how to solve america's "financial crisis"

i'm terrible at math. i do know how to balance my checkbook, though. one financial fact remains constant, regardless of your checkbook balancing abilities: if you don't spend more than you have your checkbook will balance (eventually!), and you won't bounce checks and need to borrow money to make ends meet. that financial fact is lost on corporate america when it comes to their dysfunctional business dealings with citizens. and worse yet, government has become corporate america's enabler, looking for a way to bail out wall street when they've made bad business decisions, mostly by loaning americans more money than they should have.

many americans are at fault, too. if you're making $60,000 a year (for argument's sake), why in the world do you need a $500,000 home? is it any wonder checkbooks aren't balancing on either side of this issue?

of course, i am oversimplifying this. i'm not alan greenspan or even suze orman. but being the simple person i am, i've come up with a simple solution: the u.s. population is currently a little more than 300 million. instead of spending $700 BILLION bailing out wall street, just give each and every citizen a one-time, tax free "economic stimulus payment" (esp) of $1 million.

do you really want that $500,000 home? now you can pay off the mortgage! ridiculous balances on credit cards? gone! no medical insurance? now you can afford it! do you have student loan debt or fret over tuition for your kids? no more worries!

we could take it one step further and designate that half a million from this esp goes directly into an ira, leaving each citizen with a cool half million to spend. either way, talk about stimulating the economy!

once your cool mil (or half mil) is gone, you're out of luck. if you get yourself into financial trouble you'll have to find your way out. and there won't be anymore economic stimulus payments for oh, let's say, 50 years, so spend and invest wisely.

you get the idea. as with most issues, with a little creative thinking and less bipartisanship and one-upsmanship from our political leaders, it could work. they'd have to make a drastic change in their mindset and put citizens rather than corporate america first, which admittedly is a more difficult issue to solve than this "financial crisis." but hey, i'm willing to give them a few weeks to sort it out -- i think i can afford to wait that long!

chili cook off

here are a few pix from the weekend before last, when i attended the chili cook off at christian klay winery in chalk hill, pa. i just used my cell cam, so forgive the poor quality. first, the mountains were hazy on the way up (left), but it later turned out to be a beautiful day. after the chili cook off (unmemorable, except for some GREAT nachos from the chef from nemacolin woodlands), i stopped by ohiopyle then drove past fallingwater. i laugh everytime i see the fire hydrant in front of the fallingwater sign (right). frank lloyd wright, take that!

one final comment: sharon klay, founder of christian klay winery -- she looks a bit like spidey's aunt mae, don't ya think?

@ the hhc

i spent sunday at the heinz history center. it's a great place to visit and an even better place to take out of town guests.

i happened to visit on the day they were filming for a new kdka show, "pittsburgh's hidden treasures." my friend gregg works for viewpoint productions, who were providing production assistance to kd. it seemed a good chance to say hey to gregg (even though i'd seen him and other vp acquaintances the day before) and to have some family artwork appraised.

the bad news: i stood in line for 4.5 hours. seriously. 4.5 hours. i saw gregg (and another vp friend) very briefly...there were reports that about 1100 people showed up. here's a shot i took of the insanity with my phone cam -- the studio lighting in the great hall really blew it out, but if you're familiar at all with the hhc, the line wound from outside around the block through the gift store, through the cafe, and back around through the cafe and gift shop again. wild!

lest i forget, the good news: the art is worth several thousand dollars. cool.

r.i.p. paul newman

prologue

i've been working on several scripts for what seems like an eternity. i had a laptop meltdown several years ago that took the steam out of the process when all my work went down with the dell.

a friend recently posed an interesting challenge. she thought it might be cool if i wrote the screenplay as a prose piece. i have the outline, know the story i want to tell, so how hard could it be? quite hard! but i've convinced myself that the difficulty is what makes it worth doing. after all, if it were easy, wouldn't everyone be doing it? (yikes. i just googled "screenplay." apparently everyone is doing it.)

anyway, here's a small bit of what i've written so far -- just the prologue. it's a very, very rough first draft. this is based on a true story and i'll tell you more about it later, so stay tuned...

===============

Prologue

I dream in black and white and shades of gray, like patchwork pieces sewn together in a quilt. Examined closely, the pieces mean nothing; but together, when viewed as a whole from a distance, pattern and purpose become apparent.

It's only now, almost thirty years later, that I realize sirens didn't waken me -- it was the distant, muted murmuring of voices. Somewhere in my sleepy subconscious I recognized my dad. It took me awhile to place the other voice. Uncle John -- it was Uncle John. Most people knew him as Chief Lawson, of the borough police department. He and Dad were lifelong friends so it wasn't unusual to hear them talking.

I rolled over and checked the time. It was 3 am. Why was Uncle John here this time of night? My muddled mind tried to make sense of it.

Then I heard my mother crying. A wave of panic swept over me as I leaped out of bed, suddenly wide-awake, and hurried to the kitchen at the bottom of the stairs.

The look on her face told me something unimaginable had happened.

"What's wrong?" I asked, dreading the answer I already knew. "Is it Angie?"

My sister Angie and I worked on the assembly line at the Volkswagen plant in Scottsdale, thirty minutes away. Although she was nineteen and I was twenty and we had jobs that paid well, we still lived at home. Most of our friends did, too. It wasn't so much a matter of economics as it was an immigrant newcomer's mentality that kept us close. Our parents (or grandparents) traveled to America in the early 20th century. They worked hard in the coal mines and steel mills and banded together with other nationalities to form labor unions to survive against the harsh treatment they received at their jobs. But outside of work, everything else remained separate. Although most in the community were Catholic, there were several churches and each catered to a particular ethnic group. Each group had its own social club, store, and restaurant. And even though these various cultures eventually commingled and coalesced, their early experiences filtered down to us and we became clannish and protective of one another.

That's how it was in California, Pennsylvania, a former coal-mining town in the Mid-Monongahela River valley that had long since seen its best days. Renamed after the 1849 gold rush in an effort to attract westward bound settlers, it's an expansive community located 35 miles south of Pittsburgh. In the late 1970s it might as well have been a thousand miles away. Separated by winding roads, rolling hills, and a blue-collar culture, we were the rural counterparts of Brooklynites who never cross the bridge into Manhattan.

I don't know if it was fear, pride, or ignorance that fostered such distrust of anything having to do with "the city." There was an unspoken understanding that bad things could happen to you there, which of course was true to an extent and true of all cities in general -- and, as far as we knew, nothing bad ever happened in a small town like ours.

pushing daisies

my fave tv show (when hockey isn't on) is "pushing daisies." it's a tripped out, tim burtonesque weirdly good time...

celebrity diseases

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