Category Archives: Personal posts

Dog torture; Mind melting puzzle

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• I mentioned in my last post that I had bought a bark control system for my dogs that seemed to be working pretty well, which is true. I also mentioned that the guy on the phone suggested that I remove the battery from the collar from time to time so that the animals didn’t learn that it was the collar that was shocking them, which is totally false.

I know enough about electronics to know that it is possible to make a very small battery do very big things. Through the use of a capacitor , the charge in the collar is able to deliever a much larger shock than the 6 volt battery ever could (of course that is just talking about voltage, which is only potential energy, not even addressing the ampere [which is the measure of flow of electrical energy. The latter of which is a more acurate measure of how much electrical energy is needed to actually kill you]).

The aforementioned capcitor is a battery in and of itself. It holds the electrical charge, but at often higher levels than the battery which provides the power. That is the basis of most electronic equipment in use today, not to mention why the cover on the back of your television says that you should never open the set, it really could be fatal. I can’t find any specifics on capacitors (mostly since I am trying to find vague references to fatalaty rates due to idiotic handling of such), but there has to be a reason why a somtething as small as a watch battery can be fatal.

I spoke to a friend on the phone trying to research this and found that the basic reason that the capacitor delivers more power is that it is ready to use. A battery gets its power from a chemical reaction that can only deliver so much energy per second, what the capacitor does is to suck that power out of the battery, over time, and release it in a single blast. So, while the device might still only have six volts of potential energy it is able to release it far more quickly, which can produce far more amperage, which actually hurts in the case of the dog collar.

What I completely forgot to take into account was the fact that the capacitor can hold its charge for a very long time (which is why your television says you should never take the back off of it). It is entirely possible that an electrical system that hasn’t had power for days or weeks will still have power in the capacitors. Poor puppy.

Getting back to the collar itself. The neighbors that live behind us have been in the process of moving out for the last couple of weekends, of course the dogs don’t like anyone that comes near the fence unanounced, so they bark like killers. My wife suggested that I put the collar onto the younger puppy, Zelda, but that I take the battery out first so that she wouldn’t get shocked. It really did seem like a pretty good idea at the time, but then again I think my brain might have been AWOL.

Zelda, as is usual, didn’t even set foot outside once the collar was around her neck. She came in and took up the better part of the underside of my desk. She was not barking, but she was panting pretty heavily from all the running around and barking. I heard the little collar make a beep (which is the only saving grace of the device) to let me know that she had just been shocked, even though she had not barked and the battery was sitting on the desk next to me. It seems that the collar (which is activated by vibration) can not differentiate between panting and barking.

Not only did she get shocked by the collar for no damn reason, on top of that she was having weird shivers whenever I touched her for the next couple of hours. She seemed to be thinking that it was me that gave her the shock and not the collar. She actually went in and stayed with my wife for the remainder of the night, she was afraid of me. I am pretty sure that was not the purpose of the collar when I bought it. She didn’t bark the rest of the night though.

I know that I have previously mentioned that I tested the collar on myself before ever putting it onto one of the dogs, but seeing the way she acted after getting zapped for no damn reason, I am beginning to think that the electrical collar might not be a good idea. It works extremely well when the dog actually barks, which they know they shouldn’t be doing in the first place, but, when it shocked her when she was laying at my feet, she had no idea what she had done wrong. I guess that is why the guy said that they should only wear the collar when “something that you know is going to make them bark” is about to happen.

When the people at P.E.T.A. find out that I am using this device on my dogs, however, I may have to change my story…or not… Once Zelda starts making the house payments she will be free to do to me as she wishes. Of course she won’t be able to treat me in an inhumane manner since humans are also a part of the Animal Kingdom, albeit the most vicious, vindictive, hatefull part…

• The friend that I was on the phone with sent me a couple of complex math questions, neither of which I even tried to figure out. One other thing that he sent me was this image:

All you have to do is count how many men you see in the image, then do the same once the top half of the image makes the switch. I don’t want to divulge just how long I have spent trying to figure out where that extra guy comes from, or where he goes, but I must say that this is one that has been teasing my brain for a long time. I have tried counting heads, feet, hell even noses (at his suggestion) only to find that the number is simply never the same in the second frame. I can clearly see where they are cutting some of the feet in half, but they don’t result in more or less little figures. I can see where they cut some heads in half, but they don’t result in more or less little figures. I can clearly see where the extra guy appears when the panels change, but I can’t figure out how in the hell the creator made it so. Well, I guess, there it is…proof of God…I haven’t found the answer, therefore it was a magical, mystical, omnipotent being that created the unsolvable puzzle…That, or it will take me a few days…

Come on GOD, bring it!

It seems to me that I should have really pissed of P.E.T.A. and the Catholic Church by this point, if not I am not doing my duty.

If I was into raping prepubescent boys I might be able to plug (pun intended) the church a couple more times, but having sex with children just seems wrong, no matter how much rich entertainers disagree. I do wonder though why Michael Jackson was not even considered when the papal vote went down. Sure he isn’t a Cardinal, but, he has had sex with more children than the rest of the nominees combined, isn’t that the benchmark?

Now, to piss people off for the sake of pissing them off (so you don’t think I am discriminating), Star Trek sucks! Star Wars sucks! If you don’t understand why they suck you have probably never had a job, but are always looking. Your hair-style has been the same for at least twenty years. Your only “real relationship” is with an online partner (who is probably a fat, ugly man that outweighs you. Unless, of course, you are the fat, ugly man trying to hook in that little hottie chick who happens to be a fan of either series, in which case you are hooking up with a smaller man who thinks he is hooking up with that elusive star trek/wars hottie…That hottie does not exist…)

I wanna piss more people off but I am out of ideas…

Relatives; Dogs; Bit by .. Something

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•I have long maintained that I do not want to use force to train our little puppies. Your description of a puppy may differ from mine, though, since one of our puppies is several years old and weighs in excess of 50 pounds. Even our younger puppy is over a year old now and she weighs roughly 40 pounds. Of course they are not puppies in the view of most of the world, but they are my (our) puppies, and as such they do not deserve to be trained inhumanely. They may be animals, but they are my animals…Test your lipstick on lab rats you sick fuck!

All that being said (even noting that I made the dogs sound a bit smaller than they really are), they are not perfectly behaved. The first dog, Warlock (aka Sporslook, Slooker, Stink-Wagon) is pretty well behaved and will come to any of the names that my wife invents for him. He rarely ever barks, and when he does even I get out of bed to see what is going on. There is usually something big happening if Warlock barks.

My dog, Zelda (who is only known as my dog since my wife sprung Warlock from ‘Dog Jail’, thus keeping him away from immenent death, leading directly to a bonding of sorts), who is only my dog since she wandered under the fence one night and the wife wouldn’t let me kick her to the curb to see if anyone came looking for her, is not so well behaved.

Zelda (whose name was chosen because it was the last name on the last page of a pet naming website) is a spunky little dog. She simply proves the addage that it is not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog. I weigh almost 200 pounds and I sometimes back away from her. When she is in a bitchy mood, stay away from zelda.

We had previously tried to use a non-harmful bark control collar to keep her from barking, the one in question was a collar that sprayed a bit of citronella towards her snout. She eventually began to like the citrus smell, and learned how to aim it at Warlock (who doesn’t like any smells) to keep him away from her. She was clearly not learing anything from that collar, which was thankful, since she ate the thing the next day…

I bought a new collar for the dogs, from the PetSafe.net website. This collar does actually shock the dog though, so there were a bunch of questions that I wanted to ask the people at petsafe before I put it onto my dog. My email went unanswered over the weekend, but by Monday they had not only replied to my email, but also recommended that I call them for “better service”.

After several failed phone calls I managed to get into the queue for the petsafe products. Less than ten minutes later I was actually talking to someone that worked for the company (not someone who works for a call center in India. If you don’t appreciate that then you have simply never had a problem with a pc, tv, vcr, dvd player….) who asked for the model number. I happened to have hte model number handy, since the faulty device was actually in my hand. He walked me through how to test the device to make sure it was working (which it was), then he walked me through how to test the device on myself to see how ‘shocking’ it really is.

Ideally I would have liked to have been able to test the device around my own neck, the guy told me that there would be no way that I could simulate a dog’s barking though. He works for the company that invented the device, I just think I can bark as well as a dog; whose information is more likely to be true? So I simply sated myself by making the collar shock my finger. The guy warned me in advance that “the animal has far thicker skin, as well as a lot of hair to go through before the shock takes place”. Damn Right!

The electroshock collar is working pretty well so far, but it has made the more vocal of the dogs spend most of the time on the floor by my feet. This, as the guy told me, is normal behavior. He said that you need to remove the battery from the collar from time to time when you send the dogs outside, else the dogs will start to fear the collar instead of being afraid to bark. Since making them stop barking is the entire point I will try to do just as he said. It is a bit difficult though, especially when you see that little puppy getting zapped….

She has seemed to learn pretty quickly though. She knows that if she is barking in excess, and then I throw the collar on her (which she welcomes) that she better not bark. Unfortunately she usually doesn’t go outside much when the collar is on, I can understand that since it really does give a good zap when activated, but is she actually learning anything? Only time will tell.

• Some of my relatives from Oregon are coming to see me tomorrow. Some of them I have seen as recently as last year, while some others I have not seen in more than a decade. Said visiting family members wanted to make sure that we could include all of the family that are in the Arizona region, so I suggested that we all meet at my house. This makes it so that us poor people (myself, my mother and my brother) don’t have to drive very far to make it all happen, which is a good thing all around.

The problem was that this meant the wife and I had to do some impromptu ‘Spring Cleaning’. Our house is certainly not filthy, we don’t just ignore trash piles and step over them, however, some areas of the house are cleaned far less frequently than others. The dogs’ room for example.

I don’t care what level of training your dog has, if you tell him to “clean his room” he will invariably stare at you like you are an idiot. Which is probably justified, I mean dogs can learn commands and be very obedient, they can’t actually think though, and don’t understand commands that they are not conditioned to understand. That meant that I had to do it…

I started to clean the dogs’ room, which was a full two trash bags of garbage, pretty late at night. This was partially because I hate the task, as well as being drunk enough that I really thought it would save time in the morning. As it turns out, one, or both, of those reasons were faulty.

The first hour or so of operation ‘clean up the dog room’ was going pretty well. I removed at least a couple of garbage bags full of trash from that room during the first couple of hours. Yet I left the door open to the outside while I was doing it. It started to rain.

For reasons that I would soon understand, the dogs started to go ballistic. They were chasing some imaginary foe all around the room, even had that foe cornered in a little metal can. Of course they knocked over a couple of knick-knacks along the way. I still thought that they were the dogs crying wolf, until I saw a little, cheap, porcelain statuette in my coin jar. As I reached for it, thinking that I was about to use it as a focus point for a verbal scolding of the dogs, something bit me.

I got bit by the thing that you see on the right. While it is difficult to judge the size of the culprit in the photo, I can tell you that the diameter of the can is six inches. The rodent covers the full six inches even with his back curving around the can. All of that is not even including the tail! The mouth of that vermin was able to open up far enough to give me a wound that is just a bit over a half of an inch from the top bite mark to the bottom bite mark. Not to mention the fact that it hurt really bad, and bled profusely.
I am pretty sure that I said “ouch” at least once. Ouch being the most mundane of terms that I used…The poor photo can be attributed directly to the fact that I didn’t want to get anywhere near that thing ever again. I will tell you that it really, really hurt…

Work

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I have had a really weird schedule at work this week, due to one of the bosses being out of state. That is the simple explanation for why I was getting so much better about doing daily postings then, suddenly, reverted to my old ‘post whenever the hell I want to’ schedule. Unfortunately, that same person is still going to be out of town for a few more days, so I may or may not find the time to make a post before next Wednesday. Therefore I will try to sum up the last week with this post, as well as trying to preblog the events that might happen next week, or not, I do as I please.

• First off (well, not really first since a lot of stuff happened between my last post and now, but the first memorable/blogworthy thing that happened), on Wednesday we got a grocery delivery at the store. We get them every other week so that was not the surprise. Even after unloading all the groceries (which we do by hand with the aid wheeled devices) all was still normal. It was when the driver tried to put the last freezer box on the truck that it all started going really, really bad.

My googling has not matched me up with any photos of a freezer box at all, let alone the one that I am talking about, so I will try to describe it. Your average pallet is about 40×42 inches (some smaller, some larger, depending on the width of the trailer it is being hauled in) ideally, they can fill the trailer of a shipping truck with two pallets from front to back. The 40×42 pallet is pretty standard so I am going to assume that it is the size of the freezer boxes (as they leave no room for error when trying to maneuver one around the other inside the truck). This all being beside the point anyway.

Much like everything else in the world, technology has caught up with the trucking industry. The freezer boxes are now made mostly out of fiberglass, using stryofoam as insulation. Unfortunately, some of the old steel boxes are still being used (some of them being in horrible condition), which is where the day all went to hell for me.

-I am sure that no one really wants/needs to hear this, but I have to mention it or else the story wouldn’t make any sense. These freezer boxes have to be elevated about four inches off of the ground to make it possible to get a pallet jack under them. The old, steel (well, solid metal anyway), freezers had legs welded onto them for this purpose, while the newer fiberglass boxes have them molded to the box. I hope that question is on Jeopardy sometime, else that was a wasted thought.-

The last freezer box that we unloaded was a really, really old box. The doors on it wouldn’t stay shut on their own so they wrapped it in plastic wrap to keep it from falling open. Also, it was missing one of its legs; A fact that was only discovered when the driver was trying to turn the pallet around to get it onto his truck. Then came the destruction. When the box was being turned (on the pallet jack), there was one leg missing. Instead of turning smoothly it tipped over and fell right off of the loading dock. It took the driver, a hand cart, and the pallet jack with it. Thankfully, no one was hurt. There was a substantial amount of property damage though.

The box ripped through the mesh on the steel security door like it was tissue paper, then, when it got to the edge of the door, it caught the frame of it and ripped the door completely out of the wall. It tumbled slightly, off the edge of the loading dock, to end up leaning, very precariously, against a wooden fence, the loading dock, and the lift gate of the truck. It was bad.

Always the trooper, my first thought was, “I need a lot of photos of this”, followed by, “I need him to sign a paper that says that they will pay for all the damage”. I got both of them easily, as the driver knew that his company was at fault and also needed my help to get that archaic freezer box back onto his truck. I did take a lot of the photos before we touched anything, since I wanted evidence that the box had destroyed the security door and was damn near pushing the fence over; he called his immediate supervisor to tell them what had happened and sent photos via his cell phone. That was when we had to figure out how to get the damn box back upright so that we could get it back on his truck.

Just about the same time as we were discussing how to move the box without downing the fence (since it was leaning against the loading dock, the fence, and the lift gate), the termite-sprayer-guy showed up, and was willing to help. I don’t know how much that box actually weighs, but I do know that if three grown men (even if we were all weaklings, which I don’t think was the case) couldn’t move it, it must be at least 700 pounds, of course at that precarious angle, and with little space who knows.

The story finally ends with me pushing the box away from the fence while the termite guy is holding a chain to pull it away from the fence, the driver moves his truck forward far enough to clear the fence, then all we have to do is stand it back up and get it on the truck. Oddly, the three of us were able to stand it up pretty easily, in fact getting it onto the truck wasn’t much of a problem either; I tipped it onto two of its good legs while termite guy stuck a brick under the missing leg, driver got the pallet jack under it and it was done.

The casualties in this case were only a steel security door, which is completely fucked, A wooden fence, which I will likely be repairing in the near future, and a freezer box that should have been retired decades ago. Since I got the guy to sign a paper that said his company was responsible for all the damage, perhaps I should get them to cover punitive damages??

Politics

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Well, today I am going to talk about politics. I am telling you now that you would be better off to not read what I am about to write, then again I might surprise myself. Still, I am gonna vent a few views that may be unpopular, so really, don’t read this.

I have been reading The Washington Monthly for quite a while, hell since its inception really, since I used to read it back when it was CalPundit. I know that it is a blog that is written by a liberal, so there are always liberal points made during the presentation of a story, I expect this. I think Mr. Drum does do a pretty good job of presenting the actual facts before trying to spin it though, that is what I find admirable about that blog. While I read his blog daily, I also vist several conservative blogs on a weekly basis, just to see what is going on on the far, far, far right bank of center. Without exception, the right end blogs present less actual facts and more commentary, but I like to read them anyway just enough to know where both sides stand.

I have always considered myself a liberal; I support gay marriage, abortion rights, and many other concerns that are purely liberal. I don’t think that it is anyone’s business who marries whom, beyond that, I really don’t think that marriage is a sacred covenant with GOD, it is a sacred covenant with your spouse, regardless of gender. Men should have absolutely no say in the abortion argument; when you can reproduce asexually, or give birth yourself, then you can have a say. I am also a bit to the left on many of the financial issues that affect me directly, Social Security for instance. It is at just about that point that I want out of the left.

I guess I am kind of conservative on some of the issues as well. I really don’t want a socialist economy, or socialized healthcare for that matter. While it is true that most of the rich were born rich, some have actually gotten rich by hard work and determination. In my opinion it would be wrong for them to literally pay for every good or service that the poor receive. Yet, at the same time, I really don’t think that we should allow the poor to become homeless and die on the street.

I know that I have told the story of how I ended up in Arizona before, but since I can’t find a reference to it (since I never got around to updating my archives), I will just do the quick version here: I left Oregon while I was in a bit of trouble with the law. The belongings that I had with me all fit into a small, overnight bag (which consisted mostly of cassette tapes), I moved down to live with my mother, I actually had to borrow clothes from her when I got a job, six days after I got here, since all I had were shorts and tanktops. I lived with my Mother once I arrived here for about a couple of months. At that point she was moving back to Oregon and I needed to find a place to live. I lived in a cramped studio apartment for the next seven years. I used empty soup cans for drinking glasses and bowls, I was sleeping on a “super single” mattress that was acquired from the trailer court where mom lived, beyond that the only furniture was a small (smaller than loveseat size) couch that was made of wood and naughyde. It was miserable.

Beyond the fact that I didn’t have the money to buy anything, I also had a court judgement against me that was in excess of $10,000, and an outstanding warrant for my arrest in the state of Oregon. I think that the term destitute would be a fair assessment of my situation at the time. I had nothing, and what little I had was being paid to try to clear up the financial problems (which were not of my causing) and the legal problems (which were totally my fault).

Kind of as an aside, You would be amazed at just how many uses you can get out of the average milk crate. They are modular, after all, you can use them as bedside tables, coffee tables, end tables, kitchen tables, footstools, entertainment centers (just for holding the components, trust me), magazine racks, file cabinets, I really could go on and on… Milk crates were my furniture for a lot of years.

It was from that humble beginning (using the term beginning a bit loosely, since I was 20 at the time) that I worked my way to where I am at today. I do mean worked. Most of my relatives didn’t know where I was (which was intentional, since I did owe money to the courts and creditors, and they have an uncanny ability to find debtors…The mob probably wishes that they had that type of efficiency), not that any of them were independently wealthy in the first place, and even if they were they likely wouldn’t have offered to help me out. It seems that some families really care about a strong family tree, while other families don’t give a shit until someone dies (the latter of which is describing me, but when the family members that died are the one that threw you out of your childhood home so he could sell it, followed by the one that didn’t give you the small inheritance you were due [so she could buy a new truck], what would you do?)

Some of those facts are disputed to this day. Unfortunately, the only things that I was ever able to see were the actual, factual documents relating to it. I was not able to hear the spin that whatever relative wanted to put on it. Perhaps I am a bad person for basing my opinion on absolute fact without first listening to spin? I guess I am proving myself liberal again, or at least I thought.

The Washington Monthly website is mostly viewed by liberals. While I side with them on most arguments, I at least check the alternatives first. I made the horrible mistake of reading the ‘comments’ on one of the posts today. It turns out that a lot of the liberal people are just as whacked out as the people on the right. I will say that at least the left-leaning sites usually have a comments section, while most on the right don’t, but I will have to add to that that most of the people who are commenting are getting their news (political anyway) only from that one source. Having biased information is probably worse than having no information, here I must cite the reelection of Dubya; with no information the public would have despised him, with liberal information he didn’t seem so bad. Of course, with conservative information, he was the second coming of Jesus.

I have struggled, really struggled, to pay off my debts and get a meager amount of money into the stock market. I now own my own mortgage (home), and providing I don’t miss any payments it will be mine in the year 2032 (though that number is a bit high since I am paying an extra 6 dollars a month towards the principal, which will actually shave a few years off of the loan).

My stock market investment has absolutely no gurantee. I could lose it al in a second. If I were to invest that money into an IRA I would have some protection, but I have lived under a bridge and, as such, I don’t like the thought of my money being tied up until I retire. This is perhaps naive and foolish, but, if you have ever spent a cold October night sleeping under a bridge in Oregon, you would probably agree that quick access to your money is a good thing. Which actually screws me out of the tax loopholes that the rich use, but, what are you gonna do?

The other thing that is really pissing me off is that the really poor people (like I was not long ago) are claiming that there are no jobs available. I worked at a number of minumum wage jobs for the first 5 years of my adult life. The jobs are there. One of them (when I saw a whole bunch of people applying), I told them I would work one shift for free, if they liked my performance they could hire me, if not I would walk away. I worked the one shift for free. Guess who got the job. Like I mentioned earlier, it was only six days after I got here that I had a job, while mom’s boyfriend had been out of work for months. Could it somehow be related to determination? Maybe the one that really, really wants to have a job gets the job?

Unemployment only requires that you tell them that you looked for a job, while some released convicts have to get a manager to sign to say that they applied for a job and were not hired. Let’s institute my plan: If you are out of work you can only draw unemployment for the first four weeks, then you go four weeks without it. Now you get two more weeks of unemployment, followed by two weeks without it. Then it is done, forever. Get a job or die.

When questioning my wife and then my mother and then her boyfriend, I found that none of us has really ever been out of work for more than two weeks in our adult lives, While I see girls in the town I live in banging out a kid every 9 months and living better than I do. I think it has gone far from a liberal/conservative issue, this is a moral issue. The poor are poor, the rich are rich, but why does the middle end up paying for the upbringing of the poors’ small children?

Mandatory Birth control would be something that I could get behind. Sure, it would never happen since the republicans are in power, but, come on. The wealthy have far fewer children than the poor. Is that due to better education? Is that due to the socioeconomic climate? Is that due to more prophylactics? Maybe all. The thing is that the really poor don’t look at the grand scheme of things, they hardly look two weeks down the road. Another child? well that is just downright fun! So, there go my tax dollars (being middle class) as the rich and the poor battle it out to see just who is less wrong.

I am not happy with the way I am going here, so I am gonna call it a night. As always, the email address is directly below.

Dogs

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It turns out that my online gaming activity is ever more boring than I had ever thought. This will be the third post in three consecutive days. I don’t know why or how this happens, but, in spurts, I enjoy the gaming a lot, that is nearly always followed by a period where I don’t enjoy it all that much and grow tired of it quickly. It might have something to do with the horrible problems that I have to deal with at work (pc problems), which leads me to come straight home and just play the mindless games that the internet is built on. Who knows.

On tap today, I have the puppy story that I plugged in yesterday’s post and that is about it. Hopefully something else will come to me as I retell it, else this may be a really short post.

• Our dogs, Warlock and Zelda, both have a bit of Pit Bull in their genetic makeup. I know that (to people who don’t understand the breed) the term “Pit Bull” brings to mind visions of huge, mean dogs. The problem with that is that most people get the breeds confused. A Rottweiler looks like this and is a vicious dog that is often put to death for biting/eating children. A “Pit Bull” is a breed of Terrier that is not vicious without the proper conditions. Even the term “Pit Bull” was only ever used to describe the dogs that were specifically trained to fight.

The majority of your Terrier breeds are possibly a bit anxious, easily excitable, little puppies but never actually bite anything. The term “Pit Bull” bears a black mark for the fact that they used to be trained to fight, and even today most owners just stick them on a chain in the yard and pray for the best. While I am not going to try to defend the entire canine family, I will go out on a limb to defend those Bull Terrier Mixes that we own. They are certainly not vicious, they love children (in fact, when we take them for a walk they will always stop to let all of the children pet them), the only growling that we really ever hear is while they are having bad dreams (since they do sleep in the bedroom with us), and the most vicious they ever get is when they are fighting over the kibble that the wife just dribbled the grease from a pan of ground beef over.

Perhaps, much like children, it is not the breeding of the dog that makes a killer, but the care of the child/animal?

It was never my purpose to spend so much time defending my dogs, but they do get a lot of bad press, so I kind of have to. Sure, your dog might have killed thirteen children, might still be on the prowl for new blood, might have rabies, and might be kill-on-sight material, but, had you taken care of the puppy, he/she would be a happy and well-adjusted dog. If you don’t understand that logic you probably should have your reproductive organs removed, lest you try to chain your newborn child in the yard and forget about him/her. The dog might not have a brain as big as yours, but it does have one, and it has a memory, and I doubt you would win the fight if it came down to jaw on fist action.

The dog story involves a “Bark Collar” which is a non-painful type, since I don’t want to hurt the little animal. It simply sprays a bit of citrus when the dog barks, which would suck for a dog, since their noses are so much more sensitive than humans.

The “Bark Collar” comes with a collar, strangely enough. Our dogs tend to fight when there is a collar involved. I assume that this behavior is directly linked to the fact that the harnesses that we use when we walk them is made of the same material. This collar, however, has a little electronic device on it that discharges a strong citrus odor when the dog barks. It is quite the effective deterrent.
The funny part of the story is that Zelda (the little girl dog) is the one that is usually wearing the device, since she is usually the one that is barking. While the collar does spray towards her face, it is coming from her neck, thus it is like a neck-mounted projectile of citrus smell. Zelda’s tiny little brain has seemed to work that all out.

Zelda does get the citrus sprayed in her face on occasion, but that is not story. The story is when she uses it as a weapon.

This all started when Warlock (the boy dog) jumped up onto the stove to steal a slice of yesterday’s pizza. Warlock knew he had done bad, but wanted to eat the pizza anyway, the spoils of war, I guess. Zelda barked at him, and it blew the citrus cloud into both of their faces. Warlock ran away, while Zelda finished the slice of pizza.

I think Zelda knows about it now. She knows that the collar will spray. She is just fucking with Warlock at this point. Both of their brains, put together, wouldn’t equal the weight of a pea, but they are learning. Zelda (the bitch) is learning just how much she owns Warlock. He (Warlock), on the other hand, is only starting to learn that Zelda owns him. Sure it isn’t dignified, but he didn’t lick your ass. Go Warlock!

Survivor; Oddity at work; Hockey

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An early day off at work today has made it possible for me to go ahead and throw up a post. Of course I could have thrown up a post over any of the past several days, but you wouldn’t have wanted to read it. That would be because it was all about computer problems, all week. Since my last post the computer problems have been virtually resolved on my Mother-in-Law’s PC, while the problems on the PC at work simply got worse. This was due directly to the fact that the boss ordered a brand new Dell PC, but he ordered it with a flat panel monitor, while he was planning to use his 19″ CRT monitor with the system. Without going into a lot of detail, I will just say that it took me many hours, over several days, to get that to work. What is more is that he is expecting that the flat panel monitor will work on the old pc, which is certainly not going to happen, but that will be a story for a different day. I am just tired of talking about PC’s at this point.

• Survivor, however, is on the block to be hacked at today.

Survivor is one of the only shows that gets myself and my wife to sit down together to watch the teevee (though I didn’t watch the first season, I have been a fan ever since). The bitch that I am having about the show currently is that it is a bit stale at this point. It is certainly true that the interaction between all of the players is the most interesting part of the game, hell it is really the only reason that you should be watching the show at all. The problem is that they have gotten to the point where they spend so much time showing the ridiculous challenges that they don’t show enough of the interaction of the players.

This season, for instance, one team has won damn near every single challenge. As a direct result of that it never shows what that team’s day to day dynamic looks like, while it spends a hell of a lot of time focused on the losing team. Net result: I know the names of everyone on the losing team and can identify them by their faces, the winning team…Not so much.

My wife and I do enjoy rooting against the losing team every week, but that can only take the experience about so far. They really need to quit doing such elaborate challenges and get back to showing a lot more of the interaction of the players, which was what made the show so popular in the first place. Imagine if they were to nix about half of the reward challenge time and replaced it with personal interaction, be it for the winning or losing tribe, it would make you feel far more emotionally involved in the show, regardless of whether the interactions really matter in the grand scheme of the game.

I certainly don’t want them to take the challenges out of the material that they air, I simply want them to show only the pertinent parts of the challenges. If one player really excells at a particular event, by all means show it, but, if it is a dead heat, do we really need to watch twenty minutes of people doing the same thing over and over? Especially when you consider that every player is making deals with every other player; deals that will be broken at the drop of a hat. They need to get back to the team dynamic or their ratings will continue to slide. It might only be my opinion, but, I bet if you were to poll 100 people that are not watching survivor this season (after having watched previous seasons), they would probably share my sentiment.

• Now for some strange happenings at work.

There is a nameless young lady where I work (yes, of course, she actually does have a name, but even if I did know what it was I would not put it here), who had rather a strange experience the other day. It seems she received two phone calls, about a minute apart, one from a man and one from a woman, who were both telling her that her car had been hit by another car in the parking lot. As luck would have it, I happened to be right outside the doors as the second call (the one from the man) came in, and was able to say defenitively that the guy on the pay phone was not the guy that made the second call (not that that really matters).

She ran outside to check her car only to find that it had not been in a collision, instead it had rather a morbid gift stuffed into the door handle. That morbid gift was a female undergarment, with attached feminine hygiene product, which was stained with the blood of some female (or at least I assume it was the blood of some female, I am not a detective). There was an attached note that said, “Please leave me yours. In the same place. P.S. you have a really nice ass.” Again, not being a detective, I can only speculate, but I would think that likely the note was not left by a woman. It is my guess that it was some sort of a sick prank that some of her peers came up with just to freak her out, and it worked in spades.

The police were called, the panties and feminine hygiene product were taken in as evidence. The girl moved her car to the front of the store (where she could actually see it), and she was really, really freaked out for the remainder of the day. She was fine by the next morning though, which leads me to wonder if whoever had perpetrated the prank had come clean. That, of course, is something that sixteen-year-old-peer etiquite would never be allowed to be discussed. The situation seems to be resolved, so, I guess it was the crack investigating team….That or the prankster told her about it and didn’t want to get into legal trouble.

• Did you know that the entire Hockey season has been cancelled? I know only because I occasionally watch the sport, and then I only watch it when my local team (the Phoenix Coyotes) are doing well.

The only reason that I bring this whole subject up is because the players are holding out for better contracts, while the owners of most of the teams are losing tons of money every year. Hockey is a really popular sport in Canada, as well as on the eastern seabord of the U.S., but they simply don’t fill enough arenas often enough to substantiate higher contracts. The market for Hockey is simply not as large as the market for the three major U.S. sports (being Football, Baseball and Basketball).

Here is a simple test: Name five hockey players that have ever lived.

I can come up with five off the top of my head. Brett Hull, Bobby Hull, Wayne Gretzky, Jeremy Roenick, and (pardon the name butchering) Mario Lemieux. Could you do it? Beyond that, a new test. Name five current players in the NHL.

Umm…ehhh…umm…Is Patrick Roy still playing? What about Pavel Bure? Did Wayne Gretzky ever father a child? Did Gordie Howe’s DNA get used to clone him? Where is Nikolai Khababulin, is he still playing? Do you see a forming pattern here? (The reference to Khababulin was only because he used to be a coyote, the other names popped into mind because they actually were playing last I knew. Meaning only Roy and Bure, all cloning aside.)

For sake of comparison I am going to tell you five current players from each of the three major U.S. sports. Please note that the names may be butchered since I am not going to go and spellcheck the names.
NFL: Warren Dunn, Marshall Faulk, Donnie Abraham, Fred Smoot, Aeneas Williams. (I left out Quarterbacks on that one since everyone knows the Quarterbacks).
MLB: Derek Jeter, Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa, Mike Piazza, Craig Biggio. (I ignored pitchers on this one, since that would have been far too easy).
NBA: Carmelo Anthony, Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O’Neal, Vince Carter, Steve Nash. (This one I could have done fifty players, but I really don’t like basketball all that much and I didn’t want to focus on my home team).

I am able to easily name five players from the other major U.S. sports, while I can’t come up with a single, definitiive, name in Hockey. I think that this would imply that Hockey is simply not as popular as the other sports. I would then argue that sincce the ssport is not all that popular, the money should be split between the owners and the players. If the owners are making tons of cash while the players are in poverty, that is wrong. By that same metric, if the players are making millions of dollars while the owners are losing money that is also wrong. That all being said, when is the last time that MLB or NFL or NBA cancelled an entire season??? The answer is, of course, never. No other major, U.S., sports league has ever cancelled a season. There have been portions of seasons missing on lots of occasions, but, no season had/has ever been cancelled…Untill now…

The unfortunate downfall of the logic on this one is that no one who never watched Hockey previously is goinng to start watching it . Those who have never seen Hockey are more likely to think that the players are demanding too much money for a service that doesn’t reaklly pay off.

My logic here is pretty tough to quantify, but that is only becasue it is pretty tough to find a hockey fan in the middle of Arizona.

Existential epiphone

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I posted a couple of things over the last few days that I am sure that no one ever read. Keeping in that spirit, I want to relay to you today an anecdote of sorts. It is not a story, as it has no real beginning or ending but, it is a story of personal triumph(?) over adversity.

I will get right to it.

When I walked into my home tonight, I just marveled at it. I am not completely sure why; It is the same house that I slept in last night, and the same house that I left this morning when I went to work. Somehow, though, it hit me a whole lot different tonight. I have been kicking this around in my head for the last several hours and I have yet to figure out why it was just now, today, that I had this feeling.

Now we must go back in time.

The year was 1990. I was living with my Father in Oregon, while both of my siblings were living with Mom in Arizona. The reason that I was still living with Dad, while the siblings were both with Mom, came right down to opportunity. I was (not only by my own testimony, but also mentioned by many of my high school teachers) a pretty intelligent child. I had very high hopes for myself. It was my goal to graduate High School, then go on to college to get a degree. My Ultimate goal had always been to work in Micro-Technology. That was what I wanted for myself and for my parents, I wanted to make them proud.

When my Father died (on Christmas Eve in 1990), it threw my future into a downward spiral. Not that his death had anything to do with the events that transpired, more that I made a lot of irrational decisions in the wake of his death. I, and I alone, chose to continue living in Oregon. I know that my Mother was not happy with that decision, but, at the time I had been dating a girl steadily for several years. I didn’t want to throw that relationship away to go live in a shack with my Mom and brothers… I was in love… That type of love that never works out and always ends up on the evening news…

I also had a weird notion that Dad was going to come back (I was sixteen at the time, mind you, you have lots of weird notions at that age), so I figured that if I did things that I knew he didn’t approve of he would surely show up to scold me. This was not an idea without merit, mind you, I did this on a lot of occasions with great success(not after he was dead of course). There were several times when he wasn’t yet home from a night of drinking by the following morning. Being worried about his safety, and with no way to contact him, I would just take one of his cars out for a joy ride. Alomost invariably he would show up only minutes after I put the car away. That was sort of what I was hoping would happen after he died, even though I really knew that he really wasn’t ever coming back.

The first thing that began to suffer was my education; With a lack of discipline I was cutting a lot of classes. I also was working full time at my job to try to make ends meet while waiting for Social Security to start sending a check. In the 20/20 of hindsight, I know that I really could/should have been going to classes everyday, funny how a sixteen-year-old mind doesn’t look further into the future than the weekend.

The next thing that happened was that I started drinking, heavily. That is a malady that I am sorry to say I still have to this day. Today it is in some sort of control though, while back then it certainly wasn’t. I lost one job because of my drinking; Failing to show up because I was hung over actually. I think that the drinking probably also had a great deal to do with why my wife to be left me, at which point it only got worse.

By 1994, I had been drinking like you would never believe, lost my wife to be, lost my job, got a DWI, and just generally didn’t really give a fuck about life. I spent some time living out of a friend’s van, sleeping under freeway overpasses, basically just a vagrant. I did eventually get another job which afforded me the luxury of renting a friend’s garage, which was not insulated in any way and had a horribly leaky roof. At that time I was also having to attend some faux AA meetings, which I had to pay for, my driver’s license had been revoked, and I was horribly in debt from various legal problems, as well as a lot of bad checks (mostly written by my legal guardian, but with my name on the account). I was at the point where if I were to miss a payment I was going to jail, not just for a day but until the entire amount of the debt to the state had been repaid, being that you only get a couple of bucks a day for time served, I would have been there for a very long time.

When I lost that job my life changed forever. Not to say that I was some sort of cowardly pussy running away from my debts or anything like that, more like I was some cowardly pussy that was trying to buy myself a bit of time to figure out what to do about the debts; I skipped the state. This was no small undertaking, I didn’t even have enough money to buy a bus ticket. My mother sent me the money to buy a bus ticket, but since I had no I.D. (when I say they revoked my license, I mean the physically took it away from me), I had to cash the check at one of those “check cashing” places, where they took 10% of the check for themselves. That meant that I had to sell the one posession that I had that meant anything to me, my guitar, to make up the difference. I then traded what stereo equipment I had (a receiver, cassete player and cd player) for a folding garment luggage type thing (as I had no luggage).

The day that I stepped onto the bus I was carrying only that bag. Inside that bag I had exactly three shirts, two jeans, a pair of shorts, a couple of tanktops, and a couple dozen tapes. Nothing else, really, that was all I had when I stepped onto that bus. I did have a walkman, which I was wearing at the time, but that was it. My enitre life’s work, for the first twenty years could easily be fit into a single overnight bag.

Once I arrived in Arizona, I had a job within a week. I still have that job today. While it might not be the most glorious job, it is my job and I take it pretty seriously. I went from living with my mother to living on my own within six months or so. With the help of my boss, I was able to start putting money into a Mutual Fund account, while still trying to take care of the problems I was having in the state that I had deserted. Within a couple of years I was able to pay off the debts (well my half) from the bounced checks and the legal problems. Sure I was living in a little studio apartment, using only used soup cans for both bowls and glasses, but I was getting a better start, albeit a bit later than hoped. My personal investment really soared during the ‘tech-boom’ of the late ’90’s, and I ended up far better for the investment.

To fast forward several years…

I am now very happily married, my wife makes almost 50% more than I do, and we have been making payments on our own home for the last three years. We don’t have any children (mutual agreement), but we have two dogs and a very large yard. We are happy, the dogs are happy, hell even the fish and cockatiels (we have seven cockatiels, 3 of the boys are for sale if you are interested) seem happy. This is a situation that I would never have imagined I would ever be in, at least based on my status when I originally moved down here, but here I am.

So, getting back to the walking into the house and having an epiphone, I really am a very lucky man. The trail that led me here is exactly the same trail that leads a lot of men to suicide (something that I tried three times, but only once did I really hope it worked). I am living proof that you can overcome any sort of adversity and go on to be successful. Not that I really think that home ownership proves success, more that I think that happiness is a sign of success. My wife and I are happy with no children, two dogs, and a home that is ours (well it belongs to the mortgage company for the next 27 years, but as long as I don’t miss a payment..). We may never be really wealthy, likely we will never be really wealthy, but we do have this little spot on the earth that we call our own. We have the fishes, and the birds, and the dogs, and that is enough for us. Especially when I think about what I came from to end up at this level; Life is beautiful.

A friend (knowing that I could have prevented the death of my father) recently asked me, “If you could go back in time, would you have made that call?” This is a horrible question to ask, but one that I really had to think about… If my father was still alive, I would likely have gone on to my career in micro technology, I would probably have married the girl that I had been with before his death, and My Dad would still be alive! The other side of that question is that if my Dad had not died, I would not have been subjected to all of the things that I have been. I would never have left Oregon. I would never have met my wife. I would never have been in this place at this time. That is a question that I certainly can not answer, yet, I can say that my life now is far better than I had ever hoped. So, would I change the past to make my father still be alive? I would only do that if the circumstances that put me where I am now remained the same. Which means that I likely would do the same thing if I had it all to do again. I dunno. My father’s life (at the point of his death) was pretty miserable. To trade his miserable life for my happy life is not the question, the question is, “Would I throw away what I have now to see my Dad alive?” I really don’t think that I could.

Sorry, Dad, I am happy and wouldn’t change this life for all the world.

Garfield; Dog in heat; Social security

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Normally I wouldn’t waste my time bashing a comic strip. Particularly not Garfield, since I really don’t ever read the comic. But, while in my daily surfing routine (internet that is), I happened to see a link to the latest Garfield comic, so I decided to check it out. It wasn’t even slightly humorous.

Just for fun I decided to take a peek at all of the Garfield comics from the month of January to see if there was anything there worth reading/viewing. Unfortunately, Flux’s bitch about Garfield, on BlackChampagne.com was 100% accurate: The comic strip isn’t even trying any more.

Here I offer up as evidence three strips which I gleaned from the internet. Their sole purpose to show you that I did indeed subject myself to all of the comics for the month. Well, that and proof that the strip isn’t even trying.



Note how in the first strip there appear to be 3 identical frames, the only change being Jon’s mouth? Then compare the Garfield from the first strip with the one in the third strip, do you think he looks a bit similar as well? Also the Jon from the second strip bears a pretty striking resemblance to the Jon from the third strip, and not just because it is the same guy.

There is toy that both my wife and I remember fondly, it was available in the late ’70’s to early ’80’s, I can not seem to find a link to the toy since I can’t remember the manufacturer, or the name of the toy. It is similar to This. The idea is that you have a background ‘board’ (which is a scene from your favorite show; Scooby doo, the Smurfs, you name it) and then you have decals that you can stick on it. You can make millions of different scenes, but the characters are always going to look exactly the same. When I got the G.I. Joe version of the peel and stick thing, it actually made it so that you could position the arms and legs (since the decals were separate from the torso). Now I am beginning to believe that Jim Davis might have died some time ago, and some jack-ass with an old Garfield peel and stick toy is ruining the strip. At least I wish that I was believing that, unfortunately I seem to be believing that Davis just enjoys the paycheck so much that he quit caring about quality at least 15 years ago.

As luck would have it, I did just find the type of book that I was looking for. All you have to do is do a google search for reusable sticker book. Who would have thought the answer would be so simple. No wonder someone was able to find an old Garfield sticker book and take over the strip.

• In other news, our smaller puppy (Zelda) has been in heat for the last week or so. She has the swollen parts to prove it! Our larger puppy (Warlock) seemed to finally sense this only moments ago, as he mounted up and started humping her. He doesn’t have any balls though, which leaves me a bit curious as to why is even trying to give it a go. Only slightly curious. And he has declined repeated requests to be interviewed about the subject, his stock response has been a simple bark.

• The idea of making Social Security a private fund has been on my mind since it was announced. The reason for that (it being on my mind) is that if it were in private accounts it would be in the stock market and based on an individual’s own decisions. If the Technology Boom that happened in the late ’90s, and the subsequent, catastrophic drop of tech stocks a few years ago, can make any point at all, it is this: Your average investor is really dumb.

Even during the technology boom there were people that were afraid to jump on, knowing that it could come crashing down at any second -which was true. Problem is that those investors watched as the other guys got in on the ground floor and made millions. That made your average investor want to get into the market when it was already terribly overpriced, leaving many the average investor broke; Most of the more intelligent investors would have gotten out long before the average guy tried to get in. Which leads pretty nicely into this piece that I saw on the Washington Monthly today.

I try not to be at all political around here. But the thought of tax breaks for the rich will lead directly to tax hikes for the middle class, and that is something that I find fundamentally wrong. I hate taxes myself (I do have to pay a fair share for my capital gains and dividends every year), possibly more than the very wealthy, but I can not see giving tax breaks to the highest earners when you know it will lead to tax hikes for the low/middle earners. If you follow along that scenario, eventually the low/middle earners will all be in poverty while the uppper class is in luxury. That will always result in a dictatorship.

Isn’t it funny how the U.S. administration seems to be trying to force us back a couple of centuries every time they pass a bill?

Gotta go. I have a brother who is gay. I don’t want this post to get intercep……

What time is it?

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Rejoice! I have decided to update my page today! If you don’t want to rejoice you don’t have to, I am not really doing it myself. One of the benefits of having a little site like this, particularly one that is not read daily by more than a handfull of people, is that no one really gives a damn if there is new content or not. I am sure that the people who do read it must find some sort of satisfaction in it ( I am guessing here ), but that lends itself more to the ‘snooping around in other people’s business’ category. You read what I write, yet don’t care if I don’t write, you are just taking a peek into my life. That seems to be the actual defenition of a BLOG. However, I have never billed this site as a BLOG, and don’t really consider it as such. Most of the BLOGs that I read are either political, or spend a lot of time talking about current events. That is something that I am trying to avoid here. I do talk about the news when it gets me into a bitching mood, and the same with politics. Yet, if I were to start doing that exclusively I would lose the whole point of the creation of this site.

I just love to bitch. It is my life’s blood. The unfortunate side effect of that is that no one really wants to listen to me do it anymore. Sure, the wife will listen, but the rest of the world just doesn’t seem to care. So, when I type my bitch down (maybe the next USHER song, ‘type my bitch down’), it feels like I am venting it. It really does help to clear my head and get back into focus. I do have to pay the twenty bucks a year for the domain name, and eight bucks a month for the hosting, but that seems like small potatoes when I think about how theraputic the site is (not to mention that lots of men my age are paying quadruple that price to look at porn).

Now I will put the incoherent preamble aside and get to the bitching!

• What time is it?

I don’t know how many people out there are like me. I may just be that weird freak that everyone talks about. I always keep my wrist-watch in perfect time (well not that I call every day to make sure, but within a second or two is okay), yet I have a habit of setting the time on my alarm clock thirty minutes ahead (of course that has to be almost exactly thirty minutes, else I would be fucked). Why do I do this? Well, I want the alarm to go off early enough that I will be able to get out of bed. Sometimes, when the alarm goes off, I think that maybe it wasn’t really the alarm, or maybe it was in a dream (my dreams are usually very vivid). By the time I actually wake enough to look over at the clock, the alarm might have been sounding for several minutes. When I do eventually look to the clock, I think that it is thirty minutes later than it really is, that sort of shocks me back to reality. While it would seem that you would get used to it after a while, I still manage to get tricked every day.

The hard part, you see, is to get me out of whatever dream I am currently in. It is amazing how your mind can integrate real time outside noises into the little world you create while you are asleep. Last Sunday, for instance, the wife nudged me to tell me to turn off the alarm. Her nudge wakened me to the point that I realized that the beeping sound was not the garbage truck (in the dream) backing up for me to throw in trash. Yet, once I turned off the alarm, I was back in the garbage truck, rolling down the street to collect refuse from every house.

Sometimes it takes a couple of whacks at the ‘snooze bar’ before I actually roll over to look at the clock. While you would think that I would look at the clock and immediately register that I have it set thirty minutes later than it really is, it never happens. Almost always it shocks me into waking from a dream. At that point I do remember the odd setting of my clock, but, like I said, sometimes it takes a few whacks of the ‘snooze bar’ before I give up on the dream.

I suppose that I should thank the random fluctuations of time and space that I am not a sleep-walker. If I had that condition, added to the lucid dreaming, I might not be here to type about it now. Yes, I do know that everyone dreams, yes, I do know that they all seem real. But (and this is a very big but), have you ever gone out the next morning and dug a hole in your back yard based on a dream? Now that I am sounding like some whacked-out UFOlogist, I should mention that I only did that once, and to no success.

I would never have guessed that my little, innocuous story about all the clocks in the house showing a different time would have lead to all that. Of course I didn’t ever get to the point about all of the clocks in the house having different times, which was what I was planning to do a couple of paragraphs ago.

Anyway, the time is kind of based on what room you are in around here. With the exception of my alarm clock, I don’t think any other (functioning) clock in the house is more than a few minutes off. While one clock might be five minutes fast, and another five minutes slow, actual time will come into play eventually. I have never tried to get dressed in the room with the clock that is the furthest behind, yet I am pretty sure that time itself would have continued on. (i.e. I can pick a room with a clock that says I am not late, but the clock at work doesn’t confirm that decision).

Damn, it is now 11:11, 11:35, 11:44 or 11:01, depending on the clock I look at. No wonder I have weird issues with time…

Food stamps

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I don’t have a thing to talk about today. No news items of note. No pictures to share. This will probably be a pretty short one, even by my standards.

• So something that happened at work today got me a bit steamed. It was just something that a woman said in passing, as she was buying her groceries with food stamps. What she said was that she only got 99 dollars a month in food stamps, and “how am I supposed to live on that?” The thing is that she said it while I was being forced to remove some chips, ice cream and soda from her order so that she would have enough to cover the total, which I will get back to in a minute. What I found really strange about it was that she said this in front of about six people (all the rest of whom paid with actual cash, btw) as if she honestly believed that everyone gets food stamps(at least that was how it came across to me).

I am pretty liberal on most issues, and I think that providing food for people who can’t afford it is a necessary thing. Growing up, after my parents divorced, my mother was forced to go onto that type of government assistance. Imagine being the single mother of three, making 3.35 an hour, trying to provide a house and utilities. Her paycheck was never enough to cover the rent and all of the utilites, so she was forced to juggle; let one bill go unpaid one month, then a different one the next month. That was before the thought of what we were going to eat for dinner ever came into play. Without government assistance, we would truly have never had anything to eat.

My mother was very smart with her food stamp purchases though. We did get things such as chips and sweet cereal, but only when they were bought in bulk at a warehouse store. The rest of the purchases were almost exclusively of inexpensive items that could make several meals. Potatoes, for instance, get 10 pounds for a dollar, add a 1 dollar can of corned beef and you have just made dinner for four for about 1.33, since it only took about a third of the potatoes. The next day might have been chili, a couple pounds of beans for 50 cents, a bit of whatever kind of beef was on sale and some seasoning. Maybe two dollars spent there for a meal for four. Next day, maybe use another third of the potatoes and mash them, make some gravy (the little packs were like four for a buck at the time) for say 50 cents, meal for four for 88 cents. There was always bread, of course, but I am not going to count the cost of that, since we always bought it at a bakery outlet that sold outdated bread at 5 loaves for a dollar. There was also dairy stuff (milk and cheese and the such) but we honestly got a lot of that through a government food box program, which is much the same as the WIC program is today. I think you see my point. She could easily feed the four of us three meals a day, for a week, and probably get it done for about 20 or 25 dollars.

This was in the eighties, of course, so the prices on everything have gone up. However, the prices for things like dry beans and potatoes have remained pretty low compared to the prices of other things. Frozen meals leap into my mind as something that has gone up in price by several hundred percent since that time, unfortunately that is the type of thing that most of the people on food stamps seem to buy. I could understand that if it was because they were working full time, or even part time on multiple jobs, but in reality it seems that most of the people (at least in my experience) are on food stamps because they are just plain lazy. No job at all, not even looking for work, claiming that they can’t work because they have children. Thing about that excuse is that you have to enroll them in school eventually, it is the law, not to mention the best and cheapest day care service available.

In the defense of people like my mother, as I am sure there still are people in the position she was in back then, I know that not everyone that is on government assistance is like that. In fact, I remember seeing a story on the Discovery Channel some time back where a woman that had been on Welfare for several years had worked her way up to a decent job, then actually made voluntary donations to the Welfare program to cover the amount of money that they had issued her. Of course I can’t find a link to the story anywhere on the site, and google didn’t help either, but I saw the show and was truly shocked that someone could be that proud. Kind of the polar opposite of the type of people that I see around here.

A few paragraphs back, I was talking about the WIC program (the link goes to the Arizona Wic website, as the federal site ‘cannot be found’ when I click on it). To put the WIC program into a nutshell, they give families with low incomes necessary food items. Specifically, things like milk, cereal (nothing sugared, there are strict guidelines), cheese, fruit juice (actual juice, not fruit punch), eggs, baby formula for newborns, peanut butter, dry beans and etc. This program is so much better than the food stamp program though, since they can only buy exactly what each check they have says. So instead of buying soda, they have to buy fruit juice. Instead of buying Apple Jacks, they have to buy approved cereals like cheerios, chex, corn flakes and etc. (interesting side note, apple jacks was the sixth sweetened cereal that I typed into my address bar, and the first one that actually took me to a cereal website. Trix, Lucky Charms, Cocoa Puffs, Cocoa Pebbles and Sugar Smacks (( all without spaces, and all just www.name.com)) all lead to sites, but none of them are about cereal. In fact one of them leads to a page that has casino games and adult links. How fucked up is that?) This forces them to buy nutritious foods and dairy products, and makes it impossible for them to buy junk food.

The WIC program takes it so seriously that they randomly audit register receipts to make sure that all items purchased meet the WIC guidelines. They inspect every WIC approved retailer at least once a year. They even send out WIC agents with checks to try to buy products that are not covered. If a retailer fails any inspection, receipt audit, or field test, they are put on warning for some amount of time. If, during that time, they fail again, they are removed from the WIC program. They are damn serious about it.

I would really like to see some similar model adapted by the food stamp program. Unfortunately, the implementation of anything like that would cost millions, and is pretty unlikely. There is a glimmer of hope though. Most (possibly all?) states now have electronic food stamps, you know, like a credit card. This makes it so that the customer can never get back any change on any transaction (which makes it impossible to buy a nickel gum, then use the 95 cents in change to buy a beer- that used to be a real problem-). Even though most all retailers have scanning systems that can keep track of what a consumer buys, the sheer number of products that come out every year would make it literally impossible to try to keep up a list of what could and could not be purchased with food stamps. No matter how much I wish it was possible, it is just never going to happen.

I suppose that, in some parallel universe, it would be possible to set up food stamp only stores. If the store only carried healthy, nutritious items, and if you could only use food stamps at that store, you would have to buy it. Nothing like that could ever happen in this universe. Every major market chain accepts food stamps, and every one of them would be pretty unhappy if they lost the revenue of the non-paying customer. I really would like to just get a glimpse of that alternate universe though, just to see how it worked out.

• Now, to prove that I am a hypocrite, I offer you a quick anecdote from my youth.

When my parents initially separated, my mother and the three of us moved into a tiny little shack. The little shack had (to the best of my memory) three rooms. One room was the living room, one was the kitchen and one was a bedroom, which had a small shower in the corner. The actual toilet was a tiny, wooden building about twenty feet out the back door (yes, an outhouse). I believe that we were living in this one rent free, as my mom was working for the farm that owned it. Let us just say that it was not the most wonderful home. But, Mom left with nothing. She left Dad every posession, except one car, in order to keep us kids. (in hindsight, I think that dad was really just trying to prove to mom that she would not be able to survive without him. I think that backfired, since that just made her want to prove him wrong.). The accomodations got better with each move, so there is no need to feel sorry for me, my brothers or my mom. I will say that you have to really, really, really take a dump before you go sit in an outhouse, in Oregon, in the winter though.

We were living in that little structure as our birthdays approached (my brothers’ being only two days apart, with mine a month after). As you would imagine, there was not a lot of money to be spent on presents. Of course a birthday with no presents would really suck, regardless of how poor you happen to be, so we did get presents. The first present was an itchy, smelly, green military blanket, which was as good as gold to us. The house was perpetually cold, I am not sure if it had any insulation at all, hell, I am not even sure if it had both interior and exterior walls, it could have all just been plywood. Anyway, this gift was given to us all at the same time, thankfully, even though it was a ‘birthday gift’ (here I might also note that they were donated from some church, so you see religion is not all bad).

The proof of my hypocrisy? The other gift that each of us got was ten dollars in food stamps. Ten dollars that we could spend on any kind of tooth rotting crap we chose. For the life of me I can’t remember exactly what I bought with mine. I will gurantee that there was at least one box of Star Crunch cookies, they were like heroin to me, at least until I was a teenager. That is why I am a hypocrite, I would never have gotten the gift of junk food if you couldn’t buy it with food stamps. Hmmm. Funny thought just occurred to me. I can remember what I got for my birthday in 1983, but I can’t remember what I got last year. I must really have liked those star crunch cookies.

• Damn it! I forgot to bitch about the initial point that I wanted to make. You see, if the woman from the first paragraph had exchanged all of the items she was buying for the generic equivalent items, she would have been able to buy all of the stuff. Not only that but she would have had money (food stamp balance) left over. Why is it that when it is not really your money you will buy the name brand, while if it is your money (at least in my case) you will buy the generic in almost every instance?