Red sands, crystal skulls,
Witches in the wind.
Crooked trees, spells of fire,
Tails of donkies pinned.

Season’s shadow, werewolf’s glory,
Love and war abound.
Mystery hunt, swan song’s sting,
Twilight eyes of hound.

Pale dragon’s crown, adept of blue
Bearing an hourglass.
What a tangled skein we weave
As through life we pass.

The source of death through streams of passing,
Red branches of the stars.
Servants of an unloved time
Who hide behind their scars.

War of wizards, mother’s love.
Deep water in the vale.
Night shift on the river wall
Unto you I hail.

Hunters of the legacy.
Jewels of a ladies hand.
At the gates of heaven’s door
Is where I’ll make my stand.

Crystal shard of red and silver,
Split infinity.
I think tonight I’ve found my place
For all eternity.

I love words. I always have. I discovered very early on that words, when chosen with forethought and care, have tremendous power. Power to heal and power to hurt; it’s up to you, Grasshopper, to use them wisely.

You’ll notice the title of this post is politically correct, which is what I’m planning on grumping about this evening and it ties into my opening up there. Essentially, words only have the power we allow them to have. Don’t believe me? Go hang out with a bunch of five and six year olds and you’ll quickly learn what I mean. All it takes is five kids chanting in a sing-song tone “Sally likes green lolly pops!” to bring Sally to tears. Why? Because as a child, she doesn’t realize those words don’t have to hurt her. She just lets them. More to the point, we let ourselves hear the intent behind the words as they are spoken and fly off the handle. So, that kind of contradicts my “Words have power” theme if it’s not really the words that are causing the problem, eh? Not really…

Let’s think about the words mentally retarded. When I was a boy, it was perfectly all right for an adult to say that a child was mentally retarded. It meant the child had developmental issues and that was that. However, some brilliant child took the ed off the end of the word and called someone a retard and a most glorious insult was born. I can’t tell you the joy using that word brought to so many children in my elementary schools! So, suddenly mentally retarded sounds a lot like retard and now that phrase is bad! So, they’re not mentally retarded. Suddenly they’re special. Wait though, I thought all children were special? Okay, so they’re not special. Hmmm…oh wait, I know! They have a developmental disability! Okay, that’s better. Wait, don’t say the developmentally disabled boy! That’s not okay! You’ve just labeled him! He’s a boy with developmental disabilities! What?!?

Do you see the problem yet? No? What are you, retarded? The point is that every single one of those new phrases means the same thing! No matter what fancy words you wrap around it, they all mean the kid’s not right in the head. Mentally retarded, special, developmentally disabled or shit-for-brains, they all mean the same thing. So, where does being PC get us? It makes everyone feel better about the fact that they’re referring to the retarded kid but being nice about it. Whatever…if it means the same thing, it is the same thing.

So, how does this equate to Words have Power? Political Correctness is all about words having power. Someone along the way realized that if you call someone black or brown or yellow or whatever they might get insulted. So now we have all these different types of Americans. Now you have to know all the right ways to place your words when talking about the next door neighbors Downs Syndrome disaster. Who the fuck cares? I actually spent an hour and a half meeting at work several years ago arguing about how we advertise that we have services for people with disabilities. Everyone wanted to use some other phrase to basically say the same thing. I finally got frustrated, turned to the CIO at the time and said in a nice loud voice, “What’s the big deal? I always thought the word cripple worked just fine. Why’d they go and change it?” The beauty of that one moment will live with me through the rest of my life. The whole room went into an agonized silence. You could literally see people desperately trying not to laugh, others trying to look horrified, and more actually being horrified. Luckily the CIO got the joke and actually did laugh. He also got the point. He picked a phrase and that was the end of it. But it was amazing how much power the word cripple had. And that’s not even one of the bad ones. Don’t believe me? Drop the N-word in a meeting sometime. (Notice that word has so much power even I won’t spell it out). Words have power because people let them. I used to let the phrase White Trash send me into a fury. Why? Because I am White Trash. It’s my heritage and I was horrified by it. Now, I realize they’re just simple words and I laugh when I hear them. I don’t let mere words hold sway over me but I have tremendous power to control others because so many people do.

Over the Easter weekend ABC was showing that old time movie favorite, the Ten Commandments with Charleton Heston as Moses. Now, not being big bible movie fans, the wife and I only had it on for back ground noise while we chatted on the sofa. Occasionally we would be drawn into the story but mostly we ignored it. Toward the end of the evening however, I turned to the wife and said, “You know, if I’d been Pharaoh, Moses wouldn’t have had a chance.” I could tell by the look on her face that she desperately did NOT want to ask but just couldn’t help herself. “How’s that?” she asks. I grinned really big. “First time Moses came up and said ‘Let my people go!’ I’d have cut off his head and fed him to the crocodiles. I’m the Pharaoh for cryin’ out loud! You don’t tell me what to do.” The wife just shook her head. “Know what else?” At this point, she has I really don’t want to know written all over her face so I don’t give her a chance to deny me the pleasure of sharing. “If I had been dumb enough to go through all ten plagues, I certainly wouldn’t have let everyone go. At first light, I’d have gathered what was left of my armies, gone down to the Hebrew villages and slaughtered every man, woman and child. Nobody fucks with the Pharaoh’s kid.” My wife just shook her head and replied, “The next time you feel like sharing something like that, don’t.” I couldn’t help grinning.

Being the XBox fan boy that I am, I finally got my hands on a 360 for myself. So far I’ve been highly entertained by it. It’s just about everything I had hoped for and more. Of course, having the new system makes me hunger for new games. Being as picky as I am about the games I play gives me a limited field of choice though. So far, I have only 2 games: Project Gotham 3, which is an excellent racing game. I’ve been having a blast playing. Of course, I don’t have an XBox Live Gold account so I can’t race online. I have a feeling that a year membership for XBox Live Gold will be purchased. I love racing the Solo Career in the game but nothing compares to racing online against real people. My only complaint with PG3 is that it’s not as realistic as it could be. I suppose that’s my own fault because I’ve been playing Forza Motorsport for the past year on the original XBox and it is considered to be a racing simulator. They’ve made sure that driving the car in the game is that same as driving in real life. It makes for an incredibly challenging game but also and incredibly fun one. Now, Forza Motorsport 2 is coming out for the 360 in May so I’ll have a new racing game in not too long. The other game I currently own is a first person shooter called Perfect Dark Zero. This game was evidently the shining example game for the 360 release (think Halo with the original XBox) and I must say it’s pretty impressive. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed playing it, although I haven’t played it all that much. Over all it has gorgeous graphics and the gameplay itself is highly immersive. My only issue with it is that it’s an FPS on a console wich is fairly hard to play. I need a keyboard and mouse for FPS games. Anyway, the 360 is all I hoped for and more. The best feature that I’ve stumbled upon so far is that I can turn the 360 on and off with the wireless controller. I don’t need to get up and walk across the room to do either. It’s incredibly awesome for fat lazy people like me.

Sunday morning I will be starting my annual trip to a conference I attend for work. This year’s conference is being held in Las Vegas. Being that this year I am on the committee that helps to plan the conference, I was in Vegas for the first time last November. I didn’t have a whole lot of time during that trip and consequently did not do any gambling. Now, I’m not a fan of gambling except for poker and have never actually done any gambling in casinos. I don’t have any issues with it, I’ve just never done it. This upcoming week I will have the opportunity to try out the slot machines, black jack tables, etc. and am not sure if I will or not. Partially, I don’t want to lose any money. I’m a man with a wife and four kids and it makes me none to happy to give away my hard earned cash. Also, what’s really the point? Sure, I might hit some big pot on a slot machine or get lucky at black jack but I just don’t think so. Anyway, the point of all this is that I may give it a shot this upcoming week. I just don’ t know. I guess it will depend on whether or not I can find someone to go do it with me. I’m fairly sure one of my main work buddies will NOT participate though I might get him to watch. There are a few other people I could probably get to play with me but I’m not sure I want to play with them. Plus, there’s always the giving away my money thing holding me back.

Anyway, boring post, I know. Just thought I’d jaw a bit about gambling. I still don’t know if I will or not. I’ll just have to wait and see.