Category: Orphans

It is nice to see Prez Gee “Whiz” Bush humbled by an veto overriding Congress This especially gratifies me since Bush is certainly not one who is given to obtrusiveness. The Prez probably thought he was doing the right thing by vetoing the Water Bill which most likely contained more pork that the Iowa Pork Conference.

But unlike pork, which can kill you in several different ways, congressional pork is what makes the political world go ’round. It gets lawmakers elected and brings jobs and money home in return. There can be too much of a good thing though such as, let’s say $1 million to build the Arnold Ziffel Museum. I don’t know that there is such a museum but I’ll bet some swine politician could find a way to make it happen.

What really matters in all of this is, however, the fact that GW is not impervious to the override. And that makes me downright giddy.

Too bad it’s just a cheap political stunt by congressional Republicans.

When some country far, far away from the U.S. is undergoing some political crisis — a coup, state of emergency, etc. — I don’t often investigate the situation very closely. Sadly, that has not changed with the latest crisis in Pakistan because that country has quite a bit of significance to the U.S. For you see, Pakistan’s dictator, President Pervez Musharraf, is the only — I hesitate to say friend — ally of the U.S. in that part of the world and just how much of an ally is questionable. Also, Pakistan’s got nukes. Wouldn’t that make a cool T-shirt, not: “Got Nukes.”

What I do know is this:

**Musharraf has apparently reneged on a promise to democratize Pakistan which included holding elections and possibly sharing power with Benazir Bhutto. Thus, the president (and general) has proclaimed a state of emergency.

**Bhutto was the first woman to lead the government of Pakistan but fled to exile after corruption charges were leveled against her, her husband and associates. Such charges may or may not be valid.

**Bhutto graduated from Radcliff and is one helluva good-looking woman.

And that’s it. That’s the sum of my knowledge about what’s up with Pakistan. I guess though that I better start boning up on my Pakistani knowledge. And no, I wasn’t trying to make the last sentence as a double-entendre.

Today I spent the entire day at my part-time job taking a course online. Well, the tests were online but the rest of the course was on a CD. Each of the four online tests today took forever to load. Now I get home and my aircard is taking forever to load. I think I it’s a good excuse to shut down my computer and ready a book

From today’s No S**t Sherlock Department — A study has found that daylight savings time disrupts the sleep cycle. I heard this on National Public Radio while driving back to the office this afternoon. Dr. Stanley Spiesel, who writes a medical column for Slate, said during the NPR interview that a study of Central Europeans “showed that the normal correlation between dawn and the sleep cycle becomes disrupted during the transition to daylight-saving time.”

Spiesel goes on to say that getting into the natural brightness of the day is the best way to rebound from the grogs that beset you when transitioning to daylight savings time. How to rebound completely from the other types of grogs, other than with the hair of the grog, continues to baffle medical science.

I found that the best way to make the time transitions after the clocks are set backward or forward is to do so while you are on vacation. Some 12 years ago I was on vacation, staying with my friend Sally in Massachusetts. Even though she had to get up to go to work and I had to drive with her so that I could use her car while she was at work, I found I didn’t suffer from the normal irritation of time transitioning when I returned to my job the following week. The fact that I made the transition from daylight to standard time in the Eastern Time Zone rather than in the Central Time Zone where I live may have somehow contributed to making the time change more bearable. But I think that not working and not really having much in the way of responsibility contributes the most to surviving the change from daylight to standard or from standard to daylight. I think not working helps in many ways. I think that even not thinking about working can be helpful. So I will quit thinking (and writing) about work. I am feeling better already.