What I did on my Crawford Vacation

If we were to ask the President to tackle the ubiquitous writing exercise assigned in perpetuity to returning students (but now labeled with 16 different �strands� of learning modes required by the No Child Left behind act), his paper might look like this�

What I did this summer and my plans for the Fall�

   

1-I flew a 747 across the country to a bike trail in Idaho to ride my non-polluting $3,000 trek through federal Park lands. Hey, did you see that my buddy Paul Hoffman, Cheney�s old assistant, just finished writing new Interior dept rules that let us do anything we want to the parks as long as it stays �reclaimable land�. I just love to jump over anthills with knobby tires to proclaim my importance over the little buggers.

 

2-I rattled my saber at Korea and Iran building Nukes, and offered to play golf with Putin and commiserate about the 13,000 armed missiles still ready to fly- and hope that their guidance systems have so degraded that they land in Hillary's New York instead of Washington DC.

 

3-I worked to make sure the congress helps the public 'feel the pain' by slashing Vet benefits, child care funding, and clean air clean-up funds. That shows we are tough on the budget.

 

4-I'm going to keep pushing for privatization of social security, because other than a $15 Billion S&L bailout under my Daddy's watch, we have done so little to help my banking buddies that helped fund my ball team.

 

5-I've proven we can spend 5 years working on a 1,700 page energy bill - good thing Turd Blossom had us change the name from �The Energy Company Welfare Act�. This will let them kill Alaskan Moose, destroy the Gulf of Mexico, give away more royalties than in the past 100 years, and really help my friends who played golf with Kenny Boy and me- I sure don't want them to suffer his fate.

 

6-I hate everything about the French, except their love for vacations in August. So I've decided to selectively adopt some of the best their culture has to offer. Viva La Holiday!

 

7-My good friend Pat Robertson doesn't speak for me (wink wink) when he suggests assassinating the President of Venezuela so we can keep getting at least some of their oil at lower prices to boost Exxon's 55% profit increase this quarter. Besides, being in Latin America, where they speak Latin, is easier for our Harvard and Yale diplomats to handle than those funky Arab languages.

 

8-I'm gonna stick with what works. Sending boys to die so we can buy armor from Republican donors, and watching an Islamic parliament splinter over democracy but claiming it has done the opposite.  I�ll make sure we continue to give billions more to Halliburton to keep Dickey's portfolio floating. I will make sure that the Senior Pentagon purchasing official who griped about it is demoted, maybe that�ll put a stop to the leaks.

 

9-I will now, at every opportunity, berate Cindy Sheehan. Just cause a cleric we supported led the attack on her son, and just cause I called her 'Mom' and joked about searching under the table for WMD's the week before we met, and just cause 2,000 other mothers, wives, and siblings are mourning their kids death; doesn't give them the right to meet me, talk with me, or petition for their grievances- regardless of what the constitution I have sworn to uphold says about that. Speaking of the troops, we�ve now started to engrave the tombstones in Arlington with the Military slogan of the current war; �Operation Iraqi Freedom�, maybe those chiseled marble platitudes will shore up my poll ratings.

 

10-Finally, I really need to 'keep loose' and relax in the summer heat, riding a bike with Lance Armstrong. Yeah, I know that stem cell research is one of the most likely cures for his cancer, but we'll ignore that and just trade yellow wrist bands. After all, Crawford is almost as hot as Iraq, so it's my way of showing solidarity with our troops as we prepare to kick off a $350 million recruiting campaign that will do everything except mention �Iraq�. I�ll leave that to Clint Black performing his country ditty �I Raq and I Roll� at the upcoming 9/11 fourth anniversary extravaganza.

 

I know I should be more contrite about causing so many deaths, but those military funerals at the base are just downers. Picture this; no coffin, just the inverted rifle, boots and helmet of the fallen. They call the roll, up to the name of the missing soldier. They call his name �Casey Sheehan� Then a 2^nd time �Casey Sheehan�, then a third, �Casey Sheehan�. Then the bugle plays taps. It�s an emotional experience, but not for me, I need to �live a balanced life�, and funerals for our boys just aren�t part of it.  

I�d love to grade his paper.

 

Leib Lurie is a concerned American and Troy resident who welcomes comments at his blog www.llurie.blogspot.com

The 4 R's reading, 'riting, 'rithmetic and Reality

TITLE: Back to school means back pocket expenses

In New York City school starts the first Monday after Labor Day, but runs till June 30^th. Here in Troy school started this week and our kids will schlep book bags and papers till Memorial Day through the halls of school and the streets of Troy. Dayton kids started school on August 8^th in a new experiment of almost-year-round-schooling to minimize the summer brain drain.

The stores have had lists of school supplies ready for months. The average student will be asked to find 24 different things, like a scavenger hunt only purported to be simpler. On a scavenger hunt the goods can be as varied as the imagination, but a school supply list is generally much more rigid. Our kids must bring a specific type of marker, pencil, ruler, scissors, and even specifying low-scent markers. No snorting on the sickly sweet smell for the young minds of this generation.

 The average student will be asked to spend over $400 on supplies each year, add this to book fees, activity fees, picture fees, extra-curricular fees and more; and our �free� public education can cost a family close to $1,000 per child; but that�s just for primary grades. High schools are more, and don�t even get me started on college add-on spending �opportunities�.

Teachers are no better off. The average one will put $450 out of pocket for materials, books, supplies and such that aren�t in the school budget but required for their kids to learn. According to Staples and Amazon, the two most widely used classroom supply providers for the Lurie�s, we should have 2.4 teachers in our household. What other job asks the worker to bring their own supplies and materials; and to help subsidize the needs of their customers (students) on behalf of their boss (school board) and stockholders (taxpayers).

The state makes every employee diligently report every gift over $75.00 � and gee, the state�s top official with a personal office staff of 6 couldn�t tally it up. Yet there isn�t a box on the state tax form for teachers to list �gifts� of paper, pencils and books to their students so they have the wherewithal to learn. Perhaps that�s a good thing, a perverted distortion of the paperwork elimination act to simplify the lives of our teachers who, after all, have 10 weeks of summer to play golf with or without lobbyists in their foursome.

What a great career. Kids usually look up to teachers yet many adults feel that teachers have it easy and don�t deserve raises, or any part of a new tax levy. There are those who write on these pages that renewal levies are barely all we can afford; that we should continue to put the screws to our children and their teachers. Some writers complain that the increase provided by Social Security, based on the consumer price index, has nothing to do with the corresponding cost increases inflicted on our schools and teachers.

Those people are wrong. The still unconstitutional funding formula for education in the state works in tandem with the most perverse tax policy in America. The draconian rules reduce the tax collected from every home, every year as a levy ages, and even more if renewed. Whereas a replacement levy would keep the tax payment at the same rate as originally voted. Amazing. Income taxes are pegged to income, sales taxes rise with the cost of goods, but property taxes decline every year as the price of homes in the area and building of new homes go up.

But I digress. This is the �Return of Yellow Busses Week�, when 5,000 Troy students will trounce back to class in preparation for a future of change.

Will they learn the requisite skills to beat the engineers being churned out in India and China (43 engineering grads each year to every American one)? Will they have the necessary skills to weld metal so they can up-armor their own Hum-Vees in Iraq? Have we prepared them to work for minimum wage and no benefits ringing up imported goods at retail?

School as an industry amazes me. It�s a $400 billion industry, 10% of that comes from Washington, but they send along 90% of the rules and demands for measurement and results. Yet the results continue to be mediocre, and we fall further behind other countries. The rich are breaking even in our educational morass. The poor and minorities are falling further and faster than ever. Maybe because they can�t afford the $1,000 �opportunity� fees. Could be they are trapped in the toxic dump of uneducated or overworked single parents. Tests show the TV 10 second sound bite is the nemesis of deep understanding and development of long term memory. Teachers report that many kids believe they can grow up to be an NBA star, which is trumped by the reality that every kid WILL grow up and need to be a star to THEIR children.

Reading, Riting, Rithmetic and Reality; the new 4 R�s our kids need to come back to this week.

Leib Lurie is a Troy Civic Theatre Board Member, Optimist Club member and CEO of phone message service OneCallNow.com. You can post blog comments at llurie.blogspot.com

Failure is not an option

Last week, we had the marvelous opportunity to get a little closer to Mars.

Nasa launched a new Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter satellite into orbit. This Bus size box will reach the Red planet next year and use enhanced detection tools to search for water and other forms of life below the surface by imaging through surface.

A few days before, the latest Space Shuttle Mission glided down safely in California, a far different outcome than the last mission that splattered wreckage over hundreds of miles. Some people say that we should abandon space exploration, that if we can’t make it safe, we have no business exploring with humans.

Others express concerns over the huge budget and costs involved. That unmanned missions can accomplish the same things, that safety is paramount, and real world problems at home are more important.

Yet space exploration, and manned space exploration generates a level of excitement, and winning over odds that lift our spirits, and create so many spin-off technologies we are just now beginning to appreciate them.

Some people urge NASA to give up the Shuttle, abandon the quest for the International Space Station, and lend no credence to an audacious goal to land men on Mars fifty years after Ohio’s Armstrong took One Giant Leap for Mankind.

There’s a certain incongruity of a world watching a nail biting space walk to pluck a piece of wayward insulation from between two of the 40,000 tiles on the Shuttle while 220 miles below the Gaza strip riots were erupting, Iraq plunging deeper in to a morass; and motorists having dreams of what they would do with a large tank of 526,000 gallons of gas without worrying about the current pump price. Yet when one watches the astronauts at work in an Imax 6 story theatre, as the earth rolls past is such an awesome, heart lifting sight. The new film, in 3D about the International Space Station is even more incredible. (Maybe the Army should try a Disneyesque 4D sales pitch flick)

Although the Mars rocket scrubbed the day we were there moments before launch (due to a software problem, something as a software CEO I can mock, but seriously relate to). We took the day to wander around Cape Canaveral; looking at Saturn rockets. The Saturn V is longer than a football field, and gets 10 inches to the gallon of fuel when leaving the pad. It produces the biggest noise ever created by man within seconds of ignition.

The original Apollo command room was fully preserved and mostly operational. With hundreds of desks and monitors under large screens that showed the best and most emotional of the Apollo moon program. We saw the nail biting launch to the moon two years after a deadly fire on Apollo 1 killed the first three Americans to have their name on the Astronauts’ memorial. The program has suffered other set-backs and problems. Overcoming issues and challenges of a magnitude never before attempted. In fact, over 400,000 Americans worked on the Apollo moon program, twenty times Nasa’s current staffing level.

Then, on Apollo 13, when a system failure looked like it would leave the three men aboard gasping for air hundreds of thousands of miles from home, the project team declared “Failure Is Not An Option” as they raced the asphyxiation clock to help the crew use duct tape and food foil to survive.

Barely an hour away, Disney Imagineers have opened their own version of Space, with a hypersonic mission to Mars- coupling a high tech hydraulic centrifugal force simulator with a mocked up script and simulated space hazards to complete the 26 million mile mission to Mars in less time than it took Orson Welle’s Martians to reach Earth before Ramón Raquello finished playing "La Cumparsita." in 1938.

The realism and feeling of weightlessness was complete. Someday I hope my Grandkids will have the choice to hold my hand during the simulation or be able to wave their hands to me from a space ship ready to launch for real.

The pictures from space have shown us how small and fragile our plane really is, and how broad and majestic the rest of the Universe can be.

We need to continue the exploration, and live the dream because exploring frontiers is Human destiny, and paraphrasing America’s first Interstellar flight commander, “Space is the final frontier.”

Summer Foods Sure Have Changed

Leib Lurie�s Column for TDN: To run WEDNESDAY, August 10th

 

TITLE: Summer Foods have sure changed

A recent jaunt through Kroger left me wondering what the world is coming to.

Rather than zip by the many aisles of cornucopia, I slowed down to a crawl and really stopped to look at the things I do not normally buy.

Of the 65,000  items in the store, our pantry has less than 800, so there are quite a few that don�t grace our tables. I am beginning to understand why.

The new Food Pyramid is really a parallelogram, with supposedly different choices and options based on your age, sex, and life style. I went to the web site www.usda.org to see what we should be eating. I then matched it to the myriad of choices arrayed through 28 aisles on West Market Street.  It was not a pretty comparison.

Grocers have expanded the fruit and vegetable section with lots of organic and fresh choices; making it easier to stock up for the five-a-day recommendation of fruit servings. Yet the choices are increasingly pre-packaged, pre-cut and pre-bundled, making it convenient, but at three times the cost of the good old fashioned stuff Tony the fruit man used to sell from the wagon in my native New York City.

The salad dressings to go with the greens have multiplied faster than rabbits, and faster even than the tiny little pre-wrapped tasteless carrots even the bunnies would probably reject. Dressings come in hundreds of shapes and sizes- yet none really match any category on the food pyramid; except the �fats� sliver. The Dept of Agriculture intoning we should drizzle a tiny bit of dressing on one salad a day and leave the others naked to meet the balanced guidelines set forth on their web site for my self-selected low-to-moderate exercise lifestyle.

Pre-packaged foods have come a long way since the original Swanson dinner debuted fifty years ago. There are dozens of pre-made, pre-packaged, pre-cooked, pre-sliced, pre-sauced, foods of all types just waiting to mate with the microwave for a few moments and then get gobbled up in front of the Tube. Sixty Six percent of American�s regularly watch TV while eating dinner. Maybe the rise in obesity explains why some cattle farmers have installed TV�s for their beef to watch while munching in their stalls- it dampens the natural instinct to eat slowly and stop when full; making it easier to fatten up the herd, or our kids.

The pre-packaged assortment boggled my mind. Kroger�s latest remodel added lots of space for these ready-to-go meals in a box that are, ounce for ounce, more expensive than most restaurant meals. They seem rather deceptively packaged, as the low cost grease, �er gravy, vegetables with butter sauce, and trans-fat loaded fruit crumbles are all bundled into the box that sells for more per pound than a thick rib-eye steak.

McDonald�s took the rap last year for �Super Size Me�, a horror flick where a sado-masochistic movie star wanna-be ate nothing but what could be grabbed over the stainless counter under the Golden Arches for 30 days. He almost died. Our grocers and food manufacturers shouldn�t have gotten off the hook. Grab some of the healthy muffins in the grocers bakery- and seek to look up their nutritional value. Match it with the food pyramid if you can and if you dare. Realize that after breakfast, you have 80% of your fat, 50% of sugar, and 4 servings of bread in one handy dandy overgrown brown round raisin muffin.

Teenagers tend to swig Mountain dew by the double liter. Try this at home� take a sugar bowl, scoop 9 Tablespoons of sugar into a 12 oz glass, see how much water you need to add to make it drinkable. That�s the sugar in every can of coke or Mt Dew can. But it must be pretty good- it costs more than gasoline. (Yet so does bottled water and generally milk and orange juice).

It�s frustrating that the food industry has such a lock on the Dept of Agriculture that despite triple digit increases in youth and adult obesity, the new food pyramid offers little real guidance, and never says never. The lobbyists for the manufacturers showed their true ingredients when the food pyramid was being reviewed. Make it pretty, colorful, different, and fun; but make sure that it doesn�t try to really examine or change eating habits; and make absolutely sure it doesn�t recommend avoiding anything. Use nonsense words like sparingly, occasionally or moderation. This obfuscation will make sure that the education of Americans on what to eat gets downplayed as we nuke and grab and glom in front of the tube likes Cows in the feed lots heading for slaughter.

 

 

Leib Lurie is a Troy Civic Theatre Board Member, Optimist Club member and CEO of phone message service OneCallNow.com. You can reach him at Leib@Lurie.net

 

Lurie column Aug 3- Dreamcoat- good story, bad dreams

Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat opens Friday night at the Barn in the Park. This Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice collaboration brings the biblical based story to life with marvelous lyrics and an upbeat tempo.

In a local collaboration, the Troy Civic Theatre and the First United Church of Christ will present the benefit performance whose proceeds will go to Partners in Hope a program that helps families in fiscal and emergency or hunger assistance.

The show will run Fri, Sat and Sunday this weekend and next. Call 339-7700 or go to troycivictheatre.com for tickets which are a bit more expensive than most Troy productions, but all for a great cause.

The original show was just a 15 minute parable in 1968, then expanded twice by Webber to incorporate Set to an engaging cornucopia of musical styles, from country-western and calypso to
bubble-gum pop and rock 'n' roll, this Old Testament show will rock the audience.

The story, very loosely based on a shepherd�s family in Canaan tells the story of Joseph, a dream reader, who is favoured by his father with a beautiful coat of many colours which his brothers, clad in skins coveted. Joseph lorded the coat and a heap of attitude over his brothers telling them of a vision that made him look even more omnipotent than he usually felt.

His brothers in a special collaboration of their own kind, faked his death, to keep peace with Dad, and sold him into slavery to make some easy cash from some passing merchants in what is now Iraq.

Joseph had a few tricks up his sleeve and ends up somewhat regally turning the tables on his brothers when famine strikes home.

Partners in Hope would have been very much appreciated when famine struck the area; decimating crops and driving Joseph�s brothers to Egypt to seek work, and ending up as the beginning of Jewish slavery in Eqypt.

Although the actors, singers and dancers in the high energy production are regular Americans, the show is set thousands of years ago. Of course if you want to see a more modern version of an egotistical braggart who believes himself above the fray, as he takes over as the Pharoah�s Chief advisor with the intention of consolidating power and subjugating the surrounding populace, just turn to today�s newspaper.

Instead of a single person with a coat of many colours, who used his association with power to wield power over his brethren, we have the joy to have a multitude of Washington leaders seeming to wear just one color- Green. The color of money, power and greed.

We have John Bolton moving into the United Nations with a nefarious history of lording over anyone who has disagreed with his Iraqophobe views. At a time when the UN is desperately trying to raise the profile of the 3 million starving in Niger, Bolton has said �the UN is irrelevant�. Human suffering and famine? Not a problem in his book.

Then there is Carl Rove, aka �Turd Blossom� (Dubya Bush�s name for him, not mine) thumbing his noses at the law while selling out CIA operatives. Intelligence famine? Not here.

Of course we shouldn�t forget Alberto Gonzales, (who Bush calls Fredo, the older brother in the Godfather) who had the dept of justice back off in a long running tobacco suit to save the industry that kills 3,000 people a day one hundred billion dollars, so they can continue marketing here at home, and even more profitably abroad. Tobacco famine? Not in this administration.

Of course there�s the beneficiaries of the new �energy bill�. This 1,700 page compendium is a textbook example of how to benefit the big oil company�s, the largest firms in the world, that pay the least taxes. These same firms use the same shell game process featured in Enron�s and Ebbers� trial, to avoid taxes, and hide profits; but hey, let�s subsidize these firms to do even more in the face of a 21^st century famine � oil.

Joseph and his Pharaoh collaborated to subjugate thousands of people making their lives more miserable and their own more imperial and regal. It�s a great play to benefit a great cause; too bad it hits so close to home.

 

 Leib Lurie is a Troy Civic Theatre Board Member, Optimist Club member and CEO of phone message service OneCallNow.com. You can reach him at Leib@Lurie.net  

 

See past columns at www.llurie.blogspot.com