Renegade Blogger

Not a whole heck of a lot to report on today, it was a good day overall. We had a fairly large test in government maybe a week ago and your reading the words of the only A in the class, so that’s very nice. Lets see…after school I walked up to a local restaurant and turned in my application, some guy who seemed like he knew what he was doing talked to me, there trying out two others for the prestigious job of dishwasher this week and he’ll give me a call Friday or Monday and tell me what’s up. I guess it was a very informal interview, didn’t really give me time to get nervous which is good; I’ve got a tendency to start sweating a lot when I have a job interview, even for washing dishes. I don’t think I’ll get the job, washing dishes really isn’t that hard and with two people ahead of me…I figure my chances are slim, gotta start looking elsewhere I guess. Perhaps I’ll wait tho to see what happens. I’m looking to get a job because I’ve realized simply how freaking much it’ll cost me and someone else to travel after graduation, better start working somewhere…

I’d like to do a brief post on pork, the bad kind. Pork, or pork barrel projects are usually riders on bills that earmark government funds for things such as a $70,000 Paper Industry Hall of fame, say, $1.7 million for the International Fertilizer Development Association (source). So the idea behind this is that in turn for getting money for a specific cause or creating projects that will create jobs that people will vote for the incumbent come election time. “Look” they’ll be able to say “look what I bought our community”. And for the most part most of the public will be happy, they brought jobs to the area, who the heck’s gonna complain about that. We’ll, many people, more so when the projects are as bull as the ones listed above, and especially when its government funded.
So what the problem you’re thinking, well, take my state for example. The amount of pork coming to us could be dispersed equally over the states 11 and a half million people by giving each of them 33 bucks. But that’s not that bad you say, and your right here, but its states such as ooo say, Alaska that really cause problems. In Alaska your congressional reps have secured 984 dollars for every person. Now that, I think qualifies as excessive spending. Our government is expected to spend a whopping 9,698,986,720 billion dollars on pork in ’05. For that amount of money we could pay for roughly 484,000 4-year scholarships for college students to go to a public school. Or for that same amount we could have built 869,800 homes for the homeless or needy.* Instead we build a paper industry hall of fame.
Brilliant
Perhaps its time that the average citizen start paying just a bit more attention to congress, that or start calling em and come up a with a project that needs funding…
Oink Oink

*Statistics adapted from National Priorities Project data. http://nationalpriorities.org/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=182

So Buy Nothing Day has come to an end, it didn’t really work out like I had planned, we didn’t have the guts to stop shoppers and ask them…complex questions. So instead we traveled to a nearby mall and distributed flyers about BND. We left some presents tucked into the bra’s of scantily clad mannequins, in storefront windows and in other devious places. We have to edit the video footage we took but I’ll get that up here as soon as possible, as well as submit it to adbusters BND site. They’ve yet to post anything and are hopefully still getting pictures and whatnot in from the front. Now there are two things I’d like to comment on directly about yesterday.

Number 1. Can someone please explain to me why fights broke out? I mean honestly, your fighting over something that’s likely to get broken, well, in the fight. An think about this, is there something that’s honestly worth fighting for? I heard people were throwing laptops into the air and people would converge in some mass where it was to land to duke it out. If this is what Americas come down to, well, that’s plain out sad. I for one cannot fathom fighting over a product. There’s so much more to life than having the latest 400 dollar gamming system or the best laptop. For me the holidays have always centered around family and friends. It’s time off from school to relax and enjoy the company of relatives and the peacefulness of the time of year (well, mostly peaceful…). Perhaps its time we Americans took a step back and enjoyed the finer things in life.

Number 2. I have over 30 free (hopefully) samples that Chrysler/Jeep was giving away at the mall yesterday. I uhh… took them all. But before you get on me about stealing I’d like to paint the picture of what was going on. Jeep has this thing going on called Operation Gratitude in which we, the public are supposed to fill these jeeps with items to send to troops overseas. Fine, except for the excessive name dropping and product placement. I’m fine with supporting the troops, but this Jeep lady was obviously there to sell me these cars, having the vehicle stats close at hand. See, that I have a problem with, choose one, supporting the troops, or supporting building cars that get 13/18mpg. We called her out on the SUV’s low gas milage, she couldn’t really answer us. So anyway, after noticing two decent stacks of CD’s on a nearby table I decided to investigate. They were CD’s that presumably contain “Your Personal Woman’s Day Cookbook”. I haven’t loaded one in my computer yet. But see, this has nothing to do with getting the troops toiletries and whatnot and in my mind, there just another lovely example of advertising. And so as we were leaving I walked over to the table, set my clipboard down for a moment, looked at something, and then left…with a large stack of CD’s…

Enjoy the holidays folks.

Dennis over at Vingate writes about the end of 2005 in a way that truely rang true for me. I like this guys thinking.

With every year there comes a story. Everyone has a different version of the story–their year, their times, their places. With time flying so fast, it is hard to believe that we will soon be living the conclusion of one year and planning out another. It is even harder to believe that with the passing of 2005, this first decade of the new millenium will be half-way completed.

But don’t let this discourse fool you or lead you astray–we may be close to the end of the year, but we cannot use this time to reflect or reminisce. Instead, we must fit into our year every last thing we planned in January. This conclusion’s gotta be written, and it should be a good one, a full one, about a year well-spent, and a life well-lived. We should, in the end, have enjoyed each part of the year and improved ourselves throughout the year’s passage.

There’s a lot of story to be written and concluded in the next five weeks, and it is time to start living that story.

Read the full article here

It’s snowing outside, its cold and supposedly a foot of snow is coming our way, no matter its about time it snowed here in Cleveland. While it may be cold outside I for one am not, my feet hurt I’ve been yawning pretty much all day, but who cares, I’ve gotten my hands dirty, spent some good time with my grandma and enjoyed myself as I adventured through the world of chocolate chip cookies. You see, I rose at eight thirty this morning, grabbed some breakfast and headed over to my grandma’s house where I would participate in the 13 year old tradition of baking pies for thanksgiving with her. Finally, at age 17 I can finally make the apple pie all by myself, hehe, crust is no longer a problem (hasn’t been for awhile) and if I was so inclined I probably could do the chocolate rum pie that graces our table the next day as well. I think as I’ve grown older I’ve realized how much I like spending time with her, she’s a good cook and, well, I think some of it may have rubbed off as when I arrived home (after making two apple pies and the crust for three subsequent pies) I promptly grabbed the needed ingredients and started in on chocolate chip cookies. Now, let me say, I had some trouble and the layers of cookies that are now on the plate reflect them perfectly.

Layer 1: What I call the “Pancake cookie” layer. I guess my batter wasn’t stiff enough, so they turned out a bit flat. Plus my non-stick cookie sheet stuck, what the hell.

Layer 2: The…crispy round the edges. Has some crispiness around the edges as I switched sheets and added some flour to the mix. Results showed improvement.

Layer 3: After adding probably another third a cup, paming the pan and using an old sheet that has…character the cookies started coming out well, good looking (after I had a batch of small dinky cookies as I tried to figure out how much of this new and flour improved batter to use).

Mmm, cookies. I’d like to think that for the next few days politics would put itself on hold and people could just enjoy the day of excessive eating, but I suppose that wont happen. Did ya hear…

So this postcard showed up yesterday on PostSecret and it came at a good time for me, getting ready for Buy Nothing Day and everything. I mean, how true is that postcard, we live in such a consumerist society, were bombarded from the day were born! The average hour show in the US is probably, what, at least half commercials and if that isnt enough advertising has worked its way into radio, your drive to work via billboards and even now people have discovered a supreme waste of gas, the trucks that sole purpose in being built was to advertise. They dont carry anything, there just a roving billboard. I mean honestly, it isnt bad enough that you assault us from childhood, interrupt our commutes or stick your logo on book covers that our children will use every day but a roving truck! I guess what I’m griping about here is just how much is spent on advertising and how much is wasted. Wouldnt it be nice if we chose what we bought based on word of mouth, what our friends said rather than what some flashy mini-movie on TV showed us? Think about it, how many ads have you seen today…