Rick Kinnaird

Monday, February 5, 2024

I read a short piece by a buddy of mine. It was terrific. I commented that it was and suggested he should write more. He was kind of blown away. I was blown away that he was blown away…

This is for all you who aspire to write.

What made that piece so good was I could hear his voice. By that I mean literally I could hear it as if he were talking to me telling me the story. And the story – that’s important. It’s important to have a story. A story should have a point. Most stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end with a conclusion that wraps the whole thing up.

They don’t have to be long, but they can be. They shouldn’t wander around. Especially, with today’s audiences and their short attention spans.

Robert McKee who wrote the only book you need on writing* said it this way, and I paraphrase – all stories (films, novels) should be three act plays, and if they aren’t you better have a damn good reason why they aren’t. Many films get flabby in act two (the longest and largest act) because they pack it with noise and action that has nothing to do with the story.

Another book I had was called something like “96 Reasons Your Novel Won’t Get Published, and Three Why It Might.” It was written in a similar way to “Up The Organization.” It was a series of memos on various topics (ie reasons). Here are a few:

You don’t know how to spell,

You don’t know grammar,

You don’t listen to advise,

I will immediately stop reading a piece that has a subject like “me and Joe”. Okay, maybe it’s trite but if you don’t know that a subject can’t have an objective pronoun … well, it’s just grating on my ears. Sorry. Kind of like sitting opposite someone at a meal who thinks it’s okay to show you the contents of their meal while they eat it. 

Over use of relative pronouns. Yes, I know it’s easier to write with pronouns, but if you want to be understood then cut back. Yes, it’s more boring to write that way, but remember you know where you are going with your story, your audience does not. Here’s an example:

The train was on the plain as the sun set. It was red and orange.

Okay, no problem, right?

What if I wrote:

The train was on the plain as the sun set. It was steely gray.

What? What was steely gray? The sun? The train? 

Rules of grammar say it should be the last noun encountered. That would be the sun.

Is the sun steely gray? Seems odd. Red and orange okay. Got to be the sun.

If there is any question – Don’t use the pronoun!

The train was on the plain as the sun set. The train was red and orange.

The train was on the plain as the sun set. The sun was steely gray.

In both cases above I’ve written something that is unusual. This should make a reader’s ears perk up. They might now be alert to something is going to happen that is unexpected.

If you want to write for speed, by that I mean something that can be read fast. Eliminate pronouns and complex sentences. Subject – Verb – Object is the way to go. Nothing else.

The train was on the plain. The sun was setting. The sun was red and orange. The train was steely gray.

By all means eliminate “nots” and negatives when writing for speed, or any other time if possible.

If you miss that one word you lose the meaning.

Thou Shall Commit Adultery.

Hum. Really? (Well, there was one bible written in the 1600s that forgot the “not”. A very popular edition.)

For clarity it would be better to write:

Do Not commit

because the “not” is not buried in the middle of the sentence where it would be lost.

Take time to reread your work. Even though I do, I still miss spellings. specially ones the spell checker has inserted for me! Although, I like spell checkers they are to some degree evil and you must be wary. if it’s important print it out and read it out loud. Get someone else to read it.

Okay. More than enough.

And remember, one last thing. This is very important . .

                                                                                        . .  . .

                                                                                           .   .  .  .

                                                                                                      . 

*STORY – Robert McKee (What did you think it would be called?)

Sunday, February 4, 2024

Jamie Diamond was in Davos. Jamie is head of one of the biggest banks in the world. Jamie has been saying for months, years, that the economy was going to come tumbling down. Jamie said all the signs were there. So what did Jamie say in Davos? Trump was right – sort of. Then Jamie went on to repeat right wing talking points. Hlllary – deplorables. Barack – clinging to their guns. What about Trump’s Nazi talk? Silence.

While Jamie has been saying the economy was going to go to hell I’ve been saying, “I don’t see it.”

Yes, there are signs that it could get worse, but everytime it’s gotten a bit better. Should one be cautious? You bet, because there are signs. However, there is no denying that our economay is doing well. And no thanks to the former occupant of the White House, no matter how much he tries to take credit for it.

Jamie said he liked Trump’s tax plan. Well, yeah. He and the super rich benefitted greatly from it. The rest of us got screwed. 

I’ve been thinking about a little statistical factoid that keeps surfacing from time to time. That is a statement that says the average person needs X amount to live and above that number doesn’t really too much. I think the figure quoted is around $73,000. How much do you need to earn hourly to make $73K a year? (73,000/2,000=$36.50 an hour)

How many of you that are working make that kind of money?

Maybe, it’s only $60K which would be $30/hour.

The state minimum wage varies between $7.25 and $17.00, nowhere near what one needs to meet the threshold of no worries financially. It’s no wonder that people are unhappy, because although the economy seems to be doing well, they are not.

I have multiple people I know who say they are working and working and barely making it. Others aren’t even doing that. Some have had one minor setback: an illness or minor accident that keeps them from working for a week, or they don’t get paid in a timely manner. Whatever, it is they can’t pay their bills and then they get docked, hounded, and the hole gets deeper.

This is America today.

So if $60-$73K is the comfort mark, what is the uncomfortable mark? Anything below that figure? Which would be most hourly wage earners, I’m guessing. But what figure is so low that you really can’t survive? Remember Jewel and her mom lived in their cars for a period of time? How many people are living in their cars or sleeping on the street because they can’t afford housing? Is it incumbent on us to help those people, or should we lecture them?

Do we as a society need to do something for those people? What has been done so far? Well, during the housing crisis when homes were cheap big money came in and bought up all the cheap houses. Now, they’ve turned around and upped the rents. You can’t get an aparment or condo unless you can show you have twelve months of pay stubs that show you can afford it.

If not, what do you do?

You have to figure out ways.

While I was writing this I got a call from someone who is in the exact sort of circumstances I’ve been talking about. I asked him, “How much do you need to get by?”

“$25.00 an hour,” was the answer, no hesitation. Right in line with what I was writing.

$25 an hour is $50K a year.

So, if you aren’t making that then someone or some entity needs to step up to help you. For instance, if you are making $14 an hour you need $11.00 more an hour to make it. You won’t be able to afford rent, food, and gas unless you get it. Health care? Forget it. Hope you don’t get sick and have to go to the ER. Or as Alan Grayson put it – The Republican health care plan is “Die Quickly.”

What my friend told me is most places will pay tops $21 or $22 an hour. You can’t really survive on that. Or just barely. You are trapped.

So Jamie can stuff it.

Let’s start looking at people who are trying but not making the mimimum to survive. Don’t preach. (Sorry Madonna.) Do.

What do we need to do, as a country to help our fellow country folks?

I remember growing up The GI Bill. It was for “The Greatest Generation” that fought in WWII to save us from the authoritarian regimes of Mussolini and Hitler. Republicans then, like now ,lambasted and bemoaned the big giveaway, but immediately took credit for it in their districts even though they voted against it. Then came the election of ’48 – Harry Truman versus the Republican “Do Nothing” Congress. That Congress literally would not pass any legislation so they could blame the President for not doing anything. They purposely wouldn’t even bring a bill to the floor for fear it might pass. Sound familiar?

What did Truman do? He did a whirlwind tour of the country, held big rallies in football stadiums (Did Donald learn from him? I doubt it. But still …) Truman won by the closest of margins. Even holding up a paper saying his opponent won.

Are we going to help the generations X, Y, and Z? What about our vets? The poor, hell the struggling? We can define what that amount is. The cheapest solution is to give them help, not to belittle and incarecerate.

It’s cheaper. It’s better. And it works. 

Studies in other countries and in some cities here prove the point – when you help the downtrodden they get better, healthier and they can then contribute to society. What should we call that? Pulling yourelf up by your boot straps? 

Michael Lewis in his book “The Fifth Risk” tells the story of the Fox News host who had a big ribbon cutting for an agricultural project – a farm? I forget. He was crowing on and on about how he had done it all by himself. How it was possible to suceed by yourself, if you were willing to work. Blah blah blah. There was a lady standing near by and he didn’t know who she was. He asked her.

“I’m from the Agriculture Department,” she said.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“I was the one who approved you loan that the local bank gave you.”

The loudmouth didn relaize that the Agricuture Department makes low interest loans to farmers through local banks. If they didn’t, as one person put it, “rural America would look like rural China.”

(I refer you to Econ 101 “The Farm Problem.” ie If farmers have a good year then they all do and the price of wheat (or corn, whatever) goes down. If they have a bad year the price goes up, but they don’t have any to sell. It’s an example of pure supply and demand. What get squeezed? Labor. “You work for nothing.”)

When Trump was in office his Republican financial friends like Jamie Diamond and the payday loan folks wanted to get their hands on those loans. See there’s this great opportunity to squeeze the farmers … So far they have failed. 

But in housing they’ve done well. Now the working poor suffer.

Want to talk medicine? Where else does a government pay drug manufacterers to keep prices high? And then the drug manufacturer pass the high prices on to you?

China who is making all the fentynal that is flooding into this country can make all the drugs we take at a fraction of the price we pay.

Hum. Maybe it’s time to do to the drug manufaterers what the government did to the Wright brothers? Say, “Sorry this is too important for you to have the corner on the airplane market.” Maybe, saying, “Everyone deserves to be healthy.”

I gotta go.

Whose woods these are I think I know.   

His house is in the village though;   

He will not see me stopping here   

To watch his woods fill up with snow.   

My little horse must think it queer   

To stop without a farmhouse near  …  

Robert Frost part of “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening”

Friday, February 2, 2024

So much garbage has been thrown up that this teeny tiny story didn’t make much of a dent.

It seems that the White House under Donald Trump was an open drug store dispensing Class II drugs to anyone who wandered into the pharmacy. Pills were kept in bottles and it seemed to be “help yourself.” There was no pharmacist. Records are sketchy. That means hand written and sloppy, if at all. 

Did they follow standard rules and regulations? What do you think? Hell no. (I guess rules are for losers. I don’t know.)

They ordered name brand at greater expense  instead of generics like “the rules” say. Rules are for Suckers. Part of the Administrative State.

Schedule II drugs like morphine, fentanyl, hydrocodone, and oxycodone are supposed to be kept seperate from other drugs. I’m guessing maybe under lock and key? Did they do that? Hell no. 

You want it. You take it. “helping anybody who needs help to get the mission done,” was the way it was stated to investigators. Translation: anyone and everyone, regardles of whether they were supposed to have access. Access? What access? Just go to the door marked “pharmacy,” take what you want. The bottles are all labeled.

Can you imagine if …

nevermind.

In other news:

Happy February.

This will be a busy month for the Republican front runner. He has so many court cases that some things will be going on simulatneously in different courtrooms on the same day. (I guess the last part is redundant?)

One thing that will be super interesting to wait for is the decision by the Supreme Court on whether the orange one is disqualified from running.

An amicus brief was filed by retired judge Michael Luttig. He’s been touted on news shows as a very conservative judge. What does he say about Trump runnng again for office? Trump can’t. He is forbidden by the Constitution. Period. Full Stop.

Is there an off ramp? No. And in his brief he uses some of the words of the current Supreme Court justices. Hopefully not the ones Gorsuch plagerized. It will be interesting to see what happens. By that I mean, “How will these conservative originalist justices wiggle out of this one?”

In other news: Amy Coney Barrett’s dad is in the news. The cult he is in is trying to squash reports about sexual abuse of children. Why squash it? Oh, well ya see, it may involve some father daughter stuff and her dad is mentioned front and center. Gee, did that not come out at her confirmation? No, but plenty of other weird stuff did.

Meanwhile the Biden economy is setting new records for the swiftest recovery ever and the U.S. economy is better than any other economy in the world. No wonder the right wing has switched to bitching about the border.

Speaking of Swift, the NFL has released (or someone has) about the economic effect Taylor Swift has on the Kansas City Chiefs merch and audience size. I believe the number was $350M and the largest audiences ever for a non-Super Bowl game.  And now we have conspiracy theories about her and Kelce and Biden and the Dems. Apparently, according to these allegations The Chiefs wouldn’t even be in the Super Bowl if it wasn’t for the 34 year old pop singer. Pretty impressive. Oh yeah, the Chiefs were in five Super Bowls: 1, 4, 54, 55, and 57. They lost 2 of the 5.

And I gotta tell ya, Taylor was responsible for all of it.

Who can forget her in the box in 1967 (22 years before she was born.)? (Did they have boxes back then? I don’t think so.) At halftime the score was tied 10-10. Then Vince Lombardi and the Pack showed the AFC champs how to play football. In the second half of that game, the Pack took the Chiefs to school.  (“Hey sorry guys we ran an off tackle play to the right side and you didn’t really stop us. We’re going to run the same play again, okay? Oh man, sorry. You guys suck.”) That game ended with Len Dawson, the Chiefs QB, getting sacked. Score 35-10.

Now. Things are different. They have Tay-Tay! 

Oh yeah, they also have this guy Mahomes. Some consider him to be one of the greatest QBs of all time.

And they have Tay-Tay’s boyfriend. What’s his name? #87. And he’s considered one of the best wide recievers of all time.

But do they really need them? They have Tay-Tay! Isn’t having one of the most famous, powerful woman on the planet sitting in a box enough? I think the Chiefs should invite Vivek Ramaswamy and Tim Scott to sit in the box with her. I’d like to see them get down on bended knee and kiss the ring, and then read we can their lips, “I love you Taylor!”

Then throw them out of the box and let them sit atop the press booth where the -27 wind whips across at 55 mph coming off the plains …

Oh wait, the game is being played in Las Vegas? That’s okay those two can watch the game from the top of Arrowhead Stadium. What about kissing the ring? have you heard of Zoom? They can press their lips to the screen. Hope their tongues get froozen to the …

So mean. 

FYI:

Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl history

• Super Bowl 57 (2022 NFL season): Defeated Philadelphia Eagles 38-35.
• Super Bowl 55 (2020): Lost to Tampa Bay Buccaneers 31-9.   (Tom Brady was MVP)
• Super Bowl 54 (2019): Defeated San Francisco 49ers 31-20.
• Super Bowl 4 (1969): Defeated Minnesota Vikings 23-7.

One last thought, what if Taylor starts a movement of her fans to have voter registration parties in every city in the U.S. where she has performed? What if she expands it to every state? What if she promises to drop in on some of the parties? Maybe, have a bunch at the same time and simulcast it? It could be like a marathon fund raiser except these would be voters registered. “There’s a party in Philadelphia and they’ve registered 20,135! But Boston has done 31,124! New York? How say you? What 32, 395! Whoa. We are waiting for the L.A. party to kick off…”

Thursday, February 1, 2024

When I worked at AT&T it was a regulated monopoly. It was huge. People do not understand the scale of such an enterprise. I first worked in the manufacturing part, Western Electric. As one person put it, “If we went to war and phones were bullets, Western Electric, would make them.” And plenty of them. There was a huge sense of loyalty too.

It took a lot to create a sense of urgency and a call to action, I saw it happen once. There was a fire at a central office in downtown Manhattan, seven exchanges were taken out. An exchange is represented by the three digits that follow the area code. That’s 10,000 phone numbers. Seven exchanges would be 70,000 phone numbers – in downtown New York City. The fire burned for three days. There were phone installers who had been Green Berets in Vietnam. They offered to parachute from one taller building onto the central office roof and use explosives to blow the water tower atop the central office. That’s the kind of loyalty and devotion the company engendered. Their offer was turned down.

Engineers started immediately to redesign the central office.

I was working in The Baltimore Works, which made cable and wire that went, among other things, onto ships that laid the transatlantic cables. You can still see those ships just before you descend into the Harbor Tunnel. One is appropriately named “Long Lines”. I was working in Building 70. We made all the equipment that was used to connect homes to the central offices. All the silver boxes and black round rubber casing hanging off wires and phone poles. If you go in the basement of an older home you’ll find a black hard plastic like thing with two brass cap screw on its top. It’s called a BIA128 Connector. Those brass cap things contain a carefully spaced two pieces of carbon, which acts to bleed off excess electricity thus protecting anyone using a phone and the phone equipment from getting too much electricity. They also contain a spring loaded slug of lead, which if the thing gets hit by lightning the lead will melt the spring will be released and open the circuit and thus no one gets hurt from lightning stirkes while on the phone.

The Central Offices had these protectors too, on their side of the line. They were stored in long plastic plug in panels that held 25 or 50 of them depending on the size of the panel. The back of the panel had a cable coming out of it. Typically, those cables were 10, 15, 25, or 50 feet long.

It was Thursday afternoon when we got the order for 400 of the 50 holding unit protector panels with a 250’ cable on the end. The conversation I was told went something like this:

“We don’t make a 250’ unit protector panel.”

“No, you didn’t make one before. You do now, and they will be in Manhattan Tuesday morning.”

It was a near impossible order.

The shop section chiefs were told they could ask for any workers they wanted from any job within the 7,000 person ranks and they could work for as long as they were willing and could stand up. “We’ll deal with union complaints later.” Third level managers were on the shop floor. I still remember the pride and the humngous effort it took to do that job, but we did. In writing this I shiver and it brings tears to my eyes. Such was the determined effort. Oh yes, that order was complete and in Manhattan on time.

Why do I mention this now? Because it’s an example of what you have to do to wake up a huge entity and get them to act.

Someone has been poking the sleeping giant and I think it is beginning to awaken. 

There’s the House of Representatives who refuse to look at the Border Security Bill (and let’s not forget Ted Cruz and his artful comparing it and Joe Biden to Hannibal Lecter when he hadn’t even read the damn thing.)

There’s the House Committee that has voted to impeach the Homeland Security Secretary for doing his job. (At two in the morning! They aren’t so stupid as to do it when people are awake.)

and now … now what have they done?

They’ve attacked the most successful recording artist of all time.

This will not end well for them.

You don’t really want thousands and thousands of Taylor Swift fans pissed off at you, do you?

Saw this on Facebook today:

Once this fire is lit, you will not be able to contain it.

I see thousands and thousands of loyal fans asking and doing…

You have no idea what you have unleashed.

Wednesday, January 31, 2024

In the original Star Wars movie Hans Solo had a line that I always remembered, because I thought it was so: cool? on point? Something.

Harrison Ford said something like – “these aren’t blah blah blah.” “We’re talking Corrilean Cruisers.”

Yeah. I had no idea what a Corrilean Cruiser was but in a later scene they showed these galactic ships passing by, and they were huge! You only saw the portals out of the window. And they kept on going. Yeah, that’s what a Corrillean Cruiser was – for sure. (I keep changing the spelling to see which i like better.)

I mean you can mess with a little star fighter or even a handful of them, but a Corrillean Cruiser? No. No way.

Donald got hit for five million and bumped it up to $83M. Star fighters.

But now?

Latish James is going to hit him with the Corrillean Cruiser class stuff.

$250M? No, $350M. Make it $370M.

Now, we’re talking.

Think the big guns on the Omaha. (I knew a guy that was a spotter during the Korean War for those guns. He said it was all mechanical. But you spotted something, put in the coordinates and moved to the next target. You didn’t have to look to see if you hit. The shell was so massive that anywhere near was good enough.)

That’s what Donnie is looking at.

Incoming!

PS Since this posting, less than five minutes ago, I knew that Trump could not use political funds to pay Carrol but a judge has now warned him that doing so would be a crime. Where’s my bookie? I need to place a bet.