16 Parkside Lane

Protected: Scared

Keath — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 23:24:34 +0000

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Protected: Work Update

Keath — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 15:05:29 +0000

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Just a little update

Keath — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 05:44:30 +0000

I’m just a little nervous about starting work tomorrow at the new place. Haven’t felt much like writing lately. Cindy keeps reassuring me that everything will be alright. I’m just over-thinking everything. Hopefully, it will be alright. I hope to let you know after I get home from work tomorrow night.

America’s 5 Most Stressful Cities

Keath — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 07:43:05 +0000

America’s 5 Most Stressful Cities:

With common factors such as traffic, crowds, noise, grime, and crime, cities are generally not perceived as oases of calm.

But what makes one city more stressful to live in than the next? To gauge the stress of residents inAmerican cities, data cruncher Sperling’s Best Places considered the 50 largest metropolitan areas (which includes suburbs). The team considered the following factors: divorce rate, commute times, unemployment, violent crime, property crime, suicides, alcohol consumption, mental health, sleep troubles, and the annual amount of cloudy days.

See slideshow: America’s Most Stressful Cities

There wasn’t much variance in several categories. For alcohol consumption per month, each of the top 10 cities ranged from 8.7 to 14 drinks per month; for days per month with poor mental health, the metro areas ranged from 2.9 to 4.3; and for days per month of poor sleep, the range was 6.9 to 8.2.

The data behind this list does not paint a cheery picture. The Sunshine State, in particular, seems much less sunny — dismal, even. What follows are the five metropolitan areas that fared the worst using the above criteria.

5. Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn, Michigan
Population: 1,918,288
Divorced: 11.4%
Commute time – minutes: 27
Unemployment: 15.7%
Violent crime per 100,000 population: 1111.2
Property crime per 100,000 population: 4,152.4
Suicides per 100,000 population: 9.6
Cloudy days annually: 180

Crime is a leading factor for Detroit’s stress.
Photo: Spencer Platt / Getty Images

Standout factors: The Detroit metropolitan area is in the 100th percentile for violent crime and property crime. It also ranks in the 97th percentile for poor mental health days per month, though it is in the second percentile for alcohol consumption per month.

4. Jacksonville, Florida

Population: 1,374,303
Divorced: 12.3%
Commute time – minutes: 28.0
Unemployment: 10.4%
Violent crime per 100,000 population: 557
Property crime per 100,000 population: 3,772.4
Suicides per 100,000 population: 13.9
Cloudy days annually: 139

Love doesn’t seem to last in Jacksonville.
Photo: Don Klumpp / Getty Images

Standout factor: Jacksonville is in the 95th percentile for divorces.

3. Miami-Miami Beach-Kendall, Florida
Population: 2,472,015
Divorced: 11.5%
Commute time – minutes: 33.2
Unemployment: 12.5%
Violent crime per 100,000 population: 733.3
Property crime per 100,000 population: 4,678.3
Suicides per 100,000 population: 9.3
Cloudy days annually: 117

Miami is sunny but riddled with crime.
Photo: Hector Herrera / Getty Images

Standout factors: Metropolitan Miami is in the 97th percentile for property crime, and 95th percentile for violent crime, but is in the fourth percentile for alcohol consumption.

2. Las Vegas-Paradise, Nevada
Population: 1,908,008
Divorced: 13.2%
Commute time – minutes: 27
Unemployment: 14%
Violent crime per 100,000 population: 763.4
Property crime per 100,000 population: 2,921.9
Suicides per 100,000 population: 18
Cloudy days annually: 65

Elvis weddings aside, Las Vegas leads the way in divorces.
Photo: Ethan Miller / Getty Images

Standout factors: Las Vegas-Paradise is in the 100th percentile for divorces, but it had the least cloudy days of the 50 cities analyzed.

1. Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, Florida
Population: 2,780,818
Divorced: 12.3%
Commute time – minutes: 28.3
Unemployment: 11.2%
Violent crime per 100,000 population: 500
Property crime per 100,000 population: 3,387.2
Suicides per 100,000 population: 15.5
Cloudy days annually: 127

The numbers say Tampa is the most stressful area.
Photo: George Rose / Getty Images

Standout factor: Tampa is in the 97th percentile for suicides.

Protected: Sucker Punched!

Keath — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 04:39:15 +0000

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Protected: It’s Confirmed! Starting Monday I Begin Work at the Paley Center for the Media, in Beverly Hills

Keath — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 07:51:48 +0000

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The Last Note from the Last Man

Keath — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 04:13:28 +0000

“Last Stand”
Written and performed by Harry Chapin
(*ironically, the last song he ever recorded.)

“It used to be that old John Wayne
Would fight the good fight once again,
Find the strength to bear the pain,
Stand up til he’d finally fall.

But now it’s not just movie time,
And now it’s you that’s on the line.
And now it’s you that’s going to find
If you can stand at all.

So you circle all the wagons
And you hide behind the trees,
And you try to find some courage on your knees.
When you heard the sound of taps played
By the one man band,
You knew this is where you’d have to make
Your last stand.

And so, my friends, the last stand,
The last song from the last band,
The last note from the last man,
But you gave it all you can.

The cards came down to the last deal,
You’re a starving man at his last meal,
And the movie’s rolled down to the last real,
It’s got an ending you never planned.

She’s left you now, and so it seems,
You’ve tumbled down the last stream,
And you’ve found out that the final dream,
Can disappear so fast.

Watch it all just fade away, boy,
It came down to the last day,
And then the last out, and then the last play,
And you’re alone at last.

So you circle all the wagons
And you hide behind the trees,
And you try to find some courage on your knees.
When you heard the sound of taps played
By the one man band,
You knew this is where you’d have to make
Your last stand.

Well, so it was late last night,
She left on the final flight
You watched as the last light
Went out there in your soul.

Took your look around the top,
For now you face the final drop.
You’ll go down fast and you won’t stop,
You found a very deep hole.

Say you’re off on the last ride,
Remembering how she last cried,
And you know that love had long last died
In silence, not in pain.

You lost your last, your last race
Stumbled in last place,
Too late to find the one last face
Waiting in the rain.

So you circle all the wagons
And you hide behind the trees,
And you try to find some courage on your knees.
When you heard the sound of taps played
By the one man band,
You knew this is where you’d have to make
Your last stand.”

Protected: A Spark of Hope

Keath — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 05:16:38 +0000

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Protected: But I digress…

Keath — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 06:32:57 +0000

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The Religious Posts Have to Stop for a While

Keath — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 05:53:16 +0000

OK, that’s it…no more religious stuff for a while. I know it’s a part of me, and now you know it’s a part of me as well. I just happened to tap into a part of my past that was very important to me at the time, and which reappeared in this blog with a fervor that came outta left field.

I had a few more days worth of Christian related posts scheduled to appear – but now I’m not in that mood anymore, so I saved them all to draft instead of having them trickle out into the blog over the next several days.

Honestly, now I feel a little guilty for going over the top, if you will. I feel like I’m cramming my religion down the throats of whoever reads this blog. And too, seriously, even if I knew that no one read the blog, I’d still feel it was too much.

I worked today, with a limited crew of employees on hand to cover the Golden Globes, and as usual on my Sundays at work, I had a lot of time to think. And I reasoned that I was really going off the rails as far as religion was concerned. Though I’m not discounting anything I blogged recently, I’m realizing it more as a practice best kept low-key.

So, with that in mind, I have to decide whether I want to go back to writing my blogs as I usually did, but minimizing details about Cindy, or if I should just make the entire thing private. A third option is just to stop writing altogether. It’s a hard choice to make.

I have to keep a clear head.