Arise, ye prisoners of starvation

Today being May Day makes me think about the marvelously lugubrious military parades the Soviets used to put on to remind the peoples of the USSR and the world that they really knew how to build arms.

I mean—it’s hard to choose between floats covered in flowers on 1 January and a gazillion attack tanks and truck-mounted rocket launchers four months later.

This year the Muscovite parades were apparently divided between those wanting to bring back Stalin (really) and those denouncing Vladimir Putin as Stalin.

That would be the Russian paradox.

Elsewhere, Greeks were comparing the IMF to the military junta that ruled from 1967 to 1974. The IMF being the source of the bailout to the collapsed Greek economy that seems to be taking down other Euro dominoes like Portugal and Spain along with it.

The French are protesting rumors of plans to undermine their job security system (under which a lot of companies find it’s cheaper to keep people on the payroll than to sack them) and state pension plan (I won’t even go there).

The Turks are just out in the streets celebrating the fact that there aren’t whack-job countrymen out with automatic weapons mowing them down (as happened around 30 years ago).

The US saw hundreds of thousands swarming the streets across the country to protest Arizona’s crackbrained immigration law. (“Not racial profiling”? As bloody if—are they going to stop me looking like I just got off the plane from Dublin to take an underground job as an au pair ro raise funds for Noraid? They are not. They’re going to stop anyone who looks like he might have originated south of Nogales.)

And in DC the self-proclaimed guardians of the somehow-Christian faith clogged the area around the Lincoln memorial to—well, I’m not sure what they were doing. Perhaps protecting us from the hurricanes and earthquakes that are caused not by meteorological conditions or seismic shifts, but by failure to adhere to this or that sect’s tenets. You can see the web site that was promoting this here, but it’s mostly full of solicitations for donations and tee-shirts for sale, so I can’t really determine what it’s all about.

Except the all-important anti-abortion stance, which always seems to crop up in the events of groups like this.

Me—I really miss those Soviet parades. I’m sure this Stalin/anti-Stalin schizophrenia is progress, but those suckers really were spectacular, even in the pre-Internet days. I suppose they’re too expensive to put on these days, it's hard to find the soldiers in impressive numbers, much less the mobile rocket launchers, and it’s much easier to expose their broadcasts as artfully edited propaganda pieces. (It’s not enough that you’ve got two hours of tanks going past? You have to loop the film to look like there are five hours?)

Anyhow—workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.

And your retirement plans.

Aftershock

So, the post-Boob Quake report is basically that even a day of conscious cleavage display doesn’t seem to produce earthquakes. Or, at least not in the same day.

Perhaps there’s a cumulative effect? So that in 2010 we’re paying for, say, the Mary Quant era? Or should we check for a surge in pestilence & plague?

At any rate, here’s the story from the woman who initiated the movement, Jennifer McCreight.

God bless social networking media. & pity that Iranians have their access limited.

Seismic protest

Further to my post about the Iranian cleric who’s giving Pat Robertson a run for the title of most completely crack-brained self-styled religious leader, the women of Facebook are engaging in a protest today.

They’re testing Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi’s proclamation that immodest women cause earthquakes. They’re doing this by wearing revealing clothing to see if there’s an upsurge in earthquakes.

It’s called Boobquake. (No, I am not making this up. It's in the news.)

Well, look—you knew it was coming. And you also know that it’s just going to inflame Sedighi’s impotent fury at the idea of mere women mocking his pronouncements.

So, in that respect—mission accomplished. You go, girls!

The scum among us

One of the great pains of job hunting is recruiters. Really, I’m continually driven to ask, “How do these people remain employed?”

They remind me of literary agents: they get paid when someone picks up an option (or acquires a book manuscript)—they don’t care who or what, just that something sticks long enough for them to get their cut.

I can’t tell you how often during my Hollywood years I saw scripts submitted that were utter dreck & completely NOT what a given production company was interested in. (As opposed to the utter dreck that actually got produced.)

Or how many fatuous cover letters accompanied the properties (that’s what they’re called), including the amazing-to-me disclaimer, “Dictated but not read.”

That pretty much says it all.

In a similar way recruiters are trying to toss résumés at clients, whether or not they actually are a match, because the more they’ve got in the funnel the better their likelihood (in their minds) that something will stick.

With this focus on volume they can’t be arsed to actually, you know, read anything you send them. This includes emails as well as CVs.

Sometimes they can’t even pay enough attention to get your name right when they speak with you—the one that’s on your CV & in your emails; the one you keep repeating to them.

I’m guessing they’re more attentive (= servile) to their clients, but you can’t really count on that. The instant they hear a position’s been filled or a candidate rejected, they’re off at ramming speed, trawling the job boards for new chum.

Well, as the saying goes, you can't live with them & you can't get enough C4 to eliminate them from the gene pool.

Now it becomes clear

Okay, so evidently Pat Robertson is not the only rightwing religious spewer of crack-brained balderdash: there’s an Islamic cleric in Tehran who has proclaimed that promiscuous women cause earthquakes.

Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi appears to be focused on only Iranian earthquakes, so it’s not clear whether they’re the only disasters that matter, whether only Iranian promiscuous women cause Iranian earthquakes, or whether promiscuous women globally are responsible for quakes.

Does that mean they’re also on the hook for volcanic eruptions & tsunamis?

& how, exactly, are they responsible? Did they use their wiles to get men to found population centers on fault lines? Cause tectonic shifts via seductive walking? Use aromatherapy candles to ignite Eyjafjallajokull last week?

I dunno, but I’d purely pay to see Sedighi & Robertson in a contest to see who becomes more apoplectic in delivering spurious pronouncements tying weather & geologic events to those other, really bad, people’s actions.

News of the weird, chapter 2

I’m trying to get the latest update on the corpse-in-coach story from a couple of weeks ago, but it’s been unaccountably pushed off the electronic front pages by such trivia as global volcanic-ash-air-chaos, WaMu’s CEO weaseling in front of Congress (really—there has to be a required course in MBA programs for this) and the Vatican being persecuted by the, you know, truth.

The latest (still more than a week old) seems to be that preliminary findings by a British medical examiner indicate that Kurt Willi Jarant had been dead for about 12 hours when staff at Liverpool’s John Lennon Airport put paid to his wife and her daughter’s attempt to get him onboard an easyJet flight to Berlin.

The two women are naturally claiming to have had no idea that he was dead, that he must have “passed” at the airport, and they’ve lawyered up.

There have been no results at posting from the post-mortem, and the widow and daughter are free on bail. Gitta Jarant has now said that she wants to have Willi cremated soonest and take his ashes home to Berlin. She’s cooking up something straight out of ITV in the way of, Willi being a pilot, “the pilot souls” were just calling him home (but not to Berlin)), and so it was fitting, really, that he went that way.

You have to wonder, what with court costs, lawyers’ fees, non-refundable airfare cancellations, etc., if it wouldn’t have been cheaper to have had him cremated in the first place.

Death and... (Chapter 2)

In the US we’re celebrating the annual recurrence of the second half of Ben Franklin’s two inevitabilities: filing federal tax returns. State ones, too, if you’re in one that sucks income taxes out of you.

I live in the sad, self-important state of Washington, now. No state income tax, but they pick your pocket with sales tax. In my county that would be 9.5%, worse even than California.

But even though I haven’t lived in the Commonwealth of Virginia since June 2008, it seems I owe them $11. How the hell does that work?

My accountant told me that the Governor of Virginia is very happy I’m willing to contribute. I told him that “willing” would be an over-generous characterization of my attitude. Since I sold my house there last year, the accountant said this’ll probably be my last contribution. Please God.

Much as I loathe Washington & just about everything connected with it, I will not miss the Old Dominion’s grasping income-clutching ways. What continually ate my lunch was this:

Assume you overpaid your state taxes through payroll deductions & you got a refund for $400 last year. Virginia makes you declare that $400 as income for the year. & pay tax on it.

That money is not income, it’s what you didn’t owe them in the first place, but what sat in their coffers for a year collecting interest (for them) until you throttled it from their grubby Confederate History Month-celebrating, right-to-work, tobacco-farming, concealed-weapon-toting good ol’ boy throats.

Let some of those tea-partying crackbrains burn that in effigy.

Meanwhile, I’m writing a check for $11 & noting it “refer to Appomattox Court House, April 1865”.

News of the weird

Well, as we move into one of the two inevitabilities (paying taxes), it turns out that a couple of women in the UK were trying to push the envelope on that whole death thing.

They tried to get a corpse onto an easyJet flight from Manchester, UK, to Berlin.

Evidently it’s cheaper to buy a ticket for a cabin passenger than the cost of freight for a coffin—although you’ll have more room in the coffin than a seat.

But then there’s all that paperwork. I imagine that between them, the UK & Germany could keep you filling out forms for hours on something like this.

I’m wondering what the passenger experience would have been sitting next to a person who’d been dead for some days. Bodily decomposition is every bit as inevitable as death & taxes, after all.

easyJet is one of the pioneer no-frills airline, but even so, that’s a bit of a downer as you’re heading out for your all-inclusive hol in your flip-flops & Bermuda shorts & you discover that the miserable git next to you who won’t help hand over the drinks isn’t a jerk, he’s a corpse.

Would never happen on US carrier because you’d have an entire planeload of lawsuits filed the instant the wheels touched down, for emotional trauma, pain & suffering & the obvious need for aromatherapy treatments.

Jesus wept

Okay, this just takes the wafer: at the Good Friday service in the Vatican, the preacher to the papal household likened the focus on priestly sex abuse scandals to anti-Semitism.

While individual priests committed the abuses for at least the last 50 years, the hierarchy (from diocese to Vatican) was more concerned with covering up the crimes and protecting their institutional reputation than doing anything that would stop the pedophilia.

And it seems, according to the Reverend Raniero Cantalamessa, that the recent calls for Church to man up and acknowledge the facts and apologize with humility and sincerity amount to persecution on a scale suffered by the Jews through history.

(Considering that the Church itself was in the forefront of centuries of anti-Semitism, this is particularly ballsy.)

While Cantalamessa attributes the comparison to an unnamed and possibly apocryphal “Jewish friend”, his asseveration was egregious enough to prompt a Vatican PR flack to engage in damage control—distancing the Pope (who has been personally linked to the scandals in his pre-pontifical roles) from it as well as trying to ’splain that the preacher didn’t really mean to equate calls for accountability with, you know, pogroms or the Holocaust.

I have to say that Holy Week, and particularly Good Friday, is a bizarre time for such dissimulation. Just another nail in the cross.

Sign of the times

God bless the company that knows how to pull off an April fool in grand style.

Google. Need I say more?