We’ve taken on a lot of biggies. In the past three days we Banished Blanket Statements, Gut-punched Gravity and brought Art to Asteroids. What’s left?

How about Financial Industry Reform? The Senate passed it yesterday so it’s all over the news today, which means it’s high time for some Uninformed Commentary from Bud Buck.

Finally Congress has passed a financial reform measure! This was sorely needed after the sub prime loan debacle and the collapse of major banking institutions that were Too Big To Fail. There was some other stuff that happened regarding money things that are too difficult to understand. Something about derivatives and bundling and credit-default swaps. Whatever.

But now all of that has been addressed. Or if it hasn’t been addressed, at least I can stop trying to think about it, and that provides some personal relief for me in these terribly stressful times. Thank you congress!

But there is one part of the bill that irks me, and that’s the section that creates a new Office of Financial Literacy. In addition to lowering the boom on predatory lenders and Wall Street Fat Cats, now Washington is going to try to make me smarter about money so I don’t squander so much of it! I don’t know what that will entail, exactly. I can be stubborn, so my first bit of money saving advice for the government is to not waste any resources trying to educate me! I’m doing great!

For example, I always read agreements and contracts completely before I sign anything, which is a real headache for sales people since they have to sit there and watch my lips move while I read and they wait. But over the years I’ve been able to speed up the process by skipping over the terms I don’t understand. Instead, I just go with the way the word “feels”. For instance, I always make sure my bank accounts pay “simple” interest instead of “compound”. Why? Because all simple things are good, and houseflies have compound eyes, which are creepy.

If I see that a loan has “balloon” payments, I sign it. Balloons are happy, colorful things, and so much of the other stuff that you see in contracts is gray and dismal. If the balloon payments can be shaped like pretzels or wiener dogs, all the better!

Investing is important to me, so I always go for the highest number when it comes to the projected return, especially if some fund or bank or individual is paying a whole lot more than the others, because that means there’s somebody super-smart involved – somebody who knows a lot more than all the other dummies on Wall Street. Like this guy I ran into on the street corner just outside my bank. Inside they were paying, like 2% on savings, but he said he could get me 22% on a special deal he called a “Ponzi”. That sounds like “Fonzi”, who was a very cool, very big star years ago on “Happy Days”. That’s proven celebrity talent, and if a celebrity says I should do it, I usually do. Being popular is their main job, so why would they lie?

Finally, I always make sure my finances are organized so I can get a big fat tax check back from the government in the spring. My paycheck is smaller, but what could be better than money in the mail?

So here’s a notice to the new Office of Financial Literacy – don’t fritter away those precious government dollars trying to improve my situation. Direct the money toward dealing with the truly important issues like Too Big To Fail, and leave me my Too Good To Be True.

This is Bud Buck!

Assess your financial literacy.

The European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft just completed a fly-by of an asteroid named “Lutetia” a few days ago. Here’s the striking image of a rock hurtling through space, with Saturn in the background.

Sorry, maybe I shouldn’t have used the word “striking” so close to “asteroid”.
We’re all a little sensitive about this, right?

There have been enough disaster movies on the topic to convince even the most casual worst-case-scenarist that the ultimate destination of every speeding lump of space metal is the flower bed in their own back yard. It’s not a matter of “if”, but “when”. This is enough to make a person a little bit paranoid. And in fact, the newly revealed shape of Lutetia, which previously had only been seen in images taken from here on the ground, reminds me of this famous and oft-copied universal representation of stress – Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”.
Don’t see it? Well, we’re all in denial.

How about now?

On a happier note, this fanciful discussion raises the notion that we could sculpt or paint zooming asteroids to make them more interesting to look at, even if we can’t deflect them.

Which existing work of art should be re-created on Lutetia?
Or should we turn it into something new?

Yesterday we challenged the veracity of all blanket statements.
Today, we’re going to dismiss gravity.

An article in the New York Times describes the fulminations of a physicist named Erik Verlinde, who has denounced gravity and wants to remove it from its exalted position as one of the four fundamental forces governing all objects, giving it a reduced role as a mere sidekick to the laws of thermodynamics.

Holy demotion, Batman!

First Pluto was diminished from planet status to the lesser realm of large speeding chunks. Now gravity is at risk of being dropped from the four-headed pantheon of fundamentals, leaving only the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force and electromagnetism as the invisible sheriffs in our universal town.

The article quotes Dr. Verlinde in a talk given “to a bunch of physicists,” in which he likens “the unfolding story of gravity” to the tale about the emperor’s new clothes.

“We’ve known for a long time gravity doesn’t exist,” Dr. Verlinde said, “It’s time to yell it.”

Verlinde’s comments about gravity are hailed as genius by people who admit they don’t understand what he’s saying. This reminds me of the way art mavens enthuse over the latest unexplainable painting because the work is ground breaking and the artist is brilliant, even though they have no idea what any of it is about.

That’s me. I’m completely with Dr. Verlinde on this gravity thing, even though he baffles me. Why would I get on board with such a wild idea? I can only describe it in a short, sing-songy, completely weightless poem.

What goes up must come down.
So we thought for all.
But if we want to fly around,
Gravity must fall.

Beat it up and take its lunch
Kick sand in its face.
Drop it with a sucker punch.
And leave it in disgrace.

Gravity, your song is sung.
You’re finished as a force.
And once you have dropped down a rung
We’ll conquer you, of course.

George Jetson, here we come!
Once gravity is thoroughly humiliated, how might things change?

In a shocking reversal of conventional wisdom, all blanket statements have been declared untrue as of the moment you started reading this sentence.

That’s it. Things have changed.

Old reliables like “It’s a Man’s World” and that thing about only children being coddled misfits are only the most recent B.S.’s to bite the dust, each one taken down by a different national magazine during the past two weeks.

Parting shots, no doubt, since all magazines are doomed.

And people who read paper books are pathetic luddites so out of touch with reality they will never understand what happened when these quaint artifacts they worship finally disappear for good.

Not to mention the commentators who say such things. They’re all smug, pencil-armed cowards too wrapped up in the internet to risk a difference of opinion in a face to face conversation. Good thing, too. They’d get trounced in a fair fight. All of them against a single cowboy? No Contest.

Repeat blanket statement makers are in denial about this. Their social and lobbying organization, “The Truly Wonderful People,” recently sent out a press release declaring that “all blanket statements contain at least 20% pure truth, and most are completely correct 88% of the time, a far better accuracy score than vague assertions and fair minded allowances.”

But this is typical of the B.S. crowd. Whenever they use numbers it’s a lie. Every one of them refuses to see the truth even when it’s so plainly in front of their face. They’re pathetic losers.

You all agree with me on this, of course.

Everyone who reads this blog makes a comment of one sort or another, particularly when the post involves remarkable, unassailable research like this.

That’s just the way it is.

Dear Dr. Babooner,

I worked very hard to become quite good at a well-known sport by playing with superior style and elegance. And finally my team won a difficult extended competition against many opponents, but my final victory was quite messy and the commentators are saying that although I deserved to win, the historic game was an ugly brawl.

But brawling wasn’t the sport I chose to play! I imagined this moment would be a wonderful vindication of how hard I worked to excel and not an opportunity for people who couldn’t run the length of the field to practice many different ways to use the word “sloppy” to describe the Biggest Game of My Life. I still feel happy, but a little bit tarnished.

Why can’t people just say nice things? Do they always have to find something to criticize? I would like to control everything that is said about everything that has anything to do with me. Is that so wrong? I am a champion after all, and I think I deserve some special privileges, and a little respect!

Sincerely,

S. Panya.

I told S. Panya not to be so sensitive, and certainly not to worry about what other people are saying. People can be thoughtless jerks who parrot the nonsense that other thoughtless jerks say, and ultimately none of it means anything. But of course we all care what others say about us, and when I mentioned “thoughtless jerks”, of course I wasn’t talking about you.

But that’s just one opinion. What do YOU think, Dr. Babooner?

Earlier in the week tim issued a challenge to any and all who fancy themselves poetic:

dale i think we need the writers blog for poems haiku bawdy drinking songs and bear laments as well as limericks

there once was a bear from nantucket
whose tounge was so long he could suck it
he said with a grin
as he wiped off his chin
oh look theres some mud in my bucket

cooking book club and writers den. up to it?

Well, I say why not? In poetry and food, not every dish pleases all diners.
If we can collect recipes for the purpose of filling that empty spot inside, why not stash away some silly and serious poems for the same purpose?

We’ll call the new addition “Rhyme Wave“.

I have given it a dark, poetic background, and I’ve posted tim and Clyde’s bear verse, along with our espionage limericks. There is no jury to decide about worthiness. If a poem appears in the comments, I’ll include it.

Down the road I’ll comb through previous posts to find other offerings. If you have a favorite and know how to find it, please leave it in today’s comments! This post will stay up through the weekend and we’ll start with something fresh on Monday.

Idea man Spin Williams loves the Solar Impulse, the plane that flew for 26 hours this week only using energy from the sun.

I know there’s been coverage of this story, but I don’t think people truly get the importance of what has happened. Since it began, the duration of any single manned flight has been limited by the amount of fuel we can put in the plane. Now, with the realization that we can collect solar energy during a daytime flight, store that energy in batteries and then continue to fly through the night until the sun re-appears to charge our batteries again, all that changes!

Just like a meeting that never ends, the Solar Impulse offers us the promise of a flight that never ends. And ask anybody who uses airplanes to get anywhere – they all have a dream of someday stepping aboard a flight that never ends!

Ha ha. I’m kidding. What I meant to say is this: Ask anybody who uses airplanes to get anywhere. They all feel like they’ve already been on a flight that never ends. So duration isn’t an issue.

Official observers and popular predictors say we won’t have solar powered commercial flights anytime soon, but at the meeting that never ends, we call that kind of talk self-limiting small-think! The Solar Impulse could re-shape the way the aviation industry works, helping us finally achieve the goal of low cost air travel by eliminating the need for jet fuel.

Now each major airline can put a sun powered fleet aloft and keep it there perpetually! No more stressful landings and take-offs – all you’ll have to do is check the schedule to see when the next flight is coming by! Going from L.A. to New York will be like stepping on the moving walkway at the airport.

Cynics will say there’s in insurmountable problem with getting people on and off a plane that never stops moving, but that defeatist attitude will only limit us. Naysayers forget that a commercial jet goes 600 miles per hour, but the average speed of the Solar Impulse is about 43.5 mph. This is a great advantage. College kids regularly stand up and wave their shirts over their heads in convertibles going twice that speed.

I’m not saying that grabbing on to a rescue basket and screaming like a maniac while your friend Howie steers dad’s Miata down the runway is the most practical way to board a perpetually airborne plane, but for some travelers this scenario is not entirely out of the question. For deplaning those in daredevil class, a slow flying aircraft could make use of strategically placed hay bales.

All I’m saying is that there are solutions out there if we can only free our minds to embrace all the possibilities. So here’s to the Solar Impulse! She is leading the way to a glorious future!

Make a prediction about the future of air travel.

This video is two and a half years old and has been viewed over five and a half million times on You Tube, so it hardly qualifies as “news” and yet I was completely unaware until yesterday that dolphins at Sea World in Orlando can blow bubble rings out their blow holes and then play games with them.

Some who have viewed the video say this is tragic – they conclude that the dolphins are bored. Others react by saying it is wonderful – this is evidence that dolphins have souls (and like games).

Either might be true. I suspect the producer of the video falls into the second camp, based simply on the music chosen to accompany the images – “No One Is Alone” from Stephen Sondheim’s “Into The Woods”. Just when you thought you were finished with people, you find out your REAL friends are underwater, playing stick-your-nose-through-the-bubble-ring.

I know that if I could shoot air out of the top of my head and manipulate spinning bubbles for the entertainment of appreciative crowds on the other side of a glass panel, I would probably do it. I’m that much of a ham.

But dolphins aren’t hams. Or are they?

My father once suggested while watching this show that we get a pet dolphin to keep in the bathtub. He was kidding, but I worried that he might find a way to pull it off. I’d never seen him fail. But I knew, even at age 11, that having a dolphin in the bathtub would be terribly difficult for us and absolutely no good for the dolphin. Cooler heads prevailed. The tub stayed dolphin-free.

If you were a dolphin in captivity, what would you do to keep things interesting?

Former mainstream journalist Bud Buck has been searching for his niche the past few years, trying desperately to re-launch his fading career. With reluctance I have agreed to let him write an occasional column about events in the news – a column that “will say awkward things that ‘no one else will say’”.

He calls it “A Voice In the Wilderness”.

The Republican’s endorsed Gubernatorial candidate has been ridiculed for something he said in a restaurant this week, but I commend Tom Emmer. He is the only politician on the scene with the courage to confront one of Minnesota’s major problems – obscenely overpaid waiters and waitresses.

In a state that expects to struggle with budget shortfalls and crumbling infrastructure every single year for the foreseeable future, our political leaders have been more than happy to overlook the growing tycoon server situation. But Emmer has boldly stepped up to the plate (a royal blue plate special in this case) and called out wealthy wait staff for their crazy, out-of-control compensation.

I don’t have to tell you how bad it is.

Anybody who has gone out to lunch in Minnesota can see the imbalance the moment they sit down at an establishment where the fabulously rich come breezing in to don their money aprons so they can continue to rake astonishing piles of dough.

Waitress apologists will throw numbers at you and claim that the hundred grand a year server is some kind of myth, like bigfoot. But I have been to the places where these gluttons grab their gold, and believe me, trying to explain it with ‘math’ and ‘facts’ will only confuse you.

Here are the details that haunt me:

That haughty look the waitress gives you when she approaches the table to announce that she ‘will be your server.’ The way she looms over you like some petty tyrant as she dictates a few items that will be the ‘specials’ of your day. Her terse translation of your hopes into a single line on a flimsy sheet of paper. The incessant demand – fries or coleslaw? Fries or coleslaw? As if this is the only choice available to you – the little people. The seated people. And then, having summed you up, she walks with impunity from your table back into the kitchen, a place of power and influence where you are forbidden access, a place where, I assure you, they have fries AND coleslaw.

How bad is it? In recent years when I’ve gone into some of the more successful restaurants, the waitress has had other people – “her” people – bring the actual food to me. Who are these confused minions who don’t know where the tilapia is supposed to go? They are the waitresses’ waiters. She said at the outset she would be my server, but when the real serving happens, she sends an underling! Where is she while my BLT is being placed on the other side of the table? In her Cadillac, I suppose, receiving a pedicure from a poor stockbroker who is just trying to make ends meet! And then later she breezes by the table to blithely ask if everything ‘is OK’?

I’m sure everything looks more than OK to a person who gets to walk around all day long collecting both minimum wage AND tips!

Thank you Tom Emmer, for saying the thing no one else would say!
This is Bud Buck!

How do you compute an appropriate tip?

Here’s a note from an old friend – Bart the Bear! His comments have been translated into English from the original Usus Textish.

Hey, Bart here.

This is my most favorite time of year in the woods – the stretch that comes after the 4th of July and before the State Fair. We get families on weekends and there are loads of kids with different camp groups up here the rest of the time. It used to be there was only one place nearby – Camp Shortsheets – where kids went to get harassed and abused by each other. But now they can harass and abuse each other just about everywhere, so you don’t have to go to camp for that. Instead, camp has become more of a career opportunity where you can work on the thing you love most, like writing novels or playing the piano or grooming cats.

That worries me – all the specialists up here in the woods nowadays.

We bears are all pretty much generalists. Gotta be. Everybody is good with scattering garbage. We all like to pull open the doors of cars. And you can’t last very long up here if you don’t know how to lay waste to a campsite.

I do have a talent for looking fearsome and it works pretty well as long as I don’t forget myself and crack a smile. But I wouldn’t want to be a “scary” bear all the time. “Scary” is just too one-dimensional. So I try to seem “nice” and “friendly” every now and then. And at least a couple of times a year I’ll go for “pensive”, which is a feeling most bears don’t know how to do. Variety is the spice of life, they say. And I do like my spice!

I didn’t think I would but there was a family up here just last week – the Patels from Fridley (I managed to nab a wallet along with the dinner). Nice folks. Not too careful about cleaning up, which is good! I like people to leave a little bit of a mess. And this mess was wonderful and tasty and talk about spices! Exotic stuff. Not your average mushroom soup in the hot dish, I’ll tell ya. I felt like I’d bitten into a nest of bees, and I mean that in the best possible way.

I’d like to follow the Patels wherever they go but I don’t want to seem like I’m stalking them. Bears who look like they’re stalking people wind up with a dart in the neck. Then they throw you in the back of a truck and you wake up in the Boundary Waters with a headache and a whole bunch of new problems.

Oh yeah. The tranquilizer gun. We know all about it. It’s those wilderness shows on TV. Word gets around.

If you were going to be tranquilized and transported to a new location to make a living with only the clothes on your back, where would you want to be taken?