m. yu's humble pie

m. yu who has the fabulous but NSFW bondage blog The Jade Gate and the political blog Social Seppuku wrote a post the other day about the heightened anxiety of Americans as our consumption-based economy comes crashing down around us. I loved the post and thought it would make a good movie. Here's the movie. You can read the original post here

Welfare Queens

If I had a billion dollars for every time I heard a jackass on tee vee this week exclaim that corporate executives being handed free money FROM THE TAXPAYERS deserve to make whatever salary they can get away with cuz hey that's capitalism, I could actually bail us out of this mess.

If the government gives your company more money than it is worth to fix the mess you made that is not capitalism, no matter how hard you try to spin that onion.

I heard some con on the other day say that in America everyone has the right to go before their employer and ask for what they are worth. This in defense of the CEO's who brought down our economy. I thought 'damn, what an eloquent argument for collective bargaining'. Somehow I'm sure that's not what the guy had in mind.

UPDATE: If you are so inclined, here is a petition: http://action.seiu.org/bailout/

Tax Widget - Check Out Your Obama Tax Cut

Click to embiggen.

Actually, given my real circumstances (I do not make 500k/yr yet), my tax cut would be about $500 dollars. Which is a real tax cut and not borrowing against my tax return to give me an economic stimulus check. Kinda cool, eh?

Here's your link

I'm Going To Hell.

Really.

Next month Ben and I are heading to Los Angeles to recoup the vacation I won by writing a story about a kitchen nightmare I experienced. This is not the hell we are headed for.

Rather, because I bought a vacation from Marriott Resorts over a year ago that we weren't able to use, we transferred that package to their resort nearest LA, where we'll stay for a few days before heading to the London Hotel in Hollywood.

Here's a clippy from an e-mail from the Newport Beach tourism board:

I stroke a cashmere scarf so soft that my hand seems to float weightlessly upon it. Today the good life is mine as I sail through my private island, cloaked in contentment.

Newport Beach is perhaps best known for its unrivaled life of privilege. Mariner's Mile must be experienced to be believed with its endless stream of exotic automobiles and lavish yachts, and its restaurant row boasting million-dollar views These are the vehicles used to transport their owners to the mansions and boutiques of Balboa and surrounding islands.

But perhaps the island you prefer is Fashion Island with its 200 specialty boutiques, just waiting for your discerning perusal.

Yeah, I'm going there. Maybe sunshine and salt air will cure the hives I'm sure to break out in.


(This image is taken from Shop Till They Drop and shows the tin shacks that Bangladeshi garment workers live in, unable to afford better.)

Sweet Pea

My favorite pick your own produce farm opens tomorrow! Yay! A few years ago I joined a CSA and got a big box of veggies every week. Unfortunately, we couldn't eat most of it and that's when we started our compost pile. I did learn to love kohlrabi, though. I can't grow a decent vegetable to save my life and don't really have the yard for it anyway, the sad little row of beans I planted by the fence will attest to this. The pick your own place is my dream come true.

So it is pea season. Every year it sneaks up on me just as we get ready to head nort' for the 4th of July weekend. Nothing is better in the middle of winter than fresh frozen peas, and I've sworn this year I'm really going to stock up. I even have a little pea-sheller that is supposed to make the job easier. As long as the pea pods aren't too thick and tough that is. But I haven't got a clue when I'm going to fit pea picking into my schedule. I've already missed the strawberries that I swore I'd make into jars and jars and jars of jam. At least there are later season berries to make up for the strawberries.

Man, I'd be the world's shittiest farmer if I had to do it for a living.

Ed McMahon - Feels like snark, but I got nothin'.

Ed McMahon was on Larry King last night talking about the recent news that his home is in foreclosure. I want to be snarky about it, eat the rich and all that, but I think it is just sad.

What rarely gets reported, and what probably goes to the fact that being rich don't make you smart, is that McMahon won more than the value of his home in a lawsuit against a company that was supposed to clean the mold from his house, but did not. McMahon could have paid his home off at that time but he chose not to. They say that the money went to gutting and rebuilding the interior of the home, but it doesn't look like that's what they did. From the little clippy they showed this morning, McMahon & Wife's excuse on being broke was that they spent beyond their means and showered too many gifts upon their friends. Well, when you go door to door doling out 10 million dollars, sooner or later it catches up with you.

McMahon is not alone. It seems that in Manhattan, some erstwhile Susie Socialites are quietly trying to scale back but are hoping that no one will notice. "I know the Escalade is two years old, but I just can't bear reprogramming the mp3 player". Look for victory gardens atop Fifth Ave penthouses all summer long. "The corn? It's ornamental!" I hear koi are delicious.

From Dailykos:

So New York’s very wealthy are addressing their distress in discreet and often awkward ways. They try to move their $165 sessions with personal trainers to a time slot that they know is already taken. They agree to tour multimillion-dollar apartments and then say the spaces don’t match their specifications. They apply for a line of credit before art auctions, supposedly to buy a painting or a sculpture, but use that borrowed money to pay other debts

What was that thing about the subprime mess being the fault of ignorant, low class borrowers who had no business messing with finance? Ha Ha! I found my snark.

You know what Ed McMahon and I have in common? Ascot? no. Faded trophy wife? no. Halitosis? Let me check-(huhh, huhh in my palm) yeah, probably particularly if he likes as much coffee as me. No the other thing is that Countrywide Mortgage foreclosed on me, too.

A few years ago in the midst of the re-fi, go-go market, Ben and I bought a duplex. Right after we bought it, a new lender bought the mortgage from the lender we had at closing. That lender was Countrywide. For some reason, Countrywide sent all correspondence to the rental unit (though our home address was prominent in the closing papers) where the tenant promptly threw it all away. At our house we would casually notice that we weren't receiving our mortgage bills but assume that the shell game was continuing and that sooner or later we'd get our statement.

When we finally got our statement it was in the form of a sheriff knocking on the door and handing me a summons.

In the next few weeks our conversations with Countrywide were truly bizarre. Let me say that the first thing we did upon discovering which company owned our property for us was to pay up our balance. However, Countrywide didn't want to dismiss the foreclosure until we paid their legal and search fees, which they claimed came to over three thousand dollars.

"Send me your itemized bill. Show me the hours you've been charged for," I said.

"Well," they hesitated. "A lot of that is internal. We had to do a search to find you so that we could serve you with papers."

"How did you do that?" I asked. "Did you hire a detective?"

"No. We did an on-line search".

They googled me for three grand?

"Did you check your own database?" I asked.

"Of course"

"Then you probably should have found us, since you hold another of our mortgages."

So Countrywide dropped the foreclosure, and we promptly financed through another lender. I could never say for sure but my suspicions are that Countrywide had a little scam going where they quickly moved for foreclosure so that they can collect fees they don't incur. I think that by the time we were served we had missed two of their statements. Unfortunately, the foreclosure is on our credit reports - as resolved, but still. The other crappy thing is that all those people who bought those real estate get-rich guides call you on the phone because they've seen in court records that there is a foreclosure against you. They want to buy your property for pennies on the dollar. Even though we weren't actually losing a home, it felt humiliating to get condescending calls from rank amateurs.

I feel for people, even Ed McMahon, who go through it for real.

Wundrun's Kitchen Nightmares

A local radio station is having a 'kitchen nightmare' contest. The winner gets a free trip to Los Angeles and a $250.00 gift certificate for dinner at Gordon Ramsay's new restaurant. Ramsay hosts "Hells Kitchen", a show I have never watched. That would be like cheating on 'Top Chef', something I will not do.

I have a kitchen nightmare story. This morning as I listened to the contest details, I thought "Hey, I have a kitchen nightmare story, and I can write it up and win, because I am a blogger. That's what I do. I write!" Gaining considerable enthusiasm I began to think that I could be like that lady in the Prizewinner of Cala-somethin' somethin' County! I was driving my kids up to the in-laws, where they will be hiding out for the week, so I had plenty of time to compose my winning entry in my head on the drive.

Man, that was a great entry I came up with. Unfortunately, when I sat down at my computer I pretty much forgot all those pithy things I wanted to say with precision, wit, and timing. Ah, hell. Then I remembered one other thing. I don't write so good neither. But I wrote it anyway and since it was writ, I sent it in.

Here it is. (Oh, and every word of it is true. Even the longer parts I left out and the ones I forgot somewhere around Baraboo).

When I was in college my friends and I took a summer sublet apartment. It was the upper of a dubious old house. Not much worked right, to say the least. I think that we were all waitresses or bartenders. Being around restaurants and it being the summer, none of us used much in the kitchen except maybe the microwave, and obviously the refrigerator (beer, natch).

One night I thought I would impress my boyfriend by cooking him a home-made meal. At the time my specialty was spaghetti and meatballs. Boil noodles, heat can of sauce with frozen meatballs. Serve. Expanding my horizons, I also planned to make one of those frozen loaves of french bread. Pre-garlic-buttered, of course.

I started the noodles and sauce on the stove top and turned on the gas oven to preheat. Five minutes later I opened the oven door to check if it was hot enough yet. Think about how you open your oven door, when it's one of those free-standing models: You open door, bend down, look in.

That's what I did. That's why the fireball that exploded out of the oven caught me right in the face.

At the hospital they wanted to know if I'd been playing with fireworks, because it was the 5th of July. I said I hadn't. Besides, it wasn't just my face that was burned. On the back of my head were charred little balls of melted hair globs. I think my face was probably in the blue part of the flame and the orange part sort of wrapped around my head. My boyfriend - I do think I impressed him - said the flame came out about four feet. It burned off my eyebrows, my eyelashes and my bangs. You know for a white girl I was looking quite a bit like Whoopi Goldberg. Aside from a lot of unwanted hair removal - meaning I didn't want the hair removed - my skin was mostly okay. Except that my nose was one big watery blister. The doctor peeled the skin off my nose. I went home looking like a sad, ratty-wigged, alopecia-suffering Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Strangely, the expensive restaurant that I worked at didn't want me to cocktail waitress for a while. At least not until I got the skin back on my nose.

My landlord? He stopped by to tell me that I didn't really look all that bad. And since he tried to fix the oven himself we just went on not using it.

Oddly enough, the entire house burnt down eight months later. We didn't live there by then and no one was home. It was spring break.

UPDATE: Huzzah! They are going to read my entry on the air Thursday morning! I have won an apron (I need a new one. Yay) and a cookbook (Can you ever have enough? No. You cannot!). Now I have a 1 in 5 shot at winning the whole deal. The trip winner will be announced on Tuesday.

I told my mom about it and she threatened to write her own tale: A tenant in one of their apartments tried to kill himself by sticking his head in the oven. It was electric. Ha!

Cross your fingers for me. If you do, I'll send you a postcard from L.A. (Gotta go now, I'm having a little dream sequence.)

Thank God for Big Tax Breaks

It is very important that we don't go spending tax dollars on things like infrastructure because that's not fair to rich folks who really deserve to keep all of their money because naturally they were smart enough to make it in the first place so thusly they will use their money for the best and highest purpose. Zing bang! all of society prospers! Trickle Down Trickle Down Siss Boom Bah!

Case in point:

To own one Hermes Birkin is a feat in and of itself. To have a collection of over one hundred Hermes Bags is mind blowing. This is said to be accomplished by Victoria Beckham, as if it is even an accomplishment, who has spent over $2 million dollars at Hermes. Most recently, Victoria sported one of her most casual looks, of course paired with a White Hermes Birkin. Her outfit is made up of white skinny jeans, a blue tank, a blue and white striped cropped jacket, Christian Louboutin pumps, and of course her must-have designer handbag. I must admit I am partial to the white Hermes leathers (pictures of my beautiful new addition to come later), which are stark stunning and crisp on their intricately crafted bags, but worry about any spec of dirt getting on the bag. The very light shades, especially white, must be sent to the mother ship, in Paris, and will take 6 months to be cleaned. Lucky for Victoria, she has about 99 other Hermes bags to tote while waiting

From Purse Blog, Number 20 on sitemeter's list of blogs. *sigh*