Profunksticated

What up? It’s been a few days, I know.

This past weekend, Pro attended a funeral for a brother in my 12-step fellowship up in New Jersey. He was married with a couple kids, 44 and had six years clean. He and I share the same sponsor. Dude was diagnosed with stomach cancer a year ago, but by the time they found it, it had spread. At the time, doctors gave him two months to live, but he lasted a year, dying on Nov. 16. The funeral was a combination of Christian service and 12-step meeting. May he rest in peace.

I finished what may be the final version of a video tribute to my parents, who are celebrating their golden anniversary the first weekend of December. I used a combination of home movies and still photos over a piece of modern classical music that’s familiar to most people who watch NBC News. It’s called The Mission, by John Williams, a recording of which appears below. Watching my finished product gives me goosebumps. (Yes, I’m biased.) I hope all the folks at the anniversary party feel the same when they see it.

I still haven’t seen my brother’s son. The situation with his longtime mistress-turned-official-squeeze has created something of a rift between he and my sister. My brother wants to live his life how he sees fit, even if that means him allowing the woman to visit and spend nights at the house he shared with his late wife. I tend to believe my bro’s blinded by a sense of entitlement brought about by his dealing with his ill spouse all those years.

My sister believes he needs to put girly-girl on the back burner and pay more attention to his sons’ emotional needs, especially those of the 14-year-old. She says my bro’s extramarital affair doesn’t bother her as much as him dropping the new baby and the woman on the boys so soon after they lost their mother.

Says my sister: “He snuck around with her for how many years? He could have (kept her under wraps) for at least another year (following his wife’s death).” I tend to agree. If I lost my wife, I don’t think I’d be inclined to introduce any new woman (yes, she would be legit) to my children so soon. My mom says both my sister and brother need to get over the rift. “It doesn’t make any sense,” she said.

Pray for us, please, ya’ll. Up until this year, my family has been relatively drama free. I guess it’s our turn.

This is late, but this is too funny!!! This time Barack and McCain doing the debate. Why aren’t these guys on Saturday Nigh Live? This video and the one below are getting tens of thousands of hits!!!

This brother has a future on Saturday Night Live!!! Funny!!!

By now, you’re probably realizing Profunksticated has a fascination with maps. Here’s one more from this site, showing the correlation between the black vote for Obama in the south and pre-Civil War cotton production. Click on the graphic for a larger view.

Some time back, Profunksticated talked about losing a military career and gaining a journalistic one in this post. I promised to tell you how it happened.

During my freshman year, a staff sergeant at my school’s Air Force ROTC detachment gave me a form certifying I’d never used drugs. So on it, I lied and said no. The following semester, my sophomore year, the same sergeant gave me the same form to fill out.

Anyone else would have said, "Hey sarge, I already filled out this form last semester." To which he probably would have said OK, and the matter would have been dropped. But this is Pro we’re talking about. My dumb azz panicked. Stuff was racing through my 18-year-old head. Why are they giving me this form again? Do they know something? Did someone see me smoking weed?

I didn’t stick with the lie. This time I told the truth and said I had used. That set off a chain of events that led to my paperwork being sent to some Air Force base in Georgia. Several weeks passed, then I was called into a meeting with the detachment commander, a full-bird colonel, who delivered the bad news. I was dismissed from ROTC. He showed me the form I filled out that semester and the form on which I lied the previous year. "There’s nothing I can do," he said.

I was crushed. This occurred right before Thanksgiving of 1978. I called my parents and told them what happened, figuring I’d give them time to get mad and that they’d have cooled off by the time I came home for Christmas. When I got home, my father calmly expressed his disappointment that not only I used marijuana, but that I also admitted it. I sometimes believe he still carries that disappointment with me to this day.

The commander, the O-6, told me I would have undergone a background investigation that would have revealed my drug use anyway. I believed that nonsense then. Today, I think, the only way some military investigator would know I used is that someone would have told them. None of my peers would have dropped dime like that on me, assuming they talked to my friends.

So that, my friends, is how I strangled my budding military career. There are days I rue what happened, when I think that had I made a career of the Air Force, I’d be retired now and collecting what, half my pay? Despite the setback, my life turned out pretty good. It should have been better, though.

I have to admit that the drug use that continued until my late 30s in all liklihood prevented me from doing far greater things than what I did manage to accomplish.

In case you haven’t seen it, here is the county-by-county breakdown of the 2008 Presidential election. Yes, it looks overwhelmingly red, but the blue counties appear to be home to the highest population densities.  And this one is real, unlike the satirical map three posts below. (Update, 11/15: I changed the map graphic to a clickable thumbnail; the originally posted full size version bled beneath the blog’s right column on my 19-inch flat screen monitor.)

…and downright painful if our two presidential candidates were able to swap skin.

Profunksticated has followed with some interest the travails of the Big Three automakers, most notably General Motors. It seems GM has only a few months worth of cash left and could go under if that money runs out. The firm has its hand out, looking for aid from Uncle Sam.

Excuse me if I’m not feeling too sorry for GM. Their honchos like to say that the cost of providing their retirees with health insurance is a huge financial burden.

To that I say, bullisht. Hey GM, how about building better vehicles?

I’m pissed with GM. Why? It’s personal. I spent hundreds of dollars to replace an engine in a used Cadillac DeVille I bought in 2002 for a pretty good price. When I purchased the car, it had 37,000 miles. Shortly after it crossed 100,000 miles in 2005 (and the expiration of the factory warranty), the vaunted Northstar engine leaked coolant into the block and overheated to the point where it quit.

Seems the problem is the aluminum block, which unlike the cast-iron engines of the past, expand and contract with heat and cold. This caused the block to pull away from the head, leading to the coolant leak. I went on line and found a used Northstar engine at a salvage yard in western Pennsylvania to replace the bad engine. The costs of this new engine and of renting a vehicle for the several weeks the DeVille was in the shop put a pretty good dent in my wallet. Fortunately, I had bought an extended warranty that covered the repair labor and other incidentals.

I wasn’t the only Caddy driver bedeviled by a bad engine. I began to hear of other Cadillac owners who had the same problem, including a nephew of a friend who owned a late 90s Cadillac Eldorado. I saw similar complaints on an online Cadillac owners’ forum. The problem was even acknowledged by the technician at the Cadillac dealership where I had the car serviced. He said the issue was the result of a design flaw.

I knew repairs on a Caddy would be somewhat pricey. I could understand having to pay for a transmission job or something like that. But I never in a million years expected to have to replace the freaking engine.

As a child of the 70s, I grew up believing Cadillac was the gold standard of luxury cars. However, my experience with the DeVille, which I have since gotten rid of in favor of a new Nissan Altima due to more mechanical problems, was a disappointment.

I’m driving another GM vehicle, a 2002 Buick LeSabre that was given to us. Nonetheless, do I plan on ever buying another GM product? Not so much.

Here, folks, is the REAL Electoral Map, courtesty of the Onion. It cracked me up.

Serious down time here at the office. Pro was surfing Salon, one of his favorite sites, and came across this piece. It posits that the election of Barack Obama heralds the start of a fourth “Republic” of the United States of America. Republics are 76-year periods — the first 36 years dominated by nation-builders, the second 36 characterized by small-government “Jeffersonian” backlash.

The other three Republics were started by George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, the article says. And even more telling is how the Republics end:

The final president of a republic tends to be a failed, despised figure. The First Republic, which began with George Washington, ended with James Buchanan, a hapless president who refused to act as the South seceded after Lincoln’s election. The Second Republic, which began with Abraham Lincoln, ended with the well-meaning but reviled and ineffectual Herbert Hoover. The Third Republic, founded by Franklin Roosevelt, came to a miserable end under the pathetic George W. Bush.

The author paints a portrait of American history in broad swaths, leaving the story open to nitpicking. The thesis is nonetheless intriguing.