I really like the song Running on Empty by Jackson Brown.

Here are the lyrics

Looking out at the road rushing under my wheels
Looking back at the years gone by like so many summer fields
In sixty-five I was seventeen and running up one-o-one
I don’t know where Im running now, I’m just running on

Running on - running on empty
Running on - running blind
Running on - running into the sun
But I’m running behind Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever thought about why you have to show your receipt at WalMart when the scanner at the entrance goes off? Ever feel bad when this happened? How about the lineup at the exit of Costco and how they have to mark your receipt?

Well I had not considered this a point of personal privacy invasion or even a bad business practice that shows mistrust in the customer that had just spent a lot of money in their store.

The following article: Customer Confidential shows us that there are ways to stop this bad practice.

Don’t let “The Man” say it is OK to trample your rights!

What is with the Ted Haggard affair. Looking at the press and the way that he was thrown out of the leadership of the Evangelical church I can see that apparently there is an issue with gay sex and meth use within their church. At least we know what the limits are. Also I caught this quote yesterday from Ted Haggard’s confession read by the dude that has apparently overthrown him:

The fact is I am guilty of sexual immorality, and I take responsibility for the entire problem. I am a deceiver and a liar. There’s a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I have been warring with it all of my adult life.

I guess that Ted Haggard is having a little bit of trouble accepting his gayness.

OK, I want to drop the subject now but one last bit of news. Apparently the worlds first blogger, Doogie Howser is gay and that takes away just a little bit from hiw part in the fantastic movie Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle. The best scene from that movie was when Neil Patrick Harris, who we of course only know as Doogie Howser, is driving by in a stolen car of Kumars and snorting coke off of a hooker.

I will have to watch that movie again, I think it will still have the same effect.

Advantages of a low rent lifestyle

The top 10 advantages of low-rent living

Being poor may be better than living rich…I will have to ask my sister what living rich is like.

OK I know people like to look theri best for the family photo at Wal Mart but what are these guys thinking and what kind of lifestyle do they lead. I can only imagine the conversation that led to the trip for this picture being taken.

“Honey, lets go get a family picture taken”

“Bitchin, I just got some wicked hairspray and now I can really have Peelin hair for the pic”

“Oh, and now that the kids hair has grown out we can streak and back comb her hair and she will look sweet”

OK, Star Jones is leving the view according to MSNBC.com. I don’t usually care about these boring people on the view but this story lets me put together a few stories at once.

OK, here are some apparent journalists that have a talk show, a format that has been around for 30 years but they still think that this format makes them celebrities and they always like to talk about their “personal growth” what growth would this be? Interviewing famous people? Will I Grow by interviewing crazy Tom Cruise?

Now Star Jones is leaving because of a hissy fit about Rosie O’Donnell. Rosie is one of the only people in this whole mess of a show that can bring some reality to it and she is a Jewish Lesbian not from New York. I am looking forward to the cutting up that she does on that show in the first few weeks. Star Jones was a wihip for not being there to take that wrath about her “Magic Weight Loss”

What they really need on that show is someone like Perez Hilton to really dig in and get the good stories about the staff and cast of the show and then we will get a chance to see just how grown up these rich bitches are.

I don’t ususally like to troll around about US politics becasue there are so many people on the left and right that have dedicated there lives to it but I was just reading an article by Robert Kennedy titled Was the 2004 Election Stolen?. Yikes, here in canada if there is even a hint of voting irregularity it causes a scandal large enough to topple a governemnt. In this article Kennedy says that justl ooking at the exit polls is enough to make you wonder. Exit polls are very accurate and these ones showed that the election was going to Kerry in a big way.

So if you look at the exit polls then these people thought they voted for Kerry and in the end the votes eid not show up. One of several problems seems to be that it was much harder for a democratic voter to actually get ot vote but apparently if they did vot the vote did not get counted at all.

With all of the big money invloved in US presidential campaigns you knwo that there are going to be some swaying of the votes. In a few months we will get ot see just how broken the American voting system is and if it really matters if Americans vote at all in the next presidential election.

Maybe now is the time to put UN observers into place to observe US elections, we have watched Jimmy Carter do this all over the world it would be fun to watch some frenchmen observing US citizens voting.

hehehe, I like this political discourse it is a lot of fun poke, poke poke

We all know that there are a lot of companies that offer a stock purchase program that offers employees a way to buy stock in the company at a lower price than you can get on the open market. I am not any kind of a stock analyst but tend to not like this idea a lot for a couple of following reasons.

Irritating office conversation
Whenever the company that I work for has any kind of news there is a ton of stock analysis. Some is very valid and there are a few people that I listen to on baited breath for their next prognostication but of course of everyone that knows and understands the workings of a stock market there are four people misinterpreting it or telling you exactly how the market is wrong….get it guys the market is never wrong! If the market was wrong than any idiot could make a pile of money. No, the stock market is pretty tough to win at and most full timers in the markets do not even make much money. If my companies stock moves 5 cents I am not sure it is even worth a conversation let alone wasting 10 people’s time for 20 minutes each to discuss it.

Separation of people from the man
There is an interesting thing that happens when someone owns stock in the company that they work for, a persons mindset seem to go from being an employee to being the employer although this is the farthest thing from the truth. Always remember that there is the proletariat and the greater ownership of the company. I am sure Karl Marx would laugh if he was still around and saw that someone owning a thousand dollars in stock would consider himself the equivalent of the person owning 40% of the outstanding shares. The man is the man. Unless we are substantial shareholder we are just a small fish with our income owned by the real decision makers. If our position is not profitable then we are toast. Under this arrangement many stock owners will sacrifice any kind of rights that they have as an employee such as paid overtime.

Selling off your future
There is a last way that the former employees of Enron or WorldCom will remind you of. There is no diversification in having stock in the company that you work for as a method of retirement income. If the company falls on hard times, you lose, if the company goes out of business you lose. If you have a chance to buy shares cheap many will look at it as an opportunity to buy as much as they can no matter what will happen in a year of more.

The real way to help employees.
Why bother with employee share purchase when instead you can share profits. Set up a percentage of the profit that will go to employees, prorate on the salary and then let the employees know that they are still really employees and their dedication will be the difference instead how deep their pockets are to the business. This takes that stock market out and puts the business competitive advantage to work and although Karl Marx may still have a problem with this I believe it is a little more equitable.

How disappointing, I have been looking forward for a long time to seeing the da Vinci code movie and have purposely not read the book so I would enjoy the movie without analyzing the comparison with the book at the theater. This week the da Vinci Code movie with tom Hanks comes out and the reviews have been terrible. Does no one like this movie? As Dave D said a few months back, “It’s only a book” sure maybe the contyent is based on flimsy research and lots of conspiracy theories but that is great pulp for a great movie. How could they have got it wrong then? My fear and it seems to be true after reading a few reviews is that the movie is trying to be everything that the book is. When was the last time a movie could live up to the whole content of a book?

If you look back at great movies in the past such as The Grapes of Wrath with its very long complex stroyline what the best film makers have done is to grab scenes and string them together with the temperature and feel of the underlying scenes. No one is going to be very successful trying to get everything of paper and onto the screen…unless of course you are Peter Jackson with patient fans, studios and actors.

I am sure that I will see the Da Vinci Code soon but now I am going to have to really be looking forward to the great entertaining book instead as my main vehicle of the story.

6 years ago I went on a trip with my wife to California and while in San Francisco we went to an Old Navy store. The store that we to was big and had a lot of clothes, cheap and just the look of the store was fresh although you could tell that the building it was in was a 100 years old. Something that neither of us could believe would ever look quite right in a mall.

Now we see Old Navy everywhere and in every mall. The exclusivity of the store is gone just like the fantastic food of Tony Romas disappeared the instant that it became a chain built on the blandness of process instead of the excitement of innovation and personal taste. I dread going into an Old Navy store the way that I dreaded the Gap 10 years ago. Everything is perfectly edgy or perfectly colorful and safe all at the same time. Marketing is slick and no detail to the branding goes unnoticed. My wife bought a couple of shirts I turned down looking at anything and on the way out we saw some kids pants on a rack with some sewn up holes, cute maybe buy in the definable style of Old Navy the entire rack of pants had the same sewn up holes in exactly the same places in all styles.