I was going to go into a long spiel about how we Americans take our independence for granted but I decided against it. No one gives a shit about freedom or independence beyond their use as buzzwords in politician's canned homilies or some other idiot's use of it to propagandize the killing this year's Designated Enemy.

So let me tell you about Ed. Ed is a tech for a mechanical engineering company here in Seattle. He's about 45, tall, thin, very calm and very good natured. I consider Ed a good aquaintance.

A couple of months ago, Ed had a heart attack at home and nearly died. The EMTs had to use the defibrillator on him once to bring him back.

He's back on the job and has been for a few weeks now. Modern medical thinking is that you need to get the hell up and move around rather than lay in bed and convalesce.

He was at my 2nd property today, hunting down a gas odor. He had come back in van from buying a couple of things he needed to finish sealing up a pipe and waved at me when I saw him. He came up and said, "How are you!" I said, "ME?! How the hell are YOU?!"

"Alive," he said, He showed me a scar on the inside of his left forearm that ran from the crook of his elbow to his wrist. That's where they got the vein to do his bypass with I guess.

He looks different. A bit more gaunt. But alive looks good and better than the alternative.

Ah, here's a good one. While I was writing this, I got a phone call from the on-call engineer. He told me that there was a leak at one of my piers on the waterfront and that he was forty-five minutes away and the back-up engineer (the boss) was an hour and a half away.

He asked if I could go down and check on the leak. Now, I'm not on call but I didn't stop for beer after shopping with Miss Significantly Other earlier tonight and, well, duty calls yanno?

So I go down and find that he gave me the wrong pier number. One company has offices on two of my piers and he gave me the wrong one. So I'm walking around the wrong offices, looking for a leak that doesn't exist...

I call the boss and ask him what the hell it is I'm supposed to be looking for and he gives me the right information.

So I go to the offices and find no one there. Who reported the leak? Oh, they close at 9PM. It's 9:30. Well, um... there's a leak in the ceiling of one of the bathrooms and the access door to the bathrooms is locked and I don't have a key. Call the boss.

While the boss is calling the leak reporter, I find the bathroom key on the front desk and use it.

OK. There is water pouring from the access panel in the ceiling of the Gents' room.

A quick check one floor above and I find no leaks in the hoity-toity architectual company offices.

Back downstairs, up on a ladder, my head in the access hole in the Gents', I find water literally running out of the air conditioning unit that's up there. Groovy! I know what this is: plugged drain line. UnGroovy. I don't know how to fix it. DoubleUnGroovy, water from the leak is transversing the edges of the access hole and dripping down the outside of both of my legs.

On the phone to the boss, I kill the power to the unit and water literally pours forth as unto the fountains of the deep. Not only are the sides of my pants soaked but...eeeeeyahhhh! Now the ass of my pants is soaked!

Did I mention that this is an air conditioning unit? Did I mention that the water currently running down the crack of my ass is COLD?!

OHHHHHHHHHHHH, SHITIT'SCOLD!

Ahem.

So, it's a "shut it off and it'll stop leaking and we'll deal with it tomorrow" thing now. I mop up a bit, set out wastecans to catch what's dripping, lock up and get in my car.

I went and bought beer.

I'm on my second one.

I'm stopping at four.

Goodnight and have a pleasant 4th of July.

Oh yeah, I'm on call starting tomorrow night...

Remember that today is not a military holiday.

On this date, 231 years ago, a group of extraordinary Americans declared that this country would no longer suffer under the rule of an all-powerful executive by signing their names to a document that had been in the works for months.

Today does not celebrate the violence that would come from their commitment.

Today celebrates the heated reasoning that gave birth to this country.

Would that even a glimmer of the passionate reason found in that Congress be reflected in what passes for Congress today.

I've been on-call at work since the 4th, the date of my last post.

It was the most active on-call I've had since starting with this company. Beginning with Tuesday's air handler meltdown, I had a total of three calls, all three of which were for one of my piers and required me to go down to it.

Tuesday was the air handler. Saturday I got a call around 6PM that my (Kreasote®-soaked wooden) pier had caught fire and the fire department had cut a hole in it. Erm.

Upon talking with a coupe of the piers' restaurant workers, I found out that it was a cigarette fire and that one of them had dumped a pot of water on it to put it out. Following procedure, someone called the SFD and they cut a hole and really soaked the bugger.

I'm still surprised at the smallness of the hole.

Three o'clock Tuesday morning, the pager went off and I got the Elbow Of Doom in the ribs from Miss Significantly Other.

The alarm company had received a low air alarm and a water flow alarm from the pier.

Just before I headed out the door, the answering service called again to tell me that the SFD wanted to let me know that there was no fire but that something had broken a portion of the under-pier sprinkler system.

At least the pier wasn't on fire again.

What happens is this: flotsam and jetsam get pushed toward the shoreline of the bay and under the piers along the bay by wind and wave action. When the tide comes in, this bay junk (broken pilings, hunks of dock wood, dead cats) rises with it and bangs around on the under-dock infrastructure. We get poopie line breaks and sprinkler smashies, mostly.

The boss came down as he has to do in all cases where the fire panel goes off and I went back home to change and take my morning meds. I got back at 5AM and started in with my daily routine.

I left at 1:30 - you damnbetcha!

And now here it is Wednesday and I survived another week of being on call. The best part is that I'm takingoff the next two days and doing not a damn thing! Woot! Four-day weekend, here I be!

Oh yeah, we have our annual gathering of Hawaii-minded people on Saturday, too. So my weekend is made and hopefully in the shade!

So I hear that FOX is starting up a business channel on cable to rival Bloomberg and CNBC.

If that wasn't enough, and I'm sure it is, I've received an email from another friendly tunneler from over the hedge who works in the office that approves all of the new FBN advertising. Guess what the new baby FOX's tagline is?

"FOX: We Give You The Business".

I reluctantly went to see the new Michael Moore film, "SiCKO" today.

Miss Significantly Other and I took in a matinée show at one of those God-awful bazillion-screen theaters at a local "Lifestyle Center" (nee, "shopping mall").

First, an aside: I HATE HATE HATE these huge theater complexes! Holy shit! We could have gone to a small, neighborhood-type theater over in the University District here in town but Miss S.O. thought that parking would be such a bitch that we decided to go way the fart up to Lynnwood.

From the outside, the damn theater looks like some kind of weird religious temple (the irony is not lost on me)! The damn theater has sixteen screens! The damn theater has a snack counter that could feed Bolivia! The damn theater has specially trained Malamutes equipped with GPS units that rove the labyrinthine halls to help you find your screen! The damn theater shows commercials on the screen before the movies starts! The damn theater shows commercials on the screen before the movie starts that advertise grinning chiropractors who practice out of strip malls! Gah!

And the god damned VOLUME IS TOO LOUD! I'm deaf and I didn't even need the assistive listening device to watch the movie. THAT, my finely-feathered friend, is too LOUD!

OK. On to the actual movie.

Michael Moore is fat. He's also not very good-looking. He's rather slovenly and rudely wears ball caps just about everywhere (but always upon his head, you dork).

The man has, however, made a pretty damn good movie about health care.

I only went to see this movie because a local reviewer had said that it wasn't bleatingly partisan. The reviewer also said that parts of the movie were funny (which, I gather, is how MM used to make his films back in the day and of some interest to me since I am occasionally funny myself). The same reviewer said that Moore stuck it to Hillary and, hey, who doesn't want to pay money to see that?

What I got (in addition to some good Hillary-sticking) was a rather one-sided (duh) look at the health care apparatus of America, Canada, England, France and Cuba.

What we find is that, In America, we really don't have any of that much-vaunted "choice" in medical coverage that we hear about. For those of us who have coverage, our policies are almost exclusively determined by our employers (or unions). Our level of care is determined by those policies and the insurance companies will work as hard as they possibly can to deny coverage - and save themselves money - in spite of the policies.

For the 50 million Americans who don't have medical insurance, their level of care is determined by how much cash or credit they have.

We also find that Canada, England, France and even Cuba provide health care to all of their citizens "free of charge". This isn't true, of course, because each citizen with a job pays taxes that support their care as well as the care of others.

What I liked most about the movie, was how it portrayed the culture in these other countries.

This Canadian fellow snapped a tendon in his arm while on vacation in Florida and, rather than pay the thousands of dollars he was quoted at the American hospital to reattach his bicep, he went back to Canada and had it done. Moore asked him how he felt about paying taxes to support the health care of others rather than "taking care of himself" and he said, 'Well, they'd do the same for me."

This French couple only makes a bout $8,000 a month. They have a beautiful home, two children and a minimum of five weeks of mandatory paid vacation each year. The woman collects sand from places I can't afford to vacation in on my $28K a year wage.

This English doctor makes $160,000 a year, drives an Audi, is married with a child, lives in a nice home in a good neighborhood and gets bonuses that aren't based upon how many claims for coverage he denies or how many patients he can cram into his day, but upon how healthy his patients become while in his care.

I'm leaving the Cubans out of this because you have to see the movie to appreciate what happens. All I will say about that part is that I had to wipe tears from my eyes and I never thought I'd say that after a Michael Moore movie unless it was from laughing at him.

Yes, the movie is one-sided. Yes, Moore doesn't get into the cost in taxes to the people in these other countries. No, he doesn't tell any horror stories from the countries with nationalized care.

But he asks a very important question: Who are we?

When farmer Brown's barn burns down, aren't we there to help him raise a new one? Don't we then expect he'll be over to help us when we need it?

After 9/11, didn't we band together as one people? Didn't we rise to the terror and the death in magnificent unity and gather the broken and weary into our arms?

The Canadian fellow from above, the fellow with the blown tendon, said something pretty profound. When Moore asked him why people would put up with paying for the coverage of others he said, "We take care of each other."

While talking about the work vs. leisure culture in France with a group of Americans living in Paris, one woman explained the relationship between the French government and the French people to Moore. She said, "In France, the government is afraid of the people. In America, the people are afraid of the government."

Who are we? Do we not take care of each other in this country? And if our government is by and for the people, why do we fear it so?

Go see SiCKO. Go with an open mind but don't go gullible. I think you'll be glad you went.

The Morning After? What kind of title is that? Sounds like contraception, you say?

Well, it's better than using The Morning After The First Day Back After Taking Two Days Off And Having A Four Day Weekend.

That's today, anyway.

Yesterday was...interesting. Our summer help filled in for me for the two days I was out but I was so busy yesterday that I didn't look for any ball droppings (oh stop it).

Mondays are always Hell and especially so in the summer - I'm learning. Two of the properties I help manage are, as both of you know, piers along Seattle's waterfront. You can think of the waterfront as almost being the New Jersey boardwalk: swamped with tourists and local in the summer, empty in the winter.

Even though the touristas (my word) are generally good about using the trash cans provided, tons of stuff still winds up on the ground. My single goal in life is to get it all up. Our summer help has other goals (looking at chicks and using his cell phone). OK, so I'll add looking at chicks to my list of goals too but I've learned to work and ogle and he hasn't.

So I expected a mess yesterday and I was rewarded with a truly breathtaking one. Like I said, I didn't expect the summer help (hereafter SH) to clean like I do. No one can. So I don't consider him as having dropped the ball. But man, it was foul down there yesterday.

Three and a half hours of non-stop work just to get the trash up and change out the garbage bags. And I didn't do anything in the dumpster areas except for cosmetics - getting the nasty shit up.

At the other property, which has a food court, I had Thai yellow curry over rice for lunch and for dessert I had beautiful Thai girl eye candy. (I'm a pig, I know. Oink.)

One of the retail tenants was robbed and had their front door lock broken over the weekend and I had to pull the whole mechanism out and hoof it down to the locksmith shop. Then one of the other retail tenants had a drain back up and force water out onto their floor, causing a massive leak into the parking garage below. So Bossman and me tried to snake out the drain to save the tenant a plumbing call but we couldn't get it clear. We left it for the professionals.

And now today it's showering out there so I don't know what to do. I wanted to hose the sidewalks. Maybe I will anyway. It should be quiet with the rain (touristas melt in it, you know).

So a week that started last Thursday with a day off, fwas ollowed by another day off on Friday, then followed by a trip down Buckley way to our mini-gathering on Saturday, then followed by a terribly lazy-ass Sunday, hit Monday like an egg on concrete, slid across Tuesday like fingernails on a chalkboard, slumped down on Wednesday like a drunk down a staircase and stopped on today, Thursday, like a car wheel on a kitten.

Monday, you've read about. Tuesday I did my morning routine, did my hosing and then Summer Help (SH) showed up. Late. Again.

I won't tell you who SH is but I will tell you that his Dad is important to the owners of my company. I'll also tell you that SH's heart isn't much into working. At least not working for us.

He's young, sure. He's not going to be a blue-collar worker like us, that's true. But I wish he'd put more effort in. That and stop asking if it's OK with me if he leaves early. I'm not the boss, dude.

So since SH filled in for me while I was off, I guess he's going to be at my properties for a while. Although, if Bossman had better sense, he'd stick him someplace where SH's father carries less weight. SH's Dad practically owns everything where I am so the kid has the old, "My Dad owns this place" kind of bravado.

So having SH around has been a bit stressful. Then it rained Wednesday. All day. You might think that's an odd lament to hear from a Seattletarian but rain all day in the summer is an anomaly. We put up with the water for nine months and when it finally breaks on Memorial Day, we bid it adieu and laugh as its puddles evaporate into the blue sky.

But it rained all day. And it threatened on and off all day today. I did my Hosing Part II this AM. I almost went ass-over-tea kettle and I actually do think I strained my right knee by slipping on a portion of wet metal threshold that serves as a transition from the pier to the sidewalk.

The threshold is basically like the metal diamond plate you see on trucks and such. It serves to transition from the pier surface to the sidewalk surface and covers the gap there between the pier and what is literally the top of the seawall (I'll bet people don't know that as they walk down the sidewalk along the Seattle waterfront, they're actually walking on the seawall).

Anyway, I came down flat-footed on the plate and slipped, wrenching my bulk to one side. It was only about four inches of slip but when you ain't suspecting it...

So, I did my hosing, putting up with morons who seem to have become very successful in life in spite of their total inability to grasp that a man with a hose who is spraying water on the sidewalk is someone they should want to walk BEHIND and not IN FRONT OF.

Seriously, I have to put up with Oblivions who never see the reel, the hose, the man with the hose, the water or the wall of wet dirt and cigarette butts sliding across the sidewalk and heading for the gutter.

Then there are the Luke Hosewalkers who either don't see the hose and step on it or don't see it and can't feel it and step on it repeatedly until someone points it out to them which makes them jump back in total surprise, or, worse, those who walk the hose like it's their own personal tight rope.

There are the Full Steamers, those bullheaded citizen pedestrians who are damn well going to walk in front of the hoser because it's their right to traverse any public sidewalk however they please.

Finally, there are the Mincing Ponderers who, when confronted with something as unconscionably odd as someone hosing off a sidewalk in the morning in Seattle, are so fabbershammed that they lose all thought processing capability and all control over their limbs. Thus afflicted, they stand on the edge of the hoser's peripheral vision, their bodies jerking back and forth as they attempt to comprehend the situation before them and then react accordingly. These people are fun and an experienced hoser can keep them right at the edge of his vison for a good thirty seconds. Guilt makes me look at them, cut the water and smile which seems to restore them to their former state.

So, I hosed. And then SH came in two hours late. So I gave him some crap work to do (actually passed it on from Bossman) and I went to my other property to clean a roof.

By the way, roof dirt is nasty.

But tomorrow is another Friday and Bossman is off next week. That means my fave person will be down covering for him and I'll actually get to learn how to do some stuff and have fun while I do it.

So there's that.

Rainy summer weekends in Seattle are unfair. Literally unFair.

Our annual city-wide summer shindig known as SeaFair lasts for a month with many of the major activities happening on, of course, the weekends.

For instance, today was a sponsored event at a Buddhist temple down in the International District. It's an annual traditional Japanese/Buddhist dance for the dead known as Bon Odori. It's food and fun and beautiful women and girls in gorgeous kimonos and regular folks in regular clothing (and the SeaFair Pirates) all dancing in a huge oval in the middle of the street. Miss SO and me rarely miss it. Today was one of those rare occasions, because of the rain.

Luckily, the day wasn't lost as Miss Significantly Other and me traveled down the turnpike to Burien in order to take in the 19th Hawaiian Summer Festival presented by the Waikinikona Hawaiian Club (Waikinikona is Hawaiian for Washington).

It was rather smaller this year than I remember it but then again, I could be mis-remembering it because these hula/food/vendor things tend to run together in my head.

The food was traditional hula show fare if it was non-traditionally pre-portioned in individual containers. We had (click on picture) 1. Macaroni salad. 2. Kalua pork (smoke seasoned pulled pork - the real stuff is cooked right on the piggy in a pit known as an imu). 3. Poke (pokee, going against the Hawaiian language norm of "e" sounding like "eh"). Poke is usually raw seafood, ahi tuna (big-eye or yellow fin tuna) being very popular. I'm not sure what kind of poke this was. Brown is not a good color for raw seafood. 4. Lomi salmon (also known as lomi-lomi salmon). Lomilomi is a Hawaiian massage technique but is also descriptive of the technique itself and meaning, roughly, "squished with the hands". Lomi salmon is salmon (tradition calls for canned salmon as that's what was available when the dish was born), onions, green onions, tomatoes and hot chilies tossed into a bowl and squished with the hands. It's ono (good-tasting)! 5. Rice. 6. Cake with coconut icing.

This was very non-traditional hula consisting mostly of auana (sort of "ow-onna") which is modern music and dress. The girls wore actual plastic grass and metalized grass skirts in a couple of their numbers. There was also some non-traditional Tahitian dancing.

The girls were very pretty, especially the momona (uh... healthy) one on the right in the photo. Her face was very expressive as were her fantastic eyebrows. Being less angular than the other two girls, her movements appeared more fluid. And, yeah, she was cute as hell.

There were the obligatory keiki (kay-key, children) dancers as well as others in the halau, including the kumu, who danced, but these three girls were the focus.

I gotta say, though, that this isn't my cup of awa. I like the traditional kahiko (ancient) chant/dance accompanied by traditional instruments. I'm a pain that way.

The dancing started out on a very high note from my point of view with a group of keikis backing up Hoku and all of them wearing maile (my-leh) leis and Hoku in a real grass skirt. I could smell the "green" of the things. It was great! The keikis had their own kahiko-style dance after Hoku's ended.

She came out with the whole group at the end for two full auana hulas.

I didn't mention the vendors but that's because they were pretty uninteresting. If you've been to more than two of these hula shows, you've seen everything once already.

I'm sure the entertainment got better as the day wore on but we left right after O'Lono. I found the volume of the music to be unbearable and the lack of quiet for the dancers was pretty disrespectful.

All in all, though, these shows are just that: shows. The halaus are there to recruit dancers, sell Hawaiiana and what-all. I find that very little hula is about actual cultural preservation and more about selling plastic plumeria hair clips.

For years I've failed to take advantage of a stunningly effective old marketing concept that is re-sweeping the advertising landscape like a tide of raw sewage over a ice cream farm: cross-promotion.

This is how it works: Let's say that I'm a prosthetic vagina surgeon and you own a ham plantation. We strike a deal to cross-promote each other's business. Now every woman who comes to me for prosthetic vagina surgery will hear all about the startlingly good nutrition to be found in your easy-to-make hams and every ham you sell will include a valuable cents-off coupon for prosthetic vagina surgery performed by me.

The theory of cross-promotion is even grander, if more incestuous, if I own both businesses.That's why every Panzo Cadillac sold will drive off the lot with a Bridget Sighs Massage Parlor license plate frame. Get it?

So, while I advertise my t-shirt designs over there on the sidebar, from time to time I'll be telling you all about them over here in the main body of the blog as a way to cross-promote them.

Lucky you because this is one of those times!

That's right, all across this great land of ours, "bumper nuts" are dangling.

Is this stupid? Yes it is. But so are most Americans which is why it's been an astoundingly popular thing to do.

You'd think that American men especially would be too homophobic to handle large testicles or to even be caught admiring another guy's truck's nuts.

This is why I have a design that shows a pair of these "bumper nuts" along with the slogan, "If there's nuts on your rear-end then there's a dick in your ass!"™

Look for a new design soon that will say, "If the nuts are in the back then the dick must be driving!"™

--end of incest--

There are only a few things in this life that I will not give up for any reason.

Three of them are: Miso soup (the Japanese soup made from fermented soybeans, tofu and seaweed), Pho, (the Vietnamese soup made from broth heavily seasoned with anise, rice noodles, your choice of meat and several condiments including basil, bean sprouts, hoisin sauce and hot peppers) and Hawaiian-style saimin, another Japanese soup taken to a whole other level with the multicultural influences of Hawaii.

There's a restaurant down in Kent, Washington that I'd never been to before but is talked about on the coconut wireless as serving a mighty tasty bowl of saimin. The restaurant is called Saimin Says and it's at 26218 Pacific Highway South.

Saimin Says also serves plenty of other Hawaii soul food from loco moco to hamburger steak to tako poke (raw octopus seasoned with shoyu (Hawaii-style soy sauce), green onions and other things), "when get" (when they have it).

I had the Pocho Saimin which is Saimin Says' homemade broth with fresh saimin noodles, portuguese sausage, Chinese char siu sausage, da kine pink and white fishcake (kamaboko) and seasonings. I said yes when asked if I wanted hot mustard and I squirted about a teaspoonful in my spoon and mixed it into the soup thoroughly. It wasn't until after I did this that Miss Significantly Other told me that using hot mustard was "sacrilege" and a "haole affectation" (da kine whitey thing).

Now, she knows that I try really hard to not act haole and I defended my decision by asking, "How come they give it to you if you're not supposed to put it in?"

She told me that she never put any hot mustard in her saimin, ever. I reminded her that she was even wimpier with hot stuff than I was but, of course, telling her that didn't make any difference.

She even likened my putting hot mustard in the saimin to the way I used to put butter and sugar on my rice when I first moved out here from the east coast. Hey! That's the only way we ever ate rice at home in New Jersey! (I'm over that now, by the way.)

So I felt bad having haolefied my saimin but do you know what? That was still the best bowl of saimin I've ever had! (Okay so it's only the fourth bowl of saimin I've ever had but hush up!) It was so good that I ate every noodle and drank all of the broth and even licked the bowl when I was through.

Don't ask me how it is that a white bread guy from New Jersey can find a taste for foods such as fermented soybean soup and saimin. Heck, I even like poi! I wonder at it myself but I don't question it any more.

I just eat!

It's often hard for us to consider that the people we raise to stardom were, for a time in their lives, fairly normal.

No matter what I feel about Hillary, this is a very interesting dip into the pool of that time in her life.

While it's interesting to read Hillary's 40-year old words, I can't help but think how really too bad it is that technology has dumbed down our thoughts and feeling to short-hand emails and evn shrtr txt mssgs.

What woud the world be today if our young people had to sit down and think of what to write to each other rather than simply tap out glib and empty garbage? What would they be like?

In the ’60s, a Future Candidate Poured Her Heart Out in Letters

They were high school friends from Park Ridge, Ill., both high achievers headed East to college. John Peavoy was a bookish film buff bound for Princeton, Hillary Rodham a driven, civic-minded Republican going off to Wellesley. They were not especially close, but they found each other smart and interesting and said they would try to keep in touch.