The fat exchange system.

I’ve been on a diet of late. Not low-carb, not low fat, not grapefruit, just a diet. I’ve been eating less calories than before, so I’ve lost weight. Specifics of weight lost are not that important. The pounds are not here, they’re lost.

In moments of victory like this I can ignore the greater implications of the loss. But after I’ve floated in my lightness a while, one has to asked the question: where did the weight go?

Somewhere in the eighth grade science class I learned that energy could neither be created or destroyed, only conserved and transferred. Fat is the body’s way of storing or conserving energy for later use. --Right?

It follows that if I cannot destroy fat. I can only hold or transfer fat. The “hold” concept, I’ve mastered. Leading to the repeated requests from my doctor’s to loose potential energy. I’ve asked how the loss might be accomplished. Large massive objects tend to like to stay in place. I assume I have to move it somewhere. What method of transfer I should use? Doctor’s aren’t really physicists so they usually just say, “It doesn’t matter, any method will do. Try running.” If I set my fat in motion, I could out run it? Doctor’s mostly like to just torture people of high potential energy. Judging by the number of fat people in their office, I think they don’t know much about energy (fat) transfer. However, like any scientist with a hypothesis, this is what I have observed. Given the laws of thermodynamics, if I wanted to loose the stored energy I would have to transfer it to another body. So I have set about trying to figure out where my formerly stored energy has went.

The new food pyramid came out from the Federal Government last month. It pointed out Americans were getting fat. Well I’m not, mines going somewhere. But I have noticed some of my co-workers are gaining weight as I loose it. I wonder if I’m not inadvertently transferring it to them? This is a totally plausible theory. Quite a few people have gotten gastric by-passes at work in the last year, and lost lots of weight. But an equal number of people have gained weight. Well, that’s not completely true. A few real large people have lost a lot of weight, and quite a few have gained a little. I’ve sort of discovered the fat transfer system. It appears to work on osmosis. Fat travels from areas of high concentration in one individual to areas of lower concentration in other individuals. I guess the secret to loosing weight is to surround yourself with thinner people.

This theory has implications beyond just the average American, or the human race. I have noticed that most of the large blubber bearing animals, the whales, seals, and hippopotami have been driven nearly to extinction. The side affect, transfer of their fat. The real reason Americans are getting fat, is the lack of whales on our shores and oceans to store the blubber. Now, you all make take exception with this theory. But its as plausible as some of the other theories I hear a lot on matters that concern the health of Americans. Fat transfer is akin to soul transfer that occurs with reincarnation. The fat never dies, it just takes up residence in a new body. I'm just trying to figure out how to make a fat transfer pill I can offer on a infomercial. If I claim it will promote good Christian behavior and save the whales, I can sell it to the peacenicks and the reddy’s.

A poem

Me thinks,
Red America and its Bushes
is Paris Hilton tipsy with power.
Like most drunks,
they concoct:
Everyone they hit on thinks them cute.

But the kitchen, stacked with last weeks BBQ dishes look,
We get from the neighborhood,
Is cause we have a bad whiff married to our mouths.

The hippopotami review...

I just got my annual review at work this week.

It’s interesting. I can’t really explain my job. I never have been able too. I mean my sister in law asked me last year what it was I did. I gave her the lesser deity discussion. (Blog entry of March 31, 2004) –Before I get on with review thingy I want to talk about, I just want to note, its pretty weird at this point I can refer to earlier entries in my blog to help the current one. I think I’m becoming indexed or something.

--But back to my review explanation.

Reviews at the company in the past were something you got each year that told what your boss thought you had done, or what you needed to improve on. You’d also get some sort of blurb about where you fit in the hierarchy of work without actually telling you any specifics. It is important that your review be nebulous when you are a middle-middle manager. It’s a high art form to tell someone they are really cool without telling them how they compare to anyone else. Things that have been written in the blurb part of my review in the past.

--Stan is a key member of my management team. Course, all us middle-middle people are.
--Stan is one of my more innovative out of the box thinkers.
(though people who say that “out of the box,” thing, need to get a new phrase.
Its so in the box at this point.)

--People like to work for Stan. This is true. Though, some don’t.
--Stan easily solves problems others struggle with. Yeah, and vice versa.

Fairly cool stuff, huh? It doesn’t mention whether I’m the best or worst at what I do.
But, there are good reasons for that. In Middle-middle management you tend to do something like run big zoos or farms. Every middle-middle manager gets a farm or zoo to run. Sometimes we get two or three farms or zoos. I’m lucky, I get to run a zoo, a big productive farm, and…. Oh yeah, I have this weird project no one else knows how to do, I get to clear land and build levy’s. This little side levy project is to make land arable for new farms or zoos. My fellow middle-middle managers are a little unsure about the levy job. Some would like to have it, but in reality are glad I do, and most are glad they are just managing productive farms. It’s easier for them, draining land and building levy’s is kind of out of the box for guys who run farms or zoos. But that’s not really that important as you see in a few minutes. Now, the important point is we manage managers. It’s like managing the foremen who tell the keepers to shovel up the dung from Hippo’s or horse stables. You get it? We are far removed from the dung and we try to keep it that way.

But as you can imagine it’s hard to tell if you are comparing zoos to farms and for that matter levy clearing what’s more important or who is doing the best. We are all telling people to have their people make sure the dung doesn’t pile up, but it’s hard to tell who is doing best at dung abatement. I mean those of us that run farms don’t even farm the same stuff. Some people just do carrots and wheat, others breed thoroughbreds. Figuring out who is doing a better job, the guy who grew 2 million bushels of carrots or the guy who sired 20 thoroughbreds is hard. Though over the years we figured out the basic thing was to get the new crop in, or breed some animals. In that process as long as you didn’t let the dung pile up, you were doing a good job. Though if you let dung pile up, we’d all talk about what a bad job you did. Those middle-middles who had big dung piles would get something like this written on their review:

--xxxx seems to have a lot of waste in his/her area. It should get some attention in the following year.

We usually get the message if that sort of thing appears on our review blurbs. The dung pile becomes the focus of our attention for a while.

So, why am I mentioning all this?

As it turns out, we have a new upper-upper manager who took over all the farms, zoos and levy projects this last year. Think of him as like the Secretary of Agriculture, high up in government, but still not ultimately in charge. He’s was not quite sure he liked not knowing how everyone fit in his department. You know which farmer, zoo keeper or crop was most important, and who among their farm hands and keepers did the best job. So he said every one should know how they fit. That is performance wise. Were they in the low, middle, upper or upper-upper part of the performance scale in the Department of Agriculture? We all scratched out heads. “How do we do that? Very few people have the same job or are doing the same thing?” we said. He said he’d leave those details to us. But he also mentioned his expectations were that most people fit into the middle part of the department, and the only thirty percent fit into the upper part. Of that thirty percent, only five percent fit into to upper-upper part of the department. –You can guess which part he thinks he fits in.

Now all of us middle-middle guys were a little puzzled by this and decided to consult our upper-middle manager. (The boss) We asked how we should accomplish this task.
---And, like any good upper-middle manager worth his weight in carrots he answered. “You all should form a committee and give me a series of recommendations. In the meantime, I should let you know, I intend to hold a series of races between your teams. Each of you will need to run a wagon over a one mile course like five times. Each of you will have a different course, and the wagon will have to be pulled by your own draft animals. Your team’s performance in these races on the courses I assign will be used to determine your standing in the department.”

(Nothing like a distraction, to keep form answering a question.)

We all looked puzzled. The most puzzled were the organic carrot farmers who didn’t have any draft animals.

I should mention at this point that I have one of those organic carrot farms under me. I’m also the only middle-middle running a zoo. Three of my middle-middle peers raise horses, the rest are mechanized or organic farmers of one type or another. --No draft animals. We aren’t sure what a couple of my middle-middle peers do, but they seem to regularly develop big piles of dung a few of us have to help clean up.

When committees between carrot farmers, horse breeders and zoo keepers get formed, it’s about the time I decide to go work on my levy project. I took that approach while the carotene and dung pile rationalization committee was meeting. In the meantime I had a private meeting with my upper-middle boss and pointed out that these races seemed a bit skewed. I mean I really didn’t have any draft animals, unless you counted my zebra’s. Besides another middle-middle was demanding she get to borrow them for her race. I was left only with cheetahs and a couple hippopotami. The cheetah’s were too frail and lacked the endurance for long races. He said he understood that. Winning the race wasn’t that important as determining whether we individually met or exceeded his expectations. Being the out of the box thinker, innovator that I was, he was sure I could do something impressive with the hippos. I furrowed my eyebrows at him.

I should mention at this point, that I like a challenge. That’s why I have the levy project in addition to the organic carrot farm and zoo. Farming carrots is pretty darn easy. --For me anyway. I grew up sitting in apple trees and listening to Johnny Cash sing about cotton fields. (See Sept 2003 blog.) I’m a farmer by country music osmosis.
Organic vegetated material just grows between my ears and I spit it out. The whole “zoo thing”, on the other hand, is just a side amusement. I took it on because someone else (the middle-middle who now wanted to borrow the zebra’s) had let the dung pile up in the animal habitats one too many times. She had kept borrowing my levy workers for dung removal. We had gotten really good at quickly cleaning up wet muck in the levy building business. It seemed like a natural fit, this zoo dung removal business, and it was kind of fun to feed our carrots to hippopotami. But the zoo acquisition is another story.

So, I went to the zoo-keepers and told them about the hippo race. They gave me a look like you’d give someone at the time they suggest your hitch two hippopotami to a wagon and race them against a team of thoroughbreds. I reminded them that we regularly diverted rivers together, and they laughed, and said in an organic carrot farming sense of humor way, “Well, we’ll see what we can do Stan.”

-----------------Several Months Went By -----------------------------------

We got smoked on the first race. The hippopotami came in about as far behind a team of thoroughbreds as you could expect. But of course, the funny thing was. The thoroughbreds got beat by the zebra’s. (Remember the zebra’s were being run by one of the big dung pile middle-middles) But, I wasn’t discouraged. My hippopotami team lead and I like challenges. We formed a tiger team (no zoo pun intended) and set about improving our hippo’s performance. I’m not sure I should divulge the techniques we employed. It’s not something you can learn from a book, or blog for that matter. Its something you just know from experience. But I can tell you that we pretty much uncrated all the boxes and jumped out of the river to minimize the hippo dung spreading and figure out how to get those damn lazy ass carrot eaters moving. The next race we only lost to the thoroughbreds by like 30 feet. --Ten feet, the race after that. We actually tied the next race and beat the zebra’s too in the last race. But winning wasn’t as important as the fact we made such an improvement.

Now, given my hippopotami success story, while still farming carrots, efficiently managing a zoo and clearing half the bottom land in our departments territory for new farms, you’d think I get a pretty good if not amazing review. I suppose, I did. My upper-middle manager expounded on and on in my review blurb. He pointed out how much of an innovator I was. How I took on responsibilities far beyond my peers. How I could make the most impossible task look easy. How I could most likely handle greater challenges with ease. Then he said the only reason he didn’t rate me as exceeds expectations is because my team failed to win the most races this year. So, he rates me as meets expectations.

I was curious about this reasoning, so I made the mistake of asking. The upper-middle said, “What you did with the hippopotami teams was nothing short of amazing.” He said “If anyone was going to be able to do it, I knew it was going to be you.” But in the end, I had to give the edge to the middle-middle who won the most races.

Now, as I said earlier, that turned out to be the former zoo dung pile queen running the zebra team she had borrowed from me. I was puzzled given the facts of the race, so I asked another question I should of never. “Yeah but didn’t you expect her team to win? She was running zebra’s for Christ sake?”

He never hesitated a breath. “Hell no! She’s only every managed to pile dung. I was amazed she won, even with zebra’s. She exceeded my expectations. You didn’t”

You might note, that I’m a little confused at this point. I’m better than the people who exceeded expectations, but I don’t exceed the ones applied to me. I haven’t felt like this since I was placed in a ghetto school by a slight twist of fate in 11th grade for four months. The teachers there, all knew I was better than the average student. But rather than giving me A’s, I got B’s because they knew I was going somewhere and needed a challenge so I could strive for more. I sometimes wonder if those teachers ever grew up to be secretary of agriculture. Probably not, but I know I’m thinking of letting the hippo’s out of their cages tomorrow, and waltzing them down to the upper-upper’s (Sec of Ag’s) office. By the time they get done spreading carrot dung all over, the President will mentioning the dung piles in his review.

As for my upper-middle, well, I have these gibbons, that haven’t been out of the cage in a while. I won’t even mention what they can do with dung.

Irish Drunkin Confession

Its only 1 week from my eer, mid 40's birthday. No dispute.
When I was a lad, about eight years or so, with me books and me pencils to school I did go.
To the dirty old school house, with out any door,
Where lay the school master blind drunk on the floor,
Singing "Frosted Lucky Charms. They are magically delicious."


Now, at that time, there were only a few marshmellow surprises.
Pink Hearts,
Green Clovers, (now two shades of green)
Blue F**ckn Moons.
and purple diamonds.

Who the hell ever saw purple diamonds?

But that was then and this is now.
Rainbows? What the hell are rainbows doing in Lucky Charms?
Okay, that is kind of Leprechan releated.
But, But, there are orange and white things,
There are purple horse shoes, and--
there are a yellow and orange things which are sort of a glutenous mass.
What happened to Lucky Charms.

I wouldn't even be eatin these things but they are high in fiber and low in colesterol and the marshmellow bits melt in you mouth better than cherrios.

The pink hearts aren't even hearts any more.
Where are my pink hearts.
Where is the love of my childhood?
Where is a good beer when I need it?

The climate is changing,
I can accept that.
But,
What the hell are these orange and white things in Luckey Charms.
--And why do you people read this?

Pasadena Green

So on the assumption that Cal was going to be in the Rose Bowl this year I did something for my father. I bought him tickets. It seemed certain a month or so back –Cal in the Rose Bowl, winning. They were undefeated. All Fall, I’d been listening to people revel on their way home from Memorial Stadium each Saturday. I brushed away with paint and stain from the scaffolding surrounding the overpriced exterior of my Craftsman, and former frat boys talked of bowl invites and where they were going to get a beer as they walked below me on College Ave.

Now, my Dad is a bit of football fanatic. Yeah, not fan, fanatic! He played tackle football for the Air Base we were at in England until he was 35. Where upon he injured his knee, had surgery, was out on disability for four months, and in pain for the rest of his life. So he took up coaching. He coached that same team that ruined his knee for two seasons after. Subsequent to that he has coached Pop Warner leagues, and local high school teams. If he’s not coaching it, he’s watching the game. Fall is his time of the year. When he’s not attempting to extinguish the life of a hoofed animal, wandering casually through the forests of Montana, he’s got a football game on the TV. His two favorite times of the year are Thanksgiving and New Years. It’s all football all the time for like four days straight. Course, his real favorite activity is to be watching a football game, at Thanksgiving, the Network breaks for a commercial, and he notices a six-point buck in the field below his cabin as he’s getting another glass of ice tea. He keeps a rifle by the door.

Now, as my Dad has gotten older,
and he lives in Montana and shoots hoofed-antlered animals,
and I live in Berkeley and eat organic vegetables,
so my neighbors think I’m saving the Earth while driving my four-wheel drive pickup,
it has occurred to me,
that my father
and I
don’t get to share common interests much.

Not that I don’t have common interests with my father. I mean we both like working on old cars, restoring old houses, discussing the limited thinking ability of our neighbors and President of the United States, and drinking cappuccino’s. But he lives in the boonies, so we don’t discuss the President much and he also has to drive a considerable distance for a cappuccino. But, up on my scaffolding the first weekend in November, here in Berkeley, I figured, "What the Hell, Kerry is going to be President, and Cal is going to win the Rose Bowl, I should celebrate." I called in a favor with a U.C Regent, and bought my Dad and me tickets to the Rose Bowl. Then I got him and Mom airline tickets to LAX, and met them down there on New Years Eve. We would go to the parade, and then the game. Cal would win. Dad would live important part of his fanaticism. We would have shared a common activity of interest. No hoofed animals would die. Lot’s of plants could show off their sexual organs to admiring crowds and Mom could, ah, look at those sexual organs. (I kind of think she just tolerates the whole football thing.) After all the attempts of the plants to have sex had gone to waste and the game was over, Dad, Mom and me could go to dinner and discuss how many cars my next door neighbor is going to buy and then wreck backing into her driveway. She’s gone through five since I moved here.

So there we were. Pasadena California, looking at flowered floats pass by. In a few hours the game would start, and Cal would kick some schools ass from a Red state like Texas. Problem was, Cal wasn’t in the Rose Bowl. But I had tickets and we were in Pasadena. Who the Hell played this year? Michigan and Texas? Who won? You might wonder how I would not know? I went to the game right? Wrong.

Mom and I were sitting there looking at flowers fall off floats. Dad was reading the newspaper. He kept mumbling to himself. "38 Caddilac 8-Cylinder, Hmm." My Mom and I had looked in his direction a few times as he mumbled, but he ignored us. I looked at my mother. She just rolled her eyes a bit, and said, "Here we go again."

A few more floats went by, and my Dad said, "Hey, you got your cell phone?" I handed mine over to him. Not asking why he didn’t use his own. I just figured he was saving roaming charges. He back-folded the paper and put it on his lap, pointing at a number in a classified ad, and dialed the phone. In a moment he was talking to someone about a 38 Caddilac they had for sale.

When my Dad gets and idea in his head, there is no stopping him. I give as a reference his playing around with the Internet. He saw a job online once, long after he retired, for radar engineers in Nashua, New Hampshire. Now for various reasons he applied for that job and ended up getting hired at a pretty ridiculous salary by Montana standards. Never mind the fact he lived on fifty or so acres of land and a three story cabin he had built by himself in Montana. Never mind he would have to maintain an apartment now, and fly back and fourth to his wife a lot. He wanted that job. He said, he wanted to put more money in savings, this would be a way to do it. We doubted his motives. But, for various reasons, which I will not go into, because its more intriguing if you let your imagination run wild, my mother told him to go do it for eighteen months. Before his time in Nashua was up, he had managed to not only get a job there, but join a local theater company, act in a few plays, and buy a blue Chrysler convertible to compliment to his Red pickup that he brought with him from Montana. When he bought it, he called me and said something about being balanced in his transportation needs? Course he could have walked to work from where he was staying, and he neglected to tell my mother he’d bought the Chrysler. He asked how I would tell her about it. I just laughed and told him if he wanted to stay married and save money to sell the car. He said he couldn’t sell it, it was such a good deal. He had that "such a good deal" tone in his voice as he talked to whoever on my cell phone on the street in Pasadena.

My mother just shook her head and looked at the latest float from the City of L.A. to drift by. I knew we were in trouble.

When the phone call ended, my Dad looked at a few floats as they went by and then said, "I think I’ll skip the game if you don’t mind? There is a car I’d like to go look at."

Skip the game, Car? I mean, I didn’t care I guess. Cal wasn’t in the game. I could scalp the tickets. "Ah, sure. Car?" I said. Mom just pursed her lips a bit a looked at my Dad.

"This lady, she’s in Pasadena, has a 38 Caddilac for sale." He said. "I want to go look at it. Its only a mile or so from here. Said she could meet me at 3:00"

"You don’t want us to go?" I said, thinking of shared experiences or something.
He kind of wrinkled his nose and squinted. "Nah, it probably won’t be worth anything. I’ll meet you and Mom back at the hotel afterwards."

So, Mom and I went up to the Stadium, scalped the tickets. ($50 dollar loss on my cost BTW DAD.) Then cruised over to see a friend of mine Chris who works a JPL now. I was going to have drinks later, but as DAD decided to skip the game, I hooked up earlier with Chris. It wasn’t too long after Mom and I got back to the hotel when my cell phone rang and it was Dad on his. "Hey come out to the parking lot I want to show you something."

My Mom, just said, "Oh, oh," as she heard my Dad’s words on the cell phone. We went outside, and there he was, sitting in the driver’s seat of a sort of lime and sort of opal green 38 Caddilac convertible. The interior was white leather. It was immaculate. An ugly Zsa Zsa Gabore Green, but immaculate. My dad got out of the car before we could get to it. "98 hundred original miles," he said smirking a bit.

"Little old lady from Pasadena I said?" (Unable to resist.) Looking at the odometer. It read 9879. But who’s quibbling about my father’s rounding techniques.

"She’s a retired producer from Buena Vista studios," he said. "Knew Walt Disney when he was still alive."

Now this car is in the kind of shape that you see in showrooms. I mean it would still have the wrapping on the visors if you can imagine. But it was 67 years old and I swear I could smell new car sent on it. "How the hell did you get out here with it? I mean, where is she? This car has got to be worth a fortune?" I rattled off.

My mom just pushed her glasses up on her nose. "It looks like the black one, banker Hartley use to drive when I was a kid, in Burlingame." (Kansas, not California.) She poked at the white upholstery on the top of the passenger’s seat.

"Let me ride you back to her house. I’ll explain the deal to you two," my Dad said, opening the door to the passenger side for my mother. I hopped in back. My mom sat in front and we started off down Pasadena’s Del Mar Blvd.

It turned out owner of the car had three. A 36 Dussenberg, a 37 Auburn, and the Caddilac. All of these cars she had bought from stars when she worked for Disney in forties and fifties. Now she was too old to drive and she wanted to sell. Not that she had been driving them. She is ninety four and has the dubious distinction of having graduated from the same high school as my father in Phillipsburg, New Jersey. For some reason she has taken to my Dad and his stories of hoofed animal shooting, driving 40 Ford Coupes across the bridge between Easton PA and Phillpsburg NJ, and has agreed to let him handle selling the Dussenberg and Auburn. In exchange he gets to buy the Caddilac for $10,000. (Which BTW the way, I had to pay for temporarily to get the whole deal rolling.)

My mom personally thinks the whole thing is a little silly. Mostly, because she and Dad don’t have garage space for the Caddilac up in Montana. Despite the fact they have three garages. They just added a garage for the snow tractor this fall. Another, attached to the house, has my mom’s car in it, and the other attached to my Dad’s workshop has his Chrysler and his pick up. They also have the problem of a road that is not really accessible by a 38 Caddilac convertible of any color this time of year.

So, in the mean time, my Dad is now flying between Billings and LA starting next month to try and sell a Dussenberg and a Auburn. I have a Zsa Zsa Gabore green Cadillac in my garage in Berkeley. Dad has to decide if he want to sell his Chrysler or build another garage. My truck is relegated to street parking, and we have yet to tell my brother about this. But he reads this blog regularly and comments on my bad spelling and grammar, so he’ll figure it out soon enough. If, he reads this far. I’m also erecting crash barriers in front of the garage in case my next door neighbor really misses when she is backing into her driveway.