Atomictumor

A while back I reported on The Robot Ate Me, an band (guy, Ryland Bouchard) out of Oregon, touring and coming to Nashville (no linky, because I’m lazy). Well, he came, and went, and we ended up not being able to go, although when I emailed him he said he was trying to book the Pilot Light, but they were busy that day. Yep, he’s so cool that he answers emails. He also handles all of the orders himself, shipping the merchandise and sticking little goodies in the box like posters and stickers.

But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

Yesterday, a surprise package I ordered for GAC (and that she found out about as soon as I ordered it, so it really wasn’t much of a suprise. I’m lousy with suprises) arrived from Swim Slowly records, containing one of their earlier CDs, On Vacation, of which we had almost all the music from the intarweb (gasp), but this band being one of those situations where they need the money more than I do (I do Whirlwind Heat the same way), and their newest record, Good World.

Now, The Robot Ate Me is a damn hard band to pin down. Ryland sings with the voice of a 4 year old in a post-pubescent body. He has used somewhat unconventional means to create the music (circular saws, in one song), to great effect. This new record, recorded using an old 80’s drum machine, and whats either a clarinet or bassoon, is a bit of a departure from the previous records, not only because of the concept (some kind of spider monster, and owl god, and some other things. I don’t know) but because the music was boppy and great. We listened to the record twice in a row, on account of being so good.

But like I was saying above, its great seeing a talented artist that’ll email you back.

This quotes quiz has been trotted around a couple of big sites, so perhaps some of you have seen it already. But anyway, here’s a quiz. Did Ann Coulter say it, or did Hitler??

And props to whoever I got that pic from. It’s creepy.

So says CNN (or Fox, if thats your bag - wait, as of 2 PM they haven’t reported it yet):

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Republican-controlled Senate refused Wednesday to raise the minimum wage, rejecting an election-year proposal from Democrats for the first increase in nearly a decade.

What I don’t get, and never really got about the whole minimum wage debate, is that raising the wage only changes the scale of things, but doesn’t get anybody ahead. Now, I’m not an economic genius, and C’d my way through economics in high school thanks to my rugged good looks, but it seems to me that it works like fractions. You can bump up that bottom denominator, say go from 9/16 to 18/32, but the end result is the same, because that numerator goes up with the denominator.

Damn, that was awkward. Lets think of it with fish sticks. No, wait, thats not going to work.

OK, I have no analogy. But minimum wage, while a fine idea to keep people from getting paid like illegal immigrants (whoops, wrong issue), is a bad idea. Want the minimum wage to go up, kids? Stop working for that much. Get another job. It doesn’t take qualifications to get more than $5.15, or even the $7.25 that Ted Kennedy wanted so bad. All it takes is looking for a job.

Seriously, man, damnation, I’m really not conservative in any sense of the word, but does that seem so hard for these democrats to understand? We raise minimum wage, and all that does is devalue the dollar.

Wanna help poor people? Check this out Washington, what you need to do to fix all these people raising kids on minimum wage and whatnot is

1. Give them decent health and dental (with vision) insurance. And Tenncare (or equivalent) doesn’t cut it, there needs to be universal health insurance, or there needs to be some mad caps on how much doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies can charge. Seems one answer is easier than the other.
   Of course, to do this, we’d have to pay more taxes, and these “don’t tread on me” boneheads aren’t going to let that happen. C’est la vie.
2. Start busting out some LIVING WAGE action. We need to ensure that people are above federal poverty guidelines, and a $7.25, in Oak Ridge, isn’t going to do it.
   How do we go about doing this? I don’t know. Thats why I’m not running for office. Seems to me, again, it’d be an increase in taxes, and now we hear the “don’t pay for people to slack” crowd start in.
3. Make crap more affordable. Anybody with a reasoning brain can tell you that sales tax is a tax on the poor. Drop sales taxes anyway possible on essentials (food, gas, etc), and bump em in elsewhere. State income tax? Sure, sounds good. You can pay those taxes with the money you save on the sales tax (at least I could, once I did the math). Course, now we get the “no state taxes, honk your horn” crowd that screwed up the last attempt to fix this.

You know, now that I look at it, there seems to be a common thread in all of this. What kind of people would
a: decline an increase in taxes to help those down on the luck
b: gripe up and down about how everybody on financial assistance packages are lazy
c: rabidly oppose a state income tax that would relieve sales taxes?

You got it, misanthropes would oppose it.

Now, I’ll give a dollar to whoever can come up with that analogy I was looking for up there…

Recently the Oak Ridge City Council voted 5-2 in favor of a $250,000 loan and an 8 year, $250,000/yr property tax abatement for some company called Pro2Serve, who wanted to move from a spot on the Turnpike near where Roane State used to be to the ORNL campus.

Now, abatement is a big word, so I looked it up, and it means exactly what I thought it did, which is that the city is going to forgive $250,000 worth of property taxes a year for 8 years, so in 2014, Pro2Serve will have made at least two and a quarter million dollars. In return, Pro2Serve looks to hire 200 more employees, and…?
In the meantime, the city couldn’t afford for little Jimmy to ride the bus next year.

What the hell kind of priorities are these? We can talk about budgets and placements and ins and outs and cash flows all damn day, but when the sun goes down, what I’m taking home is that Oak Ridge cares more that Pro2Serve and ORNL manage to get a new technology park off the ground than taking care of the existing citizens. Councilman Beehan, one of the two dissenting votes, tends to agree with me:

“I’m struggling to see what the city of Oak Ridge gets as far as a revenue stream,” Beehan said.”

Indeed. It looks like we have a few hundred employees, mostly living in Knox County, contributing zip to the city. If I were one to call things like they are, I’d say we have some weak willed, self serving politicians who crapped out the next 8 years to pony up to the labs and big business.

Problem is, it ain’t a deal if it’s this one sided, its just a good old fashioned screwing.

Work after a vaction is the pits. It’s too bad I’m not independently wealthy. I’d write more about the vaction, but my head hurts right now. We all got sick over in our North Carolina cabin in the woods. Lugnut, Spotz, Father-in-Law, Eldest all got a stomach bug. Now it seems the cold I picked up while on vacation has developed into a nice sinus infection.

It could be worse.

The bug bites on my legs could be getting redder. The Missus thinks a brown recluse got a hold of me, but I don’t know. My legs aren’t rotting away, so I think maybe it wasn’t said spider. It was perhaps some other kind of wampus critter.

Hey, The Spotz and I caught a big ol’ catfish!

Who cares about bugbites and stomach bugs after that?