacked on one another. In the end, however, my tally came to 20.

That meant he said "uh" an average of once every 5 seconds.

Keep that in mind though over the next few months and I'll bet you it reduces drastically. He'll have some PR speech expert use a shock collar if necessary to break him of the habit.

See I told you (read previous post for explanation)

Now why do I say that, at 33 years of age, I'm still a strange child? Well I do tend to know a lot and, perhaps, even to think too much. I love the jingles that have been created for the "free credit report dot com" commercials (all except the last one.) I find them catchy (but not catchy enough to use their services ever again.)

The problem I have is with the commercial where he's "dressed up like a pirate in this restaurant." You see, in this jingle he says "Should have gone to freecreditreport.com, could have seen this coming at me like an atom bomb."

Well, I've expressed my issues with this to the people around me and they all roll their eyes and tell me I'm weird so now I'm posting it here to my blog instead since that's basically what I created the blog for in the first place.

My issue is that an Atom Bomb is built to be fast and difficult to detect. In fact, in "Remembering the Manhattan Project" By Cynthia C. Kelly it's stated that an ICBM can reach any target within 30 minutes. I'm pretty sure I would like to see credit problems coming at me in a more detectable way and with more than 30 minutes warning. How about the rest of you?

I was a strange child (and I still am, just see the next post)

When I was a child I used to watch the cartoon "Captain Planet." I liked the whole 5 element idea as it appealed to my Native American background. There was, however, something that bothered me about the ol' Cap'n. I always wondered why he wanted to kill everyone on earth.

Now I'm sure you're wracking your brain trying to recall when he ever tried to destroy life on earth as he was the epitome of environmentalism in the late 80's (that's when I watched anyway.) It is, however, in his very theme song where you can find evidence to this.

You see his theme song states "Captain Planet he's our hero. Gonna take pollution down to zero."

Now I know I was a geeky child and probably knew "too much" if such a thing is possible. It's just that I was aware even then that moisture that is suspended in the clouds condenses around airborne particulates (pollutants) and that condensation is what forms rain drops. Without these particulates it doesn't rain. Without rain we all die.

So there you have it. Proof positive that Captain Planet wants us all dead.

The Blinking Light Phenomenon

I have always been fascinated by the ability of a blinking light to bring the most intellectual people to the verge of drooling. We see it all the time. The police use blinking lights to get our attention and make us dumb enough to confess to whatever it is they say we were doing to make them pull us over, stores use it to make us buy things we would laugh at someone else for purchasing, lighthouses use them to make us sail blindly into rocks and shallow reefs. It seems that any time we are faced with a blinking light that our brain takes a temporary vacation.

There is nowhere that I find this more annoying than at a broken traffic signal. Any time I see a blinking stop light I dread approaching the intersection. People will sit there for eons with this look upon their face that clearly indicates their feelings of betrayal that a light which has told them day in and day out just what they should do with their cars has now forsaken them.

Today I was pulling up to one such intersection and that familiar feeling set upon me. There was an SUV in the lane beside me and we reached the intersection together. As we came to a stop the “left hand turners” going the direction opposite us were just clearing the intersection leaving one vehicle sitting there waiting to go straight ahead. It was clearly his turn. Not only was he at the intersection before us but he was the only other car there and he was to our right hand side (I can see my driving instructor beaming with pride that I actually read my driver’s handbook.) The driver of the SUV and I were both sitting there staring down the other driver and waving him on. His response was to sit there and look back at us so I did the logical thing and after a good 10 or 15 seconds of just sitting there I took my foot off the brake and hit the gas. This, of course, was the opposing drivers cue to do the same. Thankfully his brain awoke from it’s blinking-red-light induced stupor and he stopped before our cars became one with each other.

It’s the perfect time of the year to send cash, checks or money orders to the owner of this blog.

Sorry, my bad, go back about your business.

Are SCE customers bad people?

Just a bit of observation here for the New Year. I've been inside most of the businesses in Ridgecrest in the years I've lived here. I've certainly been in every bank and government building and there is one thing I've never seen in any of them. There are no serious barriers between the service personnel and the public. Now DHS has Plexiglas windows and the new Desert Valleys bank has that glass window on the outside that is probably pretty stout.

I simply cannot fathom why it is, however, that SCE would need a solid plate of inch and a half bullet proof glass between them and their customers. As far back as I can remember that has been the SCE office. So seriously, are their rates so high that they have to fear a machine gun massacre from their clients?