Pissing ya off ...

Before I go to work. Guess how much tax ExxonMobil paid last year? I know what I pay and I'm seriously pissed. I'm tired of supporting these corporate assholes.

Have you traveled with me?

Spirit Airlines will start charging $45 for carry-on baggage. You can bet your left gonad that every other airline will follow right along.

...

Do you know how much I have to pack for 3 weeks in Europe?

Mrs. F, who flies every-fucking-place on business, has condensed her shit to one carry on when she goes away. It seems like the airlines only want you to fly, sans luggage. It's one thing when somebody goes on a 3-day business trip and can generally pack what they need into a carry on or a valet, but what do folks do when they, and their kids, go on vacation? It's getting to the point where they have to plan to buy an extra ticket for their luggage, a cost that's prohibitive to many people.

Do the airlines think this is gonna make them money? Sure, there are folks who have to fly (Mrs. F for one) but a lot of families will opt to load up the car with their kids and their stuff and hit the road. The business travelers, like the Mrs., will adjust and travel as lightly as possible.

Our deal, when we go to Europe in late summer, is to use the airlines to our favor, mainly a Delta Airlines American Express card. We get points for every purchase with the card and the Mrs. gets double when she buys her business travel tickets with it. With the points we accrue in a year, we upgrade to first class at no charge for the sole reason of being allowed to take 3 bags each, up to 70lbs each without fees. Since we enjoy cruising so much, we also try and arrange trips that end up in New York so we only have to fly one way; one of those perks that only comes with living in an area that has 3 cruise ports within driving distance (we'll be leaving and returning to Pier 92 on Manhattan's West Side when we go to Bermuda in a few weeks).

Air travel has become more hassle than it's worth. After all we've done in the way of bailouts and tax breaks for this industry, you'd think they could make the experience a little more bearable. They are only screwing themselves in the long term by increasing fees and downgrading service. The flying public has enough to deal with going through the security nightmare just getting to their flight and it doesn't get any better from there out.

...

So, if you check your baggage, you'll pay a fee. If you carry it on, you'll pay a fee. Oh, you could send your shit by UPS, but when you show up at the airport with no luggage, the happy fuckers working for the TSA will give you a free colonoscopy.

...

People are going to avoid flying as much as possible and it will eventually kill the airlines' bottom line. Be prepared to hear calls for financial help in the next few years. Hopefully, when they do come crying with their hands out, our elected representatives will say no.

Update:

More here:

...

One more thing - aren't you glad that American, Spirit, United and all the rest phased out those extra baggage charges when gas prices went down over the past year? Remember those were extra charges meant to make up for the surge in gas prices ...

Yeah, I'm doing the Dance of Joy!

Let me tell ya about killing ...

Stays on top today - G

...

Ok. So this film released today showed the killing of what turned out to be innocent civilians, including journalists. It also featured sick, disturbing attitudes among the soldiers who fired on these innocent civilians. And it shows that the Pentagon originally lied to the press about what happened. [my em]

...

People were disturbed by the soldiers' attitudes? People should be disturbed. That's what war is. That's what war does to the human mind after prolonged exposure. War ain't played by Marquis of Queensbury rules.

You know what it feels like to be in the middle of it? Well, combat is the Great Equalizer. It is a time where abstract thought takes its leave, when the words "moral" and "compassion" meaningless until it's over. You are in touch with your basic instincts, kill or be killed, fight or flight, and nothing much else matters. You are as wild as the rest of God's creatures, humanity be damned. All that matters is what all of your senses, heightened to the sharpness of a razor thanks to the adrenaline rush, are telling you and what animal instinct and the training you've received are causing you to act. And you can't turn it on and off like flipping a switch.

Now, do that day after day, year after year, tour after tour. Do you expect them to be any different? After years on the line, seeing the killing and the destruction, the human mind does what it has to in order to protect itself. Some of that involves dehumanizing those you might have to kill; a hardening of the shell, as it were. It's also the addiction to the rush, for there is no other like that in a combat situation (Trust me, I spent years trying to find it via more 'peaceful' means).

What the troops' attitudes should show us is that they've been there too long, too many times; a place they never should have been in the first place. It shows us that back here at home, we haven't seen enough of the horror and suffering of war. If we had, we'd never have allowed Bush and Cheney to engage in this criminal enterprise. If we had, they'd be sitting in jail by now.

Do you think these soldiers were psychopaths before they went there? They're probably guys with spouses and kids whom they're gonna go home to. They used to have normal lives but now when they get back, normalcy will be a tenuous thing for years, if not forever. The average American has no clue, or they wouldn't be so cavalier about putting our troops in this position. I'm not excusing their actions but they are certainly understandable in light of what they've been asked to do for so long.

Everybody thinks it's like a big paintball game. The troops go out, play the game, and then come home. Only a small few take the time to reflect on what effect our 'adventures' have on the minds of the people we send on them. Don't forget, we're gonna have to deal with these people once this shit is over. They're gonna have to live and function in the real world. If you think it's disturbing seeing this in a war zone, think about what it would be to see it in your neighborhood.

The Moral Weight of War

This is an adjunct to Fixer's excellent post above.

Julia Baird in Newsweek:

"We don't have the luxury of choosing our wars. We go where and when our president tells us to—without hesitation. I know it's hard for some to understand: no matter how much it sucks at times, we love what we f--king do" (Mike Scotti, in the documentary Severe Clear).

Seven years after the war in Iraq began, it's still refreshing to hear frank words from a Marine who has fought there. Who has endured, killed, seen hell, and returned. Who admits the only thing Marines think about more than sex is their rifles. Perhaps it is because the debate about war is usually dominated by pundits, perhaps because our news coverage of Iraq has plummeted. (Andrew Tyndall, who keeps track of major-network nightly news, found that there has been only one report from a correspondent on the Iraq War this year. One! This is doubtless due to progress made, but 98,000 troops remain.) Or maybe it's because we don't often see real footage of soldiers drinking, being anointed with oil before battle, or getting high on combat, and shouting: "This is the coolest thing ever! It's raining bombs! Steel rain!" Nor do we too often see graphic images of dead, bloodied U.S. soldiers, or the brains of a young Iraqi girl lying on the road after her father did not obey a signal to stop his car.

Mike Scotti's story is particularly arresting because as he fought on the front lines of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, he recorded what he saw on a mini-DV camera. This footage forms the spine of Severe Clear, which is raw and thought-provoking. It reminded me of two lessons of war that are both obvious and constantly forgotten—and a third that is urgent today. The first is that soldiers need a clear, true reason to fight. The second is that surviving a war requires enormous mental strength. The third is that if we send men and women to battle under false pretenses, our responsibility to care for them afterward is even greater.

The first is why Scotti carried a photo of Beth Quigley, a friend who died on September 11, in his pocket when he went into combat. As he watched a bombed patch of land burn with leaping flames, he says: "I knew people were dying out there, but to be honest I didn't give a f--k. For me this was payback for September 11." He wrote in his journal, "There will be no debate once we find Saddam's weapons." When those weapons were not found, Scotti tried to stop thinking about it. But when he came home, feeling like an alien, to discover there was no "imminent threat" from the Iraqi regime, he felt an overwhelming anger and slipped into a self-destructive "black hole." As we saw in the The Hurt Locker — which Scotti found so accurate, it was unnerving—returning home can be profoundly alienating. A 2008 RAND study found that 20 percent of those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan reported symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder or major depression. Only half have sought help, and half of those received "minimally adequate" treatment. Part of this depression is undoubtedly coming back, as a warrior who survived war, to realize you may not have needed to be there in the first place. The moral weight of war, and killing, is heavy enough without strategic errors. As Nancy Sherman writes in The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds and Souls of Our Soldiers, "that psychological anguish in war is also moral anguish is a fact too often ignored."

And there is serious psychological anguish. A report by the Congressional Quarterly found that more U.S. military personnel had killed themselves in 2009 than had been killed in either the Iraq or Afghanistan wars that year. A 2007 CBS investigation found that about 120 veterans committed suicide each week in America in 2005. The highest suicide rate was among veterans age 20 to 24 who had served in the war on terror: between two and four times higher than civilians their age.

When I met Scotti, I was struck by how lean and driven he was. He says he dug himself out of his hole by viewing his war experiences as a source of strength: initiative, discipline, focus, attention to detail, and strategic thinking. He went on to finish an M.B.A. from NYU Stern, work in finance, and found a charity. He wanted me to know how proud he was to be part of Bravo Battery, 1st Battalion, 11th Marines, a.k.a. the Beastmasters, the artillery unit that supported his infantry in Iraq. And that brotherhood and service still mattered more than any strategic reasons to go to war. But of course these reasons matter, even for the few, the proud, the Marines. We owe them honor, truth—and ongoing care.

Mr. Scotti worked through his problems. Not all of the Veterans will. We ain't seen nothing yet.

Question of the Day

The Rude Guy:

... How clean is coal with blood on it?

GOP senator likely to be indicted

What a delightful headline! Gives me goose bumps.

Raw Story

Nevada Republican Sen. John Ensign is likely to be indicted for a $96,000 payment he made to the husband of the aide with whom he had an affair, a leading Nevada political reporter says.

"If Ensign gets indicted, he will become a national and state nightmare for the GOP," Ralston reports. "National Democrats will brandish him as a symbol of corruption (they may anyhow) and local Democrats will wrap the junior senator around the GOP Senate nominee’s neck...."

Ralston also notes that the Justice Department's failed prosecution of Alaska GOP Sen. Ted Stevens in 2008 "has cast a shadow over the Ensign case. ... The department is being very deliberate in assembling a case against Ensign."

The Stevens prosecution wasn't a total failure. At least he's out of office.

Best of luck to DoJ on this one.

Headline of the Day

Pope Vows To Get Church Pedophilia Down To Acceptable Levels

None Dare Call It Sedition

Another 'must read', by Sara Robinson. Links at site.

Sedition: Crime of creating a revolt, disturbance, or violence against lawful civil authority with the intent to cause its overthrow or destruction -- Brittanica Concise Dictionary

These two events are a wake-up call for progressives. They're telling us that it's time to openly confront the fact that conservatives have spent the past 40 years systematically delegitimizing the very idea of constitutional democracy in America. When they're in power, they mismanage it and defund it. When they're out of power, they refuse to participate in running the country at all -- indeed, they throw all their energy into thwarting the democratic process any way they can. When they need to win an election, they use violent, polarizing, eliminationist language against their opponents to motivate their base. This is sedition in slow motion, a gradual corrosive undermining of the government's authority and capacity to run the country. And it's been at the core of their politics going all the way back to Goldwater.

At that point -- and we're there -- criminal intent and action become the real issues. Progressives need to realize that the right began defiantly dancing back and forth over the legal line, daring us to do something about it, quite some time ago. And it's high time we called it out -- and, where appropriate, start prosecuting it -- for exactly what it is.

Openly advocating acts of sedition has become the conservatives' main political stock in trade over the past year. (The SPLC offers a strong summary here.) You hear it everywhere from Rush to Glenn to Michelle Malkin to Michelle Bachman. Everybody on the right is now roundly convinced that the fairly-elected President of the United States isn't even a citizen. He's a Muslim, and thus in treasonous league with terrorists. The main goal of his administration is to turn the country over to the One World Government. He's a socialist. He's a fascist. All of these are direct attacks on Obama's fundamental legitimacy and authority to lead the country -- and thus a deliberate incitement to revolt against his administration.

These narratives are coupled with a rising us-versus-them blaming of progressives for all the problems of the country. These days, the screeds sound eerily like free-market fundamentalists freebasing Hitler: they're clouded over with the typical eliminationist vitriol that reduces liberals to subhuman vermin that must be violently exterminated from the body politic in order to restore the virtue of the country. (For those who groove on that sort of thing, there's even a slight dash of anti-Semitism in the mix.) This is dangerous stuff. And in the context of the conservatives' longstanding effort to delegitimize the government, it's also an open invitation to sedition.

What these groups are telling us is that they no longer recognize the government's sole franchise on the use of force; and they're actively organizing to seize and exercise at least some of that power for themselves.

Most alarming of all: these right-wing warriors have advanced to the point of actual target acquisition. This should worry us, because law enforcement and terrorism experts know that when groups like this get to where they're settling on specific targets, they're the final stages of gearing up for violent confrontation.

It's time to confront the sobering fact that the entire right wing -- including the GOP establishment, which encourages, endorses, and echoes these sentiments almost every time its officials appear in public -- is now issuing nearly constant invitations to criminal sedition. They're creating a climate and using language that lowers their base's inhibitions around violence -- and irresponsibly eggs on the handful of sociopaths in their midst who are already primed to kill. They've given their newly-expanded corps of flying monkeys permission to brandish their guns in public, empowered their militias, promised them glory, and are now telling them explicitly which targets to hit.

We'd be idiots not to regard this as an overt threat. Especially when they keep telling us, very explicitly, that they mean it to be. When somebody says they're going to shoot you, believe them.

If this is just political grandstanding to energize the base, they're playing with fire, and they need to bring this incendiary campaign to a screeching halt. Right now. This Mickey Mouse pussyfooting around, play-acting at sedition is criminally dangerous chickenshit politics that puts the short-term needs of the Republican party ahead of the long-term viability of the American democracy they've sworn to uphold. In case the party leaders haven't noticed, their base has taken them as seriously as a heart attack -- and they're genuinely making ready for armed revolt.

On the other hand, if seditious overthrow is what they intend, let them stand up, follow through, and face the charges. They're either Americans, committed to working in good faith within the democratic process to create our common future; or else they're seditionists in intention or fact -- and thus enemies of the state, plain and simple.

For the good of the country, we cannot continue to let them have it both ways. They need to choose whose side they're on: America's, or their own.

I have nothing to add other than keep your weapons clean and oiled.

“If we see the end of this country it will come from the right"

Chris Hedges with a 'must read'.

There are no constraints left to halt America’s slide into a totalitarian capitalism. Electoral politics are a sham. The media have been debased and defanged by corporate owners. The working class has been impoverished and is now being plunged into profound despair. The legal system has been corrupted to serve corporate interests. Popular institutions, from labor unions to political parties, have been destroyed or emasculated by corporate power. And any form of protest, no matter how tepid, is blocked by an internal security apparatus that is starting to rival that of the East German secret police. The mounting anger and hatred, coursing through the bloodstream of the body politic, make violence and counter-violence inevitable. Brace yourself. The American empire is over. And the descent is going to be horrifying.

Those singled out as internal enemies will include people of color, immigrants, gays, intellectuals, feminists, Jews, Muslims, union leaders and those defined as “liberals.” They will be condemned as anti-American and blamed for our decline. The economic collapse, which remains mysterious and enigmatic to most Americans, will be pinned by demagogues and hatemongers on these hapless scapegoats. And the random acts of violence, which are already leaping up around the fringes of American society, will justify harsh measures of internal control that will snuff out the final vestiges of our democracy. The corporate forces that destroyed the country will use the information systems they control to mask their culpability. The old game of blaming the weak and the marginal, a staple of despotic regimes, will empower the dark undercurrents of sadism and violence within American society and deflect attention from the corporate vampires that have drained the blood of the country.

“We are going to be poorer,” David Cay Johnston told me. Johnston was the tax reporter of The New York Times for 13 years and has written on how the corporate state rigged the system against us. He is the author of “Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense and Stick You With the Bill,” a book about hidden subsidies, rigged markets and corporate socialism. “Health care is going to eat up more and more of our income. We are going to have less and less for other things. We are going to have some huge disasters sooner or later caused by our failure to invest. Dams and bridges will break. Buildings will collapse. There are water mains that are 25 to 50 feet wide. There will be huge infrastructure disasters. Our intellectual resources are in decline. We are failing to educate young people and instill in them rigor. We are going to continue to pour money into the military. I think it is possible, I do not say it is probable, that we will have a revolution, a civil war that will see the end of the United States of America.”

“If we see the end of this country it will come from the right and our failure to provide people with the basic necessities of life,” said Johnston. “Revolutions occur when young men see the present as worse than the unknown future. We are not there. But it will not take a lot to get there. The politicians running for office who are denigrating the government, who are saying there are traitors in Congress, who say we do not need the IRS, this when no government in the history of the world has existed without a tax enforcement agency, are sowing the seeds for the destruction of the country. A lot of the people on the right hate the United States of America. They would say they hate the people they are arrayed against. But the whole idea of the United States is that we criticize the government. We remake it to serve our interests. They do not want that kind of society. They reject, as Aristotle said, the idea that democracy is to rule and to be ruled in turns. They see a world where they are right and that is it. If we do not want to do it their way we should be vanquished. This is not the idea on which the United States was founded.”

It is hard to see how this can be prevented. The engines of social reform are dead. Liberal apologists, who long ago should have abandoned the Democratic Party, continue to make pathetic appeals to a tone-deaf corporate state and Barack Obama while the working and middle class are ruthlessly stripped of rights, income and jobs. Liberals self-righteously condemn imperial wars and the looting of the U.S. Treasury by Wall Street but not the Democrats who are responsible. And the longer the liberal class dithers and speaks in the bloodless language of policies and programs, the more hated and irrelevant it becomes. No one has discredited American liberalism more than liberals themselves. And I do not hold out any hope for their reform. We have entered an age in which, as William Butler Yeats wrote, “the best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

[...] Those who do not rebel in our age of totalitarian capitalism and who convince themselves that there is no alternative to collaboration are complicit in their own enslavement. They commit spiritual and moral suicide.

Pretty strong stuff. The darkest days of the Reagan Era may not yet be upon us.

Simply put ...

Mr. Urban Hellhole:

...

To restate the obvious, the point isn't that there are bad (accused) priests. Of course there are! There are bad people everywhere. The point is the church using its institutional power to cover up alleged crimes, shield perpetrators, and put accused abusers and rapists in positions where they have continued access to teens and children. [my em]

Exactly, and it goes all the way to the top.

Fun in the snow!

Our pal Froggy in a comment on this post:

Ice out has been declared on Lake Minnetonka. That means, essentially, the ice is gone. Enjoy your snow. I'll be enjoying my not snow.

Go jump in yer ice-free lake, Froggy. I'll be able ta hear yer weenie slammin' ta "Min" from here! Heh.

Anyway, I took yer advice. Here's me enjoying my snow, which we got a pretty good refill of yesterday and last night. First things first:



My buddy Dave, The Berm Fairy working on Clancy's driveway next door after taking a few swipes out of mine that saved me a lot of time and work. He's hard to catch in the act, but I got lucky and had my camera on me. Pardon my finger:



I went up and got him the 5-pack of Heineken's Best Berm Removal Fuel that I've had in the icebox for a month. It woulda been a 6-pack except Mrs. G fell to temptation. Thank you, Dave.

Here's the first round of the main event, with a coupla annotated 'wardrobe malfunctions'. I have no shame, nosirree. Heh. I only wish I had the camera running as I went down the right side of the driveway. All the snow I had been throwing over there avalanched down on me. No problem, happens quite often, but it's impressive, especially when you find yourself standing in knee deep snow where you weren't a second before. As you can see, we all had a good time. We do this shit a lot in the wintertime.



Thank you for letting me bore you with my ho-hum chores.

Devil of a Scandal

MoDo, an Irish Catholic gal about whom I have fantasies of in a Catholic schoolgirl's uniform...

The exorcist also said that the abuse scandal showed that Satan uses priests to try to destroy the church, “and so we should not be surprised if priests too ... fall into temptation. They also live in the world and can fall like men of the world.”

Actually, falling into temptation is eating cupcakes after you’ve given them up for Lent. Rape and molestation of children is far beyond what most of us think of as succumbing to worldly temptation.

[...] The Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, preacher of the papal household, told those at St. Peter’s Basilica, including the pope, that he was thinking about the Jews in this season of Passover and Easter because “they know from experience what it means to be victims of collective violence and also because of this they are quick to recognize the recurring symptoms.”
...

He was talking about the collective violence and recurring symptoms of those critics — including victims, Catholics worldwide and commentators — who want the church to face up to its sins.

Father Cantalamessa went on to quote from the letter of an unnamed Jewish friend: “I am following with indignation the violent and concentric attacks against the church, the pope and all the faithful by the whole world. The use of stereotypes, the passing from personal responsibility and guilt to a collective guilt, remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semitism.”

As they say in Latin, “Ne eas ibi.” Don’t go there.

Non fæces, Sherlockus! Esplain to me the non-shameful aspects of anti-semitism?

Mindful of the church’s long history of anti-Semitism, Leon Wieseltier, the New Republic literary editor and Jewish scholar, noted: “Why would the Catholic Church wish to defend itself by referring to other enormities in which it was also implicated? Anyway, the Jews endured more than a bad press.” This solidarity with Jews is also notable given that Italy’s La Repubblica reported that “certain Catholic circles” suspected that “a New York Jewish lobby” was responsible for the outcry against the pope.

Well of course “a New York Jewish lobby” was responsible for the outcry against the pope. Aren't they responsible for everything? I didn't know the Vatican was run by Repuglicans, but I guess those old white men are as right-wing as they come.

More.

I have said elsewhere that it came to me in a flash of divine revelation that the probably centuries of child molestation by the papists is more than isolated incidents. I suspect that they know that some small number of the victims will become child molesters themselves, thus ensuring a steady supply of Catholic priests in years to come.

Celibacy, itself a perversion of the human spirit, apparently applies only to women, vessels of unholiness that they are, at least to perverts that are scared shitless of them.

Molesting children is not only a sin, it's a felony, and its practitioners and enablers should be in prison. The Roman Church no longer has any moral authority whatsoever. It invented the scam of being God's chosen mouthpiece on Earth anyway, and scared people into submission for a coupla thousand years, by force if necessary, over something that doesn't exist. This is the basis of all religions besides animism and a few others that actually make sense.

Besides the priests and victims, their cover is now blown as well.

Oh, the irony...

Ironic Times

TEA PARTY MAY HURT GOP IN FALL
Wacko wingnuts could draw votes away from rightwing nut jobs.

Most Governors Defy Order by Guardians of the Free Republics
But some do agree to resign and let ad hoc group of anti-tax lunatics take over country.

REMINDER
Only the little people pay taxes.

Sarah Palin Addresses S&M Convention
Says McCain “kinkier than he looks.”

Please, no video...

$700 Billion of Junk Bond Debt Coming Due in 2012
As predicted in Mayan Calendar.

CDC Confirms Norovirus on 3rd Straight Cruise From South Carolina
Investigators focusing on Midnight All You Can Eat Buffet on Vomitorium Deck.

Quote of the Day

My neighbor Blondie:

... CNN is losing viewers. In its efforts to get more viewers, they began to suck more than ever before ...

Late for work ...

Does Cheney sit on the board?

Because these folks are as parasitic as it gets:

...

Here is how it works: If you were employed by a company that retains the Talx Corporation, they will contest every unemployment claim that a fired employee of those companies file. They will do it without having any reasons for such a contest. When the hearing officer rules against Talx, they will appeal.

...

How can they sleep at night?

Recipe for disaster ...

Hopefully, this will end well:

...

A political climate that's already more overheated than any time in a generation. Plans for a large-scale rally of firearms enthusiasts in the nation's capital. A fast-growing group of (mostly ex-) military and cops that pledges to disobey "unconstitutional orders" from the president, and an "urgent" call from the group's leader to flood Washington to "shout your oaths in the tyrant’s face" -- on the 15th anniversary of the worst home-grown terror incident in U.S. history, the Oklahoma City bombing.

What could possibly go wrong?

...

Just wondering if this would have happened when Bush was President ...

Song For A Snowy Afternoon

We're expecting 12-18" by Tuesday. Here's a tune by the late Kate Wolf.

From the 1980 Here In California Studio Performance. Accompanied by Nina Gerber and Rick Byars. http://www.katewolf.com

Kate Wolf ~ You're Not Standing Like You Used To

Thanks to kennethrm.

The lady is a tramp

A wonderfully metaphorical photo of life's journey into the mists of the future. The end of it all being Cleveland brings it back down to Earth. Ho-hum.

A different kind of sea cruise.

EssEffChron, with photos.

We were somewhere near Newfoundland, crossing the turbulent North Atlantic on a freighter and bound for Cleveland - two things not at the top of everyone's to-do list - along with 19 Polish crewmates and 22,000 tons of steel. My wife and I had boarded the Isadora in IJmuiden, Netherlands, committing to the 16-day voyage in large part because, frankly, I'm afraid to fly. (We had circled the globe using only ground transport, and I was determined to finish without becoming airborne.)

There also was an element of romance: experiencing the sea without the distractions - all-you-can-eat buffets, belly-flop contests, tuxedo dinners with the captain and cheesy lounge acts - that come with typical cruises. The only promises on the Isadora were fresh air, relaxation, hearty Polish meals in the company of the crew and an appreciation for hardworking seafarers.

And, of course, adventure.

"Not exactly the Queen Mary," deadpanned my wife upon seeing the Isadora for the first time, confirming that my enthusiasm for the trip was not as contagious as I'd hoped.

'Tramp' freighter

The Isadora is considered a "tramp" freighter because the company sells her services to the highest bidder; after unloading the steel in Cleveland, the bosses would entertain all offers. Returning empty was not an option. As with many other freighters, the Isadora runs a side business carrying a few travelers, although passengers aren't exactly revenue generators. (The ship burns $500 in fuel every hour. That's about six hours on our dime.)

While my wife was concerned about pirates (I explained that Somalia is halfway around the world), I was more worried about seasickness, especially after the first mate explained that our cargo of steel causes the ship to roll more in the open ocean.

That night, after a dinner of freshly baked rye bread, pork cutlets and sauerkraut, the captain invited us to his cabin to sample Polish culture (specifically, Polish vodka) and listen to American jazz. The cabin swayed as we made conversation, the captain topped our glasses with spirits from his homeland and Dave Brubeck jammed through the speakers.

You don't get nights like this on a Carnival ship.

I think that last sentence qualifies as a masterpiece of understatement!

In the end, I didn't suffer mal de mer nor were we hijacked, but we did have an adventure that we agreed was the best of our global jaunt. (Although it's unlikely that beef tongue, pickled herring and tripe soup will find their way unto my plate anytime soon.)

"Maybe not a queen but certainly a lady," I said.

Much more, including how to book passage.

An actual working merchantman where you're one of eight passengers instead of one of 1600 on a floating amusement park. Or 6000. Or, soon probably, 10,000. Polish food (yum!) and Dave Brubeck in the skipper's cabin beats the crap outta the manufactured distractions on regular cruises. Meaning no offense to anyone, that means you, Mr. and Mrs. Fixer, and to each their own, that's my opinion. Just sayin'.

Granted, the ports of call (Cleveland; Burns Harbor, Ill.; and, occasionally, Duluth, Minn., and Milwaukee) aren't quite as exciting as on the normal cruises, but then, the trip's the thing.

I find this concept oddly appealing. One of the beautiful things about being out on the sea is simply being out on the sea. On my two cruises, I spent a lot of time leaning on the rail watching Mother Ocean, mostly because there wasn't much else to do besides mess duty which totally sucks at sea. For $1800 a head, cheap for 16 days, I expect someone else to cook & clean and leave me free to gaze at my navel and contemplate the vastness of it all. And eat Polish food.

Update:

Mrs. G says this is OK with her as long as as the aftereffects of all that cabbage wafts aft and off the fantail.

Update II:

One ship I do not think I will consider for a cruise is this one.

It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Obama!

Daddy Frank, on the money as usual:

Depending on where you stand — or the given day — he is either an overintellectual, professorial wuss or a ruthless Chicago machine pol rivaling the original Boss Daley. He is either a socialist redistributing wealth to the undeserving poor or a tool of Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs elite. He is a terrorist-coddling, A.C.L.U.-tilting lawyer or a closet Cheneyite upholding the worst excesses of the Bush administration’s end run on the Constitution. He is a lightweight celebrity who’s clueless without a teleprompter or a Machiavellian mastermind who has ingeniously forged his Hawaiian birth certificate, covered up his ties to Islamic radicals and bamboozled the entire mainstream press. He is the reincarnation of J.F.K., L.B.J., F.D.R., Reagan, Hitler, Stalin, Adlai Stevenson or Nelson Mandela. (Funny how few people compared George W. Bush to anyone but Hitler and his parents.)

Funny. Yeah. Ha. Ha.

What’s clear is that Obama largely remains a fixed point even while the rest of us keep wildly revising our judgments, whether looking at him through the prism of partisan politics, race, media melodrama or any other we choose. It’s our recession-tossed country, not his presidency, that is rocked by violent mood swings.

Much more.

To those who observe ...

Happy Easter and a belated Passover.

Started a new project in the house this week out of necessity. The pedestal sink in the master bathroom broke so we figured it was time to do the things we wanted to do when I built it the first time (hastily, because company was coming from Germany that year and we needed the second bathroom functional) 10 years ago. I'm praying I'll get most of it done before we leave for Bermuda at the end of the month. Oy! No rest for the weary.