The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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….

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

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.

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

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….

[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

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/2011/11/audio-version-let-yer-fingers-do-the-talking.mp3[/podcast]audio version — let yer fingers do the talking

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.