It's not you...I've changed:

Well, that didn't last long. I'm having trouble with blogger's comments section so it's off to Wordpress with a little shove from a friend. The new address is www.westsoundmodern.wordpress.com Bookmark it and I hope to hear from you soon!

Via Maggies Farm:

I have eight dogs that wonder around the place and two pre-teen boys so I couldn't resist this one.

"Hi-10...pick up the bell at 1st & Yesler":

Hi-10 was the number of my Yellow cab and typing the call sign these years later brings memories of hearing it crackle over the radio dispatch, snapping me out of my morning routine and back onto the downtown Seattle streets at around last call. People who have lived and worked in a city for a stretch of time come to know that part of the urban landscape's character is hidden to the visitor or casual observer. Things that the chamber of commerce or the tourist t-shirt manufacturers would rather remain obscure come into focus after twilight. It is my experience that the true character of a person can sometimes best be revealed during the dark hours between ten and four.

Twenty five years ago driving a hack was one of the last bastions of pure capitalism left in our ever more regulated nanny state. Many of the cab owners and drivers were immigrants with good educations and professions who were forced to flee their war torn or starving countries and start over with nothing. The competition for fares was pretty fierce but the chance to make nightly cash with your wits and guts being the only limiting factor was thrilling to a young man whose previous work experiences had been mostly in the world of union factory work.

Driving a taxi may seem to the uninitiated a relatively simple exercise in picking people up and dropping them somewhere else and that is true as far as it goes. To the driver who subscribed to this job description, a sixty or seventy five dollar night was to be routinely expected after gas and fifty bucks to the cab owner. To the driver however who could hustle and think, bend the rules a little in his favor, a couple hundred for a six hour shift was fairly common. Nothing to get rich on but not bad for a kid looking for some adventure and a few extra bucks to spend.

The iron rule and secret to success or failure as a cabbie is that the radio and dispatcher behind it is God. He controls and doles out the fares, or bells as they were called, and staying on his good side was paramount. The city was divided into ten or twelve zones and as you drove through them with a bell or without, you were required to radio dispatch as to which zone you were entering and request your position in the new zone. Say you were leaving zone three with a bell traveling to zone nine with the option of going through zones six or seven to get there. A call to dispatch would go "Hi-10 occupied in three, what's my drop (rank) in six, seven and nine". He might say "four in six, two in seven, one in nine". In this case I would say "drop me in nine" and I would be first in line for the next bell to call from zone nine. If while waiting however I saw someone hailing and picked him up thinking that I could take him to where he wanted to go and get back to nine before dispatch called my number, sometimes I would. Depending on how far he was going. If I succeeded fine. If I was caught being out of position however I was screwed. If I was out of position and missed the bell, dispatch had a habit of losing your cab number for a couple of hours. The not so secret secret to making good money was to try and fool the dispatcher into thinking you were in one place while you were in three others. The dispatchers job, and they were pretty savy having all been veteran drivers, was to catch you lying to them. As you can see, for a reasonably intelligent guy willing to gamble a little the possibilities for working the system to advantage were endless. Throw into this mix of low brow creative capitalist entrepreneurship a combination of freaks, thieves, weirdos, pimps, hookers, strippers, trannies, drunk frat boys and sorority sisters, parking meter robbers, and the other flotsam and jetsam of a typical downtown Saturday night and I've never had as much fun before or since at a job.

As far as the character angle of this story, you'll have to take my word that I had more than one opportunity to display a clear lack of Judeo-Christian principals and with only a few exceptions came through with flying colors....mostly. Well, there was that once. An unusually beautiful working girl offered to barter her expertise for cab fare. I reluctantly turned her down but in hindsight it was less an issue of character than of employing Groucho's old axiom of not wanting to belong to a club that would have someone like me as a member. I figured I didn't want to do someone who would do the likes of a cab driver. With maturity I realize that I may have been too harsh with the poor girl but I'm sure she probably got over it.
Character? I'm still working on it.

The Difference Between Liberalism & Leftism:

From Dan Collins at Protein Wisdom.
As Dan says, here is a guy who by all outward appearances is your typical moonbat. Except he 'gets it".

Does this horse make my ass look big?

There is a rough equivalent in the world of horse flesh to the insecure woman who constantly inquires whether a certain garment creates the perception of a large posterior. This is the phenomenon of the bigger guy who is convinced that only a horse of immense proportion can accommodate his frame. He will worry anyone who will listen that a 1,200 lb, 16 hand tall horse will immediately buckle under his 225 pounds. That only a Clydesdale or something approaching that size could possibly put one hoof in front of the other while he is in the saddle.

They almost always couch this in terms of concern for the poor frail animal but personally I think they are having a little trouble with an over active fantasy life or that they are just afraid of looking like this guy.

No way to start my morning:

The title link on this post will take you to a moving essay by Dr. Bob at "The Doctor Is In" regarding the recognition of pure evil and how most of us (though not all) when faced with it prefer to call it something...anything...other than what it most obviously is. If you have a minute go take a read and come on back.

Every so often I come across something in my travels through the intertunnel, an essay, a picture, an observation, that will stop me cold in my tracks. Something that will cause me to pause from the routines we all settle into and reflect on how evil, and there isn't really any other term for what I am talking about, can move so seemlessly in and out of our consiousness with little or no remark. A post by Richard Fernandez at Belmont Club detailing the final stages of the Sri Lankan government's decades long battle with the rebel Tamil Tiger's contained these couple of sentences.

"As teenager, a guy who lived through the Second World War pointed out to me the Bayview Hotel on the corner of TM Kalaw Streets and what was then Dewey Boulevard. It is nearly at catty corners from the present United States Embassy. He was a boy in 1945 and after the Battle of Manila was largely over, he went wandering, as thousands of displaced persons did, among the ruined buildings. One of them was the Bayview. In its scorched and blackened rooms he found the walls smeared with the eyeball jelly of untold numbers of women, who the Imperial troops had, in their last desperate sex and alcohol-fueled orgy, taken to the Bayview to rape and mutilate".

The horror contained in this long ago memory is beyond comprehending. As I sit here at my desk and attempt to compose a followup to that thought I realize that there is really nothing more to be said. How do such things happen seemingly without end throughout human history? To linger too long on such a subject, to allow a picture to be formed in the minds eye for most of us would be too much to bear. Got to get breakfast in the kids and get them on the bus. Run some errands, get some work done. No time to dwell on the unfortunate realities of someone else, somewhere else.

And so it goes.

I feel.........Happy!

FDA Approves Depressant Drug For The Annoyingly Cheerful