Anyone remember the scandal in the 1980s? Keating? Ethics? McCain?
Do we want this guy in charge? It scares me…
Let me know what you think…
We’re never gonna get ahead…
Now we just got whapped with another bill — this one nearly $5,000! Where in the world are we gonna get the money to pay THIS? We’ve had so many medical expenses, lost work, stubborn city workers telling us we need a new $4,000 sewer, now ANOTHER $5,000 bill.
We just ain’t got the money. I don’t know how we’re gonna pay it. That’s a tenth of our annual income.
That’s what it’s gonna cost us to bail out the irresponsible millionaires who caused the bank failures. It’s gonna be $2,333 for every man, woman and child in the United States. That’s what the Bush administration wants us to pay — to GIVE — to greedy millionaires who have a proven track record of failure.
How did this mess come about? Deregulation. The Republicans in power have constantly thumped the “regulations get in the way of a free market” drum for years. The result? The Sago Mine disaster. Bank failures. Record high gas prices and record high profits for the oil industry. One of the leaders of deregulation? Arizona Senator John McCain.
The rules were there for a reason, dammit! Now my wife and I will be $4,666 poorer as a DIRECT consequence of ultra-rich businessmen’s greed.
Genius?
I downloaded iTune’s latest update a few days ago. It was a “major upgrade,” so I was all a-quiver with excitement to see what new goodies were included… Turns out the new thing is a dealy-bobber called a “Genius List.” Ooookaaayy…
It’s supposed to work something like Pandora, where you find a song you like and tell the software to find other songs for you that are similar. So I click on a song and push the “Genius” button, noticing briefly that I didn’t really feel any smarter, and watched the software pick out twenty or so songs based on ZZ Top’s toe-tapper “Lagrange.” The first song on the list was “Come Sail Away,” a rock ballad by Styx. I didn’t even know I had that song on my computer, and I’m reasonably sure I didn’t put it there on purpose. Anyway, the two songs couldn’t be more different. I glanced through the rest of the list. It included things like “The Weight” by the Band (a countryesque song), and “Just What I Needed” by the Cars (an 80’s pseudo-electronic song).
As near as I can tell, the only things these songs have in common is that they’re played with instruments and may have been written by humans (though I’m not sure about that Styx song).
So I don’t much trust the Genius button. I do still click on it every now and then, though, hoping to feel at least a little smarter…
…until you whap yourself in the face with a spotlight. Now I gotta go get new glasses… Oh well. It was a fun party! (Anytime you have a band playing and people jumping out of a cake, it’s a fun party.)
Love ’em or hate ’em, eventually someone’s gonna tell you that you gotta go see one. It comes in different forms. “You’d better have that looked at,” is common, or “wow, that’s gonna leave a mark!” or “oops — sorry!” Or, in my case, it was my vundrous Viennese bride, Dagmar, telling me at 10 at night, “I made you a doctor’s appointment for tomorrow morning. You can’t eat anything after midnight tonight, und you can’t drink anything but vater in the morning. Be there at 8:15.”
“What?” I said. “Did I miss something? Am I bleeding? What? Why am I going to the doctor?”
“You’re going to the doctor because you can’t breathe right und you snore like a train.”
I kicked and fussed and hissyfitted, but when push comes to shove she’s right. I haven’t been able to breathe much through my nose for years now, and I often wake up in the night gasping for air… And how long can it take? I go in, he looks up my nose, tells me to squirt some over-the-counter inhaler goop in my beak, and I’m done. Right?
So, 8:15 in the morning found me fidgeting at the nurse’s desk, filling out paperwork. I’ve never been to this doctor, so it’s all new to me. “Okay, follow me, please,” said the nurse-lady. She walked me up to a scale which told me in digital glory that I need to grow a few inches taller, then into an exam room. “Here’s a robe. It ties in the back. I need you to take off all your clothes and put this on,” she said. “The doctor will be in in just a moment.”
“Wait! All I need is for him to see why I’m not breathing right. Do I have to take my clothes off for that?”
“Yes.”
She walked out, closing the door. Bowing to the inevitable, I took off my clothes and stacked them in a corner, put on the breezy little gown, and sat down to wait. In a few minutes the doctor came in… “Hello,” he said, “how are you today?” I told him I missed my undershorts and I was uncomfortable. He ignored me and grabbed my chart-doohicky.
“So,” he said, flipping through my medical history, “what can I do for you today?”
“Well, I’ve been having trouble breathing through my nose, and it’s affecting my sleep and I snore a lot.” The doctor nodded, mumbled “mmm hmmm” and flipped a page. “Having trouble breathing,” he said, distractedly. “Oh. You turned forty this year, didn’t you.”
“Yes,” I answered. “I’m officially old enough to drive a car and everything now.”
“I need you to turn around and bend over please.”
“I tell you I can’t breathe out my nose and you’re gonna shove a finger up my bum?” I said. “Ain’t you kinda going about this backwards?”
Oh, the indignity.
So anyway, turns out I’ve got a deviated septum or some such thing. (Insert deviant joke here.) They can fix it surgically, which sounds like loads of fun — especially after the LAST procedure I had (my right testicle is STILL twice the size of the left) — but I gotta have a sleep study done first. Yay. A night in the hospital. Fantastic.
They also found out that I’m half a step away from having serious heart troubles. I guess my triglycerides are high. Normal people are below 150, I’m at 850, the pancreas starts shutting down when you hit 900. I get to take a pill now, and Dagmar bought me a bag of carrots.
No. But HippieBoy Design is really keeping me busy! I’ve gotta learn how to take an hour off here and there. I’ve quite literally been working nearly every hour I’ve been awake for weeks now. My beloved Alpine bride Dagmar will occasionally drag my carcass away from the computer and park me on the couch for a few minutes just to let my eyes focus on a screen that’s more than arm’s length away from my nose, and I did get away to do a quick photo shoot Saturday morning. It was raining. I did get to jam with the band Saturday night, but I felt guilty the whole time ’cause I wasn’t getting any “work” done, even though I was getting paid to play…
Now all I gotta do is get comfortable charging customers (I ALWAYS feel guilty when I ask for money) and find a way to take a day off now and then.
Speaking of work, I’d best get back at it.
Hi everyone. Here are my vacation photos! (You don’t have to look at ’em if you don’t want.) Our vacation ended up consisting of us standing around looking at heavy machinery in our yard. Relaxing.
Blatently Stolen from SkyDad’s Blog
Olympic Flashback
Has Anyone Noticed…?
Seems to me that everything I’ve seen of the National Conventions follows a trend. The Democrats promise things and want to try new ideas, while all the Republicans seem to do is throw rocks at the Democrats. It follows in the TV ads, too — the Obama ads are all about explaining his ideas and policies, while the McCain ads are all about tearing Obama down.
The e-mails I’m getting are alarming, too — I’m starting to see e-mails that are blatantly racist. One had a cartoon of Senator Barack Obama standing with his bags, obviously moving into the White House. He’s next to a sign that says, “WHITE House,” and he says, “Well, THAT’S gotta change.” I’ve seen quite a few saying, “Watch out or we’ll have a Muslim in the White House,” some of which go on to mention Senator Obama’s Christian Minister. These kind of e-mails and misinformation only serve one purpose — to frighten the ignorant. From the amount of e-mails like this I see, we have an awful lot of frightened, ignorant people on the Internet these days.
I know they’re probably out there, but I’ve not seen one single e-mail bashing Senator John McCain. The Democrats simply don’t follow that playbook to the extent the Republicans do. The Democrats chant “change,” and compare Obama’s policies with McCain’s, but they don’t resort to character attacks. Again, this is just what I’m seeing, but it seems to ring true.
I’m glad the conventions are over and the veeps have been chosen. I’m getting tired of the circus, to be honest. The anxiety that we may face four more years of unsound economic policies and four more years of a Presidential Administration cutting veterans’ benefits is getting to me.