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13 January 2006 . . . . . . . . . . . Vol. 1, No 1
ISSN 1559-3746

Senator Maria Cantwell wrote about “Giving Seniors More Time to Enroll in the New Prescription Drug Program” as it seems most of our members of Congress don’t have a clue! It seems they have the idea that ignorance is the problem of most people on Medicare who don’t jump at the chance to enrich Drug and Insurance companies.

She says seniors have told her of problems understanding and enrolling—that “the program is too confusing and complicated.” Granted, it is that. So Cantwell supports legislation to extend the deadline another six months without penalty. As though that will solve anything. Extending the May 15 enrollment deadline will just give time for further complications.

Cantwell writes that 76% of seniors have never been online, yet the Internet “and a 100-page booklet” have been primarily relied upon. She states 26% of Medicare beneficiaries have cognitive impairments and three million, vision problems. Vision certainly, hearing too, and dental as well—none covered by Medicare. (Insurance companies are making a mint on those who don’t simply do without vision, hearing, and dental care. Except when taxpayer dollars provide Medicaid.) . . . . . .

Borrow the books you want to read, at the library

The Washington State Legislature has for almost 30 years introduced and rejected a civil rights bill, allowing gay people equal rights with everyone else in the state. The bill in 2005 passed by 61 to 37 votes in the House, and lost by one in the Senate. It is the Republicans who oppose it, which does not make economic sense.

Still trying to legislate what consenting adults do in the privacy of their bedrooms, the Republican Party misses the point that any two people willing to take financial responsibility for each other can save taxpayers money. . . . . . . . .

Sometimes, living through our personal days of individual history, it is hard to decide whether to laugh or cry. Currently I reside in a three story building of 36 apartments. A number of us subscribe to and trade various publications. Besides certain magazines, I subscribe to one weekly out-of-town newspaper. A friend downstairs subscribes to another, and her neighbor next door used to get the nearest daily newspaper.

He, and a few others, canceled when the rules changed and they were required to pay to the newspaper directly instead of the carrier—and it was demanded any tips be recorded by the newspaper. We independent types could afford more subscriptions but . . . . . . .

“Fashion” and “style” they call it, as each designer and manufacturer in lockstep changes offerings year by year. It is reported that long ago, Henry Ford said his customers could order any color of car they wanted—so long as it was black. Other manufacturers were more forward-looking and soon there were cars of many colors on the streets, changing year by year.

Clothing manufacturers don’t have the sense to realize the potential. Take pockets as an example. A pocket doesn’t require much fabric, and unused it lies unobtrusively flat. For those of us like myself however, who need a pocket because of allergies . . . . . . .

Borrowed library books, let you know which books to buy as gifts for friends

“Jobs Gone, never coming back?” Asked an Editor & Publisher headline, December 2005, page 33, where Mark Fitzgerald wrote, “Newspapers have lost over 2000 jobs this year. Are they ever coming back?” without much encouragement.

By August 2003, online access had steadied (for a couple of years) at 71% across the country. More people in the cities than out here in rural areas as I found by an informal survey, where any number seem terrified of computers and proud to be so. Despite email access being readily available.

Seventy-one percent is nowhere near those who have telephones, radios, television . . . nor refrigerators and indoor plumbing. All those took quite a few decades to reach nearly 100% so 71 in less than 20 years wasn’t bad.

During those two decades however, the trend of the number of newspapers in print continued downward. Some simply folded, others in JOAs—Joint Operating Agreements serving the same community client list—killed each other off. . . . . . . . .

Congressman Brian Baird has been successful as he tells us, in passage of a law he proposed to make the Washington State sales tax deductible on our annual federal income tax reports. There are a few things he seems to have overlooked which we might, however, point out.

Years ago when a federal law was passed making state income tax deductible and the state sales tax not, many Oregon residents and employed, gained a distinct advantage over us living and working north of the Columbia River. They had no sales tax to pay in Oregon, and the IRS forgave them the amount they had paid into state income tax coffers. If their incomes were such that they had no state income tax to pay, they still hadn’t lost anything. . . . . . .

Tell your friends to borrow my books at the library

Most interesting in any publication are usually “Letters to the Editor.” Donated work the newspaper or magazine makes money on by selling it. Guest opinions on the Op-Ed page may—or may not—be paid work.

Copyright law protects creators, writing anything including letters whether personal or otherwise, drawings, cartoons and much more. What you created, is yours. To give away, sell . . . . . . . . .

TERRALIMBO,Out of Time
A time-travel/adventure fantasy
Cover illustration by Michael A Pratt
ISBN 1-4259-2041-1, hard cover, new in 2006

Some of us first learned about the possibility of a discount well over a year ago. Arrangements can take time, but details have been learned and information published. About all the hoops that need to be jumped through.

Leaving aside for the moment the inherent unfairness of one person getting a discount which means another rather than paying a fair price must be overcharged for the difference, we leave that argument to those who will rightly argue that this is a common “marketing practice.”

You know the name COMCAST. Telephone, cable television . . . . . . . . .

Why buy my books, unless you want an autographed copy?

In the Western Hemisphere from the equator north, a quarantine system has been built, but it is like a house with one whole unscreened wall missing. Signs along our Washington state highways one year proclaimed an apple maggot quarantine in effect. Decades earlier it was a Mediterranean fruit fly—the Medfly—in California. It wasn't until I began traveling the PanAmerican highway in 1976, that I recognized the flaw.

One early morning in 1980, entering Nicaragua from Costa Rica . . . . . . . . .

Hard cover, ISBN 1-4259-6213-0

Quietly, without embellishment nor dramatization, he began speaking about the execution of Che Guevara. Some fewer than two dozen of us sat around the bright and comfortable room. About evenly male and female, ages from 19 to 55, our narrator at midpoint. By race we were from Black to blond. Our citizenship too was diverse, and the language, Spanish.

It was about a decade and a half since Che Guevara had faced the firing squad in Bolivia . . . . . . . .

There do remain some dumb mistakes I have not yet made. Never before the Internet however, can stupidity be made so public across so large a geographical area. Not by television, radio, telephone—and the only recourse is to apologize. Mea culpa . . . sorry about that . . . no excuse. That said, any dumb things I do, have nothing to do with my gender. I refuse a second 100% responsibility—to 200% total—for mistakes that men also make . . . and they sometimes try to crawl out from under.

You are more than welcome though, to laugh about how my mistake of sending out an email sized 3 MB caused multiple bounces including blockages of the message, tying up my own incoming for long periods of time. . . . . . . . .

Hard cover ISBN 1-4208-9269-X
Available worldwide via Ingram, priced in Pounds

Fewer than a quarter of the 39 people who live in this three story apartment building, smoke cigarettes. The rest of us either stopped before moving in, since becoming residents, or, like me, have never used tobacco.

Where I live is known as “senior housing.” That is, by law we must have reached a certain age, or have a disability. The kind of disability that provides a tag allowing special parking privilege to be displayed in the car.

Some tenants, like me, have allergies. One of mine being to tobacco smoke. . . . . . . . .

The sniper trial of John Allen Muhammad going on in Maryland is of much interest out here in the West where it all began, long before the publicized brutalities in 2002. The six Washington-area sniper shootings are only a part of his depredations.

No one so far as I’ve been able to tell, has ever said anything about the reason so many strangers all across the country—beginning in the Pacific Northwest—died. When it is so obvious . . . . . . . .

My first book published by Author House
is Biography/History, as I lived it
Or, my children did, as on the S S Cristobal

The crossing signal made by railroad trains, is in Morse code. I was asked to explain this statement by a fellow with far more formal education than I, especially in mathematics. One who taught the classes which have resulted in my attaining the highest class possible as FCC-licensed radio amateur. My advantage is age—I have more history.

Not so far back as Native American smoke signals, though that and drumming is where this form of communication began in the Western Hemisphere. . . . . . . . .

Greed of the railroad barons was the first reason leading to certain of our traffic problems in the United States. The railroads were subsidized. Given outright, alternate sections of right-of-way across the country in order to build. But that wasn’t good enough. They priced themselves out of business to consumers until now even the good idea of Amtrak doesn’t do as well as railroads in other parts of the world.

Shipments which could go by train, congest highways. (“Ship-ments” by land and “car-go” by sea . . . strange, this English language.) Not only big trucks, but passenger vehicle travel, could be trimmed by transport over distances by train. The way tourists have their recreation vehicles tied onto flatcars to view while on board, a canyon in Mexico. Maybe not quite to my taste, though I’ve enjoyed it as a televised documentary.

A Western Hemisphere transcontinental railroad pre-dating the one in the United States—and so far as I know any other in North, Central and South America—was built in Panama. . . . . . .