Month: November 1998

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Home Taping is Now Legal!

I don’t have a CD player in my truck so in order to listen to my favourite CDs, I have to copy them onto cassette tapes. Is that legal? We don’t really know for sure, do we? Music publishers used to try to tell us that it was not legal, but I think they’ve given up. Everybody does it.

It’s not just that everybody does it, though. Music publishers, like software publishers, have been trying to convince us for years that when you buy their products, you are not buying the physical disk on which the product is shipped, and which you would then be free to copy. You are buying the right to use their intellectual property (if you could call the Spice Girls “intellectual property”). If you were only buying the disk, you could make as many copies as you want. But if not, then you certainly have the right to use their intellectual property in your car or wherever you want. Nobody says, “you can buy this new Spice Girls CD– but you can only listen to it when you’re in your house.”

Think of all the people you know with stereos and cassette decks. How many of them, that you know of, are serving hard time right now? “Wha’dya in for, son?” “Err… home taping.”

Well, as of January 1, 1999, the music publishers, apparently, are going to agree with reality. That’s right. And you heard it here first.

You see, as of January 1, 1999, you will pay an extra 50 cents for every blank cassette tape that you buy in Canada, depending on length. That 50 cents will go to the legal body representing the music publishers and will be distributed to them, and, supposedly, to their composers and artists, as compensation.

Compensation for what? For home taping, you dummy!

Wait a minute– if I’m paying them for home-taping, then… gasp! That’s right. They are entering into an agreement with you, an implied contract, an exchange of money for services. And the service is none other than the right to copy music onto that cassette. No more guilt feelings! No more self-imposed restraint! Buy all the tape decks you want. Make as many copies as you want— after all, it’s not illegal anymore! You’re paying for it! It’s as simple as that. If you aren’t going to copy your CD’s, then what are you paying for? Nothing? You’re handing over your hard-earned dollars to the music publishing industry… just because you want to???

I want to thank the government and the recording industry for finally displaying some common sense. And for finally making good music available at a price we can all afford. For only about $.50 a cassette, plus the cost of the tape, we can now make all the copies we want.

I’m not positive, but it looks to me like you might even be able to sell those copies. Why not? You paid for it. The government and the music publishing industry have agreed on a “fair price”. They have agreed that 50 cents represents what it costs them when you copy one of their CDs onto your own tape. Okay. Fair enough. And the more tapes you buy, the more you pay. Since you’re paying for every tape, you should be able to make as many copies as you want! And since you’ve already paid for the music, you should be able to sell your copies to other people. I know it sounds naughty, but don’t worry: you’re paying for it!

There is a similar “tax” on CD’s used to record music in the U.S. and Canada. I find it really interesting that the same country that passes laws that allow handguns to be purchased by almost anybody, had decided that it should apply a special tax to every recordable CD sold just in case some people decide to make an illegal copy of something.

The NRA has an annual budget of $80,000,000.00. That’s almost as much as Mike Piazza makes in seven years. Don’t you wish you had $80,000,000.00?

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Motivational Posters

Those who preserve their integrity remain unshaken by the storms of daily life. They do not stir like leaves on a tree or follow the herd where it runs. In their mind remains the ideal attitude and conduct of living. This is not something given to them by others. It is their roots… it is a strength that exists deep within them.   Anonymous Native American.

They don’t tell you if that quote is from before or after the genocide.

Successories is a real company. It produces mind-numbing, vacuous color pictures, plaques, and pointless mementos with mind-numbing, vacuous, and pointless epigrams on burning issues like “Integrity”, “Courage”, “Determination”, “Imagination”. These things are supposed to be motivational. You’re sitting in your dark cubicle pecking away at your computer, clearing spam out of your e-mail, and trying to find some way to talk a rich client into splurging on some cosmetic enhancement of a product that doesn’t do anything useful, and you’re supposed to turn to the wall and read

Those who preserve their integrity remain unshaken by the the storms of daily life.

This 16″ by 30″ framed and double-matted picture cost your boss $209.95.

This company thinks you should “promote a culture which thrives on change, values innovation, and believes in goals”. These ugly “lithographs” will help your staff “understand your company’s commitment to these principles of success”. And make more money. The lithographs, by the way, consist almost entirely of fake images– photographs of natural beauty that have been touched up, altered, tricked out, super-imposed, or whatever.

“Honesty”?

Here’s another nugget:

Change: a bend in the road is not the end of the road…. unless you fail to make the turn.

On the same page, with a picture of a football player:

You’re either part of the steamroller or part of the pavement.

And, beside a swimmer,

The meek inherit the earth… but they’ll never rule the water.

(11″ by 14″ framed, $54.95).

I like this one– I’ll bet Bill Gates has it in his office:

Integrity: We make a living by What we Get; We make a Life by What we Give

I’d like to buy them all and put some of them side by side:

Priorities: A hundred years from now it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in, or the Kind of Car I drove… but the world may be different because I was important in the life of a child.

Rule #1: In Raising your children, spend half as much money and twice as much time.

($109.00)

I’ll bet that’s not what you’re trying to convince your customers.

Tentative efforts lead to tentative outcomes. Therefore give yourself fully to your endeavors. Decide to construct your character through excellent actions and determine to pay the price of a worthy goal.

In other words, take courses, work late, ignore your family, and steamroll anybody in your way. Doesn’t fit with Rule #1, does it.

Never, Never Quit.

I sometimes wonder why anyone thinks there is not a situation in life where your chances of success are zero. If there are, then what is the point of continuing to expend effort attempting to achieve the impossible? There are many times in life when it is simple good sense to quit and try something else.

Sometimes you just have to play hard ball.

Another useless piece of wisdom. Everybody already knows

Excellence: Many times the difference between Failure and success is doing something nearly right or doing it exactly right.

The race is not always to the swift, but to those who keep on running.

You know what really, really irks me about this crap? They have the gall to copyright it! As if! You take these mediocre thoughts that are worded without the slightest inspiration, intelligence, or originality– and you copyright them! You put them on beautiful fake pictures, and, surprise, there are enough suckers out there to make you rich!

[2011-02] I just realized why the texts are so mind-numbingly inane and lame. They are copyrighted by Successories– which would not be possible if they paid to use actual quotes by real, smart people. Say, for example, Nietzsche’s “Virtue that sleeps awakes refreshed”. They would have to pay to use that. And it wouldn’t be their own copyright. So instead, we get this incredibly lame “Never, never quit”, as if there was some kind of beauty or eloquence to the phrase.

Bill’s Alternative Anti-Motivational Posters

  • I Have No Potential
  • Pay your employees $26.75 an hour.
  • Your phone call is important to us: but if we answer it, we’ll have to work.
  • I’d love to get that done for you today but I’m hungry and tired and lazy.
  • Teamwork means sharing the credit. I’d rather foul it up all by myself.
  • Since 1981, the average pay of top executives has risen about 10 times as fast as the pay of the average worker. That explains why you hang plaques on the wall and write up inane vision statements while I work.
  • Courage: telling your boss what you really think.
  • Determination: finding a way to be far enough away from your desk that you don’t have to answer the phone all day.
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The Feminist Critique of Pure Immanuel Kant

There is an ad in the latest New York Times Review of Books (November 20, 1997) that really shook me up. It is for a book called “The Feminist Interpretation of Immanuel Kant”. It is edited by Robin May Schott, in case you want to order it.

Now, hey, I’d be the first person to say that it’s about time someone over-hauled the old transcendental critique of pure reason, I mean, after all, it’s only been out of date since about fifteen minutes after it was printed, but even I would never have guessed that the feminists would be the ones to put the last nail in the coffin. I’m not sure Immanuel would be pleased. I think he said something like “feminism is destroying our society” or something like that at one point in his career, probably just after his wife left him.

But you know, the next time some dark-minded pundit goes on and on about how our society is just falling apart and things have never been so bad and our youth have really lousy manners, and Hollywood sucks, and so on, I’m going to think about those feminists out there reinterpreting Immanuel Kant and breathe a quiet little sigh of relief. If there is one thing more amazing than any other about our society, its our ability to chew up and regurgitate almost any idea, any image, any concept, and spit it out again as lively and ripe as if it were new.

Like Immanuel Kant. It would have been audacious enough if the feminists had taken on Wittgenstein or Popper, but Kant? So what do the feminists have to say? I don’t know. I haven’t read the book yet. But I’ll bet they accuse Kant of building his entire rigid, rational system of thought on some misdirected patriarchal impulse to rule reality with an iron fist. And I’ll bet the feminists believe that a view of reality more harmonious with natural, empathetic impulses would have worked better. If I remember my college philosophy correctly, Kant was trying to rescue Reason with a capital “R” from Descartes’ radical critique, which consisted of declaring that the only thing you could know for sure was that you existed. Both of them sound a little anal retentive to me. The women probably point out that doing the laundry, cooking, and cleaning, require some pretty fundamental ontological conclusions about cause and effect that can’t be justified by going for a walk every day trying to think up new categories of existence.

Then along comes Sartre who believed we don’t exist in a static sense at all. We are constantly in the state of becoming, and that’s why we are free, unless, of course, your wife expects you home for supper. I’ll bet Simone De Beauvoir had a few precious thoughts about this herself.

Wittgenstein thought we basically constructed a reality in our language, and so our society is really nothing more than a construct of the words we imagine to describe it with. I think the feminists might find a home there. You know how they love to get together and talk. Then there was Martin Heidegger. He believed that mankind had forgotten something very, very important about existence, but what it was we had forgotten he couldn’t seem to remember either, so he joined the Nazi party and continued to teach at a university in Germany throughout World War II. Nothing like a philosophy that stimulates you into positive action! I think the feminists wouldn’t like him. They would think that it’s not that hard to remember the important things, as long as you care about people.

Microsoft Philosophy 1.01

You can tell what philosophy Bill Gates believes in by running a spell check on little known recent philosophers in Microsoft Word and then analyzing the results. Watch:

Philosopher Result Meaning
(Martin) Heidegger headgear groovy
(Imre) Lakatos lactose milk for the mind
(Paul) Feyerabend no suggestions vacant
(Albert) Camus cameos we only see reality in hazy profile
(Dan) Quayle quarrel don’t go into politics
(Hannah) Arendt aren’t we don’t exist, unless we’re banal and evil

Hannah Arendt is the only woman on the list, and I don’t think most philosophers would place her next to Heidegger or even Imre Lakatos in terms of importance, but she did come up with one great idea. While in Jerusalem covering the Eichmann trial (Jewish agents had kidnapped Eichmann, a Nazi war criminal, from Argentina and spirited him away to Jerusalem for a show trial), she found herself at a loss for words to describe the utter mediocrity of this minor functionary who was partly responsible for the deaths of six million Jews, so she coined the phrase “banality of evil”*. Later on, she was sorry that she became so well known for that phrase alone. I have to admit, that’s about the only thing I know about Hannah Arendt myself, but I like the phrase, because it captures the idea that incredibly evil things can result from the actions or inactions of people who perceive themselves as being only minor cogs in a big machine. Raul Wallenberg was a minor functionary, but he saved hundreds of lives. Eichmann claimed that he was only following orders. The crew of the Enola Gay were only following orders when they dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima (victors get to write history so we don’t seem to regard them as villains the way we regard the Germans, Italians, or Japanese). The crew of the Titanic sent lifeboats away half-filled because their orders were “women and children first” and the third-class women and children were still below decks, and the only other people present were men.

That’s the way most people behave– just following orders–and that may be the tragedy of the human race.

So if the feminists find a new way of thinking about reality that can convince most people that they should always do the right thing, even when it goes against orders or policy or whatever, then, hey, I’m all in favour of it.

* It appears that Hannah Arendt was wrong.  The discover of more information about Adolf Eichmann revealed that he was, in fact, virulently anti-Semitic, and fully on board with the plans to exterminate the Jews.

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There is an ad in the latest New York Times Review of Books (November 20, 1997) that really shook me up. It is for a book called “The Feminist Interpretation of Immanuel Kant”. It is edited by Robin May Schott, in case you want to order it.

Now, hey, I’d be the first person to say that it’s about time someone over-hauled the old transcendental critique of pure reason, I mean, after all, it’s only been out of date since about fifteen minutes after it was printed, but even I would never have guessed that the feminists would be the ones to put the last nail in the coffin. I’m not sure Immanuel would be pleased. I think he said something like “feminism is destroying our society” or something like that at one point in his career, probably just after his wife left him.

But you know, the next time some dark-minded pundit goes on and on about how our society is just falling apart and things have never been so bad and our youth have really lousy manners, and Hollywood sucks, and so on, I’m going to think about those feminists out there reinterpreting Immanuel Kant and breathe a quiet little sigh of relief. If there is one thing more amazing than any other about our society, its our ability to chew up and regurgitate almost any idea, any image, any concept, and spit it out again as lively and ripe as if it were new.

Like Immanuel Kant. It would have been audacious enough if the feminists had taken on Wittgenstein or Popper, but Kant? So what do the feminists have to say? I don’t know. I haven’t read the book yet. But I’ll bet they accuse Kant of building his entire rigid, rational system of thought on some misdirected patriarchal impulse to rule reality with an iron fist. And I’ll bet the feminists believe that a view of reality more harmonious with natural, empathetic impulses would have worked better. If I remember my college philosophy correctly, Kant was trying to rescue Reason with a capital “R” from Descartes’ radical critique, which consisted of declaring that the only thing you could know for sure was that you existed. Both of them sound a little anal retentive to me. The women probably point out that doing the laundry, cooking, and cleaning, require some pretty fundamental ontological conclusions about cause and effect that can’t be justified by going for a walk every day trying to think up new categories of existence.

Then along comes Sartre who believed we don’t exist in a static sense at all. We are constantly in the state of becoming, and that’s why we are free, unless, of course, your wife expects you home for supper. I’ll bet Simone De Beauvoir had a few precious thoughts about this herself.

Wittgenstein thought we basically constructed a reality in our language, and so our society is really nothing more than a construct of the words we imagine to describe it with. I think the feminists might find a home there. You know how they love to get together and talk. Then there was Martin Heidegger. He believed that mankind had forgotten something very, very important about existence, but what it was we had forgotten he couldn’t seem to remember either, so he joined the Nazi party and continued to teach at a university in Germany throughout World War II. Nothing like a philosophy that stimulates you into positive action! I think the feminists wouldn’t like him. They would think that it’s not that hard to remember the important things, as long as you care about people.

Microsoft Philosophy 1.01

You can tell what philosophy Bill Gates believes in by running a spell check on little known recent philosophers in Microsoft Word and then analyzing the results. Watch:

Philosopher Result Meaning
(Martin) Heidegger headgear groovy
(Imre) Lakatos lactose milk for the mind
(Paul) Feyerabend no suggestions vacant
(Albert) Camus cameos we only see reality in hazy profile
(Dan) Quayle quarrel don’t go into politics
(Hannah) Arendt aren’t we don’t exist, unless we’re banal and evil

Hannah Arendt is the only woman on the list, and I don’t think most philosophers would place her next to Heidegger or even Imre Lakatos in terms of importance, but she did come up with one great idea. While in Jerusalem covering the Eichmann trial (Jewish agents had kidnapped Eichmann, a Nazi war criminal, from Argentina and spirited him away to Jerusalem for a show trial), she found herself at a loss for words to describe the utter mediocrity of this minor functionary who was partly responsible for the deaths of six million Jews, so she coined the phrase “banality of evil”. Later on, she was sorry that she became so well known for that phrase alone. I have to admit, that’s about the only thing I know about Hannah Arendt myself, but I like the phrase, because it captures the idea that incredibly evil things can result from the actions or inactions of people who perceive themselves as being only minor cogs in a big machine. Raul Wallenberg was a minor functionary, but he saved hundreds of lives. Eichmann claimed that he was only following orders. The crew of the Enola Gay were only following orders when they dropped a nuclear bomb on Hiroshima (victors get to write history so we don’t seem to regard them as villains the way we regard the Germans, Italians, or Japanese). The crew of the Titanic sent lifeboats away half-filled because their orders were “women and children first” and the third-class women and children were still below decks, and the only other people present were men.

That’s the way most people behave– just following orders–and that may be the tragedy of the human race.

So if the feminists find a new way of thinking about reality that can convince most people that they should always do the right thing, even when it goes against orders or policy or whatever, then, hey, I’m all in favour of it.

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The Guayaki Indians of Paraguay

In a remote corner of Paraguay, in the 1960’s, lived a tribe of Indians known as the Guayaki. They lived among jaguars, coatis, vultures, peccaries, tree snakes, howler monkeys. The Guayaki abandoned their elderly. They beat menstruating girls with tapir penises in order to make them insanely ardent.   Seriously.  They practice polyandry (the female has more than one male sexual partner).

A French anthropologist named Pierre Clastres wrote a book about them, “Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians”. Clastres died at the age of 43 in a car crash.

The Guayaki are almost gone now. They numbered a hundred when the Paraguayan government moved them to a remote, uninhabited part of the country. Then 75. Then 40.

When an unusually dark child is born– the grandmother strangles it.

February 2007: thanks to international pressure, including a plea from Elie Wiesel, the Paraguayan government has amended some of its policies and the Guayaki have recovered to a population of about 1500.

Just part of that wonderful panoply of our wonderful species.

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Newt Gangrene and the Pacs

Newt Gangrene and PACS

This reminds me– during the height of the cold war, the evil Soviet Union, of course, had a TOTALITARIAN government. The United States, on the other hand, was a DEMOCRACY.

In a DEMOCRACY, the people are free to elect the leaders they choose. In a TOTALITARIAN country, the people have no choice: you have to elect whoever the party tells you to elect.

Of course, in a DEMOCRACY, special interests are free to give as much money to politicians as they want to in exchange for special favours, like laws extending copyright protection…. oops! Forget that. That wouldn’t be right! That would mean that we really don’t have a DEMOCRACY at all, that America is actually ruled by wealthy, special interests! Not true. They are free to give as much money to the politicians PAC as they want to. There. That’s better. Then the PAC gives the money to the politician.

Senator John McCain wanted to change that. He wanted new rules to enforce what the old rules were supposed to enforce: limitations on how much “soft” money a politician can receive.

John McCain doesn’t have many friends these days.

I watched Newt Gangrene speak to his PAC tonight, thanking them for helping preserve freedom and DEMOCRACY.

But, hey, this is a DEMOCRACY. So we go to the polls and exercise our choice. Those poor Russians! In our country, we regularly elect the people we choose.

Of course… it is a little strange… during all the years of the cold war, which country, do you think, most often re-elected the same guy who’s been in there for ten, twenty, thirty years already, who is fat and corrupt and tired and bloated and isolated from the the people he represents?

That’s right: the good old U.S. of A.

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Karacter and Politics

Karacter

What is character? The Republican’s keep trotting out the word “character” because they think it’s something they have and Clinton doesn’t. Someone with “character” doesn’t cheat on his wife. Oops. Bob Dole left his first wife to shack up with Elizabeth at the Watergate hotel. Where’s your first wife, Newt? The one that had cancer?

How about that fling of yours, Henry Hyde? Well, a “character” has principles. Oops. Gingrich has been charged with more than 60 violations of various ethics rules for House members. George Bush refused to intervene to prevent slaughter in Bosnia because he was afraid he would lose the next election.

Well, a “character” doesn’t give in to cheap temptations. Oops. The Republicans, eager for campaign money, keep granting all the wishes of corporate America so the money keeps pouring into those PACS. Oops, oops, oops.

Well, a “character” doesn’t sneak around recording conversations illegally, doesn’t cheat in order to get his way, doesn’t blow things out of proportion or sensationalize, and knows the value of discretion and honor. Kenneth Starr, anyone? Linda Tripp? A “character” doesn’t preach one thing and practice another. Henry Hyde, are you there?

It’s weird how this group of self-serving, conniving, dishonest hypocrites seems to have succeeded in hi-jacking the term “character”. Most people know pretty well what is meant by “character”. Honesty and integrity. Above all else, a willingness to put principles ahead of expediency. Clinton failed in regard to Monica Lewinsky, but he hasn’t done all that badly in almost every other area of government. Henry Hyde and his fellow leaders of the holy jihad, currently conducting show-trials in Congress, have demonstrated over and over again a willingness to sell their votes to whichever corporate lobbyist carries the fattest check.

This isn’t mere hypocrisy. You have to understand that while this show trial continues, Congress has been writing laws that take money away from middle-class and poor voters and hands it over to the rich as quickly as possible. Disney and Citibank are only two of the beneficiaries. Archer Daniels Midland. Microsoft. RCA. Boeing. Line up boys: the pork barrel’s full and nobody’s looking!

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Pinochet Ricochet

Baltasar Garzon is my hero. If I get a picture, I’m going to put it up on my web page.

Baltasar Garzon is a Spanish judge. He found out that some Spanish citizens had been kidnapped, tortured, and murdered in Chile in the 1970’s. He found out that the murderers were never apprehended. He was outraged. Then he found out that the leader of this gang of criminals was in England getting some heart surgery. Like any conscientious magistrate, he immediately issued a warrant for this man’s arrest.

pinochet.jpg (9510 bytes)

The man is Augusto Pinochet.

In 1973, Chile held a democratic election. The people chose a socialist, Salvador Allende, as their new President. The Americans didn’t like that. Mr. Kissinger was heard to remark something like, “Why should we stand back and let an irresponsible people elect the wrong party?” So first, with the aid of reactionary forces within Chile, a crisis was created. Then, fig leaf in place, with the help from the CIA, General Pinochet led a bloody coup d’etat, during which Salvador Allende was cold-bloodedly murdered (Pinochet’s cronies claim he committed suicide). (There is a good film, Missing, on this story). Pinochet’s army then rounded up as many dissidents and potential dissidents as it could find, held them in the Santiago soccer stadium, tortured as many as he could to get more names to arrest, then murdered thousands of them.

A few years ago, Pinochet did what all ugly, maggoty, disgusting despots do when faced with a powerful reform movement: he agreed to step down only in exchange for a full amnesty. I don’t understand how any government can even pretend to be part of this farce. A man walks into a bank . He shoots five people and locks another twenty in the vault. He takes all the money. He runs off with five hostages. He kills four of them. Then he says, “I didn’t do anything wrong, but I will turn over this last hostage to you unharmed if you agree to not prosecute me for anything I might or might not have done before this.” The people say, “if you didn’t do anything wrong, then what do you have to worry about?” Maybe the police are smart. Maybe they say yes. He turns over the hostage. Then he is arrested and tried and convicted and executed.

Except that here, no one arrested or tried or convicted Pinochet, because they were afraid of the army. The army supports Pinochet because, after all, they are the bloody arms and hands of this evil man. They are complicit.

But Garzon had the guts to say, this man is a murderer and a torturer plain and simple. And he had the audacity to serve the warrant. (The French and Swiss governments have since done likewise.) And Blair’s government seized Pinochet and are holding him pending the outcome of the legal wrangling.

Think what a bizarre, crazy, mixed up message this is going to send to the world. That we are all equal before the law? That torture and murder are criminal acts? That justice awaits even the most powerful? Idi Amin, the happy guest of the Saudi Arabian government for twenty-years, since, presumably, his last meal of fresh humans, must be quaking in his boots!

* * *

Someone says to me, in defense of Pinochet, how would you feel if Castro, on his way to the United Nations, was arrested by the FBI and held for murder and torture? You see? We must have separate rules for dictators.

Well, first of all, if seeing Castro arrested was the price to pay for having assholes like Pinochet and Amin and Hussein, and Karadzic arrested, I think I’d go along with it. Let’s arrest him and have a fair trial and see what we come up with. I doubt you’d find nearly as many serious offenses for Castro as you find for Pinochet, or the others, but if you do, then, yeah, he should be charged. The witnesses should be brought forward, and let’s try him. Yes, it would be worth it, even though I like Castro, and his beard.

There is one other complicating factor. Pinochet was not an invited guest of the British government. He came as a private citizen seeking medical treatment (using the money, undoubtedly, that he pilfered from the state treasury).

If he had been an invited guest of the British Government, they would not have had a legitimate right to arrest him. If they did, the whole system of international diplomacy and the conditions under which negotiations can take place would begin to break down. Fair enough.

When Castro speaks at the U.N., as an invited guest, he has the same protection.

But hey, if goes for a walk in Central Park: arrest him! He and Pinochet can share a cell.

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The Immorality of Komodo Dragons

I just watched a television documentary on Komodo Dragons. These creatures are real slime balls. I think we should have nothing to do with them. In the first place, they are very ugly. They’re up to five feet long, covered with scales, and they have kind of a baggy, flabby look. They look like a log covered with wet burlap. And it’s no wonder: they’re only active for about three hours a day. Why are they only active for three hours a day? Why don’t they get out there and put in a regular eight-hour day like the rest of the hard-working animal kingdom? Because they will eat anything, no matter how old or disgusting. Komodo dragons will kill large animals, like goats and deer, and eat part of them, and put the rest away for later, and not in a fridge. I guess when you’re as ugly as a Komodo dragon, you don’t care what goes into you. You see this fresh elk go leaping by and he looks real tasty and all, and then you look over at a two-week old rotting goat carcass and think, “hey, that looks good…”

Komodo dragons drool when they’re hungry. But not like you and me. Oh no. Komodo dragon drool is toxic. You see, Komodo dragons don’t go chasing after deer, knock their legs out from under them, and then break their spines, like the hard-working jaguar or cheetah. No, the Komodo dragon sort of wanders around as if he wasn’t up to anything, and then, if a deer gets kind of careless and doesn’t move out of the way quickly enough, they leap– “leap” being a relative term here–into the air and bite them. The deer often gets away, or thinks it gets away. It moves off into the distance and looks behind itself and sees this ugly, baggy old lizard coming after it… slowly. But the Komodo dragon will follow the deer for a week, from way behind, because the Komodo dragon knows that, thanks to that toxic sludge drool, that little bite is going to get very badly infected. That deer is doomed. Eventually.

You have to respect the Komodo dragon’s patience, don’t you? Would you go into MacDonald’s, order a hamburger, take a bite, and then wait a whole week until it quieted down ten blocks away so you could finish it off?

Komodo dragons will eat other Komodo dragons if they can. This is a non-issue for Komodo dragons. I don’t think they give it much thought at all. You certainly don’t see other Komodo dragons gathering around a corpse and demanding an investigation. They are more likely to demand a share. And this is why young Komodo dragons live in trees until they are three years old and at least five feet long.

Komodo Dragons mate for life, but the male doesn’t have a good memory. He can’t tell just by looking at a female whether it’s his wife or not. He kind of follows her for a while until she notices him. “Huh? What do you want? Oh—again? I should have known. Is that all you think about?” Yup. That’s her.

Seriously, if he is strolling along and he happens to see a female and he gets the urge, he has to get real close first and then taste her sweat glands. Then he knows. It is very important for him to be very, very sure that this beauty is his wife, because, if it isn’t, the minute he gets close, she might kill him and eat him. This makes it very difficult for Komodos to have orgies. I’m not saying it’s impossible or that it’s never happened: just that it’s difficult. And for the same reason that a dead goat lasts a Komodo a month, they aren’t too worried about “protection”. A Komodo thinks, “Listen, I just had a mouthful of month-old maggoty goat meat, I’m been crawling through leech infested muck for three hours, I live in a dark cave with thousands of fruit bats, and I just sniffed your sweat glands— and you’re worried about exchanging bodily fluids? What are you? A prude?”

In order to mate, the male Komodo has to bring his body temperature up about ten degrees. So he goes and lays in the sun for an hour before sex. This takes a lot of spontaneity out of the Komodo dragon’s life, but hey, how spontaneous can you be if you only move three miles per hour? So, say a couple of Komodo dragons meet in a singles swamp. He says, “hey, you look like my type.” She says, “Oooo. You’re getting me hot. Let’s make it.” He says, “Okay. I’ll go find a sunny rock and we’ll see you in an hour.”

And what if the nearest sunshine is waiting for him on the other side of a shady mango grove? He waddles over there at 3 miles per hour, lays in the sun for an hour, brushes his teeth and slaps a little after-shave under the old burlap, waddles half-way across hell’s half acre, through swamps, under trees, through gnarled roots, finds the female, sniffs her sweat glands to make sure it’s her, rears up… “Oh damn. I’m too cold.” And you thought Viagra was inconvenient?

As if life isn’t hard enough for the male Komodo dragon, if he stays in the sun too long, he will die of heat stroke. So he can’t let himself go way over the ten degrees up, and then hope he cools off just the right amount by the time he gets to the female. For Komodo dragons as for humans, timing is important.

Komodo dragons live in only one place in the entire world: you guessed it: Komodo. People have to be careful on Komodo because Komodo dragons will sometimes eat people. Now, you’ve got this 150 pound lizard roaming around this island drooling this toxic sludge and attacking your children… and what do you? You protect the lizard! You put him on the endangered species list!

Well, I think we’re just getting carried away with this endangered species business. If it was up to me, we’d be having Komodo soup every night until they were all gone.

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Mike Piazza Pie: Sports Economics

Mike Piazza now makes $91 million for playing baseball, for seven years. How on earth can they do it? Only 30 years ago, the entire New York Yankees baseball club was valued at only $12,000,000.

Well, it’s a free country. If a baseball owner wants to pay an athlete $17 million a year to play a game, why shouldn’t he?

They can pay Mike Piazza $91 million because fans continue to flock to the stadiums and plop themselves in front of their television sets to watch Mike Piazza play baseball. From that money, the New York Mets pays its players. And like every other business, they pay all their other expenses, like administrative staff, office space, scouts, managers, and rent or mortgage for the stadium… and taxes.

Well, wait a minute.

Yes, yes, the Blue Jays pay $11 million dollars a year in taxes on the Skydome. But who built the Skydome? You did. With your tax money. We paid $321 million to build the Skydome and then we rented it to the Jays for considerably less than it costs to operate it.

That is why the Skydome Corporation is now bankrupt.

This year, Hartford, Conn. is donating $350 million to the New England Patriots. And Maryland is donating $220 million to the Baltimore Ravens NFL team, and kicked in an extra $80 just to make owner Art Modell happy.

At least the Blue Jays paid their taxes last year. And so did the Expos. But the Cardinals and the White Sox, and the Red Sox, and the Reds, and the Dodgers, and the Rockies, and the Mets, and all the other teams? Not a penny.

How can that be? This is a multi-million dollar business! These owners are filthy rich. They pay their players absurdly extravagant sums of money to do what most of us would gladly do for nothing. And they don’t pay taxes?!

No, they don’t. They don’t pay taxes, because foolish citizens and even more foolish politicians have decided to use tax payer money to subsidize professional sports teams.

You see, Mike Piazza doesn’t care who he plays for. You do. You are a fan. You want your team to win. You are loyal to your team even if they lose. Loyalty is a good quality.  But baseball players have the loyalty of rats. If the New York Mets didn’t offer to pay Mike Piazza more money, he was going to go play for someone else!

But the New York Mets didn’t have enough money for Mike Piazza. How would the owners of the Mets make a profit if they had to pay Mike Piazza more money?

Well, they can cut other expenses, like those horrific stadium costs. But if the team cuts those costs from its budget, who is going to pay for it? Why the city, of course! But where does the city get its money? From property taxes. And where do property taxes come from?

Right– you. You with your $45,000 a year. You are going to give tax money to the New York Mets (if you are citizen of New York) so that they can give Mike Piazza an additional $4 million per year.

But the tax payer would think that is a dumb idea. So instead of the city giving a check to the Mets, it gives them a deduction on their taxes. And then it chips in for a stadium. And then it provides police and traffic services for free.

This is all no secret, by the way, though you would think it would be almost unimaginable that voters would be so stupid as to approve these arrangements. Sports Illustrated has been ranting about this devious little scam for years. A few smart politicians and journalists have caught on as well. And the voters in Minnesota caught on, and recently turned down a proposal to make a gift of a $100 million stadium to the billionaire owner of the Twins, who then threatened to move the Twins to some town with more idiots in it.

It is one of the biggest scandals in modern history: taxpayers subsidizing multi-million dollar contracts for spoiled athletes! And you just know that some of these same owners and athletes and sports journalists and politicians who approve of these arrangements would be among the first to complain bitterly about their hard-earned tax dollars going to a single mother on welfare. Freeloader! Parasite! Give us back your $500 a month and go find a job! Maybe you can park Mike Piazza’s spare Rolls Royce for him, if you’re good.

The problem is that too many cities give in to owner blackmail: build me a stadium or I move to a different city. And the city fathers weep and wail– “Alas, we cannot be without our sports team!” and issue a bond or debenture and build a stadium and forgive them their annual property taxes. Cities without sports teams plead with the Expos or the Twins: move here and we will give you millions of dollars. Millions of YOUR dollars.

And you voters stand for this??? You re-elect these guys? Are you insane?

The Baltimore Orioles, thank you, paid for their own stadium. Hurray for Baltimore! But they still don’t pay any taxes. [According to the Toronto Star of Nov. 29, 1998, the taxpayers paid $254 million for Baltimore’s stadium. When I find out who’s telling the truth, I’ll update this.]

Now, you will hear many supporters of these professional sport teams argue that the teams generate a great deal of revenue, including tax revenue, and attract jobs, and therefore, more than “pay for themselves”. Right. You can apply this argument to absolutely any business you like: banks, car makers, theatre companies, insurance companies, computer makers, anybody. They all generate revenue and taxes. Big deal. Pay your taxes and shut up.

And the issue has been studied: the economic benefits are grossly exaggerated, especially, as I say, compared to other possible investments.

The only solution is for all the cities to get together and agree that none of them will subsidize major league professional sports in any shape or form whatsoever. No subsidized stadiums. No tax concessions. No free police guards. Not even a parade (a long civic advertisement for the team). Tell the major leagues to conduct their businesses like everyone else: you balance out your income vs. your expenditures, and if you can’t afford to pay Mike Piazza $91 million, you offer him less.

Even better, the federal governments in both Canada and the U.S. should outlaw civic funding of sports stadiums.