Archburger and The Bridge

I was not consulted. I did not get a memo, a phone call, a comment on my Facebook page or a Tweet. The news came to me this morning as a total surprise while I was on my first cup of coffee and my second slice of cinnamon raisin toast ladled with peanut butter. 

A three-paragraph article inside the business section of the local newspaper reported McDonald’s “says it is using fresh beef in another 🍔, the latest test by the chain to swap out frozen beef as it seeks to improve the image of its food.”

The new burger, being tested in seven stores in Tulsa, OK, is named…drum roll, please, the Archburger.

McDonald’s did not ask if they could attach my nickname to fresh meat intended to be sold all over the world. Nevertheless, I hope the Archburger catches on, it would be embarrassing to have one’s name and reputation attached to a fast food flop. 

✍︎

Moving on to the Letters to the Editor of  The Post & Courier (Jan. 3, 2018) was my:

Letter to the Editor

The Post & Courier

Dear Sir:

Over the weekend I drove I-526 from Mt. Pleasant to West Ashley. As I approached North Charleston a blue bar appeared on the horizon and I had one of those ‘what’s this’ moments. 

As I got closer I realized it was the Don Holt bridge painted a magnificent, light blue from one end to the other. I have never seen a prettier bridge.

Kudos to the SC Highway Department and the contractors who, thinking outside the box,  rejected the traditional silver and grey paint used on bridges and chose instead this bright, warm and friendly blue. Magnificent!

Terror Suspects

Published Friday, Nov. 10, 2017

Letters to the Editor

The Post & Courier

Charleston, SC

Dear Editor

Marc A. Thiessen’s column (Nov 6) criticizing President Trump for treating terrorists like former President Obama, is truly off the mark and implies the United States would do better to treat these terrorists as “enemy combatants” and send them to Guantanamo, rather than read them their Miranda rights and try them in civilian courts  He wrote this would assist intelligence agencies in gathering data. 

The organization Human Rights First provides reliable information more likely to make Americans sleep better at night. For example, consider just these four points they make: 

(1) Federal civilian criminal courts have convicted more than 620 individuals on terrorism-related charges since 9/11. Military commissions have convicted only eight, three of which have been overturned completely and one partially.

(2) Federal prisons hold hundreds of individuals convicted of terrorism-related offenses. None have ever escaped.

(3) Prosecuting terror suspects before military commissions makes them look like warriors rather than the criminals that they are. As Judge William Young said when sentencing Shoe Bomber Richard Reid, “You’re no warrior….You are a terrorist. A species of criminal guilty of multiple attempted murders.”

(4) Miranda is an effective law enforcement tool that provides valuable information. Phil Mudd, former deputy director of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center and a senior intelligence adviser to the FBI, wrote that he “sat at hundreds of briefing tables for nine years after Sept. 11, 2001, and I can't remember a time when Miranda impeded a decision on whether to pursue an intelligence interview.” 

First aggravation of 2016

It was slightly after noon on January 2 when the first aggravation of the New Year reared its ugly head. I went off earlier in the morning to get a leaking tire fixed. (It had a nail in it.) This was a carryover from 2015 so it did not qualify as the first aggravation of 2016. That still lurked in the shadows like a burglar casing a neighborhood. 

On the way home I stopped at Best Buy where “Jose” helped me select a cable modem for $69 plus tax that would replace the modem furnished by my internet provider, Hargray Communications, which was failing fast. Every modem box on the shelf, and there were many, said: Stop renting a modem. Own your own. 

I took it home, dis-enaged the old one which was to be returned to Hargray and end the monthly rental fee of around $7.00. I struggled to get the new one out of the box and finally succeeded. Electronic devices are packaged to minimize sholifting and theft. It would take Houdini to open a box and shoplift one of these things in a Best Buy aisle.

I hooked it up, attached the router, plugged everything in and telephoned Hargray to have them recognize the new piece of equipment on their end. And here is where the aggravation was born. It is Hargray’s position and practice, according to the faceless tech rep on the end of the line, that a customer cannot own his own modem on their system. WHAT?

The Hargray tech rep and I argued over this practice for a couple of minutes. My warning that I would protest to the FCC fell on deaf ears. I thought about throwing Alan Dershowitz and a lawsuit into the mix, but decided against that on two counts: The tech rep probably didn’t know or care about Dershowitz, and, two, no one files a lawsuit hoping to save $7 a month in rental fees. Anyone whose retirement depends on saving $7 a month needs to continue working.  

I had to disconnect the new modem and put it back in the box for return to Best Buy. If getting it out of the box was a pain in the ass, what do you think putting it back in was?

There was one saving grace to this first agravation of 2016. The tech rep advanced Hargray’s planned service call from “next Wednesday” to “this afternoon.” A four-day advance.

The service man came, took out the old and put in a new modem. After going outside and making a phone call to some Hargray site ( I don’t understand why he went out. I wasn’t going to appropriate the secret code or whatever.) everything clicked and service was restored. 

At Best Buy, the RETURNS clerk told me she knew about Hargray’s position and it prevailed all around Bluffton and Hilton Head Island. She did not know why the sales clerks didn’t know all this and dissuade Hargray customers from buying modems in the first place. 

So ends the saga of the first aggravation of the New Year, 2016. 

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Peanut butter dripped on my shirt

I was still coming down from a non-alcoholic high on Friday morning. The final play of the Thursday Night Football game resulted in a 27-23 win for my beloved Green Bay Packers over the Detroit Lions. It wasn’t difficult to get started for the day, especially after I watched a video of the final play a couple of times and then learned that this Hail Mary pass into the end zone is somethting the Packers practice. Who knew? I would not be surprised to learn all teams practice it.

Buttressed by coffee, toast, the obligatory shower and shave, clean underwear and I was off to the Hilton Head World Affairs Council held in the Presbyteriaan Church to hear a woman who specializes on Middle East affairs, Ellen Laipson. (Click on her name to view her credentials).

Ms. Laipson gave an informative overview of how the Middle East was formed after World War I and how events are playing out in the present. There is so much in the news these days about the Middle East it is helpful to sit back and have an overview presented succintly. Ms. Laipson doesn’t have any “solutions” to the problems posed by the area today and in the immediate future. "If she did,” I told a friend, “she would not be in Hilton Head speaking to more than 300 seniors.” In my opinion there isn’t any one “solution” to the challenges the world faces in the Middle East. But we ( the inhabitants of the planet Earth) go on anyway.

I did a little shopping on the way home. It was past noon when i unloaded the groceries and realized I needed something to eat. I put two slices of cinnamon raisin bread in the toaster and poured a glass of ice tea. When the toast popped I lathered it with peanut butter and carried my snack to my favorite chair where I picked up the current issue of The New York Review of Books to continue reading “Hanging Out With Hitler,” a review of three books by Martin Filler. None of these made me wish I could hang out with that evil man. I belong to the group that wishes I could have been present at Hitler’s birth so I could strangle him as he came out of the womb instead of the mid-wife slapping his arse to make him cry out.

And then I looked down at my blue striped dress shirt and saw a large gob of melted peanut butter still rolling and coming to a stop at the third button from the neck. Heat from the toasted bread was the culprit. It liquidfied the peanut butter. To paraphrase Jimmy Carter I won’t lie to you. I used the index finger of my right hand to scoop the peanut butter off my shirt and popped it in my mouth.

Later in the evenng, I watched  a fine movie written, directed and starring one of my current favorite actors, Kevin Spacey. “Beyond the Sea”, a fantasy telling of the life of Bobby Darin. Spacey used his own voice to sing the songs and had Darin’s moves down pat. It is available on Amazon Prime for free viewing or can be purchased on Amazon. 

After that, I took off the shirt and tossed it the laundry hamper. 

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