We all know this, but here is something that will definitely keep him up at night.
A Ninja Bear!!!!
Be on the lookout.
Archive for the ‘Insanity’
25 Random Things That Piss Me Off
Over on FaceCrack everyone and their brother is doing a “25 random things about me” kind of thing. And of course I caved and did a couple myself. First I did the “25 freaking random things about me” thing. And then I did the “The randomness of 25 things” thing.
And I have gotten rather sick of it all. So I have just decided that I am going to have to do a “25 Random Things That Piss Me Off” post.
Sit back, and get ready.
1. Not knowing who is going to show up for dinner. I make dinner for the fam on my days off from my real job. When my FIL shows up, we have to eat around 5pm. If he isn’t there we can eat at a more leisurely time. I just want to know who and when. That is all that I ask.
2. People whining about the economy. Know how much you have to spend, and don’t over spend it. It is going to get a whole lot worse before it gets better folks, so you had better learn how to eat ramen noodles.
3. Speed limits are not suggestions.
4. More later.
5. Truck drivers who feel the need to tailgate me as we are coming down a hill. Please understand that I am trying to find out if you are an independant, or a company driver. Because if you are a company driver all I have to do is to hit my brakes and let you rear end my vehicle. I might not get a whole lot of money out of it, but I will seriously mess up your world.
6. People who talk to me while I am talking on the phone. I cannot listen and talk all at the same time.
7. People in an emergency situation who identify themselves as “EMT trained”, or as belonging to a fire company, but do not want to get involved in said incident. If you have nothing to add or do not want to help get the hell out of the way.
8. People who make the comment of “you are out of everything” in reference to what I have in the store I manager. The store carries 35,000 items. There is no way we can be “out of everything”. Most of those items are comparable items, 6 different kinds of ketchup for instance, not to mention the 21 varieties of mustard. Just to name a couple.
9. People who are ill going out shopping. If you have just had surgery, stay the hell at home. Do not come out and endanger yourself along with everyone else. Especially if you are doing the driving.
10. Teenagers. Why can’t we breed our children so that we can extract their hormones when they go out in public. I am tired of love struck teenagers.
11. Whack jobs. Working in a public company means that as long as the front doors are open, everyone and anyone can walk in. And some of those folks are not the most stable, mentally speaking.
12. People who do not understand the concept that departments close in a store. They do not stay open all the freaking time.
13. The stupid reasons that people give for why they have to have what they want after a department closes.
25 is such a random number
Continuing the think up 25 more random things about me is getting a little crazy. I have way more random thoughts and impressions coming to me as I go through my day. You people don’t have the amount of time needed to go through them all.
But let’s talk about these 25 random things about me.
1. I am not a good husband. I know that that is a pretty hard thing to wrap your head around, seeing as how we have known each other for these past seconds, but it is true. I put in a lot of hours at work, and when I am home I am a tired kid. Not that communicative, if you get my drift.
2. So it amazes me that MLW still loves me.
3. So when she expresses interest in something I try to get it for her.
3. Hence my purchasing her a Snuggie. Yes, I broke down and bought MLW a Snuggie. I know, I know. But she was so happy when I told her that I bought it. And when I texted her just a few minutes ago, I could envision her at work doing her happy dance.
4. I still can’t believe that I bought MLW a snuggie.
5. I talk to my dog like she can understand what I am saying. Like she isn’t really hearing “Blah-blah-blah-FOOD-blah-blah-blah-OUTSIDE-blah-blah-.” For instance when came back from the store this morning she came sauntering out of my bedroom. I know that she had been back there snoozing.
6. So there I am explaining to a dog that “you had better be guarding my house when I am not here and not snoozing or else your hairy butt will be on the street.”
7. I talk to the cats too
Ok. That isn’t 25, but it some weirdness for you to chew on.
Namaste.
The randomness of 25 random things
A whole bunch of you folks have been searching “25 random things about me” and have ended up here.
Hi.
Since you stopped by I thought that I would shoot you 25 more.
1. I loved reading “The DaVinci Code” so much more than seeing the movie. But then I really don’t like the movie adaptation of any book.
2. I am sad that Harry Potter books are no longer being written. I really loved that series of books.
3. I am drawn to dark movies such as “The Matrix”, and the “Underworld” series. And I just saw the second Resident Evil film. Have to check out the last one here pretty soon.
4. I have to brew another batch of beer next week.
5. I need to come up with another beer recipe soon.
6. I need a vehicle with 4-wheel drive so that I don’t have to putt behind the rest of the 2-wheel drive weenies when it snows.
7. As much as I hate Mark Harmons acting, I love “NCIS”.
8. When it gets nasty, and snowy like it was today I would rather do nothing than nap in a room with a fireplace.
9. I want a house with a fireplace.
10. And why not have a 2 car garage to go with it.
11. And I really like the idea of raising alpaca.
12. I am driving a truck that I bought in 1994, and has 258,000 miles on it.
13. I suck so much at workplace politics.
14. I once spent an entire afternoon before a Super Bowl game running around Columbus, Ohio searching for big enough pieces of foam rubber to turn into cheese head hats. That was a lot more enjoyable than watching 10 minutes of the game and having the boys get bored.
15. My sons gave me a complex because they always got bored doing things with me.
16. I thought that owning your own business was cool, until I found out how much freaking work went in to it.
17. In growing older I have become quirky. This is scary to me.
18. I have this thing about sleeping in a quiet room. I have to have white noise, usually a fan, running.
19. I really miss “The West Wing”.
20. I really don’t like the main character in “Burn Notice”. He is just a tad to smug, and smarmy for my taste.
21. I keep waiting to see if my eldest son decides that he wants to get a tattoo with me.
22. I am trying to decide whether or not to get more worms for this next spring and summer.
23. And if I get them, will I try to over winter them?
24. How many of you are brave enough to do this?
Send me you random things putting them in the comments, and I will post them here. Give it a shot, it is very freeing.
Namaste.
Harrisburg and the Wild West
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania is the State Capital of The Commonweath of Pennsylvania.
A pretty important city in the whole scheme of the state, or so it would seem.
Harrisburg doesn’t have much in the way of tourist attractions. We have a baseball farm team called the Senators. We have a Civil War Museum. We have a small arts community, with some nice small music venues.
And we have our Mayor Stephen Reed. Mayor Reed is the longest serving Mayor of Harrisburg. He was first elected in 1981. During his term he has developed City Island,where the Senators play, and the Civil War Museum.
And then there are the wild west artifacts. Mayor Reed purchased a large number of western items for placement in a Wild West Museum. Which resulted in a large amount of negative outcry from the City Council, and from his constituents.
Recently it came to light that he had bought a warship called the Royal Savage. The unfortunate part is that this vessel belongs to the Federal government under the NAGPRA law, which essentially says any vessel used by the Navy is Federal property.
Mayor Reed tried to sell the ship a few years ago and was unable to.
But that isn’t the worst part. Mayor Reed has recently become the model for a booblehead doll. Yeah, you heard me correctly. The Mayor of the Capital of The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has a booblehead doll.
| Harrisburg Mayor Stephen R. Reed Bobblehead |
I shit you not.
Ok, I am tapped out right now
I started working at a new location, and right now I am pretty tapped out mentally. Sorry.
The location I am now working at has some interesting issues to deal with. Sanitation, follow through by the management staff, training of the associates, and the fact that this location will be moving to a new venue in about 9 months.
Sounds like fun doesn’t it? So here I am trying to instill some basic retail standards in the current group, while trying to figure out who is going to be going to the new venue.
And right now, it doesn’t look like many of them will be.
So. That is where I am at.
I have a day off coming up this Sunday. Going to watch some football, and get my head back in line.
Talk to you then.
Namaste.
No longer waiting to exhale
This from the Detriot Free Press:
With aid approved, state readies for a cultural shift
Having avoided a chaotic bankruptcy, the Detroit Three and, by extension, the broader Michigan community must now carry out deep new cuts in the economic fiber of the state.
“There’s going to be fewer factories, fewer salaried and hourly workers, lower compensation, fewer brands, fewer models, fewer dealers,” Dana Johnson, senior economist with Dallas-based Comerica Inc., said of the near-term outlook. “Everything is going to continue to be rapidly downsized, just not in as chaotic a process if they had not gotten the financing.”
Given the importance of the auto industry to Michigan, the restructuring inevitably will bleed over into a broader cultural shift in how Michiganders see themselves and their economic life, said Doug Rothwell, president of the corporate leadership group Detroit Renaissance.
“The culture is the thing we’ve got to deal with the most, and that’s the toughest to deal with,” Rothwell said. He cited attitudes toward education, race and geographic boundaries among things that influence Michigan’s economic outlook — “all the stuff that’s tied us up in knots for years.”
“That’s the stuff we’ve got to work through and get through if we’re going to be competitive in the future,” he said.
Certainly employees of the Detroit Three felt the anxiety as much as the relief Friday at avoiding Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
Bryan Mahlmeister, a marketing research manager for General Motors Corp., said Friday that he and his fellow workers have lots of questions about how the restructuring will take place.
“You just can’t make all these changes and cuts to all these programs and get rid of brands without eliminating more people,” he said. “There’s going to be a lot of angst in the first quarter just to see how things go.”
More declines predicted
Indeed, economist Johnson forecasts a further decline in Michigan’s labor force in 2009 as the auto restructuring and national recession bite deep. He projects a loss of another 30,000 jobs in the automotive industry next year and 60,000 nonautomotive jobs — “another year of recession.”
The relief felt over the federal auto loans, therefore, must be tempered by the unpleasant reality of what those loans mean. “There was never a happy outcome,” Johnson said. “There was just a less-bad outcome.”
Broadly speaking, Michigan’s economic and cultural life has been defined for decades by a beneficence bestowed by GM, Ford Motor Co., Chrysler and their suppliers. That corporate largesse included everything from company-wide shutdowns during the Christmas holidays to superlative blue-collar wages and benefits and bountiful support to local charities.
That culture legacy has been under strain for years as Detroit Three market shares contracted year by year.
Though more diversified than a generation ago, Michigan’s auto legacy still weighs on the labor market. The state has seen eight consecutive years of job loss and over the past year has led or been near the top among states in unemployment, which hit 9.6% last month.
Visible cracks in metro Detroit’s self-image showed up in decreased giving to the annual United Way campaign, the dwindling of automotive payrolls, and, as recently as last week, the canceling of the 2009 Grand Prix auto races on Belle Isle for insufficient sponsorships.
Though wounded, the Detroit Three continue to influence all aspects of local life and will for decades to come.
At Andiamo restaurant in the Renaissance Center, Mike Nowinski, the operating partner, said he had been watching CNN daily in hopes the auto companies would get the federal money needed to survive.
“GM is our lifeblood here and also for the country, I think. If this bridge did not come through, this country would be in big trouble,” he said Friday, shortly after President George W. Bush announced the federal loans.
A new definition
Inevitably, though, Detroit and Michigan may come to define themselves less by three giant corporations and more by middle-market firms, as most other states do, Rothwell said.
After all, nonautomotive firms like software giant Compuware Corp., mortgage company Quicken Loans, and the pizza-sports-entertainment empire Ilitch Holdings have emerged as new corporate leaders in recent years.
“Clearly the corporate culture and the makeup and structure of the corporate community is changing before our eyes right now,” Rothwell said.
And many efforts are afoot to add well-paying research jobs to the state economy, even as Michigan strives to remain the nation’s automotive brain center not only for the domestic automakers but also for companies such as Toyota and Nissan, which have technical centers there. For example, the University of Michigan announced last week it would buy the facilities Pfizer has vacated in Ann Arbor and would work to add 2,000 research jobs over the next decade.
But just how much Detroit and Michigan must change remains a subject of sharp debate. Johnson scoffed at the notion that Michigan needs to model itself after, say, Alabama, a mostly nonunion, low-tax, lower-wage state distrustful of government.
“Some adjustments in attitudes required? Yeah,” Johnson said. “But a wholesale remaking of the business culture in Michigan? I don’t think so.”
Rothwell, too, suggested a different model than Alabama for Michigan to emulate: North Carolina. The mid-Atlantic state has lost a lot of its previous industry but has built a progressive reputation as a haven for high technology.
“It’s a reasonable, attainable goal for Michigan,” Rothwell said. “It’s probably going to take us a decade or more to get there. We probably started late on this path. But nevertheless, there are a lot of initiatives in place that are moving us in that direction.”
Johnson agreed.
“I think Michigan will figure out a way to do what Pittsburgh did, what New England did,” he said. “Both of those areas lost key industries earlier on than Michigan. But they found a way to come back, and Michigan will, too.”
Blood on the tracks
This was written by Mitch Albom in The Detroit Free Press:
Hey, you senators: Thanks for nothing
A few parting words for the senators who squashed the auto rescue
By MITCH ALBOM • FREE PRESS COLUMNIST • December 13, 2008
Do you want to watch us drown? Is that it? Do want to see the last gurgle of economic air spit from our lips? If so, senators, know this: We’re taking a piece of you with us. America isn’t America without an auto industry. You can argue whether $14 billion would have saved it, but your actions surely could have killed it.
We have grease on our hands.
You have blood.
Kill the car, kill the country. History will show that when America was on its knees, you lawmakers wanted to cut off its feet. How does this happen in America?
Suddenly, the worker is the problem? Suddenly, unless union members, overnight, drastically slash their wages with a hard deadline, you pull the plug on an industry?
Suddenly, Detroit is the symbol of economic dysfunction? Are you kidding? Have you looked in the mirror lately, Washington?
In a world where banks hemorrhaged trillions in a high-priced gamble called credit derivative swaps that you failed to regulate, how on earth do we need to be punished? In a bailout era where you shoveled billions, with no demands, to banks and financial firms — who created the problem in the first place — why do need to be schooled on how to run a business?
Who is more dysfunctional in business than you? Who blows more money? Who fashions and molds its work based on favors and pork and traded compromises?
At least in the auto industry, if folks don’t like what you make, they don’t have to buy it. In government, even your worst mistakes, we have to live with.
And now Detroit should die with this?
In bed with the foreign automakers
Kill the car, kill the country. Sen. Richard Shelby, Sen. Bob Corker, your names will not be forgotten. It’s amazing how you pretend to speak for America when you are only watching out for your political party, which would love to cripple unions, and your states, which house foreign auto plants.
Corker, you’ve got Nissan there and Volkswagen coming. Shelby, you’ve got Hyundai, Honda, Mercedes-Benz and Toyota. Oh, don’t kid yourself. They didn’t come because you earned their business, a subject on which you enjoy lecturing the Detroit Big Three. No, they came because you threw billions in state tax breaks to lure them.
And now — this is rich — you want those foreign companies, which you lured, and which get help from their governments, to dictate to American workers how much they should be paid? Tell you what. You’re so fond of the foreign model, why don’t you do what Japanese ministers do when they screw up the country’s finances?
They cut their salaries.
Or they resign in shame.
When was the last time a U.S. senator resigned over the failure of his policies?
Yet you want to fire Rick Wagoner?
Who are you people?
More money for the lords of Wall Street
There ought to be a law — against the selfishness and hypocrisy our government has demonstrated. The speed with which wheelbarrows of money were dumped at the feet of Wall Street versus the slow noose hung on the auto companies is reprehensible. Some of those same banks we bailed out are now saying they won’t extend credit to auto dealers. Wasn’t that why we gave them the money? To loosen credit?
Where’s your tight grip on those funds, senators? Or do you just enjoy having your hands around blue-collared throats?
No matter what the president does, history will not forget this: At our nation’s most uncertain hour, you stood ready to plunge tens of thousands of families into oblivion. Push them onto public payrolls, unemployment, no health insurance. And you were willing to put our nation’s security at risk — by squashing the American manufacturing we most rely on in times of war.
And why? So you could stand on some phony principle? Crush a union? Play to your base? How is our nation better off today now that you kept $14 billion in the treasury? Are you going to balance the budget with that?
Don’t make us laugh.
Kill the car, kill the country. You tried to slam a stake into the chest of this business, and you don’t even realize how close to the nation’s heart you’re coming. Shame on your pettiness. Shame on your hypocrisy. This is how we behave two weeks before Christmas? Honestly. What has become of this country?
Contact MITCH ALBOM at 313-223-4581 or malbom@freepress.com. Catch “The Mitch Albom Show” 5-7 p.m. weekdays on WJR-AM (760).
A Dragon Coupon Code Just For You
I am making my list Christmas Wish List. Updating it, actually, to include Dragon Naturally Speaking. I want this. I want this bad. If you take a look at the videos that I embedded above you can see why. My favorite on is where you can be away from your computer, talk into the Logitech Headset, and have your computer do all of the typing.
I hate being tethered to either my desktop, or my laptop. Makes me crazy. I find myself typing something, and then wandering around for awhile, coming back, editing (yes, I do edit at times), and continuing on with my thoughts. Having the ability to compose on the fly would make my life that much easier. And your reading enjoyment that much more.
So here is my list.
1. Personal SEO coach.
2. Dragon Naturally Speaking
3. New design. A personalized one. Call me before you buy this, I have a few ideas.
4. A new computer.
5. A new laptop.
6. An actual copy of XP that isn’t cobbled together with spit, and bubble gum.
7. The time to study with the SEO coach.
8. Finish my office space.
9. Finish the deck so that I can use that as office space in the summer.
10. A new pair of socks.
And to make your buying of Dragon Naturally Speaking that much easier here are some coupon codes for you to use:
$50 Coupon Code DNSMSBG -Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Preferred
$25 Coupon Code DNSMSBG -Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 Standard
$25 Coupon Code- DNSMSBG -MacSpeech Dictate
So Santa, hows about helping a guy out? I have been reasonably good this year. I think. I mean, we could sit down over a homebrew and discuss any concerns that you might have over my behavior this past year. I am sure we could come to a meeting of the minds over any disparities.
Namaste.
