Category Archives: Personal

And would ye be after havin’ a problem with this, now, paisan?

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Heading out in the cool of the morning Saturday for the Walk for Life, I put on two layers — a black T-shirt I sometimes wear on the weekends, and a long-sleeved baseball-style undershirt over it — in anticipation of putting on yet a third layer (the official Walk for Life T-shirt) over that.

Which worked fine during the walk.

But later, when the wife and my daughter and a friend and I headed to the Italian Festival on Main Street, the sun necessitated stripping down to the first layer. And it didn’t even occur to me to think what that layer was.

I was reminded of it when I got in line to buy some food tickets so I could buy some Italian sausage with onions and peppers to wash down with my draft Peroni lager. Ernie Trubiano, former sports scribe at The State, was selling the tickets. Quoth he, “You got some nerve showing up here wearing that…”

He said it in a nice way, though — more marveling at my brazenness than getting in my face about it.

Gee, I wasn’t trying to start an international incident. But that IS one of my fave shirts. I got it at the best St. Paddy’s Day ever in Five Points, the one in 2007, against which all such gatherings shall henceforth be measured.

The best part of the shirt is the side you don’t see — the back is a mock Guinness logo with the words being about the St. Pat’s event. I’ll try to remember to take a picture of that and share it later. It’s awesome.

Tomorrow is the Walk for Life!

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Those of you who are joining me, I’ll see you at the appointed place and time.

This post is to thank my team members, who among them have raised $892 for the cause!

  • Doug Ross
  • Kathryn Fenner
  • David Knobeloch
  • Pat Dixon
  • Nick Nielsen
  • Buddy Johnson
  • Mark Stewart

And especially Doug Ross, who came up with $410 of that on his own! Yep, Doug gives me a hard time here on the blog now and then, but he just earned the right to continue to be contrarian. He’s definitely a made man on this blog.

As are all of my teammates…

I have to get in shape; I really do

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This morning when I arrived at the tallest building in Columbia — all 25 stories of it — the elevators weren’t working. The mezzanine area was filled with office workers who “couldn’t” make it up to their workplaces. Some went to the cafe on that level to get some breakfast and coffee.

But I had already paid for my breakfast, and it was on the 25th floor. So I headed for the stairs.

And I found out something: I am really, really out of shape. I only made it by stopping for several minutes, twice. But I made it.

You should have seen the looks on the faces of the wait staff at the Capital City Club when I staggered into the darkened (the power had gone out; that’s why the elevators weren’t working) Grille Room. They didn’t know whether to find me something to eat or call an ambulance.

But I ate, and then I headed back down. On that trip, I shot the above video. There would be narration, but I was saving what little breath I had left.

Such are the hardships of modern life. Pitiful, huh?

I wonder if I’m even going to make it through the three miles of the Walk for Life… By the way, we’re up to $707! Thanks to all of you who have contributed so generously.

Our goal? To raise more than $480 for Walk for Life

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Why $480? Well, because that’s how much my wife’s team has raised. And we can’t let her win, because she’s a girl.

And yeah, I realize some of my teammates are also girls, but I suppose they have their motivations, and I have mine.

OK, seriously, I have other, better motivations. Such as the fact that my dear wife is herself a cancer survivor — nine years after having stage 4 cancer, which had spread to her liver by the time we knew about it. A precious, walking miracle.

… which, when you think about it, gives her an UNFAIR ADVANTAGE in raising money for her team. How am I going to compete with that narrative? I mean, I may be an ad whiz, but marketing genius only gets you so far. So we’re just gonna have to work harder, aren’t we?

We’re well on our way, as it happens. If you go to the Web page where you can also sign up to contribute, you’ll see we’ve raised $305. So we need $175 or more. We can do this!

You can no longer “join” the team in terms of having your name show up on the page (I don’t know why they shut that off so early), but you can still contribute (the total on the page reflects new contributions), and still show up to walk with us at 8:30 a.m. at Finlay Park on Saturday, Oct. 2.

So come on! So far, Doug Ross, Kathryn Fenner, David Knobeloch, Mark Stewart and Pat Dixon have all signed up. David and Pat can’t walk that day, but we’re very happy to have their contributions.

So come on! But I already said that…

The real Don Draper (Draper Daniels, who called himself “Dan”)

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Draper "Dan" Daniels and Myra Janco in 1965.

As the fourth season of “Mad Men” unfolds, fans wonder:

  • Will Don Draper get it together, or continue to unravel?
  • Will Peggy or Joan just get fed up to the point that she slaps every man on the show upside the head in a vain attempt to inject some sense into them?
  • Will Betty and her new husband just be written out of the show? Please?
  • Now that it’s 1964, will the show work with a post-Beatles sound track, or will the whole martinis-and-skinny ties mystique evaporate? (Hearing “Satisfaction” in the background the other night really made ol’ Don seem more anachronistic than usual, which I suppose was the point. Although I suppose the “can’t be a man cause he doesn’t smoke/the same cigarettes as me” part was apropos.)
  • Is Don Draper actually modeled on real-life Mad Man Brad Warthen?

On that last one, to end your suspense, the answer is no: The uncanny physical resemblance is merely coincidental.

In fact, we have learned who the real-life model was: Draper Daniels, who called himself Dan (… were in the next room at the hoedown… Sorry; I can’t resist a good song cue). His widow wrote a fascinating piece about him, and about their relationship, in Chicago magazine. You should read the whole thing, headlined “I Married a Mad Man” — as my wife said, it’s an “awesome” story — but here’s an excerpt:

In the 1960s, Draper Daniels was something of a legendary character in American advertising. As the creative head of Leo Burnett in Chicago in the 1950s, he had fathered the Marlboro Man campaign, among others, and become known as one of the top idea men in the business. He was also a bit of a maverick.

Matthew Weiner, the producer of the television show Mad Men (and previously producer and writer for The Sopranos), acknowledged that he based his protagonist Don Draper in part on Draper Daniels, whom he called “one of the great copy guys.” Weiner’s show, which takes place at the fictional Sterling Cooper ad agency on Madison Avenue, draws from the golden age of American advertising. Some of its depictions are quite accurate—yes, there was a lot of drinking and smoking back then, and a lot of chauvinism; some aren’t so accurate. I know this, because I worked with Draper Daniels in the ad biz for many years. We did several mergers together, the longest of which lasted from 1967 until his death in 1983. That merger is my favorite Draper Daniels story.

Reading that article, I wondered: If Don is Dan, who on the show is Myra?

As I read, I got a sense that it could be… Peggy. A woman who was a professional colleague of the main characters, a woman who had risen to an unprecedented role for her gender at the agency? Sounds kinda like Peggy to me — aside from the age difference. After all, Peggy and Don got awfully cozy that night of the Clay-Liston fight…

We’ll see…

Peggy and Don on the night of the Clay-Liston fight (Feb. 24, 1964).

Last chance to walk with Doug, Kathryn and me

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Last week when I put out the call for a blog team for the Walk for Life, Doug Ross and Kathryn Fenner generously volunteered immediately.

I had intended to keep the momentum going with a reminder each day, but I’ve had very little time for blogging this past week.

And now I see that the deadline for signing up is TODAY. I don’t know whether that means this morning, or noon today or midnight. But if you’d like to join the team, go to this link NOW and see if it will still let you in.

Here’s hoping I’ll see you on Oct. 2…

Twitter has broken my thumbs (I think)

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I shoulda broke YOUR thumbs!

— Rocky Balboa

… and I didn’t even owe it money.

The really weird thing about this is the way I can pinpoint it in time.

When I went to bed on the night of Aug. 16, I was fine. No pain; everything functioning normally. No foreshadowing at all. Then, sometime during the night, I woke up, and as I got up out of the bed to head for the bathroom, I said “Ow.” Both joints in both thumbs hurt like crazy, and doing the most normal things — such as pushing myself up out of the bed, or even something as nonstrenuous as pinching the bridge of my nose with thumb and forefinger to rub the sleep out — caused the thumb involved to pop out of joint, quite painfully. And popping it back in was no picnic, either.

And even when I wasn’t trying to use them, the joints were painfully tender to the slightest touch. And if I did try to use them — which is pretty unavoidable; our species has pretty much built its daily activities around having opposable thumbs — to use them normally required forcing the joints past points at which they want to stop, and that forcing leads to a pop (which I think is actual dislocation), and pain. Both in the ball of the hand, and the other joint closer to the end of the digit.

I had always been double-jointed to the point that my thumbs naturally bent back, on their own, 90 degrees. No more. Now, once they hit the point where they are straight, they stop, and the slightest backward pressure on them hurts.

And it’s been like this ever since that day. This is really having an impact on my life.

There was no trauma that I can recall.

I don’t think I’ve contracted any bizarre illness that attacks the joints — at least, there are no other symptoms. All the other joints are fine — except for my knee that acts up sometimes, but that long predated this.

I haven’t taken in any exotic toxins that I know of. I remember reading once of an incident involving Allied prisoners in a Japanese prison camp in the Philippines. Once they were fed a dinner of rancid fish heads, and moments after the meal, suddenly all the prisoners’ heads flopped over because they had completely lost the use of their neck muscles. After a few hours, the effect wore off. Then the next night, more fish heads, and the men’s heads flopped over again. This really freaked out the guards.

But I hadn’t eaten any rancid fish heads.

At first, I thought it was the constant typing on the laptop, and I didn’t know what I was going to do about that — both for ADCO and the blog, it’s pretty unavoidable.

Then, I finally realized: It was the Blackberry. It was the fact that I increasingly answer e-mails on it, and work with photos on it, and send text messages, approve blog comments, and… constantly, constantly, keep up with Twitter. I Tweet, I reTweet, I click on links to see what they’re about. I do it anytime I’m sitting still and not actually writing or talking or driving. Sit me down and shut me up, and I dive into Twitter.

It’s called “Blackberry Thumb.” Some of my iPhone-loving friends have told me that it’s because I use the wrong device, but they think the iPhone is the cure to every ill known to Man.

So I’m thinking that’s it. But I’ve tried cutting back, to no avail. As for cold turkey — I’m not even sure it’s possible to do that and keep up with ADCO and family responsibilities. Sure, I can avoid Googling everything in the world that I’m curious about in the course of a day, and confine Twitter activity to the laptop. But there’s a limit. There’s a good reason I pay for this data service every month.

Since I live in the good ol’ USA, it would be prohibitively expensive with my current insurance to go on a quest through various specialists in search of a cure, so I’d really like to figure this out and cure it myself. I’ve acquired a couple of braces for immobilizing my thumbs to sleep in at least, and that keeps them from waking me up from the pain of normal movements during the night — but causes them to be even stiffer in the morning.

The biggest mystery, to me, and the one thing that makes me doubt the Twitter diagnosis? That it came on, full-blown, so suddenly. Seems to me that a repetitive-motion thing would be more gradual than that. But maybe not. My goal is just to make it go away just as suddenly, and for good…

War and Peace in the hymnal on Sunday

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Remembering “War is Hell” Sherman reminded me of our processional hymn at Mass yesterday. For the first time since I was a kid, I think, I found myself singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

It sort of snuck up on me. I had been scheduled as “alternate reader” — in English this time, so I hadn’t studied in advance (I always have to practice, to warm up the right muscles, before reading in Spanish) — but when I arrived, all the slots were filled on the sign-up sheet, so I went to take a seat with my wife for a change. Then, just as the processional hymn was starting up, Judy leaned in to our pew to hurriedly whisper that I was needed, after all. Apparently, someone had messed up and signed in on the wrong spaces at a previous mass.

So I moved quickly to line up for the procession, Debra handed me a hymnal/lectionary, I asked “Which reading?,” was told it was the first (Good! I love doing the first; not so much the second), and was flipping through the book to check it out when I was asked if I could “double up” and serve as a Eucharistic minister, too, and I said sure, just as we stepped off to start the procession.

So it was not until then, as the congregation was starting the second verse, that I realized we were singing “The Battle Hymn.” Not knowing that verse, I wisely suppressed the urge to sing the first lyrics that came to mind:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the burning of the school
We have tortured all the teachers; we have broken ev’ry rule…
Glory, glory, hallelujah
Teacher hit me with a ruler
I hit her in the bean with a rotten tangerine…

Finding the right page, I then sang with the others as we walked up the aisle:

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.

And the thought occurred to me, This is what it feels like to be a Yankee, self-righteously celebrating victory over us Southerners… (And no, we didn’t sing it in a medley with “Dixie,” Elvis-style.)

You may have noticed, church gives me a lot to think about on Sundays, but it’s not always what I should be thinking about. But I try.

I focused a little better when I went to the pulpit to do the first reading, which began:

The LORD said to Moses,
“Go down at once to your people,
whom you brought out of the land of Egypt,
for they have become depraved.
They have soon turned aside from the way I pointed out to them,
making for themselves a molten calf and worshiping it,
sacrificing to it and crying out,
‘This is your God, O Israel,
who brought you out of the land of Egypt!’
“I see how stiff-necked this people is, ” continued the LORD to Moses.
Let me alone, then,
that my wrath may blaze up against them to consume them.
Then I will make of you a great nation.”…

You see why I like the first reading? Unlike all that theological abstraction you get with Paul’s letters (which is what you get on the second reading most of the year), there’s drama in the Old Testament. The readings we use from it are never boring or tedious. Lots of Sturm und Drang. You can really get into it reading it aloud. I especially like the flair in “Let me alone, then, that my wrath may blaze up against them,” like the Lord’s just beside himself, indulging in such a Shakespearean rhetorical flourish (as in, “Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, And I must pause till it come back to me.“)

I found myself thinking how like a divine editorial writer the Lord sounded there. I could imagine him haranguing SC voters for being a depraved, stiff-necked people for electing Mark Sanford twice, or nominating Alvin Greene. As I walked back to my pew, I started imagining how I could rewrite that as a political satire on the blog, but decided that would be just a little too sacrilegious.

So did I ever set aside idle digression and get into a proper, worshipful state of mind during that hour?

Actually, I did. I found myself blessed by one of those rare moments of transcendence that you always hope for, whatever church or other house of worship you attend.

I don’t know if it was the way our music director had arranged it, or the voices of the choir (only about five people at that Mass) lifting above the congregation’s, or the brilliance of Jean Sibelius, or the coffee I had for breakfast kicking in. But as we sang it yesterday, Finlandia sounded like the most beautiful hymn I had ever heard. It may sound trite, like something an envious Salieri would say about Mozart’s work, but it was as though the voice of God himself were leading us.

And as we sang, I realized the lyrics were every bit as strikingly beautiful as the music. Particularly the second verse, which was the most poetic evocation of the universal longing for peace that I have ever heard:

My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,
and sunlight beams on clover leaf and pine.
But other lands have sunlight too and clover,
and skies are everywhere as blue as mine.
This is my song, oh God of all the nations;
a song of peace for their land and for mine.

Best line of all: But other lands have sunlight too and clover…

After Mass, I said something about it, and my wife said the same. Of course, she’s not a war-monger like me — quite the opposite, in fact. So it’s not as surprising that she liked it. But it’s a testament to the beauty of the moment that I did, too. Very much.

The original Finnish lyrics, by the way, are more run-of-the-mill nationalistic stuff. Whoever wrote the English version above (and there are many songs sung to this tune), was, I believe, divinely inspired.

Who wants to join me at the Walk for Life?

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My wife, a breast cancer survivor (Thank God for his tender mercies), told me the other night that she had signed me up for her team for the Walk for Life this year.

I said, “But I was going to form a blog team!”

So she said I’d better go ahead and do it. Instead of just talking about it the way I did last year. The deadline for participants to sign up is a week from today.

So I went to the website, and set up a team called “Brad’s Bloggers.” I had no idea what to set as a fund-raising goal, so I went with the default $100. That way, if y’all don’t come through, I can cough it up myself.

But you will come through, right? It’s on Saturday, Oct. 2, starting at 8:30 in Finlay Park.

You can sign up for the team by going to this link, clicking on “Join Our Team,” and following the prompts. Once you’ve done so, please e-mail me at [email protected]. Then, just before the event, I’ll send all those who contacted me info on where and how to meet so we can walk together.

So how about it? Let’s show ’em we bloggers are more than just a bunch of couch potatoes sitting in front of a laptop in our pajamas. Put on some actual pants, and shoes, and walk with us.

Say hello to Daddy Warbucks, only with hair

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"Are you talkin' to ME?..."

Had an odd thing happen just a few minutes ago, as I was leaving a local drugstore, on my way back from taping something at ETV.

As I crossed the parking lot, I heard a small voice pipe up behind me, “Do you know where there are any jobs?”

Hearing no one respond, I turned and found a cute, petite, college-age (this was near USC) girl hurrying to catch up with me.

Once it was established she was addressing me, I asked, in order to have something to say, “What sort of job?” I was prepared for her to say almost anything, but not what she said: “Administrative.” Something ran through my head that the HR director at The State once told me about how young people today have unrealistic expectations of starting at the top.

I must have looked questioning, because she added, by way of explication, “You know, office work…”

“Well,” I told her, slowly, “I don’t know of anything at the moment…” searching my brain, thinking Wouldn’t it be cool to be able to live up to this girl’s unlikely expectation of me and actually connect this question with an actual job I’ve heard about, but came up dry.

Not wanting to leave it at that, I said, “Would you like to give me a card, so that if I hear of anything…?” with the alarm bells going off in my head as I realized how much that sounded like You wanna give me your phone number?, or how much it might sound like it to someone of her age and experience in life, but it was completely innocent, just what I’d ask of anyone else who told me he or she was job-hunting…

She, continuing to move on past me as I arrived at my car — I realized that we had kept moving the whole time — patted her pocket sort of nervously as though she would normally have cards, but had none today, and said, “No, I don’t have any cards on me…”

And I said, “Well, good luck!” And that was that.

She was bold as brass, which I suppose will stand her in good stead at some point. But what did I look like to her? Like Daddy Warbucks with hair, I suppose.

I didn’t have the heart to call after her and say, Honey, you just don’t know… it took me a year to find a job for myself…

Why spoil her illusions, especially when they are so flattering to me? She looked at me and thought me a powerful and magnanimous man, able to scatter jobs across the pavement like so many doubloons from a Mardi Gras float. Why spoil that, indeed?

Nikki wants us to know: She’s packin’ heat

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Or at least, she’s authorized to pack heat, and wants to make sure we know it. This release was sent out today:

Gun Owners of America endorses Nikki Haley for governor


Grassroots organization praises Republican candidate for protecting 2nd Amendment rights

COLUMBIA, S.C. – State Rep. Nikki Haley, Republican candidate for governor, has earned the endorsement of Gun Owners of America, a grassroots organization with over 300,000 members that supports candidates in South Carolina who are committed to protecting 2nd Amendment rights.

“Gun Owners of America is proud to make this endorsement,” said GOA Vice-Chairman Tim Macy. “Nikki Haley stands 100% behind the rights of South Carolina’s gun owners and sportsmen. In particular, Rep. Haley strongly supports concealed carry of firearms by law-abiding citizens and will work to ease unreasonable restrictions on CWP holders.”

Rep. Haley thanked Gun Owners of America for its endorsement and said, “Few things are as clearly defined as the right of individual Americans to own and use firearms. The right to bear arms was deemed so critical by our Founders that they spelled it out in absolute terms, and it is my belief that any governmental action that undermines that right is in turn undermining the very freedoms that built our great nation. I hold a Concealed Weapons Permit myself, and as governor, I will continue to fight against any government infringement on the 2nd Amendment.”

-###-

The boldfaced emphasis is mine. So now you know. Make of it what you will.

Over the weekend, I went up to visit my relations in Bennettsville, the place of my birth. My uncle told me that my aunt recently finished qualifying for her own concealed-carry permit. When she got home, he asked her how she had done, and she showed him a silhouette target with a cluster of holes in the upper left center of the torso. He then asked, “What would you like for supper, dear?” True story. Or true according to my uncle, who is an accomplished teller of stories.

I wonder how Nikki did when she qualified?

Randolph and Mortimer Duke, redux

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This afternoon at Rotary I found myself seated next to Boyd Summers, Richland County Democratic Party chairman. (Just to be ecumenical and UnParty, I also chatted with Richland County Republican Chairman Eric Davis after the meeting, so there.)

It was noted that he and I were wearing essentially the same tie, although mine was bow and his was not. Sort of a Palmetto variation on the old Brigade of Guards regimental stripe.

Anyway, having arrived way early for the meeting (I rode with Lanier Jones from ADCO, and as an ex-president of the club, he goes early), I had time for a digression. So I noted that we were like the Duke brothers, Randolph and Mortimer. I had to explain that the Duke brothers were the partners in Duke and Duke, the fictional Philadelphia commodities brokers in “Trading Places,” and that in every scene, they were wearing ties made from the same material, only Randolph (you know, Randy, like Randy Jackson of the Jackson five) wore a bow and Mortimer wore the more boring sort of tie.

When I was done with the explanation, John Durst said wow, you really notice detail, don’t you? I allowed as how I did, but that’s not really true. I mean, how could anyone NOT notice something like that — especially when one has seen the flick a certain number of times?

After the meeting, I got John to use my Blackberry to shoot the above photo, to record the moment. Aren’t you glad I did?

By the way, Joe Wilson noted to me that he, too, was wearing a similar tie. I nodded, but I was humoring him. His was like Boyd’s, except silver (as in, “Silver Elephant”) in the places where it should have been dark red. Obviously, Joe misread the memo.

Pandora needs a “like it a LOT” button (although it’s doing pretty well without one)

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Here’s a conundrum…

Pandora, the “internet radio” site that attempts to use your feedback to shape “stations” that play stuff you like, has a pretty simple system for your input: After you enter a song or artist (or multiple songs or artists) that you’d like to hear, it guesses what else you might like based on that, and you click on either a thumbs-down button meaning “I don’t like this song,” or a thumbs-up meaning “I like this song.”

That’s it. No gradations of feedback. It’s way binary; ones and zeros. I try to click on one or the other on most songs. I don’t sit there poised with the mouse, but every few songs I ALT-TAB back to Pandora to catch up with my decisions (except when I’ve gotten lost in my work and lost track of what I was “hearing,” and even then if I’m familiar with the song, I render a judgment).

But I find this frustrating everyone once in a while. Most of my “likes” mean, “I don’t mind if you keep this in my mix.” But every once in a while, they play me something I really, REALLY dig.

Examples… I have a lot of stations for different kinds of music, but recently I’ve spent a lot of time defining one called “Brad’s All-Purpose Station.” In the “I don’t mind if you keep this in my mix” on that station, I’d include “After Midnight,” “Angie,” “Another One Bites the Dust,” “It’s Money That Matters,” “Long May You Run,” “Oh! Darling,” “Smoke on the Water,” and so forth.

But there are other songs that I want to make sure Pandora knows I really like a LOT more than those songs. It may be an all-time favorite, or a really good song I seldom here and don’t own a copy of, or something I’ve occasionally heard and loved but didn’t know the name of… all sorts of reasons. Into that category I’d put: “Sexy and 17,” Another Girl,” “Baby, It’s You,” “Badge,” “Adagio for Strings,” “Bring it on home to Me,” “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” “Gymnopedies (3),” “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart (the Al Green version!),” “I’ll Cry Instead,” “In Germany Before the War,” “I’ve Got A Woman,” “Naked Man,” “New Amsterdam,” “Simple Man,” “Werewolves of London,” and others. Oh, and on that last one: I’d much rather hear “Lawyers, Guns and Money,” or “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner,” but neither has yet been offered.

When I hear one of those, I want to say, Whoa, I’m sorry I clicked “like” on those last 10, because this is what I REALLY like! Don’t just lump this in with those… But all I can do is click again on the “like” button.

OK, so I’m frustrated that I can’t give more nuanced feedback, but here’s the perplexing thing: In spite of that, Pandora does an increasingly excellent job of guessing what I’ll like. As time goes by, I hit that “don’t like” button quite seldom.

Contrast that to Netflix, which gives me five levels of feedback, from one to five stars — and yet remains pretty much clueless as to what I’d like.

Not that I haven’t put the time in… I’m sort of embarrassed to admit this, but I’ve rated 2,144 movies on that site. I keep thinking, Give ’em more data, and they’ll figure me out. But they don’t. You give “Casablanca” five stars, and Netflix assumes, “He likes any movie that’s more than 50 years old.” Yeah, it’s probably a little more sophisticated than that — but not much.

Frustrating. But kudos to Pandora.

The latest adventures of the twins

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The Twins as I recently found them on our beach vacation, hiding under the kitchen table, enjoying apples they had obtained by unknown means.

Since I haven’t posted anything all day, I thought I’d share something that I find especially fun — excerpts from the latest adventures of the Twins.

Here’s are two recent updates on Facebook from their mother. First, one from Tuesday:

So far today, we’ve been to the dermotologist and broken a mirror and played keep away with botox syringes (literally — they leave them lying around), collected and delivered a stool sample to pediatrician, broken off part of a mandolin and stuffed it in daddy’s laser printer which made a groan and died, attempted to …fix everything by stuffing plastic “magic wand” into mandolin, and now it is noon and we are nude.

Then, one from Thursday:

“Help me Sissa!” Sissa helps by lifting Sissa at waist, so Sissa can flip on light switch, in attempt to rouse Mommy. Followed by rousing chorus of Wonder Pets theme song: “What’s gonna work? Team work!” What a way to wake up!

I have yet to receive a report on what they’ve done today. By the way, in case you wondered — they’re two-and-a-half years old.

We have the best blood! (Or at least the best Red Cross)

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Congratulations to our local Red Cross blood services. I just saw this release:

South Carolina Blood Services Region of the American Red Cross Ranked #1 in the Nation

Columbia, S.C.— The South Carolina Blood Services Region of the American Red Cross has been named the top performing region in the national Red Cross system. The South Carolina Region is one of 36 Red Cross Blood Services regions in the United States.

American Red Cross Blood Services regions across the country provide blood and blood products to more than 3,000 hospitals, making the Red Cross the largest single blood provider in the United States. The South Carolina Blood Services Region serves 54 hospitals in South Carolina and parts of Georgia.

The South Carolina Region was rated for high performance in areas including growth of red blood cell donations and distribution to hospitals, quality control, cost effectiveness and hospital satisfaction.

“We’re proud to be named the Red Cross Region of the Year,” said Delisa English, chief executive officer of the South Carolina Blood Services Region. “This accomplishment is only made possible by the tremendous support of our staff, volunteers, blood donors and blood drive sponsors who work hard each day to ensure blood products are available for patients in the South Carolina Region and across the nation.”

Every two seconds, someone in the United States needs blood. The American Red Cross South Carolina Blood Services Region must have 500 people give blood and platelets each weekday to meet hospital demand. Accident victims as well as patients with cancer, sickle cell disease, blood disorders and other illnesses receive lifesaving transfusions every day. There is no substitute for blood and volunteer donors are the only source.

How to Donate Blood

Simply call 1-800-RED CROSS (1-800-733-2767) or visit redcrossblood.org to make an appointment or for more information. All blood types are needed to ensure a reliable supply for patients. Blood can be safely donated every 56 days. Most healthy people age 17 and older, or 16 with parental consent, who weigh at least 110 pounds, are eligible to donate blood and platelets. Donors who are 18 and younger must also meet specific height and weight requirements.

About the American Red Cross

Governed by volunteers and supported by giving individuals and communities, the American Red Cross is the single largest supplier of blood products to hospitals throughout the United States. While local hospital needs are always met first, the Red Cross also helps ensure no patient goes without blood no matter where or when they need it. In addition to providing nearly half of the nation’s blood supply, the Red Cross provides relief to victims of disaster, trains millions in lifesaving skills, serves as a communication link between U.S. military members and their families, and assists victims of international disasters or conflicts.

# # #

First we have the national champion baseball team; now this.

Personally, I’m going to claim a measure of credit for this. No doubt the blood that I have given has contributed mightily, if only in terms of sheer quality of the blood collected here.

We still aren’t collecting enough of it, though, so get on down there and roll up a sleeve…

I gave blood again. So should you (he said with an inflated sense of his own moral superiority)

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Yep, those are my shoes. They need polish...

Sorry about no Virtual Front Page last night. I was giving blood instead.

I did the Alyx system again, the process in which they draw out TWO pints of blood, take the red cells out of it, and put what’s left back (along with a tad of cool saline, which chills one ever so slightly on a hot day). Nice things about this: The needle is smaller (I don’t know how, since it has two channels, but it is) and therefore less uncomfortable — and you don’t get called to give again for 16 weeks, rather than the usual 8.

It was fine. I’m feeling a tad iron-poor this morning (I can sense that there are fewer things carrying oxygen to my brain, or something), but I think I did sleep a little better last night. And the iron will return.

Anyway, they’re short of all sorts of blood as always, not just my “universal donor” O positive.

So you should give, too. Be like me. ‘Cause I’m such a heckuva guy.

Irony of the day: Sarah Palin and Twisted Sister

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Most interesting item from Twitter today… Aaron Sheinin, formerly of The State (and now of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution) tweeted this at midday:

The song Palin and Handel are coming on stage to:http://youtu.be/WT1LXhgXPWs
about 4 hours ago via TweetDeck

To explain — Sarah Palin was in Jawgia today to campaign for Karen Handel, that state’s former secretary of state, who is in a bitter runoff tomorrow for the GOP nomination for governor. (Yet another case of rather presumptuous people, such as our own Jim DeMint, jetting around the country to play right-wing kingmaker and fragment the Republican Party.)

And the two women made their entrance at the event to the strains of “We’re Not Gonna Take It.” Yes, by Twisted Sister. Yes, the self-appointed maven of true, traditional downhome American values was striding out to a theme by a band that, when I was a young Dad back when they first hit the charts, I would have leaped tall buildings in my haste to keep my children from seeing so much as a picture of, so deeply offensive to basic traditional sensibilities (such as my own) I found everything about the band — their name, their look, and (to a lesser extent) their head-banging sound — to be.

By the way, I double-checked with Aaron to make sure I wasn’t misunderstanding, and he responded:

@BradWarthen going on right this second.
about 4 hours ago via TweetDeck in reply to BradWarthen

At this point, I could digress with a discourse on how the grossly childish, hostile, chip-on-shoulder attitude embodied in that song, that whole “grownups aren’t going to tell me what to do” petulant pout, fits PERFECTLY with the worldview of the Tea Party and the other bits and pieces of ex-Gov. Palin’s fan base. Which, I’m sure, is why it was chosen.

To give you a further idea of the mentality the song embraces, another reader responded to Aaron’s observation thusly:

JVTress @asheinin You know who else used that song? The one and only John Rocker.
about 4 hours ago via TweetDeck in reply to asheinin

You know, John Rocker — the former Atlanta Braves closer who was better known for shooting off his mouth and offending people than for putting out rival hitters. You know — the guy most famous for saying this when asked whether he would ever play for the Yankees or the Mets:

I’d retire first. It’s the most hectic, nerve-racking city. Imagine having to take the 7 Train to the ballpark looking like you’re riding through Beirut next to some kid with purple hair, next to some queer with AIDS, right next to some dude who just got out of jail for the fourth time, right next to some 20-year-old mom with four kids. It’s depressing… The biggest thing I don’t like about New York are the foreigners. You can walk an entire block in Times Square and not hear anybody speaking English. Asians and Koreans and Vietnamese and Indians and Russians and Spanish people and everything up there. How the hell did they get in this country?

In other words, “a Real American.”

But bottom line, the thing that gets me is the cultural aspect of the Palin-Twisted Sister connection. You know, I have frequently called down some of my interlocutors here for making like Bristol Palin’s shame is a legitimate topic for political dissection. I don’t hold with attacking folks’ families. But it does occur to me that if mom thinks Twisted Sister is a good place to go for background music, kiddies could grow up a bit confused. (And no, it’s not that I’m square, as we said in my day. I was just into Elvis Costello and Men at Work and the like at that point in musical history. I was never into “let’s twist glam until it’s positively gross.” The closest I came to that was my deep admiration for the work of Spinal Tap.)

Anyway, I’ll say this for the video at least: I love the little homage to “Animal House” in the video, from using the actor (Mark Metcalf) who played “Doug Neidermeyer” to the paraphrase of his most famous line: “What it THAT? A Twisted Sister pin on your UNIFORM?!?!?”

That did make me smile.

bradwarthen.coffee

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Who’d like to invest in a coffee shop in Surfside Beach that is designed purely as a place for people to take their laptops and connect via wi-fi?

There’s a real gap in the market there. And the public library that was my refuge last week has its limitations. For instance, my son-in-law, who is a economist/consultant, needed wi-fi in a place where he could simultaneously talk on the phone — so he ended up going to a Starbucks way up in Myrtle Beach. (Even there, I don’t know how welcome he was, talking into his cell phone in a public place, which suggests the need for a better place that is all ABOUT connectivity.)

OK, maybe “bradwarthen.coffee” is a goofy name for the place — maybe I should get my fellow ad wizards at ADCO to work on it — but I was thinking that it needs a name that tells people it exists for bloggers (like Tim Kelly, who also vacations there and has to go to McDonald’s of all places to get connected) and others who can’t get through their vacations without a reliable place to connect.

This is a bit of a throwback — a decade or two — to the old “Internet cafes” that existed before access was widespread. But I think that in a vacation spot like that that lacks a Starbucks or a Panera, it would have a real chance to catch on.

The money would be made from coffee and snacks, as one certain source of revenue, but they would not be the main attraction. And while my first instincts are that the wi-fi must be free, if it were inviting and accommodating enough (with amenities like LOTS of electrical outlets so you don’t have to jockey for those spaces, and maybe soundproof booths for those needing to teleconference and such) perhaps the market would bear a small fee for the access. I don’t know. This is just the beginning of an idea…

God doesn’t want me blogging this week

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Don’t believe me? Well, here’s the evidence:

  • The place where I used to blog when I was here closed. It was a coffee shop called Jacob’s Java. Actually, it was only sorta kinda nominally a coffee shop. They didn’t care whether you bought anything. But it had free wi-fi, and you could sit there as long as you like, as there was never any danger of being in the way of actual customers. The reason this was so was that it was a front for a commercial bakery. The local building codes required that there be a retail business in that location, so they put a coffee shop in front of the bakery to cover that technicality. Anyway, after Jacob’s Java closed last year, I was driving past and saw the owner of the NEW business, a sub shop, out doing something to the facade. I asked whether he, too, would have free w-fi, and he said no.
  • Before I came down here, I contacted Tim Kelly, who I knew from Twitter had been here last week (social media is such a wonderful surveillance tool; it makes each of us into a Big Brother), to see if he’d found a replacement spot to blog. He said all he’d found was McDonald’s. Well, McDonald’s isn’t a very conducive environment, and it’s not nearly as convenient to the house anyway, and I’m mainly here to spend time with my family, not run all over creation to try to blog amid the Big Macs. So that was out.
  • My wife’s brother and sister-in-law are here with their kids, and the second night we were here the sister-in-law went on a quest for wi-fi. She thought she’d found it in a Dunkin’ Donuts the next town over, but she could never get connected.
  • Then, yesterday, my oldest daughter arrived with her little netbook that is perpetually connected via Verizon. So I sat down with that and put up the post about Vincent Sheheen slam-dunking Nikki Haley on her chosen issue, having just read the e-mails that informed me of those developments. But then my daughter told me she gets a finite amount of data per month on her account, so that option was out.
  • Then, my middle daugher informed me that last time SHE was here, the sub shop — which was formerly Jacob’s Java — DID have wi-fi. Which made perfect sense; I guess the owner wised up. So I went there midafternoon yesterday — to find that it had closed at 2.
  • My daughter said she found yet another place, although it was a restaurant where you feel funny just sitting there and not ordering a meal. But I filed that as a backup option.
  • Then today I went to the sub shop. I offered to buy coffee, but was told “We’re not a coffee shop anymore.” Yeah, I know. But she didn’t mind me using the wi-fi — though it was lunchtime, the place was deserted — so I set up. And realized I had not brought my power cord. It was back in Columbia. Fine. I would blog fast. But then my laptop had issues, and I had to reboot once or twice, and after doing all that STILL wasn’t connected. So I left in frustration.
  • But my wife had suggested something as I walked out the door today — the public library! Doh! How could I have not have thought of that? Wonderful government services are always there when the cold, heartless marketplace lets you down! So I came here to the library, and… still couldn’t connect. Then I realized what I had been too flustered to realize at the sub shop: You have to take the steps to connect to the router first. I’ve grown so accustomed to having that set up to happen automatically at the places where I usually use the laptop, I had forgotten something so basic. So now I’m up and running.
  • But my battery is running down, and it occurs to me that I might need it for something urgent. So this it it for now.

As I said, God doesn’t want me blogging this week. And I’m fine with that. I’ve spent all my time with my family, and that’s better any time.

Just ran into Nikki Haley. She looked well…

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I ran into Nikki Haley at lunch today, at M Vista on Lady Street. She was there with Rob Godfrey and Tim Pearson of her campaign.

I think it was the first time I’d conversed with her since that time at Starbucks on Gervais shortly after the 2008 election. That day, she had a young woman in tow whom she introduced as being “with my campaign,” and I thought that was odd. The ’08 campaign was over, and it was early for a House candidate to be having meetings about the next campaign. I was probably the most shocked guy in South Carolina when it came out a month or two later than she was running for governor — it just seemed so totally unlikely that she would see herself as ready for that. It was the beginning of me seriously wondering about Nikki…

Anyway, Nikki was pleasant and charming as always when I went up to chat with her today. I don’t think Rob or Tim were all that thrilled to see me, though. They certainly didn’t smile, but then we guys don’t, do we, under such circumstances? Nikki did, but then ladies do.

We didn’t talk shop. She did the standard thing polite people do when other topics are awkward — she asked after my family. Then she asked how I was doing, and I told her that I was with ADCO and having lunch with my colleagues over there, and gave her one of my ADCO cards. She said I was probably glad not to be at the paper any more, and I thought that was perceptive of her. Or a good guess. Maybe it was just an understated slap at the paper; I don’t know. So I asked how she was holding up, and she said great, and I said something about how things had probably gotten a lot less crazy in the last few weeks, and she agreed. And then she asked me again about my family. So I began to dismiss myself, thinking I should wish her all the best but wanting to be honest, and ended up saying something totally inane like, “Well, as long as you’re enjoying yourself; that’s the thing…”

My ADCO friends thought it odd that I had gone to speak with her. Maybe they thought I was showing off, as in That Brad! He’ll just do any crazy thing! But that’s because they only know about Nikki and me through what I’ve written on the blog lately. They don’t realize that I’ve known her for years, and we’ve always had a very cordial relationship. I’ve happily endorsed her twice — in 2004 and 2008 (those were the only elections in which she had opposition), and always enjoyed chatting with her. I always had good hopes for her — before she embarked on her quest to become the new Mark Sanford and darling of the Tea Party, South Carolina’s answer to Sarah Palin. Which is deeply unfortunate.

So it was nice to see her, even though there was that slight awkwardness.