Scott Cramer wrote this.

They call it a two party system – but it doesn’t seem very fun to me.

What if we ran our political races more like the hit television series American Idol?

Right off the bat – ditch the two party system and gather up all the would-be Presidents, Governors, Senators, Congressmen, what have you, and group them together in one place. Start off with a group of journalists and political consultants and narrow down each pack to a hopeful grouping of 5 to 10 (that is, if we can muster that many potential candidates for a position). After that, let’s get them up on stage over a series of weeks in front of the viewing public and put them through some political paces. I’m envisioning a round panel question and answer session the first week on opinions and solutions relating to current public affairs – and maybe a personal question thrown in here and there for a mental speed-bump. Open up those 1-800 numbers for each candidate and come back the next night to find out who didn’t make the cut.

Round two – Since most political hopefuls come into vogue after their physical prime, I’m nixing the swimsuit competition in favor of a foreign policy face-off. We could still keep it kind of bawdy, though, by letting them wear Hawaiian print shirts, and perhaps cut-offs – if they sign a waiver agreeing not to wear the dress argyle socks at the same time.

More voting… Bye-bye yet another hopeful.

Once we’re down to the final two or three, THEN we heat it up a bit. We’ve got a whole slew of ex-Presidents and other political office-holders eking out meager livings we could bring on the show – think that MTV show Beat the Geek – to put our wannabe office holders through some real life scenario questions and answers. I’ll bet Gorby would jump at the chance to come in and host the “Cold War Double Points Round”.

The possibilities are endless! Politics and cheap network programming – primaries and sweeps weeks all rolled into one exciting package! Heck, think of all the free air time during commercial breaks for anti-drug ads… Who doesn’t own a TV in American society? Well, maybe the Amish, but we could put together troupes of hungry “Shakespeare in the Park” actors to do live show interpretations if need be. See, this idea even helps with unemployment!

We’re ready and waiting network execs! I’ve got the popcorn in the microwave, a six-pack on the table, and AT&T ready to take my votes!

I think I posted months back ranting against reality TV shows – but I’ve really fallen for Fox’s new American Idol. Modeled after a British series with the same format, Americans get a chance to pick one of their next up and coming music superstars. We’re really making a big deal out of it too. I’ve seen coverage on many of the major news stations, including CNN, speculating the next idol candidate to get the axe. Each show is reminiscent of a musical debate as each contestant vies to capture the American populace’s heart and mind – and vote. The following day we witness the culling of the pack and one singer’s concessional goodbye as they are dropped from the race. The show claims to be breaking records with every episode for the number of votes cast. This is a democratic country and we eat this stuff up! The irony doesn’t escape me, however, that we as a people have more input and excitement – and trust that our votes mean something to the outcome – in picking an American Singing Idol than we do an American President.

A few days ago I used the term “Meat Robot” to describe the brainless sector of our workforce commonly found manning the counters at fast food restaurants. I like the term and feel it’s an appropriate description for a subsection of the working public. However, I feel the need to clarify that I’m not just knocking low paying or entry level jobs – not even singling out the fast food industry. A Meat Robot – in any industry – brings nothing to the table beyond a body able to perform some mechanical task. They’re almost less customer friendly and just as unable to expand upon their jobs as their mechanical counterparts. Also, most ATM machines don’t give me attitude or scare me that I’m going to run into them in the parking lot later. Why hire them? Ultimately they’re still cheaper than their industrial robotic replacements.

You come across a Meat Robot and your best hope is that you get whatever product or service that you paid for and make it away from the interaction with a minimum of stress and negative feelings. As far as I’m concerned the future of our national labor development is a race. A race between the ability to make an actual mechanical replacement to the Meat Robots that is affordable to the business community, and the implementation of an educational/training program for entry level employees that imparts some humanity back into the Meat Robot shells – as opposed to just pinning on a nametag. Cold steel and gears or flesh and blood? I’m hoping for the latter solution to win the race, but the crass American consumer in me ultimately doesn’t care so long as my drive-thru meal comes out right and I can get through a grocery check-out lane in less than forty minutes.

The stock market may be up and down, but I turned to MTV late tonight and big boobs still sell videos.

Every once in a while I need some consistency in my life.

I don’t expect much when I go into a fast food restaurant. The performance bar is lower than a professional limbo contest. Hey, if there are croquet tournaments, professional limbo has to be at least on the radar. No matter. What I’m saying is that when I walk into a fast food joint, I consider it a successful visit if service and food balance out at totally forgettable – as non impacting in any way, positive or negative, as the mind numbing hours of late night TV playing in the background while I work.

Lately, however, you’d think the “service technicians” at the fast food counters had been taking insensitivity training. I always wondered what happened to the work force not qualified for customer abuse at public utility help desks. This week, I know. These people have no identifiable skill sets, can only count as high as the number of value meals there are on the “menu”, and personalities Ed Wood wouldn’t have cast in a walk-on part.

We’re talking total Meat Robots. Walking flesh ill programmed for even simple tasks. These work units wouldn’t score higher on the Turing Test than my toaster – which, for the record, is NOT network capable, microchip enhanced, or blue-tooth enabled.

Do I have anything nice to say about the growing number of Meat Robots in the workplace? Umm, well, some of their prison tattoos are actually quite artistic! Oh yeah, and they mostly remember to wear hair nets over their mullets!

Hmm, but they do work the 24-hour drive-thru’s and all this rambling has made me a little hungry. Maybe if I just talk a little slower this time…

Even if they wanted to churn out more reliable products, most programmers lack the skills. Point-and-click development aids like Visual C++ have turned software creation into a For Dummies exercise.
– Brendan I. Koerner, The Bugs in the Machine, WIRED August 2002

Billions and billions served. We call it McCode folks.

It’s fast. It’s convenient. You use it because it’s shoved in your face. To be fair, though, if the consumer doesn’t ask for a gourmet dinner, the restaurant isn’t going to replace the burger flippers. And if a burger flipper can be paid like a gourmet chef… why spend the time in the kitchen when you can be out spending that fat paycheck?

As computers infiltrate more of our daily lives – in our cars, our airplanes, our bodies themselves – there is more and more demand for fast written code. More demand for quickly trained programmers.

Sleep tight everybody.

You can find anything on the web. Go to a popular search engine like Google and type in what you want to find. You get a list of web addresses returned all pertaining to your subject. The more expert the website is on the topic, so the theory goes, the higher it appears on the list. Out of the millions upon millions of websites returned for each search, cracking the top 100 sets you up as pretty knowledgeable on a subject. Cracking the top 10 marks you as an expert in the field.

We have our little website here, thoughtdivers.com, and in a little eddy of information pooled off to the side is my web log. My partner was looking to see what kind of traffic was coming to the website and he sent me some surprising statistics about visitors who were coming to us from the search engine Google – all to archived pages of my web log.

# 3 ranking for anyone searching for “vinyl Shannon Doherty”

# 61 ranking for anyone searching for “pubic hair shaver”

I tell you, my eyes teared up! I was an expert! Well, at least among fetishists and discerning shavers… No matter that the words didn’t appear in this order or even in the same articles with each other.

The rankings change often, but for one brief shining moment, *I* sat among the digital elite. No one can ever take that away from me!

I was watching TV – my laptop was open and visible so it still counted as working – and the program that I was viewing just ended. As the credits started scrolling onto the screen they were whisked over to the far left and scrunched into an unreadable blur of unrecognizable, and now uncredited, names of actors, actresses, gaffers, and gophers. On the right hand side of the screen – perfectly visible – was yet another programming advertisement. Yay, rah.

Anything I might want to see about the program – a specific actor or the name about a song in the soundtrack – completely lost. I watch enough TV – okay, maybe too much sometimes – but I actually do look for stuff like this. Heck, any movie, even the bad ones, should give credit to the people involved. I imagine the assistant to the hairdresser of Billy Bob Thornton trying to point out his crowning achievement, his own name in lights, to his proud mother and her bridge club only to find the task impossible and having to slink away in embarrassment through the hurtful taunts of a disbelieving ladies’ card group.

I guess I can always look up my information on the ‘net but that, well, that’s just wrong.

Fixing computers is the mental equivalent of having a pick-up truck.

Just without the country music and gun rack.

I was talking to my brother the other day and he was on his cellphone. I’d say about five words and realize there was nothing but silence on the other end. Grrr… Redial. Establish where the conversation was before getting cut off. Another sentence or two and more silence. I call him back yet again and he tells me that every time he moves his cell phone from his right ear to his left ear he gets cut off and that there must be a deadzone…

He stops talking as I burst out laughing and finish the sentence for him. There must be a deadzone…

…between his right and left ear.

For a brief moment I almost stopped hating cell phones.

(1) Restaurants should always give you enough maple syrup with your breakfast.

(2) Restaurants should not be allowed to place unmarked containers on the table that look like little pitchers of maple syrup.

(3) Pancakes should not be allowed to soak up vinegar that fast.

I was listening to the radio in the car the other day and caught one of those sixty-second news breaks. They were talking about how Amtrak would love to scan luggage with the same (perceived) level of scrutiny as the airlines, but they just couldn’t afford to do it. Amtrak said the airline industry was given a tremendous sum of money by the U.S. Government to subsidize all the electronic whiz-bang sniffer-thingys (my terminology in case you were confused) and that the government would just have to do the same thing for them.

Then the kicker, an Amtrak spokesperson said – quite seriously – in rebuttal to the pressure to provide such high levels of baggage scanning, “…besides which, in our history a train has never been hijacked.” You could almost hear the sarcasm dripping out of the radio speakers onto my dashboard.

Ominous train hijacker: “Engineer, take me to Poukeepsie! And no funny business!”

Engineer: “But the tracks only run to Scranton…”

Brakeman: “Hey, aren’t you the guy from the news who hijacked a trolly car?”

I was trying to think of a funny way to write down this story my nephew’s wife told me. In the end, I couldn’t think of anything funnier than just presenting the facts as they were told to me. I know, I know… great writers everywhere are turning over in their graves. Not embellishing??? How does he consider himself a writer?!?! Yeah, well, I never saw Hemingway with a blog, so nyah. Of course, I never saw Hemingway write “nyah” – maybe Emerson on an off day, or Ogden Nash on a good day… In any case, on to the story.

My nephew, industrious lad that he is, had put in a hard day at his corporate job working software support for mega-unamed-900-pound-gorilla phone company in our local town. I’m sure he drove the family mini-van home that night psyching himself up for another couple hours of homework for night school business courses – which he’d get to as soon as all three kids had gone to bed and he and his wife had gotten a chance to clean up the leftover meat loaf and instant mashed potatoes. Several hours later, after four chapters, a two page paper, and every news update twice on CNN, he finally headed for bed.

It was later where my nephew’s wife relates the story. She woke up late that evening with my nephew stirring in his sleep. He sat up in bed and said the following:

“I have the reflexes…”

Then, she tells me there was a long pause, before he continued.

“…of a cow.”

If that weren’t enough already – and remember I said I had no need to embellish this story – he then exclaimed,

“Mooooo.”

You’d think all the laughter would have woken him up. But I guess not. After all, reflexes of a cow and all that.

I was looking at a black and white picture of a woman the other day. I thought, “Man, she’s hot!” Then I thought, “Man, she’s, like, 90 now.”

Remember next time you talk to your grandparents, Britney didn’t invent cleavage.

(I said remember it… not keep thinking about it)

I had two choices. Change all the light bulbs to red, or take down the Christmas lights before Valentine’s day.

Upsetting the neighbors with a bordello ruby glow was rather appealing but, besides the time involved, I didn’t know where to buy three thousand tiny red lights.

I was playing with my daughter and trying to teach her how to put different shaped blocks into the same-shaped holes in a little toy bucket. The triangle goes in the triangle hole. The squre goes in the square hole. The circle goes in the circle hole. If you don’t have the blocks matched to the right holes then they won’t go into the bucket. That’s just the way it works.

Maddie works with this concept for all of about two seconds before she grabs the bucket, takes off the lid, and places all of the blocks inside without further interruption.

We both learned something.

I would love to say the writing muse is a fickle mistress but she’s always hanging around and I’m sure she’d be quite irate if I even tried that lame excuse. She shows up staring back at me on the television screen until I can flip through enough channels to lose her for a while. The new VCR and DVD player for Christmas has only made it even harder for her to catch up to me. She thinks she’s got me when I sit down in front of the computer but, being an intangible muse, she can’t delete the icons for solitaire and surfing the web – but I’m at least in my writing zone, especially late at night when the house is quiet. I’ll give her this, she’s persistent. There’s hardly a thing I do without a whisper of guilt telling me I could be spending a few minutes composing a paragraph or small poem. Heck, I’m sure she’d settle for a run-on sentence or a limerick by now. I don’t know if muses have bosses to report to, but I’m betting I have her on probation with her superiors.

I wonder what happens to an unemployed muse to a writer who won’t write? Hmm… I’ll bet I could spin that into a cute little story… Hey!

Okay, another two points for the muse.

I can almost here her snickering now.