Month: April 2007

During my past two weeks commuting on the Metro subway from Bethesda to Washington, I have been fortunate enough to miss really crowded rush-hour crowds. Not so today. I squeezed onto the Red Line at Union Station but after a couple of stops was able to grab a seat for the rest of my ride. The train was pretty packed all the way from D.C. out to Bethesda. And I said, oh how glad I am I don’t live here.

My class wraps up tomorrow and I am flying back to Beaumont via Houston around noon on Friday. It only occurred a couple of days ago that I actually know a few people in the metro D.C. area. I e-mailed them. Unfortunately, Jackie is in New Zealand and Mary has to work. I will likely be returning sometime later this year, provided all goes well with my work.

Just a comment about national news, in particular Don “Ignor” Imus. I don’t see why it is such news that Imus is a boorish jackass. I don’t know if he is racist but he certainly talks and acts like a jackass, so I guess he passes the duck test (if it walks like a duck … )

Imus has a pattern of making stupid remarks. The last gaffe made on his show that I remember before this latest one was made by executive producer, Bernard McGuirk. He was also involved in the ridiculous dialogue with Imus about the Rutgers womens’ basketball team.

The asshole McGuirk said upon the release of freelance reporter Jill Carroll after her kidnapping by Iraqi extremists that Carroll was the:

” … kind of woman who would wear one of those suicide vests, sneak into the Green Zone” “

It shouldn’t have rubbed me the wrong way because I expect this kind of stupid banter out of the likes of people who live for nothing else but ratings. But it did. Carroll wasn’t doing anything but her job, just like the Rutgers women’s team.

Within the last hour or so, NBC Universal said it will no longer simulcast the Ignorimus radio show. I say good riddance.

Space. The final frontier. Deep, dark, space.

Maybe the subway walls such as those of Washington, D.C.’s Metro are not the final frontier when it comes to advertising. But it certainly does raise the debate of whether one man’s (or woman’s) wasted space is another’s dark hole of fortune.

Perhaps the last place many would expect to see ads for giants Microsoft and Target stores would be on a subway ride to the Smithsonian. But that is what I saw Saturday on Metro’s Blue Line. It’s part of a new wave of advertising popping up on subway’s worldwide.

Zooming out of a couple of stops out of the Metro Center Station on the way to the Smithsonian stop, the train driver exhorted his captive audience to take a peak out of the left window. Outside that window, a cartoonish woman pleaded for our train to wait for her but as she somehow hilariously runs with fast but futile steps toward us it appears in a flash of a nanosecond that Microsoft wants us to buy something, anything, of theirs.

Outside the next station was a reality as presented by Target, which is, of course, anything but reality. This was a several-second movie in which it seems our subway car will be popping out of a Target-logoed bank vault. Oh hell, just watch them yourselves if you happen to be on a subway somewhere. I’m sure they will eventually get to you, probably even if you don’t have your own subway to ride. I mean, one cannot get to much of a good thing when it comes to advertising, right?

No doubt that I would be the last person on Earth to answer such a question or even engage in a debate over whether these ads are harmless, helpful, hellish or any other adjective, subjective, objective, adverb, proverb, conjunction, conjunctivitis, wall of confusion, or maybe even confounding exercise, which might or might not prove detrimental to the health and well-being of subway commuters everywhere. That is because I don’t plan to make a habit of riding subways, light rail or any type of metropolitan camel caravan be it terranean or subterranean.

It just happens I am in Washington on business and fortunately that business will conclude at the end of this week. Then, I probably won’t ride Metro or any other conveyance of mass transit until I come back to D.C. later this year for another round of training. Maybe Target will have the whole damn movie finished by then!

But I just throw this out there for all of my friends who spend their time in dark, underground locales and, no, I’m not talking about my homeless friends back in Beaumont who have to reside every now and then under Interstate 10 bridges. Do you want your subway trip to include advertising on what would otherwise be dark, wasted walls? Do you think such advertising is an abomination or prelude to the moral decay of an otherwise innocent outlet that masks itself while we slip haplessly headed toward Hell in a handbasket? Or would you not even notice it just as you never notice anything on your morning commute with your iPods, copies of “The Examiner” that the jovial hawkers pass out each morning at the Metro escalators or snuggled up in your seat with a legal brief that you were supposed to read before you left work yesterday?

You all talk amongst yourselves. Let me know next time I am in town and riding the Metro.

For the second time since Saturday, I spent upwards of between 30 minutes to an hour trying to turn something out on this page. It’s not that I am any Melville or Twain or even Paris Hilton and her ghost of a writer. But at least when I write something — whether it is worth anything to anyone else or not — I want it to show up on my blog. A so-called “high-speed” Internet service serving my hotel called iBAHN apparently does not want that to happen.

On Saturday afternoon I spent quite some time writing, only to have iBAHN’s page asking me to sign up once again appear from out of nowhere to destroy what I was about to publish on Blogger. Unbelievably, it happened again tonight. This was after having my Internet service go on and off and on and off and on and off about 30 minutes prior … I called their customer service, which by the way their phone system is structured (to be fair, not unlike many companies today) doesn’t really want to have to talk with you. But they did.

The customer service lady I talked with the second time this evening said I shouldn’t have this problem again during the rest of my stay here at Residence Inn by Marriott in Bethesda, Md. That would be through Friday. But to be honest with you, parting this place and its substandard Internet provider will be no sweet sorrow.

My advice is that if you want high-speed Internet in your hotel room, ask questions about the service before you reserve. That is, unless you don’t have a choice like yours truly. And if that hotel has something called iBAHN, run like hell, don’t walk, away from that place of lodging. You will be doing yourself and your sanity a great favor.

This friendly fellow looked as if it wanted its photo taken, so I thought I’d oblige it.

This is obviously not the best place to park a bike in the District of Columbia.

One gets what one pays for, someone said, obviously oblivious of ending sentences with prepositions. In my case it is I get what my employer pays for, I say, in a desperate attempt to hide the preposition hanging at the end of my thought/would-be sentence.

All of such mumbo jumbo relates to the fact that I wrote a rather long opscule about my feelings upon visiting several of our nation’s most beloved monuments yesterday in D.C. This took place on a particularly cold day and after a light dusting of snow. Yes, I wrote that lengthy piece and the high-speed Internet provider took it all away in a flash as it popped up, I suppose, to ask me if I wanted to renew my free subscription in this hotel. I did. Thanks iBAHN. I didn’t like what I wrote yesterday all that much anyway.

So here it is a chilly Easter Sunday in the Residence Inn Marriott on Wisconsin Avenue in Bethesda. I am wanting to go out for awhile this afternoon to see a few more sights, so this posting will not be an interminable work of literature, or even literature, I think, as I am in a hurry but am being so damned slow about it.

The above photo is from the only panel I photographed yesterday at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. The name Tommy Ray Medley belongs to a young man from my hometown in East Texas whom I remember meeting on one of those endless summer days a 10-year-old confuses with eternity. The photo stems from the memory of meeting him, which is really all I recall about that day at a country swimming hole where my pops took my brother and me.

It would not be long after that day that both my brother and Tommy Medley would head off to the service. My brother went to the Navy and Tommy went to the Marine Corps. Both would also go to Vietnam, but only my brother among the two would return alive.

My singling out the name of Tommy Ray Medley on the black Vietnam wall was not specifically because he was a close acquaintance, although his sister and I were in the same class in our small school. Rather, Tommy was the only person I could ever remember knowing who left for that Asian hell on earth only to be struck down at a young age in battle.

Tommy Medley was killed in 1968. His death was also the first Vietnam casualty I can remember in our little hometown. Why does something that has been unfortunately all-too-common over time still shock one with such force? I don’t know, but I think having such feelings overwhelm us are positive lest apathy leaves the majority of society with approving such a tremendous waste of human life.

Feelings are what all these national shrines I visited, situated between the president’s residence and the Potomac River in our only federal district, are all about.

The garden of soldiers with stares of a thousand yards or more, pictured here from the Korean War memorial, along with its black wall etched with scores upon scores of haunted faces belonging to U.S. troops were a very powerful reminder of a war that many have forgotten over time. I had never really read or heard much about this shrine and I was unexpectedly impressed and moved by the monument.

Visiting the Lincoln Memorial and walking up the numerous steps to see Honest Abe in his big chair was breathtaking in more ways than one. And the World War II Veterans Memorial was likewise worth all the walking that I did in the windy cold air of Washington.

All of these monuments taken together are more than just walking among the faces of history. They serve to remind us that being and living in a nation is not a trivial matter, especially in our somewhat complicated republic. Likewise, the monuments show that the ability to live in our country involves costs. Sometimes those costs are in our money and other prices are paid for in lives and in the grief of those who lost someone.

It is amazing to see so many people from so many different places on the planet visiting these shrines of our great melting-pot experiment. And for one who lives here, the experience of visiting these hallowed grounds can leave one with a unique sense of being an American.

Forget all our problems, and our misguided faults for the moment. Look at what fate has wrought. We can then come home and criticize our leaders for their shortsightedness, or how they led us down the wrong pathway time and again. I don’t know about anyone else but I think the ability to live, learn, cuss and discuss the dunderheads who lead us makes our country a pretty good piece of earth on which to live.