The internet was set aflame by the story of Cecil; a lion supposedly beloved of locals in Zimbabwe killed by a dentist from Minnesota. As usual in these cases, facts are hard to come by. There are no longer any sources you can trust for information. Every media outlet, internet or otherwise, reports unsubstantiated rumors as unvarnished Truth. The hunt was illegal, the guide a well-known local poacher. The lion suffered in agony for 40 hours. Dr. Palmer is a pedophile. Zimbabwe is looking to extradite Dr. Palmer. Zimbabwean locals have no idea who this "Cecil" was. The hunt was perfectly legal, conducted by a licensed guide.
I could go on for pages, but anyone who has tried to get to the bottom of any news story in the last ten years or so already knows the drill. True journalists, people who bother to fact check and at least try to get to the truth of a story, are like unicorns or honest politicians. They simply don't exist.
Meanwhile, for the safety of himself and his patients, Dr. Palmer has closed his dental practice, as he, his family, and anyone who has ever been a patient are now considered fair game. Literally. The local police have lost count of the thousands of death threats. Personal details of not just Palmer's life, but every member of his family are being shared on the internet. But it's all good; Palmer, the internet assures us, is filthy rich and can move himself and his family off to some foreign country to live incommunicado, safe from death threats and/or legal repercussions of his hunting trip.
This is the new "animal rights" movement in all its glory: Demonstrate your love of animals by dehumanizing people, destroying their lives and the lives of anyone close to them, or anyone who makes any attempt to defend them. Carriage horse owners in New York City. Elephant trainers in circuses. Owners of ponies who give rides to children at fairs. Hunters. Small-scale farmers. (Factory farms are kept safe behind a wall of bought-and-paid-for politicians.) Trainers who work with animals used in movies or TV. All these groups have been and/or are being subjected to the tender ministrations of these so-called animal rights activists. The tactics used are predictable. The person or group are horrible people, beneath contempt, outcasts, drunkards, racists. Their actions are indefensible to all right-thinking people. Inevitably, the person or group being demonized is labeled (always without even a shred of evidence) pedophiles or rapists. Which probably says more about the accusers mental state than the accused, but does little to mitigate the damage such accusations cause.
The favorite tool of the modern "activist" is, of course, social media. Anyone remember when the internet was supposed to eliminate arbitrary barriers and brings us all together in peace and harmony, singing Kumbaya? Instead, it became a place for international mobs to form over random news stories (even if it happens to be completely fake, like the UofV rape case), demonizing random individuals or groups and completely destroying their lives, then just as quickly moving on to the next outrage. The mainstream media, so focused on being "relevant" and eager to fill up all those 24-hour news channels, jumps on board without so much as the most cursory of investigations, never bothering to retract even blatant lies.
Left behind is the wreckage that was once some human being's life. And no one even had to leave the comfort of their living room couch or work cubicle to make it happen.
I'm a hunter and unrepentant meat-eater. I'm comfortable with killing game for food. I see no difference in killing, gutting, skinning, cooking and eating a rabbit, squirrel or deer, and going to Walmart and picking up a package of chicken, beef or pork. Other than in the later instance, I've paid someone else to do the dirty work for me. However, I will say that I'm uncomfortable with pure trophy hunting; killing an animal only for the purpose of displaying some part of it on your den wall. Note that I'm not talking about getting the head of a deer mounted that was killed primarily for the dinner table. I'm referring to what Dr. Palmer's hunt appears to have been; the killing of an animal purely for the sake of displaying some part of it on a floor or wall.
Note that I said, "uncomfortable with" rather than "violently opposed to". I fully understand that trophy hunting (as well as the less-lethal version, the photo safari) provides much needed income for countries like Zimbabwe. That it is much easier to convince locals to accept the loss of some cattle to predators from the neighboring preserve if they receive some benefit from them being there. That safari income is what pays the salaries of staff who go after commercial poachers. That some "Disney animals" like lions, tigers and elephants are over-populating certain areas, meaning some must be culled for the benefit of the remaining animals. That large predators can go rogue by hunting humans and need to be killed. I fully appreciate all of it. That doesn't mean that I would ever participate in such a hunt. However, should someone else choose to, I'm certainly not going to label him a murderer and try to destroy him and everyone around him.
In this instance, the part of the story that I do find disturbing is the length of time from the first shot to the lion being killed. If the forty-hour figure flying around the internet is even close to being true, something went terribly wrong out in the field. Someone, either Dr. Palmer or the guide (or both), at a minimum displayed bad judgement and more likely, incompetence. "Never take a shot unless you know it will be lethal" was pounded into my head at a very young age. Know your weapon, know its limitations, know your limitations, were simply givens. Leaving an animal wounded by a bad shot to suffer and die slowly was considered the worst sort of slob hunting. Because we are not living in some Utopia, things go bad from time to time. But you take every possible precaution to reduce the likelihood of things going sideways. Most importantly, if there is any doubt of a clean kill, if anything feels off in any way, don't take the shot. That something so basic seems to have been ignored is certainly troubling to me. Assuming there is any more truth to the forty-hour pursuit "fact" than there is in the accusations that Dr. Palmer is some sort of sexual predator.
Now I'm seeing Facebook petitions calling for the elimination of all trophy hunting. First of all, is there anyone over the age of twelve that believes "signing" any sort of online petition or sharing a post on Facebook has any impact whatsoever, other than making you feel good about yourself for "doing something" while not actually doing anything? Secondly, definitions matter. What, exactly, is a trophy hunt? If I take home a pound of giraffe meat along with the head and hide, is it still a trophy hunt? How about two pounds? Three? Thirty? If the goal is to ban all killing of "Disney animals", what do we do about over-population or rogues? How many local children killed and eaten do you think it will take before locals start killing animals? How much dead livestock or destroyed food crops? Third, given the success of the ban on sales of ivory and rhino horn in turning poaching into a multinational cartel, does anyone think a ban on trophy hunting would have the intended effect?
And once again, I've probably pissed off enough people and should head off to bed.
Monday, August 03, 2015
Tuesday, July 14, 2015
Family Events
July so far has been Family Event Month. On Sunday, July 5, Debbie's niece got married:
I wasn't able to attend due to prior commitments at the Moose Lodge, so Debbie flew up on Saturday, attended the wedding on Sunday, then flew back on Monday.
Then on July 11, we had another of Debbie's niece's graduation open house. When we checked on airfare, the prices completely sucked, as in over $300 each. Why airfare was reasonable on a major holiday weekend, then completely out of sight the weekend after a major holiday weekend is something only the Gods of the Airline Computers can really answer. So we decided to drive up and back to save on money. We left Thursday night after Debbie got off work, drove all night and landed at Debbie's mom's place Friday afternoon. We slept there a bit, jumped up early Saturday to drive the rest of the way to Alpena for the open house. We couch-surfed there, then up Sunday morning to drive straight through all the way to Zephyrhills. We managed it, but it took a toll on our aging bodies. I remember being able to do silly things like this when we were in our 20's like it was nothing. Not anymore.
In any case, a couple pictures:
Today is a rain day, which is why I'm doing this instead of working outside. Before we left, I got a fresh coat of stain on the porch which is finally dry enough to move all the porch furniture out of my shed and back on the porch. If it ever stops raining. It will be a joy to finally be able to get into my shed again.
John Oliver hits another one out of the park, so to speak. This segment is on the insanity of taxpayer-funded sports stadiums:
Maybe I'm turning into a curmudgeon, but I find myself caring less and less about professional sports. Not that I've ever cared that much in the first place, but I would at least watch a game or two and have some vague notion whether the home team was doing well or not. Now I can't even muster that little bit of interest. Most of the players and all the team owners act and talk like narcissistic sociopaths rather than someone that ought to be looked up to or celebrated in any way. The massive amounts of money sloshing around, not just in professional sports, but college and even high school sports as well, has corrupted everything and everyone involved to the very core. Players suffering permanent brain injuries seem to be the rule rather than the exception, no matter how much padding you wrap the them in. And all so some lard-ass who can't walk ten feet without running out of breath can live vicariously through "his" team, and spend weekends screaming such uplifting sentiments as, "Rip his head off, Kowalski!!" while spraying everyone in a ten-foot radius with half-chewed nachos.
And that's probably enough on that.
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| Jerrica and Mike |
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| Jerrica doing her "I'm shy" bit |
I wasn't able to attend due to prior commitments at the Moose Lodge, so Debbie flew up on Saturday, attended the wedding on Sunday, then flew back on Monday.
Then on July 11, we had another of Debbie's niece's graduation open house. When we checked on airfare, the prices completely sucked, as in over $300 each. Why airfare was reasonable on a major holiday weekend, then completely out of sight the weekend after a major holiday weekend is something only the Gods of the Airline Computers can really answer. So we decided to drive up and back to save on money. We left Thursday night after Debbie got off work, drove all night and landed at Debbie's mom's place Friday afternoon. We slept there a bit, jumped up early Saturday to drive the rest of the way to Alpena for the open house. We couch-surfed there, then up Sunday morning to drive straight through all the way to Zephyrhills. We managed it, but it took a toll on our aging bodies. I remember being able to do silly things like this when we were in our 20's like it was nothing. Not anymore.
In any case, a couple pictures:
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| Devin |
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| Polacks doing what polacks always do in groups: eating, drinking, and BSing. |
Today is a rain day, which is why I'm doing this instead of working outside. Before we left, I got a fresh coat of stain on the porch which is finally dry enough to move all the porch furniture out of my shed and back on the porch. If it ever stops raining. It will be a joy to finally be able to get into my shed again.
John Oliver hits another one out of the park, so to speak. This segment is on the insanity of taxpayer-funded sports stadiums:
Maybe I'm turning into a curmudgeon, but I find myself caring less and less about professional sports. Not that I've ever cared that much in the first place, but I would at least watch a game or two and have some vague notion whether the home team was doing well or not. Now I can't even muster that little bit of interest. Most of the players and all the team owners act and talk like narcissistic sociopaths rather than someone that ought to be looked up to or celebrated in any way. The massive amounts of money sloshing around, not just in professional sports, but college and even high school sports as well, has corrupted everything and everyone involved to the very core. Players suffering permanent brain injuries seem to be the rule rather than the exception, no matter how much padding you wrap the them in. And all so some lard-ass who can't walk ten feet without running out of breath can live vicariously through "his" team, and spend weekends screaming such uplifting sentiments as, "Rip his head off, Kowalski!!" while spraying everyone in a ten-foot radius with half-chewed nachos.
And that's probably enough on that.
Wednesday, July 01, 2015
All Done with F*&King IRS (and some other stuff)
I'm officially done with the IRS. I'm tired of the constant bullshit and expense with this whole Enrolled Agent thing and it turns out that it's been all for nothing anyway. All done. Kiss my ass.
In other news, we went to Alaska and tramped around a bit:
The weather was completely unbelievable. We went packed for 50's and rain and instead got 80's and sunny skies. We were able to see all of Denali the entire five days we were there. Normally, there is only a clear view of Denali for something like eight days a year. We managed to dodge the wildfire as well, although our train from Denali to the cruise ship did get held up for a couple hours because the fire was burning near the tracks. We finally got through and they held the ship for us (advantage of using the cruise line's transfers), so it worked out, but we were getting a little nervous. These are from the train:
Since we've been back, I've done a whole lot of nothing. I need to get outside and get things in shape. The jungle took over a bit while we were away and I need to get things back under control, get a coat of stain on the porch, get some painting and caulking done, etc. Lots to do, just not a lot of motivation to do it.
Over at John Michael Greer's Archdruid Report, he's had a series of posts on the five phases of the decline and fall of a civilization. He calls the phases the Eras of Pretense, Impact, Response, Breakdown, and Dissolution. Our current western industrial civilization is firmly in the Era of Pretense, but as John Michael repeatedly points out in his books and on his blog, the process isn't linear or coherent. Different places will run through these phases at different times and rates and on different scales. For example, right at the moment, Michigan is in a later phase than the rest of the US:
I knew it was bad, but not living there anymore, I hadn't realized just how far gone things really were. I'd put Michigan as a whole in Greer's Era of Response; frantic attempts to prop up the status quo by any means necessary; fair, foul, unconstitutional, etc., while failing to realize that the status quo is the root cause of the state's problems.
But, in keeping with Greer's idea of the fractal nature of decline, most of the state is still a blooming paradise when compared with Detroit:
And here we see the fractal pattern being repeated at the level of individual neighborhoods, with different parts of the Detroit Metro area in different eras of collapse.
So what about where you live? Is everyone still gliding along with their head in the sand pretending all is well, or are things a bit further along? It's a fun little game the whole family can play!!
In other news, we went to Alaska and tramped around a bit:
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| Anchorage, Alaska |
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| Denali from Mt. McKinley Lodge |
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| Talkeetna |
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| View from our room at the Denali lodge |
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| Denali from inside the park |
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| Margaret Glacier |
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| Mendenhall Glacier |
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| Ketchikan Lumberjack Show |
The weather was completely unbelievable. We went packed for 50's and rain and instead got 80's and sunny skies. We were able to see all of Denali the entire five days we were there. Normally, there is only a clear view of Denali for something like eight days a year. We managed to dodge the wildfire as well, although our train from Denali to the cruise ship did get held up for a couple hours because the fire was burning near the tracks. We finally got through and they held the ship for us (advantage of using the cruise line's transfers), so it worked out, but we were getting a little nervous. These are from the train:
Since we've been back, I've done a whole lot of nothing. I need to get outside and get things in shape. The jungle took over a bit while we were away and I need to get things back under control, get a coat of stain on the porch, get some painting and caulking done, etc. Lots to do, just not a lot of motivation to do it.
Over at John Michael Greer's Archdruid Report, he's had a series of posts on the five phases of the decline and fall of a civilization. He calls the phases the Eras of Pretense, Impact, Response, Breakdown, and Dissolution. Our current western industrial civilization is firmly in the Era of Pretense, but as John Michael repeatedly points out in his books and on his blog, the process isn't linear or coherent. Different places will run through these phases at different times and rates and on different scales. For example, right at the moment, Michigan is in a later phase than the rest of the US:
One city neglected to inform its residents that its water supply was laced with cancerous chemicals. Another dissolved its public school district and replaced it with a charter school system, only to witness the for-profit management company it hired flee the scene after determining it couldn’t turn a profit. Numerous cities and school districts in the state are now run by single, state-appointed technocrats, as permitted under an emergency financial manager law pushed through by Rick Snyder, Michigan’s austerity-promoting governor. This legislation not only strips residents of their local voting rights, but gives Snyder’s appointee the power to do just about anything, including dissolving the city itself -- all (no matter how disastrous) in the name of “fiscal responsibility.”
I knew it was bad, but not living there anymore, I hadn't realized just how far gone things really were. I'd put Michigan as a whole in Greer's Era of Response; frantic attempts to prop up the status quo by any means necessary; fair, foul, unconstitutional, etc., while failing to realize that the status quo is the root cause of the state's problems.
But, in keeping with Greer's idea of the fractal nature of decline, most of the state is still a blooming paradise when compared with Detroit:
Highland Park is a tiny 3-square-mile municipality located within Detroit. Extremely dangerous, blighted, and 94% black, Highland Park is a concentrated example of the conditions in Detroit’s poorest neighborhoods—what some call the “Detroit of Detroit.”
In late 2011, the impoverished little municipality was so deep in debt to its public electric company, DTE Energy, that the local government was forced to decommission all streetlights on its residential streets. Not only did DTE cut the power to street lights in Highland Park, it sent out workers to physically dig up and remove nearly 1,000 light-poles from the neighborhood. Highland Parkers now live in permanent, debt-induced darkness.
Six miles away, in Detroit’s rapidly gentrifying downtown area, DTE Energy runs a very different public policy. The same company that repossessed 1,000 streetlights from Highland Park, condemning its residents to permanent darkness, has recently launched a pro-bono security program in the increasingly white area.
And here we see the fractal pattern being repeated at the level of individual neighborhoods, with different parts of the Detroit Metro area in different eras of collapse.
So what about where you live? Is everyone still gliding along with their head in the sand pretending all is well, or are things a bit further along? It's a fun little game the whole family can play!!
Thursday, May 28, 2015
Before May is Gone...
Not sure where the month of May went to, but I thought I'd post something here before we slip into June.
The primary reason it's been quiet on the blog is that we've busier than one-armed paper hangers for some reason. I seems like every time we think we have some spare time, something comes up that we have to head out on some errand or take care of some emergency or another. Even when we do get a day to ourselves, we're so far behind on the normal household crap that our "day off" winds up being consumed with dishes, laundry and other such fun tasks.
Most of the busy has involved the Moose Lodge. As I mentioned last post, I went and got myself elected Treasurer, so now I'm working in the office for a few hours in the morning one or two days a week, plus meetings, meetings and more meetings. As well, there are various expectations made of all elected officers to show up at certain events, volunteer for this, that and the other, etc. On top of that, we've had a pretty significant dry spell this month. Other than a couple sprinkles that didn't even get through the leaves on the trees, it didn't rain from April 29 (the day I headed out for Michigan with my parents, natch) until Tuesday evening. That means that for the first time since I've been on the Moose landscape crew, we've been able to get out into a large, overgrown area between the lodge and the highway. So lots of fun stuff there cutting neck-high grass and pulling out scrub and trees that have been growing since the last time anyone bothered to cut out there. It doesn't help that in Florida, any area with tall grass is assumed to be a public landfill; we've pulled truck-loads of garbage, broken concrete, chunks of asphalt, steel posts, you name it. We are making some serious progress, but I'm also spending about twice the usual time on the job. The hope is that with all the vegetation cut back, the sun will dry things out between rains instead of the water just piling up all summer. We're also working on drainage issues, like a blocked culvert, so all the runoff from two miles of highway will go down the ditch instead of flooding the front yard. We'll see if any of it does any good once the rainy season finally gets here.
One thing I did get to do was play with the new mobile hotspot while I was in Michigan. I did all the driving, so other than an hour or so during our stop in Alabama, I didn't get a chance to mess with it until we were in Kalkaska. After we stopped at G's for lunch, I let my dad drive out to the house and I crawled into the back seat and jumped online. I wasn't sure what sort of coverage I would have in northern Michigan, but it worked great all the way out of town, was still going good on the two-lane county road, even kept working on the dirt road. Then about halfway up my parents' driveway, "BEEP!" No signal. It's like my parents' place is a little cellular back hole. But at least I had something to do while I was sitting at the Traverse City airport waiting for the flight home, then sitting in Detroit waiting three hours for my connection to Tampa. I've also been using it on-and-off here at the trailer. The data is use-it-or-lose-it after 60 days, so I may as well burn it up. Besides, Brighthouse is trying to say that the reason that Debbie's work phone (an IP phone) works like crap is because I'm sucking up all the bandwidth reading blogs on my Kindle. Of course the real problem is that IP phones SUCK!! Businesses get talked into the things because they are so much cheaper than traditional phones. As with nearly everything in this universe, "cheap" and "works" rarely go together. So I get to listen to Debbie spend an hour asking some poor sot how to spell their last name over and over and over and over because their voice keeps cutting out or there is so much line noise she can't hear what they are saying. It doesn't help that the person she is talking to is usually on one of the New and Improved smart phones, which are neither smart, nor are they intended to ever be used as a phone. Our ten-year-old flip phone has ten times better voice quality than any "smart" "phone" on the market. Add in that the moron she's talking to is invariably driving down the expressway while trying to book a cruise. With the radio on full blast. And kids in the backseat watching a movie with the volume cranked even louder so they can hear over the radio.
Yea, I spend a lot of time at home with my headphones on trying to drown out the endless stupid with something soothing like System of a Down's Chop Suey so I don't go postal.
One of these days, I need to do a post on our attempts to grow small bits of food here in the Land of Poisoned Soil, but that will have to wait for next time. Right now, it's time to start getting things ready for tonight's stir fry chicken.
The primary reason it's been quiet on the blog is that we've busier than one-armed paper hangers for some reason. I seems like every time we think we have some spare time, something comes up that we have to head out on some errand or take care of some emergency or another. Even when we do get a day to ourselves, we're so far behind on the normal household crap that our "day off" winds up being consumed with dishes, laundry and other such fun tasks.
Most of the busy has involved the Moose Lodge. As I mentioned last post, I went and got myself elected Treasurer, so now I'm working in the office for a few hours in the morning one or two days a week, plus meetings, meetings and more meetings. As well, there are various expectations made of all elected officers to show up at certain events, volunteer for this, that and the other, etc. On top of that, we've had a pretty significant dry spell this month. Other than a couple sprinkles that didn't even get through the leaves on the trees, it didn't rain from April 29 (the day I headed out for Michigan with my parents, natch) until Tuesday evening. That means that for the first time since I've been on the Moose landscape crew, we've been able to get out into a large, overgrown area between the lodge and the highway. So lots of fun stuff there cutting neck-high grass and pulling out scrub and trees that have been growing since the last time anyone bothered to cut out there. It doesn't help that in Florida, any area with tall grass is assumed to be a public landfill; we've pulled truck-loads of garbage, broken concrete, chunks of asphalt, steel posts, you name it. We are making some serious progress, but I'm also spending about twice the usual time on the job. The hope is that with all the vegetation cut back, the sun will dry things out between rains instead of the water just piling up all summer. We're also working on drainage issues, like a blocked culvert, so all the runoff from two miles of highway will go down the ditch instead of flooding the front yard. We'll see if any of it does any good once the rainy season finally gets here.
One thing I did get to do was play with the new mobile hotspot while I was in Michigan. I did all the driving, so other than an hour or so during our stop in Alabama, I didn't get a chance to mess with it until we were in Kalkaska. After we stopped at G's for lunch, I let my dad drive out to the house and I crawled into the back seat and jumped online. I wasn't sure what sort of coverage I would have in northern Michigan, but it worked great all the way out of town, was still going good on the two-lane county road, even kept working on the dirt road. Then about halfway up my parents' driveway, "BEEP!" No signal. It's like my parents' place is a little cellular back hole. But at least I had something to do while I was sitting at the Traverse City airport waiting for the flight home, then sitting in Detroit waiting three hours for my connection to Tampa. I've also been using it on-and-off here at the trailer. The data is use-it-or-lose-it after 60 days, so I may as well burn it up. Besides, Brighthouse is trying to say that the reason that Debbie's work phone (an IP phone) works like crap is because I'm sucking up all the bandwidth reading blogs on my Kindle. Of course the real problem is that IP phones SUCK!! Businesses get talked into the things because they are so much cheaper than traditional phones. As with nearly everything in this universe, "cheap" and "works" rarely go together. So I get to listen to Debbie spend an hour asking some poor sot how to spell their last name over and over and over and over because their voice keeps cutting out or there is so much line noise she can't hear what they are saying. It doesn't help that the person she is talking to is usually on one of the New and Improved smart phones, which are neither smart, nor are they intended to ever be used as a phone. Our ten-year-old flip phone has ten times better voice quality than any "smart" "phone" on the market. Add in that the moron she's talking to is invariably driving down the expressway while trying to book a cruise. With the radio on full blast. And kids in the backseat watching a movie with the volume cranked even louder so they can hear over the radio.
Yea, I spend a lot of time at home with my headphones on trying to drown out the endless stupid with something soothing like System of a Down's Chop Suey so I don't go postal.
One of these days, I need to do a post on our attempts to grow small bits of food here in the Land of Poisoned Soil, but that will have to wait for next time. Right now, it's time to start getting things ready for tonight's stir fry chicken.
Friday, April 24, 2015
Recovering
I'm still recovering from one of the busiest tax seasons I've seen in a while. Our numbers at the Walmart location were completely off the charts this year. But it's finally over, and, like I say every year, over the next nine months, I'll forget the hell of the 2015 tax season and eagerly sign up for 2016.
In the meantime, we're trying to dig out of the accumulated chores that we've both neglected since January. It mostly involves sweeping, raking, mowing, trimming, weeding, planting, etc. Our dry season this year really wasn't all that dry, then summer showed up a month early and everything went kind of crazy on us. But we're slowly getting everything beat back into shape. Today should be the final push, then we can return to maintenance mode.
And because there isn't enough going on already, I'm now the Treasurer of the Zephyrhills Moose Lodge. There's some sort of installation thingy tomorrow, then another meeting on Monday. There's also the regular meeting on Tuesday, but I'll be missing that as I will be in a car with my 'rents somewhere between Florida and Michigan. With some luck, I should be back here by Saturday evening. We decided that it's OK for my dad to drive around locally, but the snowbird thing just ain't gonna happen no more. I'll drive them up in the spring and fly back, then fly up in the fall and drive them down. The male parental unit is gripin' about it, but it's happening anyway.
So yea, don't expect a flood of updates here. Or maybe there will be. I bit the bullet yesterday and ordered a mobile hotspot to cart around with me. It's all part of The Plan to allow me more flexibility doing taxes under my own EFIN, along with now being able to process credit card transactions, offering over-priced "bank products", and all the rest. At some point over the summer, there may be a laptop/tablet acquired and a digital signature pad. (Any recommendations appreciated for the laptop/tablet; keep in mind this will be used for data entry, so a good keyboard with ten-key is a must.) Printing is still a bit of a stumper. I understand that with all the other stuff, it shouldn't be necessary, but I know I wouldn't want my tax information being sent to my e-mail account as a PDF file, so I doubt many of my clients will either, even if the PDF is password-protected. I guess a wi-fi ink-jet running off an inverter plugged into the car is a possibility. Still thinking on that part. Anyway, if the hotspot shows up before Tuesday, I can at least use my Kindle on the trip up to Michigan to post updates here as well as keep up with my famous witty Facebook repartee. I fully expect that it will be delivered about two hours after we pull out of the park, along with the books I ordered so I would have something to read on the trip.
Well, need to get off my butt and go get stuff done.
In the meantime, we're trying to dig out of the accumulated chores that we've both neglected since January. It mostly involves sweeping, raking, mowing, trimming, weeding, planting, etc. Our dry season this year really wasn't all that dry, then summer showed up a month early and everything went kind of crazy on us. But we're slowly getting everything beat back into shape. Today should be the final push, then we can return to maintenance mode.
And because there isn't enough going on already, I'm now the Treasurer of the Zephyrhills Moose Lodge. There's some sort of installation thingy tomorrow, then another meeting on Monday. There's also the regular meeting on Tuesday, but I'll be missing that as I will be in a car with my 'rents somewhere between Florida and Michigan. With some luck, I should be back here by Saturday evening. We decided that it's OK for my dad to drive around locally, but the snowbird thing just ain't gonna happen no more. I'll drive them up in the spring and fly back, then fly up in the fall and drive them down. The male parental unit is gripin' about it, but it's happening anyway.
So yea, don't expect a flood of updates here. Or maybe there will be. I bit the bullet yesterday and ordered a mobile hotspot to cart around with me. It's all part of The Plan to allow me more flexibility doing taxes under my own EFIN, along with now being able to process credit card transactions, offering over-priced "bank products", and all the rest. At some point over the summer, there may be a laptop/tablet acquired and a digital signature pad. (Any recommendations appreciated for the laptop/tablet; keep in mind this will be used for data entry, so a good keyboard with ten-key is a must.) Printing is still a bit of a stumper. I understand that with all the other stuff, it shouldn't be necessary, but I know I wouldn't want my tax information being sent to my e-mail account as a PDF file, so I doubt many of my clients will either, even if the PDF is password-protected. I guess a wi-fi ink-jet running off an inverter plugged into the car is a possibility. Still thinking on that part. Anyway, if the hotspot shows up before Tuesday, I can at least use my Kindle on the trip up to Michigan to post updates here as well as keep up with my famous witty Facebook repartee. I fully expect that it will be delivered about two hours after we pull out of the park, along with the books I ordered so I would have something to read on the trip.
Well, need to get off my butt and go get stuff done.
Sunday, March 15, 2015
Missing Everything
I missed that Friday the 13th was on a Friday in February.
I also missed that Friday the 13th was on a Friday in March.
And I missed that yesterday was π Day out to four decimals places, something that only happens once a century.
(Not sure what font this thing is using, but that's the crappiest looking letter pi I've ever seen.)
But I filed a lot of tax returns!!!
I've gone from crazy-insane-holy-crap-why-don't-they-stop-coming-in busy to just being steady at Ye Ol' Tax Booth. I think we've already beat the number of tax returns we did all last tax season and we're only about halfway through. Because "only" four or five people a day are sitting down to have their taxes done, I've been focusing on our "mail-in" clients; people who do contract work all over the country (mostly welders, pipe fitters and IT guys) and can't come into the office. I crank out half dozen or so of those on a typical day between walk-ins. Things will likely stay "slow" until the end of March or first week of April, then all the procrastinators will come flooding through the door in a full-blown panic because Holy Crap!!! April 15th is on April 15th this year!! WHY DIDN'T ANYONE TELL ME!!! And they will of course be missing some vital piece of paperwork that will prevent us from getting their taxes done on time. And it will be all my fault. Or the IRS's fault. Or Obama's fault. 'Cause ya know, we NEVER had to file taxes before that Filthy Muslim became president!
Ahem.
Yea, it's been one of those tax seasons.
Debbie is still kickin' it to the curb in the cruise business. And dealing with lunatics. The other day, she spent 20 minutes repeating to some lady, "Ma'am, if you didn't purchase the travel protection insurance, you can't make a claim under the travel protection insurance." I kid you not, she must have said the exact same thing to this crazy person 50 times. I finally had to snap on my headphones and crank some Sleeveless Meeks and the Right to Bare Arms so I wouldn't grab Debbie's head set and start screaming at Crazy Lady to go do something anatomically impossible to herself.
In between all the work craziness, I've made a couple big steps in my personal tax preparation abilities. As of yesterday afternoon, I can now accept credit cards. I had bought a Kindle Fire a while back and Amazon now has one of those cool swipey thingies that plugs into the headphone jack. It's all set up and ready to go as soon as the physical swipey thingy shows up today or tomorrow. I'm also now set up with a bank so I can take my tax prep fee out of the clients refund, just like the big kids. That won't be "live" until Monday as I had to fax them some signatures yesterday. But it's getting there. I've already done twice the returns I did last year and may actually make money at it. What a concept.
[Update: Before I could hit the Publish button, I received notification that my signature form has been received and I am as of now live for banking products. Woot!]
[Update to the Update: My cool swipey thingy just arrived and I was able to charge myself $1.00!! Woot!! Woot!!]
And that is pretty much our life at this point.
Over the last month, I had accumulated all sorts of political and economic articles that I was going to post comments on, but I got tired of having 20 tabs open in Chrome reminding me that I hadn't posted anything here is weeks, and closed them all down. And it turns out that Wolf Richter pretty much summed it all up earlier this month:
In other words, expect low gas prices to continue for a while. If you work in fracking or anything related to it, expect a pink slip. And then we have all that fracking debt and derivatives piled up in everyone's pension funds....
Enjoy the Ides of March.
I also missed that Friday the 13th was on a Friday in March.
And I missed that yesterday was π Day out to four decimals places, something that only happens once a century.
(Not sure what font this thing is using, but that's the crappiest looking letter pi I've ever seen.)
But I filed a lot of tax returns!!!
I've gone from crazy-insane-holy-crap-why-don't-they-stop-coming-in busy to just being steady at Ye Ol' Tax Booth. I think we've already beat the number of tax returns we did all last tax season and we're only about halfway through. Because "only" four or five people a day are sitting down to have their taxes done, I've been focusing on our "mail-in" clients; people who do contract work all over the country (mostly welders, pipe fitters and IT guys) and can't come into the office. I crank out half dozen or so of those on a typical day between walk-ins. Things will likely stay "slow" until the end of March or first week of April, then all the procrastinators will come flooding through the door in a full-blown panic because Holy Crap!!! April 15th is on April 15th this year!! WHY DIDN'T ANYONE TELL ME!!! And they will of course be missing some vital piece of paperwork that will prevent us from getting their taxes done on time. And it will be all my fault. Or the IRS's fault. Or Obama's fault. 'Cause ya know, we NEVER had to file taxes before that Filthy Muslim became president!
Ahem.
Yea, it's been one of those tax seasons.
Debbie is still kickin' it to the curb in the cruise business. And dealing with lunatics. The other day, she spent 20 minutes repeating to some lady, "Ma'am, if you didn't purchase the travel protection insurance, you can't make a claim under the travel protection insurance." I kid you not, she must have said the exact same thing to this crazy person 50 times. I finally had to snap on my headphones and crank some Sleeveless Meeks and the Right to Bare Arms so I wouldn't grab Debbie's head set and start screaming at Crazy Lady to go do something anatomically impossible to herself.
In between all the work craziness, I've made a couple big steps in my personal tax preparation abilities. As of yesterday afternoon, I can now accept credit cards. I had bought a Kindle Fire a while back and Amazon now has one of those cool swipey thingies that plugs into the headphone jack. It's all set up and ready to go as soon as the physical swipey thingy shows up today or tomorrow. I'm also now set up with a bank so I can take my tax prep fee out of the clients refund, just like the big kids. That won't be "live" until Monday as I had to fax them some signatures yesterday. But it's getting there. I've already done twice the returns I did last year and may actually make money at it. What a concept.
[Update: Before I could hit the Publish button, I received notification that my signature form has been received and I am as of now live for banking products. Woot!]
[Update to the Update: My cool swipey thingy just arrived and I was able to charge myself $1.00!! Woot!! Woot!!]
And that is pretty much our life at this point.
Over the last month, I had accumulated all sorts of political and economic articles that I was going to post comments on, but I got tired of having 20 tabs open in Chrome reminding me that I hadn't posted anything here is weeks, and closed them all down. And it turns out that Wolf Richter pretty much summed it all up earlier this month:
The price of oil did today what it has been doing for a while: it waits for a trigger and plunges. As I’m writing this, West Texas Intermediate is down 4.4%, trading at $44.99 a barrel, less than a measly buck away from this oil bust’s January low. It’s down over 20% from the peak of the most recent sucker rally.
US oil drillers have been responding by slashing capital expenditures, including drilling, in a deceptively brutal manner. In the latest week, drillers idled 56 rigs that were classified as drilling for oil, according to Baker Hughes. Only 866 rigs were still active, down 46.2% from October, when they’d peaked at 1,609. In the 22 weeks since, drillers have taken out 743 rigs, the most dizzying cliff dive in the data series, and probably in history....
You’d think this sort of plunge in drilling activity would curtail production. Eventually it might. But for now, the industry has focused on efficiencies, improved drilling technologies, and the most productive plays. Drillers are trying to raise production but with less money so that they can meet their debt payments. Thousands of wells have been drilled recently but haven’t been completed and aren’t yet producing. This is the “fracklog,” a phenomenon that has been dogging natural gas for years.
So US oil production hit another record of 9.366 million barrels per day for the week ended March 6, according to the Energy Information Administration’s latest estimate.
In other words, expect low gas prices to continue for a while. If you work in fracking or anything related to it, expect a pink slip. And then we have all that fracking debt and derivatives piled up in everyone's pension funds....
Enjoy the Ides of March.
Monday, February 16, 2015
Fingers Crossed...
...that the worst of tax season is over. We got our butts royally kicked for nearly four weeks straight. At this point, we've got to be a hundred returns past where we were last year. Even now that things have slacked off a bit, I'm still cranking out ten returns every shift. By this time last year, I was spending most of the day reading books, doing blog posts, checking up on Facebook, etc. If this keeps up, we'll be sittin' pretty come season-end bonus time, but getting there has been fairly grueling so far.
Not that corporate is making our jobs any easier with their Advances, Walmart gift cards, and every other gimmick you can think of to extract money from the clients for anything other than doing their taxes. Without all the "banking products" (every one of which is pitched to us as a way to "enhance" revenues), we could easily shave 20% off our fees. Worse yet, the code monkeys at HQ completely screwed the pooch implementing the stupid gift card thing so about one out of every ten people never get one. But the $50 is still being subtracted from our revenue by corporate. And we usually end up writing a $50 check to shut the customer up, who will likely never darken our door again. When you call the help desk, all they tell you is to talk to the local rep. Who has not one iota more control over the thing than we do, which is absolutely none.
In other news, there ain't much other news. Debbie is still cranking away for her busy season, which just got a little busier because one of the few remaining agents is "no longer with the company." For the entire five-and-a-half years she's been working there, the number of agents has steadily dwindled from 13 or 14 to six, with no plans by management to get anyone new anytime soon. And by the time they do, given their past history, another agent or two will become "no longer with the company."
In spite of all that, we did manage to sneak away for an evening to go see Bob Seger at the Amalie Arena in Tampa. As usual, trying to get anywhere in Tampa while an event is going on was a bad joke, aided by the fact that the Tampa police were a complete no-show. The concert was on a Thursday evening, meaning we had the twin joys of dealing with daily commuter traffic, which by itself completely gridlocks the mess the city "planners" have made of downtown, combined with an extra 20,000 or so people trying to get to the Amalie. But the concert was well worth all the grief of getting there, and, for a few hours at least, we were able to forget all about taxes and cruises and old-people park drama and the Carefree RV Resorts corporation and its ass-hat CEO, Nancy No-Nuts. It was a very pleasant few hours. The trip home was easier than the drive in (no thanks to the still-non-existent Tampa police) because by then, the commuter traffic was gone and everyone was more-or-less going the same way.
And then it was back to the same-ol' same-ol'.
Speaking of which, I see that ISIS/ISIL/IS/Daesh released a video of the beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians who were in Libya, which, thanks to the tender ministrations of the US military, is now a part of the Caliphate. As they were Egyptian, the Egyptian military responded with air strikes inside Libya with which is shares a long border. This is an entirely logical response. I'm sure the US will be equally logical and will strongly condemn the killings, offer condolences to the families of the victims, and let Egypt handle its own affairs.
Heh. Yea. Right.
I'm sure it's just a matter of time before, as the Joker said, "everyone loses their minds," and we stage another of our ISIS recruiting events. The Forever War must be perpetuated.
Meanwhile, our "leaders" have been so lost without the Cold War that they seem desperate to start a hot war with Russia. I can't for the life of me figure out what we hope to accomplish by getting into a shooting war with a major, nuclear-armed military power, over who gets to claim the complete basket case of a country that goes by the name "Ukraine". This won't be like any of our recent wars with such military non-entities as Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan. Not that we've been exactly decisive in all of those, but they were a cake-walk compared to what going head-to-head with Russia will be. Unless the goal is to eliminate a sizable fraction of the US's 20-something population, I can't see what we hope to gain. (Other than the obvious benefit to the military-industrial complex, of course. But that goes without saying.) Why would NATO or Europe want a corrupt, bankrupt country without much in the way of oil or gas? It currently serves as a pipeline route for Russian natural gas being sent to Europe, but how is destroying that infrastructure while simultaneously pissing off the Russians going to benefit Europe? Are our heads of state beginning to believe their own bullshit? That the US can supply all of Europe's natural gas from our non-existent surplus (The US is still a net importer of natural gas) converted to LNG in non-existent facilities, and shipped aboard a fleet of non-existent LNG-capable ships?
Have we gone stark raving mad?
OK, that sort of answers itself.
Not that corporate is making our jobs any easier with their Advances, Walmart gift cards, and every other gimmick you can think of to extract money from the clients for anything other than doing their taxes. Without all the "banking products" (every one of which is pitched to us as a way to "enhance" revenues), we could easily shave 20% off our fees. Worse yet, the code monkeys at HQ completely screwed the pooch implementing the stupid gift card thing so about one out of every ten people never get one. But the $50 is still being subtracted from our revenue by corporate. And we usually end up writing a $50 check to shut the customer up, who will likely never darken our door again. When you call the help desk, all they tell you is to talk to the local rep. Who has not one iota more control over the thing than we do, which is absolutely none.
In other news, there ain't much other news. Debbie is still cranking away for her busy season, which just got a little busier because one of the few remaining agents is "no longer with the company." For the entire five-and-a-half years she's been working there, the number of agents has steadily dwindled from 13 or 14 to six, with no plans by management to get anyone new anytime soon. And by the time they do, given their past history, another agent or two will become "no longer with the company."
In spite of all that, we did manage to sneak away for an evening to go see Bob Seger at the Amalie Arena in Tampa. As usual, trying to get anywhere in Tampa while an event is going on was a bad joke, aided by the fact that the Tampa police were a complete no-show. The concert was on a Thursday evening, meaning we had the twin joys of dealing with daily commuter traffic, which by itself completely gridlocks the mess the city "planners" have made of downtown, combined with an extra 20,000 or so people trying to get to the Amalie. But the concert was well worth all the grief of getting there, and, for a few hours at least, we were able to forget all about taxes and cruises and old-people park drama and the Carefree RV Resorts corporation and its ass-hat CEO, Nancy No-Nuts. It was a very pleasant few hours. The trip home was easier than the drive in (no thanks to the still-non-existent Tampa police) because by then, the commuter traffic was gone and everyone was more-or-less going the same way.
And then it was back to the same-ol' same-ol'.
Speaking of which, I see that ISIS/ISIL/IS/Daesh released a video of the beheading of 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians who were in Libya, which, thanks to the tender ministrations of the US military, is now a part of the Caliphate. As they were Egyptian, the Egyptian military responded with air strikes inside Libya with which is shares a long border. This is an entirely logical response. I'm sure the US will be equally logical and will strongly condemn the killings, offer condolences to the families of the victims, and let Egypt handle its own affairs.
Heh. Yea. Right.
I'm sure it's just a matter of time before, as the Joker said, "everyone loses their minds," and we stage another of our ISIS recruiting events. The Forever War must be perpetuated.
Meanwhile, our "leaders" have been so lost without the Cold War that they seem desperate to start a hot war with Russia. I can't for the life of me figure out what we hope to accomplish by getting into a shooting war with a major, nuclear-armed military power, over who gets to claim the complete basket case of a country that goes by the name "Ukraine". This won't be like any of our recent wars with such military non-entities as Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan. Not that we've been exactly decisive in all of those, but they were a cake-walk compared to what going head-to-head with Russia will be. Unless the goal is to eliminate a sizable fraction of the US's 20-something population, I can't see what we hope to gain. (Other than the obvious benefit to the military-industrial complex, of course. But that goes without saying.) Why would NATO or Europe want a corrupt, bankrupt country without much in the way of oil or gas? It currently serves as a pipeline route for Russian natural gas being sent to Europe, but how is destroying that infrastructure while simultaneously pissing off the Russians going to benefit Europe? Are our heads of state beginning to believe their own bullshit? That the US can supply all of Europe's natural gas from our non-existent surplus (The US is still a net importer of natural gas) converted to LNG in non-existent facilities, and shipped aboard a fleet of non-existent LNG-capable ships?
Have we gone stark raving mad?
OK, that sort of answers itself.
Saturday, January 17, 2015
It Begins
I'm three days into another tax season sitting in Walmart, and I'm ready to start punching people. Things did not get off to a good start; on my very first day, as I'm walking into Walmart, I get smashed into by a People of Walmart type going out the entrance. She looked drunk, stoned, or possibly both, sporting some serious bed-head, and was dressed in pajamas, a bath robe and bunny slippers.
As I walked in the door. On the very first day. Not good.
Our tax booth is located in the same prime real estate: across from the bathrooms. That's good, because bored men waiting for their women to emerge from the restroom are easy sales targets. It's bad because it seems every woman in Pasco county turns into a screaming harpy every time Walmart tries to clean the bathroom. Understand that, thanks to the lawyers, they have to close everything down anytime they mop until the floor is completely dry. Do the screaming harpies care? Nah. So the entire time (we're talking 15 to 20 minutes), they stand outside the restroom, sometimes alone, sometimes in a giant harpy chorus, screaming profanity three feet from where I'm trying to do people's taxes.
Lovely. Simply lovely.
I also fully expect, sometime before the end of tax season, to have my lifeless body pulled from the rubble that was once our tax cubicle. I can't go five minutes without some blind old dude smashing one of those electric shopping cart things into the walls, or a texting hipster walking into the side of the thing. Listen up, people; it's a temporary structure and ain't exactly what I'd call sturdy.
[As a side note, a little tip for purse and/or baby snatchers: outside your local Walmart's women's restroom is a target-rich environment. And Walmart even helpfully provides comfy benches for you to sit on that have been placed in the most advantageous spots for you to ply your trade. Better yet, they don't seem to mind if you camp on one of them all day. You can even bring drinks and snacks if you wish.]
As far as actual tax preparation, we got off to a bit of a slow start, but yesterday things seemed to pick up. I managed to complete a half dozen returns over my eight-hour shift in spite of constant glitches. That whole "we can download your W-2's" thing is an even bigger fiasco than in prior years. For example, the only way to download a Walmart W-2 is to type in a special code. That is only printed on the employees W-2. So we still have to have the physical W-2 to download the electronic W-2. So what is the point, exactly? It doesn't save me any time. After I go through all the crap to download the electronic W-2, then type in all the numbers to confirm that the W-2 downloaded correctly (which means I also need the physical W-2 to do that step), I've spent more time than it would take me to type in everything manually from a physical W-2. It doesn't mean that clients can file their taxes earlier. In order for electronic W-2's to be available for download, the employer has already done all the necessary year-end work and has likely printed the physical W-2's. Which I need in order to download your electronic W-2 anyway. The whole mess sounds like yet-another rent-extraction scam by outfits like W2Express that "facilitate" (for a fee, I'm sure) all this unnecessary "work".
Sort of like the tax preparation "industry".
Anyway.
Speaking of beginnings, I'm going to call it. The fracking bubble has popped:
Now you're probably saying to yourself, "Self, it's OK. I don't own any of that stuff." Don't be so sure. For example, it's a safe bet that your pension fund has some of this crap, or derivatives based on it, just like it had bunches of derivatives based on crap mortgages back in 2008.
And although you would never know it from the media, this isn't just about oil:
Hong Kong is also pegged to the dollar and they may become impatient with us more quickly than China.
Are we having fun yet?
As I walked in the door. On the very first day. Not good.
Our tax booth is located in the same prime real estate: across from the bathrooms. That's good, because bored men waiting for their women to emerge from the restroom are easy sales targets. It's bad because it seems every woman in Pasco county turns into a screaming harpy every time Walmart tries to clean the bathroom. Understand that, thanks to the lawyers, they have to close everything down anytime they mop until the floor is completely dry. Do the screaming harpies care? Nah. So the entire time (we're talking 15 to 20 minutes), they stand outside the restroom, sometimes alone, sometimes in a giant harpy chorus, screaming profanity three feet from where I'm trying to do people's taxes.
 |
| FYI, ladies; when you act like that, this is what every man around you is seeing. |
I also fully expect, sometime before the end of tax season, to have my lifeless body pulled from the rubble that was once our tax cubicle. I can't go five minutes without some blind old dude smashing one of those electric shopping cart things into the walls, or a texting hipster walking into the side of the thing. Listen up, people; it's a temporary structure and ain't exactly what I'd call sturdy.
[As a side note, a little tip for purse and/or baby snatchers: outside your local Walmart's women's restroom is a target-rich environment. And Walmart even helpfully provides comfy benches for you to sit on that have been placed in the most advantageous spots for you to ply your trade. Better yet, they don't seem to mind if you camp on one of them all day. You can even bring drinks and snacks if you wish.]
As far as actual tax preparation, we got off to a bit of a slow start, but yesterday things seemed to pick up. I managed to complete a half dozen returns over my eight-hour shift in spite of constant glitches. That whole "we can download your W-2's" thing is an even bigger fiasco than in prior years. For example, the only way to download a Walmart W-2 is to type in a special code. That is only printed on the employees W-2. So we still have to have the physical W-2 to download the electronic W-2. So what is the point, exactly? It doesn't save me any time. After I go through all the crap to download the electronic W-2, then type in all the numbers to confirm that the W-2 downloaded correctly (which means I also need the physical W-2 to do that step), I've spent more time than it would take me to type in everything manually from a physical W-2. It doesn't mean that clients can file their taxes earlier. In order for electronic W-2's to be available for download, the employer has already done all the necessary year-end work and has likely printed the physical W-2's. Which I need in order to download your electronic W-2 anyway. The whole mess sounds like yet-another rent-extraction scam by outfits like W2Express that "facilitate" (for a fee, I'm sure) all this unnecessary "work".
Sort of like the tax preparation "industry".
Anyway.
Speaking of beginnings, I'm going to call it. The fracking bubble has popped:
Layoffs are cascading through the oil and gas sector. On Tuesday, the Dallas Fed projected that in Texas alone, 140,000 jobs could be eliminated. Halliburton... axing an undisclosed number of people in Houston. Suncor Energy... will dump 1,000 workers.... Slumberger... will cut 9,000 jobs.
...
Larger drillers outspent their cash flows from production by 112% and smaller to midsize drillers by a breathtaking 157%....
...
California Resources... watched [shares] drop to $4.33 by today....
Its junk bonds... were trading at 79 cents on the dollar today....
...
Samson Resources... junk bonds... traded at 26.5 cents on the dollar today....
Halcón Resources... saw its shares plunge 10% today to $1.20.... Its junk bonds slid... to 72 cents on the dollar.
Hercules Offshore... [is] trading for $0.82 a share.... In mid-October, its 8.75% notes due 2022 traded at 66 cent on the dollar. Yesterday they traded at 45.
...
Today, Paragon’s shares trade for $2.18.... Its junk bonds are now down to 58 cents on the dollar.
Swift Energy... stock, now at $2.37... saw its junk bonds shrivel another eight points over the week to 36 cents on the dollar.
Now you're probably saying to yourself, "Self, it's OK. I don't own any of that stuff." Don't be so sure. For example, it's a safe bet that your pension fund has some of this crap, or derivatives based on it, just like it had bunches of derivatives based on crap mortgages back in 2008.
And although you would never know it from the media, this isn't just about oil:
On Thursday, the Swiss franc rose a staggering 30 percent against the euro, and the Swiss stock market plunged by 10 percent.... Meanwhile, the euro is in greater danger than ever.... With this move by Switzerland set off a European financial crisis?
...
And one of these days, another extremely important currency peg is going to end. Right now, the Chinese have tied their currency very tightly to the U.S. dollar. This has helped to artificially inflate the value of the dollar. Unfortunately, as Robert Wenzel has noted, someday the Chinese could suddenly pull the rug out from under our currency, and that would be really bad news for us…
...
So keep a close eye on what happens in Europe next.
It is going to be a preview of what is eventually coming to America.
Hong Kong is also pegged to the dollar and they may become impatient with us more quickly than China.
Are we having fun yet?
Sunday, January 04, 2015
Welcome to 2015!!
OK; so I'm a few days late. Sue me.
We managed to make it through 2014 without becoming homeless nor did we kill our moron neighbor and bury her body in the woods. Yet. It was a close call on both of those, but we somehow snuck through by the skin of our teeth. Those two items were our only goals for 2014 and given our present situation, will likely remain our only achievable goals for 2015. We'd like to be able to set other goals for ourselves like eating healthier, exercising more, saving money, but heh; who are we kiddin' here?
We have made modest progress towards getting our trailer a bit more livable with the new closet and shelves in the Florida room. We'll probably make a bit more progress over tax season assuming I can fit it in time-wise. It seems like it's taking us forever to get anything done, but all we can do is keep picking away at all the projects we have around here. We figure by the time we finally get everything the way we want it, we'll sell the place and move.
One thing we finally did get done this year is planting something edible outside. People keep giving us ornamental plants which seem to do OK, but every attempt we've made at growing food has not really done well, other than the rosemary bushes that are trying to bury our porch. This time, we used a bunch of containers with real dirt in them instead of trying to grow anything in the sterile sand around our place. We are having modest success. We have some lettuce that seems to be doing well, and a few tomato plants that are beginning to put on, along with a couple different kinds of basil, sage and parsley. So far, thyme and oregano have been no shows, but I'll just keep trying and see if I can make anything happen. At least down here, we can plant pretty much anytime we want so if something fails to germinate, we just keep replanting until something grows.
Politically, 2015 is off to a surreal start, with the New York police on what amounts to a work stoppage following the assassination of two police officers while the mayor was perceived to be siding with the anti-police protests:
So either two-thirds of what the police in New York City do every day is a waste of time, or the city will quickly plunge into utter chaos. I don't follow the news very closely these days, but I've not heard of much in the way of chaos yet.
And we have the now-infamous hack of Sony by North Korea. Except it now appears that the FBI was working backwards from the Whitehouse-ordained conclusion that the perpetrator was North Korea rather than the disgruntled ex-Sony employee(s) who actually did the hacking. But never mind; as we learned from W. and Iraqi WMD's, modern presidents never change course no matter what the facts show:
Ye gods and little fishes.
As for the economy, the fracking bubble may have not yet popped, but it's certainly leaking air faster than a week-old birthday balloon. Like the housing bubble, there is a great deal riding on it other than the fortunes of a few drilling companies. Pension funds, in an attempt to win back the loses from 2009, are up to their eyeballs in fracking-related junk bonds and derivatives. So are the banks, although we already know that the taxpayers will once again bail them out and guarantee Jamie Dimon and Loyd Blankfein will be paid their multi-million dollar bonuses. But anyone on a pension can expect to once again get the shaft. By any honest measure (meaning statistics generated by pretty much anyone other than our government), the working and middle class continued to get hammered in 2014 by any and every means possible, while the one-percenters piled up more wealth than they and the next dozen generations of their descendants will ever need. I don't expect that to change in 2015, although our government will continue to produce all sorts of numbers and graphs trying to convince you that what is happening to you isn't.
Happy New Year!
We managed to make it through 2014 without becoming homeless nor did we kill our moron neighbor and bury her body in the woods. Yet. It was a close call on both of those, but we somehow snuck through by the skin of our teeth. Those two items were our only goals for 2014 and given our present situation, will likely remain our only achievable goals for 2015. We'd like to be able to set other goals for ourselves like eating healthier, exercising more, saving money, but heh; who are we kiddin' here?
We have made modest progress towards getting our trailer a bit more livable with the new closet and shelves in the Florida room. We'll probably make a bit more progress over tax season assuming I can fit it in time-wise. It seems like it's taking us forever to get anything done, but all we can do is keep picking away at all the projects we have around here. We figure by the time we finally get everything the way we want it, we'll sell the place and move.
One thing we finally did get done this year is planting something edible outside. People keep giving us ornamental plants which seem to do OK, but every attempt we've made at growing food has not really done well, other than the rosemary bushes that are trying to bury our porch. This time, we used a bunch of containers with real dirt in them instead of trying to grow anything in the sterile sand around our place. We are having modest success. We have some lettuce that seems to be doing well, and a few tomato plants that are beginning to put on, along with a couple different kinds of basil, sage and parsley. So far, thyme and oregano have been no shows, but I'll just keep trying and see if I can make anything happen. At least down here, we can plant pretty much anytime we want so if something fails to germinate, we just keep replanting until something grows.
Politically, 2015 is off to a surreal start, with the New York police on what amounts to a work stoppage following the assassination of two police officers while the mayor was perceived to be siding with the anti-police protests:
Furious at embattled mayor Bill de Blasio, and at what Police Benevolent Association chief Patrick Lynch calls a "hostile anti-police environment in the city," the local officers are simply refusing to arrest or ticket people for minor offenses – such arrests have dropped off a staggering 94 percent, with overall arrests plunging 66 percent.
If you're wondering exactly what that means, the Post is reporting that the protesting police have decided to make arrests "only when they have to." (Let that sink in for a moment. Seriously, take 10 or 15 seconds).
So either two-thirds of what the police in New York City do every day is a waste of time, or the city will quickly plunge into utter chaos. I don't follow the news very closely these days, but I've not heard of much in the way of chaos yet.
And we have the now-infamous hack of Sony by North Korea. Except it now appears that the FBI was working backwards from the Whitehouse-ordained conclusion that the perpetrator was North Korea rather than the disgruntled ex-Sony employee(s) who actually did the hacking. But never mind; as we learned from W. and Iraqi WMD's, modern presidents never change course no matter what the facts show:
US foreign policy just jumped the shark: a few days after both the FBI and the US State department were humiliated when it was revealed that it wasn't North Korea but a disgruntled, laid off Sony employee that was responsible for the "hack", and when the best possible course of action would have been to simply let this latest embarrassing incident fade from memory, moments ago Obama - currently not working out next to a rainbow or flashing his support of "Shaka" - just signed his first executive order of 2015, imposing even more sanctions against North Korea.
Ye gods and little fishes.
As for the economy, the fracking bubble may have not yet popped, but it's certainly leaking air faster than a week-old birthday balloon. Like the housing bubble, there is a great deal riding on it other than the fortunes of a few drilling companies. Pension funds, in an attempt to win back the loses from 2009, are up to their eyeballs in fracking-related junk bonds and derivatives. So are the banks, although we already know that the taxpayers will once again bail them out and guarantee Jamie Dimon and Loyd Blankfein will be paid their multi-million dollar bonuses. But anyone on a pension can expect to once again get the shaft. By any honest measure (meaning statistics generated by pretty much anyone other than our government), the working and middle class continued to get hammered in 2014 by any and every means possible, while the one-percenters piled up more wealth than they and the next dozen generations of their descendants will ever need. I don't expect that to change in 2015, although our government will continue to produce all sorts of numbers and graphs trying to convince you that what is happening to you isn't.
Happy New Year!
Thursday, December 25, 2014
Merry Christmas!!
A dual-purpose post: First, does Blogger's scheduling thingy work (and do I know how to work it), and to post my traditional Christmas videos:
Merry Christmas!!!
Merry Christmas!!!
Tuesday, December 09, 2014
Run, Run, Run
December is our traditional crazy month with a bunch of stuff all happening at once, and not just Christmas/New Years. This is supposed to be Debbie's slow time, but she just set a new personal and office-wide record for the most cabins sold in a pay period (and week, and day, and probably hour). [Correction: I've been informed that this was not a record for a pay period; Debbie sold 80 cabins in a pay period back in February while this time it was "only" 72. It was, however, a new record for one week: 52.] I've been doing more security gigs, plus taking on more up at the Moose Lodge, plus cranking out CPE and trying to get ready for tax season.
Then because we're not already having enough fun, our crazy neighbor decides to go off her meds and start harassing Debbie every chance she gets. She always been nuts, but up to this point it was the harmless kind of nuts. Then she decided she was going to screw with Debbie, and, well, that ain't going to fly. I called the park manager, which as usual accomplished nothing. So I unloaded a whole truck-load of my kind of crazy on her wrinkled ass and it's been relatively quiet ever since. (I don't think it will come as any surprise that the only person in the park who doesn't think she's batty is a certain other "person" who decided my parents were fair game last spring. If you're thinking of involving yourself in my business again Dickhead, I seriously suggest you re-think.) Have I mentioned lately how much I hate Carefree?
Anyway, the other project this week is Christmas cards. Debbie has made four dozen or so cards, which ought to cover us for this year. We're only sending to close family and a few people here in the park. We just don't have the cash this year for card stock, envelopes and postage to do all 200+ names on our mailing list. Sorry. Maybe we should do a Kickstarter campaign. Debbie is mostly done with her part (making the cards), so now everything is waiting on me to clean up the address list with all the changes/additions since last year, print labels, and prep and stuff envelopes. I should be able to get step one completed today. Maybe. It's another Moose night, and I'm doing this instead of that, so....
Later.
Then because we're not already having enough fun, our crazy neighbor decides to go off her meds and start harassing Debbie every chance she gets. She always been nuts, but up to this point it was the harmless kind of nuts. Then she decided she was going to screw with Debbie, and, well, that ain't going to fly. I called the park manager, which as usual accomplished nothing. So I unloaded a whole truck-load of my kind of crazy on her wrinkled ass and it's been relatively quiet ever since. (I don't think it will come as any surprise that the only person in the park who doesn't think she's batty is a certain other "person" who decided my parents were fair game last spring. If you're thinking of involving yourself in my business again Dickhead, I seriously suggest you re-think.) Have I mentioned lately how much I hate Carefree?
Anyway, the other project this week is Christmas cards. Debbie has made four dozen or so cards, which ought to cover us for this year. We're only sending to close family and a few people here in the park. We just don't have the cash this year for card stock, envelopes and postage to do all 200+ names on our mailing list. Sorry. Maybe we should do a Kickstarter campaign. Debbie is mostly done with her part (making the cards), so now everything is waiting on me to clean up the address list with all the changes/additions since last year, print labels, and prep and stuff envelopes. I should be able to get step one completed today. Maybe. It's another Moose night, and I'm doing this instead of that, so....
Later.
Tuesday, November 18, 2014
The Big Five-Oh.
Yep. Half a century. Got my AARP card in the mail. More years behind me than in front. Hit the local CVS for a walker and some Geritol. Blah, blah, blah.
The reality is, of course, that I am exactly one day older than I was yesterday. But Western Civilization loves its anniversary dates almost as much as it loves its "old people talk" about pills and pains and procedures, so here we are.
In more important news, it's cold. The "polar vortex" (which is, in fact, nothing new but gets people all worked up thanks to a rather silly movie from a few years back) is knocking our temps out of the 70's and 80's for the next few days. I'll probably move our plants that are in pots into the shed or up onto the porch snuggled up against the trailer. The stuff planted in the ground is on its own. If this plays out like it usually does, our little micro-climate we have back here in the corner will stay up close to forty and it will be no big deal. By Friday we'll be back into 70's territory, and everyone will be talking about how we survived the Great Polar Vortex of November 2014. Ya know, it used to be that people were too busy surviving for real to waste time blowing perfectly normal weather events into an endless series of apocalypses that we "survived" by the brave expedient of putting on a sweater....
We were busy last weekend making more changes to the trailer. We installed some shelves in the Florida room that will also serve as a partition between the "living" area and the spot for the laundry, hot water heater and a small, upright freezer. We put twelve-inch shelves facing front to replace the monster book shelf we currently have taking up one entire wall, and sixteen-inch shelves facing the back that will hold the vacuum, folding chairs, laundry and cleaning supplies, etc. The long-term plan is to move Debbie's work space into the Florida room, and move the TV and my computer into the actual living room in the trailer itself so we can seat more than one guest at a time. We will also be able to set up a better space for Debbie's card-making operation out in the Florida room once we've shifted everything from the Monster Bookcase to the new built-in, and ditched ol' MB someplace. We'll probably donate it to the park library or some such. That's all a bit further down the road. I want to get the paneling up in the Florida room before we get too anxious shifting things around.
Anyway, some pictures:
I still need to cut the shelf boards to fit, which will likely wait until the weekend, then we can check another thing off the to-do list. While adding three more. But we don't talk about that.
We inherited a couple rose bushes that someone else was killing. I'm not sure how it happened, but we've become the park Plant Doctors. We've been receiving a steady stream of dying plants from people who hear that we can "fix" them. Our "miracle cure" generally involves re-potting in an appropriate-sized container and placing the plant out of full sun. (Almost nothing, including plants sold as "full sun" plants can survive Florida full sun.) Not sure how that makes us plant whisperers, but apparently it does around here. Anyway, the rose bushes. We got our first blooms. Just in time for them to be knocked off by the cold tonight. But there will be more:
I was going to say something about economics again, but with the gloomy weather, it seemed like piling on. So instead, here's a few links for those readers who aren't depressed enough by the cold and the rain/snow:
The Crapified Magic of the Obamacare Marketplace
Japan Is Dying and We Still Don't Get It
The Instability Express
Two Detroits, Separate and Unequal
If anyone needs me, I'll be curled up in my blanket escaping reality by reading about fictional murder and mayhem.
The reality is, of course, that I am exactly one day older than I was yesterday. But Western Civilization loves its anniversary dates almost as much as it loves its "old people talk" about pills and pains and procedures, so here we are.
In more important news, it's cold. The "polar vortex" (which is, in fact, nothing new but gets people all worked up thanks to a rather silly movie from a few years back) is knocking our temps out of the 70's and 80's for the next few days. I'll probably move our plants that are in pots into the shed or up onto the porch snuggled up against the trailer. The stuff planted in the ground is on its own. If this plays out like it usually does, our little micro-climate we have back here in the corner will stay up close to forty and it will be no big deal. By Friday we'll be back into 70's territory, and everyone will be talking about how we survived the Great Polar Vortex of November 2014. Ya know, it used to be that people were too busy surviving for real to waste time blowing perfectly normal weather events into an endless series of apocalypses that we "survived" by the brave expedient of putting on a sweater....
We were busy last weekend making more changes to the trailer. We installed some shelves in the Florida room that will also serve as a partition between the "living" area and the spot for the laundry, hot water heater and a small, upright freezer. We put twelve-inch shelves facing front to replace the monster book shelf we currently have taking up one entire wall, and sixteen-inch shelves facing the back that will hold the vacuum, folding chairs, laundry and cleaning supplies, etc. The long-term plan is to move Debbie's work space into the Florida room, and move the TV and my computer into the actual living room in the trailer itself so we can seat more than one guest at a time. We will also be able to set up a better space for Debbie's card-making operation out in the Florida room once we've shifted everything from the Monster Bookcase to the new built-in, and ditched ol' MB someplace. We'll probably donate it to the park library or some such. That's all a bit further down the road. I want to get the paneling up in the Florida room before we get too anxious shifting things around.
Anyway, some pictures:
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| The "before" shot. |
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| A view of the rats nest we had to relocate. |
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| Sorting through the boards. Typical of the Crapification of Everything, lots of damage and defects to hide. |
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| The back of the first shelf unit in its place. |
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| The front of the deep shelf unit. |
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| And the finished project before it gets filled up with shelves and books. |
I still need to cut the shelf boards to fit, which will likely wait until the weekend, then we can check another thing off the to-do list. While adding three more. But we don't talk about that.
We inherited a couple rose bushes that someone else was killing. I'm not sure how it happened, but we've become the park Plant Doctors. We've been receiving a steady stream of dying plants from people who hear that we can "fix" them. Our "miracle cure" generally involves re-potting in an appropriate-sized container and placing the plant out of full sun. (Almost nothing, including plants sold as "full sun" plants can survive Florida full sun.) Not sure how that makes us plant whisperers, but apparently it does around here. Anyway, the rose bushes. We got our first blooms. Just in time for them to be knocked off by the cold tonight. But there will be more:
I was going to say something about economics again, but with the gloomy weather, it seemed like piling on. So instead, here's a few links for those readers who aren't depressed enough by the cold and the rain/snow:
The Crapified Magic of the Obamacare Marketplace
It’s the crapification that gets me: We’ve got, on the very same continent as our own, a single payer system that covers everybody for a boatload less money — those wacky Canadians call it “Medicare” — and the best we can do in this exceptionally great country, this shining city on a hill, is normalize a program that still leaves 41 million uninsured, that has gross defects in its construction, and that is a full of traps for the unwary that will cost you bucks to some unholy number or needed treatment for a vital organ, whenever you look at it sideways or put your foot down in the wrong place. Because markets.
Japan Is Dying and We Still Don't Get It
What is it with us? Don’t we WANT to understand? Japan announced on Monday that its economy is in hopeless trouble and back in recession (as if it was ever out). And what do we see? ‘Experts’ and reporters clamoring for more stimulus. But if Japan has shown us anything over the past years, and you’re free to pick any number between 2 and 20 years, it’s that the QE-based kind of stimulus doesn’t work. Not for the real economy, that is....
Japan’s stimulus has achieved the following: banks get to pretend they’re healthy and stocks rise to heights that are fundamentally disconnected from underlying real values. On the flipside of that, citizens are being increasingly squeezed and ‘decide’ not to spend (not much of a decision if you have nothing to spend). Since Japan’s ‘consumer’ spending makes up about 60% of GDP, things can only possibly get worse as time passes. If ‘consumers’ don’t spend, deflation is the inevitable result – and that has nothing to do with the much discussed sales tax, it’s been going on for decades.
The Instability Express
Plummeting oil prices are a symptom of terrible mounting instabilities in the world. After years of stagnation, complacency, and official pretense, the linked matrix of systems we depend on for running our techno-industrial society is shaking itself to pieces. American officials either don’t understand what they’re seeing, or don’t want you to know what they see. The tensions between energy, money, and economy have entered a new phase of destructive unwind.
Two Detroits, Separate and Unequal
That Detroit is a more than 80% African American metropolis makes the idea of its rise from bankruptcy with second-class status all the more problematic. As Hammer explains, the plan for Detroit bears an eerie back-to-the-future resemblance to the famed Kerner Commission report of 1968, issued by a presidentially appointed panel in the wake of the urban rebellions that were then sweeping the country. Its findings were that the nation was moving toward two societies: black and white, separate and unequal.
“That was viewed as a call to action, as unacceptable in 1968,” comments Hammer. Nearly a half-century later, he adds, it’s portrayed as progress. The vision of a future Detroit as a sprawling second-class black city with a small, wealthy downtown and a few elite neighborhoods surrounded by thriving white suburbs will, he projects, bring the 1968 finding to life. “The truth is, what [bankruptcy] Judge Rhodes will do when he approves the bankruptcy plan of adjustment is ratify that conclusion as prophecy.”
If anyone needs me, I'll be curled up in my blanket escaping reality by reading about fictional murder and mayhem.
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
Porch Project
Now that the weather-gods have decided that we may have 72 hours in a row without rain, we decided it was time to do my mom and dad's porch. We scrubbed it all down with deck cleaner, let it dry for 24 hours, then started slapping on the stain.
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| Started with the outside edge. |
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| Edge and steps all done; time to start really putting down some stain. |
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| Lunch break. |
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| Missed it by THAT much. We had to open a full gallon of stain to do this little bit. |
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| The more-or-less finished product. I'm over on the left still trying to pry the plastic ring off the new can of stain. I'd forgotten what a royal pain those things are. |
I'm still kicking out the occasional security gig. This Sunday I get to work the local America's Got Talent thingy down at the convention center. It will be one of the longer jobs I've done so far: 6am til 8pm. Feet will be aching by the end of that shift for sure. Debbie is still cranking out cruises, but she's hitting her annual slow season. She's still getting enough cabins sold to bonus, but not by much. I'll need to try to pick up more security work during November to make up the difference. Initially, her bonus money was just extra, but thanks to the rent going up 5% every year for no other reason than the bastards who own this place want to, Debbie's bonuses are no longer... well... bonuses.
Speaking of money, I haven't written much about the economy lately. But recently, I'm starting to get the same queasy feeling I had back in late 2008. That didn't turn out well for a lot of people, including us. This time around, it may be worse given that most of us schlubs are still digging ourselves out of the manure pile. Normally I just keep those sort of feelings to myself, but it looks like other people are coming out of the woodwork that make me look like an optimist:
The bear market is here, and a 30% decline is highly probable. So be defensive, raise your awareness, and get help from professionals who survived and thrived in the previous three crashes. Those who ignore history are doomed to experience the worst.
That'll hurt, especially given all the retirees that were forced into the stock market after the Fed cut real interest rates down to negative territory. But given the nose-bleed level the stock market is at currently, even a 30% drop is hardly Armageddon. Of course, last time around, it was the bursting of a nice big real estate bubble that turned a normal economic event into The Great Recession. So this time, what part of the economy suffers from constant hype from analysts and our government?
-By 2040, production rates from the Bakken Shale and Eagle Ford Shale will be less than a tenth of that projected by the Energy Department.
-The three year average well decline rates for the seven shale oil basins measured for the report range from an astounding 60-percent to 91-percent.
-Four of the seven shale gas basins are already in terminal decline in terms of their well productivity....
-The three year average well decline rates for the seven shale gas basins measured for the report ranges between 74-percent to 82-percent.
And all of it paid for with borrowed money. Yea. Nothing can go wrong there.
And we have some sort of election coming up. The only thing about it I'm looking forward to is an end to the non-stop political ads everywhere. I know I say this every election cycle, but I cannot fathom in what universe there exist people so stupid that their vote would be influenced by the barrage of crap that pours out of our TV to do anything other than stay home on November 4th and declare a pox on all their houses. That's exactly what I'll be doing. I'm done. Throwing in the towel. The pricks (and sorry; they're all pricks) will do whatever they want regardless of how anyone votes, so I'll be watching this circus from the sidelines.
Not that voting has any meaning whatsoever in the age of touch-screen voting and the registration of illegal aliens. Sure, there has always been a certain level of shenanigans when it comes to voting in this country, as evidenced by the Chicago ballets still sitting on the bottom of Lake Michigan. But at least with a physical ballot, you have to work at it (hanging chads not withstanding). When everything is a ghost in the machine, a reasonably bright four-year-old can rig an election.
And enough of that. I'm off to do some dishes so we have something clean to eat dinner off of.
Tuesday, October 07, 2014
More Standing on the Box
At this point, I've survived four events while wearing a shirt that has the word "Security" splashed across the back of it. The first two times, I was at the main gate for the last couple Rays games. So I was standing in the full Florida sun for several hours wand-ing down people and repeatedly yelling to the crowd to "Please take everything out of your pockets. Everything means EVERYTHING. Cellphone, keys, change, wallets, small furry mammals. Everything needs to come out of your pockets. Please" Then the first person I wand gets a beep. "Do you have something in your back pocket?" "Just my cellphone. I need to take that out too? You want me to take my shoes off? This is worse than going to the airport..." Blah, blah, blah. Meanwhile, there are 20,000 very hot, very sweaty, very impatient people behind said person. Fun stuff. I didn't actually lose my voice, but by the second or third hour, I was starting to sound a lot like Darth Vader. But other than being hot and hectic, it really wasn't anything I'd call hard work. One thing I really like about the company I work for: they do the laundry. You're handed a clean shirt at the beginning of your shift, then seven sunny, Florida hours later, leave the sweat-soaked toxic mess for someone else to deal with. Sweet. The downside was the drive. The stadium is waaaaay down in St. Petersburg, so the cost of gas takes a serious chunk out of my take-home pay.
The second pair of gigs were concerts. The first was a real pain in the ear; 65,000-plus screaming, prepubescent girls and yet-another, record-label-created boy band. (Four Directions? One Dimension? Ah, here it is: One Direction.) I started out at one of the gates doing bag checks. (Primary things we were looking for: weapons, sex toys, lewd or profane language on signs and/or clothing. Simply wearing lewd clothing was not a problem.) Once the warm-up act was done, my gate was closed and I was "redeployed" (yea, some of these guys are seriously into their military jargon) to the main floor. My job was to keep the aisle clear and make sure that no purple wristbands tried to get up to the stage. I expected it to be a nightmare, but it only took me making one pass down the aisle before things got rolling, making sure everyone knew the drill. After that, all I mostly had to do was start walking towards someone or even just wave them back into their row. The only real problem children were not, in fact, children. They were the cougar moms trying to get to the stage. I'm not sure on what planet any self-respecting 20-something guy would give these wrinkled crones a tumble. When said 20-something is an international celebrity, its a safe bet the odds are effectively zero. And for Cthulhu's sake, put some clothes on. Anyway, it was a fairly easy gig, although we did have to do the human line thing when everyone on the floor tried to rush the stage during the final encore. No one tried to scratch my eyes out, so I guess that makes it a good day.
The second concert was a road trip. We all jumped on a big tour bus and headed north to Archer, Florida. Well, to be precise, we were bused to a cow pasture somewhere in the general vicinity of Archer, Florida to help beef up the local security presence at one of Luke Bryan's Farm Tour stops. I got a major cush gig in the VIP area, checking credentials of people trying to get on the roof of the lounge they had set up. It was kind of a cool little deal; a semi-trailer that expanded out into a 1,000 square-foot lounge and bar, complete with restrooms and four flat screens connected to a satellite dish. (We'll leave aside the question why someone would pay hundreds of dollars to get into the VIP area, then sit indoors and watch a ball game....) People with VIP passes could pay an extra $500 to go up a ladder onto the top of the trailer for a better view and all the free beer, soda, water and Five-Hour Energy they wanted. My job was to make sure the people up there had actually paid and that they didn't try to jump off the roof. It was the easiest money I've made in a long time. It did get a little intense when all fifty people started bouncing in unison. Me and the other security guy both had two fistfuls of railing trying not to get thrown clean off the roof. I swear a couple times I had a good foot of air under me. But we made it through, then did our usual herd-everyone-out-the-gate routine and got back on our bus. The only bummer with the whole thing was the five hours on the road. I came crawling into the trailer around 3am Sunday morning.
Anyway, so far, so good on the whole security thing. I can pick what events I want to work, and they don't mind that I'm going to disappear for tax season. This weekend coming up, I'm doing a couple football games. We'll see if my luck holds out, or if some drunk tries to knock my teeth out.
The second pair of gigs were concerts. The first was a real pain in the ear; 65,000-plus screaming, prepubescent girls and yet-another, record-label-created boy band. (Four Directions? One Dimension? Ah, here it is: One Direction.) I started out at one of the gates doing bag checks. (Primary things we were looking for: weapons, sex toys, lewd or profane language on signs and/or clothing. Simply wearing lewd clothing was not a problem.) Once the warm-up act was done, my gate was closed and I was "redeployed" (yea, some of these guys are seriously into their military jargon) to the main floor. My job was to keep the aisle clear and make sure that no purple wristbands tried to get up to the stage. I expected it to be a nightmare, but it only took me making one pass down the aisle before things got rolling, making sure everyone knew the drill. After that, all I mostly had to do was start walking towards someone or even just wave them back into their row. The only real problem children were not, in fact, children. They were the cougar moms trying to get to the stage. I'm not sure on what planet any self-respecting 20-something guy would give these wrinkled crones a tumble. When said 20-something is an international celebrity, its a safe bet the odds are effectively zero. And for Cthulhu's sake, put some clothes on. Anyway, it was a fairly easy gig, although we did have to do the human line thing when everyone on the floor tried to rush the stage during the final encore. No one tried to scratch my eyes out, so I guess that makes it a good day.
The second concert was a road trip. We all jumped on a big tour bus and headed north to Archer, Florida. Well, to be precise, we were bused to a cow pasture somewhere in the general vicinity of Archer, Florida to help beef up the local security presence at one of Luke Bryan's Farm Tour stops. I got a major cush gig in the VIP area, checking credentials of people trying to get on the roof of the lounge they had set up. It was kind of a cool little deal; a semi-trailer that expanded out into a 1,000 square-foot lounge and bar, complete with restrooms and four flat screens connected to a satellite dish. (We'll leave aside the question why someone would pay hundreds of dollars to get into the VIP area, then sit indoors and watch a ball game....) People with VIP passes could pay an extra $500 to go up a ladder onto the top of the trailer for a better view and all the free beer, soda, water and Five-Hour Energy they wanted. My job was to make sure the people up there had actually paid and that they didn't try to jump off the roof. It was the easiest money I've made in a long time. It did get a little intense when all fifty people started bouncing in unison. Me and the other security guy both had two fistfuls of railing trying not to get thrown clean off the roof. I swear a couple times I had a good foot of air under me. But we made it through, then did our usual herd-everyone-out-the-gate routine and got back on our bus. The only bummer with the whole thing was the five hours on the road. I came crawling into the trailer around 3am Sunday morning.
Anyway, so far, so good on the whole security thing. I can pick what events I want to work, and they don't mind that I'm going to disappear for tax season. This weekend coming up, I'm doing a couple football games. We'll see if my luck holds out, or if some drunk tries to knock my teeth out.
Sunday, September 28, 2014
Native American Powwow
Debbie happen to be reading through one of those free ad papers and found a blurb for a Native American Powwow not too far from here. We both had Saturday off, and we didn't feel like more yard work, so off we went:
This little guy just stole the show. You could hear the Awe's and OMG's follow him around the circle:
I could have sat and listened to the music all day. Unfortunately, the weather seemed to have other ideas. Everyone shrugged off the first couple rain showers, but when the lightening started, the organizers pulled the plug. By then we were pretty well drenched anyway, so we called it a day.
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| These three girls had been named princesses at other powwows for work they do in the Native American community. |
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| Some of the regalia. Love the blending of western and Native American. |
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| More regalia. |
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| This little guy was having a blast running around behind his dad. |
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| The only time we could get a pic of this guy that wasn't blurry was during a break between songs. |
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| The Head Woman Dancer and the Head Man Dancer and his son. |
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| The guy in the shorts on the left was still going strong after a couple hours of dancing; the Native American version of Tony and Leo Boris? |
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| The regalia was awesome, but I can't imagine wearing all that in Florida, never mind dancing around in it for hours. |
I could have sat and listened to the music all day. Unfortunately, the weather seemed to have other ideas. Everyone shrugged off the first couple rain showers, but when the lightening started, the organizers pulled the plug. By then we were pretty well drenched anyway, so we called it a day.
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