I was sent home early from work on Friday because of the impending Blizzard Nemo. I had great difficulty convincing my co-workers that the storm was named after the sea captain:
And not the fish:
Really, why would you name a storm after an animated clownfish? Seems like bad taste to me. A mysterious submarine pilot makes a better choice any day of the week.
Needless to say, the MTA was slow all weekend. I don't accept this constant service failure at the slightest sign of inclement weather. Oooh, there was snow. Big deal. Do you suppose the Berlin subway shuts down every time it snows? What about Moscow? The New York subway would shame even the most impoverished former Soviet republic.
It's the fault of those damn reactionaries who run the country who believe that, if people are going to demand public services, then at least those services should be underfunded and lackluster. Otherwise, what do people have to strive for?
Puns! Is there any word more thrilling to the human soul?
I recently discovered a monthly pun competition in Brooklyn called Punderdome 3000.
The
format is simple: 18 contestants or pairs are given a category and
challenged to make puns relating to it. They have 90 seconds to think
while distracting music plays.
The winners are given by audience reaction and can proceed to the next round.
Naturally
they're not going to provide a helpful topic like 'food' or 'music'.
Instead, you'll get things like 'pirate nicknames' or 'pumpkins'.
My category was 'Seasonal Affective Disorder'. My story was something like this:
So, the changing of the seasons always gets me down. I was telling my friend Thomas '[Aw, Tom], this winter...it's like you only have one old pair of shoes that you can't avoid wearing, and I feel like I'm going to [fall back] into [dis pair].
He said to me 'I know that around Christmas you [pine] for warmer weather, but be patient and we can [spring forward] into a new season."
Not my best work, certainly, but not bad under the circumstances. Until next month!
I haven't read A Christmas Carol in almost 15 years - since 7th grade, in fact. It's a short read and this year I decided to take another stab at it.
What is most surprising about the story is not the plot itself - we've all probably seen a hundred adaptations of it by now - but how vivid the setting, and by contrast how lacking in imagination is Scrooge's conversion.
It is a little strange to describe Charles Dickens as lacking in imagination, but there you are. Dickens saw, and clearly saw, the problems of Victorian England - the filth, the poverty, the wretched inequality and the exploitation of children. But he completely failed to understand why those problems came about, and how they might be resolved.
Scrooge refuses to give to charity, won't go to his nephew's Christmas dinner, underpays his clerk and forces him to toil in a freezing-cold little office. Why? Dickens' only excuse for Scrooge's meanness is that he had simply forgotten how wonderful Christmas was, and a few examples were all that was needed to bring him around (what a shame Scrooge did not have a photo album). It does not occur to Dickens, perhaps, that paying workers low wages and scrimping on coal make a certain economic sense and are not usually done out of pure spite.
Of course, if the sole reason that Scrooge is a miser is human cruelty, then the only possible remedy is human kindness - and here we see the same theme repeated over and over in his other books, that of a kindhearted rich man coming along and solving everyone's problems with bags of gold. Dickens simply can't face the idea that the system might be producing problems by design - if only people would be nice to one another, everything would be fine. Maybe so, but for a renowned social critic a response like that is simply an evasion.
With the fiscal cliff fast approaching, let's take a moment to reflect before plunging downward.
The 'fiscal cliff' is a not-at-all alarmist term for a set of spending cuts and tax increases that will go into effect at midnight, December 31st, if Congress doesn't act. The GOP is taking the opportunity to demand we deal with our long-run deficit problem RIGHT THIS INSTANT or they'll crash the economy just to be make a point - deficits, of course, are only a problem when a Democrat is in office.
Mr. Burns explains:
Most of the Very Serious People in media and politics have decreed that 'both sides' will have to offer 'painful concessions' - in other words, The Republicans will have to acquiese to certain tax increases and defense cuts, while the Democrats will have to allow for cuts in Social security and Medicare.
Here's the problem: asking for some spending cuts and revenue increases certainly makes sense in the long term, but with unemployment still doggedly around 8% what the country needs is more investment, not less.
Even more importantly, if you really believe that the deficit is a problem, Social Security and Medicare don't add to the debt at all. Both are funded through specially dedicated levies (or taxes) which are seperate from the budget as a whole. Social Security is estimated to start losing money in 2033, while Medicare is completely solvent up until 2024. At that point, the programs do not 'go broke' - they simply start spending more money than they take in, and will require money from the general budget to keep going - like every other government program.
In other words - this is more or less a scam. Republicans hate entitlements so they want to get rid of them. The deficit is only an excuse; if the programs were free they'd still try to get rid of them.
The good news is that even as the GOP refuses to budge from their anti-tax orthodoxy, we still have a month or so before things really start getting hairy. For that month the only real loser will be the stock market, but at least they can blame the Republicans.
