we all know at this point that lawmakers in DC rejected the bailout plan that was proposed by W and his band of merry men. and there are people out there with more economic and political knowledge that can explain the repercussions of that a hell of a lot better than i can. most people i talked to told me that $700 billion really needed to be about $1.2 trillion in order to actually make a dent in the problem. and even then it was going to be a long row to hoe. personally, i would just like someone that isn’t running for re-election to explain to me how the whole thing was going to seriously impact my daily life.
this whole thing started a full on financial panic a few weeks ago when W started talking about it. then ike hit. now, over the last couple of years when hurricanes usually come through, everyone gets a little nervous with the gas consumption and availabilty coming out of the gulf pipelines. this usually results in a jump in price AFTER the storm blows through and they have to get things up and running again. with ike, this happened here in the CLT BEFORE the storm even hit houston. this led to all sorts of accusations about price gouging and such here. but most importantly, it led to a rush to the pumps. all those clowns that hear hear the word hurricane or snow that usually run to the grocery store and clear out all the aisles of bread and milk now heard the words gas shortage and ran to the corner gas station to fill up every oversized SUV and grocery getter that they had. and yes, media, you created the panic. a lot of people said that if we all would have just done business as usual, there would have barely been a hiccup in service. but no, the hoarding mentality that kicks in when people think their survival is going to be threatened kicked in. not only that, but there were people waiting in line with three quarters of a tank, burning gas, in order to top off and fill up all the gas cans that they had in their tool shed. ridiculous. i saw in the paper this morning that some lady was in a less than appetizing part of town waiting in line for gas when some hood rat cut in front of her and flashed a piece at her before filling up. seriously.
and then this morning citigroup bought out the huge chunk of wachovia. this is going to leave a ton of my friends here in the CLT in some dire straits. this is a city that instead of people asking what you do, its sometimes easier to just ask if you work for watchoverya or BofA.
so without a whole shit-ton of financial intelligence or whatnot, it just feels sort of like this some sort of implosion in what was thriving and growing young city a few years ago. now there are half finished highrise condos in foreclosure, a definite spike in unemployment, and no gas to get the hell out of dodge. like we are trapped to deal with this shit. i feel like we are just a few weeks away from mohawks, face tattoos, marshal law, sawed off shotgun toting, and hijacking gas trucks in tribes that are lead by the guy that screams the loudest. i might be in the kitchen loading shells tonight…

… nipple. just kidding. i do love that movie though. the cable guy is one of the most under-rated movies in my book as far as quotability is concerned. red knight going down. down, down, down.
but i digress…
so, this past week, i had to log into our timesheet system to plug in the standard forty to be approved. unfortunately, my password had timed out and it needed to be changed. i had been working my way through movie characters, but they put new restrictions on the system.
- a minimum of 8 characters, a maximum of 10.
- cannot begin with a number
- cannot have two numbers together
- cannot have the same character together
- cannot be on of the previous 32 passwords you have already used
- cannot have any special characters
seriously? why don’t they just make me solve a game a soduko everytime i log in?! i would have a better chance at that then remembering what my last 32 passwords were. hell, i cannot even remember what clothes i wore yesterday.
so, after the five minutes and three tries that it took me to come up with a new password, i got to thinking. just how many freaking passwords i have to remember on a regular basis.
i remember back in the day, all you needed was your social security number and your MAC pin. for those of you that have never dwelled north of the mason-dixon, MAC is a money access center. which i think sounds a hell of a lot cooler than ATM. and you only had to learn your social security number once you got to college. before college? your address and phone number. and nobody knows phone numbers anymore because once you store them in your cell, you forget.
so here is the skinny, between my home computer and my work computer and all my online “pursuits” i would say that i have no less than 30 different passwords to remember. that is my seven different email addresses, my two myspace pages, facebook, bank accounts, suicide girls, three fantasy football teams, et cetera. and that doesn’t even count the stuff like the newspaper online that i just have to log in for. i have forgot that password several times and since you need a different password everytime you re-register, i know get junk mail to all my email addresses.
i know a lot of people do their kids names and years of birth, dogs names, home address, and such. i think i read that a lot of people use a lot of semi-x-rated passwords as well. and i can honestly say that with my creative swearing, i have had the occasional fucknuckle or jack@ss on my passwords. simply because i just so pissed off having to come up with new stuff all the time.
we do all these different passwords to protect our online identities, but yet have to still deal with spammers and hackers kicking the shit out of us with hard on pills and get rich quick schemes. what is the point? i have no point. i am just sick of trying to come up with freaking passwords.

alright, so the guy in the next cube popped his head in and said, “did you see that article about PETA asking ben and jerry’s to use breast milk for ice cream?” now, this guy is notorious for bad jokes. ie, poor taste and such. so i waited a split second for the punchline. no punchline.
i saw the video on wsoctv.com and now i am stupified.
first off, i cannot remember if i was breast fed or not. i imagine i was. and i love my mom, but knowing female breasts as an adult male and knowing breasts as an infant are two TOTALLY different vantage points, so i would never ask her. my point is, if i was breast fed, i cannot remember how it tastes as far as closeness to pasteurized cow’s milk. and from articles that i have read, a mother can vary the taste of her milk depending on diet. i think? but still…
picture this. human dairy farms. rows and rows of topless women hooked up to breast pumps cranking out milk so that you can feel a little bit better about the treatment of cows when you are eating your chunky monkey or cherry garcia or chocolate chip cookie dough. but wait! there is milk in milk chocolate! we need to petition hershey’s and get them to switch! they could market chocolate bars in the shapes of breasts so that they would be okay outside of bachelor parties.
and where do you plan on getting all these volunteers? women with nothing better to do than just get paid to make milk for ice cream… women okay with having their deflated breasts flung over their shoulders when they go home after a long day at the farm…
okay PETA, nevermind the impact that putting our bovine dairy farmers out of business and having women demeaned by degrading them to cattle status. nevermind the fact that the american farmer is already struggling with the fuel costs and increased price of food in the US because we need to increase ethanol production with the mythical gas shortage (by the way, the government is holding back on distribution of gas. we have it. we have a surplus of it. they just want to hedge their bets on future pricing.). but we will do it all… for the cows.
i am all for the protection of animals. endangered species especially. love dogs. tolerate cats. can’t stand birds. but cows? i remember long trips to my dad’s when i was a child and my grandma martin would say to me and my brother, “look boys, cows!” yeah, grandma. we lived in lancaster, PA. amish country. home of one or two farms. i have seen cows.
can’t PETA really find anything else to get on a national soapbox to help with? i am a big fan of the women that do the “i would rather wear nothing than wear fur” campaign. how about a few more of those and you leave my ice cream alone? deal?

so as i currently type this, that nutjob david blaine is suspended upside-down in the air over central park in manhatten doing his latest stunt called the “dive of death”. right. genius.
if you look him up on wiki, they call him a street magician and an endurance artist. what the hell is an endurance artist? are you kidding me? monks and other religious people fast all the time to prove discipline and experience heightened sense of spirituality all the time. they have done it throughout the years. he just takes it to another level.
in the past, he has been “buried alive!”, he has been frozen in time, he stood on a pedestal 90 feet in the air, and he was in a clear box with no food for 44 days. with proper training of your body, good balance, and no claustrophobia or acrophobia, none of these feats are actually special in my mind. would it be tough to do? yeah. does that mean that i would voluntarily do something like this? hell no. i don’t have that kind of free time.
i mean, is someone paying him to do this? does he have corporate sponsorship? i don’t see goldenpalace.com written on his back or anything. as a corporation, do you write this up as part of your advertising budget? i can just see the IRS asking for justification for that.
“are you the purveyor of jim’s fish mart?”
“yes.”
“we are showing that you are claiming $2 million on your advertising budget last year.”
“yeah.”
“care to explain?”
“we put david blaine in a fish bowl for seven days to promote out exotic fish sale.”
“how did that work out for you?”
“at the end he set the world record for holding his breath underwater and i moved a japanese fighting fish and two betas.”
“awesome.”
this guy pops up on the radar once a year to do some dumbass stunt and the country marvels at it. will someone please offer this guy a real job so that he is not taking up space on the top of my online newspaper with this stupid shit. i mean, he is taking away from space that could be used for REAL news. like who is on the next dancing with the stars, survivor, i love money, or whatever bullshit (sur)reality show they are peddling this week…

is it allergy season? when the hell is allergy season? my freaking sinuses are killing me. its like i have a little man trying to push my eyes out of my noggin while pushing on my forehead at the same time. sucks. and i never had this problem when i was north of the mason-dixon line. no allergies, no constant melon pressure. when i first found out i had allergies, i was out sick from work for three days before the doc diagnosed me. that was five years ago and i still have no real solutions.
so a few years back i was watching six feet under and the mom’s new husband gave nate a neti pot. for those of you who don’t know what a neti pot is, its basically an odd shaped single serving tea pot that you stick warm salt water in and then pour it up one nostril and out the other after it goes up into your sinuses. the actor playing the husband had a huge schnozz, so i thought it was something for big beaked folks.
then i guess oprah had some sort of holistic healer or something on the show that encouraged people to use them. cut to seen of all the people that have drank oprah’s kool aid over the years rushing into their cupboard and getting out grandma’s china teapot to dump boiled water with salt packages from mcdonald’s up their nose and telling all their friends that they feel so much better.
finally, i was listening to the radio the other day and all these people were all calling in to talk about remedies for allergies. and again with the neti pot.
so, i go online when i get home and do a little research. i watch a nice little video of this very motherly looking ladies that is cool as a cucmuber about pouring this solution up her nostril and watching the water pour out in the most tranquil of flows out the other nostril. so i go on amazon and order the little kit.
i get it in the mail yesterday. the little teapot looking ceramic neti pot? check. special salt that dissolves easily in warm water to create soothing solution? check. an herbal additive that holistically helps aleve all the crap in your sinuses? check. somewhat easily understood instructions on use and exercises to do afterward? check. the ability to peacefully dump water up my big nose to irrigate my sinuses? HELL NO!
they say the gravity will drain the water out of the neti pot, through your nasal cavity, then out the other nostril. if you get a tinge of it trickle down your throat, lean forward a little more. seems simple enough. seems that way.
first, there is the infamous jared yerg tremor. if there is something that i need to do that has intricate dexterity as a prerequisite, i am hosed. brain surgeon was out the window for me from the age of five. then there is that little fact that am not a fan of anything up my nose.
gravity never fully took effect. the water wasn’t coming out the other side, but the pot was still full. try breathing through my mouth and all of a sudden my mouth is full of this solution. this stuff is not made to taste good. i lean forward nothing again. more tears are rolling off my nose than solution out the other side. i spend the next fiteen minutes coughing up salt water, eyes watering, and blowing water out my nose.
that was fun. something else i can throw it the cramped closet of shit that i will never use again. unless of course there is some sort of resale value for a tiny teapot that i have crammed up my nose? it has a pretty lotus flower on the side…