The Cukerbit Sedan--Now With Airbags

I’ve had a reader request! I find this amazing because, to be honest, I didn’t think that anyone other than my wife and my mother-in-law was paying attention to my ramblings. My wife must read me because of some very, very, very fine print I put in our wedding vows. (She didn’t see it until I pulled out the microscope and said “See… that’s not a dot above the ‘i’.”) As for my mother-in-law…. Well, she’s a saint who is occasionally is tempted by the dark side.

Obviously, someone down Preskit way was given a choice of eating Koolickles or reading me, and they’ve made a poor decision. Trust me, Koolickles are only almost as bad as they sound.

What? You people have never heard of Koolickles? Oh… yeah… that’s right… you are reading this which means that you are literate which means that you can’t be from the South and therefore you’ve never heard of Koolickles.

Time for a little digression into indigestion...

One of the steps that goes into making pickles involves soaking cucumbers in a brine. This can be either a salt brine or a sugar brine. It really doesn’t matter as long as the brine will take a perfectly delectable cucumber and render it so horrid that even the lowliest bacterium will find it inedible.

Leave it to our countrymen in the South to take this oh-so-ugsome process and turn it into something truly icky... like brining pickles in Kool-Aid. (I understand that cherry is one of the favored flavors.) These are the same people, by the way, who think that George Bush should have been elected to a third term and who can’t understand why the American auto industry is in trouble.

Mmmm… doesn’t this look yummy….
http://grannygeek.us/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/kool-aid-pickles.jpg

I digress… only to regress into something less appetizing… the economy. Seems like I just mentioned the auto industry, and I’m sorry folks, but I’ve just got to blast off about this one. Let’s look at the situation: we’ve got a bunch of overpaid people making really crappy products and the economy has tanked. Without any discretionary income to throw around, the Average Joe decides not to shell out the bucks for a crappy product. Assuming he buys a product at all, he goes across the street and buys a good product made by people who are only marginally well paid. This happens over and over again. Eventually, the companies making the crappy product can’t pay their high labor costs and go into the toilet.

Simply put, this is how the market economy works, right? The companies making bad choices eventually lose, and the companies making good choices win. This is the system that we Americans loved… as long as we could sit on our fat asses and roll in the money. But now that things aren’t going so well, everybody wants Uncle Sam to bail out the Big Three Bad Companies.

The hypocrisy of it all turns my stomach, but I understand the implications. If the Big 3 go down, they’ll pull down all the companies that supply them, and tens of thousands of people will lose their jobs and the economy will melt down into a smoldering lump. This is a horrible situation and I think we should stop it, but I don’t think that we should provide subsidies so that bad companies can continue to make bad decisions. That’s just dumb. But then again, this is America, and if anyone challenges us to be dumb we say “Pass me the Koolickes and let me at it!”

My aforementioned reader asked what I think of our President-Elect. If you look at our country and its troubles and boil it all down, what we need in a leader becomes clear. We need a hero. We need someone who’s smarter than us. We need someone who’s stronger than us. We need someone who’ll make the really tough decisions that we can’t or won’t make for ourselves, and someone who will make them well. We need someone who will lead us to do what we should instead of let us do what we want.

I think Barack can take us where we need to be, but sadly, I don’t think we’ll give him a chance. It’s taken us decades to get this country into the mess it’s in now, and all Barack can do in four years is start to turn things around. I don’t think we’re a good enough people to stick with him through one term, much less another election cycle. Barack can do it, but we can’t.

Does this thing still work?

Yeah, yeah, yeah… I know. Over a year has slipped away since I last posted. Instead of offering lame excuses, I’ll tell the truth…. 1) I’ve been lazy, 2) I was busy playing Scrabble and 3.) I’ve been lazy.

It’s been quite a year though…

In our lovely Alaska town, Suburban Blight, the price of gasoline is almost half of what it was earlier this year. Given the state of our economy, this is no big surprise. (If you want insightful writing on the economy, check out my wife’s blog, www.omegamom.com. If not, read on.) But still… petrol has dropped two bucks a gallon! Wow. To me, this has raised a big red flag that everyone else seems to have missed.

The banks are slurping up a bailout, and the American automakers are begging one. Wall Street is a mess—even Walmart stock is behaving poorly. The housing market is gone. G-O-N-E gawwwnnnnn. But petroleum is off by half and the oil companies are…

Strangely quiet. The financial world has found the proverbial handbasket of hell, and the oil comps are silent. And no one seems to be wondering why? Why aren’t they whining? Why aren’t they pissing? Moaning? Bellyaching?

Simple, they’ve been screwing us for years, and they know if they pitch a fuss right now, we might just notice that they are still making money hand over fist.

But then again, we might not. This is America, after all. This is the country that elected George Bush twice and destroyed another country for no good reason at all. This is the land where millions of people purchased homes they couldn’t afford with credit they didn’t have. This is the country that ignored global warming until we couldn’t afford to pay the air conditioning bill any longer. Face it, we aren’t all that bright.

So if the oil companies want to continue putting the squeeze on us while the rest of the economy goes south, the only response I can muster is… well… fuck us. We've got it coming.