Up at 255 they have one of those yappy dogs that old people always have, a teensy, super high-strung terrier or somesuch. Cutesy name like "Rags" except it isn't "Rags," it's just something like that. I'm sure they tell me the dog's name every month when I go to collect from them but for the life of me I can't remember.
Their house is an old-people house, with that odd white-doily cleanness and the TV that's always up REAL LOUD and the smell, of course. Old People Smell. I think people's sense of smell gets less acute as they get older, so maybe it's just that old people tolerate more pet smell than most people would or maybe it's a combination of that and some household cleanser they're using, which would at least explain why the place is always spotless in spite of the weird smell.
When I go to collect it's always the same scene. They're retired so they're pretty much always home. Somebody comes to the door, usually the wife, and she invites me in and then goes to get the money while her husband stays sitting on the couch watching Jimmy Swaggart or CHiPs or whatever. He looks over at me and makes small talk in a REALLY LOUD VOICE while the missus putters around getting exact change together. They're big on exact change. So I stand there awkwardly chatting with him about the weather and I have to repeat everything I say once or twice for his benefit. Meanwhile this skittish little dustmop is sniffing around my feet, clearly suspicious of the intruder in his realm.
Another thing about old people is that a lot of them seem to want to hang out with you. Old ladies are always offering me lemonade and wanting to sit around talking about how I'm doing in school and what I want to be when I grow up, or else they want to tell me all about their own grown-up kids. It's not so bad really, but if I did my collecting that way it would take forever so I usually have to excuse myself in what feels like mid-conversation. Retired people have all the time in the world but I don't. Still, most of them are very nice and it's a mystery to me how the girls I go to school with now will someday wind up as sweet little old ladies like the ones on my route. I suspect that between here and there is a long and rocky road.
"I want you to know we appreciate you putting the paper in the mail slot. It really does make it a lot easier on us." she says as she brings me the money.
"DON'T GET AROUND LIKE WE USED TO." the husband chimes in cheerfully.
I of course tell her it's no trouble at all, lying.
"Well, I wanted you to know we appreciate it." she adds as she hands me $5.46. The extra fifty cents is for putting the paper in the mail slot. I can tell she thinks it's a lot of money. Oh well, it's a nice gesture. It is a bit more work for me, having to walk up to the house every day and put the paper in the slot instead of just hucking it onto the porch from the street.
Of course the main reason it's an extra effort is Rags, because every day when I lift the slot to put the paper through he comes tearing out onto the glassed-in porch and smashes into the aluminum door at full speed, barking his head off like he's gonna bust a blood vessel. The first couple times it happened I was pretty startled, naturally. After that I came to expect it, and I got to the point where I was playing little games with him, seeing how stealthy I could be in my approach and if I could get the paper in and be gone before Rags could make it out onto the porch. His little charges got to part of my daily routine, so much so that if on any given day Rags didn't nearly kill himself trying to get to me I'd wonder if he was sick or something. You get used to anything, I suppose.
There was one day when I wasn't really ready, though. I must've been preoccupied thinking about school or girls or something, but for whatever reason I was a little slow on the draw. Rags had been lying in wait for me, having devised a strategy that would at last afford him a clean shot at the monster hand that came through the hole in the wall every day and dropped things into his house. The days of the Hand's reign of terror are at an end and it's all thanks to Rags! --I'm positive that's what the little brute was thinking as he snatched the paper out of my hands the instant it came poking through the slot. He had it clamped in his jaws and shook it like he'd gotten hold of a rat or something. He pretty much tore the paper to shreds. It was hilarious.
So after that the old guy built this little metal shed to protect the area around the mail slot, and now little Rags bashes his head against the sides of that little tin box every day instead of against the front door. No doubt still dreaming of his big rematch with the Hand.
Just saw a Mercedes commercial featuring Janis Joplin singing "Lord Won't You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz." A song which, as far as I can tell, was supposed to be lampooning the kind of self-centered materialism that would ask God for a status symbol car (or a night on the town or a color TV.) Now stripped of its original meaning and used to sell those very same status symbols! Thank God for the Irony-Inverter Ray!
The moral: If you write a popular song with an iconoclastic theme, don't die. Sooner or later your relatives will need money and then they'll sell the rights for some completely inappropriate use. Unless you don't have any relatives. In which case, a record company will own the song and they'll sell it before your corpse is even cold.
Also, if you become a popular, iconic actor like Steve McQueen or Humphrey Bogart, when you die advertisers will use your image to sell everything from pretzels to radial tires. They'll CGI you into some radial tire showroom and there you'll be, saying "Here's lookin' at you, kid" to a set of all-season Rainbeater steel-belted tires (with advanced anti-hydroplaning directional tread design.)
Hey, those would go perfect on my new Mercedes Benz! If you're listening, God.
This sometimes happens when I read the news too much: Stories start to run together in my head, and all the information that I've been trying to take in ends up getting mixed together, pell-mell, and baked up into a big information casserole.
I'm just saying this by way of explaining why I now think that the moons of Saturn should be colonized by muscle-powered nanobots. And then, once they've got a basic infrastructure in place, they should hold free elections!
Also, has anyone else seen the story of the doughnut king?
A classic rags-to-riches-to-rags story, this gripping account of a young Cambodian immigrant fleeing from the Khmer Rouge who arrived in California in 1975 and over the following ten years, through hard work and determination, started a chain of doughnut shops that ended up being a stepping-stone to financial independence for thousands of Cambodians has all the elements of a classic Horatio Alger story. Except for the ending, when after becoming a millionaire and achieving the American Dream, Ted Ngoy managed to lose it all to a gambling addiction.
It was all very sad (and you've got to read the part about his teenage courtship with his wife -- it's so Shakespearian!) until I got to the part about him joining the GOP and campaigning for H.W. Bush, encouraging other immigrants to do the same. Obviously, he was a poster boy for the Republican free-market gospel, the archetypal hard-working immigrant who doesn't need a welfare handout or any social services and manages to make a fortune through sweat and pure moxy. Ngoy returned to Cambodia in 1993 and formed the Free Development Republican Party, based on similar ideals to its American namesake. In the nineties, he was able to use his GOP connnections to lobby for most-favored-nation status for Cambodia.
Anyway, he's homeless and penniless now, and because of the gambling addiction he's long since burned all the bridges to anybody who might help him out financially (this includes his estranged wife and children.) He's sleeping on somebody's screened-in porch in Long Beach, living off handouts. Probably could use some of those social services that him and all his millionaire GOP buddies fought so hard against, since he's a little old to be spending 17 hours a day on his feet like he did when he was building his empire. And to be honest, he probably won't be building another fortune in the time he has left.
So obviously at this point in the story a little bit of schadenfreude kicks in, which I know is wrong but there it is. I mean, I'm a bleeding-heart liberal, so I wouldn't begrudge him a roof over his head and enough to eat because I think anybody deserves that. But I might make him wait in line a while. A long while. If it were up to me.
Is that cruel? Yeah, probably.
Proving once again that "protect the children!" is the single greatest justification for awful, awful ideas ever devised, the Spring, Texas school district has instituted a new policy of requiring all students to carry ID badges with radio-frequency chips that allow the student's movements to be tracked at all times. Arguably done to prevent student kidnappings (in spite of the fact that the district has never experienced one), other more practical benefits include automatic attendance monitoring and continuous tracking capabilities for concerned parents.
Similar systems have already been adopted at a charter school in Buffalo, NY and in a Phoenix, AZ school district, with the Phoenix variant relying on fingerprinting to verify the students' identity. (This of course creates the additional side benefit of a database of fingerprints for every student in the district. Should come in handy in crime investigations a few years down the road!) Some school districts have already expressed interest in systems using the subcutaneous RFID (radio frequency id) chip approved by the FDA in October. An implant, many argue, could bypass some of the problems of the ID card, such as the fact that a kidnapper could throw it out the window, as well as preventing more mundane abuses such as students giving their friends their ID cards in order to register them as present when they aren't.
Of course the biggest benefit is unstated: Getting children used to being chipped and tracked continuously so they don't grow up with the expectation of privacy. Which will differentiate them from a large subset of adult Americans today who for various reasons object to National ID card schemes. This is one of those issues that unites viewpoints from the "left" and "right" of the political spectrum, from the civil libertarians who object to the creation of a police state where everybody is treated as a criminal who must be monitored at all times, to those of an Apocalyptic Christian bent who notice an odd similarity between the ID chip and the Mark of the Beast mentioned in Revelations.
As is typical in any "protect the children!" -style Trojan Horse argument, this application of the RFID technology puts any naysayers into the unenviable rhetorical position of appearing to advocate for child kidnapping. The Spring Texas School Board's decision to adopt the $180,000 system was said to be a unanimous one, with no recorded objections of parents or teachers. One might reasonably expect this pattern to continue, particularly in other relatively affluent districts.
My concern that this is the first step down the road to everybody in the US being required to carry (or be implanted with) similar identification is mainly this: Mr. Galt has been predicting the day when we "all get chipped" for years now (it is rant # 12, I believe) and when it finally happens I'm gonna owe him five bucks.
I think my personal pick for most likely company to be tapped to create the national ID card is Diebold. Yes, that Diebold, the one that makes the voting systems that nobody really trusts. They make ID cards too, as well as ATMs, safes, jailhouse doors, padded cells and armor plating for tanks. They are also an industry leader in the field of biometrics. De La Rue, the company that owns Sequoia Voting Systems would also be a strong contender for the job, since they already make national ID cards for other countries ( as well as passports and in some cases currency.) Of course, this is all reckless speculation on my part. Which is why I'm willing to give odds!
Chips, anyone?
So apparently Hardee's restaurants are being hailed as fast-food trendsetters for unveiling their new Monster Thickburger, a shot across the bow at the "Food Police", those politically-correct naysayers who insist on pointing out that eating a steady diet of fast food may not necessarily promote good health. The Monster Thickburger has "not one, but two 1/3-lb. charbroiled patties, topped with no less than four strips of crispy bacon, three slices of American cheese, and some mayonnaise – all on a buttered, toasted, sesame seed bun."
Weighing in at 1420 calories (not including fries) and 107 grams of fat, enjoying a Monster Thickburger for lunch sends a clear message to all those tofu-eating finger-waggers, and that message is "I am a rebel. I am not afraid of heart disease and I am happy with my body the way it is. In fact, if I had a complaint about my body, it would be that I'm not fat enough. Furthermore, nobody is going to tell me how to live my life, because I am an American and the red blood of Freedom courses through my veins. Freedom paid for with the blood of the brave men who died on Bunker Hill and the beaches of Normandy. Freedom to do what I please, whenever I please without regard for the consequences. Freedom to eat a really big hamburger. To do otherwise would disgrace the memory of those brave souls who gave of themselves so selflessly, laying down their lives so that I and future generations could continue to breathe the sweet, sweet air of Freedom."
Here's an excerpt of an actual fan letter that Hardee's received from John Frensley, a 22-year old Texas college student (I have reprinted this verbatim from this L.A. Times article):
"While other restaurants were a bunch of Nancy-boys and became low-carb cowards in the face of moronic 'they made me fat' lawsuits, you did the AMERICAN thing ... by spitting in the face of lawyers, nutritionists and food-nazi types and offering a monument to Americanism."
And all I can say to that is wow. The man wrote a fan letter to a sandwich.
I'm looking forward to the day when independently-spirited Americans carry this idea further and begin thumbing their noses at the politically correct health nazis who insist on telling us that we shouldn't drive after eating a whole Jimson Weed root and that it's "unhealthy" to gouge one's eyes with a number two pencil. That'll show 'em!
So my housemate was sitting here reading WIRED because even though he's no longer technically a software geek he still likes to keep abreast of the latest developments in technology marketed towards people with too damn much money. I think he enjoys torturing himself. No different than me lustfully browsing the "Exceptional Properties" catalog I guess. (Hey, some of those houses are nice!)
As an indicator of how twisted the readers of WIRED are, there's a feature called "Japanese Schoolgirl Watch." But wait, it's not what you think. You see, Japanese schoolgirls are notoriously hip early adopters of technology, so the feature is just a regular report on what new gadgets the rich kogals are into this month. That's right, it's not the schoolgirl being fetishized, it's her portable LCD Display DVD player backpack. And that, my friends, is WEIRD.