08.20.03 - 5:42 p.m.

It was another gray whatever day outside my window, though the sun is out there somewhere as the air is sort of bright without any obvious direct-from-the-sun-shadows. The bridge is more distinctive, and I can see St. Mary's in front of it, just above the trees.

D "fixed" my fountain by finding a new pump for it, but the new pump is too big for the structure itself, so it makes the shelves sit askew atop the hulking bulk of the new pump and water spatters everywhere because, duh, the pump is too big. So, I don't use it. Even though everyone's all, look! Your fountain! Fixed! I'm all: uh, no. I do not need a lake on my floor.

My eyes were really bothering me last night, so I had a hard time getting to sleep and (heh, stupid: but I couldn't help it) spent a lot of time rubbing at particularly the right one, which isn't even the bad one. This morning, my eye felt raw and distended as a peeled grape coated in sand.

I'm having a hard time concentrating on work. I'm not sure what I want to do.

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The local union representing workers at a local company will hold a second vote regarding a new contract containing wage concessions and benefit cuts, particularly for retirees. (Remember that health care we promised you? Eh, well, it wasn't really a promise.) Oh, and they're going to, uhm, end their pension plan. I suspect that - on this, the second vote - the union will go for the contract, as otherwise they are facing liquidation of the company, the loss of their jobs (1000 highly paid factory jobs, a rarity around here) and so on. If I worked there, I'd vote for the contract, all the while gritting and grinding my teeth. You see, like Endron, United Airlines, and Weirton Steel, the company has requested and received permission to give huge fat retention bonuses to the president and other corporate officers while requesting wage concessions from ordinary workers. The idea is just so offensive. People who run a company into the ground (well: there's some luck involved in economic success, the background economy for Weirton Steel, which produces aluminum for things like tin cans, is just ferstunken.) should not receive bonuses to keep them around. The business world should not reward the gentlemen who make up its highest echelons for f'ing up. We do, however, reward them for f'ing up, and repeatedly. Why? Old boys network: the kind of corruption for which one cannot get arrested because it is legal, the kind that haunts Congress and the Senate. Lovely.

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Arch Moore, our former governor and favorite felon, is appealing his conviction on federal racketeering charges. What did he do? He took a bribe to release a several million dollar deposit to a coal company from the Coal Workers' Pneumoconiosis Fund. While most pneumoconiosis claims are completely bogus, coal miners really do get black lung, which really does kill them. The state is still struggling to recover from the way Moore played fast and loose with the system. Alright: lots of people on both sides have played fast and loose with that particular system, but Moore was the worst offender.

Anyway, Moore now says that whole guilty plea thing was really an accident. It was 1990. He was a former governor, long-time politician, and lawyer, and he didn't know wtf a guilty plea meant? If he were on death row or even in jail, I might be able to rationalize pulling out all the stops to try to save my life, including the laughable allegation that I was confused by that whole not/guilty thing. However: Moore is not in prison, his daughter is our congresswoman from the 2nd District, and he is at least 70 years old.

He obviously knew what he was doing, and there is no reason, now, to say that he did not know what he was doing except for his sheer unmitigated gall.

Of course, Moore is nothing compared to Idi Amin, though can I be forgiven for thinking that Moore's corruption is different from Amin's in degree, only? Sure, Moore never killed anyone, while Amin was responsible for the slaughter of tens of thousands of people, and often ate his own victims, but government corruption is government corruption. Put someone like Moore somewhere like Uganda...

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I just blew a bubble through the straw I have leftover from lunch. Yay me.