Fred Thompson, The Next President Of The United States Of America

Fred Thompson has finally entered the race for the Republican nomination as an official candidate, and I just don’t think I could have held my breath any longer. The interested reader of 8 Dollar Days and some folks who might decide to google “sticks a knife in your throat man” will recall my endorsement of Thompson, or what might better be called my endorsement of skipping the painfully lopsided pantomime of an election that we would witness with as rock solid a candidate as Thompson in the race.

To illustrate, Fred is already–on only the first full day of his campaign–leaving the other lame-os shamefaced and stupefied with his airtight policy proposals. Clinton, Obama, Giuliani, and McCain and the rest of that uninspired band of bozos have had months to craft concrete and actionable plans to address our nation’s ills, and what have they come up with? Zilch. They stand up and blah-blah every day feeding us a bunch of vapid rhetoric that’s supposed to make us feel warm inside but doesn’t actually offer us anything of substance. Fred, on the other hand, has already outlined his plan for an honorable victory in Iraq, AND the rest of the world. In Iowa he announced,

We have to demonstrate to friends and foes alike that we are determined and united as the American people to do whatever is necessary to prevail, not only in Iraq but in the broader global war.

Yeah, I wouldn’t want to be a candidate in that race either. Republicans and Democrats alike drone on in their narrow-minded debates about the performance of the Iraqi government, about whether to withdraw troops from Iraq, how long it would take and what would happen afterwards, while Fred has demonstrated he has an unimpeachable plan to win the whole global war! It’ll take some more time to work out the details, but I think his plan will work with healthcare and immigration, too. So, with Fred having elaborated his “whatever is necessary” proposal, the only thing for the other candidates to do would be to withdraw in his favor. But will they? I doubt it. I just hope that Fred can find a way to let the losers keep a shred of their dignity after he totally wipes floor with them.

Me And My Big Mouth

I’m usually very circumspect in what I say; I tend to choose my words carefully in the interests of being precise and of not cheesing off the wrong people. That’s why I often surprise myself by what I say in class in front of dozens of people. Sometimes students ask a question about which I’m not certain, but which I answer with the apparent authority of Mr. Wizard. These answers sometimes extend into mini-disquisitions of several minutes duration, and after class I wonder where in the world it all came from. It all sounds plausible as I’m saying it, but I shouldn’t really speak of the Russian party system in more than a speculative way.

I can even say things that might qualify as less than tactful if taken out of context. On the first of day class last week, for example, I found myself devising an off the cuff class system for the English speaking world: the aristocratic British, middle class Americans, and tacky lower class Australians. I’ve never thought of anything like this before and koalas are as cute as can be, but it just sprang to mind so I said it. At least I made sure there weren’t any Australians in the room beforehand. Of course it could be offensive to others as well since the Irish and South Africans and whoever else must by implication fall  outside the class system altogether into a group of untouchables. I guess in these days of hair-trigger litigation I should monitor myself more closely, lest I be accused of discriminating against people with funny accents.

The Joy of Learning

I’m back from Mexico and getting ready for the upcoming semester, which for me means shuffling through piles of dusty papers looking for hardcopies of my class notes because some jerkwad stole my USB memory stick/jump drive/flash drive from my backpack, presumably in one airport or another. Said wad also stole my ipod Shuffle, but since my USB drive housed every bit of work I’ve done in the past five years it’s far more valuable to me than any mp3 player. Not because it was exemplary work, of course, but because it saved me from having to do any reading or investigation as preparation for class lectures; even though I’ve long forgotten on what authority the information in my notes rests, I figure it must be accurate if I bothered to write it down.

In any event, in my search for notes I came across some notes that I took myself in a graduate class. They’re on a handout illustrating a problem in one of the statistics courses I had to take to fulfill my degree requirements (see below). For those of you who don’t know, I study politics, not statistics or economics or anything like that. You’ll notice that the problem concerns transportation choice in Australia, an issue to which generations of political scientists have devoted their careers, sort of like the search for dark matter among astrophysicists. We think we may be on the verge of explaining why some people in Melbourne take the bus, thus closing a chapter opened by the great founders of our discipline like Aristotle and Machiavelli.

This imminent breakthrough notwithstanding, sometimes I think a lot of political scientists spend way too much time on math problems and not enough on, you know, politics. These folks do some really sophisticated stuff, way beyond the quadratic equations I was able to do in high school. In fact, I don’t understand anything they’re going on about, and as the professor was discussing this particular logit (don’t ask me what that is) I was busily daydreaming the class period away. And you’ll see at the bottom that I had calculated the number of seconds in the class, which was many more than I thought I could live through. I really pity the past me who went through that.

Sirs, Smell You Later. Regards, D.E.

We’re going on hiatus here at 8 Dollar Central for a few weeks in sunny Mexico so I won’t be posting any earth-moving insights for a while. Which is to say that nothing is changing.

Local Color II: The Color of Fear

Longtime readers of 8 Dollar Days will recall the portrait I drew of some of the townspeople where I live and their innocuous eccentricities. Well, to quote Hot Fuzz quoting Bad Boys II, this shit just got real. It’s starting to look less like Northern Exposure and more like Twin Peaks around here.

Sure, there’s Mr. Fleece, the meterman who wears a fleece vest while he distributes tickets in the oppressive 95 degree heat and 80% humidity; there’s also Paddy MacBagpipes, the punk rock bagpiper who had a public territorial feud with some fundamentalist preachers over their mutually-preferred street corner. These folks can infuse a little levity in our otherwise dull lives.

Nazis aren’t often funny, though. Hogan’s Heroes Nazis were funny and Adenoid Hynkel was funny. Putting on a Nazi uniform and giving stiff-armed salutes in public might be some form of all-too-subtle satire that I’m not picking up, but I rather suspect that the dude who’s actually doing this is just a nutjob. Maybe he’s wholly inoffensive, maybe he’s a social critic of some sort, but he needs to cut it out.

Then there’s the gang of toughs who put a guy in the hospital after beating him up in plain view downtown. That’s not the quirky foible I’ve come to expect from watching TV shows about small towns, but the kind of thing that makes me go home and lock the doors when it gets dark.

Vermin!

I used to have a roommate who had a flea fixation. He was certain that our apartment was overrun with the things. The weird part is that I never saw a single flea, honest to goodness. He swore that they infested his bed and sucked his blood at night. He was so tormented that he would put all of his clothes and bedsheets in a garbage bag and take them to be sanitized at a dry cleaner. He also washed his hair with dog shampoo. Periodically he would warn me not to come home for twelve or fourteen hours because he was going to set off an insect fogger. Despite his efforts he just couldn’t be rid of the buggers.

I hadn’t known this fellow before moving in and just tried not to rock the boat, especially since he would sometimes get quite agitated over the issue. When he complained about the fleas and inquired into my inexplicable immunity to them I tried to say as little as possible and certainly never suggested that there were no fleas. “That’s weird. I guess they’re only in your room,” I’d say. “I’m going to go to my mom’s house for the weekend.” Sometimes he’d say something to the effect that I must think he’s crazy, which I’d very faintly protest. At some point I guess he determined that the fleas had dispersed. That didn’t mean that things got normal, though. At one point he asked me if I had put a Kleenex in his bed (I hadn’t). Someone had sneaked into his bedroom and left it as a message of some sort. “I’ve made a lot of enemies in this town,” he said darkly. I moved out as soon as I could, which is the subject of another story.

Ladies and Gentlemen, The Next President of the United States of America

It looks like Fred Thompson is going to run for president in 2008, and I’m going to go ahead and call the election for him since he has everything a successful candidate could want. Besides being a cigar-chompin’ straight shooter with a folksy manner–which is probably enough by itself–he’s obviously the most qualified. One look at his resume makes that clear: Thompson has played the director of the CIA, a White House staffer, an admiral, an FBI agent, and a senator, even complimenting this role with an off-screen stint as a senator from Tenessee. Portraying the gruff DA Arthur Branch on all five Law and Order permutations Thompson has dispensed at least as much two-fisted justice in New York City as Rudy Giuliani. The only other candidate with credentials as strong as Thompson’s is probably John McCain, and have you seen this fossil on camera? Bor-ring. Can you imagine him saying something like “Well, my daddy always told me if you’re goin’ fishin’, be sure to bring yer bait” the way Fred Thompson could?

As for the Democrats, the frontrunners are Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama, the experience of both of whom amounts to a few years in the Senate, and is that going to cut it next to the wealth of Thompson’s accomplishments? I don’t think so. So now that that’s taken care of, we can thankfully skip all of the election hullaballoo.

The Latest in Skin Safety

Every late spring I become preoccupied with sunscreens. Being ginger-haired and porcelain-skinned my genes suit me to live somewhere at or above 60 degrees north latitude. My ancestors were likely awed and frightened by the angry ball of fire that appeared in the sky in mid-July. So now that I’m stuck in the sunbaked south I have to take all measures at my disposal to protect myself from those annoying sunburns and melanoma-induced death.

When I was a kid I would abandon myself to sun and surf all day at the beach or swimming pool and paid for it afterwards with grotesquely blistered shoulders and several days of painful immobility. Now that I’ve let the cows out of the barn I figure it’s time to close the door and start blocking harmful radiation. That’s why I’ve learned that it’s not good enough to prevent sunburn. There are other, more sinister ultraviolet rays that don’t cause sunburn but do cause deadly cancer. Thus I go questing for the sunscreen with the special and expensive ingredients that block these rays and save the day.

Nonetheless, I’m pretty ambivalent about the sunscreen industry. After all, isn’t this a marketing executive’s dream come true? Invisible rays with equally invisible but alarmingly pernicious effects sounds like something hatched to scare up demand in a saturated market. You even have to wear sunscreen on cloudy days, and I’m considering buying a laundry additive to make my clothes UVA-proof. Where will this end? With the ozone layer disappearing will I have to have my entire body dipped in an anti-radiation PVC coating? Then I might look like the Silver Surfer, which would be pretty awesome, in fact.

Am I Right, Folks? That Guy In The Front Row Knows What I’m Talking About

Grocery store trainers simply must examine their bagging curriculum. There’s a widespread consensus that everything has to go into a bag, and the fewer items per bag, the better. Baggers in every store I go to insist on it, even for things that have handles, like milk jugs and six packs. For the love of Pete, they even put bags into bags. “Dear me, however am I going to carry this plastic bag of oranges? Ah, another plastic bag, of course!” I imagine there’s a sign in the break room that reminds the employees “More Bags, Happier Customers” and that they have contests to see who can use the most bags in a month.

Besides being wasteful and environmentally destructive and everything, it’s downright inconvenient for me because I have a houseful of grocery bags and don’t know what to do with them. Sometimes I ask them to use fewer bags but this doesn’t often get me anywhere because they’ll usually just nod vacantly and continue on their bagging spree. One time the response was to put more stuff in a single bag and then put each of those bag into another bag, leaving me with even more bags than usual.

What I Think Will Happen On Lost

Last night my wife and I huddled around the computer monitor to tune in the season finale of Lost. Here’s what I thought.

I was somewhat disappointed with Jack’s beard. Besides looking like one of those fake ones that hook behind the ears, it gave it away that it was a post-island future, diminishing the gestalt switch payoff at the end. One thing I’ve learned about TV is that silly looking facial hair always means a leap forward in time (witness Battlestar Galactica, new and old). Jack’s reference to his father being upstairs made me wonder if it was the past, but the other doctor’s “Jack’s lost his mind” reaction appeared to confirm the Escape From Lost Island hypothesis.

Walt’s only been off the island for, what, a month? And suddenly he looks like he’s Lebron James? Maybe the island is like Narnia and so many other magical worlds where time moves at a different rate than the non-magical one. That must be it.

Who was Kate talking about when she said “he’ll be waiting” or some such thing? Did she and Sawyer tie the knot? I have to say no because I can’t imagine Sawyer owning a Volvo. I see him on a chopper with his old lady on the back seat. And why isn’t Kate in prison? Maybe they were declared dead after the crash and the authorities realized–second rate thriller style–that they couldn’t put a dead person on trial. Ours is a nation of laws, not of men, after all.

Who’s death almost sent Jack over the edge (pun definitely intended!)? At first I assumed it would turn out to be one of the castaways. “Dammit Hurley, why did you die on me?!” Kate’s callous disregard for the departed occasioned the thought that it was Sawyer and they had fallen out. But surely someone else would have shown up to pay their respects, and more importantly–if we assume that this isn’t the distant future–Sawyer is too hunky to kill off. We’ve got three more seasons to fill up and we need those dimples and rakish smile.

So who was it, then? Here’s where fifteen minutes of casual speculation have brought me, so hold on to your hats: It’s none other than our friend Benjamin Linus. Jack is going to lose his nerve and spare Ben (no surprise for that do-nothing wuss), and Ben returns to civilization, maybe because Jack forces him, maybe the Others effect a coup d’état, maybe he just gives it up. As we’ve seen, Jack comes to regret leaving the island. Ben was telling the truth about the island being under assault, so now Jack will have to gather up the old team for one final three year mission to save the island–and the world!

I got your number, producers of Lost. By the way, if a bunch of other jerkfaces have already thought of this, don’t tell me.