Kurt Gerwitz

Dinner tonight at the Pagano’s included the soon to be world famous funny future priest Antonio Bernard.

The tour de france makes me sick, but so does riding my own bike. I puked today and learned about nutrition, too.

Noonan and I used to compete on who could throw up soonest at track practice. Throwing up was a clear sign of working harder than the other fellow. He usually won. Today, Hans said that blood sugar causes is the most likely cause. hmmm… not work ethic, eh?

Quote of the day: I had previously shared with Hans the story of myself vomitting as a middle school student getting up for camp and comsuming cereal and milk. This morning, while I was retasting last nights veggie sandwich, Hans says, “You really are alergic to mornings.”

1) Cingular continues to suck. I called my caveman lawyer today. He said: “I may be from another era, when men battled glaciers and mastadons. Your “cars” scare me. When I ride in a jet, I sometimes get scared, thinking that I’m in the belly of a beast. But I do know that my client, Kurt, is entitled to at least 2.1 million dollars in compensatory damages.” I tried to calm him down and tell him that I just want a few simple condolences. He told me to aim higher. ah…caveman greed. (Caveman Lawyer is a Saturday Night Live reference.)

2) “I’m between theologies.”
Why hasn’t everyone converted to Catholicism, or at least secular humanism?
Reading the history of the Presbyterian church grants me feelings: negative ones. I can feel satan…probably in the same way that protestants can feel satan when they think on Catholicism. hmm….

1) I lost another game of Risk. Always the 2nd finisher. Never the global conqueror that my height dictates I crave.
We played a lot of historical “what if” and finished my mind off by trying to recreate a scenario where the winner would have done something different than I did. We might as well have tossed toothpicks on the ground and guessed the number.
Seriously, how much does luck affect the game? There’s gotta be a way to measure that, right? I mean casinos know the odds, but how to we measure the ______ between control and chance?
2) King of wasted of time and energy?: I peeked today at the books that Kristan the uberaccountant has. Sickening.
3) I just smelled starbucks. This is really really wierd to me. Here’s why: I interviewed today at Starbucks. Father Officer from Loyola, my philosophy professor and a former cop, taught us that dead body smell will “follow” one around because the smell molecules (damn, I sound smart, eh?) actually stick to the hairs in your nose. Could Starbucks have stuck in my nose? Is this an odd form of Deja Vu?
4) I just heard “confabulation,” one of my favorite words, three times in a row:
http://www.comedycentral.com/sitewide/media_player/play.jhtml?itemId=72090
5) I just stayed up wayy tooo late!

As a professional mixer, Dad knew the best way to blend anything. He taught me to use a circular motion, spooning from the bottom to the top when blending my grits.

Imagine the man shaking a ketchup bottle upside down over his head. What\’s all the fuss about in the people around him? The ketchup bottle was unknowingly open.

Dad, at his Riverview Pharmacy, gets a call from Joe Tuley, a fellow funny drugist at Tower Pharmacy. “How do you get rid of crabs?” this fellow asks dad.
Dad says: “Well, that’s simple:
Get some shaving cream, a razor, lighter fluid, vasoline, match and an ice pick.
Shave a strip of pubic hair in the center. Vasoline everything you don’t want burnt. Use the lighter fluid carefullly and light the remaining pubic hair. As the crabs run to the shorn middle strip, stab them with the ice pick.”

Ending:
The man on the other line says, “Oh God, there’s got to be another way.” This is when Dad realizes that it wasn’t Joe Tuley but a serious client inquiry. He promptly hangs up.

Alternative Ending: Joe Tuley hangs up and a few days later over beers, Dad reminisces the tale with his buddy to which Joe replies: “I didn’t call you. I don’t know what you are talking about.”

Willy Wonka:
‘64 Book and ‘71 Movie
‘72 Book sequel “Glass Elevator” in title.
‘73 Book revision
‘05 Movie with Johnny Depp
‘05 Video game

The history of the Oompa Loompa is one for the archives, no doubt.
1964 book: The oompa loompa is an African pygmie.
1971 movie: The oompa loompa is the green haired orange fellow we all love to fear and dream about.
1973 book’s revision: The NAACP complains and the editor’s rewrite history to make the oompa loompa as a golden brown haired pale whitie from Loompaland, not Africa.
2005 movie: The oompa loompa is an amazon pygmie from loompaland.

While watching a Michael Jackson trial clip, including pictures of Neverland.

\”Micheal Jackson: what a wierdo, molesting those kids, making himself white, just a freak… oooh, look, an elephant… I\’d let him play with my willy for an elephant ride!\”

Maybe you had to be there, but it was one of the funniest thing I\’ve ever heard in my life.

5 million bucks for a Shakespeare book. I’m going to keep it simple when I say that our monied economy is disordered.

This person could be lead through a path to see that that money for this old book could be used for better things. I assume here that we take certain truths to be unalienable and obvious.

The unrecognized problem is that money is not a fair measure of value since different people have different amounts. Let’s say two persons value something at 10% of their potential to value. That 10% has way too much variance in this world. So-and-so’s 10% value is different than someone else’s. That’s fair only if so-and-so has performed, has merited the unequal distribution through a more honest measure than today.

The solution I propose is a focus on equal opportunity from birth. A “human experience” more uniform and fair than the diverse possiblitites currently available.

The dream seems to include communal raising of our children, like school, only hopefully vastly improved and effective. The dream includes common sense achievement of humanitarian goals and standards.

I agree with Hans that we must rethink our ideas of equality. We are not equal on many levels. This needs to be recognized by “society.” We should have equal chances to excel in our common pusuit of human advancement. Human advancement can be specified and measured, yet it is not… not in the way I want at least.

Capacity to meditate perhaps can be measured with a clock or brain imaging. People who can demonstrate particular capacities or histories are rewarded with new freedoms, new choices, better housing.

Help me refine this manifesto, constitution.

Dad died a year ago yesterday. So let’s party it up, eh?
The best John story was that he ran outside to yell at his brother to stop throwing snowballs at the girls. What a hero!