Category Archives: humor

The Continuing Saga of This Old House

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I have an old house. Those of you forty-five and over will find this disconcerting as your age is equal to or greater than that of my old house. It’s disconcerting for me because the house was still in its infancy when I was born. As I’m currently trying to whip it into shape to sell or rent it out, I’m discovering the downside. We didn’t buy a newer house because I was told they were popping them up so fast in the area and taking short-cuts that sometimes ended in tragedy–like burying construction debris in the backyard so that it formed a ticking time-bomb for a sinkhole to swallow up unsuspecting children at inopportune moments–as opposed to when you want them to be swallowed whole by the Earth.

Given that the life expectancy of a house–theoretically–is as long or longer than a person, what makes my house old? It’s the fact that half the time I have to get custom replacement parts because “they just don’t do it like that anymore.”

Our built-in wall oven is tiny by today’s standards. People buying houses in the late 60’s were often children of the Great Depression. They, therefore, didn’t know that a respectable house had to have an oven big enough to prepare Thanksgiving turkey and all the accouterments for the Second Infantry Division. This creates an intriguing problem. If I want an oven that will fit our cut-out, we have to pay $2,500 because they are only made by German companies with names like “Gruber & Kafarfignugen” for tiny apartments in Amsterdam or Munich–and thus have to be sailed over special order.  Or I can buy a new style wall oven for $800, but then I have to pay the other $1,700 to a carpenter to modify our cabinets.

They just brought two brand-spanking new exterior doors to my house yesterday that I had bought the day before. Then they took them away because: a.) they were the wrong size (somewhere along the line someone decided that  four of the inches of width were extraneous, but we needed one extra inch of height.) I understand the height thing, Americans have been getting taller in the post-War period. However, Americans have also been getting fatter; so why are the doors getting narrower?) b.) they have no idea how to install the door frames because the construction methods were different 45 years ago, and they only know how to replace doors on new homes. QUESTION: “Why are people replacing doors on new houses so much more than on old houses that the company doesn’t even think to consider one might have an older house?”

It’s true, in some cases the old ways were crazy. We have two fluorescent light fixtures in the kitchen, one was original and one is newer. The old one was designed to never be taken down by an amateur–I think the electrician’s union was in cahoots with the lighting manufacturer’s union, because the design was truly crazy and not the least bit customer friendly. The new one could safely be put up and taken down by a bright five-year old. However, the downside of this all this user-friendliness is that the “professionals” often don’t seem to know more than we do about any situation that is the least bit out of the ordinary because they are used to using the same customer-friendly products.

One thing has gone smoothly so far, and that’s the electrical bit. At least my house was born of the circuit-breaker era. I’ll try to end on that up-beat note. I could use it.

Google Thinks They Know Me, We’ll See!

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I sent an email to my wife asking if she wanted to have pizza tonight. Lo and behold, there was a Gmail ad for Dominos by the time I hit send. From here on out, I’m using the code “murder the butler” in place of “buy pizza.” I don’t want Google knowing that I’m carbo-loading.  I have shame. Find me an ad for that, bitches.

In related news:

“watch TV” now equals “watch gay porn”

“have a beer” now equals “fire up the crack pipe”

“masturbate” now equals “file a fraudulent insurance claim”

 

You think you know me, Google? We’ll see.

 

 

WHAT WERE THEY THINKING: Presidents of Wild Facial Hair Coin Set

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As I’m eating breakfast this morning, I noticed this ad among the newspaper flyers.

Notice Grover Cleveland's two different styles of facial hair (for authenticity, as he served two non-consecutive terms.)

Notice Grover Cleveland’s two different styles of facial hair (for authenticity, as he served two non-consecutive terms.)

This spurred two thoughts. First, is there really a pent-up demand for coins with these three Presidents on them. I realize that, besides Abraham Lincoln, we don’t have any “money Presidents” who’ve made bold choices in facial hair (only with wigs), but is that really enough. I remembered the boondoggle in which Congress required the Treasury to mint coins faced with all the deceased Presidents on them (FYI- that’s the only way Jimmy Carter will ever be on a coin unless he kills an alien invader with his Habitat-4-Humanity claw hammer.) Anyway, they minted all these coins, but there was no demand for them–precisely because banks were afraid that tellers would get shot for trying to pass on a coin with Benjamin Harrison’s face on it. People won’t accept a Grover Cleveland coin as money (regardless of whether he sports the Hulk Hogan fu manchu) any more than they would a coin with Justin Bieber on the front and a poodle on the back.

Then, of course, I realized that these seem to be the very same coins put out by the U.S. Treasury. Which brings me to my second point, you can buy 8 of these $1 coins for 8 dollars. Normally, that isn’t called “buying” but, rather, “making change.” So it looks like the Treasury held a fire sale to get rid of all these coins. Congratulations, our Congress may be the first to have mastered reverse-seigniorage. For those of you who weren’t economics majors, seigniorage is revenue that is normally earned by the government as a maker of money. For example, if it costs $0.16 to make a quarter, the government makes $0.09 in seigniorage. Of course, if you sell the coin for enough less than face value… well, you can do the math. (FYI -This is why there is a movement afoot to eliminate pennies, because it costs $0.0124 to mint these $0.01 coins.)

You’ll note that the government has been trying for years to replace the iconic paper dollar with a coin. However, they always seem to blow it by either a.) making the coin the exact same dimensions as a quarter, b.) being super PC and putting someone on the coin that [fairly or unfairly] no one recognizes as money-worthy (e.g. Sacajawea, Susan B. Anthony, William Howard Taft, or Chester Arthur), c.) doing both of the above.

Granted, there are economic reasons for wanting to replace the paper dollar with a coin. The dollar is such a rapidly circulating denomination that it wears out quickly. Travelers will note that most countries have coins for the denomination that represents a roughly similar level of purchasing power to the dollar. However, I think there’s a more insidious reason for the drive to dollar coinage, and it may–in fact– be the reason that all attempts to date have thus failed. There are always movements to try to put strip clubs out of business. The coin dollar is just one more attempt. Frequenters of strip clubs cannot tuck a coin into a g-string, and if they start tucking $5 bills the average customer won’t be  able to stay for long. Thus, it’s those who enjoy strip clubs that keep the demand for the paper dollar high, and they are winning in their fight against the Moral Majority–or whatever we are calling the group that tries to dictate morality to the rest of the world while knoodling their secretaries behind their wife’s back as god apparently intended.

A Postal Solution & A Related Rant

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I heard on the news yesterday that the US Postal Service was backtracking on its plan to stop Saturday mail service. It turns out that they need approval from Congress to make such a change. Of course, it’s hard to get Congress to agree on anything, but–adding to the challenge–Congress is not really familiar with the concept that one must have money in order to spend money. When the Postmaster General testified before the House that the Post Office could not keep operating as is because they weren’t taking in as much money as they were spending, the entire chamber was seen to simultaneously tilt their heads like the RCA dog. The House’s best and brightest was heard to inquire, “Why don’t you just use other people’s money?”

At any rate, I have a solution for the Postal Service. Instead of offering junk mailers a bulk rate discount, don’t. Here me out. I know what you’re thinking, if it wasn’t for junk mail there’d be no mail. Instead of charging Ida Mae Bludgeonsworth–an octogenarian from Beaver Springs, Montana who is the last remaining sender of private letters–half a dollar and charging Citibank ten cents, you flip it.  Yes,  it’s true that if one increases the cost to the credit card companies to spam us to, say, $3 then revenues won’t increase (remember discussion of Laffer Curves from Macroeconomics? I didn’t think so. The idea is that as you raise tax rates eventually you will reach a point where revenues decline because people will not feel an incentive to work anymore. There is great controversy about where we are on the Laffer curve at any moment, but that such a tipping point exists is undeniable–i.e. how many hours a week would you work if you paid zero income taxes? How many, if you paid 100% of income to taxes?) So revenues would likely decline (or your interest rate would shoot up), but if one cut out junk mail, the Post Office would only have to deliver to my house once a week–a substantial savings.

I know it’s always hard to see a career field go the way of the dodo. We have great sympathy for the typewriter repairmen and personal travel agents of this world, but it may be better to rip the bandage off swiftly.

You may wonder why I harbor ill-will towards the makers of junk mail? The person I particularly hate is the evil genius who decided to start putting plastic mock credit cards in each piece of credit card junk mail. Up until then, I didn’t even need to bother with opening envelopes, I could simply drop the junk mail into the shredder whole. Now I have to be bothered with either a.) opening the letter and extracting the shredder-killing  blockage, b.) purchasing an industrial strength chipper-shredder. I think I should be able to charge junk mailers for my time for making it such a pain to discard their “pre-approved” offer–which has to be shredded because it is half filled out with information they shouldn’t even have and is thus a case of fraud waiting to happen.

TODAY’S RANT: DIY Home Improvement Videos, or Vishnu Wallpapering

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So, I’ve been doing a lot of home improvement lately. My life, largely divided between having my nose to either a laptop or a book, has prepared me to  find out how to do any task in record time–in theory. Give me a few minutes and I can find out how to–in theory–install a cardiac shunt. That’s from a starting point of not knowing what a “cardiac shunt” is or even if it’s a real thing. The problem is that this background has in no way prepared me to interact with the physical universe. (So while I can find out everything one needs to know about cardiac shunts in a short period of time, and even probably understand [or look up] all of the arcane language in the scientific journals, I wouldn’t offer me $100 to install your cardiac shunt if I were you.)

I ramble. So I know how to optimize my search terms to find out how to do exactly what I need to do. Then I watch the video and I’m filled with great confidence, having seen exactly how easy it is. And then I wallpaper myself to the wall. The whole time the experts in the video are doing the task, they are filling my head with false confidence. “See how easy that was?… People think this requires an expert, but…”

It occurs to me that this might just be a strategy by such experts. My training as an economist invariably leads me to ask one question–from an economist’s perspective it’s the root question about any human behavior.  That question is, “What’s the incentive?” What is the incentive for a professional wallpaper hanger to make a do-it-yourself video? We don’t see travel agents (if such mythical creatures still exist) doing videos on how to use Orbitz, Kayak, or Travelocity. My training as a human has led me to be skeptical of munificence in all its forms. I think the strategy is to build false expectations. If one went into a home improvement chore knowing that it was going to be a hellish nightmare, one would have the right state of mind to get through it. However, if one thinks it’s going to be easy-peasy, then one ends up ripping one’s hair out and creating holes in the wall for an expert to–lucratively–repair.

That’s just one theory.  I have others. Now, I know that you are familiar with the common adage, “It’s a poor workman who blames aliens or Hindu deities.” Still, I can’t help but feeling that the wallpaper hanging experts in the YouTube videos had extra appendages that I couldn’t see due to some sort of psychic block or CGI erasure (i.e. like when they take the wires out of kung fu movies.) It’s my contention that one would have to have extra arms, like Vishnu, to keep the paper that straight and perfect as it’s applied. At one point I thought I’d made a breakthrough in string theory when I saw my wallpaper curl into more than three dimensions simultaneously, but it may have just been rage-induced brain hypoxia.

So why would multi-armed aliens, or Vishnu, make home improvement videos? How should I know. I can speculate that Vishnu might enjoy practicing Shakti, which–as I understand it–is the ability to make the impossible possible, the impossible in this scenario being effortless wallpaper hanging. The aliens might just be testing whether our species has the fine motor skills to challenge them in their impending takeover.

It’s All Fish Balls and Kipper Snacks From Here on Out

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FishballsOwing to a freakish and inexplicable popularity of this blog with Norwegians, I recently received a quasi-lucrative endorsement offer from the King Oscar Canned Fish Corporation. In exchange for tweaking this blog’s content, I will receive all the canned fish products that I can eat– for life. Yeah, that’s right, I get all the minced mackerel, pickled herring, and fish balls that I can stomach. (FYI- Fish balls aren’t aquatic rocky mountain oysters, if you were wondering.)  This is almost as good an offer as was received by Flipper, and he had immense star power. The first truckload arrived this morning as promised, putting me on retainer. Therefore, from this moment onward, the content of this blog will be devoted to the delectable joys of such foods as herring fillets in monkfish sauce or Kipper snacks in oil.

Rest assured, I’ll continue to present the same type material I have in the past, but it will now all have a canned seafood theme running through it. For example, for those who have enjoyed my poetry, I have a doozy coming up entitled “Ode to the Happy Anchovie.”  I will continue to produce humorous postings. There is only one subject off the table… no, not pedophilia… I will never make fun of the delicious Norwegian canned fish snacks of the King Oscar Corporation. However, I have a scathing rant against people who don’t want anchovies on their half of the pizza that I think you’ll find particularly rib-tickling.

In conclusion, I’d like to wish you all a happy April Fool’s Day.

POEM: They Spiked My Punch

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IMG_5559They spiked my punch.
I had no lunch.
I got so drunk, so very drunk.
Drunker than I thunk
that a man could ever be,
and I don’t know if I can trust what my eyes did see:

I saw: two elephants riding pogo sticks,
the Taj Mahal made  of Lego bricks,
Ned Flanders as a creepy voyeur,
A lady talking to an honest lawyer,
goats doing kung fu in the park,
a talking dog and a man who barked,
a traffic cop with a great big smile,
the line for kicks formed in single file,
two geese played a wicked ping-pong match,
I got hit by a bus–look not a scratch.

TODAY’S RANT: Crossing False Alarm

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Source: roadtrafficsigns.com

Source: roadtrafficsigns.com

If you’re like me, when you see the above sign, you say to yourself, “That is all well and good, but what if I get a non-conformist deer, or one of those illegals who can’t read English?”  Now, I know what you’re thinking, usually they put a little leaping deer silhouette on the sign so the deer knows the sign is addressed to it, even if reading is not its strong suit. (Let’s face it, if reading were essential to life on this planet, most of humanity would die out.) At any rate, for any number of reasons I might collide with a deer in a completely inappropriate zone.

Now imagine my confusion, and then excitement, when I came across this sign on a recent walk.

IMG_5309This was a flat piece of land, and rocks are generally believed to be inanimate.  So–at first blush–this doesn’t seem to make a lick of sense. However, then I began to think, “What if they mean ‘Rock’ as in ‘rock-n-roll’?”  So I staked it out for an entire day, hoping to get an autograph–maybe Clapton or REO Speedwagon. Who did I get? No one. Not even Donnie Osmond, because–you know–he’s a little bit rock and roll (a very little bit, an infinitesimally small part nano-rock-n-roll.) There weren’t even local bands.

What’s more, no actual rocks tried to cross all day. No igneous, no sedimentary, no basalt, no granite, no shale, no pyrite, no agate, no jasper, no oolite, no amber, no opalite, no Icelandite, no norite, no obsidian, no quartz, no chert, no flint, no gneiss, no marble, no schist, no slate… are you getting my point here? There wasn’t a single rock crossing event all day. Furthermore, how would a rock even know where to cross the trail? They aren’t as smart as deer.

A [Different] Skeptic’s View of Traditional Chinese Medicine

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Tai Chi Sculpture; Taken in Montreal

Tai Chi Sculpture; Taken in Montreal

I’m sick. I mean that literally for those readers who are saying, “Yes, I read your blog occasionally; I’m well aware that you’re a sick freak.”

I rarely get sick. I can usually knock colds out at the first sign of a scratchy throat with big does of zinc and remedies I’ll discuss below. I can’t remember the last time I had the flu. Let me say to any angry gods that I’m not bragging, so please don’t smite me. I hope I haven’t just fallen off some divine pestilence list (God: “Geewhiz, that boy hasn’t had the flu since like 2002, lets send him a doozy… plus throw in a side of locust plague.”) I’m just stating a fact; I’m blessed with a mighty immune system and a lack of those plague-bombs commonly called children.

However, before you, too, begin to wish evil upon me for my freakish good health, let me say that when I do get a full-bore cold, it’s a catastrophic train wreck. This is because I have a proclivity for sinusitis. That means that all those tiny little tubes by which mucus flows from one chamber to the next in my head so that it can eventually be expelled into a facial tissue become clogged up. This creates an effect similar to a trucker’s strike at a dildo factory. The phalli (phalluses?) keep coming off the line, but none of them are being shipped out, so soon everything is fucked. When I tap on the highest point on my head it sounds like one thumping on a perfectly ripe watermelon. GROSS CONTENT AHEAD: (If you’re disgusted easily, skip to the next paragraph.) So, last night my left side passages were so blocked that pus was oozing out around my left eye, and I began to have an earache as the pus tried to escape out my ear only to find my eardrum in the way. END GROSS-OUT ZONE.

So you might be expecting that I had a sleepless night and have a doctor’s appointment this morning. I’ve gone that route before. I know exactly what the doctor would do, she’d write a prescription or two: one for a round of antibiotics and one for something to reduce the pain. As a skeptic, this is the approach in which I should put my trust. They develop these medicines using the scientific method and double-blind studies.

What did I do? I diced up some ginger and made a steaming cup of ginger tea and, as it steeped, I ran through a couple qi gong exercises. Then, after drinking the tea, my passages opened up, I blew my nose and slept soundly for about four hours until it was time for me to get up and start my day. As a skeptic, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) isn’t the horse on which I should put my money. It all revolves around chi (qi), life energy, a substance whose existence is to the best of my knowledge is completely unsupported by direct observation. It’s chocked full of archaic sounding treatments like “Immortal spanks the naughty dragon.” (Okay, I made that one up, but you get my point.) TCM proposes that the kidneys are integral to sexual health.

So why am I pressing acupressure points, doing qi gong (life energy exercises), and making homemade tea? The easy answer would be that, if I hadn’t, I probably would have gotten five non-consecutive minutes of sleep last night, and I’d, at best, now be sitting in a waiting room with my skull in my hands hoping to be squeezed in to a doctor’s busy schedule.  However, I have more of an explanation than that.

I don’t know much about medicine (either Western allopathic  or TCM.) So in the absence of knowledge about what one doesn’t know, one seeks analogy in what one does know.  First, everything I know makes me distrustful of the  “free lunch.” To my mind, the Western approach, in which I don’t have to do anything but pop pills periodically, is a free lunch scenario. If I to be active (or even consciously passive, i.e. restful) to achieve my cure, I’m inherently  more confident in it. In the martial arts, we groan at the sight of these “home-study black belt” courses. Any martial artist who is honest with himself or herself knows that the only way to develop the skills is by spending at least a couple of days a week in the dōjō and training outside the dōjō as well. One can’t learn martial arts like one learns music appreciation or business administration. As an economist, there’s always some hidden cost of the “free lunch.” So despite the vigorous use of the scientific method, I tend to be skeptical of Western medicine.  I’m skeptical because nothing worthwhile I’ve ever done could be achieved by just popping a pill, and I see little reason why achieving a healthy state should be any different. [If anyone knows of a pill for manuscript revision, I’d be willing to try it.]  (I’m particularly disconcerted by medicines like pain-killers that remove the symptoms while apparently doing nothing about the ailment itself.)

So I can’t say for sure whether the ginger tea, acupressure, and qi gong had anything to do with my passages opening up. It was, after all, a system under tension. GROSS-OUT BEGINS: At some point either the passage was going to open, my left eyeball was going to pop out of its socket, or my eardrum was going to rupture sending an avalanche of pus pouring onto my shoulder. GROSS-OUT COMPLETED. However, even if all the TCM approach did was to take my mind off of my misery while I was waiting, it did more for me than the pill-popping alternative.

Second, I also know a little something about systems, generically speaking. Another thing that appeals to me about TCM is its fundamental recognition that any problem will create feedback effects that reverberate through the system.  In other words, the root cause may not be anywhere near where the problem is first noted. Because of this, one may end up having to fix a dysfunction distant from the symptom in order to fix the problem. This seems consistent with other systems with which I am familiar.

I have some arthritis from a lifetime of beatings–most notably in my lower back and my ankles. It occurred to me that my back problem might be exacerbated–if not caused–by a problem with my right foot and ankle. I suspected the damaged ankle and flat foot might cause my pelvis to tilt and my lower back to be off kilter, thus wearing through the cartilage on the side of my back that gives me problems. Maybe this was, in fact, wrong. However, when I asked the specialist who diagnosed my ankle arthritis about this possibility, he looked at me like I was the biggest idiot in the world.  “You see, son, the ankle bone is connected to the shin bone and the shin bone is connected to the knee bone and the knee bone is connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone is connected to the pelvic bone, and it’s not until this point that the pelvic bone is connected to the back bone. There’s like half a dozen things between those two problems. They couldn’t possible have anything to do with each other.”

Now let me be clear, I’m not dismissing Western medicine by any means. There are some things it does vastly better than TCM or Ayurvedic healing or any other holistic healing method. So if I show up in your Emergency Room with a piece of rebar sticking out of my skull, please don’t throw this back in my face. “Oh maybe you should massage the Valley of Harmony (LI-4), do some ‘Parting the Clouds,’ and drink a glass of lavender-infused carrot juice.”

TODAY’S RANT: How’d I Get So Much Stuff?

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IMG_5194I don’t  like to use words like “stuff”, “things”, or the vague but picturesque “crap.”  Such words have low information content and are thus semantic lightweights. However, there are few words for the random compilation of tchotchkes, trinkets, baubles, gewgaws, kit, tools, devices, objects, gadgets, contraptions, contrivances, gizmos, widgets, thingamajigs, and doohickeys that line the drawers, shelves, and closets of my house.

You may think I’m some sort of packrat, but the sad fact is– I’m not. I’d say our household buys  less than average for homeowners. For one thing, we have no children. For another thing, both my wife and I might be classified as, for lack of a more eloquent term, cheapskates. (She’s an accountant and I’m trained as an economist, what do you expect?)  Of course, many people, perhaps most people, organize their junk better than I.

I do have one consumption fetish, and that is books. If you live in a very small town (or a large city with many small, local libraries) I may have more volumes in my house than does your local library. However, two things have slowed me down in collecting [physical] books. First, I buy most of my books on my Kindle these days. Second, I’ve come to realize that the reason I’ve bought so many books is the hope that one of them would provide some impetus for me to say something interesting, insightful, and valuable, and the entire English language canon has failed me utterly in this regard.

Still, I have a lot of miscellaneous detritus floating around in my home. You’ve heard of the 500-year flood? I have 500-year tools; that is, tools that are specifically for some task that only comes up once every few lifetimes or so. In a reasonable world, one would rent such tools. However, most tool rental places are also tool sellers. Such businesses have learned that if the tool sells new for $60, they can rent it for $50. Most people will buy it on the principle of the matter, and if they don’t… CHA-Ching. Who would rent a tool that costs almost as much to rent as it does to buy? I’ll tell you who (you thought that was rhetorical, didn’t you?), people who have the good sense to think of every object that comes into their home as an item being warehoused at their expense. People who have garage sales are brilliant. They are getting paid to store their junk in your home.

When I’m doing spring cleaning, as I am now, I frequently find containers that contain nothing. I guess I’ve just kept them around in case some pressing containment needs pop up. I keep all sorts of things because I think one day I’ll need them. However,  I never do need such items again, except the day after I throw them out.  To avoid such a situation, I don’t pitch them. However, if I keep them I won’t need them. If Joseph Heller was still alive, he could write a novel about my life.

Of course, sometimes I do need such items, but–owing to my poor organizational paradigm–I can’t find them. I then face the ultimate dilemma. Do I put the new one that I just bought with the old one that I found after I made the purchase, or do I put it in an entirely different location in the hope that when I need it again I’ll have a better chance of finding it.

No place have I felt the weight of how much “junk”  is swirling through our planet as when I was in Bangkok’s Chinatown last fall. There are miles of cramped alleyways and corridors packed to the gills with little plastic-wrapped junk, much of which seems to serve no purpose other than to satisfy the aesthetic needs of people with really poor taste or as gifts for people to whom you really want to send a statement of loathing. I had to get out of there, owing to a fear that shelving would collapse and I would be buried alive under a pile of knock-off Hello-Kitty coin purses.  I can think of no death that is more embarrassing and yet apropos of life in the modern world than that.

Of course, one of the many downsides of an economics education is the knowledge that our high standard of living is dependent upon people making and buying ever more stuff. If you are saying “what high standard of living?” and you haven’t hand-churned your own butter, darned some socks, and killed a mastodon today, I would encourage you to look into how people lived in the past. People unburdened of an economics education can make statements like, “People shouldn’t be materialistic and everybody should have a job and all jobs should pay a living wage.” However, that is like saying, “I should be able to keep my cake and I should be able to eat it as well and somebody should pay me $100 for it.”

We are still hunter-gatherers. We just hunt for bargains, and gather up geegaws.

IMG_3804