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It wasn’t exactly a romantic dinner, though Friday evening’s meal has become something of a specialty. After all, we hardly see each other all week. She works long hours, we’re up at five each weekday morning, and there’s scarcely time in the evenings to rush down a freezer meal, watch half an hour of television, before she’s off to shower and do all those things a woman needs to do before bed by nine and grabbing eight hours or so if we’re lucky.

Friday evening is for relaxation, a bottle of Riesling, and what my old mother called a ‘proper meal, cooked from scratch with good ingredients, not one of those iced up plastic trays of chemicals, with processed meat left over from the war.’

My mother thought everything ‘processed’ originated as army rations during ‘the war’.

The meal was prepared, the wine chilled; a favorite TV show recorded and ready to go. We sit down, toast the coming weekend, begin to enjoy the first tentative forkfuls of a delicious chicken dish. The show is fun. We’ve waited all week to watch it. Life, after five long, punishing days, is finally good.

Without warning, a fork of chicken halfway to my lips, the TV blacks out, we’re plunged into Stygian blackness. AmerenIP, our one and only Illinois power supplier has yet again pulled the plug. Responding to our frantic cellphone call, the long familiar computer voice informs us she’s aware of an outage in our area. It’s effecting 608 households. The engineers hope to restore our light and sanity within one and a half hours.

Sure enough, in one hour and twenty-five minutes the lights burst back to life, the smoke detector emits a single tweet of alarm as 120 volts suddenly surge up its jacksy, and the Tivo video recorder begins an interminably long reboot to the accompaniment of a screen proclaiming, “Just a few more minutes” and a silly cartoon character with an aerial stuck out its head that makes you want to hurl bricks at the screen.

And none of this would matter if it all hadn’t happened before, with monotonous regularity. It was barely two weeks since the last power outage left us devoid of entertainment for a whole evening. All that varies is the length of time before they switch things on again.

I lived in numerous different parts of Britain for fifty-three years. In all that time, I could count the number of power outages on the fingers of one hand. Then, it was due to an unusually severe storm, or flooding, or even on one occasion a local IRA sympathizer attempting to blow up a substation.

In Illinois, the power goes out on balmy evenings, on lovely sunny autumn days without a wisp of wind or a single spot of rain. You just blink once and – poof! – it’s gone. AND THERE’S BUGGER ALL YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT!

That’s the most frustrating part. There’s no-one to rail at. Human beings don’t exist at AmerenIP. It’s impossible to get past the computerized woman. And when the lights finally come back on, the same bloody digitized female has the nerve to ring you up and tell you the power’s back.

I KNOW THE POWER’S BACK! THE FUCKING LIGHTS HAVE COME ON, HAVEN’T THEY. AND THE BLEEDING TIVO CHARACTER’S DANCING A JIG AND TELLING ME, “JUST A FEW MINUTES MORE.”

Filed under: Power crazed

I’m not Mister Keith Olbermann’s number one fan by any means, but the American people are facing a choice on November 2nd like they’ve never faced a choice before.

This time it’s not just about voting Democrat or Republican. Once, it didn’t make that much difference to the way this country is governed. Next Tuesday, it undoubtedly will.

Political extremists – those of the nutty extreme left, or more dangerously fanatical far-right, have always been around on the fringes of the political scene. Every country has its Bob Barr, but only in America are such extremes allowed to develop into serious challenges to democracy, and no more so than today.

The rise of the Tea Party brigade in this nation has been swift, but shallow. Organized and backed by corporate power, it’s a rag-tag conglomerate of right-wing extremism. Normally, such transient political eruptions have all the power of a fart in a tempest, but coming at a time of harsh economic uncertainty, coupled with millions of dollars of corporate money used to spread their half-baked message through the media, the impact of the Tea Party on US politics could prove a greater and longer-lasting catastrophe for this country than 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and the Great Depression, all rolled into one.

Voting any of these fanatics into the halls of political power in Washington will not only play into the grasping hands of a corporate menace hell-bent on enslaving you, but could result in this nation finding itself experiencing the true meaning of living in a Theocracy.

If it does, the American people will only have themselves to blame.

Filed under: To hell in a handbasket

What’s been arriving in your mailbox lately? Have you recently noticed an increase in the amount of junk dumped on your property by the US mail person?

Here’s what the US mail delivered to my address today.

^{(Click image to enlarge)}

Yes, that was just today’s mail. I laid it out on the floor of the spare room. It covered approximately ten square feet. In fairness to the postal service, we don’t get this much every day. Usually, the mass junk mail arrives once or twice a week, though at present the political junk is a daily occurrence.

That particular category of offensiveness has never arrived in such quantity before. Given the US Supreme Court’s recent ruling, with regard to corporate political funding, it’s not surprising. They can afford to cut down lots more trees now.

Take a good look at the image. Imagine, if you can, it all multiplied one hundred and twenty-nine million, nine hundred and twenty-five thousand, four hundred and twenty-one times. That’s the number of housing units in the United States, according to the 2009 census.^[1]

I wonder if everyone who receives it, does the same as me…….

…….without giving it more than a cursory glance.

^{[1] “U.S. Census Bureau”}

Filed under: Trash