Carnival Royale

When you write a blog like this you need some time for relaxation...a little escape, but sometimes it can feel like incarceration.

Walking into the dark trailer from the bright sunlight temporarily blinded me. The man in the sport jacket over a turtle neck in 85 degree weather, who had his hand firmly clasped around my wrist, had no problem for the dark sunglasses helped him make the transition easily. The character of Oddjob flashed through my mind as he fit the description complete with a bowler hat on top of his head. I was a little bit disoriented and tried to focus on where I was. There were small television monitors across the one wall and a man sitting in front of them who motioned for me to sit down on a wooden chair directly below the glare of a floor lamp with a flexible goose neck. At least it was cool in the trailer so I took a couple of deep breaths before complaining, "Whats all this about?" He ignored my question and said "Tell me, are you a very good gambler...or just a very lucky one. Or is it maybe something else?"  "I hardly call it gambling" I said, and he responded "Well, I guess that I shouldn't either for you seem to win all the time, not much gambling in that." "So that's why you brought me here. I win a lot?" "That's right," he glanced over at my winnings which the apparent security detective laid on the table in front of me and continued. "Is it mathematical equations?  Nah, it can't be that, or are you some sort of magician?" "Look" I said brusquely, getting increasingly angry, "My wife must be out there looking for me." I paused to catch my breath and continued, "I pulled five bucks out of my pocket and if I had lost that I would be home by now." "Five bucks? You expect me to believe that you raked in that haul from five bucks?" "Yeah! I'm not going to waste more than five bucks in a dump like this!" With this Oddjob pushed me back into my seat and his friend said "We take a lot of pride in our work. We run a first class operation. A lot of people have a good time, we make a small profit, that is until someone like you comes around." "I have to find my wife." I said. "She must be getting worried by now." My interrogator was heavy set and bald. He began scanning the monitors on the wall. "Look at these screens. do you see her anywhere?" I pulled up closer to the monitors. She wasn't by the merry-go-round, or the caterpillar....or the french fry stand. "There she is. Look...she's looking all around....by the cotton candy booth" Curly, for lack of a better name, looked at Oddjob and said "Go get her. Tell her that we just have few questions for her husband." He looked at me "OK now?" I settled down "Make it fast." He got up from the desk and walked over and picked up Snoopy. It was a good three feet tall, white and fluffy, with a perfect likeness of Charlie Brown's dog. I fidgeted, for the tips of his fingers had nicotine stains. "Please keep your hands of my Snoopy." He set it down and pointed to each one of the stuffed Snoopys "One, two, three, four, five...and six...six huggable, squeezable Snoopys...all won on a game that, mathematically speaking, shouldn't give a winner more than once every other day..." I was getting more irritated and stood up "Look...I tossed the ball and it rolled into the red cup..." He met me face to face "Six Snoopys on five bucks... three balls a buck, that's 16 balls." Oddjob, who had returned, interrupted, "15 balls boss." "Fifteen balls... do you think I was born yesterday?" I didn't back down and shouted myself, in spite of the aroma of sauerkraut...very bad sauerkraut, coming from his flaming nostrils. "Look, there's 576 cups on that board...thirty of them are yellow, 16 are blue and one, in the center, is red!  I just happened to toss fifteen wiffle balls and six of them rolled into the red cup!" He backed away "And I suppose you think that a jury will believe that?" "A jury?" I gasped. "This is a travelling street fair...and I won six Snoopy dolls....are you crazy?" "Crazy?  Each one of those Snoopy dolls are worth thirty bucks! You walk off with a hundred and fifty bucks of my merchandise and..." Oddjob interrupted "A hundred and eighty bucks boss" "I don't care, a hundred and fifty bucks, a hundred and eighty bucks. I want to know how you did it?"  "I told you....I rolled the little white wiffle balls and..." He interrupted again and grabbed a cellphone from his shirt pocket...putting it right into my face "You want me to call homicide?" Oddjob looked at him "Homicide...boss?" "Homicide, Vice, Immigration...whatever. You come into my house and rattle off how may blue and yellow cups.... I don't even know those numbers!  You cased this place and I want answers!" I grabbed the phone out of his hand "I'll call the police! You can't pull me in here and give me the fifth degree because I rolled six little white wiffle balls into a red cup!" "One red cup" he shouted "out of six hundred and fifty two cups." Oddjob corrected him "576 boss" "I don't care how many cups are out there. What did you do...guide that wiffle ball into the red cup with some kind of remote control or satellite?" He stopped abruptly and his eyes widened.  "Do you have an iPhone? You do, you have an iPhone!"  he demanded. "Its an app...isn't it? You guided those balls with an iPhone app!" "Yes I do have an iPhone. Oh Look! Here it is"  I said as I took it off my belt. " Lets see.... nine...one...one..." He grabbed the phone out of my hand and began jabbing on the screen all over with his finger, hoping to stop the phone call. Oddjob took it and tapped once to end the call.  Curly ran his fingers over his scalp as if expecting to find hair and paced around for a minute or two. "Look. OK. You got me on this one. Tell you what...I'll give you three hundred smackers just to tell me how you did it." "I told you already. I just rolled the little wiffle..." He had had enough of my explanation and pushed me aside as he opened the door of the trailer. The bright sunlight invaded our space and I covered my eyes but not before I could see that he had no hair at all...absolutely none, and a very reddish complexion. "You can leave now...mister. But I'm warning you. By dawn I'll have your picture spread to every carnival...five counties wide... each direction! You stay away from Roll The Ball!" I didn't say anything. I just grabbed my Snoopys one by one and walked out. My wife threw her arms around me and helped me by carrying three Snoopys. As we were walking out of the street carnival, I turned and walked back over to the Roll A Ball. There were half a dozen kids and their parents standing by the rail, waiting to buy balls. I hoped Curly, or should I call him Goldfinger, was watching on his monitors. I started giving away the Snoopys to the kids. They were excited beyond belief and they and their families walked away, holding their prize for the night. I looked up and saw a camera pointing at me from a pole. I saluted into it and my wife and I walked off hand in hand.

There is only a grain of truth in this story. I did go to our local street carnival and bought a peanut covered caramel apple and spent a little bit of time at the Roll A Ball.  Watching the kids faces is the real joy, especially since it seems that it was not that long ago that our son was rolling the ball. Today he's a lawyer who could have been called if this scenario had taken place. I did count the colored cups and spent some time trying to figure out just how to land that wiffle ball in the center cup.

Take The Grapefruit Test

I'm a person of habits....to an alarming degree. I would never put my right boot on first! What kind of crazy lunatic would do that? I was in a quandary the other day after work. My routine is to take my seat behind the wheel and peel an orange while offering some thoughts of thanksgiving after the days work. I enjoy an orange every day on my ride home. This particular day, Wednesday I believe it was, I reached in my bag only to find a grapefruit! I had mistaken the orange...orange, for the orange grapefruit in the fridge. What to do? Do I drive for twenty minutes in disarray having no orange slices to put in my mouth.....or do I peel the grapefruit and put the grapefruit slices in my mouth? I opt for the latter for both oranges and grapefruits are citrus fruits.  Technically I was in keeping with my habit but my face was contorted, and eyes watering the entire trip home. Are you a person of habits also. You may have gone to this particular church you belong to for so long that every hymnbook in the sanctuary must have your DNA on it.  You sit in this certain pew and say hello to these six people and give a thirteen word statement about the weather to the pastor on the way out every week. What kind of lunatic would, short of excommunication, go to another church when everything is so.....non-threatening? What I am insinuating here is that you MAY need to look for another church. Try this test. Take a Tupperware container of grapefruit slices to church with you and eat one every time our redemption through the blood of Christ is mentioned. If you leave with a full container it may be time to reassess your church membership. If someone calls for the EMTs during the service....well, as Roseanne Rosannadanna would say..."Never Mind."

Steve Forbes On The IMF (International Monetary Fund

Steve Forbes is one of the few of the ultra-rich in our society that I feel a camaraderie with. He ran for President twice (1996 and 2000) and is a Conservative. I have the latest Fortune and Forbes magazines before me. I open the former with a healthy dose of caution but look forward to the latter knowing that it actually encourages responsibility to society in fiscal decisions. It's Forbes' editorial in this latest issue that I want to write about. Titled Immolate The IMF, Forbes writes as if addressing Everyman of whom I am a part of. He begins with "What is the IMF.....and do we need it?", and proceeds to give a summary of the organization which most recently made headlines with the arrest of its then chief, Dominique Strauss-Kahn. I'd like to pass his summary on to you. He writes, "It possesses some $375 billion in assets, including 90 million ounces of gold. Most of the money came from you, the American taxpayer." Beginning his story with "Once upon a time" he describes the International Monetary Fund as having a purpose when it was created "in the waning days of World War II." It was to "undergird the new postwar international monetary system" where "the dollar was fixed to gold" and "other countries tied their currencies to the greenback at a fixed rate." It was created to give "emergency short term loans...to give them (struggling countries) breathing space." According to Forbes, it worked very well for a time, then in the early 70s, the United States was "beguiled by false economic nostrums" and nixed the fixed exchange rates. "Did the IMF close shop" asked Forbes, now that it wasn't needed. No, it "reinvented itself as a "global economic doctor." that would "cure all the (world's) country's economic woes." It could now "impose draconian measures on wayward borrowers" while the banks profited while avoiding blame for those measures. It was "Keynesianism on steroids" and "perpetuated poverty for its patients." Fortunately for us, Ronald Reagan came along and the U.S. economy "boomed" and other nations of the world "started to engage in more free-market economics." The result was that the IMF "had nothing to do." and "fewer and fewer countries on which to ply its poisons." Alas, "then came the economic crisis and the IMF  was back in business" and is "peddling austerity without the necessary companion policies that engender growth." Steve Forbes' conclusion is to "shut it down" and "distribute the booty back to those who put it in in the first place" of which "Uncle Sam would ultimately collect more than $70 billion." South Carolina Senator Jim Demint, who is my choice to become our next President in January of 2013 (should God permit us to last that long as a Constitutional Republic) locked horns with Barack Obama on this last year and wrote "The International Monetary Fund board has approved a $40 billion bailout for Greece, almost one year after the Senate rejected my amendment to prohibit the IMF from using taxpayer money to bailout foreign countries." He continued in describing how various accounting methods were going to be used to "hide the bailout from Americans already angry with the $700 billion bank bailout," and also wrote "America can't afford to bail out foreign countries with borrowed dollars from China and certainly shouldn't allow state sponsors of terror a hand in that process." Thomas Sowell wrote as early as 2003 "More and more economists and others have begun to complain that the policies which the international donor agencies like the IMF  have imposed on various poor countries around the world, using the leverage of foreign aid money, have made matters worse instead of better." This issue is still simmering and back on the front burner as President Obama, earlier this month, said in a speech concerning Greece, "We have pledged to cooperate fully in working through issues both on a bilateral basis but also through international and financial instituions like the IMF."

http://www.conservatives4demint.com/
http://www.tsowell.com/

In Due Time

It was the winter of 1959 in Buffalo, New York. There was just enough light to put the ice skates on and whack the homemade puck around for a little while on the toddler's play area turned hockey rink but no one had shown up. The snowflakes falling were large...I remember that. All dressed up, or bundled up, and no where to go, so to speak. A few feet away from the chain-link fence was (and still is today) a small hill, maybe six feet high at the most, where I once, in summertime, was riding my bike home with groceries on the handlebars and hit a rock or something on that hill and crashed but survived, shaken but unhurt. A tree was growing beside the path worn by bike riders and all the leaves were long gone, the branches covered by a blanket of snow. I climbed up that tree and peered off to the north and the south etc., as a seaman in a crows nest would. I contemplated life and the beauty of the snowfall and the desolate fields behind the Airport Plaza. My parents had separated and there wasn't much money. With no siblings or father at home, and my mother working hard, all I had was the silver screen and television to show me what life was about. Sometimes it was about patriotism and courage for it could not have been too long since I watched Fess Parker gaze off over the Texas landscape as his friend Georgie Russell strummed that ballad Farewell the night before the Mexicans overran the Alamo. Life was gay (not as used today) as Fred and Ginger would glide across the screen. Life was dramatic as I watched Robert Ryan dig for gold on his own farm when he should have been farming it. I didn't come close to understanding that movie-God's Little Acre! Life was funny as Lou Costello was constantly getting he and Bud Abbot in trouble. And life was this curious thing called romance. Life was black and white, heroes and villains, good and bad. I had no idea what I wanted to do in this life. I stumbled around in the confusion of unmentored youth until I joined the army then marched around in the confusion of unmentored young adulthood. I married a wonderful young lady (I still can't figure that one out either) and stumbled around a little bit more before God said "I will have mercy on that one." I will never figure that out until He tells me Himself. And then a son came. I only had one bit of wisdom from my past for what was within my scope of raising him; whatever I did in youth, have him do the opposite. The television was stored in the basement for nine years and he recently graduated with honors from law school. Now its time to turn attention back to myself. Lets see...what do I want to do in life? Besides work in a coal-fired power plant and write a blog that is. Well, I guess that is, what it is, and it is good..., maybe not the blog, but God's plan. I sat down tonight to write to the youth and this came out. By the way, don't pass this on to anyone, it's kind of embarrassing, but to those youth, should any read this, one piece of advice: your scope of knowledge is greatly limited right now and you are a source of income to those who would readily sell you as a fish at Wholey's Market on our strip! Examine the issues of the day, indeed-search for truth but burn no bridges until you see Christ's imprint on every page of Scripture. Hold fast, dig in, establish a perimeter and keep watch. None other than Jesus Christ commands this army. Supplies will always be there and reinforcements when necessary. No military victory any mortal army ever achieved will compare to when Christ returns with His holy angels. Trust in Him and not yourself for He has joys unspeakable to share with you...in due time!