With Singular Focus or a Lack Thereof...

I do believe that the combination of amphetamine and coffee is making me more frantic and manic than usual. I wish I were kidding you. Currently, I am multitasking at unhealthy levels. Even for me.

I'm uploading pictures to flickr. Reading and commenting on blogs, reading work emails and responding to them, working on this post, listening to music, having short online chats with friends, updating contacts in my email, going through my sitemeter to see who is visiting, updating Facebook, twittering (tweeting?), fretting about the upcoming busy weekend, and trying to figure out how to edit a video using Picassa so I can upload it to youtube and bore you to death with a snippet of life from Golden Manor.

Plus my hands feel dry and I need to dig out the lotion from my purse, but if I stop typing now and do that, I'll end up doing six other things before I get back to this post. Now I just paused to read a text message on my phone and before I got back to this post, I checked my gmail and deleted a couple of things without reading them, took a drink of water and thought for a second about opening my flickr tab because pictures have uploaded and I need to tag them and finish the process.

Please, oh please, tell me that you are just as scattered.

I remember when I was a kid and my siblings and I would be sprawled out over our M&M colored beanbags watching The Price Is Right or The Flintstones and my mother would say something to us through the passthrough to the kitchen. Not one of the three of us would respond and she would raise her voice and would finish by bellowing at us that we couldn't do anything when the television was on. Her point was that our focused attention was a bad thing. We were not so easily distracted.

I do believe I have said the same thing to The Spawn. Now I'm thinking that the ability to do just one thing and to focus on it completely is a skill I need to relearn. Seriously.

So, on to the real purpose of this post. I have been asked to dig through my obsessively sorted and categorized photo files because susan has tagged me with the photo meme. I cannot deny susan who thinks possibly naughty things when she sees the milk mustache advertisements, so here goes. Business first, though.

The Rules:

1. Go to the 4th folder in your computer where you store your pictures.
2. Pick the 4th picture in that folder.
3. Explain the picture.
4. Tag 4 people to do the same.


So here is the picture in my 4th folder. My folders go like this: Baseball, Birds, Blogging Pix, Bloomington, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

That is MathMan in 1990 during one of our trips to Indiana. We'd already graduated from Indiana University, where we met and married. When we visited my family in southeastern Indiana, we would typically swing through Bloomington. On this particular trip, we went through the campus and took a bunch of pictures.

MathMan is standing in front of the old arcade at the corner of Kirkwood and Indiana. What was it called? Spaceport or something like that? Anyway, look at him, so young! So hairy! Dang, he was such a hottie back then. (Still is.) No wonder I propositioned him the second time I met him........

Oh, and about that shirt - it was a gift from my parents who had just returned from a cruise. Looking back over the years of grief I have given MathMan, the message on that shirt seems a bit cruel. I think I'd better have a word with my mother about that........of course, she'll have to turn off the television and put down her crossword puzzle so I can speak to her.

Consider yourself tagged, my happy little amphetamines:

Kulkuri
Nan
The Earth Bound Misfit
SaoirseDaily2

I Find It All Quite Taxing

I wanted to write a post about how the current arguments surrounding the proposed stimulus package are getting on my last good nerve. I was struggling with what to say because lately I get so annoyed about it that it's all I can do to sputter a few invectives and grab the remote to switch to watching old movies or listening to music.

This morning, though, my fellow Georgian Nan has a post that says very much what I'd like to say and she says it with clarity and doesn't even descend into foul-mouthed vituperative left-wing blogger mode. Nope. Nan - a great writer on many and varied subjects - makes her point without dropping a single f-bomb.

Go, read Nan's post and think about the Republican talking points you're hearing and about the cognitive dissonance involved in spreading those lies and getting Americans to believe them through repetition.

Oh, and think about this, too, because I feel it fits with Nan's post. Ready? Because I'm about to spread a rightwing propaganda here on this blog....

The top one percent of tax-payers pays forty percent of the total income taxes!!!!!!!!

I'll wait for a second while you catch your breath and recover from the injustice of that. I know, calm down. I'm losing sleep over it, too. I really think the uber wealthy should be able to keep more of their income and contribute significantly less to the common good.

Look, I know that the best the Republicans can do right now is well-lathered outrage and subterfuge. They lost and they lost big. No one likes having their asses handed to them and, even though they aren't willing to admit it, the November elections were a a repudiation of the hideous conservative policies that have wrecked our economy. And what's more, the way the Republicans have conducted themselves with massive levels of hypocrisy and blatant disregard for the common good and our collective needs should require that they hang their heads in shame and slink away. But oh no, not them. No, their arrogance and belief that Americans are completely ignorant allows them to look straight into the camera an lie and lie some more. In between their alcoholic mouth twitches (I'm looking at you, Congressman Boehner), that is.

So yeah, for cliff's sake, the upper one percent is paying a large percentage of the taxes, but that would follow. They've amassed an unprecedented percentage of the nation's wealth. And try as they might to avoid it, some of that wealth and income is taxed. And since it's all percentages, the more scratch they make, collect and have, the higher their taxes go even if tax rates stay the same or even decrease.

And since the wealth has migrated to a tiny island of solid gold toilets and special man-servants to apply $6,000,000 per ounce ointment to the tip of one's penis before sex with a $4,000 per hour prostitute, then it would follow that the rest of us swim in the vast ocean of less wealth and income.

So really? Boehner and company want us to get bunged up about the fact that those with more and more still are paying a greater percentage of our overall taxes than those of us with less and less? Heh. Right. Okay.

I have an idea. You know how the Right likes to say the higher taxes are a disincentive to hard work and success? How people won't try to become wealthy because they don't want to pay high taxes? Well, the reality is that most people would love to be rich and I've never heard of a single person who has chosen poverty over wealth because they don't want to pay taxes. However, what actually happens when one does get rich, is pretty simple - one tries to buy enough influence to have their tax rates lowered.

Well, let's turn that around on Boehner and company. Fine, we can say, if the uber wealthy doesn't want to pay such a high percentage of the taxes, let's have them redistribute their wealth to the other ninety-nine percent and we'll make the ninety-nine percent pay taxes on that new, redistributed income and their percentage will go up and the formerly uber wealthy, now simply wealthy will see a decrease in their percentage?

Works for me........