Angry Seafood

For years children have been exploited to manufacture some of the products we buy. They get paid meager wages, work long hours in factories that aren’t well-ventilated, and with no lunch break. No recess either. Imagine your child denied of the playground. It is absolutely terrifying.

While the notion of seeing ten-year old Chinese children making the shower curtain I bought at Wal-Mart the other day is not pleasant, it is an eye-opener for me on a whole different level. Why the hell are they paying them as much as they do?

What kid wasn’t a go-fer for their parents growing up? What did I get for having to go to the store ten times a day for my lazy mom? A freaking dollar a week! Keep in mind this also included having to make my bed, clean my room, and make sure the Jesus statue was always facing the 38th parallel. Making shoes would have been like summer camp in the context of my childhood.

I cannot tell you the amount of times a fun play experience with friends doing kid stuff like building forts and having some form of physical injury occur was interrupted by the distant shout of my name. My mother had this voice that could be heard for miles. When she called my name it was like Tarzan calling for the creatures of the jungle. Nobody else’s mom had this ability, lucky me.

So the siren goes off, indicating it was time to get back to work.

What was my weekly wage called? An ‘allowance’, which is something that sounds like a very positive thing, but make no mistake about it; the root word ‘allow’ does not mean free money. There is always a catch whenever you get something in the workplace.

Me: “Can I go home (slash go out and play) early?”
Boss (slash Mom): “Sure, if you do this, this, and this first.”

I am sure many of us have heard that one before, and it always seems to be followed up with more tasks and chores. You end up leaving when you were supposed to originally. Or in my case, it would be raining by the time I got to go outside.

So I took my dollar a week, made 1,232 trips to the local store, walked to the bank twice and filled prescriptions for relatives as part of my seven-day workload.

Did kids picket as a result of these obvious harsh workplace infractions? Did children revolt? No and there is a good reason why.

Parents deliberately held back the facts about money management and what it all meant back in the day. I was given a dollar and suddenly became the nine-year-old Trump of the neighborhood. I even had that messed-up hairstyle, all kids did then, just less combed-over.

Like the people in these third world countries, a dollar is more then I had before. Then the kid with the rich parents strolls down the street. He is loaded, the best toys, the best clothes, and the killer bicycle.

There I am with my unicycle and some crappy strap-on roller skates. It took me five-hundred-and-thirty-four weeks of allowance money to get them but young Mr. Rockefeller of the damn neighborhood needed not do a single chore for his riches. I was like Cathy Bates’ character in Titanic but much smaller, male and much younger. I was no blue blood.

All of a sudden though, when this happened, the whole fallacy about money unraveled. I learned for the first time that a dollar is worth shit and that I have been working as hard as little Hajji making uniforms in Jordan for millions of United States children to wear to school, yet he probably made more than a dollar for forty hours of hard work. I was getting the shaft on the other hand.

What did I do when I got my epiphany? I bought a set of earplugs with my hard-earned cash. It was my first lesson of capitalism: the lowest-paid do the most work so make sure you procrastinate or ignore as much work as possible.

“Sorry Mom I must have been out of shouting range.”

(Reprinted from former blog)

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I have decided to give up the fight against the overwhelming evidence that global warming is caused by us. It is absurd to think that the sun is more powerful then humans. We have been around now for tens of thousands of years and we created Wal-Mart and computers. It is silly to think the massive star with its never-consistent amounts of heat would ever have an impact on climate and temperatures. It is us stupid.

So what can we do as humans on this planet to fight this problem?

First off, we are carbon-based life forms and since CO2 is part carbon it must be our fault. The first thing we must do is learn to exhale less. It’s a hard road to take, I know but any journey starts with that first important step. I recommend starting off small, begin by pacing your breathing first at two second intervals, then three, then four until you exhale as much CO2 as you would while sleeping or at rest. But even this might not be enough. I would shoot for a goal of breathing intervals of eight to twenty seconds. With the addition of all the humans in the last decade, this would bring us in line with inhaling and exhaling levels in 1990.

The next step is to reduce farting. All that methane gas is deadly and we don’t really think about its effect on the planet. Our best avenue of approach would be to ban beans, especially the baked kind. Fart jokes must also be eliminated. You cannot hope to achieve this objective if people are reminded of this subject. Farting is like yawning, if someone hears or smells it, they suddenly have the urge to ‘let one go’.

We also need to get the animals involved. All they seem to be doing is adapting to a constantly-changing climate leaving the burden on us to attempt to control nature. I don’t think this is fair. Like asking China to pay their fair share of the CO2 taxes, we need to get these non-humans to foot their share of the bill. After all, they invade our backyards, eat our garbage, and get in the way of our vehicles on the roads and highways. The last thing we need is more freeloading from them.

One final recommendation this site fully endorses is to increase the mileage of vehicles. It has been determined that driving in reverse uses less gas then going forward. I have even tested the theory for six hours in a Jack-In-The-Box parking lot. I used .5 less gallons of gas! In just six hours! Imagine the savings multiplied by seven billion people! (That particular fast food outlet is a perfect test area by the way due to the lack of patrons.)

I am sure there are more ways I can think of to help with the global warming problem. This is just a start but I feel a good one. We all need to get our act together or huge lightning bolts are going to destroy our SUV’s and Bouncy Castles.

We cannot let this happen for the love of God.

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We all wonder about things. Ok, perhaps I do more then most people, but sometimes simple tasks and routines beg for answers or twists. Of course, many will not actually seek them out. But someone must if we are ever going to find out the pertinent information.

So the other day, as I finished taking a shower, I asked myself: “I wonder how long it would take to dry if I didn’t have a towel?” I am not talking about using an alternate, like paper towels or a face cloth. I mean just standing there and letting the amazing laws of physics work their magic.

Sounds boring right? Yes, actually it was, very boring indeed. But someone had to be the guinea pig.

I began the task by of course showering, but before that I brought in some reading material so I could keep occupied. There was no way I was just going to stand there and let my mind wander. It’s dangerous to do that because I just don’t know where it ends up.

My brain is a lot like the drunken friend you had in college that always ended up in the strangest of places on a nightly basis. One morning he is waking up in the monkey cage at the zoo, another night he’s passing out on the State House lawn. With a stripper.

So the shower ended and my experiment was underway. How long would this take? Would it be so boring I say screw it all and use a towel?

I begin dripping my way to answers. As the whole thing started I had this nagging feeling in my mind that I was forgetting something. You know the kind, the ‘left the iron on’ one.

Still I pressed on. Whenever you take these kinds of challenges, there are sure to be pitfalls along the way.

I was still half-soaked by the time I had run out of reading material and my mind had already visited a Bangladesh cathouse that was also a petting zoo and tannery. I knew right then and there I was starving. This is what I must have forgotten to do.

There was an odd question in my mind though as the fifth hour dragged on. I kept hearing my cell phone go off for what seemed like a million times. Who the hell keeps trying to call me?

Finally, after much time had passed the last drop of water evaporated and I was completely dry. At that point I was able to investigate why my phone was going crazy, I forgot to go to work! My experiment made for an interesting excuse but not very credible. Still, the feeling persisted that I missed a crucial detail.

The experiment was now complete and finally I was able to come to you now and report to you just how long it takes to drip-dry after a shower, sans towels.

And that is when it hit me what I missed. I forgot to set a timer or even look at a clock before I started.

(Reprinted from the former blog)

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Hello everyone, my name is Doctor N.C. Heere, noted practitioner of unsolicited consultation. I have been asked to come here to ‘Nothing to See Here’ to assist Chris on the advice section of his fine blog. I told him I would be fine with dispensing my vast knowledge of advice to the fine people at Yahoo Answers as I enjoy my retirement from the field of medicine jet-setting around the world and hobnobbing with the elite.

Today I pen this from the island of Bora-Bora, where a fine breeze is settling in and the local drunks unfortunately are passing by my commode. I really need a new travel agent.

Lets’ get started shall we?

How do you take care of a baby bunny when it has an almost broken neck and leg?

Singed,
Blind in Boxford

By my profession medical deduction I would answer this with a question: did you accidentally step on your pet bunny?

If the answer is yes, then I would say you are probably too stupid to care for anything beyond a cactus. It will be sad to see the bunny go, but thankfully he or she was the only casualty of your innate inability to nurture a living thing. I also highly recommending having your fallopian tubes or testicles removed immediately and be banned from adopting children or even grown adults.

What to wear over baby dresses?

Signed,
Fashionable in Foxborough

Personally, this fine doctor usually goes with something conservative, perhaps a shawl or a sweater. But I am not so sure you are interested in my fashion attire, so I will say that fashion is something personal. Experiment, try and find things that look good to you. If you are like me, most of your women’s clothing will be worn UNDER your actual clothes, so it really is a personal preference.

Does the Ouija Board Work?

Signed,
Sonja from Salem

I think we need to consult the board itself for that answer….y…o…u…a…r…e…d…u…m…b.

Perhaps there is merit to this parlor game after all.

How could Ted Bundy have a girlfriend if he hated women?

Signed,
Confused in Chi-town

I find people like Mr. Bundy to be inspiration to single lonely men who don’t think they will ever find someone. If Ted can do it, anyone can.

Have you ever fallen for someone who doesn’t speak your language?

Signed,
Love-struck in Lebanon

As a matter of fact I have. Her name was Millie and she was from France. Normally I am not attracted to goats, but there was an instant connection as we frolicked in the fields of Paris and made out under the Eiffel Tower. Alas, it was not meant to be as I cannot speak a word of the Parisian language.

How much money would you give me if I was a bum on the streets?

Signed,
Curious in Camden

Well, seeing as I am a man of stature and a noted aristocrat, I would probably kick you in the groin and tell you to get off the property while unleashing my team of trained and food-deprived pit bulls on you. I would then follow that up by firing the head of security at my estate.

I have always wondered: do mirrors have supernatural links? At times I feel I will see a spirit, especially at night.

Signed,
Spooked in Southie

I have had similar experiences. In my youth, I saw a mirror for the first time and I marveled at the sight of the ghostly image stared back at me, echoed my every move. It was frightening. Then I realized it was me. You may have guessed this was self-awareness and you would be correct. The good news is you should experience this epiphany any time now.

At those swim up bars in Mexico, do people pee in the pool? Do you?

Signed,
I.P. Daily

Research has shown that the combination of the water, the food, and the beer leads to the undeniable urge to both urinate and defecate in the pool. Be glad pee is your only problem.

(Reprinted from the former blog)

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