[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/audio-version-beauty-in-the-eye-of-the-accountants.mp3[/podcast]audio version –beauty in the eye of the accountants
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In today’s newspaper there was a groundbreaking study showing ‘beautiful’ people have significant advantages over ‘ugly’ people. Better jobs, better chances for advancement, better salaries. Likelier to be happy, likelier to get bank loans with lower interest rates, likelier to marry a highly educated and equally attractive spouse. I double-checked to make certain it wasn’t a study funded by the Plastic Surgeons of America. Needless to say they’ll be inundated soon by unemployed college grads so wattle-neck deep in student loans already that another debt won’t matter much. A little liposuction might mean an extra 6 figures over a lifetime, so say the experts.
It came as a shock to me too that attractive folks have a leg up on us toads. Explains everything from TV commercials to beauty contests to presidential primaries. And here I thought brains and talent were my downfall all these years of unemployment, low wages and marginal socialization. If I’d only know …. A nip there, a tuck here, some botox occasionally, I might have had a chance. I coulda been a contender, not some chump sent packing to Palookaville’s South End. But back then our fearless researchers hadn’t defined beauty yet, which I had sadly been informed at an impressionable age, was in the eye of the beholder, not a scale or a matrix or a scientific formulation.
The study even calculated that beautiful people will make $230,000 more over a lifetime than those with ‘below average’ looks. I wish I hadn’t done it, but I took out a calculator and ran a study of my own, put my lifetime earnings up against the neighbors’, graphed out the disparities and concluded — scientifically — how really ugly I must be to make so radically much less. And … that’s assuming most of them are extremely good looking. If they’re not, I’m going to need a helluva lot more than some plastic surgery.
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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/audio-version-let-yer-fingers-do-the-talking.mp3[/podcast]audio version — let yer fingers do the talking
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I read in the news the other day that the average kid text messages 200 times per day. You might be skeptical of that number … unless you’ve sat in a room with some of these nimble fingerers. They will ignore an incoming meteor before they put down their I-phone or whatever device their parents have empowered them with. Hell, I even see the folks now just as addicted, drifting off from our conversation to check an incoming text message.
200 messages! The phone companies must be making a gazillion bucks on our kids. They’re making nearly as much on their folks.
People ask me — well, people who don’t know me, ask me— what my cellphone number is. When I tell them I don’t really have one, they look at me now like I just walked out of a jungle in Southendzonia, possibly the Missing Link between apes and Cellular Magnon Man. They check for opposing thumbs, incipient language skills, tool usage. Sadly, I fare poorly.
But in my defense, I have a telephone. Which, I point out, is connected to a digital answering machine and a computer modem. I receive and send e-mails. I can surf the Web. I just don’t happen to do it 24/7. I don’t want to be that connected. I don’t want to send or receive text messages 200 times a day. I’m just not that social an animal — and if that makes me maladjusted or by definition, sociopathic, I guess I will plead guilty on Facebook.
You know, when I join. Right after I buy my I-phone. The day after hell freezes over.
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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/audio-version-tv-nation.mp3[/podcast]audio version — tv nation
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I just saw a survey that showed where 30% of kids under the age of 4 years old have a TV in their room. Granted that Mom and Dad want their child not to feel deprived. No one, not even kidless me, wants a maladaptive, potentially hostile punk menacing his or her fellow pre-schoolers because of a deliberately imposed TV deficiency. Plus, it’s a great solution for a 2 year old’s fear of the dark. Boogieman under the bed? Believe me, he’ll pale in comparison to the nightly news.
I remember sitting in front of our first TV – a small box on metal legs with a rabbit ear antenna on top – waiting for Howdy Doody to come on down in the pre-dawn livingroom while we stared at the Indian chief test signal. TV didn’t program 24/7. No, it had the decency to Sign Off at 11 or midnight, let your brain de-fuzz awhile. Us kids would sneak a flashlight under the covers and read a book. At least until the Old Man came in and told us to go to sleep….
Obviously 30% of you don’t find anything wrong with parking a TV in the nursery. But I do. It feels like the scene in Invasion of the Body Snatchers where the parents — who’ve been snatched already — put the space pod under their kids’ beds. Somehow I doubt the tots are watching PBS. More likely they’re tuning in to 30 commercials an hour, making mental notes for what cereal to whine for or what candy bar or toy or the car they’ll want at 16. Might as well join us adults in the Consumer Nation. Plus it’s a great babysitter. Don’t worry about attention deficiency when they reach 6. They’ll have a computer by then.
Tomorrow I’ll probably see the study that 50% of kids under 7 have their own credit card. Just order up what they want with their I-phone and have it delivered overnight. Call now — our advertisers are standing by.
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[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/audio-version-for-sale-real-cheap-greece.mp3[/podcast]audio version — for sale real cheap — greece
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The world has shrunk up so small these days, when Greece makes noises in the EU that maybe they’ll just go bankrupt instead of paying off their debts for a party binge they’ve been enjoying for a decade, even Elger Bay Store instantly raises its prices so that now vino costs what a new car used to. Gas prices jump up and down on daily speculation. Stock market looks like some of my friends when they’re off their meds and Congress makes speeches that make the Occupy Wall Street crowd look positively visionary. Any little tremor in the economy of some country the size of the South End sends shock waves that amplify along the international spinal cord until investors and hedge fund managers hit the panic button to sell Sell SELL!!! Course, next day they’re buy Buy BUY!!! And Congress forms another committee to investigate oil price manipulation.
I think back fondly to those golden days when all my pals traded in their jobs for a warm pair of slippers and some flannel pajamas, then spent their days in front of a computer speculating on the day trade market. Easy money back then. You bet on a stock market that’s in heavy bubble mode, every day is a sunny day. Kinda like buying houses in Florida on borrowed money. Nothing to it.
Ponzi schemes are nothing new. Just takes a few million suckers to make em work. Sure, we had a little setback here this past few years. But other than a few scapegoats, nobody went to jail. Most of em got big bonuses or fat retirement packages. You think things are gonna change, you maybe should live in Oz. Bank of America — I love the name — BOA had a pretty good quarter of profits last quarter so they decided to hit us up with a 5 buck fee to use a debit card. Got a little backlash, they did, and backed off, but they’ll nick you, trust me on that. Next time they won’t use the large print.
I wish I could be more optimistic about the world, especially since I live down here on the South End, which I used to believe was a backwash so remote, nothing except a nuclear war would penetrate our isolationist tendencies. But now it’s clear that practically everybody and everything is a ripple on the global pond and by the time that ripple hits our far shores, it’s practically a tsunami. Probably explains why my pals quit daytrading. The only trading they’re doing these days is swapping out their jammies and slippers for some waterproof boots. The water is up but not all our boats are rising with it this time.
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