Am I Blog Enough For You?

I saw that on a license plate last week. The car was a Miata, and a young blonde girl was driving it. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but I’ll bet she gets stared and honked at all the time. How did this get past the censors at the DMV?

NYTimes last Sunday had an amazing article about how the rural, middle part of the country is getting more poorer and more crimier. Some fun facts from the article:

   ¶The average person in one county in Nebraska (Loup) makes $6,600 a year.

   ¶Of the 25 poorest counties in America, more than half are in Nebraska, Texas, or South Dakota

   ¶There were 300 times more seizures of meth labs in Iowa than in New York and New Jersey combined

   ¶Drug-related homicides in rural areas tripled over the last decade. (In urban areas, they fell by 50%.)

   ¶47% of farm subsidies given out have towards buying or rebuiding IROC-Zs

Okay I made up that last one but be sure to check out the fun multimedia of “Interactive Feature: Rural America’s Downward Spiral.”

Does this mean that S.’s books about happy farm animals having adventures together are a bunch of bullshit?

Hey, Safe From Harm by Massive Attack is playing. That always reminds me of the Cosmodemonic Internet Concern. (I was looking back to see if you were looking back at me to see me looking back at you.)

Which reminds me of another news article from last weekend, this one in the San Jose Mercury News. I hope that one is sitting down as one is reading this because it appears that there were some executives who profited from their Internet companies even though most of the other shareholders lost money. (Read here, here, and here for mention of the CIC’s fearless leader.) It’s unpleasant to confront such a shocking truth I know, but now that we have learned our lesson and won’t be fooled again let’s go out and buy a bunch of stuff because that’s the way to fight terrorism. Good.

One thing about my new job is that I cover Asia as well as Southwest America. So I work a whole entire working day doing some work and some other work. Then when it’s time to go home from all that work, Asia wakes up and has its own exigencies. Usually they just send us P.O.’s and that’s fine, but lately they have been figuring out that I’m the kind of guy who can’t help but answer certain questions and calling me on my cell phone as I drive home. My Sunday night is their Monday morning, and I have taken to shutting off my cell phone then. Oh well, too much business is a problem that a lot of companies probably wouldn’t mind having right now.

One last thing before I go to bed: Today I went out to lunch with some sales people and some people from one of our 7,000 resellers. For some reason a woman started talking about how she’s driving to LA to see Brian Setzer play on Christmas. That’s fine by me, but then she started talking about rockabilly and how some people are all into rockabilly and some started getting into swing. After a bunch more talking about this she asked me if I knew what she meant by people who are into rockabilly. I asked in all seriousness, “You mean those people who dress like the cast of Happy Days or like Sha-Na-Na?” This got a big laugh, and I’m not sure why. I was just trying to make sure I understood what she was talking about, certainly not to be derisive because this woman seemed to be so into it. So then I said, “I don’t know a whole lot about rockabilly, but I do like Carl Perkins and Wanda Jackson a lot.” This only got an “oh” from Rockabilly girl. So I threw out The Stray Cats and The Beat Farmers. I seemed to be getting warmer but by then the topic of rockabilly had pretty much played itself out. I was slightly confused by that whole part of the conversation and was happy when it was over.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 10th, 2002 at 11:15 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.