A cougar used to mean a wild, big blondish cat that lurked in remote parts of the United States, but also occasionally showed up in urban areas, for example late at night on a golf course near your house.

Today, the word had taken on a completely different meaning, and has gone to a sexual meaning. Every time a word in the English language changes meaning, it goes from an innocent to a sexual one. English speaking people must have sex on the brain. Maybe that’s why there are 375 million of us.

A cougar, sometimes called a mountain lion or a “puma,” has so many titles, it’s obvious that in the old days the animal used to scare the shit out of people. As they were running away from it, they screamed, “it’s a cougar, it’s a puma, it’s a mountain lion.”

That’s kind of like, “it’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Superman.”

A noble Frenchman naturalist of the late 1700s with the sissy-sounding name Count Georges Buffon coined the word calling the puma a “cou–gaar” (spoken in a French accent). This word evolved from an earlier Brazilian-Portuguese word that was in turn derived from an ancient Tupi Indian word in Brazil that meant “false deer.”

In other words, by the time you got close enough to figure out it wasn’t a deer, it was tearing the shit out of you with its claws. You screamed, “it’s a puma, it’s a mountain lion, it’s a cou–gaar!”

Other names for the cougar are painter, panther and mountain screamer. If this cat got its claws on you, you were the screamer in the mountains. A stalk-and-ambush-style predator, you would try to run away from it, probably the reason a brand of track shoes are today labeled “Puma.”

If you see a cougar you’re not supposed to run, you’re supposed to stand still and not look scared and act tall. Good luck!

It’s fitting therefore that today a cougar means a 40-year-old woman who stalks younger men for sexual purposes at a bar. Some of these women are no doubt blonde like the big cat from using hair dye.

How did this word change? Some credit Valerie Gibson, a romance columnist for the Toronto Sun Times. Others say the word changed in the 1980s when Hockey players nicknamed older women who wanted to sleep with them “cougars.”

See the link. Hockey is very popular in Toronto. It’s clear. Valerie Gibson went to a hockey game and tried to flirt with a hockey player. Sex on ice with a hockey puck. Thrilling!

There are many similarities between the cougar, the cat, and the cougar, the older woman at a bar in search of young men. They both look hungry and stalk helpless prey under 25-years-old, the young, juicy ones. They both come out mainly at night and sleep in the day like Dracula. They both have lethal fangs and nails. They both lock their arms around their prey in a vicious hug while chewing at the victim’s neck.

But what if you’re a transvestite cougar? This is a unisex world with women now serving on combat submarines. Don’t expect only women to be cougars. Guys can be too. Guys in drag. You can probably tell if it’s a male cougar. They are often taller, and hairier, standing at the bar. They often have cat-looking heavy mascara around the eyes, thick lipstick and long tongues hanging out. If you see a tattoo on a muscular arm with a US Navy anchor and the word “Mother,” it’s probably a transvestite cougar.

Transvestite cougars often use the line, “you just don’t understand my kind of love.”

As you can see, it’s a wild world and word out there.

What is a loser?

Let’s assume it’s accurate.

What are you losing if you’re a “loser?”

Not being a loser to most people must simply mean the attainment of money and the purchase of things. Things purchased are proof you’re not a loser. In other words, you’re so insecure a person, the mere purchase of things will convince you you’re not a loser.

But if you are, what have you lost?

Is life a win-or-lose proposition like a football game with a time clock that declares one team (or in this case one person) better than the other?

Let’s say I’m a loser, and you’re a winner.

We both get up drowsy with sleep in our eyes and stagger to the bathroom and go poop. We have our coffee. Yours’ is a bigger coffee maker because you are a winner. We put our pants on one leg at a time. You spent more money on your pants because you’re a winner. But mine cover my butt just as good.

We go out to our cars. Yours’ is newer because you’re a winner. But mine gets me where I want to go also. We both pollute the air that is killing honey bees.

We both fight our way down the freeway locked in traffic. Nevertheless, you’re a winner.

We both reach our jobs. Yours’ is more important because you’re a winner. You earn more money than I, the loser. But you also have more stress because nine times out of ten, more money and more responsibility means more stress, and more to lose, for you the winner, if anything goes wrong.

Therefore, you’re working on an earlier heart attack than I, the loser.

After a day of shuffling papers, we both return up the freeway in the opposite direction that we came, to our wives. My wife loves me. She must because she’s still married to me, the loser. You are a winner, so it’s unclear if your wife loves you or partly because of the bigger things you buy. If you were to lose, it’s also unclear how deep her love would be.

We both eat dinner, belch and watch TV. Yours’ is a big screen because you’re a winner. I watch the same show and don’t notice my screen is smaller.

We both take showers before going to bed. Yours’ is bigger because you are a winner. Mine gets me, the loser, just as wet.

If it’s Friday night and nobody has a headache, we both have sex with our wives. This is a great equalizer. There is no purchase of anything (including sex aid toys) that can signify without a doubt winning or losing here.

We both nod off to sleep dreaming of glory and winning. Your dreams are more focused on keeping what you have, though materially, since you’re a winner, you can never have enough material possessions. Since I have less, my dreams are also about having more. But ironically, I, a loser, since I have less to lose, can’t be as big a potential loser as the winner, who has more to lose if something goes wrong.

Though I’m perhaps not intelligent enough to understand what Ghandi understood, I will be better off in many ways if I remain a loser.

We both grow old and die. In the end, everybody loses life. We are buried in similar boxes, you the winner, and I the loser. We don’t take anything we own with us. We are both buried without our shoes, just wearing socks. We only need six feet of earth.

You win.

“http://www.youtube.com/v/UrlSpNS5lRg&hl=en_US&fs=1&”></param><param ram><param  “http://www.youtube.com/v/UrlSpNS5lRg&hl=en_US&fs=1

 I wanted to go to the South Seas and become a bearded Paul Gauguin, but agreed to a lesser trip to San Francisco for two days because of bills including putting braces on my twelve-year-old daughter’s teeth. Driving there, I noted that people are insane

They’re going eighty in the slow lane. It’s a wide freeway. Why did that bastard have to cut in front of me? What kind of country is this?”

My hands shook.

 This trip came about because my daughter wanted to see the stage production of Lion King.

By some miracle, we arrived in the city unharmed and threaded our way past slow-turning traffic lights; electric cable buses and cocktail-drinking restaurant overflow crowds (imbibing in the street) to the hotel. Told our room wasn’t cleaned yet, we killed time looking in stores. I needed to find a place, any place, out of the way of surging pedestrians coming from every direction like a herd of wildebeests. Big cities can be dirty. Lots of paper strips blowing around.

Guys holding cardboard signs that read, “I need work.” But I heard that the economy was better. We got our room. A nice room. I should have hunkered like a trapped animal. But it was time for the theater. Only three miles away. Already worn out, I tried to drive there—-up Lombard Street. A nightmare come true. Hell on earth. Purgatory. Judgment Day. Rush hour. Intersections jammed with humanity. We crawled along. The cars ahead would stop, leaving me stranded in the middle of an intersection. Cars on both flanks whom I was now blocking blared horns.

“Why did I let you talk me into this?” I used uncouth language. I sang a Tony Bennett song about San Francisco as a vicious parody. “I left my (swear word)—-in San Francisco!”  Where did all these people come from? It all started with just damn Adam and Eve.” I was mad boy.

We reached what I judged to be a tough section of town. I commented on the fiscal status of the inhabitants. “I have a hundred dollars on me. I wish I had my gun.”

We parked in an underground parking garage. I hate those. What if an earthquake happened and we’re buried alive? We made it to a restaurant in a hotel near the theater where we intended to have dinner. The waiter explained that staff was absent, so we could only have salad.

“I’ll get even with you for this.” I mumbled under my breath while my wife’s back was turned.

We had to go to an elevator to get to the street. I avoid elevators because of chronic claustrophobia.

“Where are the stairs?” There were no stairs. I’m doing everything I hate most in life, fighting traffic, crowds, sitting in subterranean parking garages, riding elevators. What if the power goes out and we’re trapped?  

I decided to ride the elevator. I didn’t want my wife and daughter to face it alone. I drank several glasses of wine at the theater. The show was great, the audience huge. At half-time, like a human river, they rushed out into the lobby. I couldn’t use the bathroom because the line was too long. I threatened to relieve myself on the rug in a corner, but didn’t. When we got back to the hotel, I relaxed. I had faced danger, and survived.

The next day was better.

photo courtesy Politicalarticles.net

The following is an unauthorized biographical interview I did with Sarah Palin’s subconscious.

Me – Sarah, you recently forced Obama’s advisor Rahm Emanuel to apologize for using the word “retarded,” saying it was an insult to your son. Was that a publicity stunt or an attempt to re-write the English language?

Sarah – How dare you?

Me – It’s easy.

Sarah – Okay then. No, I did it because it’s heartbreaking.

Me – But the word “retarded” is an accepted word in the English language.

Sarah – It’s an insult to my son.

Me – Would you also be against the use of the words, stupid, idiot, moron, cretin and numbskull?

Sarah – Yes.

Me – Because they’re an insult to your son?

Sarah – No! They’re an insult to me personally.

Me – Why did you say publicly you’d consider running for the president when you’ve already made the decision to run because you’d like to be the first woman president so bad you can taste it?

Sarah – To appear humble.

Me – I see. What will you do first if you become president?

Sarah – Order five hundred pairs of the most expensive shoes and have my hair done.

Me – No, I mean in government.

Sarah – Undo the Bolshevik policies of what’s-his-name.

Me – Obama?

Sarah – Whoever.

Me – But President Obama is not a Bolshevik.

Sarah – He takes his instructions from the Kremlin doesn’t he?

Me – He does?

Sarah – The Kremlin is near Alaska, where I was on the front combat lines, so I should know.

Me – But the Cold War came to an end when the Soviet Union fell apart.

Sarah – Who told you that?

Me – The history book.

Sarah – What’s history? A bunch of nonsense from communists and traitors. Real Americans don’t buy that. We’re going to have a new revolution to make things right. Things need to be right. Are you one of them?

Me – Them who?

Sarah – Traitors.

Me – I never thought of myself as a traitor.

Sarah – A bad American then.

Me – Okay. Who in your mind is a good American?

Sarah – All those honest hard working people out there who chop wood by hand and who eat Spam and who have soccer games they go to and who heat their homes with propane on the frontier and who believe that God will ferret out the subversives and the scum who are ruining this country, the greatest country in the history of the world, and a far greater country than any other country. My country. Not yours.

Me – Isn’t scum a harsh word like retarded?

Sarah – Not when you’re a liberal.

Me – Don’t you view democracy as a two-party system that to work at least needs some kind of occasional compromise to be initiated so that some forward progress in dealing with problems like health care, global warming, terrorism, Third World starvation, and for example, ecologic threats to our fisheries, can be enacted?

Sarah – Where did you get your attitude? Are you finding fault with the greatest country in the world? I’m not going to work with those agents of the Godless devil who believe in having abortions and X-rated movies and bath-houses where they can be perverts and undermine our values.

Me – That’s kind of a generalization isn’t it?

Sarah – Leave our military out of this. How dare you criticize our generals? These brave men and they’re real men. They’re over there fighting those heathen savages who threaten our lifestyles. It’s God’s will that we massacre them.

Me – Then I take it you’re in favor of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Sarah – You’re not very smart are ya?’

Me – I don’t know. I consider myself average.

Sarah – Of course I’m for smiting the vermin back into their rat holes there in the Asian plains where they are and it’s God’s will because they are faithless Muslims who deserve everything that they get because they don’t believe in the God of America.

Me – You mean the Middle East?

Sarah – Don’t tell me where it is. It’s over there where those Godless savages are.

Me – What do you think is the most pressing problem we face as a nation?

Sarah – The wrong people being Americans and coming to America. People who don’t have the values we inherited, that of hard work, and saving for your children, and sitting in the right church that we founded, and who know that when George Washington founded this country, he meant that it should be for us, and not a bunch of foreigners and trouble makers who don’t look like we do.

Me – That’s an interesting theory. Don’t you think that as president, some of those assumptions could be challenged?

Sarah – You’re not very smart are ya?’

It is therefore somewhat fitting and ironic that the word “platonic” had its roots in the homosexual environment of ancient Greece, and like the alternative lifestyle it represents, swung the other way (to a non-sexual meaning).

Platonic today means a non-sexual friendly relationship with a person of the opposite sex.

The word is named after Plato, a genius Greek philosopher mathematician of the Fourth Century BC. Plato was a student of the equally famous Socrates, a brilliant man whose teachings on ethics laid the basis for Western thought.

Platonic is also derived from the Greek word “platon,” meaning broad-shouldered.

I think it’s safe to assume that Plato was a young artistic hunk with broad shoulders standing five-foot-three. Most people were short back then. This was in the days before vitamins, when you had to exist on untreated water and a limited diet of baklava.

Let’s be open-minded and not homophobic. We all know very artistic and intelligent people who are gay.

Homosexuality in ancient Greece carried no stigma, was no different than heterosexual behavior. After all, there were very few women around. Except for the town’s worked-over harlots, women were often hidden away in tiny rooms or Vestal Virgin convents as virtual slaves, untutored unlike Plato, seemingly brainless, too busy cooking and scrubbing things and being dirty (sluttish) and worn out to be interested in sex. Only the richest of men could afford women in the home, and this was a world where life was a struggle just to exist into next week.

Sex of any kind was way down the list of priorities.

You grabbed it where you could.

Thus, if you’re Plato, you’re a dreamy-eyed, highly intelligent artistic sophisticate, sitting in a class of only men, where you admire the mind of your teacher. And he, a portly little fellow with a beard, pot belly and bad breath, admires you because you’re not only smart, you have broad shoulders. You look good in a suit of armor. One thing leads to another.

You go out for a ride together in your chariot. There’s a full moon.

You’re not going to bother to pursue a woman whose only skill is scrubbing out a chamber pot. C’mon!

Western culture developed into world prominence because these guys were interested in each other. I mean, let’s face it. If Plato had been lusting after an ignorant maiden, sure he would have produced some children, but he would never have learned from his master Socrates, and the Parthenon would not have been built.

Unlike people, there’s only one Parthenon.

Interestingly, it was a Renaissance man in Italy approximately 1,700 years later reading Plato’s writing about Socrates and his interest in young male students, and assuming much, who changed the intent, the meaning of the word platonic, to its present sexless form.

It wasn’t that Plato and Socrates were gay lovers that offended him. It was rather the notion advanced by the church at that time that pleasure of any kind was wrong.

In other words, it was okay for Plato to be smart and for people to learn from him. After all, we needed his teachings to climb out of the Dark Ages when we were all a bunch of morons who couldn’t even figure out how to use a knife and spoon. But it was not okay for Plato and Socrates to fool around during break-time from school.

This 14^th century word meaning change was the first example of the “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy toward gays of the kind currently used by our military.

History repeats itself.

Even go-with-the-wind Democrat Harry Reid joined in the criticism.

Because no-good thieving bastards led originally by a gangster-back shooter named Bugsy Siegel created a neon whorehouse out in the desert where it shouldn’t be, an abomination that exists on water and power it doesn’t have, a monument to fake glitter and greed and snarled traffic amid false-front lit-up tacky recreations of the Eiffel Tower and the Egyptian Sphinx, where excess, gambling away money you haven’t saved, and consuming alcohol to blur your mind so you’ll gamble more, and put calories on your already obese belly is a virtue, amid overpriced or cheap hotel rooms and blowing sand, trash, tumbleweeds and throw-away periodicals advertising the services of call girls from the Philippines.
 
Where millions of air conditioners draining the Colorado River ward off the 100 plus degree heat and where shots, screams in the night and the wail of police sirens and ambulances amid the man-made concrete canyons of greed over the smog wafting among the dunes has replaced the former shrill lone cry of the coyote.

Where vagabonds and derelicts gather and dazed lower middle class people wander with empty pockets turned out because they gambled away their pittance life savings, and street prostitutes sell the last of their physical charms, and wide-eyed rubes from Bugtusle, Minnesota look up at the phony neon Roman palace and say, “gosh, gee! Ain’t that perty!”

Where Chamber of Commerce officials, all of them white conservatives who don’t like immigrants, hand out brochures with a smile to visitors to a community that attracts an army of women from Brazil who change the sheets on beds in millions of hotel rooms, many of them unoccupied.
  
Because the whole rotten stinking cat-box mess is sinking into an abyss of foreclosures and bankruptcy because restraint and honesty were never a factor in Las Vegas, an idea that exists solely on the principal of MORE MORE MORE BIGGER BIGGER BIGGER!
 
Because Obama said college kids should spend their meager tuition money on college getting an education so they can survive in the world and not on gambling.

Because of that you’re mad, huh? Not me. I’m happy.

Well, I’ve got some news for the governor of Nevada. You believe in this house of cards. You can go to hell. Or Las Vegas.

What does John McCain have in common with cancer patients?

Former presidential candidate John McCain is famous for using the word “fight” in every speech, peppering his rhetoric with it. He says over and over using the word perhaps thirty-five times in a single speech, “I’ll fight for your rights,” or “I’m a fighter,” or “in the coming fight (election), we need to stand strong for America.”

He has a compulsion about this word.

Since serving as a politician is often a slow, deliberative process of attending boring meetings and shuffling papers in an office, speaking to constituents and wearing a freshly pressed and dry-cleaned suit and tie, it’s curious why he uses, or misuses, the word “fight.” A word that means a breakdown in human relations and restraint, often done in a grunting and sweaty animalistic manner, accompanied by vile language and shrieks, in which you and an opponent try to do each other physical harm.

In fairness to McCain, other politicians use or misuse the word “fight.” For some reason, they like to view themselves as fighters, despite the fact none of them could survive one round with a thirteen-year-old Golden Gloves boxer.

Cancer patients also like to use the word “fight.” I’m going to “fight” this disease they say. Why? Another favorite with macho men is “I’m going to go down fighting.”

Cancer is not something you fight. It’s not a drunk you take out into an alley and beat senseless. It’s a mutant cell dividing and reproducing. The doctor throws things at it (medicine) in an attempt to slow or stop it. Whether it does or not is up to the helpless whim of fate, if you believe in that.

You don’t beat up cancer. You don’t decide. It decides whether it will slow or stop.

Then why use “fight?”

Because it’s a psychological crutch.

If you say the truth, I’m a helpless blob of skin at the mercy of a disease that’s killing me and a doctor I can’t afford, and there’s a good chance I’m going to die and there’s nothing much I can do about it except suffer, wait and see.

If you admit that, that’s bad.

Fight means you have some kind of fictional control, a way to get back, a way to respond. Sometimes they don’t use the word “fight” and say instead, I’m going to “lick” this, meaning the same thing.

McCain and his ilk use or misuse the word for similar reasons. If you call yourself a “fighter,” you’re tough, decisive, bold, a leader. That is how you like to view yourself. You’re not going to get up in front of an audience of voters and tell them the truth. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I still can’t believe I was elected. I barely have an understanding of the problems we face, and my knees are shaking because I’m scared shitless, and all I can do is try and act like I know what I’m doing.”

He’s not going to say that.

Instead he will say something like, “I was born a fighter.”

A fetus with boxing gloves on?

Misuse of the word fight isn’t a Freudian slip. It’s an open Freudian declaration, a tremolo Tarzan call. It proves Darwin was wrong and we haven’t evolved since the cave days when we also couldn’t admit the ugly truth. That’s why wars will continue to happen. For all our pretensions to civilization, it is still who carries the biggest imagined club who is in the right.

A cave man cowers frightened in his cave while a giant man-eating sloth breathes hungrily outside. A more truthful response might be, “do you see a giant man-eating sloth? I don’t see a giant man-eating sloth.”

Instead the caveman grunts, “I’m a fighter.”

He knows he’s not going to fight the sloth. He’s going to wait until it eats him or goes away.

Why would God bless America if he did bless it (assuming God is a he)?

I never hear anyone say, God bless France. Or, God bless the United Arab Emirates. I’ve never heard a foreigner say, God bless my particular country.

Many people over the centuries have invoked God’s name including soldiers when they conquered other countries by saying “God is with us.”

But God bless America?

This seems to be a peculiarly American wish. First of all, if God only blesses America, and doesn’t bother to bless Uruguay, then God only represents America. God is supposed to be the God of all people, believers and non.
 
This saying seems at odds with what every major religion on the face of the earth claims, the universality of God, in other words, my God is the God—-of all people. I never hear the Pope say the Catholic God is only God over America. If God only blesses America, he must be mostly America’s God, and not the God of Mongolia.

When you say God bless America, America only makes up about five percent of the world’s population. What about the rest? They don’t matter?

What if I made it even more exclusionary and said God bless Reno? Everybody else is left out. Now, I’m sure God could find something nice about Reno to want to bless it. It has gambling, and it has hills that turn golden in the sunset. But if you said Gold bless Reno, and reasonable people heard you say that, I’m certain most would say that sounds a little bit foolish.

They’d think you were a moron. God bless Reno?

Why should God bless America?

Why should God bless an artificial border created by men, as women had very little to do with both the Louisiana and Gadsden purchases of 1807 and 1853, that occupies a 3,000-mile swath of the North American Continent, and was created largely by purchase, or outright conquest, from its original native inhabitants, and Spaniards who had come before? A confederation of states ruled from the District of Columbia, a tiny piece of land stolen from Native American Indians, so named for the Italian explorer Columbus who mistakenly thought he was in India and thus called them Indians?

Why would God bless this area of land and the people in it? If we go back a short hundred years, it must be obvious he (God – assuming God is a man) didn’t bless everybody. How could he? Native Americans were conquered, annihilated or placed on reservations where they were sometimes starved by the government. Women were as cattle to their husbands and didn’t have the right to work or vote. Blacks were slaves. Mexicans were considered greasers by the ruling elite.

The drawn up Constitution which said “We the people,” left everybody out except white, rich land-owning founders.
 
Would God in his infinite wisdom bless such a land?

Right wing haters and nuts will accuse me of being against God and America, and I’m really not. It just seems that way. It’s my manner. I question things.

Maybe God blessing America is a more modern thing. He (God) has only done it since the 1930s. He ignored us before, but he blesses us now.
 
Originally, God Bless America was a song coined by composer Irving Berlin (born Israel Isidore Beilin), a Jewish immigrant from Russia, as he languished at an army post in the U.S. during World War 1. Its opening stanza was copied from an old Yiddish tune called When Mose Leads his Nose, and later became a popular song in the 1930s sung by Kate Smith. The saying seemed to take on special importance during the Red Scare days of the 1950s when Americans thought they were going to be wiped out by Godless heathen Russia in a nuclear war. So paranoia, some founded in reality, some not, may be behind this statement’s popularity.

But we haven’t answered the question. Why would God bless America? Why would he want to? Is it because we are better than other people? Is it because we have a higher standard of living than many other impoverished countries?

Does God consider America his best creation, his finest achievement, the cream of the crop?

For God to bestow his special favor on Americans, there has to be a reason. I realize that God bless America is essentially a request. We’re saying, God, please bless America. But why would God? And why don’t we want him to bless the people of other countries?

We seem to have many of the same problems other countries do, a higher crime rate, poverty, pollution, drugs.

Isn’t this a bit like a few of us forming an exclusive club? And to make ourselves feel better, saying to others “keep out?” This is only for us. It seems to imply ownership of God. Is it because we think better of ourselves than we do of others, many of whom are less fortunate?
 
Shouldn’t it be instead, God bless all good people, wherever they can be found?