Globalization and you...

I don't envy that much from my parents/grandparents lifetimes but one thing I wish I had a chance to experience is their level of financial simplicity compared to the complete macro-economic boondoggle that we have to deal with in my day and age. 

In our parents hay-day, a husband’s job at the mill was enough to comfortably support a family of four. His wife didn't have to work. They had a house.  Everyone was fed and they could even take a vacation every year.  Now, a family of four, trying to live off of one parent, working at any sort of mill, is impossible unless that family likes living in the back seat of a car, not eating and finding the idea of a vacation laughable

When our parents got paid, they put their money in a bank, and that's where their money stayed, literally in that bank.  If they found a good enough bank, that was good enough with their, at the time, well managed, advisable investments, they could yield 8 or 9% interest on their money that they put in.   Basically, their bank was their 401K.   Now, if you can get a bank to give you a quarter every month for your trouble, you're way ahead of the curve.  Most people end up giving the banks money now for the privilege of holding onto our money.

I also use the phrase, "holding onto our money very loosely".  While there are still a few reputable financial institutions out there, most manage your money about as well as a compulsive alcoholic gambler. Within milliseconds of your direct deposit hitting your account that money is immediately thrown into the dark, foreboding world of global trading. 

Back in our parents days, globalization was laughable, as it should be today so their banks invested in local economies, which gained higher yields on their money, which benefited everyone around them.  This drove down costs of living, put more money in everyone’s pocket, increased employment, fed kids, the system worked. 

Now, over the years, as we have "Globalized", our banks, the drunken gamblers that they are, have been gifted a whole world of financial games to play with your money.  The money that would have been invested in small local business's 40 years ago may now be invested in a carrot enterprise in Greece, or a concrete company out of Moscow or even bundled up into packages that Steven Hawking can't decode and sold to other banks.  The end result is delusion of your dollar at a borderline criminal level. You get no interest for your money, your money is worth less, your cost of living increases, both parents have to work, and everyone is pissed off.

Now, most people blame the investment bankers themselves for this fiasco.  This is fine, because it really is their fault however, I also blame the people who empower them, mainly the "World" Banks and the botched up Federal Reserve System, but that is a different story entirely.  Good old fashioned human arrogance is a major player in this disaster.  People, with doctorates in economics, who have studied global markets and trading schemes for decades of their lives, admit that they still don't have a handle on the asinine complexities of our global, macro-economic system.  But for every one of these people who are humbled by this spider-web of revenue streams and market futures, there are a hundred others who think that they have tamed this beast.  They are so, incredibly arrogant and stupid, that they actually believe that they understand a system that interweaves everyone’s money and nearly every company, in the entire world.  This, inevitably, leads to them making terrible decisions with everyone’s money and then you end up eating Ramen Noodles for dinner. 

Globalization helps major corporations as it opens so many more options for them to acquire assets throughout the entire planet instead of in their immediate region.  This is really where the party ends. Defenders of globalization will tell you how "it prevents wars" and "aids the developing world".  How can this be true?  How can diluting the world currencies to a point where everyone has less money help the developing world?  Has it helped the developing world?  Is anything better in the "Developing World" since we have implemented this system?  Should we ask Egypt and Libya how they feel about globalization?  Globalization may prevent wars between two countries, but it is not doing much to prevent wars between governments and their own people.  Any system that costs people money and jobs will harbor this sort of behavior.  Every time, that American's have to take a hit within their 401K because some Eastern European country can't grow enough tomatoes this month, is another step towards this end.  Personally, I would rather just have to have a war with some random country every 20 years then have to worry about the monster that is a planet full of pissed off citizens.

We live in a global economy and it sucks.  It doesn't seem to be benefiting anyone in a positive way with the exception of people who are already extraordinarily rich.  Even when the opportunity was ripe to let it disappear we gave the people who caused it more money than they needed to get it back on track, billions more.  It's as though we are all on steam engine, on a collision course with a mountain and we just keep shoveling coal into the fire even though we are all well aware that we're going to crash and die.

It could get better; we just need the entire world to have as good of an economy as we do.  That's not unrealistic, right?  I could totally see Afghanistan managing to diversify their opium driven economy or hundreds of years of lazy, transient culture going away because our major companies in the developed world want to keep globalizing. 

No, this will never happen.  But companies want you to keep thinking it will.  They want you to honestly believe that you are going to get more money in your pocket someday because a company in the Balkans sold a few grapes to a French Winery that puts it’s wine in bottles that are made in the US.  When in reality, more often than not, a drought would have hit the company in the Balkans, preventing them from growing grapes, which were then not shipped to the French winery causing them to cancel the order of bottles from the US, putting that company over the edge financially, forcing them to fire your neighbors.  Any system, with this many moving parts, can’t work, ever.

Human Observations within a major corporation

There are a few; unique observations that working for a large company can offer you.  

Listening to a speech from a company "officer":  As a comedian, I find the opportunity to witness a speech from a CEO or a CIO or a COO or a CMO or a CFO of a major corporation almost as hilarious as a waterskiing squirrel. It is truly incredible to watch these people, fill out an hour or two meeting with such an elegant level of meaningless, useless, pointless blathering that it has got to be considered an art form.  These people went to Ivy League schools and got their PHD in Bullshit.  They are first ballot hall of famers in phrases like, "Going Forward", "Moving Forward", "As we ...", "We're projecting too...", "We'll just have to eat that elephant one bite at a time".  They often have slides or a PowerPoint Presentation that could only make sense to the slaves that created it for them while they were trying to work off of the incredibly vague, incoherent idea that was handed down to them by "the officer". 

Witnessing the people around you at a speech by a company officer:  If you are lucky enough to take a look around at your co-workers during a speech by one of the companies officers at a major corporation, take notes, because it is a unique and hilarious time within the human psyche of a crowd of people.  At one point, our companies CEO said, and I quote.... "Boy I sure hope that we left enough time for questions", in somewhat of a sarcastic tone.  Without hesitation, the conference center erupted into laughter as though it was the funniest thing that any of these people had ever heard in their entire lives. You could even see people, trying to "out laugh" the people next to them in some sort of feeble attempt to attract attention from the CEO from within a crowd of hundreds of other idiots. People, in these situations actually think to themselves, maybe that guy up there, will see me laughing harder than anyone else and he will think, "boy that guy really gets my humor" and promote me!  This can also be witnessed by people sitting close to the stage and taking notes like we are in 5th grade and the garbage that falls out of that guys mouth needs to be documented. You also have the people who will nod their head as though personally accepting whatever in the hell that dude is talking about.  There is always the guy or two or three who will come up with some sort of question at the end to ask "the officer".  It's the same few people every time, desperately trying to make themselves look interested in their bosses eyes by asking, what are usually really dumb questions in front of the entire company.  It is incredible how such a massive group of people can sit together for an hour, listening to some guy talk about nothing and act absolutely thrilled to be there.

Listening to people have day to day conversations at work in a major corporation:  The day to day conversations that people have with each other, while at work in one of these places can barely even be considered a form of human communication.  They are packed with questions about one another’s families and the weather and the traffic.  It is like small talk on steroids.  It is a delicate ballet of multiple people, trying as hard as they can to carry on a conversation while making a constant conscience effort to not say anything that could possibly offend anyone else.  Lines like.  “Yeah, like he is ever on time”, or “Can you make the clock go faster?” or “Are you hard at work or hardly working?”, actually pass as jokes in these places.  And for some reason, people do laugh when they hear them.   These conversations are nothing more than some people, saying a bunch of words, while looking at someone else’s face.

Watching how excited people personally get over whatever kind of garbage the corporation announces:  People will nearly piss their pants over the excitement they feel when something new that their company is doing is announced.  It doesn’t matter what that something is or what it does.  Inside of their heads, they completely skip the evaluation and acceptance steps and go right to the being absolutely thrilled about it step.  If it has their companies stamp on it, no matter how ridiculous the world will think it is, they think it is the greatest thing since sliced bread.  I have a hard time determining if this behavior is just a lot of people acting, or if there are actually that many borderline brain-damaged people that have actually stopped deciding for themselves whether or not they think something is good or bad. 

Old people at major corporations:  From my experience, the old people are the ones that are closest to a voice of reason that you can get.  They are too old to dilute themselves anymore like the young people do and will generally be willing to call Bullshit when appropriate.  It is unfortunate that many of them walk a fine line with this behavior so as to not risk their eventual retirement money.   More of them could really do a lot of good amongst the masses of fake, kiss-ass, young people.

Watching the progressive soiling of an otherwise motivated employee:  Over a long enough timeline, if you work in the same place you can all witness this phenomenon.  A young, just out of college kid will be hired.  Generally, over his/her first six months, they will reply to every email, never be late for a meeting, display the appropriate amount of fake enthusiasm towards their work.  Then, around the one year mark, the weight of the collective delusion will begin to grip them.  Suddenly they don't smile as much.  It will take a day or two to get an email back from them, they get a little snippier with you when you ask them a question.  Eventually, after an unknown amount of time, they will devolve into the typical, fake, credit stealing, political game playing animal that most major companies are chalked full of.

Meetings:  in my opinion, major corporations are full of two kinds of people, people who are good at doing the work and people who are good at talking about the work in meetings.  It is rare to have someone who is good at both.  Unfortunately, our society loves the talker; so the people who are good at talking about doing work, but can't actually do it are the ones who are heralded as the best employees while the folks that actually do all the work just accumulate more work until their heads eventually explode. Eventually, groups within the corporation will become so full of people who don't know how to do any work that they will just keep having meetings about the work and the work never gets done by anybody. These sort of stalemates are usually fixed by hiring consultants to do the real work.  It is a vicious, expensive cycle.

Watching everyone leave, exactly at 5 o’clock:  There is something so refreshingly ironic about watching hundreds of people, all of whom have just sat in a building for 8 hours acting like they loved every minute of it, agreed with everything that their manager said all day, pretended to love everyone around them, all file out of a building as soon as the clock strikes 5, as though the place is on fire.  It reminds you that the real world is still out there and life at a major corporation does not operate within the realm of reality and that everyone that works there is acting and whoever honestly believes that they aren't is delusional.  

The Life of a Cleveland Sports Fan

I live in Massachusetts now and most people around here can sort of relate to the heartache that comes with being raised a fan of Cleveland sports. Prior to the last 8 or 9 years, Boston/New England hadn't won anything in quite a long time either.  But since, Jesus-Christ have these fans been blessed.  Between the Pats, Red Sox, Bruins and Celtics, there is constantly something to be excited about in these parts. 

I have been here for about 3 years and while I do root for the teams here, I don't bleed their colors like I do for the Cleveland teams and I don't think I ever will.  I would be excited to see the Sox win the series this year but nothing near the tear-jerking, holding back vomit, weight of the world off of my shoulders, utter-jubilation that would ensue if a Cleveland team managed one championship in my lifetime.  To this point, I live 10 minutes from Foxborough, where one of the greatest quarterbacks in the history of the game plays for one of the greatest game planning coaches in the history of the game and I watch the Browns on DirecTV instead. 

I find it amazing, that I am 30 years old and no Cleveland team has won any sort of title throughout my entire life.  Statistically, this seems about as likely as me being attacked by a shark and a bear on the same afternoon.  I find it absolutely amazing.

Below is a rundown of what exactly pops into my head, immediately when asked..  "What's it like to be a Cleveland Sports Fan?" 

The Fumble:
I remember being 7 and watching the Browns score what had to have been the game clinching touchdown vs. Denver in the AFC Championship that was going to put them in their first ever Super Bowl.  Only to watch John Elway destroy the Brown's number 1 ranked defense that season and score a tying touchdown with 2 seconds left on the clock.  Then watching Denver win it in overtime.  I remember being happy that we had gotten that close and wondering why my father was threatening to kick the television through the wall. 

The Shot:
I remember when I was 9 years old.  I did not miss a single game of that Cavaliers season.  I learned most of what I know now about basketball watching Mark Price and Brad Daugherty and Larry Nance take on anyone who would challenge them and usually win.  Then Jordan hit the shot over Craig Ehlo and in 2.2 seconds, at 9 years old, I learned how bitter of a pill it is to be a Cleveland Sports Fan.  I remember being 9 and wondering why in the hell Lenny Wilkins had decided to have Craig Ehlo check the greatest player in the history of the NBA with the season on the line. I hyperventilated for about 5 minutes.

The Blown Save:
I remember being 17 and watching Jose Mesa trot in from the bullpen for the Indians in game 7 of the World Series against the Florida Marlins.  Mind you, Jose Mesa, hadn't really been touched all season in a save situation.  However, on this night, me and 20 of my closest friends watched as Edgar Renteria lined a single, inches over Mesa's glove into center field, scoring two and ending the World Series for the Tribe.  I remember watching as my normally boyserous, outspoken friends leave my house in silence, almost a state of shock. I didn't sleep for 3 days.

The Decision:
I remember my 30th birthday, July 8th, thinking, there is no fucking way, Lebron James is going to go on ESPN tonight, on a show called "The Decision" and leave Cleveland.  Not today, not on my 30th birthday.  After all, who could possibly be that big of a scum-sucking douche bag?  And then after one sentence... "I'll be taking my talents to South Beach", I nearly vomited my birthday cake onto my 48 inch flat screen.  I remember being too pissed off to be pissed off.  Which is an emotion only a Cleveland sports fan can relate to.

There are plenty of honorable mentions to this list; namely The Quit. When Lebron just decided to mail it in during the Boston Series in the 2009-2010 playoffs.  Or even the "Other Shot" where Jordan buried an impossible, fall away, 20 footer over Gerald Wilkins to end the Cavs season for another year. You can also add "The Meltdown" when the Indians took a 3-0 Series lead against the Red Sox only to lose 4 games in a row in the ALCS, knocking them out of the World Series.  I would mention "The Fumble", Ernyst Byner’s famous fumble at the 1 yard line vs. Denver in the AFC Championship Game, ending the Browns season, but I was like 4 and don't remember it happening, thank god. 

Rooting for Cleveland sports teaches one to deal with heart-wrenching disappointment at an early age.  These are emotional scars usually reserved for people in their late 30's that I began accumulating inside of me before I knew long division.  Recently, I have been asking myself, how much happier would I be as a sports fan, if I had been born and raised in Pittsburgh or Boston or New York or anywhere but Cleveland?  Why did I have to be part of this demographic of pain and disappointment?   Why did my parents have to park me in front of my first Brown's and Indians and Cavs game?  Why did I love it?  Why do I still love it?   What the hell is wrong with me?

The answer is this; there are a couple of million people in the Cleveland/Akron/Canton/Elyria/Mentor/Lakewood market that have had the same heartbreaks that I have experienced.  And when the Browns win a Super Bowl or the Indians win a World Series or the Cavaliers win an NBA Championship, it would be a million times sweeter than a team winning their 8th Superbowl or a team winning it's 3rd World Series in 10 years or the Yankees winning their 500th World Series. It would be a celebration unlike anything this country has ever seen on Euclid Avenue.  A collective gorilla being lifted off of the backs of millions of people in an economically depressed region.  A team would instantly be heralded the greatest ever in the eyes of so many championship starved fans.  It would be terrifyingly fantastic; it would be heaven on East 9th.  For this reason and this hope, I will die a Cleveland Sports Fan...  Hopefully, they win a championship by then.

McMeltdown!

Over the past year, at 3:00 pm on Monday's, via a Google news alert that I created, I have received a summary of the previous weeks "incidents" that have occurred at or around a McDonalds.   Ever since, 3:05 on Monday's has become one of my favorite times of the week.  Here are some of my all time favorite "McMeltdown" (is what I call them)  headlines, along with my commentary...

"McDonald’s snake wrestling incident leads to the arrest of 2 men"

Basically, these 2 men decided to steal a 23 foot python from a local zoo/animal shop in Australia.  Then they proceeded to do what any two guys would do with a stolen snake, they took it to a McDonald's parking lot and began to wrestle with it.   Ultimately the men got arrested and thrown in jail, the snake remains on the loose.

"Woman hiding sandwich down her pants is in jail again"

Now the word that sticks out to me in this headline is “again”.  Apparently, this is not the first time that this woman has received a McDonald’s sandwich, stuffed it down her pants, and then tried to convince the employees that she didn’t receive it in an attempt to get another one.  No, this is actually the third time.  Overall, the Spartanburg South Carolina resident has had 14 run-ins with the police over the past couple of years.  She is now stuffing food down her pants in the slammer! 

“On Tape: Rage over McNuggets Not Being Served”

This lady was not “Lovin it”.   She attempted to order a 20 piece McNugget meal at 6:30am; what better way to start your day?  When told that they don’t server nuggets at that hour, she then drove up to the drive-thru, got out of the car and punched the attendant in the face.  The manager then punched her, after all what’s a McDonald’s manager there for if not to punch angry customers in the face at 6:30 in the morning.  The Toledo Ohio woman was charged with assault. 

“Hot Chicken Fries Dinner, McDonald’s Settles Suit”

Now I don’t have any idea what this headline means, but the story revolves around a Florida Carnival Worker who claims that a McChicken sandwich somehow had a grease bubble in it, that exploded in his face and burnt him.   Now, ask yourself, is there a more reputable type of character out there then a Florida, Carnival Worker?  And I don’t get how this is scientifically possible unless the man bit into his McChicken within mille-seconds of it being pulled out of the fryer.  I can’t think of any other explanation.  Apparently McDonald’s thought he had a good enough case to settle out of court, so now he can probably put a pony-ride and an elephant ears stand in the back-lot behind his double-wide. 

“Princess Di's niece kicks man on crutches”

Apparently royalty is not immune to the occasional Mac Attack.  In this case, a man in South Africa cut in front of Princess Di’s niece at a McDonald’s in Cape Town.  Without a moment’s hesitation, she flicked a cigarette at him and then just basically kicked his ass.  The Royal family is claiming that she acted in self defense.  The niece is also thinking of pressing assault charges.  Either way someone is going to have a rather expensive trip to McDonald’s on their hands.

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These are just a few of the many examples of horrendous things that occur at McDonald’s on a weekly basis. I would suggest setting up your own alert within Google news to share in the fun on a weekly basis. 

New Years Resolution, 6 weeks later.

At some point back in October of 2010, I made a conscience decision to quit smoking as of January 1st 2011.  And I did, and I haven't smoked a cigarette since, which is nice I guess. 

A little background;
I began smoking on and off when I was 16 and became a daily smoker at 18.  This continued for about 12 years and to be honest I really got sick of it.  I feel like an old man but I can remember when a pack of smokes cost 4 dollars and now, in Massachusetts they are around 9 dollars a pack and going up on a yearly basis.  So an extra 180 dollars a month in my pocket didn't really make the decision difficult. 

I can also remember when people were allowed to smoke in or near buildings and structures.  Now even asking someone if you can smoke in or around someone’s establishment is generally met with a steadfast, heated, venomous outburst about how you can not smoke in their establishment as well as how they personally feel you should not smoke anywhere. You minus well ask them if you can sleep with their sister. If you are really lucky, they will even feed you the kool-aid about how second hand smoke from you somehow weasels its way into the lungs of everyone in the tri-county area.  Meanwhile the exhaust fumes pouring out of the 230 million cars in the United States is of no concern to them. When it comes to anti-smoking, everyone is a really shitty scientist. I have zero respect for anyone who imposes their uneducated opinions onto others.

This is basically why I quit.  Sure there are health benefits from not smoking.  But mainly, it's too expensive and I was just tired of dealing with partially retarded, anti-tobacco, pseudo activist, douche-bags.

There are several things the information that I read on the Internet left out about quitting smoking.  Don't get me wrong, by no means did I think quitting smoking would be easy but I thought it would be difficult in the sense of "God dammit, I want a cigarette, right now!!!".  This isn't the case, to be honest, the idea of smoking sounds disgusting to me anymore.  The main difficulty is not mental it is your body trying to physically transform itself into a non-smoker after years of smoking.  This is a slow, physically painful process that I wouldn't wish on Lebron James.   I feel like I have had a bad cold for going on two months, flu like symptoms, skin feels irritated, energy is drained etc.  My doctor tells me that my body needs time (sometimes up to a year) to push out all of the crap that has accumulated over the course of smoking for more than a decade.  Prior to quitting cigarettes, and with the exception of the swine flu (which wasn't my fault), I hadn't been sick, in any way for over 10 years. I can honestly say, I felt 110% better, physically, when I was smoking a pack a day. 

The other major pain in the ass has been the fact that, you can't exactly clear your calendar because you quit smoking, Instead, you have to just press on as usual, going to work, dealing with loved ones, handling life's day to day pains in your ass all while trying to quit a substance that is more difficult to shake then heroin.   Your boss doesn't care that you quit smoking cigarettes.  You can't call in sick to work because you’re having nicotine fit.  This is especially hard in the 3rd and 4th weeks when your body is begging you to just close up shop for a few days and stay in bed. 

The experience has been eye opening.  You really can't realize how poisonous cigarettes are until you begin denying your body their chemicals.  It really is disgusting.   If I had to advise anyone about the benefits of quitting right now I would say, I don’t know, I will have to let you know once I start seeing some benefits from not smoking, or once I stop feeling like I just spent three weeks vacationing in Chernoble.

And don't quit for New Years.  Don't quit anything difficult for New Years.  A New Year’s resolutions should be like "I'm giving up soda or I'm not going to buy things off of QVC anymore".  Reason being, New Years also marks the beginning of the worst part of winter.  This isn't a time for quitting anything.  The dog days of winter are hard enough without having to crave nicotine on top of the horrendous boredom that ensues.  Keep your vices intact until the weather turns nice, there will be a million other activities at your disposal to keep your mind and body occupied.  And get some sort of medical help with quitting.  Quitting cold turkey was a poor, arrogant decision that I would take back in a heartbeat.

The "motivations" for quitting that you read on the net are for the most part ridiculous.  Like, "Put all of the money you have spent on smokes into a jar so you can see how much money you're saving!"  First off, nobody pays cash for anything anymore and nothing looks more "Kentucky" in your home then a jar full cash.  And if you need to keep the money that you would have typically spent on cigarettes in a jar in order to keep track of how much it is, it may be time for you to revisit 4th grade math.

Sometimes they tell you to keep a "journal" and write down your thoughts during cravings.  Great idea!  What a masterpiece of modern literature that thing would be after about one week.  I hope my loved ones find it and read all about good ol Matt, Mother F’ing the entire planet!  And what am I going to do.  Open it up and read it in a couple of years and be like "Shucks!, those sure were some tough times boy!"  Do I want to be reminded of this?  Do I really want this shit documented for later review?  I don't think so brospeh.

Here is the best advice I can offer.  Know what you’re in for.  Your head, your body, your entire being will tell you that quitting smoking was the worst decision you ever made.  But let reason prevail, let that horrible mentality turn into anger about all the crap that they put in your cigarettes, and all the assholes who work there that causes such delusional thinking.  I mean, how terrifically horrible can cigarettes be that they can inflict such a tremendous psychological effect onto so many, otherwise forward thinking, logical people?

Don't even try unless you are 100% committed to never having another puff of a cigarette ever again, otherwise it won't work out.  Read what other people have to say about it but don't take it as gospel.  Everyone's body is wired differently and will react differently when deprived of it's familiar chemicals. That is my motivation.  Happy F'n New Years.

The unemployed...

Since the financial calamity that ensued in this country in 2008, we have heard how much of a tragedy it is that our unemployment rate is hovering around 10%.  Apparently somewhere around 5% or 6% would be an acceptable amount of folks without jobs. 

Personally, I can't get myself on-board with this concern.  If you take the optimistic view, 90% of Americans still have jobs. Based off of the caliber of human beings that I personally run into on a daily basis, I find this statistic mindblowingly impressive.  I would be pleasantly surprised to find out that 90% of the people who I am surrounded by in my day to day, outside of work, know how to dress themselves and tie their own shoes, let alone hold any sort of a gainful employement.

Look around you outside of your workplace and put yourself in your employers shoes.  Could you imagine hiring 9 out of every 10 of these people?  I personally wouldn't want to call my credit card company at some point and have to deal with Cletus, the Keno Addict who hangs out at my local Food Mart.

Everyone points fingers at the corporations for not hiring, can you really blame them?  Our country, at some point over the past 20 years has become chalked full of people who don't think they have to earn anything.  In the 50's and 60's and even 70's, it was acceptable to call people out on this and force them to do something about it in order to become some kind of contributing factor to society.  Now instead of this system, we have decided to cater to their needs and look at it like it's our fault that their lazy or talentless.  Now we take that a step further and try to invent jobs and industries full of activities that they can handle.  If this fails, then we just give them food and money, forever.

Everyone has their own ludicrous way of fixing the jobless rate that they can't wait to crap out of their mouths as soon as someone is willing to listen....

Things like, you get unemployment for 3 months, if you can't find a job for yourself in 3 months then a McDonald's application is mailed to you courtesy of the Federal Government. 

I would be interested in seeing how McDonald's feels about that.  And the quality of food there is already fairly horrendous.

Some people even want the unemployed forced into military service and possibly sent to war.

I often wonder how our real military personnel would deal with just such an influx.  It would be like the movie "Stripes" in real life and on a mass scale.  Probably not the sort of savvy motivated personnel we need fighting the Taliban.

Then there is the current idea of putting the unemployed to work fixing and implementing our infrastructure. 

A decent plan for those who are physically able to work on roads and bridges and train tracks.  My only concern is that I would like to see a study done that gauges the amount of money companies lose in employee productivity and/or customer traffic when they are constantly surrounded by road construction.  I think the numbers could be surprising when weighed against the "benefit" of putting these people back to work as opposed to just paying them unemployment and leaving the roads open to commerce.

The fact of the matter is that the unemployment rate is justified, just like the national debt, just like our taxes, just like everything else.  The only reason we weren't already at or over 10% much sooner is because we were riding an illegal housing bubble that allowed for every company to become fatter then Kirstey Alley at a cake convention.  Therefore could then just give people jobs who they normally wouldn't and actually make money off of them with illegal life insurance policies and tax breaks.

Media outlets portray minor annoyances as though they threaten the well being of our entire solar system in order to get people to watch TV and buy papers and magazines.  If you want to sell a magazine the formula is this, work with media outlets to convince people that they have a problem or their country where they live has a problem, write a magazine with information about the problem that they think they have.  Watch the lemmings buy the magazine with information about their made up problem.  Buy a yacht.  When news organizations had to start making themselves profitable, over simply reporting the news, was the beginning of this end.  It is how we choose to interpret and react to their spin that matters.

People are, for the most part unemployed because they either choose to be or because they are simply not hireable.  If you are hireable, it is not that hard to find a job.   I found 3 in 2 months, in the industry that I want to work, using nothing but monster.com.  The real problem is education and our core family values that embrace our neighbors ignorance with open arms.  You can have the best schools in the world but it doesn't matter if you have a populous that won't appreciate them.  Until this is rectified, and we force people to become talented in something, instead of making them feel like victims, 10% unemployment will probably be a low figure.

I think Obama has us on the right track...

"That responsibility begins not in our classrooms, but in our homes and communities.  It’s family that first instills the love of learning in a child.  Only parents can make sure the TV is turned off and homework gets done.  We need to teach our kids that it’s not just the winner of the Super Bowl who deserves to be celebrated, but the winner of the science fair." --- "Barack Obama - 2011 State of the Union Address"

Winter: A time for optimism.

Here we are, in the dog days of winter. 

This has to be the worst time of the year for global warming activists in the Northern Hemisphere. How can you possibly sell anyone on the ideals of global warming in the middle of the worst winter in over 100 years?

Now I will admit, I don't have the necessary scientific erudition to understand how we could be in the middle of the coldest, snowiest, life claiming, resource gouging winter since people learned how to write things down, because it is getting warmer somewhere else.

However, I do have a right to be miserable about it.  Winter is the time of year where I always seem to run into these uber-optimistic boobs who just want to spin some kind of positive angle onto everything.  From my experience, the real optimistic people are usually medicated in such a way that could make even the worst situation seem wonderful however, there are some people, who will debate anyone who dares say anything bad about winter. Examples and responses....

"Don't you like skiing or snowboarding and sled riding?"

Sure,  just not for 7 straight months.  And if I liked it that much, I could travel to places with elevations that allow for year round snow.  Also, these are expensive, often dangerous hobbies, they don't even come close to justifying the overall misery involved with winter.  Ask the Bono family how much they like skiing.

"Don't you think the snow looks so pretty outside?"

No, I sure as hell don't.  Do you think my 300 dollar gas bill looks pretty too?  Sure, a distant mountain, covered in snow may be eye catching but so could a mushroom cloud.

"Isn't it nice to have seasons?"

Yeah, summer. And let's face it, spring and fall are pretty much gone anyway.  It's basically winter and summer and that's it.  I used to love fall when I was a kid because it lasted more then a week before you got your first blizzard. And spring has always just been another term for "late winter".  The season's that you speak so highly of don't actually exist anymore, so put the pipe down and get past it Cheech.

"Don't you love the winter holiday's?"

I could take them or leave them.  And the fact that Christmas falls in December is a matter of an ongoing historical debate.  New Years is great, if you don't mind massive crowds of people all paying 12 dollars for a beer and trying to avoid 30 police checkpoints on the way home.  Also, new years tends to suck more and more the older you get.  It is the closest thing to physically watching the years run away from you.  And Dick Clark is a catchers mitt who can still talk somehow, nothing more. 

"Well what's so great about summer anyway?"

I can play golf, I can go to the beach, fresh air, the ability for my body to produce vitamin D, being able to drive without fearing for my life, my car not needing washed once a week, I can open my windows and not freeze, my gas bill goes down by hundreds of dollars, you can take walks, you can go to the park, you can walk on sidewalks instead of the sides of busy roads, your floors in the house stay cleaner, you don't have to shovel snow, you don't have to scrape ice off of your car, you can cook out, every plan that you make doesn't have to involve being indoors, you can play basketball, you can play football, you can play softball, the days are much longer, it's not dark when I drive to work, it's not dark when I leave work, I can tan, I can drive with my windows down, TWO WORDS: DRINKING OUTDOORS!!!.  These are just a few examples the real list of benefits is endless. 

Now I don't want people to think that I don't respect the opinions of people who love winter.  Who am I kidding, yeah I do. 

People in the Laundromat

If your washer and dryer breaks or if you are one of the millions of Americans who don't have one available to them, chances are you have spent your fair share of time at the Laundromat.  The Laundromat is really a place like no other.  A large room, full of machines and people sharing their entire dirty wardrobes with the world. 

You check your shame at the door when you enter the Laundromat.  What do you have in that basket, your dirty sheets, your underwear, your snuggie, a towel that looks like it hasn't been cleaned since the mid 70's?  Bring it on in here!  Everything is socially acceptable at the Laundromat.

I find the psychology of people at the Laundromat interesting.  Everyone seems on edge, as though someone is after them or their dirty clothes.  They tend to stand guard in front of the washers/dryers that they have claimed their own until their quarters run out as though an intruder may attempt to charge the machine and steal one of their wet, soapy pillow cases.  They never venture more then 5 feet from their machines as though they are forging gold bullion inside of it.

It is tough to make eye contact with anyone at the Laundromat.  You came here to do laundry and so did they, so there isn't much to do besides wait for your cycles to finish while staring aimlessly into the middle-distance.  What kind of conversation are you supposed to strike up with anyone? 

"Hey I see you've selected the extended spin cycle."
"Yeah, I think it really brings out the darker colors in my cotton"
"Alright, see you later"

I have seen more then five arguments erupt at the Laundromat.  One of which led to a fight in the parking lot eventually needing police involvement.  And the entire ordeal was over a pile of quarters that got knocked behind a dryer. In a way, I can understand the frustration.  In the real world, a pile or quarters might be worth 4 or 5 dollars but at the Laundromat, it is worth it's weight in gold.  In the wold of the Laundromat the quarter is the 1000 dollar bill.

The service at the laundromat is always sub-par at best.  Sometimes there is an attendant but most of the time they are nowhere to be found which is fine until someones washer begins to spew black smoke out of it that smells like burnt rubber and none of the patrons want to shut it down for fear of wasting quarters.  But these incidents are rare, maybe once a month.  This gives the Laundromat plenty of time to pursue his or her other drug and alcohol related interests.

In many cases, the spirit of the Laundromat will transcend it's walls into the neighborhood that immediately surrounds it.  It is rare to find one in a nice part of town.  Two months ago, a man got hit by a car outside of my laundromat.  It was a serious collision, enough to rip his shirt completely off, somehow. However, instead of alerting the authorities or even confronting the driver for that matter.  The man, scrambled to his feet, collected his items from the ground along with the remains of his shirt and sprinted into an alley and hopped the fence, all with what had to be a severe concussion, never to be seen again. 

I love the Laundromat.  Sure you can get all of your clothes cleaned in an hour.  But the pure comedic entertainment within and outside of it's walls far outweighs that benefit.

ESPN, The World Wide Leader in what?

You know,

Just when you think that something could possibly be any "Less Disney" then the Insane Clown Possey signing to the Disney Record Label, you come to find out that ESPN, is owned by Disney.  As a native of the middle of North America that ESPN has never heard of, I find it hard to beleive that the same institution that brought us 101 Dalmations and Aladin could also be beaming moving pictures of Tony Kornheiser into my home on a daily basis, berating everything about the place I was born and raised and come to love with all of my being.  An institution that broadcast more New York Met games last season then the two teams who played in the World Series combined.  A company who has never seen a Yankee or Red Sock transaction that it didn't absolutely love for fear of losing the fan bases that surround them.  A company who berates teams who are down on their luck like a bully in the playground kicking a kid half his size.

I know, if I don't like it, then I don't have to watch it.  Well, if there was a guy, standing in the street, outside of your house, shouting expletives about you and your family, I guess you could just ignore that too, right?

ESPN calls itself "The Worldwide Leader in Sports".  This would make sense if the 1-95 corridor was "The World"  and not a relatively small region of one country, on one continent, in one hemisphere. 

The more logical slogan that Disney should adopt for ESPN would be "The Worldwide Leader in Sports pertaining to said sports that are played between Boston and Philadelphia".

Sure they kind of pay attention to eveyone else.  But they make the task of covering anyone outside of their comfort zone seem like it's court ordered labor.  They take every oportunity to poke fun at the fan base, their teams and their city.  They are around in the sense of an abusive parent, never around for anything good and all over you for anything bad.

I truely beleive that ESPN's financial interests are killing professional sports outside of the top 5 to 10 US markets.