The 'Wizard of Wall Street' strikes again!

If I have to read another variation of the "Obama's tax cuts will only save me $14 bucks a week, big deal" meme I'm going to do that magic trick Heath Ledger uses in the "Dark Knight" on myself. Seriously. I have the pencil ready on my desk and everything.

Who the hell thinks $14 dollars a week won't help them out? Is everybody as rich as Paris Hilton? Or just conservatives?

I make a pretty good salary but even then I did some quick math and that money could mean a lot of good things for me. In a month that increased cash could do any of the following...

• Fill up my gas tank twice.


• Buy all the bread and milk on my grocery budget.


• Pay for that oil change I've been putting off because I was short on cash.


• Pay for one of #1Animefan's visits to her counselor since the insurance won't cover it.


• Pay for my wife's medicine prescription.

I could go on but you get the idea. I wish these aspiring Mr. Howells who apparently light cigars with $100 dollar bills would just shut the hell up.

Over? Did you say "over"? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!

I watched the speech last night and came away convinced more than ever that we made the right choice in November.

Besides Obama's great ability to communicate complex economic issues in easily understandable terms, I got a kick out of how much of his speech was composed of subtle and not-so-subtle attacks on the opposition. He put Republicans in the position of having to choose to cheer against economic recovery, ending the war in Iraq and making sure CEOs pay their fair share.

When Obama mentioned the deficit and Republicans started catcalling he immediately pointed out that he would be tackling that "that deficit that I inherited." He put the jerks in their place.
Indeed- you could tell from Jindal's response to Obama's speech and the Republican talking points in response to the speech that they simply do not have a solution to Obama. If Republicans weren't being propped up by the Fourth Estate they would be completely irrelevant at this point.

Are we supposed to take a political party seriously when the biggest criticism they can level at the President's take on the state of the union is that the President lied when he said "The nation that invented the automobile cannot walk away from it." You guys can't see how ridiculous and petty that is? C'mon, really?

This isn't nitpicking, it's picking micro-organisms of nits themselves.

Putting aside the triteness of the "it was Karl Benz not Henry Ford who invented the automobile" line of argument, do you really want to put your political party in the position of advocating that it wasn't an American that built the auto industry, that the United States really isn't number one? That's a political winner.

If I didn't hate those knuckleheads so much I might actually feel sorry for their clueless asses.

I hate every ape I see, from chimpan-A to chimpanzee. No, you'll never make a monkey out of me!

This is a bit of an enigma.

On Facebook I recently found somebody named "Doc Zaius" who looks suspiciously like our own Doctor Zaius of blogger infamy. When I asked our Zaius about this denied the Doc Zaius of Facebook was in fact him.

Does Zaius have a psycho imposter who is aping him on Facebook?

(Facebook's "Doc Zaius.)

("Our" Doctor Zaius.)

You would have to admit the resemblance is uncanny.

But what really prompted me to post this was how impressed I was with the doppleganger's Facebook friends list. He's somehow surrounded himself with a bevy of hot babes and celebrities like Belinda Carlisle and Morgan Freeman. I checked their Facebook pages and they appear to be legit. Carlisle provides updates on practicing for Dancing with the Stars for instance.

Consider this- you're Belinda Carlisle who headed up a pretty popular female rock band in the 80's and went on to a successful solo career. In your Facebook email a friend request pops up from somebody who has taken on the persona of an ape scientist in a 70's sci-fi movie. Do you---

A) Report this headcase to Facebook for terms of use violations or
B) Ignore this request as this person is obviously unbalanced or
C) Say to yourself "what the hell" and confirm him as a friend.

That she chose the last option is all sorts of cool.

If it really is you Doctor Zaius, I salute you for the sheer chutzpah. If it's not... well, then I have a new hero.

I think you're right. I will have a drink.

During an evening of real joy (and some drinking) in our house last night I sat down and wrote the following post. I was planning on posting the recipe for the drink I'd assembled, which is why I took the pictures. I just wasn't planning on doing it while still under the influence of that drink.

Rather than clean it up I thought I'd share it in it's raw form.

____________________________________________________

As of Sunday Ms. Wormer and I will have been married 17 years. That's 16.9 years of wedded bliss to those of you keeping score.

For shits and gigglles I thought it would be fun if we shared a drink from the now defunct Vegas "Star Trek the Experience" called a "Warp Core Breach." Here's a pic of said drink:



We had a kickass time in Vegas a couple of years ago drinking those and flipping the Ferengi and Klingon guys that walked through Quark's bar shit, questioning their masculinity and some such.

but the Star Trek Experience is no more and finding the ingredients to this drink turned out to be more problematic than I thought it would.

(Berfore I type anymore I think it's a good idea to say that at this point I'm very, very drunk. A wise man said"never post drunk." I kicked the shit out of that man.)

Eventually I vfound the recipe for the drink at a website where the guy swore up and down he'd abartended at Quark's. Consider this my version of "cooking with Dr. Monkerstein."

Here's the ingredients:

White rum
Dark rum
Bacardi Limon
pice rum (cpt. morgans or some such) 151 rum- doesn matter. It's all good.
Dekuyper Lucious Rasberry Rush.
Dry ice.
orange juice, pineapple juice, cranberry juice.


Get a big bowl and mix 6 parts white rum, 4 parts limon rum, 2 parts dark rum, 2 parts spice rum and 2 parts spice rum. Then add two parts Dekuptypr rasberry rush and 1 part 151.

Then mix equal parts pineapple, cranberry and orange juice into the rink. Pour over ice and add a bit of dry ice so it bubbles.

(dry ice)



(Tghe reason I'm babbling incoherently at the momemnt. Finished drink.)

Anyhoo tomorrow we're going to dim sum to celebrate our anniversayr. I really do love her, you know.

Live long and prosper.
Dean

'Mr. Hand, will I pass this class?' Gee, Mr. Spicoli, I don't know!

If you could make a single book, film, or album required material to graduate from high school, what would it be?

Isn't that a tough question? I'm going to make it a little easier and limit it to one from each category.

Book: "The Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, Third Edition."

Film: "Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain"

Album: Monterey International Pop Festival Live, 1967.

How about you guys?

All I know is when we win a game, it's a team win. When we lose a game, it's a team loss.

When it comes to sports I'm a real sucker for stories about sportsmanship. It seems to be such a rare thing.

I'm on the board for the local youth tackle football league and the stuff I've seen at games has often forced me to question my faith in humanity.

So when I come across a story about sportsmanship like this one about a Dekalb, Illinois basketball team I can't help but get a little choked up.

The story is really worth reading but here's a summary: Johntell Franklin was one of the star players of the team they were playing was late to the game because he had just left the hospital where his mother had passed away from cervical cancer. Even though he was grieving he still wanted to play in the game, but under the rules his team would be assessed a technical foul if they put him in.

Out of sympathy the DeKalb coach asked the referee let let Franklin play to waive the technical, which the referee refused. The DeKalb coach then asked for a volunteer to shoot the two technical free throw shots. Senior Darius McNeal volunteered.

He went alone to the free throw line, dribbled the ball a couple of times, and looked at the rim.

His first attempt went about two feet, bouncing a couple of times as it rolled toward the end line. The second barely left his hand.

It didn't take long for the Milwaukee players to figure out what was going on.

They stood and turned toward the DeKalb bench and started applauding the gesture of sportsmanship. Soon, so did everybody in the stands.

"I did it for the guy who lost his mom," McNeal told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "It was the right thing to do."

THAT'S what team sports should be about.

You will travel far, my little Kal-El

Swinebread has asked me to help fill in over at his place while he changes diapers and such, so I'll be occasionally posting over at Atomic Romance on comics, movies, video games and such.

I met a girl. We ate lobster and drank pina coladas. At sunset we made love like sea otters. THAT was a pretty good day. Why couldn't I get that day?

On regrets...

When I was in high school I was a pretty serious guy. I was a good student. I was active in politics. I was a member of the church youth group. I didn't drink much. I certainly never touched a blunt. I had the world figured out completely in black and white.

This last Friday I had coffee with the old flame I'd dated through most of high school (thanks Facebook.) In many ways she was sort of the opposite of me. She was a free spirit. She broke into dance at the drop of a hat, partied, drank and smoke pot. She wasn't a good student but damn did she love and celebrate being alive.

At this point you can see why this relationship didn't work out, but that's not my point here. :)

So we had a great time laughing and catching up on the last 20 years. We talked about old times. We couldn't figure out what happened to "Buddy" the stuffed monkey we used to trade back and forth with a generous helping of perfume or cologne for good measure. I tend to believe that all the Old Spice I dumped on the thing rotted it clean away.

At a certain point she asked me about regrets from those times. I shared with her that my biggest regret is that I was too serious. That I didn't party more. That I didn't dance more. That I didn't get to know all of the great people in my high school better because I had such a colossal stick up my ass.

Then I asked her if she had any regrets. She shared with me that she wished she'd been more serious. She wished she'd been a better student. She wished she'd worried a little more about the future.

When I was driving home after this I started thinking about this exchange and quickly went from giggling to laughing maniacally at the irony of this. When you broke it down- I regretted I wasn't more like her. She regretted she wasn't more like me.

It strikes me there are more than a few life lessons here.

There can't be a person on this planet that doesn't carry regrets from when they were a teenager. I wish I'd had the courage to ask out that pretty girl from first period English. I wish I'd told that cute guy I liked him. I wish I'd tried out for basketball. I wish, I wish, I wish.

Sometimes I wish I had a "rewind" button for my own life. Often that wish comes when I'm thinking about someone I've loved and lost like my dad. I want back some benign, irremarkable moment like a family dinner that I could just take in and enjoy him telling a bad joke, or an old story.

But there also times that I wish that I could go back and make a different decision, pick a different path. For example- that time my friend Doug tried to set me up with that hot girl and we were over at her apartment drinking Everclear (straight) and I was so drunk that when she asked me to head up to her room with her to "help her set her alarm clock" I told her to "push the 'clock' button at the same time you push the up down arrows" and went back to drinking. It didn't occur to me until the next morning when I was hung over and throwing up that maybe, just maybe she knew how to set that clock and wanted me upstairs for another reason.

Dummy.

The thing is- that's not the way life works. Life is not like the movie "Groundhog Day." There aren't right choices and wrong choices that we could "fix" with just the benefit of hindsight.

For every decision we make, for every door we close we may be losing an opportunity but we're almost always opening another door in return. You may not have asked that girl you liked to the winter formal but may have wound up falling love with the girl you did wind up taking. You may not have gone out for basketball but met your best friend while sitting in the stands cheering on the team. You may not have slept with that hot girl your friend was trying to set you up with but at least you swore off Everclear for life.

Strike that last one.

I think sometimes we forget that who we are are the sum of all the millions of decisions we've made in our lives. Even the "bad" decisions have helped to bring us to the person we are today. Are you happy with yourself? Thank the younger, wilder and wholly irresponsible you.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go dig through my closet looking for an old, stinky stuffed monkey and spray Old Spice on it. Just for old time's sake.

Logic is little tweeting bird chirping in meadow. Logic is wreath of pretty flowers that smell bad.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Go Animate just added a flash feature where you can make a Star Trek cartoon. Here's what I threw together trying to include as many of my blogger friends as I could.

The tool is pretty cool but it won't let you add anything that looks like a swear word ("class" or "ubermilf".) Do you have any idea how hard it is to do a Randal Graves character without swearing?

Also- I didn't have time to add everybody but a big Valentine's Day hug to everybody. Oh, Snabalus- you were going to be Chief Engineer Montgomery Snabby but I didn't do an engine room scene. Maybe if I continue the story...

GoAnimate.com: Blogger Trek


Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

Baa-ram-ewe! Baa-ram-ewe! To your breed, your fleece, your clan be true! Sheep be true! Baa-ram-ewe!

Obligatory 1000 post critter pictures.

1000 posts. That's a hell of a lot of bad grammar, poor spelling and improper punctuation. :)

NAME: Little Joe, AKA "Rasputin."

TURN ONS: Supergoat brand oats, wild blackberries, being scratched between the horns, pellet pooping wherever I please and staring at the two-leggers with my devil eyes.

TURN OFFS: Wasps, dogs, flooding in my pen and amorous hillbillies.

HOW I GOT HERE: A farmer gave me away.

QUOTE: "Feed me or die."

NAME: Mathilda

TURN ONS: Napping, sitting on the couch with Dean with my head on his shoulder, chasing my people's car across the highway.

TURN OFFS: Fireworks, thunder and amorous little dogs.

HOW I GOT HERE: I was adopted from the Humane Society after they caught me and my mom running wild through the park.

QUOTE: "It's all good."

NAME: Sheba

TURN ONS: A full bowl of dog food, my best friend #1Animefan and chasing my tail.

TURN OFFS: An empty dog food bowl, grouchy little dogs and having to go outside when it's cold.

HOW DID I GET HERE? I'm just staying temporarily while they find me a new home. Going on five years now.

QUOTE: "What? Hey, look there's something shiny."

NAME: Spike, AKA "CMD" (Chihuaha of Mass Destruction), "Little Devil," "Mini Monster," "Spikerdoodles."

TURN ONS: Playing fetch with my red ball, push my red ball into the people's hand so they'll play fetch, finding my red ball after they've hidden it because I'm annoying them.

TURN OFFS: Being put in a cat carrier (it's so humiliating), having Dean take something out of my mouth that I'm not suppossed to have and my nails clipped.

HOW DID I GET HERE? They paid good money for me from a breeder. Suckers.

QUOTE: "Okay, you die and you walk away with a severe limp."

Good luck with your layoffs, all right? I hope your firings go really well.

This is the 999th post so tomorrow it's pix of my critters.

I've been sharing some of the more egregious things I've seen from inside the corporate world to try and present a sort of counterpoint to all the bitching we've seen about the role of government as of late. There seem to be a large block of people who still believe that government is inherently evil, while private enterprise is all noble competition, candy canes and lollipops.

Besides the salary limits and bonus thing I've already talked about, the company I work for has also done the following in the last few years---

• Eliminated carryover vacation time for employees and instituted a "use it or lose it" policy. (I refuse to honor this btw. If my employees made good faith efforts to use their time I comp it into the next year.)


• Changed health care providers plans every year and health care providers twice. Each time our rates and deductibles have gone up.


• During the most recent change they picked a provider that implemented the social engineering with deductibles plan. We're responsible for a much higher percentage of our deductible for diagnostics. The excuse is that they're trying to keep people from getting "frivolous" MRIs and X-rays by making it more expensive. I am seriously considering taking my kids out of sports because of this. We can't afford an injury.


• Eliminated a 70-year old company tradition by which the company essentially shuts down, employees are recognized at a party and, most importantly, frontline employees were allowed to ask direct questions of the top management of the company. Funny how this went away just as they started squeezing employees.

For those of you that might be wondering why I continue to work for an institution that would take all those actions the answer is that I have friends at competing companies and the horror stories they tell about cuts to benefits, etc. make the complaints I've listed sound benign by comparison. These issues are widespread and systematic.

Some of the things I hear about how government should stay out of the way and let the market just correct itself leave me seriously flabbergasted. I can't help but wonder if these corporate fanboys have spent even a single day in a corporate environment. The idea that corporations are anything less than amoral institutions dedicated almost entirely to providing value to their shareholders is pretty ridiculous.

I wonder if we could ever get back to the days of Henry Ford when the prevailing corporate philosophy was to take care of their employees with the recognition that they themselves were consumers. I consider conservative's arguments about corporate tax cuts and how they would lead to higher wages and job creation and think they might as well be speaking Farsi for all the sense those arguments make. They simply have no relation to reality.

You're walking around blind without a cane, pal. A fool and his money are lucky enough to get together in the first place.

I'm having a hard time figuring out how to write this and not have it come across as whining because it concerns my personal bonus, or lack thereof. I decided to share this because it's just another micro example of how American business doesn't always operate in good faith towards the people it employs.

I'm a believer in incentive (bonus) programs not just for managers but for years I've been pushing the company to adopt some sort of profit sharing plan for staff. If they're structured correctly and tied to performance I believe they provide the company with engaged, satisfied staff.

The incentive program I participate is pretty standard. Basically I'm given a numerical rating on a quarterly basis. This rating is a combination of employee and customer satisfaction and performance against budget. If my numerical rating is mid to low against those factors then I don't qualify for a bonus.

If I'm an dick of a boss and have a bunch of employees leave then I won't qualify for a bonus. If I have really unhappy staff and that's reflected on employee feedback surveys then I won't qualify for a bonus. If I lose customers or customers are unhappy with our product or service then I won't qualify for a bonus. If I don't beat the company's top and bottom line financial goals for my book of business then I really, really won't qualify for a bonus.

On paper it's a pretty good plan. You can see how managing to that plan forces me to be a better manager and not take anything, or anyone for granted.

In 2007 the company tweaked the plan. Apparently corporate didn't like the unexpected allocations for bonuses that would pop up (they don't like financial surprises) so they decided to take money out of your book of business to set aside for any bonuses you may qualify for. A line titled "performance sharing" appeared on my profit and loss statements and a dollar amount based on a percentage my salary was set aside from my total revenue each month on this line.

This had it's obvious downside for managers. The financial goals for an incentive now became that much harder as your numerical rating was figured after all of those line items, including "performance sharing" were subtracted from your overall revenue. They were slyly making it harder to score a bonus.

In 2008 they tweaked the plan again. This time they indexed manager's numerical ratings against their region. This means you could have a great quarter but not see a penny if the other managers in the region were boneheads who didn't know how to run their businesses. Their excuse was that this would encourage "teamwork" but that idea is laughable. I have nothing to contribute to accounts in Seattle or San Francisco in terms of personnel and vice versa.

This had the desired effect of putting bonuses out of reach of even the best performing managers, myself included. My feeling was something akin to "Whatever. I'm lucky to have this job. At least the site financials will look even better."

Yet, they continued to take "performance sharing" dollars out of my account like clockwork. I had assumed that they would just pay that unused chunk of bonus cash back into the account at the end of the year when they closed the books. I kept checking my financials for this big block of cash, now totalling over $7000 to show up. Of course it never did.

This week I had a conversation with my manager and asked him where this money went. He flew into a rant. Apparently we've already identified and complained about this with corporate and were met with the hand. Apparently that "performance sharing" is meant for somebody else to share and is not to be questioned.

To sum up: the company takes money out of my book of business to cover a potential cash incentive for me, the very act of taking this money out makes it harder for me to achieve that incentive so they don't have to pay it, when I fail to achieve the incentive they keep that money without an explanation rather put it back into my business.

Why, it's almost like they're stealing it.

I wish I could tell you that Andy fought the good fight, and the Sisters let him be. I wish I could tell you that - but prison is no fairy-tale world.

Tales from private industry...

Boiled down to it's essence the debate over the stimulus is between those that subscribe to the tired religion of the "free market" vs. those who realistically recognize that there are occasions when it's necessary for the government to take action to keep the economic waterwheel that is the economy from seizing up and grinding to a stop.

There are more than a few people who continue to look at government as evil and for them the debate begins and ends with that concept. They cannot fathom that private industry ain't all that and a bag of chips. As someone who actually has spent his whole life in private industry I find this idea pretty absurd. Every criticism you can level at government can be turned around and thrown and private companies. Every single one.

I value my bloggy anonymity, mainly because I'm often reading, writing and commenting on other's blogs from work. They say that's frowned upon. So this may be somewhat vague, but all of it is true.

I'm a middle manager at a Fortune 500 company in real life. I like the company I work for quite a bit. I consider them well run, their reporting to Wall Street is pretty above board and they're not likely to wind up on the nightly news because of any corporate shenanigans. But they are a company like any other, which means we've continued to increase productivity for years without rewarding employees and they do things that I would consider unfair if they weren't standard corporate practice.

Just one example of how employees suffer the death of a thousand cuts behind the scenes. For years annual merit raises have been held to 3% average, 5% for our best performing employees. It's a sort of grading curve where as a manager I'm expected to identify poorly performing staff and exclude them from an annual raise. The thing is - I have no poorly performing employees. If I did they wouldn't be working for me.

So the net result is that my experienced, tenured staff wind up getting 3% raises annually. Well below the cost of health care inflation alone, not to mention the cost of living. The longer they work for me here the worse off they are going to be financially.

I've been terribly worried that this year this would be even worse and that the percentages for non-exempts would be lowered or raises frozen altogether. They've done that with managers like myself already so I won't be getting a raise this year. Truth be told- I'm just happy to have a job in this economy so I'm not terribly upset.

Tomorrow I'll tell you about how the company recently started sticking me with incentives I'm eligible for. They've really become quite ingenious in how they screw you. Under other circumstances I might admire their creativity.

You have been weighed, you have been measured, and you have been found wanting.

I would swear we just had an election. Which side won again?

That is all... cats rule.

I should hit my 1000th post sometime early next week and can't recall for the life of me what the tradition was on that.

Am I supposed to post pix of my kids or my pets?

I think it's pets because, let's face it, Canine Americans have no expectation of privacy in this country. (That goes both ways as anyone that's been getting busy with their special someone only to suddenly feel the cold stare of their fury little friend on their naked booty can attest.)

Anyway- I'm out of here. It's Take Your Spouse to Work Day at my workplace. If you haven't heard of that it's because it's because we just invented it.

I got a fever and the prescription is more cowbell.

Dear Doctor McConnell,

My two-year old schnauzer has a problem with urinating when he gets excited. I've tried doggie diapers but they don't seem to work. Do you know how we can't turn off the canine waterworks?

Sincerely,

Soaking in Spokane


Dear Soaking,

Urination due to excitement is common in these breeds. Just give the dog a tax cut and he'll be fine.

Mitch

------------------

Dear Doctor McConnell,

Due to my uncontrolled gambling and drug use I'm in heavy debt to some rather unsavory characters. I'm scared that they may hurt me. What should I do?

Signed,

Terrified in Tennessee


Dear Terrified,

I know the kind of people you're dealing with. We get all sorts of donations from bankers. That's why the solution here is to give these "goodfellas" a tax cut.

Mitch

-----------------

Dear Doctor McConnell,

My girlfriend doesn't like to fool around anymore and the other day she said she thought Megan Fox was "a hottie." I'm concerned she may be Lebanese. Oh, I also can't achieve an erection unless I watch Japanese mouse-stomping videos first.

Yours,

Worried in Wenatchee


Dear Worried,

Erectile Dysfunction is a common problem among men your age. The solution is a tax cut. Indeed; half of our caucus can't achieve an erection until we've had such a tax cut, so you're in good company.

Mitch

------------------

Dear Doctor McConnell,

I recently came home early from work and caught my husband in bed with the maid. I'm concerned that he may be cheating on me. Should I confront him or take him at his word that he was just "helping her change the sheets from a prone position?"

Naive in Naples


Dear Naive,

As a wife in this situation you may be tempted to grab a pair of garden shears and cut off his... assets. Cut his taxes instead.

Mitch

Please don't throw me in dat briar patch!

McCain says Democrats need to 'seriously negotiate.'

Napoleon demands Wellington 'stand down and surrender.'

Foreman tells Ali to 'stand still so he can punch him.'

Hirohito insists Truman 'stop ordering attacks on Japan.'