The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/black-friday-terrorism.mp3[/podcast]black friday terrorism

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It’s Black Friday today.  Unless you’re living in a cave on a remote mountain in a country you don’t know the name of, today is officially SHOPPING DAY.  Big sales, big stores, big news.  A lot of stores opened at midnight for folks waddling away from Turkey dinners only hours ago who join their fellow consumers in the long lines at ToysRUs or Sears or WalMart.  You snooze after the Thanksgiving pie, you definitely lose.

It’s early afternoon here at blackblogcentral, a bunker deep in the Midwest heartland miles away from the closest mall now under siege.  Already news flashes are lighting up the War Room screens, mostly happy reports from giggling retailers, but one troubling crawler reported that at a San Fernando WalMart a woman sprayed fellow shoppers with pepper spray in order to get to one of a limited number of X-boxes.

In light of the recent rash of unprovoked spraying of Occupy protesters, this may be a new trend.  Force Shopping.  While I don’t condone it — pepper spraying, I mean, not mass shopping, which I certainly do not approve of —  I can appreciate the tactic under these martial conditions.  Let’s be honest, sale shopping is war.  People are trampled, crushed, elbowed and knocked down.  A modern consumer should be more armed than just carrying a hefty handbag or wielding a massive shopping cart.  Guerilla tactics, trench hand-to-hand, diversionary incendiaries and high decibel sound immobilizers:  these are the insurrectionist sale shopping strategies of the future.

Let the media wring its uncalloused, pampered hands all it wants, this is only the first salvo.  Mortality rates will soar as profits are maximized.  Sales will start before Thanksgiving Day dinners, families will divide between the armchair quarterbacks and their mallwife warriors.  Blood and cranberries will be spilled.  That, I humbly suggest, is the true price of Christmas.  This year, stuff your stocking with tear gas canisters.  Santa doesn’t give a damn who’s naughty and nice — he wants a winner.

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Well, as the wise guyz always like to say:  when the goin gets tough, the tough get goin.   Never one to contradict the sages, Skeeter’s goin away awhile.  Got some turkeys back in Wisconsin to eat, got some travelling up into the Yukon for a job prospect, got stuff to do other than track down a computer and try to file a post for this blogsite.  So… if you two or three readers need a dose of Daddle, scroll down the site for some of those earlier posts you might have missed.  Or just been avoiding.   I’ll be back when the frostbite heals….

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/audo-version-keep-em-barefoot-and-pregnant.mp3[/podcast]audo version —- keep em barefoot and pregnant

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I read the other day that Bank of America was planning to charge $59 a year for fees on using their debit cards.  Apparently the new finance laws are going to cut back the swipe fees from an average of 44 cents a card use to a cap of about two bits.  Banks were pulling 19 billion dollars from these small print fees, but now they’ll only get barely over 10 billion.
Down here at the fiscally challenged South End, we had an ATM machine at Tyee Store for awhile.  Three dollar fee for every transaction.  You’d see folks extracting $10 to pay for their cigarettes and lottery tickets and think:  holey moley, that’s a usury fee of 30%.  But they pay for it later.  Actually, it just sort of disappears from their account and I suspect they never really bother to do the math.
The banks are betting that these same folks won’t notice and won’t care.  These are the same financial giants who gave folks subprime loans without one thought concerning their ability to make long term payments.  These are the monetary wizards headhunted from our physics departments who gave us our current recession and who took TARP money but never plowed it back into a recovery.  These are the folks who decry government regulation and live pretty much by the motto BUYER BEWARE.
I guess it’s hard to demonize the folks my neighbors use to run their transactions at the local stores.  They run their credit cards and pay the minimum monthly payment.  They swipe, but they never gripe.  They lost their job, lost their savings, lost their house….but they’ll pay the 5 dollar a month debit card fee.  And when the time comes, and it will, they’ll use the pawn shop for a loan.  Eventually they’ll go the Pay Day Loan or Money Tree and pay huge usury fees, all legal, all sanctioned, all owned by our mega-banks.  The poor get poorer, that much is true.  They need to get smarter.  Probably why we’re making all those cuts in education is all I can figure….

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/audio-version-culinary-curiosities1.mp3[/podcast]audio version — culinary curiosities

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I’ve been living with a couple crocks of fermenting cabbage this fall, what the peasants of Eastern Europe call saurkraut.  No, it’s not really a South End variant of saurnettle … or sour anything for that matter.  But it is a tradition at our shack.  We shred huge heads of local cabbage with our antique slicer/dicer, 3 horizontal blades on a maple track that a box slides over with the cabbage held inside, a primitive but effective giant grater.  Great care should be taken not to mix epidermis, fingernails and blood into the crock below.
You add some salt every layer or so and for our recipe, you add lots, and I mean lots, of garlic.  Probably some concoction passed down by a mixed marriage of Pole and Italian fearful of vampires in the neighborhood.  When the crock is full, you put a wood top on and weight it down and then you wait.  Pretty soon the cabbage starts to break down and just like homebrew, the stuff starts to ferment.  Not rot, mind you, although the odor is more than reminiscent.
I will admit that kraut is an acquired taste.  If you’re making 12 gallons of the stuff, you probably acquired more than the taste, you might need a 12 step program for addiction.  Folks who walk in the front door often stagger backwards first whiff.  Explanations don’t really cut the aroma and most guests just smile wanly, probably wondering if next visit we’ll be sporting babushkas and making blood sausage.
The South End may be primitive, but they hadn’t counted on barbarism.
So far the neighbors haven’t complained.  Course, they’re usually upwind.  If the storms keep pounding the westward coast, they’ll be fine.  If we go into sudden doldrum — or, God forbid,  an air inversion —  I expect For Sale signs to proliferate like mushrooms and property values to plummet.  Who’d have guessed South End real estate was so closely linked to sauerkraut and global climate change?  I’m just hoping polar bears don’t start changing their dietary habits.

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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/audio-version-stop-overeducating-us.mp3[/podcast]audio version — stop overeducating us

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I been hearing a lot of chatter on Hot Talk Radio about the high cost of a college degree these days, how it’s not worth the cost of the sheepskin, how it forces our young’uns into an early  bankruptcy, all these B.A.’s, M.A.’s and PhD’s in useless fields, no jobs, no prospects, no hope.  We got too many smart, over-educated people, apparently.  Better to train kids for vocational skills.  Or burger flipping.
Course, I also hear on the same Hot Talk that it’s the unions that are driving the country into the ground economically.  High wages, excessive benefits  — real Job Killers for the corporate Job Creators.  They want to keep minimum wage maybe a lot more minimum, so when they bust the unions, they can boost profits.  More profits, more jobs.  Just pay a little less.
They rant and rave about the illegal immigrants taking our American jobs, you know, the grape pickin, pea pickin,, agri-frickin work all our kids would jump right into if they didn’t have to compete with Hispanic families willing to work for, oh, slave wages.  Am I stoopid or is this a frontal assault on not only the working class but on the educated class too?  I guess if you got a Harvard MBA you’re entitled to the whole pie  — the crumbs maybe we can redistribute to the little people.
I’m one of those folks who went to college, got a degree, spent a fortune, then never got a job.  Course, in full disclosure, I didn’t want a job.  I wanted an education.  I wanted to think critically, to have some book learning for a foundation, to associate with people who were brilliant in their fields and have some of that brilliance rub off a little.  I wanted to learn how to learn, to use that to keep on learning, to figure out that college maybe could be a means to a job and a career, but it could also be just a love of knowledge.
I certainly understand some graduates feeling gypped they went in debt to acquire a sheepskin that’s not going to get them a job …. But I don’t understand the assault on universities themselves.  Course, I didn’t get a PhD so maybe that doctorate would’ve helped explain it.  I figure, though, I need more education, not less.  So do these critics….

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