Primary Day
Tue., September 9, 12:12 PM
They’re holding primary elections in our town today, to decide whether or not to keep the current mayor. The challengers have lots of complaints about him, but I haven’t heard one constructive suggestion to resolve the complaints. In any case, we’ve been flooded with ads from all three contenders for the past month, and I have left them all on the counter for Husband. I will vote, of course, because I always do. However, Husband may or may not, though I have brought up the subject several times. Most recently: “Do you want to vote next week?” Answer: “No.”
I made plans to pick up M.D. after work and bring her to the polls before I take her home. Simple, neat. And this morning, from Husband, “What time are we gonna go?” Does the phrase “I’ll kill him” sound familiar?
I actually started juggling times in my head – if I get off work at four and don’t have to get M.D. till five… Wait a minute; that can’t be done. It takes him fifteen minutes to get out of the house. “I can’t take you, you’ll have to ask U.D.” He says, “I thought we could go out to eat after….” Let us suppose – just for the mental exercise – that I drop off M.D. and take him out after that. By the time we had supper – believe me, he takes longer to order than it takes most people to eat – it would be dark. Who’s gonna drive home? And we can’t call U.D. because she’s got a date.
It will be interesting to see whether he actually asks U.D. He could offer to treat her and her friend to supper. Don’t be silly; that would make sense.
Notes from the news: Someone has done a study (announced last week) indicating that bullying is not a good thing. It should be stopped while the bullies are still young. The article goes on to enumerate the damage done, not only to their victims but also to the bullies themselves. Hello? Where were these geniuses when I wrote Non Illegitimati Carborundum?
Every half hour last Friday I was hearing the news about what’s wrong with productivity. I’ve written about that too. An economist somewhere now mentions that the unemployment figures go down when people’s benefits end or when they just lose hope of getting more work. The rest of that equation? When you get one person to do the work of two or three, it increases productivity, supposedly leading to greater profits. Someone has suddenly realized that it also leads to fewer jobs. Let us consider one more result. A large inventory of finished goods is not profit; it does not become profit until you get it out the door. And if there are fewer people working, to whom are going to sell your goods?
Maybe the next question is, does a market for those goods exist for those finished goods in the countries where they’ve outsourced all the jobs?
Best laugh I’ve had recently (not counting Kevin and Kell) was on “The Resident’s Life,” a new medical show on The Learning Channel. In his leisure time, one of the residents goes “jeeping,” a sort of off-road way to ruin a vehicle. (I’m not explaining that well; it’s out of my experience.) “Most fun you can have at three miles an hour,” he says, “does that make me a redneck?” And on the side of his jeep, like the Intel logo, it says “white trash inside.”
