November 18, 2008

Sam and I visited Harrisonburg, Virginia the first week in November and stayed at the Massanutten 4 Seasons Resort. We have become regulars at the Resort since Ali started college at James Madison University in 2006. Apparently it is very easy to get good deals on condos at Massanutten through RCI, we got a two bedroom complete with sauna for about $250, for the week. I played golf at one of Massanutten's two 18 hole golf courses, beautifully maintained, and we visited some Shenandoah Wineries. The wineries are just getting started save for Shenandoah Winery which has been going for about 10 years. We brought back a case of wine and all bottles have been good, however, they were not cheap.

The main purpose of the trip was to see Ali in another lead role in a JMU main stage production. This time "The Rover" an old English comedy written by a woman Aphra Behn and set in Naples in 1655. It is a battle of the sexes comedy and Ali played one of the two sisters at the center of the battle. As usual Ali was brilliant and beautiful even though the other sister, played by her friend Lauren Ramsey, had most of the funny lines. The costumes we elaborate and required several changes for the female leads. Ali's presence on stage continues to amaze me. She seems at home no matter the role, like she belongs right there at that time and place. She never misses a line, no wonder the keep casting her. I wonder where it will all lead? She longs for singing roles in musicals, but there is no question she is a natural born actor.

October 30, 2008

Why I will vote for Obama.

Change is good. The Republicans have held sway in Washington since 1980. Clinton was president for 8 years but for six of those years the Republicans controlled Congress. It is time for a different view of government and its place in America. Ronald Reagan said that government is not the solution, it is the problem. This has been the mantra for nearly thirty years, even though the government has grown in size and power. But government power under Republicans has not always been used for the good of the all of the people. Senator Obama now says that the government can be our friend. That it can be used to better our lives, all of our lives. He says that the upper class in this country has a disproportion of the wealth and that trickle down economics has not worked. I think he is right. At the very least I think it is time to try another way of governing. The country is truly not better off now than it was four or even eight years ago, and while all of the problems cannot be blamed on Republicans it is clear that the country now needs to go in another direction with a new philosophy.

October 20, 2008

In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem. From time to time we've been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people.

Ronald Reagan January 20, 1981.

If this is not exactly what is happening now in Washington I must be crazy. The same people who caused the housing bubble and the following financial crisis are now going to bail us out of the mess. Even the Washington Post is now admitting that Congress, with the complicity of the Clinton adminstration, encouraged lenders to make unwise loans in furtherance of what they call the worthy cause of home ownership. The bubble burst and the whole house of cards came tumbling down. My fear is that in our haste to dig out of the rubble of this disaster our leaders will take us down the road to socialism. As Winston Churchill once said: " The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socalism is the equal sharing of miseries."

August 9 2008

I have read that Presidential Candidate Obama has proposed a "windfall profits tax" on oil companies as part of his energy plan. Two things strike me about this proposal: (1) it was tried in the 1970s by Jimmy Carter and the then democrats in Congress and it did nothing to alleviate the energy crisis of that time; and (2) if we tax excess profits of corporations, should we not provide some form of relief to corporations when they have excess losses, I am thinking here of the American automobile companies. It occurs to me that the best thing the Federal government can do for the American economy is to stay as far away from it as possible. The price of oil has begun to come down, and thanks to our Washington gridlock (and I am not talking about the traffic), the Federal government has had absolutely nothing to do with the decline.

June 8, 2008

I went to see Sex in the City (the movie) last night with my wife and 19 year old daughter. I commented that it was the quintessential chick flick, however, upon reflection I must also admit that the movie’s message was one that needed to be stated for the sake of all women. I was never a fan of the TV series. I thought the four main characters were vacuous and totally lacking in any redeeming qualities. Their main purpose in life, it seemed to me, was the pursuit of males and the sexual conquest of same. Then they would get together, sip cosmopolitans, and talk about their conquests or failures and commiserate with one another on the inequities of life in general.

Sex in the City (the move) had a more positive message for women. While it is true that each of the gals suffered misfortune in their amorous affairs, in the end they all came to the realization that one size does not fit all, weather it be in shoes or the male anatomy. The main character, Carrie Bradshaw, had a 10 year relationship with a man, Big (aka John Preston), who she came to realize was the love of her life. They were together and happy until she fell into the common pitfall of a large number of upper middle class to wealthy couples. It is what I call the status trap or what used to be known as “Keeping up with the Joneses”. The wedding became the center piece of her life rather than her relationship with Big. He, being a man, felt he was playing second fiddle, and this caused him ask himself, “What am I getting myself into”. Everything collapsed sending him into exile and her into depression. It took a year, and a few clever plot twists, for her to come to the realization that Big was in fact the love of her life and being his wife was far more important that being in Vogue magazine. So they did what they should have done in the first place. They got married at city hall with no one in attendance and then they went out and celebrated with friends and whoever.

The other three women making up the ensemble also came to life altering realizations. Samantha, the nymphomaniac, realized that that indeed was her lot in life, so she left a handsome man who loved her and a dream house in Malibu for her old life in NYC. Miranda, the lawyer/mother/wife came to the realization that her number one priority in her life should have been her husband and her son. Instead of them taking a back seat to her legal career, it should have been the other way around. She finally got it right. Charlotte, pretty much had it right from the beginning of the movie, so she simply got rewarded with the baby girl she had always wanted.

The positive message of the movie, that everybody is different and no one answer is right for everybody, was for me, a refreshing change from the negative vibes of the TV series. I also liked the fact that Carrie waited until she and Big were in their forties to get married. Personally, as the father of two daughters this appealed to me, as did the idea of getting married at City Hall, a small church would have done, and then celebrating. All in all things turned out well for the girls, but I don’t know if sitting through almost three hours, of chick flickery was worth the effort for me.

There is an interesting article in the Washington Post this morning by Walter Williams, an economics professor at George Mason University. Williams cites The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 as the, or one of the causes of the current "Sub-Prime Crisis". The Act encouraged banks and savings institutions to make the so called "no doc" and "Liar" loans that are now so frequently in default. His point being that most problems in America are caused by Government actions, which are often well intentioned. The Government adopted, in the 70s, a policy that every American should own his or her own home. In theory this is a wonderful idea, but in actuality it can't happen without Government subsidizing home purchases. Instead of providing the subsidy the Government simply mandated the dream and hoped that it would become a reality. It worked for a while, but markets and economies do not exist in a vacuum. Things change! And so it was with the housing market. The moral of the story, the Government should stay as far away as possible from mandating things it can't deliver on, like lowering gasoline prices.

March 23, 2008

West Virginia University finally made the front page of the Washington Post Sports section. The WVU basketball team beat Duke 73-67 in the NCAA tournament to make it to the "Sweet 16" for the second time in three years. During that time Duke only made it to the "Sweet 16" once, yet Post columnist Mike Wise devoted almost his entire column to the loosing squad. WVU was mentioned, but the article was about the losers. This is typical of Post coverage, or I should say, non-coverage of Mountaineer athletics. The Post treats Virgina Tech like a local team, but seldom mentions WVU even though Morgantown is closer to DC than Blacksberg (161 miles to 215 miles). Virtually every VT basketball and football game is covered but WVU has to do something out of the ordinary to even get a mention.

March 18, 2008

I filed our Federal Income Tax return today, electronically! It cost us $46, I used Turbo Tax, what the hell we can deduct it all on next year's return. What really amazed me was that when I printed it out the return was 62 pages. Unreal! We are not rich, we don't have complicated finances, so why does the Federal government need 62 pages of information about our income? How many pages does Bill Gates need? Or, Warren Buffet? We really need tax reform in this country, but, I don't hear any of the candidates for president talking about it, so I don't suppose it will happen.

March 16, 2008

I read a brilliant article in the Village Voice, dated March 11, 2008 (http://www.villagevoice.com/generic/show_print.php?id=374064&p...), by the Pulitzer Prize winning play write David Mamet. He summed up pretty much what I have gone through in my political thinking. Like him, I am a child of the 60s, meaning that I grew up with negative feelings about government, business and positive feelings about human beings. I have learned that while the usual human vices hold sway throughout the world, in my life things are not always wrong, neither are they wrong in the community in which I live or in my country. Mamet's comparison of George W. Bush and JFK is pretty much right-on, except that JFK had charisma and Bush doesn’t. For me, the person occupying the White House, or the party controlling the Congress, makes little difference in the long run. What makes our country so great is the U.S. Constitution, which created a form of government so brilliant that no single person or party can fuck it up for very long. Sure, we have ups and downs (like right now is a down), but I am sure this will not last. I really don’t think the next presidential election is going fundamentally change anything in America. I like Obama because he is charismatic, like JFK, in form if not in substance.

I really liked the Mamet piece, especially, when he called Thomas Sowell “our greatest contemporary philosopher”. I have been reading Sowell’s columns for years and could not agree more. My only question is why he is never seen or heard of in the MSM? You want to know how smart Thomas Sowell is, just read this article. http://townhall.com/columnists/ThomasSowell/2008/03/12/non-judgmental_nonsense.

Sowell was born in North Carolina, where, he recounts, his encounters with white people were so limited that he didn't believe that "yellow" was a possible color for human hair (A Personal Odyssey). He later moved with his mother's sister (whom he thought to be his mother; his father died before he was born) and siblings to Harlem, New York City. He dropped out of high school when he moved out on his own at the age of 17 because of money problems and a deteriorating home environment.^[2] Soon after, he served in the US Marine Corps.

After his service, Sowell passed a GED and enrolled at Howard University. His top-notch grades enabled him to transfer and completed a B.A. in Economics from Harvard College, magna cum laude, an M.A. in Economics from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Chicago. He chose University of Chicago, he has said, because he wanted to study under George Stigler. Stigler's achievements were recognized when in 1982 he won the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Sowell has taught at prominent American universities including Howard University, Cornell University, Brandeis University, and UCLA. Since 1980 he has been a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, where he holds the fellowship named after Rose and Milton Friedman.

February 29, 2008

Leap year! I was born in a leap year, 1944, but not on February 29. Am still in the process of preparing my 2007 income tax returns, a process stalled while I wait for more forms. I was distressed to discover that we will owe the state of Maryland $616, and that we were assessed a penalty of $11 for not having enough withheld. What kind of bullshit is this.

Yea, that’s right Maryland sucks! With all the taxes assessed on its citizens this putrid state still has a budget deficit. We paid the state and the county $5000 in income taxes in 2007, not to mention the nearly $6000 we paid in real estate taxes. What the hell do the idiots in Annapolis spend this money on? The Inter-County Connector? The Purple Line? New schools? The only thing they can agree on is that nobody should smoke cigarettes, which is really ironic since the state of Maryland’s main product for 150 years was tobacco.

While we are talking about taxes, has anybody seen the assessed value of their house go down? All you hear about in the media is how the housing market is depressed and people are loosing their shirts because the value of the family home is in the tank. But not one word about property taxes going down to reflect the depressed market. I propose a moratorium on the payment of salaries to all elected officials in the state and county until the budget deficit is eliminated.

Yesterday, February 20, 2008, I witnessed, on TV, the greatest putting performance I have ever seen. Tiger Woods was two strokes down with five holes to play in a match against J. P. Holmes in the World Golf Championships Match Play tournament. Two weeks earlier Holmes had defeated Phil Mickelson in a one hole playoff to win the FBR tournament by sinking a ten foot birdie putt after Mickelson missed a 25 footer for birdie. In the Match Play tournament Woods sank birdie putts on the 14th hole, the 15th hole and the 16th hole, then on 17 he sank a 35 foot eagle putt. No other golfer I have seen can putt like this man. The putts he made to win this match were not gimmies, they were 15ft, 18ft, 20ft and 35ft putts. In comparison Mickelson, a good player, could not make a single 25ft put in a playoff. Much is made of Tiger's strength and his short game prowess, but he wins tournaments with his putting. I wonder if this is the year he wins all four grand slam championships? The only thing standing in his way is himself.

Jack Hoxie Selected films of this star available for viewing: Lightning Bryce (1919) Back Fire (1922) Riders of the Law (1922) Desert Rider (1923) The Back Trail (1924) Border Sheriff (1926)

Return to photos page

I have been doing a little research lately on the Hoxie Family, and one of its most famous ancestors, Jack Hoxie, the 1920s silent film star. Jack appeared in literally hundreds of films from 1910 to 1933, but is best remembered for the thirty-six he made for Universal Studios between 1923 and 1927. These films were immensely popular with the public and made Jack one of the top cowboy box office attractions along with such other notables a Tom Mix, Ken Maynard and Hoot Gibson.

So far I have been able to find little information about Jack or his father Bart in the seminal book on the family, The Hoxie Family, Three Centuries in America, by Leslie R. Hoxie, published in 1950. This is not surprising since the family tree is extensive covering three-hundred years and scores of branches ranging from Massachusetts to California. There is little doubt, however, that Jack Hoxie is descended from the same common ancestor of all Hoxies (including the various spellings of the name, e.g. Hoxsey, Hoxsie) Lodowick Hoxie. Lodowick arrived, it is believed from Scotland, at the Plymouth Colony in what is now Massachusetts sometime around 1650. Leslie Hoxie traces all of his decedents through the various branches of the family from Lodowick’s nine children (seven males).

Jack Hoxie’s father Bart was a veterinarian originally from the east cost. He went west like many other Hoxies and settled in Oklahoma, where Jack was born. Jack’s father died when he was young, less than 12, and his mother remarried a man named Stone. The Stone family lived on a ranch in Idaho which Jack left, due to a dispute with his stepfather, when he was about 18 years old. He became a real cowboy working on ranches herding cattle and eventually went to Hollywood and became a stuntman. Jack’s real life reads like a movie as he apparently lived for a time with the Nez Perce Indians in Idaho and was known as Red Elk.

This cartoon is from Politico.com one of my favorites, and it sums up my feeling about the Clinton campaign. I wonder what they have in store for Obama? I like him and will vote for him on Tuesday in the Maryland Primary, but if the Clinton's concoct some way of screwing him out of the nomination McCain will be the next president.

That makes sense

According to a new poll, just out, the national approval rating for Congress is just 22%, equaling the all time record low rating. So, of course, we as a nation are about to elect a member of Congress as our next President. That makes sense. It makes one wonder, what hath God wrought?

"Mass Transit is a Pipe Dream"

I read a lot about oil dependency, traffic congestion and air pollution and I wonder what if anything can be done about these issues.

I found a new blog by Brock Yates who used to write for Car and Driver and also race cars. In his first posting he talks about traffic congestion, oil dependency and America's love of cars. I saw another blog, On Day One, which talks about what the next president should do on his first day in office. Yates thinks that mass transit is a "Pipe Dream" which reminded me of an article I saw last year "Mass transit does not reduce congestion" by Wendell Cox, author of a book titled "War on the Dream: How Anti-Sprawl Policy Threatens the Quality of Life". He claims that congestion and mass transit are completely different subjects. He also claims that "No level of transit investment, anywhere in the world, has materially reduced traffic congestion." If you look at the DC area he would appear to be correct.

Yates' claim that "...Americans continue to lead the way into a dark future of more emissions, oil use and wasted time. And here comes the third world, as India, China and other Tiger nations of the Far East start producing millions of private cars for a wildly eager population." is scary when you think of a billion plus Chinese driving gasoline powered cars. I have no solutions since I admit I am not willing to give up my car. But I really think the On Day One people have a point, American can deal directly with at least one issue, oil dependency, if our leaders have the guts.

Giant Bluefin Tuna Fishing

January is the month for Bluefin tuna fishing off the North Carolina coast. These giant fish can weigh up to 600 lbs. and measure 8 ft. and they are the mainstay of the sushi trade in the far east.
A single average Bluefin can bring as much as $2,500.00 on the wholesale market. No wonder fishermen flock to the NC coast in January. A Bluefin outing in the Atlantic in January can be quite a trip, literally.

Income Tax Time

Its income tax time and two delinquent cases are in the news. One guy in Virgina, reportedly worth about 30 million was convicted of income tax evasion and sentenced to a year and a day in prison. His lawyers asked for home detention and the maximum was about 10 years. The other case involves Wesley Snipes, movie star, who is accused to not reporting 38 million in income over a period of about 5 years.

I wonder what would happen if an ordinary person with average income and a family failed to report income? Nothing much happened to Marion Berry or Elinor Holmes Norton for failing to even file tax returns. I file my tax return every year, on time, because I fear the IRS and going to jail. I think everyone should pay their fair share, but what is fair? Is it 10%, 25%, 28%, 30%, 35%, or even more? One thing is very clear to me, the income tax laws in the US are much too complicated, more complicated that they need to be. All political candidates ever talk about is raising or lower tax rates, very few talk about making the tax laws simpler.

My first blog.

I wonder about a lot of things that go on in the world, so I decided to create a blog to start sharing some of my comments about what is happening, not that I am egotistical enough to think any one else cares, but during the winter months I have some time on my hands. My main interests are current events, sports (golf, tennis, etc.), food and wine, and my family and friends. I read a lot, well, not a lot, but enough to claim that I am semi-literate, and I know quite a bit about many very unimportant things, which I will share on this blog, again, not that anybody really cares, but maybe people who visit will have some time on their hands. I have really wanted to be a blogger for some time so now, I am one! Anyway welcome to my blog.