Sick Sucks!

Being sick sucks.

And, by "sick," The Blog doesn't mean diarrhea, vomiting, headache or a nose full of snot. He doesn't mean an itchy rash, a sore throat, aching joints and muscles, or just feeling "all around shitty."

Although, to be fair, all of those things DO suck... some.

No, by "sick," I mean, "major organs that no longer work the way that they are supposed to."

I mean, "filling your body with over a dozen controlled poisons (aka: prescription meds) every day, several times a day. Many of which have side effects that can be found referred to in the first, actual, paragraph in this post. Just because suffering those side effects is preferable to the alternative, which is sudden (or slow) death.

*A Brief Aside...*

One of The Blog's most favorite scenes from one of his most favorite TV shows, "House, MD." is the one where Dr. House is doing clinic duty and encounters a mall Santa suffering from diverticulitis. House prescribes "two cigarettes a day." House explains that nicotine has been shown to prevent the symptoms of diverticulitis.

                                           This is true! The Blog once read that in The Reader's Digest.

Santa: But, aren't cigarettes dangerous?

House: Pretty much everything we prescribe is.

*End Aside*

By "sick" I mean, "against every conceivable obstacle, getting all conditions in order, (lowering blood pressure, losing enough weight, and passing a psych evaluation,) to qualify to be put on an organ transplant list, so that, maybe, in a decade or so, the patient might receive a new (well, actually, used, but still working) organ.

By "sick" I mean spending four days a week, three and a half hours at a time, hooked to a machine that sucks our your blood and then puts it back, like some kind of robot vampire.

                                                      Which is, seriously, not as sexy or romantic 
                                                                 as some pop culture shit would have you believe!

By "sick" I mean "...going through your day, just fine. Then finding yourself in a hospital Emergency Room, covered in more blood than Carrie at her prom."

                                                                                      Your own blood. 
                                                                         Not the pig's blood that that asshole 
                                                                           John Travolta dumped on you.

That is what I mean by "sick."

Do you know what else sucks, almost as much?

Being the person whose loved one is that sick.

Never knowing when the one you love is going to spend her/his night screaming, crying and moaning in pain, as you stand by, helpless to do anything to make it better.

Catching the wrath of the miserable, frightened, loved one who "hates you," because you sent her to the hospital, rather than allowing her to sanguinate. (Um... that means, bleed to death.)

*Another Aside...*

Warfarin, also known as Coumadin, is an anti-coagulant used to prevent blood clotting.

According to Wikipedia, "It was initially introduced in 1948 as a pesticide against rats and mice and is still used for this purpose..."

Some months ago, The PC went to the local CVS Pharmacy to pick up Mrs. Blog's Warfarin prescription. He also placed four bottles of Diet Mt. Dew (one of the few soft drinks that a kidney patient is allowed to drink, weirdly,) and a bottle of moderately priced Scotch on the counter.

Pharmacist: I can ring up the Warfarin and the Mt. Dew. But, I am not allowed to ring up the Scotch.

The PC: Seriously? I can pay you, here, for the medical grade rat poison and four bottles of shit that metabolizes into formaldehyde (Google "Aspartame + formaldehyde." I'm not kidding.)

*(Note to self... One of these days, write a post about the history of "NutraSweet, the FDA and the Reagan administration. That will be a good one.)*

The PC continues: But, I have to take the Scotch to another register?

Pharmacist: I know. Right?

*End Aside #2*

So. In light of last night's events, The Blog has some advice for the desperately ill...

I get it. At best, you are frustrated. More likely, you are terrified. You will spend the next few hours being subjected to inconvenience and pain.

Given the alternative, you have to accept this.

You can antagonize the EMTs, piss off the nurses and insult the doctors.

In spite of that, they still have only one goal. And that goal is to save your life. The same goes for your loved one, your caregiver, your spouse.

There is a portion of the brain in every one of those people that is thinking, "Fuck you! Bleed out and die. Just don't do it on our watch." 

But, the EMTs, nurses and doctors don't say that. Because it is their job and responsibility not to.

Your loved one, caregiver, spouse doesn't say it because he/she doesn't want to live without you.

So, suck it up. Because everyone around you is doing their part. You need to do your part, too.

*A Note to the Healthy People...*

If you have not done it already, become an organ donor. Check the box on your driver's license or register with your local hospital. Save a life.

The "WAR ON CHRISTMAS" post is still coming. Give The Blog another day or two. The subject is based on stupidity, addressing stupid people. It's all just stupid. This post feels more important, at the moment. So it took priority.

And, to my Jewish friends, Happy Chanukah! 
 

Another Delay, But, Check This Out! The Worst/Weirdest Christmas Gift, Ever.

The Blog is working on his promised "WAR ON CHRISTMAS" post.

That post is coming. But, The PC is having too much damned fun writing it. And, Bill O'Reily just can't stop himself. He just can't shut the fuck up.

So, The Blog is peddling as fast as he can.

But, Bill O' keeps adding fuel to the fire.

With any luck, The Blog's rant will post tomorrow night.

In the meantime, let me lay this on you... The Worst Christmas Gift, ever.

Or, at least, the weirdest.

A couple of years ago, Mrs. Blog, a school teacher, received this gift from a student.

                                                                         No, seriously!

Now,The PC does not mean to denigrate the gift, itself.

As "they" say, "It's the thought that counts." And, the thought was sincere.

But, WTF?

Two plastic pigs, climbing over each other, in a totally not sexual way, (right?)  to hold wine glasses.

What does this mean?

I don't know.

If you, my Blogglitts have any thoughts about this, please share them.

Or, if you have a bad gift, or a weird one, share it with The Blog in the comments section.


 Let's have some fun here!

Sorry For the Delay

The Blog spent way too much time, tonight, dicking around on Facebook. trying to, finally, change his "cover photo" to a pic of the young Blogling with Santa.

The good news is, The Blog finally succeeded.

                                                                                    Here it is, if you care.

The bad news is, The Blog's newest post is only half written.

I promise that it will be posted tomorrow night.

Thank you for your patience.

B,B,B, & B (Part Whatever...)

At this point, this is all starting to feel like old news.

The friend who posted the original question has made it clear that she has no interest in what I have to say, and will no longer read this blog.

So fine.

So, a quick summation...

"Papa John" offered a half-assed apology and a major back pedal on his position on "Obamacare" on the Huffington post. Feel free to look it up.

Wal-Mart heir, Alice Walton, posted a press release standing with striking Wal-Mart workers.

Cynical PR move? Or, an admission of a clueless disconnect from the "little people" who have made her wealthy? We may never know.

Hostess shuts down business. Blames the baker's union. Gives multi-million dollar bonuses to their upper level suits while filing  bankruptcy. Hostess owners, hedge fund, corporate raiders, aka "Vulture Capitalists" sell off assets while putting thousands our of work. They don't care. They made their millions.

Costco thrives while paying their employees a living wage and health benefits, and the CEO takes no more than half a million dollars in compensation. Proving that capitalism works if ethics are included in the mix.

You can fact check all of this with a few minutes on Google.

The Blog is too fucking over it to do your homework for you.

Go! Learn! Have fun!

The Blog will be back tomorrow with the post that he has waited almost a year to write. Be here when The Blog rants about the so called "War on Christmas!"

See you then!

Billionaires, Bakers, Bankruptcy and Backpedalling (Part Two)

Now... Where was I?

Oh, right! Sorry. I got distracted by Angus Jones for a few minutes.

At this point, I guess I should continue on with my commenter's, uhm, comments.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with working our way to the top and accumulating massive amounts of wealth...

My friend is absolutely right about this! She and I are in agreement 100%!

There is nothing wrong with working your way to the top. And there is nothing wrong with enjoying the fruits of ones success.

But....

There is something deeply, morally, ethically wrong with achieving that success or protecting your personal profit margin by short changing the hard working employees who you could not have achieved that success without.

There is nothing right about trading in your mansion for a compound, buying a second personal jet and adding four more classic cars to your collection while laying off employees, cutting the remaining employee's benefits (and tripling their workload) and raising the price of the product you are selling to your customers, because, "Things are tough all over."

The Blog personally witnessed the following conversation between an employee and the company's CFO a couple of years ago....

Employee: How was your Christmas vacation?

CFO: Miserable! We are having our kitchen and dining room remodeled and it has taken longer than we expected. We had to spend the whole holiday at the Ritz Carlton. It was awful.

What makes this exchange galling is that the employee, a divorced mother of two (who was, frankly, just trying to make polite conversation) was, at the time, in the middle of fighting the foreclosure of her house, due to the fact that the CFO in question had cut her annual income by a third the previous year, in order to keep the company's profit margin at status quo.

The employee in this story walked a way, at that point, and cried.

*A quick digression*

In many cases, one of the main jobs of a company's CFO is to keep the CEO out of the loop where employee wages are concerned. In a, sort of, defense of CEOs, many CEOs would be appalled if they knew how little their employees were being paid. On the other hand, that's why they employ CFOs.

*end digression*

Moving on...

I think Poppa John's has great food...

Well, that is a subjective opinion. I think Poppa John's pizza sucks.

To be fair, I'm not a fan of Pizza Hut pizza or Dominos, though both are better, IMO, than Poppa John's. Also, to be fair, I think Poppa John's is superior to Numero Uno, Godfather's, Little Caesar's and Chuck E. Cheese.

But, that's not saying much.

Poppa John does a lot of charity work.

Sure he does. And that's good! So do most corporations and multi-millionaires.

Philanthropic foundations are a great tax shelter. And, it's cheaper PR than any television ad buy. The fact that they get to support some of their pet charities in the process is almost accidental.

Call me a cynic, but it's true.

Philanthropy is a good thing, whatever the motivation. I'm all for it!

Is it fair that he (Poppa John) doesn't want to pitch in a few cents for healthcare?

No. It's not. It is also short sighted. Sick employees are unproductive employees. Full time or part time. Employee healthcare is a win/win situation.

"Poppa John" has backpedaled on his comments. I'll get to that in "Part Three."

See you here tomorrow. 

What's the Deal With Angus T. Jones?

The Blog got online late tonight.

Unlike some bloggers, The PC doesn't write a bunch of stuff in advance, then set a timer to post later.

Because that would be cheating.

(And because The Blog hasn't figured out how to do it.)

So Part 2 of last night's blog won't happen until, hopefully, tomorrow night.

For tonight, a couple of quick comments about "Two and a Half Men" star Angus T. Jones' bizarre YouTube "testimony."

In case you have been under a rock for the last few days, Angus is the titular "Half" man of the wildly successful and, evidently, indestructible CBS sitcom.

A couple of days ago, Jones posted a video on the YouTube channel of the cult like "Forerunner Chronicles," a supposed offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventist church.

I don't wish to drive any traffic to this video or their web site. But, if you want to catch up, a quick Google search will take you there. You're on your own here.

The Blog doesn't pretend to know much about the Seventh Day Adventist church. They have a church right around the corner from The Blog's house. What I do know is that, after several years of claiming that "Jesus is returning soon!" on their marquise sign, they exhibited a wry sense of humor the day after the supposed Rapture last year by adding "Just not on May 21st."

This is pure speculation on my part, but I suspect that the "Forerunner Chronicles" has as much to do with the Seventh Day Adventists as Warren Jeffs' "Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints" cult has to do with the Mormon church.

*digression*

"The Forerunner Chronicles" sounds less like a church and more like a "Young Reader's" series about student wizards or sparkly vampires.

*end digression*

In the video, young Mr. Young calls his show "filth" and asks people to stop watching the show.

A day later, Angus issued a press release "apologizing" for his comments. The apology reads like it was written in a hurry by a panicked publicist.

“I apologize if my remarks reflect me showing indifference to and disrespect of my colleagues and a lack of appreciation of the extraordinary opportunity of which I have been blessed. I never intended that.”

Because calling the show that he has been a part of for the last ten years of his life (and which he is being paid a reported $350,000 per episode) "filth" should not be construed as disrespect.

Emmy award winning television writer, sports announcer and blogger Ken Levine has observed that, "...the next time we see Angus on television will probably be on an "E! True Hollywood Stories" episode or "Celebrity Fit Club."

Angus' Mom is deeply worried about her son's newfound devotion to this organization.

And here is where The Blog has some information that no one else has mentioned.

For all of his mother's hand wringing, she is culpable.

Angus spent his elementary school days, the days of the early seasons of "Two and a Half Men," when he wasn't on set, attending a private school attached to a fundamentalist "Christian" church.

The Blog knows this because one of his teachers at that school is an old college friend of The Blog.
She was fired from the school when she admitted that she had read the Harry Potter novels and thought that they were really nice stories.

Yeah. THAT kind of fundamentalist school!

So, you see, young Angus was well primed to wind up going all Kirk Cameron.

I will say this...

Angus must be one heck of an actor.

In spite of the "filth" that he now derides, he didn't appear to have any problem, this season, when Miley Cyrus was jumping his bones.

My biggest worry is that he may have already turned his $350,000 per episode over to his newfound "church."

But, it happens in Hollywood.

Tom Cruise, John Travolta, Nancy Cartwright and others have all been there.

That's Hollywood.

Billionaires, Bakers, Bankruptcy and Backpedalling (Part One)

In response to the criticisms by The Blog, and others on Facebook, of Papa John's Pizza CEO John Schnatter's claim that he, a multimillionaire, can't afford the 14¢ per pizza cost that The Affordable Care Act would inflict on his personal profit margin will force him to cut employee hours and increase costs to his customers, a lovely young lady, who is not just a friend of The Blog, but damned near family of The Blog, who is predisposed to lean to the right, posted the following question...

She continued....

I thought that her central question was an excellent one. So excellent, in fact, that I asked her permission to allow me to use it as the basis of a blog post, here.

***** Two weeks have passed since The Blog pecked out the above.*****


When the old PC set out to write this post, he wanted to give a well thought out response. Research was done. Sources were found. Graphics were collected.

Thanksgiving week arrived and The Blog went off-line to spend time with his family.

But the world does not rest. Not even over a holiday week. And, Holy Crap! did things get weird last week! So much so that, what I thought would be a pretty straightforward post suddenly developed more twists than an Ira Levin play.

                                                                          Anyone?

So, in the interest of keeping this post from becoming completely unruly, I'm going to try to break it down into two or three parts to be posted over the next couple of evenings.

Tonight, I will try to address the basics of her question. In later posts I will discuss some of the stories of interest that have come to light over the past few weeks. Especially last week.

So, here we go....

Why are people so bitterly outspoken about CEO's and Founders?

Because, 40 years ago, the average CEO made eight times more than his/her average employee. Around 1980, that began to change. CEO salaries climbed while employee wages began to stagnate. Today, CEO compensation is nearly 300 times higher than employee's wages, while those wages have flat-lined in that time. 40 years ago, CEOs and founders still had their mansions, household staffs, expensive cars and such. But, they also treated their employees as valuable assets to their companies, rather than as expendable cogs in their profit machines. Or worse, as thieves, stealing from their "rightful" profits.

The Blog once, personally, witnessed a $40 million a year CEO berate a $20 thousand a year employee for walking on his $80 thousand turkish rug with his shoes on. A bit of a disconnect, no?

And, by the way, those employees pay about 27% in income tax on their wages while their employers use loopholes to pay about 12%. 

It's not like they just woke up one day and inherited all of that prosperity.

Well, sometimes no. But, very often, yes, they did inherit that wealth.

Inherited wealth is far more common than "Horatio Alger" style, success from nothing wealth.

I have observed, over the years, that those rare few who built their success from scratch are more likely to have empathy for their employees than those who inherited their wealth.

Not always. But, generally speaking.

Consider Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, who rose out of "the projects" and has, personally, seen to it that his employees are paid a living wage and receive medical benefits, as opposed to the Walton siblings, who inherited their Wal-Mart fortune from their father (who must be spinning in his grave.) They didn't "work their way to the top." They were born there. And it shows.

(More about the Waltons in tomorrows post.)

Do you really care about their beliefs... on certain issues.

 Yeah. Actually. I do.

It is a sad fact that it is virtually impossible, in today's world, to not do business with people whose business policies are contrary to my beliefs. But, given the choice, I will do business with a company that does right by it's employees and customers over one that does not. Even if I have to pay a few cents more for the product. 

Quality is the only thing that matters to me. 

The truth is that quality is lacking in much of today's corporate climate. Quality is certainly not something that you will get from "Papa John."

My invitation stands. Come visit me sometime and I will buy you a quality pizza made by actual Italians in a hole-in-the-wall pizzeria.

You will never eat a Poppa John's pizza again! 

Success breeds jealousy.

Mitt Romney called this "the politics of envy." And, it is an exquisite pile of steaming bullshit.

The Blog can't speak for others. But, I don't begrudge the successful the spoils of their success. I just want them to recognize that they didn't succeed without the help of us "little people."

It's a matter of basic ethics and, dare I say it, morality.

More tomorrow night...