Personal Worth

NOTE: changed the title, not the link itself, because I realized I wasn’t talking about the economy at all.

If someone walked up to me on the street and told me that they were going to give me 500 million dollars, I would have no idea what to do with that kind of money in my wildest dreams. Even if it was a fraction of that (say, 50 million), I’d still be flabbergasted and confused.

Breaking it down, that is around 20,000 bucks a week for 49 years (or working from age 16 to 65). Even if the goverment taxed me out fifty percent of it, that would be still ten grand a week. That is an astonishing number. If you can not live your life the way you want on 40K/month, you deserve to be shot, hanged, or both (plus more).

My personal high water mark would probably be somewhere around 3 thousand a week. That’s 156K a year and that would around 7.6 million for a normal working lifetime. So it would seem to be that if I won some lotto jackpot for 150 million dollars, that I should be able to just dump 142.4 million of it in the garbage and live my life out swell.

But, really, what idiot would do such a thing?

No, I would just have to see if I could turn that 150 into 300, and that 300 into 600 and so on and so on until eventually I die (and leave my children something to fit over). It just doesn’t make any sense, but it is this mindset that has people claiming BONUSES on top of their yearly salaries that I could live comfortably on and then being absolutely disgusted when they don’t get six more figures on top of the six they are currently being given. It’s sickening.

Tangent: No one, NO ONE, deserves the millions of dollars that are shelled out to play sports. Period. I don’t care how entertaining or spectacular it is. That is the kind of money that could be going to doctors, teachers, and everyone else that keeps the country standing on two feet, not dashing through an end zone or trotting around the bases. It also seems like every major sports championship winds up with a city being decimated by looting and riots. It’s one of the reasons I’m glad I don’t live in a major sports city. It’s getting so bad that if Cleveland broke their drought I don’t think the city would exist anymore after it was all over. “We just watched our favorite player, who is worth an apparent 20 million, win a championship, let’s cause that much in property damage! woo!”

…and then you complain when your taxes go up to help pay for all the destruction. Boo Hoo.

Tangent over.

Peace,

James.

 

Domestication

It is perhaps, looking back on the last 8 years of my life, the one thing I wish I would have paid closer attention to. Part of the problem might be that I never left home to go to college (campus was four blocks away) and I took little notice about all the little things in life – like laundry, dirty dishes, and etc.

Anyone can clean a room, and some people can easily clean a whole house. I think I can “clean a house”, but things like laundry and dishes drive me up the wall. I grew up with a dishwasher (a machine, not paid restaurant help) and then it was just the matter of putting clean stuff away at the end of a cycle. It really throws you for a loop when you are put in a situation where there is no machine. However, even when there is a machine it helps to know how to use it. I will not name names, but I have seen people put dish-washing liquid (the stuff you would use if you were hand-washing) into a machine. That creates a *LOT* of unnecessary bubbles – and while stuff might get somewhat clean from this procedure, so does the floor and possibly the cabinetry when everything overflows. This is not something you ever really want to do unless you are trying to prank someone (note: the author will not be held responsible for anyone covering a kitchen floor in large amounts of soap suds).

So I hate the fact that I do not know how to be a ‘homemaker’ is a pain in the ass. I can sort-of cook, but am so picky with my food choices that it is a chore in and of itself to try to figure out how to throw something together that isn’t the same old crap. I never wanted to be in one of those “oh, it’s Meatloaf Wednesday!” type of families, so I’m doing my best to hunt down new recipes – even if it’s all based on the stuff I’ve been having for the last 8 years.

I am married, and I want to also say that it is very obvious to everyone (even to just plain old single folk) that you do not want to be in a relationship where the workload is strapped onto the back of just one person (especially if that one person is you). If you are younger and have life waiting just up ahead – domesticate yourself. Get away from fast food, dishwashers, and “can you do this for me?” and try to figure it out yourself. Ask questions, ask your parents or a girlfriend or whomever how to do laundry so you don’t end up with accidentally colored whites (not that I have ever done this, but I try to be either very meticulous or only wash my own stuff so that any destruction is solely of my belongings). Someone will be more than willing to help you once if they know you will be a little more able afterward. It’s that whole ‘give a fish, learn to fish’ thing put into homeworking practice.

Screw having your pets spayed and/or neutered. Get domesticated. Wash a dish (sometimes I do, I swear), dust a shelf (not hardly…who does?), fold a shirt (I still can’t do that very well), save the world (working on it).

Don’t be like me.
Peace,

James.

 

The art of advertising

I hate to say it, but nobody cares about advertising anymore.

It is all garbage. Coca-Cola shouldn’t advertise. Pepsi shouldn’t advertise. Most restaurants shouldn’t advertise. Most retail chains – forget it. M&Ms? EL Fudge? Pillsbury? Does anyone really need to see a commercial at this point?

Even the Super Bowl, the mecca of television commercials, is basically more about how goofy they can be rather than the actual product being thrown out there for the world to purchase. I can say there are days when I go into a grocery store and run aisle-by-aisle browsing for new things – and I usually find them. Nothing advertised – it’s just there.

As far as the Internet goes, it can work – to a point – but there are also many websites that use “no advertising” as a way to get people to pay money. People are willing to fork over cash to get rid of them rather than scroll a few extra times to avoid them. It seems the only time advertising actually matters is when you are the one trying to get noticed (hi mom!) and even then I, at least, try the old word-of-mouth technique. It has its ups and downs. Mainly it is because people just don’t care.

So that’s it. Nobody really cares. If it is special enough people will find it, eventually, and it will be just as big a deal then as it might have been a tiny bit earlier and with hundreds of thousands of dollars spent. Maybe I’m just not at that special level yet…

…and yet, somehow I’m being found by google in such odd ways. Last week was ‘food court landscape themes’ and this week (so far) yields ‘english word + one who sees the big picture’. Quite the eclectic group of searchers stumbling upon this humble little page on the interweb. Let’s see what tomorrow (and the future) shall bring.

Peace,

James.

 

Six degrees of conversation

There are days where my brain reacts to almost any subject like a thesaurus rather than a dictionary or encyclopedia. It takes the subject and says “okay, that links to this and that, and those two link to these four,” and so on and so forth. It is a psychological test, really.

“What does _____ make you think of first?” and what comes out could be anything. It takes something ’special’ to go from slide rules to Pete Rose’s penchant for sliding into bases head-first instead of feet-first, and then to wonder if there really is any scientific reasoning behind it (I doubt it, after all – it was Pete Rose) and then from Pete Rose the conversation might turn to gambling, specifically sports gambling, and then to any number of things – poker faces, the art of the bluff, and whether or not lying can be considered ethically sound depending on the situation.

All because someone mentioned slide rules – and nobody cared enough to actually talk about them. This is how most conversations go, I think, even if you actually do have a lengthy conversation about the original subject it eventually jumps to something tangential, possibly related (but it does not have to be) and then you hop and skip all over the place.

Personally, I blame Wikipedia, but the ‘problem’ was around long before that. Wikipedia (or any wiki, really) can just eat up my day if I am not careful. Clicking from this to that to whatever. You, for whatever reason, want to read about the Gummi Bears cartoon, then see that one of the voice actors also voiced some people from Winnie The Pooh, so you jump there, then you are reading about A.A. Milne and how much his son hates to be named “Christopher Robin” because of what his father wrote – and that jumps to Kenny Loggins thanks to his writing the song “Back To Pooh Corner” and then we end up at Top Gun or Caddyshack and then to Tom Cruise or Bill Murray or Chevy Chase and then to Saturday Night Live or Katie Holmes and Scientology and then Issac Hayes and South Park and so on and so on and so on. That could be three hours or pure ‘who really needs to know any of this?’ entertainment.

For the record, I am only making assumptions about most of those jumps, having not made that particular click-to-click trip, but if the internet is anything besides a gateway to pornography, it is a place where you can start looking up information about Gummi Bears and end up possibly changing your religion.

I like the red ones.

Peace,

James.

 

Food court landscape themes.

So, the fine people at WordPress have a way to tell me if someone found this blog by way of a search engine. They are also able to tell me what keywords the person used. Someone yesterday (or possibly the day before thanks to their wacky time-coding) searched for “food court landscape themes” and happened upon my post about Mystic Falls.

Seriously.

I have yet to figure out exactly what one would be searching for if they searched for that. I am not sure there are any websites based around such a thing, and a quick look at Google shows this here blog about halfway down the second page. So, not only did someone search for it, they waded through a page and a half of sites until they got to this one. If that person ever looks at this again, I hope they can leave me a comment to explain exactly what it is they are looking for and maybe I could be of some real assistance. I would say a good way to landscape a food court is just to include plants that don’t smell like vomit or any other undesirables. Also, don’t put trees where a chair might be more useful. That sounds like a good idea. Oh, and try to keep small animals away from any kind of cuisine you can’t pronounce without sticking eight or nine vowels and/or consonants in a row.

This is the kind of stuff I was put on this planet for. Probably.

Peace,

James.

 

No ideas.

I pride myself on being an idea man. I pride myself on being able to just pump them out no matter what the reasoning. They might not all be perfect, and most will be downright horrible, but I at least like having that ability to find them somewhere in the deep recesses of my mind.

Today, I have none.

I have things I *could* do, sure, but nothing I really want to step up and commit to. Most of them, like more stuff on Mystic Falls and my ever-expanding list of hacky stand-up comedy subjects, I am saving for some time in the future. So, I have ‘nothing’. It’s really depressing.

Have you ever seen an advertisement on TV or read about a company on the internet and say “If only they did ___________ they would be so much better!” or “Why can’t they just do _______ instead?” and of course “I could that! I don’t even have a degree!”  Now, I am not much of a fan of the collegiate educational system (again, a subject for another day) and I know I could not weather sitting through tons of boring management type classes to get myself an entry-level gofer type position at any of these companies, but that seems to be about the only way to really get yourself noticed by anyone in any kind of position of power. Half the time that does not work either because you are just some little worker ant in the giant scheme of getting someone in a perfect suit a six-figure bonus that would be like two or three years of your salary, at the least.

The other problem is that people in power positions hate to be told they are doing something wrong. Even if it is just your opinion it makes their blood boil that someone thinks that they are absolutely perfect. Other people, however, are indifferent to what they do, and see the gripe of the everyman as just wind through the trees that they can ignore so long as their paychecks and bonuses keep popping up. I am not sure if I would be any different, but living on the ground floor of bluecollarville for as long as I have makes me want to believe that I would listen to the voices of those beneath me because I know what it is like to be screaming about change and having nobody even give me a glance, let alone pay attention long enough to see if anything I have to say is actually worth listening to.

This, I feel, is the reason behind so many blogs and webpages like this one here. It is just a group of people that want their voices to be heard, and will do damn near anything to make it happen. There are days when I come up with ideas that I think could change the face of the world – and then I either forget them, or try to write them down and find everything to be a jumbled mess. Then there are days like today where I would rather just get some sleep and try twice as hard tomorrow. You never know, most big ideas are complete accidents. Let’s just hope I don’t fall on my head trying to get there.

Peace,

James.

 

My own special ‘not place’

I felt like I should back of all the crazy touchy subjects, at least for a day or two, and talk about my own Utopian vision. In reality it is not exactly a better world, or even a better country, state, or even city. Well, it might be about the size of a small city by the time my mind is wrapping around it.

To those that know me on a personal level, they know my love of Disney, specifically Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. I know almost everything there is to know about the place that isn’t kept confidential by the higher-ups in the company. It is one of the those lingering dreams of mine to be able to create something that is as beloved as anything Walt helped create or inspire in his near 66 years walking this mortal coil. I just want to build my own amusement/theme park. To be fair, there is a large difference to me between a theme park and an amusement park. An amusement park is more of a Midway with the standard anchor attractions like a rollercoaster or two, log flume, bumper cars, etc with a nice dandy food court area somewhere near the center with loads of half-smiling high school kids working summer jobs.

A theme park is much more encompassing. MY theme park is something that completely pulls the guest outside of their reality and dumps them into something entirely different. The problem is, I can not pull that off to the extent I would like to – so I have come up with an acceptable compromise.

Mystic Falls.

It is not so much about any singular amazing waterful that can be seen from all over the park, that would be hard to pull off (I tried dealing with schemantics and my brain nearly melted) so I instead decided I wanted my park’s hotel to nearly encompass the entire park like the beltway of a major city – with it’s own small shopping and food sections along with various types of hotel accommodations from bungalows to penthouses to every size room imaginable. There would be public transportation all around this ‘city’ area and to the various main gates (four of them in total) around the inner park area.

Now, this area would not be all concrete and architecture, as greenery is a big deal any time the word “waterfall’ and ‘mystic’ should pop into a sentence together, so there would be plenty of landscaped space, including small streams and tiny waterfalls here and there not only through the city but also in the park itself, helping to separate various areas and attractions from each other and also giving guests a beautiful vista as much as humanly possible.

The main penthouse building of Mystic Towne (or whatever I happen to call it) would be much larger than any of the smaller buildings, as the smaller buildings would try to be out of view of those inside park limits. The main one, however, would tower above the area and feature two thin waterfalls down either side of the main face, starting from the roof to a faux rocky area near the base that could be seen from behind by those in the hotel as well as from all points within the park itself and possibly from most areas around the city.

On the outskirts of the park, wrapping almost entirely around (except for near where the two main falls are) would be a series of large faux trees with gigantic branches. These would house “treehouses” that would serve as living quarters for a portion of the staff and even some of the guests who would be able to pay special fees to reserve a chance to stay inside park grounds. The ‘branches’ would serve as elevated walkways as well as housing various wires and pipes from treehouse to treehouse, each will be soundproofed and have tinted windows to help keep out any peepers. Every main tree will also house a stairwell/elevator to get to ground level so that an employee/guest can go straight to their room and right into the park at any time they please. Being that they are on the outside arc of the land between the city and the park, at night when the park area is closed the doors and elevators will lock one set of doors and only allow access into the city and not back into the park area.

The rides themselves would be the so-called standard (rollercoasters, speed rides, kids rides, slower adult rides, theatre shows, etc) that dominate any themed amusement park and be kept with the theme of the Mystic Falls landscape and story about civilization and nature becoming one in harmony with each other.

Of course, I have more specific details on these various attractions, but going into detail would probably take the next two or three hours to really paint the mental image that I would want to make it really feel as though you were right there smelling the mist of the falls and the dazzling scents of the landscape around you. Some other time, when I find myself in the mood, I will open up that vault and showcase an attraction or two to help flesh this out into a more stable reality than just the various dings, buzzes, and blips in my brain at this time of night.

But remember…always have a magical day.

Peace,

James.