Corporate intelligence, Vol. 10: We're number -1, we're number -1!

I'm filing this one in the No Press is Bad Press folder:

While perusing the Web to find out if there was already a pitchfork-wielding mob I could join on the march to the Frankenstein's Castle of whoever makes those TVs at gas stations and grocery store lines, or if I'd just have to start my own, Google brought me to GSTV.com.

GSTV stands for Gas Station TeleVision, which, as far as I can tell, is a company that supplies content for the TVs in gas stations and, presumably, other totally inappropriate locations.

But the page to which I was pointed was not their splash page, designed to sell me on the idea of not cursing the waking nightmare this concept has wrought, but rather to a (authorized?) reprinting of a Wall Street Journal article in which the company is mentioned.

The article, despite the WSJ's "pro-business" bent, is distinctly hostile to the very idea of this company, starting with the title, I Don't Want My GSTV, and ending on this gem with which I couldn't agree more:

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Before allowing me to complete my transaction, the pump TV asked me whether I was hungry and exhorted me to go inside to check out the snacks in the minimart. I wasn't, but it did make me wonder -- do they sell hammers in there? There's a TV I'd like to smash.

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I'm thinking someone down at headquarters needs to call a meeting to pass a motion to consider implementing a new policy of manual review of the automatic feed to this section of the Web site.

Pretend it's still Halloween with me!

In case you're breathing a sigh of relief that, after hours of painstakingly inspecting, and possibly dissecting, your children's Halloween candy, they were not near-victims of some dastardly neighborhood psychopath, I just thought I'd like to share with you the secret fact that No one has ever found an actual razor or pin or anything similar in a piece of Halloween candy from a stranger. Ever.

This is decades-old madness, so people need to relax and be sensible. Teach your kids what skeevy-looking candy is, and that they should set it aside for you to dispose of. If need be, offer a per-piece financial incentive like my mom used to for our Halloween gum haul.* And if you're smart, make sure to identify some of your favorites as the skeeviest of all.

But Dan, you say, you just finally eased our minds by saying the candy was safe! Why not tell the kids to down those skeevy pieces? We know how you hate waste in all its forms.

Well, I didn't say the candy was safe, per se, I just said no strangers are putting razor blades in their candy. For one thing, do you know how expensive that would get? Not to mention ridiculously laborious. And what would come of that anyway, a cut lip? Other than your "husky" son who's half boa constrictor, of course.

One body who's always itching to find the answer to a juicy what-if like this is your friendly neighborhood corporation, passing off production to whatever distant land offers the sweetest deal, then rewarding them by promptly squeezing them incessantly for increased profits until they're forced to stir in some surplus metal filings and actual razor blades to thicken up those goddamn lollipops that have to cost no more than 0.000008 cents each.**

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One more thing that bugs me, since I'm already pre-wound for a tirade:

This paragraph (all errors and style choices are theirs...) is from my son's elementary school newsletter a couple weeks before Halloween, and it left my jaw hanging open. I'm not exaggerating-- as you might imagine, I often rant at inanimate objects in the privacy of my own home, but this one left me searching (still) fruitlessly for the right words to express all the feelings it stirs in me:

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As your child begins to think about what he/she wants to be for Halloween please be mindful of appropriate costumes for school. [...] Students choosing to wear a costume for the Halloween party and parade should wear costumes that portray positive images. Scary, grotesque or negative costumes are not acceptable and will not be allowed. Please make certain your child's costume does not include:

• Toy weapons or look alike weapons
• Masks
• Gadgets that show blood, etc.

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How it manages to stir that (non-scary) pot of those feelings (non-violently) without anything that could also be viewed as a weapon, I'm not sure...

Why don't we just give up and call it "October Dress-Up Day" with only slutty, cute, or funny costumes allowed, and then let's all give Halloween a proper burial, with the only pictures allowed to remember it by coming from before the past 15 years??! Sounds good to me.

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And on that note, I hope you all had a great Halloween! Since Christmas stuff has already been in stores for a month or so now, I think the next holiday must be Valentine's Day. Better get your lollipops while Dollar General still has them in stock!

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* Gum was forbidden, so this was like a "Cash for pistols, no questions asked" program.

** And those aren't pills in your Smarties, those are prizes!

IL to ME Odyssey: New York through Maine

Here is the final set of my observations on our car trip from Chicagoland to visit family in Northern Maine, part of the series of posts: Illinois, Indiana, Ohio & Pennsylvania, New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire & Maine.

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NEW YORK
Distance Traveled: 407 miles
Bathroom Breaks: 3

Since we took on New York in the early afternoon, everything was pretty well just dandy, so I have nothing memorable to report. This time.

The last time I went through New York was when we moved out here, and let me tell you: do NOT sleep in a hotel a few miles from the western border in Buffalo and then accidentally take the moving truck through the EZ-Pass lane on your way out of state the next morning if you don't have an EZ-Pass transponder. Those people will gladly spend $100 over the course of months making sure you satisfy the 42-cent debt you'll have incurred.*

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MASSACHUSETTS
Distance Traveled: 170 miles
Bathroom Breaks: 2

WARNING: If you live in Boston, or you love someone who lives there, you may want to skip this section altogether and mosey on down to good ol' New Hampshire.

• We had the good fortune to arrive in Boston** with perfect timing to take my wife's very good friend up on her longstanding offer to let us stay with her and her husband just outside Boston proper. We were so glad this worked out as well as it did, though despite numerous warnings against it, my 5-year-old son D- managed to quickly co-produce, direct, and edit --with his much-loved Corduroy bear-- the latest installment in the long-running reality show, "Where the F*** Did Corduroy Go??"

But just when he thought he was finally free, he got stuffed into an airless box and mailed on up to Maine. I'd love to see his happy-go-lucky spin on that chapter in the storybook.

• If you ask anyone who knows me, or who has walked past me on the street sometime within a few weeks after I've left Massachusetts, I hate the city of Boston with a passion that burns hotter than herpes in Hell. Don't get me wrong, I know good people who've lived in Boston, I was happy for the Red Sox when they finally won it all, but I dread and regret my every visit to their (generally) rude, horribly organized, urine-soaked burg.

Before you think I've judged Bostonians and their city too quickly, you must know that over the course of 9 years, I've passed through their airport dozens of times (and spent two nights in it, in fact...); I've made use of their bus station and both of their train stations, several hotels, and a hospital; I've walked along many streets of the city and surrounding towns, taken educational tours, and even spent nights in actual residents' houses on more than one occasion.

So, again, while some of the people (including my brother and brother-in-law) who live or have lived there may be very nice, competent, capable people, and while there may be a few good things there or from there, overall, I think this city represents some kind of horrific disease that must be contained. I pity the future of our country and its standing in the world if this is our city foreigners see first. Eight years of Bush/Cheney/Co. would have quite a battle on its hands in the contest for Worst Face to Show Potential Terrorists Still on the Fence.

If forced to say something pleasant about Boston at large, I suppose I could scrounge up the following items:

1. We have thus far been some of the lucky few not yet crushed to death under falling chunks of the shoddily constructed boondoggle that is the famed Big Dig tunnel.

2. I'd say I enjoy surprises, so having to guess 3 or 4 times, at 50mph, which split in the web of underground roadways we want to take --when the GPS navigator didn't indicate (before losing contact with the satellites, not unlike what would happen before "the good part" in a horror movie) any such choices for many miles-- provides potentially hours of spontaneous urban exploring fun. I'm pretty sure, though, that the Boston contacts at the GPS map companies just haven't told headquarters what really goes on in these tunnels, and no one has the guts to venture in to check on it.

3. If foreign armies were to choose Boston as their point of entry for an invasion, provided they were traveling only by road, we would have literally months to prepare the defense of our capital, with the front likely centered somewhere as close as Brookline. Actually, we could probably just build a 20-foot-thick, 50-foot-high wall around the entire metropolitan area. Using only union labor. Imported from New Jersey. On foot.

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NEW HAMPSHIRE
Distance Traveled: 18 miles
Bathroom Breaks: 0

Nothing much to say here, given the short distance, except I'm happy to report that crossing the New Hampshire-Maine border bridge is much less stressful when you're not totally delirious from driving compulsively the 1400 miles from Chicago to Presque Isle all at once, as I did when I moved out there almost 6 years ago.

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MAINE
Distance Traveled: 345 miles
Bathroom Breaks: 2

• I gotta say, under these circumstances, driving the normally pleasant state of Maine is an absolutely soul-crushing experience. Not anything to do with the state itself, per se, it's just that moving through so many states so quickly and then hitting the southern border of your destination state in the afternoon, only to spend another 6 hours in the car, can be a bit much to ask of us long-haul travelers trying to get past all the lobsters, rustic sweaters, and salty sea air up to the calm, comforting expanses of potato fields, black flies, and that only-slightly-ornery air of self-sufficiency.

• We arrived. With no major injuries for any of us, self-inflicted or otherwise. Family was happy to see us, we were happy to see them, and we were doubly happy to spend only about 1 hour total in the car over the next two weeks.

I'll post a few pictures from the trip tomorrow, rather than make this post any longer. Longer than the above plus these two footnotes, of course... enjoy!

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* Each stamp on the redundant notices they sent me exceeded the original debt, as did each minute of the time I spent on the phone trying to square away my options for avoiding the sizable penalties they automatically tacked on. What's best is I had to mail them a CHECK for 25 cents, and then mail them a SECOND check a couple weeks later for 17 cents when they realized they had quoted me the car toll instead of the truck toll.

** Note that I said "arrive in Boston" with perfect timing, not "make it across the city to our friend's house"... It was unfashionably late.

Better late than early... isn't that a saying?

So the word on the street is, no, I didn't pick a post to appear this morning, so all 20 of you who read blogs on Friday were left hanging. Sorry about that. My only excuse is that I am horribly disorganized.

To make up for your likely paralyzing distress at not getting to be mildly amused by my verbosity this morning/afternoon, I'll throw out this bonus tidbit:

According to my 2-year-old daughter M-, because she bumped her foot on something when I was corralling her away from somewhere she knew she wasn't supposed to be, I am officially "mean", as well as "nasty", because "[I] hurt [her] foot."

Throw in a couple curse words, and she can reuse that tantrum in 12 years or so if she ever runs low on material. Speaking as a blogger, I recognize the value of such an asset, and yet speaking as her father, I'm pretty sure this girl will NEVER run low on material.

I'll just say I'm not home right now

Do you ever feel kinda stupid answering your phone only to hear a recording respond?* They might as well start every one of those messages with, "Ha-ha! Made you say 'hello'! Idiot."

I guess it's better, though, than having an awkward, forced interaction with a real person (courtesy of a misguided corporation) who just pretends to be a robot 8 hours a day.

But anyway, I think it's pretty logical that my next thought is, "How dare some sleazy company give my phone number to The Robots just to save $7.50 an hour from their marketing department's Wasted Money budget?!"

Haven't they ever seen The Terminator? Or Eagle Eye? They almost killed Shia LaBeouf!! And a bunch of kids and stuff. ...And Megan Fox**... or wait, was that Transformers? Either way, the point holds.

I don't think it's fair that, as a rational person, I now have to fear for my life just because I once expressed an interest in finding out whether GEICO could actually save me any money on my car insurance. (Answer: Not at all. But that's probably just because of how much money they had planned to spend mailing me things for the next 5 years.)

I think World-President Obama and his Pet Congress*** should make a new consumer-friendly corporate-transparency law that requires all companies to publicly declare whether or not they are in league with The Robots whenever they ask for, or plan to take and use, your personal data.

That way, you'll at least have a sense of the number of databases The Robots will have to work from when rampaging through Southern California looking for you and your punk friend on that badass moped. That's gotta be worth some small comfort, right? Better start doing your one-armed pull-ups now, ladies.

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* It's an even more one-sided conversation than talking to me when I'm ranting.

** What an appropriately named person.

*** Currently infested with an awful case of the Boehner fleas, characterized by swelling and itchiness, primarily around the anus.

No, Babe won't give you herpes

Consider this post an early Mother's Day present for my mom, who for the past two weeks has been ranting about how inane the swine flu hysteria is almost as fiercely as I do about random things like the suddenly high percentage of crossword puzzle clues relating to rap/hip-hop in the Tribune lately.*

I've endured this "swine flu" nonsense for about as long as I can take, and while I usually steadfastly ignore fads that try to compel me to acknowledge them with at least outrage or satire, I just couldn't resist after reading this article:

Flu fears alter life at U.S. universities

No, the take-home lesson of this article is NOT how easily life can be drastically thrown off its axis by overhyped paranoia spread by 24-hour news outlets,** but rather how little a college degree is apparently worth in America today.

To celebrate the latest inductees into the elite club that is the enormous percentage of our extremely populous country that has graduated from college, the wizened elders of the prestigious Northeastern University scrambled to make sure there were sufficient quantities of anti-bacterial lotion on hand at the graduation ceremony Friday to combat the (excruciatingly inefficient, it seems) killer virus that has so many people helpfully pitching their pork chops into the trash heap these days.***

Neighbor dogs have never eaten so well! And they won't again until the killer bacteria, perfected by the hyperactive evolution chamber that is our modern "anti-bacterial" society, finally emerges to leave us all as main courses in the Gutter Buffet our dogs will treasure until the germ can tweak itself enough to take them out, too.

Happy Wednesday!!

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* I pick an example like this just because I don't want to dare imply that she's even flirted with the intensity of my rants about the few things that matter more than my weekly State Of The Crossword speech.

** So far, this new strain of known flus has proven to be equally as infectious as every other common flu virus, and, by my observation, dramatically less lethal. So if you haven't died from a flu in the past, even if a few viruses manage to perform the near-impossible feat of getting past your force field of Purell, you probably won't die this time, either.

If you HAVE died from a flu in the past, well, let me apologize for my smarmy tone, and also for the overly chewy texture of my precious, delicious BRAAAAAAIIIINSSSSS!!!

*** Just to re-state for the record, and not because I have any particular love for the pork industry, eating pork can NOT give you any kind of swine flu. If you're worried about eating the flesh of an infected animal, your biggest concern should be nothing more than whether that pig's final coughing fits toughened up the meat too much and made it slightly less delicious than that of its blissfully immobile and fatty compatriots.

Corporate intelligence, Vol. 8

Once again, I'm here to demonstrate the importance of saying exactly what you mean, and nothing more. Just as I am the noble hero of literalism, picking apart your statements at will to reveal the messages you didn't know you were sending, there is a dark side to this power, and those who practice it do not show mercy even to fat, lazy, spoiled, Depressed nations.

My example this time comes from our hard-working United States Congress, doing its best as always to provide a steady, paternalistic hand guiding the feisty sled dogs of capitalism, while those dogs do their best to distract that hand with giant sacks of cash.

Paper industry starts using oil to get billions in alternative-fuel credits

Before you decide this sounds boring, let me sum it up for you, to innocently feed your disbelief and rage while you're trying to decide how you're going to make it through these next few years with both the shirt on your back and an absence of Chinese capitalist Communists laughing while they repossess Mt. Rushmore:

A few years ago, Congress passed a law meant to promote decreased use of fossil fuels. The language of this bill was so poorly chosen that at this most ideal of times, we all are now on the hook for many billions of dollars in unplanned-for expenses paying crafty companies to start mixing diesel fuel in with the renewable fuel they've traditionally created from their industrial waste.

So we have a single bright spot in a generally toxic industrial process, the usage of a waste product as fuel in place of more damaging alternatives, and these giant companies, hemorrhaging money for too long, snuff it out with a shower of diesel fuel injected into the process to qualify them as "mixing a taxable fuel with an alternative fuel."

The result for us, the taxpayers? International Paper, for example, will get "probably close to a billion a year of cash" from the IRS encouraging them to "keep mixing alternative fuels with the diesel fuel", and the manageable $61 million projected by Congress for extending this right-minded credit three months could instead "cost as much as $2 billion." The likely total payout to the top ten paper companies alone for this year is $8 billion.*

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"The money to be gained from exploiting the tax credit so dwarfs the money to be made in making paper ... [that] the ultimate result of the credit will likely be to push paper prices down as mills churn at full capacity in order to grab as much money from the IRS as it can."

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So at least you can get a few reams of paper way cheaper than before, for drafting all those letters to your Congresspeople. Just call me Mr. Sunshine-- I'll always find the bright side even if I have to make it myself! Maybe they can use all the extra paper to print up some more currency-- doesn't that always fix things whenever money is tight?

Remember this heartwarming story of poor word choice** as you hunker down with your industrious neighbors to help patch this sinking ship, making daily sacrifices just to get by, gladly exchanging a pay cut for a non-binding implied desire not to fire you in the immediate future.

At least SOMEONE'S making some money, right?*** That's gotta trickle down somehow... or do I need to go buy the latest edition of this classic 1983 economics textbook?

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* $8 billion! Before all these corporate bailouts and emergency loans, that used to be an awful lot of money.

** I say "poor word choice" only assuming no Senators from paper-producing states were involved in writing this bill.

** For my readers abroad, rest assured that, as you can see, even the economic elite of America are determined to help dig a way out of the hole we've dug you all, by any means necessary.

I am not responsible for this behavior

While a lot of people like to point to certain events, character traits, or incidental behavior as indicative of a child's similarity to or even destiny to become exactly like one or more of his parents, I prefer to promote the idea that this is complete nonsense, except in the rare case in which doing so might make me look good.

For an example of the former, let me share that my now-5-year-old son D- recently hit his leg on the coffee table entirely out of his own carelessness, which, if you ask me as his loving parent, causes him pain and discomfort far too infrequently to really teach him anything of use.

His response to this assault was to immediately engulf himself in soaring flames of impotent rage and begin letting loose the following diatribe:

"OW!! We should move to a different house that doesn't have this stuff in it!"

He then dramatically threw himself upon the couch, before just as quickly standing back up to add some other points he just thought of:

"See?? (pointing at the TV) We've got all this stuff everywhere to walk into and we should just go somewhere else where we don't have any stuff in the way on the floors!"

In rereading this before publication, I realize that it sounds at best partially fabricated, but let me assure you with the three fingers of my Boy Scout salute held high in the air that since I was sitting at the computer at the time, I transcribed this rant word for word.

I have no further comment.

Your post title is on its way!

Upon reading the slip of paper (I can't even bear to call it "a fortune") hidden inside one of our fortune cookies recently, I knew I had to ridicule it in print, in the probably vain hope that whoever wrote it might know how much shame they have brought upon themselves and their already-pretty-pathetic profession.

As lame as the so-called fortunes usually are, given that they are often either blind guesses at facts about your present or past, or generic bits of reassuring advice, this one takes the stale cookie.

After barely rescuing this paper from the furious snatches of my starving litter of rabid fox kits, I had to allow my eyes a second chance to focus on the words before reading them again in disbelief. I was insulted with the following message, which isn't even worth adding "...in bed" to (as discussed in this past post):

Your fortune is on its way!

What is this, some kind of sick karmic IOU? Call me a self-absorbed, overreacting prick, but I declare this to be absolutely Unacceptable as a fortune. I reject it and demand a replacement, or at least immediate delivery of the actual fortune promised by this one.

Also, I demand a bag of free cookies to dull my rage, but not the awful ones-- the good ones that people are always expecting when they bite into a fortune cookie, assuming anyone still makes those.

I suppose I should be grateful they used the correct its... Otherwise police all along the multi-state cookie supply chain might be desperately chasing the aptly named Stale Cookie Impaler.

A note upon Inauguration 2009

I needn't point out that today is a special day. We all know my preference for president, so I won't go on about that.

I just want to state for the record how disappointed I am that this inauguration is taking place in the middle of the week, and that I am not able to be there. I know that as time goes on, life will leave me even less flexible to accommodate last-minute schedule changes for opportunities like this, so I had really hoped to make it happen somehow.

Alas, J- will be left watching with all the students in her school, I'll be watching with the kids until we have to take D- to preschool, but I'll do everything I can to make sure the kids remember this day even if only in some small way (such as vague memories that I wouldn't stop yammering on about it during Duplo time).

I won't do this because we've elected "a black president" but rather because we've broken the centuries-old mold of what a president must look like, and we've started chipping away at least a bit at who he or she has to know and be indebted to.

And possibly even more important than that is the fact that even though we elected yet another candidate from our democracy-choking Two Parties, it feels like we all cast aside the many safe, easy choices this time and went with someone whose fresh ideas (at least for our current age) we listened to and specifically responded to, one way or another.

How many people were genuinely inspired by John Kerry, Bob Dole, Michael Dukakis, or either of the Bushes? These are people, among others, who benefitted from either "seeming presidential", having the right connections in a shallow pool, or just not screwing up enough to lose their party's nomination.

So for better or worse, we'll turn our back (at least for a little while) on the willfully irresponsible and damaging Bush years, and try our hand at shaping our own future. Even if Mr. Obama does nothing but speechify and Propose Big Things for four years, as long as he helps keep this momentum going, I think we can help ourselves just fine.

We can all tear down the duct tape and plastic wrap (for longer than it takes to hit the mall for the latest Thing We Don't Really Need), slide our Terror Alert Level down from Orange - Convenient Generalized Fear and Pliability to the never-before-seen Green - Commonsense Vigilance with Personal Freedom, let the sun shine on us and all our affairs, and then really start digging ourselves out of the many messes we're in.

It may make for a long few decades, but at least we can get through it with a smile and a lighter load on our shoulders. So here's to that!

The weather inside is spiteful

It was raining all last night here in Chicagoland, which makes me mad. It's supposed to be winter, a time of cold, fluffy snow, not balmy rain and lethal ice.

I think it's quite possible that Hell is actually a frigid ice fortress full of horrifically pointy icicles in every direction and black ice the only floor covering.

I have a feeling this warm-up indicates we'll miss a white Christmas yet again in my lifetime, which happens so often I'm never surprised, even though Christmas occurs at the end of December in Chicago. Two and two equal five here, it seems.

All of our beautiful, hard-fought snow from earlier this week (whose sudden arrival during rush hour caused me to park the car and walk with D- to Target rather than endure another half hour trying to drive a mere mile and a half), will be iced over and ruined, like a jilted lover left to rot at the altar.

This perfect snowball powder I didn't even get to roll in once got Havishamed in one long, bitter night, and what I'll be walking out into, whenever it is I choose to exit our icy cocoon, will be a shadow of its former self. I'm almost too upset to even picture it. Breaking through the icy crust over the yard (with the back of my skull, no doubt) to find the soft insides dried-out and useless for anything but metaphors...

I'm too digusted to even crack a simile.

Takin' care of business

As I reluctantly sat there in the grimy bathroom of a greasy spoon liquefying my insides (resting comfortably on my nest of toilet paper lining), I prayed for the sweet release of death to come only after the immediate banishment of Papa John* and his minions to the deepest circle of hell.

Through my confused haze of rage, agony, and relief, I somehow managed to detect a poorly tuned radio station's attempt to bludgeon me with the melodious strains of Bachman-Turner Overdrive's landmark hit, Takin' Care of Business.

As my business took care of me itself, I couldn't help but realize that this song was made to be played in 30-second snippets at the absolute longest. It has a clear message to communicate, it's catchy, and it's said pretty much all it has to say in about half that time.

To sit and actually listen to the entire song in one sitting, so to speak, is torture enough, but to have it coming in and out --crystal clear one minute, fading quietly into mild static the next-- is like forcing someone to work next to an unshowered, incontinent, alcoholic hobo at the Customer Service station of Wal-Mart the entire week after Christmas.**

Just when it seems that 35 additional iterations of the refrain is all that those many commercials and movies have been sparing you these past few decades, the radio signal comes back clear as day so they can do a quick 10 more before it fades back to lie in wait ominously.

If I tried to work as many hours of overtime as these guys claim they have, I'd have been converted to a salaried position before the single was even released. But I guess, "Takin' care of business / And continuing to work until everything is done enough for my boss, regardless of the number of hours worked vs. dollars paid, and without concern for the long-term effects on employee morale or efficiency / Work out!" doesn't make for such catchy lyrics.

Anyway, you'll be happy to know I've survived my ordeal so far, although the song is still firmly stuck in my head.

Just be glad you caught that instead of the other thing.

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* It can't be a coincidence that "Papa" John's last name is Schnatter. As in, "Oh my God, where's your Schnatter?!? I just finished lunch at Papa John's!"

** Having logged thousands of unhappy hours shopping at Wal-Mart in my lifetime***, I feel qualified to offer the following skit starring Clem, my generic hillbilly voice:

"Yeah, I got this here shotgun fer Christmas, but ever' time I try to shoot it, it won't DO nothin', no matter WHAT I's pointin' it at. I'm pretty sure Santa bought it here, wink-wink, so y'all need to take it back an' gimme one thut works when I go like this. ... Whoa, thar she is!! Nevermine, I guess. ... I s'pose you gotta go call somebody to have that looked at, huh?"

*** There are extremely few alternatives in Presque Isle, Maine, but now that we moved back out to Chicago, my personal visit count has likely stopped forever.

Who hsa time too prufread?

Let me start by saying you can't imagine how difficult it was to type out that title, and how painful it is for me to let it sit there as it is.

Now that I have your sympathies, I'll continue.

When I mentioned J-'s seemingly disastrous t-shirt purchase at the Obama rally in Grant Park, there was at least one request to see the offending shirt, and I'm nothing if not accommodating. 

Here is the front image, which as I said is interesting and unique enough, and actually impressive given the price:

I should jump in here to note that to compound my coming complaints, the salesman apparently misheard J-'s request and gave her an extra large shirt, so it's wide enough for the whole family to proudly wear at once.

And now, I forewarn you to choke back your vomit before continuing, because if you're like me, you may not be able to handle seeing the reason why it was only $5 without exerting tremendous self-control:


You know what my "New Hope" is? That sometime before the end of the Reign of Man, we will finally finish evolving enough that before even an everyday-schmo-just-trying-to-make-some-extra-money-capitalizing-on-his-fellows'-exultant-willingness-to-collect-memorabilia places an order for a few thousand t-shirts, he can manage to at least ask someone with a fresh eye to look over the design just once.*

And if we could keep things going enough to not make such errors on this tiny selection of text in the first place, that would just be icing. Right now, the only icing on this s***cake is the inexplicable use of a comma after the abbreviation of the month.

You may think I'm overreacting, but I don't know any other way to be. Life's too short to underreact to things like this. Plus, I've spent years of my life being paid to mercilessly deride people for boneheaded mistakes like this, so it's a hard habit to break.

Full Disclosure: That wasn't necessarily spelled out in my job descriptions, but it was always clearly encouraged. Or tolerated. Or quietly marveled at, in fear. Either way, it definitely seems called for here, because there's no red pen in the world that can wash this tragedy away.

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* Barring that, maybe in this hypothetical nearly perfect world, the printer would notice the error and, since it's not his job to alter the design of his clients' orders, he would just print up a single shirt that says YOU ARE AN IDIOT - TRY AGAIN (SOMEWHERE ELSE).

At long last, Pt. 1

Well, by now I've sat here and read most every article I could find related to the election and all its tangents, and after much procrastination, I'm faced with finally writing about my experience at the Obama rally in Grant Park (Chicago) on Election Day, as requested by many of you.
                                                  ...
Let me start off by saying that we did not rate tickets to the gated kingdom that was the area around the stage at the rally. I apparently missed the initial announcement that tickets were available for the asking (which probably lasted about 15 minutes), and instead I got an e-mail out of the blue from the Democratic Party the next day. I clicked the link when I saw it a few hours later, and I was immediately informed that I was on the waiting list.*

This was of course due to the fact that they offered tickets to only 32,000 people and a single guest each. Based on the fact that hundreds of thousands of people showed up to the park and the surrounding area**, I think you can tell the deck was stacked against me from the start.

So it was with a mixture of glee and disappointment that we made our way down to Grant Park that evening, alongside the expected anxiety with all those votes still to be counted.

Our 10-mile train trip in from the suburbs went flawlessly, with the relative lack of company due to our being considered very late to the party by arriving a mere 2 hours before the scheduled admission time. Our trip home was much more crowded and chaotic, though to the CTA's credit, it was still remarkably smooth.

We walked a few blocks from the L stop to the park, and had we worried about where we needed to go, we had only to join the sizable throng of latecomers still inexorably marching down the streets like it was free sample day at the cookie factory.

Impressive as we were, bending the normal flow of traffic to our will, we were but a tiny stream disappearing into the sea of human flesh already assembled in the park.

As we tried to join the party, we were of course briefly stopped by "Security" and quickly stripped of the most threatening of our contraband. That's right-- whoever thought they could get within a block of our future president with a fully loaded water bottle must have been drinking too much of something other than water before showing up.

Speaking of which, my later observations determined that giant jugs of vodka were totally cool with these guys. Also okay: portable furniture, 25-foot telescoping flagpoles, large knives (probably), and airhorns.

Basically, the golden rule seemed to be that anything cited as disallowed in the public invitations was actually encouraged, and other common-sense, life-sustaining items not mentioned therein would be fished out of your colon, if necessary.
                                                  ...
It seemed like a good idea to break this up into multiple posts, so look for part 2 tomorrow, part 3 the next day, and part 4 after that.

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* As if people were going to be refusing these tickets-- way to get my already-generally-high hopes up higher against my better judgment, Democratic Party of Illinois. 

** I say there were much more than the 240,000 estimate I keep hearing, since I think it discounts a lot of people gathering right across the street and elsewhere in the area, as well as comings and goings over the course of many, many hours.

Corporate Intelligence, Vol. 5

Though I was born and grew up out here in the Chicago suburbs, I lived in Northern Maine for over 3 years, until about a year and a half ago. Since that move, oblivious companies of all shapes and sizes who must hate the sight and smell of their own money took it upon themselves, with the assistance of the USPS and phone companies, to update their mailing and calling lists with my new information.

Now, this common practice makes sense for most nationally focused corporations, even if their message isn't always skewed appropriately for the drastically different region, time zone, accent, economic sphere, population density, worldview, pronunciation of various important words,* voting habits, or level of quaintness of my "new home".

What I'm really thrown by is the local businesses and organizations who seem to consider Reality Checks the province of "city slickers who don't have the sense to root for the Mighty Red Sox even when they live physically closer to Boston than we do."

Here are just two examples:

• Once we stopped getting the usual bits of local junk mail forwarded by the Post Office halfway across the country just to be immediately discarded, we started instead getting local junk mail formally addressed to our new house, trying to lure us back 1400 miles just to catch a mildly unbeatable deal on snow tires (This Weekend Only!) or The County's best interest rate on a snowmobile loan GUARANTEED!

• Lately, we've been getting automated calls from the Maine Democratic and Republican Parties, urging us to support their presidential candidate or vote against the opposing candidate, respectively. While you may say that a national campaign warrants a national calling list, you must agree that a long-distance call from Maine begging an Illinois voter to support his own Senator, elected with 70% of the vote just 4 years ago, is a senseless waste of money.

And lest you think that Democrats in Maine just don't have the time, money, or manpower to weed out useless numbers from their automatically updated phone lists, you should know that the strikingly low population of Maine allows it to have a single area code covering the entire state, and I'm pretty sure that even Thomas Edison's original autodialer** could be programmed in 10 seconds to ignore any numbers not beginning with 207.

But then where would AT&T and Verizon get the cash to buy both the ink for their Important Messages AND the souls of folks who'll speak out against Net Neutrality?

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* Moving back, almost exclusively, from Incorrect to Correct, including, but certainly not limited to, the words permit and aunt ("aaaaaaaant"... I say if you don't live in London or Cape Cod, just give the whole "ahnt" thing a rest, already).

** Used to plant seeds in the minds of the nation's 137 early telephone adopters that Nicola Tesla fathered a black baby out of wedlock with his secret Muslim terrorist mistress, and that Alternating Current was just typical Liberal flip-flopping.

Brother, can you spare $700 billion?

The following is an only mildly sarcastic note I sent to my Congresspeople* yesterday. If you'd like to send one, too, you can go to VoteNoBailout.org for a quick and easy method (including a prewritten letter, if you don't have time to write one of your own).

Note: Feel free to reuse my letter below for writing your own representatives, if you're so inclined.

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Hello,

I'm writing to register my feelings on the massive bailout package proposed by the Bush Administration and currently being considered by Congress.

The people controlling the giant banks that run our financial system knowingly put themselves, and the rest of us by extension, in position for this disaster for the sake of making increasingly huge profits for over a decade.

Let them use some of these riches they made to bail themselves out, and save the people's money for those of us who don't have such resources to dig ourselves out.

If these corporations didn't have a contingency plan to avoid bankruptcy, then they're no better than the homeowners so derided lately for signing on to mortgages they couldn't afford to pay.

Of course, it would seem that the banks' first-level backup may have been to get the Bush administration to use its still-impressive power to publicly bully and belittle politicians into going along with whatever they demand, in this case a free pass to tear up the piles of IOUs the bankers wrote without any ability to back up.

Why are "socialist" programs and efforts only acceptable to Republicans when the beneficiaries are huge corporations and wealthy individuals? They spend all their time when profits are up preaching about the simple beauty of capitalism-- they can use some time dealing with the less fun side of it now. I'd hate to incite what would normally be a huge outrage for them by encouraging the "government to interfere with the free market."

Whether this bailout money goes to them or not, we're all on our own to sort through the effects of their unchecked greed and irresponsibleness, barring whatever assistance to individuals the government decides to offer. That assistance is much less likely to be substantial once this incredible sum of money, pulled from who-knows-where**, is gone.

Please vote No to Bush's Bailout, and instead urge these people to use all their business school training and financial intelligence to sort things out for themselves, so the rest of us can get a helping hand as needed from our representatives in government.

I hear there's $700 billion dollars just laying around in our emergency fund-- maybe we could use that?

Thank you for your time.

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* Which includes, of course, the Distinguished Gentleman From Illinois currently running for president.

** I know where-- China!***

*** No, I didn't include any footnotes in the e-mail itself. But I should have.

The finest in casual dining

A couple of days ago, the kids and I took a jaunt down to the massive outdoor mall* near our house, which meant that we got to bite into a juicy cross section of what passes for Americana these days.

Among the stores we passed was a Chili's**, which caught D-'s eye immediately. He said, "Hey look, there's that 'rons-traunt' we went to that time." I acknowledged this and praised him as usual for his good memory, since it was quite awhile ago. He stared at the window as we (happily) passed it by, and his brain began to slowly warp itself before he continued with a second thought. I was all over it two words in-- I don't know why I'm so tuned into his brain patterns most of the time, but I just knew exactly what he was thinking.

D-: Remember we went there that time 'cause Momma's friend works there, and she...

Me: Nope, that was a different place.

D-: No! It was that place right there! We went there and Momma's friend...

Me: You're right that it's the same kind of place, but it's a different restaurant, from a different company.

D-: No it was that place! We went there that time and Momma's friend gave us cookies and they sang Happy Birthday to you!

Me: I promise you, that was a Bennigan's. This is a Chili's. They're pretty much exactly the same restaurant, with the same kind of food, but they have slightly different decorations on the walls. They're from two different companies, and they have two different names, but I can see how you could get confused.

He walked on in silence, since my Imperious Kung Fu is much stronger for the time being, but it was clear from his posture that he still believed he was right, just like I would. As I caught him gazing innocently off in the direction of the Outback Steakhouse, rather than go through this all over again, I immediately veered off the sidewalk to instead cut through the parking lot in the general direction of a big box store whose name willfully escapes me.

Who says America doesn't have any culture?

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* Not to be confused with the other massive outdoor mall also in our town but another mile farther away in a different direction.

** I had to quickly double-check that it wasn't actually an Applebee's, Ruby Tuesday, Chotchkee's, Flingers, Fuddruckers, Uncle Moe's Family Feedbag, TGI Friday's, or one of the others.

Is this what defines the 21st century?

Once again, I couldn't see posting about something else today and ignoring the obvious. This day has haunted all Americans and much of the rest of the world, in one way or another, for most of this century, and it likely will for many more years to come.

So I'm putting this little post out there in memory of the thousands of people victimized on this day 7 years ago and so many days again since, by those seeking to profit in some way from their suffering and tragic deaths.

Here's hoping we can all begin to move past this event and its aftermath in a healthy way, with the same unity we felt back then, so those responsible can be revealed and calmly dealt with in a civilized, rational manner.

No comments necessary.

Caution: Men Not Working

In case you were looking for more signs that we're surrounded by people who are dangerously lazy, and that we are definitely ruled by people who want us all to be so, here's a nice little tidbit for you:

Recently, while helping J- to relieve one of several local office-supply stores of the remainder of their loss leading pencils and notebooks, I saw a big display for a "Reduced Effort Stapler", which promised* to save me "70% of the effort required by traditional staplers."

Using a specific figure like this of course relies on the illusion, if not the actual fact, that they performed some kind of clinical research into this pressing problem. This is almost enough to stun me into silence, which you must have already realized is quite an impressive feat.

How they even managed to break down the effort needed to staple a couple pieces of paper together in the first place exceeds my imagination-- they've got to be coming as close to dividing by zero as anyone ever has. The undernourished math nerd in me, suddenly remembering the word asymptote way too late for my freshman year midterm, is eager to see the graphs* produced by this crack team throughout what must have been an incredibly arduous R&D process.

It was probably almost as complex as the epic gauntlet that was the gestation of that pinnacle of American ingenuity, electric scissors.**

Please come save us from ourselves, Jebus!


* They might have come out something like these classic graphs from xkcd.***

** Already ridiculed beautifully by David Cross.

*** Now that I've found another reason to link to this hilariously perfect and wonderful comic, I'll also point out this one that seems to have been made for J- and I as much as this one was.

In a tough world, you get first shot at your kids

Do either of these exchanges from this morning make me a bad parent? I'm often struck by that thought after I let loose some of my initial reactions to things.

D- (walking into the room first thing this morning): Hi Daddy, can you make me something to eat?
Me (coughing like I just pried open a dusty old crypt): Whoa, we need to brush your teeth!

This was my gut reaction-- I couldn't acquire enough untainted oxygen to come up with a "Hey, let's go get cleaned up for the day first!" or something else innocuous.
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M- (after reaching up, opening a kitchen drawer, inserting her finger, and deliberately closing the drawer): Oww! Fin-gerrrr!!*
Me: Yes, 'Ow, finger!' indeed. We've been down this road before, many times. (I find it amusing to speak this way to a 17-month-old, on occasion.)

Disclaimer: She closed the drawer pretty slowly, and she seemed to be expressing less pain than disappointment (bafflingly so) with the result of her experiment. She got over it in a second.
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On a similar note, I haven't yet gotten around to writing a manifesto of my parenting philosophies, but this morning I found out I don't have to. The folks at The Art of Manliness (a great site, by the by) have done it for me:

Quit Coddling Your Kids

The only tweaks I can think of offhand after reading this a couple hours ago are that, as seized upon by some people in the comments, they don't mention much if anything about being appropriately supportive of your kids or consistently telling them that you love them. I think they just forgot that since the focus is more on people who insulate their children from everything negative whenever possible, especially by blindly supporting every choice and action, whether selfish, hateful, or otherwise ill advised.

One of the comments mentions world-proofing your child instead of child-proofing his or her world. That just sums it all up perfectly-- it needs to become a new proverb.