Good morning Boys and Girls.

Anyone hear about the Michigan woman accused of trying to hire a hit-man to kill her internet lover from California on Craig's List?

Knew she was from our little hoity-toity town here, but I just looked up her name on whitepages.com - where each listing automatically generates a map and driving directions - and saw she lives about three miles from here.

I think I know her next door neighbor. I think I've done some work for the guy.

Now part of me, the part that guiltily looks at the headlines on the tabloids at the checkout in the supermarket - as I curse myself for doing so - wants to call the guy to find out if he thinks she's always been nuts, or if this infatuation drove her over the edge.

God forgive me.

Never mind.

I won't do it.

Be good to everyone.

Good morning Boys and Girls.

Sitting here trapped by the weather and thinking hard about when to head South; after next weekend or the weekend after that? Either way, I'll travel via sound waves, coursing through the ether; a zephyr on mild steroids; floating above the fray and throbbing like a weak but unexpected A.M. signal that pops onto your radio after cresting a hill in the boondocks of Southern Kentucky. The signal is half static, but you make out the Renfro Valley Gatherin' gals singing some old hill tune in a just-off harmony, briefly reminding you - with some strange fondness - of long ago Sunday mornings in your Dad's car when you'd hear the show on "The Great Voice of the Great Lakes, Clear Channel WJR 760," on the way to church. You hated it then, and constantly begged him to change the station, up just half a click to Windsor's powerhouse Rock and Roll station, 800 CKLW, but now?...

Sorry... Got a little James Elroy there for a minute. (Anyone ever read "The Cold Six Thousand"? Really fun.)

My head is spinning with possibilities - and reservations. Trying to work out whether it would be a good thing or a bad thing... I just don't know, but I know I'll do it. I have to.

Need warmth. Need sunshine. CRAVE sunshine. I had a Scotch last night and thought about having another - a rare thing for me but something I thought I ought do lest I perish from annoyance with the picture I see as I look out the window; the ever growing blanket of white that covers every surface even remotely close to horizontal.

Just two weeks ago, the day before I left for Iowa, we'd just had a three-day thaw. Except for some of the plowed piles, every last bit of snow here had melted away. Even the hills out back were brown with decaying leaves - believe it or not, a beautiful sight to me at the time. Tonight, on the deck outside my dining room, the plastic table I use as my measure-at-a-glance has at least twenty inches of snow on it, a perfect four foot wide disk with an edge that tapers away ever so slightly.

Going to Detroit this next weekend. The weekend after that, right around the tenth, I think I'll head South. Optimally, if it can be arranged, I'll go via the western suburbs of Chicago and not head any further till Monday.

Sun, do your thing.

Be good to everyone.

Good morning Boys and Girls.

Okay... So here's the idea. It's yours. Do with it what you will.

About fifteen years ago, I actually thought this was a good one, and for a month or so, I considered going into business with a extremely enthusiastic young guy, about twenty-four, with whom I often bandied things about. It was during a caffeine induced brainstorming session at a local coffee shop, when, upon returning to the table after an especially annoying trip to the john, I kiddingly made the suggestion.

The problem was, the kid took me seriously. After a moment's silence to contemplate, his eyes widened and he began extrapolating like crazy, to the point where, after a half hour or so, I too started believing my flippant remark might indeed be the genesis for something not so nuts after all.

We'd been trying to come up with a alternative product line for use as fund-raisers for schools, churches, youth-groups and the like. My kids were in elementary school then and were forever bringing home catalogs for various cookies, popcorns, fudges, greeting cards, and the like - always stuff you didn't really need or want, and the stuff was always overpriced for what it was, though,of course, you weren't supposed to notice, because they were, after all, raising funds.  

I swear, sometimes it seemed new catalogs and order forms came home every week or two and at the time I was getting a little irritated by it. You'd end up buying stuff from your kids, the neighbors' kids, your nieces and nephews, and so on, ad infinitum. It could really add up.

What a great scam, I thought. The way I saw the price structure and the profit split, it seemed to me that most of these outfits only gave the organizations about a third of the gross profit, meanwhile having recruited hundreds or thousands of little salespeople coerced by their teachers or activity leaders to get their butts out there and SELL! "You could win a BIKE!"

And since it's kids doing the selling, they were automatically armed with the greatest, most effective closing tool in the history of sales.

Guilt!

What if, we thought, we sold something people actually needed, something they had to buy anyway on a continual basis, and what if we sold it at a reasonable price and set it up so that it provided a convenience that actually made peoples' lives easier?

Sure, you'd still have the kids out there making the initial sale, but if we set it up right, you'd have a customer long term, meaning continual funds for the organization and continual profits for our company. If we could come up with something, it could be win-win...

So, that had been our criteria...

Just before I'd left to use the rest-room, we'd been trying to figure out what sort of product every single family in America uses; one you simply HAVE to have, anyway. It would have to be something with a long shelf life. -Maybe something that could be sold in a non-traditional manner that might make peoples' lives just a little easier. Surely there was something...

Exactly.

You guessed it.

The idea was to sell high quality toilet paper in  large rolls, similar to those you see now in commercial establishments.

Our idea, however, was to have T.P. made by a private-label manufacturer who'd offer a few different styles, textures and colors that would fit into attractive dispensers available in various styles. Some, for instance, might have been nicely finished wood complete with a magazine rack or maybe even a reading light - you name it, we quasi designed it.

The only requirement for the dispensers, we decided, was that they had to look as though they were indeed made for the home, while still holding single rolls large enough that they'd only require changing every month or two instead of, well, you know how often a roll needs changing in most family bathrooms.

We decided to call the company "The Cooperative Efforts Club," and we went so far as to design a logo - a bee, though why that was I don't remember. We worked up an introductory pitch and called some schools and churches to see if - once they stopped laughing - they'd consider looking at our information if we decided to go forward. Everyone we talked to, once we'd really explained the idea, said yes, of course they would. It made sense. I talked to a few manufacturers and had appointments to see a couple of them...

"No more fights about who didn't change the roll when it was empty - or far fewer of them anyway..."

It was feasible. As crazy as it seemed, I was getting excited. Except...

At home, after listening to me go on about it for a week or two, my ex-wife decided it was about the dumbest idea she'd ever heard of and put the kibosh on it once and for all. She did NOT want to be associated  in any way, shape or form with my becoming a huckster for toilet paper.

Alas. She thought it was a crappy idea.

So, anyway, if you like the idea? It's yours. If done in the right way, I'm still convinced it would work.

Hey - no more stupid than the Chia-Pet.

Be good to everyone.

Good morning Boys and Girls.

Every now and again, you see something so weird; so completely out of the realm of normalcy; that it makes you question whether the world has shifted on its axis overnight while you were snoozing away, blissfully assuming that the coming morning would bring nothing more startling than a fresh pot of coffee; nothing more exciting than a new box of tissue.

So then, what are you to do, if this morning, during your morning wake-up stretch - just after you've clicked on your TV, put on your glasses and given your eyes the few seconds it takes to gain their focus - the very first blurb you make out on the little news crawl at the bottom of the screen, is this one?

"India to outsource their tech support to Columbus, Ohio."

I'll tell you what you do. You get back into bed and go back to sleep. Might as well. You must still be dreaming anyway.

Be good to everyone.

Hey all, check this out. This is from the front page of yahoo news today...

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia - Two years ago, a knock on Fatima and Mansour al-Timani's door shattered the life they had built together.

It was the police, delivering news that a judge had annulled their marriage in absentia after some of Fatima's relatives sought the divorce on grounds she had married beneath her.

That was just the beginning of an ordeal for a couple who — under Saudi Arabia's strict segregation rules — can no longer live together. They sued to reverse the ruling, publicized their story and sought help from a Saudi human rights group.

But the two remain apart and Fatima said she is considering suicide if her recent appeal to King Abdullah does not reunite her with her husband.

"Only the king can resolve my case," Fatima told The Associated Press by telephone in a rare interview. "I want to return to my husband, but if that is not possible, I need to know so I can put an end to my life."

Fatima's case underscores shortcomings in the kingdom's Islamic legal system in which rules of evidence are shaky, lawyers are not always present and sentences often depend on the whim of judges.

The most frequent victims are women, who already suffer severe restrictions on daily life in Saudi Arabia: They cannot drive, appear before a judge without a male representative, or travel abroad without a male guardian's permission.

Recently, the king did intervene and pardon another high-profile defendant — a rape victim who was sentenced to lashes and jail time for being in a car with a man who was not her relative.

The two cases have brought Saudi human rights once again into the international spotlight, revealing not only the weakness of the kingdom's justice system, but the scant rights of Saudi women.

"When I heard that the (rape victim) was pardoned, I couldn't believe it. My case is so much simpler than hers, since my divorce is invalid," Fatima said.

Fatima said her husband, a hospital administrator, followed Saudi tradition in asking her father for permission to marry her in 2003.

"My brother reported good things about him, so my dad accepted his proposal," said Fatima, a computer specialist who was 29 when she married.

She said her father knew that Mansour came from a less prominent tribe than hers, but that he did not mind because he "cared about the man himself."

A few months after the wedding, several of Fatima's relatives, including a half brother, persuaded her father to give them power of attorney to file a lawsuit demanding an annulment, she said.

Then her father died, and Fatima said she had hoped the case would be dropped.

But on Feb. 25, 2006, police knocked on the couple's door to serve Mansour with divorce papers — which said his marriage had been annulled nine months earlier.

"We were shattered. How did this happen? Why?" Fatima asked.

Under Saudi law, a woman needs the permission of her family to marry.

Saudi lawyer Abdul-Rahman al-Lahem, who used to represent the couple, said local interpretations of Islamic law hold that relatives of a married couple have the right to seek an annulment if they feel the marriage lowers the extended family's status.

He said authorities are reluctant to overrule such annulment orders, believing they are private matters within extended families.

Fatima took the couple's 2-year-old daughter and 4-month-old son to live with her mother, who had persuaded her to let Mansour deal with the legal issues on his own.

But after three months without her husband, Fatima and the children sneaked out of her mother's house and flew with Mansour to the western seaside city of Jiddah, where they sought to live in anonymity.

Saudi police soon discovered them and imprisoned the family for living together illegally.

"The police told me I either return to my (mother's) family or go to jail," Fatima said. "I chose jail."

"My children and I were thrown in a cell with women sentenced for pushing drugs, practicing witchcraft and behaving immorally," Fatima said. Authorities allowed her to send her daughter back to live with her father, but the infant stayed with Fatima in jail.

"He learned to speak in jail, he learned to walk in jail and his teeth came out in jail," she said.

Meanwhile, Mansour went to court to appeal the divorce ruling, but a Riyadh appeals court upheld the decision in 2007.

Last September, the head of a prominent Saudi human rights group reportedly asked the kingdom's highest court to review the case.

Bandar al-Hajjar, head of the National Society of Human Rights, submitted two Islamic studies concluding that the divorce was invalid, according to the Arab News, a Saudi English-language daily.

The studies, conducted by Islamic researcher Adnan Al-Zahrani and Bassam Al-Bassam, a counselor at the Court of Cassation in Mecca, said that if a woman's legal guardian represented her at the original wedding, then other relatives have no right to object to the marriage based on compatibility.

Both studies concluded that Fatima married Mansour with her father's permission, and that only the wife can decide whether she wants her marriage annulled, the paper reported.

Despite their legal fight, Fatima and Mansour remain apart.

After nine months in jail, Fatima moved to an orphanage where she and her son share an apartment with several other women.

Fatima said she is holding out hope the king might pardon her, and recognize her as "married to Mansour, before God."

"I love him more than ever. He's the only one who has stood by me," she said.

"Remember kids, you'll never understand everything. It's okay. Love each other for eight or nine decades. Once you get that right, I'll give you more instructions individually. Till then, try not to hurt each other, and for goodness sake, enjoy the gifts I've given you. If you need help, look to each other. I'm kind of busy dealing with things so far beyond your comprehension, it would be insulting to you for me to try to explain them. Fair enough? Oh and please quit splitting hairs. It's annoying and it gets in the way.

-sincerely, God."

Good morning Boys and Girls,

Over the last few months I've been privy to an ongoing campaign of passive aggressive behavior; the target being someone I care about a lot; that's like nothing I've ever seen before. The smoothness of the attack; the non-threatening language in all written correspondences - while behavior that can't be recorded is full of bile and hatred - without ever crossing the line so blatantly that, for instance, the police need to be called; makes me realize and understand just how calculating some folks can be.

I have a horse in the race (all cliches' are for bawdy who loves it when I use 'em) so you might think I'm prejudiced with regard to which side of the dispute ought "win," but you'd be wrong.

If one person, a crazy, says, I want to kill all the red haired people, and the other says, "Um, I don't want anyone killed." The compromise can't be, "Okay, you can kill HALF the red haired people and we'll call it a draw.

Here's a weird example from earlier this week, that, I suppose, isn't close to being relevant to the actual situation I'm talking about, but evoked similar feelings, I'd guess, though to a far lessor degree, since it wasn't "aimed" at me:

Here in Grand Rapids, racial prejudice simmers just below the surface. The amount of it is staggering to me; sickening really. I can't tell you how many times I'll hear people - after checking to the left and right - talk of their absolute hatred of anyone of color, usually with something akin to "I know they're not all like that, but most of them are," as the final line in a diatribe. Then it's almost like they want to do a secret handshake with you to make sure you're on board with their thinking; to show "solidarity" with the "cause."

It's happened so frequently over the past couple of years that I've come to expect it, sad as that is. Still sometimes it'll come from a source that I knew couldn't feel that way. When it does, it absolutely freaks me out.

So it was earlier this week when I found myself listening to someone I really like go into one of these bile-filled rants. I was shocked. Evidently this person assumed that every thinking person shares her views, and so had no compunction about telling me about her long ago experience with one person that somehow fixed her opinion of a third of the world's population for life.

I knew better than to argue, but it broke my heart.

I mean, come on, this is 2008.

So it must be awful to realize that someone you cared about for many many years holds you in such low esteem as to attempt to undermine your ability to carry on reasonably, simply bcause the relationship has broken down. How disheartening to realize that what they really feel is more like this: "It's not enough I should get what I want. No. I need for you to have nothing - to be smashed - for me to feel real satisfaction."

Sane people don't deliberately hurt people. That's the mark of a crazy. After all, there's reasonableness and there's craziness. You can't split the difference and call it "fair," or, "sane."


Be good to everyone.