The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

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

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.

[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

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.

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

Someone asked me recently if I was one of those xenophobic yahoos who hate seeing newcomers roll in to the South End with their yachts and their 40 foot travel trailers and their McMansion bluff homes.  I said I think you got me confused for someone else, my evil twin maybe.  If my curmudgeonly attitude has confused me with my doppleganger sibling, I apologize to all my new immigrant neighbors, the tired, the not so poor, those dot.com masses, yearning to breathe free the salty seabreeze we share.  Because, you see, I’m an immigrant too.
Oh I know there are plenty of Old Timers proud of the fact they were born here, raised here and will no doubt fall of their milking stool with a heart attack someday.  Their parents and their grandparents stayed put.  Their names are now our road signs and their legacy is that they were immobile.  My interrogator, once we established my correct identity, asked how long I’d lived on these shores.  Well, sir, about half my life, I said, which, he judged by the grey in my beard and the senility in my thinking, to be a very long spell indeed.
I don’t have a gate to close behind me now that I’m an Old Timer myself.  Wouldn’t if I did.  I believe in cultural cross pollination —- makes life a lot more interesting to have neighbors from all over, from all walks of life and all points of view.  Those folks who came early and stayed late, who raised crops and families, who never dreamed of greener grass  ….. well, good on em.  They’re the same folks who made Stanwood what it is today and we’ll honor them down at the Historical Society all right.  But we all hitched up the Toyota conestoga and then stayed for our own reasons.  Just like all our ancestors did when they left Europe and Scandinavia and Asia and Africa and Mexico.  We’re all immigrants and when we start getting uppity about our pioneer kin, go sit with a member of the Tulalips or the Stilly or the Swinomish.  As for us, the Southendomish, we got the gate open, the door unlocked and we’ll leave the light on for the next wayfaring stranger.

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

Lately I’ve been reading the letters to the editor of the local paper down in Everett.  If you thought the impasse in Congress over the Debt Ceiling was turning ugly, you maybe should avoid the Herald’s comment page since they took out one of their comic strips without asking readers first.  You’d think the paper was burning babies or calling for Spanish Only in America.
One lady wrote in to say she ONLY read their stupid newspaper for its comics and this particular strip was her all time favorite.  She was thinking of not reading the paper at all now.  I mean, who can blame her?  Sorta like not watching TV because her favorite advertiser quit advertising.
But now we got a war of reader writers weighing in on what comics are stupid and what ones aren’t funny and which ones are so offensive to their family values they can’t let their kids half a mile near a newspaper.  Which explains a lot of things, you ask me.  Even ‘Peanuts’ took a hard shellacking.
Course, I got my own opinion of the comic section.  Not enough of one to write in to the editor about, but I figure I can skip a couple of strips without feeling gypped on my subscription rates.  And anyway, now I got the Letters to the Editor page to make up for any lost belly laughs.  You got a gripe with Congressional deadlock, check out who voted them in.  You’ll laugh til you cry.

[podcast]https://www.skeeterdaddle.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/CLICK-TO-HEAR-occupy-your-head.mp3[/podcast]CLICK TO HEAR —- occupy your head