My Brother Art

It's been a year since my brother Art Siemering past away unexpectedly at age 64. He was born in Grand Island, Nebraska on May 28, 1941 and died on September 3, 2005 in Overland Park, Kansas.
I had just spoken to him by phone 2 days earlier, and he told me he had just lost his long-time job with Noble and Associates. I was planning on leaving on September 3rd to visit Art and his wife, Carol, when I got the news from my other sister-in-law, Kay, my other brother Ken's wife.

This is a brief tribute and remembrance of my brother.

Art was down-to-earth- unpretentious, but wanted to have nice stuff for himself and his family: 2 children, Bob and Becky and 1 grandchild, Emma (see photo above.) He had many cool cars over the years, including a Riley, Barracuda, MG, and Saab. He was not high-tech- he just recently had bought a TV-DVD combo.
He was an old-school liberal Democrat: always concerned for the least in society; not a prejudiced bone in his body. Art had a sometimes-salty sense of humor, but was never obscene.
He accepted me, with all my faults: bailing me out of some stupid situations. Art was never judgemental of me, but would give advice when I asked for it.
He was loyal to his wife and kids, moral in a non-religious way. All three share his good qualities, and are good people. I feel lucky to have had him for my brother. My brother Ken, his wife Kay, and their girls Karyn, Kim, and Kris are also a blessing in my life and I treasure our relationships.
I became even closer to Art and Ken when our parents passed away, since I was the "baby" of the family. Both brothers have helped me out many times over the years.
Art took care of all the details when our dad died. He did every thing he was supposed to and never thought of taking anything for his own benefit. He even took our mom into his home in the last years of her life when she could no longer live on her own. I will always treasure that act of generousity.
And he was generous to a fault: didn't hold on to money, but used it for his family and a few obsessions such as jazz, wine, movies, and good food. He miraculously rose above our plain food, picky-eating childhood family to become the world-class food expert that he was.
He was fun-loving, and could find humor in many everyday situations. We spent a lot of time, when I visited him, laughing about old times, (and some new.) He loved railroads, classic cars, and classic television shows.
Art was very intelligent. He was the first-born child of older parents, and read voraciously, even though his eyesight was bad from birth. He never went to college, but was a master in the arts, humanities, and history.

I'll miss Art because he was smart, fun, loving, moral, and creative. Mainly, I'll miss him because he was my brother, and I loved him.

It's Been a Long, Long Time.

Contrary to public opinion, I am not dead, although I feel like it sometimes! I guess I'm really not good at being a DAILY columnist at this time. Ebay has taken over my life for now - it IS very addictive! My selling has gone way more sucessfully than I expected. (Visit my store at http://www.stores.ebay.com/Kwirk-Kafe). So, from now on I will leave comments as they strike me with no huge plan in mind. Here goes:
Here are a few more things I hate:

• The Burger King standing at the guy's window in that awful TV commercial. He makes Ronald McDonald look like Tom Cruise. He is the personification of scary clowns. If you woke up to him, you'd think you were in the middle of a nightmare!
• Mime: one of the most awful displays of ego there ever has been. Someone who is TOTALLY absorbed in their own world, wrongly assuming that anyone cares.
  
• Opera: should retreat to the Renaissance Period where it probably was entertaining, since they didn't have much else to amuse themselves. Side note: If I ever hear that awful expression "It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings." again, I think I'll slap someone!
  
• Renaissance Festivals: Too awful to even imagine attending. "Grown-ups" acting out a period of time that is best left in the distant past. ( See previous comment.)

That' s enough trouble for now. I'll be back soon - keep the light on for me!

The Death Penalty - A Start to an End

This will be the first chapter in spelling out what I think of the death penalty. I plan to span several columns with this weighty topic, so let's begin:

• Above all, I came down on the side of anti-death penalty a long time ago. Something about it has never felt right to me. The only possible reason to use it that I see is for retribution, getting back at someone for doing something bad to you. I just don't see this as morally valid.
• Michael Dukakis (remember him?) was ridiculed out of any chance of winning the election against George Bush, the First, by Republicans, along with a compliant media. His sin? He stumbled, during one of their debates, over a question of what he would do if his wife was killed. He was asked if he would be for the death penalty for his wife's hypothetical murderer. He was taken by surprise, and acted like he did not quite know what to say. A "nuclear bomb" tactic, indeed!
• I would have had a hard time coming up with the right words, too, as is often the case in debating strident right-wingers. These are the people who take advantage of populist sentiment of the moment to push their own mean-spirited agenda. I would have commented about how nasty and superficial the question was, and then gone on to say that what I believe about the death penalty is etched in stone, (in fact, The Ten Commandments, which Fundamentalist Christians have adopted as their own,) even if the victim is my wife, and I might have a gut feeling of revenge. I would ask for life without parole for the murderer, to be sure he pays for what he did.
• Further comments to come. This is NOT the end.
  

A Little More About Me.

Yesterday's column reminded me that I wanted readers to know The North Star wasn't my first stab at writing. When I was a kid, I put out one page neighborhood news letters. Really just a bunch of kid stuff. My oldest brother had a little rubber typeset printer and I had a plastic offset printer. Neither one worked very well, so I printed the papers out by hand. At least one copy still exists, about 50 years later, and I can't believe the things I talked about.
In high school, I worked on 2 other newspapers during summer programs I attended. Then in college, the University of Nebraska at Omaha, I worked on the Gateway newspaper and the yearbook. At that time, I got a BA in broadcasting, but never went into the field.
About 35 years later, during a period of unemployment, I went back to school and got an Associate degree in graphic arts and a second BA, in journalism. At the same time, I wrote music reviews for 3 local alternative papers plus the Gateway (again.) This was one of the most fun times of my life, which I will write more about soon.
At this point in time, the only other writing I'm doing is creating ads for my various sales on the infamous eBay. If you want to see what I am selling, go to http://stores.ebay.com/Kwirk-Kafe. I call it that, because I intended to use it to sell a lot of Adult magazines, tapes, etc. Unfortunatey, eBay does not allow stores to sell that stuff. You have to sell by auction only in the Mature Audiences area. So, of course, that's what I do. I sell in that area under the name "siement". See for yourself, but don't be shocked by what you might find! Let's just say I sell a real variety of stuff.
I am presently working on a website where I will eventually sell my stuff directly. It is siement.com. I have a nice starter page there, but that is all so far.

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There. Now you know a little bit more about me. Isn't that special?

Snarking

When I was in high school, many, many years ago, (Omaha North HS, Class of '66,) I wrote a humor and gossip column for the school newspaper, The North Star. I called it "Out of the Frying Pan", because I always figured I was jumping into the fire. I really went in with both feet one day. In a column, I wrote about how some students were out behind the building "snarking" before school. The principal, Harold Reeves, who was some kind of a prude, misunderstood completely what the word meant.
Snarking was a kind of game where six guys kicked around a small, wooden football-shaped object, trying to keep it in the air with only their feet. It was basically what we now call Hackey-sack. Mr. Reeves apparently thought it was some sexual reference. He gave the journalism teacher hell for publishing it and demanded an apology from me.

• The reason it got published at all is because I was the Editor of the paper, did all the proof-reading, and went to the printer to approve the final set-up of each issue. (This was way before Quark and all those other publishing programs on the computer. Computers were room-size devices that used IBM punch cards to store data.)
• My dad went in with me to speak to Mr. Reeves and explain how this was not the least bit offensive. He still did not agree.
• The teacher stopped speaking to me for nearly the whole rest of the school year. She finally was forced to speak to me when I had to ride home from a school event with her and she had to find out where to drop me off. Needless to say, her reaction was a bit juvenile.
• I kept writing the column until the end of the semester and tried my best to stay out of trouble. Later that year, my senior year, Mr. Reeves seemed to have gotten over it by blanking out who I was, and calling me "Gary" for some reason.

And the guys kept snarking. Maybe we should all do that!

It's Hard not to bash Bush (and Rush)

• Just watching the President's press conference was enough to make me gag. He managed to avoid answering every important question about his Supreme Court nominees, John Bolton, gas prices, you name it. He was smarmy and evasive and semi-illiterate, as usual. He put on his best passive-aggresive, folksy-guy routine when he called one reporter "Stringbean." The guy answered "I've been called worse." What he was probably thinking was "...by better people than you." What he should have done was call Bush "Stringbrain". That would have been good!
• In the middle of all his usual verbage (or is it Garbage?) he dropped a bombshell. I hope every Democrat, Republican, and Independent, who cares about average people, will pick up this and run with it. He proposed a truly progressive, Democrat-like, New Deal, Great Society idea: to pay out BIGGER Social Security payments to poor people (the many who depend on SS alone) and SMALLER payments to wealthier people. This is exactly what conservatives always accuse liberals of promoting: redistribution of wealth.
• This is one change whose time, maybe, has finally come. Many Democrats have been pushing this for years. It would probably save the Social Security trust fund from running out of money for many, many more years. I'd say it is probably the only fix the system needs for now. Where did Bush come up with this one? If he would just drop the personal account thing and keep his eye on how to help the least of us, he might have a chance of redeeming himself, and actually being a Passionate Conservative.
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• Another person, who is anything BUT a passionate conservative may finally be getting his due. Rush Limbaugh actually lost his case in the Florida Supreme Court. He now may have to answer to charges concerning his illegal use of drugs. The mean, hateful jerk deserves jail time like the much gentler Martha Stewart. She may be greedy, but her advice is always meant to help people. She always exudes a positive attitude. Unlike Rush, who promotes negativity and makes an art out of hurting and making fun of good people. Rush speaks out loud the prejudicial thoughts that many, many people have. He tries to make an end-run around our entire system of government.
• Thank God we have a representative democracy, instead of a direct democracy. If Rush's devotees had there pet causes put into law, the clock would be turned back to the 19th century. And thank God we have the courts to put the brakes on all the various things in life that hurt the least among us. The courts have forced many changes on the reluctant that help the people who have no power. Many people only care about themselves. The courts have allowed the rest of us to be just as important. They have allowed America to be as great as it is now.
• A lot more work needs to be done.
  

RED (State) ALERT!!!

Is Bush losing it? The answer, course, is, no, he lost it years ago. Here are 3 recent examples of why I think he is A) a puppet of big business, the mega-rich, and the Moral Minority, B) completely and utterly stupid, or C) a compulsive liar:

1. His totally bizarre and unnecessary Social Insecurity private investment plan. A sure way for his banking industry backers to get way richer, and the US to go even further into debt than all his crap has already taken us. (Remember the last president's huge budget surplus? Certainly a fond memory.) How can he say, with a straight face, that we need to allow people to redirect part of their FICA taxes to personal savings accounts? As I've said before, don't we already have these, with 401ks, etc.?
2. He somehow manages to keep a straight face (well, he does smirk a bit when he talks about this) and say there is nothing he can do about the gas prices. Who decided to raise these prices? Duh! His buddies in the oil industry. Nothing can stand in the way of their gigantic profits! How about cutting profits and executive salaries to much more modest levels? Greed trumps decency every time. (An aside, Isn't Trump a good name for The Donald? He thinks he holds the trump card in the big poker game of life.)
3. It just doesn't seem possible that a reasonable person would nominate such a complete jerk as John Bolton to be our UN ambassador. But it wasn't a reasonable person, it was our President. What a great representative of our country Bolton will make! The Ugly American personified. A self-professed UN hater being sent there by our government. How humiliating. But apparently not for GW. If he gets the chance, he'll probably appoint Pat Buchanan to head the INS.

Enough Bush-bashing for today. There's always tomorrow - unless the Bushies have there way. Then there will only be yesterday.

Stating the Obvious- Part 1

Some things are just obvious to me, but I consider them worth remembering when people argue over the relative value of one thing over another.

1. Beta came before VHS. Sony invented the video tape format, and it was used in broadcasting for years before it became available to the public (at $1000.00 or more). VHS became more popular, I guess, because you could record 2 hours longer on the tapes. When I first bought blank VHS tapes, around 1980, they were $10.00 each! The player I bought in 1983 was something like $200.00. Prices have defintitely come down. And Beta has gone the way of the 8-Track.
2. CDs and DVDs will not be around much longer. With all the new, tiny data storage devices and media players, there is no need for those big, round, awkward, easily damaged pieces of crap that were foisted on the public by extremely greedy mega-corporations. These dubious inventions made us all go out and buy new versions of our records, tapes, and videos. They would have gone away if so many of us hadn't given in to their come-on. I certainly held out as long as I could. Let's see exactly what they will push on us now to listen to Led Zeppelin or watch our "Porky's" collection. Pretty soon, all our devices will become extinct, like our TVs, when the new High Defintion systems come out. By the way, have you tried to buy a needle for an Edison Victrola or a bulb for your Super 8 projector lately?
3. Apple came up with the format of windows, instead of DOS, and the mouse for easier navigation on the computer screen. Microsoft basically stole it all, and now dominates the market. It is definitely the WalMart of the computer industry. Bill Gates and Company would love to have a monopoly on EVERYTHING that even remotely relates to computing. And don't they do a good job? Steve Jobs and Apple keep coming up with more and more wonderful innovations. Unfortunately, they're usually priced out of reach of the average user. Apple may be Number 2, but they try harder!

I will keep adding more of my observations of the obvious as time goes on. Enough for now.