Serious Humor

THE TRUTH LIESWITHIN

June 28, 2003 Volume I Issue 199

Environmentally friendly since late 1999

Made entirely of recycled bits & words

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Commentary

Long time fans will note that I didn’t take my usual winter hiatus this year. It has been my custom for the past seven years to take six weeks off and go to Florida. The reason I do this is because my previously described injuries have turned arthritic and I have trouble bearing up under the cold and damp New York winters. I go down to Florida to recharge my batteries. I am able do this because I stay with my parents. What I save in room and board I more than lose in sanity. But, I also come back with a wealth of material for my articles. If I were paying for the trip, and had any income, I could write it off as a business expense for research. The good folks of Sunrise Lakes Condominiums, Phase One, have never let me down yet. The reason I didn’t go this year is because I was waiting for the approval of my knee surgery and aftercare treatment and I am trying to sell my house so I can make the Florida gig a more permanent thing. I am planning to move the theme park in my mind, Sleuthland, to the west coast of Florida, where there has been little influx of my relatives to date.

If you have been following my exploits over the years, you know that my parents live in the Sunrise Lakes condo and their neighbors are Rose and Morty David, Larry David’s parents. He is the co-creator of "Seinfeld" and the creator of "Curb Your Enthusiasm." As I have mentioned before, most of the plots on Seinfeld are taking from real life and Jerry’s parents are actually modeled on Larry’s parents. The scary part for me is watching some of these episodes, especially the ones that take place in Florida, and seeing my own life up on the screen. One day my parents were visiting me and we were watching a Seinfeld rerun where Jerry and Elaine are visiting Florida. Jerry and his dad have a conversation about renting a car and my dad and I had the exact same conversation the day before. The dialog we had was almost word for word the same as Jerry and Morty’s conversation, though I had not seen that episode before. In another episode from the first season, Jerry is playing Scrabble with his mom and his dad keeps getting involved in the game. For us, it was my dad and my me playing Scrabble, and my mom was the one interfering. She kept looking over my shoulder and suggesting words to me. My dad got mad and said, "No fair helping," to which I replied, "Did you see me send an invitation out for help?" Besides, my dad cheats by making up words. He made up a word "upweed" and, though it is not in the dictionary, he still justified it as a real word because he could use it in a sentence. "The company relocated and he was upweeded from his job." I informed Noah Webster Eisenberg that the word he was probably thinking of is uprooting. He informed me that "Weeds have roots too, you know."

My parents don’t appear to be affected by these similarities, but I am not so sure that I enjoy being a stereotype. I am more the monotype type. I have to wonder if we are all that common that we behave just like our TV counterparts. Am I destined to end up in such a place, or do I have a shot at avoiding such a fate? Of course, my parents have done more outrageous stuff than I have seen on Seinfeld, which I have written about in the past. I am not above selling out if the price is right. Especially since I found out what kind of money Larry was pulling down. Of course, so far I have made nothing, but there is always hope. I am still entertaining offers. Feel free to make as many as you like.

When Jerry refers to the fictional Del Boca Vista as an insane asylum, I cringe because I, too, have referred to the real life Sunrise Lakes as "an insane asylum without walls." I also refer to it as a living sitcom. My parents, naturally, like Queen Victoria before them, are not amused. Let’s face facts. Too much free time leaves the mind free to wander to new territories. And these wandering Jews are the Lewis and Clark of Florida.(No offense intended just in case you are reading this, Lewis and Clark.) I was in a Publix supermarket with my parents a while back. They were doing their weekly food shopping. My mom wanted to buy one can of beets. She picked up two cans of Publix brand beets. The sliced beets were 79 cents and the whole beets were 69 cents. She actually contemplated out loud which one to buy. She finally decided to buy the whole beets and "slice them myself" in order to save the dime. I offered to pay the dime for her to save her the labor, but it was a matter of principle. Of course, if she were in a mood to fight for principles, I might have pointed out to her that the sliced beets were probably mismarked because where I come from, they don’t charge any more for slicing beets and I noticed that the name brand beets were the same price, no matter how many pieces they were sliced into, whole, quartered, sliced, and diced. But, after listening to this important debate on Eisenberg fiscal policy, I certainly was not going to open a can of worms. Especially the sliced worms which were a dime more than the whole ones, for some unknown reason. I doubt that Chairman Greenspan himself would have interjected his "irrational exuberance" into that meeting of this finance committee.

My dad, to his credit, has a long history of service to his community. In 1995, the City of Sunrise gave him a special award because he called the fire department. Well, actually he did more than that. One day he noticed some flames coming from the top of the three-story building across the street. He called 911, then went through all three floors, knocking on 32 apartment doors and hustling the people out of the building to safety before the fire department arrived. Of course, he had to encounter more than one tenant who gave him a hard time. One old lady in particular gave him the third degree before she would make the trip downstairs to safety.

"Do you know what apartment the fire started in, Max?"

"No, dear, I don’t."

"Do you know what caused the fire, bubala?"

"Heat, oxygen, and fuel, I’m guessing."

"When did the fire department say they would get here, tatala?"

"Between three and five, just before the cable guy. Really dear, you must leave now for your own safety."

"Well, do you think it is really necessary, darling? I would hate to go all the way downstairs for nothing."

"In your case, probably not. I’d love to stay and chat, but I have other people to rescue."

I can see why they gave him a plaque for that. He managed to save these people despite themselves. And, because he promptly notified the fire department, they got there quickly before the fire spread too far, minimizing property damage. They also gave him the key to the city. Then they promptly changed all the locks.

For most of the eleven years that they have lived there, my father has served as Building Administrator for his building. He represented his building on the condo board and, for many of those years, Morty David was the president. My dad also served as the head of the Safety Committee. In fact, I am fairly certain that he was the entire safety committee. Larry did buy Morty a Lexus when the money started rolling in, just like Jerry bought Morty a Cadillac on the show, but I don’t think there was a Jack Klompus who drove it into Alligator Alley. Besides, Alligator Alley is all fenced in these days so even the alligators can’t get to you any more. I do seem to recall some of the local "gators"discussing Morty’s possible impeachment, but I don’t think they had enough votes.

Many of the characters on the show are based on real people and I can see some of the resemblances between the TV Floridians and the real life "Condo Commandoes" of Phase One. There are many people there who have nothing else to do but to mind other people’s business. They are retired and I guess they have a lot of free time on their hands. Gee, I am retired and I can’t seem to find time to tend to my own business, let alone anyone else’s. I must be in the wrong place.

Last year, when Morty’s term as president ran out, he was touting my dad to run for the spot. He would, of course, give Dad his full support, as it no longer fit him. This is not the first time that they tried to tap my dad to run for the top job. A few years ago, Dad’s neighbor, the late Milty Weiss, wanted to run my dad for president. They were putting together a coalition of the powerful condo machas who would back Dad for president. Of course, they wanted to wield power from behind the scenes in a sort of "puppet regime." My dad has too much integrity for that. He may play many roles in life, but Cosmo Kramer is not one of them. I think that he is more likely to play George in the revival of "Seinfeld, the Musical" at the Sunrise Playhouse.

As for Morty, Milty, and all the other members of the Tri Lateral Commission, I think that they have seen one too many Seinfeld episodes and they should stick to what they know best, shuffleboard and Friday night poker games. They should leave the politics to the professionals. God knows that Florida has its share of those.

And THAT, was my two-cents plain!

Irvmeister

the artist formerly known as

Meisterzingers

Set your old books free to run in the wild.

Subscribers may have noticed that I have a message attached to my e-mail that says,

Books just wanna be FREE! See what I mean at:
http://bookcrossing.com/friend/Irvmeister

If you have some books that you no longer need or want, just go to Book Crossing.com at the above link and register for free. You can then print out labels and/or book marks, and every time you register a book it will be assigned a serial number that belongs to you. You then set the book free at a public place for someone else to find and use. When someone finds the book, they contact Book Crossing and can add their review to yours, if you chose to review the book, and then pass it on again. Book Crossing will keep track of the book as long as it is in circulation. They have people all over the world doing this and they even have monthly meetings that you can attend to discuss books and good places to set them free. It is quite a neat idea and an easy way to dispose of books. I tried giving mine to the public library and they didn’t want them. Can you believe?

CheyAnna referred me to the site as we were wondering what we were going to do with all the books we have managed to accumulate over the years that we didn’t want to schlep to Florida. I have hung onto books from graduate and undergraduate school for more than 30 years. Though they may make me look intelligent if they were in my bookcase, I realized that I had not really looked in these books for many years and, but I could get any information that is contained in those books on the Internet. So why did I still need them? The answer is, I don’t, so I have been setting them free. So far, I have set fourteen of them free this week. It should be fun to see where they go. With my luck, some stock boy will pick them up and throw them out.

Letters to the Editor

Re:- Martha My Dear, In the Clear?

Irv-

You are absolutely right. Our government has some strange criteria for whom it decides to prosecute. If I had the information that Martha (evidently) was privy to, and I had a bunch of my $ tied up in that stock, I'd have done the same thing she did. Only an idiot would hold onto stock that he/she knew was about to tank.

Skip Bell

That’s because they spell it p-e-r-s-e-c-u-t-e. Thanks for the compliment as far as my stock picking prowess is concerned. I did honestly believe they would eventually come back only I am not so sure I will live so long. (-Ed.)

Irv:

You might remember me as the ex-WBAI staffer who wrote to you correcting a minor error a couple of years ago.

With reference to your story on un prosecuted federal crimes, I would like to call your attention to something called a Qui Tam lawsuit that any whistle blower may file ON BEHALF OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. If justified, the Feds are then obligated to perform the bulk of the legal work and the whistle blower gets up to 20% of the ultimate penalties against the defendant. This type of suit appeared on the news this past week in conjunction with the defrauding of Medicare by AstraZeneca, a scheme in which the drug company gave the cancer drug to doctors free with the doctors charging Medicare for patient dosing. The two whistle blowers worked for an HMO where some of the physicians were doing this. Their share of the $300 million dollar settlement announced last week will be $46 million. Not bad, even if they have to pay a third to their attorneys.

So if you are aware of details of a case or cases where the government might properly collect substantial fines I suggest that you investigate this system. BTW, I think qui tam in Latin means "on behalf of" so that's why the suits have this name. They are more commonly called whistle blower lawsuits, however.If you go ahead with this, I'd like to know.
Robbie Barish

Of course I remember you. I believe you corrected my error on the Paul McCartney is dead piece. Something about Steve Post, as I recall.

Actually, there is a "rat fee" of 10% paid by the IRS to anyone who gives them information that ultimately leads to a collection of money. However, anything that I learned as a result of my investigations while being employed for New York State is protected and I am expressly forbidden to disclose the information to any outside agency by section 535 of the Labor Law, "Disclosures Prohibited." We could not share our info with any outside agencies, even NY State Department of Taxation and Finance. We could only share what we learned with the U.I. Tax Division, because the information could only be used to administer Unemployment Insurance law.

If not for that law, I could have made a small fortune on the side, even if I only turned in all the people I uncovered working off the books, which is income tax evasion.

While it is possible that the law may have since changed, any information that I might have had is probably well past the statute of limitations, since I left State employment in 1989.

The Qui Tam law specifically applies to frauds being committed against the federal government. In the past, I have attempted to alert Medicare about frauds committed by medical people and they did not want to know, despite the protestations to the contrary on all the forms they send you. Ditto with my private health insurance, and dental insurance as well. They turn a blind eye to fraud on the part of medical people, which is a shame because it is costing the public millions of dollars which might be better spent on better coverage for all Americans. (-Ed.)

When that piece gets to its . . . uh. final resting place, please let me know. I definitely think it's the type of column my weblog visitors will enjoy. Thanks.
Mad Kane

I shall certainly do that and thank you. I was thinking of sending it to Martha, herself, but I don't know if she would appreciate the sexual fantasy thing. I hear she is kind of stuck up. Then again, she should be grateful. I know I would be. (-Ed.)

Hi Irv . . .

Your articles are great as ever . . .

Thought you would enjoy these.

Still raining here in Florida.

Squish Squish. Can't dry out.

Regards

Albert (swissal)

Thanks Al. If it is any consolation to you, it has been raining here for about a month, as well. The Ark plans are on the way. (-Ed.)

Excellent! In a former life, I was the Administrator of a local business tax and as part of a filing enforcement project, worked in the State DOR gathering tax information. After I spent many hours on the cases, many large foreign corps were let off the hook or allowed to negotiate a minimum payment without interest of penalties. My ex-government employer continues to cry over decreasing revenues to encourage higher local taxes while the filing enforcement basically disappeared after my departure. Good enough for government? Yeah, right . . .

~Shirley Sanders

Unfortunately, it is all too common in the government these days. I only hope we live long enough to see the government once again representing the people, but I won't be holding my breath. (-Ed.)

Sleuth-O-Grams

Charlene O’Connor celebrated a birthday this week. CheyAnna and sister Kate are recovering,

I took my last shot to the knee and I begin the other knee mid-July.

WebMaster's Corner

Regardless of your position on the war:

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