Cause Celebre

Wow… if you didn’t see the opening of the Tour de France – and let’s face it, you probably didn’t – you might have heard about the world-class narcissist who stuck their body and a sign in front of the pack in order to get on TV… AND THEN CAUSED A MASSIVE PILE-UP.

On day 1.

At stage 1.

No? See below. It’s just encroyable!

The spectator who caused the Tour de France pileup has reportedly fled the country | The Week

Then this mental mannequin supposedly bailed on a flight outta the country. How do they know? If they couldn’t identify the person then where’s the traceability? Who knows them? I’m sure there’s plenty of guilt and shame lingering over what they call a soul, but I understand why they won’t come forward to accept their punishment. FFS, people have murdered people for being fans of an opposing team THEY DO NOT PLAY FOR… so imagine being the person holding a sign that says “ALEZOPI-0MI!” prior to causing a massive crash that sends heavily-sponsored and (likely drug-enhanced) bike riders to l’hopital! Yeah, get le fuck outta towne.

June 28, 2021 0

We Can’t Miss You If You Don’t Go Away

Well things have gone and gotten into an international garbage fire, huh? Governments are trying to quell the crash of their society’s fears against the crumbling economies, hinting that “everything will be fine when you’re back at work, producing, happy, normal, YOU WILL BE FINE WE PROMISE OR WE WILL FIRE YOU, AND YOUR FAMILY WILL DIE IN THEIR BEDS.” In the meantime, there’s a groundswell of sentiment backing the Workers of the World. As employees (non-CEO-levels) are forced to stay home, the world’s climate is seeing rest and repair while commutes and factories are reduced to almost nil in some places. And some people with almost no personality at all are missing the normalcy of a routine that was leading them to a nice retirement card and an early grave.

Now, there’s shit to be shoveled everywhere at all times. As someone who has shoveled shit of one kind or another, and will do so in the future, I have been trying to “stay productive” in the days since being sent to work from home (WFH), going on 1 full month now. It’s different and weird and not what any of us would want, but this is reality now. Dwelling in Reality is the only way to really center yourself when you don’t know what to do next. And sometimes shoveling shit isn’t really what you’re supposed to do at all.

Yesterday I, and 50% of the employees for the company I work for, were furloughed due to the quick, sharp decline in consumer spending. I am still processing feelings and ideas about it, from “they don’t see me as important” to “now’s the time to finish up the 1,000,000 things I say I’d do if I had time.” We’re also in the middle of a stretch where our kids are not in school, and we’ve done our best to homeschool them, or at the least, not let their brains go completely pudding-like. So now I can look at all the shovels and all the shit and decide what I want to do with either of them.

I surely have more to do than I have written down. In the past year I left one job, had 3 days off, and started the new one. Shortly thereafter I tore my quadriceps tendon, which I didn’t find out for about a month, then had surgery to repair it, and currently I am rehabbing that. Also in the past year I got into a debate online (I know… dumb move) about how workers control the industry, but nobody believes they do, because you’d never be able to organize enough people to walk out at the same time to cripple an economy “just to prove a point.” My point was that if every person in a major industry took a week off, and had their company pay for it by way of paid vacation time, the industry would see a hit that would likely correct the way of thinking. That introduced a larger, more problematic idea to get past.

The idea is that people fear the loss of their income so much that they’d never do something that drastic, something that would raise the ire of the company for which they trade time for production and knowledge. Not enough people would trade a paid day off to march in a protest if that meant they would lose time to do nothing around the holidays or take a trip somewhere. I know, this sounds very Marxist, and even though I’ve read only a wee bit of Marx and usually when I was hungover. I know this leans very socialistic, because it is from a Worker’s point of view. But again, I’m not against Capitalism. But a minimum wage isn’t the least you can make, it’s the least a company is forced to pay you, and some would pay less if they could, because Profit Margins, bitch.

We have a greater power now. In a time when many of us looked at saving our jobs by going to work, we can help save communities and people and industries if we do waaaaay less than we are used to doing. There are skills to learn. There are museums you can tour, virtually. Work on your lunges. Come July you can have those bakery-fresh buns you always promised yourself you’d bring to the party. And if you would just STAY HOME AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE, there can be parties to go to, with people you truly like, who have jobs with golden shovels. Won’t it be nice to be missed?

March 26, 2020 0

The Ray/Lee Files IX: It’s Not A Coincidence

For years now I have had a weird fascination with how certain middle names align with certain crimes. I noticed that people with the middle names of “Ray” or “Lee” seem to perpetrate an inordinate number of crimes, and usually, the more heinous in nature are those crimes. That’s not to say everyone with either of those middle names HAS or WILL commit a heinous crime. Just saying that when I see a crime like “Man accused of poisoning step-sister at Easter brunch” or some-such, I always click in to see what the guy’s name is. The accused’s middle name is often posted to help the reader differentiate between Danita Renae Horvath of Lincoln, NE and Danita Lee Horvath of Lincoln, NE who was found covered in entrails outside the petting zoo…

And here we go again…
“North Carolina Man charged with killing his wife with poisonous eyedrops.”

A North Carolina man has been charged with using Visine eye drops to kill his wife of eight years. Joshua Lee Hunsucker, 35, was arrested and booked late last week, charged with the first-degree murder of Stacy Robinson in September 2018. His bail has been set at $1.5 million.

Lawyers for Hunsucker “strenuously opposed” the allegations and pleaded that his bail should be lowered to $50,000 so he can be with his two young children. The judge refused the request.

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I’ll say right now that allowing that guy to see his children would be a huge, deadly mistake. This dude’s sick and has cracked, dead-eyed to the world and probably touting a “nobody understands” mentality. Until further notice, please refrain from middle names of Ray or Lee when naming anbody other than an alligator or sword-wielding gorilla.

December 23, 2019 0

Death, Taxes, and Other Investments

In the past 2 weeks I have spent over 4 hours on the phone with the IRS’s on-hold music. I worked on a 1099 last year, wherein I took a higher level of pay and didn’t have taxes taken out; instead, I defer the payment to a single tax payment after some standard deductions as a consultant. If you play it properly you have the tax money (and then some) stored up and ready when the bill comes due. In our case, the payment to the IRS hasn’t happened because of… well, I’m not sure. It seems like the payment was supposed to, but didn’t, go through, and then I got a letter that prompted a call. Apparently, that letter went out to a lot of people. I have yet to speak to an actual human at the IRS.

At the same time, a massive merger between AT&T and TimeWarner occurred, creating WarnerMedia. Having worked at AT&T a number of times I can honestly say it is one of the corporations that is best at treating employees with the most basic of respect to keep them from leaving. Which is too bad. Because when publicly-traded corporations are beholden to shareholders, the CEO will do a dance to perhaps make people feel good about their investments. Money rolls in. Stock price rises. Dividends are paid out. Employees grind through work to keep the machine rolling. The company makes a very public, virtue-signaling bonus payout announcement. But that’s just a small part of the story.

So what’s my problem? It’s this… Shortly after the announcement, a round of layoffs began. There was no announcement for that. It’s a year-end move AT&T, and likely other corporations, do in order to get money off the books before benefits reset. For a company that touts itself – and this is for any corporation – as wanting to grow, invest in, and care about the people who work for it, nobody is more important than the Investor. That might also be employees of the company. The workforce within, and this is also common at many corporations, is heavily augmented by consultants, contingent workers, or contractors. We do not receive the same benefits as the people who we work alongside who are full time employees. But we do the same work. And many times, from management or leadership positions.

I work for a great corporation at the moment. I’ve worked for not-great corporations. A great corporation takes care of people, inside-out. It pays taxes to the areas and nations it works in. It has jobs for people to move in to, and up to, and cuts workforce as a last resort. Yes, Capitalism has allowed me a very comfortable lifestyle while I work to pay off taxes I accrued by working in a Capitalist economy. It’s a loop I’m out of, with an anchor to cut loose instead of reeling in to drop somewhere again. There’s a point where we all have to get to a 0-balance life. Hopefully we’re alive when it happens.

June 23, 2018 0

Time Travel

The past almost-6 months have been crazy in various ways.

Work-wise I as given a project that is like living with a demanding, under-medicated chimp. It could rip your arms off and eat your hands, or just kinda hang out and cuddle, READY HERE WE GO nope, all good.

Life-wise, we’ve had some vacations (LegoLand: We Hope You Like LEGOs All The Time!) ed. note: We do…. and some trips to the ER (on my birthday! for me!)… and some other life-lessons (don’t have a discussion about money the day after you buy expensive stuff).

Societally, I now know the politics of 78% of my kids’ classmate’s parents, and some of them are pretty surprising, if not downright frightening. Lotta people buying bunker supplies already. Not sure if I’m nervous or turned-on.

ANYway, I wanted to say that I’m sorry for not writing more. Between the Project, the Infection, and the Election, my life was all sorts of crazy. I feel like I aged from 38 to 43 in the past 3 months. But as I always try to do, the lessons I’ve picked up have been wonderful. For example…

Quitting Is Not An Option: Look, sometimes, it sucks. Work. The day. This party. Stain removal from the party. Your kid’s friends. And I want to say F THIS S, and just stop doing what’s not fun and move on with whatever. But I don’t. I wake up, I thank G-d for another day to try to get it right, and I check “Didn’t Kill A Punk Bo-Hatch” off my list. I can’t quit. I have bills.
Quitting Is An Option: Yes, you can chuck it all and bounce. You can. Your moral level-line likely keeps you from doing so, but yeah, you can escape. My older son quit coach-pitch baseball this season after 6 weeks. 3 of which were rained out. 3 games. 90min practices. And the coach, meh, he’s a great coach for 10 year olds. But not 6-7 year olds, like my son. And my kid’s happier, getting to focus on soccer and football and reading. And I got 8 hours of my week back.
Apologetic Assertiveness: I’m not assertive unless what I’m dealing with is Wrong, on a moral, practical, or personally financial sense. I was called “a push-over” at work by somebody on another team, because I didn’t push back on a topic 3 other people had talked to death. When I remarked that any agreement and discussion on the call would have just been expensive noise, seeing as how we’re all being paid to talk instead of work on the problem we all agreed on, I don’t really care what he thinks of me. Then I had to assert myself when asked why so many people were in a particular meeting.
1. Because the initial invite list was 8 people, and 3 of those people invited 2 other people (14 now), and 3 of those 6 invited 1 other person each (17 now), and 2 of them invited 2 other people (21). And only 5 of the original 8 are even talking. So this went from a discussion to a weekend party when the parents are gone and everyone heard about it. Why don’t we ask the people who aren’t talking why they’re here? (Silence)

So, yeah, I don’t dictate attendance, I just make the meeting go.

ANYwho, we’ll come back around to some stuff at some point.

The biggest news is that I’m down 20lbs from the start of the year, and my Flag Football team started the season with a 20-7 romp over the Northshore Vikings. So, things are good.

Thank you for reading. Anything I can write up for ya?

April 25, 2017 0

Staph Meeting: The Small Bug That Bites Big

About 2 months ago I hit the busiest period of my life in the past 2 years. Work was humming along, coaching teeball one night a week (not for the money) working out 3 days a week, and preparing to move to a new home/sell a home/argue about moving and packing. Bizz. Eee. I wasn’t sleeping much but felt fine. I was eating healthy and not over-doin’ it with booze. OK, I suppose “over-doin’ ” is subjective, but for my standards, I was FINE, OK, I was fine…

Then I got hit with a bastard of a staph infection on my thigh. I think I got it from the mats at the gym, though I usually wipe ’em down before stretching on them.n I’ll never use mats again. The smallest cut and a latent response to the bugs and next thing I knew, a cyst the size of half a golfball was growing on my outer thigh. The part where you sit down and it hits a chair. Or you stand up and your pocketed-phone bumps the side of it. The area where you nudge it and cry a little. I couldn’t think of it without wincing.

After about 5 days from “implantation” to “it has a heartbeat,” I had a doc take a look at it. I thought it was MRSA due to my medical training (Thanks WebMD.com!) but it wasn’t. It was the non-MR staph aureus, which bode well for me. It was also a nice little scar about the size of a penny to remind me to not F around with that stuff.

Fast forward to 2 weeks ago; final weekend of moving into the new house. 90deg-F, in and out of trucks, sweating like a training montage in a 1980’s martial arts film. And I get the smallest cut on my back from whatever. 24 hours later, IT’S BACK. The warm, infectious feeling of spreading staph! Now, I thought MAYBE it was an ingrown hair and begged my wife to hot compress it and break out the big safety pin and go to work. NOPE. Too gross for her. Too much to ask. And in hindsight that could have spread the bug much further into my system.

The next day I’m begging to see the dermatologist because my other doc was a little too happy to dig in with a knife. The area on my back spread from a Quarter-sized area of heat and pain to about the size of an adult hand, tucked under my skin. And it hurt like somebody was pressing an iron into my back, but with a lovely little Vesuvius right there in the middle, a grotesque Ground Zero of bacterial bombardment. It had moved from a red to a deep purple spot about 1/4″ across, which was not a bruise. Instead, it’s necrosis; the bacteria and eaten and killed everything in that are and moved on.

My dermatologist took one look and said “OK… well… how much time do you have this morning?” 10min later, laying face-down on the table and lidocaine injected into the infected area. A slice, a push, and doc says “Yeah, this was getting bad. You had an abscess here that wasn’t gonna stop. We’re gonna drain this and see what we can do.”

That was 3 weeks ago now. I went through a round of Cephalexin to kill it. I had twice-daily “expressions” of the area to release any fluid built up under the left shoulder blade and in my back. I couldn’t sleep but in 1 position, and not even a fair dose of painkillers could lull it to rest. People used to die from this thing, and through the miracle of modern medicine, I have a quarter-sized hole in my back, packed with gauze, and draining only a slight amount of clear fluid and blood while it heals itself. My wife has become a field-nurse of heroic proportions. She saw my inner back-meat, and didn’t flinch.

The weird part of all this is… I had been telling myself, and been told by others, to gear-down. I had about 3 high-stress, low-sleep months where I powered through it and was ready to slow-down once we moved into the new house. Well, I did. I haven’t been to the gym for a serious lift in 4 weeks. I slept more. I drank less. My body revolted against my mind in order to preserve itself like a biologic Bastille Day; my body needed resources to stay healthy, which I was refusing it due to my own agenda. Your body seeks balance, HomeoStasis, a mid-point of reserve and expression. I guess this is part of getting older; shut-down for benefit, or be shut-down.

So hot-wash every bit of clothing, bedding, and toweling you have. Steam-clean the car seats. And remember that you should take it easy now and again. Life is not a sprint, nor a marathon. It’s a nice walk around town with a few stops for friends and meals and medically-approved THC-infused brownies.

September 5, 2014 0

If you’d like to see how quickly the civilized world is degrading, look no further than the Comments section of any on-line local news story. What starts as a forum for community members to express their opinions of how much clothing a barista needs to wear, quickly spirals into political pissing-matches, name-calling, race-baiting, Obama bashing, and general dumbassery. It’s the kind of language that if used in a public place across a table would get the speaker either removed from that city council meeting and/or punched in the face many times. Many, many times.

For example, after reading this article about a man arrested for cutting into safes and being caught, here is one of the comments… Is it about the detectives? The criminal? Let’s find out!!!

Thats why I read the story. Wasn’t anything near a safe. Maybe sheeple boxes, but definitely nothing I would have much less use for storing anything but crap in.

Keyboard Badasses. Qwerty Warriors. Internet Assassins. Trolls. This dude’s lettin’ people know ain’t nobody gonna do nothin’ to his safe that’s not a piece of crap no-how.
The anonymity of the internet allows people to express, at times, a linguistic acuity within a spectrum of “skull half-full of sloth vomit” to “prison-educated neo-Nazi.” And it’s all because we gave people with access to the internet a “voice” via the Comments section. And that’s how we’re using it. #ApocalypseNowPlease

But lately there’s a growing genre of internet input that I am calling full “BULLSHIT” on. It’s the “Epically Hilarious Customer Review,” which started, I think, with the Amazon reviews of the Bic “For Her” pens. The reviews took a sarcastic tone early on, and for good reason. While Bic aimed at a pretty pen women would enjoy, the interwebs took it to a new level, submitting reviews such as this one from “Amy O’Rourke:”

“For years I had dreamed of penning a masterpiece and yet, when it came to that blank piece of paper the harsh offensive masculinity of the pen was just too intimidating. Finally it seems someone has actually considered what it is like to be female in this cruel world and how easily our little minds can be intimidated and denied the opportunity to do our life’s work. Five stars. “

And this one… from a”daveyclayton:”
“I bought this pen (in error, evidently) to write my reports of each day’s tree felling activities in my job as a lumberjack. It is no good. It slips from between my calloused, gnarly fingers like a gossamer thread gently descending to earth between two giant redwood trunks.”

Right… Because lumberjacks use parentheses and words like “gossamer thread gently descending…”

Now comes the Haribo Sugarless Gummy Candy reviews.
Sugar-free candy is loaded with an artificial sweetener like a sugar alcohol, which is a solidified, probably indigestible form of the gas kinda like your intestinal flora create when it can’t digest something properly. Primes the pump for some serious issues in the back of the factory. If you like to fart, I mean like LOVE TO FART… I mean like “Competitively Fart”… eat some sugar-free ice-cream the night before a road trip with a friend. You’ll set a record for decibels and oxygen displacement.

So the reviews start off with a few funny ones, then somebody went all-in, and it got a little viral heat on the web. Then people went batshit and piled on and WOW, all of a sudden the internet is not only full of people who have a real gift for literarily expressing bodily functions, but THEY ALL SEEMED TO HAVE EATEN THE EXACT SAME CANDY WITHIN A FEW DAYS OF EACH OTHER… ? Is that possible?

Does a sugar-free gummi bear make you shit in the woods?
That’s why you gotta soak ’em overnight in tequila. Pfff… amateurs. Go back to your parent’s insurance coverage, noob.

Call me a buzzkill, a jerk, a loser, a pooh-poo’er, a handsome-as-hell-despot-of-backlashing-to-attempts-at-comedy, I don’t mind.
But here-forthwith, I put into this internet record a declaration on all “Hilarious, Epic, Embarrassing, Overly-Detailed Product Reviews” as BULLSHIT.

Please leave a comment.

January 30, 2014 0

So I’m like 3 months away from my 40th birthday, and I have a particular goal of dropping 20 el-beez. LB’s. Pounds. Lard Bricks. I wanna drop ’em by the Friday prior to the Super Bowl. I know I can do this, but I’m also stumped about how my droppage seems to have stalled. Admittedly, the past weekend of Halloween and eating like a foraging bear (candy, date night, pizza party and cake for the youngest’s birthday) didn’t help. I put on 3lbs since last Thursday morning. 3. It’s probably retained water and frankly I could feel it and my face looked it. So if my body will store it that easily, it can lose it that easily.

So what’m I gonna do? Doing the same thing and expecting different results is the definition of violent minds meeting great opposition to mediocre dreams ~ Oprah Lincoln. Or whomever said it, people mash-up and misquote so many Faux-tivational quotes these days, even with the internet to validate against. Ridiculous. I have a dream that one day we will not be judged by the choosing of our quotes but by the accuracy of their citation.

So my plan is as follows:

Eat less crap: I need to be strict with my intake. Depending on which expert you ask, nutrition is 80% of the success towards weightloss. Some say 70%. I’ll gun for 76.47% and see where that lands. I can’t afford a “cheat day,” so maybe, MAYBE, one cheat “thing” a week. But not 1 crap-pile a day for 3 days. Come on, dude… Come on…
You can eat like this if you are THE ROCK. Or turn your heart into A ROCK.

It’s hilarious the games we play with ourselves about crap eating. “Oh just a little isn’t gonna be a problem.” Right. Put a cake out at your workplace and sit by it. Nobody will touch it, no matter how many people come by. Now walk around the corner, and hear the woodchipper that is your coworkers scraping the last of the buttercream off the lid. Do right by you, but no games, Geoff.
Eat more boss: My ideal meal is about like this: Roasted salmon with broccoli, Brussels Sprouts, sweet potatoes. And then right to bed. I need to get away from food, and in the house the best place to get away from food is when I’m asleep. So, eat well, then stop eating. I like the Paleo path best, and I rarely eat breakfast. I’m not hungry until about 11:30 anyway, so why force food into my face when I’m usually behind schedule anyway? No, skipping breakfast doesn’t slow down your metabolism when you’re like me, which is “kinda fat.” So shut up.
Lift Some Heavy Shit: No, not my ass off the couch, ha ha, so funny I forgot to laugh. I finally have found the joy of proper squat technique, dumbbell deadlifts, and pushing heavy stuff around. I did circuits for a while and looked good but wasn’t very muscular for a dude walking around over 240. For cardio I like either HIIT on an elliptical, hill sprints, or road raging.
Sleep More: I seriously have to get to bed earlier. 11:17pm ain’t cuttin’ it.
Stop worrying about it: I need to chill out a bit on this. I know what I need to do, so now I just need the consistency of doing it. This isn’t a diet, this is a lifestyle.
Stay Motivated As All Hell: Not sure what I need to get super motivated, like whatever blind self-allegiance Guy Fieri has that keeps him from assessing his life. I need that. Maybe it’s seeing 4 of 6 abs. Maybe it’s being under 12% bodyfat for the first time since kindergarten. Maybe it’s just that I need to prove to myself that I can do this. The ultimate goal is to drop 35lbs by April 2014. Mostly, I need to do this for a better quality of life in a few years as my boys get older. They aren’t going to do LESS in life from here on out.

So I’ll post some stuff here in the “20 by 40” posts about what’s up with my bod and how it’s going. May even get some “BEFORE” and “LATER” pics if I’m feeling froggy. Sorry, this was kinda boring and self-indulgent, got low blood-sugar, gotta find some work cake.

November 5, 2013 1

The “Ray/Lee” Files IX; This Is Real

Sadly, another human smudge with the middle name of Lee has been implicated in a heinous crime. The crime is sad, the middle name, however, stands as a harbinger of morbidity.

“A California Amber Alert was expanded to Oregon and Washington as authorities search for James Lee DiMaggio, 40, who is believed to have kidnapped 16-year-old Hannah Anderson. DiMaggio is believed to be driving a blue 2013 Nissan Versa with California plate 6WCU986.”

I hope it’s not all true, the death of a young boy and the abduction of the girl. But folks, please keep track of this stuff. If you meet somebody with the middle name of Lee or Ray

August 8, 2013 1

Category: News