Playlist The Very Best Of Tyrese Rarest

✍ THE QUOTE “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.” — ♢ SINE QUA NON No matter how spineless, ridiculous, fatuous, self-sabotaging, flip-flopping, pompous, pretentious, condescending, naively idealistic, or downright batty my Democrats are, we have nobody on our side — repeat, absolutely nobody —. ✍ Let me reiterate: Nobody. (BTW: I want my props for using the term reiterate properly — I had repeated the word nobody once already, which was an iteration, then I used it a third time. Ergo reiterate. Thank you.) ♢ CUT HIM IN HALF AND COUNT HIS RINGS Speaking of Democrats, today is Bloomington City Council member ‘s birthday. No word yet on whether ice cream and cake will be served at City Hall. Birthday Boy ✍ (Just in case anybody gets the wrong idea: Tall Steve is not spineless nor is he ridiculous, fatuous, self-sabotaging, flip-flopping, pompous, pretentious, or downright batty.

Sadly, this means he has no future in state or national party affairs.) ♢ ASSES Without Cracked.com I don’t know how I could survive in this crazy, mixed-up world. The linked to a site that is pure genius. It aggregates FB posts, Tweets and other social media ejaculations, all of which have in common some variation on the caveat, “” Here’s an example: ✍ Or how about this? ✍ Homo Sapiens sapiens is billed as the Earth’s most intelligent species but, honestly, even Equus africanus asinus is disgusted with us. “Jesus, You People Are Idiots.” ♢ REAL AMERICANS We Democrats are fortunate to have as “The Others” a gang as wacky as the Tea Party. We make fun of Tea Party-ists dressed up as colonial rebels. We dig pointing out the risible hypocrisies in their rants.

Tea Party Party ✍ When they call themselves true Americans we even go so far as to say that couldn’t be further from the truth. Ho-o-o-o-old on there, paisanos. A closer look at the origins and execution of the what the history books refer to as the Tea Party reveals that the 21st Century apers are as American as, well, pizza or even chop suey. (Side note: I grew up thinking that chop suey was the definitive Chinese food. It wasn’t, of course, but such was the extent of our ethnic and cultural understanding in those days. Does anybody even order chop suey anywhere anymore?) ✍ Anyway, here’s the dope on the Tea Party, Part I.

There wasn’t just a Boston Tea Party; there were a minimum of five, all of which took place relatively simultaneously. Tea Parties also broke out in the harbors of New York City, Greenwich, Connecticut, Philadelphia, Charleston, South Carolina, and Annapolis, Maryland. Between smokes in the teacher’s lounge, your seventh-grade history teacher told you angry patriots dumped tea in Boston harbor because those mean old Englishmen were proposing to tax the bejesus out of it. Those Englishmen, her story went, loved taxing us and not allowing us representation in their hall of flatulence otherwise known as Parliament. Ergo, we started a Revolutionary War to fix their asses.

The Teachers Lounge At My Elementary School ✍ Like the (and chop suey itself) — it’s full of shit. The tax on tea actually was imposed on The British East India Company, a multi-national outfit headquartered in jolly old. BEIC raised its prices accordingly for everybody it shipped the leaves to, including colonists and Englishmen alike. As for the tea trade in the New World, BEIC was the sole approved dealer of the stuff.

When that company raised its prices, a lot of colonists, including many surprising names, cranked up a black market, importing tea illegally from places like the Netherlands. Suddenly, BEIC found itself stuck with tons of tea it couldn’t sell in the colonies. So the company slashed its prices to compete with the black market. Our patriotic forebears became quite huffy about this turn of events. They didn’t like an enormous British corporation trying to muscle in on a market they’d created for themselves here.

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In fact, no one was more put out about it than the guys who ran the black market import operations. In other words, businessmen. As opposed to patriots who spent their free time mulling over history and philosophy and the rights of man and so forth.

In the case of the Boston version of the Party, big shots like Sam Adams and Benjamin Edes whipped up crowds with fiery rhetoric and filled dozens of tough guys with high-proof rum as three BEIC ships sat in the harbor ready to unload their cargo. Instead, Edes’ gangs of drunken men boarded the ships and for three hours dumped the tea into the drink. The task might have been accomplished in less time but many of the raiders (dressed as Indians — what is it about Tea Parties and the wearing of Hallowe’en costumes?) began puking their guts out from the cheap rum they’d been drinking and had to be carried away. ✍ The English closed down Boston harbor as punishment. One thing led to another, war was declared, the plucky Americans won, and now we’re free to listen to the Lady Gaga CD of our choice. So, the original Tea Party was nothing like the grass-roots uprising we’ve been led to believe.

It was manipulated, financed, and directed by big business. The Koch Brothers and the Mellon Empire are propping up the modern Tea Party.

Americans all. ♢ WASH YOUR FACE. BRUSH YOUR TEETH. GET OUT OF THE HOUSE. Today’s events listings. Click the logo, then GO! ✍ THE QUOTE “We’ve bought into the idea that education is about training and ‘success,’ defined monetarily, rather than learning to think critically and to challenge.

We should not forget that the true purpose of education is to make minds, not careers. A culture that does not grasp the vital interplay between morality and power, which mistakes management techniques for wisdom, which fails to understand that the measure of a civilization is its compassion, not its speed or ability to consume, condemns itself to death.” — ♢ A MIND IS A TERRIBLE THING TO WASTE A hearty hat tip to Bloomington novelist, who posted the above quote on her Facebook page. According to Hedges’ criteria, laid out so clearly and forcefully, this holy land has condemned itself to death. I’ll go one step further: it’s already dead. We just don’t know it yet. Here Lie Us ✍ We thought we were smart and superior when Soviet communism deservedly died. But as Fran Lebowitz so aptly put it, “In the Soviet Union, capitalism triumphed over communism.

In this country, capitalism triumphed over democracy.” The making of scads of dough became this nation’s — and most of the world’s — one and only pursuit. ✍ Home ownership? Hell, that wasn’t about putting down roots, becoming part of a community, creating a stable base for your kids, or any of that old fashioned silliness anymore. It was about serial buying and selling so everyone could make a quick buck. Saving and investing? Not about prudent management of assets nor about slow and steady growth for the future. College education?

Honestly, how many people in these Great United States, Inc. Want their kids to go to a university to become a rational, analytical thinker? How many dream that a college degree just might make their young-un a better human being? I Am Gonna Be So Rich ✍ Pshaw. I once was involved in a discussion with recent college grad and his dad. I won’t reveal who they were because I’m hoping daddy-o regrets his tone and philosophy. Suffice it to say the three of us knew each other extremely well.

The kid was trying to figure out what to do with himself now that he had a bachelor’s degree in business. Pops was giving him the fish eye because it didn’t seem as though the kid was banging down any doors trying to get a job. The truth was, the kid really had no idea what to do. So, silly me, I figured the kid ought to pursue employment in some field that might, you know, bring him a little happiness in his life. I said, “The first thing you have to do is ask yourself, ‘What do I love?' ” What Should I Do With My Life? ✍ Oh, daddy-o nearly popped a neck vein.

“What the hell are you feeding him that kind of shit for?” he demanded. See, by the time this exchange took place, the concepts of happiness and fulfillment not only were quaint — they were downright dangerous.

Anyway, Hedges is saying what I’ve ranted about in these precincts time and again. A college education should be a good thing in and of itself, not just because it’ll bear you well as you climb the corporate Jacobian ladder. It broadens your horizons. It opens your mind.

It exposes you to the world and the world to you. It helps you learn to think rather than react, to listen rather than spew, to realize that what you’re sure of today might not be what you believe tomorrow. How dangerous. ♢ BOGEYMEN Does it strike you as odd that guys who challenge capitalism’s alpha male set-up seem to get nailed on sex-related criminal charges more often than the average bear? John Edwards. Julian Assange. Elliot Spitzer.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn. Those are just four very, very high profile cases in the last couple of years.

Now, the truth is all four could be as guilty as sin. DSK, for one, has a rough and tumble sexual rep. And Spitzer really did meet with prostitutes in that Washington hotel room.

DSK May Be Warped — But, But. ✍ Still, I feel sort of itchy about the whole thing. Is it that guys who see the inherent flaws in the world’s dominant economic system are unusually prone to sexual peccadilloes and transgressions? Even more so than guys whose lives are dedicated to climbing over piles of average citizens to reach an obscene pinnacle of power and wealth? Or could there be a chance that when guys like Spitzer sniff around places they’re not supposed to go and start telling the public precisely how they’re being sodomized by the plutocracy, the sharp knives of the system get pointed at them? Maybe I’m just imagining things.

Or maybe not. Make plans for today.

Click on the GO! Logo for the best events listings in Bloomington. ♢ THE WORLD IS A GHETTO was the very first group I ever saw in concert. They led off for at Chicago’s old International Amphitheater back in 1973.

I’m fairly sure of the year. My pal Whitey and I took a couple of multi-bus, hour-and-a-half rides to and from the Amphitheater that night. We didn’t get home until around 3:00am. Funny my partner should have been nicknamed Whitey — we were among the very few white guys in the place. Oh, and the reek of pot — we couldn’t believe our noses! Naturally, we had to stop off at for a couple of dogs smothered in grilled onions after we left.

Munchies, you know. ✍ THE QUOTE “If you want to be a purist, go somewhere on a mountaintop and praise the east or something. But if you want to be in politics, you learn to compromise. And you learn to compromise without compromising yourself. Show me a guy who won’t compromise and I’ll show you a guy with rock for brains.” — former Wyoming Senator ♢ WILL YOU BE MY HERO, PLEASE?

How about that Alan K. The old bird who used to be a demi-villain to liberals back in the ’80s is now a darling of the left set because he over the weekend. Simpson appeared on CNN with Fareed Zakaria Sunday and called GOP legislators’ anti-tax intransigence “madness.” Anti-Tax-ists ✍ Just goes to show how far we liberals and progressives have fallen when we have nobody to idolize but Republicans who occasionally say something that makes sense. Simpson, by the way, says only a combination of solutions can revitalize the economy. That includes higher taxes for some Americans. Click this logo for the Pencil’s events listing, the best in Bloomington, natch: ♢ FACE TIME I’m the most curious guy you can imagine (and that’s true on a number of levels.) But there are certain things I don’t need to see or know.

One of them is the video of the cops shooting that crazy nude man who was eating the face of another man. Here’s A Pretty Cardinal ✍ In fact, that’s all I know about the story. I fear that if I click on any of the articles about it, I’ll see too much. There’s nothing more I need to know about it.

♢ UNHAPPY ANNIVERSARIES Get ready for the flood of stories on the one-year anniversary of the disappearance of IU student. Profit-driven media is big on anniversaries. I look at it as lazy journalism. If you think the Spierer anniversary will be bad, just wait until November, 2013.

That’ll mark the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination. He Did It, Okay? Can We Move On Now? ✍ Oh, and steel yourself for yet another wave of conspiracy books, documentaries, and articles.

♢ VEGETABLES ARE SOCIALIST Michelle Obama’s new book comes out today. “” recounts the story of her White House garden. ✍ Which reminds me that the unimaginably bizarre Rush Limbaugh raked her over the coals last fall for her garden. “We do not like being told that we can only eat what’s in her garden,” he ranted on his radio show, which is listened to by tens of millions of mammals daily. BTW: he also called her “uppity” once. But neither he nor his listeners are racists.

How do I know? They say so — when they’re not busy calling a professional woman who happens to have dark skin “uppity.” Sometimes I just want to scream. ♢ HARVEST FOR THE WORLD I don’t remember if I’ve posted this song before but no matter, it’s worth hearing again. The beauty of this Isley Brothers tune is that, while acknowledging that things are largely going all to hell, there is always hope. Every time I hear it, this song makes me think of morning. ✍ THE QUOTE “The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true.” — ♢ FOR THE BIRDS Steve the Dog and I enjoyed the last of the really pleasant dusks of the season at Lake Monroe Thursday.

We go to Cutright and Paynetown three or four nights of the week to watch the sunset. Well, I watch the sunset — Steve is too busy sniffing every surface he can put his snoot near. I got a special treat Thursday when two magnificent took flight together across the water from the direction of the Paynetown ramp all the way toward Mellencamp’s manse. The birds were so close to the surface of the water that the tips of their wings occasionally plinked up a bit of water as they flapped. Starting Friday, though, the lake area became a madhouse, meaning similar solitary sightings will become far rarer for the next three months or so.

The campgrounds were overflowing, the trailer lots were packed, the shores were lined with fisherbeings casting their lines — I think I saw one woman reel in the man who was fishing next to her. Of course, it’s the Memorial Day weekend but the summer season seems to be getting off to a chaotic start, what with a couple of knuckleheads wrasslin’ and horsin’ around until one of them drowned.

On a more pleasant note at an apparently less perilous lake, some people have seen one or more at, about 50 miles south of us. Here’s a photo taken May 12: ✍ A week later, a fellow named Jim Sullivan of the bird: ✍ Who knows?

Perhaps the pelican or one of his kin will make the trek up to Lake Monroe this summer. I hope so — toward that end, Steve the Dog and I will continue to run down to Cutright and Paynetown despite all the wrasslin’ and all the people trying to snag each other with their fishing hooks.

He’ll sniff, I’ll keep my eyes open. ♢ BEAUTY Just in case you’re one of those Luddites who believe everything created by science and industry is the handiwork of the devil, I submit this: ✍ The Golden Gate Bridge today. It is not only a triumph of humankind’s engineering prowess but of our capacity to create art. ♢ ALL THE LUCK How about that? If I’m him, I play the lottery.

He yesterday, he’s one of the most successful drivers in the world, he’s a charming and charismatic personality whom the TV talk shows love to have on, he’s loaded, and he’s married to the scrumptious and very cool. Hi Honey, I’m Home! ✍ Some guys, huh? ♢ ME TOO Not that I’m lacking in the luck department. Here’s the latest on The Loved One. We purchased our first riding mower the other week. We let it sit in the garage for a while, mainly because we were afraid to touch it.

But by and by the lawn started looking rather rainforest-y so T-Lo gave the word, Let’s crank it up. Sure, honey, I said, at which point I turned on my other side and fell back into a delicious snooze. Next thing I knew, I heard T-Lo pushing the contraption out of the garage to the driveway where she could fill its tank and try to turn the engine over. Our New Hot Rod ✍ I hauled myself up off the sofa and went to help, which is code for watching her do the work. She eventually dragged me into the process, though, and between the two of us we had the thing running within a half hour. Okay, I said, it works.

Let’s put it away now. T-Lo had other ideas, though. She began mowing the front lawn with a demonic look on her face. Within minutes, she was handling the thing the way Dario Franchitti wheels his IndyCar around the Brickyard. You sure you don’t want me to do it? I yelled over the roar of the engine. She gave me a look that implied I’d get myself bloodied if I tried to get her off it.

Now our lawn is the envy of the neighborhood. BTW: I was fast asleep again before T-Lo was finished. ♢ HONOR Memorial Day. All the radio and TV stations as well as the newspapers and websites are chock full of stories about how wonderful we are because men have been willing to die for our holy land.

When I was a kid, I drank that brand of Kool-Aid. It was easier to believe it all then. The fellows who fought in what the, were still around, many of them in the latter parts of their prime. My own daddy-o was drafted in 1945 and was just about to get an all-expenses paid trip to the South Pacific when the Army Air Corps dropped the Fat Man on Hiroshima.

He was lucky. A Hundred Thousand Died So I Could Be Conceived ✍ Memorial Day was a celebration of brave humans who sacrificed their lives so Fascists and Nazis and Imperialists wouldn’t take over the Earth. Since then, though, it is these Great United States, Inc. That has become the empire. Thankfully, we’re not Fascists or Nazis despite what some overwrought drama junkies care to believe. Still, we often bully our way from one end of the globe to the other. Korea, Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Nicaragua, Grenada, Iraq, Somalia, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Libya, Pakistan — we’ve been racking up the advantage miles for some 70 years now.

Nam ✍ Some of our little adventures have been noble. Well, noble-ish.

Trying to stop the warlords of Somalia from slicing up the people there, or helping put an end to the Qaddafi crime syndicate were quasi-admirable decisions. Throwing the Taliban out of Afghanistan was good. Curbing Serb and Croat bloodlust in Bosnia had to be done. But ousting the democratically elected president of Iran for the benefit of British Petroleum? Bucking up the corrupt petit-tyrants of Vietnam? Those were the acts of the world’s biggest bully.

American men and women lost their lives in many of those follies, too. They died because we weren’t so wonderful. The truth is every nation demands its people die for it. Wehrmacht soldiers were just as willing to offer up limb or future for the cause as some farm kid in Iowa. If we really wanted to honor people like or, we’d demand our elected leaders knock off the bully-boy games. Ron Kovic At 1972 Anti-War Rally ✍ The truth is, though, we don’t give a shit about Miles Craig or Ron Kovic. We’re more concerned with drinking the Kool-Aid.

✍ THE QUOTE “Free speech is the whole thing, the whole ball game. Free speech is life itself.” — ♢ WEIRD AMERICA Before we say anything else, let’s agree that every nation and culture is weird, bizarre, inane, ludicrous, and so on until we run out of adjectives.

Some Middle East cultures force their women to cover their faces. Ultra orthodox Jews practice Kapparot around the high holidays, wherein a person (okay, a man) reads Psalms 107:17-20 and Job 33:23-24, then grasps a live chicken and swings it over his head, thereby transferring his sins to the soul of the chicken. Emmis (Yiddish: the truth.) Kapparot ✍ Here’s more. Many subcontinent Indians still practice dowry wherein the family of a girl child must sell home or land or even go into crushing debt to fork over a pile of rupees to the family of the girl’s future husband.

People in the town of Phuket in Thailand celebrate their annual Vegetarian Festival by sticking knives and spears through their cheeks and other penetrable parts of their bodies. ✍ Some Somalians girls still undergo female circumcision, which is a palatable way of say clitoridectomy, which itself is a palatable way of saying those people are jerks Many Mongolians refuse to pee in the direction of the rising or setting sun, fearing the act would demonstrate disrespect toward the holy orb. Hey, Point That Thing The Other Way! ✍ Under Bubi law, people of different social classes in Equatorial Guinea are forbidden from eating together. Before we start patting ourselves on the back a little too much, remember Americans value the gun over all other items and concepts mentioned in our Constitution.

We also drive to the gym to workout. We consume more calories and fats than any other peoples in the history of the Earth, yet an alarming percentage of us still suffer malnutrition. Starvation Diet ✍ America is the most technologically and educationally advanced nation of all time, yet many folks in this holy land believe the Earth is 6000 years old and that angels hover around us, making sure safes don’t fall on our heads.

So we, too, are kinky beyond all reason. I was reminded of this. It was part of, which I usually try to ignore, being constitutionally incapable of caring about whether some husband and wife I don’t know are in love with each other.

It is the definitive emotional porn, which is inferior to sexual porn in that the latter at least has a payoff in the end. ✍ Anyway, today’s Story Corps deals with a teacher who describes his first few days at Chicago’s notorious, which is to secondary education what is to charm school. Marshall kids get killed by stray bullets with alarming regularity. Many a Marshall teacher considers the day a success when no student flings a shiv at her.

The next time the name Shakespeare is bandied about in Marshall’s halls will be the first time in a long time. ✍ The teacher, a fellow named Tyrese Graham, says that on his first day at the school, he tried to get his class to quiet down.

One student, according to Graham, shouted out that he musn’t know what the fuck school he was. Another student asked who the fuck he thought he was. Graham goes on to recount the first funeral of a student he had to attend. A young man had been shot in the head by a drive-by shooter aiming at someone else. The dead boy’s mother also was hit in the arm. Graham says he did his best to present a strong front but eventually broke down and sobbed in the funeral parlor.

Graham ✍ He says he wondered what the hell he was getting himself into that first week on the job. He promised himself he’d get through one year and then get out. But Graham eventually learned to love the place. He calls it more than a job. “[Y]ou’re dedicating your life to this,” he says. Now, that’s a hell of a story, one every citizen of these Great United States, Inc. It’s a hell of a lot more meaningful than the typical StoryCorps piece about someone’s grandmother falling in love as a young girl.

Anyway, here’s the bizarre part. Before the story ran, the announcer issued a warning — there will be language, she said, that may be offensive to some people.

Clearly, she was referring to the F-bombs mentioned above. Now it gets really psychotic: the F-bombs were bleeped out.

Even the online version of the story ran the word [expletive] rather than the original spoken word. ✍ In other words, you might be offended by not hearing the strong language. Your ears and sensibilities might be so fragile that the mere thought of the dirty word would ruin your day. Not of course, the idea that high school kids are getting their brains blown out or even that the typical Marshall class is as docile as a pack of hyenas.

The F-bomb — or, rather, the very idea of it — might boil your blood. We are one nation of weirdos under god. ♢ SUNDAY DOINGS Click GO!

♢ SEVEN DIRTY WORDS Who else? ✍ THE QUOTE “I love sleep.

My life has a tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?” — ♢ Scary? Just a tidbit from Bill Maher’s: “If Obama were as radical as they claim, here’s what he already would have done: pulled the troops out of Afghanistan, given us Medicare for all, ended the drug war, cut the defense budget in half, and turned Dick Chaney over to The Hague. Here’s what Obama actually did: he cut taxes and spending, he didn’t go on a spending spree, he didn’t break up the ‘too big to fail’ banks — they’ve only gotten bigger and fail-y-er. That’s not what liberals wanted; that’s what conservatives wanted. [U]nder Obama, there’s more drilling than ever. That’s not what environmentalists wanted; that’s what conservatives wanted. Obama spent most of last year conceding the Republican premise that government needed cutting.

That’s not what progressives wanted; that’s what the Tea Party wanted. The Dow was at 7949 when he took office, now it’s at 12,000 and over. Corporates profits are at their highest ever. If he’s a socialist, he’s a lousy one. He could not be less threatening if he was walking home with iced tea and Skittles.” ✍ ♢ I DUNNO. WHADDA YOU WANNA DO? Don’t do a single thing today until you visit the Pencil’s.

♢ SLEEPLESS IN SUCCESSVILLE I am a world champion napper. Napping is one of humankind’s finest pursuits.

A day spent without a nap is a day wasted. I’ve been partial to naps ever since I emerged from the womb and yawned. ✍ Imagine how thrilled I was when my cardiologist told me that due to my congenitally malformed heart, I ought to take a nap whenever I feel the need for one. (Almost as giddy as when he told me drinking a glass of wine and eating a piece of chocolate a day would be of great benefit to me — I nearly kissed him.) Now, I love working at the Book Corner save for one terrible drawback — Margaret, the owner of the place, won’t let me take a nap while I’m on the clock. Apparently, much of the world seems to be able to get by without naps. And, if I can believe what I read, there are those who have energy to burn, who are on the go, go, go, all day long, who can get by with only three or four hours of sleep in a night. Do I Have To Do This?

✍ Bill Clinton is one of those people. I suppose any number of presidents and aspirants to that sleepless office have less than the average bear’s need for slumber. I’ve met dozens of people who are great successes in business and entertainment, many of whom view sleeping at night as a kind of annoyance. They can’t get anything done when they’re asleep, they complain. They’re aghast at the idea of taking a nap. It seems as though the real hard-chargers in this mixed-up world, people like Michael Jordan and Oprah Winfrey, Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Wozniak, Jamie Dimon and any Mexican drug cartel boss worth his salt rarely go to sleep. Who Has Time To Sleep?

✍ Maybe that’s the key to their fabulous success. Maybe that’s why Donald Trump and Lady Gaga are who they are.

They’re blazing trails while the rest of us are laying on the sofa. Oh, sure, they have piles of dough. I’ve got my naps.

I was thinking about all this yesterday when I went to go see young Dr. Joe Mackey at the. I went in for my one-week follow up exam after eye surgery. The verdict: All is well. That’s pretty much all Mackey said to me. As always, he was in a mad rush.

I’ll bet he’s one of the people who don’t sleep much. The guy darts from room to room like a crystal meth fiend. He once told me that on his day for surgery he performs 14 or so procedures. The other days of the week he’s peering into and jiggering with the eyes of dozens and dozens of people each day. If I tried to keep up his pace for fifteen minutes I’d have to take a nap. A good long one — 45 minutes, maybe, or an hour.

What An Exhausting Day! ✍ On the bell curve of human sleep needs, he and I occupy the opposite flanges. Guys like Mackey, big time sports stars, Hollywood actors and actresses, corporate CEOs, big city mayors — all sorts of high achievers seem to be racing every minute of the day. And their days last from before dawn often until after midnight. Mackey could have elected to live a nice, relaxed lifestyle. He could have opened his own opthalmology practice in some far off locale where he’d see a couple of patients a day.

That’s what I would have done. He could do one eye surgery a week. Maybe one every couple of weeks. Then he could take a nap.

You’re My Third Patient This Month! ✍ But he chose to go to work for a multi-million-dollar eyeball factory. The Eye Center has dozens of employees, its own surgery center in the basement, enough high-tech, high-buck machines to fill a medium-sized warehouse, and most likely a huge debt load.

If you work for old man Grossman and his partners, you’d better be ready to hustle from room to room, checking patients out and sending them home, calling for the next one, chop chop, saying only what you need to say, generating revenue. This, said Hyman Roth to Michael Corleone in ” The Godfather Part II,” is the business we’ve chosen. ✍ We talk a lot about doctors needing a comforting bedside manner these days. We need the doc to hold our hands while she tells us to lay off the pie and the french fries. That’s fine for a general practitioner.

They have to lay the oil on us if only to get us to open up and tell them about the ache in our knees or the funny mole on our back. But specialists like Mackey don’t need to cajole information out of us. They’ve got special skills and devices that can tell them a hundred times more about us than we ever could. Then, when it’s time to act, they wield other devices like Jedi knights, they flutter their fingers over our most fragile organs with a deftness that borders on magic. Has The Patient Been Prepped? ✍ Mackey shined some tiny beacons into my eyes and muttered notes to an assistant who transcribed his impressions at the keyboard. “Terrific,” he said.

“Excellent.” “Very good.” “Healing well.” “Vision better than can be expected.” I felt flattered, as if somehow I had a hand in the whole procedure. “Yeah,” I said, “I feel great. No complaints.” Dr. Mackey recoiled slightly from his machine, as if he were surprised I was there. And you know what? He probably was.

He’d been commenting on his own handiwork. He’s a borderline magician and he knows it. Voila — You Can See! ✍ And the truth is, without that confidence, without that arrogance, he wouldn’t be one-tenth as good as he is. How big does your ego have to be to carve up another person’s eyeball and hope not only that you don’t blind the poor sap but can actually make him see better? Answer: Huge.

Mackey pulled his diagnostic machine away and wished me a pleasant weekend. And like that he was out the door. He moved so fast I thought there’d be a sonic boom. Joe Mackey is of a different breed than I am. Maybe even a different species. But that’s what makes him so spectacularly good.

I’m gonna take a nap. ✍ THE QUOTE “We need to get over this love affair with the fetus and start worrying about children.”, former Surgeon General of the United States (h/t to ) ♢ HIDDEN NO MORE is a lovely development and Bloomington will forever be in debt to the late for ponying up the dough to rehab the place, but let’s be frank — it’s tough for a retailer who doesn’t have sidewalk frontage to make a go there. Anyone There? ✍ Brynda Forgas, boss-lady at boutique, has been surviving in Fountain Square for a few years. She hopes to thrive elsewhere now. She’s opening up new digs behind the in the old home of Glorious Moments, an art emporium that closed down suddenly under fishy circumstances a couple of months ago. Forgas & Friend ✍ Brynda and her husband are hustling to rebuild the interior of the space for the Closet’s “grand-ish” opening party, Friday, June 1st, at 5:00pm.

She says she’s calling it “grand-ish” because she doesn’t want to raise people’s expectations too much but she did reveal she’ll be serving cream puffs. That’s grand enough for me. See you there. ♢ HIDDEN TREASURE Speaking of Fountain Square, one of Bloomington’s secret pleasures remains hidden there. That would be, down in the lower level of the mall.

Fab sandwiches and sides. The place is run by a husband and wife team from Afghanistan. They treat customers as though they’re long-lost cousins. ✍ If Stefano’s had a streetside storefront, the line to get into the place would be halfway around Fountain Square. As it is, you can go there at lunch time, get served in the snap of a finger, and eat like a king. May as well take advantage of it now, before they move out, too, and you’ll have to wait. ♢ WHY THE UNIFORM?

BTW: Have you ever wondered why the always wears a uniform?: the, which the SG commands, originally was a uniformed arm of the nation’s defense apparatus. When it was formed in the 18th Century, the USPHS originally was called the Military Health Service. It’s job was to tend to sick and injured sailors (at the time the US only had a naval military service.) The post of Surgeon General today carries a military rank equivalent to a vice admiral in the Navy. The wearing of the uniform had fallen out of fashion among SG’s until came along under the Reagan administration.

Koop was a national health evangelist and he felt wearing the uniform would would cause citizens to pay a little more heed to him than other fed bureaucrats. Surgeon General Koop ✍ Considering the fact he yelled at Americans to stop smoking and stood on his head to raise AIDS awareness, any trick he could think of to get us to listen was worth a shot. Koop was a strong anti-abortion advocate, although I can’t come down too hard on him because his belief stemmed from years of treating fetuses and newborns, so I don’t suppose it was born (pardon the pun) of some lockstep religious conceit. He also wouldn’t take to the bully pulpit to condemn doctors who performed abortions or women who received them.

Anyway, Bloomington has a notable Koop connection. In 1982, local parents of a child born with severe Down Syndrome, esophageal atresia, and a tracheoesophageal fistula wrestled with the decision to treat the child or let him pass. The attending physician advised them the boy, known as, only had a 50 percent chance of recovering fully from surgery and even if he did, he would be virtually unable to care for himself for the rest of his life due to mental retardation. The parents elected to withhold food and water from the boy and he died after six days. Koop, a noted pediatric physician before taking his government job, had performed surgery on hundreds of newborns with the maladies and said he’d never lost a patient. Moved to action by the Bloomington Baby Doe case, he protecting children born with severe birth defects, eventually passed by Congress as the Baby Doe Law. Koop seemed a decent Joe despite the fact that he championed a “right-to-life” agenda.

Just goes to show not everyone we disagree with needs to be demonized. Hey, don’t forget to check the Pencil’s. ♢ SAVE THE CHILDREN From one of the five greatest pop albums of all time, Marvin Gaye’s “” If you don’t have this disc or mp3, your collection is incomplete.

✍ THE QUOTE “I had a romance novel inside me, but I paid three sailors to beat it out of me with steel pipes.” — ♢ DO SOMETHING Today’s Bloomington-area events at the. ♢ GREY, AS IN DULL I thumbed through “” the other day. You’ve heard of the book, no doubt.

✍ Number one on the New York Times Best Seller list, viral marketing phenomenon, has sold more than 10M copies, gave birth to the newly-coined genre “mommy porn.” Here’s the bad news: don’t get your panties in a bunch over it. The sex scenes are as tepid as anything in any cheap, bodice-ripping romance novel you can get in a grocery store. Swear to god, the author, some previously anonymous keyboard banger named E.L. James, refers to men’s junk as their “manhood” and even once, when describing a scene wherein the heroine unzips a man’s fly, refers to what pops out as simply, “him.” Oh, the sizzlingness of it all!

James, Author of Th Z-Z-Z-Z-Z-Z, Oh, Sorry ✍ So, if “50” isn’t good for the sex then it’s good for nothing. Save your dough. ♢ RIGHT-SIZING AMERICA lost her bid to win the California governor’s race in 2010. As you know, she was the big boss over at eBay at the time and now she runs Hewlett-Packard. She ran, as all business big shots do, as a candidate who knows how to run a corporation. California voters didn’t buy it; they elected retread instead. Whitman Knows Business ✍ Whitman yesterday announced that in its long history.

Some 27,000 poor saps are going to lose their jobs. Whitman told reporters that the lay-offs won’t be easy but “they’re absolutely critical for the long-term health of the company.” Which puzzles me. Weren’t the 27,000 part of “the company”? Looks like their long-term health prospects are awfully dicey right about now. A couple of guys named Hewlett and Packard, natch, started the biz in a garage back in 1939. The two were worth a tad more than $500 at the time. Hewlett-Packard World Headquarters, 1939 ✍ By the turn of the century, H-P had become a multinational corporation, ranked in the top ten in the Fortune 500, and shelling out billions to take over competitors and vendors.

Hewlett and Packard ran the joint until they were doddering old men in the 80s and 90s. Since 2000, H-P has had a total of six CEOs. You know, the type of folks we ought to be voting for because they know how to run corporations.

H-P hasn’t been doing well of late. Fewer people are buying its computers and those in the know say the outfit isn’t being run properly.

Naturally, the rank and file will suffer because those at the top have done a lousy job. But, you know, we ought to vote for people because they’d run big companies.

See, when they get into office and times become tight, they know how just what to do. They can lay off a few million citizens.

Mitt Would Know Just What To Do ♢ THE STEROIDAL EX-PATRIOT I pride myself on being a contrarian. If I could, I’d stop breathing because, you know, that’s what everybody else does. Anyway, many of my fellow literates would sneer at me because I believe that was a fraud. You know her: “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” Sheesh. Stein was part of a famously terrifying lesbian couple, the other half of which was Alice B.

Toklas, who was responsible for the pair’s only real contribution to world culture, her (the recipe for which she stole, BTW.) The Happy Couple ✍ Anyway, Mental Floss that truly puts old Gert into perspective. MF collects 11 different quotations from either Stein’s “writings” or Jose Canseco’s Tweets. Lunkheaded major league baseball player who loaded up on steroids and went out with bimbos even more brainless than he was? Canseco was chasing down a fly ball in the outfield once, he missed it, the ball clunked off his head, and bounced into the stands for a home run. You know, that Jose Canseco.

✍ The Mental Floss quiz challenges you to determine who’s responsible for each quotation. I took the quiz. I swear on a stack of Bibles I could not tell who said what.. ✍ THE QUOTE “Can we all get along?” — ♢ BELTIN’ BIRDS The alarm hadn’t even rung this morning. It was about a quarter past five. Yet I was awake. The din outside my window was, considering the hour and my state of unconsciousness just moments before, deafening.

I should have been mad, no? A countless variety of birds was whistling, clattering, gargling, hooting, chirping, yipping, and otherwise letting the world — and this no-longer-sleeping beauty — know they were alive. It was the most beautiful cacophonic symphony imaginable. Like the birds, I was glad to be alive.

♢ TINKERING The Electron Pencil’s GO! Events Listings now have. You wanna know what to do today?

Click the button above. — the best listings in Bloomington.

♢ TOO TOUGH FOR OUR OWN GOOD During the dark days when the Republicans seemed to be the only party in this holy land with guts, with a vision (albeit repulsive to me), and with exciting candidates (at least to fellow Republicans), I longed for my Dems to, well, wake up. I mean, honestly, Michael Dukakis? Y’Wanna Vote For Me?

✍ The late 80s was the nadir of the party. The GOP was constantly prowling and attacking and my Dems were always cowering in a corner. The tone was set when, during the 1980 presidential debates, Ronald Reagan listened patiently to incumbent Jimmy Carter (I mean, honestly, Jimmy Carter?) read off his list of particulars, accusing Reagan of being, you know, a Republican, and then, when it was his turn to speak, gave a sad little shake of his head and said, like a headmaster, a camp counselor, a disappointed father, “There you go again.” Now You Listen To Me ✍ Reagan needn’t have said another word. Carter was deflated. Reagan knew it. And America knew it.

The Republicans, particularly Reagan, had a way of withering the Dems with a single phrase. I was embarrassed to be a Democrat back then. It was almost as bad as being a Cubs fan. I longed for the day my party would rear up and fight back. The Republicans through the years had had their Joe McCarthy, their Donald Segretti and G.

Gordon Liddy. By the 80s, they had their Lee Atwater. All tough, no-nonsense guys who’d stick a shiv into the belly of any Dem at any time. Tough, Albeit Deranged ✍ Why, I wondered, couldn’t we have a guy or two like that?

Would we always be so touchy-feely, so accepting, so forgiving, so ready and willing to bear our necks and let the predators of the world go for our jugular? It got so that the Republicans turned our passivity into their own campaign asset — they would argue, Do you want these softies “protecting” you against the commies and the brown-skinned people of the world? And, really, who would want Walter Mondale, to be the wingman in an alley fight? Don’t Worry; I’m Right Behind You ✍ But the Dems were learning. In 1989, Lee Atwater floated the rumor that Speaker of the House Tom Foley lived in a “liberal closet” (wink, wink).

Barney Frank, the advance guard of the nascent fighting Dems, came out swinging. Frank announced to the press that if the Republican innuendos about Foley’s sexuality didn’t cease forthwith, he’d release the very next morning a list of five prominent Republican congressbeings who were secretly gay and do the same thing the next day and the day after that until all the GOP closets were empty. The Republicans jumped like scalded rabbits. Atwater instructed the White House operator to track down Foley immediately so he could tell the Speaker the attacks were history. C’mon Man, You Can Take A Joke, Can’t You? ✍ And then, a miracle.

Bill Clinton came out of the nowhere that is Arkansas. He was tough. He was ready and willing to throw some thumbs. Not only that, he had a snarling dog on a long chain next to him, one James Carville, a guy who could make even Liddy take a deep breath. Clinton’s campaign headquarters became know as a War Room. The gloves were off.

The fight was on. The Dems won the White House, woo-hoo!

The Republicans, of course, eventually came back with a series of rabid curs: Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Dick Armey, and Karl Rove. They snatched away first the House of Representatives then the White House. Rabid ✍ Then came Barack Obama with his own carnivore, Rahm Emanuel. By the 2008 presidential election, it seemed the Democrats had reached parity with the Republicans in terms of toughness. Still, the Republicans had their lunatic fringe fighters, the so-called Minutemen along the Mexican border, the abortion clinic bombers, the murderers of doctors who provided abortions, Michigan militias, and other terrifying creatures. Now these really were people who could make the sane among us cower in a corner. Somehow we always knew the guy flying the plane into a government building or the loner purchasing tons of fertilizer-based explosives would be a right-winger.

White Makes Right ✍ And even if the Republican establishment tut-tutted these folks, I always got the feeling that puffy, paunchy chicken hawks like Rove secretly wished they too could bring a sidearm to a political debate. We Dems could proudly say, Yeah, we’re tough now, but we aren’t psychotic.

That is, we could say it until now. And the newest psychos come from right here in good old Monroe County. You may have heard about the brutal attack on a gathering of white supremacists (perhaps the first time those words have ever been written together) in a Chicago suburb over the weekend. See, a gang of five Bloomington-area men barged into a family restaurant in Tinley Park Saturday and beat the bejesus out of a bunch of old men gathered there to eat club sandwiches and tell each other how fabulous they are for being descendents of Eastern Europeans. Attack Scene ✍ The five were under the mistaken impression that the old men were part of a white supremacist organization. It’s not known what feelings the old birds have in their heart of hearts for brown-skinned people, or even if they consider brown-skinned people people at all, but they swear up and down they’re not part of a Klan-like gang. But let’s assume for a moment that they are, just for the sake of argument.

Let’s assume they despise people who aren’t blessed by god with pasty skin. Let’s assume they met at the Ashford House Restaurant to discuss among friends how the darker people of this land are ruining it.

Even if that were the case, the five men who exploded into the restaurant carrying billy clubs, knives, hammers, and other instruments of mayhem are jerks. Thought Police ✍ They went into the place with murder in their hearts (trust me, when you carry a hammer into a brawl, you’re looking to kill someone), aiming to punish human beings for their thoughts. Thought crime.

I thought it was a fictional conceit. But the from Bloomington, Indiana, have made it real.

Now, we of the left side of the spectrum have our own fringe fighters. We’d better do more to distance ourselves from our psychos than the Republicans did. ✍ THE QUOTE “Some people ask the secret of our long marriage. We take time to go to a restaurant two times a week. A little candlelight, dinner, soft music and dancing. She goes Tuesdays, I go Fridays.” — ♢ VI WILL VIE Hoosier Dems are going all in for women this election year.

I’m all for it. Gubernatorial candidate John Gregg is putting his money on, the Indiana Senate Democratic Caucus leader, as his running mate on the Democratic ticket. He’ll make the announcement today. Vi And Her Guy ✍ Simpson joins the state’s Ninth District Congressional candidate on the November ballot.

It’s a gamble and it’s a good one. Indians has been turning monochromatic (red) since Barack Obama squeezed out a narrow victory here in 2008. Senator Evan Bayh retired and was replaced by retread Dan Coats in the 2010 election. Congressman Baron Hill got the thumb that year as well and watched altar boy Todd Young fly to Washington. The Dems need to turn to their ace in the hole — women — to reverse that trend. Neither Shelli Yoder nor Vi Simpson will strike rural voters as wild-eyed, radical femi-nazis — that is, of course, unless said suffragists have been so conditioned by the Fox News gang to see all those to the left of as loyalty risks, traitors, and saboteurs.

Democrats have no hope of ever luring those voters away from the GOP. I’m not deluded enough to think Indiana may turn touchy-feely liberal Democrat any time soon (or even later) but the Dems must put up a better fight than they have of late. Even Obama’s surprising victory here owed more to the upset stomach that the Bush/McCain/Palin bunch induced in the voting public than anyone’s great desire to see an almost-liberal take the White House. But, jeez, folks — if even the People’s Republic of Bloomington can’t put a Dem in its own Congressional seat then these precincts truly have become a one-party monolith. ♢ TERPSICHOREANS My old man came from the generation that knew how to dance.

No matter how paunchy, tubby, clumsy, or homely a guy who grew up during the Great Depression was, the minute a wedding band would strike its first chord, he could jump up and sweep his equally awkward wife across the dance floor as if he were a combination of Gene Kelly and Jack Kennedy. They’re Playing Our Song, Jackie ✍ It never ceased to amaze me that Dad and all my uncles could become as smooth as silk when the music started.

I mean, I knew these these guys wore black socks with their slippers at home, that they were more adept at producing a variety of different flatulent tones than cooing sweet nothings in their brides’ ears, and that the simple act of getting up out of the La-Z-Boy was for them akin to scaling a medium-sized mountain. So how could they also be these fabulous dancers? Old Joe Glab could also swing a shoe to a polka tune like nobody’s business. Polka dancing demanded a certain level of physical exertion that in other circumstances would be guaranteed to strike Dad and all his peers immediately dead from myocardial infarct. Yet he and his contemporaries could polka all the night long. When I was 21 and 22 I could undulate my hips to funk or disco five nights a week. I could pogo to punk with the best of them.

But at some indeterminant point in my life, I lost the ability to dance. I learned this dramatically one Friday night about a dozen years ago. I went out on a date with a hot tomato divorcee named Robbie. She and her ex were big-time art dealers in Chicago. We had dinner, then she suggested we go out dancing.

So we zoomed up to Joe Shanahan’s uber-trendy near Wrigley Field. I’d spent many a long night gyrating and sweating to the likes of and there in the mid-80s so I figured I could still reach back and put the good moves on. I Could Ride The White Pony With My Eyes Closed ✍ We dashed out on the floor and started in. Robbie acquitted herself quite nicely — I, on the other hand, felt as though I’d suddenly turned into an epileptic. I could no more keep to the beat than a Mormon.

I looked around and saw all these kids half my age slithering the way I once could. Some of them, I have to admit, were eying me critically. Slick Ball Keygens. As in, What the fk?

It felt as though the DJ was aiming a spotlight at me. Come to think of it, he may have been. Of course, I became even stiffer and more dopey. More kids started staring at me.

I was certain they’d go home that night, fall asleep, and then wake up with a start, horrified at the memory of what they’d seen. Worse, I could imagine them imagining that Robbie and I would go home later and, ugh, have sex. (We didn’t.) I’d scarred the poor kids for life. How could I lose it all so quickly?

And why were Dad and his generation able to keep it well into their 60s and 70s? Life is unfair. I’m reminded of all this because of the Sun-Times Facebooked the news that Chicago’s polka king,. Just about everybody from the dancing generation is gone now. Soon — very soon — the only males left in the world who can dance will be those under the age of 30. Did I mention that life is unfair?

♢ VIRAL PIE Yet another reason why the interwebs is (are?) the greatest single invention of mankind. Without my connection to the faux/real world, I would never have known this pizza joint ever existed: ✍ Me? I wanna go there, eat a slice, and then stand outside the place scratching at the corner of my mouth. Imagine the looks on people’s faces as they drive. Yeah, I’m deranged. Anyway, BuzzFeed has.

Go there and laugh.

You might remember the mad Beanie Babies craze from the late 90s (or maybe you don't, if you're young enough). If you don't, this gallery might make you wish you did. Beanie Babies appeared on the toy scene in 1993. Something about the posable stuffed animals filled with plastic pellets caught on. The toys came as nine characters – Legs the Frog, Squealer the Pig, Spot the Dog, Flash the Dolphin, Splash the Whale, Chocolate the Moose, Patti the Platypus, Brownie the Bear, and Pinchers the Lobster. Fun, lightweight, and relatively simple in design, the plush toys provided a softer alternative to the number of plastic toys that were all the rage in the early 90s, like Furbie, GigaPets, or Sky Dancers/Dragon Flyz. As their popularity grew, Ty Inc., the company behind Beanie Babies, released a line of Teenie Beanies.

Teenie Beanies were miniature versions of regular Beanie Babies and became instant hits when Ty Inc. Partnered with McDonalds. The Teenie Beanies became part of Happy Meals around the world. Beanie Babies, both large and small, were often shipped with the wrong tags or the wrong identifying information, and they had quietly begun to gain popularity on the collectors' market. Within two years, everyone wanted one. In 1999, Ty Inc.' S owner, Ty Warner, decided to stop producing Beanie Babies.

The following year, recognizing that there was still demand, he began producing them again, and has since launched a new version complete with an interactive website. Has also partnered with a number of popular movies and television shows to create licensed Beanie Babies. The toys have never really regained the popularity of their early years.

However, the Beanie Babies from those first few years are still very valuable collector's items. The 5 Beanie Babies below are worth an incredible amount of money for what amounts to a small stuffed animal (full of beans, naturally). Here are the five most valuable Beanie Babies around.