Let's talk about some complaints first, even though complaining is counter to my usual sweet and agreeable nature.

You know about Google maps and Mapquest. I rely on them both from time to time, and usually find them very helpful. But when you need them most is when you're trying to find someplace like my country home, which is out where God left his shoes in Southwest Michigan. Mapquest gives more or less accurate directions, but then on its map indicates that my house is about a half mile away from the actual location. What's actually there is a single-wide mobile home. So far as I know the people who live there are respectable, decent folks, but it's not the 10-room 2-story home I tell visitors to look for.

Google maps also puts my house a half mile away, in the opposite direction. In their infinite wisdom, the people who create these things decided to extend the "street" (actually a gravel road) on which I live several miles beyond the point where it actually dead ends. In their imagination, they run it over some neighboring land, and then, miraculously, up the middle of the river for some distance.

Supposely you can report mistakes to both of these services. Yep. You sure can. You can pray to the ghost of Elvis Presley too. Continue...

(This is a re-run from about a year ago. Spring is here, but there are other reasons I want to share my thoughts on this again. Here in the United States of America many of us are pessimistic about the future. There’s an almost universal feeling that we’re headed down the wrong road. Worse, we’re angrily divided over which wrong road it is that we’re following. It’s a good time to remember that, however strange we may be in however many ways, we Americans are a resilient lot. Whatever mess we dig ourselves into, we survive, hopefully a little stronger, if rarely much wiser. We need spring, in the weather, of course, but also in our hearts and our national conscience!

Meanwhile, in the Middle East, a demand for freedom has burst through the walls of repression. At long last the masses are being heard, and directing their anger at their oppressive dictators, rather than against the traditional American and Israeli scapegoats. Sadly, many lives will be lost in the process, but like the first flowers of spring, democracy is putting forth its tender shoots.)

Yes, Passover and Easter have deep religious meaning for Jews and Christians respectively, but each has additional meaning for everyone. In older cultures outside of Judeo-Christian influence, spring itself had religious significance.  Continue...

School was 9:00 to 4:00, and there were four grades taught in each room. That was only because the district had "consolidated." When I transferred there for the last few weeks of the fifth grade, all eight grades were in one room, one grade for each row of desks, so for slightly more than four years I had the same teacher.

That was the late 40s. The good years, with the war over, new cars available again, the economy booming as never before in spite of a top marginal income tax rate of 90%. But also the bad old days in many ways. Cruel and blatant discrimination for one. When our old warhorse of a teacher, Mrs. Brackman, told of having taught where there were "two little Catholic kids" in her class, it was as though she were speaking of a different species.

I caught hell (she'd have slapped me for saying "hell") for using the word "belly" in front of some girls on the playground. It didn't matter that our agriculture textbooks used the word frequently. Agriculture was a core subject starting in the sixth grade; the curriculum was built on the assumption that a majority of students would stop school after the eighth grade and pursue life on farms. Three miles away, in an actual city, grade school students instead were systematically prepared for high school. Those agriculture textbooks referred to breeding, and even artificial insemination, and calving...real "facts of life" stuff, except that it didn't refer to humans. Mrs. Brackman was incredibly naive if she didn't realize that most of her students had put two and two together by the time they learned to read. We speculated that she'd have a heart attack if she knew what her students were learning in haylofts, Continue...

For many years, Jon Burge, may his name be cursed, and other Chicago detectives under his command, tortured suspects to obtain false confessions. Some of their victims went to death row. One that I know of was only 16. One was forced to falsely confess that he had set a fire that killed his own wife and son.

After ruining the lives of hundreds of innocent people, destroying families, creating a pervasive fear of police in Chicago's black community, staining the reputation of a beautiful and remarkably livable city, Burge retired to Florida to enjoy his pension and his booze. Apparently one of the few things this psychopathic scumbag really cared about was his alcohol. Finally, after decades of dodges and delays, he came to trial, in a federal court.

Why did it take so long, and why wasn't he prosecuted under Illinois law, which he was sworn to uphold but trampled? Continue...

Gold is only a metal, but we see it as much more. The gold medal. Good as gold. The gold standard. For thousands of years, it was the reliable currency of commerce, although it had little practical value until recently. Now it's handy for a few things like dental fillings and electronic connections, but by far the main reason we can get emotional about gold is that it's pretty and doesn't rust.

In fact, many of us get emotional enough to pay a ridiculous price for a commemorative coin that's "clad in 14 milligrams of 99.9999% pure gold," the value of which may soar to $3,000 an ounce in the near future, we're told. It's a first-class swindle, in my opinion, but Continue...

We'd like to think so. In Iran, a woman faces death by stoning for the crime of adultery. She was already flogged for her actions - you know what that means: Lashed with a whip that leaves your flesh draped in pieces from your back. The good news is that she may not be stoned. She may just be hanged. Gee, thanks.

In Pakistan, a Christian woman faces death for supposedly blaspheming the name of Mohammed. All over a catty argument about drinking water. It's the law, you see, and although officials of Pakistan's central government, including the president, have said it appears the charges were unwarranted, and although leaders around the world, including the pope, have spoken on her behalf, the forces of hatred are determined to have her head, literally. In fact, one Pakistini religious leader has said that he will give $5,800, a small fortune in that country, to anyone who severs her neck should she be released. And Christians make up only two percent of the Pakistini population, so those who think their God is too much of a wimp to defend himself don't have much to fear from those who have different ideas of God.

OK, time for fanatics who call themselves patriots to wave the flag and strike up the band, and blather about America being the greatest land on earth, because we know that kind of thing just can't happen here. Continue...

Good news first.

Roller Derby today is great entertainment, a serious sport with serious rules, but it's a lot more. Most of the derby skaters today, and all the skaters on all the teams in the 98 leagues that are in the Women's Flat Track Derby Association (WFTDA) are, as the name suggests, women.

Simply stated, Roller Derby is a phenomenon of women's empowerment. It was women who loved skating that took a second look at the earlier version, born in Chicago during the depression and mostly gone after the 60s. It was women who revived and revised it, kept a lot of the spectacle, and literally wrote the book on how the game was to be played. Continue...

At my age, little cues can trigger a complex of feelings and memories. That's why someday, no longer able to even lift my head, I may cry when one of the angels in my life merely says "good morning, Grandpa!"

This wasn't an angel. It was a replacement battery for a power supply, and this was my second attempt to get the right one from the manufacturer. To be absolutely certain of not missing any valuable identification marks, I peeled back the bar code sticker. There, in yellow letters against the black surface, were the words MADE IN VIETNAM.

Had I attempted to verbalize what went through my mind in the next couple of minutes, any of my fellow psychologists would have labeled it "flight of ideas." Continue...