Goodwill - the new Saks?

Recession-era reverse snobbery it may be, but these days it’s just fine, thank you, to brag about the new/old tank top you snagged at the consignment shop for $4.95. Even if you are heading out for a winter cruise, you may as well skip the trip to Macy’s or Saks, for resort wear, since the hot look from designers such as Tory Burch has been filched right out of the consignment-store aisles, or so it seems to me.

Take a look for yourself at:

http://www.toryburch.com/lookbook_resort2010_runway.aspx

Wonder is our need today, not information

So said Elia Kazan, actor director, playwright, and novelist. Kazan was famous for his visual daring, and so I would imagine he’d be blown away by the stellar performance of the moon, our most versatile celestial actor, pulling off a disciplined performance, a full, stately and slow lunar eclipse, the likes of which our world has not seen in some 350 years, and it happened in the wee hours Tuesday morning December 21, ushering in the winter solstice.

The best seating for the grand spectacle in our backyard was in the darkest corner, beneath the Australian pine tree, hidden away from glaring street lamps and the white reflections of Christmas decorations floating in the lake. We crept there with our chairs and passed the binoculars round and round and put out cell calls to interested parties and shot frame after frame of the action, much to the disgust of an anhinga whose single loud squawk surely meant, “down in front.”

As the silver moon turned the deep shade of an overripe tangerine, clearly visible to the naked eye, a deep orange blush, an expression of love from the world’s shyest guy.

The supporting cast was wonderful. The big dipper, usually so full of himself, lay prostrate, bowl overturned in a posture of complete and worshipful submission. Just offstage, Orion, the archer, served as a heavenly impresario saluting the moon’s greatest performance with a silent nod and a still wave of his arm.

Athlete Wannabe Dips Toe in Plasma Injection Pool

There I sat in a hospital bed staring at a syringe about a third full of a fizzy pink substance; in color and texture it looked like a raspberry snow cone. The syringe was a result of what I had given consent for my podiatrist to do: I was having my own enriched blood plasma platelets injected into my foot, a cutting edge medical technology.

“Isn’t this what famous athletes do?” I asked the nurse who was tucking a heated blanket around my icy feet.

“All sorts of athletes have it done for their injuries,” she replied. “Tiger Woods had it in his knee before his big tournaments this year. Pittsburgh Steelers Hines Ward and Troy Polamalu did it before the Steelers won the Super Bowl. It’s a treatment that speeds up the healing process.”

Blood plasma taken from my arm was spun in a centrifuge right there in the Gladiolus Surgery Center in Fort Myers, FL. The enhanced blood platelets were separated out and were to be re-injected into the wound site, in my case the incision where an arthritic bunion at the base of my toe was to about to be removed. The big toe would be realigned by means of a titanium screw. The payoff for me was the stabbing pains to my foot would stop.

The plasma injection marshals the body’s natural defenses in muscles and tendons where there’s not much of a natural blood supply to begin with. The platelets, which look like tiny sponges under a microscope, catalyze tissue growth. Though more research needs to be done on this procedure, the fact that my insurance covered the procedure was an indication to me that I might hope for positive results, even though there’s been an aura of scandal attached to this procedure in the world of professional sports.

The New York Times, Scientific American, and the scandal watch website, Steroid Nation have all reported on rich plasma injections (PCP).If an athlete has PCP done in to repair an injury, as Woods did before playing The Masters Tournament at Augusta Georgia, then the procedure is legit. If an athlete has it simply to boost performance, as various Olympic runners and Tour de France cyclists have been accused of doing, then it isn’t.

Where I was concerned, I figured that a side benefit of having a rich platelet procedure was bragging rights. I hoped it might enhance the status of a laggard writer among the star athletes of my extended family. A pencil pusher who does a few yoga stretches and leisurely walks with the Intrepeds, our ladies’ hiking group in Deer Harbor can’t be taken seriously in my end of the gene pool.

Brother Dennis Kincaid climbs the major peaks in North America to keep in shape. A summer or two ago he visited me on Orcas Island after summiting the 22,841-ft Aconcagua, ‘Sentinal of Stone’, in the Andes range of Argentina,highest peak in the Americas. I just had to keep up when Dennis did a Sunday stroll up the 1519-ft Turtleback Mountain on Orcas. Next day I collapsed while Brother Dearest put in eighteen miles or so on his mountain bike.

On the Williams’ side of the family tree, ‘Jamaica Bill’ Williams of LTU Pub in Negril is a disciplined runner who was training for a 13-mile marathon when I saw him a few weeks ago. His younger sister Christine Shaw in Boston has been a competitive gymnast her whole life. Chris is now involved in rigorous training so that she can be called upon to judge in the Olympic level competitions.

The height of my own athletic endeavors was a climb of Mt. Adams in south central Washington State, waaay more years ago than I care to admit. A Mt. Adams climb is a useful brag, however. The 12,281-foot Adams is closely aligned with its more lethal Cascades Range volcanoes, Hood and Rainier, which have a nasty habit of offing experienced climbers on a regular basis.

Mt.Adams has a gentle slope, a walkers’ hike, a very long, exhausting hike, and I was an under-trained last-minute substitute among several hundred serious hikers who made a mass climb of it, in the way the Japanese gather en mass to walk up Mt. Fuji. We awakened at midnight, summited at dawn, the miners’ helmets on our heads snaking up the mountain, a magnificent sight this was.

I’ll admit right now that I never would have summited at all but for the coaching of Everest class moutaineer and expedition photographer Steve Marts, hired by my editor to see that I got off Adams alive and lived to write about it for Cascades Magazine in Seattle. Marts refused photo credits for the assignment lest his serious climber pals laugh him out of the club. My editor, as I now recall, was the guy who bailed on the hike at the last minute; he didn’t dare leave me to fend for myself on Adams.

As for the plasma injection? I slept right through it. Having this procedure, while not exactly a piece of cake, is more of a strawberry snow cone number. However, my podiatrist insisted that his traditional treatment rules still apply. Stay off the foot for 72hours, apply ice, take pain meds if necessary, remain bandaged for four to six weeks, and hobble around in a rigid boot for at least three weeks.

One Bank Robber Jailed

Just why our Bank Robber was in jail by nightfall, I can't say for sure but the reverse 911 call to everyone with a land line in the area may have inspired the tip police got as to where he was hiding out.

Meanwhile the hard core News-Press followers were bitching about why the 911 call description was not more specific. "Facial hair" didn't cut it with them. I don't know what they wanted: moustache, Van Dyke?

However, since I'm new to the alerts, I have to say that just receiving a call was amazing in itself.

Here's a creative touch in policing

At 5:30 p.m. Wednesday the 911 dispatch for the Lee Co. FL sheriff's department notifies us in a recorded telephone call that a B of A bank has just been robbed. Be on the lookout for a white male, glasses, facial hair, striped sweater, 30ish, ball cap, etc. Though it was unlikely any but an idiotic robber would turn down our street, which is a dead end several miles away, I rushed out and notified what neighbors I could find.

This a.m. I thumbed through the "paper" paper (yes, I still love newsprint) but the story isn't in today's version, I did find it on the News-Press website and I'm high on the sheriff's department for such an innovative move.

Uncle Sam Wants You, Mr. & Mrs. Rich

In a pragmatic move that has offended many in his own party, President Obama has agreed to hold his nose and approve a measure that would ensure that the Bush tax cuts are to be extended for everyone for another two years, even to the group earning a quarter million a year and up. One would think these people could afford to pay a few taxes, since it is a fact that 70 percent of the wealth of this nation is concentrated in the hands of a mere ten percent of the population, and those making $250,000 and up are closely aligned with the richest three percent of the population who collectively control about forty percent of total wealth.

With the exception of Switzerland, no other industrialized nation on earth has a greater concentration of wealth in the hands of so few, or so says Professor William Domhoff in his exhaustive study, Who Rules America: Wealth, Income and Power. Domhoff’s website offers an exhaustive accounting of the wealth of our nation as compared with the rest of the world.

The richest people in America do collectively pull their weight where income tax is concerned, however. The top ten percent of Americans, about 1.2 million people, pay close to sixty percent of all federal taxes, while the bottom 50 percent of Americans pay around four percent. In the last decade, the upper tiers of middle class taxpayers have edged up in tax burdens, while the burden on the poor has been lightened.

From a practical standpoint, however, if you pass along a tax cut for the individuals who have been paying a chunk, then you raise the federal deficit, and it’s amazing that the Republicans who came into this latest congress, voted in on a platform of cutting the deficit, have now succeeded in raising it.

Republicans insist, however, that taxing the ultra wealthy is wrong. Wealthy people are the engineers of job creation, they insist, even though the evidence we do have suggests otherwise. In 2004, for example, where the economy was rocking along, overall income increased by 27 percent, although 33 percent of the increase went to the top one percent of the population.

When the economy crashed, by July 2009, the median wealth of the nation dropped by an astounding 37 percent, while the top one percent of households took a much smaller hit, about 11 percent.

In the battle to keep the economy from further deteriorating , the government gets two dollars back for every dollar passed along to the jobless, who must spend every dime just to keep going. The wealthy may choose to put their tax cut in a savings account. This is the mantra of the US Congressional Budget Office, which is said to be non-partisan.

Obama went along with the Republicans this time around because the tax cuts for wealthy are tied to the extension of unemployment benefits to the hard core jobless, and other measures designed to stimulate the economy, or at least prop it up. Obama is wily enough to realize that Republicans couldn’t very well hand tax cuts to the Sag Harbor set, while leaving some fifteen million people jobless in the Great Recession without a dollar to buy a doughnut.

Let’s not forget people were thrown out of work by the fiduciary recklessness of the Wall Street traders, over-leveraged hedge funds, and the lame brains in government—including those in elected offices, not the least Mr. Oracle at the Fed--who were supposed to be minding the economic store. Cut benefits to the jobless now, it’s revolution time. Suppose a few million jobless people start a march on Washington? On TV this would definitely not look good.

This tax cut extension will last for another two years, which I believe is enough time for the wealthy to prove their mettle. Rather than handing money carte blanche to the Gucci bags, tax cuts for the wealthy should be done in the form of tax credits contingent on the creation of a new business or by putting someone to work.

Extending tax benefits in the form of credits to the rich would create a statistically valid paper trail. That way voters could make rational decisions about the trickle down theory of wealth, which has its vehement detractors.

Let the wealthy have their tax cuts, so long as they prove they are spending them. Hiring is hiring, whether it’s money spent on an additional trainer for the horse farm, a captain for the yacht that’s been put in mothballs, or a personal trainer to work off the anxiety created when one’s hedge fund collapsed. Uncle Sam Needs You, Mr. & Mrs. Rich, to get out on the front lines and put America back to work.

What's Next for the Barefoot Bandi? Jailhouse Flip-flops

From the San Juan Islands here in the Pacific Northwest to the Bahamas in the Caribbean is a stretch, but the Barefoot Bandit had made the trip big-time, sticking to form. Steal a plane, crash land it, break into houses, hide in plain sight, island hop in stolen boats...But this time the word was out, the police in the Bahamas had word from the FBI and the local islanders recalled seeing him bathing in the bay...lurking in the woods...buying a gal a drink in a bar...When a 40 foot boat went missing the authorities on an adjoining island had a watch out, nabbing Colton as he attempted to dock his stolen boat around 3 a.m.
Meanwhile, this wily and capable bandit enjoyed his erstwhile fame as his victims found themselves basking in a perverse sort of glory. For instance, the a.p.photo flashed around the world this morning is from the Whole Foods Market in Eastsound WA, here on Orcas Island. Whole Foods baked the blueberry cheesecake Colton loved so much he robbed the market not once but three times.