I love baseball. Always have. Hank Aaron was my favorite player of all time – still is. But even Hammerin’ Hank did not do what Albert Pujols just did.
Now, don’t get me wrong, Albert Pujols is a serious stud. I love the way he plays the game. He has what contemporary culture would call “mad skills”. My complaint is that he’s too good. So good, he has helped to ruin the best baseball trivia question of all time. I mean of all time.
Of course, he wasn’t the first to ruin the greatest trivia question. Frank Thomas and Barry Bonds ruined it before him. I’m talking about an obscure fact I learned in the early 80’s just after Dale Murphy won his back-t0-back MVP awards in 1982 and 83. Prior to Frank Thomas, Barry Bonds and, now, Albert Pujols, the greatest baseball trivia question of all time was this: “In the history of baseball, nine players have won back-t0-back MVP awards. Ironically, there is a player at each of the nine positions. Name them.”
Here they are (were):
Pitcher – Hal Newhouser (1944-45)
Catcher – Yogi Berra (1954-55)
First Base – Jimmie Foxx (1932-33)
Second Base – Joe Morgan (1975-76)
Shortstop – Ernie Banks (1958-59)
Third Base – Mike Schmidt (1980-81)
Outfield – Mickey Mantle (1956-57), Roger Maris (1960-61), Dale Murphy (1982-83)
Of course you can add Thomas to 1st base, Bonds to the outfield and now Pujols. Oh well. As Yogi said, “”I always thought that record would stand until it was broken.’”
This morning, I nearly spit out my coffee after reading an article in the Macon (GA) Telegraph concerning the inability of the State of GA to audit prepaid cell companies operating in Georgia to account for 911 fees.
About two and a half years ago, the GA Legislature passed laws requiring that companies offering prepaid cellular service in Georgia pay $1.50 per prepaid customer per month in 911 fees that the traditional cell phone consumers already pay as part of their contracts.
I understand from the Macon article, written by Travis Fain – tfain@macon.com, and visible here http://www.macon.com/local/story/905004.html, that the DCA (GA Dept of Community Affairs) is powerless to enforce these regulations. Furthermore, any kind of audit of these records is unfunded. This creates a hollow law, with no teeth, and makes the state look foolish, once again.
Fain quotes Clint Mueller, the legislative director of the Association of County Commissioners of Georgia (ACCG), who says, ““There’s a lot of corporations that they’re (DCA) not collecting from. We don’t know how much (money) is getting left on the table.”
Says Fain, “The DCA was given power to collect the 911 fees, which were supposed to go into a pot that local 911 operations could tap for grants. That hasn’t happened, and instead the state has used the money to help fund its normal budget, which funds all sorts of state functions, such as public education and the Georgia State Patrol.”
GA Rep. John Lunsford, who sponsored the origianl bill and whom I know to be a reasonable legislator, says “The process is flawed. I think we need better accounting and we need to put some teeth in the laws. What I’d like to actually see is criminal penalties for failure to pay.” I’m with you Rep. Lunsford, but why didn’t we think of this in 2007?
“This is real money that actually belongs to the local taxpayers.” Lunsford said. He’s right in so many ways.
How much real money? Nobody knows. The DCS has collected $15.5 Million since 2007 from companies who HAVE been paying their share. What is unknown is the number of companies, representing an unknown number of consumers, who are not paying their share.
So, we have multiple problems here. First, we have cell phone companies who may not be obeying the law and may not be paying the required toll to support 911 services in Georgia. Second, we have no way to know the impact of these underpayments because the state cannot afford to conduct the audits. Third, we have created laws with no teeth. Fourth, we have a state agency who has little or no control over laws and regulations they are charged with enforcing. Fifth, we have a state budget process that is using collected funds, designated for a pool from which 911 Emergency Service agencies can tap for grant money, that the state is using to fund the General Operating Budget. Finally, we have no plan to fix this.
Where have we seen this before? See my previous blog articles: “Protesting a 12-day Shutdown of State Gov Agency” http://wp.me/pxvZf-E and “Why I’m Not a Fan of Sales Tax Holidays” http://wp.me/pxvZf-h. So you northerners won’t think this is a southern problem, here’s where I rcently dinged Illinois’ stupid sales tax law changes http://wp.me/pxvZf-m.
I’ve been reading all day about remembrances of September 11, 2001. That got me to doing some reminiscing of my own. Everyone has a story. Everyone remembers where they were and what they were doing. Here’s mine.
At the time, I was the project manager on a massive government relocation program. We were moving about 1,200 state employees from the GA Dept of Revenue off of Capitol Hill in Atlanta out to an outlying location about 10 miles from the Capitol. Every Tuesday morning at 7 am, we had a project status meeting with the department heads. There were about 20 people in each of these meetings.
I was temporarily housed in the new building and we were having the first of these weekly meetings there. Our IT department had already moved and I was occupying a cubicle on their floor.
The meeting broke up and I returned to my temporary cubicle to answer a call from my wife. Because she was a teacher, and two months pregnant at the time, I was disturbed to receive a call from her at that hour – wondered why she wasn’t at school. The news she had for me was shocking. As I listened to her telling me what was happening, I looked across the way and saw a group of middle eastern programmers watching a video on their computer screen of smoke coming out of the side of the WTC and speaking loudly in a language I obviously couldn’t understand. But it got worse.
I immediately left for the day. Not because of what was happening in NYC, but because the news my wife told me on the phone was much more personal. She was losing our baby.
I imediately raced home (12.8 miles – a short commute by Atlanta standards) and held her as she writhed in pain. Together, we saw the North Tower collapse.
Jean and I had been married for two and a half years by that time. We honeymooned for 10 days in NYC and had visited there again just a few months prior for our “once in a lifetime” experience of standing in 18 degree weather watching Dick Clark from about 60 feet away in Times Square. On that trip, we had shopped in the mall below the WTC, I vividly remember the girl who helped us at the Coach Store. We bought clothes at Century 21 across the street, and toured the little church and cemetery down the block. New York was our adopted vacationland. We had even considered moving there, and I had gone on several interviews there before the job with the State of GA came along.
So, my reminiscence of 9-11 involves some deeply personal stuff. We didn’t lose any loved ones in the attacks that day, but I couldn’t (and still can’t) get it out of my head wondering how many people we had seen on that trip who may have been killed that day. How many of them were instantly disintegrated? How many of those that we said “Hi” to, as crazy southerner tourists? How many were just GONE?
But we had one of our most intimate experiences as a family that day. We cried a lot and prayed a lot that day and in the days to come. Mercifully, God had a plan for us that we did not understand at that time. We stayed in Atlanta. Our daughter was born almost exactly 10 months later. And we have had so many blessings since that time, I can’t name them all. I will mention that the best news out of that day was that my college roommate’s daughter was born that day. Easy to remember her birthday.
But the horror we felt as we watched all those years ago . . . is ingrained in our psyche. We still feel it to this day. We will never forget.
I really don’t want to get engaged in political flashpoint issues on this, but after last night’s heckling of the President by Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC), I guess I have to put in my two cents worth.
This afternoon, I got involved in an online ”conversation” with several younger people. The originator commented that if she had called her boss a liar in a staff meeting, that she would have been fired. Hmm.
Someone responded with this gem, “His boss is not the President, his boss are the racist republicans that he represent [sic] in his district. To them he is a hero. And of course he is the liar because the plan does not cover illegals. You know that I’m glad to see that you are paying attention…Don’t call your boss a liar LOL!!!” She kind of halfway had that right. His boss is not the President, but his constituents who hired him to represent them.
My response, was this. “I may be missing something, but how can Joe Wilson’s outburst be construed in any way as racist? It was stupid of him to shout it out, but racist? Nope.”
Another response to that was, “To Todd Kelly…Who [sic] do you see on TV when illegals are mentioned and what is the President. [sic] Last but not least who [sic] do you see at the town hall meeting with the same disrepectful mentality of Joe Wilson? That’s how I see it! Yep!” (Notice the clever repeating here. I said “Nope”, she gave the witty rejoinder of “Yep!”)
I understand, of course, what she meant by “what is the President”. I’m not one to prejudge people based on their membership in a demographic group, or based on their ethnicity, ‘cuz I try to live in a post-racial world. I don’t care what the President’s race is – or what anyone’s race is, for that matter. I’m much more concerned about the content of his character. Isn’t that what Dr. King wanted?
What does puzzle me is that many of the same people (of all races and ethnicities) cry the loudest when “their man” (is that sexist?) is heckled. When the past administration was challenged with chants like “Bush Lied, People Died”, where were those people’s protests? When previous legislators were shouted down at war protest rallies and social security town hall meetings, where were these people? Oh wait, think they the ones doing the shouting.
If it’s respect for the office of President of the United States, you want, then show it equally across the board, no matter the occupant. Otherwise, don’t get upset when “your man” gets challenged. President Obama is as much my president as he is anyone else’s. I respect the office he holds. He’s just really, really wrong on this whole socialized medicine issue.
Bottom line is, in my opinion, it’s a bad plan the way it’s currently proposed. Government control of medicine, the insurance industry, the auto industry, the oil industry, or any other industry simply does not work, because those who are elected soon find that they can use their regulatory power over those industries to control the ballot box. We’… Read Moreve found that already with Social Security, with Medicare and Medicaid, with public education and public transportation. They don’t work – this won’t work either.
I wish it would work. I wish that we could live in a Utopian society, wherein all of our members had universal health care and where everyone simply got along. That’s another blog topic for another day.
I have just finished reading Max Lucado’s new book Fearless, and I can’t emphasize enough how timely this book is. Lucado reassures the reader that it’s ok to be afraid, and he addresses many things that we fear in terms of how a Christian should look to the scriptures before reacting.
I like the way that Lucado does not preach, but rather, walks along through the normal fears that haunt our minds and hearts. He addresses common fears like being alone, losing a job, losing loved ones, worries about children, among other fears. You feel like he shares these with you. That he has lived through them. In the book, he describes many times that he did.
What sets Fearless apart, is how Lucado uses familiar scriptures. Some of the chapters really grabbed me, and I felt my uplifted. One example is the story of Jesus calming the storm. While the disciples were afraid for their lives, Jesus slept soundly in the worst part of the boat. When He awoke, He showed them how baseless their fear was, and immediately calmed the storm, like a parent going into a small child’s room at night to prove there are no monsters under the bed. Just as the parent knows there is no monster, Jesus did not fear the storm. We, are like the small child.
Max Lucado’s book Fearless is published by Thomas Nelson Publishers.
First, let me explain that I love Twitter. I’ve even made a little money on Twitter. I manage Twitter accounts of my own and quite a few others for clients. I have one for each of my businesses, Tweettraxx and Taxtraxx, and a personal one PToddKelly. One of my businesses, Tweet Traxx, exists solely to help my clients learn to use Twitter and Facebook as marketing tools to drive traffic into their businesses. But not using a “get 300 Twitter followers” routine.
With my personal account, I only follow friends. That’s not as pretentious as it sounds. In almost every case, anyone I follow on my personal account is someone I actually know, know of, want to hear from, and care what they have to say. This isn’t to say that none of those criteria apply to those I follow with my other accounts. In fact, I do care greatly what my followers and those I follow have to say. Thousands of followers among the many accounts I manage get good information and plenty of benefit from the businesses I represent. And I do it without being a Twitter Spammer – it can be done.
But I’m not here to tout my qualifications, but to caution that you have to be very careful with Twitter, because there really is no place to hide.
My first advice is to be careful who you follow. You need to make this call for yourself; it’s none of my business who you follow. I get that. But as for me, I try to follow only those people or organizations that I would not be embarrassed to have someone find on my “FOLLOWING” list. Be careful, and remember that anyone can go to your profile and see who you are following. Everyone. Anyone.
There are plenty of social media outlets that provide some anonymity. Twiitter is not one of them. Go somewhere else if you have something to hide. I’ll be glad to provide that information in another article; but, if you are a “pillar of the community,” or someone who wants to remain above reproach, or just don’t want your spouse (or partner) to know ALL your business, choose carefully whom to follow.
Hold on, it potentially gets much worse.
We’ve already covered watching who you follow. But, on Twitter, anyone can follow you, unless you block them. Blocking someone requires action on your part. So unless you remain on watch, you can have people following you that you might not want anyone to associate you with.
Here’s why that’s a problem. On Twitter, you can go to anybody’s page and look to see not only who they follow, but who follows THEM. So, by extension, you can see if any unsavory folks are following anyone, like your pastor, your little league coach, your business partner, your spouse. You get where I’m going with this, right?
There are countless robot applications running now that seek to build followers by following every account they can find. Now, some of these actually work, using algorithms to narrow their search by geography, relevant keywords, naming conventions, etc. Some of these perhaps, are not so great. (See my blog post “Midnight Train to Georgia” here http://bit.ly/6l60Q about how I inadvertently was sucked onto the Follow-Train and how I was able to unFollow-the-Train.)
Legitimate success can also bite you. You have one successful blog post, or a couple of retweets by someone with hundreds of thousands of followers and suddenly – Whammo!!! I’m not naming names, but have you received followers that you just didn’t understand why they would follow you? Perhaps your thing is collecting Teddy Bears and you suddenly have a follower who sells lace Teddies at an adult website. OK. Fine. Maybe you have been looking for a nice gift for your wife or girlfriend – or yourself – but would you want the children, or your in-laws,or your neighbors, or your co-workers to associate you with these folks? Oh, they will. They will.
Unfortunately, we live in a society where Guilt by Association is rampant. Even if it’s not your fault. Because of this, each of us runs the risk of being found out – even if there’s nothing to find. Don’t let your guard down.
By the way, you’re all welcome to come follow any or all of my accounts. I promise not to try to sell you any underwear, or underwear products.
Have you ever awakened in the middle of the night with a great idea for a blog, a journal entry, an invention, or a new way to do something? That happened to me recently, on August 12th to be exact. What it was inspired the headline for this blog entry, “Social Media Makes Some Folks Laugh.” So, I got up, logged in to WordPress and typed in this headline. I thought it would be a great article, that would inspire millions, and change the way we all look and use Social Media.
The great lesson I learned this time was that I have to remember to write more than just the headline next time I have an inspiring Wake Up Moment, because I completely lost the thought when I went back to write the article. In fact, I completely forgot that I had even written the headline until I was cleaning out my drafts today. Poof.
So, sorry folks. I guess that whatever world changing words would have come from my fingertips have been lost forever – kind of like the great literature of the ancient world.
If I emailed any of you in a state of slumber and told you about it, please let me know.
This article comes from www.ajc.com, the online version of what once was “The South’s Standard Newspaper”, the Atlanta Constitution and the Atlanta Journal, which, for decades claimed to “Cover Dixie Like the Dew”.
The headline for this article reads ”12-day shutdown of state social service agency protested – Advocates say children could be more at risk”. To this, I say, “Harumphhhh.”
First a little background. Georgia’s bloated state government (more than 100,000 employees) is in deep financial trouble. Falling sales tax revenues (see my other blog articles on government waste) have resulted in agencies being forced to require employees to take unpaid furlough days in order to cut costs.
So, the Department of Human Services, and Commissioner B.J. Walker have tightened their belt and agreed to furlough employees for 12 days beginning the Friday before Labor Day and going through next June.
At first glance, this seems like an honorable solution to help with the state’s budget shortfall. But, there’s some deception in play here. Allow me to explain. All of the days, except for the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and New Year’s Eve are Fridays. Several of the Fridays fall before a scheduled 3-day state holiday weekend (Labor Day, Columbus Day, Martin Luther King’s Birthday, and Memorial Day). I’m not sure why they don’t have the Friday off before Confederate Memorial Day, which Georgia still celebrates at a state holiday the last Monday in April. This means that DHS is really extending the vacation time for these employees.
So . . . furloughing the thousands of employees in the DHS for 12 days saves the state money, right? Not really. Here’s why. As I observed during my eight years or so as a manager in GA Government, a huge number of employees take these days off anyway, using personal leave, annual leave, or conveniently scheduled sick leave. In Georgia government employment, annual leave and sick leave are earned each month that an employee works, based on a rate that increases as tenure increases. Personal leave can be earned by “cashing in” unused sick leave (up to three days per year) – so this is paid bonus time that employees can use for any reason, that allows them to save annual leave that can later be used or “cashed in” at retirement or resignation. [Disclaimer, when I resigned my position in the Department of Revenue, I "cashed in" about 4 weeks' worth of unused Annual Leave, thus earning an additional paycheck equal to about a month's pay for time I was not on the payroll. No, I'm not sending the check back.]Why is this NOT a good deal for the state? Because employees who would otherwise be using annual, sick, or personal leave to be off on these days are now off without pay. This means they don’t have to use their leave, and can take off another day at some other time during the year. By having the employees taking an additional day off, the services will be cut even further, causing a reduction in efficiency and putting the vulnerable citizens who need these services at further risk.
Anyone who has ever worked in a government environment, or any corporate environment, for that matter, has seen how little work gets done on the Friday before a long weekend, with employees taking it easy and getting into “weekend mode”. Now, the weekends in several cases will be 4-day weekends, so Thursday will be the day that those workers get into “weekend mode”. I have no empirical evidence to support this prediction, but I’m guessing that there will be a significant percentage of the workforce who uses annual, sick, of personal leave on the Thursday preceding these newly created 4-day weekends. Some may even try to take Wednesday, or at least Wednesday afternoon, as well.
Knowing that they are, in effect being paid less for their services, will also reduce their incentives to provide the best quality of service. I can imagine several of my former employees saying something like, “Well, they aren’t paying me for tomorrow, so I’m not working today”, while sitting in their cubicles reading a newspaper, and, by extension, reducing vital services to Georgia’s most vulnerable citizens. Again, I have no evidence to support this prediction, other than real life experience supervising more than a hundred government employees.
So, in my opinion, the bulk furloughs of state employees is not the money saver the state expects it to be, or advertises it to be. A better solution would be for DHS to rotate the furlough days by having a percentage of their work force take their furlough days on various days throughout the year.
An even better solution, in my opinion, would be for the state as a whole to make some drastic changes in the way that annual leave is awareded. First, they should eliminate the “Personal Leave” program and require employees to leave sick leave as sick leave. Employees are not allowed to “cash in” unused sick leave at termination like they are with annual leave. Second, employees should be limited in the number of annual leave hours they are allowed to roll over at the end of each year. Finally, the state should (and they have the authority to do so) trade the forced furloughs back to employees and require all employees to take a 15% reduction across the board to the number of annual leave hours accrued. This move alone would create a savings of millions of wasted dollars, and would protect the state for years to come – not just this year.
Now, if the AJC were a competent journalistic entity, they would assign a reporter to dig deeper into the REAL financial impact of these decisions. Hey, AJC, feel free to contact me at todd@tweetraxx.com and I can show you how to get your head out of (the sand) and walk you through how to investigate this.
From a political standpoint, I never really agreed with the late Sen. Edward Kennedy on much. His brother President Kennedy died almost exactly two years before I was born, and his brother Bobby was murdered when I was only 2 1/2 years old, so Ted was the only Kennedy I really knew about in life.
I remember following with interest his run to unseat Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination in 1980. I had just moved to Georgia a year earlier and the people there were so aghast at what a poor President their native son had become – I think that’s when Georgia flipped over to become what is now called a “Red State”.
One thing about Ted Kennedy that I always admired was that he never waivered in his positions. He never changed his tune. He was a liberal and was not ashamed to say so. So many from the left nowadays shy away from the liberal label, preferring to be called things like “progressive”, while conversely requiring derogatory labels for others.
Kennedy had his problems, no doubt, and history may or may not remember them. He had his qualities and we will hear of them ad nauseum for weeks.
Now, I hear that Robert Byrd wants to name the Socialized Medicine bill in Kennedy’s honor. Appropriate, considering that this was his dream for decades
I don’t know. I’ll kind of miss the liberal old lion. Now all we’re left with are lyin’ old liberals.
First, please let me apologize for a couple of events that I experienced recently on a couple of my Twitter accounts, caused by – The-Follow-Train. For the record, the accounts were @ptoddkelly and @tweetraxx
I hope I’ve had a chance to apologize to all my Twitter followers for the way those jackholes spammed my account over the past few days. If not, please accept my humblest apologies.
After some research, I have figured out a logical way to prevent it. I have been reading your replies and DM’’s, with chagrin.
In order to keep you from falling into the same trap, take a lesson from what I learned. I signed up for the Follow-Train a few days ago, because a trusted Tweeter whom I follow suggested that I do. Well, that’s not entirely true. As I later found out, he had been spammed in the same way. Why? Apparently he had been told, er, spammed to do so by someone HE trusted, and so on, and so on, and so on.
Cut to the chase – the 3rd party app promises to increase your followers by having you follow a group of “VIP”s who, in turn will follow you. Sign is free, and you also have to follow 20 additional victims, er, people, who are also “Riding the Train” (to Nowheresville). And, finally, they ask your permission to retweet on your account, but what they DON”T tell you is the frequency of these tweets, which turns out to be, in my experience, about every 90 minutes or so, to the point that long time Facebook friends were posting snide comments on my wall, followers were leaving, etc.
It’s free and simple, but nearly impossible to “Quit the Train”.
Here’s what happened to me. I signed up late one night, thus the title for this post, and went to bed. I did not see the promised increase of 200 or more followers in a single day. I did see that they had hijacked my account and tweeted overnight about seven times the following message: “RT – Get 350 twitter followers in a day – NO SALE – http://xxxxxxxx.com/x” (I have concealed the URL, so that no one reading this is in anyway tempted to click on it.
After seeing this, I immediately went back to the site and attempted to cancel my account. I thought this would solve the problem and that the RT’s would stop and that I would have happy tweeps! About 2 hours later, the Re-Tweeting started again. Even though I have cancelled the account!! Once again, the only “Train” I got was more complaints from followers.
I did some more research and have found that the only way to make this process stop is to change my Twitter password, which I have now done. So far, so good, let’s hope and pray. Bear in mind that changing your Twitter password opens up a whole other can of worms, e.g. changing said password on all legit 3rd party apps like #Tweetdeck, #Hootsuite, # Tweetlater, etc.
Several other people have posted blogs about this topic and it appears that the general consensus is that there are two things fundamentally wrong with this particular 3rd Party. First, it auto-tweeted AFTER I cancelled the account (several people claim to have had the same problem), but there is no way to contact anyone on the Follow-Train website (whose URL I am not publishing, remember). Of course, if I’d used better judgement in the first place, I would have probably noticed this and avoided all this hassle.
As other bloggers have said, I would love for someone from Follow-Train staff to comment, and maybe offer some kind of explanation for these issues many have had. I haven’t noticed anybody from this company commenting on anyone’s blog so far. But, who knows. Seems like there’d be a conductor, an engineer, a porter, even a guy from the ticket window who could reply.
My advice – stay away from “The Follow Train”. If you’re on the train, don’t bother trying to get off, just change your password, because that’s the only way that appears to work.
Once again, sorry to those whom I inadvertantly spammed.
