Corporations are peepholes, my friend

Did you see the story where a guy who was a derivatives vice-president at Goldman Sachs says that he resigned (after making a fortune there for 12 years) because he suddenly found that all the people there were interested in making money, and did not put their clients first?  His name is Greg Smith and he wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times this week about how evil his coworkers were.

Imagine the shock!  A company is out to make a buck, well, several million bucks a minute.  Goldman Sachs is the honorable firm that had the honor of a paying a $550 million dollar fine a couple of years ago for misleading the investors, and now, hold the presses! They're in business to make money off people who invest their money to make more money than people who just put their money in the bank, or a mayonnaise jar.

I await the fallout.  Next thing you know, leading executives at McDonald's will quit because they came to realize that the Golden Arches are selling beef.  Bigwigs at Wendy's will blurt that Wendy's hair was not really red.  Baskin will reveal that he never could stand Robbins, and General Motors will finally have to quit making Buicks, thereby depriving the over-80 set of their favorite ride.

Corporations are people, my friend.  A very wise man said that last summer at the Iowa State Fair.  Corporations are people, and heaven knows, people have their problems. I am certain that Mr Greg Smith will be giving away his vast fortune, all accrued during his time at Goldman Sachs, as he shudders to see the ill-gotten gains that now sadden him so.

Mr Smith, could you write me a check?  I want to help you feel better!

Splitting Hairs

B. Jones

In our culture, we don't always name hairdids anymore, especially the ones for men.  Used to be, a man could go into a barbershop and ask for a flat top or a Chicago box-car, which was a flattop with long sides and a duck's ass in back.  Or he could say he wanted a Prince Valiant, most notably worn by Brian Jones.  Or of course, there was always the Full Elvis, with the pompadour, slicked sides and a d.a. with sideburns.

D. Beckham

And don't forget the traditional wiffle, or buzz, cut.  I don't know where that name "wiffle" came from, but it's what you get when you just run the clippers all over your melon and cut it down to the lowest length.  This look is popular among David Beckham, Sinead O'Connor, and every male member of the armed forces during their basic training.

S.Keezix

Lately I see a lot of guys - mainly in what I refer to as the "non-retired," or "still working" age group - wearing what I refer to as the "Skeezix" haircut.  That's the one where the hair is pretty short all over and the barber leaves enough at the very front to grab and freeze with hair goo, leaving a look like the picture on the button at right.  That's Skeezix from the Gasoline Alley comic strip.  I know it's an old comic, but everything old comes back again, if you give it enough time.

Isn't that right, Moe?

The Do's and Don'ts of Walking

Today on my walk I decided to go for a Theme Walk. So I loaded up the iPod and spun around to the D's: specifically, songs whose titles started with "Do" and "Don't."

Now that I am retired, I have time to think of these things.

Anyhow, here is the bill of fare to which I paraded around the neighborhood:

Do I Love You - The Ronettes
Do It Again - The Beach Boys
Do Wacka Do - Roger Miller
Do What You Do Do Well - Ernest Tubb
Do What You Gotta Do - Tom Jones
"  "   "        "         "     - Al Wilson
Do You Remember These - The Statler Brothers
Do You Know the Way to San Jose - Dionne Warwick
Do You Wanna Dance - Beach Boys
Do You Wanna Touch Me - Joan Jett

and then I skipped over Does My Ring Hurt Your Finger (Charley Pride), Dog and Butterfly (Heart) and Dog Breath, in the Year of the Plague (Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention) to get to

Don't - Elvis
Don't - Sandy Posey
Don't be Cruel - Elvis
Don't Change on Me - Ray Charles
Don't Cry, Daddy - Elvis
Don't Dream It's Over - Crowded House
Don't Expect Me to Be Your Friend - Lobo
Don't Fear the Reaper- Blue Öyster Cult
Don't Fence Me In - Bing Crosby
Don't Go Away Mad (Just Go Away) - Mötley Crüe
Don't it Make You Wanna Go Home - Joe South
Don't Just Stand There - Patty Duke
Don't Let Go - Weezer
Don't Look Back - The Temptations
Don't Make Me Over - Dionne Warwick
Don't Put Onions on your Hamburger - MAD magazine
Don't Say Nothin' Bad About My Baby - The Cookies
Don't She Look Good - Ernest Tubb
Don't Sleep in the Subway - Petula Clark
Don't Take it so Hard - Paul Revere and the Raiders
Don't Think Twice (It's All Right) - Jerry Reed
Don't Waste My Time - John Mayall
Don't Worry, Baby - Beach Boys
Don't You (Forget About Me) - Simple Minds
Don't Try to Lay No Boogie Woogie on the King                  of Rock and Roll - Long John Baldry
Don't You Believe Her - Nat Stuckey

He saved us from Walkmen

That was a good time!  You might call this an eclectic list...but going from, say, Patty Duke (yes, that Patty Duke) to, say, Weezer is like being at a buffet and going from the sweet and sour chicken to the spicy shrimp in one bite.


And just think - tomorrow when I walk, the first song up will be "Double Shot of My Baby's Love" by The Swinging Medallions.

But for right now, so you won't feel left out, here's the original album ("Uncle Meat") cut of Dog Breath, in the Year of the Plague.  Please hear my plea!

Boss Tweeds

I guess it's reality TV, if you need to specify the genre, but it doesn't have any Kardashians, and hardly any fishing, and no icy roads at all, so I like to watch "Undercover Boss" when someone interesting is on.

The premise of the show is very simple.  The head cheese of some big company puts on a disguise and works among hoi polloi, so as to get a little taste of life on the other side of the assembly line, pizza oven or fish nets.

The setup never varies.  The show opens with a look at the company involved, and then we meet the HPIC* who talks a bit about how well the company is doing, but he/she thought it would be a good idea to leave the home office for a couple of days and work with people who actually do the work.  So the boss gets fitted for hair extensions, or a toupee in the case of a man experiencing baldness, and they add or remove facial hair, glasses, and color the hair.  Slip Mr or Ms Big into a company uniform or whatever mufti they wear delivering pizzas, and away we go!

They always come up with a cover story for the people on the job site, lest they become concerned as to why there are 27 cameras pointed at them.  They say that they are part of a reality show where one lucky guy just won his own Domino's franchise and is learning to make pizzas and drive real fast with pizzas in his car so as to run the place.   Or that they are shooting a reality show about people whose businesses went under and are trying to get back in the game in this new line of work.


The hitch is, it has to be a huge company for this to work.  I mean, if you're the head sandwich maker at Nick 'n' Tony's Deli, and you come to work one day and neither Nick nor Tony are around but you see someone who looks a lot like Tony prowling around trying to slice prosciutto, you're gonna get wise in a hurry, you know what I'm saying to you here?  But if you are one of 83,000 burger flippers working for Checkers, and the boss looks like the guy on the left above, and then one day a guy in a red shirt and vest is introduced to you as a new trainee who used to run a Blockbuster, you'll go for it, sure as heck.

So, the tycoon reports to work and there's always a problem, always a complaint.  Working conditions are awful, the equipment is so bad that "I have to bring in my own cleaning supplies from home" (Popeye's) or "I can't hear the customers in the drive-thru line" (Checkers.)  We get to hear the personal problems of the people tasked to work with El Supremo, and that comes in handy later.

As does all the pointing-out-of-problems, because like in last week's episode about Oriental Trading Company - America's #1 source for inflatable golf clubs, giant gag eyeglasses and pink lawn flamingos - the guy loading the truck on a day when the temperature hit 103° told the cheese that they used to get free sports drinks when it was that hot.  The boss is then shown in deep remorse as he realizes that it was his idea, when the economy hit the skids, to cut back on the free electrolyte replacements.  Hey, it's never 103° in the boardroom!

Then all the employees are called to the home office, and the big shot prances in and watches the dawn of recognition break across their furrowed brows.  He/she then earnestly avows to take their suggestions and complaints to heart, hands out money for cars, scholarships and medical bills, and there you are for another week.

Peggy was asking what percentage of the promises of sweeping reform benefiting the working person I thought were actually carried out.  I guess 50-50, but maybe that's high. Or low. I have to figure that at least once, as soon as the camera crew drove away, some boss said, "That guy in Omaha who said I made pizza like a drunken aardvark...get him in here...NOW!"

Tune in next week for our new hit series "Unemployment."


*HPIC= Head Person In Charge

Bag man

We talked a few days ago about the goofy goin's-ons down in Anne Arundel County, Maryland.  Hot-a'mighty, they're going crazy down there!

Place #1, they still haven't replaced the county councilman who left that august body to serve his jail time for tax evasion.  And just as I figured, they seem to be planning to wait until he comes back and takes his rightful place on the council.  Why not? The remaining six members can't break this 3-3 deadlock in the vote to replace him.

That's small potatoes in a county whose chief cash crop used to be tobacco. The big news is that the County Executive, one John Leopold, was indicted recently for such peccadilloes as:

• Having county cops drive him to mall parking lots so he could have sex with one of his lady friends
• Having his police security guards drive him around pre-dawn during the election campaign so he could hop out and pull his opponent's campaign signs out of the ground
• Having his police security guards keep a watch on his hospital room as he recovered from back surgery so that his one girlfriend, a county employee, would not come in contact with his live-in girlfriend
• and finally, as they said in Animal House, individual acts of perversion...so profound and disgusting...that decorum prohibits listing them here.  But then they go ahead and list them: he required his staffers to empty his catheter bag as he continued to recover from his surgery.

Truly, a fine gentleman, this Mr Leopold.

Also being dragged through the fine red mud of Anne Arundel County soil is the Chief of Police, James Teare Sr.  The indictment against Leopold states that the cops forced to do all those dumb duties for Leopold complained to their superiors, including the chief, and their complaints fell on fallow ground. Two police unions have recently taken votes of no confidence on his chiefiness.

It's a sad situation in AA Co, so for a bit of comic relief, let's turn to Councilman John Grasso, who, you will recall, called certain parts of his own county "a ghetto" and questioned the need for diversity - stating that anyone who inferred racism in any comment made by any other person was, ipso facto, a racist.

Robert Duvall will play Leopold in the movie

Uh huh.

So we leave you with Mr Grasso's statesmanlike take on the county executive's philandering in a county car.  He said it was speculation, motivated by the unions.  "It sounds like it's good, juicy reading material," he told the Baltimore SUN.  "But you don't know if it's true or not.  John Leopold is 69 years old. If he can still work it like that at the age of 69, good for him.

Click here to hear the 911 call and subsequent police activity from 2009 when a citizen reported "nekkid" people having sex in a car - reported to be the county executive's car - outside of Nordstrom in Annapolis.  Man, it's really true. You can get anything at Nordstrom's.  
 

Sunday reun: Here's the scoop

This.Is.True.
Next time you run over to Java The Hut for a cuppa' joe, why not order a nice steaming (!) cup of Civet coffee? Sounds great, huh? Make mine strong, please, and plenty of half and half.

In fact, if you're pouring mine, just give me a cup of half and half and hold the civet coffee. As you'll see here, it's pretty daggone expensive stuff. But, you say, coffee is an essential part of my lifestyle, so what does it matter if the price is a little steep? Bring it on, and how about an almond biscotti with that?

Civet coffee is the new rage among the coffee drinkers who really want to be on the cutting edge of the new coffee rage. What it is, is coffee berries that have been eaten whole and then allowed to pass undigested through the digestive system of the civet cat. Then someone who really really hates his or her job a thousand times more than you could possibly despise yours has to pick the berries out and roast them.

Then someone packs the beans in a bag and charges you 25 or 40 dollars a pound for it.
And you ask why I stick with Lipton Tea?

Saturday rerun: 21 Jump Over The Counter Street

I see they're coming out with a movie version of the old TV show with Johnny Depp, "21 Jump Street."  Here's a Saturday rerun from July, 2009, just because...

In Bob Greene's book "Billion Dollar Baby," about his time as a Plimptonian member of Alice Cooper's band, participating as a journalist, there is a passage about the band members meeting some kids from Akron, Ohio. Now, you have to remember, this is all set in 1974...just a few short years past the Summer of Love ('67) and Mac and Katie Kissoon's immortal recording of "Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep ('71.) Different times, for sure.

But in this scene, as the local scrabble mobs around Cooper's troupers, the kids are telling the band that they just know they're going to take all the money they earn from record sales, concert grosses, foreign royalties, and the like, and invest it all in peaceful alternatives so that all men can learn to live like brothers, and put an end to war, and then we can like paint rainbows on our faces and dance in the moonlight...after electing Donovan as Secretary of Defense.








This Donovan, not that Donovan...that one plays on offense.
Anyway, the band members (including Mike Bruce,the guitarist best remembered today for a) not being allowed to plug in his guitar during a concert, so maladroit was he as a guitarist and b) being described by Greene as "being built like a cigarette machine") all acted like yeah, man, that was the plan; all this loot was going right to building a great big sky full of love, peace and happiness for all mankind. But, pointed out the writer, the kids would have been crushed to find out that the band's income went directly to the purchase of apartment complexes and shopping centers.

So much for the dream of the big butterfly dropping petals of love across the nation.
I was thinking of all this idealism because I see the hype is already kicking in for the new Johnny Depp movie in which he portrays John Dillinger, the noted gangster/bank robber/murderer from the 1930s. Depp, who lives in France (!), posits that Dillinger was like a Robin Hood, who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. I've been studying Dillinger since I was a kid, and none of this is true. Neither is that other rumor that always goes around, for that matter.

John Dillinger did have a certain flair for the flamboyant public gesture. He knew there was something catchy about vaulting over the counter into the teller's area to scoop up the loot. He would gladly pose with hicktown sheriffs, acting all buddy-buddy. And there were stories about him leaving his overcoat draped over the shoulders of a woman he had, moments before, robbed.


But there is no reason to believe that Dillinger ran around handing out the money he had just stolen from banks in the Midwest to the families of starving farmers and out-of-work accountants. He much preferred lavishing the bucks on ill-bred strumpets such as Billie Frechette, a hatcheck girl who accompanied him almost to the grave, and the purchase of expensive automobiles.
The Alice Cooper Band and John Dillinger were in the businesses they were in for the money, for themselves. Just like any other profit-making enterprise, be it Joe's Corner Deli or General Motors.
Well, you know what I mean.