Going For Broke - Literally!

Let me tell you a story about a man named Jed. A poor mountaineer who barely…


No, wait a minute, that isn’t the right story.

Sorry, wrong book.

Ah here it is.

Hello and welcome to Prof. Bob’s Story Time. Today’s story is about how not remembering history will land you in a huge heap of cow poop.

Are you ready children? Good here we go.

A long time ago, in the country known as USA was a beautiful Golden Land known as California, where the people lived a golden life and whose gross income was that of a small emerging nation. In this Golden Land where the sun always shined and the young women walked around in what would amount to three sheets of Kleenex on strings, there was happiness everywhere you looked. There were strong industries that supplied jobs aplenty, top rated colleges and universities, nice tract houses with swimming pools, home of the movie stars and more wine than all the winos in both New York and Chicago could drink in a year. In other words a modern Eden, (remember the women in the Kleenex and strings?).

The Golden Land was so popular that ten thousand people moved there from the eastern part of the country each year to get away from the crime and cold weather that made everyone angry and mean towards their fellow men. In California everyone was tanned and smiling, at least that is what all the television shows and movies showed you, so why not believe them? They wouldn’t make stuff like that up would they?

Also in this land was a smaller subdivision of Magic called Disneyland, built by a man who sought only to bring family entertainment to all, but like so many great thinkers and dreamers, his land would fall into evil hands, who would subvert it for the sake of money and profit. But that is another story for a later time.

At the time this story begins the elected leader, or GOVERNOR of the Golden Land was Ronnie the Reagan, who had once been an actor in the movies and was very business savvy having run the Screen Actors Guild for many years, so he knew how to make the land better. To this end he had stored money collected from many forms of taxes to build an emergency fund in case of disasters or any bad things that might happen to the beautiful golden land. He had worked long and hard to make the land prosperous and free of federal aid. But his term was coming to the end, and the people looked towards choosing a new leader.

Now as with any mythical and magical place where there is happiness, beautiful beaches and those women dressed in next to nothing; there was evil lurking on the sparking California horizon. This evil had clothed itself in a guise of YOUTH and NEW HOPE. He was indeed a youthful fellow, but he was the son of the governor who had almost bankrupted the Golden Land many years before Ronnie the Reagan had taken office. This youth was known as Jerry the Brown Jr., (his father being Jerry the Brown Sr.). He was young well educated and raised in the Golden Land, he spoke well and except for the severe dark eyebrows that looked like they needed a weed-whacker to trim, he looked youthful. He was a child of the generation “Free Everything;” free love, free food, free mindedness, free, free, free. This point will come back later to haunt the people of the Golden Land.

Well, as you may have guessed he won the election and became the new Governor of California.

All seemed well until he actually started to do things, and then things went not so well. He decided he didn’t want the nice big Governor Mansion, so he sold it and moved into a luxury condo. Then he decided that the welfare regulations were too strict and made them easier for those in need. This backfired, because other states learned how easy it was to get on welfare, (the only real requirement was “are you breathing?”), and that you didn’t have to be a long term resident of the Golden Land to qualify. So they began sending their welfare dregs to the Golden Land so that heir states could boast lower welfare costs while California’s went up. Now the cost of welfare began to rise and those who actually had jobs were now paying more for those who didn’t want jobs from other states that had shown up asking for all the free money.

He started many other such programs, even waging a war on political corruption in the form of the dreaded magic paper called PROP 13, which didn’t stop the corruption, just moved it to another part of the state legislature. All these programs fell nicely into his free thinking stance he had said during his campaign. Slowly but surely while no one really was watching the reserve funds that were established by Ronnie the Reagan were almost gone. The media who had once been his friend, now referred to him as “Governor Moonbeam” because of his hippy attitude that was no longer youthful and new, just costly to the tax-payers.

Luckily for the people of the Golden Land his term ended, before the state had to file for Chapter 11.

Since his time many new Govenors were elected some good, some corrupt and one impeached, until a true hero came on the scene: The Govenorenaitor! He was big, he was strong, and he spoke broken English! He was the poor emigrant who made it big. He was an icon of the age, his presence moved mountains, if not, he would move them himself! He even married a member of the great royal house of Kennedy! He was the true symbol of the Golden Land!

He was a no-nonsense leader. He changed the rules for welfare it wouldn’t be bleed dry, he focused on balancing the budget to help save the Golden Land, but at every turn he was stymied by those who still followed the “Free for All” thinking who had survived from the Moonbeam times. He tried to fix the problem that had been laid on his really muscular shoulders. He was making headway, but it was slow moving at best.

Last night his reign ended. And now the darkness has returned…. Moonbeam is back! He isn’t youthful anymore, he isn’t new anymore, his forehead does look like the full moon though, and he still is preaching NEW HOPE.

But deep in the pile of papers he carries with him to the Governor Condo he once occupied decades before, there is one that is tri-folded neatly and crisply, almost lovingly like a cherished heirloom. In bold letters typed clearly under the title are the words: “Chapter 11 – The State of California.”

A New Resolution

Sorry I have been away so long from bloggong here, but I have had to expand my income to help the current administration pay for its $14 trillion debt it belives we need. So with my free time almost nothing and my ability to get any sleep, I will try to post new blessaies (term Taken from Stephen Fry), from now on - starting as soon as I get some sleep, grade papers, walk the dog and find an actual day off.

So for my followers, all four of you, keep the faith as I try to do better. For anyone who becomes a follower, GREAT! THANK YOU, THANK YOU!

Now that being said, here is what you will see as you follow along; more observations and commentaries as I am now embarking on a writing career to finally finish my list of things to do before I croak. I am working on a short story for submission to a magazine, as well as to get on a writer for a online magazine, so if you know anyone who is looking PLEASE TELL ME... (sound of begging added here).

There will also as always be cartoons for each blessay as you have seen before since I am a cartoonist I love to illustrate my stuff to add a good right to the jaw, so enjoy those.

Well it is off to job #2, but I wanted to let you guys know I am still here.

P.S. I am going to add "Oprah" and "breasts"to key words to see if my viewing goes up - you just never know.

Obama: Year One

I did this cartoon after listening to President Obama's State of the Union

Your 15 Minutes Are Up!

I am beginning to think I must give the wrong impression to people, judging from the emails that I get in my inbox.

Aside from the ones telling me that I need to revitalize my “manhood,” reduce my home loan payments, and the never-ending ones from a rather scantily clad young woman named “Sparkle,” who wants very much to meet me online, I am concerned about the emails I get from people who actually know me!

This all came about one evening while I was checking my three email accounts, (yes, I need three email accounts, doesn’t everyone?), I spy one with a subject line that read; “You will love this!” Fearing that in is another email from Sparkle, I right mouse click the message to get the properties of the sender to make sure it is not from her, or a radical terrorist group whose method of bringing America to its knees is through corrupting Gmail accounts.

I see it is from one of my students, still vaguely apprehensive I open the message. The message simply states that said student saw this video and immediately thought of me.  Below the message is pasted a hyperlink in the familiar Bob Ross happy sky blue colored html-speak. I pause for a moment, considering if I should open this link or not, granted it did get past my security software, but then again can you really trust software that sounds like a drunken Scotsman…

I click the link and I am taken to the Mecca of the Damned – YouTube! There on the screen is a grainy pixilated video of a woman lip-syncing to Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl” dressed like the pope. I am not saying I was offended, in fact I chuckled, and then asked forgiveness for my sins, but I thought why post this. I mean, her face was visible; she must want to get dates, go to college, get a high paying job, and to have a happy life, right? All of these things were now in jeopardy because she thought it was funny and felt that the world would be a better place by posting it on a site for the mentally challenged.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not against YouTube in principle, on the contrary I can watch clips from shows and films I remember from my youth, it is a great place to watch movie trailers to see if I really want to spend the price of my monthly rent on dinner and a movie. What does disturb me is that it has become the repository for those people that have no life, a vidcam and the burning urge to share their sad existence with the entire world.

 I miss the old days, (the late seventies and eighties), where such people were confined to shows like Montel, Jerry Springer, and the founder of it all Phil Donahue. Shows which the media now fondly refer to as Reality Television, proving that the media does live in an alternate reality. The only great show that was worth watching at that time was the Gong Show, a sort of spastic version of American Idol. These shows allowed those people you wouldn’t invite to Christmas or your child’s birthday party to achieve their, as quoted by the late Andy Warhol “15 minutes of fame.”

What is even more interesting is that they were paid to debase themselves on national television, (back in the eighties the going rate was $2000 for appearance on Geraldo).Imagine that, you would be paid a large sum of money to destroy your credibility as a human being! No wonder those types of shows are still on today. In today’s sagging economy, you could make your house payment by say, launching your child in a hot air balloon… nah, who’d pull a dumb stunt like that.

Anyway back to the “YouTube: Mecca of the Damned”. This site is the godsend for the people who missed out on the whole Gong Show thing, or maybe they’re the children of those people, (shudder). With the use of a low cost camera or vidcam mounted to the monitor, anyone can upload whatever they want! You can see a man singing in the shower, a dog that farts the national anthem, or my favorite the little child telling mommy how it will kick a monster’s @$$! (The last one was given legitimacy by being shown on America’s Funniest Videos). That kid is probably being scouted by the WCF as we speak.

Now all this sounds funny and whimsical, but I don’t think that these people have fully thought out this whole thing. Yes, you could make your career break like Katy Perry, or you can kill your career, hope for employment, marriage, etc, just as easy. Just imagine if YouTube was around 1998, “Sherman set the Way-back machine…”

You are sitting in the congressional hearing; President Clinton sits at a microphone facing the speaker of The House:

Speaker: “Mr. President, these allegations of your involvement with the young woman Monica Lewinski. Are they true?

Clinton: “Define what you mean by involvement Mr. Speaker.”

Speaker: “Let me show you this video we found on YouTube…”

Clinton: “Shit.”

 My question to these people is, “Have you ever considered your acts of stupidity and juvenile exposition can be seen by anyone at anytime!”Moreover, it never goes away unless you remove it from the web, (but then again the damage is already done, so what is the point really). I have a friend who is in Human Resources for a major studio in Hollywood, and she told me that they now check applicant names on YouTube, MySpace and Twitter to see if the applicant is right for their studio or for right for an opening at the local sanitarium.

 And it is not only the professional sector checking these sites, it is also the colleges and universities as well. Did you ever stop to think the reason you were not accepted at that Ivy League school could be that funny video taken while stoned at your friend’s high school grad party may not have been a good thing?

My point is this, today’s youth have grown up in a world where the 15 minutes of fame, is the Holy Grail to the easy life and piles of money; and they are willing to risk it all to obtain it. Thanks to the  short-cut-to-graduation school system, (where history is the memorization of dates, not to show us how our actions affected our future); they don’t understand the long-term effects of their actions. What seems funny today is not going to be funny in a job market tomorrow, and where only the smart are employed in high paying jobs, while the rest are working at Starbucks for minimum wage.

Barista: “What can I get for you…?”

Customer: “Hey, aren’t you the girl in that video singing “I Kissed A Girl” dressed like the pope?”

Barista: “Shit.