Join The Club

I've often thought that bringing up kids was the ultimate opportunity for the exercise of simple common sense. So much of what is wrong with kids (especially other people's kids, you understand) comes down to the feckless stupidity and lack of discipline of their parents; surely all you have to do is play the game straight and everything will come out right. Right?

Well, it's now time for Bison Daughter's twelfth birthday, and the thing she wants most is a phone. Not really to talk to anyone, just for the texting. All her friends have phones, and they sit there on the school bus, texting each other. There's absolutely no point to it, of course. They have nothing to say, and I cannot see the point in expending $150 on a phone and a further $20-40 a month on a plan simply so that Bison Daughter can recede into a sad world of "CU L8R" or whatever meaningless drivel it is that passes between preteen girls as an alternative to actual conversation.

It's a no-brainer really. I mean, I didn't get a mobile phone until I got a sales job at the age of twenty four, and that was a car phone which had some apparatus the size of a four-slot toaster in the trunk, so it wasn't really "mobile" in that sense. Since when did it become an imperative that all our offspring have a mobile phone? Since phone companies figured out that they could sell them ringtones, wallpaper and no end of expensive and worthless downloads, that's when.

The problem is that, shite and worthless though the phone-text traffic is, that's the only means of communication kids seem to have now. They don't talk to each other - I don't believe most of them could hold a conversation if their phone depended on it - so if you're not part of the texting network then you're likely an outcast. No parent wants their kid to be left out; teenage girls have cruelty and exclusion down to an art form - I think it gives them something to do in between pulling the wings off insects and torturing small mammals - and being different is just an invitation to exclusion.

So much as I relish the thought of knocking down the "all my friends have one" argument with some tried and tested parental reasoning like "well, if all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?" I know that at some point, eventually, I'm going to break down and get my kid a phone too. Which is a sad indictment of the society in which we live, isn't it? Parents go off to work, and spend way too many hours there, trying to make enough money to pay all the bills, including the mobile phone, while their kids sit around like little vegetables, only able to communicate at all by typing partial words and sub-sentences into their little reality-avoidance machines.

If we hadn't persuaded ourselves that we needed all this shit in the first place we could work less and spend more time with the people we purported to love. Applying the simple principles of common sense to raising them, so they didn't grow up to be dysfunctional freaks with social alienation disorders and an inability to relate to other humans, or cope with delayed gratification. Yeah right. LOL to that.


Copyright © 2010 Edward Bison

Party Time!

There appears to be a cycle that you fall into, if you're not lucky, of really shit New Years Eves. Things are OK when you're young - I clearly remember back in the day attending a festival of debauchery at our local pub with some mates, which involved fancy dress, joyfully shit music and precious little concern that none of us had yet attained the legal drinking age. I remember subsequent events that involved a touching act of faith by one friend who let me crash in his parents' bed, apparently unconcerned that I might fill it with diced carrot, or urine (which I did not), and sundry acts of lust carried out on someone's lounge carpet. Yes, those were the days - the parties were long and the hangovers short.

Fast forward a few years and for some reason everyone grew up and became sensible. Sure, people still had parties, but they were the kind of party where people played Pictionary, and we weren't invited in any case, possibly because I'm shit at Pictionary, but more likely because no-one wanted their lounge carpet defiled after midnight.

There were still parties at pubs and clubs, and for a few quid, or dollars, you could go along, drink crap beer to excess with people you'd never met before and end up wondering why hangovers, like hemorrhoids or arthritis, never bother you until you get older. But if you don't go you end up at home watching the most utterly fucking shite television in the history of the known universe. Inane and witless presenters fill the air with drivel until what seems like a hundred thousand morons count backwards from twenty and the new year is ushered in, pretty much like the old one, i.e. full of morons.

For that reason I have to admit I've turned in early a couple of times over the years, but recently we've fallen in with a bad crowd of people in our neighborhood who know how to see in the New Year in style. The event always involves lots of well-aged Scotch, so this year I brought along some good rye whiskey, just for a change of pace. My 2009 theory was that if I drank nothing but whiskey all night I might be spared the worst of the 01/01/2010 suffering, and let me tell you that it's a great theory, if for no other reason than that it gives you an excuse to drink whiskey all night.

This year, however, the host's teenage daughter was having a party of her own downstairs, giving us all a chance to vicariously relive earlier excesses. All the attendees were considered responsible enough by their parents either to drink sensibly, or to refrain from drinking, which made it that much more entertaining when the non-drinking girl whose over-protective mother had made a special point of showing up to have a few words and check out the party, ended up draped around the toilet bowl, yurking her champagne-and-cake mixture into the depths.

At least she made it to the bog, unlike the boy who yakked up some orange regurgitate in one of the bedrooms. There was beer pong, but not much else, and I have to say that I was pretty disappointed in the youth of today - if you're drunk enough to vomit orange in a stranger's house you ought to be drunk enough to sing, dance, do the conga, attempt to shag someone or stagger out into the street and throw a bottle at a passing car. They just sat around and did nothing. Generation Y, or whatever they're called, can't even figure out how to have a good time unless someone scripts it for them and hand-holds them through it.

There was one blonde girl, all of eighteen, with the kind of wonderful boobs that make you question how any bloke could seriously bear to be gay, and no-one was on top of her under a pile of coats at any point during the evening. You could suggest that this was because of her virtue, or the restraint shown by the fine youth of St.Louis, but frankly that's just bollocks. Restraint be buggered - if you're going to chunder fluorescently in someone's bed, at least make the drunkenness worth your while.

In the end I was just happy to be spared a Pictionary marathon, watching Dick Clark's prune-like visage, an evening with Ryan Seacrest (Jesus!) or an early night like a sad wanker. I also decided that rye whiskey is an exceptionally smooth way to drink through an evening and that I still like big eighteen year-old boobs. But then again, who doesn't?


Copyright © 2010 Edward Bison

It's Airline Rules Silly Season Again...

I read with dismay the details of the latest attempt by a self-proclaimed al-Quaida terrorist to bring down a US-bound airliner. My dismay does not arise, however, from the fear that I will become the victim of another such atrocity, but from the sure and certain knowledge that this incident will precipitate another round of bizarre, pointless and irritating "additional security measures" from the brainless pricks at the TSA and the airlines.

This Nigerian wanker had not even been charged and there were already reports of important new measures being introduced to ensure our greater security in the air, among them:

• Passengers to be confined to their seats for an hour prior to landing.
  
• Passengers to be forbidden from having anything on their laps (such as, for instance, a laptop)
  
• Passengers to be discouraged from bringing on any carry-on bags
  
• Passengers to be prevented from accessing their carry-on bags during the flight
  

Now I would like to point out that the felon in this case had a bomb strapped to his leg, which he apparently attempted to detonate when the plane was coming in to land. It wasn't in his carry-on, or on his lap. He didn't get up and get it out of his bag - it was strapped to his fucking leg from the moment he got on the plane. The salient point here is that someone managed to get explosives through security because security is designed not to detect explosives but to prevent you from taking nail clippers, shampoo or bottles of water onto the flight.

Yeah, if Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had attempted to smuggle any shaving cream onto the plane then he'd have been in big shit, but it was only explosives, so he was OK.

So yet again the TSA, in a belated attempt to be seen to be doing something (anything) responds to a problem with a set of entirely unrelated measures, certain that the renewed misery and inconvenience visited upon the traveling public will be interpreted as a sign of vigilance, and that no-one's complaints will even be considered because this is "an issue of airline security". In other words, a reason to suspend common sense and all join in the pathetic charade of lining up and allowing ourselves to be treated like shit.

For a start, what is the point of confining people to their seats for the last hour of the flight? Surely that just means that any future explosion will be attempted while the plane is still at 30,000ft. Do you really believe that will cause al-Quaida to think again? "Oh shit! We can't blow up any more planes because we have to sit in our seats prior to landing. Confound these infidels and their regulatory trickery!"

Did anyone bother to note that theft from checked bags in airports has reached endemic levels? Did you know that it is reported to be up 50% in 2009? It is not safe to check ANY item of value because of the hard to detect and, (thanks to their union) impossible to fire, criminals who infiltrate the ranks of baggage screeners and TSA officials. So if you can't carry on a bag and are forced to check it, who stands behind you when (not "if", you will note) your valuables are stolen? Not the airline, that's for sure; they will quote their terms of carriage, disavow any liability and leave you on your own to file a report with the airport police and kiss your possessions goodbye forever. (See WSJ article HERE.)

So if you can't carry anything onto the plane because it's a "security risk" and you can't check it because there are so many organized thieves in baggage handling and "we cannot be responsible for any losses" what fucking use is an airplane ride? The TSA even boasts that their rules are not consistent, as they are designed to confuse potential terrorists. Really? Seems like they're designed to piss off travelers and yet again provide the pretense of action in the face of political paralysis.

Anyone notice that the screeners at O'Hare used to demand that you put your shoes directly on the belt? If you put them in a tray they would make you take them out. Until last week, when suddenly, for no accountable reason, trays were OK again, just like they are at every other fucking airport. If you couldn't x-ray shoes through a tray I could understand the issue, but that can't be the case, otherwise every other airport in the world wouldn't be wasting their time making us take off our shoes and put them in a tray, would they? So if there's absolutely no security value, why can't they at least be consistent, and sensible?

Don't waste time stopping frequent fliers from accessing their laptops during a flight, and don't prevent people from taking a piss for an hour before landing. It is an insult to our intelligence when I see people in loose-fitting clothing, or apparently obese people, waltzing through security with enough room on their person to conceal any number of bombs, and no-one is taking the time to pat them down. How about starting with anyone in a hijab? Fuck their human rights - why should their right to dress funny trump our right to live. It's not like there's any debate that al-Quaida is an Islamic terrorist organization is there?

If this Nigerian twat smuggled a powder-based bomb through security under his clothing then come up with something to address the real threat, like explosive detection, or pat-downs of all people on a terrorist watch-list, and not a knee-jerk set of pointless rules in a pathetic attempt to divert our attention and make all the sheep believe that "something is being done".

I won't be holding my breath. I just plan to show up at the airport next week in a Speedo. "Is that an explosive device, sir, or are you just pleased to see me?"


Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

It Will Rub The Lotion In Its Laundry

In case anyone wondered if I'd just died, my apparent absence has not been the result of my untimely demise, but instead has been caused by a new job, and the consequent need to move to Chicago. I mentioned a while back that I needed to find a new job, but that I didn't intend to make my job search the subject of a running journal ("Chronicles of an Executive in Transition") or anything wanky like that. So I've been silent on progress and activity.

Now that I have a new position I can reveal to anyone who gives a shit that job hunting is a soul-destroying, miserable pain in the rectum. It tends to become such a complete focus of your life that even when you're not actually engaged in it you tend to forget about anything else (or at least I did) and for that reason it didn't seem like I had much else to write about. Humorous situation observed? Who cares, I'm unemployed. Read an interesting article, could write a funny observation on it? Couldn't give a shit, I'm still unemployed. Why write a blog? Go and find yourself a fucking job.

Well, now that I'm in the middle of all the "new job, find apartment, sell house, buy house, explore new city" bullshit I have plenty of stuff to fuel my writing, but precious little time that I'm inclined to devote to it. Suffice it to say that I have located a temporary apartment and am now experiencing all the joys and misery of living around other people. And I can also reveal to anyone who gives a shit that living around other people is a soul-destroying, miserable pain in the rectum.

It does have its moments of levity, however. The other night is was down in the apartment building laundry room, attempting to decipher the instructions on the washers and dryers so that I could deal with two weeks worth of assorted undergarments and other clothing detritus. It was apparent that you needed to put money on a laundry card, but not at all apparent where said card could be obtained. At this point an attractive blonde girl entered the laundry room and approached the dryer next to me.

Now I don't know about you, but when a pretty young girl comes into a lonely and remote laundry room, and I, 230 lbs of scary male, am the only other occupant, I naturally assume that she's sizing me up as a potential rapist or sex criminal, and so I'm very careful not to do anything that could be construed as rapy, threatening or just plain weird. Standing there staring at an empty dryer, with no washing in my hands and clad in black hooded sweatshirt and black jacket like a target from America's Most Wanted, already put me dangerously close to the "weird" category, though, so I figured I'd better ask her where you get a laundry card.

"They give you one when you move in" she replied.

Great, now she assumes I don't even live here, but that I've somehow sneaked into the building to prey on lone females in the laundry room, chatting them up with stupid laundry card questions to which anyone who actually lived there would already know the answer. (Thanks, apartment rental company, for not giving me either a card or instructions on the fucking laundry.)

At this point she hurriedly opened her dryer, and a pair of her white underwear fell out into the floor between us. And there, on the gusset, was a huge, brown mark. I could immediately sense the shift in priorities. "I don't care if he's a rapist, my gusset-mark is on display. I must retrieve the situation quickly." She bent down and grabbed the offending underwear, while I made my excuses and left.

Over the road was a wonderful little laundry where a friendly Korean woman took my clothes and, for the princely sum of $8.50, will have them clean and folded for me on Monday. And, what's more, she didn't once look at me as though I were a sex criminal. Fuck the laundry room - I'm going there from now on.


Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Kill Me Now Catalog

Today the mail brought with it a horrific surprise for Mrs Bison. Mixed in with the bills, statements and assorted credit card offers was a free catalog addressed to her personally; it was a clothing catalog, just 64 pages long and only 8 x 11 inches per page, but the message it delivered was profound and unmistakable:

YOU ARE A FRUMPY OLD BITCH AND YOUR LIFE IS OVER

It was one of those catalogs that is filled with sensible ladies' clothing, with a heavy emphasis on seasonal knitwear, slacks that hide your shape, clogs and patterned cardigans. There were sweaters with flowers, sweaters with animals and sweaters with Christmas designs. In case you needed to drive home the seasonal theme there was even a pair of Rudolph The Fucking Red Nosed Reindeer earrings.

Poor Mrs Bison. For the life of her she couldn't figure out what she'd done to bring this monstrosity down upon herself. These catalog people obviously try to target their audience, so was this just a case of "You're a woman older than 40 so you now need to dress like a comedy fifties housewife"? Or was there something in her previous pattern of purchases that had flagged her profile and brought her to the attention of the Seasonal Attire Mafia?

Mrs Bison isn't what you'd call a fashion victim. She's doesn't abandon everything she bought because "it was last season's outfit". Nevertheless she keeps up with style changes and refuses to dress like an old bag, a direction made easier by Bison Daughter's strident shopping opinions, forcefully delivered any time she sees her mother about to buy something "lame" or "unfashionable".

It's not as though we even buy shit from catalogs. I don't know how anyone buys clothes from catalogs - a simple trip to the store to buy a pair of jeans in the same style as I bought a year ago is enough to convince me that I should never attempt catalog shopping. The same jeans that were "comfortable, bordering on the loose" last year are now "tight enough to cause restricted blood flow to the testicles" today. Or the manufacturer whose XXL shirt was a perfect fit last week now has a new style, and, guess what, the XXL covers my arse like a dress. My success rate trying on clothing in a store is less than 5% - if I bought everything that looked good in a catalog I'd spend my entire fucking week at the post office returning shit that didn't fit.

No, the point is that someone thinks that if we were the sort of people who bought clothing from a catalog we would be buying snowflake sweaters for the winter. And my wife would be wearing seamless high-waist briefs as an accompaniment. (I swear there isn't a man alive who could maintain a viable erection upon lifting his wife's skirt and discovering those.)

Whatever happened to the kind of catalogs that had pretty women in fabulous, sexy underwear plastered across eight pages? Why aren't they sending us any of them? It's a conspiracy, I tell you. The fifty-something Pod Women are determined to reprogram your wife and lure her to the dark side of comfy seasonal knitwear and thermal undergarments. Well fuck 'em. You're never too old to say no to snowman sweaters and reversible quilted jackets...


Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Uncritical Thinking

One of the downsides of being unemployed is that any time it looks like someone is interested in hiring you they want you to take tests to check if you're really the business genius you portray in your resume, or if you are, in fact, an intellectual midget with excellent bullshitting skills.

I've taken plenty of tests over the years and I'm fully aware that I'm smart. But everyone has their own preferred tests, and it's not like they give a shit what I scored years ago on the GMAT, or anything else. You're only as smart as the last test you took. The toughest tests are the critical thinking ones, where you have to look at data or information and draw conclusions. These tests involve the application of logic, the ability to manipulate data, numerical reasoning and thinking under time pressure.

There's a reason businesses want to know if you can think and reason logically. It's not like anyone presents the "real" problems of business in a nice clean question form. In reality you have a jumble of information, opinions and data. You have to make decisions, but if you make them too soon you might miss something important, and if you wait too long you risk missing the boat completely. Plus, no-one tells you afterwards if you got it right; you only find that out five years and a hundred million dollars later. Oops.

Wouldn't it be great if people in government were required to pass the same kind of tests. or at least expected to perform with a level of ability something above what might be expected from a garden snail? In fact I'd settle for having them all tattooed with one message: Correlation Does Not Imply Causality. In other words, just because one thing is often found at a higher level when another thing is at a higher level does not mean that the one thing caused the other.

I happened to be reading a news article about school test scores. (It's amazing the lengths to which it is necessary to go in order to fill the non-working day.) The point was being made that test scores were lower in areas that were "poorer", and some genius was making the point that this relative poverty explained why test scores were lower in those areas. This person even asserted that "the economy has a significant impact on students' learning". Really? Do kids get thicker when GDP falls?

The really objectionable thing, coming as it does from someone allegedly involved in education, was the logical leap that because lower incomes are correlated with lower test scores they must be the cause. Not only does this not necessarily follow, but it might actually be more sensible to postulate the opposite - that lower test scores are the cause of poverty.

There was a separate news item a few weeks ago which was bemoaning the lack of employment opportunities for young people in the benighted city of Detroit. It profiled a couple of teenagers who had left school at around 15, having been involved in various illegal or antisocial acts while at school, and now found themselves without any qualifications in a job market where employers have no need to take on unqualified people with a history of crime. They appeared destined for a life of crime and/or poverty, but it's safe to assume that their future economic situation would be a result of their lack of application and success at school.

So did the poverty of their parents cause their poor results, or did their parents' poor results cause their poverty? It's an important distinction because treating the symptom rather than the cause won't result in recovery. Trying to find ways to funnel more of other people's money into the hands of the urban poor in the blind assumption that this will result in higher test scores for their kids and a consequent improvement in their life prospects is a pointless waste of effort. Their kids will still be undisciplined and thick to exactly the same extent that they were beforehand, and having a 50" plasma TV at home won't change that.

This use of poverty to excuse poor educational achievement is dangerous, self-deluding bullshit that lets hundreds of thousands of low-income parents off the hook for their failure to instill standards of behavior in their feckless offspring. People don't do badly at school because they're poor, they're poor because they did badly at school. Over in China there are millions of little kids who exist on a fraction of what is regarded as a "poverty line" income here, and they leave school well-educated and ready to kick Western ass in the economic marketplace.

There is another possibility, of course. It's sometimes said that if we moved the kids from the bad schools to good schools then everything would be OK, but how do schools become "bad" in the first place? Violence, disruption, truancy, drugs and indiscipline are not baked into the walls of the building. The blame can't be laid with teachers, either, although there are for sure some crap ones out there. Schools are bad because the kids are bad. And kids are bad largely because their parents are shit. If a whole bunch of people are lazy, skip school, make crappy choices and refuse to work hard then it stands to reason that they will underachieve financially and eventually become concentrated in "lower income" areas.

So instead of making excuses for them, how about holding the parents accountable, and pointing out that crap schools are the result of crap kids, and not the other way round?


Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

In Praise Of Bacon

One of the side benefits of unemployment is that Mrs Bison and I get to have lunch together a lot more frequently these days. It's a small benefit, I know, when set against loss of salary, healthcare costs and the arse-wrenchingly dull and painful process of networking for a new position, but you have to count the small positives...

Anyway, today's lunch happened to be bacon sandwiches, which, again, doesn't seem like it would be a major cause for celebration, but I've developed a renewed affection for this most satisfying of pig products, and all because of my ex-administrative assistant. I used to be firmly of the opinion that bacon was better in Europe - where we had meaty "Canadian-style" back bacon, versus the US, where bacon was thin, streaky and cooked to the point of being brittle and dry. Then I saw my assistant cooking bacon simply by putting it in the oven, rather than grilling or frying it. The result was just wonderful - that perfect stage between fatty and dry, where the bacon glistens and melts in your mouth.

Mrs Bison has really taken to this bacon thing, to the point where "healthy" turkey bacon has been utterly banished from the refrigerator, replaced by stacks of tasty, pig-flavored delight. The experience of eating it is so good that today she wondered aloud to me if it would be better, for a "last request" to have a bacon sandwich or an orgasm. And, you know what, it's not an easy choice. I'm not sure whether it's a sad comment on my sexual technique or a massive affirmation of the power of bacon, but Mrs B was leaning towards the sandwich. (By the way, I'm going for the "massive affirmation" one, in case you're wondering...)

I'm not over-concerned though. I figured I can make the most of this simply by wrapping my knob in fresh bacon. Everyone wins! Just have to be careful to let it cool after it comes out of the oven, otherwise I'll be on bacon sandwiches for the rest of my life, and I can assure you that no pig's going to taste good enough to take your mind off that.


Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison