Category: Life

At the local recycling facility this afternoon, I say the following bumper sticker:

Support Organic Farmers

I assume that person will be one of the last to welcome our new robot farmer overlords.

I just returned from one of those January holiday parties, and I admit that I, too, was finally offended by the overtly PC sensitivity people who insist on calling it a holiday party instead of naming it properly to pay homage to the reason for the season.

The people throwing the party should have called it a Martin Luther King, Jr., Day Party along with any company throwing parties for their employees in January and calling them “Holiday Parties.”

Over at Boots and Sabers, Owen is covering the proposals to increase minimum wage in Wisconsin using a lot of insightful commentary, meaningful statistics and projections. We here at MfBJN won’t rise to that level of discourse, preferring to build consensus on anecdotal evidence about the negative impact of minimum wage increases on the morale of the brighter and harder working mambers of the lower end of the wage scale. Who am I kidding? It’s all about me.

I got my first job in the summer of 1990 in Milwaukee at a grocery store. I worked as a bagger and accepted minumum wage, $3.85 an hour, as a matter of course. All the teenage boys and infrequent twentysomething bagger started at minimum wage. Gold’s Shop Rite wasn’t a union shop, so the raises weren’t planned nor mandated. Still, my exemplary nature as an employee shone through as I learned the facets of the business and could be called upon to not only man the checkout lanes, but also to handle the other sundry duties involved in grocery stores without goading from managers. To reward me, they gave me a $.20 or a $.25 raise, so I was making about $4.00 an hour. Then they trained me to run a cash register, one of a few baggers ever entrusted to do so, so they raised me to the checker’s starting wage as a reward. As such, I received two merit raises in under a year, and by March of 1991, I was making $4.20 an hour. It’s a pittance, I know, but it wasn’t brain surgery. I was very pleased to be recognized and rewarded by earning more than people who’d started the job before me.

When I opened my check in the first week of April, I noticed my wage had increased $.05. Without prompting. That’s an odd raise, I thought, and my first instinct was to draw the error to the attention of the store manager. Then I remembered something about the minimum wage going up.

Of course my employer couldn’t raise my salary respective to the minimum wage, as it already had to contend with increased labor costs in a low margin business. The federal government and my duly elected legislators had deemed me as equal to the freshest, least productive employee hired off the street even though my employer had thought otherwise. Thank you, Uncle Sam, for returning me to my place as poor cog in the machine, getting uppity and increasing my earning power without the help of my betters in bureaucracy. Thank you, comrades, for ensuring that other people who didn’t bust their hump were rewarded the same as I was.

See, to this day it rankles me. I was working hard in a low paying job, and I went from a cut above everyone else to earning just as much as anyone else. I know how much a little bit more matters–I spent almost three years after college switching jobs for an extra quarter an hour–but on that April day, the minimum wage increase forced me to trade a point of pride–my heightened salary–for two dollars a week more in income. Pre-tax.

You know, I always put the outgoing mail in the mailbox with the stamp to the left. It’s not a conscious thing, but it just seems right to have the addresses rotated counterclockwise. Isn’t that weird?

6. Health Information

D) Do you, or any family member listed in Section 5, take any medicine(s), drugs, pills or herbs, or require shots? X Yes _ No

If you checked any itesm in Question C or answered “yes” to Question D, please complete the following (use additional application form, if necessary):

Name of Person	Condition	Dates Diagnosed and Treated	Type of Treatment/ Names of Medications	Current or Further Treatment?
Brian J.			Basil
Brian J.			Sage

Well, they asked what herbs I was on.

Today’s word for the day sounds like it’s related to swearing, but it’s not:

ineffable

Used in context: That ineffable nutbar in the Durango just cut me off!

Stray 3 x 5 card in my office, frequently shunted about while cleaning but not discarded in case it’s important or I would be inspired to remember what it meant:

There is no mention of the ships docking or crashing or sinking or going back to Miami. No further word at all.

Let that be the final thought, then, for this index card as I discard it, literally. For now there will be no mention of the no mention of the ships.

Lutheran World Relief

A special message to the pagans in the audience:

Happy holidays!

You know, the current kerfuffle of the season (or currfuffle in the lingo of those who need kerfuffles to survive) revolves endlessly about the de-Christianization of Christmas. As every year, groups of aggressive atheists file suits to prevent governments from putting mangers on their properties. Since not everyone can involve themselves in the constitutional litigation and legislation, a lot of common folk have decided that saying “Happy Holidays” is the contemporary equivalent of throwing Christian believers to the lions. Remember the reason for the season, they shout, ignoring the fact that the season occurs because Persephone ate six pomengranate seeds while in the underworld, whereas the anniversary of Christ’s birth provides only the reason for one of the holidays in the middle of winter.

I’ve participated in a holiday program that wished consumers “Happy Holidays” and have seen the instant backlash produced, wherein previously loyal customers threaten to go elsewhere because the company used the inclusive turn of phrase. I’ve seen reasonable people in the blogosphere sputter their indignation. And when it comes time for my company to send out holiday greetings, I send out something that says “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas.”

I use the “Happy Holidays” professionally, as I assume many commercial people do, when I address people whose faith I don’t know. I do wish my family and my Christian friends a Merry Christmas because I know what they celebrate, and I don’t want to be an oaf and ask them to enjoy a holiday they don’t celebrate. I would never say “Happy Independence Day” to a Canadian on July 4. I think the “Happy Holidays” captures the spirit I would like to share with everyone, regardless of creed, during late November and all of December. Come January 2 or 3, though, it’s back to curses for everyone.

Some of the commentariat argue that “Happy Holidays” is disingenuous because it doesn’t recognize the clean-up batter of the holiday lineup, and that political correctness has run amok. James Lileks, columnist for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, says:

Am I offended that they name the other holidays by name? Of course not — no more than I’d be offended if a practitioner of those creeds wished me a happy whatever. This is America. Come one, come all. Frankly, I look forward to the day when the Mexican Day of the Dead is a national holiday; having a picnic in honor of departed relations is an improvement on, say, Arbor Day. Fifty years from now, we’ll all drive hovercars right up to the grave and grill some steaks. In any case, if someone wished me a Happy Whatever tomorrow, I’d be honored that they cared to include me. Why some companies are terrified of this idea I cannot imagine.

As though those who say “Happy Holidays” avoid the word “Christmas” because they don’t want to offend minorities. Instead, I think people who use “Happy Holidays” want to include as many as they can., instead of because they want to include. Two separate sentiments entirely, I say.

Virginia Postrel, author and former editor of Reason magazine, says:

I can’t blame Christians, who are the vast majority of Americans and the ones whose religion is celebrated in all those carols at the mall, for wanting their holiday acknowledged in public. I don’t get offended when Dallasites assume everyone, of course, celebrates Christmas. (Everyone they know does, after all.) And I hope to have a happy, though not necessarily merry, December 25. But I wish good-hearted folks like Lileks would consider that Christmas greetings don’t make everyone feel good.

Once again, she’s focusing on the predicate that people don’t want to offend instead of the impulse to include. I think they both misunderstand the impulse to say Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas or Happy Winter Solstice or any particular holiday in this period of increased brotherhood among men and sisterhood among women and consumerhood among consumers.

But what really twists my valve is that the most vehement of the anti-Happy Holidays crowd demonstrate the impulse to exclusion that they project upon everyone else. That if someone wants to wish you well during December, that that person must say, “Merry Christmas” or the sentiment won’t stick. Plainly and simply, some Christians won’t accept the good tidings of others unless it acknowledges their particular tastes in good tidings, that heathen beneficience is the work of the devil. It stems from the retake-the-holy-land impulse in some strains of Christianity, not the brotherhood-of-man strain, and it’s particularly odious given the spirit of the Holidays. I rankle, and I refuse to let others exert their self-imposed authority over my holiday greetings.

So I bid you happy holidays, whether you like it or not.

The end of the year brings reflection on where you have been, and continued viewing of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century brings reflection on what I haven’t done in the last twenty-five years, so I have lit upon a list of things that don’t yet make me feel old, but undoubtedly will in the next few years:

• Remembering the Rewind button.
• Jokes where the punchline involve Imelda Marcos.

I am sure I had others, but I just cannot seem to remember them right now.

The Meatriarchy guy defends Wal-Mart:

Most of the criticisms I see leveled towards Wal-Mart are not only applicable to them. But to any other store in the retail sector.

He refutes a lot of things anti-Wal-Mart forces marshal as arguments to why capitalism, or at least the concrete capitalism practiced specifically by Wal-Mart, is bad.

Crikey, one femibar, and suddenly I’m drinking coffee from a Holly Hobbie mug:

(Click for full size)

Thank goodness for that one remaining Buck Rogers costume, or I could have had to have been Holly Hobbie.

I suffered a mid-morning hunger pang, so I grabbed one of Heather’s femibars. You know, a Luna bar, the Whole Nutrition Bar for Women, strong enough for a man, Ph balanced to empower a woman, blah blah blah.

So I opened the package and started on it before I noticed the flavor. Toasted Nuts and Berries.

Has a food item ever given you a stern sense of You don’t belong?

A small anecdote, to celebrate the release of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century – The Complete Epic Series on DVD and this household’s purchase thereof:

Halloween 1984

We, being my mother, brother, and I, lived with my aunt and uncle in St. Charles, Missouri; I don’t know if my mother was working her job at the onion ring factory where she separated onion rings amid the immigrants or whether she had started in government service in the clerical pool at $12,000 a year, but she didn’t have a pile of money to spend on Halloween costumes, nor did she have the time to whip up some of the cardboard costumes for which she had become legend in the housing projects of Milwaukee. So when she got a couple of extra bucks, it was immediately before Halloween, and we hit the Walgreens off of Fifth Street on what must have been October 30.

The costume section had been picked over to the extent that only two costumes for young boys remained, so we got them. The next night, my brother and I tossed coins, drew lots, or perhaps did the traditional simple fight for who would wear which costume. Now, I don’t know if you damn kids even know what passed for costumes in 1984, particularly costumes you could buy at Walgreens. They consisted of a thin plastic mask which covered only your face, secured to the back of your head with a rubber band, and a trashbag-like smock depicting a motif to augment what you were. Not an authentic costume by any means. My brother, the little punk, got Spiderman, so he got red and blue trashbag and a Spiderman-mask red-colored plastic face piece with two dots for the eyes, a slit for the mouth, and two nostril holes located nowhere near his nose.

“Oooh,” said the people who answered the door when trick-or-treating, “It’s Spiderman. And….”

For there I was wearing a trash bag with a guy with a laser pistol and a mask depicting the front 20% of a white helmet with orange bolts and a generic pink male face over my generic pink male face. “I’m Buck Rogers,” I said.

Because, friends, bloggers, and countrymen, it was 1984 and the television show ran in 1979.

It would be the equivalent of dressing like Capt. Malcolm ‘Mal’ Reynolds from television’s Firefly—in 2007. Sure, one sci-fi junkie at one house recognized the outfit–out of an entire subdivision–but that’s before these things were available on DVD and even before the Sci-Fi channel.

I think I was traumatized from the experience, and I can only talk about it now. And now that I have the DVD, I’ve had to relive the experience.

But my kind and beautiful wife, who has agreed to watch the series on DVD with me, is offering her support, and together we will overcome my childhood pain which still haunts my intrapersonal relationships.