My Time to Waste

Today we bought a house!  Debby and I have been trying to sell the house we are in and buy a house we love.  After much back and forth involving various amounts of miscommunication, the buyer we thought we had for our house backed out.

We love the house we found and Debby figured out how to buy it even without selling this one, but financing changes were required.  So there was plenty of negotiations with the bank and it was all worked out.  Time was short.  The realtor was concerned that the sellers might not accept another delay of the closing.

The problem is that the money has to be there.  And it turns out that the bank would hold even a cashier’s check for a couple of days.  There was no alternative but to get cash.  Debby went to the bank and withdrew the cash.*  They put it in an envelope for her.  She drove to Fort Wayne and presented the cash to the bank.

The teller examined each bill.

Debby now has a receipt for the $400 that the bank has determined may be counterfeit and is delivering to the Secret Service.

Fortunately, the dollar amount Debby was given was approximate and the $400 was not necessary to close.

Unfortunately, we just might be out $400.

Something wrong with that picture!

The bank informed Debby that there have been other cases of counterfeit hundreds in Fort Wayne recently.  In examining the bills, the teller was focused on the date.  I suspect that the bank has been informed to be on the lookout for bills of a certain date and that some of Debby’s bills matched that criteria.  It is possible that the Secret Service will authenticate the money.  At least, we hope so!

If it turns out that those bills are counterfeit, then that means that one cannot be sure that the cash a bank gives out is in fact legal currency.

*This was not tens of thousands of dollars.  Just several hundred to cover the last bit needed.

Roman Polanski raped a 13 year old girl.   He accepted a plea deal.  He pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor.

Then he skipped out prior to sentencing.

That was 32 years ago.

It is long past time for Mr. Polanski to face a judge and accept his sentence.

I’ve seen much written about Polanski’s art and how he shouldn’t have to suffer over something that happened so long ago.  This is absurd on its face.    He did the crime, his art is irrelevent.

I understand his victim has said that she does not want the criminal charges pursued.  The criminal justice system does not exist to serve the wishes of the victims.  Often a convicted criminal is sentenced to a punishment that the victim consideres woefully inadequate.  With any luck, Polanski will be an example of a criminal sentenced to a punishment that the victim considers excessive.

…as long as I only pat my lower back.  Click the Mike Pence tag for my earlier posts on this subject.

Mike Pence has not made any announcements that he is running for president.  But now he is in the top five!!!

The recent Values Voter Summit included a straw poll for 2012 and

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and Indiana Rep. Mike Pence each won roughly 12 percent of the 597 votes cast.

Huckabee won with 29%.

The momentum builds….

I got a chuckle* from this on page 376 in Coming Into the Country.   The speaker is a woman named Elva.  Elva has a master’s degree in education and for many years ran the school-districts health program in Anchorage.  This experience leaves her the most qualified medical provider in the town of Eagle.

People come in off the river with blood infections, red streaks up their arm.  They get cystitis from not enough water.  They come down from Dawson with v.d.  We don’t have laboratory tests.  We treat on symptoms.  An outboard motor chewed on a guy’s legs awhile.  We sewed him up.  I tell everyone, ‘I don’t mind helping you out.  Just don’t use me.’  We don’t want to be awakened for nothing, for someone who is merely drunk.  For gunshot wounds and stabbings I of course get up.  Oh, we have enough of that sort of thing.  Yeah.  You betcha.  We’re getting ready to have dinner with company and they come in and bleed all over the sink.  Who needs TV in Eagle?  We’ve got action enough in the streets.

You betcha.

I’m guessing health care costs in Eagle were (are?) on the low end.

*I wonder if I’ve ever used that word before…..

…when you’re having fun!   Let me clear a couple of cobwebs off….

There.

Geez, one post in the past two weeks.  A bit off my goal of one every other day.

In my defense, we are in the process of trying to sell our house and buy another house.  This is a bit of a distraction.  It does appear the closings will take place soon, so the process of moving might be a bit of a distraction.  I appreciate the patience of, ahem, all my loyal readers (I think there’s three or four).

Another distraction is the advent of football season.  I’ve spent too much time reading Green Bay Packer blogs.  One would think the world is about to end since the Packers lost to the Bengals.

McPhee’s Coming Into The Country has begun to get more interesting in the second half…

On page 261* is this:

In a good fish year, two moose, two hundred ducks, and seventy-five quarts of king salmon will be plenty for one river couple.  The upper Yukon now is considered “full,” saturated with settlers, all space reserved–roughly one person for every five miles.

One person for every five miles is considered saturation.  I guess because if things get more crowded a need for a wee bit of government arises.

Just prior to the above is an account of a nearly week long gathering of “river people” for the 1976 vernal equinox.

It was a council of war and a party, too–a time of talk and music, no booze–a way to keep contacts, to exchange opinions and information.

Then just a bit further on:

They planned a network of cabins for winter travel.  They tried, with no success, to agree on a a communal bulk food order, and on a way to administer common ownership of a truck for use in Eagle.  Their desire to be “tribal” does not approach in strength their need to be self-reliant.

There always have been and always will be people who feel crowded when the density goes beyond a couple of square miles per person.  People who want to survive or fail to survive on their own.  People who are unable to come to an agreement on a communal bulk food order.   There has always been a wilderness for such people to go to.   Surely those days are coming to an end.  The available wilderness is now all set aside for parks, for mining, for drilling, for natives.

Such a life will soon be available, if not already, only to those wealthy enough to buy all the needed land.

*Yes, I am a slow reader.

The supply of hypocrites is unlimited.

Debby and I watched Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona the other day.  Good film.  Here and there during the movie I had to remind myself that it is probably funny.  And as soon as I thought that, I found it to be funny!   Even to the point that I laughed out loud.

But I could have easily sat through the whole movie without realizing it was supposed to be funny.  I would wager that I have done that at least once in my life: watch a movie that is supposed to be funny without ever realizing that was the case.  And then thinking “strange movie.”

On the other hand, I find Craig Ferguson to be very funny.  I actually find him to be funny even when he is being juvenile.

But Conan O’ Brian isn’t funny at all.

By the way, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is really good.  Filmed in terrific settings, very good acting, and a decent script.  And Allen is not in it (a big plus in my book).

I don’t remember where I heard or read this idea, but the concept is straight forward.  If you want a particular situation to exist,  you determine what the results would be if the situation did exist, then you take steps to bring those results about independently and this will help to bring the desired situation into being.

This method has its limitations.  If one wishes to be a millionaire, buying a Porsche 911 might not be the proper way to go about it (though there might be cases….)

Many years ago my brother urged me to answer the question of “How are you?” with “Terrific!” regardless of how I actually felt.  I tried it.  And I was surprised to learn that answering “Terrific!” (exclamation point clear in my tone) actually made me feel better and often seemed to brighten the mood of the questioner.

Now Scientific American finds that my experience is not unique (and here I thought I was one of a kind…).  Smiling makes a person happier, at least in the short term.  The linked article mentions evidence that smiling in the face of reason to frown constitutes repression of feelings that then manifest themselves in other ways.   So don’t get carried away with it.

Hat tip:  3quarksdaily

It is a seventeen page article, but the writing is good and it goes fast:  Trial by Fire by David Grann in The New Yorker.

It really has never been a question of if, but only of when.  When an innocent would be executed, and when we will finally do away with the death penalty.

It appears that the first question has an answer.

hat tip:  The New Republic