Archive for September, 2007

…to say the least.

We have been clearing off some land by my Grandmothers house this summer. There are a few stumps in there that I couldn’t quite pull out with the tractor. I decided to dig around the stumps to loosen them up a bit and then try pulling them again. This was the second stump that I had been working on this particular day.

I will write some more after you see the video below.

After the video cuts off, there was a lot of freaking out going on. We were unsure as to whether or not we should call the police. Ultimately, we decided not to call them. I went back up and got the jar to get a better look at the secrets it held inside.

There is a little man in this jar. When I first saw it, I thought it was just a tangle of roots..typical of buried jars. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be a long haired, long nosed, freaky looking fella. Along with the man, there is an old obituary of a gentleman that no one in my family seems to know. I will not disclose his name, at least, not at this time. There is also a bone that looks like it is several years old. I have yet to determine if it is human or animal, but it sort of resembles a chicken bone. There is also a jagged tooth in that jar. Quite possibly the most disturbing thing in there… it looks very human.

The wife and I debated on what to do with this, and we decided to put it on the internet to see if anyone had any insight as to what this could be. I don’t know anything about voodoo or stuff like that, but I’m sure there are several people that do. If you have any ideas, please speak up… we are very curious.

Just an FYI, I still have not opened the jar, it creeps me out.

I will get some photos soon so everyone can get a better visual of the items.

Is bitch a four-letter word? The New York City Council thinks so. It’s trying to officially albeit symbolically ban the use of the word. Councilwoman Darlene Mealy of Brooklyn introduced a measure on July 25 that would make the term verboten. The move follows the council’s ban earlier this year of the “n-word” (as the New York Times refers to it). Councilwoman Mealy calls the term deeply sexist and hateful. But some New Yorkers aren’t so sure.“Half my conversation would be gone,” Michael Musto, the Village Voice columnist who writes about celebrity gossip and the club scene, told the New York Times. “We toss it around with love.”

“I think it’s a description that is used insouciantly in the fashion industry,” Hamish Bowles, the European editor at large of Vogue, told the paper, while ordering sushi in the Condé Nast cafeteria. “It would only be used in the fashion world with a sense of high irony and camp.”

In recent years the words has become more common, not just in music with “adult” lyrics but in mainstream TV shows such as Sex and the City and in permutations such as “beotch”, used as an endearment as well as insult. Lindsay Lohan was recently pictured wearing a t-shirt reading “Skinny Bitch!”

“If you’re an 8-year-old it’s a great idea. If you’re a 28-year-old it’s silly,” says Tula Karras, a 39-year-old journalist who lives in Brooklyn and has used the term with her friends. While she recognizes the ban is about respect, “you really can’t police linguistics in that way.”

Even Councilwoman Mealy, who introduced the measure, acknowledged that its use is widespread. “Even council members are saying that they use it to their wives,” she said, giving a curious insight into the marital politics of New York’s ruling class. So far 19 of 51 council members have signed on to the ban. The Council’s Civil Rights Committee is expected to debate the measure next month.

Its inspiration - as with so many things these days - is hip-hop music, with ten rappers cited in the legislation. “Ho” is also banned in the same bill. (No word yet on whether “Hey, ho” is bandied across council members’ dinner tables as yet.)

It has launched a semantic conversation that extends beyond the Empire State, with bloggers and commentators questioning the constitutionality of banning words, as well as analysis of the words themselves: “First of all, ho isn’t a word, it’s slang,” according to the blog Wake Up America. It continues: “How did we go down a road where banning words is okay, what has happened to our constitution?” “More of the nanny state” said a forensic psychologist blogger in Tennessee.

Typical, it had to be some ugly bitch councilwoman that proposed this.

Someone should start suing all these fools that want to ban everything.

I think I just might sue that bitch for offending me by taking a word out of my vocabulary that I use to express when women can’t stop flapping their gums.

Where the hell is freedom of speech.

When did it disappear?

BITCH BITCH BITCH BITCH BITCH

There. If you’re reading this in New York, you’re probably in trouble.

What is our obsession with work? I hear people who brag about working 50, 60, 70, even 80 hours a week. They brag not because they’re proud, they brag because they’re trying to one-up someone else who is talking about a difficult job. We tie our identities into what we do for a living. We say things like, “I’m a technician” or, “I’m an accountant” or, “I’m a salesperson”. Our definitions of who we are are what we do. When we meet a new person, we invariably ask, “So, what do you do for a living?” We are consumed by our jobs and our careers. We put up with behaviors from our co-workers and superiors that we would never tolerate from friends and use the excuse, “Well, they pay my salary,” to justify our subjugation, yet grumble every moment we have away from the workplace, engaging in the afore-mentioned “Oh, yeah, well where I work…” game with our friends and families. We view others who don’t work as much as us with a certain level of disdain and those who don’t work at all with a level of contempt on par with our contempt for thieves.

We carry our cell phones and on our time off are expected to take calls from work to discuss work. We receive emails from work on our time off and are expected to respond to those emails on our time off. We say, “Well, I’m a salaried employee so I guess they can expect this from me.” We martyr ourselves to our jobs in the hopes that someone will recognize us for our unflagging devotion to our work, yet that recognition never comes. Still, we continue to sacrifice in the hopes that one day….

Taking time off for illness or recuperation is viewed as a weakness. If we become ill ourselves, we fear losing our jobs so we continue to work even at the risk of infecting others or worsening our own condition. When a family member is seriously ill or dying, we feel guilty for leaving work behind to be with them and return to our jobs 2 days after losing a loved one and are expected to do our jobs as if nothing has happened. No one wants to see or feel your grief at the risk of making them uncomfortable.

We expect stores to be open on holidays so if we forget an item, we can make that quick trip to the store. We seem to forget that someone will have to give up that holiday so we can buy the cranberry sauce we forgot. Why did we forget the cranberry sauce? We were so consumed with work we forgot to get it on the way home from work. We have no empathy for the employee working at the store on these holidays yet would be furious if asked to give up the same holiday for our boss.

We suffer from stresses, anxieties, rages, depressions and myriad other illnesses and conditions. We figure the best way to deal with this is to immerse ourselves in our work, never wondering if our obsession with overworking ourselves might be the cause.

Why don’t we learn to relax a little?

The Water Runs Black In West Virginia.

VBS: Why is water such a big part of this whole environmental crisis?
Meredith: Well, because of a little thing called coal-sludge injection. Sludge is the by-product of cleaning and processing coal.

So they blow up the mountain to get at the coal, but the coal is all mixed in with other stuff?
Impurities. They use diesel fuel and chemicals to extract the useable coal from the impurities and that’s essentially what they call “washing.” So there’s this crap left over from the washing of the coal. It’s like thick black water. Then they use something called Flocculent, which is a chemical that separates the solids from the liquids. They mix this stuff in there, then they kind of skim the top off. That’s the sludge, which is this weird, foamy substance. I know because I’ve stepped in it, and it actually discolored my boots and ate away at the leather.

So they do this out in the open?
No, they do this at a processing plant, in a closed area. They take the coal and truck it to a processing plant, which might be in some adjacent valley, then they have two by-products: The sludge and water. The water is fucked. It might look kind of OK, but it’s fucked up. They’ll put this water into a pond for containment: Tons of sludge in a pond. For a while they were pumping it into old mine shafts.

Just to keep it out of sight?
It’s storage. There are miles and miles of underground honeycombs, so it’s all this empty space that they’re not using anymore. They pumped it full of toxic waste. But since the coal seams are natural aquifers, or the way that water travels through the mountain, the stuff is going to move and it’s going to seep into the ground water. So what we see in Mingo County is a community with contaminated well water. The water has turned black, and it stinks. And the same chemicals in heavy metals that are present in the sludge are now in their water.

This has got to be a crisis for people in terms of their daily lives.
Oh my god, I have no idea how these people live. I mean we all got sick from just being in this house for 30 minutes. We had to go out to the car and pass out. I mean, we got sick. Imagine how much water you use during the day to shower, to flush the toilet, to drink. These people are only given enough clean water to drink. They’re still showering with the bad water! This water that stinks, that made me dry heave upon smelling it. This is what they’re showering in. This one woman I talked to said, “Yeah, sometimes when I get out of the shower, everything’s so shiny. I feel like I can barely see because everything is so shiny.”

So someone is giving them fresh water to drink?
Yeah, Massey. Massey was court ordered, as of last September, to give the people drinking water. But everyone is sick there. Everyone’s got some kind of cancer, tumors, cysts, skin lesions, respiratory illnesses…

We’re encouraging this environmental crisis though, aren’t we?
Well, we’re using coal right now. We don’t know what’s happening when we turn on our light switches. What are the repercussions of our consumption?

You’ll need to use your headphones for this to work properly.

If you would like to experience true 3D sound, you have to try this. Just plug your headphones in and press play.

It’s not something that will scare you. There are no loud noises or screams to make you jump. It’s just 100% true 3D sound. I love it!

[audio:virtualbarbershop.mp3]