A quick three-note post this Thursday morning as I wait for the insomnia to drop from my brain. After a really good weekend with Dad, I spent the next two days in bed drowning in fever from a cold picked up last week on a run to Olympia with T to hang out with her friend and friend's daughter in the hospital. I don't know if it was really a cold I caught there in the emergency room or remnants from the cold snap of February in the Northwest, but I was fighting off something that made yesterday's blue sunny skies a pain in the rear.
Really, I'd rather be one of many Northwesterners bundled up with a touque on top of the head, sunglasses in eyes, and fingerless gloves arrayed against the cold as I type merrily away from the balcony on a Northwest sunny spring day. I'm not worried about the cold, so much, as getting the Vitamin D from the weather gods that atypically grin on the Sound. But since yesterday I spent most of the day hacking and coughing, a simple burrow under the sheets fully dressed in jeans and t-shirt with the window open and the sunlight streaming in was what I had to settle for. It is days like Wednesday that make you want a dog - in my case, a West Highland White Terrier (seriously, these things sound like Irish Wolfhounds if they're woofing it up) and in T's case, a "cute dog" - which I've taken to mean a dog that would be outclassed in size and weight by her current other male, a black-and-white feline named "Man" in Greek and prone to perching on my hip when I'm snoozing on T's couch (and thus acting like a lead balloon to my back. Thanks a lot, cat). You want the dog because running after frisbees is a really pleasant way to spend a day like Wednesday - and doing it yourself seems silly.
It is also the day I finally retired my very first "Talk Nerdy To Me" t-shirt, purchased from T-Shirt Hell. I felt kind of bad about it, but hey, the hole in the armpit couldn't be explained away any longer, and the black had fully faded from black to green-black to green-gray to gray. I was going to hang on to it, but really, I see no point in giving any money to T-Shirt Hell, or having any sentimentality to the products they sell any longer.
Which brings me to part one. Apparently, T-Shirt Hell was never going out of business. The guy who runs it decided that sending up huge sob story posts as a "prank" against the people who bought shirts from him would not only send business through the roof (which it most likely did) but also be a funny way of seeing how many people actually buy shirts from him. Thing is, it worked. He got marketing attention and a lot of free publicity from the circles of people who buy products from him.
And now he's never getting another dollar from me again. Nah, not because I can't take a joke, but because in the uncertain times of the economy, I don't feel terribly compelled to spend money at any vendor who acts like a retarded chimpanzee with a minimal amount of action/reaction comprehension. Act like a jerk to your customers, and customers generally don't return to your store. I was wobbling on them to begin with, having once ordered three shirts from them and getting two with the third sent a full month later, but absence (and long-term memory) tend to fade out the negatives. Now I remember - they're jerks both to their customers online and when they screw up your order - and you have to call 'em on it.
But hey, some of those shirts were funny, and it was going to be a pain to find a local t-shirt maker who'd be willing to do a single runoff of a shirt for me. So I held off. And like at any other funeral for a former acquaintance, you hold off on some of the coarser language. I have yet to hear "Yeah, Mikey sure was a mean son of a bitch when he drank, and not very good with kids" at a funeral. So it goes with Internet companies which view customers as things to abuse and lose packages for.
But, again, my original post holds true - I don't have the dollars to kick down for overpriced Made In China funny shirts any more, and I don't think I'll be adding many of those to my wardrobe. I have lots and lots of shirts, and www.dieselsweeties.com still has a huge portion of smarmasaurus shirts that I will cheerfully don to meander out to the bars. Or not, since I've more or less cut all boozahols from my diet for the next ninety days.
Which brings me to the second portion of my post for the day - the Republicans of the Senate and House seem to be sneering at Arnold and the rest of the gang who are working across the aisle with Democrats and the President to bring an economic stimulus package to the table, and Arnold is making some cutbacks in his state of California.
Now don't get me wrong, I actually like Arnold. I think out of all the states, he's done the best turnaround so far, and while my California-residing sister and brother-in-law will likely disagree with me on that one, I see in Arnold a willingness to compromise and work things out that was rare in the past decade. Say what one will about the Guvernator, he is and always has been a proponent of his own state.
But now we're looking at a new playing field, and Arnold and Crew have to make some serious cuts and compromises. His administration needs to bring in some serious cuts and raise taxes to make the paychecks go out. And I don't think that many of the people who fought for years to keep spending the government of each state and nation into debt really thought about who was going to pay the tab.
That's the thing - the last eight years were an orgy of spending and financing, and the party ended right at the right time for the Republican majorities - when the Democrats came on board. Like it or not, the pattern of the last two series of Republican majority Presidencies spent the United States into recessions and left nobody there at the end to pick up the tab. It's small wonder that the economy hyperinflates during a time of immense government spending and deflates when it's obvious the free rides are over.
And now the lawmakers who are watching George and Company run out the door are eying each other carefully and making protests against paying the bill (IE, raising taxes and limiting spending for things we can't afford - like two unfinished wars).
And that's the thing. Most of these men and women who protest higher taxes and complain about hardworking Americans who work hard for their money and don't want to be taxed voted unanimously for the vast blank checks written to the causes of George W. Bush and the Republican majority. It's not a bad thing, it's just that they should remember the first rule of credit 101 - you have to make the minimum payment, and if you don't, you need to find a way to pay the money back you overspent.
I don't know, I find it disturbing that there is still a high percentage of men and women in the establishment of the GOP that don't seem to grasp the idea that the United States has a checkbook, and if those checks bounce, the economy is going to be in serious trouble. The best way to get out of it is to put money down NOW instead of later, because those insufficient fund fees really are a killer.
And third: speaking of taxes and taxes that have full conservative backing, the infamous Porn Tax of Washington State was repealed before it even got wings. For those not in the Rain City Region, a Democrat from Federal Way proposed a porn tax - a tax on salicient items sold in Washington State to the tune of 19.5 percent. Anything and everything in the state sold to, as one sad strip club up on 15th Avenue puts it, "stimulate body and mind" would have had a twenty percent sales tax on it. Which, ironically would have been counterintuitive - during times of recession blue businesses and liquor store sales skyrocket while bar sales dwindle and strip clubs go begging.
I still find it funny that a guy from Federal Way decided that the most intelligent way to fund a program that helped people under the General Assistance - Unemployable was to tax sex toys, tapes, and DVDs, when the likelihood of those sales being able to support said program was laughable in the first place. But, of course, what sounds good on paper rarely turns out to be so - like several other taxes on specific goods and services (the ten-cent per cup of coffee tax in the city of Seattle springs to mind), the fairness of the tax didn't make sense, and I'm sensing that State Rep. Mark Miloscia, D-Federal Way, is likely going to make it into the annals of Puget Sound ridicule as the guy who wanted to make more money off porn.
Though frankly, I do wonder - I've been to Federal Way, and there really isn't a lot going on there in the later hours outside of sports bars. Maybe Miloscia saw a vast untapped pool of sales taxation in the region and thought, "Hey, why aren't we taxing the hell out of that?" But that does call into question A) how much time Miloscia spends outside Federal Way porn stores calculating revenues from a 20% sales tax on naughty toys and B) what kind of support his re-election will have from the local business community if indeed Federal Way's Adult Entertainment businesses are that successful, even in these economic times.
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