Category: Rants

In which I go off on the stupidity of politics, politicians, world affairs, religion, and whatever else I deem to be screwed up.

Oh Donny Boy, Oh Donny Boy, Show Me the Money!

Posted on by chappyshi

From this article in the Washington Post dated May 24, 2019:

“In all, American families will pay an additional $767 a year for everyday items following the latest round of tariffs, according to a report by the Trade Partnership, a Washington-based research and consulting firm. If the Trump administration extends that tax to all remaining Chinese imports, that figure could go up to about $2,389 a year for the average household.”J.C. Penney and Kohl’s have failed their most loyal customers: Middle-aged moms

we can see the potential affects of Trump’s trade war on us all. Trump punishes China and I see a loss of nearly $2400 a year? Trump offers up $27 billion dollars in relief to farmers and U.S. Agricultural Secretary Sonny Perdue, no conflict of interest there, says:

“The package we’re announcing today ensures that farmers do not bear the brunt of unfair retaliatory tariffs imposed by China and other trading partners,”Trade impasse: Trump pledges $16B to farmers; markets slump

The latest bailout comes atop $11 billion in aid Trump provided farmers last year.  And Donny boy says:

“We will ensure our farmers get the relief they need and very, very quickly,”Trade impasse: Trump pledges $16B to farmers; markets slump

How about showing the rest of us the money Mr. President?

Got Gloves or Mittens?

Posted on by chappyshi

I saw an advertisement for those packages that you rip open to expose the interior to air so it heats up to warm your hands or other body parts as desired.  Really?

HOTHANDS

The FAQs say the innards are all natural and biodegradable.  I don’t know about the packaging but I am going to say it probably isn’t readily biodegradable.  Even if it is, what the hell ever happened to gloves and mittens?

Letter to My Virginia Legislators

Posted on by chappyshi

Legislation, proposed by Virginia’s right-wing nut bag governor and passed by Virginia’s apparently right-wing nut bag Assembly, that includes removing our 17.5% gas tax, not changed for 25 years, and replacing it with a 0.8% sales tax increase makes no sense to me, probably because I am not a right-wing nut bag.  This is just redistribution of wealth to the wealthy and cannot help with Virginia’s transportation infrastructure problems nor can it help to reduce consumption of gas or vehicle created pollutants.

Read more here about the current state of the legislation:

Va. lawmakers give McDonnell partial win on transportation at session midpoint

Below is my letter to my representatives asking them please to not let this legislation pass:

Please don’t let this legislation pass.  I think about all the poor people who ride buses because they can’t afford cars.  Their environmental and consumptive impact is minimal thereby reducing long term costs to our environment and infrastructure.  They are the least likely to benefit from no gas tax and most likely to be negatively impacted by an increase in the sales tax.

On the flip side, those in the upper middle class and higher who can afford to and are more likely to buy and drive unneeded gas hogs including SUV’s and sports cars will certainly benefit from no gas tax.  They will then contribute less to minimizing the economic impact of pollutant spewing gas hogs and the degradation of our transportation infrastructure.  Lastly, since they have more disposable income, the impact of a 0.8% increase in the sales taxes is much less likely to impact their personal finances.

Withering Heights

Posted on by chappyshi

It was in the high 70’s today in Northern Virginia…March 13.  Give me a break.  If these temperatures continue into the summer we are in for a scorcher.  I for one am not looking forward to it.  I just got home at 2230 and it is 80 in my apartment.  I have only had the heat on for two days out of the whole winter.  I should have my AC on!

Speaking of getting home from work….  It was another day at the mercy of the customer who is heedless of the support staff’s personal obligations and lifestyle.   Accordingly, my day went from a predictable 8 hours to 11.5.  I just love leaving the office at  2130 w/o having had dinner or a significant break all day.  I guess that is the price I pay for having a job in a society where the top 1% beats the rest of us into the ground and tells us we should be happy.

To cap it off, we fight hideous traffic in our commute.  If you try to work a bit of flex time, you have to fight the highway construction in the area.  Flex time in this area means leaving for work no earlier than 0900 and going home before 2230 or after 1930.  But no matter how many lanes the state adds to the highway, there is always some bottleneck that makes all the expansion basically worthless.

To make things even worse,  most of the highway work around here is for new toll roads along side the normal  byways.  As such, the 1% can pay their way away from the madding crowd and theoretically avoid the traffic jams.  Meanwhile Juan, the landscape engineer and his household maintenance technician wife. Juanita, along with the rest of us can fight the traffic jams.

Well, it is after 2300  and time  for me to finish my after work beer and get some dinner!  Midnight snacks were never this good!

Life Is a Fist Up the Ass

Posted on by chappyshi

My new apartment management company (at least the 3d since I have been here for six years) decided they needed to issue new parking passes.  This was  because, in this advanced computerized day and age, the new company couldn’t import the previous company’s records into their database.  And in this advanced age they only issue the permits that you have to hang from your mirror.  This is an impediment to my site picture as far as I am concerned.  It is even worse on my motorcycle because I really have no secure place to hang it and riding with it hanging from my rear view mirror is just not an option.

Anyhow, to get the permit, I had to provide a copy of my  vehicle registration.  Well  I re-register as required every two years but I don’t know what the hell I do with the registration cards.  Oddly, I found the one for my car in my glove compartment but the one for my motorcycle was  nowhere to be found.  So I thought, “Cool, I have one of the registration cards.”

Well, I left that one in my car and down the line cleaned out my car and added whatever paper products to my recycling and took that to the recycling center.  Next thing you know I couldn’t find my car registration.  Crunch time…I had to get the stickers by 9/1.   So, on the last day of the month, bad time to be at the DMV, I drop in at 1400 or so.  Thankfully the line was moving well.  I got a bit freaked out when the woman who was setting us up w/ paperwork and such gave me some forms that asked for information I did not have with me.  All I wanted to get was reprints of my vehicle registration cards….  So I filled out as much of the paperwork as I could and  waited for my number.

When my number came up, I went up to the counter and was pleasantly surprised to find that my request, after I explained what it was, was easily and quickly fulfilled.  I paid 2$ each for the reprints and marched right out of that place.

It was not much later that  afternoon when I got myself ensconced in a chair in the rental office to get my vehicle parking permits.  I handed my paperwork over to the clerk who was inputting my vehicle information when she stopped to ask me if I could have the same license plate for both my car  and motorcycle.  I said, “No, of course not” and looked at the printouts of the registration only to find that the DMV clerk printed out two copies of my car registration and none of my motorcycle registration.  The rental management company, thankfully, and aware of the folly of trying to hang vehicle parking permits from motorcycles, has  said that they will not be towing motorcycles.

So where is the fist up the ass?  I don’t know but I hope it isn’t near me.  I just want to say that the whole process felt like getting one.  And then this evening when emptying my grocery bag, the environmentally considerate one, I found my car registration car.  Fistulator, eh?

Background Investigation Shenanigans

Posted on by chappyshi

In the process of getting a  contract job and hopefully getting hired on to the company I am sub-contracted to I have had to go through four background investigations including one for a Public Trust clearance.  The first investigation was to get the job offer from the contractor.  The second was for the clearance.  The clearance, even as low as it is, required 15+ pages of information to be filled out.  You would think by the time I had done that, they would have had enough information and done enough investigating.

Yet when I applied for the full-time position, I had to fill out more paperwork for background investigation three.  Then, after accepting the job offer, the company had to do another background investigation.  Who is paying for all this BI BS?  To cap it off, the fourth investigating agency today asked me to provide a W-2 for the staffing agency I am currently working for…wait for it…at the company that wants to hire me?  Apparently they cannot verify that I actually work for for the staffing agency….

Quiet Walk in the Park? Not!

Posted on by chappyshi

I headed out today for a walk on the Occoquan Trail which runs 17 miles from Bull Run Regional Park to Fountainhead Regional Park along Bull Run Creek.  The trail meanders along the creek and up into the hills and creek overlooks.  I figured it would be messy since we had a six inch dump of wet snow a couple of weeks ago and temps today were in the low fifties.  I didn’t expect to see much in the way of critters.

It was muddy as hell in many spots making for slippery, sloppy conditions.  But I had the good fortune to meet a couple at the top of a hill, as I was breathing heavily from the ascend, who had just seen a hawk, Bluebirds, a Downy woodpecker and, they said, a Red Headed woodpecker.  I stopped to pull out my binos and caught all the aforementioned birds less the hawk.

I pondered the likelihood of seeing a Red Headed woodpecker at the time and a bit later after checking my bird book realized that the woodpecker was really a Red-breasted which are much more common in my area.  The Bluebirds were brilliant.  I have seen them before later on in the season when their colors are not so vibrant.  I followed a flock of them for awhile and everyone I saw had very pronounced blue on the back and wings as well as pronounced orange on the breast.  Beautiful birds!  I also saw a Tufted Titmouse.  To cap it off, I heard either one rapidly moving Bard owl or two of them calling out to each other.

There was  a downside to the whole venture unfortunately.  As soon as I got on the trail I heard and saw 4-wheelers on the other side of the creek.  One was stuck revving its annoying engine trying to get out while a mud-splattered friend was trying to push.  Never in the three or four years I have been hiking on this trail have I encountered 4-wheelers.  They were not on my side of the creek in the park but they were certainly annoying.  I saw at least four 4-wheelers and one dirt bike and heard them and smelled the exhaust for most of the six mile hike I took.

I could see the trails they had blazed including areas where they went in and out of the creek to the islands and up and down the embankments.  The noise and smell was annoying enough but when I think  about the potential erosion and degradation of the flood plain and all the crap that will flow down the creek to the reservoir and eventually to the Chesapeake Bay I just cringe.  I also have two friends who live on that side of the creek who must hate the noise of these off road vehicles.

It is a shame that the northern side, the Fairfax County side, is protected as parkland but the Prince William County side to the south is wide open to such abuse and devastation.

Can’t Get Enough Air

Posted on by chappyshi

Yesterday I woke in the wee hours just baking in bed.  I threw my comforter off  and managed to get back to sleep.  It was still warm when I got up.   Thermostat read 72.5 degrees.  Now, please understand that I set my thermostat at 63 degrees most of the time during the winter months.  I don’t mind the cold, save some money, and save the environment.  It was going to be a warm day for February so I opened up the sliding glass doors in my bedroom and dining area.  Nonetheless the temperature stayed at 72 degrees.

Since I have moved into my new smaller apartment, I have found that the doing laundry, particularly the drying aspect, raises the temperature in my apartment 3 to 4 degrees.  So I do laundry on weekend mornings to warm up my apartment rather than turn the heat up to 68 degrees, which is my weekend norm if I plan to be in house most of the day.  I had to do some laundry so the temperature crept up to about 75.  I was schvitzing.

The temperature had started to go back down a bit, not lower than 72 degrees though, by the time I headed out with my brother to get some growlers and spring rolls as our contribution toward the Super Bowl (can I say that?  Please don’t sue me) festivities.  I closed the apartment up at that time, eight hours after I had opened up the doors.

I watched the first half of the game at my sister’s house and then came home to watch the second half.  By then the temperature had gone back up a couple of degrees.  I send off a scathing rant to maintenance and left another on the apartment manager’s voice mail  After the game I was pretty tired so I hit the fartsac without paying too much attention to the temperature.  However, I woke up once again schvitzing in my flannel sheets.  When I got up, the temperature was at a steamy 76 degrees.

While I was working today, I thought that I must have sounded odd to the apartment maintenance staff and office personnel but when I got home, the temperature in my apartment was 80 degrees!  I immediately headed off to the rental office.  I figured, since I could  actually feel the warmth in spots on my tile floors in the bathroom and kitchen, that the maintenance office, which is below me and is a story for another time, had the heat maxxed out and suggested that to the manager.  They said they would check into but didn’t really seem to understand how screwed up the situation was.

Help me, I’m melting!

Trying to Get Air…and I Am Not Skiing

Posted on by chappyshi

Looking at my left front tire after coming out of the grocery store today, I thought it was looking pretty low on air.  I figured I had better get some air in it before I went home.   I stopped at this one place I go to where you dial up the tire pressure on the pump, add air to your tire, and it beeps when your desired pressure has been reached.

There were two idiots in front of me trying to get air.  The first car took one kid with pants falling off his ass and an aging dude in white hair six minutes to fill up one tire on a Subaru wagon.  Considering it was a Subaru and all that I am glad they didn’t use a person powered bike pump to fill up the tire.   Good for the environment and all that…

The next airhead was in a van, skinny and older, wearing odd shoes and pants rolled up at the ankles.  He seemed to have some issues bending down to remove the caps from the tire valve.   He only did the left front and right rear tires for some odd reason and used a tire pressure gauge, despite the pressure reading functionality built into the pump, for the front tire but not the rear.  It took him about five minutes to accomplish this.

When it was at last my turn to get air, I topped off all four of my tires in less than two minutes.  Thankfully, the tire that I thought was inordinately low, was only down a pound or so.    In the meantime, two cars had backed up behind me.  I have never seen lines to get air except at ski areas.  Bottom line though, how hard is it to put air in your tires?