Please. Save me some real time in the daylight

Thank God, it's over.
Daylight savings time, that is.
I hate daylight savings time with a passion usually reserved for creepy-crawly things and drunks who misdial at 3 a.m.
I guess at one time it had a purpose.... like back when children had to do chores on the farm and walk to school in their bare feet after doing said chores.
These days the bare feet are on the mother's chauffeuring their kiddies to school in a luxury minivan and the closest thing to a chore a kid does before heading to school is charging a cell phone.
So, yes, I hate the obsoleteness of DS and the insistence in hanging onto something that used to be a good idea but no longer is.
Even the government finally acknowledged that its latest effort -- expanding DS by about a month -- actually cost the country (Read that as you and me) money. We paid for more electricity because we ran our air conditioners longer at night. We turned the lights on sooner in the morning, and generally managed to burn up any supposed energy savings which we were promised by having a longer period of DS.
I think Arizona has the right idea. Arizona, that plucky state, Just Said No to daylight savings time. They've never had it. Don't want it. Know they don't need it.
So, I have to constantly ask myself when calling friends there: Is it one hour difference or two? My friends never have to remember to fall forward or backward. Their biological clocks aren't in a constant state of readjusting like mine. Their dogs don't need to be retrained twice a year on what time their little doggie world is supposed to start.
And my friends NEVER have to adjust their clocks, digital, manual, VCR, oven, microwave, car, computer or other.
Which is what I'd call saving real time in the daylight.

Southwest Airlines: Where has all the fun gone?

We all know the reputation which helped build Southwest Airlines.

Fun in the skies.

Flight attendants who joked.

And sang.

And made fun of the instructions while telling you things like, "Really. The seat beneath you which barely has enough padding to support your rear quarters, is a flotation device. Trust me."

Their non-corporate ways have gone bye-bye faster than the planes.

Yes,I'd heard of those flight attendants. Like I'd heard of a T-Rex and 10-cent coffee and newspapers which everyone read with more daily commitment then they gave to attending church.

But finally, last Sunday I had the fun of being on a flight with those high flying Southwest Dinosaurs.
And, it was fun. And funny.

And the passengers clapped at the end of their routines.

And we all felt better about flying.

And for no rational reason, I felt like the odds were good I'd make it to my destination.

And my sense of well-being about the world rose.

And I felt really good about picking Southwest, too.

Did I mention passengers clapped?

Granted, the singing wasn't that great and the jokes weren't that funny, but the unexpectedness of it made up for any lack of talent.

And the passengers clapped.

And I went to my destination happier than I would have been if I hadn't been on that flight. For that I am thankful. I suspect others were, too.

On the return flight, sadly, the Southwest Dinasaurs were extinct replaced by flight attendants who thought they worked for .... well, American.

We got home safely -- and my motto is any flight that lands safely is a good one -- but, trust me, it wasn't nearly as much fun.

Ballon Boy: He's six - so what's CNN's excuse?

In the news business, we're used to reporting bizarre stories. We report about life, which often is, as they say, stranger than fiction. The saga of Balloon Boy falls right in there with the strangest of the strange.
For those of you who missed it, the nation was riveted -- driven in part by CNN non-stop video coverage -- as a weird silver object looking way more like a mushroom than a balloon -- whisked its way across the Colorado landscape for some two hours.
CNN's talking heads narrated non-stop the journey of the dipping and diving device, all the while speculating whether the 6-year-old was A) in the balloon B) still alive C) fallen out of the balloon D) at home E) suffered other fate. Watching, I flashed back to a similar second-by-second video chase of a slow-rolling white bronco driving down a California highway.
OJ Simpson.
Balloon Boy.
Non-stop coverage of every twist and turn.
Talking heads with vacant air to fill, often making comments that sounded as if there was more air between their ears than in either the balloon or their time slot.
As I listened to this news report which was long on speculation and short on facts, I had another flashback of the grainy black-and-white video where Walter Cronkite reports the shooting of President Kennedy.
Cronkite's most memorable line -- at least among journalists -- was: Get it right. Not "Get it fast." Cronkite knew reporting news fast is worthless if whatever you get isn't also right.
No doubt about it, CNN's Balloon Boy report was great entertainment. It was a mixture of truth, human drama and pure bull.
Afterward, the public was outraged at the parents, partly I suspect because we'd been taken on a two-hour emotional roller coaster, courtesy of CNN.
In the old days, we called such stuff a fictionalized account based on actual events.
These days, it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.
Great entertainment. Great fun. Just not great reporting.
Meanwhile, let's not forget: Balloon Boy is a 6-year-old. They do and say childish things. Cause THEY'RE SIX. They do things which don't make sense. Cause THEY'RE SIX.
Sadly, we all don't have that same excuse.

Gardens and guns for all

In case you haven't seen the ad in our paper, there's a gun show this weekend at the Civic Center.

Last fall, before the Presidential election, I went to a gun show there. I was in search of a handgun.

Some of my friends were aghast I'd consider buying a gun at all, much less a handgun. I grew up in rural Virginia and guns were as much a part of life as cars and gardens. Every October there were gun safety classes during school -- the yearly course before teenage hunters descended on the backwoods in search of a large buck. Boys routinely came to school with trucks sporting gun racks holding multiple rifles so they could go hunting immediately after school. And, yes, they parked their trucks in the school parking lot.

No one ever stole their guns and no one ever worried about one of them going crazy and shooting up the school. The world was a simpler place.

We were indoctrinated in the principle that the Constitutional right to bear arms had nothing to do with defending yourself against a burglar and everything to do with defending yourself -- and I quote my seventh grade teacher here -- "against a government gone awry".

The last time I visited my sister, who still lives in my hometown, I saw a golf cart painted in camouflage, adorned with a two-gun rack driving into the parking lot at a country store. So you see, Virginians are as serious about their guns as Texans.

I say all this as background to what I encountered at the last Amarillo gun show I attended before Obama was elected president. Several times I was told I shouldn't wait to buy a gun because the next show would be "after the election, and you don't know what will have happened by then". The not-to-veiled implication was that under a Democratic president, gun sales would be immediately eliminated, or drastically curtailed.

Well, it's now after the election and there's been at least two gun shows here since. And, I'm not worried gun sales will end no matter who is president or what party is in control.

I just wonder what my seventh grade teacher would say about the rampant belief that the Constitution could be so easily thwarted by one man. Of course, Miss Driscoll wouldn't have believed a president would have allowed wiretaps on U.S. citizens without warrants, either.

The world was a simpler place.

Looks do matter - just ask Sarah Boyle

It's the latest Internet sensation.

Britain's Got Talent -- the Limey version of American Idol -- has Sarah Boyle singing.

Jon Mark Beilue writes about it in his blog today. Women everywhere seem struck by the 47-year-old singing sensation.

I sent the YouTube clip (viewed by more than 12 million people) to a girlfriend of mine. She wasn't as appreciative of the acclaim being given Boyle as I was. Not because she doesn't think Boyle is great. She does.

But she thinks the reaction reflects a double-standard no one is acknowledging:

Here's her take on the reaction to Boyle's performance:

"Yeah, I saw this on TV, on You Tube, etc.... It kind of annoyed me. It was like — WOW! a woman who is not beautiful can sing! Stop the presses.
They were so condescending on the show I couldn’t stand it. These people need to get to the opera where they will discover that women who don’t look like models actually have talent.

"That video has been freakin’ me out since I saw it. Then I go to the gym today and the woman at the desk is showing the video to everyone and they’re all exclaiming and crying over it. I can’t believe it. It is so insulting!

The show was unbelievable — judges crying, people cheering like crazy. AN UGLY WOMAN CAN SING. STOP THE PRESSES!!
The blind can see. The lame can walk. The dowdy can sing. It’s a miracle!!!
If she had been young and pretty we wouldn’t have even known about her."

I don't think my friend is completely correct. If a young Boyle had been pretty with a voice like that, I believe she would have been discovered years ago. She wouldn't be unemployed and previously unknown at age 47, languishing on the shelf of life like a remarkable book deemed unworthy on the basis of its cover.

And that's the sad double-standard.

Dave Barry humor moment

"Lately, when I tell people I work for a newspaper, I've detected subtle signs of disapproval: the dirty looks, the snide remarks, the severed animal heads in my bed."

Hey, President Obama -- that's no pound puppy

The new presidential pet is a -- drum roll please -- Portuguese water dog.
From a breeder.

After the White House's much ballyhooed 'we want a pound pet' the first family has eschewed all the Hinze 57 varieties awaiting their death sentences in shelters across the country.

I understand the Obama children have allergies to many dog types. But, I just can't believe the most powerful man in the world can trot the globe and not manage to find a single pedigree-free hypoallergenic dog sitting on death row somewhere.

Granted, maybe The Prez has a few other things on his mind currently - like saving the economy from its death knell - but surely he has people he could task with the job of finding a suitable pound puppy that is hypoallergenic.

I don't have anything against pedigreed pets. I own one. I just object to a feel good publicity campaign aimed at promoting a message that apparently wasn't on the White House agenda.

The message I got from all this was: Do as I say, not as I do.