2008, SEPTEMBER

September 30

In difficult economic times, it’s good to know you get more for your money at the 99-cent store.

September 29

I'm afraid to think about it. So I was sitting in the dark, waiting for sunrise…

CROSTITUTE: a transvestite sex worker.

POSTITUTE: a woman who offers sex for spaghetti. Or, pronounced the other way,

POSTITUTE: a hooker who keeps her appointments on sticky notes.

PROSITUTE: someone who makes toasts for money.

PRONTITUTE: a quickie specialist.

PROSPITUTE: a highly successful courtesan.

PROSTITUBE: a working girl who watches TV in bed.

PROSTITUNE: a sex professional who hums while she works.

September 26

Seems like all the folks who were so hot to deregulate the financial industry (I still think “financial industry” is an oxymoron) are now clamoring for more “oversight.” Based on past performance, I think the word they are looking for is “overlook,” but shat do I know? (That was a typo, but my typos are frequently more revealing than the word I thought I meant, so I’m leaving it alone.)

What I know is that the people who are in such a big damn hurry to sell us their solution to the problem are the same people who got us into this mess in the first place. Why on God’s earth should we believe them this time? I find it a little unnerving that when Secretary Paulson is asked “what if this doesn’t work,” his answer is “Well, uh…it has to work.”

And I know that their $700 BILLION plan will cost you, if you pay taxes, somewhere in the neighborhook (that’s another typo, and once again, I’m leaving it alone) of ten thousand dollars. Of course the President says that the mortgage-backed securities we are buying for pennies on the dollar will someday, probably, be worth a dollar again, so if we live long enough we’ll get it back. Well, somebody will get it back; I doubt they will put my name on the $10,000 worth of paper I’m paying for.

The idea is to take all those semi-worthless (“troubled,” I believe is the term of art) so-called assets (which is more absurd, calling them "securities" or calling them "mortgage-backed?") off the lenders’ books, so they can breathe easier and feel good about making bad loans again. This will allow our economy to “move forward.” I realize that businesses need some credit to operate, but isn’t easy credit what got us into this in the first place? If forward is where the economy goes on credit, maybe forward isn’t the right direction. It’s like a child whose house of cards just collapsed and his reaction is to pick up the cards and start standing them on edge again. Could this be an opportunity to base the economy on something other than the assumption that we will always have more tomorrow?

I heard last night that the House just passed a $612 billion defense bill. Say, that gives me an idea….

September 25: Just When You Thought You’d Heard Everything

PETA has issued a call for Ben & Jerry’s to switch from cow’s milk to breast milk in their ice cream.

Why should we stop at ice cream? If breast milk is better for people, why do I have to put that stuff from cows on my cereal? Why do they sell cow’s milk for human consumption at all? I have this picture of a human dairy, with women being milked every morning and evening. Their babies, of course, would have to subsist on Nestle’s famous Deadly African Formula, but it would be for a good cause. What would the AETP (Animals for the Ethical Treatment of People) say about this? I can see the two groups forming a coalition to promote the use of soy milk, but then the People for the Ethical Treatment of Plants would get all up in arms.

PETA’s suggestion implies that leaving all those udders painfully distended is somehow better for the cows; maybe they should ask the cows. OK, granted the udders would be full only because we raise cows to produce milk, so it’s our fault in the first place. Ethical behavior mandates that we give cows their freedom, releasing them into the wild to fend for themselves. Then we could establish a hunting season to appease the people who like to eat them. Hunters shoot cows all the time anyway—I’m sure they would love to be able to say they did it on purpose. Once the hunters and the forces of nature reduced the bovine population a bit, it should be quite workable. The cows can be allowed to roam around freely in Montana (which is owned by Ted Turner, who surely wouldn’t mind). I don’t think the species would last very long, but if they somehow managed to survive and started to urbanize and become a problem in our streets, we could put microchips in them like they do in New Delhi to make it easier to round them up (Hey, look! We’re back to the old-fashioned round-up! The cowboy’s career is saved!) and put them in cow pounds.

Of course, we’ll hear from PETA about this….

September 23

Unclear On the Concept, Grand Prize Award winner:

The Cadillac Escalade Hybrid.

September 21

I can’t deal with the economy just now, and McCain & Unable are doing well enough at self-parody that they don’t need me, so let’s talk about something easier, like life.

We spend our first 20 years learning stuff. Then we spend the rest of our lives learning that it was all wrong or greatly oversimplified. Like life: when I was a kid life was clearly defined and it was easy to tell if something was alive or not. It’s not that easy any more. Take my computer, for instance; it’s an inanimate object only in the sense that it can’t go down to the fridge and get a beer. I don’t care what the debaters at MIT say, I can tell you that this box of wires has self-awareness.

I was working on my photo website, trying to add some pictures, but every time I tried to save my changes, the whole thing crashed. MacDoctor told me to go to “Resources” and try “Resample All.”

Clickety-hum, clickety-hmm, hey, what’s this? An octopus? It’s supposed to be a jellyfish. Bzz-click a few more tentacles, pockata-mmm delete the eyes. There, all fixed.

And it was.

Mac also heals himself. When I got the job done and went to upload it, I got an FTP error. (If you don’t know what this is, don’t worry, I don’t either.) So I tried it with “Passive FTP” on (me either, but it’s a box you can check, so I checked it) which didn’t help. I switched the firewall setting from “allow only essential services” to “allow all incoming connections.” In theory it shouldn’t matter, since, my upload was outgoing, not incoming, but that’s what worked last time. Not this time. So I waited a day.

Today it works fine. Okay, now I’m getting scared. If you can’t read the next paragraph, it’s because Mac doesn’t want you to know that

September 18

I’ve got a lot of stuff going on right now, including trying to get the new chapter of the Curmudgeon up before I get lynched (hey, lighten up! I just got home 4 days ago, and it’s harder than you think), so I don’t have time to say much here.

Fortunately, as always, the L.A.Times to the rescue:

A13: “McCain reverses self on economy.” I don’t know why McCain reversing himself is news, but there you are.

C3: “Workers’ suit outrages Zell.” Apparently Sam Zell, owner of the Times, is outraged that current and former employees (soon to be all former employees) have filed suit alleging that his “management…is destroying the value of the company.”

And my personal favorite, on page A20: “Obama elitist, says Lady Rothschild.” Yes, that Rothschild.

September 15: News bites

I couldn't make this up.

Al Franken, of Saturday Night Live fame , beat out six other candidates for the Democratic nomination for Senator from Minnesota. Wait, didn’t we already have all the primaries? He will face the incumbent, who won the Republican primary over an expatriate living in Italy. Governor Ventura, what have you taught those Gophers?

NASCAR fans, quit your bitching: at the Bathurst 1000, a weeklong event in Australia next month, officials have decided to limit the amount of beer the fans can bring in to 24 cans a day. “Anyone who needs to drink more than 24 cans of beer in a day to have a good time is not welcome,” a police official said.

September 12

Well, the latest test results are in and we Californians can be proud that our high schools have registered a significant improvement over past performance. Fully 48% of our graduates now meet minimum federal educational requirements. Forty-eight percent! For those of you who attended California public schools, that’s almost half. OK, maybe it’s not as impressive as you might first think, since the kids get seven tries to pass the test, but still—almost half. You can check this yourself: Google “skool rankings.”

I urge you to disregard the mean-spirited comments of the naysayers and, yes, curmudgeons who suggest that our great leap was achieved by lowering the bar. You see, unlike elementary and middle schools, high schools are allowed to submit the results of their own exit exams as evidence of pedagogic accomplishment. So California's PEZ, the Public Education Zar (why,yes, I did attend California public schools; how did you know?), made the test easier, thereby making all of our students look smarter.

By any measure, I believe we still rank above Mississippi. This is because most (for those of you who attended California public schools, that’s one geek with adhesive tape holding his glasses together more than half) of our graduates can spell the name of the state they live in. Though in fairness, this may not be an entirely impartial criterion: “California” is pretty straightforward but there are a lot of ways to go wrong with “Mississippi.” Besides, it gives an unfair advantage to kids in Ohio.

September 11

After 14 years and 8 billion dollars, they finally turned on the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland and the world did not come to an end.

Oh, well. I suppose it was worth a try.

September 8: More surge

Bob Woodward has come out with yet another book—his fourth—about the conduct and progress of the war. This is Woodward, my Watergate hero, not to be confused with Bob Woodruff, the ABC reporter who was supposed to be imbedded in Iraq but it turned out the other way around. Don’t feel bad: I get them mixed up all the time.

Apparently Woodward is alone among the People Who Know Stuff (Some people refer to them as People Really In the Know, but that leads to a rather awkward acronym, so I’m sticking with PWKS) in questioning the success, or at least the importance, of the surge. He agrees that violence is down in Iraq and that increased troop levels played some part in that, but cites other influences as well, including the inexplicable call by Muqtada al-Sadr for his Mahdi Army to chill for a while.

Woodward also thinks a major factor has been the operation of a super-secret government program to identify, target, and kill key figures among the opposition. This is where the reporter loses all credibility. I have to admit that I haven’t read the book yet; I am relying not on Woodward’s interviews with others, but rather on others’ interviews with him—specifically, what he has said is in the book. But he’s going to need a lot of footnotes to convince me that there is anyone in the CIA or any of our “super secret” agencies who could find out what time it was while standing in front of Big Ben. If he could, he wouldn’t tell anyone but his boss, who wouldn’t tell anyone at all. Besides, if we could do that, why didn’t we just do it five years ago with Saddam and save everybody a lot of trouble?

September 5: A Modest Proposal

The Surge is working, or has worked, or is going to work. We know this not only because John McCain says so, but because General Petraeus and even the Liberal Media say so. But Petraeus doesn’t want to reduce the number of troops in Iraq yet because of “concerns that widespread violence could return to Iraq.” The implications are obvious, and lead me to propose the obvious solution.

Since it appears that the presence of Americans leads to, and is necessary for, a reduction of hostilities in Iraq, we should send more troops. Lots more. This would of course require restoration of the draft, but that should not pose any problem for our leaders who are eager to demonstrate their readiness to “make the hard choices.”

We would continue to send more troops until the Americans outnumber the Iraqis, at which point the Ameraqi government could apply for U.S. statehood. As the fifty-first state, Iraq would have to have a secular government (contrary to current opinion, this is in the Constitution) and any remaining Sunnis and Shia could continue to squabble in harmless Ecumenical Councils like the Catholics and the Episcopals.

Meanwhile, our dependence on foreign oil simply vanishes. The economy (i.e. Halliburton) gets a major boost. It would even improve international relations: I’m guessing that Iran would become much more tractable if it shared a border with the U.S. Especially if we stored a few Weapons of Mass Destruction in our new state.

September 4

They say you should open with a joke, so I just came up with one. You know how you slap yourself on the forehead on the way home from the party when you realize what you should have said? Well, I think I just set the record for the delayed-reaction comment:

If you have an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters, they are probably taking the California Bar exam.

That would have been really funny 25 years ago. Now people ask “what’s a typewriter?”

Story of my life.

They say you should also close with a joke. Sarah Palin. Looks like I was wrong about her sole qualification; girl got some mouth on her, don’t she?

A friend forwarded this to me. Could I not share? Our country is in good hands.

September 3

Her family’s problems are absolutely none of my business and none of yours, but I can’t help wondering if, in her heart of hearts, Sarah Palin still advocates “abstinence only” sex education.

In any case, I suppose I’m going to have to register to vote. I have not voted since Nixon was elected over my determined objection. It was partly a matter of not wanting to encourage them, and partly the realization—borne out by the victory of Scalia over Gore—that the assholes would find a way no matter what I did. And in a way I figured I couldn’t win: the best I could hope for in a democracy is that the majority would prevail, and the majority is an idiot (present company excepted, of course).

But I’m being shamed into rejoining the process. My friends say I can’t bitch if I don’t participate. That is patently untrue, but still, since I will not be denied my right to bellyache, I guess it’s better if I do it from the mesa of moral rectitude.

But how am I to register? I couldn’t be a Republican, even if they would have me. And I can’t say I feel any affinity for the Democratic Party, which is like the Republicans but without the organization. Or the invidiousness. Does that mean the Democrats are more vidious? I think they're just as dirty, only not as good at it.

I tried to register as an Independent one year, but somehow they put me into George Wallace’s American Independent Party instead and I’ve been trying to live that down ever since. Is there a Cynical Party?

There is one political party I’m not eligible to join: the Alaska Independence Party, whose goal is secession from the Union. Some guy named Palin was a registered member for years. His wife apparently did not get around to joining formally—she was trying to get elected to something, and busy applying for pork projects for Wasilla and Alaska for McCain to condemn—but she did encourage them. In print.

Just a thought: if the Alaskans actually did attempt to secede from the U.S., do you suppose their neighbor, Russia, would invade to support them?

September 2

I have GOT to start going to bed earlier...

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