Redzilla Attacks

On the radio yesterday, I heard Arnold Schwarzenegger playing word games involving the livelihoods of state employees in California.  As the economy tanks, the Governator is looking for ways to save money that don't involve raising taxes.  His solution: cut the salaries of state employees.  In some cases, lowering wages to $6.55/hour, the federally mandated minimum wage.

Help me, here, because I don't quite understand how this is different from a tax.  If you tax me, you take money out of my paycheck.  If you cut my salary, you take money out of my paycheck.  What's the diff?

Oh, right, the difference is that in this scenario, which Schwarzie claims will save the state $1.2 billion per month, the only people being taxed are state employees.  Everybody else gets a free ride, including the governor, who gets to claim he hasn't raised taxes. 

$6.55 an hour.  Think about that one.  I don't know how much money you make, but I don't make a lot.  Hubbicula laughed when he saw our tax return from last year.  Still, $6.55 an hour is less than half what I make as a humble state employee.  At $6.55 an hour, I wouldn't be able to pay my bills, let alone pay my mortgage, or keep the kittens in kibble.  Never mind keeping Hubbicula in college.

Before you even start on state employees, I'll say it for you: we're lazy, incompetent, indifferent, reckless, and greedy.  Fine, agreed.  The only question is: do you want my job?  No, I didn't think so.  We state employees may be the bottom of the barrel, but we were willing to take the jobs nobody else wanted.  No matter how grudgingly and slowly, we provide important services.  Without us, your kids don't get educated, your paperwork doesn't get pushed, and your highway medians don't get mowed.  We guard you while you sleep. Do not... fuck with us.

I knew I shouldn't click on the link.  I knew reading about the woman who had her dog cloned was just going to piss me off, but I did it anyway.

I expected a low-grade contempt, but it turned out to be even worse than that.  Bernann McKinney sold her house to raise the $50,000 to pay for the cloning.  Fine, it's her house, her money, although I'd certainly suggest there are more worthwhile causes to which one could contribute $50,000.  What got me, what pushed me right up to the edge of a full-blown fit of rage is what Ms. McKinney had to say about why she had her dog cloned:

"I had to make sacrifices and I dream of the day, some day when everyone can afford to clone their pet because losing a pet is a terrible, terrible loss to anyone."

Where did this amazing, "indispensable" dog named Booger come from?  McKinney rescued him from a shelter.  So, instead of honoring Booger's memory and his invaluable contribution to her life by going back to the shelter and rescuing another dog, she opted to spend $50,000 to bring five more dogs into the world.  Five.  Five shelter dogs who got gassed in the place Booger.  Imagine how many dogs that $50,000 would have saved.

McKinney's dream sounds like my nightmare.

UPDATE: Now it comes out that Ms. Dog-Cloner is also Ms. Mormon-Missionary-Raper.  Charged in 1977 for stalking, kidnapping, and sexually assaulting a Mormon missionary.  She jumped bail and disappeared into obscurity...until now.

So, the Accounting off ice has made the switch to an elaborate online bill-paying software that is theoretically a big improvement over the old software.  I say theoretically, because at this stage it's really hard to tell if the new software is better.  This is because thus far the training they've offered us has been largely hypothetical.  Take for example this particular problem.  They recently posted "instruction manuals" for the new software, which I diligently followed while paying the first bills I've been able to pay since the fiscal year-end blackout. 

I entered my bills and everything was going smoothly, until it came time to print out the required report to send to Accounting with the bills.  I flipped to the index and learned that the instructions for printing reports are on page 21:

On my walk to work this week I've seen this same item that the trash guys declined to pick up:

Some sort of treadmill, I thought, approaching it from the south side.  As I passed, however, I noted this little pronouncement:
And on the backside, we achieve brand identification:

Yes, my people, that's a treadmill for dogs.  A treadmill for dogs.  A treadmill for dogs.  A treadmill for dogs?

Or more accurately, a treadmill for the dogs of people who are too lazy to take their dogs out for a real walk.

Revolutionary?  Sure, if your idea of a revolution is having your dog chew your favorite slippers, crap on your rug, and maul you while you're sleeping.  Gee...I wonder why the Jog A Dog is sitting out at the curb.

Thank you to Spucko for giving voice to the existential crisis this device would surely produce in a dog accustomed to being walked in the park: "How am I supposed to take a crap on this thing?"

At least it wasn't a fatal encounter, as it was for the people in Minneapolis who didn't survive to tell their crumbling infrastructure story.

It rained all night and I went to bed hoping the basement wouldn't take on too much water.  Nights like that I have serious buyer's remorse.  Remorse that I didn't buy a boat.  At about 1:30, I woke to the sound of my neighborhood transformer blowing.  It's in my backyard, so it's hard to sleep through the conflagration that occurs almost any time it rains for more than hour, any time it snows more than an inch, any time the wind blows much, and sometimes when an errant sparrow flies by and farts in its general direction.  It is a very sensitive little transformer. 

So, after the transformer blew, I lay in bed, trying to convince the cats that despite the explosion and the bright lights and the cascading sparks, that we were not in fact about to be killed by terrorists.  The electricity was out, naturally, so I also lay awake wondering how badly the basement would flood if it kept raining and the sump pumps didn't have power. 

I had just started to drift back to sleep when I heard a man say, "Is that a toilet?"

Why, yes, yes it is.

Because the transformer is mounted on a pole in my backyard, when it goes kablooey, the city workers tromp through my yard to investigate.  Often they wait until morning, and sometimes I actually sleep through their work, but not that night.  It would have been hard to sleep through four massive trucks parked in front of my house and one in my drive and about seven guys in full-body rain slickers with halogen headlamps arguing outside my bedroom window.  It was like something out of E.T.

Then the city workers began to chainsaw through the shrubs growing around the electrical pole.  At 2:30 in the morning.  This went on intermittently for another hour, and then two guys crawled up the pole, and the guys on the ground began hoisting up a variety of tools and equipment to them.  Now, just for the record, take a good look at the pole:
See how it leans ever so dramatically off to the side.  Nice, huh? 

Then the city workers began to drill and hammer and generally run whatever noisy power tools they could get their hands on.  All of that, however, wasn't the best part.  The highlight was this snippet of conversation I overheard:

Pole Guy #1: I don't know where you think I'm going to bolt that L-bracket.  About half this pole is rotten.
Pole Guy #2: It shoulda been replaced ten years ago.
Ground Guy #1: Yeah, well, considering there's no money for maintenance, it's probably not going to be replaced for another ten years.
Ground Guy #2 (laughing): or until it falls down.

In my backyard.  Until it falls down in my backyard.  In the middle of some wretched winter ice storm and takes out the electricity of three city blocks.  So, that's where we are.  Not just big, headline-worthy catastrophes caused by a failure to perform maintenance on bridges, but a nationwide, localized failure to perform every kind of maintenance on our infrastructure.

When I was in college, I had a friend who had grown up in Lebanon and we were once stuck together during an ice storm in Manhattan, Kansas.  The power was out for five days and we were miserably cold and hungry.  On about the third day, Nadal said, "You know what makes America great?"  Don't laugh, but at the time--1992--I answered: "Our Bill of Rights?" (Little did I know...)  Nadal said, "No, it's that even the poorest people in America can get running water and electricity 24 hours a day, every day of the year.  Oh, sure, it's out now because of the storm, but it'll come back on and it'll stay on.  We never had that in Lebanon."

At the time, I thought she was being funny, but sometimes I look back and agree with her.  One of the things that made us great was the notion that we were all in it together and we were all going to sink or swim together.  We were all going have lights and water and good roads and decent schools.  I don't feel like that's a sure thing anymore.  I feel like as the infrastructure falls apart, as we keep giving tax breaks to corporations and rich people, as we keep wasting money of wars and military technology, we may enter a new era when the electricity and the water and the good roads aren't a given.

The answer is fairly simple: it's the FUCKING TAXES, STUPID.  If we don't tax the citizens appropriately, we don't have enough money in the coffers to pay for repairs to things like bridges and electrical grids.  That's exactly what we've been failing to do for years.  After the initial outlay to build all the metropolitan water systems and a national electric grid and an interstate system, we just stopped allocating tax money to maintain it.  Like buying a million dollar house and then refusing to repair the rain gutters until your whole roof falls apart. 

What do the anti-tax people think?  That the Infrastructure Fairy is just going to pop by and drop off a few billion dollars?  Or do they think that all this free market enterprise is going to magically produce companies that will dip into their profits to maintain infrastructure, out of the goodness of their hearts? 

And that, my people, is part of the conversation I'll be having with my city commissioner just as soon as he calls me back.

I've returned from my whirlwind tour of lovely Wichita, Kansas, where I mostly sat around and wrote.  And wrote.  And wrote.  32,000 words.  Not on any of the projects I could use 32,000 words to finish, but on a new project, of course.  All the same, 4,000+ words per day is nothing to sneeze at.  My new project involves a narrator on death row and the ugliest girl in the world.  Oh, and I got some more good news: the essay about my very brief stint as a topless waitress is going to be published.  As that's my 4th acceptance since January, that makes 2008 a pretty good year, and it's not even over.

I told my sister she should open a writer's colony in her little WW2 era brick ranch.  She said that would be fine, as long as all the writers baked for her like I did.  I've heard Tobias Wolff makes a mean carrot cake. 

(Speaking of dessert, try this: get a pound cake mix and bake it up.  Then take a block of cream cheese, softened to room temperature, 1/4 cup of lemon juice, 1 tsp. of lemon zest, 2 cups of powdered sugar, sifted, plus a small carton of whipping cream, whipped.  Mix the lemon and cream cheese, then sift in the powdered sugar and mix until smooth.  Fold in the whipped cream.  Frost the pound cake with the goopy mixture, then refrigerate for two hours.  Throw away pound cake and eat frosting with a spoon.  This is the best cake frosting ever, and I say that to you as someone who was raised on home-made buttermilk-and-vinegar red velvet cake, which is now the second best cake ever.  The thing is, it doesn't matter what cake you put it on, the frosting is so insanely delicious.  I plan to try putting the lemon frosting on the red velvet cake, but I'm worried about the potential for a bacon-and-chocolate like culinary Armageddon.)

I actually got back on Monday, when I came into the office, I discovered that my office was still inaccessible due to construction.  Ditto Tuesday morning.  This morning, I am finally back in business, pushing all my paperwork and blogging.  Because that's what I do at work.

Hope you all had fun and didn't throw any wild parties while I was gone.

Okay, my people, I'm headed off for my glorious week-long vacation in...lovely Wichita.  Although I have other obligations, my goal is to turn this into a writing vacation.  Or, failing, that, a lying around doing nothing vacation.

I don't remember who, but someone recommended the film Dead Man's Shoes to me.  I like Paddy Considine, so I put it on my Netflix queue.  He not only stars in it, but he wrote and directed it.  I was disappointed, for a number of reasons, none of which have to do with the utterly unoriginal story line.  You'll recognize it: older brother returns to town from prison/army/a life of crime, to avenge the murder/death of his brother. 

I can forgive that.  Hell, there are only a few dozen stories anyway and we just keep retelling them.  Or I could forgive that if anything in that over-used story line were believable.  There's some great acting, from Paddy as brother Richard, and from the lovely Toby Kebbel as retarded brother, Tony.  It can't save this film. 

Ultimately, the retarded brother's death is revealed to be a suicide, with the suggestion that the drugs and emotional torment meted out to him by some local thugs brought it about.  The cause of death isn't revealed until the last fifteen minutes of the film, and it's just one more nail in the coffin.  The suicide seems completely improbable, not just based on what we know of the emotional life of the character, but based on the melodramatic set up of the physics of the suicide.  Really?  We're to believe the retarded brother found a rope, tied a noose, and strung it up in a rather inconvenient location, where it's difficult to tell how he even would have managed to hang himself. 

The last five minutes were even worse as they featured what was touted in some reviews as a "truly surprising twist."  Yeah, well, so the dead brother riding back from Hell on a unicorn would have been a "truly surprising twist."  What wasn't exactly surprising or all that twisty is that the last of the local thugs on Paddy's to-kill list turns out to be a nice chap and in the flashbacks is the only one who tries to put a stop to the alleged torments faced by the retarded brother.  So Paddy is overcome with guilt at the "monster he's become" and to wit: instead of murdering the last of the men who were present at his brother's death, Paddy forces the guy to kill him.  Yes, the last witness to the retarded brother's death is forced to stab Paddy in the gut.  Which for the record is not a very easy and quick way to die, although he seems to drop off quite quickly. 

As a cherry on top, the film has the very same weakness that every other film of its ilk has: no explanation of how the older brother has turned himself into some sort of merciless death-dealing ninja.  Unless that's just standard training in the British military.

So, I don't recommend Dead Man's Shoes.  Instead, what you should put on your queue is the Special Edition DVD of Get Carter.  No, no, no, don't even think of the Sylvester Stallone remake.  Don't sully your mind with that cinematic craptasm.  Go back to 1971 and watch Michael Caine do his thing.  At 38, he was all squinty-eyed and dangerous sexy.  Despite the girly way he runs, you believe he's capable of doing some bad shit.  Plus, it's just more fun to watch, especially the bizarre, oyeuristic* phone sex scene.

 

*So, what is the auditory equivalent of voyeurism?

Ever since Congress passed the FISA Amendment Act of 2008, I've been trying to figure out what I want to say about it.  Several times over the last few days, I've opened a new post and stared at the white space without typing a word.  Normally, I'm not short on things to say, but thinking about the changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, I find I can't come up with anything that adequately expresses my dueling sense of horror, betrayal, rage, and defeat.  Or at any rate, it's hard to transcribe the inarticulate cries of moral indignation that were my first reaction to the passage of the bill.

FISA has always existed in a bit of a grey space, allowing retroactive warrants to be issued for wiretapping, but this new amendment pushes it out of the grey and into some place much darker.

Let us look first at our humble Fourth Amendment:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

It says only that we have the right to privacy, unless a well-documented reason exists to suspect that we are breaking the law.  Only when that reason exists and is properly attested to by officers of the court, will our homes, belongings, and personal communications be searched or scrutinized.  See how beautiful that little amendment is?  To paraphrase it takes me almost as many words as the amendment itself.  Economy of language and sentiment.

The new FISA amendment essentially does an end-run around the Bill of Rights.  Everyone is angry over the retroactive immunity the bill offers to telecommunication companies who have helped or will help the government engage in illegal data-gathering, but that's hardly news.  The government has always been in a position to protect companies that helped it break the law.  More troubling is that the new FISA allows the government to conduct these searches--both of physical property and of personal communications--without keeping records.  It allows emergency warrantless wiretapping to last as long as seven days, and it guts the portion of the Fourth Amendment that requires the "particular" description of places to be searched and the persons or things (including data) to be seized.  In short, the new FISA gives the government permission to engage in fishing expeditions. 

After all, theoretically, we're all potential criminals, potential terrorists, so all of our personal communications could potentially contain incriminating information.  If the government no longer has to specify what data they're looking for, couldn't they just say they need to have access to all the personal communications of every citizen. 

It happened in East Germany, where the Ministerium für Staatssicherheit infiltrated the private lives of its citizens so completely that by the time the Berlin Wall fell, it was estimated that a full 30% of East Germany's citizens were actually spying for the Stasi.  Remember Operation TIPS?  People made a big fuss, and the Bush Administration backed down.  They didn't stay down, and this time there doesn't seem to be much complaint about the new FISA.

Of course, it all reminds me of when we lost habeas corpus, and I waxed indignant about how much vitriol gets spent on defending the Second Amendment, even though we never use our guns to protect our other rights.  It holds true here.  Guns are physical things, and if the government passed a law requiring people to turn them in, you'd have a fight on your hands.  Take away our intangible rights, the ones we can't see well enough to know when they disappear, and people don't take up arms against the government.  We blink stupidly, like a fat raccoon startled in the garden, but we don't do much more than hiss and grumble before we scurry away.

After the last two weeks I feel like I need to be wearing safety gear at all times.  Like a crash helmet, a raccoon-proof vest, a mega-absorbent maxi pad, a pair of steel mesh shark diver gauntlets, and some sort of protective cup to go over my ego.  Just to be sure.

All I know is, I made it out the other side to Friday.  I'm alive, I got paid, and the dental hygienist says, "Your teeth are really white for someone your age."  Thanks, little girl. 

How are you all doing?