The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

Like about 23% of my fellow Americans, I watched the Democratic debates the last couple of nights. More of us interested than I thought since I thought maybe me and a couple of news junkies and most of the lying media would be the only ones interested enough to tune in. The rest, I figured, would just wait for the Russian trolling ads to waft through their Facebook feeds.

Interesting group of wannabes is my take-away. A third were women, one was gay, a couple were various races, some were very young and plenty were very old. What you’d call, for lack of a better word, diverse. Latinos, blacks, gay, straight, women, old and young, a pretty full rainbow of Americans. Kind of gave me hope for a country that lately seems dominated by white old guys. White old farts, really, who seem pissed off they don’t see themselves reflected in the American mirror. After all, aren’t they the fairest of them all?

The Supreme Court pronounced yesterday that they aren’t going to weigh in on gerrymandering. Go right ahead and use an algorithm to insure the Party in power can keep that power. McConnell probably threw a champagne party. All I can say is Democracy is still a dog fight. Money still talks and bullshit walks, as my old buddy Snooky used to say. But I’m heartened to hear folks talking once again about the poor, about immigrants’ rights, about income inequality, about something more compassionate than protecting the middle class, which is wall that I heard the last bunch of elections.

I’m not going to handicap this election. I’m not even going to predict which one of these 20 people might be the candidate. But I think I’m going to like just about any one of them for standing up for the poor, the defenseless, the downtrodden and the forgotten. Hopefully we’ve moved past the time when the beleaguered white guy is to be protected and the rich need more tax relief. Folks and their spokesman Trump will say the Democrats have moved left, that they’re now Socialists. I say about damn time….

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/audio-version-beauty-in-the-eye-of-the-accountants.mp3[/podcast]audio version CLICK ON THIS TO PLAY Read more »

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.