Mr Bison's Journal

Not My Regular Breakfast

2012-02-05T09:46:00.000-08:00

I get to spend a fair bit of my working life in hotels, or at least waking up in hotels, which means that I am no stranger to the experience of blearily taking the elevator down for breakfast. In some places you're faced with an extraordinary selection of breakfast delights, fresh fruit juice, friendly service, eggs made to order and all the hot tea or coffee they can force down your neck. But recently my travels have been more, shall we say, routine in nature. Lots of Hampton Inns, and very basic breakfast buffets.

When it comes to breakfast, the main thing is to eat enough that you're not starving by 10:00am. This means eating eggs. If I get eggs for breakfast I can pretty much choose when to get lunch (not whether to get lunch, mind you - missing meals is strictly for anorexics and fools) but no matter how much fruit, cereal, toast, pastry, etc. I cram down I know I'll be ready to chew off my own arm by 10 o'clock. That said, after I get done with eggs and whatever "allegedly meat based" accompaniment is in the adjacent tray, I will often go back for something "healthy". Because everyone knows that the negative impact of the crap fried food you eat can be directly offset by throwing something better down right after it.

This typically means some form of fruit, and whatever basic economy-grade yogurt is sitting in a bowl of ice at the end of the table. It's usually common strawberry, although the place I've been staying recently has taken to buying economy-grade light yogurt, which takes the whole thing to an unacceptable level. Still, at least it wasn't Activia.

You've seen the commercials, right? Where fresh-faced yummy mummies share their innermost issues of "irregularity" with Jamie Lee Curtis? Now when I get to the end of the breakfast buffet and I see a bowl of Activia pots in ice I just cannot bring myself to pick one up. For a start I get this slight repugnance because, obviously, this is a bowel yogurt. It's not fruity, or tasty, or healthy. No, it will help you with your irregularity. What does that even mean? When the woman won't go in the swimming pool because she's having issues with irregularity I have no idea what the problem is? Does it mean she's going too often? Or not at all? Or maybe just having to shit at different times every day?

"You know, I used to be a seven o'clock person, but just lately I've been getting irregular, and now I find myself wanting to curl one down at all sorts of different times. Can you help me, Jamie Lee?"

As a result, I can't risk eating it. If it helps by blocking you up, that's no good to me. I'm on an egg-based breakfast regime, remember. And if it's going to loosen me up that's no good either. I'm not playing Russian Roulette with some strange yogurt that'll have me running to the gas station toilet in some bumfuck Pennsylvania backwater, with my hands clutching my arse cheeks together. Thanks, but no thanks.

I just can't believe there's a market for the damn stuff. Whatever possessed the marketing team when they came up with the whole product positioning for Activia?

"I think all the major yogurt brand propositions have been staked out already. They've done fruit on the bottom, fruit on the side, crunchy bits on top, more fruit, more taste, less calories, exotic flavors, economy packs, giant pots and race for the cure. They even did big, fat Greek yogurts that look like congealed donkey sperm and have no flavor, but sell for five times the price. It's all been done."

"How about we go for bowel movements?"

"What?"

"You know, our yogurt will make you poo better."

"What do you mean by 'better'? Do you mean more, or less, or bigger lumps, so you have to wipe less, or what?"

"I don't know. Let's just say it will make you more 'regular'. That way all the people shitting too much will eat it to make them shit less, and all the people who are out there straining, with their eyes bugging out, will eat it so they can take a dump without risking a brain aneurysm."

"Brilliant! 'Regular' doesn't actually mean anything at all! But how can we sell that to men? I don't see them going for the bowel image thing."

"I know, we'll get Jamie Lee Curtis to promote it. Men don't buy yogurts, and when their wives and girlfriends bring this crap home they can just say that Jamie Lee is pushing it, and they'll instantly be OK, because they remember her outstanding boobs from that move where she went topless."

"What movie?"

"I don't know. I don't remember the title, I just remember the boobs. But trust me, so will they."

Nevertheless, in spite of the memory of those boobs, I bypassed the Activia offering at the hotel last week. Like I say, I just can't take the risk. And who wants to be walking back to their table with a pot of that on display? It's like buying Preparation H, or Viagra. Everyone will just know you have "that" problem. And I don't want everyone thinking I have a problem that I can't even explain. Frankly I'd be more comfortable picking up the erectile dysfunction yogurt. It's surely only a matter of time until they launch it. I suggest they call it Dicktivia.

Copyright © 2012 Edward Bison

No Room Up Front

2011-08-26T12:35:00.000-07:00

I think it's fair to assume that if there's a heaven and a hell, there will be a special place in the latter reserved for home builders. I just bought a town home in St.Louis, for reasons too tedious to enumerate, and on the face of it it's a nice abode. OK, the walls are newspaper-thin, and bits of siding might drop off for no apparent reason, but when you're dealing with the average US home builder your expectations had better not be high at the outset.

Nevertheless there is one flaw that aggravates me more than all the others, partly because I'm reminded of it every day, and partly because it affects my most sacred time and place.

When builders design a home they obviously try and make it seem as large as possible while actually giving you as little real space as they can get away with. Normally you make an effort to check things like the size of rooms, the number of closets, and all that. I failed to spot that my garage was suitable for one full size car only if no-one ever wanted to open a door and get out of it, but that's just par for the course.

But when you start messing with a man's toilet then your just taking the ... well, you know.

The builder of my particular domestic palace apparently decided that a normal toilet might give the impression that the bathrooms were a bit, well, small. This would be accentuated by people constantly falling over the toilet on the way to the bath. So rather than, say, enlarging the rooms by a few inches they instead installed micro toilets. These have round seats perfectly designed so that when you sit on them you can have your arsehole inside the rim. Or your junk. But, importantly, not both.

I don't know about you, but when I'm enthroned I don't want to be having to make critical decisions like "am I about to drop one off or piss". I usually count on having the whole apparatus, so to speak, inside the rim, and then nature takes over. In fact I doubt whether anyone consciously considers the order of their ablutions. Or the consequences of getting the order wrong.

Where do you even find toilets like that? Is there a special catalog for home builders which sells crap fixtures that no sensible human being would ever want? "Amaze your client! Magically increase the size of your bathrooms! Just don't ever actually try to take a dump in one!" Or did they just order it from the supplier who does school lavatories?

If home builders were women I could understand the abject lack of appreciation for the physics of wedding vegetable placement, but I'm pretty sure they mostly aren't. That makes them the most vile traitors to their gender, selling another man's dangly parts short just to pimp a town home and drag a few more inches of apparent space out of nowhere. No surprises what's top of my list for home improvement. And I hope the builder catches his parts in a circular saw - serve the bastard right...

Copyright © 2011 Edward Bison

Good To Be Back?

2011-07-24T10:53:00.000-07:00

It is said that all good things must come to an end, and having escaped St.Louis two years ago I have to report that I've now returned. I won't go into the details - suffice it to say that the positives must have outweighed the negatives - but now that I'm back I have the opportunity to reflect on everything I missed about St.Louis.

And the answer is "not much", when I think about it. Sure, I missed friends, but that has nothing to do with St.Louis - you make friends anywhere, and missing them is just a feature of moving, no matter where you're from. I thought I'd be glad of the lighter traffic, after Chicago, but with my current commute I'm not much better off than I was before, and here's the kicker - when you're done driving home in Chicago you end up in a place you want to be (i.e. Chicago). Personally I'll kill a few minutes extra each day to be able to say that.

From Chicago you can fly anywhere in the world, many places direct, on real planes. In St.Louis the airport is, frankly, shit, and hardly anyone flies a real plane there anymore - it's all regional jets, with seats so uncomfortable that if I were, say, a veal calf I'd have PETA petitioning for my better treatment. As if to emphasize the point about the airport I was welcomed back on the night I returned by a tornado which ripped half the roof off, rendering the ambience of the place even more "third world" than usual.

"Ah, but houses are so much cheaper in St.Louis" I hear you exclaim (or at least I think I hear that - after a few weeks in St.Louis hearing voices is just part of the charm). Well yes, you can have a barn-sized plywood house in one of the sprawling subdivisions for a lot less than the equivalent-sized home in a Chicago suburb, but here's the thing: the Chicago house would be made largely with brick, and have a real garden, and be situated in a real neighborhood, and generally look less like a builder knocked it up in the least time possible, with the shittest materials available, and then stuck granite counter-tops in to sell it. Great neighborhoods do exist in the suburbs of St.Louis, but guess what - they cost the same as the ones in Chicago.

That brings us to the last refuge of the St.Louis apologist: "It's a great place to raise a family". Well whoopee shit. That's what you fall back on? That's the best you have to offer as a clincher for the St.Louis area? Firstly, this is a pathetically weak pitch - I don't understand what supposedly marks out St.Louis as an especially great place to "raise a family". But more importantly it demonstrably isn't true, at least for much of the region. It certainly isn't true of the City of St.Louis, nor of East St.Louis. North St.Louis county is a shithole, so dangerous in places that you may be killed simply for getting lost and accidentally venturing into some areas, and much of South county is crap and crime-infested too, so that pretty much just leaves West county, where you find all the big plywood houses.

Sure Chicago has a miserable winter, but it's not much worse than what you get here, and in return you get a summer you can use - it's about 100 degrees outside now and there's just no point going outside unless you enjoy sweating, heat-exhaustion, palpitations and death.

In fact the only thing I was pleased to experience here again was a small barbecue restaurant which has very good pork, excellent fries and nice friendly staff. And I'm not sure it wouldn't be easier to have them move to Chicago than drag my carcass back here...

Oh, and by the way, you can stick the St.Louis arch up your arse.

Copyright © 2011 Edward Bison

Oh Yes?

2011-02-27T12:00:00.000-08:00

While I was at the gym, fortified by half a packet of bacon and Bison Daughter's home-made pancakes, reminding myself why squats and deadlifts are best done on different days, Mrs Bison was shopping. Until recently she split her food shopping time between Target (great prices on meat and many other items, shit selection of fruit and veg) and Dominicks (good fruit and veg, more expensive meat). However she recently stumbled upon a store called Garden Fresh, or something like that, which is a "third option", and today she went there.

I haven't been there yet, but it seems to be set up to cater to the food shopping needs of a clientele that can best be characterized as "immigrant", predominantly Eastern European. The other shoppers were hard-faced scary-looking types. Certainly Mrs Bison felt somewhat isolated there today, as the sole (apparent) English speaker. At any moment she expected Liam Neeson to jump out and start looking for his kidnapped daughter.

So Mrs Bison came home with a pile of vegetables, some assorted meat, and a selection of ethnic "treats" to add a little extra to our Sunday lunch. There was a box of "choco cake" from a company called Haitai, which came from Korea, and whose principal selling point was the legend on the box which read "Presents for your delicious taste. Enjoy your happy times". I mean, what could possible go wrong there? In addition she had a bag of Russian pick'n'mix. She'd experimented with these two weeks ago, with some success, and so this time she jumped right in with a new assortment of Soviet candy.

Having partaken in a salad, designed to create just enough sense of healthy eating to justify shameless indulgence in foreign sugary treats, we moved on to the Korean choco cake, sold under the brand name Oh Yes. Well, just in case the outer box didn't put you off there was writing on each of the individually wrapped choco-effect, fake coated synthetic sponge squares, which read "You know that sweet things make smile. We love to see you smile with your people. So just taste this cake." Apart from the halting English (OK, my Korean isn't so hot either) you have to admire the logic behind this selling proposition:

Sweet things make you smile. We want you to smile. So eat the sweet thing.

The only problems was the lack of significant sweetness in the "thing". In fact the text on the wrapper should be updated to read:

We know that sweet things make you smile. This is a very bad cake. Don't give it to your people.

So, flushed with disappointment we moved on to the Russian pick'n'mix. Each of these was individually wrapped, but unlike Western candy, where a coconut candy might have a picture of, say, a coconut on the wrapper, these things had pictures which could not possibly have borne any relation to the ingredients. At least I sincerely hope not, since otherwise I have just consumed two pieces of chocolate candy containing ground penguin (or possibly ground swallow).

The other pieces had pictures of poppies, a cherub and daisies, and I would venture to suggest would have tasted significantly better had they in fact been manufactured from these ingredients, rather than the sawdust, cocoa and cigarette ash which I can only assume were the principal components. How hard is it to make candy taste good? You only need a bit of sugar, milk, chocolate, and maybe a few nuts. They teach tiny kids to make candy in elementary school (or at least they did when I was a kid, before they got concerned about all the two hundred pound fourth graders showing up). What possible reason is there in any civilized society for people to be eating candy that tastes like a cocoa flavored ashtray?

The very best candy in the bunch tasted a bit like a protein bar, which, to any one who's actually eaten one, is a pretty good indication of just how shit it was.

Maybe this goes some way to explaining the miserable, scary disposition of the other shoppers at Garden Fresh. If the most you have to look forward to, having loaded up on beets and sausage, is a bag on candy that tastes like dog-ends, and a choco-effect cake to make your people smile, you too might wonder just what the fuck happened on the way to the American dream.

I'm sure all the Albanian people-traffickers in "Taken" would have been quite happy to have stayed at home had they just had access to some decent sugary snacks in their home country. But as Liam Neeson would say: "Good Luck".

Copyright © 2011 Edward Bison

Reality Ever After

2011-02-26T16:41:00.000-08:00

Mrs Bison is watching re-runs of Sex and the City, and I have to admit that it doesn't seem half as bad as I remember it. OK, no need to demand my "guy card" back just yet, it's not as though I'm watching it myself. How can I be? I'm writing this. No, my point is not that it got better, nor that I turned into the kind of limp-wristed, flamboyant excuse for a man that would actually enjoy it. My point is that compared to the utter crap that's cluttering up my cable TV these days, Sex and the City is brilliant.

Do you remember when TV shows had actors and stories? Or when we had interesting documentaries, or investigative shows? Now I trawl through the channels and all I find is "reality shows". You name it and someone's made it into a reality show. I cannot fucking believe that there are shows out there solely about people who make cupcakes, and all the trials and tribulations of being a cupcake maker. There are shows where people compete in stupid contests to become the next top model, or cake boss, or apprentice or whatever fucking idiot idea someone in LA or NY just came up with. This is about as "real" as little green men probing your anus while whistling the theme from Bonanza.

I could go on and list all the dumb "reality" shows that center around some lifestyle or profession, such as clamping cars, being a woman cop, getting married, hunting wild hogs, giving our parking tickets, collecting scrap metal, buying a wedding dress, operating a pawn shop, having a makeover or losing about two hundred pounds of bodyweight, all of which are chock-full of completely staged situations, created to bring drama and suspense to the tiny-minded plebs watching. What really pisses me off, though, more than anything else, is the plethora of "celebrity" reality shows, centered around the kind of vacuous bullshit non-people whose only claim to fame is being famous. Once upon a time we just had Paris Hilton, but now we have the overpaid, overexposed, real housewives of just about anywhere, all prancing about like utter twats in a massive celebration of the collective stupidity of the American populace.

Unlike the internet, which allows people to self-select according to their tastes, and where absolutely anyone can find something of interest to them (farmyard porn anybody?) cable TV is all about appealing to the masses. Only by attracting enough viewers to support advertising can TV companies make any money, so they work extremely hard to make sure that EVERYTHING we see is targeted at as broad an audience as possible. We can assume that they've got pretty good at it by now (economic Darwinism working its magic), so we can by extension assume that the swathes of reality TV shit that they put out are exactly what the majority of the American viewing public desire. I mean, TV companies aren't stupid.

Now we've reached a new low. Bethenny Ever After is coming. A woman famous simply for being on reality TV is now getting yet another reality TV show, just about how tough her life is now that she's married and has a kid. (Makes a change from a litter of six kids, or nineteen, I suppose.) What the fuck? I'd never heard of this weird looking cow before, but it turns out she's been on an apprentice show, been a real housewife, and also had some other show about planning her wedding, and now we're being offered a chance to watch the next episode of her life. Jesus wept! That's what America's doing now - tuning in to see what this "famous for nothing" celebrity bitch is doing in her manufactured life every week.

If we could decide for ourselves which cable TV channels we wanted in our bundle you can be absolutely fucking sure that this piece of trash wouldn't be on my list. I'm about ready to junk cable altogether, because it's nothing but crap and cartoons.

How did we get to this stage? The great moronic mass of the voting American public is sitting down every night to worship synthetic celebrities. Now we have Kim Fatarse Kardashian (where the FUCK did she come from?) hawing herself, her perfume, her clothing, and just about anything else that you can stick a brand name on. She's only famous for being famous, and that's what gets paid for in America today.

You know, compared to that load of old crap, even horse-faced Sarah Jessica Parker's looking good these days...

Copyright © 2011 Edward Bison

Good Vibrations

2010-12-31T06:18:00.000-08:00

In amongst all the festeringly uninteresting commercials on TV this Christmas, I couldn't help noticing an outbreak of Trojan ads. These started with commercials for Fire & Ice condoms, which are supposedly so good that they make couples rush into the drugstore to buy some more. Let's overlook for the moment that among the things I'd willingly put on my erect penis, neither "Fire" nor "Ice" are in the top 1,000. Plus, while condoms may be a necessary evil, nothing about their use makes sex better, unless you're the kind of two-pump chump for whom lack of sensation is considered a benefit. Still, I'm happy to see something advertised that isn't cut-rate auto insurance, end-of-year auto sales or a mobile phone.

Trojan seems to be branching out, however, with the Trojan Vibrations device. The commercials are suitably vague, but it appears to be what you and I would know as a good old-fashioned vibrator, "woman for the stimulation of" as they say. Of course this is the twenty-first century, so it doesn't look like a big rubber dick. In fact it seems to resemble nothing so much as a lipstick, maybe because women like lipsticks, or maybe to overcome that inner resistance which may come from purchasing something that just screams "shove it up your vag".

The commercial shows a group of seemingly professional suburban women sitting around exchanging birthday gifts, and, guess what, three of them have given the birthday girl a Trojan Vibrations thing. Supposedly it "blows your hair back", and the girls in question turn to show that their hair is, indeed, blown back, signifying that they have brought themselves off with the Trojan product (although hopefully not the one they just wrapped up for birthday girl).

Now on the one hand I'm delighted to see the open advertisement of vibrating sex toys, since it signifies a society which accepts sex as more than religiously approved baby-making. However I can't help wondering what would happen if they advertised the male equivalent. There is a massive double standard when it comes to sexuality, and it's exactly the reverse of what you might imagine. When a group of girls go to watch a male stripper they're "just out to have a good time" whereas a group of men going to a strip club are "typical seedy, dirty guys". The well-groomed women sitting around examining their lipstick-shaped vibrating sex toys would be in stark contrast to a group of men comparing blow-up sex dolls. "Hey, she's got real hair AND a fully functional anus!" Not that any man would be seen dead comparing sex toys with another man - this heinous a violation of the Guy Code would see you banished for at least ten years. Still, I'm willing to take sex toy commercials for women, one-sided as they may be, as part of the general progress to a more enlightened America.

Of course if you live in Alabama you'll be waiting a while yet for this progress. It's one of seven states which appear at the bottom of the commercial where Trojan Vibrations are not for sale. They are, not surprisingly, mainly southern states: Alabama, Georgia, Kansas, Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Virginia. I'm not going to point out the contrast between the desire for gun ownership and the death penalty in these states and their apparent fear of sex toys, mainly because I like both gun ownership AND the death penalty, and would happily support more of both, even while encouraging the general population to experiment with vibrating sex aids.

It does seem strange though that any state would attempt to prohibit something as harmless as a vibrator while quite openly allowing gay sex. If you're going to get all worked up about something, you'd think a bloke shoving his dick in another bloke's "tradesman's entrance" would be a bit more disgusting than a woman using a vibrator. I mean, what would YOU rather find on the internet? (I rest my case.)

I can only assume that gay sex is tolerated down there because the Federal Government says it has to be, and maybe because it's kind of hard to stop it. I mean, you can close down the vibrator stores but you won't stop the fudge packers from finding a way. It's true that there was an attempt to overturn the vibrator law in Alabama but the state courts sided with the legislature and the US Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal, thus condemning the good people of Alabama to a vibrator-less wilderness where their only options were to carve wooden penises or sit on the corner of the washing machine during the spin cycle. Or both.

In any case it goes to show the huge hang-ups that parts of America still have with sex, especially parts where religion is deeply entrenched. (Guess what, the Taliban doesn't approve of vibrators either.)

So to the good women of the US I say: "Take up your vibrating sex toys, made to look like lipsticks so you won't get squeemish, and use them to their full potential. And maybe post the videos online so we can share the joy..."

Copyright © 2010 Edward Bison

Rescue Pets

2010-12-28T07:51:00.000-08:00

The thing about watching Christmas TV in a turkeyed-out haze is that you can easily miss things. For instance, if it weren't for Mrs Bison's careful attention to meaningless ads I would have completely missed the commercial for the Rescue Pets Train & Play Puppy. Let's gloss over for the moment the fact that, in the interest of cuteness, this monstrosity has the kind of massively oversized eyes that make you wonder if it shouldn't have been humanely destroyed, or at least renamed "Rescue Pets Genetic Freak Aberration Puppy". No, the "fun" thing about this particular toy is that you can feed it a plastic biscuit (included) and it will then walk off and deposit said biscuit as "poop", to the apparent delight of the kids in the commercial.

I believe that this toy is supposed to introduce kids to the reality of owning a pet, prior to them heading off to the pound with mum and dad, and picking up the real thing. However I believe I have spotted the minor flaw in this plan. You see, when the Rescue Pets Puppy drops its guts, you just pick up the plastic biscuit; you can stick it right back in the little bastard's mouth, or, if you are so inclined, in your own mouth, with no ill effects whatsoever. (Unless you happen to be one of Darwin's "special" children, and swallow the plastic biscuit.)

In the real world of dogs they don't deposit a small plastic toy right where you expect it. They leave you a massive pile of foul-smelling, sometimes worm-infested ordure, and often where you least expect it. Yeah, let's replay the commercial and see how the three little girls react when the dog leaves a steaming pile of logs on the table. Who's going to be laughing and rushing to pick it up then? Ready for your trip to pick out a REAL rescue puppy girls? Just grab a hold of that festering heap of warm, recycled kanga chunks and feel it ooze through your fingers as you scurry to the toilet / trash can / back door.

Herein lies the beauty of electronic toy pets. For a start they have an OFF switch, so you won't be awakened in the night by scratching and whining. They can be thrown away when they break, with no vet bills, and your running costs are limited to a couple of sets of AA batteries, before the kids get bored with watching the biscuit fall out of its synthetic fur arse. They need no feeding, worming, inoculating, exercising, grooming or attention, and as such are completely useless as a means of preparing for the reality of caring for a dog.

What's more, I've been to the rescue dog place, and let me assure you that it's not full of puppies. It is, however, extremely well-stocked with pit-bulls. And excrement. And more pit-bulls. There's an assortment of sad older dogs which part of you wants to bring home so they can be loved again, but you can't help wondering if the reason they're there in the first place is that they snapped one day and ripped a little boy's arm off. I mean, if you were shopping for an adopted grandpa you probably wouldn't start at the local Salvation Army hostel, would you. Sure, there's some good guys down there, but the odds are high that you'd end up with a meth-addled serial masturbator with klepto tendencies.

Plus, adopting an old dog is like buying an old car - the nice smell is gone, and you're on the hook for the expensive maintenance as it breaks down all the time. And there's always shit coming out the back end.

Maybe, for added realism, there should be a Rescue Pets Savage Pit Bull Puppy. Abused since birth, forced to mate with it's own mother and repeatedly fight in order avoid having its skull crushed by a black NFL player, it is now ready to come home with you and join your family. Only, WATCH OUT, as it randomly attacks a child and bites their finger in a "plastic biscuit poop" synthetic version of real canine violence. That should get the kiddies ready for the joy of being savaged by a seventy pound Chinese Shar Pei rescue dog like that kid in Wolverhampton.

Or just take a big shit on the floor, then have the kids pick it up and take it for a two-mile walk in a bag. Every day for three months. Then they'll be ready for a dog...

Copyright © 2010 Edward Bison

Cleveland Steamer

2010-11-19T18:50:00.000-08:00

It's said that there's no accounting for taste, but when it comes to sex there clearly is NO accounting for taste. I know that the internet contains everything you could possible imagine, along with many things you couldn't, but for the most part you can remain in blissful ignorance unless you actively go and look for something (in which case you have only yourself to blame).

I could have happily gone my whole life without knowing about the sexual act known as the Cleveland Steamer, but when I heard the Bob and Tom song of the same name I admit I had to Google it, along with many of the other acts mentioned in the song (rusty trombone anyone?)

Now there seems to be some debate among aficionados of this act as to what exactly constitutes a Cleveland Steamer. It seems clear that the first part of the process involves a man taking a shit on the chest of a woman with whom he is having sex. Then the process may (or may not, depending whose opinion you trust) require him to sit on the shit and rock backwards and forwards, possible while making a whistling noise. Personally I doubt that these embellishments are required - they sound like the kind of thing that would be added after the fact to enhance the myth. I mean, it's hard to imagine any woman lying quietly while a bloke on top of her smears shit on her chest (although it's equally unlikely that she will lie there while he takes said shit on her chest). Has anyone ever actually done this? I mean for real, with the intent of actually getting pleasure from it, not as part of some twisted video shoot?

Let's just imagine, for the sake of argument, that two consenting adults actually did want to indulge in such an act. (I can hardly believe anyone could type those words with a straight face.) We're talking about a bloke taking a shit here - surely he's going to want to grab a newspaper or something. And I don't think I've ever known a woman who didn't moan at her man for the amount of time he's spending in the bog; just imagine how pissed she's going to be when he's squatting over her, flicking through USA Today for twenty minutes, while waiting to get the turtle's head. "Can you just hurry up and shit on me already?"

And what's the etiquette for afterwards? I mean, assuming you don't just want to kill yourself? You're sitting there, either the shitter or the shittee, surrounded by the smell of fresh excreta, and it's not as though you can just wipe and flush is it? You're going to have to get that bad boy down the pan somehow. And wash the sheets, for sure. Possibly scrub the carpet too. And, worst of all, try and make some conversation with your erstwhile partner. "So, how was the turd for you?" "Oh, fine." "Fancy a chili dog?" "Nah. Not hungry just yet..."

Frankly it's hard to believe that anyone would want to try this Cleveland delight, but even harder to imagine that you could work it into conversation. "Hey, how about we try something a bit different tonight?" "OK. What did you have in mind? Dressing up? Talking dirty? Role play? Outdoors?" "Well, actually, I thought you could lie on your back and I'd take a massive dump on your tits. How's that sound?" Sounds like you might be pulling yourself off alone tonight.

Oh, and by the way, why Cleveland? Is that the kind of thing they dream up in that town? That's now what you're known for. Detroit has cars, Chicago has corruption, San Francisco has queers, and you have people taking a shit on each other. Might want to rethink that marketing approach...

Copyright © 2010 Edward Bison

Someone Else's Fault?

2010-11-19T15:35:00.000-08:00

Here is the conclusion of a recent report by the Council of the Great City Schools:

"Black males continue to perform lower than their peers throughout the country on almost every indicator"

And what is the conclusion that is to be drawn from this report? That we must spend yet more money improving the prospects of black urban youth.

"...African American males are not getting the attention and support they need to succeed..."

Really? Here we go again with the mealy-mouthed, politically correct bullshit. The thesis of this report is that somehow this inequality of outcomes is the result of inequality of opportunity. Inner city blacks do badly in school because they are poor, or so we are told to believe, but how about the opposite hypothesis: inner city blacks are poor because they do badly in school. Of course you don't have a whole lot of income opportunity if you drop out of high school and end up illiterate, incoherent and functionally useless to any employer. No shit!

We are also asked to believe that inner city blacks do badly because they are in poor schools, but how about the hypothesis that the schools are poor because they are full of inner city blacks? We never hear that possibility explored, do we? Why not? After all, a school is the sum of four components: building, teachers, kids and parents. The quality of the building has absolutely fuck-all to do with learning potential. I remember being schooled in temporary huts, with an oil-fired heater in the corner, and sent out to play in the freezing cold at break time, and it never did any of us any harm. Likewise the teachers, while not unimportant, are not the major issue - we grew up with teachers that were crap, as well as those that were great, and inner city schools don't have a monopoly on shit teachers. (Besides, you won't ever hear the politically correct lefties blame the teachers - they're good union members, and can only be cast in the role of victim.)

That leaves us with kids and parents. Since parents are very largely responsible for the behavior and attitude of their kids, I think we can narrow the reason for crappy inner city schools down to crappy inner city kids, a result of crappy inner city parents. Not that all inner city parents are crap, but the study doesn't state that all inner city blacks fail, only that a much larger number fail than do whites.

Is it possible that inner city blacks don't care about education? It would be reasonable to believe that a very large proportion do not; otherwise they wouldn't be dropping out of school. In a superficial, mindless sub-culture, where respect comes with money and guns, why would you work hard to get a low-paying job when you can live on welfare while you try to make it big as a rapper, basketball player or drug dealer? You think this is a stereotype? Check the fucking statistics.

The repeated response to the observed failure of inner city black males to become educated is to spend more money trying to educate them. What the fuck is the point if they decided that they didn't want to be educated in the first place? Perhaps it would be more productive to cut off any welfare support for them or their bastard offspring, so that they would have to go out and get a low-paying job, simply to survive. Then they might put some emphasis on education for their own kids. Until they start taking responsibility for their own failure I fail to see why it should be my responsibility to dig even deeper in my pocket to bail them out. Society has provided schools - if you choose to waste the opportunity then the consequences should follow.

Generations of dirt poor immigrants have worked hard in crappy jobs, putting their kids through school so that they could have the opportunities their parents couldn't. Does the inner city black community lack that selfless attention to the development of the next generation? The massive majority of single-parent "families" doesn't exactly suggest otherwise.

The debate on this issue is pointless until the really tough questions can be raised, and the responsibility for the low achievement of inner city blacks finally be accepted by the people whose laziness and lack of commitment to education is so vividly on display. Crappy people make crappy schools, and not the other way around.

Copyright © 2010 Edward Bison

Why Bother Trying?

2010-08-09T04:42:00.000-07:00

When I was about sixteen I lived in a small English seaside town. The average age of the populace was well into the sixties and there was fuck-all to do that any self-respecting sixteen year-old would consider doing. A lot of kids in the area seemed to be connected with the local Free Church. It was one of those family-oriented happy-clappy places with family-friendly events, and everything watered down in a "right-on" socially acceptable way. My friend Sven went to this church and I remember him telling me about the "sports day" they had organized on the seafront some years previously. There was a running race which Sven had entered, and won. At the end of the race the simpering do-gooder in charge had quoted the biblical phrase "the last shall be first and the first shall be last" before giving the prize to the kid who had come in last.

Nice life lesson there. That's what happens when you let the liberal weenies run things - success becomes denigrated, and your prizes are "redistributed" to those who didn't run fast enough.

I was reminded of this when reading a WSJ article about how so many vacant homes are now being given over to Section 8 housing in the US.

Section 8 refers to the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974, and is intended to limit the percentage of income that "poor" people have to pay for housing. Under this program tenants pay about 30 percent of their income for rent, while the balance is paid with federal money. (And by "federal money" we mean taxes - that's where federal money comes from, after all.)

The WSJ article referred to a woman (let's not stereotype, but she's a single parent black woman called Shawnetta who works in a pawn shop) who moved to a nice home in Las Vegas, where "about half her $1,400 rent" is paid for by taxpayers. The article says a government program pays for it, but that's one of the tricks of language that you have to watch - it sounds so much more direct if you say "paid for by taxpayers" or even "paid for by you and me" but we wouldn't want to let the cat out of the bag, would we?

So at around $700 a month we're paying $8-9,000 a year in free money to this woman so she can live in a better house than the (presumably) $700 a month rent she could afford herself would get her. The picture in the paper shows this grinning parasite in a home that I could not have hoped to afford when I left college, but which is now apparently a "right" for anyone, no matter what stupid, feckless decisions they (or the father or fathers of their children) might have made along the way.

Let's leave aside for a moment the social costs of dispersing the human detritus from the crime and social depredation pits that blacks have created for themselves in many inner cities. What do you think happens when all these Section 8 families move in next door? They're all "fleeing the drug-infested neighborhoods" but guess what - the problems weren't with the addresses but with the people who inhabited them. The crappy people just infect new places.

No, what's really galling is that there's no incentive for you (or your fatherless kids) to work hard in school, get a better job, work overtime or study part time to get another qualification in order to get a better home. Why bother? Big government, in its infinite wisdom, fueled by a plethora of "rights" that have been teased from the penumbra of the US Constitution by a succession of liberal judiciaries, has determined that you have a "right" to live in a nice house now. Not just a roof over your head, but a nice suburban home, away from the social problems that you and your neighbors created. And the rest of us are going to dig into our pockets to pay for it, because we wouldn't want you to be in any way unhappy now, would we?

Nearly half the eligible population in the US pay no federal taxes whatsoever, and you have to believe that a significant additional number pay very little. For people who make good money, the fact that they are having money deducted from their paycheck every month so that Shawnetta can have a better home is ridiculously unfair. But what about the people who now live next door to her and her kind? They aren't likely to be wealthy. They worked hard to save money so that they could buy a nice home where they could raise a family. They did whatever it took to make the house payment every month, and that meant doing it year after year. And now some bitch who didn't do anything of the sort is being "gifted" the same lifestyle. By you. So when you're working overtime so you have a few extra dollars, just remember that Shawnetta only makes $10.50 an hour but she can live in the same house as you, no worries.

When you set the bar for entitlements so high it becomes difficult for many to justify working for what others get for nothing. Yeah, the last shall be first and the first shall be last. After that Sven didn't bother racing again...

Joining a Gym

2010-08-01T08:12:00.000-07:00

Now that my carcass is pretty much relocated to Chicago it's time to join a new gym. This seems like it would be easy - just find something between work and home, closer to home (for weekend workouts), with decent equipment and a monthly fee that won't bankrupt me.

I tried out the local Ballys, which was characterized by sweaty lowlife who don't wipe down the equipment or replace the plates on the weight machines. At least it was convenient and cheap(ish), though, so I considered joining. Mrs Bison suggested I look online for a deal. "They always have deals online" she opined, with the sure and certain insight of someone who has never actually joined a gym.

So I looked online and found the $19.99 a month*, $0 enrollment fee* offer. Did you spot the * sign? That means "restrictions apply". If you click on the restrictions you will find the following text:

Offer Restrictions
One Club Easy Monthly Payment Plan Membership: No Enrollment Fee. First monthly payment of $19.99 to $29.99 (rate varies based on location selected), plus $29 card fee due at time of joining, then $19.99 to $29.99 per month as long as you remain a member. Monthly payments are subject to increase as stated in your Membership Agreement. A prorated usage fee through first scheduled payment date may be added. An annual fee of $19 or $29 may be charged to your provided account in December of each year. Annual fee varies by market. Recurring Credit Card (RCC) transactions only. Sales Tax not included (where applicable.)

I think I may have commented before that gym chains are usually cheating scum who want nothing more than to separate you from your hard-earned with visions of six-pack abs and spotless facilities, so this information hardly comes as a surprise.

First point - you can only pay by Recurring Credit Card transaction. Good luck cancelling that if you want to leave. Think you can contact the card provider? Think again - you signed an agreement with the gym, and they can keep debiting your card until you cancel with THEM. LA Fitness seems to have a particular penchant for "losing" cancellations that haven't been sent via certified mail, if you look at their reputation on the web.

Note that there's a $29 card fee at time of joining. So there's $0 of enrollment fee, but you have to pay a $29 card fee, and you can only pay by card. If that's not an "enrollment fee" what the fuck is it? Calling it a card fee is simply hiding the charge. Note also that you can be charged the fee every year in December if they feel like it. And that your fees may increase when they feel like it, according to an agreement which is referenced but not included in the small print. You should ALWAYS read the small print in agreement because therein lies the truth about how you'll get fucked later, and you may as well be prepared.

To be fair to Ballys (though I'm not sure why, since they can't be bothered to make slimy people carry a towel in their gym) their people did not have the "what can I do to get you in this car today" approach that the wankers at LA Fitness had, but my reaction when I see businesses try and hide charges and "cheat" in a small way is to assume that they would, by extension, be quite happy to cheat you in a big way later, and that hardly makes you want to give them your credit card now, does it?

Still, for anyone naive enough to believe what gyms tell you BEFORE you join, why not check out the satisfied customers with LA Fitness Problems as highlighted by ConsumerAffairs.com. You might end up with six-pack abs, but your wallet will look like a steroid boy's wedding tackle.

One Flush Or Two?

2010-05-23T06:47:00.000-07:00

It's been well over a hundred years since the introduction of the flushing toilet, an innovation that, for obvious reasons, greatly improved upon the previous practice of "throwing your shit out of the window". (Although, living as I do on the twentieth floor of an apartment building, I can't help occasionally being tempted.) Since the popularization of the toilet it's been left to the natural processes of competition and market forces to refine and improve on the original. In theory this means that buyers shop around for lower prices, and suppliers are forced to improve their products and lower their costs in order to stay ahead of their competitors, earn higher prices and sustain profitability.

If you buy into that evolutionary theory of product design (survival of the fittest) you would expect that only the very best toilet designs would by now be in production, the others having been consigned to the scrap heap of history, porcelain dinosaurs, never to be flushed again. So why is the toilet in my apartment so completely shit?

It's not as though the fundamental concept is challenging - pull the turds and paper out the bottom, try and rinse any detritus off the bowl and refill with pristine water, with no remnants floating in it. That being the case, why is my toilet designed to fill to the brim and swirl everything around for five seconds before emptying, leaving assorted wreckage all the way up the bowl while failing even to "swallow" the contents fully, resulting in the need for multiple flushes and frequent application of the toilet brush?

I must have taken a dump in more than a thousand different toilets over the years, maybe even five thousand, scattered over the highways and byways of Great Britain, hotels on four continents, airplanes at thirty thousand feet, and other places even I won't mention. I remember being forced (by a previous night's curry) to take an unscheduled stop in a run down town center public toilet. There was no lock on the door, no seat, and a convenient hole, just in case someone was inclined to push their penis through from the adjacent stall. But here's the point - the thing flushed just once and the whole lot disappeared. (And I was glad of it too - I wasn't planning to hang around, in case that penis appeared.) Why is technology that is considered standard for a public bum-fondling rendezvous not considered routine in the equipment installed in expensive houses and apartments?

I tried out one of the toilets in my new house and it's the same. It doesn't take the turds for a magic ride around the rim of the bowl like the one here, but it seems highly disinclined to "swallow". And this is an upmarket toilet. What happened along the way that meant basic technology was lost?

Here's what happened. Remember that "improve performance, lower cost" route to better margins? Well there's another option, namely "fuck performance, lower cost". That doesn't work if you're selling something to the person that will use it AND they have the opportunity to try it out first. It also doesn't work if consumer reports puts out comparisons of product performance. But most people never buy a toilet - it's in the house when you show up, specified by the builder, who doesn't give one solitary fuck whether it flushes well or not, whether your legs fall asleep when you're enthroned, or whether the seat works loose after six months. It's just cost to them.

Even if you want to make a change, what are you going to do? Are you going to ask the assistant in Home Depot if you can take a shit on their display model and see how it flushes? Are you going to have a curry the night before and bring along a newspaper, "to give it a proper test"? I doubt whether most people would even sit on one, trousers on, to test for seat height and comfort. Buying a toilet without sitting on it is like buying a car without getting in it; buying one without flushing is like buying a car without driving it, which is why performance is rewarded in car design - people try before they buy, and the products are rated. You can buy Car and Driver magazine to see comparisons of different products; you can read reviews by experts, and you can compare all the statistics. Where's "Toilet and Flush" magazine when you need it? I don't think you could even ask the Home Depot assistant with a straight face "How does it flush? Will it get everything in one go?"

In the real world no-one replaces toilets unless they want them to match the new design of their bathroom; how they flush isn't even a consideration. Builders only care about what they cost and consumers, when they care at all, only care about how they look. So toilet makers receive no reward for performance at all. Which means that I can't get my shit to flush at the first attempt, and Thomas Crapper must somewhere be swirling in his grave.

Copyright © 2010 Edward Bison

Nothing Downstairs

2010-05-22T15:00:00.000-07:00

One of the problems with moving to a new city is that you have to sell your house in the old one. This is quite enough of a pain in the arse in the normal course of things, but when you're in the middle of a housing market meltdown, and the city in question is St.Louis, a place that is often referred to as "a great place to raise a family" simply because there's fuck all else good to say about it, a place that lost its airport hub status and is now admirably served by a fleet of cigar-shaped coffin regional jets, and a place with absolutely no basis for economic growth, things get tougher.

Selling a house is a pain for many and varied reasons: you have to deal with realtors, a life form that ranks slightly above the tick in terms of sheer parasitic uselessness; you have to try and make your house appealing and keep it that way constantly, ready for any potential buyer to show up; and you have to deal with members of the public. I know the "public" is theoretically made up of people, just like you and me, but there's something about that designation that causes people to leave their brains at home, in a jar beside the bed.

Let's take my house, just as a for-instance. It isn't the best house in the world, but it's clean, airy, well-situated, well-maintained, nicely landscaped and priced in line with similar offerings. One thing it does not have, however, is a finished basement, or "finished lower level" in realtor parlance. Now, I remember buying this house nearly fifteen years ago, and the process of house-buying then involved looking at dozens of printed one-page house details, each with one small photograph, and trying to determine which ones it was worth going to check out. Inevitably a whole lot of them weren't even worth going into once you arrived and realized that they were adjacent to a parking lot / school / insane asylum.

Nowadays, however, we have the internet in all its glory. Not only are all the houses listed on Realtor.com, so you can check out multiple pictures, but you can also see Google street views and aerial shots which will tip you off in advance that the reason the house is so cheap is that it's literally side by side with a crappy old gas station. The house details listed will give you numbers of rooms, types of rooms and dimensions of rooms. You can see pictures of many rooms, and after a while you figure out that if you can't see a picture of the important rooms, such as kitchen or bathroom, they must be utterly shit.

So with all this information literally at your fingertips there really is no reason to be completely surprised when you show up, even if the realtors still have the enviable ability to make a postage-stamp yard look like a football field with cunning photography. It's certainly possible to cut down on time wasted looking at houses which don't even meet your basic requirements.

Which brings us back to my unfinished basement. Last week a couple made an appointment to see the house, which necessitated Mrs Bison tidying up and fucking off out for a couple of hours, but no problem because - joy of fucking joys - someone actually wants to see the house. Afterwards you wait with bated breath for the feedback from the visit, and in this case the potential buyer was not interested because the house didn't have a finished lower level, and they really needed one because granny and "failure to launch" kid were going to be moving in too.

Well excuse me for pointing out the fucking obvious, but if you knew you wanted a finished basement, what would make you want to visit a house that didn't have one? It's not as though it's a small detail you might forget, like an aversion to hydrangea bushes or a preference for deep pile carpet. It's a fucking unfinished basement, dickhead - what were you thinking when you read the house details? "Oh look honey, this house doesn't have a finished lower level, but we should go and see it anyway - you never know whether it might have grown one in the night." Did you think the fucking finished basement fairy might have visited and we'd all walk down there and exclaim in unmitigated delight "Wow, look at that elegant drywall and extra bathroom - how did that happen?"

At the end of the day the worst part about selling a house isn't the tidying, the realtors, the scheduling of appointments, the price reductions or the lack of control. It's dealing with members of the public in all their fucking stupid mindless ignorance. It's listening to their witless "feedback" about the lack of something we told them wasn't fucking well there before they decided to come and waste our fucking time with a visit. In any civilized society I should now be entitled under common law to go and kick the buyer firmly in the nutsack for sheer brainlessness. It's simply the right thing to do.

Copyright © 2010 Edward Bison

On Yer Bike

2010-05-19T19:06:00.000-07:00

Want to know what pisses me off? I don't mean the whole list, you understand. Not even a subset of the list, really. No, just the most recent entry. It's cyclists. Fucking ladyboys in lycra weaving in and out of traffic like accidents are just something that happens to other people. There I was, driving home in Chicago traffic, trying not to run over the dayglo lycra-clad wanker to the right of me. At the stop sign I pulled forward, behind the car at the line, and two more gayboy cyclists cut in front of me and shot through the junction.

What is it with cyclists that makes them think they're so much more important than anyone else on the road. They exude that smug "I'm a more righteous road user than you" attitude, which would be bad enough by itself, but when you roll in that hideous uniform, shrink-wrapping their junk in brightly colored shorts, the urge to drive over one is almost irresistible. There was a bloke in the UK recently who chased and ran over a cyclist who'd knocked into his car, killing him. He got life. Life? Fuck me, more like justifiable homicide.

Leaving aside the stupid clothes for a moment, don't you just hate that "Now I'm traffic, now I'm not" bullshit that cyclists pull? When they're riding along the road you have to treat them like another road-user, swerving to avoid them as they wander all over the place, because heaven forbid that you actually hit one. Shame on you, not yielding to this uber-important and fragile fellow traveler. But as soon as there's any kind of impediment - stop sign, traffic light, you name it - they suddenly cease to be a road-user. "Those silly rules don't apply to me. I'm going to ride on the pavement, run the red light, cut in front of the car and fail to stop at the stop sign." Then, once they're past the obstruction it's right back to blocking your way and insisting that you yield to them. They're wankers, end of.

Now if I decide to have a little race with the car next to me, plod will have me in handcuffs before you can say "Rodney King", but wanky cyclists race along the road or sidewalk just as they please and nothing is ever done about them. Frankly, I'd lock the fuckers up just for the crime of shaving their legs, and it would serve them right if someone tattooed a pair of tits on their back and made them their prison wife as a result.

That cunt Lance Armstrong has a lot to answer for...

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2010-04-15T12:24:00.001-07:00

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What Is It With Students?

2010-03-06T17:53:00.000-08:00

I was walking back to my charming temporary apartment this afternoon, having singularly failed to locate a shop wherein I could purchase a fucking newspaper, when I walked by a couple of female students. From Northwestern University. I knew they were from Northwestern because they were talking about it, in that peculiarly intense, whiny way that only students can.

Now, Northwestern is right down the street from me, so it's not as though the whole area isn't infested with students, and I do try not to let them wind me up, honestly I do, but it's hard.

This one girl was opining to the other, "...the reason I bonded with Hannah is that she really gets where I'm coming from, you know..."

And that, right there, is why I hate students: their fucking meaningless socio-babble. You spend somewhere North of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars sending some vacuous bint to college and she's walking down the street, talking with an utterly straight face about how Hannah gets where she's coming from. You know.

Well let me tell you, I have a pretty good idea where you're coming from too, Ms. Braindead. You're coming from a nice home where mummy and daddy worked their arse off so that you could go to Northwestern and witter aimlessly about nothing. I swear that every other word out of their mouths was "like", as though they were eleven year-old airheads, OD'd on Kids' TV.

All this would be bad enough, but this area is littered with expensive coffee houses - you know, the places where your cappuccino costs five bucks, and they're perpetually full of students. There's even a sushi place, and that's full of students too. Since when do poor, hard-up students have the wherewithal to be grazing on sushi? Back when I was a student (and I'm not saying that I wasn't an arsehole sometimes too) food was evaluated for purchase based on the ratio of calories to cost.

IN: pasta, rice, cheap pies, tinned meat, bread, potatoes
OUT: just about everything else

Sushi wasn't just "out"; it wasn't even on the consideration list in my non-cosmopolitan backwater, and if I had excess cash it was going on beer, or cheap hamburgers, not tiny pieces of fish.

These fucking kids waltz around in new cars, with cell phones, casually sipping expensive lattes and wittering aimlessly through four years designed to qualify them at great expense for precisely fuck-all. No wonder college is so bank-breakingly expensive: it's a gigantic fucking holiday camp for the hard-of-working.

So excuse me for thinking that you and Hannah and all the rest of the cappuccino kids could do with a little less cash, and the world could do with a whole lot less of your whiny bullshit.

Copyright © 2010 Edward Bison

Airline Taking The Piss

2010-02-27T19:07:00.000-08:00

The list of things that are a pain in the arse when flying is a long one, made ever longer by the almost unbelievable arrogance of semi-literate so-called security personnel, who have barely graduated from flipping burgers but now have a bright blue TSA uniform, which apparently comes complete with a lobotomy and a massive ego infusion. It's a pain in the arse getting to the airport, parking at the airport, checking in, shuffling through the security lines, being ordered to perform completely different but equally useless routines in the interests of "security", traipsing through crappy lounges, consuming overpriced and shitty food and eventually boarding an outdated plane, staffed by surly and ancient flight attendants, determined to get through the flight with the minimum of actual effort, on the basis that they are there "primarily for your security", i.e. to order you around rather than serve you.

That said, airlines are constantly on the lookout for new ways to fuck with you in-flight, hence the much-heralded decision by All Nippon Airlines to introduce women-only toilets on their planes. It's bad enough already trying to take a piss on a plane. For a start they don't want you getting up until well after take-off and they make you sit down more than half an hour before landing, for no fucking good reason. In between time, if you're not in an aisle seat, good fucking luck getting up, crawling over your corpulent seatmate, getting past the cart in the aisle and getting through the line at the toilet before the seatbelt sign comes on and some miserable flight attendant bitch, made bitter by getting fucked all ways by pilots for forty years and never marrying one, orders you back to your seat.

There are never enough toilets on planes, largely because seats can be sold, whereas toilets are a non-revenue generating waste of space. (Unless you're that Ryanair wanker who wants to charge for their use.) Taking one of these rare and sacred appliances and turning it over for the exclusive use of women makes no fucking sense.

Apparently the airline did a survey, and women identified dedicated toilets as their number two need (number two - geddit?) right after desserts. (Here's a thought ladies - if you spent a little less time hitting the desserts you might not have to spend quite so much time in the can.) Why is this? There was some mumbling about men leaving the seat up, or leaving a mess, but I could just as easily complain that they leave the seat down, and what's more, I am reliably informed that women's public toilets are by far in worse state than men's, due in no small part to women's unwillingness to actually sit on the seat, preferring to spray indiscriminately from a great height.

What pisses me off most is that this is a typical double-standard. If men were granted dedicated urinals on planes there'd be a fucking outcry, with women picketing the airline's offices and N.O.W. lezzas in full warcry. Besides, regardless of the cause, it's simply a fact that there are more men flying in business class than women. Always. And there aren't enough bogs to go around now, so how does it make sense to dedicate one to the two women flying?

Actually I'd suggest that men-only toilets would make a lot more sense. Many's the time I've taken the overnight flight to Europe, where you arrive at around 7am, ready to work a full day. You try and sleep on the plane as long as possible, meaning that ideally you wake up, take a piss and land. But the chances are that one of the two women in business class will scuttle into the toilet clasping her make-up bag and then you can forget about anyone else having access for the rest of the flight. The bitch will be in there for twenty minutes, making herself "presentable", and emerging just in time for the wizened old flight attendant to order you back to your seat. Again.

The rule should be "The toilet is for piss, shit, and, maybe, just maybe, cleaning your teeth. For anything else please wait until you fucking land. Bitch."

Of course I'm expecting that the dickheads that All Nippon Airlines did just as good a job polling men on what would make their flight more enjoyable. If so, I shall look forward to the cigar bar, extensive range of scotch, free blow job and full English breakfast on my next flight. Yeah right...

Copyright © 2010 Edward Bison

Ve Haf Vays Of Making You Vait

2010-02-20T16:14:00.000-08:00

I always thought the Germans were supposed to be efficient. And I also thought Chennai airport (that's in India, dumbass) was the worst airport in the civilized world. Well, as of yesterday I have revised my opinion of the Germans, and even though I can't say that Frankfurt airport is actually worse than Chennai, it comes fucking close, especially when you consider that it has all the supposed benefits of Western European development, and that there are no cows in the road outside or one-legged beggars in the parking lot.

Chennai is bad because it's badly run. You go to check in at Jet Airlines but you can't find the desk. Then, when you do find it, you realize that business class check in is a hundred yards away across the concourse. They give you a form when you check in, but they don't tell you that you need to fill it in before you can go to the next stage. Then you stand in a line for immigration (why do they need to inspect your documents so closely when you're leaving, for fuck's sake?), and this can easily take an hour. If you're lucky you can now sit in an overcrowded lounge while you wait for boarding, but don't wait too long, because you still have to clear security. That's the biggest clusterfuck of all, with shiftless workers manning x-ray machines and metal detectors that aren't paired up. I put my belongings on one belt and then got sent five lanes up for scanning. I swear it's a miracle that my laptop was still there when I returned. Then they check you documents THREE more times at the gate. Don't ask me why...

Frankfurt can handle the check-in part OK, but then you clear passport control and head to your gate. I realized there may not be a lounge because the check-in wench didn't give me an invitation, but I didn't realize that the gate would have about ten seats for a whole 767 of passengers. We asked a security bloke at the gate if there was an American Airlines lounge, and he said there was, only it was a bit hard to follow his directions, on account of him having a speech impediment which appeared to be linked to significant mental retardation. Nice of the Germans to give him a job - care in the community and all that.

So we walked in the direction he seemed to be indicating (unless that was just a spasm) and found another set of security checks. The staff there directed us back in the opposite direction, and we had a nice fifteen minute walk through the airport, just to satisfy ourselves that there was, indeed, no American Airlines lounge. But by the time we got back to the gate, the security checks had commenced.

In every other airport in the civilized world they have one big set of security checkpoints and you can go through as soon as you're ready. At Frankfurt they have a little set by gate 6 just for that gate and they don't open it until less than an hour before the flight boards. The set-up was simple - a long, Disney-style winding line, in order to get to two x-ray machines for your bags, either side of a single walk-through metal detector. People loaded their bags on the machines but they didn't move, because the bottleneck was the metal detector. Almost anything would set it off, and then the offending passenger would be subjected to a full pat-down and wanding, shoe removal and x-ray. Meanwhile everyone else had to wait. There as one man doing pat-downs for men, and one woman for the women, but only one of them worked at a time.

I was close to the front of the line and it was fucking painful to see such an exercise in complete fucking futility, organized so fucking inefficiently. Even if you believe that this type of security check does anything useful, you might at least expect that it would be organized so as to run smoothly. I stripped everything metal from my body, with the exception of fillings; even my belt, watch and wallet, which don't EVER set off metal detectors, just so I could avoid having the overtly homosexual German security man rub me down. Then I realized why the process was so fucking slow. In addition to the pointless rub-downs, your bags would be hand-searched, even if nothing suspicious showed on the x-ray. And guess what? It was the retard speech impediment twat who was doing it. Having opened up all the zips on my computer bag and messed everything up, he informed me that my computer power adapter would have to have the cables checked. (At least I think he said that - I have to admit I backed off a little at that point, just to minimize the saliva overspray.) Then he opened my larger bag and rifled through my dirty underwear while other passengers stood by.

[Note to fellow travelers: unless your wiping is of a magnificently high standard I recommend you avoid white underwear. Personally, I only buy black.]

Now you might think that having Helmut the Halfwit rummage through my bag would help save lives and keep America free, but it's worth noting that he failed to search my trainers, which were in a plastic bag, and were easily the most suspicious thing there, and he also failed to spot that I had an illicit bag with liquids in it (which I noticed when he uncovered it, but which he failed to spot). So why go through the fucking motions, piss me off and have the whole plane waiting in a pointless line, when you're not even paying attention?

I went to a separate room for my cable check, but what they actually did was an explosive residue test. Sorry Helmut, you weren't even close.

My colleague asked the Germans at the scanner (you have to do something while you wait) why it was that they didn't put more people on the line. The old woman at the scanner replied that they didn't need more people - "less people, but just more time". That's the kind of attitude that explains why I will be driving to another country before I leave Europe in future. My parting comment to Frankfurt security:

"With organization like that, no wonder you couldn't fucking take Stalingrad."

Wankers.

Copyright © 2010 Edward Bison

Ford Tortoise

2010-02-09T16:45:00.001-08:00

I'd been meaning to get a new car for years, to the point where Mrs Bison refused to engage in any conversation about what I might buy, on the grounds that a) she didn't care, b) she wished I'd just go and buy one, and c) did she mention that she really didn't care?

Part of the problem was that I really wanted an SUV because I'd got used to the higher seating position, and my joints don't favor sedans after soccer games. But I also wanted a sport sedan, because I wanted to drive something that felt alive again. I really wanted something classy, like an Audi, but I was fucked if I was going to lay out the best part of 60 large on something that was going to get dinged in a mall car park the week after it arrived. So I ended up buying nothing.

Well, the best part about my new job was that it came with a company car. Not necessarily one commensurate with my monumental capabilities, you understand, but a company car is a bit like sex - not something you turn down when it's free. So to cut a dull story short I ended up getting a Ford Taurus, because it was an AWD option which I could get with all sorts of equipment. It has a navigation system, which is great, but it also has fancy alloy wheels, of the type which practically guarantee that if I park it in the wrong part of Chicago I'll be coming back to a car on bricks. In fact I might not want to stop at the lights in certain parts of town.

So what's the new Taurus like, I hear you asking? It's not bad, but you can tell it's a Ford. I got a black one, and it looks great, although once you're inside, the narrow slit windows make you feel like you're piloting something from the Wacky Races. And the drop down plastic holder for your shades doesn't fit right - the plastic hangs down, a tragic reminder that in a car that probably sells for close to forty grand, Detroit still can't quite get the basics right. The rain sensor windshield wipers have various settings, all of which are guaranteed to be exactly wrong for whatever precipitation is falling. You either get the annoying squawk of rubber across glass, or you peer out through the frosted windshield, trying not to kill anyone while you wait for the next sweep.

I have to say, though, that it's been great in snow, in spite of the low profile tires. And the stereo sounds good, especially when you turn it up loud enough to cover the squeak from the armrest. But best of all, I won't be boring the living shit out of my spouse with tales of potential car purchases. Lucky her.

Copyright © 2010 Edward Bison

Join The Club

2010-02-07T13:24:00.000-08:00

I've often thought that bringing up kids was the ultimate opportunity for the exercise of simple common sense. So much of what is wrong with kids (especially other people's kids, you understand) comes down to the feckless stupidity and lack of discipline of their parents; surely all you have to do is play the game straight and everything will come out right. Right?

Well, it's now time for Bison Daughter's twelfth birthday, and the thing she wants most is a phone. Not really to talk to anyone, just for the texting. All her friends have phones, and they sit there on the school bus, texting each other. There's absolutely no point to it, of course. They have nothing to say, and I cannot see the point in expending $150 on a phone and a further $20-40 a month on a plan simply so that Bison Daughter can recede into a sad world of "CU L8R" or whatever meaningless drivel it is that passes between preteen girls as an alternative to actual conversation.

It's a no-brainer really. I mean, I didn't get a mobile phone until I got a sales job at the age of twenty four, and that was a car phone which had some apparatus the size of a four-slot toaster in the trunk, so it wasn't really "mobile" in that sense. Since when did it become an imperative that all our offspring have a mobile phone? Since phone companies figured out that they could sell them ringtones, wallpaper and no end of expensive and worthless downloads, that's when.

The problem is that, shite and worthless though the phone-text traffic is, that's the only means of communication kids seem to have now. They don't talk to each other - I don't believe most of them could hold a conversation if their phone depended on it - so if you're not part of the texting network then you're likely an outcast. No parent wants their kid to be left out; teenage girls have cruelty and exclusion down to an art form - I think it gives them something to do in between pulling the wings off insects and torturing small mammals - and being different is just an invitation to exclusion.

So much as I relish the thought of knocking down the "all my friends have one" argument with some tried and tested parental reasoning like "well, if all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?" I know that at some point, eventually, I'm going to break down and get my kid a phone too. Which is a sad indictment of the society in which we live, isn't it? Parents go off to work, and spend way too many hours there, trying to make enough money to pay all the bills, including the mobile phone, while their kids sit around like little vegetables, only able to communicate at all by typing partial words and sub-sentences into their little reality-avoidance machines.

If we hadn't persuaded ourselves that we needed all this shit in the first place we could work less and spend more time with the people we purported to love. Applying the simple principles of common sense to raising them, so they didn't grow up to be dysfunctional freaks with social alienation disorders and an inability to relate to other humans, or cope with delayed gratification. Yeah right. LOL to that.

Copyright © 2010 Edward Bison

Party Time!

2010-01-03T17:12:00.000-08:00

There appears to be a cycle that you fall into, if you're not lucky, of really shit New Years Eves. Things are OK when you're young - I clearly remember back in the day attending a festival of debauchery at our local pub with some mates, which involved fancy dress, joyfully shit music and precious little concern that none of us had yet attained the legal drinking age. I remember subsequent events that involved a touching act of faith by one friend who let me crash in his parents' bed, apparently unconcerned that I might fill it with diced carrot, or urine (which I did not), and sundry acts of lust carried out on someone's lounge carpet. Yes, those were the days - the parties were long and the hangovers short.

Fast forward a few years and for some reason everyone grew up and became sensible. Sure, people still had parties, but they were the kind of party where people played Pictionary, and we weren't invited in any case, possibly because I'm shit at Pictionary, but more likely because no-one wanted their lounge carpet defiled after midnight.

There were still parties at pubs and clubs, and for a few quid, or dollars, you could go along, drink crap beer to excess with people you'd never met before and end up wondering why hangovers, like hemorrhoids or arthritis, never bother you until you get older. But if you don't go you end up at home watching the most utterly fucking shite television in the history of the known universe. Inane and witless presenters fill the air with drivel until what seems like a hundred thousand morons count backwards from twenty and the new year is ushered in, pretty much like the old one, i.e. full of morons.

For that reason I have to admit I've turned in early a couple of times over the years, but recently we've fallen in with a bad crowd of people in our neighborhood who know how to see in the New Year in style. The event always involves lots of well-aged Scotch, so this year I brought along some good rye whiskey, just for a change of pace. My 2009 theory was that if I drank nothing but whiskey all night I might be spared the worst of the 01/01/2010 suffering, and let me tell you that it's a great theory, if for no other reason than that it gives you an excuse to drink whiskey all night.

This year, however, the host's teenage daughter was having a party of her own downstairs, giving us all a chance to vicariously relive earlier excesses. All the attendees were considered responsible enough by their parents either to drink sensibly, or to refrain from drinking, which made it that much more entertaining when the non-drinking girl whose over-protective mother had made a special point of showing up to have a few words and check out the party, ended up draped around the toilet bowl, yurking her champagne-and-cake mixture into the depths.

At least she made it to the bog, unlike the boy who yakked up some orange regurgitate in one of the bedrooms. There was beer pong, but not much else, and I have to say that I was pretty disappointed in the youth of today - if you're drunk enough to vomit orange in a stranger's house you ought to be drunk enough to sing, dance, do the conga, attempt to shag someone or stagger out into the street and throw a bottle at a passing car. They just sat around and did nothing. Generation Y, or whatever they're called, can't even figure out how to have a good time unless someone scripts it for them and hand-holds them through it.

There was one blonde girl, all of eighteen, with the kind of wonderful boobs that make you question how any bloke could seriously bear to be gay, and no-one was on top of her under a pile of coats at any point during the evening. You could suggest that this was because of her virtue, or the restraint shown by the fine youth of St.Louis, but frankly that's just bollocks. Restraint be buggered - if you're going to chunder fluorescently in someone's bed, at least make the drunkenness worth your while.

In the end I was just happy to be spared a Pictionary marathon, watching Dick Clark's prune-like visage, an evening with Ryan Seacrest (Jesus!) or an early night like a sad wanker. I also decided that rye whiskey is an exceptionally smooth way to drink through an evening and that I still like big eighteen year-old boobs. But then again, who doesn't?

Copyright © 2010 Edward Bison

It's Airline Rules Silly Season Again...

2009-12-26T18:02:00.000-08:00

I read with dismay the details of the latest attempt by a self-proclaimed al-Quaida terrorist to bring down a US-bound airliner. My dismay does not arise, however, from the fear that I will become the victim of another such atrocity, but from the sure and certain knowledge that this incident will precipitate another round of bizarre, pointless and irritating "additional security measures" from the brainless pricks at the TSA and the airlines.

This Nigerian wanker had not even been charged and there were already reports of important new measures being introduced to ensure our greater security in the air, among them:

Passengers to be confined to their seats for an hour prior to landing.
Passengers to be forbidden from having anything on their laps (such as, for instance, a laptop)
Passengers to be discouraged from bringing on any carry-on bags
Passengers to be prevented from accessing their carry-on bags during the flight

Now I would like to point out that the felon in this case had a bomb strapped to his leg, which he apparently attempted to detonate when the plane was coming in to land. It wasn't in his carry-on, or on his lap. He didn't get up and get it out of his bag - it was strapped to his fucking leg from the moment he got on the plane. The salient point here is that someone managed to get explosives through security because security is designed not to detect explosives but to prevent you from taking nail clippers, shampoo or bottles of water onto the flight.

Yeah, if Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had attempted to smuggle any shaving cream onto the plane then he'd have been in big shit, but it was only explosives, so he was OK.

So yet again the TSA, in a belated attempt to be seen to be doing something (anything) responds to a problem with a set of entirely unrelated measures, certain that the renewed misery and inconvenience visited upon the traveling public will be interpreted as a sign of vigilance, and that no-one's complaints will even be considered because this is "an issue of airline security". In other words, a reason to suspend common sense and all join in the pathetic charade of lining up and allowing ourselves to be treated like shit.

For a start, what is the point of confining people to their seats for the last hour of the flight? Surely that just means that any future explosion will be attempted while the plane is still at 30,000ft. Do you really believe that will cause al-Quaida to think again? "Oh shit! We can't blow up any more planes because we have to sit in our seats prior to landing. Confound these infidels and their regulatory trickery!"

Did anyone bother to note that theft from checked bags in airports has reached endemic levels? Did you know that it is reported to be up 50% in 2009? It is not safe to check ANY item of value because of the hard to detect and, (thanks to their union) impossible to fire, criminals who infiltrate the ranks of baggage screeners and TSA officials. So if you can't carry on a bag and are forced to check it, who stands behind you when (not "if", you will note) your valuables are stolen? Not the airline, that's for sure; they will quote their terms of carriage, disavow any liability and leave you on your own to file a report with the airport police and kiss your possessions goodbye forever. (See WSJ article HERE.)

So if you can't carry anything onto the plane because it's a "security risk" and you can't check it because there are so many organized thieves in baggage handling and "we cannot be responsible for any losses" what fucking use is an airplane ride? The TSA even boasts that their rules are not consistent, as they are designed to confuse potential terrorists. Really? Seems like they're designed to piss off travelers and yet again provide the pretense of action in the face of political paralysis.

Anyone notice that the screeners at O'Hare used to demand that you put your shoes directly on the belt? If you put them in a tray they would make you take them out. Until last week, when suddenly, for no accountable reason, trays were OK again, just like they are at every other fucking airport. If you couldn't x-ray shoes through a tray I could understand the issue, but that can't be the case, otherwise every other airport in the world wouldn't be wasting their time making us take off our shoes and put them in a tray, would they? So if there's absolutely no security value, why can't they at least be consistent, and sensible?

Don't waste time stopping frequent fliers from accessing their laptops during a flight, and don't prevent people from taking a piss for an hour before landing. It is an insult to our intelligence when I see people in loose-fitting clothing, or apparently obese people, waltzing through security with enough room on their person to conceal any number of bombs, and no-one is taking the time to pat them down. How about starting with anyone in a hijab? Fuck their human rights - why should their right to dress funny trump our right to live. It's not like there's any debate that al-Quaida is an Islamic terrorist organization is there?

If this Nigerian twat smuggled a powder-based bomb through security under his clothing then come up with something to address the real threat, like explosive detection, or pat-downs of all people on a terrorist watch-list, and not a knee-jerk set of pointless rules in a pathetic attempt to divert our attention and make all the sheep believe that "something is being done".

I won't be holding my breath. I just plan to show up at the airport next week in a Speedo. "Is that an explosive device, sir, or are you just pleased to see me?"

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

It Will Rub The Lotion In Its Laundry

2009-12-12T15:32:00.000-08:00

In case anyone wondered if I'd just died, my apparent absence has not been the result of my untimely demise, but instead has been caused by a new job, and the consequent need to move to Chicago. I mentioned a while back that I needed to find a new job, but that I didn't intend to make my job search the subject of a running journal ("Chronicles of an Executive in Transition") or anything wanky like that. So I've been silent on progress and activity.

Now that I have a new position I can reveal to anyone who gives a shit that job hunting is a soul-destroying, miserable pain in the rectum. It tends to become such a complete focus of your life that even when you're not actually engaged in it you tend to forget about anything else (or at least I did) and for that reason it didn't seem like I had much else to write about. Humorous situation observed? Who cares, I'm unemployed. Read an interesting article, could write a funny observation on it? Couldn't give a shit, I'm still unemployed. Why write a blog? Go and find yourself a fucking job.

Well, now that I'm in the middle of all the "new job, find apartment, sell house, buy house, explore new city" bullshit I have plenty of stuff to fuel my writing, but precious little time that I'm inclined to devote to it. Suffice it to say that I have located a temporary apartment and am now experiencing all the joys and misery of living around other people. And I can also reveal to anyone who gives a shit that living around other people is a soul-destroying, miserable pain in the rectum.

It does have its moments of levity, however. The other night is was down in the apartment building laundry room, attempting to decipher the instructions on the washers and dryers so that I could deal with two weeks worth of assorted undergarments and other clothing detritus. It was apparent that you needed to put money on a laundry card, but not at all apparent where said card could be obtained. At this point an attractive blonde girl entered the laundry room and approached the dryer next to me.

Now I don't know about you, but when a pretty young girl comes into a lonely and remote laundry room, and I, 230 lbs of scary male, am the only other occupant, I naturally assume that she's sizing me up as a potential rapist or sex criminal, and so I'm very careful not to do anything that could be construed as rapy, threatening or just plain weird. Standing there staring at an empty dryer, with no washing in my hands and clad in black hooded sweatshirt and black jacket like a target from America's Most Wanted, already put me dangerously close to the "weird" category, though, so I figured I'd better ask her where you get a laundry card.

"They give you one when you move in" she replied.

Great, now she assumes I don't even live here, but that I've somehow sneaked into the building to prey on lone females in the laundry room, chatting them up with stupid laundry card questions to which anyone who actually lived there would already know the answer. (Thanks, apartment rental company, for not giving me either a card or instructions on the fucking laundry.)

At this point she hurriedly opened her dryer, and a pair of her white underwear fell out into the floor between us. And there, on the gusset, was a huge, brown mark. I could immediately sense the shift in priorities. "I don't care if he's a rapist, my gusset-mark is on display. I must retrieve the situation quickly." She bent down and grabbed the offending underwear, while I made my excuses and left.

Over the road was a wonderful little laundry where a friendly Korean woman took my clothes and, for the princely sum of $8.50, will have them clean and folded for me on Monday. And, what's more, she didn't once look at me as though I were a sex criminal. Fuck the laundry room - I'm going there from now on.

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Kill Me Now Catalog

2009-11-04T18:18:00.000-08:00

Today the mail brought with it a horrific surprise for Mrs Bison. Mixed in with the bills, statements and assorted credit card offers was a free catalog addressed to her personally; it was a clothing catalog, just 64 pages long and only 8 x 11 inches per page, but the message it delivered was profound and unmistakable:

YOU ARE A FRUMPY OLD BITCH AND YOUR LIFE IS OVER

It was one of those catalogs that is filled with sensible ladies' clothing, with a heavy emphasis on seasonal knitwear, slacks that hide your shape, clogs and patterned cardigans. There were sweaters with flowers, sweaters with animals and sweaters with Christmas designs. In case you needed to drive home the seasonal theme there was even a pair of Rudolph The Fucking Red Nosed Reindeer earrings.

Poor Mrs Bison. For the life of her she couldn't figure out what she'd done to bring this monstrosity down upon herself. These catalog people obviously try to target their audience, so was this just a case of "You're a woman older than 40 so you now need to dress like a comedy fifties housewife"? Or was there something in her previous pattern of purchases that had flagged her profile and brought her to the attention of the Seasonal Attire Mafia?

Mrs Bison isn't what you'd call a fashion victim. She's doesn't abandon everything she bought because "it was last season's outfit". Nevertheless she keeps up with style changes and refuses to dress like an old bag, a direction made easier by Bison Daughter's strident shopping opinions, forcefully delivered any time she sees her mother about to buy something "lame" or "unfashionable".

It's not as though we even buy shit from catalogs. I don't know how anyone buys clothes from catalogs - a simple trip to the store to buy a pair of jeans in the same style as I bought a year ago is enough to convince me that I should never attempt catalog shopping. The same jeans that were "comfortable, bordering on the loose" last year are now "tight enough to cause restricted blood flow to the testicles" today. Or the manufacturer whose XXL shirt was a perfect fit last week now has a new style, and, guess what, the XXL covers my arse like a dress. My success rate trying on clothing in a store is less than 5% - if I bought everything that looked good in a catalog I'd spend my entire fucking week at the post office returning shit that didn't fit.

No, the point is that someone thinks that if we were the sort of people who bought clothing from a catalog we would be buying snowflake sweaters for the winter. And my wife would be wearing seamless high-waist briefs as an accompaniment. (I swear there isn't a man alive who could maintain a viable erection upon lifting his wife's skirt and discovering those.)

Whatever happened to the kind of catalogs that had pretty women in fabulous, sexy underwear plastered across eight pages? Why aren't they sending us any of them? It's a conspiracy, I tell you. The fifty-something Pod Women are determined to reprogram your wife and lure her to the dark side of comfy seasonal knitwear and thermal undergarments. Well fuck 'em. You're never too old to say no to snowman sweaters and reversible quilted jackets...

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Uncritical Thinking

2009-10-30T10:56:00.000-07:00

One of the downsides of being unemployed is that any time it looks like someone is interested in hiring you they want you to take tests to check if you're really the business genius you portray in your resume, or if you are, in fact, an intellectual midget with excellent bullshitting skills.

I've taken plenty of tests over the years and I'm fully aware that I'm smart. But everyone has their own preferred tests, and it's not like they give a shit what I scored years ago on the GMAT, or anything else. You're only as smart as the last test you took. The toughest tests are the critical thinking ones, where you have to look at data or information and draw conclusions. These tests involve the application of logic, the ability to manipulate data, numerical reasoning and thinking under time pressure.

There's a reason businesses want to know if you can think and reason logically. It's not like anyone presents the "real" problems of business in a nice clean question form. In reality you have a jumble of information, opinions and data. You have to make decisions, but if you make them too soon you might miss something important, and if you wait too long you risk missing the boat completely. Plus, no-one tells you afterwards if you got it right; you only find that out five years and a hundred million dollars later. Oops.

Wouldn't it be great if people in government were required to pass the same kind of tests. or at least expected to perform with a level of ability something above what might be expected from a garden snail? In fact I'd settle for having them all tattooed with one message: Correlation Does Not Imply Causality. In other words, just because one thing is often found at a higher level when another thing is at a higher level does not mean that the one thing caused the other.

I happened to be reading a news article about school test scores. (It's amazing the lengths to which it is necessary to go in order to fill the non-working day.) The point was being made that test scores were lower in areas that were "poorer", and some genius was making the point that this relative poverty explained why test scores were lower in those areas. This person even asserted that "the economy has a significant impact on students' learning". Really? Do kids get thicker when GDP falls?

The really objectionable thing, coming as it does from someone allegedly involved in education, was the logical leap that because lower incomes are correlated with lower test scores they must be the cause. Not only does this not necessarily follow, but it might actually be more sensible to postulate the opposite - that lower test scores are the cause of poverty.

There was a separate news item a few weeks ago which was bemoaning the lack of employment opportunities for young people in the benighted city of Detroit. It profiled a couple of teenagers who had left school at around 15, having been involved in various illegal or antisocial acts while at school, and now found themselves without any qualifications in a job market where employers have no need to take on unqualified people with a history of crime. They appeared destined for a life of crime and/or poverty, but it's safe to assume that their future economic situation would be a result of their lack of application and success at school.

So did the poverty of their parents cause their poor results, or did their parents' poor results cause their poverty? It's an important distinction because treating the symptom rather than the cause won't result in recovery. Trying to find ways to funnel more of other people's money into the hands of the urban poor in the blind assumption that this will result in higher test scores for their kids and a consequent improvement in their life prospects is a pointless waste of effort. Their kids will still be undisciplined and thick to exactly the same extent that they were beforehand, and having a 50" plasma TV at home won't change that.

This use of poverty to excuse poor educational achievement is dangerous, self-deluding bullshit that lets hundreds of thousands of low-income parents off the hook for their failure to instill standards of behavior in their feckless offspring. People don't do badly at school because they're poor, they're poor because they did badly at school. Over in China there are millions of little kids who exist on a fraction of what is regarded as a "poverty line" income here, and they leave school well-educated and ready to kick Western ass in the economic marketplace.

There is another possibility, of course. It's sometimes said that if we moved the kids from the bad schools to good schools then everything would be OK, but how do schools become "bad" in the first place? Violence, disruption, truancy, drugs and indiscipline are not baked into the walls of the building. The blame can't be laid with teachers, either, although there are for sure some crap ones out there. Schools are bad because the kids are bad. And kids are bad largely because their parents are shit. If a whole bunch of people are lazy, skip school, make crappy choices and refuse to work hard then it stands to reason that they will underachieve financially and eventually become concentrated in "lower income" areas.

So instead of making excuses for them, how about holding the parents accountable, and pointing out that crap schools are the result of crap kids, and not the other way round?

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

In Praise Of Bacon

2009-10-13T14:26:00.000-07:00

One of the side benefits of unemployment is that Mrs Bison and I get to have lunch together a lot more frequently these days. It's a small benefit, I know, when set against loss of salary, healthcare costs and the arse-wrenchingly dull and painful process of networking for a new position, but you have to count the small positives...

Anyway, today's lunch happened to be bacon sandwiches, which, again, doesn't seem like it would be a major cause for celebration, but I've developed a renewed affection for this most satisfying of pig products, and all because of my ex-administrative assistant. I used to be firmly of the opinion that bacon was better in Europe - where we had meaty "Canadian-style" back bacon, versus the US, where bacon was thin, streaky and cooked to the point of being brittle and dry. Then I saw my assistant cooking bacon simply by putting it in the oven, rather than grilling or frying it. The result was just wonderful - that perfect stage between fatty and dry, where the bacon glistens and melts in your mouth.

Mrs Bison has really taken to this bacon thing, to the point where "healthy" turkey bacon has been utterly banished from the refrigerator, replaced by stacks of tasty, pig-flavored delight. The experience of eating it is so good that today she wondered aloud to me if it would be better, for a "last request" to have a bacon sandwich or an orgasm. And, you know what, it's not an easy choice. I'm not sure whether it's a sad comment on my sexual technique or a massive affirmation of the power of bacon, but Mrs B was leaning towards the sandwich. (By the way, I'm going for the "massive affirmation" one, in case you're wondering...)

I'm not over-concerned though. I figured I can make the most of this simply by wrapping my knob in fresh bacon. Everyone wins! Just have to be careful to let it cool after it comes out of the oven, otherwise I'll be on bacon sandwiches for the rest of my life, and I can assure you that no pig's going to taste good enough to take your mind off that.

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

I'm All Better Now, Honest

2009-10-09T13:11:00.000-07:00

Got a stubborn stain that you need to remove? Tried everything but without success? You need "Sports Fame", the product that's guaranteed to remove any stain from your character, instantly. I know, it sounds too good to be true, but you don't have to take my word for it, just ask any one of our satisfied customers - people who have committed violent, abhorrent or criminal acts and whose characters have been washed clean with the simple application of some Sports Fame.

Take Leonard Little, the St.Louis Rams defensive end - he killed a woman while driving drunk, but thanks to Sports Fame he miraculously avoided serious punishment and was soon back to being cheered as a hero by jerks across the city.

Now, thanks to groundbreaking research, we are pleased to introduce new Sports Fame Plus, offering even faster rehabilitation, with no stubborn lingering character stains. Just ask our spokesperson, Michael Vick. Thanks to Sports Fame Plus he's gone from being an animal-torturing, bankrupt criminal to a cuddly, lovable TV star almost overnight. In fact Black Entertainment Television is now filming an eight-part miniseries about Michael, his fall from grace and his wonderful redemption and transformation into a Humane Society supporting, family-loving role model.

Excuse me a moment while I puke. Hands up if you're stupid enough to fall for Vick's "I'm so sorry - I'm a new man now, just pass me a puppy to pet" act. As a spoiled football player he was raking in millions for running around with a ball in his hand, but he chose to play "Big Man In The Hood" and run a dog-fighting ring with a bunch of low-grade scum. Having been caught he was faced with a simple choice - fade into penniless obscurity as a hated moron with no useful career skills, or kiss as much public ass as possible in the hope of getting reinstated and raking in more millions. Which one did he choose? Let me think about that for a minute...

I can't believe the animal rights brigade actually bought his bullshit. You conduct experiments on animals in the hope of finding a cure for ALS and you'll get your house firebombed, but torture dogs to death as part of some ghetto fun-time amusement and it's all "Wow, good old Michael, hasn't he changed!"

Poor old Phillip Garrido. Yes, I know he kidnapped a young girl, repeatedly raped her and fathered two children with her, keeping her trapped in back-yard squalor, but his big mistake, clearly, was not choosing a career in football. If he had he'd be on Oprah, apologizing for having let down the fans, and hoping for the league to reinstate him, prior to publishing a book. Obviously BET wouldn't be interested in televising his story because he isn't black, but I'm sure he'd find someone.

Just goes to show - a normal person commits a vile act and they can expect to be ostracized and vilified, but a sports personality (or any other famous person, come to that) does it and they're to be "understood, rehabilitated and given another chance".

So, good news for Roman Polanski then. Who'd have thought that drugging, raping and sodomizing a 13 year-old girl, and then running away before sentencing, would have the film and arts world rallying around you as a "victim" of malicious prosecution? Maybe Phillip Garrido should have been a Hollywood film director. They were right in school when they told us how important our career choices could be for us later in life...

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bisom

Magic Dog Anus

2009-09-26T09:13:00.000-07:00

We have these two parakeets as pets, and they get to fly around the house for a while every day. Well, I say "around the house" but in reality they mostly stay along one side, close to the windows. Fortunately this makes it easier when it comes time to pick up their shit. I was consoling myself this morning, as I scraped a small splodge of parakeet crap off the window sill, that, surely, other types of pet would be just as likely to deposit their shit in the house. Wouldn't they?

If I think back to my childhood days, and dog ownership, it's certainly the case that 99% of the time the dog crapped out in the garden. But, and here's the important point, on the rare occasions that it dropped its load in the house, the volume of crap would be more than you could squeeze from a parakeet in several years. Admittedly we didn't have the problem of having to pick up the shit when we took the dog for a walk because, as I said, the dog crapped in the garden, but it wasn't such a large garden that you could ignore the faeces and you would soon get to the point where you didn't so much walk in the garden as mince around it, picking your way between little piles of excrement in various stages of hardening. At that point someone (let's be honest, it was almost always my mum) would carry the shit by the shovel load into the house and flush it down the bog.

The major problem with this endeavor was that the shovel was made of flattish metal and the dog shit was sort of cylindrical, coming as it did from what I assume was a round-shaped dog's arsehole. Cylindrical things tend to roll off flat surfaces, especially if the things in question have been drying nicely for a couple of weeks in the sun, so it would be fair to say there was probably more shit distributed around the house that way. Oh, and the bog was at the front of the house, so the shovel-loads of shit would have to go through the kitchen, out into the carpeted hallway, past the front door and into the bog.

This led to the minor problem associated with the exercise, namely that at any point someone could ring the doorbell. You couldn't pretend not to be in, or walk away, because the door was one of those wonderful frosted glass things (that seemed like such a good idea before the UK government decided that we didn't want to lock up burglars any more), so you'd be standing there, frozen in mid-stride, a shovel full of shit in your hands, pondering your next move. Even if you managed to get the load down the bog, flush quickly and hide the shovel behind the door, you'd still greet the visitor upon opening with the sound of the toilet refilling and a deep and pervasive smell of dog excrement. I don't know what people thought, but they probably assumed we lived on a diet of Pedigree Chum. ("Jesus, did you smell that? What do those people eat?"

So I did indeed conclude that a few parakeet turds around the house still put me ahead of the average dog owner, especially as dogs tend to shit in the house when they ate something that disagreed with them, and then you're not talking turds but lakes of brown sauce. And forget cats - any animal that requires you to have a tray of its leavings permanently on display in your house can fuck right off as far as I'm concerned.

I also considered the issue of dogs, having just deposited a massive squelchy load on the sidewalk, now climbing up on the furniture, or even your bed, or dragging their claggy arses over the shagpile. But to be fair dogs seem to have these magic arseholes that close with no "debris", and that got me wondering how our great Creator managed to fuck up the design on us.

I mean, let's face it, we are kind of the top-of-the-line model when it comes to land-mammals. Dextrous, intelligent, reasoning, with all sorts of fancy capabilities, but He didn't give us the magic self-cleaning arsehole that he fitted on dogs! And, by the way, on just about every other mammal, as far as I can tell. When I buy a high-end S Class Mercedes (we're talking figuratively here) I expect to find all the bells and whistles that you'd find on the C Class, and probably a few more. I don't expect to find that a really useful feature which is present on just about every other vehicle on the road is absent from mine.

We are the S-Class of the mammalian world, but we have an exhaust mechanism from the dark ages that seriously needs updating. You doubt me? Then why does the toilet paper industry exist? Why can't we just drop the kids off at the pool like any other mammal and simply walk away? Fido can dump on the pavement and jump right on your bed but you try not wiping and you can forget all about those white undergarments, sunshine.

Sure, I fully understand why we were not given the capability of licking our own genitalia like dogs can; a lot of people would probably never leave the house otherwise. But I don't see any reason why we wouldn't benefit from the magic dog anus. All I can think is that the lobbyists for Charmin, Cottonelle and Scott are operating at a much higher level than we realized...

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Mid-Year Exam: Racism 101

2009-09-16T05:32:00.000-07:00

Before you begin, please fill in your name, school name and ethnicity on the front of your answer booklet. When instructed to do so you may begin to read and answer the questions below. Only write in the spaces provided in the answer booklet. In order to receive full credit it is necessary to show all working. The duration of the examination is one hour, after which you will be instructed to put down your pencil while the answer booklets are collected. [Please note that students of Caucasian/White ethnicity will receive a "Fail" grade regardless of answers.]

QUESTION 1

The President of the United States is called a liar by a member of the opposing party in Congress, because he claims that his health coverage proposal would not cover illegal immigrants while knowing full well that there is absolutely nothing in the bill that could be used to prevent illegal immigrants gaining access (thus allowing him to appear to be "tough" on this issue while doing nothing to offend his liberal supporters). The previous President spent eight years being vilified by Democrats and accused of everything from war crimes to stupidity. Nevertheless it has been suggested that any criticism of the current President must be proof of continuing racism. This is obviously true. Discuss.

QUESTION 2

A white teenager in Belleville is beaten by black teenagers on a crowded school bus as he tries to sit next to one of them. He is beaten once, offers no resistance, and is subsequently taunted and beaten again. Other black teenagers cheer the attack and photograph it with their cell phones. The whole episode is recorded on the BUS VIDEO. The police ask the perpetrators if this was a racist attack and they said it wasn't so obviously that must be true. Plus they're black and the victim was white so it can't be racist can it? Discuss.

QUESTION 3

If a bunch of white Belleville students attacked a black student for sitting next to them on a bus then the attack would definitely be racist. Al Sharpton should immediately organize a march, the school should be picketed, and the parents of the victim should sue the school district for violating their child's civil rights. It's clearly the right thing to do. Discuss.

QUESTION 4

When a black person alleges assault by a white person it's very important to assume from the outset that the white person is guilty and to proceed on that basis, regardless of the facts, or of any regard for due process. Discuss, with special reference to the Tawana Brawley and Duke Lacrosse incidents, which were both clear incidences of the facts interfering with racial justice. [Note that any discussion of the ironic similarity between past lynching of blacks based on a presumption of guilt and the current "media lynching" of white suspects will result in marks being deducted.]

QUESTION 5

There is a clear hierarchy of race in the racism arena. Black or "African-American" people are assumed to be victims of racism but never perpetrators. Those of Hispanic origin can be victims of racism, unless the perpetrators are themselves black, in which case tough luck. People of South Asian ethnicity are not entitled to be viewed as victims of racism except when the perpetrators are white; in all other cases they should themselves be viewed as "white", especially when their grocery stores are being smashed and looted. The same applies to people from the Indian subcontinent, who cannot be victims of racism except by whites, since you're all computer programmers and doctors. Discuss.

This concludes your Racism 101 Examination. If you finish early you may leave your answer booklet on the table and file quietly out of the room. White students last.

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Drinking At The Y

2009-09-14T14:42:00.000-07:00

It's always enlightening, and not a little depressing, to see where the government spends some of the money it confiscates from the working population through taxes. It's been said that the problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people's money, but governments, be they in the UK or US, spend other people's cash like it grows on trees.

Problem number one is waste - governments just don't work hard to eliminate waste because if they run out of money they can always increase taxes. There's subway line in Boston which is "forced" by outdated union practices to employ two drivers on each train, while every other Boston line, and just about every subway line in the world, uses only one. The Boston Globe has estimated that the second, utterly unnecessary driver costs the government $30 million every year. It's pathetic that they keep coming back and putting their hands in our pockets when they don't even have the decency to run a competent administration.

What is even more galling, however, is problem number two - stupid spending. Today's case-in-point is a report that the National Institutes of Health has awarded $3 million to the University of Illinois in Chicago to identify the things that cause lesbians to drink alcohol. Newswise has reported:

The University of Illinois at Chicago College of Nursing has received a $3 million federal grant to continue research to identify risk factors for excessive drinking among lesbians.

The five-year study, led by Tonda Hughes, professor of health systems science, will examine how stressful experiences -- childhood sexual abuse, adult sexual assault and discrimination based on ethnicity or sexual orientation -- are related to psychological harm and hazardous drinking in adult women.

Data will be collected from a diverse sample of 384 adult lesbians in the Chicago area who were previously interviewed by Hughes and her research team in 2000 and 2004. Another 250 new subjects -- who are 18 to 25 years old and of African-American and Hispanic descent -- will also be interviewed.

The grant is funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, one of the National Institutes of Health.

Here we are, arguing about how to pay for a massive overhaul of health spending in the US, and the government is throwing money away, millions of taxpayers' dollars, on utterly worthless, politically correct bullshit "research". A bunch of workshy, job-dodging post-graduate researchers will no doubt spend the next five years living off the government teat while they ask a bunch of minge-guzzlers why they drink so much. Note the reference to two previous studies, presumably also funded by the public purse. This "professor" has already, according to the report, spent the last 20 years working on "lesbian health issues". You couldn't make this shit up.

Never mind that $3 million could instead be spent dealing with some of the very real, and very treatable health issues in the US. Or, failing that, that it could be returned to the poor bastards who had it confiscated from their pay packets (including me, thank you very much). No, let's instead spend it on some research with the vague purpose of gaining "...a much more realistic picture of the patterns and variability of lesbians' drinking, and to provide information for developing alcohol abuse prevention and early intervention strategies." This, in spite of the researchers' having found that lesbians who drink do so at levels similar to those of heterosexual women. This is therefore money wasted investigating a problem that doesn't even exist, and which, if it did, would be a self-inflicted disorder, not a genuine health issue.

We'll never solve the health crisis in this country as long as crap like this is considered a priority, or a "reasonable" use of other people's money. This is bullshit.

Of course, I'd be happy to take the $3 million myself, and I'd be prepared to advance a hypothesis that would be at least as credible as anything this team could come up with. It didn't take me five years, either; just five minutes in fact:

Q: Why do lesbians drink alcohol?
A: To take away the taste.

Problem solved - just send me the check...

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Hands-Off Banking

2009-09-11T18:14:00.001-07:00

In spite of the fact that I live in the US, I've found that it's useful to maintain a bank account in the UK for occasional transactions in local currency. It was almost impossible to get an account without a UK address, ostensibly because of regulations and policies introduced to prevent money movements by terrorists; nevertheless I do have an account, with one of the major high street banks.

Said bank chose to send me, presumably in ironic celebration of the anniversary of 9/11, an updated schedule of the charges for various bank accounts. (Everyone knows that since banks lost a shitload of money "lending" to penniless deadbeats with no possible means of repayment, they now have to fuck their regular, paying customers in the arse with a slew of increased charges in order to cover their deficits.)

I couldn't help noticing, in amongst the various fee-bearing accounts, that you can now get special FREE Islamic bank accounts:

"No interest paid or received (in accordance with Shariah law) and this means no planned overdraft possible. Money managed in a Shariah way."

I'm sorry? Did I read that right? Is this what we've now come to in the civilized world? Pandering to this miserable religion and giving out free banking to muslims so as not to offend their petty sensibilities? "No, I'm sorry Mr Christian Person. You're out of luck Ms Atheist. No special favors for you. Not until you start bombing people and marching in the street can you expect special accounts from our bank. Oh, and by the way, there'll be no eating by staff on the premises during the month of Ramadan, just in case the sight of it offends any of our more, shall we say, militant customers."

Can vegans now expect special accounts administered in a meatless environment? Can Buddhists have banks which guarantee to harm no living creatures in their offices? Where does it end?

And what the fuck does "managed in a Shariah way" mean? I don't claim to be any kind of authority on Shariah law but it does seem to involve an awful lot of disenfranchising women and wearing pyjamas during the day. Do you get a free prayer mat when you open an account? Does the woman behind the counter have to wear a veil? Whatever you do, don't be tempted to steal the pen from the counter at the bank - they'll probably cut your fucking hand off.

And all this on another day when "right wing" marchers in the UK, protesting the destruction of the nation by uncontrolled immigration, are attacked by thousands of muslims who care nothing for the history or culture of their "adopted" country, and proceed to attack the police for having the temerity to defend some tiny measure of free speech. (Notice how the left, in all its forms, is all in favor of protests, marches and demonstrations right up until the point where someone wants to express a view they don't agree with. Then they violently attack them.)

As Neville Chamberlain memorably demonstrated, appeasement doesn't get you anything. And this just smacks of the worst kind of tokenism in the face of a dangerous religious movement. Kind of like marking Hitler's invasion of Poland by offering special Nazi accounts for German immigrants "managed in an Arian way". I think not...

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

The American Bison

2009-09-09T18:28:00.000-07:00

I recently took the final step in a process that commenced more than 12 years ago: I became a US citizen. I didn't need to take this last step - as a permanent resident I could have continued to work and live here indefinitely. No, this was a definite choice.

The ceremony itself is a very tasteful event at a federal courthouse, and I can honestly say that I was proud to become a US citizen. That's now my flag, and my country, in a way that isn't quite the case when you're just a permanent resident. There were about fifty of us going through the process, and most were from Eastern Europe and India. In fact, with the exception of one person from Japan, there was no-one else who originated from what I'd call a "top tier" developed democracy.

While we waited in line to hand in our green cards and sign the citizenship form an American accompanying another applicant asked us where we were from. "United Kingdom" I replied. "Why are you becoming citizens?" he asked, clearly surprised. I gave a short, polite reply, resisting the temptation to spoil the ambience by asking why the fuck he should be so amazed that someone would actually want to become a US citizen for some other reason than to run away from the crappy poverty of their home country.

Actually it was a relief that the twat in question didn't ask us where in the UK we were from. I get that all the time from Americans. When I tell them (actually I give them a list of about ten places I lived) they proceed to look at me blankly before telling me that they had an aunt who once went on vacation to Norwich (which they insist on pronouncing Nor-Witch) or Leicester (which they don't so much pronounce as emit in a spasm of drool). They don't recognize a single place I mention, and if I included a few Serbian place names for the fun of it I doubt they'd notice. So why ask?

Maybe you think it's funny that I take the piss out of Americans having just become one, but that's the thing about citizenship: you don't have to like all the other people who live in the country. You don't even have to like the president (thieving socialist tosser). What you do have to do, as far as I'm concerned, is put that country first. Brits above a certain age (which won't include a bunch of Generation Y Facebook-junkie losers) should remember Norman Tebbit's Cricket Test. For all the immigrants from the Indian subcontinent who call themselves "English" the real test is who you cheer for when England are playing India, Pakistan or Sri Lanka at cricket. If you don't cheer for England you're not English, end of story. You're just using a flag of convenience to enable you to live in a country, in a parasitic way, rather than have to make it back in your "home" country, where life ain't so easy.

So while I will continue to support England over Australia in cricket, in the event of an England vs USA soccer match I'll cheer the US team, because to do otherwise would be the height of hypocrisy. (Of course I'll still want England to beat the French. And the Germans. Even if in reality they're lucky to beat Croatia on a good day.)

But there are some things that won't change. The definition of "fanny" is set in stone for me, and I can't move over to the US version. I'm not getting my teeth straightened, or giving a solitary fuck about baseball statistics. You can stick Disney World up your arse, and I cannot take evolution-denying uber-religious nutjobs seriously under any circumstances, especially when they start speaking in tongues. I won't ever consider American chocolate fit for anything other than cooking low-grade brownies, and I cannot consider a country fully civilized where they consider "salted" to be about the only acceptable potato chip flavor.

I do, however, like living in one of the few developed countries where they still have the balls to execute some of the worst murdering scum (although not nearly enough) and where guns can be owned by normal people, not just criminals (look how well that gun-ban experiment worked in England. Twats.) And as a fully-fledged citizen I can now do my bit to help ensure that the liberal left and their whiny socialist agenda doesn't take away all that made this country worth joining. It ain't perfect, but it's home.

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

This Will Hurt A Bit

2009-08-14T18:23:00.001-07:00

It seems you can't fart these days without someone passing comment on the great US healthcare debate. There are clearly two sides to this issue and I have to say, as a dispassionate observer, that they both appear to be fucking clueless. Now I say this having lived for many years under the UK national health care system (the NHS) as well as the US system. Let me summarize the difference for the hard of thinking:

In the UK everyone has access to healthcare but it's pretty crap, so many employers offer supplementary private insurance as a benefit; in the US the healthcare system is great if you're insured but you're buggered if you're not. The merit of the UK system, at least as far as consumers are concerned, is that should you ever need urgent care you'll get good treatment and won't have medical bills bankrupt you. The downside is that for the less urgent stuff you might be waiting a while. Oh, and you might die in hospital from a MRSA or C-Diff. infection.

I clearly remember on the few occasions I went to my primary care physician (GP) in the UK the advice was always "Take two aspirin and come back in a week if it's no better". Didn't matter what was wrong with me - sore throat, broken bone, strange skin disease - it was always two aspirin and come back in a week. I was brought up on the "Don't Go Unless You Need To" philosophy, so by the time I'd decided to go I would have waited a week and taken loads of aspirin, but that didn't matter. I still had to wait another week and then come back again. And in the meantime I'd probably come down with something else, contracted from the dozens of wheezy, infected, spluttering bastards who clog up waiting rooms in the UK. The NHS worked on the principle of attrition - care was rationed according to your willingess to put up with their shit.

Contrast this with the US: here parents take their whiny brats to the doctor for every tiny fucking thing. Kid's got a temperature: let's go to the doctor. Kid fell over: let's go to the doctor. Kid threw up: let's go to the doctor. Kid threw up twice: let's go straight to the emergency room for IV fluids. I puked my ring up for two days solid in the UK and my mum never took me to the fucking emergency room, but here I've lost count of the number of times I've heard about IV fluids for some kid who just had a bug.

And this is perhaps the crux of the whole debate: if something is free, people will use it like crazy. Without some disincentive (and in the UK it's crap service) people trot along to the doctor for every little thing. Now combine this with the other bane of the medical world - litigation. In the US juries of tiny-minded halfwits will throw out multi-million dollar sympathy verdicts to just about anyone who ended up in bad shape, never mind if medical science had a hand in it or not; someone has to pay, and it's only a faceless insurance company, right? So doctors practice defensive medicine, ordering endless tests, and insurance pays for them so the consumer doesn't mind. The hidden costs of all this waste get rolled into health insurance premiums; employers get stung every year for increases and private buyers are priced out of the market completely.

Here's the problem: if you want to have limitless, unrationed healthcare for all it will bankrupt the country. The cost of healthcare in the UK is astronomical, and it rises every year out of all proportion to the cost of living. It's the largest drain on the UK treasury and it's out of control. If the whole US population starts showing up at their doctor for a sore throat and ordering MRIs for a stiff knee it won't matter what the world economy does, the resulting tax rate on income will stifle growth like a stranglehold and the dollar will sink like a stone with the massive borrowing.

So where's the middle ground? How do you have a safety net so that people can get treatment if they fall badly ill, while not creating a sudden and massive new "entitlement" that everyone else has to pay for. Because you know damn well that what starts out as "Don't Let Poor Cancer Patients Suffer Without Morphine" will soon become "Gastric Bands For Fat Fuckers, Transgender Surgery, Breast Enhancement, Hair Removal, Fertility Treatment, Boner Pills, Insemination For Lesbians and New Livers For Alcoholics are a right for all".

This is where the wankers on the right, like that mental pygmy Sarah Palin, have it wrong. If you want to provide the maximum benefit to society as a whole (a humanist perspective that I kind of like) you have to ration healthcare. This means that not every operation should be performed, not every life should be extended and not every condition should be treated as a right. You have fertility issues? I sympathize. Now save up for treatment or have your insurance pay if you're lucky - we're not short of babies in this world and the population is exploding; your problem does not equal my obligation to help pay for it. A safety net health service should be just that - for serious health problems, not lifestyle issues. Think that's harsh? It's just practical common sense, a commodity which appears to be in very short supply on either side of this debate.

Republicans seem to want limitless healthcare, but only for people with insurance; Democrats want limitless healthcare but have no fucking clue how to pay for it. And neither side should, under any circumstances, be trusted to set up a national healthcare system. Let's face it, Congress couldn't run a lemonade stand. Not without running up a million dollars in debt to lemon suppliers, failing to deliver any actual lemonade and pocketing half a million in campaign contributions from the lemon industry.

One thing of which you can be very sure: neither the left or the right has YOUR interests at heart. If the Democrats wanted to fix healthcare the first thing they'd do would be remove the massive cost imposed by meritless litigation, but to do so would hurt their friends in the tort industry (trial lawyers) who bankroll their campaigns with donations, so it doesn't matter what is in your interest, it will never happen. If the Republicans wanted to fix healthcare they would insist that the prices offered by hospitals to large insurance companies are the same prices you and I would pay if we bought the procedure ourselves (rather than the poorest users having to pay the highest prices). Fair and equal pricing is not a new principle in business - that's why we have the Robinson-Patman Act. And the religious right would have to grow up and realize that at some point we need to stop extending worthless life so that we can do real and practical good for more people.

At this point I'd make some comment on the Obama "plan" but he doesn't actually have a plan. Most of the details are "to be defined later" meaning that no-one figured it out yet (or, possibly, that it's figured out but the public would shit a piano if they knew the facts). In the meantime all I know is that the current system is fucked, the new system will be worse, it will cost a fortune, benefit everyone but the working taxpayer and be larded with right-on new lifestyle entitlements that the rest of us will have to bankroll. Just see if I'm wrong.

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Walk Or Ride?

2009-08-08T14:38:00.000-07:00

I've spent a fair amount of the last week meeting people for lunch or dinner, all in the noble cause of "networking". The venue has varied, according to where the other party is driving from and what we feel like eating, but it's amazingly easy to eat a lot of crap in a week. Sure, I tend to go for sushi a fair bit, and I'd happily eat it every day, but there are a couple of problems. Firstly, there are some people who can't get their minds around raw fish or, indeed, anything that doesn't come with fries. And secondly, sushi comes in unsatisfyingly small portions or, if eaten in decent quantity, is ruinously expensive.

It's easy to see how people can pile on the pounds eating out. There are some very nice restaurants around, but if you want "convenient and reasonably priced" in this area then you end up with a lot of chain restaurants, where the emphasis is on heavy, carb-and-fat dishes, bread, fries, glutinous salad dressings, pizza, pasta and batter. You could blame the restaurants for offering all this shit, but they're not stupid - they sell what people want to buy. At the end of the day, unless you're getting your meals through a tube, you're directly responsible for what you put in your stomach.

Look, I've got nothing against fat people per se ("some of my best friends are fat") but there are degrees of lardiness. Most of us are technically overweight, and are none the worse for it; obsessive food nazis and nutrition weenies can fuck right off - if you want a piece of cake you should have it. But there has to come a point where you figure that you crossed the line. Different people might draw the line in different places - for some of us it might be a pant size, or being able to run after your kids without a sharp pain in your chest, a bright light and the voices of dead relatives in your ears, but regardless of this I'd hope that we could all agree that once you can no longer walk, you should step away from the buffet line and sort your fucking life out.

So why is it that WalMart is so infested with obese fuckers on mobility scooters? Surely the last people who should be riding around on their arses are those fat wankers who can't walk anymore. This is nature's way of telling you that you should eat less and GET SOME FUCKING EXERCISE. Rather than pander to their self-inflicted flabbiness and lazy self-indulgence, perhaps we'd be better off if society expected them to get off their fucking backside and walk to the cheesecake aisle.

Don't give me any of that whiny crap about glands, or heredity, or "I tried dieting". I don't want to hear about how it's not their fault - of course it is. At some point on the path between eight pound baby and six hundred pound bloated lardarse, surely you considered cutting back on the donuts, or maybe going for the occasional walk? No-one did this to you; you were free to slow down at any point. You CANNOT get to be that big without MASSIVE overeating.

But no, society doesn't just fail to criticize, it has become a blatant enabler of this gross over-consumption. Not only do we accept that fat bastards can now ride through a supermarket, we also classify obesity as a disability, and employment legislation can be used to force companies to buy scooters just so their fatarse employees can ride around instead of doing their job properly. If you want to know why America keeps getting lardier, how about the fact that enabling lardiness has become government policy; I'm only surprised that the stimulus package doesn't have a special donut credit for anyone over three hundred pounds.

Maybe it would help if fast-food chains were forced to use someone other than skinny teenagers in their commercials. How about the next time Pizza Hut advertises its foot-long, one pound, pizza dough, cheese and meat P'Zone, the person chowing down on it is a four hundred pound balding man with an oxygen tank to assist with his breathing? Or the woman buying the P'Zone rides away from the counter on her mobility scooter? Yeah right.

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Vertical Challenge

2009-08-04T18:51:00.000-07:00

Apparently one of the things you have to do as an unemployed person is have networking meetings, where you attempt to make a good impression with someone who is in a position to introduce you to other people, one of whom might be willing to offer you a job. This makes good sense, at least in principle, so today I found myself driving to such a meeting. Obviously the "make a good impression" part is kind of important - if you're going to come across as feckless, irresponsible twat I would imagine you'd be better off staying at home.

So, step one in the making a good impression stakes is showing up on time. I once had a boss whose motto was "five minutes early is ten minutes late", and while I thought the axiom was a bit wanky I do agree that allowing a bit of extra time for the unforeseen is a good plan. I also believe in making sure you know where you're going, and where you'll park when you get there: in this case no problem since the parking lot was underneath the building where I was meeting.

So all went according to plan and I pulled up outside the building in my (coincidentally freshly washed and surprisingly shiny) truck. That's when I noticed the sign on the ramp down to the parking lot that said "No full size trucks or vans", along with a height limit of 5'9". Being unfamiliar with that part of town I had no idea how long it would take me to find somewhere else to park, how far away it would be, whether I would be on a meter that would expire (resulting in tow away), or how much of a sweaty bastard I would be having hiked six blocks back in the summer heat. I watched two mid-size SUVs drive down into the parking lot and decided, on the basis of no calculation whatsoever, that I would chance the height limit. After all, I could see where the roof line was and it didn't seem that tight to me.

I drove down the ramp and turned to begin looking for a space. Oh fucking hell. Above me was not a simple roof but a maze of hanging pipes, beams and rafters that seemed to be about an inch above the top of my truck. Something snagged my aerial and twanged it back. All the spaces on that level were occupied and so I drove around very slowly, now wondering if at any moment something was going to pierce the top of the cab and peel it back like a large sardine can. It also occurred to me that this would be a great introduction: "Good morning, I'm here to see Reginald Arbuthnot. Oh, and I just got my truck wedged immovably in your car park, so no-one's going home tonight. Is that a problem?"

As I turned the corner in the car park the floor began to slope down to the lower level, temporarily opening up some headroom, but at the bottom it bore down on me again, only this time even closer; I got out to check if I had any room - there were literally a few inches at that point, but it was impossible to tell if any of the pipes or other hanging impediments would pierce the top of the truck further down. But What was I going to do? Back up a full-size pick-up? There were already people behind me, driving regular cars, unconcerned with the risk of roof removal and obviously wishing I would drive faster. Faster? Fuck, I could end up in the very first GMC Sierra cabriolet.

About fifty yards further on I found a spot and managed to back into it. I could have used a small scotch to recover but I doubt that gives a good first impression either. "It's 9am and he smells like he just got off a park bench after necking a bottle of supermarket own-brand whisky." After the meeting I retraced my route, at least with some hope that I could exit the parking garage damage-free, but the exit was on the other side, necessitating the negotiation of a new stretch of hanging pipework, and more aerial twanging.

Eventually I got out in one piece and went home. When I got out of the truck I couldn't help noticing that it was about as tall as I am. That's 6'2". And when I checked the specs for the thing the height was confirmed at 74". In other words "Nowhere near 5'9", you dumb shit."

Effective job hunting is all about emphasizing your strengths. I'm going to point out in future that I'm "a bold decision maker, comfortable taking risks and not afraid to challenge perceived limitations". And I'll take Mrs Bison's car next time. And I'm going to have that scotch now.

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Can I Have A Free Car?

2009-08-02T17:19:00.000-07:00

So the "Cash For Clunkers" money has run out, and members of Congress are running around like headless chickens trying to get more of this "stimulus" money to give away. But before they do, it would be nice if they thought a bit about where this money comes from.

Lesson One: It doesn't grow on trees, fuckwads. All that cash you're giving away in the name of "stimulus" has to be earned by the rest of us and paid in taxes. (I say "has to" rather than "was" because the US Congress is addicted to spending money it hasn't collected, putting off the day when someone somewhere has to cough up.)

Lesson Two: If you designed a program to create 250,000 new sales, surely you should be happy that it succeeded, and move on. Just because more people out there want free cash (there's a novel concept) doesn't mean that you should give it to them. If it was such a good idea for more people to get a handout, why didn't you design the program that way in the first place? This just smacks of opportunistic politics from people who just LOVE to give away other people's money, so long as it buys them popularity.

So 250,000 vehicles at $4,500 a time means $1.1 billion in cash given away like candy. Hey, I'd like some of that cash please! On what basis did the twats in Congress decide that those people with the most worthless, crappy cars should get free money from the rest of us? Socialism, that's what. "From each according to their ability, to each according to their need." This is the very antithesis of the American way, the philosophy whereby you work for what you want, rather than getting it via redistribution from other people.

If you really wanted to get 250,000 extra cars sold, why not give the money to anyone? Why only target the shittest cars? I imagine the idea is that at that end of the car-buying spectrum the people involved would otherwise buy pre-owned cars, so now you get them to buy new. On the other hand, the free cash from the government helps the car industry sell cars at higher prices than they would otherwise have to: without the extra handout they would simply have to increase the amount of incentives to get regular people to buy. So in that respect this is as much a handout of a billion dollars to the auto industry as it is to people who own ultra-shitty cars. And no-one has had their hand deeper in our pockets than the auto industry, so this represents yet another Socialist propping up of a weak industry that has been hijacked by unions.

Don't get sidetracked by the hype about getting gas guzzlers off the road - this is pure gesture politics, to dress up for the green lobby what is just another handout to the auto industry. What's so special about that sector of the economy? You could just as easily have pumped a billion into some other part of the US manufacturing economy (what's left of it) and spurred demand there.

Bottom line is that I'd find it a refreshing change if some of the relentless taxation found its way back to the people who paid the taxes, rather than continually being siphoned off as free cash to people who didn't earn it. Every dollar the government gives away has to be earned by us, and the interest burden has to be carried by us, just so fat wankers in Congress can play fucking Santa Claus and buy votes for next time around among people who aren't paying the bill.

Breakfast Sausage

2009-08-01T16:23:00.000-07:00

It's a week now since I returned from vacation in Oregon, and the joy of falling asleep to the sound of the sea has been replaced by the irritation of trying to sleep under a ceiling fan that whines if you run it in one direction and clicks if you try the other. Piece of shit.

It was a good holiday, meaning that there was no planning, no list of things we had to do or see, and lots of relaxing. We also ate a lot of good holiday food, including a few cooked breakfasts; there really is nothing quite like bacon and eggs in the morning. Sucks to be a vegetarian, because, let me tell you, fried tofu is not going to get the job done. Sorry. Strips of dead fatty pig, with eggs, fried bread, mushrooms and sausages. Only thing missing was the black pudding and HP sauce.

We ate most morning and evening meals in the house we'd rented, which had a great booth-style table which looked out over a neighbor's garden, towards the sea. And almost without fail the neighbor's overweight labrador would amble down into the garden and take a massive shit in front of us just as we were sitting down to eat. Didn't matter if we ate early or late, the fucking thing adjusted its schedule so that it could curl down its load for us, twice a day.

Down on the sandy beach there were a few families clustered where the steps descended from the road, and quite a few surfers. The beach was blocked off at that end by a rocky point but in the other direction it curved round to a distant lighthouse. We walked along the beach one day, doing pennance for a pizza and some mint Oreos, I think. The tide was in so you could only walk about a mile, to a stretch where the tide washed right up against the sandy cliff above which was the main road. At that point there was also a stream running down to the sea, under a bridge which carried the road. Obviously there was some kind of campsite up there because, in contrast to the completely empty stretch of beach we had just walked, there were more than a hundred people clustered around this stream.

I can remember as a kid how we'd go to the beach, and no sooner had we got on it than I'd want to get out my bucket and spade, or go in the sea. My old man would insist that we walked further along the beach, to where the people thinned out a bit (they never thin out that much in the UK - fucking people everywhere), and it would irritate me, because I was a kid and I just wanted to play. Now.

So it bothered me that here were maybe two hundred people all stuck together in one of the least attractive parts of the beach (road noise overhead, rocky stream, no dunes, trees or scenery) all practically falling over each other as they staked out their tiny piece of sand. There were several blokes trying to fly kites over the heads of other people (without much luck), and absolutely no-one was in the slightest bit inclined to walk a few hundred yards along the beach to have a space to themselves, with driftwood logs to sit on and clean sand.

And they were fat. Not all of them, but for the most part they were chunky bastards, and there were a fair number of absolute bloaters - you know, the kind of people who should have been walking along the beach, or just walking anywhere (other than a donut store). Fat families with grossly overweight kids, all piled together because they couldn't be bothered to walk a few yards further down the beach where it was deserted for a distance of about a mile. What the fuck makes people do that? I mean, it was great that they couldn't be bothered to walk, because we had a mile of beach to ourselves, but there had to be something wrong with them.

In many respects they reminded me of the labrador. I'm sure each day they walked down to the same piece of beach, turned around a few times and just sat down. I guess I should be grateful that they didn't actually take a shit there. Now that would have put me right off my breakfast...

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

20 Years Ago Today

2009-07-28T18:53:00.000-07:00

The cake above bears witness to a notable anniversary: 20 years ago today the future Mrs Bison and I met, at a party. We lived in sin for years before marrying (and the sin was great, by the way) so we never really got round to marking the wedding anniversary, preferring instead to remember that original date. I am therefore one of the few non-single men who does not get shit about forgetting his wedding anniversary. (Most of the others probably being married to women with Alzheimer's.)

This event gave us the opportunity to look back and take stock of how far we've come in 20 years. When Mrs Bison met me I was unemployed, and driving a ten year-old car. Now, 20 years later, she's married to a man who's unemployed and driving a ten year-old truck. Big progress!

To be fair to myself (which I fully intend to be, since no other fucker is likely to take the trouble) I've only been unemployed two weeks. I could write for a long time on that subject. In fact I could go on for the next x months about the struggles of the executive job seeker, the highs and lows, the daily challenges and the deep insights I would receive into my personal psyche, but no-one is going to give a shit, because, frankly, it's going to be boring. So let's skip over the whole job-loss thing. Suffice it to say that I worked my arse off so hard over the last 6 months that I've neglected my writing, disappointing my (possibly) one remaining reader, and the only moral I can take from my story is "Don't Work Your Arse Off".

Mrs Bison has been very supportive. She's taken to referring to me as Dole Scum, a reference to the funny Job Seekers sketches with Pauline from the League of Gentlemen, an example of which which you can SEE HERE. She keeps asking me to let her know if it's starting to piss me off, presumably in case I snap and end up burying her in the garden, in a shallow grave, but it's very unlikely, especially if I keep getting cakes made for me.

No, let's focus on the ten year-old car. I remember the piece of shit I had when I met my future spouse: it was an orange Talbot Avenger with a black vinyl roof, and like most cars of that era (it was made in 1979) it was a rust-infested nightmare. Avengers were renowned for the way the brackets around the headlights rusted away to nothing, and the front fenders always rusted too. The sills and the suspension mounting points were hotbeds of rust, and of course the exhaust system was designed to rust through and fall off at the most inopportune moment, giving the vehicle the sound of a jet engine coupled with the torque of a singly-occupied hamster wheel.

I once went to the scrap yard (which was where I obtained all the replacement parts I ever needed for my POS Avenger) looking for a front fender (or wing to UK readers). The scrappy informed me that unrusted fenders were "as rare as rocking horse manure" but I looked anyway. And there it was: not only was the fender in great condition but it was orange, a perfect match for my car, which was uncanny because the car it was attached to was uniformly red on all other panels. Not only was the fender orange but it had the same double-black pinstripe which ran down my car (mine had clearly been resprayed in a past life, and it was probably only the paint that held much of it together). Unfortunately it was the right side fender and I needed a left. Life has a habit of crapping in your lap sometimes, just for the fun of it.

So a ten year-old car in 1989 was a fucking rolling disaster, literally falling apart as you drove it. Now, in 2009, I have a ten year-old GM truck on which I have replaced only the battery and tires from new. I had to top up the fluid in the air conditioner this year but, let's be fair, the only air conditioning in my Avenger was courtesy of the hole in the floor. Cars last a long time now, and look pretty damn good while they do it, which means that today's feckless youth know little of the joys of welding around the suspension mounts to get their car to pass annual MOT inspection.

On this auspicious occasion I would say that my 20 year companion compares better to my 2009 truck than my 1989 Avenger. Bodywork in good shape, low maintenance, and the airbags don't need to be replaced. That, along with the cakes, is the secret of a happy relationship, so I'm going to celebrate by buying her some furry dice to wear later...

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Nutritional Bisonomics

2009-06-06T17:10:00.001-07:00

Here's a couple of statistics that might just be related, although which causes which is up for debate:

Illegal immigrants in the US: 12-20 million
Recipients of food stamps in the US: 30-33 million

Yes, that's right, at least one in ten of the US population is now getting free food paid for by the rest of us, according to Associated Press estimates (although others figure it's now more like one in nine). The federal government has creatively re-branded the food stamps program as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which is a piece of timeless lefty euphemism. It would better be described as the Free Food Giveaway Program.

Now, maybe I'm a bit slow, but I'm always hearing about how we only have illegal immigration because of all the jobs that legal US residents won't do. ("It's a victimless crime - without them who will pick the fruit or cut your lawn?") Meanwhile there are thirty million US residents getting free food because they don't work. Excuse me, but that is utterly fucked up.

Let's allow for the fact that some of the thirty million SNAP recipients are children. (Given the high incidence of single parenthood and the unselective breeding habits at that end of society, let's face it, it might be quite a lot.) There are still probably around eight or ten million potential workers getting free food, paid for by taxpayers, while not doing the jobs that illegal immigrants end up doing. Why don't they get out there and get jobs? Because they're better off staying at home and sucking on the public teat than busting there arse cutting lawns, gutting chickens or replacing roofs.

It's a simple fact that with a nice cosy welfare safety net people don't have to go out and find work. Meanwhile, immigrants from countries where the taxpayers won't feed you while you sit on your arse are only too happy to come here and work hard. When I had my roof replaced the workers were all Hispanic. I have no reason to believe they were illegals, but they worked hard from early morning to evening. Meanwhile, in some public housing project, hundreds of thousands of people will have been whining about the lack of job opportunity for them, explaining that this is why their kids are selling drugs, moaning about poor schools and tucking into free food provided at someone else's expense.

In theory you could just send all the illegals home and then have the unemployed do the work. Ten million illegal workers replaced by ten million food stamp recipients. It's easy, right?

Here are some more statistics to brighten up your day:

Average cost of food stamp program per person: $113 per month
Number of recipients: 33 million
Total annual cost: $45 billion

Number of US taxpayers: 90 million (135 million tax returns, less 45 million that pay no federal taxes)
Annual cost to each taxpayer of providing free food to other people: $500

That's right, if you pay federal income tax you're coughing up five hundred bucks out of your paycheck so that other people can spend their money on beer, cigarettes, cable TV and other "essentials" while you buy their family's food. That's fucking bullshit. I've heard from a firefighter, working hard and economizing to make ends meet, who got pissed off continually seeing people in public housing with big flat screen TV's that he couldn't even hope to afford, all paid for with other people's money. Their "entitlements". It's amazing what you can afford when your food comes free, your rent is paid by the government and your kids' clothes are given to you.

Something's wrong here, people. It's fashionable to compare the current economic downturn to the great depression, but that's laughable. Back then people would criss-cross the country, willing to do anything to earn a crust. Nowadays you can just sit on your arse and wait for food to drop in your lap. There are, we are told, so many jobs available that we have to let illegal immigrants come here. So why are more than ten percent of the population getting free food then?

It's enough to make you puke, but bear in mind that you'll be replacing that meal with your own money if you do...

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Crap No-one Needs, #16

2009-05-25T09:07:00.000-07:00

The Art Establishment

Have you ever thrown up on the pavement? You might be an artist. Ever spilled some paint on the floor? Yep, sounds like you're an artist. Ever cut a cat in half to see what the insides look like? You could possibly be a psychopath, but you probably have a great future as a famous artist. The whole art establishment is so infested with useless wankers who wouldn't know real art if it crawled up their anus and tickled their spleen, that there's really no qualification required anymore.

Remember the "Piss Christ" photograph? Some moron pisses in a glass and puts a plastic crucifix in it, takes a photo and calls it art. The National Endowment for the Arts, a $155 million Congress-created boondoggle for worthlessness, puts this and other similar shit on exhibition at the taxpayer's expense and calls it art. If there was ever a sector of human endeavor that exhibited the Emperor's New Clothes phenomenon it's the art world: if you think some dozy tart's unmade bed, half a cow in a glass case or someone's crude painting with their own excrement isn't real art it's because "You're just a middle-class drone who doesn't comprehend the artist's deep appreciation of the human condition, communicated through a complex medium in order to bypass our natural emotional filters". In other words, if you think the emperor is naked, you must be stupid.

If all these wankers were just running around on welfare pissing on crucifixes then I wouldn't care, but they're doing it on our dime. It's not the business of government to be subsidizing the arts - if something is good enough then someone will pay to see it. Those that clamor for government arts funding (which, let's face it, means arts funded by taxes expropriated from working people against their will) realize full well that given a choice the working public will not voluntarily pay to support someone who spends his day pissing in a glass and taking pictures of it. Without government intervention art would have to survive on its merits, which would immediately condemn half the liberal arts establishment to get a real job.

Yeah, I know, people pay millions for Damien Hirst so-called artworks. which doesn't mean they have any artistic merit, but that's an entirely different phenomenon: art collection. The whole point of that is for people with more dollars than braincells to buy stuff so they can show off to other such people how wealthy and "enlightened" they are. It doesn't have to be good, only "desirable", an attribute conferred by an art establishment so removed from what the real world thinks as to have rendered their opinions meaningless.

Here's some art rules to live by:

1. If The Bloke Down The Pub Could Do It, It's Not Art

When we watch professional sports we know that the quarterback, sprinter, tennis player or goalie is performing at a level that we couldn't; that's why we pay to see them. They demonstrate excellence. It's the same thing with art. When I see a Bruegel painting I know I couldn't have done it, plus it's interesting to look at. Half of what passes for modern art requires no real talent other than the art of self-promotion and the ability to talk bollocks, which brings me to:

2. If You Have To Explain It, It's Not Art

If you could walk right by the so-called art and have no idea that it was art at all, then it isn't. Notice how modern art requires a soundtrack of interpretation and commentary to help the observer "understand and appreciate" the artist's message. This is a clear sign that it's a load of old bollocks; the number of accompanying words is directly proportional to the speed with which it should be consigned to the dumpster.

3. If It's Not Painted Or Sculpted, It's Not Art

Since music and dance are their own categories, art is a term for things of beauty that are static and to be looked at. This includes pictures, sculptures and maybe certain photography. That's it. It does not include "art installations" which consist of crap just thrown together, or people engaging in "interactive art". This is just bollocks. You know it's bollocks because normal people, uncontaminated by art indoctrination, would walk up to it and exclaim "What a load of old bollocks". Living in a room for fourteen days is not art.

4. If It Needs A Famous Name Attached, It's Not Art

What's the chance that if I'd pissed in a glass and put a crucifix in it, I would have got it into an exhibition in New York? If I cut a dog in half and put it in formaldehyde would I get my own show and have someone pay a million for it? Fuck no. If you took a Constable picture and took the name off you'd still walk past and think "Fucking good picture of a haywain, that." If you walked past the glass of piss you'd think "Jesus, I think someone pissed in that glass. Is there a tramp in here?" So just imagine it's not Tracy Emin's unmade bed, or Damien Hirst's half a cow, or Andres Serrano's glass of piss. What if Albert Bloggs or Dave Brown had done it? Would it still be good enough for an exhibition? Of course it wouldn't - it's not real art, it's just a bunch of art establishment wankers crawling up each others' arses.

Fundamentally the art scene is infested with pseudo-intellectual wankers, and if it that's what makes them happy then good luck to them. Except when the government, laboring under the biggest deficit in history, finds it essential that they confiscate money from working people to hand out to so-called artists who are just climbing over each other to be more "shocking" and "controversial" while not being required to exhibit any real talent.

Here's a suggestion to all those cutting edge art tossers: the Piss Christ is old news - if you want to be really "out there", why not take a dump on the Koran and photograph that? No, I didn't think so. Not so brave when some Islamist would cut off your tiny balls and make an exhibition out of you?

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

A Horse's Head For Chrysler

2009-05-24T08:03:00.000-07:00

There was this old mob technique which was employed when they wanted to take over a bar or other such money-making establishment. They'd send in some boys to trash the place or rough up the staff and then offer the management the opportunity to buy protection. The thing is, the cost of protection tended to go up, and to come with other strings attached, so that eventually the owners would just give in and sell up for a fraction of the real value of the business. This is called extortion.

Chrysler is in bankruptcy. The real owners of the business are the secured lenders, since they have first call on all the assets of the business. This is what was agreed contractually when they made the loans. However, the deal being offered to them is to sell up for approximately 20% of what they are owed. Guess who gets 55% of the value of the "new" Chrysler? Yes, it's the UAW autoworkers union.

There are lots of theories about why US automakers went in the toilet, many of them referring to "poor management" or "unattractive product". There's even been a chorus of wisdom suggesting that they lost money because they weren't offering fuel-efficient vehicles, making a neat link with prevailing eco-weenie sentiments while neatly missing the point that the only vehicles they made any money on were trucks and SUVs. No doubt they had poor management, but if the product has been weak it has to be related to the fact that they've been losing money for years. How can you put A-grade vehicles in the market if you make a loss on every one, and would make a bigger loss if you tried to make them better?

Let's cut through all the bullshit: the reason the traditional US automakers are losing money is the gold-plated, over-the-top, extortionate pay and benefits that the UAW has extracted over the years with threats to strike and shut down operations, plunging the companies into insolvency. For years management has chosen to pay off the thugs at the UAW rather than face them down, and just like the poor bar owner faced with the goons from the mob it's hard to pass judgment on them from the safety of your armchair. Any normal company shuts down plants when sales fall (and remember that US automakers have lost share every year), but in the twisted world of the UAW, the automakers have to pay all the workers even if there are no jobs to do, or pay them a small fortune to fuck off, and then pay their medical costs, pension costs and those of their families, forever.

What really pisses me off is Obastard's government brokering a deal where the union gets to walk off with most of what's left of Chrysler, in spite of them having no secured position (unlike secured lenders) and completely missing the fact that the UAW is what caused the whole mess in the first place. They should be grateful that there are any jobs left for their members at all after what they did. Obastard has been bought and paid for by the UAW (campaign donations anyone?) and has pressured the rightful owners of Chrysler to sell out cheap.

Tell me what's so different between the UAW crippling the automakers and then walking off with most of what's left, and the mob running down a bar and then buying it for a song. The labor laws over here just encourage this sort of large-scale extortion (remember the unions did the same thing to the airlines, bleeding them dry until 9/11 came along to finish them off) and it's no accident that the non-union auto operations in the US are growing.

In the twilight world of left-wing ideology we're supposed to look the other way as union thieves take other people's property, since it's all "in the interests of the workers". But what else would you expect from a government determined to confiscate ever more of our money to hand out to its cronies to buy votes?

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

A Simple Explanation...

2009-05-21T07:25:00.000-07:00

I was sent the following explanation of the financial crisis, rendered in simple terms:

Heidi is the proprietor of a bar somewhere in Europe. In order to increase sales, she decides to allow her loyal customers - most of whom are unemployed alcoholics - to drink now but pay later. She keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers loans).

Word gets around and as a result increasing numbers of customers flood into Heidi's bar.

Taking advantage of her customers' freedom from immediate payment constraints, Heidi increases her prices for wine and beer, the most-consumed beverages. Her sales volume increases massively.

A young and dynamic customer service consultant at the local bank recognizes these customer debts as valuable future assets and increases Heidi's borrowing limit.

He sees no reason for undue concern since he has the debts of the alcoholics as collateral.

At the bank's corporate headquarters, expert bankers transform these customer assets into DRINKBONDS, ALKBONDS and PUKEBONDS. These securities are then traded on markets worldwide. No one really understands what these abbreviations mean and how the securities are guaranteed. Nevertheless, as their prices continuously climb, the securities become top-selling items.

One day, although the prices are still climbing, a risk manager at the bank (subsequently of course fired for his negativity) decides that slowly the time has come to demand payment of the debts incurred by the drinkers at Heidi's bar.

However they cannot pay back the debts.

Heidi cannot fulfill her loan obligations and claims bankruptcy.

DRINKBOND and ALKBOND drop in price by 95 %. PUKEBOND performs better, stabilizing in price after dropping by 80 %.

The suppliers of Heidi's bar, having granted her generous payment due dates and having invested in the securities are faced with a new situation. Her wine supplier claims bankruptcy, her beer supplier is taken over by a competitor.

The bank is saved by the Government following dramatic round-the-clock consultations by leaders from the governing political parties.

The funds required for this purpose are obtained by a tax levied on the non-drinkers.

I wish I could say that I had written it, but unfortunately I've been much too busy, what with having to work extra hard to pay all the taxes required to bail out the dumb fucks who put us in this mess. Beer anyone...?

Weight Loss

2009-04-19T17:49:00.000-07:00

Like so many things, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Someone decided that we should have a weight-loss competition at work, which involved teams of five people seeing how much weight they could lose over a couple of months. When I accepted the invitation to join a team I didn't really pay much attention to the other members - after all, I wasn't about to get all psycho about weight loss. Unfortunately what I hadn't realized was that of the four other team members, three were bone-thin bastards with no weight to lose, and the fourth had already been working hard at it for a month, meaning that I was the only one who was a candidate to lose any weight at all.

Now, I'm no fat bastard, but I could probably lose a few pounds and feel no worse for it. Mrs Bison thinks about ten, which is optimistic. Bison Daughter is expecting me to end up with a six-pack, which is simply ridiculous, but represents a charming show of faith in her old man. It's not like I'm in this to win it; there are some people in our office who could - how do I say this delicately? - comfortably lose the bodyweight of a good sized dwarf and hardly notice. Nevertheless I at least want to be sure that we're not the only team to actually get fatter while supposedly trying to lose weight.

So what's my strategy? "Eat less and exercise more" is a well-established approach, but I already exercise five or six times a week, and I'm buggered if I'm going to go hungry. The thing about lifting weights is that it's important to ingest a significant amount of protein at regular intervals during the day, so I can't skip that. The only other time I decided to lose weight I went on a "no pasta, rice, bread or potatoes" regime for a few weeks. (I didn't cut out cakes or sweets.) It worked well, but I became pissy and irritable for a few days, and the aggravation of having to try and find alternatives to these starches while traveling became a monumental pain in the arse.

This time I'm going to cut back on the carbs again, reducing the starches, avoiding cakes and candy, and adding in fruits and salads to fill the space. I've been at this for a few days now and I have to say it's a fucking pain in the arse. Of course Mrs Bison decided to mark my endeavor by making her famous cherry cake, which I had to refuse, even as she repeatedly taunted me with the offer of a slice. (Does she actually want me to lose any weight?) Tomorrow I'm going to take a salad to work, complete with a can of tuna and hard boiled eggs for protein (which hopefully means I won't look completely gay).

Obviously this isn't a diet where I eat less food, only different food. If I was a bloater I might have to reconsider, but I'm only prepared to contemplate minor deprivation in the cause of pointless competition. The problem is that I just discovered Five Guys burgers. There's a place close to the office and I only got round to trying it just prior to the start of this contest. It was outstanding, no other word for it. Fabulous juicy burger, big pile of tasty fries; fuck me, I can almost taste it now. And yesterday Mrs Bison bought ice cream. Fucking diet...

Maybe there's a better way. I could just avoid wearing underwear when they weight us in at the end, that should save a few ounces. Have a haircut the day before, leave my car keys at my desk, wear lighter shoes, that sort of thing. On the other hand, Mrs Bison is now watching one of those tiresome period drama Dickens productions on public television. Watching that would bore the shit out of me. If I can only watch long enough, surely significant weight loss is guaranteed?

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Male Enhancement

2009-04-13T15:11:00.000-07:00

I decided to drop my car off for an oil change today before taking Mrs Bison for a gratuitously large Chinese lunch. Normally I'd wait with the car and take the opportunity to look over the new and used cars in the dealer lot, just for fun. Show me a man who can find himself surrounded by cars and not want to look at them and I'll show you a man who doesn't need a car simply because he's on the other bus. I could have checked out new cars when we came back from lunch but today my heart wasn't in it. You see, it appears that in addition to a new car I'll also need a bigger penis.

Whoa! Hold on there - I've had no complaints (he hastens to add) - but I've been reading car magazines recently, you know, things like Car and Driver, and if the advertising is anything to go by I can't get a new car without also doing something about my dick. There was this full page advert headlined "Does Size Really Matter To Your Lover?", followed by a lot of small text, the upshot of which was that I should send anywhere between $70 and $100 to purchase some non-FDA approved dried monkey jizz (or whatever the stuff is made of) which would give me a bigger, thicker more energetic manhood with "Orgasmic Thrust Activation".

Maybe it's because the advert was in a car magazine, but I can't help thinking that orgasmic thrust activation is something you'd find on a new Corvette, maybe to help you pull away quickly at the lights. Except it would be abbreviated to "OTA" and you'd have to nod sagely when the salesman told you that the car had it, even though you had no fucking clue what it did. And it would have its own little light on the dash which would come on after two thousand miles to inform you that the OTA wasn't working, and before you knew it you'd be back at the dealership every other week for them to try and fix it. But it would still be a bragging point: "Yeah, I got the Z06 model because of the OTA - you should feel your neck snap when you hit the gas!"

There was a second advert in the same magazine under a "Size Does Matter" banner, but this time you could spend more than $300. Maybe you get a really big penis with their stuff. But what if it worked? None of your pants would fit anymore, and if you got an unexpected erection at work you'd have to hide it under the desk. Fortunately the risk is low - I'm sure none of this shit works, but there must be plenty of blokes out there willing to roll the dice. And it's got to be good business for the companies who sell it. I mean, not only does it not have to work, they don't even really need to send you any pills. What are you going to do? Complain to the Better Business Bureau? Yeah, I can see that conversation happening.

"I'm calling to complain about this company. I sent them $300 because they said I could add three inches to my penis. And girth too. They definitely said girth. Now I've been taking the pills for a month and nothing's happened. No, definitely no bigger. Because I measured it. With a ruler. How long? Is that really important? It's the same as it was before, surely that's all you need to know? The girth? I don't know, it doesn't feel any thicker. No I didn't measure it - the ruler wouldn't bend. Oh, I suppose you're right, I could have used a bit of string and then measured the string. But I want to complain - they won't send my money back. My name? It's - erm - Smith. Yes, Smith. Address? I'd rather not say..."

Or maybe the company sends you the money back on a big pink check emblazoned with the words "PENIS ENLARGEMENT REFUND". Like that's ever going to get cashed.

Some of the other ads are more subtle - they don't mention size directly but instead refer to "Natural Male Enhancement", which is right up there with Around View Monitor, Lane Departure Prevention System and Electronic Brake Assist in the list of options on your new car. "I'd like it in black with the leather interior and the Natural Male Enhancement package please."

Clearly lots of blokes want a bigger dick. I'd love to be able to reassure them that "Size Doesn't Matter" but my non-scientific survey tells me that "Women Talk About Size". At least one of my colleagues claims to be getting the "short end of the stick" whenever she takes one home. My question is, are new cars disproportionately purchased by men with small dicks who are looking to compensate? Is that the real reason the car magazines are full of penis enlargement adverts? Whatever the reality I'd suggest to any bloke considering sending his hard-earned cash to some outfit promising to add inches to his member that he would indeed be better off putting it towards a new car. Not because it'll make up for the shortfall, but simply because he'll at least get some pleasure from the car. And in the meantime remember this sage advice from a noted stand-up comic:

I took this woman home and when I got undressed she pointed at my dick and said "Who do you think you're going to satisfy with that?" and I said "Me."

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Life Everlasting

2009-04-12T16:34:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's fitting that on Easter Sunday, when millions are celebrating the last time someone rose from the dead, I found myself listening to a National Public Radio program about cryonics. Normally I eschew NPR, full as it is of dreary arty bollocks, lefty liberal apologetics and "black-only" racist programming, but it has its moments, and today contained one of them. The program looked back to the early days of cryonics in the sixties, when some bloke called Bob Nelson started freezing people and storing them in the charmingly ridiculous hope of reviving them later. The technology wasn't there at the time, but who knows what will be possible later, and I couldn't help thinking what a horrific thing that would be.

The idea behind cryonics is that most people who die aren't really "dead" according to the "information theoretic" definition of death, since their identity and memory is still preserved in their brain tissue at the moment of clinical death. As minutes or hours go by the brain will decompose and identity would be lost, but in theory if you froze someone who died of something like a heart attack you could revive them later.

Let's leave aside all the scientific questions about how long you could wait to freeze someone, what you'd need to do to preserve the body tissue and all that other stuff. For a start it's arse-clenchingly dull to anyone who's not into cryonics, and I have a suspicion that anyone who is into cryonics is a nutter. Frankly, I couldn't be arsed to research the subject. But let's think about this for a bit. What if it worked? What if people didn't die but just went into stasis for a bit and got revived later?

For a start it's not as though the world is short of people. The population is now estimated at 6.7 billion; when I was a kid I remember being told it was about 4 billion. Even without cryonics we're going to run out of places to put them all, and land to grow food for them. About 60 million people die every year, but even if you only consider the "wealthy" ones the number isn't small. 2.5 million die annually in the US. Assuming that cryonics becomes possible and affordable just imagine the additional land that'll be given over to gigantic frozen warehouses for all their corpses. And what are the eco-weenies going to say about the huge amounts of electricity being used to refrigerate all these bodies; instead of returning their carbon to the earth they'll be using fuel for centuries. Bear in mind that it's not necessary to prove that you can revive people for there to be a market here - there's no shortage of idiots willing to be frozen just on the off-chance of future success.

Let's hope the idea never works - with the birth rate at 75 million per year (a net of 15 million over the death rate), even if we only revived 25% of the stiffs we'd be looking at doubling the population growth.

And what would we get at the end of it? Statistically speaking an awful lot of people die when they're old. I've seen old people: forget the problem with all the senile ones, just think about how they spend their time now. Revive them and before you know it we'll be knee-deep in wrinklies. They already retired so what are we going to do? Pay them another pension until they die (again)? You won't be able to move at WalMart, and forget trying to eat during the early bird special. The economic might of the United States will be devoted to the production of dentures, incontinence pants and arthritis drugs. The promise of cryonics is that we get to see a wonderful future, beyond our dreams, but the revived pensioners are just going to moan about how much better it was in the old days so what's the point?

That's the trouble with people - they don't think things through. Everyone wants to live forever but I'm afraid that doesn't work. Instead of people trying to extend their lives indefinitely wouldn't it be better if we enjoyed life while it lasted, embraced death when it came, and realized that millions of drooling carcases, kept alive only by advanced medical intervention, should be sent on their way? Today millions remember how two thousand years ago someone got nailed to a cross so we wouldn't have to fear death anymore. Doesn't seem like it worked, does it?

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Fuck Me, It's Dwayne Dibley!

2009-03-29T15:12:00.000-07:00

Mrs Bison spent about four hours yesterday taking Bison Daughter shopping, on account of the fact that she's grown out of everything. In the good old days we'd buy clothes in advance - whatever was on sale at the end of the season we'd buy it in a larger size for next season, and that way we'd stay ahead of the game. (To be fair, when I say "we", I obviously don't mean me.) However that doesn't work now because the girl has discovered "fashion". That means a shirt with no logo from Target is "unfashionable" but the same shirt with "Hollister" plastered all over it is "way cool". Never mind that they're all made in China and would fall apart if she didn't grow out of them so quickly, the branded stuff is much better.

There's a balance here - I'm not going to force my kid to be the only one with no logo gear, but I'm also not giving in to this "everyone else has it so I have to" bullshit. A few branded items amongst the other stuff go a long way.

The marketing of branded clothing to kids is an irritating way to suck more money out of our pockets but at least the clothes still look like clothes. The other night I had the misfortune to experience America's Next Top Model on TV. Have you ever seen such a load of complete bollocks in your life?

The whole fashion industry seems to be populated by freaks, degenerates and weirdos, the kind of bizarre, self-obsessed nonces that you'd cross the street to avoid in real life. Just look at what goes up and down catwalks in the major fashion shows - no-one in their right mind would ever conceive of actually wearing any of that crap, and anyone who'd pay what it sells for clearly has more money than sense, by a phenomenally wide margin.

I don't want to sound like an expert on America's Next Top Model, but it falls into the standard reality-show format, where a cast of wannabes are put through a series of tests and gradually eliminated by a panel of judges. One of the judges is a "bloke" (I use the term in its broadest possible sense) by the name of Miss J.Alexander. What struck me when I saw him on the show was that he was dressed in the kind of gear that would make anyone look like a complete pillock. The whole fashion industry is an "Emperor's New Clothes" experience; if some "high fashion" name started prancing around in a bin bag and wellies suddenly everyone else would want to. Who could believe that flared jeans came back, for fuck's sake?

But as soon as I saw J.Alexander, the famous fashion figure and catwalk coach, the first thing I thought was "It's Dwayne Dibley!" Yes, the ultimate fashion-failure character from Red Dwarf. He was the spitting image! I know everyone from the UK will know who he is, but here's a link to Dwayne Dibley for those who don't. And if you haven't watched Red Dwarf before I can only suggest that you've clearly been wasting your life to date.

At the top of the page are four pictures - two are fashion failure Dwayne Dibley and two are fashion guru J.Alexander. Can you tell them apart?

So forgive me if I'm somewhat reluctant to ponce about in whatever the fashion industry tells me is now "in". Remember, just because it's fashionable doesn't mean you don't look like a twat.

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Handy Job

2009-03-28T07:19:00.000-07:00

I'm not quite sure how the subject came up. There we were, sitting in a cozy restaurant in Belgium, with low ceilings and candlelight, enjoying one of those meals that you just don't get in St.Louis. It was a place run by a husband and wife; he cooked while she ran the front of the house. There was no menu - when we arrived she just explained what they were going to make for us and checked that everything would be OK. (Presumably they'll make accommodations if something would cause you to heave.) Outside the rain fell steadily, and through it, illuminated by evening streetlamps, we could pick out the classic architecture of the town square.

Early on the conversation was polite but hesitant; this was a business dinner, with seven or eight of us gathered. Gradually the conversation shifted, however, and I found myself relating the story of a television program I saw many years ago in which zookeepers were harvesting semen from a gorilla in captivity. I pointed out that the process involved sedating the gorilla and then inserting a large stainless steel vibrator in its anus to cause ejaculation. Two things struck me: firstly, a gorilla has a really tiny dick considering the rest of its physiology; secondly, there didn't appear to be much in the process for the gorilla, who was presumably going to wake up with a hangover, a sore arse and an empty sac. None of us want that to happen, do we? What do you think goes through the poor beast's mind after that? "Jesus, I must have hit the fermented bamboo juice a bit hard last night. What the hell's wrong with my arse? Oh fuck! Who was I with? Oh man, does that mean I'm gay now? I hope no video ends up on YouTube."

I only verbalized the first part of that story in the restaurant, not the imagined thoughts of the awakening primate, but you have to be careful with stories like that because if you misjudge the mood of the group you can suddenly end up with an awkward silence, and everyone studying the menu intently. Since there was no menu in this place we would have been screwed. Fortunately my counterpart came back with an even better story.

Apparently his company used to be in the pig genetics business. Like most industrialized companies they had a very active health and safety program, involving sharing learnings and improvements between different sites that would make the workplace safer. In one instance there had been a problem with the people who had to harvest the sperm from the hogs ending up with carpal tunnel syndrome, which had resulted in the development of a new tool or gadget to help them avoid this. Carpal tunnel? You mean they did it by hand?

Harvesting sperm sounds like it's a noble and scientifically justified endeavor, but at the end of the day you know that you're basically a pig-wanker. How do you live with yourself if your job involves giving hand relief to swine on a daily basis? What do you say when your kid asks what you did today? More to the point, what's the going rate for jerking off a hog? Because I have to believe that there would be more money in pulling off people, and probably less chance of being trampled in the mud while you're doing it.

Back in the restaurant, three excellent courses were followed by a fine dessert. Although the rain was still falling when we eventually stepped out into the cobbled street to make our way back to the car park, life didn't seem too bad. The weekend was coming, and there is, at present, no prospect that I will have to wank off any pigs in my immediate future. And I'm not hung like a gorilla either. Happy days!

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Road Trip

2009-03-20T13:33:00.000-07:00

It's Spring Break here in St.Louis so, contrary to normal practice, we decided actually to go away for a few days. Since I'd rather stick pins in my gonads than pay to be treated like shit by an airline, we set off by car for Big Cedar Lodge, down in Southern Missouri by Table Rock Lake. This is about a four hour drive from St.Louis, providing the opportunity to experience the very best of highway-side Missouri entertainment along the way.

I have to assume that the places dotted along the highway are examples of what is known as "small town America", albeit somewhat corrupted by the influence of so many passing travelers just begging to be separated from their dollars. It must be interesting to live there - it's not at all clear what you'd do by way of entertainment, unless you have an inclination to junk food, fireworks or pornography, because that's all you see along the road.

One of the large signs proclaimed "The World's Biggest Rocking Chair" was nearby, begging the question "Who gives a shit?".

One of the great benefits of I-44 is that you have plenty of gigantic billboards to help ensure that you don't miss any of the fine roadside establishments that grace the highway. On the way down we were still two hours out of Branson when we began to be bombarded with invitations to stop off for Branson coupons, or to see the big-name tacky shows that infest this otherwise meaningless town. Of course there are also many artery-hardening junk food emporia peddling their greasy wares, but by far the most entertaining signs are those advertising "ADULT STORES". The signs are invariably large and yellow, whereas the stores themselves appear small and seedy, although judging by the number of cars parked outside they weren't hurting for business, even before midday. Isn't there some sort of basic principle of decency that you shouldn't hit the scud mag store before lunch? It's like drinking - perfectly understandable if you do it in the evening, but if it's the first thing on your mind when you get out of bed then you've probably got a problem. The exotic dancers at the place next to Big Louie's apparently start at 11am, in case you're interested...

My favorite store sign was the one for what I believe was called the Lions Den establishment just outide Waynesville. It apparently offers a new video arcade, which cannot help but to conjure up images of people tugging themselves off in little cubicles. No-one watches porn unless they plan to "take Captain Picard to warp speed" do they? Can these people really not wait until they get home to rub one out? Or maybe they can't take the porn home in case the missus finds it, in which case this is less of a porn shop and more like a porn library. (Silence please!)

Anyway, this store was almost next door to the Grace Covenant Christian Center, which seems like unfortunate planning on someone's part. Maybe the Lions Den name was an oblique biblical reference, although I don't recall Daniel pulling his pud when he was thrown in with the big cats. What really got my attention was the giant bowling pin eight in front of the Adult Store sign. Maybe there was also a bowling alley nearby, but it just seemed to me like they couldn't quite get planning consent for a huge pink dildo to advertise their store, and consequently had to make do with a bowling pin.

In between the Christian Center and the Porn Warehouse was McDonalds. Now we know they don't site their stores by accident - they pay great attention to traffic patterns; clearly plenty of people frequent the video arcade. Or perhaps they just have an outlet for all the man-mess generated. What's that funny sauce they put on the Fillet O Fish called again?

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Vegetable Rights And Peace

2009-03-15T17:44:00.000-07:00

No wonder vegetarians are such miserable cunts - have you ever tried the food? Mrs Bison decided, for reasons better known to herself, to mix things up on the dinner front tonight, with a recipe for meatballs based on this Match textured vegetable protein. Now I have to give Mrs B the benefit of the doubt on this - she almost always makes excellent food, something she attributes to me having low standards and being easy to please. No matter what the truth in this, I get a lot of good food, and all of it based on variations on a theme of dead animal, so I was willing to give the soy-based veggie crap a go.

Jesus, how does anyone choke that shit down? I was prepared that it wouldn't taste like meat, in much the same way that a spicy bean burger doesn't taste like a hamburger. But here's the thing, a bean burger does taste like real food; in this case beans. And spices. So while you're certainly going to be disappointed if you bite into one and you were expecting medium rare ground sirloin burger, if you set out to eat it as a bean burger it can actually pass as food.

Textured vegetable protein is another thing altogether. It doesn't taste like beans, or any other recognizable food substance. It has the consistency of something that has been extruded from the rearmost orifice of a cat, and a flavor that makes you wish that it had. At least cat shit would have some meat content. I suppose the veggie crap is supposed to be all nutritionally beneficial but, let me tell you, the nutritional value of something is irrelevant if it engages your gag reflex so comprehensively that you can't swallow it.

Bear in mind that Mrs Bison's characterization of my eating habits is not far from the truth. If it moved once I'll eat it. Even if it's still moving I'll give it a go. I've eaten duck brains, fish eyes, frog ovaries, dog penis and cow tongue, so I'm not what you'd call a picky eater, but I'd eat any one of them before ever again tucking into textured fucking vegetable protein. It's earthworm-guts, leper-sputumly disgusting. I kept trying to eat it; I got three balls of the shit down, for fuck's sake, but I couldn't get through it all.

So I retrieved the package from the trash to see what the source of this vile taste was, and I have to say that I was left somewhat in the dark. The ingredients included the aforementioned textured vegetable protein and some other items like caramel color, but did not include any clue as to the source of the nasty seed things in it, which appeared to be mildly less appetizing than what we feed the parakeets. What I did recognize was assorted veggie-world slogans about this kind of crap being "better for the world" and "better for everyone". Bollocks is it.

Bison Daughter complained that she needed some meat, which made me very happy, since with girls you worry that they're only one step away from some bullshit vegetarian anorexic nightmare. Just imagine that there was no meat though. Last night we went out for barbecue, and the dead pig meat was so tender I could have hugged it; what if you had to exist for the rest of your natural life on the kind of tasteless, nutritionally worthy, ethically responsible shit for which textured vegetable protein is the poster child? Fuck that!

Have you noticed how the animal rights brigade are ready and willing to engage in violence so they can stuff their world view down everyone else's throat? You know what, if I had to eat that modified dog excrement every night I'd be ready to burn something too, although I'd be more inclined to direct my ire to the vegetable protein manufacturers before going after Hummer dealerships, drug companies and those people who like to make beagles smoke. I've never yet had a smoking beagle ruin my dinner.

Anyway, I'm now about ready to yak up the few veggie balls I swallowed, and Mrs Bison has vowed never to go anywhere near that shit again. Tomorrow I fully intend to find myself a vegan and slap them for being such a dickhead. If it wasn't for them no-one would make that textured veggie bollocks, and it wouldn't be lurking on the shelf, ready to ensnare the passing shopper with wholly unfulfilled promises of flavor.

It's fucking shite - don't ever attempt to eat it, OK?

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

A Good Read

2009-03-08T19:37:00.000-07:00

It was a wonderful sunny day in St.Louis, and there's always that little voice inside me on days like this that says "You need to go out and make the most of it". Fortunately I've got really good at ignoring that voice, as it can result in a perfectly good relaxing day being spoiled by some pointless trip and vain attempt to wring joy from it. Much better to sit on the deck in the sun and fritter away the afternoon aimlessly. To be fair, I didn't ignore the little voice which said "You need to go to the gym and do your leg workout", which was why I only had the afternoon to fritter.

What I really like to do on a day like this, or indeed any day with nothing better to do, is to sit with a good book. Unfortunately I am shit at buying good books; I can wander into Borders with the best of intentions, but no matter how hard I try, I can't find anything remotely worth reading. It's all trashy fiction, deep meaningful treatises on feminist thinking and nineteenth century drama by people who you get to study in literature classes. (And don't we remember how shit they were?)

For good reading I have to rely on gifts from my in-laws, who periodically send me excellent books, and without whom I'd be reduced to reading the back of cereal boxes. Sure, I don't get many books from my in-laws, but that's not a problem because I can re-read the good ones. In fact, in a couple of decades I probably won't even know I've read them at all, so I'll never be short of a good book.

Today I sat in the sun with McCarthy's Bar, an outstanding gentle travel/comedy book by Pete McCarthy which I've had for years but which never gets old. It's about his travels in Ireland, the country of his ancestry, and his attempt to see if he belonged there by virtue of his Irish roots, even though he grew up in England. I strongly recommend you get a copy.

I always enjoyed going to Ireland because of all the great people I met there (and not because of the weather, which was invariably shit). I can't stand St.Patrick's Day, and all that pseudo-Irish green shamrock bullshit, paraded by fat Americans who had a great, great grandfather who once drank a pint of Guinness, and who consequently believe they're all refugees of the potato famine. Fortunately Ireland isn't like that, apart from the touristy bits which cater to all the visiting fat Americans, of course.

I used to travel regularly to Mullingar, which I've never seen mentioned in any travel guide. It's about two hours West of Dublin, assuming you know where you're going and you avoid the highway. I always went on the back roads, using directions I'd copied on a cardboard rental car sign while being driven at night by the bloke whose job I was taking over, while suffering from the after-effects of food poisoning. (I'd spent the better part of the previous night riding the porcelain bus in a hotel in Manchester.) When we arrived in Mullingar we went to the Bloomfield House hotel, which had been a convent in the past (there was only one other place to stay at the time, the Greville Arms I think, and it was always risky because loud parties could be taking place right under your room.) As we left the check-in desk and walked upstairs all noises faded away and suddenly you felt a weird silence, kind of creepy and ominous. Every time I walked up there alone I half-expected to see a ghostly nun sweeping down the corridor.

On this occasion my colleague was walking with me and as he opened the door to his room he beckoned me in. "See? Can you smell that? It is the menstruation of the nuns!" Frankly I think that says more about him than the hotel, which was always excellent, and never smelled of nun menstruation as far as I could tell (although I'm hardly an expert).

Anyway, in spite of my careful directions I got lost the first time I tried to drive to Mullingar by myself, on account of following a sign to the town of Trim (which was on the way) that actually directed me off the road to Trim. I drove down the narrow lane and came to a junction where five lanes came together. There were no signs to give me a hint, but there was a man standing there with a herd of cows. I wound down my window and asked him where Trim was; he directed me back the way I'd come, but then he asked me if I wouldn't mind putting my car across one lane and standing in front of another so he could drive the cows without them wandering off in the wrong direction. That's when I realized that I was really in Ireland.

It'll soon be St.Paddy's Day, and wankers everywhere will be drinking pissy green beer, wearing ridiculous shamrock crap and pretending they're "Oirish". I won't be among them - the whole thing is bollocks, and dangerous bollocks at that, used in the past by Irish Republican terrorists to cadge cash for weapons from fat gullible Americans so they could kill kids in the streets of England. But I always enjoyed the real Ireland, regardless of the personal hygiene habits of its nuns...

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Tipping Points

2009-03-07T19:35:00.000-08:00

Two things are happening that have the potential to bring economic prosperity to an end, and at the risk of referencing one of the most overused new phrases of the age, in each case we are approaching a tipping point.

The first issue is that approximately half of voters the US pay no net income tax. Of course it's long been the case that the majority of taxes are paid by the wealthy, and you can certainly argue that this is fair - why shouldn't everyone pay the same percentage of their income in tax? Unfortunately taxes aren't "fair", and the very wealthy always end up owing much more of their income in tax than lower income earners because it's so tempting for the many to push the burden onto the few, especially since envy is such a powerful social motivator. Sure, the rich can always respond by just not paying the taxes - note how many wealthy Democrats failed the "have you paid all the taxes you owed" test recently. And that's just the ones exposed to scrutiny as part of Obastard's confirmation process.

The problem comes when so many people pay no tax at all. When most people pay tax there is a natural brake on government spending because people don't like tax increases. Without any brake, government will always find new ways to spend money and never cut back on the old ways. However, if you don't pay any tax, why not vote for all sorts of new spending? Free healthcare? Yes please! Someone else is paying! At the point where the majority of voters have no personal interest in restricting tax increases we risk an accelerating orgy, a society bingeing in new entitlements at someone else's expense.

You might hope that Americans wouldn't be that stupid, but just check out what they watch on TV to get an idea about the IQ of the typical voter. They're fucking idiots, and considerably less likely to take a considered view of long term economic impact of tax policy than they are to text their vote for American Idol while eating themselves to obesity on stuffed crust pizza.

Meanwhile government is adding new branches, new programs and millions of new non-jobs, all paid for by taxes. (Climate change department, anyone?) There comes a point where more people work for the government than work for private companies. Obviously it's worth pointing out that government contributes absolutely zilch, zero, fuck-all, nothing by way of productivity. No wealth is, or ever can be, created by governments; it can only be redistributed, inhibited or destroyed. But that's not the tipping point issue. The problem is that when most people work for the government the majority suddenly has a vested interest in the government not cutting back on wages, benefits and other perks. In fact they'll likely use the power of their union to make sure that the government pays them well above what they are really worth every year. Governments, being craven bodies, entirely beholden to the fear of losing power at the next election, will avoid facing the economic crisis that results from a bloated, inefficient, unnecessary, overpaid, unaccountable bureaucracy, and will just vote it another pay rise and print more money to do it.

So if you're expecting an economic recovery from the so-called stimulus package, don't hold your breath. Taxing the rich and employing more enviro-crimes officers will simply accelerate the decline in the economy until it finally becomes apparent even to the liberal cocksuckers that money does not, in fact, grow on trees.

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Wasting Money

2009-03-02T16:47:00.000-08:00

OK, I'm not even going to pretend to be in a reasonable mood today. I'm still pissed about that $900 million gift to Gaza that our fuckwitted government intends to make on our behalf. My equilibrium was not improved by the stock market's further collapse below 7,000 today and the consequent knowledge that everything I invested in it was a complete fucking waste, and I'll be working until I'm ninety, whereas if I'd pissed away the cash and taken out a big loan instead, for a house I couldn't afford, I could now sit back and wait for everyone else to pay my mortgage for me.

Needless to say, I've heard nothing whatsoever from the complete twat that "manages" my investments (such as they are). The only things he ever sent me were selected articles titled "Next Stop The Dow at 15,000" or similar crap. Ever since the decline started I periodically receive articles from him pointing out that we're now at the bottom, and the only way is up, usually prefacing another round of collapse. What a cunt.

Anyway, I don't think yesterday's short and vitriolic note really captured the underlying problem I have with how governments spend money. I was concentrating on how stupid it was to give huge amounts of our money away to strangers. I didn't even get onto two other salient points which Ms. Clinton might have considered:

1. The Palestinians all hate America and want us dead. They hang effigies of Americans in the street and regard us as the Great Satan because we support Israel. Giving them a huge gift is like giving a Rolex to a cousin who hates your guts, except it's $899,995,000 more expensive. You might as well burn the money.

2. The Palestinians will continue to fire rockets at Israel, so the Israelis will knock down Gaza again, rendering the investment utterly pointless.

But even that isn't really the point. Just imagine that the project made sense (go on, really try). Assuming someone did the math and evaluated the project goals, the potential approaches and the costs and benefits, how did they come up with a number of $900 million, with an initial payment of $300 million? Don't those numbers seem kind of round to you? For those of us who live in the real world, where capital is scarce and has to be justified based on a cost/benefit analysis, return on investment calculation, consideration of alternatives and supported by a well thought-out project plan, just imagine going before the Board of Directors and asking for $300 million for a project.

"Really? You need $300 million exactly? You developed a plan to accomplish a goal and the cost for this plan to be executed came out to be $300 million exactly? Pull the other one, shit-for-brains, you haven't got a plan at all, have you? You just showed up here with an idea and expect us to write you a giant check? Did you even attempt to find a less expensive way to achieve your project goal? Did you carry out any value-engineering? Use any cost management tools? What's your bid strategy?"

Nothing the government does is ever properly thought-out. It's always a really big round number, and then they go away and spend it without any oversight, usually with no-bid contracts for all their cronies.

Even on a smaller level I just don't understand why government isn't required to act like business. Our local school district is remodeling Bison Daughter's school. In reality they're making a new entrance and enlarging some office space. Total square footage of additional classroom? Zero. Total additional amenity provided to the kids? Zero. Total return in terms of enhanced education? Fucking zero. And yet they're spending the money anyway, because it'll look pretty, and presumably it got passed because "educating our kids is a priority". Bollocks.

In business we have to at least show in theory how investment generates return. If I brought forward a multi-million dollar project to create a new entrance for our office, but it didn't add any revenue, reduce any costs, increase quality or add productive capacity, I'd be laughed out of the room. And even if it's a good idea we're expected to work that idea, to reduce costs and consider different options, so that when we spend the money we get the best return for our investment. Guess what? None of them ever show up as a round number.

So you can bet your arse that no matter what you think about giving money to fucking Gaza, the money will be wasted. Which just pisses me off more, because amongst all those companies with falling stock prices are many who would just love to get $10 million or $20 million to invest in new facilities, here in the good old USA. Instead Obastard is going to increase the tax burden on corporations, making investments less attractive. If you wanted the Dow below 5,000 you could hardly write a better prescription. Which probably means I can expect a note from my investment advisor tomorrow, pointing out what a great time it is to buy stocks...

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Thin The Herd

2009-03-01T09:09:00.000-08:00

Today I'm suffering from Rhinovirus Homilis, better known as the Man Cold. Of course it didn't hit me during the week, so as not to interrupt work, but instead chose to fuck up my weekend. Yesterday I felt like shit, and was therefore looking forward to the cold progressing so that I would feel better today. Instead I now feel like double shit, lightly toasted with a side-serving of shit. Shit cubed, in fact. Yesterday I bought a mountain of cold remedies, not because I had a cold, but because the money in last year's health savings account is about to expire and I thought I may as well spend it on something. I don't know why I bothered - cold remedies don't do shit.

So I'll spend the rest of my day drinking tea and filling tissues with unhealthy looking phlegm, until I eventually give up on stupid cold remedies and mix some honey, scotch and lemon for a proper treatment.

In the meantime, since thoughts of illness and impending early death were on my mind, I was reflecting on the mess we've got ourselves in with old people. Let me put in simply: the fuckers are everywhere. They make up names for themselves, like "seniors" in an attempt to connote wisdom, societal status and rank, but we know them better as those fuckwits who buy a new Buick every three years, put white tires, a vinyl roof and a luggage rack on it and drive it up the pavement or over a bus queue.

To be fair, old people come in different categories. Mrs Bison has a relative of 102 who still lives at home and tends his own garden, whereas a significant portion of those twenty years his junior are sitting in a giant diaper being fed soup, if they aren't already pushing up the daisies. One centenarian in the same town apparently developed a penchant for internet porn, which is as far as I'm concerned a reason to congratulate him (although not to shake his hand); at least it gave him a reason to get up every day.

There are, however, legions of old people sitting around just waiting to die. A lot of them are warehoused in old people's homes, at considerable expense to them, their relatives or the government (i.e. the taxpayer, you and me). The problem is that people don't die of anything anymore. Back in the good old days a harsh winter would take care of the weak and feeble. Heart attacks, cancer and all the other old favorites would similarly thin the herd. But with all the medical advances of recent years it seems that the expectation in the medical community (indeed, their whole mission) is to postpone death indefinitely.

The problem is that while you can postpone death, you can't postpone aging, so that the animated carcasses you get left with don't necessarily have any quality of life. Of course the medical profession links arms on this point with religious groups who seem to have some major hangups about letting people die. This seems somewhat odd when you consider that the afterlife is supposed to be such a fabulous "meeting God, no more pain, eternal joy" affair. If Great Grandpa is kept alive by machines, is fed through a tube and shits in a bag, what's the big deal about letting him go on?

Leaving aside the personal morality, what about a bit of simple common sense? In 2004 old farts represented 36 million, or 12% of the US population; by 2050 they will number nearly 90 million, more than 20% of the population. Not all of them will be taking Viagra and going on cruises; a significant portion will require full-time care and constant, increasingly expensive medical intervention. At the same time we're being told that the healthcare system here is broken. At some point we need to grow a spine and confront the fact that a massive portion of our limited healthcare dollars are directed to the pointless extension of low-quality life. Not only is it spend with a very low return in terms of quality of life improvement per dollar, but everyone completely avoids talking about what a waste it is, while younger people die for want of quality care.

The danger here is that the AARP is already a powerful lobbying group in the US (meaning that by giving money to politicians they effectively buy policy). Why do you think that blind half-wits who don't realize the war is over can drive their giant Cadillacs through a school playground? The AARP effectively blocks any attempt to force old people to be checked for driving competence. Imagine that their ranks are doubled: now we have a society which will spend its entire working life generating money to pay for Mum and Dad's residential care, or their own. The US economy will implode and no-one will be able to buy anything except incontinence pads, tartan rugs and small, annoying dogs. We'll all be working directly or indirectly for the healthcare industry.

At some point we need to accept that people should die. When I was a kid we learned that there were about 4 billion people on this planet; we're now over 6 billion, actually closer to 7 billion, and expected to pass 9 billion by 2050. If you serioulsy believe that we can, and should, extend every life indefinitely, where the fuck are you going to put everyone? There won't be enough space to park all their fucking Buicks!

I vote for letting people push the button and end their lives when they're ready. And if you no longer know what's going on around you, that's a pretty good indication that it's time to go, so at that point someone else can choose. Hell, I can barely put up with this fucking cold, endless nose-blowing and feeling like crap for two days; if I have to sit in my own piss and breathe through a tube while I'm doing it you can sign me up.

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

The Lunatics And The Asylum

2009-02-28T09:20:00.000-08:00

It would be funny, if it weren't so sad, that so many stupid people here in the US believe that it's the Government that will solve the problems of the economy and lead us all to a bright financial future. Let's leave aside for a moment the oft-repeated assertion that governments can't create economic growth, they can only facilitate it by creating the right environment for the market to work. More often, of course, they fuck it up most comprehensively by waggling all sorts of economic levers which they don't understand and following a set of dogmatic principles that have nothing to do with growth and everything to do with wealth redistribution or social policy.

It was Winston Churchill, one of the greatest men ever to have lived, who pointed out that "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries." You could see that immediately in the Obastardization of the so-called stimulus package and the idiot's subsequent tax policy - never mind about creating more wealth, let's just make sure we grab from those who earned and give to those who didn't.

But regardless of your politics, left or right, I simply don't understand how people can possibly believe that the government is effective at anything. This applies to governments of either party here in the States - after all, it's mostly the same cast of characters in Congress, and the same millions of useless bureaucrats who administer policy, no matter who's in office.

Just take something simple like the switch to digital TV. The February 17 date for the switch was set years ago. Since then TV stations have been required by statute to devote endless hours to reminding us that all our aerial TVs would stop working on that date if we didn't have a digital one, or buy a converter box. Everything was rolling to this date, and then what happened? A twat got elected and decided to postpone the change, ostensibly because people weren't ready. Weren't ready? Are you shitting me? Having been prodded and reminded of this for literally years, having put up with inane and repetitive commercials on TV, endless discussion on the radio and reminders at every turn, some people aren't ready. Well fuck 'em.

There's only two types of people not ready - those who couldn't be bothered and those who couldn't afford a converter box. The government already spent millions in free vouchers for the converters; what's next? Are we going to impose a new TV tax on anyone earning over $100k per year so we can buy a new flat screen for every lazy tosser out there who devotes their welfare check to methamphetamine and cheap beer? The point is, though, that there will always be people not ready; delaying the switch won't change a single thing, other than fucking up everyone's plans for the changeover. It's like having Y2K and then deciding it should be in March because some people didn't pay attention.

This is the big difference between businesses and government. Both are capable of fucking up. When a business fucks up it loses money, or goes bust. When government fucks up it just takes more of our money away from us. When a business encounters hard times it reduces costs; government just looks to increase taxes or borrow more. Check out California - they've run out of other people's money but they won't cut any of their "sacred cow" excessive spending. When businesses treat their customers like shit they go somewhere else; governments routinely treat people like shit, providing a level of service that would be laughable in the private sector. (Just head down to your local DMV office if you are in any doubt.) But customers don't have a choice.

In the real world businesses dismiss employees who don't work hard, who steal or who treat customers badly. What do you think the turnover in the public sector is? How many lazy, failing teachers get dismissed every year do you think? How many rude and incompetent DMV administrators? How many corrupt local officials? The very thing that makes businesses deal with their problems (the knowledge that someone else is trying hard to make their customers leave them) is the discipline missing from government. Nothing gets better because no-one's arse is on the line if it doesn't.

Amazon managed to build a world-class supply chain infrastructure that can get you just about anything you want to your door tomorrow. The government spends billions and can't even get a digital TV switch to happen on time.

So why can't the government run anything efficiently? Could it be because so few people in government ever had to run anything in the real world? People were surprised at the chaos in post-hurricane New Orleans but what do you expect of the leadership at the top of every government organization is a political appointee whose major qualifications probably come down to the quantity of political dick they've sucked over the years. Out in the real world, real people in businesses make a living providing a product or service that people want, with the discipline of knowing that customers can leave. That means you have to manage costs aggressively, innovate, invest wisely and provide the kind of service that makes people want to buy from you again.

There are millions of managers and directors who have learned how to do this. But who do we see running the country? Wankers like Obama who never ran anything in their lives, who couldn't be trusted to run a fucking lemonade stand. If you walk around Congress and peek inside the offices of the elected representatives you will see that most of their staff are about twenty three years old, straight out of college, never worked a day in the real world, and are immediately immersed in the bizarre parallel universe of politics, where letting people keep more of the money they earned is considered a "gift" by the government, and taking my money simply to give to people who didn't earn it is somehow not seen as "expropriation" or "theft".

Yet people persist in expecting this cast of clowns, from both parties, to magically fix the economy. Would you trust a surgeon who never trained but spent their entire life working backroom deals and making speeches to remove your appendix? I think not. The very best we can hope for from government is that they create the conditions for economic growth, and that means incentives for private investment and tax policies that encourage success. What we're seeing instead is Obastard's paymasters on the left rifling the pockets of the economy while it's flat on its back, shamelessly taking money they didn't earn to hand out to those who didn't work hard enough or behave prudently enough, along with a sickening cast of left wing interest groups.

Stimulus package my arse.

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

More From Whitey

2009-02-18T18:04:00.000-08:00

I was definitely planning to write something lavatorial or vaguely penis-related, and definitely humorous, as an antidote to yesterday's more serious post, but I saw that our new attorney general, Eric Holder, (did he cheat on his taxes too?) gave a speech on the subject of race today and I just couldn't let it pass. First he took the opportunity to call us a nation of cowards. Then the gist of what he said was that we're still basically a self-segregated society, and that "we must feel comfortable enough with one another and tolerant enough of each other to have frank conversations about the racial matters that continue to divide us".

Really? A frank conversation? Apparently yes, because he went on to say "If we're going to ever make progress, we're going to have to have the guts, we have to have the determination, to be honest with each other. It also means we have to be able to accept criticism where that is justified."

Yeah, right. I know how this process of race politics works in real life here - the criticism is fine so long as it's leveled at whitey, but you so much as hint at any failings in the so-called black community and you may as well just check yourself into Racists Anonymous and be done with it.

Let's peel this racial onion a little bit, though, just in case Mr Holder is serious. His point seems to be that we're not the "melting pot" that we're supposed to be. White people largely hang out with other white people and the same for blacks. He didn't mention Indians, Chinese or Mexicans, which is not a surprise because in the world of racial politics these "not white but not African" people are an unfortunate distraction, but I'm sure the same is true for them. This isn't good enough for Mr Holder though - we should all be living in mixed race neighborhoods like those smiling pictures in adverts where the random group always contains at least one black/woman/hispanic, and probably a token gay as well.

This would make perfect sense if the idea that we're all the same apart from our skin color was actually true, but it is, in fact, utter bollocks. Sure it's true for some of us - the black colleagues I've had were basically the same kind of person as me. They were professionals, family men, lived in suburbia, dressed smartly and had a lot of the same experiences growing up (such as going to college). But in spite of the fact that they have everything in common with people like me and fuck-all in common with some hip-hop, drug using, pants round his arse, ghetto pimp, they get labeled together as part of the "black community". And who does this? It's the fucking black community themselves, or at least a very vocal section of it.

If Holder really wants a color-blind society where we all mix in, one of the prerequisites is that we don't pay attention to skin color and use it as a badge of commonality. People like him need to stop labeling all black people as part of one group, and implying that we should see them all as "the same". It's noticeable that Holder gave his speech to mark Black History Month, which is exactly the kind of useless, racially charged, divisive bullshit that reinforces differences and the black/white divide. If we can't even talk about our history as one thing, without segregating it, how the fuck does he expect that we're going to forget about race and live together in a color-blind nation?

Meanwhile the NAACP has its Image Awards, which, like every single awards ceremony up to and including the Oscars, is a sickening display of mutual fawning and backslapping, the main difference being that it's by and for blacks. Or, to be more accurate, everyone but whitey. And probably the Chinese too, because they aren't brown enough. Just attempt to substitute "White" for "Black" in all these events and you're back on the fast track to Racists Anonymous, but apparently racial exclusion is OK when blacks do it. And yet this dickhead Holder wonders aloud why it is that we tend to self-segregate, when the whole mission of the supposed vanguard of the black community seems to be to reinforce differences, create a separate black identity and opt out of a mainstream multi-racial society in favor of a new range of cultural ghettos.

If he really wants to have a "frank conversation" let's start by asking when he's going to stop perpetually looking backwards. At what point do we stop taking a month out of the year so everyone can wallow in the civil rights past. Do we have a Jewish History month where we remember the Holocaust? I think that was a pretty big event too, but we don't have so much as a day set aside for that. What about the rich history of the Chinese, or Indians, civilizations with an enormous amount to teach us. Do we have a month for them? What about all the different European histories? Where's British History Month, for fuck's sake?

Until we stop using the civil rights past as a catch-all excuse and people start taking accountability for raising their children, looking after their neighborhoods, improving their schools, working hard to put food on the table and kids through college, nothing's going to change. When Holder says he wants a discussion, what he really wants is for whitey to feel bad that there's not enough black people in his street and for this to translate into yet more redistribution of money, as though if we wave the magic dollar wand we'll all live happily ever after in a multi-racial nirvana. Bollocks.

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Court Order

2009-02-17T17:23:00.000-08:00

It's that dead time of winter - February is only half over and Spring is nowhere close, but football (by which I mean the NFL, American football) is over for the season. Fortunately baseball season hasn't started - I have to say that I find this the most pointless of all games - steroidy bloaters play 162 games of rounders and each team wins and loses almost exactly half their games. As if that unending succession of individually meaningless games wasn't enough to bore everyone rigid it's only a prelude to a long, drawn-out playoff process, culminating in the so-called World Series, where one American team plays another American team. Although each team is mostly made up of people from the Dominican Republic.

So in the meantime we have basketball. What a fucking waste of time that is. Each team of seven-foot, baggy-shorted, tattooed role-models takes it in turns to bounce the ball down the court and score, before running back to watch the other team bounce the ball and score. Again and again and again, until one team wins 116-112 or something like that.

On the few occasions I watched basketball I couldn't help noticing that most of the NBA players are black. Something must be wrong here, surely?

Colleges and law schools in the US routinely go out of their way to increase the numbers of black students above that which would result from a strictly merit-based admissions policy, such as would result from considering exam results, test scores, etc. This "affirmative action" approach effectively results in racial quotas, even though these have been found to be unconstitutional. (Quotas are supposed to be illegal but race may be considered as a factor in admissions, and we know what that means.) This results in black students attending colleges that they would otherwise not be able to attend, and the thinking seems to be based on a fundamental precept: blacks and whites are equally intelligent, so if the white kids are better qualified it must result from some bias in the education process, which must be remedied by setting the bar lower for the black kids.

Hmmm. So far so good, but why are there so many black kids on the basketball court? I have to assume that black and white kids are equally sporting, otherwise I'm perpetuating a terrible stereotype. Therefore the imbalance must result from a lack of opportunity for white kids to develop their basketball skills growing up. I would therefore suggest we introduce a system of racial quotas (sorry, "consideration of racial origin in hiring") to get more whites into the professional game.

Yeah, I know the purists might be concerned that the talent would suffer, but that's the price we pay for racial equality; just ask the white kids with higher test scores who couldn't get into Harvard.

I'm assuming equality between races here, but maybe this is one of those selective equality things, like gender equality. This seems to hold that anything a man can do can be done equally well by a woman (firefighter, welder, boxer) but that many of the things a woman can do can't be done nearly as well by a man (raising children, for instance - just ask any man fighting for custody in a divorce). Maybe blacks are as good as whites at most things and better at all the rest. Sort of like a master race, right?

Of course, back in the real world we let coaches pick their own teams (although we do have special rules to encourage the appointment of black coaches) but we can't let that degree of Darwinism apply to the world of business can we? This in spite of evidence put forward by Richard Sander at UCLA, a left-wing supporter of racial preferences, that the process of preferences in law school admissions actually hurts minority students by placing them in tougher academic environments than their qualifications justify, resulting in half of them ending up in the bottom 10% of their class, with twice the drop-out rate of white students.

Never mind the unfairness, this is like sending a bunch of pasty white kids to the NBA under a system of racial preferences and then looking the other way as they get their arses kicked on the court.

Meanwhile I can take an objective view of the issue. For a start, I regard basketball as a complete fucking waste of time. And on top of that I regard most lawyers as a complete fucking waste of oxygen. So it really doesn't matter much to me whether each group is black or white, but I would like to see all those lawyers we don't need working to get white kids on basketball teams we don't care about. At least until football season starts again...

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Turn Your Head And Cough

2009-02-16T18:08:00.000-08:00

Today I managed to take an hour out of my fun-packed work schedule and get a physical. It's not that I felt I needed one, nor did I have any strange symptoms that made me suddenly reassess my mortality. No, my trip to Belgium had used up the last of my sleeping tablets and for some unaccountable reason the quack likes to see me periodically (like every year or so) if he's going to keep writing me a script for narcotics. So, since I had some money left in my health savings account I thought I might as well get the 30,000 mile service, have my oil checked and make sure I wasn't one step from the breaker's yard.

For some reason I couldn't get to see an actual physician until March (obviously being ill is very popular right now) so I saw the Physician's Assistant. After all the obligatory weighing, blood pressure taking and answering of questions on a form (such as "Have you ever had sex with a man?") I was ready for the fun part. Something important changed since I was last at the doctor's office. Something very important. I turned forty. This means I qualify for a prostate exam (although, thank fuck, it's another ten years until I'm due to have a Dyno-rod up my anus for the full colon exam).

The build up was very subtle - first she lulled me into a false sense of security with an ear exam. Then she tested my reflexes, of which I apparently possess none, and checked my breathing. Next thing you know it's down with the pants and time to turn my head and cough for the hernia check. Nice warm hands, but no time to relax because the next step was "Turn around and bend over". Apparently I'm not bending over far enough, and I'm requested to bend over further; meanwhile I'm murmuring "There's no place like home. There's no place like home."

At this point she tries to relax me by telling me that she's not going to do anything without telling me what she's about to do. I'm sorry, but do you think that makes it better? Do you really think I want to hear you tell me what's going to happen in advance? So I can visualize it? Trust me, some things are easier to handle when they come as a complete surprise.

"OK, first I'm just going to look."

Oh right, just in case I wasn't self-conscious before, I'm now having my ringpiece examined by an expert. What's she checking for? To see if it looks healthy? Or maybe she doubted my answer to the question about sex with men. Nah, probably just taking aim. I don't know what she said next but it had something to do with lubricant.

"Now I'm going to shove my entire hand in your anus and do rock-paper-scissors."

Well that's not exactly what she said, but it may as well have been. I now know how the turkey feels. All I needed was a light basting and I was oven-ready. Apparently there are men out there who actively enjoy having their prostate gland manipulated during sex - it's supposed to be terrific. Well, file me under "Not Going To Try That" because I cannot for the life of me imagine how anyone stays focused on the task at hand with someone shoving a middle digit up their khyber pass. And what happens when they get their prostate exam? I don't even want to think...

The good news is that I'm healthy. At least for now - perhaps the blood work they ordered will reveal some hideous ailment in a week or two. But tomorrow I'll return to work an older, wiser man. I'll have that look in my eye. You know - the flinty "I've experienced a few things in life" look of the range-hardened cowboy. Kind of like John Wayne. I'll probably be walking like him too...

Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Day Trip To Brussels

2009-02-15T18:10:00.000-08:00

I happened to look in the mirror today and notice that I still look like crap, a fact confirmed by my family back in the UK when I spoke to them via Skype. I didn't think the picture resolution was that detailed, but apparently I look every bit as knackered as I feel. This in spite of the fact that the "Day Trip to Brussels" that was probably responsible for much of my haggard demeanor happened more than a week ago.

The plan was simple: throw a change of clothes in a bag and buy a ticket Tuesday morning (last minute - when I say "plan" I don't mean "in advance"). Leave Tuesday afternoon, fly overnight and arrive Brussels airport 7:30am Wednesday. Be at the office by 8:30am, shower and start work by 9:00. Fuck up a couple of people's days and then have dinner with a colleague and his wife Wednesday evening before crashing at a hotel. Head back to the airport Thursday morning and catch the 10:40am flight back through Chicago. Simple, right?

It worked fine right up to the part where I got to the airport on Thursday and found the flight was delayed. Mechanical problems. The airline wanted to route me back via New York but then send me on a five hour misery journey via Raleigh Durham (where the fuck is that?) on a tiny runt of a regional jet. Since my arse falls asleep after thirty minutes stuck in one of those things, and given that my delayed flight through Chicago was still showing an earlier arrival in St.Louis than the alternative, I rolled the dice that the plane would be repaired.

Turns out that it couldn't, but of course we didn't get to hear that until after the departure time had been repeatedly put back for an hour at a time. The airline rep, a half-Asian woman who apparently possessed half a brain, was so clearly not in the loop that any conversation with her was pointless. Initially the delays were met with good humor but eventually I gave up and pointed out that she had no information of any use and that she was clearly not being informed by her airline about what was really happening. She argued that she was being kept very well informed, at which point a fellow passenger interrupted to tell us that the flight had just been canceled, thus rather neatly proving my assertion and causing her to scurry off.

We got 13 Euros worth of food vouchers but since I stuffed myself with sandwiches in the British Airways lounge I used them instead to buy Mars bars to take home to Mrs Bison. Chocolate over there just shits all over the stuff we get here, even when the brand name is the same.

So we all got marched over to a nearby hotel for the night. By this time I had got talking to the fellow passenger, a woman also heading back to the US who was conveniently plain enough to banish any "readers' letters" fantasies from my mind, but good company under the circumstances compared to the rest of the sheep with whom we were surrounded.

They checked us into the hotel, but since it was being paid for by the airline we weren't "real" customers, and so they'd turned off access to any "pay" features in the room. No high speed internet, no phone calls (even to free numbers) and no soft pornographic movies. You'd think after fucking up the whole day the least they could do would be to let their customers rub one out in the comfort of their hotel room, but apparently not. I had work to do so I ordered a room service burger (shouldn't have been able to do that either, but I don't think their system can block it) and tried to get the internet working by giving a credit card at the front desk. The people at the hotel (are you reading this, Sheraton?) were completely and utterly fucking useless, and couldn't figure out how to take the "block" off my room, so I had to go down to the lobby and use the free wireless. All I needed to do was enter my name and room number, but when I tried I got an error. "Incorrect name".

Fucking morons had entered my name wrong when I checked in, but I had no way of knowing what they'd put instead. How fucking hard can it be to enter five letters when they're written down in front of you in capitals? And now there was a line of people checking in half way to the door, so I had to cut in and ask the useless Belgian motherfucker at the desk exactly what fucking absurd spelling of my name he'd used so I could get online. It had been a long day.

The following day we were supposed to be at the check-in desk at 8:40am, not a significant challenge since the hotel is right at the airport and walking over takes about sixty seconds. I booked a wake-up call but the airline also booked calls for all of us. Obviously they have problems with the sheep getting ready on time because I got seven wake-up calls before I could finish showering and get downstairs. On the last one I asked them how many fucking calls they thought I needed and they apologized. After breakfast I went back to my room and got another wake-up call. I asked why - the response was that I didn't answer when they'd called earlier I pointed out that this was because I had been eating breakfast downstairs after the previous seven wake-up calls. Jesus! Some people shouldn't be allowed to leave their house unsupervised, let alone work in the hospitality industry, where they have to have contact with the rest of us.

At the check-in desk the bad news was that our plane was still not repaired; on the plus side they'd canceled the New York flight instead and given us that plane, so we left on time and arrived in Chicago, where I discovered that as a permanent resident I now have to stand in the Visitors line at immigration, a line which move about a foot every hour and which is filled with Indians, all holding documents which the immigration officials have clearly never seen before, with about eight mistakes in, and all attempting to import eleven relatives spanning three generations. And a water buffalo.

So no, global travel isn't glamorous. In fact it sucks arse, and will probably be responsible for me dying early, with more wrinkles and less hair than I deserve. And if I didn't live a worthy life, I'm sure my time in hell will be reassuringly familiar - seven wake-up calls every day, an endless queue and absolutely no porn. Can't fucking wait...

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Bear-Faced Cheek

2009-02-14T14:38:00.000-08:00

Happy Valentine's Day everyone. Hands up if you bought roses or chocolate-covered strawberries? All you lot with your hands up, you're twats: Valentine's Day is the biggest rip off, load of old bollocks known to man. When I was a kid it was still a fun day. You'd wait to see if you had a Valentine's card from a mystery admirer, always anonymous (which was the tradition, and also what made it fun). You could also send one to that girl you fancied, the cloak of anonymity providing cover against looking like a saddo if she wasn't interested. I don't know what grown-ups did back then, but it seemed to me that Valentine's Day was for people who wanted to get together, not for people who were already a couple.

Fast forward thirty years, and the Hallmark crowd has turned the whole event into one massive excuse to make you part with your money. Firstly they have created this whole imperative that couples give each other cards and gifts. Peer pressure and relentless advertising combine to make Mrs Average feel neglected if Mr Average doesn't come home with at least a dozen red roses, and possibly something with a diamond in it, too. Poor old Mr Average daren't show up empty-handed and incur the wrath of his spouse; and Mrs Average wouldn't dare tell her harpy friends that she only got a box of chocolates for Valentine's Day, in case they looked down at her with smug fake pity. Meanwhile the chocolate, diamond and flower merchants are raking in your money as you subserviently feed the myth of the "romantic day". Tonight, even crap restaurants will be full of couples going through the motions of a dinner, simply because the calendar says Feb 14. Baaaa!

Of course, if you do give in and buy roses you'll end up paying three times the normal price. The flower industry pretty much makes all its money on Valentine's Day and Mothers Day. But buying flowers is at least understandable; what I cannot comprehend is how a whole fucking industry has grown up around people sending each other Teddy Bears. The Vermont Teddy Bear Company offers the Loverboy Bear, which sports jeans, a t-shirt and shades, and in fact more resembles Homoerotic Bear. Or there's the Love Bandit, which comes dressed in a black shirt, with a black mask, and should possibly be renamed the Arse Bandit. And here's the hilarious bit - each one comes in a "Fun & colorful gift box with air hole". An air hole? Are you shitting me? What, in case the poor thing suffocates? Jesus H Christ! The world has gone completely fucking monkey bollocks arse-backwards retarded! Small wonder that we're disappearing up our own economic arse when people like that are allowed to take out mortgages. I'm just amazed they don't drool all over the forms.

Here, let me spell it out for you: If you send someone a romantic Teddy Bear, you are a twat. T.W.A.T. But there must be a sod of a lot of you, because Vermont Teddy Bear's stock of dumbass romantic bears is listed as "sold out".

Meanwhile, back at the kids, all the fun has gone out of Valentine's Day. At Bison Daughter's Elementary School they had a class party yesterday. That's a pretty tenuous excuse to interrupt education. Here's a thought, fucking dickhead teachers: how about you spend your time educating my child, like I pay you to, and leave the "having fun" part to us, rather than wasting half the time they're in school dicking around with bullshit "class parties" and then sending them home with a ton of fucking homework so that we never have any time together. Wankers! The really stupid thing is that they couldn't call it a Valentine's Party. Oh no, it had to be a "Friendship Party". What the fuck? If you don't like Valentine's Day don't have the stupid party at all. And don't make the kids give cards to every other kid in the class, boys and girls alike. How fucking retarded is that? Typical politically correct lefty educational bullshit - reduce everything to the level that it becomes utterly meaningless, just in case we offend someone.

Hallmark and their friends have completely neutered Valentine's Day, just so they can sell more crap. It used to be about sending a card to someone you fancied, but now they're twisted it (at least in the States) so that parents give Valentine's gifts to their kids. Now that's just wrong. (Except in parts of Arkansas, but they mostly can't write in the cards anyway.) The whole day has been hijacked to make us all buy stuff we would otherwise never buy, to assuage the guilt they'll pile on us by proxy if we don't comply.

Fortunately Mrs Bison can also spot bollocks a mile off, and much prefers that I buy her flowers on a day she's not expecting it, because it means more that way. Which is perfect by me except for one small detail. I'm not that good at remembering to buy them when there isn't a billion dollar multi-media advertising blitz to remind me...

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

A Little Light Reading

2009-01-24T12:32:00.000-08:00

I just finished reading a book called The Grey Gentlemen. It's a strange little book by Michael Ende which dates back to 1974 when it was translated from the original German. Now I'm not the kind of person who seeks out obscure foreign literature, and the only reason I ended up reading this was because a good friend gave me a copy. It's obviously been out of print for a long time, and this was second-hand book he bought specially for me over the internet. Since the only copy I could find on Amazon was listed at more than $90 this is clearly not the kind of book you give unless you really want to.

I'm not going to spoil the book for you by explaining the plot, although the chances that you will ever read it are as close to zero as makes no difference, but I will say that it seems to be a children's book for adults. I don't mean "adult" in the sense of things like my Little Red Riding Hood story, but in the sense that the message of the story would be lost on kids, who probably haven't experienced the things that work, money, responsibility and ambition bring.

The central figure in the book is a little girl called Momo. The message of the story is essentially all about time - the paradox that we spend so much of our lives saving time and yet we never seem to have enough of it. Why is that? And, more importantly, what do we give up in our relentless attempts to save time?

Think about it. We spend a huge part of our waking lives working; especially in the US, we are working more hours than ever before. Our kids spend most of their days at school, and when they're not at school they're being driven around various timetabled activities, or doing homework, all to make them more "rounded" and marketable later, in the world of work. When people aren't working for money they will spend an inordinate amount of time working on their house, or their garden, making them look nicer. Just watch the traffic at DIY stores on a weekend.

Why do we spend so much time working? Because we need the money. And why do we need the money? Well, there's that house, for a start, and the college education, and all the smart clothes that you need to buy so you look nice at work. And we have to eat out at restaurants, or buy convenience foods, because we don't have time to cook a proper dinner every night. And we need better cars too, and phones and iPods and a Wii. (Everyone, apparently, is dying for a Wii...)

The thing is that I spend most of my life working, or thinking about work. And yet I'm not short of money. Don't get me wrong - it's not that I'm rich, but I don't live any differently than I did fifteen years ago, when I had bugger-all money. I'm not intentionally frugal, but most of the things that I enjoy (curry, scotch, lifting weights, fried breakfasts, friends, cream soda, etc.) aren't that expensive. So I'm not short of money, but I am definitely short of time. I love weekends because I can relax and do fuck-all if I feel like it, and yet there's always a feeling that I have to make the most of the weekend because it'll be over in a few hours, and I'd better not have wasted it vegged out in an armchair.

The irony is that in spite of the fact that I'm not short of money but would definitely like more time, I'm engaged every day in trading more of my limited remaining time for more money. And in thirty years, unless I pop my clogs early, I'll be an old man and willing to trade almost anything to have my time over again.

Now if this was just me then everyone would just shake their head, mutter "sad bastard" and get back to their own idyllic lives; but it's not just me. Most of us are engaged to a greater or lesser extent in trading precious time for money, so that we can buy crap that doesn't make us any happier, and which in some cases we only have to buy at all because we don't have any time. A few weeks ago I started making my own bread. It pisses all over the stuff we buy at the store, and not because I'm doing anything special - this is just basic bread machine dough. Even Bison Daughter loves it. And yet we still end up buying bread at the store because I don't have enough time to make the good stuff.

OK, so I'm not about to give up civilization and live in a yurt, eating creepy crawlies and wiping my arse on leaves. And I might buy a Porsche Cayenne this year, even though "Porsche" is practically a byword for "small penis". (It's a risk I'm prepared to take.) I'm just saying that we all spend way too much time rushing around earning and spending. We're not saving time by eating take-out pizza and pre-packaged convenience food full of high-fructose corn syrup. You can't save time - you can only choose how to spend it. And as someone once pointed out. no-one on their deathbed wishes they'd spent more of it at work.

One of the central themes of a book called "Why Work Isn't Working Anymore" is that happiness doesn't come from "stuff" but from time we spend with friends and family. But in the quest for more "stuff" people spend less and less time with friends and family. They have more stuff than ever before but they still can't understand why they're not happy. Even having spare time doesn't do you any good if you don't have people with whom to spend it. This is what Momo knows in the book, but it was also noted by a comedian I heard recently who bemoaned the fact that he didn't use any of the time he had these days to learn new languages or musical instruments, but instead devoted it to "cupcakes and masturbation". You may win the lottery and give up the quest for stuff, but your friends will all still be working so you'll have no-one to hang out with. Faced with the hideous alternative of daytime TV you'll be hitting the cupcakes and yanking that thing before you know it.

This might seem a little depressing, but The Grey Gentlemen isn't a depressing book - it just makes you think about time a little differently. Having said that, I don't know about you but I think it's time for a Scotch...

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

An Exciting Future

2009-01-11T18:20:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow's another day in the office. The good news is that, at least for now, I still have an office to go to. The bad news is that, in the face of an economic collapse, we have a moratorium on travel, so the office is now the only place I ever go. I am, more than ever, massively grateful that my job (normally) allows for travel and a change of scenery. Sure, I get the hassle of fat TSA wankers asking me to remove my shoes at airports, and crap seats on tiny planes, but if I had to show up to the same four walls every day for a whole year I think I'd just off myself and be done with it.

Everyone seems to be in the same boat, apart from law firms (that's a recession-proof business, since people never tire of suing each other, and the economic mess just provided a rash of new excuses) and a few similar types of business. We're all tightening our belts, laying people off, cutting expenses, canceling investments, taking pay cuts and missing bonuses. At home we're buying less stuff, eating cheaper food and avoiding big spends like cars and holidays, just in case it's our arse on the line next.

So why is everything suddenly such a fucking mess? On one hand this may be a self-fulfilling prophecy. When the economy shows signs of slowing down, companies project lower sales so they trim expenses. In the face of a full-fledged economic crash everyone's suddenly stopped spending. Companies aren't investing in new capacity because they no longer need it, so jobs are lost. Banks aren't lending money to people because they no longer have it, so businesses have to halt construction and other projects, and jobs are lost. Consumers are worried that their job may be next so they stop spending too, and suddenly unsold cars and houses are piling up; production has to slow down, and jobs are lost. (Unless you're in the UAW, where for some reason you're entitled to full pay and benefits for life even if you do fuck-all, but that's another story.) Maybe this whole mess started with excessive lending by banks to people who had no earthly hope of paying loans back, and the belated realization and write-off of those "assets", but perhaps it's now nothing more than a crisis of confidence - we're in a recession because we think we are. If everyone believes the future's bleak, and as a consequence stops spending money, then surprise, surprise, the economy grinds to a halt and we're in a recession. You can thank the obsessive doom and gloom media for that.

On the other hand this could just be the chickens coming home to roost. People are being confronted with the crumbling of a paper economy where growth was based entirely on people borrowing money they didn't have to buy crap they didn't need, in the expectation that continued growth would always provide a bigger pay check and a longer line of credit next year. It's like a big party - so long as everyone keeps drinking the hangover never happens, but once you stop you're in for one hell of a miserable come-down. Everyone stopped drinking at once and now we're all gazing around at the vomit and broken furniture, wondering who the fuck is going to clear it all up.

Two things happened today that convinced me that both of the above may be true. Firstly, Mrs Bison and I went for a walk and encountered a man in his mid-thirties walking on a mile-long trail which is either gravel or fully paved, equipped with two walking poles and a strap-on hiking belt festooned with what appeared to be Batman's clip-on appendages. Trust me, if people are buying shit like that to go for a walk on a path there really is no hope for civilization, and maybe a massive recession is what is required to teach people not to waste their money.

Then we stopped by the supermarket to buy some mince for dinner and on the front page of the free small business monthly newspaper was a story about how a pet spa business just got funding for an expansion in spite of the recession. Just so some sad wankers can pamper their dog with a shampoo and set, or have their cat massaged. You know, if people are still out there spending money on fucking crap like that then the economy is alive and well, and as soon as we stop listening to the whiners in the media and get back to business as usual then this will all be over. When we resume normal buying behavior then businesses can start making things, and hiring people again. Then some of them will borrow money, make investments and hire even more people.

Personally I'm looking forward to it. When the economy picks up I'll be back on the road, experiencing the very best in crap airline food and useless airport security. Or, should I be unfortunate enough to lose my job, it appears there's a great opportunity out there brushing the clag out of long-haired dogs' coats, and polishing cat's arseholes. I can hardly wait...

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Stroh

2009-01-01T14:41:00.000-08:00

It has long been my view that New Year's Eve is a bunch of hype about nothing - the date clicks over and we're expected to drink ourselves into insensitivity so that we can join hands and sing the few words to Auld Lang Syne that anyone knows, while some ball drops in Times Square or a group of inebriates counts backwards from ten. Then we're supposed to kiss, shake hands and wish each other a Happy New Year, before trooping out into the night, perchance to sleep and reawaken, faced with the same load of old bollocks as last year, only now with the addition of an outsized, fuck-off hangover. The only thing worse is being at home, and having to watch celebrity new year activities on TV; I can only assume that 31 December is a hot suicide date.

This year, however, we went to a party at a friend's house and, in contrast to the picture of misery above, it was excellent. The food was outstanding and beyond plentiful, as was the liquor, with at least ten different single malts available, plus about twenty beers. In fact, there was a game where we had to guess which beer was which on a list of fifteen, by taste. The list included offerings from England, Ireland, Belgium, Italy and Mexico, as well as some decent American beers. It did not include any Bud Light, Miller Light, Coors Light or Michelob Light. In fact next year I'm planning to arrange a taste test with just American Light Beer, along with Donkey Urine as a wild card.

Unfortunately I had consumed an excessive quantity of Mrs Bison's home-made soup at lunch, so by the time I'd loaded up with food at the party I had little room left for beer. What do you do when the space available for liquor is too small for regular beverages? Switch to something stronger of course, and not much is stronger than Stroh 80.

I picked up this 80% alcohol Austrian spirit years ago at a duty-free because I couldn't believe anything could be that strong. It has a taste reminiscent of kerosene with a light flavoring of charred chocolate, and it will burn all the way to your genitals and back again when you drink it neat. This is, I have to say, the only safe way to consume it, because if you blend it in, say, Coke, you will have no idea how fucked up you are getting until it's too late. Then you too might find yourself vomiting from the upper deck of an open-topped bus. (But that's another, much older story.)

Having called it a day at about 3AM, after beer, red wine, vodka cocktails, champagne, Scotch and the aforementioned Stroh, I was ready for the traditional breakfast of champions this afternoon. Yes, I made a pilgrimage to McDonalds because, for no accountable reason, I fancied a quarter pounder with cheese and some shit fries. As I may have mentioned in the past, new year's resolutions are for arseholes, but if pressed to make one on this first of the year I would have to choose "Never Eat At McDonalds Again". Their motto should be "A Little Slice Of The Ghetto In Suburbia". Not only was the food shit (even by their desperately low standards) but as the sole occupants of the establishment we were treated to a ringside seat at a staff dispute between female staff members:

"Have you clocked out?"
"Ahm just leavin'"
"Ah'll write you up agin."
"Ah knew you would, you just causin' trouble."
"Wah don' chew just leave?"
"---"
"What you jist say to me?"
"Nuthin - I wuz jist talkin' to mahself."
"Well don't you be walking by me saying that stuff."
"I wouldna come in if ah'd known you wuz on."
"Well ah'll make sure ahm on every day so what you gonna do then?"
"You ain't gonna have a job much longer's what ah heard."
"You ain't comin' behind here again. You don't got no reason to come behind mah counter."

And so on, until we finished out styrofoam fries and fucked off into the wintry sunshine. I'd planned to take something back home to Mrs Bison, but I was buggered if I was going to buy more crap food at the FcDonalds soap opera that was unfolding, so I went instead to the Hardees drive-through, where the service was quick, the Little Thick Burger was excellent and the fries were (according to Bison Daughter) much better. What was I thinking? I know Hardees is better than FcDonalds...

I can only assume that the Stroh killed off more brain cells last night than I'd realized, specifically those associated with good judgment. Still, it's now 2009, and the Darwinian economic apocalypse that is in full swing should hopefully result in dismal establishments like our local FcDonalds going to the wall. Survival of the fittest, that was Darwin's big thing. Having survived the Stroh though I'm more inclined to the wisdom of Nietzsche: what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. By that line of thinking I'm about ready for anything 2009 has to offer.

Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Good Neighbors

2008-12-31T09:10:00.000-08:00

When I was younger I trained as a scientist, which was fine until I realized that being a scientist was going to bore me rigid because I didn't have the patience for it. One good thing about it, though, is that it reinforced a fact and hypothesis-based approach to thinking, which should serve anyone well in any profession. Ironically, in the "real world" of science, you don't have all these neutral, open-minded scientists engaged in an exciting joint pursuit of the truth; what you get is a whole host of pet theories which are vociferously defended, notwithstanding the discovery of evidence that they are, in fact, complete bollocks. The system is far from perfect, since funding has a lot more to do with who you know than the quality of your ideas, but at least ideas can be promulgated somewhat freely.

Unfortunately, in the realm of politics, ideas are not able to be debated because political correctness has already dictated that "the world is flat" and not only will no amount of data suggesting otherwise change this belief, but anyone calling attention to it will be labeled a heretic and their ideas dismissed from consideration. This is a well-established liberal/socialist approach to achieving political goals - don't compete on the merits but shout down your opponents, intimidate them and label them "racist" or "elitist". If someone has unpopular ideas then they are racist, and no-one needs to consider the views of a racist, do they?

This was demonstrated just recently in the UK, where residents were invited to comment on the proposed siting of a "travellers camp", a euphemistic name for a piece of land where benefit-scrounging pseudo-gypsy bastards park their caravans and from whence they embark on a litter-strewing, thieving, burglarizing, mugging and drinking assault on the local community. Everyone knows this is the case but no-one is allowed to say so because under EU law it would be "hate-speech" towards the "Romany" people who supposedly make up the travelling community. (Never mind that they are mostly of Irish descent and no more Romany than you are.)

The point is that by labeling certain points of view racist, the liberal establishment effectively prevents anyone expressing them. Even if they can't throw people in prison for having those views, they don't need to compete with the ideas on the basis of logic or fact; they can simply be shouted down.

One of the side-effects of the housing crisis has apparently been an influx of black "Section 8" renters into more affluent neighborhoods, as cash-strapped mortgage holders opt for the stable government-subsidized income from these renters as a means to survive financially. This has apparently resulted in an increase in crime and anti-social behavior, but to say so immediately invites charges of racism, as this story shows. The liberals can wring their hands all they want, but anyone who suggests that an influx of families from the projects won't increase crime is talking out of their arse. Who the fuck do you think commits the crime in the projects? The crime fairy? It's not someone else, it's the people who live there, and it's not as though there's some magic filter to sieve out the scum when they move out. Just ask the people in Houston who experienced the massive crime influx when New Orleans exported its inner city black population.

"Oh Mr Bison, you're just a racist - we don't need to listen to you, blah, blah, blah." Bullshit - try looking at the facts. Every night on the news I hear about killings in North St.Louis, and the footage always shows wide streets of fine brick houses, considerably better built than my wood shack. These used to be wealthy suburbs before large numbers of black people moved in and "white flight" left them monochromatic. Now people talk about white flight as though this was the "sin" that caused the decline of these neighborhoods. Fuck off! When the nasty white racists left, the neighborhoods were fine - everything that happened since then was done by the black people who moved in, but you won't find a single politician who will say so, because they'd be "racist".

The schools in these areas are often violent, and routinely are accused of failing the children, but no-one suggests that maybe it's the children who are violent, and the children who are failing the schools. You see, buildings aren't violent; houses aren't criminal and streets don't join gangs and sell drugs. People do. And when you export people with those values to "nice" communities, you don't magically transform them.

Funnily enough, it's the same values that enable people to escape poverty that would make them fit into "nice" society - respect for hard work, education, the law, family, property and individual responsibility. I've seen the reality with my own eyes - a well-maintained suburban house with a pool, in a top school district rendered near-derelict over the period of little more than a year. Rusty cars in the drive, a chain-link fence with a pit-bull, the pool water turned black, guttering hanging off down to the ground and unrepaired, police SWAT teams in attendance, garden ruined, rusted bikes and garbage left outside. Eventually the black occupants left and the new owners have spent weeks working to render the house habitable. But it wasn't their black skin which was the root of the problem - the black bloke over the road was a great neighbor - but the values (or lack thereof) that they brought with them.

For as long as we refuse to criticize the people who have made the cess-pit communities what they are, and shift the blame onto whitey, we won't make any meaningful changes. And it's not about money. Even if you reward indolence with free money, even if you pay for all these "poor, disadvantaged people" to move into nice suburban houses, how long do you think it will be until they have wrought the same destruction, crime and misery there? That's the massive fraud perpetrated on our society by the perpetuation of this myth of the "victims" - it's not their fault, therefore it must be society's fault, so society must pay for their failure, over and over and over again.

One thing basic to the scientific method is cause and effect. If you pay no attention in school, get no qualifications, commit crime, can't get a job and then produce multiple offspring which you cannot afford, it's your own fucking fault. Priority one might not be to get a pit bull and some gold jewelry, and it certainly should not be the responsibility of those of us who made the effort to pay for you wankers to live in the house next door through Section 8 just so you can fuck up our lives too.

Just don't expect to hear this issue debated freely any time soon.

Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Christmas Hooker

2008-12-25T18:42:00.000-08:00

Well, I've just spent all day having a Happy Christmas, and I have to say I'm glad the bastard thing only happens once a year. Sure, it's great when you're a kid - lots of presents and tons of great stuff to eat, followed by chocolate and candy, and no school for two weeks. Then you grow up, and instead of a stress-free festival of hedonism you end up with a ritual of miserable shopping, cooking, getting dragged out of bed early by over-excited kids and realizing after dinner that you've consumed enough calories to fuel an Olympic decathlete and are now guaranteed to enter the new year as a fat bastard.

I used to think I looked forward to the turkey dinner, but this year, when I got done cooking and eating it, it suddenly occurred to me that it really wasn't worth the effort. Next year I guarantee I'm not spending Christmas morning up to my elbows in lard and stuffing - we're having a fucking cheese sandwich. And a large Scotch. I realized that Christmas is mostly about doing things that you do every year, because they've become some sort of ritual, like sticking the turkey neck in your pants and pretending it's a penis:

It wasn't as funny as before...

At least we minimized the present-buying hell this year. Bison Daughter did OK, of course (no reason she shouldn't enjoy the hedonism for a few more years) but Mrs Bison and I don't get expensive shit for each other, and we had a present truce with our brothers. The only problem with this is that once you rule out the turkey dinner and the presents there really isn't much left in the whole Christmas Day thing. You don't see anyone else since they're all committed to their own personal family Christmas hell, and there's nothing to do except eat. We forced ourselves out of the house for a short walk before tea tonight, and as soon as we walked back in we were hit by a thick fog of turkey, stuffing, sprouts and colon gas (which consists mainly of recycled turkey, stuffing and sprouts). Hence the cheese sandwich for next year...

Mrs Bison did get me one very thoughtful gift this year - a copy of "The Happy Hooker", the saucy memoir of a madam called Xaviera Hollander from back in the 70s. This book (or, to be more accurate, its sequel, called "Xaviera") was an integral part of my sex education when I discovered it under my parents' bed when I was a kid. Trust me, I learned things from that book.

Next year I'm hoping for a copy of "The Hand-Reared Boy" by Brian W Aldiss, since I think I found this at around the same time, and it featured a girl called Virginia, who was known as "Virgin for short, but not for long", which I always thought was a better line than anything that wanker Shakespeare came up with. Or maybe I'll go for "A Man With A Maid", which I don't recall had much literary merit, but it was passed around at school and I ended up swapping it with a mate for a full-color scud mag which he'd "borrowed" from the newsagent. Happy days!

I might as well recognize that I'm now past it, and reminiscence is about all I have to look forward to. Bison Daughter got a CD by Ashley Tisdale from Santa, which she thinks is great, whereas I know that it's utter shite. It's soulless, over-produced, teenie-girl pop shit that could have been put out by Britney or any one of a dozen near-identical blonde consumer-bitches. Not at all like the AC/DC and Motorhead I got for Christmas when I was her age. So I'm now officially old because I hate my kid's music. Meanwhile, I got some Thin Lizzy. Let's face it, Phil Lynott's been dead about as long as Ashley fucking Tisdale's been alive, so he's not exactly current, but Chinatown pisses all over her. Which, incidentally, is about the only thing Xaviera doesn't do in her book, so I strongly suggest you get a copy.

Happy Christmas!

Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

What The F---

2008-12-21T09:08:00.000-08:00

Today was Bison Daughter's dance recital; she had to be at the show early so Mrs Bison took her, and I went along later. After the show she wanted to drive home with Dad, so I put her in the front seat of the truck as a treat, since she's probably big enough now. As we were driving home a twat in a Toyota Sequoia cut me off; with my little girl beside me I could neither swear at him or utilize the appropriate hand signals, so I resorted to mouthing the words in the hope that the twat was looking in his rearview mirror.

Later at home, with Bison Daughter still in her Nutcracker Suite costume and make-up, we were sitting at the table when she explained to Mrs Bison that there had been this man who Daddy had got angry with.

"I think he said fuck" she stated, in a perfectly polite voice.

Bear in mind that we have been at pains to avoid teaching our daughter any of the really bad (good?) swearwords, and we had no idea that she knew this word yet. Mrs Bison looked at me balefully, as if to say "how could you have taught our little girl that word?"

I was quick to realize that, bright as my daughter may be, she would not likely be able to lipread a word she didn't already know, so I asked how she learned it.

"At soccer" she replied, meaning my indoor soccer games, which she watches sometimes, "Chris is always saying it."

That much is true. Chris, a fuckwit who should know better, thinks nothing of talking loudly after the game about the "fucking referee", the "fucking goal" or the "fucker" who tackled him. Bison Daughter never reacted to the word, never showed any indication that she had heard it and never asked about it, but clearly she had filed it away for future reference.

OK, so I was off the hook as the source of the new word, but now we had to make sure she didn't use it again. Mrs Bison told her in a very severe voice that this was not a word we ever wanted to hear from her again.

"OK" said Bison Daughter. Then, as an apparent afterthought, she said "Cock".

I'm sorry, I know I should have kept a straight face, but her comic timing was impeccable - you had to be there to appreciate it. I about fell off my chair. On the one hand it may be appalling that she knows words like that, but on the other hand she knows how to use them sparingly and appropriately, to great comedic effect. (And, fortunately, only at home.)

The good news is she didn't notice that according to me the bloke in the Toyota was also a wanker...

Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

300

2008-12-20T19:41:00.000-08:00

I happened to notice that this will be the three-hundredth entry in Mr Bison's Journal, and I thought this momentous event should be in some way celebrated. So how to mark such an occasion? Start an original meme perhaps? Look back on the highlights of the last 299 posts? Or reflect on how writing this journal has changed my life? Yeah right. Since this site has always been based on a healthy foundation of cynicism and profanity (admittedly mostly profanity) there would be no better way to mark the three hundredth post than by listing three hundred bad words. Mrs Bison said it couldn't be done, but with the benefit of poetic license and a wasted childhood (and without cheating on the internet) we came up with the following:

Anal anus arse arsehole arseholed arsebiscuit arsewipe arselicker arse-kisser arse-invader arsefucker arse-grapes assbag assclown assmunch baby-gravy backdoor balls ballsack bastard bellend bitch blowjob bloody bleeding boner boning bone-on bonk bonk-on bonking box box-off browneye brownhatter bugger buggered buggering bollocks bullshit bum bumhole buttplug cameltoe chubblies clap clit clitty clittylicker clodge clunge clusterfuck cock cockbreath cockmunch cockmuncher cocksucker cocksucking crap crapper crapping cretin cum cumshot cumbreath cumstain cunt cuntbreath cuntbubble cunt-like-a-bucket cuntyballs deepthroat dick dickhead dickwad dickstream dickbreath dickcheese dildo dirt-denter dogfucker doggystyle dogging dogsbollocks dominatrix dong faggot fanny fanny-batter felch felching fellate fart fartbreath fetish fingering fist fisting fist-fuck flaps flapshots fluffer foreskin frig frigging frottage frotting furburger fuck fuck-off fucked fucking fucker fuckbuddy fuckhole fuckwad fuckstain fuckstick fuckflaps fuck-a-doodle-doo fuckwit fuckwitted motherfucker motherfucking gash gayboy gloryhole gobbler golden-shower hamburger-shot handjob hand-shandy hand-solo happysack hard-on helmet helmet-cheese homo hump humping jackoff jam-rag jerk jerkoff jerkwad jizm jizz jizzwad jizzstain jubblies lezbo lezza lickout longdongsilver lovespuds lovetunnel love-truncheon man-mess mams masturbate masturbation melons milf minge money-shot muff muffdiver mutton-dagger nads nadbags nadsack nancyboy needle-dick nips nob nobcheese nobhead nob-rot onanist panstain pearl-necklace pencil-dick penis pillowbiter pinkmeat piss pisser pissed pissflaps piss-stain pissing pisspot pods ponce poof pooftah porksword porno prat prick prong pubes puff-hole pussy pussyjuice quim queef rimming rumphumper scrotum scrotum-pole scrote scrote-bag semen semen-stain slag smeg smeghead smegging shag shagging shagger shagged sheepshagger shit shits shithead shiteater shitfaced shitstain shit-for-brains shitter shitting shitstabber shirtlifter sphincter sixty-nine skidmark skinflute skullfuck slut snatch sod sodding sodomy sodomize sodomite spam-ram spanky spanking spankmag spaz spazwit spunk spunkbag spunkbubble spunkrag spunkstain spunkbreath stiffy stringpuller subdom suck-off suckjob suck’n’fuck tart tatty-water threeway tits titjob tit-roll titties titfuck titwank toss tosser tosspot tossrag tug soapytitwank teabagging trousersnake twat turd turdbrain turd-burglar vag vibrator vinegar-strokes vulva wang wanger wank wanker wanking wanked wankjob wankmag wankstain wide-on whack-off whore womb-broom woody.

Since it's nearly the end of the year, when bloggers everywhere start discussing their new year's resolutions, perhaps you might resolve to use ten of the above words in conversation next year. Or maybe you could just use them to enliven the family Christmas dinner.

"Hey Grandma! Would you pass the motherfucking cranberry sauce please?"

Feel free to contribute your own - I'm always happy to enrich my vocabulary. Plus, I'm fucked if I know what I'll do when I get to four hundred...

Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Good Job

2008-12-16T18:46:00.000-08:00

You can file this under "reasons to despair of public education". I may have mentioned before that I do not understand why so much of the elementary school curriculum is given over to things that have absolutely nothing to do with education. The way I see it, the school should teach my kid to read, write and do math. Then they can move on to science, foreign languages, history and all that other stuff. Oh, and do some sport too, since that's good for health and fitness, as well as teamwork. Meanwhile I can take care of all the other stuff - I don't need the school to teach character or bollocks like that.

Instead, on the few days when the kids are actually in school for a whole day, they get parties. Endless fucking parties with junk food, for no good reason whatsoever. This week Bison Daughter has a gift-wrapping party, where they wrap gifts for "poorer families", an end of term party and a reading reward party. Do they ever bother to do any actual teaching? It's not enough that the fucking teachers only work six months of the year anyway, but now they spend half of that presiding over fucking parties.

And don't get me started on the gift wrapping bullshit. The profiles of the people who will receive the gifts include sizes (so people can buy clothes for them). They're almost without exception grossly obese. They can't afford to buy their own clothes but they can eat crap to excess on a daily basis. Perhaps instead of attempting to instill "character" by collecting gifts (which actually just demonstrates the very different attributes of "peer pressure" and "competitive parenting") the school could teach how important it is to get an education and take responsibility for yourself. And not spend all your time in class parties so you end up obese.

Today, however, the school plumbed new depths in educational time-wasting. My ten year-old daughter was given a test to determine what kind of career choices would be good for her. Are you shitting me? On how many separate dimensions is this absurd? For a start, no healthy, well-adjusted pre-teen should have the tiniest concern about what their career choice will be. Do well in school and you have options; screw around and you don't, but you're still a kid, so relax and enjoy it while you still can. What's more, no-one at that age is in any position to know what they want to be. They probably don't have any clue what jobs exist in the real world, what it's like to actually do one, how much they pay, or how desperately you'll want to end your life if you get trapped in a crap one. In fact the only thing they know is that teachers work a third of a year and eat a lot of cake. I didn't know what job I wanted to do when I was twenty, let alone ten. In fact I had to do a couple of crap ones along the way in order to figure it out, so what possible benefit can accrue from making kids think about it at that age?

OK, so leaving that minor point aside, what did this fabulous exercise teach Bison Daughter about her future career? Bear in mind that she's a very smart kid, in a supposedly good school district. A possible scientist? An engineer, manager, investment analyst, sales professional or supply chain expert? No. According to the school she's ideally suited to be a cosmetologist, a hairdresser or a dancer.

Fuck me sideways! Why don't you just list "pole dancer" as well, so we don't miss anything? Apparently she's a creative thinker, and that just screams "cosmetologist" doesn't it? The school district tested her, identified her as an exceptionally bright child and sent her to special classes one day a week just so she could learn to do make-up. I'm so proud. It's not that the world doesn't need hairdressers (although it's hard to imagine that it really needs a lot of cosmetologists) but the process is obviously utter bullshit.

When I was ten I wanted to be a goalkeeper for West Ham United and save a penalty in the FA Cup final. If you'd asked what I wanted in a job I'd have made "working outdoors" a must, but today I have to say I was sodding delighted not to have to work outside in the 15F temperature. In other words I had no bastard clue what I really wanted to be back then. When asked, I always said I wanted to work at the place my Dad worked, because it had a revolving door and an elevator. Plus he got chocolate biscuits with his tea. That was the sum total of my insight. And instead of spending half a day testing me to see if I wanted to be a cosmetologist, my school taught me to spell, write coherent sentences and add up numbers so I didn't have to be one.

The degree to which I despair of the education profession is hard to put into words. The best advice I could give to a class of ten year-olds today would be "eat as much as you can at all the class parties, don't bother about learning anything, and then someone else will send you food and clothes when you're older". Or, failing that, there's always cosmetology...

Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Who's There?

2008-12-15T18:58:00.000-08:00

It must be tough to be a Roman Catholic these days. I mean, it's got to be hard enough being a member of a church that has institutionalized kiddie-fiddling to a degree that has the NAMBLA complaining about turf infractions. Who can send their children off to a catholic school, summer camp or youth club without lining up a good psychiatrist and attorney, just in case? But as if that isn't bad enough, the church appears to be chock-full of nutjobs, convinced that they see the image of the virgin Mary in countless bizarre places.

The most recent case was a woman called Pamela Latrimore who was trying to sell a brain scan which she claimed contained an image of the virgin Mary. Does this sound messed up to you? Well, bear in mind that the blessed virgin gets about a bit. She's already been sighted on a tree stump and a fence post, as well as on a pebble. She popped up on an expressway underpass, prompting all sorts of weird bastards to show up and turn it into a shrine. She's done windows - an office window in Massachussetts and a hospital window. Obviously glass is a good medium for the virgin because she's apparently also appearing in a greenhouse in Canada. Her appearance in a mirror was seen as a clear sign that little Elian Gonzalez (remember him?) was blessed and should not be sent back to his father in Cuba.

Food is also a good place for her to show up. So far she's appeared in a grilled cheese sandwich, a bowl of salsa and a pizza pan. She's been immortalized in the grease of a Geroge Foreman grill and even taken time out to inhabit a rotten grape. Believe it or not she's also been sighted in a toilet bowl. This is a clear indication that the catholic church is slipping in its discipline. Back in the good old days of the Inquisition I'm pretty certain that anyone who claimed that the blessed virgin could be found in their shitter would have wound up sitting on a pile of burning wood, reflecting on the error of their ways. And what kind of fuckwit turns around after dropping their fudge and checks it out for any reason? Who looks at a pan stain closely enough to see what resemblance it may bear to persons alive or deceased, let alone Biblical? Do they call family members to come and verify their claim? "Hey, Martha, come look at this! I think the virgin Mary's appeared in the spicy bean dip that disagreed with me last night!" You'd have to be fucking insane.

To be fair, these people probably are insane, or at least borderline mental defective. Why is it that when they see an image that bears the tiniest faint resemblance to the stereotypical virgin Mary, they instantly assume that's who it is? Doesn't anyone else get to show up on a grape or spend a little time in a pizza pan? Maybe it's Mother Theresa, and she's constantly pissed to be mistaken for the mother of Christ every time she puts in an appearance.

It doesn't even have to have a face - all it takes is a swirl. By that standard I could turn out images of the virgin in a cake mixer every ten minutes.

Of course this could be the same problem that affects the sad wankers who are convinced they've lived a previous life as Cleopatra or Joan of Arc. No-one ever gets reincarnated from a dirt-eating peasant, a chicken thief or a goat molester, do they? Oh no, they all spent time in the court of Marie Antoinette or Henry VIII. So by the same token that indistinct image in the road salt on the side of your truck just has to be the virgin Mary - who else could it be?

These people are certifiable head cases, but with a faith that is capable of imagining faces in the window it's no wonder they managed to convince themselves to start burning witches. It's just the kind of deep, unshakable faith that's necessary in order to send your kid off with the priest for a sleepover. Which is convenient...

Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Señor Floppy

2008-12-12T16:51:00.000-08:00

Bad news for all you Hispanic men today - according to a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine you're two and a half times more likely to have difficulty getting it up than other men. That means one in eight of you have boner issues, compared with about one in twenty of the rest of us. And that's just for men in the 20-50 age range - once you include the old guys you have a 40% probability of limp dick syndrome.

Now I can't help thinking that it's a little ironic that there should be such a massively disproportionate incidence of "downward facing dong" in the Hispanic community, given the reputation among Hispanic men for machismo. I guess all that Latin lover, open shirt, medallion-wearing, slicked back hair, tight leather pants stuff is just bollocks; the willy just can't cash the check that the image is writing. Maybe this is why the Latin lover thing is so prevalent: as Shrek would put it, "Do you think he's compensating for something?" It's the same syndrome that results in it always being little fuckers who start fights in pubs, as they try to prove that they're every bit as tough as everyone else. Meanwhile we know they're just pissed off because they can't reach the condom machine in the pub toilet.

Us pasty white blokes don't waste time waxing our chests, whitening our smiles and gelling our hair. We don't do the Samba or any of that crap. We don't have to because we know our equipment works. Sure, Juan will gaze into your eyes as his open-necked shirt exposes his tanned chest, but can he get an erection? Apparently the answer, at least 12.5% of the time, is "no". Just as you shouldn't bring a knife to a gun fight, there's no point showing up at the ballgame with a floppy bat.

What's interesting is that there is no apparent reason for the observation in the study. The data was corrected for medical issues like diabetes, so the obvious question is "Why do Hispanic men have such difficulty getting it up compared to the rest of us?" We're biologically the same, so what's the key distinction that would explain the difference in hard-on activity?

Well, at the risk of being politically incorrect, has anyone considered the women? I mean, it's well known that for all the mixed race relationships that exist, the statistical majority of relationships are within ethnic groups; most Hispanic men are dating or married to Hispanic women (or other Hispanic men, but let's not go there) just as most white and black people tend to marry within the same ethnic group. It may be as much a matter of who you happen to be surrounded by as anything else, but it's a fact nonetheless. Is it possible that there's nothing different about Hispanic men, but that it might be harder to get wood with Hispanic women? The hypothesis fits the data.

Now, far be it from me to suggest that Hispanic women are unattractive. I happened to meet a woman in Mexico who could probably have given an erection to a dead man, never mind anyone else. But we're talking about averages here - could it be that a higher incidence of hairy top lip, overgrown thatch or wide arse than exists in the general population is responsible for the "downturn" among Hispanic males? Well, I'm no medical man so it's not for me to say, but somehow I don't imagine that this will be the subject of the follow-up research paper in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

It turns out that you can research pretty much anything you want, but there are some questions which cannot be asked, just in case the answer isn't what people want to hear. In the meantime, while us lucky guys fully expect to wake from slumber with the "wife's best friend" at attention, spare a thought for Southern California, which must be the flaccid penis capital of the United States. Keep taking the little blue pills, guys.

Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Let There Be Light

2008-12-08T18:56:00.000-08:00

Wouldn't it be great if you bought stuff and it didn't turn out to be crap. And wouldn't it be even better if Christmas tree lights from last year occasionally fucking worked. I'm of the opinion that these two concepts are inextricably related - since retailers are all busy competing with each other to drive down price, the quality of the goods they sell is of secondary importance. (Who am I kidding? It's of no importance at all most of the time.) So the tree lights that were bought last year from K-Mart, and carefully stowed in a large plastic box at the end of the season, utterly failed to perform their, let's face it, pretty limited task when Mrs Bison plugged them in on Sunday.

To add insult to injury, some of the lights on some strings worked, but I'm buggered if I could figure out what to do to make the rest come on. Sure, I tried replacing fuses, changing out bulbs and straightening wires, and then, when that didn't work, I resorted to shaking the fucking things and banging them on the floor, but without any success. Mrs Bison ended up going back to K-Mart and buying a whole load more crappy lights. Next year we'll pull them out of the box again, and next year they'll be fucked again. I guarantee it.

How hard can it be? Tree lights are just some wire, some bulbs and a plug. They are a borderline fire hazard on a good day, but it's not like they have a sophisticated task to perform. You can buy a mobile phone or game system with millions of sensitive microscopic connections etched on tiny silicon wafers, and they'll continue to do their job for years, even if you drop them in the bog. And that job involves complex tasks, like communicating with people in different continents. We have plasma TVs, mobile GPS systems, MP3 players, Nintendo Wii and noise canceling headphones. So why the fuck, after half a century of experience, can manufacturers not figure out how to make a string of bulbs on a wire work?

Tree lights are all made in China, obviously in the factories which specialize in lead-lined children's toys and contaminated milk. The Chinese can produce goods of very high quality if necessary, so who specified the lights to be made "as shit as possible"? It must be K-Mart, right? They know what they're buying. Now, you might ask why I don't buy more expensive lights, in the expectation that they'd last longer. I learned my "don't pay more" lesson years ago with tin openers.

Everyone knows that tin openers all corrode and, after a while, you can't get them to turn properly. So you go and buy another one. I figured out that if I bought a better model, with interlocking wheels and a more robust construction, it would last forever, and save me having to keep buying new ones. Guess what? It rusted up just as fast as the cheap ones. Rule Number One of the retail trade: paying more doesn't mean you get more. So if I buy more expensive tree lights I'll just end up throwing away more expensive-but-useless lights next year.

It's the same story with everything from shoes to clothes to furniture - it's not made to last. I'd be more than happy to pay extra for tree lights that I knew would work next year, but how would they be distinguishable at the store? A big label, saying "Guaranteed Not To Be Shit" or "Work For Ten Years Or Your Money Back"? I don't think so. So if you fully expect the stuff you buy to be crap, the only sensible response is to buy the cheapest crap so you waste as little money as possible. Which means that retailers will continually drive down the quality of what they sell, since it's expected to be crap, and needs to be cheap.

Mind you, it's always possible that Mrs Bison didn't pick up the "Never Work Twice" lights and instead selected the "Burn You Alive In Your Sleep" ones. In which case I won't have to worry about getting them out of the box next Christmas. Or buying a new tin opener either, for that matter...

Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

It's The Law

2008-12-06T07:07:00.000-08:00

As we each proceed on our personal journey through life it is certain that we will learn things, mainly by making mistakes that have been made millions of times already by other people. This is called "experience", and its benefits are hard to pass on, partly because no-one listens to advice, and partly because it's stupid to take advice from people who've already clearly made so many mistakes. Nevertheless there are certain immutable laws of life that emerge from collective experience. Most of them are dull, and relate to things like work, money and family. Here, however, are some observations more related to what men spend 90% of their time thinking about:

Stockhausen's Law
"Women can be too thin."

My old mate Stockhausen observed that although thin women can be nice to look at, they are generally a lot less fun to fuck than chunky women. In my experience most men would probably admit this, even while many adorn themselves with women who look like they've been on the "Sudan Diet", with ribcages like a xylophone. Men like women with a bit of meat on. This doesn't mean we're all secretly yearning for a 600lb fatty monster - it's one thing to appreciate the additional comfort and pleasure afforded by a full-figured woman but I'm sure it's quite another to fumble around looking for an "in" hole that would require a GPS to accurately locate.

Peter's Law
"In the internet dating game, divorced women over 35 are all fucked up."

This law, assiduously researched and demonstrated to a high degree of statistical significance by another mate, holds that when you are dating a divorcee over 35 the question is not whether she has "issues" but merely which issues she has. Apparently the percentage of women in the St.Louis area in this category who are on anti-depressants is staggeringly large. (Whether that's a result of the prior relationship or more symptomatic of living in St.Louis is another question, of course.) When you're fishing in this pond you find yourself looking for the "issue", and if it's not an obvious one you really can't relax until you figure out what it is. You just hope it's nothing involving drugs, theft or sharp implements...

Charlie's Law
"A really good shit is almost as good as sex."

I can't say I subscribe to this one - either Charlie never figured out how to do sex right or I've been taking a dump wrong all these years. Maybe his observation was a result of not observing Stockhausen's Law...

Darren's Law
"Your chances of meeting a woman you really want to impress increase exponentially according to the embarrassing nature of your situation at the time."

Darren was a mate at university who had a habit of going out and getting drunk on purple nasties on a regular (and increasingly frequent) basis. This may have explained his inability to actually obtain any kind of degree, or (in his third year) attend a single, solitary lecture. Darren also used to throw up quite often at some point in the evening and no matter how careful he thought he was he'd usually get some puke on his trousers. Seeing as he was drinking purple nasties the puke was invariably purple. He would then run into some girl he wanted to impress, and talk to her for fifteen minutes, believing he was making good progress. The next morning he'd wake up and realise he'd been covered in purple vomit the whole time and the girl in question would avoid him like the plague from then on. This is the same Law that dictates when you're a kid that the girl in your class who you fancy will see you at the shops buying shoes with your mum and not hanging around by the swings in the park, smoking a cigarette and looking cool. Life's a bitch like that.

Jim's Law
"Cheat with married women - they have as much to lose as you."

This is a good one to remember if your're not attempting to audition the next wife but just looking for some extra-curricular activity. Single women are typically looking for Mr.Right. Even when they say they aren't (even when they believe they aren't) they mostly are. The fact that they are with you means that you are prey, and she will be a lot less careful about not getting you caught as a result. She may even actively try and expose your relationship in order to drive away your wife and free you up for your future life together. Careless phone calls, e-mail messages and panties in your glovebox, for instance. Married women, by contrast, will be as keen as you to keep the lipstick off your collar, and the spooge off their skirt.

Paul's Law
"If you're going to cheat, try and pick a woman with the same hair color and length as your wife."

This should be obvious. Stray blonde hairs on your jacket are a lot easier to explain if your wife is blonde. Likewise a two foot brunette hair isn't likely to have come from your wife if she has her hair in a four inch bob. You can ignore this Law if so inclined, but as Paul says, "Hair gets fucking everywhere - you have to recognize that."

Marc's Law
"When you're on the pull, go out with a mate who has different taste to you."

Women are like free radicals (chemistry reference, look it up dumbass) - they do not exist in the solitary state in nature, except on a very temporary basis. Quite often they exist in the diamer state (i.e. pairs). If you and your buddy both like the same thing you are almost certainly going to compete for the "attractive" one of the pair. However, if you like "natural brunette with curves" and he likes "skinny blonde with plastic tits" you might find a pairing that works for you. At the very least if you find a girl you like he'll be a good wingman and not be trying to hit the same target.

Bapi's Law
"When dancing with girls in Malaysia, look closely at the hands."

This applies equally in Singapore and Thailand, obviously: some of the women aren't. You might think you wouldn't be fooled by some bloke in a dress, but in countries where the women are slim-hipped and the men are hairless it doesnt take nearly as much effort to disguise the goods. Bapi danced with that "girl" for a good fifteen minutes; we would have warned him, but, well, it wouldn't have been as funny. Another bloke I knew had this theory that if you couldn't tell, it didn't matter, but as far as the rest of us were concerned it mattered a lot. Plus, not all are post-op, and unless you want to have your own personal "Crying Game" moment, pay attention to large hands.

I know this is but a small selection of learnings from friends over the years - feel free to add to the wisdom. You never know how many men you might help.

Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Smell My Finger

2008-11-28T19:38:00.001-08:00

I've gone on record in the past that my only criterion for evaluating toilet paper is whether it's strong enough that your finger doesn't go through it. All those TV commercials that go on about how soft it is are wasted on me, and on Mrs Bison too, since her buying decision is based on "what's the cheapest 2-ply stuff in the store today?" I rolled my eyes when they started finding new ways to differentiate their product, such as "it doesn't leave little bits of white paper up your arse when you're done", and I never understood why the product was advertised with fluffy cartoon bears and kittens, unless the subliminal message was that wiping your hole on their product would be just like using the fur of one of those creatures.

Now, however, I am ready to declare a winner in the bogroll stakes - Charmin Ultra Strong gets my vote. Yes I know it has annoying cartoon bears on its commercials, but not only does it pass the finger test, it also seems to enable you to get away with substantially less product.

On an unscientific but statistically meaningful sample of recent uses I was able to achieve zero-tolerance wiping with no more than six sheets in all but one case. The exception was an eight-sheet fudgy encounter, but this would probably have required a good half-roll of certain other products, and was canceled out by a four-sheeter yesterday. This is good stuff! Normally I wouldn't subscribe to the notion that buying a more expensive but superior product gives you better value than the cheap option, especially when the product in question is only purchased to be shoved up your arse, but in this case I would recommend the product for any man reading.

Note that I said "man". One day last week I pulled six sheets off a new roll in the morning; by the next morning the bastard thing was practically fucking empty. What do women do with bog roll? Are they making papier mache hats out of it when I'm not in the house? Do they eat it as a filling but calorifically negligible mid-morning snack? Does it mysteriously migrate out of the house, like all the ballpoint pens which I bring back from hotels, and which disappear so that there's still never a pen by the phone. Ever.

I'm thinking of installing an extra bog roll holder - "His" and "Hers". On mine will be a roll of Charmin Ultra Strong. At six sheets a day I could buy a "Big" roll and it should be good for about a month. A twelve roll pack would last me a whole year. Even allowing for occasional bouts of dysentery I should be able to buy a few jumbo packs of twenty four and have them last me until my fifties. Anything longer than that would be pointless - I might be in Depends by then. On the other bog roll holder would be "Women's Special Roll", i.e. the cheapest most miserable shit that money can buy, which can be wound round your entire hand three times before use. I expect this roll will need replacing daily. There's no point putting the good stuff out because it makes no difference whether it's as thin as tissue paper or thick like a blanket - they'll still yank off thirty sheets. If you really did use kittens to wipe your arse they'd need a whole basket of them every morning. In fact, they'd probably want something larger, like a tiger.

On a not-entirely unrelated note, just over a year ago I stayed at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai, the one that was just attacked.

My abiding memory, other than the incident with the pigeons, the midnight Muslim festival and the man who offered us a hooker when we arrived at the hotel, was a particularly violent spicy chicken dish that made repeated assaults on my sphincter one night. Charmin Ultra Strong was made for such occasions. Of course, my evening wasn't interrupted by gunfire and the sound of lunatic Muslim extremists coming to my room to kill me. I don't think they make a roll strong enough for that...

[By the way, I apologize for the title, but Mrs Bison thought it was funny so what could I do?]

Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Entertaining

2008-11-23T17:21:00.000-08:00

I recently hired a business director, and since he was in St.Louis with his wife on Friday, house hunting, I thought it would be hospitable if I invited them over for a drink. He'd already made dinner plans for the evening so I didn't have to prevail upon Mrs Bison to cook something. This was probably a good thing: Mrs Bison works pretty much full time, and the things she cooks for us fall more into the "hearty home cooking" category than the "poncy showing off to guests" one. This means that anything wanky we choose to offer is very likely never to have been cooked by us before, and therefore to be something of an experiment. Some of these experiments don't end well - things can look great in a cookery book but end up resembling afterbirth on a plate. However the things that we usually eat can be a little exotic for the Midwestern American palate, by which even onions can be regarded as "over-spicy food of the devil". All in all it's better if people don't come for dinner.

So we got prepared with a range of soda (coke, diet pepsi, root beer) and some beer, as well as chips and little smoked salmon and cream cheese things on crackers, which were great, except that the crackers kept breaking every time Mrs Bison tried to spread the allegedly spreadable cream cheese on them, causing many bad words to be stifled.

The guests arrived; he asked for beer, so Mrs Bison got a bottle from the fridge. We had a very pleasant conversation - he finished the beer but declined a second one. I stuck with soda as I was playing soccer later that night. After a while they left for dinner and I went off to play soccer. (Two great goals but we still lost. Bollocks.) It wasn't until the next morning that Mrs Bison noticed a bottle of root beer missing from the fridge. And a full complement of proper beer still intact. She'd given our guest a root beer without noticing, and he'd not said anything.

Of course I had to e-mail him and call him out as a pussy for not telling the boss's wife that she'd given him the wrong drink. Some people are just too polite. Or maybe he thought we were teetotal weird bastards who didn't believe in alcohol.

Some people are natural entertainers, and others are not. We're in the "not" group. We haven't actually poisoned anyone yet, but we did serve samosas to this Indian bloke and they were still frozen in the middle. It didn't really matter though, because he was a cunt. Poisoning him would actually have been a bonus.

From now on I think we're going to start fucking with guests for fun. If they're too polite and/or scared to say anything we should try adding things to the food, just to see what they'll choke down. How about half a mouse in the dip, or a large centipede on the lettuce? It would take more than a couple of root beers to wash that down...

Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Bankrupt The Automakers

2008-11-18T18:19:00.000-08:00

I've been trying so hard not to comment on the US automakers' begging trip to Washington DC, and their strident bleating for a taxpayer-funded bailout but I just can't let it go by. Not that I have the slightest illusion that anyone gives a flying fuck what I say on the subject, but if I start to let that bother me then what would I do with all my toilet horror stories?

Here's what Rick Wagoner of GM said today: Three million jobs would be lost within the first year, personal income would drop by $150 billion and government tax losses would total $156 billion over three years. "This is about much more than just Detroit. It's about saving the U.S. economy from a catastrophic collapse."

The extent to which this is just complete bollocks beggars belief, but most people are too uninformed about the US bankruptcy process to realize it. Let's imagine that GM runs out of cash and has to declare bankruptcy. It would reorganize under Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code as it clearly is a viable business, making millions of cars that people want to buy. However it suffers from a bloated cost structure resulting from years of extortion at the hands of the UAW union, and management weakness.

Once under the protection of Chapter 11 GM would have access to Debtor In Possession (DIP) financing, which would provide operating capital to keep the company running. Ironically, the business would be much better placed to invest in retooling and new technology under Chapter 11 as it would no longer be required to conserve cash to meet obligations that were suspended during the reorganization, and would have ample cash from DIP financing. This is where the $25 billion could be used productively - a secured loan to fund the company during reorganization. (Not that it would likely be required - DIP financing is very secure and there would certainly be plenty of lenders.)

"Ah, but what about all the suppliers to GM? Surely they would go under when GM didn't pay their bills?" No they wouldn't. One of the first tasks of the bankruptcy court is to approve payments to suppliers that are necessary for continued operation of the company; such contracts may be "assumed", i.e. accepted, in which case they remain in force. If they are rejected then the contract holder becomes another creditor in the bankruptcy. In this case, however, since GM has supplier contracts that would be almost impossible to improve (since they fuck their suppliers so hard in the arse already) they would be able to assume contracts and pay bills very quickly. If the government had issues then this is an area that they could usefully intervene - cash payments to auto suppliers to tide them over if there were any delays and avoid a knock-on bankruptcy effect.

Let's look at the facts: GM loses money. A shitload of it. Giving them more money won't change that - it will just buy them a little bit of time. It's like looking at a bucket of water with a big hole in the bottom and thinking "Hmmm. All the water's running out. I'd better solve the problem by topping it up." What GM is facing is common to many industries - it's a sudden reduction in demand. What does every other company do when faced with this? They cut costs and restructure their business to face the new demand picture. Why didn't GM do this already? Because the greedy motherfuckers at the UAW have held all the "Big 3" US automakers to ransom for decades, insisting on gold-plated medical packages and retirement plans, keeping open unprofitable plants and making it punitively expensive to reduce the workforce. Make no mistake - they have bled the companies to the point of death. All the while they managed to keep the exsanguinated body barely alive, but the latest economic downturn has left them staring at a near-corpse. So now it's supposed to be our job to give it a blood transfusion simply so they can go on sucking at it.

[Imagine inserted cartoon of a giant bloated mosquito with the head of Ron Gettelfinger, sucking on a withered body which is attached to a drip. Around it stand Obastard, Pelosi and Reid all murmuring "I see the problem - it just needs more blood". Unfortunately I can't draw it...]

That's why bankruptcy is the best option for GM - it needs to shed its overburdensome cost structure and emerge fit to do battle in a global economy. Why do Rick Wagoner and the UAW make common cause here? Well, the UAW has no interest in restructuring because they'll lose much of their feather-bed pay and benefits system, as well as losing jobs. But that's what it takes! No-one will lend to GM right now because no-one sees any way for them to make money. Unless they're prepared to change that they have no business asking for cash from anyone, be it bank or government. And management has no interest in bankruptcy because the last people on the payout list are shareholders, which means that all their stock in GM would be rendered worthless by the process. So they join hands in an unholy alliance to fleece the taxpayer.

Chapter 11 works - look at the airlines who restructured under the process and emerged fit to survive. And note that the numbers of workers were cut, and their pay and benefits reduced. It was a necessary reaction to years in which their unions had bled the companies by essentially ensuring that the first one to resist would be driven into bankruptcy by a strike. Only when there was no option, after 911, did the companies get to finally deal with the problem.

And on a final note, consider the case of Chrysler. They are not a public company but a privately owned enterprise. The fat cat speculators who funded the buyout from Daimler expected to get a big payout by buying low and running the company for cash. Ooops! Why the fuck should US taxpayers bail them out? When venture capitalists, private equity and hedge funds win big, they claim the outsize payouts are just reward for the risks they take. Well this was a big risk, and guess what motherfuckers: you lost. Step away from the table and take your pain like a man. Don't ask me to bail you out.

What do I expect will happen? Of course they'll get bailed out. Never mind that the successful companies, like Honda, Toyota, Nissan and Hyundai (who interestingly enough are not infested with the UAW sickness) don't need our cash, and build cars here quite happily. This isn't about common sense, but about the Democrats paying off their UAW contributors in return for all that election cash. Welcome to the real world...

Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Does My Arse Look Big In This?

2008-11-17T18:12:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since anything worthwhile has happened, so I've refrained from relaying it to you, faithful readers. Now, however, I am forced to break my silence. Not because of anything worthwhile, you understand, but if I'm not careful I'll forget how to type with two fingers, and next time I try I'll be down to one. So I figured it was time to write something.

As luck would have it, Mrs Bison was looking for a dress at the weekend, for a Christmas party that isn't going to happen. Of course, we didn't know it wasn't going to happen at the time - we're not that stupid, and it would have saved a lot of effort if we'd knowm, but there you go. So off we went to the mall, with Bison Daughter in tow. I fled as soon as we were inside and went in seach of Boring Man Clothes. It seems I only possess two types of clothing - assorted grey/black pants with blue or white shirts for work, and jeans with t-shirts for weekends. It has been so long since I had cause to buy much else that I have become a fashion desert. (Not to be confused with a fashion dessert, which would be altogether more fruity.)

Clothes seem to fall neatly into two categories: stuff that's reasonably priced, which makes me look like a sad suburban middle-aged wanker, and stuff that's cool, which I can't fit in. Not because I'm fat, but because the "male body type" of today is an anorexic weed with a concave chest and no shoulders. Oh, and it's expensive stuff, too, and nothing says "I'm a cunt" like paying top dollar for clothes that don't fit.

Meanwhile Mrs Bison was checking out dresses, ably abetted by Bison Daughter, who has the blend of innate fashion sense and extreme opinionated-ness given to ten year-old girls. By the time I checked in the list was down to two, one of which, my daughter assured me, was "horrible and made Mum look like a fish". I dutifully stood outside the changing room while the fish-dress was tried on. It looked fine to me, which is to say that it accentuated all the best bits of Mrs Bison without leaving any odd parts exposed. Unfortunately they only had one color in her size; all the others were in sizes that ranged from Large through Extra Large and all the way to Giant Waterbuffalo.

I made positive noises, sufficient to encourage purchase, once I had ascertained that said fish-dress was not going to bankrupt me. (What is the point of spending a huge amount on a dress when the very first thing you'll hear next time a dress is required, is "I can't wear that one again - I need a new one"?) Bison Daughter was not happy - "Dad! She has zero fashion sense. You have to stop her!" Did I mention opinionated? I think she gets that from me. When Mrs Bison brought home her new boots last week I suggested that they were very "American Indian" in style, and proceeded to do a rain dance every time she put them on. The difference is that I know when to shut the fuck up, while it's still mildly funny and before I lose important privileges.

So, job done we returned home. I didn't get any Boring Man Clothes, but I got a great deal on some protein supplement at GNC, which will help continue to ensure that I will not be welcome at "no shoulders" Banana Republic anytime soon. Since then the party has been canceled, which means that the dress should go back to the store, because you just know it won't be right the next time a dress is called for. Bison Daughter would be delighted - I think she was rooting for Mrs Bison to choose something from the "My Mommy The Streetwalker" collection. Nice...

Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Your Vote Counts - If We Agree

2008-11-05T19:13:00.000-08:00

Here's a riddle for you: When is a democracy not a democracy? When the liberals don't like the outcome, that's when. The one bright spot in an otherwise miserable election day was the news that California voters decided to ban same-sex marriage. Not that this hasn't been done before, you understand, but the state Supreme Court decided in its infinite wisdom to overturn the previous law on some spurious basis. So how did the vociferous and self-important gay lobby greet the result of this exercise of democracy? Not with open arms, it's fair to say - two legal challenges have already been filed, and we can expect the issue to go before the courts again as the militant homo community rejects the democratically reached outcome and seeks to make an end-run around the will of the people.

They should be assured of a warm reception in a court system that seems determined to thwart the democratic process by overturning any laws that go against the prevailing liberal orthodoxy. A recent example was the Supreme Court decision to overturn a Louisiana law that made the death penalty a punishment for child rape. The magnificently arrogant decision was based on the concept of interpreting the Eighth Amendment according to "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society". In other words society rejects the idea of executing child rapists so any law which allows this must be unconstitutional. How the fuck does this work? I thought society expressed its view on the "evolving standard" very clearly when it decided to pass the law in the first place, so what gives the Supreme Court the right to impose its own lefty views without any constitutional basis whatsoever? The court isn't interested in what society's view of decency actually is, only in what they'd like it to be.

In an ironic twist which would be funny if it weren't so sick, Justice Kennedy suggested that the flow of death penalty cases for child rape could overwhelm the country’s criminal justice system. He noted that in 2005 there were 5,702 reported rapes of children under the age of 12. Hmmmm - seems to me that this is an argument in favor of the death penalty for kiddie rapists, not the other way round. Clearly the message isn't getting through to these criminals.

So how do you measure "the evolving standards of decency" in society? How about a referendum on the issue? What do you bet that if the issue of executing child rapists went to a vote it would be overwhelmingly approved? Not much doubt on that one. Apparently the gay lobby is complaining that the California decision represents a decision by the majority on a law affecting the minority, and as such it should not be allowed.

Well here's an interesting perspective: Obastard has clearly stated that he will increase taxes on the so-called rich in order to fund giveaways to the "poor" (which includes a huge raft of lazy, uneducated scum). The rich are a minority in this country and it seems to be perfectly acceptable to the liberals that a majority who did not create the wealth can elect officials simply to confiscate money from the minority and give it to them. Compared to that the idea of not being able to marry another bloke seems to be pretty trivial.

So how about we take this issue to the fucking Supreme Court? Isn't there something in the consitution about unreasonable seizure? Or do the "evolving standards of decency" only work if you're raping kids or walking down the aisle in a two-sausage freak show? Don't write in - I already know the answer...

Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

TV Sex Lessons

2008-11-03T13:23:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the television there's little risk that my child will grow up without a full and complete education on the facts of life. We try to be good parents - we answered all the questions about where babies come from without resorting to lies or fairy tales, and Mrs Bison even bought a book to explain it all properly. (I went away on a business trip so I didn't have to try and keep a straight face when explaining what the "penis" was for.) Nevertheless, we drew the line at basic procreation, not out of some weird religious notions of what sex is for, but because explaining sex toys, girl-on-girl and snowballing to kids is just wrong. Those things you have to learn by yourself as an older kid, which is why porn magazines were such a godsend, not so just to us kids, but also to parents.

I learned all the really good stuff from magazines - stuff that I didn't even know existed, and since all the stories were well written (and often fully illustrated) there was never any need to embarrass my parents by asking them what "cunnilingus" meant. This was just as well - I vividly remember a BBC news story when I was young, where there was a reference made to two men engaging in "intercourse".

"How is that possible?" I asked, my basic understanding of sex not capable of explaining how you could make a hot dog with two sausages and no bun. My dad did not respond, and remained resolutely staring at the TV in silence, until we were called to the dinner table. It was not until later that I learned the dreadful truth about what one man could do to another man's arsehole.

Looking back I have some sympathy for my old man, especially as my younger brothers might have been listening, and might have been less ready than I to process a lecture on the finer points of buggery. Just a couple of days ago I was watching an episode of CSI, where the story revolved around a bullrider who was killed when he discovered someone stealing semen from one of the bulls to sell privately. Here I was, daughter at my side (it was only 8pm) while the detectives discussed the presence of semen on the man's jeans. They then went on to discover a large vibrating tool which was lubricated and shoved up the bull's arse, in order to cause it to ejaculate. They went on to explain how bulls in captivity become homosexual.

I stared at the screen, at any point expecting a small voice at my side to say "Dad? What does ... mean?" I looked over at Mrs Bison. She looked back at me, with a face that said "You're on your own on this one". But thankfully the question never came. Of course this can only mean one of two things - either Bison Daughter doesn't know enough to know what she doesn't know yet, or she already knows way more than I believed.

I used to watch Family Guy with her, safe in the knowledge that the really bad jokes were so "out there" that she wouldn't even know to ask what they meant. Now, however, I'm not so sure. In last night's episode Peter Griffin went into space; on his return he described it as a great place to "rub one out" except that after a while it's like you're "living in a snow globe". I'm so fucking glad we sent the child to bed early. The silence would have been deafening.

Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

At The Dreupelkot

2008-10-31T10:51:00.000-07:00

I spent the early part of this week in the Belgian town of Gent, a wonderful historic city in the Flanders region. Of course, I spent most of the time in meetings, but we did have a couple of good dinners along the way. One of the problems with Belgian dinners, as I've noted before, is that in upmarket restaurants they tend to last about four hours. During this time I lose all feeling below the waist, along with the will to live. This week's dinners were only about three hours long, but even so, I was delighted to get up at the end and restore the flow of blood to my legs.

It was therefore not hard to persuade me to take a short walk to the Dreupelkot, for a couple of genevas. This place is a famous bar, about the size of a suburban living room, tended by its white-haired owner, Pol, who dispenses more than two hundred versions of the Belgian hard liquor called geneva. It's a tiny place, already crowded with only fifteen people in it, just round the corner from the Hot Club, where they play excellent jazz. This is a place with character, just a few tables and a bar, most people standing up (because that's the only option) and a sign asking people to use the toilet (which appears to be in a cupboard) rather than the alley out the back.

Geneva is an excellent end-of-evening drink. It's taken neat, in small glasses which Pol fills to the brim, so that there's a positive meniscus on each one (look it up in your kid's science book). He has all sorts of frou-frou genevas with vanilla, chocolate, cream and stuff like that in them (which attracts drunken students) but real geneva is either clear or slightly brown, like diluted whisky. Some purists maintain that only the clear stuff is truly authentic but they both taste good to me.

Anyway, about four of us wandered in and squeezed up to the side of the tiny bar. We worked our way through five glasses, along with some blokes from Ecuador that we struck up a conversation with. Along the way we noticed that amongst the group of studenty types in the center of the room there were two girls giving a lesbian kissing display. You could tell they were real lesbians and not just two drunk girls showing off, because one of them was ugly.

The thing about geneva is that it stimulates the brain cells. It got me thinking, and I have to say that it led me to revise one of my theories about lesbian couples. I used to believe that the reason one of the lesbians is always bloke-like is that the other one really wants a bloke. She's therefore losing out because she gets all the boot-faced hairy ugliness of a bloke, but without the benefit of a penis, necessitating the purchase of strap-ons, etc.

It occurred to me, though, that I was missing the point - it was the ugly one who was the "aggressor" and it suddenly became obvious - she knew she was a boiler and her decision to go with women had to be based on one of two subconscious drivers:

1. She resents pretty girls because she'll never be one, so she picks them up to vicariously experience prettiness.

2. She resents blokes because they like pretty girls and not her, and so she picks them up to reduce the number available for us, thus pissing us off.

Personally I tend towards theory number 2, but in either case the implication is that the "blokey" lesbian is motivated by spite and bitterness. This would lead you to expect that manly lezzas would be bitter, moany, resentful creatures; well bugger me if that isn't exactly what we observe in nature. Quod erat demonstrandum, as they say...

Well I'm glad we sorted that out. Now can someone pass me another geneva?

Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Bucket Of Women

2008-10-22T17:50:00.000-07:00

I'm proud to say that no-one has ever "tagged me with a meme" or any other such blog shite, which may represent my triumph in distancing myself from the common herd, or might just signify that I'm a miserable cunt who has no friends. I've seen those things on blogs from time to time, though, and one of the old standbys is the bucket list - the things you'd want to do if you only had x months to live.

I've never tried to make such a list but I can see how actually having a year to live would focus your mind on what you wanted to do with that time in a way that pretending just can't achieve. Most of the lists seem to be from people trying to imagine what they'd want to do.

What always gets me is the absence of the one item that should show up on any man's list (and, for all I know, might be on many women's lists too, albeit in reverse). The item is "Have Sex With Two Women At Once". The world neatly divides on this subject into two camps: those who want to have sex with multiple women at once and those who already did. (Those who already did and who want to do it again are only a subset of the latter group.) And on this subject homosexuals don't count.

I'm not trying to suggest that all those other worthy bucket list items shouldn't be considered. By all means watch the sun rise from a mountain top, scuba dive the Great Barrier Reef or hot air balloon over the Serengeti; just don't pretend for a moment that you wouldn't put all this on hold for a two-hour long romp with three "willing and able" girls in a hot tub of your choice. Did this really not occur to you when you made the list? Or do you just lack the honesty to admit that, yes, you'd like a four-breasted encounter just once before you shuffle off this mortal coil? Maybe you don't want to appear shallow.

Well, let me tell you, you're not shallow. Your desire is a manifestation of your basic masculine humanity, as natural as wanting to watch football, eat steak or scratch your nuts. When you blow out all the candles on your cake and people ask what you wished for, you might pretend it was "world peace" but we know better, don't we.

All you women out there, when you get done reading this why don't you go and ask your bloke if he'd be interested in s three-way. I swear his eyes will light up like he's just won the fucking lottery. And I guarantee that not only has he considered the possibility but he's already planned who it would be. In fact, you might be neither of the people he had in mind, but unless he's a certifiable moron with less intellect than a ham sandwich he's not going to let on to you.

Many years ago a girlfriend and I were discussing the subject and she stated that she didn't understand the big deal - what was so great about two women? I was a bit taken aback by this question - it was akin to asking what was the attraction in breathing oxygen, almost too obvious to answer. I think my response had something to do with many breasts and the ability to have certain things at eye level and crotch level simultaneously, but it wasn't a well-reasoned position. Now that I think about it, the answer is obvious.

Music is good - this is an indisputable fact. But music in stereo is better. Much better. When people used to listen to records in Mono sound I'm sure there were those who asked what was the big deal with stereo. But once you've listened in stereo you appreciate the world of difference. It's a treat for your ears. So, in much the same way, sex with multiple partners is a treat for your penis. Which is reason enough for it to be in any man's bucket. Just bear that in mind next time you're tagged.

Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Reasoned Political Discourse

2008-10-21T17:52:00.000-07:00

Based on what I see of the Presidential candidates, I'm starting to despair of the political future in this country. I've written enough about that wanker Obama already, and how he's only in the position he's in because he's black. Any other candidate with a similar lack of track record, who'd spent the last few years associating with racists and terrorists, and whose idea of politics is to simply take money from those who earned it and give it to those who didn't, would have been subjected to some serious examination by now. Admittedly he's a socialist liberal cocksucker, and as such is considered "off limits" to the left-leaning TV networks and media weenies, but in spite of it having been pointed out many times that a man who'd been hanging out at the church of the KKK, and who'd been associating with convicted right-wing terrorists, would have been chased out of the presidential race on day one, the media persist in giving Obasshole a free ride.

What really amazes me, though, is the idiocy of the Republican party. I proudly belong to the section of society in the middle - the people who don't blindly sign up to the doctrines of either party, and who make up their own minds. Let's face it, neither party would have me:

I like low taxation. I believe that Congress is incapable of managing money, and for that reason should be given as little as possible. I believe trial lawyers are the scum of the earth, and do little but extort money to line their own pockets, pushing up costs for innocent working people. I support the death penalty, and only wish it could be imposed for many more crimes, and much more quickly. All multiple repeat offenders should be executed as the utter worthless scum and leeches on society that they are. I support gun rights, and secret ballots for unions. Affirmative action is bullshit. Therefore I must be a Republican.

I support abortion (within reasonable limits) and don't believe that victims of rape and incest should be forced to carry a foetus to term just to satisfy some religious Group's hang-ups on conception. I believe in separation of church and state, and that creationists are functionally retarded and should be locked up. No-one should be running around with bazookas based on some ancient text about well-armed militias. The financial community must be regulated or they'll cheat us every chance they get. Therefore I can't be a Republican.

Clearly I'm not a Democrat either, since I haven't had my brain surgically removed, but it really doesn't matter what I am because, quite apart from the fact that I can't vote, it doesn't make much difference who gets in. Policy is made by organizations that buy the votes of Congressmen - it's that simple. Bet they don't teach that in your fucking civics class, do they? But it's true. You think you can call up your Congressman and ask them to help you? Dream on. Unless you've written them a big check they won't even talk to you. Some places they even specify (although it's never written down) how big a check is required. How did some bullshit tax change for toy wooden arrows get included in the bailout bill? In any functioning democracy there would have been absolute bloody outrage about the bare-faced corruption implied by crap like this, but here it just slides by. We're immune to it - it's just the way things get done in Washington.

Anyway, back to the Republicans. They could have put up any one of a number of compelling candidates against Obarmy - personally I would have liked to see Giuliani, since he's actually had experience running something big and being a statesman - but who did they choose? A grumpy old coffin-dodger who's got about as much personality as a dead hedgehog, and a woman whose one and only qualification for the position of Vice-President is the possession of a vagina. Yes, in response to the "only there because he's black" candidate they came up with the "we managed to find a woman" one. But not a qualified woman. Not Condoleeza Rice, for instance, but some moose-humping nobody from fuck-knows-where USA, whose only contribution to the debate is experience shopping at Wal-Mart. They fucking deserve to lose.

Is there another option? Well, Ralph Nader is running, but you wouldn't know it, would you? And why is that? The aforementioned left-leaning TV networks have been warned off giving him any publicity whatsoever in case he attracts their vote away, again. You'll hear NOTHING about what he stands for, which is a shame, because he's one of the people who see the corruption in Washington for what it is. You're not really supposed to vote for him though - just shut up and tick the box for one of the established parties so Congress can get on with pissing away trillions more...

Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Toilet Traders

2008-10-20T12:56:00.000-07:00

I was reading a news article from the UK about a bloke who stabbed a gay accountant to death in a public toilet which was described as a "well-known venue for homosexuals who would meet there for sex". What caught my attention was not the knife attack, or even the claim by the killer that the dead man had previously accosted him in the toilet, but the fact that gay men are still apparently hanging around public lavatories looking for people to fuck in the arse.

I could probably understand why, many years ago, with no way to meet other gay men and maybe no possibility to "come out", homosexuals would be drawn to places like that, although I'm buggered if I can see why any bloke would want to shag another bloke. What gets me is that we're now in the twenty-first century. The internet allows people to hook up practically anywhere they want, with anyone they want, to do pretty much anything they want. At the same time homosexuality has progressed from a taboo to practically being compulsory. Governments are bending over backwards to pander to the "rights" of this militant and demanding minority. (Which, to be fair, is probably better than bending over forwards.) Just look at this example of political correctness - a fire engine takes a detour to shine flashlights on gay men fucking each other in the open air (a criminal offence, by the way, whether you're gay or straight), presumably for a laugh. Oh no! You've infringed on their "rights" so you have to be punished. Hang on a minute, no-one has a "right" to break the law. If people don't want to be ridiculed for having sex in public then there's a very simple solution - don't have sex in public. Go home, or get a room, for fuck's sake.

The excessive "sensitivity" to the "needs" of the "gay community" has resulted in them apparently being given a free pass on criminal activity. If this public toilet was so well-known as a place for homosexual sex, why weren't the sex criminals who operated there arrested. Yes, people who have sex in public toilets when the law says it's forbidden are sex criminals. No-one in their right mind goes to a public toilet unless they have to. Maybe it was those six pints of cheap lager at lunch time, or that ill-advised chicken vindaloo last night which is now threatening to melt away your sphincter, but when the call comes, the object of the exercise is to get in, get done, and get the fuck out ASAP.

No-one wants to find themselves perched on the cracked porcelain reading graffiti invitations to "suck my huge cock", or wondering if anything is about to be thrust through the hole that someone has made in the cubicle wall. No-one wants to hear some bloke getting one up the Gary Glitter in the adjoining stall. At least no-one who I'd want to meet. Let's face it, if your idea of a good time is ending up balls-deep in some other man's arse, on a cracked and piss-soaked floor, as he bends over a shit-stained toilet bowl then you've got real problems. Is it a victimless crime? I think not. Just imagine some bloke hanging around the Ladies toilet, drilling holes in the wall and asking girls if they'd like a fuck; he'd be arrested in a heartbeat. So why is it OK for blokes to do that to other blokes?

There's no excuse for it now. It's not done out of a "need" as a result of gay men being unable to "find ways to meet each other". There's fucking parades of them in major cities, and thousands of web sites dedicated to them. So why does George Michael want to fuck strangers in the bog? And, more importantly, why should he be allowed to get away with it?

The bloke with the knife in the story I read didn't seem to be the most stable of characters, and who knows what the truth was there, but it used to be assumed that if you accosted a stranger in the khazi you were justifiably risking a good kicking. Nowadays you'd probably be arrested and branded a homophobe for punching out a bloke who approached you in a public toilet with his dick in his hand.

What I really can't understand, though, is that gays are supposed to be so much more classy than the rest of us. That whole Queer Eye For The Straight Guy thing played on the stereotype of the gay man who was better dressed, better groomed, and better at interior decor than any heterosexual bloke. So if they're going to hang out in the public bog, why don't they clean up in there, hang some drapes, upgrade the toilet paper, provide good quality hand-soap, use pastel colors to create the illusion of space in each cubicle, and improve the atmosphere with some pot-pourri? A couple of uphill gardeners lurking by the sink with a hopeful look in their eye might be a small price to pay for a bog in which you'd atually look forward to parting company with that chicken vindaloo.

Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

It's The Economy...

2008-10-16T14:30:00.000-07:00

Brace yourselves for a rash of blame-shifting related to urban crime. In the face of an economic slowdown precipitated by people borrowing money they couldn't afford to repay, defaulting and then whining about how it's not their fault, the economy will become a ready excuse for just about anything. A case in point is the news that homicides in Kansas City are up this year. In this article there is the usual hand-wringing and speculation about the causes.

What struck me was the case of the young man who was killed holding up a convenience store, and the easy way his "mentor" characterizes him as a "victim" rather than "criminal". It is pointed out that he dropped out of high school unable to read, write or do math, and somehow he was unable to get a job. Really? Who'd have thought that it would be tough to get a well-paid job if you can't read or write? Even the wife of the taxi driver who was murdered later in the article falls into the trap of sympathizing with the kllers, as though they are victims of circumstance. That quote, "They feel like all of their opportunities have been snatched from them" is pure bullshit. No-one snatched their opportunities - they chose to piss them away all by themselves.

Here's a newsflash to all the "it's not their fault" whiny liberal bastards out there: if you drop out of school and can't do shit you'll probably end up with no job and no money. There are consequences to choices, and choosing to fuck up at school is not an option without implications for later happiness.

Of course it's not entirely the fault of these kids that they drop out of school. Kids are stupid - left to their own devices they might choose to eat Big Macs and dick around on the Playstation all day. You can't trust them to make informed choices to study hard at school at the age of ten; even if they eventually do work out that they should have paid attention, it'll be too late. We would almost certainly have done the same without guidance (don't kid yourself) and that has to come from parents. So where are the parents? While I don't have any statistics to hand (that would be a job for a proper writer) I can be fairly certain that the family circumstances of many of these "disadvantaged" kids is far from ideal. I'm guessing a lot of them are in single-parent households, and not the "good" kind either.

I know there's some Biblical saying about the sins of the fathers being visited upon the sons even unto the whatever generation, and maybe this is what they meant. Without parents to impose discipline, kids won't get an education or learn to act intelligently. They then grow up to father another round of bastard offspring, which in turn has no hope of ever getting guidance from non-existent or negligent parents. And then the whiny do-gooders make out that they commit crime because "society" doesn't give them options. Bullshit. Did you see that comment from the "community leader": "It seems like everything is falling on these black males 17 and up." Well if it is, it's because of the black males 33 and up who fathered them. No-one held a gun to their heads and made them hold a gun to other people's heads.

Until people have the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that we have so many scum kids because we have so many scum parents there's no point papering over the problem. Especially when the paper is all colored green and was earned by people who bothered to pay attention in school. Still, if we're not lucky, in a few weeks we'll all be living in Obamaland, a world without consequences or responsibilities, where there are no criminals, only victims. Why bother getting a job? You can just sit around and wait for handouts from other people. Unless they want you to have to turn to a life of crime...

At a simplistic level, people aren't unemployed because they live in crappy neighborhoods; people live in crappy neighborhoods because they are unemployed. And not getting any education is a pretty safe way of ensuring that outcome.

Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Money For Nothing

2008-10-11T10:25:00.000-07:00

Having been away for more than a week, I was not surprised that there was some mail awaiting me on my return. However, since Mrs Bison had already binned all the obvious junk mail, there were only two things left - a statement which showed that my investment portfolio was now worth fuck-all, and a letter from the University where I got my MBA. The basic thrust of this letter was that they would like me to give them some money. Preferably lots of money, and on a repeated basis. In fact, they would be only too happy to deduct the money from my credit card if I would be so kind as to give them the number.

I simply do not understand the concept of giving money to colleges and universities. Sure, if you're a billionaire who has an ego with its own zip code, and they're going to name an arts center after you, you may as well write a big check. (After all, you can't take it with you.) But for the rest of us this is a transaction with no upside.

Let's imagine, by way of analogy, that you just bought a new car. A few weeks later you get a letter from the dealership asking if you'd like to make a donation so that people less fortunate than you can also buy a car, and so that they can build a new showroom with more comfortable seats an a coffee machine. You may be inclined to bin the letter with a snort, and an exclamation such as "They must be fucking joking!" So why is a university any different?

To put this in perspective, 4-year college tuition rates rose by 7% in 2007, and have consistently risen by 50% more than the inflation rate. While automobile prices continue to fall in real terms, even as more features are added, college costs continually increase, while they find new ways to screw you. If they want to build a new school of architecture they can bloody well pay for it themselves. Colleges are incredibly wealthy - Harvard has a $35 billion endowment. If they gave away college educations for free they'd be hard-pressed EVER to run out of money. In fact they'd be able to do it entirely from the interest on their portfolio, without eating into the principal.

Universities like to whine about how they use your money to help out poorer people. But how does that work? You pay for a college education not on the basis of what it's worth, or on the basis of supply and demand, but on some socialist principle of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need". If their program is too expensive why don't they reduce the cost? If the car dealership wants to help poor people get into a car they should sell cheaper cars, or cut their prices. In business we have to continually strive to cut costs in order to stay competitive. Not in the world of higher education though - they can just stick it to us with ever-higher prices while putting their hand out for more free money. The key thing is that they already have MORE than enough money to help out poorer students without guilting the rest of us into doing it for them.

It won't be that long until Bison Daughter is old enough to go to college. When that time comes I know for a fact that my alma mater will swiftly move from "We love you, please give us some money" to "You earn too much, here's your giant bill". So in joyful anticipation of that moment, here's my response to your donation request: You Can Fuck Right Off.

Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Make My Day

2008-10-01T19:04:00.000-07:00

The high spot of the travel schedule this week (arrived home three hours ago; leaving again in twelve hours for Europe) was the chance to go to the Smith & Wesson range in Springfield again and shoot some targets. We took some colleagues there for "team building" Monday evening and engaged in a little healthy competition. The winning team received Smith & Wesson hats while the losers got a copy each of People magazine - you know, the edition with the picture of Clay Aiken on the cover with the giant headline "Yes I'm Gay".

I won't bore you with the details - you can always recap on my last visit here - but as a special treat they arranged for us to shoot the Smith & Wesson 500. This is the .50 caliber revolver that re-established S&W as the manufacturer of the most powerful production handgun in the world (according to them - it's not as though I checked).

This beast is loaded with five gigantic cartridges, but the range officer was only putting one round in the chamber in case the firer panicked and dropped the gun on experiencing the recoil. Bear in mind that Dirty Harry's .44 Magnum produces about 900 ft.-lb. of muzzle energy while this gun produces almost 2600 ft.-lb. with its heaviest load. A single factory round costs about $4, apparently.

I didn't even realize the thing was there until late in the session and, of course, I had to have a go. The range officer put the one round in and instructed me to fire double action (without pulling back the hammer), since the trigger was sensitive. It was indeed a beast, but not hard to fire, although it's definitely not for the nervous. I put in a fresh target and loaded up with five rounds. This time I fired single action (cocking before firing) simply because it's automatic for me to do it and I forgot not to; the trigger sensitivity was fine.

Below is the target - I was pretty happy with that. And I'm fairly confident that this gun would, in fact, be capable of "taking your head clean off". So go ahead - make my day, and buy me one. Please.

Copyright ©: 2008 Edward Bison