On the Dad front.
I finally received a letter from Mom and Dad. At the time Dad wrote the letter he was still getting advice as to treatment options. He mentioned that he needed blood transfusions on Friday and Monday.
My dad will be 80 this year, and certainly I have wasted the last 12+ years of my relationship with my dad, and it now looks like I may never get to see him again.
I think I do not read enough of the New York Times, but yet I read things you did not. Asperger's tends to leave one with a troubled sense of balance. How much time should I spend reading the paper, how do I decide what to read. I do remember a recent article that said the average reader spent 40 minutes a day reading the paper. One of the things I do think the hard copy paper has over the web is that with the web you are more likely to read things that interest you, and may even have various sites set up to filter stories that cover a certain company or location. I do scan each and every page to the paper and constantly end up reading stories that if I was searching for news as opposed to allowing the Times to offer a smorgasbord of stories to pick from.
For example while I am certainly not a sports fan, I love to read the stories about the new baseball stadiums being built in New York, the way the Mets are honoring Jackie Robinson and other techie-type sports stories.
I have hundreds of articles that I have clipped out of the paper. I decided to start going through them and thin out the 20 different manila envelopes. The first story was about the Pentagon sending nuclear arming devices to China instead of helicopter parts. Oops. That would make a great blog post.
To err is human, to really screw things up you need a computer, but to really, really, really screw things up it takes the US Government. Also I thought perhaps that might make a great plot line for an espionage thriller. That is my problem, I see these articles, know that I might be able to use it at some in the future and so the collections grow. Sure if I had a computer, with internet access I could build an electronic index but alas...
If you remember I was doing the volleyball thing while back at Club Fed. I dislocated my ring finger on my left hand. It was reset by the PA on duty and the finger is not exactly the way it should be. Rule number 1: if they have no sports medicine in prison, I better not play sports. So how the hell did my leg get broken? But there is a lot more to that story too.
Should I mention that your hard earned tax dollars are keeping me here in the lap of luxury? Sorry, I know that it is not a laughing matter. I do think we need to have a serious look at what the government should be responsible for, and then how to pay for it. I think it is amazing every time there is a story about how much of the war effort is done by "private" companies, and the billions of dollars that is paid out under the no-bid contracts. I think I have an article that says it is over 50 percent of the dollars spent by the Pentagon.
As an aside, I wish I had met with the parole board this month. Apparently, the word came down from the governor that he wants to close some prisons. This despite the fact that the four that were supposed to be closed under the just passed budget will remain open. So it appears a few more inmates than usual that met the board this path month were released. Guys who already had been denied several times before. That just shows how flawed the system is. It is not, as it should be, whether you would be a law abiding citizen upon your release, it is let us see how many bodies we need to keep in the system this month. Life is not fair, and then there is the justice system.
