My friend, Buffalo, sent me two e-mails today. The first is a post that’s been making the rounds for a year or more, purported to be Robin William’s Plan for Peace. The second post was Buffalo’s plan for peace. He was willing to let me repost those e-mails here, so I have my first guest blogger.
This is the first of the two posts:
You may have seen this before, but it bears repeating. Leave it to Robin Williams to come up with the perfect plan…what we need now is for our UN Ambassador to stand up and issue the following message:
1. The US will apologize to the world for our “interference” in their affairs, past & present. You know, Hitler, Mussolini, Tojo, Noriega, Milosevic and the rest of those ‘good ole boys.’ We will never “interfere” again.
2. We will withdraw our troops from all over the world, starting with Germany, South Korea and the Philippines. They don’t want us there. We would station troops at our borders. No one will ever sneak through holes in the fence again.
3. All illegal aliens have 90 days to get their affairs together and leave. We’ll give them a free trip home. After 90 days the remainder will be gathered up and deported immediately, regardless of who or where they are. France would surely welcome them.
4. All future visitors will be thoroughly checked and limited to 90 days unless given a special permit. No one from a terrorist nation would be allowed in. If you don’t like it there, change it yourself and don’t hide here. Asylum would never be available to anyone. We don’t need any more cab drivers or 7-11 cashiers.
5. No “students” over age 21. The older ones are the bombers. If they don’t attend classes, they get an “F” and it’s back home baby.
6. The US will make a strong effort to become self-sufficient energy wise. This will include developing non-polluting sources of energy but will require a temporary drilling of oil in the Alaskan wilderness. The caribou will just have to cope for a while.
7. Offer Saudi Arabia and other oil producing countries $10 a barrel for their oil. If they don’t like it, we go some place else. They can go somewhere else to sell their production. About a week of the wells filling up their storage sites ought to be enough.
8. If there is a famine or other natural catastrophe in the world, we will not “interfere.” They can pray to Allah or whomever, for seeds, rain, cement or whatever they need. Besides most of what we give them is stolen or given to the army. The people who need it most get very little, if anything.
9. Ship the UN Headquarters to an isolated island some place. We don’t need the spies and fair weather friends here. Besides, the building would make a good homeless shelter or lockup for illegal aliens.
10. All Americans must go to charm and beauty school. That way, no one can call us “Ugly Americans” any longer.
“The Statue of Liberty is no longer saying ‘ Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled masses.’ She’s got a baseball bat and she’s yelling, ‘You want a piece of me?'”

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Chicago schooling is in an incredible mess! For quite some time school administrators have been campaigning to get the students to class on the first day of school. What kind of household send their kids to school when they feel like it, rather than on the first day of class?
This indifference to schooling is a serious problem, but now the City of Chicago has given students even more reason to be indifferent. Students who attend schools which have an over all failing grade have been given permission to seek a spot in another school, where the student might get a better education. Unfortunately, the Chicago school district was totally unprepared to deal with the volume of students who wished to change schools.

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I have written my thoughts about school uniforms in the recent past. I feel that the casual clothing kids wear today makes it impossible to create an environment where the students can focus on the lessons.
I was delighted to hear that one school has announced that short t-shirts which reveal the belly are banned. Neither the students, nor the teachers may wear them. Should a student come to school in one, they will be greeted at the door and handed an oversized T-shirt to wear for the day.
The students dislike wearing the oversized T-shirts so much, that they are changing their wardrobes.
Clever….very clever.

Education is an important subject to me. I spent a lot of years as a teacher, and it’s not possible to turn off my thoughts about education in general now that I no longer teach.
I was half-listening to the radio today and heard part of a blurb about a school that planned to address student absenteeism by charging the parents when the students were not in school.

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We have a cable channel here in the US which used to be known as The Nashville Network (TNN). It has recently been taken over by aliens and is known now as “Spike.” It’s being touted as the first network for men.

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Lord, spare me from Homeowner’s Associations! It seems that they are all powerful and that you are guilty until proven innocent.
Did you know that your Homeowners Association can fine you for each stork that a relative plants on your lawn to celebrate the birth of your child. Or that you can be fined for planting TOO MANY rosebushes?
You can be fined for hanging out your laundry, or hanging a cute little swing by your doorway. You can also be fined if you paint your house the wrong color! AND you can be fined for a fence that is the wrong height, or for having foster children, or for disturbing the new fallen snow!

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I was in the car earlier this week and heard that Pfizer and Glaxo, two of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the US announced that they would discontinue supplying Canadian pharmacies that resell their product to the US. For more on the subject, visit the Boston Globe article from August 7, 2003.
The entire subject of the cost of drugs in the US riles me. We pay at least TWICE as much for the exact same drug as the Canadians, and other countries pay much less than the Canadians. It’s the exact same medicine, not a generic, but Americans are expected to pay through the nose “to support the cost of research.”
HORSE HOCKEY!!!
Those companies can sell their products for the same price to every country, and they might make a billion or two less in profits, and still be able to fund the research. They are going to find very rapidly, that the baby boomers in the US will NOT be able to pay their outrageous demands and their free ride will be over.
It can’t happen soon enough!

We’ve all experienced it, an ad that riles us so much that we turn the radio off, or click the mute button on the TV. We’ve all suffered through the expansion of pop up ads and banners and all forms of telephone harrassment…er marketing.
I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that ads like that contribute to road rage and violence in the home.
There’s one particular ad that we find so offensive that we RUSH to mute it. It’s an ad for Menard’s. It’s a chain similar to Lowe’s or Home Depot. Overly eager singers proclaim “Save More Money At Menard’s.” I can bear the singers and the jingle, it’s the spokesman who drives me wild.
He’s an old fashioned saleman with a huge smile and “Hail fellow well met” demeanor who hawk’s the week’s sales. I expect him to reach out of the TV and grasp my arm and pull me into the store, all the while telling me what wonderful things I’ll find within. I can deal with all that, but his tone of voice simply makes me want to take a header off a cliff to get away from him.
We thought at one point that our prayers had been heard when a young woman replaced him for a while, but we suspect she must be his daughter. Same voice. (sigh)
I want advertising people to take notice: If you persist in making your ads this offensive, you will drive customers away. I will NEVER shop at Menards.
I’ll save my complaints about pop ups, telemarketers, coupons in magazines, and fragrance ads that stink up an entire magazine for another rant.
If you shop at Menard’s, would you please tell them to change the ads??

I wrote about the Chicago Tollway Authority and their push to collect all the unpaid tolls for the past two years, on June 9, 2003. That post has been a magnet for people who want to tell their stories.
The CTA was refusing to allow people to make payment plans. They have been demanding payment for two years of tolls and fines within 16 days. It was announced that those with fines over $500 could arrange to make payments, but it must not have gone into place in time for the last woman who commented.
Go read the comments and see how things are shaping up.

Discourse, Dialog, Diatribe, Disappointment
I had hoped when I started blogging that I would find that the blog world was slightly different from the other areas of the Internet that I have experienced. Recently, on one of the blogs that I read, I learned that things are the same all over the Internet.

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