By the time I had walked ten minutes...

one of my knees was aching, so I had to head back.  I'd wanted go to out 15 minutes and back the same amount.  But I'll take what I can get.  Even in the cool morning air, I'm sweating more (I almost typed swearing more, which would be true this morning as I cursed the pain in my knee) than I was and I can see the cummulative effect of losing days to rest, recuperation and class.  So I'll be leaving an earlier wake-up call on class mornings, so I can walk.

We have our first quiz in class on Friday, but I took it already during the first class session...basically because I was being a smart-ass.  I can re-take it if I want to, but I scored 93%, which is good enough.  I don't have any aspirations to set any records with a perfect course score or anything like that.  I just want a score above 90%.

One of the nail salons I walk past on these walks has two new neon signs in their windows.  "Permanent Makeup" is one sign and "Eyelash Extensions" is the other.  I remember there being a fad of permanent makeup back in the 80s or 90s, where women were going out, and getting their made-up face sort of tattooed on, so it would always be there with no effort.  Sounded painful and way too permanent.  Not to mention that then the husband looks like shit in the morning when he wakes up, but she looks perfect.  Could be stressful on the relationship.

With South Korea earning the title of men's make-up capital of the world, and men there spending half a billion on cosmetics last year, maybe the time has come for people in the dating world to come with "truth-in-advertising" labels (forgive me if I've ranted about this before, I'm tired and can't remember all my prior morning blog entries.  Guys wear "power" t-shirts to hold in their guts, make-up, wigs or use "Touch of Grey" to hide their real hair color, so they aren't really any different any more from women wearing make-up, hair extensions, "act of God" bras that squeeze and hold up what otherwise would sag like all get out, Spanx and so on.  Maybe the key is for interweb dating sites to have photos of potential dates with no make-up, their real hair, and wearing only Speedo bottoms.  On second thought, no thanks.  I might accidentally see a page of that while surfing the web for other stuff.

Ever have a craving for something come on out of nowhere?  I had a friend who owned a bakery in the Silverlake area that closed a few years back.  She made the very best lemon squares ever.  They were advertised as "Lemon Sex" in the display case and eating one was close to orgasmic in the pleasure level generated.  Not there, but close.  Suddenly, as I was sitting here writing this I was hit by a craving for one.  Today's quest I guess.

I'm expecting a movie to arrive today via Netflix and while I'll watch it all the way through, I'm really only interested in one particular scene.  This one:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXTTXNZucIU

There's just something about the ultimate irony of Randall "Tex" Cobb saying "boy, usin' that Oriental martial bullshit's gonna get real expensive" and then using that very same type of "Oriental martial bullshit" to kick the crap out of Patrick Swayze. 

I've decided I'm going to help the Romney campaign.  I bought a can of athlete's mouth spray and mailed it to Romney campaign headquarters.   Given the frequency with which he manages to stick one or both of his feet in his mouth, it's clear he will end up suffering from athlete's mouth at some point, if he isn't already.  That will be my contribution.

He could hire me to keep him from putting his foot in his mouth, but unless he's willing to be fitted with an earwig so I could tell him what to say all day long, I don't think he'd be able to keep from saying stupid things.  Plus even with all of his money, I don't think he could pay me enough to keep him out of trouble.  I shudder to think about how the debates will go.  Fish in a barrel facing a shotgun probably have a better chance of surviving than Romney does once he's alone on stage with Obama and the moderator.

Lawyers for an obese prisoner in Ohio are trying to argue that his upcoming execution for the 1983 murder of a woman would end up making him suffer "severe psychological and physical pain" as well as "a torturous and lingering death".  They're also worried the execution gurney might not hold him.  I'm in favor of the death penalty on moral grounds, although I question the fiscal soundness.  It's much cheaper to lock away a convicted murderer for life without parole than it is to fight the endless appeals that go into a death penalty case.  Conversely, if there were swift and final resolution for death penalty offenses, and there could be an absolute certainty about the guilt of such individuals, perhaps the death penalty might become the deterrent it is intended to be.  Most criminals don't fear going to death row because they know they will likely outlive their death sentence and die from other causes while in prison.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has accused a Federal appeals court judge of lying about him in an attack on him.  Scalia cracks me up.  When asked what happens when the lingquistic analysis of a law conflicts with existing court decisions, he said that judges can't "reinvent the wheel, particularly if the precedent has been in place with a long time."  But when asked about Roe v Wade, that's a wrong decision and therefore should be overturned, even though it's a precedent

AIDS has been around for a long time now, and it is not the death sentence or stigmatizing condition it once was.  Unless you're in prison in Alabama or South Carolina.  Prisoners in one of those two state's prisons are segregated from the general prison population and not given opportunities for work-release or other rehabilitation programs that would allow them to transition back to a more normal life once they are released.  Now the ACLU is suing Alabama on behalf of those prisoners.  As long as they aren't having unprotected sex, what risk could they possibly pose?  Are they going to suddenly bleed all over the other prisoners?

A new study shows that military drinking is now a "crisis".  I saw first hand, over 25 years ago, the dangers of the heavy drinking that is commonplace among the members of the military.  It ruined a very close friend's life.  He had almost 16 years in the service and needed one more reenlistment to be able to retire.  He had a wife and kids, but they'd gone home to live with her mother while he wrestled with the demon of his alcoholism.  We'd already sent him to a "dry-out" facility once, and the service won't normally do that a second time for someone...but he was such a talented aircraft mechanic/crew chief, that the commander went to his higher level commander and fought to get him one more chance.  When he rreturned from his second 28 days of drying-out, he was told that was it and his next transgression would be his last.

So when we had a mission deploying to Las Vegas, he was selected to go, since his plane was the one going.  I tried to convince the powers that be that sending him to Vegas so soon after rehab was a bad idea, but no one would listen.  He showed up for work drunk, drove his stepvan into the engine of his C-130, causing tens of thousands of dollars of damage and that was his career.  Four years short of retirement, he left the service, with a valuable skill, no wife, no more access to his kids, and I have no idea what happened to him.  I suspect he drank himself to death.  So I don't need to hear a new study to tell me that military drinking is at a "crisis" stage.  No, one alcoholic doesn't a crisis make, but he's just one of many examples I saw during ten years of service.

Colin Powell, in his autobiography "An American Journey" wrote about his time as a brigade commander while at Fort Campbell, KY with the 101st Airborne Division.  He was concerned about the growing number of DUI incidents among his officers and so he put the Officer's Club off-limits to them.  He figured the way he could best help his officers was to prevent them from doing something that could ruin their careers.  His higher-ups ordered him to lift his ban, because it was bad for business at the Officer's Club.  So it's more important to let the officers drink, get drunk and possibly ruin their career with a DUI so the Club will be in the black.

Let me illustrate this another way.  The evaluations that are done of officers are critical to their career advancement.  The higher level the "endorsements", the better.  At every base I was ever stationed with, when sending an officer evaluation up the chain for a higher level endorsement, it was required to include a cover sheet with information about the officer who was being evaluated.  One of the factoids that you had to provide was whether or not the officer belonged to the local Officer's Club (membership is technically voluntary).  In every case, the higher ranking officers would refuse to endorse an evaluation where the officer in question was NOT a member of the Officer's Club.  So much for voluntary membership.  They were expected to join and expected to spend money there, which means drinking. 

OMG.  They are going to bring the awful TV show "Manimal" to the big screen.  Why?  What were you thinking?  Some ideas are just bad and there's no need to reimagine them.  This is one.  Watch this thing fail in a major way.