Apr282011

Birther defect

By John Robinson | April 28, 2011 | Posted in Columns | Tagged | Comments (4)
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My political future came to an abrupt end yesterday when President Barack H. Obama (the “H” stands for, “he’s not like us!”) released his long-doubted birth certificate and screwed me over pretty completely.

It’s not that I made my political bones on alleging “BHO” (as they call him on the blogs where they want to emphasize his “otherness”) was unentitled to run for the office of President of the United States because he wasn’t born in Hawaii, as he said, but rather in Nigeria or Kenya or the planet Tatooine as Sarah Palin and Donald Trump and Emperor Palpatine seemed to allege. It’s because the man actually quit standing on principles such as “read the bottom line of this here document I gave you where it says it’s satisfactory evidence that I was born here, even for knuckledraggers like yourselves, and I’m talking to you, Roger Ailes,” and actually went to the bother of getting the State of Hawaii (“Hawaii” stands for, “don’t hate us because you can’t be from here too”) to waive its rules and give him two actual copies of his actual birth certificate, rather than the copy he’d been showing all along, which is all any ordinary resident could have gotten. (I’m sure we’ll hear next about the abuse of Presidential powers obvious in the way strings were pulled and arms were twisted Richard Daley style to get him this special “favor”.)

So because of what Barack H. Obama (H: “He’s a muslim! It says so right on his secret bir– d’oh!”) did, waffling on core values like “are you serious?” and once again doing the easy political thing, he screwed me and my quest for higher office. Now I can never be President.

I don’t have a birth certificate.

I have a passport. I have a driver’s license and pilot’s license and a boating license and a ham radio license and a commercial radio license and a Social Security card – not that it will be worth much of anything by the time I’m supposed to collect, but dealing with that little problem is apparently less important than proving the President isn’t a sleeper agent of the Somali pirates – and I have credit cards and property. And somewhere, I’m told, there’s a baptism certificate with my name on it, and probably even a hospital record up at Dartmouth denoting that someone actually paid some bills resulting from my nativity there several Novembers back.

But no birth certificate. I don’t really know for sure why. It has something to do with ice dams in the Connecticut River and flood waters in the town hall of Woodstock, Vermont and a lot of things getting ruined, and therefore a whole generation of children registered in Woodstock now on the brink of ineligibility to win electoral votes from the state of Arizona. Exactly why a baby born in Hanover, New Hampshire had a birth certificate filed in Woodstock, Vermont where it could be flooded and lost has never been clearly explained to me, but that’s my story and I’m sticking to it, and I always figured if it ever became an issue, then Glenn Beck would sort it all out for me, but now that he’s being laughed out of Fox News – no small feat considering what they can say with a straight face over there, such as “the President is an iguana!” – I guess I’m on my own.

Which means, I’m screwed. Now I’m not only at risk of losing Arizona’s electoral votes, I’m at risk of deportation if I’m ever stopped jaywalking there. After all, if the birth certificate that was good enough for everyone else in the world wasn’t good enough for Barack Hussein Obama’s foes (“Hussein” stands for “Saddam”), then my mere passport will mean nothing to some vigilantes along the Great Wall of Tuscon since it was issued based on inadequate proof and explained by a dubious story and attested to by some church. So thanks for the hope and change there, Mister I Guess You Can Be President Now. For a guy from Hawaii, you sure play the Chicago game well.

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By John Robinson | Posted in Columns | Tagged | Comments (4)
Apr142011

Skipwaves

By John Robinson | April 14, 2011 | Posted in Columns | Tagged | Comment (1)

Glorified and sanctified be God’s great name throughout the world which He has created according to His will. May He establish His kingdom in your lifetime and during your days, and within the life of the entire House of Israel, speedily and soon; and say, Amen.

May His great name be blessed forever and to all eternity.

Blessed and praised, glorified and exalted, extolled and honored, adored and lauded be the name of the Holy One, blessed be He, beyond all the blessings and hymns, praises and consolations that are ever spoken in the world; and say, Amen.

May there be abundant peace from heaven, and life, for us and for all Israel; and say, Amen.

He who creates peace in His celestial heights, may He create peace for us and for all Israel; and say, Amen.

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Apr072011

Self-liking

By John Robinson | April 7, 2011 | Posted in Around Town, Columns | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)
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If you follow this website on Facebook (news flash: you can follow this site on Facebook!), you may have seen about 30 columns by me this week. Fortunately, they were all posted on Facebook together sometime on Monday. I should have counted just how many there were as I diligently went from story to story “liking” each one, but I lost count. My fingers were getting sore.

They tell me I have arthritis. They haven’t managed to tell me why I have arthritis in only one knee, and why it came on suddenly while I was skritching a dog in a bicycle shop a few weeks ago. And they haven’t told me why arthritis feels like something is floating around in my knee and making it feel like it’s about to collapse.

But if I have arthritis in my knee, maybe I have it in my fingers too, which would explain why “liking” posts of my own stories made the aforementioned fingers ache. If so, that would suck, being as how I’m a writer and all, and you kind of need your fingers for that.

As it turns out, I’ve been typing just slightly less long than I’ve been walking. Touch-typing was a required course in ninth grade. We learned on a row of manual typewriters with painted-out keys. We groused because we could not envision why we’d ever need to type. Even then the affluent scions with whom I attended school were pretty clear on the fact that they’d have secretaries to take down their dictation.

The typing teacher tried to tell them that they would need a typist’s skills in high school and college first, but most of them disagreed. They figured they’d just hire whatever skills they might find they needed. They probably did too. We didn’t wind up in the same high schools or colleges.

As for me, I picked up typing mostly because it helped when I played with computers. Most of the other kids didn’t see why they’d ever need to use one of those either, since these were the days when computers occupied temples tended by acolytes in white short-sleeve shirts with pocket protecters full of transparent Bic ballpoint pens with different-colored caps, to whom you passed your programs in the form of a stack of punched cards, which they would then offer into one end of the machine for it to sort along its length until another card came out at the end, supposedly the results of your computation, or at least something you could identify.

Or you could just use the teletype instead. If you could type, that is. They charged for teletype time by the minute, so hunting and pecking was disincentivized. It turned out time really was money, especially when you used it to think instead of punch keys.

I picked up walking sometime before ninth grade, probably eleven or twelve years, but enough years have passed since that those two landmarks are closer to each other than the nearest is to now. I kind of dwell on that, I know, because it amazes me. I know where the time went so I don’t have to ask, but I just didn’t realize there was so much of it.

So anyway, in the past few weeks I’ve begun to lose the ability to walk – at least, without pain. The doctor says it’s too soon to think about artificial joints. He also says that my demographic – forty/fifty-something males – have the hardest knees to treat. Delightful.

So anyway, I was pondering that infelicity and resting my knees whilst liking my old posts. They were coming up on Facebook because Steve Young (news flash: Steve Young runs this site) had deleted them all. He did that when he was trying to clean up the mischief inflicted by some Russian hackers who attacked the site while he was also grappling with a (pun alert!) mudslide of traffic about ice cream sundaes due to something on Google about local senior citizens. Or something like that. I might not have read his explanation very well. It turns out that my eyes are starting to fail me too. Nature sucks.

I understand all the old stories are back on line again, which is nice for permanence of it all – after all, Steve likes to say, “online is forever,” so I guess today it’s more perpetual to live on in a web server with a good backup policy than in a hardcover book. It’s a lot easier to achieve too, and that’s actually somewhat comforting to sore fingers and crumbly knees.

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Mar312011

Iron knee

By John Robinson | March 31, 2011 | Posted in Around Town | Tagged , , | Comments (6)
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As I was finishing this last night the weather forecast for today in Manchester was for snow, with a winter storm watch for tonight into Friday. WBZ radio in Boston was already cranking up the hype machine with forecasts for ten inches of snow, but they were being less than specific about where – a good thing because on their own website, the forecast map was anticipating between zero and two inches down in The Hub of The Universe.

There’s a blog on their website too. Every so often one of the WBZ television meteorologists puts up some thoughts about the forecast and whether it proves or disproves the theory of anthropogenic global warming, the accuracy of the Old Farmer’s Almanac, or the leading computer models, and then all hell breaks lose.

Readers post comments. It’s absurd. They argue about the forecasts. They post their own predictions. They ascribe malicious motives to people who post forecasts that don’t agree with their own. They actually accuse each other of wanting snow or not, as though their desires actually influenced the weather.

They call each other names. They use fake names to hide their identities. They use fake names to pretend to be each other. They argue about which post by people with the same name is actually from the real person with that name and which ones are the fakes. They don’t consider that all the posts could be fakes, or that all the posts could be the real person messing with them. They analyze spelling and sentence construction to determine who’s writing which posts about the weather, and who’s having their posts written by someone else for them.

They wish posters they don’t like would go post somewhere else. They complain that the same posters are posting everywhere. They threaten to go to post on another blog until someone they don’t like leaves the blog they do. They never actually leave, they just complain that the blog isn’t what it used to be when it was only themselves and the people they like posting. And when the posts were about the same weather they like. And not about the weather they don’t. The forecast for today, for example. It’s calling for snow – ten inches of it, somewhere in New England, on April Fool’s Day. Isn’t it ironic?

Locally, though, there’s also a winter weather advisory for Litchfield. Our house in on the Litchfield-running side of town, but we’re still technically within the region covered by the weather service office in Gray, Maine, whereas Litchfield and Manchester are served by Taunton, Massachusetts. And although it’s probably a coincidence, Londonderry seems to be right under the line on the snowfall maps where the predictions of three to six inches abuts the swatch of six or more, presumably up to at least ten.

So one last time this winter, we hope, we’re grappling with the Big Question of Life, which is whether or not there will be school on Friday. On the one hand, the girls would like a three-day weekend. On the other, they’d like summer vacation to start before the end of June too. The irony here is that they both want time off from school, they just can’t decide whether they want it now or later – as if it mattered to the weather what they want – so I guess whichever way it goes will be a win and a loss for them, but either way Friday morning will bring some degree of disagreement.

Irony is fun stuff. Irony is what you get when you cancel school and it rains instead of snows, and everyone hates you; then you have school because the snow is supposed to turn to rain but it doesn’t, and everyone hates you; or you get it right and it snows and you keep the kids off the road and everyone hates you anyway.

Irony is a forecast for snow on April Fool’s Day that turns out to be wrong and it’s funny, or it turns out to be right and it’s funny. Irony is the fact that we focus more on the forecast than the storm, and as soon as one storm passes, we start looking forward to loathing the next. And that just when we figured there won’t be more storms this winter, we get one on baseball’s opening day, just less than a week after I bought a bicycle to help myself get over the fact that I hurt my iron knee in a bike shop, after a test ride of a bike I was thinking of getting myself as a reward for having lost a hundred pounds. I didn’t hurt it in the ride; I didn’t even hurt it when I was nearly half again my present size; I hurt it kneeling down to pet the shopkeeper’s dog.

Lose weight, exercise, cut your hair and shave, and wind up on crutches anyway. They did an MRI this week. I get the results next week. Assuming we’re dug out by then, because I wouldn’t want to hurt myself slipping and falling on ice and snow on the way to the doctor’s office. That would be irony too.

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Mar242011

Echoes of Galveston

By John Robinson | March 24, 2011 | Posted in Columns | Tagged | Comments (0)

Seriously, Tupelo’s? I post a reply a week ago about how I actually bought tickets to see Al Stewart at your place, and you know that beer will be involved, so it’s a win-win for you and me both. Then today you announce that you invited back Tom Rush? Whom I wrote about a year ago and yet I didn’t get any complementary tickets? Beer would have been involved then too. It still could be. Seriously.

Maybe you missed it it last year. So let’s try that again, shall we?  Seriously.

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So I see on this website that Tom Rush is playing Tupelo’s in December. I heard him play on my first night of college. The City of Boston had, I guess, a summer entertainment program called “Summerthing,” and Rush was the last act for the summer of 1975.

He played at the Hatch Shell, where the Boston Pops do the Fourth of July, but back then only a few thousand people showed up for Independence Day. So I suppose the organizers were a little surprised when tens of thousands of college kids packed the Charles River Esplanade on Labor Day weekend to hear Tom Rush. It was a happy evening.

Please note that I didn’t say I saw Tom Rush. I have a memory of a speck of light beyond an ocean of heads, but it contained nothing discernible. I remember the beer – the drinking age was still 18 then, and if you were a college freshman you were presumed to be legal, even though I still had two months and a week to go. And I remember the chorus of a song that I learned about thirty years later was called “Galveston Flood,” booming over the river, the grass, and — it seemed — the whole city with the the deep resonance of electronic amplification and thousands of voices singing along:

“Wasn’t it a mighty storm?
Blew all the people away.”

I didn’t say it was a happy song. I said it was a happy experience.

This thought came to mind on Tuesday, the same day that I reported on a story about the University of New Hampshire inviting back members of its Class of 1970 to mark the year the students went on strike and closed the school three weeks early. There had also been a story on the radio about how Boston University had canceled its 1970 commencement due to campus unrest. You see, that was the year of Kent State and the height of the Vietnam protests, so close in time to Martin and Bobby that the wounds were still tender, and so soon after Woodstock that young adults actually believed that love and music could change the world.

Silly them.

We were largely over those illusions as we entered the class of 1979, although we would become the seniors who walked picket lines with our professors as they closed out the decade with a strike of their own… interesting bookends. And we’re so much beyond it 40 years later that we can’t even imagine how our older brothers and sisters could have believed they could end a war by boycotting their classrooms. How quaint.

Then I started thinking about time and the way we understand it. Starting college you think of the world existing in the window of time you’re alive. A few years later you feel that your lifetime is just a small window of the world. And if you don’t watch out, you gain a perspective on where in time events exist, and you grow new insights into moments that were when you weren’t thinking about moments at all.

So Tom Rush played Summerthing in Boston on Labor Day weekend, 1975. That year was closer in time to Woodstock than we are to the Millennium. It was closer to the Second World War than we now are to that weekend itself. And just about everything that happened in most of our lives, the things that defined who we have been and are today, all happened since the echoes faded across the Back Bay and Cambridge.

So I see Tom Rush is playing Tupelo’s. More’s the surprise that Tom Rush is still alive. No disrespect if you ever see this, Tom (and somehow I suspect that you will), but when I was 17 and starting college, any performer on a stage seemed a fair bit older than me, if only because I was just an incoming freshman and they were already on stage. So much has happened since then — babies born, parents died, careers made and changed, storms blown through, landmarks pulled down — that you learn to expect that the mileposts you once recognized will not be there anymore. The expectation of change is the first defense against loss.

But play “Galveston Flood” anyway, Tom. Dedicate it to water under the bridge and over the levies, to spilt oil in the salt marshes and ice storms in New England, birthdays and deathdays and triumphs and disasters. Sometimes songs are less about the words and music than everything that happens from the first time you hear it to the next. Tramps like us were born to run, and it’s surely been a mighty storm.

Oh, and send me some free passes.

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Mar172011

Sporting interests

By John Robinson | March 17, 2011 | Posted in Columns | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)
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I love the Londonderry High School Lady Lancers basketball team. Every blessed, talented one of them. Although to my knowledge I’ve never met any of them, and I don’t know the first thing about basketball, except that the team with the most points at the end of the game, wins.

That’s not always true, of course. When I was 13 and learning to program computers, I taught one to score a sailing meet. You got something like three quarters of a point for winning, two points for finishing second, and so on and so on. I got the idea from my uncle, who had taught the very same computer to figure out who won a ski meet, which turned out to be a much more complex challenge involving ski-down-hills, ski-off-jumps, and run-with-skis-on events, and which used to take coaches longer than the meet itself to figure out by hand.

Whereas, in a sailing regatta, you could pretty much figure out who won in your head while you walked from the lake to the teletype to key all the data into the computer. But hey, I was young.

Back to the dribblin’ Lady Lancers. They went 16-2 this year and finished second in the standings to Winnacunnet, to whom they also lost in the tournament finals. That’s a heck of a good record no matter how you look at it.

But that’s not why I love ‘em. In the week that the college “big dance” starts – or as I prefer to think of it, the final tryouts for the NBA – I think it’s fitting to give a shout out to women’s sports in general. I love them because the play the game in its purest form. They’re not obsessed with the flash and posing of the allegedly “professional” players, so they tend to be more focused on playing good that looking good. They harken back to the day when the game was about the sport rather than about the show – something that’s terribly lacking in the “elite college ranks” and just about banned from the NBA, which has about as much to do with the actual sport of basketball as has the WWE with wrestling.

And you don’t need me to tell you why. The fact that the top level of major sports are generally referred to as something like “the show” tells you everything you need to know. Sports has morphed from athletics to entertainment in a single generation, at the same time entertainment has grown increasingly coarse and outrageous. Sports stars and performing artists used to be polar opposites, but now they’re nearly indistinguishable. A really good player in any sport is, after all, a rock star.

Which brings us to the elephant in the room – the slobbering, snorting, stomping, snarling elephant in the room full of ceramic billion dollar stadia where people will actually pay $250 to stand outside and watch on TV while people inside play. Yes, ladies and germs, it’s time to ponder the National Football League and its hosing match with its players.

(And that fact that I can write that sentence without fazing you tells you all you need to know about that too. You accept without question that “the National Football League” is the owners, not the players. They used to call the people who owned baseball team “the lords of baseball” too, as though they owned the very sport itself. Which, I guess, they do – just as the NFL owns football as well.)

Now, I’ve never understood strikes all that well, especially strikes lead by people who refer to each other using titles bestowed upon them by the businesses they are trying to cripple – for example, airline employees named “Captain Cunningham implementing the shutdown of American Airlines.” So I don’t really get it when “All Pro Quarterback Drew Brees” becomes half-responsible for shutting down Professional Football. I’m a supporter of unions in general, but mainly those unions that work constructively with their fellow stakeholders rather than trying to gouge them. Hello, ex-NFLPA, take a lesson from your union brothers and sisters who actually work for a living.

Put those together – the coarsening of the game and the selfishness of all the principals – and I just don’t care if the NFL owners and players manage to immolate themselves into a fall without (NFL) football. About the only sporting interest I still have is in seeing just how much each side is willing to hurt themselves in the hope of hurting the other worse. None of them seem to care how much they hurt their customers in the process – not even the few fans who are still rich enough to afford to sit inside the stadium.

So if there’s no (pro) football come this fall, I’ll be okay with that. There are other things to do, even other levels of sports to watch. Particularly the ladies’ sports. They’re truer to the essence of the game.

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