The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/CLICK-TO-HEAR-saving-time.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR —saving time

Even down here in the bucolic nettle fields of the pastoral South End, our laid back, porch-rocking, garden hoeing pace is definitely picking up speed.  More and more satellites are whizzing through all that space junk overhead to bring us faster weather reports, more TV channels, instant text messaging and close-up photos of the rocker on the porch from Google Earth we don’t have so much time to sit in anymore.  Our attention spans now aren’t long enough to make it through the Stanwoodopolis Weekly Gazette so we check Yahoo headlines on the computer that rockets in on DSL.  If you’re younger than 30, you never looked at a newspaper in your whole life.  Why bother, you can get the only news you’re really interested in on Facebook, what your ‘friends’ are doing, news enough, I guess, these days.

Our old shack has its share of 21st century gizmoes.  Microwave oven, digital telephone answering machine, ma’s nano-pod, two computers (his and hers) and all the peripherals right down to a podcast microphone.  We got lazerized CD players, DVD players, a remote controlled TV antenna, digital alarm clocks, electric guitars.  We look like the Jetsons without the robot maid.  And that’s on back order from Amazon….

This is all the stuff advertised as Time-Saving Devices back when.  Help do your chores more efficiently.  Give you leisure time galore.  Free you to live your dream.  Be your True Self, not a slave to the menial tasking days.  Right…
Maybe I’m too old and too cynical.  Maybe Facebook updating IS your true self.  Maybe bad TV IS the dream.  Maybe what we wanted all along was something to keep us busy, keep us constantly entertained, keep us from sitting too long on the rocker contemplating the front yard that needs mowing.  The world is smaller and definitely accelerating.  The question I got, rocking to an older rhythm, is what the hell was the point of saving time if everything got speeded up so fast all our free time is gone?  Well, I could waste more time on this, but I have to hurry up and update this blogsite.

Another woman has come forward to accuse our President of sexual harassment, no little thing when you call out the most powerful bully on the planet. Trump, no great legal mind, offered up his best defense: he wouldn’t jump someone who looked like her. And besides, he never laid eyes on her, much less hands or lips.

Plenty good enough for half of the voters, I’m betting. They already cast a verdict even after 16 or so other women had accused the playboy king of the same impropriety. The same folks, I’m betting, who wanted Clinton impeached for his infidelities. What’s good for the goose apparently doesn’t apply to the gander. One guy is a predator, the other, well, just the perks of a billionaire thug. No, I don’t get it either….

Obviously a lot of guys think the #MeToo Movement is about them, just a green light for the usual. Kavanaugh was confirmed, justice served like the same warm dish Anita Hill received. Nothing much changed other than louder outrage. Boys will be boys and rapists get away with murder. Trump defends himself by calling his victim ugly. Yeah, something’s ugly all right.

I’d like to think we’re becoming a better, kinder, more sensitive society, I really would. I’d like to think we learn from our lessons, that we can empathize with the victims of injustice, that our folks who claim to be religious might actually be religious. I’d like to believe we’d elect a President we could admire, who would be a role model for all us citizens, maybe show is a Better Light, a more enlightened Path.

Course, I’d like to believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy too, but they haven’t come visiting since I was a kid. Too ugly for me anyway. Plus I never met them before, how would they know if I was naughty or nice?

The other day I bought a bag of Frito-Lay potato chips and as is my wont from my early reading days as an 8 year old studying cereal boxes, I read the packaging.  These potatoes, I was informed in a tidy paragraph written by public relations specialists who had no doubt conducted extensive customer surveys, were FARM-RAISED.  Imagine!  I’m guessing grown right in the ground.  Tractors, fields, insecticides, migrant labor:  farm raised.  BOLD TYPE.  Major advertising feature.  The oils used were ‘natural’ too and this was worth trumpeting.
Holy cow manure, Batman, what’s the NEXT big thing in the food biz?  Cheetos raised hydroponically?  Personally I’m not sure consumers are really ready for food grown in the wild.  Bugs, fungus, bacteria, all that creepy stuff a farmer is ill-equipped to handle outside a laboratory or a petri dish.  We can grow meat without legs now, protein on a rope, and rumor has it the burger chains are nearing a breakthrough on cloning buns, with or without sesame seeds, directly on to the meat patty grown in secret underground hermetically sealed bunkers of Monsanto and Dow Chemical.  You think they’re going to stick a filthy leaf of lettuce or a listeria riddled tomato on their antiseptically pure chemoWhopper?  Get real.  Not….

This whole Slow Food movement just flies in the face of 21st century culinary logic.  We invented TV dinners so we’d have the time to watch more TV instead of wasting countless hours messing with the cooking of raw potentially contaminated food.  These purveyors of old school eating call themselves environmentalists, but what about the damage from a bazillion cookbooks printed on paper from slaughtered trees?  Next thing you know, they’ll advocate recipes for bark.  A backlash is coming, count on that, the next step beyond vegetarianism.  Stop eating plants.  Stop the killing of carrots.  It’s not only cruel, it’s filthy with germs and dirt.  So Frito-Lay, nice try.  But I’m afraid the world isn’t ready — we’ve turned the corner on 19th century farm products.  Work on synthetic broccoli that tastes like Snickers if you want to stay profitable.  Hook the kids and you own the future.  Next time you need marketing advice, call me first.  Save yourself some embarrassment.

The acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan stepped down this morning, apparently to spend more time with his family. A lot of Trump folks seem to crave family time these past couple of years, but this one is a bit more interesting, given that reports of his withdrawal for the nomination were the result of investigations into a couple of family disturbances many years ago. Police reports indicate a squabble in an affluent section of Seattle that ultimately led to a backyard brawl. Patrick seems to have lost the bout, nose bloodied, hand bleeding, after what his now ex-wife claims was precipitated by his punching her in the stomach. Seattle, a tough town, all right. She grabbed the kids and lit out for sunny Florida. Couple years later her boy beat her with a baseball bat. Family life, I guess, isn’t what it’s cracked up to be by the folks exiting the Trump White House.

Now that he was officially nominated as Sec. of Defense, the FBI began to do the background checks. Lots of ghosts in that family closet so Mr. Shanahan decided maybe to drop out. Good timing, Mr. Secretary. You just sent 1000 troops over to Iran, what you called a defensive maneuver, and now you want to throw in the towel. Sure, the country’s in good hands, Trump and Bolton taking turns at the wheel and all, but geez, maybe you might’ve seen this coming. Obviously you need some martial arts training. That, or the mizzus was teaching you a lesson you needed learning. It is called Defense Secretary.

Of course, there’s always the slim possibility that Trump decided to dump his latest Cabinet Crew. I know, doesn’t seem likely, given his loyalty to those who serve. No doubt whatsoever that he has someone lined up to take Shanahan’s place in these perilous times. It’s what makes him the greatest Commander-in-Chief of the last couple years, and I mean that as a Yuge compliment.

From my viewpoint in steerage the boat seems completely rudderless. The Commander is now starting his campaign run and given his notorious lack of attention span, this should suck up all his available time when he’s not rerunning Fox and Friends. Some of my cohorts were heartened back in the good old days of this Administration when the Donald hired on generals to run the country for him. Adults in the room, my colleagues sighed in great relief. They, like most of his picks for Cabinet, are long gone now from the sandbox, most of them followed by taunts of ‘Loser!’ from the boy who hired them in the first place. I’m sure, and I’m sure you are too, his next pick to run the military will be a thoughtful one.