Last Saturday night there was a break in this mirthless pall that’s hovered over the Plainview spirit for the past few months as Wayland Baptist University parted the clouds, let the sunshine in and set toes to tapping again.
It was a fresh clean breeze, something to give us that up, up and away feeling . . . a boost, a shot in the arm if you please, to make us feel good about ourselves.

The long awaited, highly anticipated Wayland Baptist University Centennial Gala was the occasion.
We’ve been downcast because of bad news about the national economy, unfavorable national attention on us because of the peanut company disaster, the loss of jobs as a result of business closures, and related issues. We’ve been in the doldrums. But Saturday night, Wayland struck up the band and brought music to our hearts.

And what a band it was! The famous Glenn Miller Orchestra played their hit tunes and our old favorites. Sodexo Food Service provided a fantastic dinner. Individuals and companies gave thousands of dollars worth of goods and services that were auctioned on the spot by auctioneer Clay Golden, with all proceeds going for Wayland scholarships.
It was a night to remember, an experience that will extend long beyond the event.
Thanks, Wayland; can we count on something like this, say, once a month?
Thanks for reading,
Paul

Plainview has lost industry and jobs with the closing of the salmonella-producing peanut plant and the evaporation of the nearby ethanol brewing facility. These events, coupled with the general economic decline, have, to put it mildly, not been good for our economy.

The Plainview Hale County Industrial Foundation is high-behind to develop new industry here, and I have a suggestion for them that could create a financial bonanza for our area.
Fox News reported today that one of the most deadly spiders in the world was found in the produce section of an upscale Oklahoma grocery store. An employee of Whole Foods Market in Tulsa discovered what an expert said was a Brazilian wandering spider in a bunch of bananas from Honduras on Sunday and managed to catch it in a container.
The spider was given to the University of Tulsa animal facilities director who identified the arachnid and said that type of spider is one of the most lethal in the world. One bite will kill a person in about 25 minutes, so you wouldn’t want to bite one.
But a Tulsa Zoo official looked at pictures of the critter and challenged those findings, saying that it was a Huntsman spider-which is harmless to humans.
To me, that’s a distinction with a real difference . . . possibly a deadly one. I’m by that like I am about the difference between a poisonous snake and a synthetic knockoff. Who the heck cares? Just get me a sharp hoe! With a long, long handle.
But here are the economic possibilities for Plainview and Hale County.

Oddly, the Brazilian spider delivers more than a painful bite that sends most victims to the hospital. Researchers have found that its venom also stimulates an hours-long erection in men. Patients not only experience overall pain and an increase in blood pressure, they also get an uncomfortable erection.
In Brazil, it’s reported, emergency room staff can immediately spot the victims of a bite.
“The erection is a side effect that everybody who gets stung by this spider will experience,” said study team member Romulo Leite of the Medical College of Georgia, presumably speaking only about male bite victims.
“We’re hoping eventually this will end up in the development of real drugs for the treatment of erectile dysfunction.”
Eureka! Can’t you see it now? Viagra move over. Plainview could become the “Spiderection” capital of the world.

Consider this: the now-vacant Peanut of America Corporation building out on the interstate would be the perfect place to raise Brazilian wandering spiders for commercial purposes. If it was a fertile place for salmonella to flourish, it ought to be good enough for a bunch of randy arachnids.

My mind is delirious with ideas. I can see a web of venom producing facilities, acres and acres of spider food being grown, drug companies galore . . . the possibilities are endless. PHCIF directors take note.
Thanks for reading,
Paul

Let’s get one thing straight right off the bat before I start this story. Nobody . . . not you, your family or anybody you’ve ever heard of . . . has ever been as sick as I was last Thursday night. I don’t want to hear about it. You don’t know what sick is; you just think you do. I know what sick is. I was sick, sick, sick.

You hear what I’m telling you? I was sick, sick, sick. If you don’t believe me, you can just call my friend Gary Lloyd who took me to the doctor and the hospital. His private un-published home number is 296-2408. Gary will tell you what sick is.

If you don’t believe him, you can call Dr. Peeler, whose private un-published home phone number he gives out only to his sickest patients is 555- 9111. He said I was the sickest patient he’d ever seen-that didn’t die-in his years of practicing medicine.

When he came into the room and saw me, he recoiled against the wall and gasped, his face blanching at the sight. The sight of sick, sick sick.

I’m better now, but not completely out of the woods. A relapse is not out of the question. I still need sympathy. Thursday night, I needed mercy.
Dr. Peeler didn’t prescribe for me when I left the hospital. He did suggest that I have professionals with EPA certification to clean my kitchen and refrigerator. (Excuse me, Doc! Don’t you know that penicillin grows on that stuff?) Actually, he said buy a new fridge, but after paying his bill, I couldn’t.
All right friends, that’s enough about me. I hate it when people just talk about themselves, especially about their illnesses. Here’s something good that came out of my hospital experience.
The nurse gave it to me. An emesis container. Blue. (Looks like something you’d expect to see at a horse doctor’s office.) It has a five inch round plastic rim at the mouth attached to a 13 inch sheath of crinkled plastic, almost looks like very thin paper. When regurgitating, you put the rim over your nose and mouth and blast away. Everything goes into the “sack.” It’s spill proof, fool proof. You don’t have to see its contents and it’s easy to hold. It has a capacity of 40 fl oz. When finished, you just twist the top, which locks it, and trash in it into a trash can. Before use, it’s rolled up, giving it a height of about an inch. I have one right now in my robe pocket. It would be easy to carry in a shaving kit or purse.
I’m going to buy a lot of them to give as Christmas presents, wedding gifts, etc. I’ll never throw up again without one.
Speaking of hospitals and nurses let me tell you about Covenant Hospital Plainview. I can speak with authority as I’ve served time in a few. And about its second floor nurses who cared for me.
In a word or three, all first class!

Hospital: AAA all the way. No germ could live in a place as clean and sanitized as that.
Nurses: I can’t name them all, so I won’t try. If pressed, I’d call them angel this and angel that. They were the best, everyone of them. Warm and friendly and efficient . . . I was in good hands all the time, and I knew it.
In closing, dear readers, I know your thoughts and prayers are with me, so don’t call and bug me.
One bug a week is enough.
Thanks for reading,
Paul

I have a crack CPA named Givu Gazpayne. (We’re close, so I call him GG.) I asked him today if he does my tax returns with TurboTax and he said, “No . . . RotoRooter”.

Whatever, the effect is the same . . . either way you get cleaned out. And the pain is the same.
GG is good. He keeps me honest and broke. But since I’ve been using him, I’ve never had to make a fool of myself in front of a U. S. Senate Finance Committee looking into my tax returns.
I’m going to recommend GG (we’re close, so I call him GG) to the next U. S. Treasury Secretary. President Obama has appointed boy genius Timmy Geithner to that high position. Cabinet appointments are in the process now of being examined by the Senate. This is a constitutional process, as the president’s appointments are subject to the “advice and consent” of the Senate. The Senate Finance Committee has voted 18 to 5 to approve Geithner, so he’s well on his way to being confirmed.

The entire political realm is agog over the boy genius and his credentials. Appearances count too, so his youthful good looks ring the first bell for him. He’s articulate; that rings the second one. Actually, this guy could be a one-man bell choir! He graduated from Dartmouth with a degree in government and from the Johns Hopkins School of International Studies with a master’s degree in International Economics.
Unfortunately, he’s had no basic training in how to operate TurboTax on a computer, which as you know is a popular software program widely used by American tax payers in preparing their income tax returns. It’s designed for use by ordinary people, claiming in its ads that “It’s the Easy Way to Do Your Taxes . . . TurboTax simplifies taxes, so you can complete your return with speed, ease, and confidence.”

Geithner, who will also head up the Internal Revenue Service in his new job, uses TurboTax to prepare his tax returns. Maybe he didn’t buy the deluxe version. Maybe he should try RotoRooter. GG can show him how to use it.
Here’s the story.

Geithner got audited by the IRS and had to pay back taxes for the years 2003 and 2004 for “mistakes” he made in his returns. However, even though he’d made the same mistakes on his 2001 and 2002 returns that were not being audited, he did not correct those returns or pay the back taxes on them-not, that is, until Barack Obama’s hounds discovered the little “oversight” when they were vetting him for high office.

Could it be that he knew those years’ taxes were barred by the statute of limitations, so that the IRS could not force him to pay them, even though he still owed them? Is that why he didn’t pay them earlier? He claims he made honest mistakes, not intending to defraud the government out of the $40,000 taxes he had failed to pay.

Let me get right to what you want to know, what the world has been waiting for: my opinion: 

I think he knew at each step that he was liable for the taxes, but that he deemed the issue too vague to surface. After he got caught on the 2003 and 2004 audits and paid those taxes, IRS probably told him he’d paid his due . . . as to those years. He conjured that into an all-clear for the prior years’ returns as well, gambling that they would never come up again. If they did, he could hide behind the statute of limitations. What he didn’t count on was Obama’s political sleuths being more aggressive than the IRS agents were, because their incentive was greater: they didn’t want something like this coming out and stinging Obama in the beehind. It was after their discovery-and only then-that Geithner paid the 2001 and 2002 taxes he owed.
Politicians, bankers and big business are all slobbering at the mouth to get this guy confirmed as Secretary of the Treasury. Most of them don’t care whether he’s honest or not. He appears to them to be a panacea for all the woes of these desperate times, notwithstanding his recent series of major mistakes. For example, he had a hand in the bankruptcy filing of the investment bank Lehman Brothers, also was an MVP in the $85 billion bailout of AIG (later increased to $152 billion), and he, along with former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, flew the planes for the various financial bail outs of the last several months.
I, personally, would not vote to confirm him because of his involvement in the bailouts. But that’s another story.

What, then, about the integrity issue, if that’s what it is? He clearly did not steadfastly adhere to a strict moral or ethical code about paying what he owed, or he would have paid the 2001 and 2002 taxes, even though he wasn’t legally required to if they were in fact barred by limitations. What would I have done under the same or similar circumstances? What would you have done?
I’m checking with GG today for his thoughts on the matter. I’ll try to pass the buck to him. 

Thanks for reading,