Eight Feet Deep

One hears the term “nickel and diming” quite often these days. Most often the phrase is mentioned during discussions about the airline industry which — facing huge losses due to higher fuel prices or so they claim — has proposed charging passengers for every extra that can possibly be conceived.

“Would you like a pillow, sir?”

“Why yes. Thanks.”

“No problem. That will be $15.”

“Oh, sir, you say you need an airsickness bag? They are $5 each. And please have the correct … oh my …”

Everyone during times of financial difficulty seems to think nickel and diming is the way to go. For example, the city government where I live is beginning to use nickel and dime economics.

A story on local TV station KFDM Channel 6 last night said the Beaumont (Texas) City Council wants to raise water rates on those who rent apartments and homes. It would seem likely the reason for the increase is the fact that they can. But the stated reason is that:

” … people in apartment complexes and mobile homes have been paying less than homeowners for more than two decades.” This according to Hani Tohme, the city water utilities director.

Renters would pay an extra $7-9 per month and the city would reap about a million bucks. Whoo hoo! Future renters should not expect to see “water paid” as part of the rent package, at least in my estimation.

The city says the money would go back into its infrastructure but other than fixing drainage and sprucing up downtown for turistas, I don’t see a lot of infrastructure being improved. Just take a drive down Seventh Street in Old Town and see if the ruts and potholes don’t shake you up like a jackhammer.

Many renters are those who are spending every spare $7-9 they get each month on all those unimportant items such as gasoline to get to work (about 2 gallons as it stands), food and medicine (a couple of generic ‘scrips from Wally World.)

I hope the Beaumont City Council gets an earful when it takes up the water rate hike in August. The council needs to show that it needs the money and give a detailed explanation of how it will be spent. I also think the council needs to spread the pain around so us “non-wealthy” individuals won’t have to carry the water for those who aren’t hurting quite so bad. There is always hope but I won’t hold my breath.

As much as I like National Public Radio I must confess that the theme music for some of its shows annoys the hell out of me.

A fellow named B.J. Leiderman is responsible for most of those themes which include the NPR programs: Morning Edition, Weekend Edition, Car Talk, The People’s Pharmacy, Common Ground, A Moment In Time with Dan Roberts and Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me! I am unable to link Mr. Leiderman’s Website at the moment so if you are a fan or are curious to see what a man looks like who probably gets paid tons of music for writing whimsical but, to me, quite annoying music then dial-up:

http://web.mac.com/bjleiderman/BJ_Leiderman_Music/Welcome.html

Hopefully you will copy and paste the above url rather than type it but if your fingers need the exercise, then have at it.

This is not to say Mr. Leiderman’s music is bad. It has been around for quite sometime and I don’t know that any mass acts of hari kari have resulted from people listening to his theme songs. But I have to admit that if I were locked in a room and this music was played over and over and over and over … then I would probably divulge all the state secrets. Like I have any.

I have an acquaintance who is a correspondent for NPR. She is a very nice, pleasant, intelligent, quite attractive woman. I have never mentioned the fact that the music for her network’s news programs could very easily send me out among the Plain of Jars in search of cosmic pickles.

By now, I suppose one might have gathered that I am not a real fan of the theme music for NPR. But that’s okay. As goofy as the music sounds to me one really has to appreciate Mr. Leiderman’s something or other. And at least those themes aren’t rap. You see, if you can’t say something good about someone then … I don’t know … get off the porch, maybe?

Some guy was substituting for Joe Paggs on the Joe Paggs show this a.m. at Houston’s KTRH-AM talk station. Where do you get substitutes for a talk show host for someone whom no one has heard of anyway? But this guy asked the question of those in talk show land: Was TV coverage of Tim Russert’s passing Friday overblown this weekend?

It occurred to me that if the substitute host was all bent out of shape about too much coverage then why was he giving the story even more media coverage? Not so sharp, some people.

Yes, there probably was too much coverage concerning the passing of this important media figure. But you have to fill up that 24-hour news hole somehow don’t you?

“The river rose all night
Some people got lost in the flood
Some people got away alright
The river have busted through clear down to Plaquemines
Six feet of water in the streets of Evangelne.” — Randy Newman, “Louisiana 1927”

It seems as if Ma Nature is trying to wash away the U.S. Midwest. One can hardly stop thinking about flood songs while conjuring up visions of large corn pasture chunks and farm homes floating down river toward places like Plaquemines and Evangeline: “Louisiana, Louisiana/They’re trying to wash us away” and “How high’s the water Mama? Five feet high and rising.”

The electronic media seems fixated on trying to tie the flooding and large number of tornadoes this year to global warming. The right, of course, is ridiculing the media as usual while still others try a more thoughtful approach in making their case against The Big Heater as the villain.

Me? I am somewhere in the middle because my degree was not in climatology or meteorology or one of those other “-ologies.” As some talking weatherhead was saying yesterday on TV, the biggest factor with an unusual number of tornadoes and severe flooding this year has more to do with geography and the ever-present battle of hot air versus cold air. Some like it hot … Could global warming be to blame for what the fellow in the linked article above describes as a continual deluge of 100-year floods? Maybe, maybe not.

Global warming is the 20 and 21st centuries’ “Flat Earth” dispute. And it will not matter whether our spherical planet melts every iota of ice away some day, there will likely still be someone around like “Flat Earth Society” proponents who will believe global warming is a scam, myth or both.

But the speculation of media types each time some sort of rash weather takes place that global warming may be in play does little other than fill a news hole with something a little different than saying the same trite words or showing the same cliche video. Without people who — unlike me — know what the hell they are talking about to offer some perspective or analysis as to whether weird weather is actually abnormal or just cyclical, then wheels will just be continually spun and we advance no more in our understanding than we had before the tape rolled or the words were written.

Dadgum, that is one long sentence! And everything here I have typed out while my arthritic neck shoots out little shocks of pain is much longer than I had planned. But there is little I can do about it now. The water’s rising. It’s time to flee!

With this being the season for graduations, I look back wistfully at my own college commencement exercises at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, (Mascot: Lumberjacks)in May 1984 where the late U.S. Sen. John Tower, R-Texas, asked the assembled crowd what was to be a haunting rhetorical question for the ages: “Where are my trousers?”

No, actually I don’t even remember what Tower said that morning. I think he said something about Communism and indicated that it was bad. But I figure if that was really what he said and I actually got the context of his message right then he did much better at imparting knowledge than more than a couple of my professors.

Comedian Don Novello, known for his portrayal as Father Guido Sarducci during the golden era of Saturday Night Live, has a well-known comedy routine known as “The Five-Minute University” with his comedic thesis being that everything one learned in college can be reduced to five minutes. (Example: Economics? Supply and Demand.)

Fr. Sarducci’s hyperbolic observations aside, certain members of the human race do indeed expect much to come out of much more when there really is much less. “By God, your A) Mother & Dad B) Government C)Prison System (Pick one) is/are paying tens of thousands of dollars/Euros/pesos to put you through four years of college (or more)and so you are expected to give us four years (or more) of knowledge.”

Right. Like you really would want to listen to someone who absorbed every single word spoken to them by some windbag professor or gleaned from some august text sold for $56.50 retail at the university center bookstore and can be resold at the end of the semester for $1.62.

One must never forget, however, that a higher education is more than a sum of its parts. It is part of the sum. Or some of the part. Or something.

So as I rapidly dissemble as a means of escaping that which one might mistake for meaning, I bid you a good day and a bright future grads and future grads as well, both young and old. You deserve it. Remember to always brush after each meal. Walk facing traffic and not directly in front of it. And please remember, all aspirins are alike.