Meanderings of the Directionless

Greetings from real life.  It seems trying to come up with a visual theme and some appeal for a form of technology that lost it's mainstream audience five years ago (blogging) is a Herculean task.  Note:  By Herculean, I mean the low-budget 70's animated Hercules, of course.  Complete with sound effects generated by kids banging on a garage door with a baseball bat, and slow-moving, dull-witted monsters that have a narrow range of expression.  Basically, they all go "HNNNNGGGHHHHGGGHHHH!!!"

Hey, I love long-form writing as much as the next meatbag; but with the limited amount of "leisure" time available to me, I have been avoiding this place like the plague, or at least trying to shorten up the amount of time required to to dress it up with unrelated photos. Look! Here's Frog & Toad™, for no apparent reason other than I like them:

I'm going to pledge nothing in terms of content, but I need to wet my feet here, so bear with me for the short term while I try to conjure up a eureka moment to figure out why this blog should exist.  So far all I've come up with is a smörgåsbord combo of fiction, humour, news, op-ed style writing and personal diary, all related to the central theme of s**t that gets in your way as you try to navigate the deceptively shallow waters of life...

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Failure - Not Only An Option, It's Now Encouraged!

What's bothering me this week? Stupidity, gross ignorance, lack of ownership, accountability and indifference of the general and more specific varities. No one seems to be outraged that children aren't allowed to fail, no matter their grades, in elementary school even if they are, in fact, failures.

If this is the new trend, then hopefully it will spread concentrically to our jobs, and society in general so that we can run over people at will and do nothing (or something, only poorly) all day at work and be rewarded for it.

This country and society are well on their way to ruin and not only because of the complete economic failure that is heading our way. Lessee, Tommy didn't hand in his geography assignment because he was out all night drinking? Give that boy an "A+" and get him into ninth grade ASAP. We need more young men like you, son...

Seriously, what good will come of letting children who are failures believe they are successes?

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Steely Dan - Gaucho Outtakes

These are nearly-complete outtakes from the rather difficult 1979 recording sessions from Steely Dan's 1980 album Gaucho, famously leaked to the web about ten years ago.  Amply demonstrates why even their discards are better than most artists' A-sides.

Many thanks to the video montage master Melegorm, who created these and dozens of other interpretations of classic SD material, both released and not.  Personally, I believe this to be their most fertile and interesting period - you can hear the early midlife crises of Becker & Fagen's internal struggle in the sound and lyrics of these tunes and I can identify with the "untapped potential" quotient.  Imagine realizing your best days are behind you at age 32.

Hey, wait a minute...

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Comment + thought = Stand-alone article

Posted by my bro in the comments of the post below, thought it worthy of an entry all on it's own:

My favourite take on the auto industry is how it's all the Union's fault that everything is going off the rails. It has nothing to do with GM's greed in needing a competitive vehicle in every single niche market, no matter how insignificant. Also, Chrysler needs to make vans and nothing else. Well maybe the Challenger, but not for $60k. It's not like it's a new design or even a new engine. 

GM released the Chevy HHR after playing catch-up to the PT Cruiser, but about 5 years too late to cash in on the trend. The HHR, much like the PT Cruiser is now D.O.A. and no one would be caught dead in one. This is an example of wasting huge development costs for a trend that's already dead by the time you get your crapwagon to market.

Labour costs are about 10% of the price of a vehicle. Take 10% off every vehicle and you still aren't selling vehicles because people are :
a) afraid they will lose their jobs
b) cannot get a loan from the bank
c) really don't need to replace their three year old car in the first place
d) waiting for the prices to drop.........waiting .......still waiting..........

Toyota had to lease an ocean liner to store unsold vehicles because they have run out of fields and warehouses to store new vehicles. As supply and demand tells us, this glut of unsold vehicles should mean lower prices, but instead government is stealing from us to prop up the Companies for another few days.

.....still waiting........

What's really inferior about north American cars is their design and engineering. But everyone targets the union people who put them together. There's something about a car assembled for minimum wage that would not make me comfortable at 130 kph on the 401, but that's just me.


At GM there are 5 retirees for every line worker. This is simply not the reality at the Japanese branch plants since they only began producing here in the 1980s.

What is inexcusable has been the quality lapse which is narrowing, but honestly should have been met or exceeded in the mid nineties. Japanese vehicles are clearly more reliable if one looks through the well regarded Consumer Report auto edition. If more people did this, GM and Chrysler would have been out of business long ago.

As you bid farewell to iconic manufacturers here in Ontario you need to realize a basic economic rule. Manufacturing creates wealth, and these Companies are the last gasp of big manufacturing here. Countless Ontario part makers will also fail along with the companies they supply. That will mean more unemployment and a lower standard of living for you and I eventually. And Dalton McGuinty, Premier for life, will respond as he always does, by raising taxes. Which further hampers any recovery and punishes anyone still trying to make a living honestly.

Also these parts suppliers are supplying Honda and Toyota here in Canada. If/when they fail, your Canadian made imports will be even more expensive since parts will be made everywhere else in the world but here.

I was on to the greedy business owning bastards as our manufacturing jobs were slowly sent offshore in the nineties, but no one else noticed. Now we cheer with glee as the last of the industrial revolution dies off, leaving service sector jobs and little else. You won't even be able to ask anyone if they want fries with that because there won't be any paying customers.

Professional analysts are saying that a depression will follow the collapse of the big two. This will be a nasty summer for Americans, who will protest violently as jobs evaporate faster than stimulus dollars, and people start to go hungry. I hope they are wrong.

At least my eight year old Ford is still running as I approach summer layoff. I might need to keep it a few more years, peeling paint and rusty bare spots not withstanding.

Tuesday, April 21, 2009 by K.R. Raven

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GM Needs To Die

In apparent contradiction to my supposedly Conservative viewpoint (truthfully, pretty malleable on a day-to-day basis) I am responding in knee-jerk fashion to a headlining story I've just read about GM cutting another 1600 jobs cuts in order to qualify for yet another round of government aid.  Gimme, gimme, gimme...  

To me, that's like cutting off your foot to collect your accidental death & dismemberment uinsurance.  Sure, it's a great payoff, but you can't f&*$ing walk anymore.  And to carry the metaphor a little further, unlike private citizens, GM hasn't been paying it's premiums the last little while. 

If GM was a car, it'd be an uninsurable wreck.  To even 

write a news story about them, it's now mandatory to preface the phrase "automaker" with the word"struggling".

Would you  consider buying a GM(or Chrysler) vehicle at this point, knowing that Chapter 11 protection is probably weeks away?  Even if either company had a desirable vehicle, it'd be a no-brainer.  

Governments on both sides of the 49th parallel need to stop pouring buckets of cash down the stinking, clogged drain that is the North American auto industry, let them die their much-deserved death and let everyone get on with their lives.  Out of the ashes, phoenix-like, something better will arise.

This "stimulus package" money that has been bandied about by Obama and Stephen Harper like some sort of saviour has done the sum total of nothing to stimulate the economy.  No one in the auto industry has learned anything.  They've had 33 years since the Honda Civic was introduced to catch up, and the best they can come up with is the Dodge Caliber, Ford Focus (2008 version) or Chevrolet Cobalt.  Put the cane away, guys, the horse is dead.  

It's time to stop this horrible waste of money.  How about incentives for ordinary folks to actually buy vehicles?  How about incentives for Toyota, Honda, Mazda, VW, Hyundai, Kia, etc (you know, SUCCESSFUL auto manufacturers) to build more of their products in North America to keep at least some of the people who comprise the world's largest market employed at more reasonable rates of pay and without some of the more ridiculous union protection?  Contracts need to be renegotiated to keep this kind of protectionism out of the language of all labour contracts.  

There's a reason this nation is failing, and throwing non-existent money around like some sort of drunken moron who just won the lottery is not going to save it.

Arrivederci, GM and Chrysler.  

(I considered saying "It's been a hell of a ride", but the K-car, the Chevy Vega, the Dodge Durango, the Pontiac Aztek, the Pontiac Sunfire, the Pontiac Acadian, the Pontiac Sunbird, the Pontiac Grand Am -  hell, the Pontiac AnyF$%&ingthing pretty much put a nail in that coffin.)

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Miley Cyrus defends her older boyfriend

So will a lawyer one day. The only question is what type? Divorce? Criminal? Personal injury?

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Shout-out of the week

Bill Maher's Real Time. Great HBO show that cuts through the bolshevik that pervades our media. He tempers his political vitriol with just enough humour to avoid depression and panic.

Very right for the times and of more use than Stephen Colbert and that other guy, whasisname, Jon Stewart. Those guys are so pre-meltdown. Only complaint: Once a week isn't enough!

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