In honor of my miraculous return, from my death bed, all the way three feet over to my blogging throne, I give you, The Friday Super Blog. Here we go (Yes, you are being scammed. Yes these are all topics I meant to blog this week, except I was sick. Yes I will cry about it).
Thought this was fitting for my return to the office yesterday, particularly as I chose mexican for lunch, so this nifty venn-diagram was particularly on-point. Yes, I did just share that with you, lets keep right on rolling.
My Fox Boston - Parents are trading in traditional fairy tales, like Hansel and Gretel, and Jack and the Beanstalk, for more modern stories less to likely leave their children in tears. Almost half of mothers and fathers refuse to read Rumpelstiltskin or Rapunzel to their children because parents were worried about the kidnapping theme that appears in each tale.
Fucking kids these days, they're either going to grow up soft as hell or dead because an alchemist imp with a funny sounding name has locked them up in a dungeon to spin hay into gold for sweatshop wages. And if you have no idea what I'm referring to, then you obviously didn't get down with the Brothers Grimm as a child.
BOSTON -- Boston is poised to become one of the first cities in the nation to ban satellite dishes from marring neighborhoods, Newscenter 5 has learned. Next week the Boston City Council is expected to pass a resolution, which will be signed by Mayor Thomas M. Menino, that will require satellite companies to install dishes in locations that don’t affect the aesthetics of a neighborhood. City Councilor Sal Lamattina, who wrote the ordinance, called the dishes a "blight" on city neighborhoods. "All I want them to do is make every effort to place their satellite dishes anywhere but the façade of the building," Lamattina said.
That sound you hear? Sal Lamattina and Mayor Menino wheeling their hoards of cash from Comcast down to the bank. Crooks, plain and simple. Don't worry about any of the important stuff going on around the city, or the nightly murders in Dorchester and Mattapan, the real blight is those damned satellite dishes, not the chalk outlines. Ridiculous.
Ground Hog day, huh? I'm guessing when you buy a sticker like that, instead of 6 more weeks of winter it was more like 6 more years before he did it again (BAZINGA!)
A couple more serious, but equally rant-y notes:
CNN - They may dress better than average, but they usually don't invest that way: Last year 79% of large-cap fund managers trailed the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index, says Morningstar -- the worst showing since 1997.
Absolutely astounding. 79% of fund managers, despite their outrageous pay and hours of research did worse than if the average person just parked their cash in a single S&P fund and never thought about it again for the rest of the year. Think about that. 4/5ths of the world's "best investment professionals," with all their advantages, their Bloomberg terminals and expensive haircuts, couldn't out pick a blind monkey flinging feces at a page of Vanguard index funds. Good work fellas.
CNN - Rather, I found some numbers buried deep in last month's Congressional Budget Office semi-annual update that predicted a far bigger cash flow deficit for the Social Security system than the system's trustees had predicted in their 2011 report, and tried to figure out what was going on...This deterioration—call it a total of about $300 billion for this year and the next four—will become obvious when the Social Security trustees release their annual update, probably in April...However, because of higher energy prices and other inflationary fallout touched off largely by Arab Spring, the adjustment was 3.6%.
I touched on this once before, but this really got me going again today. So all of a sudden higher gas prices are equivalent to nationwide inflation and merit a 3.6% raise, funded by me, when just about everyone else in the private sector will be lucky to get a 1-2% inflationary raise this year? Am I reading that right? Like gas prices aren't higher for everyone? Just everyone living off social security? BULLSHIT. First off, inflation has been essentially flat for the past year...Yea gas prices have gone up, last I checked that's not the only measure of our economy...In fact, managing to stave off inflation is about the only positive thing the clowns leading this economy have succeeded at lately. But hey, old people vote, and if they need their raises for their cars they shouldn't be driving anymore anyway, hey, lets give it to them, am I right?
Fox News - An eighth-grader suspended after pranking a classmate with a bag of oregano following a lecture on the dangers of marijuana has a civil liberties group in his corner, but officials at his North Carolina school aren't backing down. The boy was booted from his school for 55 days for the stunt at Cuthbertson Middle School in Waxhaw, N.C. School officials cite the district's policy manual, which says a student can get a 10-day suspension for "possessing illegal or counterfeit drugs and "misuse of chemical/material (organic or otherwise) that causes or is purported to cause a hallucinogenic/mind altering effect." A longer suspension can be imposed if officials determine a student's conduct "demonstrates a willful violation" of school policies.
Am I missing something here? Has oregano made the jump from a fairly mundane domestic spice to a class D drug? Like, how did we skip right past the standard 10 day suspension (which still would have been ridiculous) go right to the 55 day, your future is fucked, sentence. For a bag of flavor enhancing herbs? What's next, kids getting detention for PDA for doing that old sex motion with their fingers?
Allright, I'll be completely honest, I just wanted to post that .gif. For some reason that old finger-sex motion that we all used to do in middle school popped into my head the other day and I just started laughing...It was like 11:30 at night and I broke out into hysterics. And now you can all enjoy as well.
