On the hot dog lobby....

I’m not a conspiracy theorist by any stretch of the imagination, but I know people who are and most of them are crazy as a shit house rat.  I have a brother who doesn’t believe that we’ve been to the moon.  He thinks that what NASA should do to quell all of the talk from him and the 10 others who think like him is point the Hubble Space Telescope at the moon so that they can see the Tang containers we left behind.  He says that then he would believe it.  I laugh and poke fun at him about this every chance I get; it’s fun.

I’m not stupid either though and I do consider myself to be intuitive.  I see something here and hear something there and my intuition does the rest.  I’ve always thought that I would be a good investigator.  Once there was a woman who came in for an ID card who couldn’t tell me her deceased husband's full name or where he was stationed, only that he was in the Air Force when it first became the Air Force.  I made about 20 calls and eventually tracked him down and got her that ID card.

About ten years ago I was listening to the radio while driving home from Chattanooga and heard a short news report about an annual hot dog lunch that a number of politicians routinely attended.  “Hot dog lunch”, I thought to myself, “a fine example of the hot dog lobby hard at work currying favor with our elected officials”, and chuckled to myself.  At the time I didn’t realize just how prescient that fleeting moment out on Interstate 24 was.  After that day the hot dog lobby became a distance memory and I all but forgot about it.

About five years ago I read about a piece of legislation introduced in the House of Representatives (H.3462) that would have made it unlawful to use chicken knuckles in the manufacture of hot dogs due to health concerns and the inhumane methods used by chicken farmers in the harvesting of said chicken knuckles.  Manufacturers argued that chicken knuckles were actually good for us and that they would be the least of our concerns if we knew what else is in hot dogs.  Before the bill came to a vote its sponsor withdrew it from consideration without comment.  I thought about this briefly, then something shiny distracted me and just like that earlier news report it was soon forgotten.

Last year a bill was introduced by a Senator in North Carolina (S.1291) that would have forced hot dog manufacturers to package their hot dogs in an eight pack to match the number typically found in a pack of hotdog buns.  This bill made it out of committee and was voted on by the full Senate, but it failed to pass by a vote of 95 to 15.

Here are my issues with these two pieces of legislation:

• The Representative who introduced the chicken knuckle bill suddenly became wealthy off of some hot dog futures that he claims were purchased prior to taking office.  Shortly after withdrawing his bill from consideration he retired to Vienna, Austria. 
• There are only 100 senators, but there were 110 votes cast.  Where did those other votes come from?

After the incident last year in the Senate I became convinced that the Hot Dog Lobby that I had dismissed with a chuckle ten years previously actually did actually did exist, so I began to sit back and observe, determined not to continue to be a victim of dirty hot dog politics.  I began to see headlines like this one from NYDailyNews.com:

 (Click on the titles to see the article if you don’t believe me):

British PM David Cameron stuffs face with hot dogs, keeps mum on Lockerbie bomber deal

Were the hot dogs a bribe to keep him quiet about Lockerbie or just a reminder of who he works for?

And this one from FoxNews.com:

Hot Dog Diplomacy: Obama Says It's Up to Iranian's to Accept July 4 Invitations

After a time I knew that I had stumbled upon something so sinister and secretive it made the Illuminati and Red Elephant Club look like the Girl Scouts.  Then came the final piece in the puzzle when in June of this year the USDA held an event during which it was revealed that they were pulling the old swicheroo and replacing the traditional food pyramid with a plate graphic. 

Who headlined the event unveiling this new plate?  None other than Michelle Obama of course.  Here is a picture of that graphic:

What's missing?  The venerable hot dog.  Michelle Obama has apparently adopted nutrition as her pet cause, which brings us to this headline from The New American:

Are the Obamas Food Hypocrites?

Ask yourself this: With your wife making such a huge deal about nutrition, why is Obama out throwing down dogs? Just who are you beholden to Mr. President, your wife or Oscar Meyer?

This brings us full-circle back to the incident that first started me down the path of uncovering this hot dog conspiracy.  I started thinking about that first little news snippet that I had heard and made it my mission to track down more on this story.  After months of intensive research followed by a ten second query via Google, I found this:

AMI's Annual Hot Dog Lunch Hits Home Run on Capitol Hill

That’s right, the Hot Dog Lobby now has a name, the American Meat Institute.  How hot dog manufacturers were able to join an institute dedicated to furthering the just cause of meat is beyond me, but there it was in black and white.  Like deviled ham, SPAM, vienna sausages and bologna, I hardly think that the contents of the common hot dog would qualify it as meat anymore than me being born in an oven makes me a biscuit.  Here's a quote taken directly from this article:

“The event was also sponsored by the American Bakers Association, International Bottled Water Association, American Beverage Association….”

So the hot dog industry doesn’t have a tight enough grip on the American political process and had to bring in reinforcements in the form of buns, water and beer.  What’s really cooking in the kitchens of Oscar Myer and what agenda are they pushing?  Part of the answer is their desire to continue the use of chicken knuckles in their products and their refusal to conform to the eight hot dog/eight bun standard.  There's more to it than that though and I assure you that my investigation will not stop until I have the full story.

On waiting room etiquette....

I don’t care much for waiting rooms and I don’t know many people who do.  Some of them are better than others; when my wife was pregnant and we would go for her monthly check-up’s we rarely waited more than about 5 minute or so.  Not only did we not wait long, but they didn’t even pull that little trick where they take you back quickly and then make you wait in the examining room for three days; offices that do that should have their license pulled.

I’m almost positive that they pump a gas into waiting rooms that makes you sleepy, this would explain why the little receptionist window is only open long enough for them to thrust a clipboard at you and take your co-pay; as soon as that’s done they close it again so that they don’t get sleepy too.  I’ll also never understand why they make you fill out the same paperwork every time you go there; until they prove differently that S-O-B died of kidney failure, just like I reported last time and on the ten previous visits.  Attention to detail and consistency are the keys to escaping detection.

I could write a book about doctor visits, but that’s not really what this post is about, this post is about the waiting room and people who dwell there.  The wait is horrific and the poking and prodding that follows the wait isn’t fun for normal people either, but worse still are the people you have to sit with while waiting your turn.  I don’t know where these people come from, but they violate nearly every social norm known to mankind, they just don’t act like people who have been living in civilized society for their entire lives.  Maybe the explanation is that they weren’t, maybe they were rescued from the jungles of South America. 

There’s an unwritten rule that I follow when entering a waiting room and that rule is that I search for the one seat that is as far away from everyone else as possible and that’s where I sit.  It’s kind of like The Urinal Code.  For those of you who don't know, The Urinal Code states that you have to allow at least one empty urinal between you and the other guy. If, for instance, there are 3 urinals and only the middle one is empty, do you use it? Yea you use it, if you're an anarchist. If you believe in maintaining the fabric of society though you check your watch, or cell phone, or whatever else you can do to look distracted until either the guy on the right or the guy on the left leaves, then you're in the clear.  When society breaks down it will start at a urinal.  Count on it.

This urinal selection is not something that is taught, it is ingrained in our DNA. I'm like a Terminator, I can go into a waiting room or restroom, do a quick two second scan and based upon complex mathematical calculations that not even I understand pick out the correct urinal, toilet, or chair.  Some people apparently don’t care though, they will go into a waiting room filled with 30 chairs, only one of which is occupied, and plop their lazy butt down next to the poor sap that’s sitting in it.

Some people want to strike up conversations with complete strangers in the waiting room.  I’m a people person, really I am, but I don’t want to talk to waiting room people.  My problem is that I get attached to people too easily and that five minute conversation about Dancing with the Stars, which incidentally I don’t even watch, is going to make me feel too close to you.  Just when that bond starts to strengthen and I start to realize that I would take a bullet for you, your name is going to be called and you will be out of my life forever.  I can’t handle that loss.

Maybe it’s because they’re nervous about what’s about to be done to them, but striking up conversations with strangers in a waiting room is a bad idea.  They want to talk about medical stuff, they don’t really want to get to know you.  They don’t want to hear about your hopes and dreams, about your successes and failures; they want to talk about hemorrhoids and bunions.  Hemorrhoids and bunions are subjects that just aren’t that compelling to me.  Now if you want to talk boils, I’m in.

Several months ago I had to go to a place while my wife was having tests run.  Sitting in a waiting room with someone isn’t so bad; at least you have someone to share the misery with.  But alas, as expected she was called back for her two day wait in the back and I was left alone.  At least there’s no one else here, I thought to myself as I settled in for the long wait.  But of course two seconds later in walks the Bertrum von Yapper family, who promptly sets up shop right beside me and without so much as a one seat cushion between us.  When a family enters a waiting room the alpha male is responsible for selecting the appropriate seat for the rest of the pack, but he failed in this responsibility. 

What made this particular incident so uncomfortable is that they received some less than joyful news and when that news was delivered the young lady sitting next to me burst into tears.  What does a person do in that situation?  You were there first and there are about 1500 square feet of unused space containing about 25 comfortable chairs, is it appropriate for you to get up and move elsewhere?  If you do get up and move elsewhere will they see it and think it rude?  Do you say anything at all?  I decided that the solution was to pretend to go to the bathroom and then sit elsewhere when I returned, so that’s what I did.  It didn’t make me happy that I failed to defend my position, but The Urinal Code doesn’t cover everything, so I fell back to another fortified position.

With the von Yapper family though there’s never a bad seat in the house, so I was able to learn that the news wasn’t quite as bad as that young lady thought and that the rending of cloth and gnashing of teeth was a little premature, father von Yapper was going to be just fine.  That brief encounter with the von Yapper family was like a good movie; I laughed, I cried, I was transported to another place and time.  In short it was a real honor to know that of all the waiting rooms in all the towns in all the world, they walked into mine and setup camp in my lap.

Maybe I’m old fashioned, but people just don’t respect personal space anymore.  They stand two inches from you while you’re putting in your PIN at Wal-Mart and they force you to listen to conversations that you really don’t want to be a part, all while apparently enjoying total ignorance as to how obnoxious they’re being.  But I’m not the kind to identify a problem without suggesting a solution, so I have a Zorb on order and will just take it everywhere I go and when my burdens are too heavy will ride off into the sunset in it.  That should resolve the issue.



On LOL....

I hate LOL, I don't really know why, but it just irritates the crap out of me.  I think that more than anything it's probably that everyone over uses it.  To me if something's funny just say that it's funny.  I have only used LOL twice, both in these posts, and I have vowed that I will never use it in a text message or IM.  Instead, I put "ha", or "that's funny".

My family makes fun of my for my utter disdain for "text-speak" and often make fun of me for it.  They say that they could read one of my texts and tell it was from me because of the correct use of punctuation, capitalization and my refusal to use abbreviations.  Once I was driving down the road and got a text from my wife.  Because texting and driving is dangerous, I responded with "k".  Her next text asked "who is this?", so I pulled off to the side of the road and wrote that it was me, who else would it be.  She then asked me who texted her back and said that she didn't believe that it was really me.  Call me anal, but I text like I would write and refuse to do otherwise.  Maybe if everyone else would do that they wouldn't text so darned much and would just pick up the phone.

Through Facebook I have been exposed to writings that I would never have seen otherwise and have observed that many young people post there like they text.  Some of them I have to think about for a minute to figure out what the heck they're trying to say and I wonder if they know how to spell; do they think that "you're" is really spelled "ur"?  If your post isn't written in plain English or gives me a headache trying to decipher it I'm probably just going to skip it.  Hopefully that skipped post doesn't contain the answers to the mysteries of the universe.  Of course if it did you probably wouldn't be posting it on Facebook anyway.

I fully expect the two people that read this post to text me with an "lol", but don't expect one in return.

On the man dance....

I don't know whether it's social conditioning or something that's ingrained in us, but people of the same sex tend to act in remarkably similar ways.  I mentioned this test in another another post a couple of months ago as an example.  Though this is listed on Jokes2000.com, like most funny things what makes it so humorous is that this kind of thing is what guys do.  If you don't believe it, have 5 guys that you know take the test and compare the results, you'll be amazed at how similar they will be.

Guys do something that I call The Man Dance.  The Man Dance isn't something that you're taught, it's something that you just do, it's in our DNA.  For instance, if I asked a guy to drive me up the street to pick up my car from the shop the rules of The Man Dance dictate that I offer him gas money.  It may only be a half mile trip and thus not really worthy of the gas offer, but the offer has to be extended.  The Man Dance also dictates that the offer of gas money must be rejected because this is what guys do for one another.  That is how men interact and this is what makes it like a dance; the steps are choreographed and each participant understands the progression and which step happens next.  When someone breaks the rules of the Man Dance things are thrown off balance.

A couple of years ago a guy that I work with wanted a dachshund.  Knowing that I had two, he asked me where I had gotten them.  I told him that I had gotten them from a breeder and offered to call her to see if she had any available.  It turned out that she did and he asked if I would be willing to ride out there during lunch to take a look at them.  Although it was about an hour drive from the office, I told him that I would take an extended lunch and ride out there with him.  So we went and he picked out a puppy.

On the way back to the office he asked if I was hungry and I was so he pulled up to a McDonald's drive-thru.  The drive-thru attendant gave us the customary greeting and asked for our order.  This is where the dance should have started, but instead my co-worker said that he was going to have two orders.  Mentally I had already changed into more comfortable shoes knowing that some dancing was about to go down, but instead I was transported to a place where the rules of society no longer mattered and anarchy prevailed.

My co-worker should have offered me that lunch at McDonald's for my trouble.  Then I would have declined, he would have looked at me with wonderment in his eyes and asked if I was sure, and I would have said something like "Absolutely, I was glad to do it.  In fact, let me buy you lunch buddy."  This is The Man Dance and it is the absolute essence of male behavior.  The steps are offer, decline, offer again, decline again.  The code says that I have to say no, but even though he knew that, the code says that he has to offer.  These are the rules and yes maybe they're silly, but life without rules would be chaos and in a world of chaos no one gets McDonald's.

For the last 3 or 4 years I have been able to secure Cotton Bowl tickets.  The first year that I got them I mistakenly told someone in Missouri that I had a spare one that he could use in addition to the two that I knew he had gotten.  A couple of hours later I realized my mistake and immediately called him and informed him of my error.  Dude gave a very strong verbal indication that he wasn't going to be very forgiving and ranted about how he had already made plans for that extra ticket, so I offered up mine.

I had to offer because it was my mistake, but this is where everything went all Twilight Zone on me because he ACCEPTED my offer!  That's right ladies and gentlemen, he took my ticket.  Not only did he take the ticket, he asked me if I could overnight it to him at my expense.  He didn't just violate the code of The Man Dance, he blasted it with a 10 megaton bomb and rendered it totally unrecognizable.  There wasn't any of that "no, it's your ticket and I would feel bad about taking it," to which I would have been obliged to respond back with something like "no, I probably wasn't going to go anyway" (in situations like this the code of The Man Dance dictates that you try to lessen the mental strain on the other party) he accepted before I even had the offer completely out of my mouth.  What he did was take advantage of the code.  Knowing that I would have to offer, he had his acceptance speech prepared.  He zigged and I didn't zag.  He thrusted and I failed to parry.

But this total and complete breakdown in the fiber of society wasn't enough for him.  He never, and I do mean never, thanked me for that ticket.  If he had danced I could have at least left that situation knowing that when called upon to dance for the betterment of mankind I stepped up to the plate.  I would have felt better about the situation.  There should have been an offer, a decline and at least one more offer before his acceptance.  But instead he threw the rule book out the window like a piece of old chewing gum.

I was with a couple of guys at work the other day relaying this story to them and their jaws nearly hit the floor.  They were appalled not necessarily because he took the ticket, but instead because he seemingly had no interest in adhering to the customs of men.  Were there mutated genes involved here or was that ticket so important to him that the violation of code was, in his mind, worth it?  I may never know the answer to that but I do know that if any offense is worthy of having your mancard pulled, this is one of them.

I learned the other day that the guy that pulled the ticket shenanigans on me is no longer with the company and is having a difficult time finding employment.  Karma is indeed a bitch isn't she?

On sucking it up....

I've been going through one of those periods lately where anything and everything has been making me angry, one of those periods where I've wanted to stab someone with a pencil and might have done it if a pencil had been readily available.  I've gotten angry about little things and I've allowed them to set the tone for my entire day.  Last week I woke up to a brief radio blurb about the Jerry Sandusky situation at PSU and I let that 5:30 AM blurb set the tone for the rest of the day.  I let a Thanksgiving event at work get me so hemmed up that on Friday night I barely slept for thinking about it.  I forget sometimes that not only will these things not matter 100 years from now, they probably won't matter next week.

I have someone who works for me who complains about salespeople constantly.  It's the same complaint all the time; their paperwork is never right, they don't send everything in, their orders are wrong....  I tell him that I have been with the company for 13 years and have come to expect certain behaviors from sales; it has always been this way and probably always will be.  It isn't a glass-half-empty response, it's just that people are people, they have their little foibles and being angry about it changes nothing.  I remind him that if they weren't selling new products we would quickly be out of work, that they are just people who are trying to get by like the rest of us, but every two weeks or so he's back in my office and we start all over again.  It's like being on one of these:

That gerbil gets up there and thinks that every time he runs forward he's closer to his destination.  My employee thinks that getting upset at sales is going to change something, but all it does is add to his aggravation without accomplishing anything.

I get wrapped around the axel the same way and sometimes it takes me entirely too long to realize it and make the necessary corrections to get me out of that rut.  I get frustrated at work when issues outside of my span of control are dumped on me.  I get frustrated when the guy who is supposed to be my right hand man drops the ball, which happens frequently.  I get frustrated when half of the people are complaining that it's too hot and half that it's too cold. Getting frustrated, though, does absolutely nothing to change the situation and just makes for a crappy day.

What I forget is that I'm blessed.  I have an incredible wife and great kids, 99% of the time my employees do what's required of them, and do it well.  I don't have to worry about where my next mortgage payment or meal is coming from and I'm compensated well for what I do.  Nothing else is really that important and letting the little stuff cause me grief is just plain stupid.

On user prompts....

I kind of get tired of being asked if I'm sure I really want to do that every time I do something on a computer.  Yea I admit that it has probably saved me grief once or twice, but the ratio of "thank-you's" to "just do what I ask you to do's" is so disproportionate that the prompts are really just an irritant.

What I really need is a user prompt between my brain and mouth that would allow me one last chance to consider my words before I say them.  Or maybe a feature like they have in Microsoft Outlook where you can recall a message.  Sometimes, like most people, I say what's on my mind when it's better just to keep my mouth shut; but if I had these options available to me it would allow me another opportunity to edit my words or recall them altogether before they get me in trouble.  Something like this would save me a ton of grief and prevent a lot of those "did I just say that out loud" moments.

I had this girl that worked for me once and toward the end of her employment she frequently had duty after hours and was thus given a company cell phone.  One day she got a call and stepped outside to take it.  When she returned I asked her if she had just taken a duty call or booty call.  Though it was funny and I chuckled I probably would have recalled that statement; human resources frowns upon such witticisms.  Knowing her though it probably was a booty call.

This same girl quit because she felt that she was underpaid; she had an overinflated sense of self-worth.  We were disagreeing about what she was worth in relationship to everyone else when she said "well I guess that we can agree to disagree then and I will be turning in my resignation."  I walked her to her desk, helped her word her resignation just right, accepted it and told her that I would pay her for the 2 weeks, but that she was free to leave.  I don't think that she saw that outcome when she threatened to resign and I'm thinking that she would have recalled that message to me if she could have.

My lack of a filter is well documented in Goodson household lore; it's the thing upon which legends are built.  We laugh about it now, but a couple of years ago my wife was sick and spent most of the night hugging the toilet.  When I get roused from a deep sleep it takes a minute for me to gather my faculties about me.  At about 2 o'clock that morning I was awakened by the sounds of my wife being victimized by a particularly vicious round of sickness and I turned around and asked her if she could throw up more quietly as I was trying to sleep.  As I said we laugh about it now, but at the time she was not amused, not one little bit.  I didn't mean it, I was just half-awake and the minute those words came from my mouth I knew that the price for saying them would be steep.

My wife and I laugh because over the years we have discovered that she doesn't have a filter sometimes too, so we're more alike than we previously thought.  I guess that filter deficiency is really something that we all suffer from at times.  The fact that we recognize it and wish to correct it shows that if nothing else our hearts are in the right place; it's those who know they don't have a filter and don't care that I don't like to be around much.

On victimocracy....

I found the term victimocracy when doing a Google search for the images that I typically include as a lead-in to my posts.  The Urban Dictionary defines victimocracy as “an offspring of democracy whereby the greatest victim yields the most power.”  This summarizes for me what our society has become; everyone’s a victim of someone and everyone’s powerless against it.

In a previous post I mentioned how I refuse to allow events that happened more than 30 years ago define who I am today.  This is an opinion that I’m pretty passionate about and I basically call it my Suck It Up philosophy.  To some that may sound harsh, but what it means is that when you face tough times you pick yourself up by the bootstraps and keep moving forward.  For me to do anything else is simply unacceptable.

I am a frequent listener to sports talk radio and the big story this week has been the Penn State child sex abuse scandal.  The fact that adults decided that the reputation of a university was more important than protecting young boys from this pervert absolutely sickens me.  Adults thinking that their responsibility ended with reporting this to their superiors sicken me.  The fact that they allowed this man back on campus astounds me.  There are several aspects of this situation that are just unsettling.

What are also troubling though are some of the commentaries I’ve heard and some of the remarks made by callers.   A lady caller to the Paul Finebaum show yesterday evening said that she was molested as a kid and it totally ruined her life and damaged her forever.  Obviously I am not a woman, so maybe it’s different for females, but I was molested when I was 10 and for me to say that it ruined my life and damaged me would be ludicrous.  Has it affected me?  Sure it has, but ruined me?  Not by any stretch of the imagination.

To me it’s pretty simple; you can chose to be a victim or you can chose to be a survivor. Telling yourself that you’re not going to be a victim doesn’t mean that it will be easy and that there won’t be struggles, but keeping your head straight goes a long way toward helping.  Thankfully I heard another caller this morning express this very sentiment, so not everyone wants to play the victim card, some people realize that they have choices to make. If you say to yourself that your life is ruined and you’re damaged you will be; it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Being a victim is easy, you get all kinds of attention and you don’t have to take any responsibility for your screw-ups. 

The crazy thing is that this society allows people to be victims.  I can’t tell someone to suck it up because that’s insensitive.  Alcoholics have a disease, they aren’t people who have no self-control and don’t care enough about themselves and others to stop drinking, and they’re “powerless against it.”  The basic philosophy behind drug and alcohol treatment is flawed because we tell them that they have a disease.  We allow them to be victims of that “disease” instead of telling them to suck it up and take responsibility for their lives.

It’s time to quit allowing people to point to distant events as an excuse for their behavior; if we don’t we’re giving the kids that Sandusky molested an excuse to do it to others.