CSotD: Random indignities
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Here's today's Candorville, in honor of the fact that it's been five years since I took on a job that lasted about six months. Before I accepted the job, I asked my prospective boss how the then-new recession was hitting the paper and he assured me that things were just fine, that a community with a college and a major hospital was pretty much recession-proof.
Of course, the relevant question should have been, "Do you know what the hell you're doing?" but I'm pretty sure the answer would have been equally accurate.
In any case, the net result was about eight months of unemployment, during which I had to declare bankruptcy. It was a tough decision but I sure wasn't alone at that stage of the collapse.
My only obligation, beyond food and housing and suchlike, was credit card debt carried over from my time as a single parent, by then a good decade in the rearview mirror, which is why I could justify pulling the rip cord.
That is, if they'd been charging me six or seven percent instead of 26 or 27 percent, my cards would have long since been paid off.
And why was I being charged such usurial rates? Because they didn't think I would pay them.
Now there's a self-fulfilling prophecy for ya.
If you total what they got over the years, they recovered their principle plus a good amount of interest and pardon me if I don't weep for their loss of projected income. I lost some projected income myself, thanks, as did a lot of people then and continuing to the present.
Oh, and, by the way? Part of the bankruptcy procedure is that they offer you a lower payment rate so you can afford to keep up with your obligations. My minimum payment was in four figures; the offer would have saved me five dollars a month. I love you, too, guys.
Anyway, I yanked the cord knowing it would trash my credit for several years to come, but, guess what? Barclay Bank sends me a letter two or three times a month assuring me that I've been prequalified for a card.
Which, of course, I haven't been, and they're not actually going to give me anything except a denial on my credit history.
Their use of the term "prequalified" to mean "we bought a mailing list with you on it" is the kind of perverse, deceptive lie that wouldn't have been permitted before deregulation allowed the free market to bring the whole thing crashing down.
An economy based on blue skies and deceptive advertising has a predictably short shelf life, one would think.
And, yes, before I bailed, I looked into the pay-it-off schemes Lemont is signing up for, and my only criticism of the cartoon is that most topical comedy is based on exaggeration.
No exaggeration. This is how it is.
This is also how it is.
Okay, this isn't exactly how it is. Jim Morin is using that exaggeration thingie I mentioned.
But in a sea of incredibly lame, off-target or grindingly obvious cartoons on the topic, he's none of those, and that's to his credit. The more radical conservative cartoonists, having no rational argument to advance, are now down to recycling lies and throwing out insults, while the progressives seem fixated on drawing suicide-bomber elephants.
So now the rightwing fringe is complaining about having to buy affordable health insurance, and the industry's bought-and-paid-fors are doing a nice job of parroting lobbyist talking points on the floor of Congress, insisting that it's not fair and nobody wants it.
Which, first of all, brings a different — though no less subversive — meaning to the term "McCarthyism."
And which requires these shameless insurance industry shills to ignore this:
If you wait long enough, and if it's four in the morning, and if you managed to get through long enough on your last visit to create an account before erroring out, this page will eventually give way to a log-in where you can enter your username and password and it will take you here:
Imagine how overburdened the servers would be if anyone actually wanted this thing that we so overwhelmingly elected President Romney to repeal?
But I have come up with a compromise that should work:
1. Free up the budget and let the Affordable Care Act go forward.
2. When people ditch their private health policies in favor of Obamacare, instead of pocketing the savings on premiums, they send that money directly to their Congressional representatives.
It's not perfect, but it does cut out the middleman.
By happenstance:
On a totally other topic and one that may only interest me, Keith Knight's current Breaking-Bad-themed K Chronicles happens to co-incide with something I wrote the other day.
Co-incidence #1 is that I tried to get into Breaking Bad and stuck with it on Netflix until the Spooge sequence, at which point I decided we were really in violation of the Archie Bunker Rule, which is that nobody who wouldn't be welcome through the door is welcome through the TV.
Not Spooge and his old lady in particular, but the whole scene: Walter Jr was the only cast member I wanted to be anywhere near and why would I sit around with the rest of those depressing, soul-sucking weasels?
So I knew who Keef was talking about, and I even caught the Ken Tanaka reference 'cause, y'know, I'm pretty hip.
But I focused more on the logical connection between that guy and an undercover officer who was one of the guys in the room when, as I recalled two days ago, a particularly airheaded local TV reporter cracked everyone up.
This guy had the right look to play Spooge, too. He had heavy eyelids, permanently blood-shot blue eyes, a long, kind of slack-jawed face and could, with a little stubble and no effort at all, look like he was hungover, strung out and messed up. Instead of playing a junkie on a TV show, however, he did it as a cop.
I remember running into him at the mall one time and being unwilling to say "hi" to him in case he was working, but he spotted me, too, and greeted me and we talked for a minute, so I guess he was off-duty.
But what an odd gift, and how nice for both guys to be able to parlay it into a career.
Patty the Prophet
Yesterday was the 63rd anniversary of the launch of Peanuts. I didn't know we celebrated anniversaries that don't end in 5 or 0, but people made a big deal of this, and it's an excuse, if nothing else, to point out that GoComics has a blog that is frequently updated with fascinating irrelevancies and occasional forays into the best of Sherpa, their semi-pro webcomics site.
Charlie Brown didn't make it another 60 years, unless you count reruns, but poor Patty didn't make it nearly as far as he did. The disappearance of Patty and relegation of Violet to "third kid in scene" status seems to have been part of the odd timing of "Peanuts," wherein everyone aged until they were about nine and then became frozen in time. Once that was established, the role of "snotty older girl" sort of disappeared, and, with it, the snotty older girls themselves.
Lucy, who had entered the strip as a toddler, took over the "snotty" role as she attained Terminal Age.
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