1472 The One-Eighty

It’s 7 in the morning. You’re on the cross town bus, crawling along through morning traffic.  You’ve arranged for a babysitter.  You’re heading to work as a register clerk at MegaMart. Your phone chirps.  It’s a text from your manager.  

She says “Hi, Lucy! We don’t need you today. Please take the day off.”

You call and explain that you’re already on the bus, that you’ve booked a babysitter and you’re due in at 8.

Boss says:  “Sorry, L, our software says it’s going to be a slow day and we can’t use you.  Do a 180 and go home.”

If you’re in New York or several other states, they owe you a half day’s pay for that.  If you try to collect it, you’ll get it. And then two weeks down the road they’ll find or create some minor infraction and fire you.

Our Lucy and her MegaMart are fictions.  But the situation is real, at least in the view of the New York State Attorney General who is looking into the practice according to the Wall Street Journal.

And he’s naming names:

Target, Gap, Abercrombie, Ann Taylor, Burlington, Crocs, Penney’s, J. Crew, L Brands, TJ Maxx/Marshall’s/Home Goods, Sears, Urban Outfitters and Williams-Sonoma, to use the Journal’s list.

The half-baked excuse for those who commented for the article?  “We’re doing our best to be fair.”  “We know it’s a problem and we’re working on it.”  “We need to stay lean and mean.”

Mean enough to disrupt lives of mostly minimum wage workers who are trying to stretch a buck to make ends meet and often failing?

Software rules. Igor the computer (all computers are named Igor) has decided the traffic count at Mega’s will be 20% below normal today.  Bad weather.  A weekday after a holiday weekend.  Some reason.

Heaven forbid they’d keep the help on duty and open enough registers to handle a smaller crowd faster than at the usual snail’s pace.  But no, they have to squeeze every crummy dollar into the top line.

The retailers have taken a page from the restaurant trade and made it worse.  Waiters, cooks, dishwashers, bartenders and hosts are often “cut” as they call it when business is slow.  They report for work and they work.  Then they’re sent home before the shift ends.  At least they get paid something.

Maybe enough to pay the babysitter.  Maybe even that and the bus fare home.

These practices view workers as machinery.  Turn ‘em on when you need them, unplug them when you don’t. We had a labor movement, once, for things like that.  And unions.  No more.  Not in retail or food service.

Can you see this practice spreading?  Be great fun in businesses like medicine or car repair or news gathering.

“Good morning, Dr. Barnard.  Your patient just died so we won’t be needing that heart transplant today. Take the day off.”

“Hi, Clarence. It’s John. Yeah… John Roberts. Listen bud, we have a low caseload today so don’t come to work, ok?”

“Good morning Mr. Holt. Please hold for Andy Lack, please…”  “Lester?  Andy here. It’s going to be a slow news day.  We won’t need you until tomorrow.”

“Good morning Mr. President.  This is Mary from HR…”

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2015

1471 Hillary for Champion

Note to readers:  I lied.  I didn’t mean to.  But plans for a weekly posting for Wessays have been postponed and the thrice weekly schedule will continue.

1471 Hillary for Champion

This stiff wants to be America’s champion? Fine. Get her a box of Wheaties and a Babe Ruth mask and let her swing her big bat all over the land.

America doesn’t need a champion any more than it needs a tea party and its young and restless.  It needs a President. And no one who has announced for a major party nomination is worthy of the title, let alone the job.  For that matter, neither are most -- if not all -- of the people “everyone expects” will eventually announce.

First let’s clear the air about Grandma Clinton and the three jobs she’s had since you first heard of her: First Lady, US Senator and Secretary of State.

The first lady does nothing.  Oh sure, Mrs. Roosevelt and Mrs. Johnson and even Mrs. Eisenhower had their little causes.  Nancy Reagan’s big job was keeping her beloved Ronnie as close as awake as he could get.  

Hillary Clinton as first lady was so busy standing by her man and trying to bigfoot congress on health care reform that she might as well have gone on vacation for eight years… which maybe she really did.

As a US Senator, she made sure the roads in Chappaqua were more or less free of potholes while campaigning on the winning premise that she wasn’t Rick Lazio.

As Secretary of State she was queen of the telephone. She operated at State like she was the psychic hotline in reverse.  Everyone heard from her.

In her favor: the Benghazi screwup was the fault of the Republican-dominated congress which cut the security budget.  Yeah, yeah, lives were lost.  But lives are being lost every hour of every day… many of them in wars she supports.  THAT’s a problem, not a handful of people in a Libyan hick town.

America is its own champion.  If we weren’t, there are always Serena Williams, Muhammad Ali, until recently the Atlanta Braves, the Pittsburgh Steelers, whoever won the most recent national spelling bee and Gene Autry's horse.

We need someone who can untie or cut the knot that congress has become.   Someone who can help close the wealth gap without taxing everyone else out of existence… get our troops back home from at least some of the wars we’re fighting… ferret out bad cops and reward good ones.  Ferret out bad teachers and reward good ones.  End the freeloading charter school drain on public education funding.

It can’t be that difficult once he or she disembowels the dummies who are trying to disembowel the rest of us.

Hillary combines all of the vices of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton and the virtues of neither.

Not to mention she’s running a close second to Nancy Grace and may soon overtake her as most obnoxious person on the planet.

And send your contributions to Wheaties for Hillary.org.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2015

1470 Downsizing

Time to cut back a bit.  This blog has been running three times a week since the fall of 2005 and its radio equivalent since 2000.  That’s about 2,000 different Wessays™ in 15 years.

It’s time to find new ways to get into trouble, anger people and remain a Certified General Nuisance.

So starting next Thursday you’ll see one of these each Thursday before noon eastern time.

If the Google analytics department to be believed, the number of people stopping at this site has ballooned considerably over time and I’m grateful for that.

If I can make you think or make you laugh or -- better yet -- both, I am grateful to you and satisfied.

When I left Bloomberg in the late 2000s, I thought I had a book deal.  The goal was to write 1,000 of these posts and put the least worst 100 or 150 between covers.  The deal fell through, but doing this “work” had become a bad habit, so I continued.

I just kept writing.  And writing. And writing.  Now, a little less.

Talk show godfather Barry Gray once wrote a daily column for the New York Post back when it was respectable.  But he gave it up when he decided “no one has something to say five days a week.”

Giving it up feels wrong.  Cutting it down doesn’t feel right, but it feels less wrong.

Shrapnel:

--Rand Paul and Ted Cruz are just like the traveling driveway paving scammers.  Make promises, take the money. And like the fake pavers, they can’t and/or don’t deliver what they promise.

Grapeshot:

-Note to Rand Paul: stop spinning the wheel, pick some positions and stick to them.

-Note to Ted Cruz: Fulgencio Batista called and asked you to come back.

-Other note to Ted Cruz: Stephen Harper called and asked you to honor Batista’s invitation.

-Note to that pizza joint that won’t cater gay wedding receptions: That 800-grand in crowd funding is ordinary income and has to be reported to the IRS.

-Not that they deserve one, but is there a humane way to curb the enthusiasm of the Westboro Baptist Church’s smear campaign against gays and Jews?

-Note to Netanyahu: Are you familiar with the old Yiddish expression “you’re too smart for your own good?”

-Note to President Obama: Are you familiar with the old Yiddish expression “you’re too smart for your own good?”

-Note to Hillary Clinton: You may be familiar with the old Yiddish expression “you’re too smart for your own good,” but no worries… it doesn’t apply to you.

-Note to Linc Chafee if you’re serious about running for president, get a new hair stylist, one that doesn’t make you look like Howdy Doody.

-Note to Bob Schieffer: No no no… don’t retire!

-Note to Brian Williams:  And stay out!

And Finally:  An actual spam email promoting a scam that’s supposed to save you from scammers.  You can’t make this stuff up.... and you’d best not believe a word of it when you read this:

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) is compensating all the scam victims and your email address was found in the scam victim's list. This Western Union office has been fully mandated by the IMF to transfer your compensation to you via Western Union® Money Transfer.

However, we have concluded to affect your own payment through Western Union® Money Transfer, $5,000 twice daily until the total sum of $1.800.000 Million is completely transferred to you. We can not be able to send the payment with your email address alone, thereby we need your information as to where we will be sending the funds, such as; Receiver’s name:................... (Your Full Name) Address:......................Country:..................& Phone number:...................

Reply back on (officemailwork1988@gmail.com ) with your full information. Note that your payment files will be returned to the IMF within 72 hours if we did not hear from you, this was the instruction given to us by the IMF. We will start the transfer as soon as we received your information.

Thanks,

Mr.CHRIS VIN LEE

Director Western Union®

Tel; +229-9977-9742

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2015

1469 What About the Victims?

True crime stories dominate the tabloids and the cheap- end television channels.  But the murder rate has fallen in most of the country for most of the last decade or so.  It’ll never fall to zero or anything close. So, fear not.  There’ll be plenty of new stories to go around.

Lately, there has been a lot of concern about the victims, and rightly so.  But we’ve gotten into the habit of nearly deifying many of them.

And this is natural.  We’re taught from childhood “don’t speak ill of the dead.”  And those are words to live by most of the time.

But there’s a difference between not speaking ill of someone and hoisting him onto a pedestal.

You never hear or read in obituaries that say “...he was a nice guy, got along with his neighbors, never had a knock-down-drag-out with his wife or kids.  Went to work every day.”

You never hear “...she was a good kid.  Got pretty good grades in school, took care of her little brother and worked the cash register at the dollar store after school.”

Not every murder victim

--lit up the room.

--made everyone laugh.

--cheered up the room.

--had his or her “whole future in front of him or her.”

-- wasn’t allowed to live long enough to make the wonderful contributions to society we could tell were coming.

Why do we do this?  

A lot of reasons.  We are sad and recalling highlights or potential highlights helps us in our sadness.

We make more of lost people (and pets and objects) to heighten our sense of loss or to dull it.

Sometime in the early 1950s the occasional artist and renowned comedian Salvador Dali opined that every dead person becomes 10-thousand times greater than he was in life.  

The part that the true crime programs and the tabloids don’t get is that the lost lives count.  Not because “she was so bubbly” or “he read stories to old people with bad eyesight,” but simply because he or she was. At root, we’re all ordinary and no one has to go to great lengths to prove otherwise.

Shrapnel:

--This is one of those things you can’t make up. Ashley King of New Berlin, Illinois is getting married. Her fiance is Joel Burger.  Maybe they’ll name their first kid Whopper.

--Final Four Follies followup: First in-vincible Kentucky gets vinced. Then Duke dukes Wisconsin.  Mitt Romney was one of the one percent of bracket filler-outers who got it 100% right; 52% got it mostly right; 47% cheated.

--A new company, Elio Motors of Phoenix has sold 40-thousand cars that don’t exist.  More accurately, 40-thousand people paid between $100 and $1,000 for placement on a waiting list.  The car, if it’s ever built, will seat two, have three wheels instead of four and supposedly get more than 80 miles per gallon from a standard lawnmower-esque engine.  Cost: seven grand.

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2015

1468 Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?

It’s only a matter of time before the cell phone “ring tones” include the sound of an AK 47 or an Uzi. Or at least the sound of a Colt .45.

They call the sounds that cell phones make “ringtones.” Phones don’t actually RING anymore. Not even real phones attached to real land lines. Such as there are left of them.

So, they make sounds and most of the sounds are inoffensive, and they call them tones.

Most cell phones don’t make sounds similar to weapons. Yet. They are much deadlier. They play imbecile-grin versions of classic and classical melodies. “Moonlight Sonata” is a current favorite. For the devout, there’s always “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring.” And for the frolickers (does anyone really FROLIC?), there’s always a snappy Latin favorite like “La Cucaracha” or maybe “Brazil.”

Notice they use older melodies. This is largely because newer songs don’t HAVE melodies, any more than newer telephones have rings.

Soon people will tire of stupid melodies played stupidly, and that’s when you can expect the sounds of weaponry.

Beside the AK47 and the Uzi, we’re likely to get the sounds of a suicide bomb, downloaded live from Iraq, Afghanistan or anywhere else America may be not minding its own business on any given day.

For the traditionalists, there are the authentic sounds of an American Revolution era blunderbuss. (Remember, back in those days, almost no one owned a gun, except in times of war, and one of those Uzis could have changed the course of the war if it had been on the side of the Redcoats. Even when militias were granted the right to bear arms, most didn’t. Gun nuttiness is a 20th Century phenom.)

After the upcoming Sounds of Mass Destruction, we may expect to hear telephones imitate the sounds of traffic, or the sounds of typewriters or adding machines. Or pinball machines. Or windup toys. Or the hooves of horses. Or windup alarm clocks. Or AM radio.

All kinds of stuff you don’t hear anymore, or that several generations have NEVER heard.

Construction noises are waiting in the wings.

Jackhammers. Cement mixers. Cranes.  Steam shovels.

And let’s not forget transportation sounds: garbage trucks backing up or ingesting trash, for example. Steam engines. Ambulances. Fire trucks. Police cars.

Subway cars.  The sound of the D Train pulling into 59th St.

Or cows, sheep, goats and barking dogs. Or factory sounds: the five o’clock whistle. The Ford production line. Or if you’re a real nostalgia fan the Pontiac production line.

Or office sounds – like paper jamming in a printer. Or lechers getting slapped in the break room.

Perhaps even a shredder shredding e-mails.

Kitchen sounds, maybe. A tea kettle, boiling water.

All of these are better than electronic rendition of “The Anvil Chorus” or Beethoven’s Fifth.

But no silly synthesized sound is better at signaling an incoming call than a plain old telephone ring.

Grapeshot:

-Go Badgers!

-RIP Victor Gotbaum, 93, the labor leader who helped pull New York back from the edge of bankruptcy.

I'm Wes Richards, my opinions are my own, but you're welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2015

1467 More On Indiana and Arkansas

They don’t call it fly-over country for nothing.  But there’s a little more reason to land in Indianapolis or Little Rock now.

The laws allowing businesses to not serve gays have gone from wrongheaded and unnecessary to just plain unnecessary.   Both states have proposed changes that more closely parallel the federal law.  So why bother?

Why?  Because the genius governors of both states had to do something to take the heat off.  

Look at the great forces of social liberalism which pounded them.  The labor-friendly folks at Wal-mart. The collectivists at General Electric. The inclusion-mad people at NASCAR.  The NCAA. Angie’s List.

In reality, these are outfits with enormous clout.  And not one of them is known as a participant let alone pioneer in diversity.  But all are economic powers in either one or both states.

Money talks. The magic of the market!

But the state laws now are about the same as the federal statute that’s been on the books since the Clinton administration.  That is to say it says “your religion, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation are your business and discrimination is naughty.”

Legislators in both states had knuckled under pressure from the religious right that wants every gay to be scared straight.  Now, they paint themselves as paragons and leaders in diversity, tolerance and good will.

Useless and evil originally. Now, just useless.

But they’re going to have to scrap those checklists.  You know, the ones that helped you certify that you were white and straight, spoke English like a native.  

Goody. You no longer have to earn the right to buy pizza for your wedding reception from The Guardians of The Straight and Narrow.

(Who would make pizza the main course at a wedding reception?  Oh, wait.  It’s Indiana.)

Scholars at Little Rock University were already developing the customer qualification list.  And word was spreading fast.  Roses at the wedding? Yes. Pansies at the wedding? No. Also no: lavender tuxedos for the groomsmen.  

So we can all breathe a sigh of relief.  Once again the wise leaders in two states of dubious consequence have learned to keep their bigotry to themselves.

Shrapnel:

--This post is living dangerously.  First, it disses the kind of people who show their disagreement by putting snakes in one’s mailbox.  Second because people who read this blog generally don’t like followups… although the latter keep their snakes to themselves.

Grapeshot:  

-The New York Times plans to publish one-sentence news stories and might be wise to find and hire some old hands from the Associated Press broadcast desk which used to pump those out at a rate of four an hour for radio and TV stations that wanted a quick read for its listeners and viewers, an art that’s not often practiced these days.

-The sentence above runs 63 words and could easily be broken into several sentences which would be easier to understand.

--The target audience for the singlesentence stories is wearers of the Apple Watch and will be hardtoread no matter the sentence structure.

I’m Wes Richards.  My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2015

1466 Let's Go Sailing

(MOOTE POINTE, NY) -- At last, some sense from the New York State Legislature, or at least its leadership. It’s approved a budget proposal. And not only was it on time, but it takes a giant step toward reducing taxes.

If you buy a yacht here in Moote Pointe, you will have to pay the sales tax only on the first $230,000.  That’s a mere $19,837.50 at the current 8.625%.  The rate’s a little lower in Westchester and a little higher in New York City.  But with a bargain like this, who’s counting?

The yacht industry (I’ll bet you didn’t know there’s a yacht industry) is cheering this as a great step toward boosting employment and the economy.  Oh, sure. You can see the “now hiring” signs popping up at every marina in the state.  You can hear the production lines revving up at all the manufacturers.

The proposed budget line doesn’t quite define “yacht.”  But if you have to ask, you can’t afford one.

The Wessays™ Research Team did a little … um … research.  What it found was that most dealerships in the Metropolitan Moote Pointe area do not post prices on the internet and if visited are as foggy about them as an August morning at the beach.

Boats -- especially big ones -- have window stickers like cars at a dealership.  And like the car stickers, these mean little.  But the negotiations are much more genteel.  After all, we’re talking boats as big -- and as expensive -- as houses.

But while few dealers list prices, some actually do.  And the Team found prices from the mid five figures to the low sevens.  Depends on whether the boats are new or used, how big, how luxurious and how seaworthy.

If you see one advertised as being agreeable to “your crew” you’d better have a crew if you intend to buy it. You go for something 70 feet long that sleeps ten, you aren’t going to run it yourself, chances are.

But if they can cap the sales tax on boats, why not cap the transfer tax on houses?  The average price of a single family home in Moote Pointe is $465,000. The transfer tax is one percent.

If they capped the taxable amount at $230,000, they’d really create some action… and some jobs.

Shrapnel (Back Home Again in Indiana Edition):

--Time to test the new freedom of religion law in Indiana.  The governor says it’s not a license to discriminate.  Let’s send a few good friends to Terre Haute, tell them to walk into an eatery holding hands and see if they get seated.  

--Even the fossils at the NCAA don’t like the law.  They took time out from their main job, crippling division one athletic teams to say so.  “Not conducive to the goals of higher education,” is more or less how they put it.

--Even the ultra conservatives at Indianapolis-headquartered Angie’s List don’t like it.  They’ve halted plans to expand their headquarters there.  Maybe they’ll even create a new category “states in which to not live.”

I’m Wes Richards. My opinions are my own but you’re welcome to them. ®

Please address comments to wesrichards@gmail.com

© WJR 2015