Lunch

One of my favorite Onion Headlines:

Kitten Thinks of Nothing But Murder All Day


I'm that way about lunch.

Why I [Heart] Jon Stewart

Jon Stewart isn't always the best debater, but he caught Bill Kristol in a mess of twisted logic the other day.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNfamHulC6Y

Kristol was, as usual, trotting out some tired old conservative talking points, maintaining that the evil government will ruin health care. He made the following statements:

1. Government-run health care is expensive, inefficient, and ineffectual.
2. Our soldiers have a government-run health care system.
3. Our soldiers deserve, AND HAVE, the best health care system in the world.

   Stewart got a little distracted by Kristol's point that soldiers' deserve better health care than the general public, but he soon put all the pieces of Kristol's argument together to come up with the following conclusion:

4. The best health care system in the world is government-run.

Kristol tried to backpedal from this, but he'd already realized his mistake. Stewart then pinned him down that it's not so much that the government can't deliver good health care, but that it's just too expensive for the unwashed masses. A common conservative point of view, but one they don't like to admit in public.

********************************
Why is it that whenever I hear a conservative pundit, they have to resort to such twisted logic to get their point across? Either that or they appear to be trying way too hard to hide their true agenda. When they do show glimpses of their true agenda, they come across as monsters, like when:

• Rush Limbaugh made fun of Michael J. Fox's Parkinson's, or
  
• Glenn Beck, dispensing with an pretense that minorities watch his show, decried the fact that whites will be a minority in 50 years and encouraged whites to start making babies, or
• Bill O'Reilly told the son of 9/11 victim to shut up because he disagreed with his politics.
  

Not all conservatives are illogical monsters, but it does seem to me that the conservative point of view requires a lot more mental gymnastics to justify itself. When you have to really consider the nuances of every issue, and thoughtfully include alternative viewpoints, conservative ideals eventually lose out. It's no coincidence that intellectuals lean toward the left and there are more bullies on the right. After all, slavery, segregation, denial of voting rights-- these were all conservative ideals at one time.

Like Steven Colbert says, reality has a liberal bias.

The Box Collector

Here are most of the boxes I used to move into my new home recently. (This picture doesn't tell the whole story, since the bigger boxes have multiple smaller boxes inside them.) For the past two years, these boxes had been stored in my brother's crawlspace.

When I went into the crawlspace to collect my boxes in preparation for the move, I had to admit something about myself:

I'm a box collector.

I've done it for years now, probably because I move so often. Because every home is a temporary one, I want to hang on to the boxes that were so helpful to me during the last move. Meanwhile, I buy new stuff and keep the boxes it came in, in case I'll need them for my next move. (In my latest move I probably had at least a dozen shoe boxes, for example.)

Some boxes have been in my life a long time. I got the one above when I left my first public library job in 1994. It's a nice big, sturdy box, with handle-holes, made for transporting books. For 15 years, through 11 moves, I've filled it up with my oversize books-- atlases, coffee table novelties, and large comic books-- and lugged it to my new place. It's been with me longer than most of the people in my life.

My predilection for keeping boxes was really just a symptom of my transient nature. But now that I've bought a house, I'm putting down roots and don't anticipate another move. And so it's time to deal with my "problem." I need to let go of my boxes. The first step was letting my brother throw out a bunch of empty ones that were not even employed in this move. There was a pile of them left in my empty apartment and he wanted to throw them out. I grit my teeth and said, "I'm going to look the other way. You do what you need to do."

Then a friend of my brother's family was looking for boxes because she was moving. I reluctantly agreed to let her at my beautiful, beautiful box collection. It's time to let go. So I piled all my boxes in the corner of my spare bedroom and let her take what she wanted. I was a little offended when she rejected some of them. In other cases, she took the box but left the lid! How can you disrespect the sanctity of the box like that? Why, a moving box without the lid is like...like...like... well, I can't think of a better metaphor than a box without a lid!

I was secretly thankful that, before I let select her boxes, I had put a few special ones in the closet. Like the library box above. It's been in my life too long to be discarded like that.

Now let me tell you about my bag collection...

Language Stickler Buys a House

During the hectic final days before the closing on my new awesome house (which successfully happened last week-- woo-hoo!), I received an email from the assistant to my mortgage loan officer.

Before the mortgage holding company could process the loan, they needed some documentation to explain why my W2's show my annual income so much higher than my (so far) biweekly paychecks would indicate. (There's a clear, but long, explanation for this-- having to do with my summer contract-- but it did require another flurry of paperwork to sort out.)

But they didn't explain it quite that way. The mortgage company told my loan officer they needed following: "Satisfactory explanation from employer why borrowers YTD and W2 income is so much higher then his bi weekly pay [sic]."

This is a professional correspondence between a mortgage company and a loan officer, and they can't even exhibit a basic grasp of possessives and comparative phrases? Plus, who are they calling bi?

And these are the people who will be in charge of hundreds of thousands of dollars of my money?

Is this why the mortgage industry crashed?

...mortgagor owe's more then there income...