--- Goddamn Needless-Markup to hell

--- Goddamn Needless-Markup to hell and back!

Stop sending me catalogs, would you? We is po’. I cannot afford the stuff in these catalogs. You’re killing trees needlessly.

But, oh yes, do I ever want the junk. Especially these. And these boots Prada---you know those jokesters in Milan---has titled the sport buckle bootie I could even probably make do with these despite the fact every practical bone in my body is screaming Nooooooooo,
don’t do it! For the love of all that is good and holy reject your
preppy instincts! Throw your tattered Preppy Handbook down and then
burn the effing thing. It’s taking you down the path to HELL!
They’re not made with waterproof leather!

The phrase that keeps running around in my head is Resistance is Futile,
like I’m someone who’s about to be assimilated into those butt-ugly
Borg cubes. But, in the spirit of all good little anti-marketing
campaigners, I will resist. I will muster my defenses. I am strong. I am a shoe whore and I am proud of it, but I will not pay ungodly sums for designer shoes…until
I sell the manuscript and can indulge my shoe whoredom. Free markets
are free markets, after all. You just need to be able to afford them.
Yeah. Um-hmmm. That’s it. --- Ah, God love flame wars. They’re fun.
There’s been an interesting one going on over at A Small Victory,
and, wow, have the Neanderthals come out to play! Michele, rightly, is
pissed off. It started here and has gone on to here , here and here.
I’ll let you look it up if you’re interested. It’s about the
newly initiated free breakfast program at public schools in NYC.
Originally some windbag over at Right Wing News decried
this and it’s all gone on from there. The comments started off in a
fairly innocuous way when Michele replied to this. Support, for the
most part, but then someone said something to the effect of hey, he’s got a point
and has now deteriorated into men telling women to keep their legs shut
so they and their resultant fatherless children won’t be a burden on
society. Hmmm. Always telling, comments like those. They say a heck of
a lot more about the people who wrote them rather than providing useful
evidence to back up their point. These guys are like the much hated
next door neighbor who is forever giving me shit about my much beloved,
but on its last legs 1983 Camry, because he has four cars for two
drivers and he’s so cool because of it. The essence of his bafflement as to why we don’t replace it seems to come down to something like this: Capitalism
and boot strapping worked for me, it should work for you too! I
shouldn’t have to pay for your mistakes! Your car is driving my
property values down! Have you no pride!
Ummm. Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. I just choose not to apply it to
social status obtained by the purchasing of fancy automobiles. Driving
a Saab, in other words, doesn’t make me a better person. Nor does
having an expensive car payment, but thanks for playing upon my
insecurities about not fitting in because money and all the things it
can buy a person is what you
value and what prompts your refusal to shut the hell up about it. While
I reject the nastiness of these men, and the overall idiocy of some of
the suggestions, I think all of the debate is focusing on the wrong
thing. No one’s going to deny some kid a hot breakfast if their
parents can’t provide one for them. It doesn’t matter if this is a
back-channel attempt by the NYC public schools to boost their funding
from the Agriculture Department. Kids do better in school on a full
stomach: end of story. All of this junk is irrelevant.
What is relevant here is the frustration of the average taxpayer who
keeps getting hit up for stuff like this. Because this is one more
straw that’s being added to the camel’s back; when the camel will
collapse, no one knows, but something’s got to be done about it
before the taxpayers go into complete and utter revolt. Now, the
husband and I are your average married, with no children, taxpayer. We
rent, so we don’t get a homeowners discount on our taxes. We have no
children, so we don’t qualify for any deductions on that front
either, nor did we receive that nice refund check all the people with
kids got earlier this summer. Sure, we do get a few deductions from the
husband’s business, but it’s generally not enough to lower the
burden all that much. We pay the highest percentage of taxes we
possibly could on the income the husband brings in to not only the
feds, but also to the State of Minnesota, who, in the past, depending
upon which bracket we fell into at the time, actually charged more than
the feds. Minnesota is actually giving out property tax rebates as a
form of tax relief. They threw them in the mail the other day. We
won’t be getting that check because, despite the fact most of our
rent goes to pay property taxes, it doesn’t technically count. This
says nothing about all of the ordinary taxes we pay on a daily basis:
sales tax; gas taxes; taxes on cigarettes and pipe tobacco and cigars;
taxes for services, like electricity and phone; taxes on tag renewals
for the car. It goes on and on. Everything in the State of Minnesota, besides food and
clothing, is taxed. There is no escaping it. And don’t tell me to
push out a kid or buy a house or even to set up an offshore company so
I can escape the taxes like you no doubt have. This is not the point.
It’s a very sad day when it’s to my benefit to change my lifestyle
so I can pay the government less. That’s latent socialism and I
don’t appreciate it.
I have no problems with paying my taxes, other than bawling like a
little girl when it’s time to sign the checks. While I have some
issues with some of the spending (ok, a lot of issues, but that’s not
the issue), I still realize that if I want less spending, I have to
vote for someone who believes that too. This is the way our government
works. What bothers me is this willy-nilly (sorry for that usage, but
it’s the truth) dumping of money into the educational system and
thinking it’s going to solve all the problems that are going on
there. This
is why people are so enraged at this notion of free breakfast for poor
kids. It’s not that anyone in their right mind would deny a kid a
free breakfast. (And if you do, simply on the premise that feeding a
hungry child is wrong in this instance, that this is where you’re
going to make your last stand, you’ve got your priorities out of
whack and you’re making my case for eugenics stronger). It’s that
it’s one more straw on the camel’s back. You just have to look at
some of the kids that are coming out of the public schools today to
wonder where the hell is all that money going because it’s certainly
not going into educating these kids. I used to manage a coffee shop,
and as such, I had a lot of teenage employees. Their applications were
incredible: they couldn’t spell to save their lives. The interviews
were amazing, because they couldn’t connect A to B in a coherent way.
If the cash register/computer went down and the calculator was missing,
the idea of adding and subtracting manually was enough to throw them
into a tizzy fit because they hadn’t done that since grade school and they weren’t going to be held accountable if the drawer was short.
The employees that I did have would talk about school, and some of the
things I learned were astounding. Did you know they have TV’s in the
classroom nowadays? Yep. It’s there for educational purposes, but
it’s generally on MTV, or so one girl said. At one point, the seniors
were reading 1984 and, as a group, they declared that they
thought it was the hardest book they’d ever read. And they were all
in AP English. And no, I’m not joking. I read 1984 in 1984. When I was fourteen and in the eighth grade. When I was a senior in high school, we were tackling Lord Jim. I don’t want to regress into one of those back when I was in school
sort of thing, but hell. I’m only thirty-two and the things that were
considered educational priorities way back in the 1970’s and 80’s
is dramatically different from now. I could add and subtract. Not well,
mind you, but I could and I didn’t panic hysterically at the mere
thought of doing so. I can spell. I can connect A to B verbally. I
couldn’t ignore the differences and it would have meant willful
blindness on my part to do so. Every time there’s a tax increase
being proposed, legislators, federal, state or municipal, they talk
about how good it would be to have the extra money going to the education of our children.
It would allow schools to do so much more. More computers, more
textbooks, more #2 pencils. They intimate that a generation of
Einsteins will come about if only the average citizen would pay just a little bit more in taxes.
Well, it’s a cheap trump card to keep throwing down and I, for one,
am sick of it. It’s emotional blackmail, because it hits all the high
notes: children, education, the future of our world, etc. You look like
a Dickensian nightmare if you refuse. God, how could you deny poor Johnny a textbook! Shame on you!
All of the money I already pay you isn’t producing that generation of
Einsteins as it is, so why should I pay you more? Learn how to use your
resources wisely. I always find it amazing that teachers are the ones
being laid off when there’s a budget shortfall. I don’t see fat cat
administrators taking a pay cut. I don’t see the teachers’ unions
telling their members that they don’t have to pay their union dues
because, maybe, the teachers could use that money to pay their phone
bill because they’re underpaid enough already. They need that money
for the strike fund, don’t you know? If the fiscal situation was
quite so bad, shouldn’t the administrators be working for free? If
they don’t have the money for paper in the classroom, perhaps the
bureaucracies that run the school districts should be giving over their
office supplies so that there is? But no, it’s easier to lay-off
non-tenured teachers because it draws a big ol’ red arrow to the
point that the fat cats don’t think there’s enough money to run
their school district. Yet another cheap emotional trump card to lay
down, but it works, so why shouldn’t they keep doing it? It gets more
money in. More money for them to spend unwisely, when the students
can’t spell and, at age eighteen, think 1984
is a tough read that they just don’t get. We spend so much money on
education, and the kids aren’t getting educated. That’s what the
issue is here. Not free breakfast for kids who don’t get fed at home.
Education is supposed to be about lifting our children up so that they
might do better than us. Right now, we’re barely giving them the
tools needed to work on the night shift at a convenience store. --- We
have a guest blogger today. I know. I know. Gasping for air doesn’t
quite fill the lungs after the shock of the idea I would allow someone
else to blog here hit you squarely in the chest, does it? Breathe
deeply. You’ll get your wind back soon enough. Like Lileks, we also
rented The Core this weekend. Unlike
Lileks, however, we liked it. It was fun. Its Kung Fu was strong. The
husband has a few points he would like to make regarding it so….away
we go with the cutting and pasting. - This may explain why Mr. Lileks sticks with the 50’s sci-fi movies.

I admit at first I was reluctant to watch “The Core”, for the same reasons that Mr. Lileks was eager to see it. ”stuff
blows up, there’s a fancy ship, the world’s in peril, etc. Could be
a great bad movie. Could be a bad good movie.” However, he’s
off base with most of his conclusions. The two conclusions I’ll agree
with him on are that Hillary Swank didn’t look like she belonged
there and that much of the cut-scenes should have stayed in the film.
But overall, I really liked the movie. It was very intelligent in all
the right places. The physics were plausible, and the combination of
sciences meshed very well. I’m wondering if Mr. Lileks prefers his
science fiction dumbed down for the masses like most of the garbage we
get out of Hollywood.
First, Mr. Lileks argues that the hacker persona ‘Rat’ was
inaccurate in that furious typing can grant access to the critical
location’s equipment and shut down systems as needed. Granted, all
movies oversimplify this aspect of hacking, but nevertheless it is
plausible. There’s a scene where Rat tells the overly-elitist
physicist played by Tucci “Multi-tasking, I couldn’t think as slow
as you if I tried.” I could go into a plausible scenario how, with
the several computer systems operating simultaneously Rat could have
used many different tactics to locate, crack, comprehend and disable a
public power supply, but I won’t…it’s boring. Anyway, what the
hell would a MAC guy (he says with disgust) know about how real
computer systems work anyway??
Then he goes on about aspects of the film. His criticism of the pigeon
scene is way off. Have you ever been to Trafalgar square? I have,
there’s so many birds they have to hose the square off several times
a day. It’s disgusting. It gets so bad that the pavement is slippery
and dangerous. Mr. Lileks seems to believe that the shot was filmed to
make it look like pigeons pushed a bus over…not true. In the shot in
question, the bus very clearly drives over an obstacle in the road that
causes it to flip. The birds’ role was simply to distract the driver
directly and through the hysteria caused by them crashing through
windows. And he complains “destroying the Coliseum by lightning? How? Why, but striking it so many times it glows, then explodes.”
Well, not exactly. If he would have looked closer, he would have
noticed the capacitor effect the coliseum began to exhibit. As the
lightning entered the bowl, perhaps some minor conductivity in the
stone, combined with the sheer size and unique shape of the Coliseum
actually had the effect of storing a charge temporarily until an
explosive force was built and pushed past the structure’s ability to
contain it. Unlikely I’ll admit, but the movie-makers here were at
least trying.
Finally, here’s another comment: “It’s good to know we could
construct a ship capable of visiting the earth’s core - and have it
ready to go, with custom launch pad over the Pacific, in three years.
“ Well, if he was paying attention (again) he would have
noticed that all the experimentation was done! The material was
developed and prototyped already. The rest was engineering and money
for fabrication. Pretty easy to obtain when you have the world’s
governments behind you and the goal is to SAVE THE PLANET! I’m not
sure what a newspaper columnist knows about construction and
manufacturing, but in the end it’s all a matter of resources. If you
know what you want to build and money is not a problem, manufacturers
will line up at your door to ask you when you’d like it delivered.
Anyway, that’s my opinion. It’s a very intelligent movie with well
written roles, good humor and engaging excitement. At least it was for
me. I’ve been called a geek, though, so take that for what it’s
worth.
- Me here again…the only thing I have to add is that Lileks says the
ship was built in three years. It was three months, not three years. I
have to wonder, though. We live in the same neighborhood that Lileks
does. Granted, he does not live in Cake Eater Land, as we do: he lives
across the street in the Minneapolis province of the People’s
Republic of Minnesota. We’ve sussed this out just by reading The
Bleat. We go to the same Target and now I’m beginning to wonder if,
when Reloaded comes out in a few weeks, we’ll be fighting over the last copy at the local Blockbuster.