Compliments? No thank you...

Couple things instead of a long post which I will do when I get home.

1) My yogurt exploded all over my work clothes on the way to work. How awesome is that? I mean not only did I miss out on my breakfast but I also forgot to put it in a bag so it was free to explode in my backpack on the bikeride in! Oh man I was so pumped when I saw that my work clothes were covered with my breakfast! "Fuck yes! I get to wear yogurt soaked clothes all day this is fucking fantastic! The only way my day could start off better is if I ran head first into a filing cabinet!" So I did that and now I have a bump and yogurt stained clothes, and I look pretty terrible which is no change from how I normally look except for the bump on my head.

2) Someone in another department sent me an e-mail this morning asking me to do something so that they could finish a task. I got the e-mail and did my part of what they needed in 2 minutes, and sent them an e-mail that told them it was done and asked to please let me know if they needed anything else. They sent me back an e-mail that said, "YOU ROCK". I looked at it for a second and then started drafting an e-mail to explain to them that I did not in fact rock and that perhaps they had a slightly jaded opinion since I'd helped them out so fast and maybe they needed to contact me more often to see my lack of rockinness (rockin' ness? rockiness? ROCKINNESS? rockability? rockitude...). The e-mail was about a paragraph long when I decided to just let it go and accept the compliment at face value without questioning the criteria by which my status had been established. Because frankly I rock about as much as a dead childhood pet at the moment (oh my god, he goes to work, goes to the gym, then goes home and reads or whatever...he's a rock star!). I think I should just be willing to accept compliments more readily, and also I should get some face paint and some drugs...and maybe learn to play an instrument...maybe a neon green wig.

Oink Oink

Most people freeze up when they have to talk to police, something about the uniform or some ingrained sense of respecting authority. Whatever it is most people act noticeably different when faced with the prospect of talking to a police officer. I minored in talking to police officers in college, police affairs if you will (that would be such a cool subject). I've learned the ins and outs of getting what you want out of cops, cracking jokes and also being an asshole/making fun of them and getting away with it. It doesn't always work but honestly these guys are just working and it's ok to razz them if they are being unreasonable dicks because just wearing a uniform doesn't give you the right to be a jackass. I do appreciate the safety and service they provide just like I appreciate all members of the military, post office, garbage collectors, etc... but there's a difference between protecting and serving, and using your authority for no other reason than to entertain yourself. When such situations occur (and they do) it's time for me to let them know how inconsiderate they are being.

Saturday night I got pulled over at about 7:30 after taking a right turn at the intersection of two major roads. The cop threw his lights on and turned on his mega powerful search light and aimed it at my side view mirror so that I couldn't see. he then trundled up to my window with a stick up his ass and informed me that I had not come to a complete and total stop before taking that right turn. My first thought was, wow this guy must be really bored, because there wasn't that much traffic and I don't think I did anything that was that bad. I'm sure I didn't come to a 3 second complete stop, but I am sure I stopped and looked before turning. Either way I knew I was getting a ticket for something that I wouldn't normally and although I deserved it by the letter of the law, my impression was that this guy was being overly obnoxious for something else that had happened. So I gave him my license and registration and he went back to his car to write up my ticket, but he kept his light aimed at my mirror and it was really hard for me to see anything.

After about a minute of moving my head around to try and not be blinded I got out of the car and walked to his window and knocked on it.
"Would you mind turning off that light, it's blinding me."
"I have this light for my protection sir, I needed to make sure nothing suspicious was going on. You might have had weapons-(cut off by me)"
"Well I don't and since you already saw that I would appreciate it if you could turn it off because it's blinding me."
"Yes sir, sorry about that."
"No problem, also if you'd like I probably have a crossword puzzle or sudoku book in the back of my car if you are bored and want to do some paperwork." (You should have seen his face after I said this, he was pissed. But I was pissed too.)
"No thank you, now please return to your vehicle, I will be with you in a minute."

A couple of thing here, first what I did was highly questionable, and if he'd decided to he could have arrested me for leaving my vehicle. I figured he wouldn't because I'd been polite when he first came to the car. Second, he was entirely within his procedural rights to keep that light on, but he didn't have any reason to given that he already had his headlights on and he had seen that I posed no real threat. Third, I'm sure I probably, by the letter of the law, deserved a ticket for the way I took that turn. It's a stupid thing to give someone a ticket for and while I was willing to accept his attitude (which sucked) I was not willing to accept him blinding me while writing a normal traffic ticket. Look we all get bored at work, but when I get bored I don't go around giving out expensive tickets for borderline offenses. "Uhh Wendy you didn't replace all the staples in my stapler when you used it, that's going to be $85 dollars or a trip to court." If he tagged me for being in a residential zone, which is possible because I was on the borderline of one, then I'm going to court, and I'm going to sass his ass in court. Why? It's not because I really care about getting a ticket or worry that I won't be able to pay. It's because I enjoy the hell out of being sassy to cops when they are being jerks. So yes, I'm a petty small minded douschebag sometimes but everyone already knew that.

The funny thing is that I almost got a ticket later in the evening for almost the same thing (taking a right turn in front of an oncoming cop without stoping completely). But I hesitated and waited for the car to pass before turning and it turned out he was a cop and probably would have given me a ticket. So thanks to the first officer for making me mind myself when taking a right turn. You saved me getting a second ticket...

Someone kill the radio in my head.

So many things I want to write about, so much sloth, so we'll get to them eventually. Sunday night I was pleasantly surprised by how well the Eagles played. I'm sure my roomates wouldn't agree since I was forced to yell and such while they were trying to sleep but whatever. After the game I was left in an emotionally drained mood and I was tired as hell, you would think that would lead to sleep right? Well you would be very wrong...shame on you. The next 6ish hours were spent sitting in my bed thinking, thinking specifically about one event in my life. This event has been going around in my head for the last 6 months in my head and you would think by this time that since I've thought about it from every angle, I wouldn't need to think about it any more. You would think that the emotion and the rehashing of every detail would be long past, and that I would be done scrutinizing myself. Well I'm not done doing those things, as apparently my mind seemed to think that once again, for what seems like the 1000th night in a row, it was all I could think about. That and the obnoxious songs running through my head...but more on that later. I finally fell asleep at about 5am, 15 minutes before my alarm went off, which I didn't wake up to. And I slept right through till 630, which by then I was late for work. I fucking hate being late to work, but what I hate even more is what awaited me when I woke up, which was another terrible group of songs running through my head.

We all get songs stuck in our head, it happens from time to time. Whether it be some long gone favorite you heard a part of recently or the most recent pop hit on the radio. My head is a constant concert, and we get artists from all over the spectrum of music, it's usually a rockin' good time. It is a good mix and usually it doesn't bother me when music is stuck in my head, because normally it is good music. But ever since the disappearance of my ipod I haven't been listening to much music at all. Also, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, the music that gets on my mind and stays there at all hours of the day has changed. Where it used to be songs I enjoy or thought were pretty good, now it has changed to a greatest hits of the 2000's mix of shitty annoying songs that I hate. I'm not sure where the hell I'm channeling this awful racket, but there it is, stuck in my head all the time.

There is probably a common theme to the songs, something in the lyrics, but I hate each and every one of them so much that I refuse to find out what it is. Whoever the DJ in my head is, he needs to be replaced, perhaps with a bullet. The worst part is that most of these songs are songs I not only hate, but didn't listen to when they were popular. So where did I learn the fucking tunes and lyrics? With all the other shit going on you would hope that at least the inside of my head would remain loyal and cool to me, playing songs I like, but now even that has betrayed me.

Arts and Crafts Day Hooray!

Part of my job involves signing documents that are worth considerable amounts of money to other government institutions. Some of these places put special rules on the documents they receive and they try to impose what they will or will not accept. One of these places, I won't mention which, has special rules that make them hate me everytime I send them a document that has some boilerplate rules on the second page that they don't want to see. They call me and tell me, "Marty we hate you and we don't want to see these rules you have on your document and you smell bad." I can't change the boilerplate because it is populated automatically. So that leaves me with the option of arguing with them that they should ignore these rules since it doesn't apply to them, or allowing them to change the document. Either way takes more of my time then I would prefer. So I came up with a third solution, and it's lots of fun!

But every time I do this I feel like it's arts and crafts day back in kindergarten! What happens is I print out the document, then take the page with the offending rules, and cute a slip of paper to cover up the inch and a half (approx) area where these rules are on the document. I take that covered sheet over to the copier and print out a new copy that should have the rules they don't like blanked out. But of course the first time I do it the sheet slips and I end up covering things I shouldn't and I have to do it again. Then on the second try it goes a little crooked and it shaves off most of what needs to go away but maybe leaves like a sliver of a sentence. So then I have to get rid of that. But eventually I have a reasonably neat new copy of that page. It makes me want to get out some glue and sprinkles and make glue drawings of like an eagle or something and attached that to the back of the document with a statement like, "Hey I made this for you guys while I was signing this document, I hope your whole office enjoys it!" And if everyone did it then I could like, hang up my favorite pieces around the office, and when someone came by I could be like, "Oh yeah, that's my favorite, I got it from my buddy at the Department of Homeland Security, he's got a real talent for line drawing/financial management documents."

How cool would that be? Different government organizations trading artwork they made themselves with the mundane documents and memos they send around. Of course then people would start making up ridiculous rules about what we could and couldn't send them, "All cross stitch patterns must contain less then 10% red thread." or "All crayon drawings must go through an approval process from your legal staff before we accept them." But that would lead to things like me getting a call from the legal staff, "Marty, was this supposed to be a drawing of a dinosaur? Because if so it is wildly unacceptable to our standards here. You need to colour inside the lines..." Only government bureaucracy could make arts and crafts no fun.

I need a portable thought collector

I saw an advertisement several months back that eschewed the many virtues of some random cellphone. One of the amazing qualities of this cellphone was the ability to blog on the go with it. I laughed and wondered who the hell would ever need that, I mean who needs to blog on the go? Well after "writing" a blog for several months I realize how amazing a tool it would be and I regret not having a device that would allow me to blog on the run. The number of ideas I come up with, then forget, then remember again, then forget, then remember partially is astounding. Or I'll think I have a great idea on the way home from work or something and when I get home I wonder what the hell my awesome idea was. So I'm sorry for mocking the ability to blog on the run, I now understand the value and wish that I had this capability. Just add it to the long list of gadgets I want but don't need (less of a receding hairline, new car, girlfriend, rocket boots, new workout shoes, etc.). Oh well, it's not like my blog would overall be better off if I was to remember these ideas, the only way it could be better off is if I were to cease writing it!

Yuck

I was going to write about facial hair or sweaters, but I saw something this morning that just boggled my mind. When I bought my BREAKFAST this morning the man in front of me purchased the following items: 4 cans Redbull(tm) energy drink, one large bag Lays(tm)Salt and Vinegar potato chips. I asked him if those were all for him and he said yes, that was his breakfast. One can of Redbull makes me feverish and sends my system into shock, I can't imagine what four cans would do to you. At the very least it would likely put you over the edge in several nutritional daily recommended values. I can say with some confidence that if I were to consume four cans of Redbull in a day (much less for just my breakfast) I would die. No exaggeration, I would outright die.

To compound the fact that he got 4 energy drinks, upon completion of his transaction (that was over $10) he opened the bay of chips. Walked over to the condiments counter. And poured hot sauce into the bag. He then gingerly walked out into the rain and beagn eating his chips. I've never tried Salt and Vinegar chips with hotsauce, but I'd imagine that it isn't the best breakfast. To each their own and all, but this guy's diet is revolutionary. And not the good kind of revolutionary (overthrowing your oppresors), the bad kind (a vending machine full of used schoolgirl underwear).

He also purchased a pack of gum, and by my calculations it is going to take at least one pack to cover this man's breath and gastric emissons (from his mouth) after consuming 4 redbulls and a bag of hotsauce chips.

Out going

I don't understand sometimes why I leave this house to go out and hang at a bar or club for the night. It always ends in me having no fun and having my wallet slightly emptier, and to be frank I could be having no fun in the comfort of my own home which is considerably less expensive. Maybe it's because I stopped drinking or maybe it's just that those activities don't appeal to me anymore but let's make a list of the pro's and con's of both staying home and going out to a club.
Going out to a bar/club:
Pros: Get to see lots of exotic people. Sometimes you get to watch some jackholes get in stupid fights.
Cons: Your out $31 for cover charge, buying drinks for two girls, and tipping a dollar for a glass of water. You get to listen to a shitty 80's band do covers of songs you hate and are sick of hearing. You get to be jostled by the large crowd and drunk people spill crap on you. Girls talk to you to get drinks and then shut you down at the end of the night when it comes time to get their number. You can't hear a goddamn thing and your ears are ringing the next day. You end up taking care of drunk people/friends, which gets old. You get your coat stolen.

Staying at home:
Pros: It's cheap. Your ears don't hurt afterwards.
Cons: You just hang out by yourself doing the same thing you do every night (try to take over the world).

So as you can see, there are a bunch more cons to going out to a bar/club and they far outweigh the benefits. Staying at home and being lonely has the side effect of you feeling like a desperate loser, but the feeling is a little bit better then getting shot down by girls and going home desperate and lonely with the feeling of rejection. On the other hand that money isn't going to spend itself on frivolous evenings on the town! I'm not sure when I lost the desire to go out and have "fun" but that feeling is dead, and every time I do go out it ends up sucking.

Union blues

This writer's strike situation really highlights another issue that I have in general, and in writing about it I'm going to reveal some of my political views. Which are views that I keep very closely guarded even to friends and loved ones. The use of unions to squeeze an industry, possibly until it dies, is one of the biggest problems I have with the whole union structure. I'm not against unions, a group of workers banding together to strengthen their interests is fine, in fact it is a completely necessary tool in some industries. However, oftentimes a union gets so caught up in fighting for the little bits and pieces that it fails to see the overall picture. What happens then is that the union begins to bite the hand that feeds it, and sucks life from the industry that the workers serve. Instead of working to better the industry, which would in turn help the workers, the union can, and oftentimes will, cause unrepairable damage to the organism which provides them their precious jobs to begin with. The goal of getting what they want, however small it might be, seems to blind the union and galvanize it against any form of logic or reasoning.

Take the steel industry as an example. The steel industry was one of the major things that this country was built on, a vast moneymaking empire that was a juggernaut for this country and it's success over the last century. Yet for all intents and purposes the steel industry is dead in this country. Where once the steel companies were Goliaths in this nation, now there is only one or two companies in the U.S. (Nucor being the only real one that exists, also the only steel company in this country that has a great philosophy check them out) that survive, the others having faded into obscurity or gone away altogether. The U.S. now largely imports the majority of the steel we use, and if a world war were to ever break out, we would be largely in trouble when it came to our steel needs. Two things (in my opinion) essentially killed the steel industry in this country. Unions, and lack of long term investing.

The lack of long term investing is evident in almost all of the industries in this country. Investors are rarely interested in putting forth the capital to improve an industry for the long term future, this would actually require that the investor remain patient and overall they would make more money in the long run. U.S. investors have historically gone for the quick buck, investing their money and making the quick dollar and then going off to spend their capital gains. The U.S. steel industry suffered from this much in the same way the auto industry is now. What the industry really needed was to upgrade all steel making facilities, make them more efficient, make them better, make them competitive with new technologies. Instead we ended up using patchwork investments to mend what we had, and just keep the great monster moving in small intervals instead of upgrading it for the long journey, and eventually the monster died from age and unions. It also didn't help that the U.S. helped build steel mills abroad after WWII that were more advanced then what we had. But a long term investing strategy of updating plants, and improving things would have helped the U.S. to still be the best steel producing nation in the world. I say helped, because even with those improvements it is unlikely that the steel industry would have survived with the financial pressures the unions placed on the companies.

The unions didn't have the foresight to see what their demands would do to the steel industry in this country. It wasn't all the union's fault, in fact management failings had a large part to do with it because of the unreasonable way that management had dealt with unions in the early part of the industry. The unions in the steel industry demanded high benefit concessions before the 1980's. Such lofty and unreasonable demands by the union put such companies as Bethlehem Steel into an inevitable chokehold from which it could not return, even under favorable conditions. And favorable conditions were not to be had due to foreign competition, lack of innovative investment strategies of steel executives, and the increasing animosity between management and union leaders.

I should of course elaborate on how management had quite a bit of responsibility with all of the problems. In the steel industry's case, management worked the day labourers to the bone with little to no concessions or benefits and wages for years and years. So when the time came for the union to get it's turn, they took all they could get from the management. Also there is absolutely no fucking way to justify the salaries of some of the company executives in this country. $20 million dollars for executives is absurd because there is no way that any of these clowns mean that much to their large companies. So fuck them for the crops they sewed then and fuck them for what they are reaping, both in the steel industry, and now with the writers. Those overpaid penny pincher's had this coming for quite some time.

So we're left with the writer's potentially shutting down entertainment in various forms. Almost 20 years ago when the writer's guild last went on strike it cost the entertainment industry close to $500 million dollars. So assuming the strike is just as bad, you can go ahead and multiply that $500 million by 20 years of inflation. Will this be a huge burden on the entertainment industry, specifically movie and t.v.? You bet. Especially given that new forms of media have already been taking over a large portion of the pie from the more traditional media. This "new media" like videogames and blogs and other such digital media is huge, in fact video games alone are burying the motion picture industry by some measures, and it will likely get worse. Has the writer's guild thought about how much smaller their slice of the pie might be over the long run if they hurt the television and movie industry now? Although the writer's guild is trying to unionize and control much of this new media, which I hope they won't get a red cent of.

So in the end shame on the writer's union for potentially not seeing what kind of harm they could do to themselves and their industry in the long run. I hope the short term gains are enough to placate you before you lose your jobs altogether. Shame on the executives for being so greedy and being way overpaid compared to your average worker. And shame on me for presenting this whole thing in a badly written blog post.

A new age of darkness

I'm going to do this in two parts, the first part will complain about the Writer's Guild of America strike. The second part will talk about some of my views on unions in general. the first part will probably be more entertaining, the second is more of a history lesson. Enjoy, or don't whatever.

Welcome back to the dark ages, where quality writing and programming takes a back seat to garbage on television. Or at least that's what I perceive, with the onset of this writer's strike that affects both Hollywood and television. Now it looks as though in a few weeks we will be subjected to a rash of reality television and worthless unimaginative game shows, both of which require no writing. I hate reality television, to even watch 15 minutes of the garbage makes me hate myself. The only reality show I watched with any consistency was "Joe Millionaire" which I only listened to over my shoulder as I worked at the computer in college. Also for some reason every person in my fraternity watched that show and we would all stream out into the hallways afterwards to gossip about what had occurred. The entire house would groan whenever something ludicrous or unbelievable happened on the show and we all acted like gossipy women in a hair salon when the subject came up around the lunch table. An entire house filled with mostly football players, talking about a reality television show...

I equally hate mindless game shows and talent competitions. Things like "Jeopardy" are acceptable because it is not mindless chance or luck that drives the game. However besides "Jeopardy" it is difficult to think of any prime time game shows that have come out in the last 2ish years that require any skill other then making a blind choice and coming up lucky. I guess maybe "Are you smarter then a 6th grader" or whatever it is called, I never saw it. The point is that any game show that requires nothing more then backing your way though a trial by absolute luck is worthless to me, and I suspect a large number of my peers. Talent shows like "American Idol" will continue but I've never been a fan, and frankly I'd be relieved if I never had to know that something as dumb as "Kidnation" ever existed. So basically this strike leaves a situation where one of two possibilities.

1) We get a mindless rash of game shows and reality television, and network television falls to darkness forever. I had thought this possibility had been killed in the early 2000's but the guild of writer's apparently is a vessel of some cult that wishes to bring on the apocalypse. In just a few short months our society will burn in the flames of stupidity and mindlessness in the absence of intelligent discourse on television (hahahaha that's a total oxymoron, intelligent discourse on television, haha). Not to say that many of the sitcoms were terribly intelligent, but some of them required the audience think for more then two seconds before slapping their ham fisted appendages together in glee.

2) Network television begins to show some of the successful shows from the cable networks they own. This is an interesting possibility, because it means that some of the more interesting shows that are around could be shown to a wider audience and the national stage. They wouldn't be new episodes, but the reruns would be new to a large part of the viewing public, who are too afraid to try and distance themselves from the mild warmth and comfort that network stations provide. Unfortunately for me I actually go out and seek the alternate cable shows that I might like and I wouldn't watch their reruns on network television (Unless they start showing Firefly or Eureka reruns…maybe "Nip/Tuck" and that show is fucked up from the two episodes I've seen). But overall it might get some of these shows to become a permanent staple on network television and that probably couldn't hurt.

For some reason I think we're far more likely to be doomed to the first possibility, in which case I should begin getting my worldly affairs in order. The next update will talk about Unions in general. It is much less entertaining.

Death in the family

Saturday night we had a party at my house. Your standard Halloween fare, decorations and such and plenty of snacks and booze. I dressed up as a zombie which was really just an excuse to wear ratty clothes and not wear shoes around the house. We also had a house full of people dressed up as news reporters from "Anchorman" as upwards of 10 people dressed up as characters from that movie (a movie which inspires me to remember a myriad of emotions). All together I guess it was a decent party, some inspired costumes, some not so inspired costumes (wearing a Nationals jersey that you wear all the time and having a piece of tape that declares you "Benny the Jet Rodriguez" is not inspired...). The night went by without any real incidents that I am aware of...almost.

Several hours before the guests arrived I sat down to make a playlist on my Ipod for the party, because I like to keep up with all the greatest hits of the 80's, 90's, and today! As I plugged in my ipod to my computer I was greeted with a message that informed me that the Ipod was corrupt. Fucking great. It had been acting up on Friday and I had hoped nothing was wrong with this relic (3 years old!) but it was not to be. I looked at the ipod and was greated with a screen that had a exclamation point, and an anthropomorphic picture of my ipod with an unhappy face and two x's where the eyes should be...no joke. Here is my artist's rendition of what this screen looked like:

Nice. So it looked like I was not going to be able to play any of my music during the party. That and I had lost valuable data and other things which I would not be able to recover. I was heartbroken, I loved my Ipod, and his death left a hole in my heart. I thought that I would need to mourn for days and cry myself to sleep.

That was not to be the end of the Ipod, it would rise again with the aid of a mystery man. A guest arrived at our house and upon hearing my tale of woe he pulled me aside and said he could help. The told me that he is of a profession that I myself one day aspire to be. An appliance healer. A man of the cloth who uses his supernatural abilities to drive demons and disease from appliances and small electronic items. My saviour had arrived. He spoke of a healing art that would fix my Ipod and allow me to continue using it for many moons. He then proceeded to chant a quick healing prayer, and drop my Ipod from 5 feet up in the air.

My Ipod responded immediately, it had been healed by this miracle man, and all were able to listen to music of my choosing for most of the evening. I meant to have this healer look at my vacuum cleaner too, but he disappeared as mysteriously as he came into my house. Taking all his secrets and techniques with him. The Ipod played on into the night, until it froze up again, but by then it had played its purpose.

When morning arrived I looked around the house but my Ipod was nowhere to be found. That's right, my newly healed Ipod has disappeared, and after scouring the house dozens of times it appears to be lost. Is it possible that it was stolen? Yes, but that is unlikely. I have searched the house and am confident that my Ipod no longer resides here. The irony is of course that at first I thought my Ipod dead, only to see it arise from the ashes to live again, and then go missing. Some birds are far too beautiful to be caged, my Ipod is apparently one of these amazing creatures. I wish him well in whatever travels he may decide to undertake, and if he returns to me I promise to treat him with the utmost care and respect. If not, then I wish him well in his second life, however short that may be.