Mr. Toy's Mental Notes

OK, this is sort of a follow up to my pet peeve report of April 19. This is a story about being too polite. Today I crossed the street again. It was a two-way street. On the left was one small car. On the right was a long stream of cars. Who stopped? The one car on the left. Did any of the cars on the right stop? No. Having no hope of crossing immediately, I waved the guy on the left through, but he insisted on waiting patiently. When the right was clear, he was still there, waving me across. He didn't need to do that. It didn't make my day any easier, nor his. It was pointless politeness.

Living in a tourist town has its plusses, but holidays are not among them. I'm working today, and getting to work was no fun at all. Traffic jams are everywhere, making me even later than I usually am. I don't know what would posess so many people to want to be in the same place at once. All on the same streets, all wanting to go to the same waterfront attractions, only to find the parking lots full, the beaches clogged, and not enough seating at the restaurants to handle all of these hot, cranky, hungry people. If the point is to have fun, it ain't happening anywhere I can see. Better to stay home and come back when things calm down.

Two items have come to my attention that have called into question the reputation of the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula (CHOMP), the only hospital on the Monterey Peninsula. The first was a news item earlier this week about the helicopter ambulance service called CALSTAR . Evidently Calstar was working with local police and fire departments to practice landings around the Monterey Peninsula, doing several drills in the coming days. This piqued my interest because I was listening to the police scanner recently and heard that a CALSTAR helicopter needed to land on the football field at Monterey Peninsula College to handle a trauma patient involved in an accident on Highway 1. I found this odd because CHOMP is barely a mile up the highway from the accident scene. In fact the football field was probably no closer. Why did they need the helicopter? The news story about the CALSTAR training gave the answer. CHOMP is no longer accepting trauma patients. They now have to...

Reality TV. Now there's an oxymoron for you. Shouting news commentators. Talking louder does not make their points any more valid. Breast implants. Who wants to look at a naked girl with carnival balloons on her chest? Electronically enhanced vocals of female pop stars. Can't their voices stand on their own? Corporate control of local radio stations. Bring back the local DJ! Neoconservatives. New, but definitely not improved. Low carbs. Diet fads come and go, but diet gurus will be with us forever. Self-appointed food police. Moderation, not elimination, is the key. One-party control of both houses of Congress and the White House. Neither party is worthy of being in total control. Checks and balances, people! Liberal bashing. Liberals are not the enemy. Conservative bashing. Real conservatives are nice people. (Neoconservative bashing is OK, 'cuz they haven't actually accomplished anything.) Imitation Rob Lowe hairstyles. The harried businessman look was never in. Ov...

Many years ago when I was working in the hardware department at Brinton's  in Carmel, I was approached by a customer. He was a rather frantic looking fellow, a yuppie type, who was asking about doormats. He said his decorator told him to get one made of some material I had never heard of. I showed him our selection, which was fairly large and diverse, and made a few suggestions. Throughout our discussion he kept asking me if his decorator would approve of this one or that. After about the fourth time I said "The important thing is to get something you can be happy with." He looked up at me and said "Really?"  I nodded. He then looked at the mat in front of him, decided it was acceptable, and took it to the cashier.

Safeway.com came to town recently. On-line grocery shopping is now a reality on the Monterey Peninsula. We've been looking forward to this for some time, and it finally opened up early this month. We tried it out last week when we were pretty busy and kinda tired and didn't want to go to the store. So we signed up and we were on our way, happily adding stuff to our virtual grocery cart. Then reality sank in. It was taking quite awhile. Then the browser crashed. To Safeway's credit, they held the contents of our cart when we signed on again. So I added more stuff. Then I got to the dairy case. All I wanted was two gallons of 1% milk. Or 2% would be fine. We always get the two gallons for a discount deal. But they didn't have it on line. If we wanted gallons all we could get was whole milk, and no two-fer deals. In 1% and 2% all they listed were half gallons.  Game over. I had to go to the store after all. When I got there I realized that many of the things I shopped fo...

A pair of warbirds came to town yesterday. One was the only B-24 Liberator still in flyable condition. The other was a B-17 Flying Fortress, one of only a handful still functioning. These WWII bombers are amazing machines. I wasn't able to see them up close before they departed, though I was able to crawl through them on a previous visit. However, since I live just a mile from the Monterey airport, I was able to enjoy seeing them in flight. These planes are not large by today's standards, being roughly the size of a Boeing 737 airliner, yet they are visually imposing. They are grand machines that helped end the worst war the world has ever seen. It is an honor to watch these birds still flying. It is equally impressive to hear them. There is nothing like sound of four radial piston engines working together to take a bomber into the air. It's not quite a growl, it's not quite a rumble, but it's a little of both. It can be heard for some distance, but it is not part...

The Iraq war has been a series of miscalculations and bungled opportunities. -Callous dismissal of world opinion before the war.  -Erroneous "intelligence" on the weapons of mass destruction.  -The belief that Iraqi oil would pay for reconstruction, at little or no cost to the American taxpayer. -Inadequate forces to control looting after the fall of Saddam. -Inadequate civil control which gave terrorists a foothold in Iraq, where none existed before. -Shutting down a newspaper, in violation of our own principles of a free press, that sparked an uprising. -Ignoring the festering Fallujah until it exploded. And now....  This week the $#!^ has really hit the fan. What were those prison guards thinking? They not only abused Iraqi prisoners, they photographed their own crimes that showed then gloating over their idiocy. How many more ways can we screw this up? Bush took a huge gamble by invading Iraq in the first place. Failure would end up making things far worse t...

  I read the news today, oh boy.  It reported that Sinclair Broadcast Group censored the April 30th   Nightline on ABC affiliated TV stations it owns. On that night Ted Koppel read the names of all the Americans who had been killed to date in Iraq. Sinclair didn’t like that on the grounds that Koppel, in the opinion of Sinclair management, was pushing an anti-war agenda.   So much for freedom of the press.   In a statement on the front page of their website , Sinclair justified its action by saying: ” Mr. Koppel and "Nightline" are hiding behind this so-called tribute in an effort to highlight only one aspect of the war effort and in doing so to influence public opinion against the military action in Iraq.   “We understand that our decision in this matter may be questioned by some. Before you judge our decision, however, we would ask that you first question Mr. Koppel as to why he chose to read the names of 523 troops killed in combat in Iraq, rather tha...