Stevieslaw: White House Loses All Touch with Reality

Posted on November 8, 2011 by stevieslaw

The nation section of our local, the Centre Daily Times, picked up an article out of Washington today declaring that the White House has no evidence that extraterrestrials exist. Apparently, the White House has a feature on its website that allows people to submit petitions that they must answer. In response to questions about extraterrestrials, Phil Larson of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy said that the White House has no evidence that life exists outside the earth, or that any member of the human race has ever been contacted by ET.
No matter how you come down on the issue, it is quite clear that no one at the White House, from the ground floor up, has been listening to the Republican Presidential Debates or reading the Republican candidates statements in the News. Clearly, they are sadly unprepared for the reelection campaign.

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Stevieslaw: Republicans to Cut Wealth Gap

Posted on November 7, 2011 by stevieslaw

Hope Yen, writing for AP, reported today that the “wealth” gap between the old and the young is increasing. Smokey Diamond, our intrepid reporter, was startled—and trust me when I say that the one thing you don’t want to do is startle Smokey Diamond.
“Do you mean to say,” he queried “that people who have worked all their lives, have paid for a house, and subsist mostly on Social Security are wealthier than young people that are just starting out, have an underwater mortgage, and are having difficulty in finding jobs because there aren’t any.” “Astonishing,” he murmured. “And, he noted, “it is a nice touch having the headline for the article call it a “wealth gap,” when the difference is between people living on social security on those living on nothing.
Smokey reports that the Republican caucus on the Hill was positively gleeful over the study results.” Their spokesperson, Rip Cutcaus, took time out from his busy schedule of explaining the Republican strategy in blocking job bills and denying a continuation of Federal Unemployment benefits to tell Smokey, “This is the death knell for entitlement programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.” “We have catered to the old for too long and the result is this huge discrepancy in wealth.” “Moreover, this is a problem Republicans can solve,” continued Rip. “If we cut entitlements this wealth gap will close, and, there will be no need to trouble the job producers with insane calls for more taxes.

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Stevieslaw: My Voices of PA Nov. Article

Posted on November 2, 2011 by stevieslaw

Don’t Ask: Career Recommendations for the Next Millennium

My friend Joel Levine wanted to be a doctor, Arnie Slansky a lawyer and Crazy Eddie an Indian Chief. I wanted to be a mailman—still do. Down the block we had our share of Teachers, Scientists, Librarians and Nurses. We had Einsteins, Salks, Nightingales and Mantles. That’s why I was shocked to learn that my niece’s 8 year old son, Marrs, wants to be a hedge fund manager. Times have changed, and mentioning Jonas Salk to an eight year old today will only get you a blank stare.

We are faced with dramatically new times, new heroes, and new careers. How then do you help your 37 year old nephew, who has been living in your basement since 9/11, find a career? Here at Stevieslaw we are proud to publish “Don’t Ask: Careers for the New Millennium,” as part of our Less-Intelligent-than-Average American Guides series. With the help of the guide, you will learn just how likely it is that your career choice will be rewarded sufficiently for you to make it into a tax bracket, any tax bracket. While many of you might be depressed about what your college degree has gotten you: a job at McDonalds, Walmart or Kohl’s, LAG will show you that things can certainly get worse. As a sample, consider the year 2024,

In the Professions:

1. Doctors will vanish, as enlightened Insurance Companies finally realize they can do without the middle men. Nurses will handle the everyday business of medicine as they do now—in 23 hour shifts eight days a week. Sadly, it will be Jewish mothers who suffer most.

2. One out of every three Americans over the age of 6 will have a law degree. Fourteen, if we count the Supreme Court Justices, are working. And with no doctors to sue…

3. Scientists will reap the rewards of a $3.42 research budget in this fiscal year. Those not getting a piece of the research pie will still be able to conduct “thought” experiments, provided the topic has been approved by President Santorum.

4. University Professors will teach by referring to the results of public opinion polls, much as they do today.

In the Arts (where nothing much has changed):

1. Remember when your little rock and roller performed in your basement for the neighborhood kids? He will remember that as his high earning years. Other musicians will not do quite that well. For the purpose of discussion, dancers are musicians with funny shoes and large health care bills, while actors are dancers that don’t. The good news—waiting tables.

2. The Fine Arts are, of course entirely different. One can make a good living in the Fine Arts, as evidenced by the four or five fine artists, who since 1603, have.

3. Write. For Money? You Nuts? In 2024, the Nobel Prize in Literature went to a Japanese computer code named Murakami.

In the Trades:

1. Remember bookstores, record shops and affordable restaurants other than pizza joints and fast food dives. Your five year old won’t. Is your name Amazon? No. Then don’t try to revive them.

2. Remember building things? Won’t in 2024. Back in the day, my uncles all worked construction as plumbers and electricians. They built this country. Often, they were called in to build homes for people or to fix problems in privately owned homes. The concept of owning the place you lived in was called home ownership. Look it up on Wikipedia if you don’t believe it ever existed.

In Local and State Government:

1. Teachers will be hunted during the summer months in 48 states. By 2024, they have been hunted to extinction in Alabama and Mississippi, where the locals claim to have no need of them anyway. And as they say right here in PA, it is the only way to keep thems varmints down.

2. Post offices, having been betrayed by Netflix and the Credit Card companies through their on-line features, have closed. Mailmen hang out at what used to be libraries. They use their cool leather bags to carry their lunches.

3. No one knows what happened to all the other government employees. Some cynics suspect they wandered off after not being paid for a decade or so.

In LAG we will show there are still high-paying careers out there and that their rewards are likely to grow. Finding careers as superstar athletes or performers, ponzi schemers, natural resource manipulators, talking heads, evangelists and political hacks will still be possible—as will those most lucrative careers as elected officials in local, State or Federal government. It just requires good genes. No, not brilliance, just good genes, as in a mom or dad with money or pull. As Ogden Nash might have said (see, I yield to my learned brother…): Well Connected men, they have no cares/ Whatever happens, they get theirs.

As for the nephew in the basement, who so obviously lacks parents with money or pull, have you talked to him about marrying money? He’s in love you say with a girl as poor as he is. Move him out. Basements must be reserved for the next generation of performing artists. You might as well remind him of some other words by Ogden Nash (see, Love under the Republicans (or Democrats)) who did predict the future for your nephew and a billion others in the new millennium: We’ll live in a dear little walk up flat/with practically room to swing a cat.

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Reworking “My Cousin Vinny.**”

Posted on October 26, 2011 by stevieslaw

Stevieslaw: Reworking “My Cousin Vinnie.**”
At Stevieslaw, we are shopping an idea for a “Cousin Vinny” remake—be sure to tell your many Hollywood director/producer friends. In our rewrite, a Joe Pesci look alike and a Ralph Macchio look alike have a hell of a good time in a small town in Mississippi. Too good a time. Under the new Mississippi law, they are charged with murder by birth control. The young and ambitious district attorney seeks the death penalty, as a headline grabber. They are saved in the end by the Marisa Tomei character—a wise cracking, New York accented young woman, with a truly encyclopedic understanding of birth control methods.
Tell me you wouldn’t go see this movie twice.

**Voting on Conception as Legal Start of Life
By ERIK ECKHOLM –NY Times 10/26/11

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Saturday

Posted on October 10, 2011 by stevieslaw

Today, in Pennsylvania,
we have the kind of
perfect October day
that often arrives with
the High Holidays.
The trick of living here,
in the shadow of the great
lakes, is not to let the tilt
of the low and lazy sun,
onto your horizon too soon.
It is not easy, as we who have
lived so often through the
encasement of winter are not
unlike the little furry things that
rush about beneath the fading
flowers. We wish, as well, to fatten
our cheeks and store our seeds
safely in some stately oak.

Later, we will hear the shouts of
victory or defeat, from our enormous
football field bounce and echo
off the pine-treed ridge.
Perhaps, with time, I may
also hear the ancient sounds
of prayer join the cheers
there. For although, I seem
no longer fan nor Jew, I still
long to hear fall’s raspy voice
plead against all odds for a winter
late in arriving and short in its stay.

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Cousin Myron Pipes In

Posted on October 9, 2011 by stevieslaw

Myron Pipes In
Myron, my fire-eating red-headed cousin, does not often find his name and the word compromise in the same sentence. He is particularly hard on the filthy rich, waiters and idiots. It is not all that unusual for Myron to throw one of each through a plate glass window in any given month.
When he called me to suggest a compromise on the Keystone XL pipeline project, I was stunned.
“I had a great idea for the project,” Myron told me. “But I don’t know how to publicize it.”
“I’ll put it on my blog, cousin,” I said. “That way ten or twelve people this year will read about it.”
“It’s a start,” said my cousin. “A very, very small start.”
Myron’s compromise is simplicity itself.
1. Build the pipeline. It will create tons of good paying jobs in the middle of a jobs recession.
2. Have the oil companies pay for the pipeline construction using their very large pool of government subsidies. They won’t miss it.
3. Don’t connect the pipeline to anything in Hardisty or in Houston/Port Arthur. Keep it empty and shiny.
New jobs. No new taxes. No environmental mess. It’s a win, win, win.
As an aside, Myron is heartbroken about his Yankees. He is shocked to learn there will be no Congressional Investigation into the loss.
“What do those idiots do?” he wondered aloud.
My advice to congressmen and women is to avoid having lunch in any restaurant with both plate glass windows and Myron until the first pitch next April.

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Wall Street Wheat

Posted on October 7, 2011 by stevieslaw

Wall Street Wheat
When I was a graduate student, way back before the beginning of recorded time, board games were still the rage. A group of us would meet at someone’s place, late at night, and play Monopoly or the world conquest game Risk. We also played a game based on the Chicago Commodities Market, called Pit. In it, we tried to corner the market in some commodity by trading with each other. As I recall, trading was accomplished by each of us holding up commodity cards while screaming for a trade at the top of our lungs. You had to drink a lot of beer to be successful at the game, but the playing field was level and the beer made the game just that much more fun.
I just received a new version of the game from Amazon and was astonished to learn that the rules have changed. In the new version, you and your friends get to sit in a corner somewhere and worry about the price of staples—food, heating oil, and gasoline, while Wall Street fat cats in suits bid for the commodities through stylized computer codes.
Beer anyone?

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Wall Street and the Vets

Posted on October 5, 2011 by stevieslaw

Smokey Diamond, our intrepid reporter, and I love when our local newspaper, The Centre Daily Times, asks and answers its own question in the same issue. Today, they ran the article by Adam Geller of AP headlined: Protest’s Mission Remains Murky, about the Wall Street protests. What do these protesters want? The CDT provides a simple answer in the article out of Atlanta in which “a whistle-blower lawsuit claims several large banks and mortgage companies defrauded military veterans and taxpayers out of hundreds of millions of dollars in a “brazen scheme” to hide illegal fees. Proven? No. Plausible? Oh yeah.
The protesters want crap like this to stop. The NYTs today reports that Mellon Bank was being sued for overcharging their customers some 2 billion dollars in exchange fees. Perhaps that stuff should stop as well.
The Geller article picks up on the new Wall Street defense—the victims-are-equally-to-blame-rule. Why did they go for the teaser mortgages or run up their credit card bills? Aren’t they responsible too? Sure. But in this country, we still recognize the difference between foolish and evil. Buying a well-marketed slice of the American Dream is, in retrospect, foolish. Knowingly marketing and selling that impossible dream is evil.
An American Government that promotes the well being of the hucksters, because they are (a little Bach and a respectful hush please) the job creators, over the well being of its common citizens has misplaced its purpose. Citizens are disgusted because the financial system they live under is disgusting and the government they hired to help protect the average Joe doesn’t.

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October Voices Article

Posted on October 4, 2011 by stevieslaw

This was chopped up in the print copy of Voices.

Just Shoot Me: Your Aged Relative and the Extended Hospital Stay.

My mom is much improved. Thanks for asking. I am ashamed to say though that she’s fallen into that “culture of dependency” I’ve heard so much about. Perhaps many desperately ill ninety-five years olds become dependent, but my mother didn’t even try to snap out of her post-surgery anesthetic haze to tell us which rehab facility she wanted to go to.

Not that she had a choice. There was only one that took both her particular Medicare insurance and could provide the intravenous feeding she needed. That one was about 21 miles away. Unfortunately, the Medicare reimbursable range for ambulance transport is five miles—so she had to be transferred four times. We carried her the last mile. It was entertaining for mom though. At each transfer point—usually on the berm of I95, she had to sign reams of legal documents absolving each ambulance company in turn from any liability and guaranteeing payment for “as long as the sun may shine.”

For many baby boomers, helping an ailing aged related person (AARP) is on the horizon. Now, Stevieslaw will publish the Less-intelligent-than- average American Guide (LAG) to senior health care in America. In Part 1, the extended hospital stay, you will learn about

1. The Mission: Senior heath care is a life and death struggle between the hospital and the insurance company as governed by several million pages of government guidelines. Try not to get in the way.

2. The Environment: The average hospital has several 12 story buildings on at least 25 acres. Neither the buildings not the floors are numbered. Parking lots are clearly labeled by multicolored “No Parking” signs. Plan to leave your car—you will never find it again.

3. Visiting: In an effort to separate the thousands of people who want entry to the hospital so they can sample the cuisine, shop for gifts, and breathe the tainted air from those who want to visit a sick AARP, you will be subjected to a rigorous security screening by someone who desperately wants to be somewhere else. Be nice.

4. Finding Your Way: You can’t. If you ask three people in white about the location of the surgical suites, you will get four different answers. Want a can’t- lose- start-up business? Create a hospital gps system that can be rented at the gift shop.

5. The Room: Your AARP will have a bed in a private or semi-private room. A private room has one TV blaring. A semi-private room has two TVs, usually set to different stations, blaring. In addition, equipment and warning lights are always either flashing and beeping or broken. This is the place to test your favorite headache remedy.

6. The Staff: Nurses look like people doomed to spend 18 hours on their 10 hour shifts. They are. When they are not helping the AARP, they are charting what they did to help the AARP. When they are not helping or charting, they are rushing from room to room to find out why something stopped flashing and beeping. Aides are dressed in pastel. A successful facility hires aides that look alike. A Doctor or “Attending” is required to make rounds once a day or she is demoted to aide. You are unlikely, however, to ever meet one. Rumor has it they round at night—disguised as janitors. Surgeons on the other hand are accessible. After all, every day is a Happy Halloween for a surgeon. They can be identified by the words “right” and “left” embroidered on the sleeves of their gowns.

7. The Lingo: Listen carefully to the nurses and the aides. For example, when asking for help, an “I will be right back,” means at least a two hour wait, while an “I will find someone to help,” means I will never return.

8. Medication and Tests: At the hospital, medication is given on the At the Moment System (ATMS). If your AARP has a rapidly changing blood pressure, it is not unusual for her to be on three pills to lower her pressure, two to raise it and one to control the diabetes she doesn’t have. Your AARP is not senile, just dopey. Feeding and hydration is often through an IV line. The IV mechanism is often flashing and beeping because it is empty or kinked. Don’t let that make you nervous. Imagine that is how it is supposed to work. Blood is drawn every 20 minutes day and night. That’s about 200 gallons of blood a week, if we have done the calculation correctly. It can’t all be from you AARP, so keep your arms and legs covered—if you are in the room you are fair game.

9. The Food: Your AARP will live for the orange jello.

10. Discharge: Discharge is initiated by the insurance company when they coo those three little words—no longer reimbursable. A “janitor” will then attest that “discharge is the best idea I have ever had,” and sign something. Social Workers and Case Managers, who prior to this had just provided you with out of date brochures and folk wisdom, will become ferocious and call everyone in the United States with your last name to come get the AARP right now. You’d better get down there.

Stay tuned for Part II. Rehab—the care-free hospital.

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Fashionable Facts

Posted on October 3, 2011 by stevieslaw

As we all secretly believe, fact is like fashion. The fashion model, Heidi Klum, who hosts the runaway hit show Project Runway says it best, “In fashion, one day you’re in, the next day you’re out.” That’s why our intrepid reporter, Smokey Diamond, was so pumped to test the hot new app, “She loves me—or not,” available exclusively at Stevieslaw. Smokey says, “With facts, as with fashion, one day they’re correct the next day not. “Now you can use the SLM-ON app to test any “fact” for instant accuracy, just as long as the test can be posed as a simple yes or no question.”
Have trouble believing the earth is round? Ask forty-four million of your equally misinformed peers their opinion. Today, you will find that 57% believe it is not. Bingo—today, the earth is flat. And, tomorrow? Excited yet?
SLM-ON can help with the simplest fashion questions, “Should I buy this new blue shirt because it makes me look thin (just upload the photo)” to the thorniest of philosophical queries—“Is there a God and does he look like Woody Allen?” (1.Yes 14%: 2. Yes 87%: 3.Yes 86%). Can’t sleep? Stay up all night and watch the evolution (pun intended) of your truth.
Real Americans will be happy to note that SLM-ON has already been warmly endorsed by the Tea Party. A spokesperson for Michelle Bachmann notes that, “this will end the twin tyrannies of science and history.” While a Rick Perry spokesperson suggests that SLM-ON will quickly eliminate the need, and the expense, of higher education.
Are they right? Check it out on SLM-ON. Download it now from Stevieslaw for only $19.97—less than half the cost of a steak dinner at Arbys. Or is it?

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