It Depends

Bury Them Deep

Brief Revival

Since I have yet to succeed in the “wait for someone to offer me a terrific, enjoyable job” vein of garnering gainful employment, I am going back to school. As my last class before completing my AA degree, I am enrolled in Emerging Technologies at Ozarks Technical College. These opening statements are probably moot, since I wager the only ones reading this blog which, heretofore has been idle and stagnant lo these four years, are my fellow students in the class. But, pretending I have an actual readership, creating a blog is part of the assignment for the week, so I thought I’d just put in a new post on this old friend here.

I maintained a blog in some form or another for probably three years (I started it on My Space, if that tells you anything) posting something almost every day. The reason I quit is that I felt I was in real danger of becoming irrevocably self-obsessed and one of those people who believed, despite all evidence to the contrary, that their opinion is somehow valuable. After doing this blog for so long it just started to feel like self-indulgent navel-gazing, and I had to give it up. Well, it was that, and the fact that I started going back to school, got married and bought a house, so the endless hours of vomiting random thoughts into the internet interspersed with marathon sessions of video games pretty much went the way of the Dodo.


While I don’t particularly have the time nor inclination to do a blog any more, I am very glad I did it. It felt good to actually create something, albeit something of questionable value, that at least a small segment of the population seemed to enjoy and find amusing. And there are few things better than getting positive feedback from something you’ve posted. It also gave me a vehicle to vent things that I found frustrating. As a politically progressive person, you might understand how the years 2004-2008 were especially frustrating, and left me with a feeling of liberal outrage fatigue. This blog game me an opportunity to point out the things I found unfair, outrageous, and just downright wrong. It gave me, in some small way, a feeling like I had somewhere to put all the indignation I was feeling.

They weren’t all political, topical posts; probably not even most of them. In looking back here I found several of which I’m still really proud. The “K-O’d” post (11/20/06) and “K-O’d; Round II” where I go all crap-house on John K. You might remember him as the creator of Ren and Stimpy, but you probably don’t know that he’s also an incredibly arrogant curmudgeon who clearly Googles himself regularly, because I actually got a response from him over those posts.




Another good series was my rant over the whopping turkey of a movie The Island, and how it was an obvious rip-off of the low-budget Parts: the Clonus Horror. Here’s a link to the series. I actually got a response from the producer of Clonus, Robert Fiveson, commending me on the article, and informing me of their ongoing litigation with the studio that made The Island. I recommend checking those out, if you have the time.

I do still write down my thoughts and events that transpire in my humble little life, but now I do it offline. In what would be recognizable to historical generations as a “private journal.”

Bring Out Your Dead

3/26/08

Long-time readers will no doubt be aware of my affinity for “found objects.” You may recall the massive haul that Hanni and I made from out apartment dumpster last summer, right around the time MSU students were bounding back home for summer break. If not, I invite you to enjoy that here, right after you finish this brief post.

With the ever-decreasing price and availability of consumer electronics, it’s easy to give up and throw away any product that malfunctions even minimally. And how couldn’t you? It costs more to repair, say, a TV than just to buy a new one. Plus, the new one will have a better picture and consume less power. Even so, I feel a severe pang of white, liberal guilt anytime I have to chuck a piece of electronic detritus into the trash to clutter up our ever-expanding landfills. Not only for the fact that I’m creating trash, but because things like TVs, cell phones, radios, microwaves and the like contain some really rather nasty materials and chemicals that may or may not turn all our decedents into flipper-babies.

Fear no longer! In an NPR story earlier today I heard of a website where you can go to find out what type and where certain recycling centers exist near you. Just plug in your zip code and you’ll find places that will take and recycle everything from TVs to cell phones to cameras to any and all computer parts. It’s http://www.mygreenelectronics.org/, dear readers.

Use in good health, my friends. Because a race of angry, mutated flipper-babies is much more frightening in a world where the ice caps have melted. Thank you for your kind attention.

Incest and Home Repair

3/10/08

My wife and I are buying a house this coming spring. Given our budget, we’re probably not getting a top-of-the-line, ready-to-move-in model. Think the “BEFORE” pictures on an HGTV show. Hanni is less enthusiastic about the level of “fixer-upper” we should be willing to get ourselves into, given my propensity for procrastination. I’m sure she has visions of living for two months in a house without a front door because “I’ll get to it,” and really, that duct-taped cardboard rectangle looks fine, doesn’t it? I could even cut us a porthole and pretend like we’re in a submarine! Wouldn’t you like that, First Mate Hanni? Hey, what are you doing with that suitcase?

I feel she has little faith in my inclination or ability to complete home projects. And that’s really unfair. Sure, I don’t have “experience,” or any “know-how,” and nothing in our tenure together has given her any reason to believe I won’t blow off installing the cabinetry in favor of building a small army of paper maché men, but by-thunder I’ve got moxy, and a head full of wild ideas, and that’s something you can’t quantify!

Today I was surfing around trying to find out the best way to paint cabinetry, in the event that we purchase a house with cabinets that look as though the previous owners were running a diaper-testing factory. So, you know, there I am on a website called This Old House, discovering the ins and outs of making like Bob Villa. After reading the article I get to the “comments” section, which started out pretty normal—“normal” in this case meaning normal for the internet, which includes horrific spelling and the grammatical equivalent of having your nuts twisted—with comments such as this:

Mr. Cabinets Wed, Aug 01, 07 at 10:27 AM
Great article about painted kitchen cabinets.

Ruth Robertson Sun, Aug 05, 07 at 12:25 PM
how to paint metal kichen cabinets?

Ruth Robertson Sun, Aug 05, 07 at 12:29 PM
How can you paint METAL kitchen cabinets to look as if they were sprayed?

Fine, right? As I read on, the comments get increasingly weirder, and seem to be posted by people who didn’t bother to read the article, but treated the comments section as if it was going to summarize and get back to them:

Sue Mon, Aug 27, 07 at 04:51 PM
Again,can you paint over oak in the woodwork,or cabinets? Will the wood grain show through? Thanks, Sue

edna stewart Sun, Sep 02, 07 at 01:18 AM
the kitchen cabinets at my church are old we cant afford to replace them but so how would i clean them and what do i use to paint them to give them new life

nancydumas2000@yahoo.com Sat, Sep 15, 07 at 11:13 PM
I need to repaint some metal kitchen cabinets. How should I prepare them and what type of paint do I use to paint them?

I would point out that all of these things were covered in the article. But I mean, these people are busy; look, that woman Edna doesn’t even have time to use capital letters! Ugly kitchens have infected her with chronic run-on sentences! How can she be expected to read when she’s clearly so panicked about her shit-stained cabinets* it has rendered her illiterate?! That’s all good for a chuckle and I can hear the sound of grammar-loathing readers chambering their shotguns, so I should say language isn’t the point of this story.

What I came across shouldn’t have shocked me. We all know that spammers use software to automatically post comments to blogs without verifying passwords. Even so, I was hilariously floored at the direction the comments took on February 29th. I’ll just give you a taste:

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Jesus! They put “Spamer” right there in the name; the brazenness of it all! Animated incest? I had no idea there was such a market for hillbilly cartoons. Not to be outdone, the magic crowd chimed in just for variety:

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I only included examples of the postings on here, but a good 90% of the comments concerned the unnatural love between family members. Maybe there’s some bizarre, hillbilly connection between revitalizing your home and banging your favorite sister-daughter, I dunno. I’m a little afraid that sanding and painting my kitchen cabinets is going to give me a powerful urge to drink Mad Dog and booty call my sister.


*That’s two jokes in one blog about cabinets being inexplicably covered in excrement. I assure you, this is a state of kitchen nightmare to which I have never been privy. What the hell is wrong with me?

Like White on Rice

2/25/08

Are you or someone you know friends with a white person? Maybe you’re a white person yourself and just want to know what other Caucasians like. Find out here, dear readers:

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/

You’re welcome.

Third Time Is a Smelly Charm

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Smoke Em If You Got Em

2/7/08


Whenever I was a smoker* it used to annoy me no end when non-smokers would slap their holier-than-thou palms together at every tax hike or new regulation that came out against cigarettes. It still irritates me a great deal whenever someone pushes their unsolicited idea of healthy living onto another. The jury’s still out on how damaging occasional second-hand smoke is, and while I find the thought of people smoking inside their home around their kids appalling, it seems the casual incidence of standing next to someone puffing away out on the street corner is slightly better than breathing normal city air.

There was, however, one argument the Nons use that I could never really refute. That is the assertion that non-smokers shouldn’t have to pony-up their hard-earned tax dollars for the increased cost of health care associated with smoking. How could I find fault with that? I certainly find the idea that I’m shelling out more to keep the 400-pound woman sucking down KFC extra-crispy than I am for the guy down the block who runs two miles a day. Long have the fat and smoky been chastised for ramping up the costs of health care on the rest of us who’d just rather have an apple, thanks. Well, ladies and gentlemen, it turns out the lady with the doughnut and that dude with the coffin nail are actually saving us thousands.

According to a Dutch study released Monday in the Public Library of Science Medical Journal, the health costs to the public to take care of healthy people is far more than that of smokers or the obese. Why? Bluntly, because “healthy” people hang onto life longer than either of these other groups, and the most expensive healthcare comes from the last years of life. Let’s run the numbers, shall we?

The National Institute for Public Heath and the Environment, who conducted the study, considered three groups of 1000 people each: One smoking group, one obese group, and one healthy group. Healthy people, on average, live 84 years. Obese people about 80 years, and smokers around 77 years. The smokers and obese tended to have more heart disease, obese people had more diabetes, all three groups had the same cancer risk (save the increased lung cancer risk for smokers) and, strangely, the healthy group had the most strokes.

From age 20 on, the cost for health care for the healthy cost about $417,000. The obese cost $371,000, and the puffers came in cheapest at a paltry $326,000. Essentially, healthy people die later for more expensive reasons. Nursing homes are among the most expensive health costs for the people living out their Kevorkian years.

According to Dutch economist Pieter van Baal who took part in the study, “If you live longer, then you cost the health system more. Lung cancer is a cheap disease to treat because people don’t survive very long. But if they are old enough to get Alzheimer’s one day, they may survive longer and cost more.”

So the next time you pass a fellow human shivering on the sidewalk, furiously sucking fire deep into his lungs, give him a little wink and say, “Thanks for doing your part, buddy.”

* As of last Monday I’ve been a non-smoker for 7 months. I think I’ve had 5 or 6 smokes since quitting.

Sources:
http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/health/15293006.html
http://www.ibnlive.com/news/living-longer-is-hazardous-to-the-taxpayer/58164-17.html
http://www.reformer.com/editorials/ci_8192931

The Devil is in the Disney

2/2/08

Sometimes you look at the current incarnation of a company and think, “Oh, if only its creator could see it now, he’d be spinning in his grave.” Wal-Mart, for instance. Sam Walton was a down-to-earth businessman who believed in uplifting the common worker, sharing the wealth, and, you know, treating people fairly. If Walton could see the demonic, spirit-crushing juggernaut his creation has become today the spinning would be so intense he’d most likely escape into orbit.

That’s really the only example I can think of offhand, as it seems much easier to imagine business moguls who would be pretty much fine with the way their particular economic horror shows are being run today. Henry Ford springs to mind. Henry was, as you may have heard, a bit of a dick. Sure the production genius best implemented* the large-scale assembly line, which has directly led to the mass production of tons of really bad, cheap crap today, but he also was fervently anti-union, a rampant anti-Semitic, and I’m pretty sure one time he ate a baby. But it was a China-baby, so it’s okay.

Disney is another one of these mega-corporations that began with a brilliant douchebag at the helm. Walt Disney fostered a feeling of anti-Semitism at his studio (why were people back then so afraid of brisket and dreidels?) and may or may not have been a Nazi sympathizer. Also, he was under the distinctly rich-person-mentality that the “camaraderie” of his studios compensation for the fact he paid his animators less than other companies. Walt pointed to an animator’s strike as evidence of the “growing Communist conspiracy” in the United States.

And ever since Walt’s death in 1966, Disney has moved ever closer to realizing Walt’s dream of bringing joy to people through charging them out the ass for their shit, and if you can corn-hole a few of ‘em on the way, so much the better! I need not point out their King Midas style admission and toy prices, but what the hell is with this malarkey where Disney videos are on sale for like three minutes and then “go back into the Disney vault” only to be re-released in year or two for another round of hoarding? It would be like J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury publishing 50,000 Harry Potter books only to say, “Sorry, poor kids! Good luck finding a copy! Maybe if your parents stop buying food next Christmas when we print another 25 copies of the Sorcerer’s Stone, you too can be happy!” It’s not illegal, but it is a shit-heel way to run a business, rather like China’s artificial suppression of its currency, Disney manipulates the market for bigger profits. But today I heard the most callous, ass-way the demons at Disney have come up with to fleece parents and turn children into fit-throwing dictators who identify a parent’s love with their willingness to open their wallet.

Miley Cyrus, who has changed her name more times than Prince, and plays Hanna Montana on the wildly popular Disney show, recently wrapped her concert “Hanna Montana and Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds.” A concert title much more appropriate for hermaphroditic porn. In the concert the disturbingly attractive daughter of one-hit-wonder Billy Ray Cyrus plays both herself and her Hanna Montana character…which totally isn’t weird at all. Right. The show was so successful Disney has decided to launch a 3-D movie version. Now, this isn’t your Jaws 3 or Friday the 13th 3D, either; this is like one step removed from virtual reality. U2 is releasing a concert in this medium as well. From all accounts it’s supposed to be truly mind-blowing; like you’re right there with Hanna, if that’s your bag. The beauty about this is that kids who couldn’t get tickets to the live show, either because of time constraints or cost prohibitions, can now go watch it on the big screen and get at least a sense of what it was like. Or, that would be the case if Disney weren’t the corporate equivalent of pure, capitalist evil.

Disney has announced that this movie release will only run from tomorrow, February 2nd, through next Friday, February 08. Oh, and most of the timeslots are sold out. And, naturally, scalpers are now charging cocaine prices to parents unequipped to explain corporate evil and greed to their 4th-grader. It’s a movie, okay? It’s a fucking movie, Disney! It’s not like Hanna herself is up there running around, you monsters; it’s celluloid! What conceivable reason other than bowing to the forces of Satan could Disney have for putting a timetable on this movie?

Man…just…fuck you, Disney.



*Henry Ford did not invent the assembly line. Nobody “invented” the assembly line. Ford was just the first one to put in a moving conveyor belt in 1913, thus best improving the process. In truth, it would be more accurate to say Ransom E. Olds (Olds Motor Vehicle Co) had the first assembly line in 1901. Ford just made it faster, more convenient, and mobile. Ford’s greatest genius was listening to very, very smart people.


Sources:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18599173
http://www.news-tribune.net/features/cnhinspopculture_story_031103453.html?keyword=topstory

Governor’s Mansion: Everything Must GO!

1/27/08


Governor Blunt has lost his lease! All merchandise priced to move! Especially those pesky emails we don’t want the public to see! Missouri’s Republican governor Matt Blunt (son of Congressman Roy Blunt) announced to a stunned audience last week that he will not be running for reelection as governor. This was especially unexpected since he had been fundraising like Jerry Lewis and had already started running negative campaign ads against Democratic rival Missouri Attorney General Jay Nixon. Hey Matt, what’s with the sudden 180? In his own words:

“What we set-out to achieve four years ago has been accomplished… After a great deal of thought and prayer, and with the knowledge that we have achieved virtually everything I set out to accomplish, and more…I feel we have changed what I wanted to change in the first term there is not the same sense of mission for a second.”

Wait, really? Your excuse for quitting is, essentially, “all done here!”? It appears so, which seems odd and flimsy at best and downright idiotic and suspicious at worst. It’s not like being governor is akin to being camp councilor, where, you know, when the summer’s over your job is fucking done. But hey, sure, political figures who are at the top of their game, 37-years-old and have done nothing wrong walk away from office all the time. About as often as Ann Coulter has experience periods of lucidity, I’ll wager. Oh, but don’t fret; Blunt is a Republican being investigated for wrongdoing, so naturally he tacked on this tired old piece of refuse:

“Melanie and our son William Branch mean the world to me. I have spent more time away from them than I would like. We are ready for the next chapter in our lives and I am looking forward to spending more time with them.”

Ohhhhhh, good gravy. The family card, Matt? You’re playing the family card? How could--oh sweet Jesus what's wrong with that kid? I don't want to be cruel, but are Blunt and his wife related? It looks like that thing from The Island of Dr. Moreau. Yeesh.

Why is Blunt really tucking tail? Basically, it’s a huge election year, and he’s a big, fat, smelly liability for the Republican Party. Not only is Blunt’s office and Blunt personally being investigated for knowingly deleting interoffice government emails (which are public record in Missouri and illegal to trash) but he was informed by his lawyer that they shouldn’t be doing it. Not only did Blunt continue the policy, but he fired his attorney Scott Eckersley, and then went into Eckersley’s personal email account fishing for information about to whom the scrupulous lawyer blew the whistle. If you have any doubts whether Blunt is guilty of this crime, one only has to turn to the press conference he gave a few weeks ago about the charges. Blunt took questions for about 3 minutes, then his eyes appeared to glaze over as he cut the reporters short in mid-question and almost sprinted from the room like a gazelle spotting a lion. It was very strange and hilarious.

As for the claim that Blunt has accomplished all he set out to do, he has had a not-unimpressive record. If you don’t care about people, that is. His big selling points in yesterday’s release were balancing the budget, boosting education, reducing unemployment, and medical care for the poor. Quickly, we’ll take them into account.

1. Balanced Budget
He did do this. Without raising taxes. All he had to do was gut Medicare and slash social services. However, if Blunt’s plans for this year were implemented, we were looking at a $400 million budget deficit in 2 years, according to the Missouri Budget Project.

2. Boosting Education
This seems to have been done, there was more money for some schools and universities, but I’m sure Hanni would know more about it than I would.

3. Reducing Unemployment
Again, he did accomplish this. For awhile. Unemployment hovered between 5 ½ and 6% in 2004 when Blunt took over. Between August of ’05 and July of ’07, unemployment ranged between 4.6 and 5.3%, with the average being 5%. It hasn’t been below 5% since then. I will say it’s not bad; even a 1 percentage point drop means 25,000 more people are working, but the 90,000 “new jobs” Blunt claims to have created is rather misleading.

4. Medical Care
Okay, frankly this one baffles me. Blunt’s balanced budget and cash for other programs pretty much came from dismantling huge swaths of Medicaid and other social programs. His program ended health care for 125,000 Missourians. Most cuts were:

A. 61,000 low-income parents — mostly working mothers — with incomes between 30 percent and 75 percent of the poverty line (between $4,800 and $12,100 per year for a family of three), after certain deductions;[2]
B. 4,600 senior citizens and people with permanent disabilities with incomes from $6,900 per year (for an individual) to $9,600;
C. 3,000 working people with temporary disabilities (receiving medical assistance under General Relief);
D. 1,150 people who recently left welfare for work;
E. 13,600 children and adults who would lose coverage because of stricter application requirements and increased paperwork; and
F. 24,000 children who would lose Medicaid (MC+) coverage because their families are unable to pay increased premiums.

http://www.cbpp.org/4-4-05health.htm

Since I’m running long I won’t even touch on the fact that Blunt has made it more difficult and supported legislation to ban pharmacists from distributing emergency contraception, or the fact that he would be pleased as punch if medicine and science in the Show Me State went back to leaches and ether.

So…you might say I’m skeptical when he dusts his hands and claims “we is done!” Not the worst governor we’ve ever seen, but I’m not sad to see him go. Also, what horrific things could possibly be in those emails for Blunt to risk deleting them even when he knew it was illegal? My guess: Weasel fights in the state office.


Sources: http://www.cbpp.org/4-4-05health.htm
Employment: Dept of Labor
http://www.kansascity.com/281/story/433207.html
Governor’s Press Release - transcript

Pop Quiz

Overheard in an Office

1/22/08

“Well, I don’t have to go to my doctor for another 2 weeks at least. My doctor was in a mood last night. A funny mood; he was funny. I told him I got a new scale—a new talking scale—and he said “It’s not sarcastic is it?” Heh-heh. Well I know I haven’t been weighing right because I don’t do it with shoes or street clothes. According to his scale I’ve lost 7 pounds. I’m a lot more accountable for what I put in my mouth if I’m weighing myself. ‘Course then after I went to the doctor’s office we went out to eat at Red Robin, so…”

I ask you, ladies and gentlemen; are the above statements:

A. Dumb things to say
B. The Dumbest thing to say

Pass your tests to the front whenever you’re finished.

Gotcha. That Will Be $8

1/18/08

There’s an interesting book gracing the shelves of your local bookstore, ladies and gentlemen, and it covers a topic that concerns us all. Namely, the fact that businesses in the new millennium seem bound and determined to small-print-fee us into the poorhouse.* It’s called Gotcha Capitalism: How Hidden Fees Rip You Off Every Day-and What You Can Do About It by Bob Sullivan.

We all know that companies are…pretty much ripping us off on a daily basis. It’s not as if they don’t have the right to charge whatever they want, but they don’t have to be so bloody sneaky about it that you have no earthly idea how much something will end up costing you. In his book Sullivan points out that we all know about the $2-$3 fee for using another bank’s ATM, but what you may not know is that your bank could charge you another two or three dollars for the same transaction. So that $20 you took out has now essentially been instantly reduced to $15. We all sort of take this stuff for granted, because is it really worth getting your dander up over a measly $2? Maybe not, but that stuff adds, up, friends. From the book:

"You didn’t fill up the rental car with gas?Gotcha! Gas costs $7 a gallon here.
Your bank balance fell to $999.99 for one day?Gotcha! That’ll be $12.
You miss one payment on that 18-month same-as-cash loan?Gotcha! That’ll be $512 extra.
You’re one day late on that electric bill?Gotcha! All your credit cards now have a 29.99% interest rate."

That last is a bit of an exaggeration. But, your credit card account will “adjust” to a higher rate if you pay your bill late. Pay late twice in a 6-month period and it’ll be jacked up to that 29% rate, all right. Oh, plus the $35 fee each time. Plus the annual fee. And cash withdraw fee. Oh, and that cash APR will be much higher, too. And the “transaction fee” of 3% to use one of those “promo rate” checks. Also, when you pay your bill, your payment is first applied to any fees, then to the interest, then to the principle. And it goes to pay off the lowest interest rate first, if you have, say, some purchase on there made with a promo rate. I used to work for a credit card company. You ever wonder why they all have a Wilmington, Delaware address? Is “The First State” some kind of wonderland for financial institutions? Yes, actually; credit card companies are based out of Delaware because that state has no cap on how much they can charge you in interest. Oh, and we can say thanks to the former Republican Congress of 2006 for the butt-fucking fact that credit card debt can no longer be dismissed through bankruptcy.

Booking a hotel room is another big one. Since the advent of the internet companies have become aware that we can find the cheapest price for something just sitting at home. So they basically made it impossible for us to tell how much something really was. Hotels have taken to charging hidden booking fees, local phone and even room-to-room call fees, and at the Wynn in Las Vegas, well, they’ve just gone off the rails. The Wynn has mini bars in its rooms, just like anyplace, but if you even take something out to look at it, the Wynn will charge you for it if you don’t replace the item within 60 seconds. It has a little optical sensor and everything. Sweet tap-dancing Christ.

Bob Sullivan supposes there are probably a lot of companies that would love to do honest business. But we’re stuck in this kind of shame spiral because the ones who do can’t compete with the ones that hide their price behind a wall of fine print and bullshit. There was a hotel, for example, that started posting its true price for rooms on the internet. I’m sure you can guess what happened; their sales tanked. Customers were still paying the same amount to stay there as before, and the same or less than comparable hotels, but those other hotels hid their costs in fees for ice or what-the-shit ever. That’s the saddest goddamn thing I think I’ve ever heard.

We’ve become so inured to thinking that this is just the way things are we don’t even get upset about it anymore. And if you did, what could you do about it? Banks are probably the worst. Many banks now actually make more money on the fees they charge than from interest. Their entire business model has changed from making money through loans and finance to trying to figure out how much they can siphon off a dollar at a time before an angry mob of pitchfork-wielding villagers sacks the building.

I can relate. My wife and I have a checking, savings and credit card account at a certain bank which will remain nameless. Okay, I’ll give you a hint; it’s Bank of ___(the “A” in USA)___. Wanna transfer money between your savings and checking? Well that’s easy, convenient and free online, but don’t let your savings account drop below $300 or that’ll be $3, please! I used to pay my Bank of…somewhere credit card online, but since Hanni and I opened a checking account there, I can’t. Know why? Because my main checking account is at another bank, and once you get a BOA checking account you can no longer pay your credit card bill with any other account. Man…just…FUCK YOU!

At any rate, it’s an interesting read.



*They don’t actually have poorhouses anymore. But writing it makes me feel just so delightfully Dickensian.

Sources:

NPR – http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17898418

Amazon.com – http://www.amazon.com/Gotcha-Capitalism-Hidden-Every-Day/dp/0345496132

A Guy Walks Into a Brothel

A Guy Walks Into a Brothel…


1/10/08

Good evening Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea, let’s go to press! Dots and dashes and lots of flashes from city to city and coast to coast!* Here’s the news…oh, by the way, this was supposed to be posted yesterday, so here’s your discount, day-old news!


How Much to Fold the Laundry?

(WARSAW) I can think of fewer things sadder than a married man who chooses to frequent a brothel. Well, there is one thing that’s sadder; finding out that your wife is working there in her spare time.

That’s precisely what happened to a Polish man, according to the tabloid Super Express. Apparently his dear lady wife had told her husband she’d been getting all the extra money working in a nearby store. I guess she just neglected to tell him it was a vagina store.

“I was dumbfounded,” the man told Super Express. “I thought I was dreaming.” The unhappy couple had been in the shackles of holy matrimony for 14 years.

There is some good news, though! They’re getting a divorce. Rarely can I think of two people that so desperately should not be married.

*This is actually a famous Walter Winchell quote, not yours truly.

Source: NPR.org – Marriage Unravels After Meeting at Brothel
Yahoo News – What are you doing here?


Just Wind It Up & It'll Go!

(NEW DELHI) The Indian carmaker Tata Motors unveiled the its new car The Nano, yesterday at a New Delhi car show. The Nano is officially the world’s cheapest car, with a price tag of only $2500 US. You may have recently heard of Tata Motors Ltd, as they are negotiating to purchase the Jaguar and Land Rover brands from the demonic and floundering Ford Motor Co.

The Nano is actually a pretty sexy little number, if you consider vaguely egg-shaped objects sexy. It’s a 4-seater and doesn’t have a huge get-up-an-go, but it doesn’t need it. The Nano also sports no truck, as it’s a rear-engine vehicle. Even with taxes the Nano will go for about half of what the world’s former cheapest car from Maruti Suzuki costs. The cute little thing gets an impressive 45 miles per gallon. It’s designed for developing nations, such as India, China and Africa, who traditionally have relied on scooters, motorbikes and bicycles for locomotion. In India only 8 people in 1000 own cars, and The Nano is an attempt to not only tap a new market, but an effort to more safely get people around without having to pile 3 people and several hundred pounds of cargo onto a tiny scooter. And they do that. It’s friggin’ nuts.

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/ousiv/idUSDEL00094120080110


Definition of Self-Delusion

(JERUSALEM) President Bush announced he was “confident” there will be a peace plan in place between Israel and the West Bank before he leaves office. He thinks there can be a peace, establishment of a Palestinian state, and an end to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which has been going on since 1967. Bush has reason to be confident, it having been a full 12 or 13 hours since a salvo of Katyusha rockets rained down into Israel. I wish that were a joke. Also, Israel won’t accept any peace negotiation that doesn’t include the Gaza Strip…which is controlled by Hamas. You may remember them as the terrorist group that violently overthrew Palestinian control of Gaza. Yeah, they’re the guys who don’t recognize Israel as a nation, and want it wiped off the planet. Sure, that should only take a year to hammer out, no problem.

Calling the President delusional at this point is rather like calling Hitler “a little angry,” but even for Bush, believing not only that there will be a Middle East peace, but that his influence means anything is delusion of epic proportions. “I am committed to doing all I can to achieve it,” were the President’s words.

I’m not sure exactly what in Dubya’s reputation makes his Swiss cheese of a diseased mind think he has any credibility in the Middle East. Which do you think carries more weight, his continued dick-waving behavior in the region, or the fact that this week was the first time he even bothered to visit the Israeli area in his 7-year tenure? Maybe it’s the fact that he pretty much ignores any country that either (a) doesn’t contain oil, or (b) that he doesn’t want to launch his next holy Crusade upon that makes him the perfect adjunct to this peace process.

Buy Me House, Glorp, Snoggle, Fnag

1/9/07


I’ve mentioned some of this material before, but this post has the joy of a ludicrously moronic Craigslist posting, so bear with me.

Anyone who has spoken to me for more than a few minutes is probably aware I’m a bit of a dick when it comes to grammar. It is physically painful for me to hear people butchering a language that is already the biggest bastard in the orphanage. Hearing some douchebag in a smelly muscle shirt insert non-existent R’s into the word “wash,” claim something literally happened which is beyond the scope of reality, use the word “ain’t”, or ask “where you at?” with that final word just dangling there like a dead, rotting herring, send me into fits of homicidal rage. Visions of attempting to cram an English textbook down their sic-spewing throats dance through my head like the singing movie snack advertisement.

It’s not that I’m elitist, snarky, or merely an asshole. Well, okay, I am all of those things, and it is them a little bit, but not mostly. Mostly it’s just the frustration that so few people don’t seem to give a shit how terrifically ignorant they sound. Whenever I bring up the fact that, hey, it’s Joe and me in this instance, they react as if I’m asking them to pour battery acid into their crotch. There’s this prevailing notion that grammar doesn’t matter. But it does, if only in the way others perceive you. I found this, for example, on a recent online posting:

"we have two houses that we would like to sell we have listed with two different
realtors and they could not sell none of them one realtor was dumber than a box
of rocks one house is 3bedroom 1 bath that needs fixed up it was priced at
49900.00 the other one is 2beedroom 1 bath with 24x24 shop and new furnace and
hot water heater newac system it was listed at 69900.00 one is at 2028 n benton
which is rented for 475.00 and the other one is at 2127 n lyon which we live in"

Great smoking horny toads! Upon reading this my eyes began to glaze over and I’m pretty sure I had a minor stroke. The right side of my face is still tingly. Leaving aside the fact that this entire post is a run-on sentence, nary a punctuation mark in sight, I love the fact that they refer to their realtor as “dumber than a box of rocks” right after the gem of a phrase “could not sell none” makes its ghastly appearance. It’s sort of like hearing Corky call someone a fucking retard. And what, was moving his pinky finger over to the Shift key just far too much effort? “I ain’t cap’tlizin’ sheeeeet. Fuck ‘em, man! Pass me them Twinkies, Murtle.”

Can you take an ad like this seriously? I’m not sure what the legal ramifications are when purchasing a house from the brain-damaged. This cat might be the smartest mongoloid on his block; he might even be a goddamn genius but you’d never know it because he writes and, likely, speaks as if the left hemisphere of his brain has been removed. Perception, people.

Why take the effort to speak properly? Because doing otherwise gives your listener an excuse to think you are an idiot, and conclude you don’t know what the bloody shit you’re talking about. It’s an excuse for people to dismiss you. If nothing else, maybe someday you’d like to make a first impression that doesn’t require you to end up banging the sleepy-eyed turd who smells like cheese because everyone with above a 4th grade vocabulary isn’t interested in your ignorant ass.

Of course, the amendment to this rule is that if you’re attractive enough, you’ll be forgiven anything and might as well go around just grunting and pointing whenever you want something.

Ryan's Lonely Xmas Eve 2007

Ryan's Lonely Xmas Eve 2007

I have no doubt you have all been anxiously awaiting my new lonely Xmas Eve video. Well...here you go, dear readers. Enjoy.

Warning: There is some PG-13 nudity. But really, what is Xmas without some butt-shots, huh? Watch with caution, ladies and gentlemen.

Happy HanuChrismaKwansika

12/21/07

My wife likes her family. She likes traditional things. I have my suspicions that she popped, fully-formed, from the cover of a Hallmark card drawn by a drunken and dangerously insane Norman Rockwell…because her family is, like most of ours, delightfully dysfunctional. I like my family, too, I just don’t really have the seemingly irrepressible compulsion to hang out with them the way Hanni does. I have never particularly understood why someone should feel closer to another on the sheer Universal happenstance that you share a huge swath of DNA. I’m personally closer to my friends, and feel about them in the same way Hanni feels about her family. I think she has always looked upon this view as somewhat perverse. Whenever we discuss why oh why she feels we have to call every sibling on every birthday, my dear one gives me the sort of look usually reserved for wet, smelly things recently pulled from a shower drain.

I admit, in many of my opinions, I am unconventional. But I don’t think Hanni fully appreciates that my seemingly idiotic values have as much worth to me as her more traditional ones. No, dear readers, I fear what we have here is a value-superiority complex. Christmas is a prime example.

I love Christmas. LOVE it. You might think it bizarre for an atheist who seems to regard humanity with constant disappointment and distain to go a big rubbery one inside at the thought of tinsel and lights, but it’s true. I love almost everything about it*. I even love the commercialization aspect of it. I love the fact that every year it seems to gobble up more of the calendar, like some unstoppable Pac-Man juggernaut. I love that most people seem to be just a little bit nicer, even if it only means dropping a few pennies into a large, red pot because of liberal guilt under the stare of a bell-ringing madman. I love that people actually wear clothing with decorations on it a 3-year-old should be embarrassed sporting. I love the crowds, I love the shopping, I even love that it takes 2 hours to drive 3 blocks, and that you have to park far enough away from to entrance so as to require a native guide. I fucking love wrapping presents.
I love the fact that, for a few weeks out of the year, drunken, semi-dangerous individuals are allowed to dress in disguise and interact with children.

I love egg-nog, spiked with whiskey, please!

I love White Elephants, I love bad and embarrassing employee parties, I love buying toys and gloves and food for needy children. I love snow, I love the food, I love Christmas movies; I love Christmas with a sort of teary-eyed wonder that should only be possible for characters of Claymation™.

It’s a Wonderful Life makes me cry every time. But to be fair, I’m usually pretty drunk by the time Jimmy Stewart starts bellowing “Merry Christmas, you old Building ‘n Loan!” in his curiously penguin--esque voice. Ryan’s (No Longer Lonely!) Christmas Eve is a thing of beauty, ladies and gentlemen.

My wife does not love these things. She loves Xmas, but for all the wrong reasons. She seems to be operating under the delusion that Christmas is the celebration of some jive turkey who had an awfully trusting step-father and a mother with a highly suspect story. She is also under the impression that this time is about being close to your family, and that one should spend huge cross-sections of the day interacting with people who, let’s face it, we wouldn’t be friends with were it not for the outside chance we might need a kidney or some bone marrow someday. Sure, I like my family and I go to their houses to open presents and spend like, a few hours there, but nothing like the marathon Yule-fest I fear my wife has planned this year. I’ve heard some horrifying talk of…games, and dangerous speak concerning…Christmas Eve services.

But we make a pretty good compromise of it; I see far more family and consume far less booze than I am comfortable with, and Hanni only gets to play 4 hours of dominoes with her kin instead of 8. I am grateful this holiday season to be married to a wonderful, understanding and loving woman who last night described being hitched to me as taking care of a horny 4-year-old. We celebrate it in vastly different ways, but I can think of no one with whom I would rather share the forty or fifty more Christmas’s to come.

Happy Holidays, everyone. And I cannot be more sincere when I say, peace on earth and goodwill toward man.


*Well, I mean, except for the religious thing, but thankfully that’s been almost bred out of it.

It’s a Gerbil Xmas, Charlie Brown

12/11/07


As I may have mentioned in a previous post, Hanni and I procured a couple of gerbils after my goldfish, Mr. Tickles, went fins-up. Through the ignorance of myself and the pet store employee (though, to be fair, pets aren’t my fucking business) we did not end up with two males as previously thought, but a male and a female. Our first clue came when puberty descended on the male like an Acme safe. It looks like he’s carrying two hairy lima beans down there. Naturally, our house turned into a sort of incestuous gerbil-porn-show for a few days. ‘Cause, y’know, their brother and sister. The sounds of Barry White, banjo music and squeaking nigh drove us to madness. If images of freakish, inbred, flipper-baby gerbils are playing through your head, don’t fear. Provided our guys weren’t terribly inbred already (and they showed no obvious genetic defects to believe this) it’s highly unlikely incest of this nature would result in genetic monsters. Good news, Alabama! Long story short, last Friday the gerbils we named Alexander and Hamilton used the latter’s vagina like a log-flume and out came seven tiny, pink and distinctly alien-esque babies.

This is the pups at one day old. See that white part of the stomach? That’s actually milk; their skin is so thin you can see right through it.

Yes, we have handled the babies, and no, she didn’t eat any of them. That’s only common in hamsters; gerbils should be fine with your smell on their tots. The only times a mother will eat her babies is if there is no water available, if they smell of something truly bizarre like an unfamiliar gerbil, or if one dies. The father’s cool, too. Apparently gerbil fathers watched a lot of Leave It to Beaver, because their fairly attentive parents.

The really troubling thing is that Hamilton is almost certainly preggers again. You see, gerbils mate right after the litter is born, and the embryos are implanted after she’s finished breast-feeding. So, in about 40 days, we will have another swarm of pink science-fiction creatures.

We have six pups that will almost certainly be black like the parents, and this one guy here who we think will be blond…or albino…I don’t even know if gerbils can be albino. It will almost certainly have pink eyes, which is visible through the skin. I’m pretty sure it’s a lab rat pretending to be a gerbil. Clearly Hamilton is a tawdry whore.

Dude. Gerbil 69. Nasty:

We are now in the uncomfortable position of either separating Alex and Hamilton and keeping him with one son and her with a daughter (they must be kept in pairs) or enduring the laughter and ridicule of several veterinary professionals until we find one who will neuter a tiny rodent.

Sometimes They Come Back

12/4/07

You know, there are certain objects that, despite their astoundingly useful existence, never really get the credit they deserve. A can opener, for instance. That is the sort of thing that you just never think about until you suddenly discover you are powerless to get into that tin of cream of mushroom. Sure, you could puncture it with a knife enough times to pry the lid off, I suppose, and after a trip to the emergency room you might even be able to enjoy your lunch. But the can opener is an object with only one specific purpose, and it performs this job so swimmingly that no other tool even comes close.

These are the things I thought while watching in horror as poop slowly rose perilously close to the lip of my toilet bowl like horribly little brown ships on a polluted tide. I’m pretty sure I must have brain damage, because despite the fact I have lamented on occasions just like this the fact we don’t have a plunger, once the danger has passed I am immediately afflicted by plunger-purchasing-amnesia. I’m no world-class pooper or anything, it just so happens that a few times a year something frigs up and the toilet suddenly reverses its only job, which is to make waste go away.

I can tell you here and now that there is no object quite as useful as a plunger when you need it. It’s not even as if you can rig some kind of MacGuyverian stand-in to work as a plunger; there is no object or combination of objects that will do. Well, I suppose you could use the hose attachment of your vacuum, but that plan seems to have three or four severe flaws, not the least of which is the horrors of accelerating feces to hurricane speeds. What’s the other option? Straighten a hanger and just sort of jab at the fibrous mass of impacted TP until it is sufficiently aerated to give way? The mind recoils in terror. A non-brain damaged person would probably get in their car and aim it toward the nearest hardware store, I guess. But not your intrepid, neighborhood reporter, ladies and gentlemen! I would have none of that malarkey. I opted for the method kids have been using to get out of doing dishes since time out of mind – the soak. I let time and water work its erosive magic until the paper fell apart and was whisked away. Thankfully, this happened automatically, because with the water level a scant 2 millimeters from the rim there was no way I was going to test the situation by flushing again. All was well by the next morning. But can I count on being so lucky next time? Images of poo logs melting all over my bathroom floor like decaying goldfish rise in the mind.

That reminds me…I need to buy a plunger.

The Devil is in the Details

12/3/07

In its ever-continuing attempt to finally make television unwatchable, Fox Network has upped the bottom-scraping once again with its new game show “The Moment of Truth.” Now, I’m sort of a default Democrat, since I happen to care whether the planet’s weather system collapses and believe that old men shouldn’t be shot in the face, so I’m pretty much on the writers’ side in this whole strike situation. But if there’s one reason to be angry as a wet badger in a bag about it, it’s the fact that the strike will invariably increase the number of unscripted, “reality” programming out there, and “The Moment of Truth” is its whorish herald.
The show features “average” people strapped to a lie detector and asked devilishly embarrassing and personal questions such as:

· “Do you really care about starving children in Africa?”
· “Are you sexually attracted to one of your wife’s friends?”
· “Do fat people repulse you?”
· “Would you cheat on your wife if you knew you wouldn’t be caught?”
· “Do you think you will be with your husband five years from now?”

Whenever I told Hanni about this historic shit-pile, she asked me how you win at such a game. My first thought was, “Does anyone win?” The object is to answer up to 21 questions. If you answer all 21 honestly, you get $500,000. The player can stop the hemorrhaging at any time, but once a question is asked it must be answered. I suppose you could argue the people participating in this televised abortion of entertainment deserve what they get, especially since they know all of the questions they’re going to be asked. You see, in order to obtain a level with the polygraph, the contestants are asked 75 questions beforehand, 21 of which will be asked on air, in front of a live audience including your soon-to-be former loved ones. They aren’t told the results of the polygraph, so I’m sure a great number of these greedy lunatics figure they can beat the box.

Said friends and family are even provided with a button meant to “rescue” the contestant from a particularly spiky question. Naturally, since the type of people this show would attract are the ethical equivalent of week-old afterbirth, they never use it for the intended purpose. Instead, they dive for it like a lion on a bunny whenever a question hits them where they live. For example, when asked if she would be more attracted to her husband if he dropped twenty pound of lard, the woman’s partner couldn’t jam that button fast enough. According Fox’s president of alternative entertainment Mike Darnell, “What ends up happening is they use it to help themselves because they don’t want to hear something revealed about themselves.”
So, basically what you get to witness is the worst factions of human selfishness trotted out because of greed. Fantastic. Aside from the fact you’re watching a physical manifestation of the Id, the fact that polygraphs aren’t particularly accurate may give one pause. They’re dynamite for telling whether someone is nervous or not, but in determining the validity for a statement their accuracy has been put somewhere between 80-98% by the American Polygraph Association. That’s…a pretty big gap.

A version of the show originally aired in Columbia. Of course it did; the rest of the world is America’s testing ground for shows we can’t think of on our own. But in the Columbian show the questions were…a bit different. The show was temporarily taken off the air when a player confessed to hiring a hit-man to bump-off her goddamn husband. I would have loved to be in on the meeting where that question was thought up. What sort of ad campaign would you air during that show? Rat poison? Surprisingly, Fox has decided questions related to a felony aren’t going to be part of its package.

The really depressing thing about this whole matter is that I have just described something that will be wildly successful. Fuck you, you human bastards. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go empty the world of whiskey and try to forget all this.

Source: TV Week, Darnell in Defense of the ‘Truth’

A Brief History of Time

11/26/07

As you may or may not be aware, I am taking online classes in a desperate attempt to carve out a better life for my wife and myself. I really rather like the History class that’s just wrapping up, and my final project is to do a 3-4 page paper concerning my family tree and any interesting characters several generations back. Prior to this exercise, I might as well have hatched from a giant space-egg for all I knew about my ancestry. Fortunately, several years ago my uncle took it upon himself to research the Jett family, and I had to do minimal investigation since he just emailed me all the information. It seems I have a rather…interesting family history. I suppose it should surprise no one that a man who thinks taking and sharing pictures of himself, naked, perched atop a stool is funny, would have a somewhat bizarre and really rather fucked up genealogy.

That, my dear readers, is the coat-of-arms awarded to the first known “Jett,” a Bavarian by the name of Sir Johan Van Jett, for his service in the first Crusade (1095-1099). So…great. My premier ancestor went to war because people keen on Jesus decided to kill a whole lot of folk in order to “reclaim holy land.” Also, the plundering was good back then. It seems some of the Jett line stayed in that region, evidenced by the same coat of arms above used by Baron Jett zu Munzenberg of Prussian Bavaria in 1701, and another portion went to England. I am totally going to start referring to myself as Baron Jett.

The first Jett to hop the pond, and to whom my uncle has been able to directly link us to, was Peter Jett. He came over to Virginia with his wife, kids and another family, in 1663. Where half of them were promptly killed in an Indian raid. Things are quiet for a few generations, and then it seems in the latter 1800’s our family has a rather embarrassing and loony brush with history. You may remember a feller by the name of John Wilkes Booth who shot Lincoln, spouted some gibberish, and leapt from a balcony to disappear off into the night. Booth injured his leg in that jump and, after ferrying across the Potomac, chanced across three former Confederate soldiers. One of them was Private (or perhaps Captain, the history is vague) William “Willie” Jett. He was sympathetic to Booth’s plight, and led him to a friend’s farmhouse by the name of Garrett where the assassin holed up for a few days. Jett was eventually found and questioned and, when threatened with a serious hanging, gave up Booth’s location. Fun!

I don’t have the specifics on hand, but I hear tell that the first Jetts to come to Missouri were horse thieves, which was punishable by death in those days. Then again, looking at a man sideways in the 19th century was tantamount to anally raping his mother, so…

Oh! One more fantastic journey down Jett lore: This gentleman is also not directly related to me, but there was a Curt “Bad Curt” Jett who received a life sentence for killing Attorney J. B. Marcum in Jackson, Kentucky, and shooting his cousin, Marshall Jim Cockrill from a courthouse window in 1902. Jett was apparently a “feudist,” which is a fancy way of saying his family didn’t get along with people. He was pardoned for reasons not entirely clear to me some 20 years later. It is, I suppose, kind of neat to have a relative with a nickname in quotes, but I think I could have been more creative than “Bad Curt.”

So…what have we learned? Well, I am descended from thieves, murderers and treasonous abettors. Wonderful. On the up side, my mother’s side of the family is so fucked up that she just found out after his death that the man she thought was her half brother was really her real brother, because her mom banged her ex-husband while married to another man. And my maternal grandmother spoke 3 languages, was a fantastic artist, abandoned her family for weeks at a time, and thought she talked to the Devil. Also, kind of a racist.

It’s a blue-eyed miracle I’m not either in prison or the booby hatch…the latter being not nearly as fun as it sounds.