Recent News Stories Linked to Depression

Watching the recent news extras from local TV has made me want to become homebound. Are the news anchors really trying to scare us? First Kare 11 does a story about a rare form of breast cancer that cannot be easily detected!! The warning signs of breast cancer do not exist for this type. What are we supposed to do with that information, sit in fear?
As you may know one of my favorite hobbies is shopping. But my favorite mall apparently has faulty and dangerous escalators!! See WCCO’s Terri Gruca’s Blog for details. What am I going to do, well I guess I will have to find the stairs, for my own safety. I guess I will survive.

I understand news stations have to tell us about bad stuff all of the time. But really these extra stories… Maybe I am ready for some light hearted personal interest crap again.

Fashionistas are watching you, anchors.

I don't have much time for fashion; it's silly, fickle, and meaningless. Furthermore Bruno has done an excellent job showing how devoid of thought much of the fashion world is.

But what the hell was Amelia Santaniello wearing on WCCO last night? It was like a combination smock/overalls. Seriously. A white blouse covered by some sort of black smock that had straps going over the shoulders. It was indescribably ugly. I couldn't concentrate on what she was saying as I stared at that amazing fashion decision.

Scrooge (and Obligatory Mention of Sven)

Sven Sundgaard charms all of Minnesota by playing "Duck Duck Grey Duck" and drinking "pop." I still think Sven is incredibly uncomfortable with the "unscripted friendly banter" portion of the local news show, but he's not without hope. He'll never be Ron Burgandy, but perhaps he'll never again be that frightened little boy who looked helplessly into the camera and said "I don't really know what to do right now."

As I wrote below, I don't like Santa Claus and don't want little Pacifist Viking to believe in him. If you'd like to read more about why Santa Claus sucks, see "War on Santa" by Philip Kovacs.

You might read that and ask, "So, do you hate Christmas?" in petulant sarcasm. No, I'm not joining any fictional "war on Christmas" (read about that farce here).

But I don't like Christmas time. Not much at all.

It's a holiday that has been turned into a celebration of capitalism and materialism. It's covered with festivity, family, and religion, but all Americans know the true spirit of Christmas, and it involves a credit card and a mall.

Christas gift-giving, besides using materialism to show relationships, is fraught with OBLIGATION. Giving gifts to people I love? That's a good thing. Giving a gift to somebody that I rarely see because that person gets a gift for me? That's silliness. I hate the sense of obligation that comes with gift-giving. For some amusing takes on gift-giving, see this month's The Rake.

December is a busy time of year for me. I spend fair portions of it grading papers. Before that, I spent fair portions of it writing papers. So all the Christmas festivities and fakery is dull to me.

Now, I've never actually not enjoyed Christmas. I like my family and we have fun times when Christmas actually comes. There are a lot of good Christmas movies. And I do like this Jesus fellow being celebrated. I even put out lights on my house.

But Christmas now is a month of lame music, big spending, materialistic glee, and obligations.

Cheapness and Holiday Shopping

In today's world, to avoid feeling like a cheapskate and to show people we care about them, most of us spend lots of time and money preparing gifts for everyone we are close to. When you are as super-popular as I am, this adds up to spending a lot of money. And, as is obvious, we don't like to spend much money in general, if it can be avoided. Here are my tips for giving gifts on a budget during the holidays.

1. Spend Thanksgiving evening reading, re-reading, and re-re-reading the ads for all the stores in your area. Get up at 4:00 am the next day. Drive to said stores. Purchase inexpensive, doorbuster items for everyone you need things for. Done. (Seriously, the sale prices border on insane at some places. It is worth the effort)

2. Make stuff for people. Remember being a kid and making some crummy ash tray for your non-smoking grandmother out of clay or dry pasta? Didn't she love it? It was the effort and personal touch that counted, really. But nowadays, crafty items are popular (if well-done). People under the age of 60 are knitting, crocheting, and quilting, and the products they make are not only made with love, but they are similar to what stores are selling, in many cases. You can also make ornaments or baked goods. People like these things.

3. Have a baby. Have your baby get its hands covered in paint. Make a handprint painting and put it in an inexpensive but nice-looking frame. This will please most family members. Not to tip my hand about my plans for next year...

Santa Claus: Symbol of the Capitalist Holiday

Right now Child of Pacifist Viking is living a peaceful warm existence inside Possible Flurries' stomach. We have made a decision about our child.

We aren't going to teach him/her to believe in Santa Claus.

We'll still "have" Santa Claus; he'll be a jolly fun guy we talk about and laugh with. A game we play. But we aren't going to tell the kid he's real. Kids think an old fat guy in a red suit who lives on the North Pole, has reindeer, and is friends with elves, would be a really fun concept. We won't keep that from our kid.

There are many reasons for not teaching our kids to believe in something we are almost certain isn't real. Primarily, I don't want to have the following conversation:

"You know how we told you about that magic man that lives far away, and he can always see what you're doing, and he's full of magic and wonderment and brings you gifts? Well, we made it up. Yep, we lied. But God, he still exists. Yes, you should still believe in God--he's the magical figure you never see that really does exist, even though Santa Claus isn't real."

There's a lot of wonder and mystery and magic in this world; in fact somewhere around 95% of the universe is made up of Dark Energy and Dark Matter, which our best scientists know nothing about other than that it is there. I'm not arrogant enough to suggest that we have all the answers, or that "reason" has any value other than arbitrariness. With Fox Mulder, "I want to believe." In just about anything: ghosts, afterlife, parallel universes, God, and all sorts of other mysteries and enigmas. I think there's plenty of mystery without muddling the kid with early lies about the existence of Santa Claus.

So we'll have Santa, but our kids will know he's not real.

Rumblings and Ramblings

Do you think Sven googles himself? If so, he's probably found this blog. My guess is he was bored by it. He's a trendy metrosexual with a sense of style; he probably isn't interested in the half-mad half-bored ravings of a bunch of cheapskates. And if I had written "Do you think Sven googles himself?" a decade ago, what would you have thought I meant?

The Sven blog is temporarily down. That's obviously not a good thing. We already only have so much material to write about to try incorporate our blog's namesake; what can we do if they take away such a vital source?

We're late to the party, but we absolutely have to recommend Da Ali G Show. Sometimes I think I'm done laughing out loud uncontrollably--and then something like this comes along.

Our cat, Sue Ellen Mischke, she of the recently scraped ovaries, is a bitch. When we want to leave the house, we have to get a toy, throw it across the room, then sneak out quickly as she runs after it. I actually think her consciousness is fighting her instincts. Here's my stream-of-consciousness guess at her thoughts: "They're leaving, gotta get away, gotta get away, gotta get outside, they're leaving, what the hell is that? bright colors, gotta get outside, fight it, gotta sneak out the door, they're going to open the door, they're THERE IT GOES! CHASE! CHASE! CHASE! GET IT! Wait...no..no...NO! They're gone!"

Cross-promotional alert: if you want to hear my thoughts on Mission Impossible III, you can read them at Costanza Book Club. It's got new bright colors.

TV Tonight

Who will it be Mario or Emmitt?

My vote is for Emmitt the one and only 'Sir Shimmy'

If you don't know what I am talking about, I am not taking the time and effort to explain.

My Restaurant Reviews

This past weekend I was lucky enough to become a restaurant critic. Actually I just attended to four restaurants in 2 days so feel the need to write about it. Fortunately, since I am living on a budget I only had to pay for one of my meals out. This was helped out by a generous boyfriend and father.
First there was Old Chicago on Snelling Ave. I am a huge fan of Old Chicago especially the pizza. We didn’t have to wait too long since the couple we were meeting was already there and put our name down, but the wait total was about 15 minutes. I had an individual pizza, which is actually large enough to take some home for later. Having left-overs is a great part of going out to eat; you can get two meals out of one bill or at least one meal and a midnight snack. Overall I recommend Old Chicago, great food, service was a little slow but it was busy so understandable and about $8-11 per entry.
Saturday was a big day for eating out (it was my birthday so I wasn’t going to cook anything!!) Actually the only planed outing was supper on Saturday night, the breakfast and lunch just came up and filled me up! Breakfast was at Perkins by Mcknight Rd. No waiting at all. Friendly service (waiter had a big pen mark on his cheek so it was hard not to laugh at him every time he came around. Lots of food I had a sausage and cheese omelet that included hash browns and three pancakes. Needless to say I had left overs again. I just ate the rest of the omelet for breakfast this morning and it was still good the second time. Still have 1.5 pancakes in the fridge. Overall I also recommend Perkins.
Lunch was in Maple Grove at Fuddruckers. Great environment and again great food. I had a huge hotdog and French fries. The fries are great there; I couldn’t even eat all my hot dog… more leftovers. Then since it was my birthday I was able to get a free caramel and chocolate Sunday. Delicious. (Good to note it wasn’t embarrassing at all; they just nicely brought out the dessert and nicely set it on the table. I have been to other restaurants where this wasn’t the case. I won’t name names but it had the initials TGIF. It was really embarrassing. The employees all came out to sing and tie helium balloons to my wrists. How was a supposed to eat my food with balloons tied to my wrists? It wasn’t cool, but my brother father and mother sure got a lot of amusement out of it, oh well.) I also recommend Fuddruckers, but suggest going on a bit emptier stomach than I did.
The last restaurant for the weekend wasn’t until around 8pm Saturday night, it was Olive Garden near White Bear Ave. The wait was at least 30 minutes, lots of people. After we were seated the service was pretty good and food great as always. A few tables around us seemed to have problems with their service and food and got discounts and free meals, unfortunately everything went well at our table and we paid for at all (when I say we, I mean A bit more humid paid for it) I recommend Olive Garden. I had the fettuccine alfredo and of course the endless salad and breadsticks.
Ok the point is all the places I ate at were great… no complaints other than my extremely full stomach…

Weatherpeople, cheapness, and us

The Weatherpeople Control Our Lives
It snowed last Thursday night/Friday morning in parts of Minnesota. I know this for several reason, one of which is Kare 11's Friday 5:00 news LED with the snow. This continues to baffle me. Snow. Minnesota. LEADING THE NEWS.

Film about Weatherpeople
If you like the people that read the weather, you should see the movie The Weather Man. A story about a weather man explores the human condition. Fun times.

Cheapness and Wardrobe
I'm wearing a nice sweater I found in my closet. It used to be my dad's. I'm on a nice frugal wardrobe system: my dad buys/gets new clothes fairly frequently, and then passes down older clothes to me, which then become my nicest and best clothes. In 2006, I've purchased four clothing items for myself: khakis for 11.98, cords for 4.98, tennis shoes for 16.99, and a long-sleeved peace t-shirt for 6.98. And despite this, I have more shirts than I could wear in three straight months.

Cheapness and Buying Clothes
If you do have to buy your clothes, and you want decent clothes cheap, go to "Steve and Barry's," which seems to be revolutionizing the prices of clothes.

"It's like a sauna in here"

Minnesota is a weird state. How does a place that has been so cold recently suddenly pull a tropical climate day out of early November?

It's also a weird political state. We've had Jesse Ventura and continue to have third party impact in gubernatorial (my favorite word!) races. Our Democrats aren't called Democrats, they're called DFL (Democratic Farm and Labor). Now we've also sent the first Muslim to ever serve national office to Washington. We do things a little differently than the rest of you chucks out there. Happily, we are also a state that has not created a constitutional amendment denying equal rights to people, at least not yet.

And somehow, both state branches of legislatures belong to the DFL, all the bureaucratic positions (auditor, sec. of state, attorney general) are DFL, the only statewide federal position up for election was dominated by DFL (Klobuchar), there was a major upset that went to the DFL (Walz)...but we still have a Republican governor. How is this going to work out? But that's something about democracy: of the approximately 60% of eligible Minnesota voters who did vote, 46% wanted Pawlenty to be governor. That means this morning 54% of voters are unhappy, and we don't even really know about the other 40%.

Anyway, something tells me the word "veto" comes up in Minnesota newspapers sometime in the next four years.

Uninformed Voting

This morning I casually filled out the front page of my ballot. Well, somewhat casually. I have some slight OCD, so I was extremely slow in making sure I filled in the ovals entirely, but within the lines, and then in double-checking that I voted for the candidates I wanted. An easy page--all recognizable names and people I planned on voting for, and at the very least there were party affiliations listed, anyway. As I was ready to go, I flipped the ballot over, only to discover entirely more ovals to be filled out.

This side was a little harder. I recognized at least two things from this side (school referendum and sheriff), and knew nothing about anything else listed. However, among my OCD fears is that if I leave a single position unfilled, my vote won't get registered (I'm also worried that the St. Paul school referendum on the back had the same "not voting counts as a 'no' vote" stipulation as the transportation amendment on the front and that people will forget to do it). So how does one decide who to vote for judges one has never heard of? How do we even know what a soil and water commissioner does, much less know whether one randomly named person would do a better job than another randomly named person? Well, there are a few ways to make a decision.

1. Incumbents. If this is listed, you can vote for or against those already in office, depending on how you feel about the way things are.
2. Gender. Like my wife, if I don't know the people, I tend to vote for the woman. There are far more men in power in this country than women, so it is a semi-legitimate, quasi-informed way to make a vote that would otherwise be randomly based on the order the candidates are listed or the sound of the names. Which brings us to...
3. The names. I didn't vote for one woman just because her last name was "Reagan": I didn't like the association. You can choose names you like, names with letters you like, long names, short names, names of people that sound like nice people, or any stupid thing like that. Or...
4. The order the candidates are listed in. Do you feel people listed first might have an unfair advantage? Then vote for the person listed second.
5. You could play a childish game, with some stupid little rythmic, rhyming expressing as you bounce your finger back and forth between the names. This leaves your vote entirely up to fate or hazard (as you prefer).
6. You could not have OCD and leave the oval unfilled.

Comments on Frugality: Movie Theaters and Free Samples

The movie theater
In the calendar year 2006, I've attended a movie in the theater exactly four times. I saw Brokeback Mountain (excellent--actually, now I'm not entirely sure I didn't see it in late December, but I think it was early January), The Lady in the Water (awful), Snakes on a Plane (it is what it is), and finally, this Saturday I saw Borat with Possible Flurries. Four movies, even though I like watching movies. in 2005, I saw Revenge of the Sith in the theater four times itself. I don't know how many times I went to the theater in 2005--I would estimate somewhere between 25-40. But this is one way that I've proven talented at frugality. I show patience, and wait to see films on Netflix, which is a much more efficient use of an entertainment budget. But I had to see Borat, and it was well worth it. An unbelievable, original comedy with repeated laugh-out-loud moments.

Free Samples
If you take the free samples at a supermarket, what do you do? I usually nod and say "MMM" to the employee who is explaining what the product is. I don't want to just take it and eat it; for some reason I don't want them to think I'm a total cheapskate. But those employees aren't on commission, are they? What do they care whether I'm going to go buy the product I just mooched off them?

They Day-Old Cycle and Red Wine

Day-old Donuts caught in vicious cycle.
The Kwik Trip on the east side of Woodbury sells day-old donuts cheap: 50 cents for two. It is quite easy to see how this happens.
1. Store has extra donuts day x, puts them out day x+1 cheaply.
2. Person comes in day x+1, wants donuts, and gets the cheaper day-olds rather than buy the more expensive fresh donuts.
3. At the end of day x+1, there are extra donuts because of day-old sales. The extra donuts are put out cheaply on day x+2.
4. Repeat cycle into infinity.
We are the beneficiaries of Kwik Trip's vicious cycle.

Rats drink red win and live a long time. It's worth a shot.
Something in red win helps obsese rats live a long time, according to new research. From now on, when I'm looking for a beverage to cut my gin with, red wine will be the first choice. According to Rob Stein,

"The substance, called resveratrol, enabled mice that were fed a high-calorie, high-fat diet to live active lives despite becoming obese — the first time any compound has been shown to do that. Tests found it activated genes that protect against the effects of aging, essentially neutralizing the harmful effects of a bad diet on the animals' health and life span."

Tommorrow's headline: "Fat Guy's of World Rejoice, spend money on red wine."

Because I will be drinking red wine, I can keep buying day-old donuts.

I'm back, baby!

For some divine providence, I am somehow able to access blogs today. Thank you, internet devil, for temporarily disturbing my school's monster filter system. Awesome.

As we all know, yesterday was Halloween. We learned in the last post that Pacifist Viking dressed as a burrito. I dressed as a reverse camel. I had been looking forward to passing out candy for a while, since we have so many kids in the neighborhood, and our last place didn't allow trick-or-treaters (LAME!). So, I was excited to see the kiddies in their costumes.

We had close to 200 kids come, I would guess. One bad thing that happened is that we ran out of candy, like right away. It didn't help that we ate like a whole bag of it over the weekend. By 7:05, I was blowing out the jackolantern and turning off the lights. I actually hid in the bedroom for a while. It was terrible. But Pacifist Viking returned with more candy, so all was well. The trouble was the only candy left for him to buy at that time on Halloween was Starburst. I like them and all, but these were not intended for trick-or-treaters; these were individual squares. And since Pacifist Viking didn't want to have to leave the house again, there was a while where I was handing one little Starburst to each kid. Yup, we were that house. I am surprised nobody egged us.

Here is my plea to homeowners all around: give teenagers candy on Halloween. Teens are people too. But they are too big for their parents to buy them costumes, and they are too young to drink (legally), so what are they supposed to do with the night? I bet this happens for like half the teens. They decide the are all going to hang out, but then they have nothing to do. They don't have costumes, because they are too cool for that (or so they thought). But by 7 or so, they get silly and someone finally says, "Should we just go trick-or-treating?" They do. They brave the cold and the ridicule of adults who think they are too big to have fun. They go from house to house, like beggars, trying to have an innocent, good time, trying to reconnect with their childhood. It is sad, almost. So, people--GIVE THEM CANDY! They already have lots of bad things to deal with (zits, pubs, homework, etc). They deserve a smile and a treat. And the longer they are out doing harmless things like that, the longer we keep them sweet and not pregnant.

They can take my dignity, but they'll never take my burrito

Oh, you think a college professor has too much self-respect to past a piece of tinfoil on his forehead to get a free veggie burrito from Chipotle?

You're wrong, my friends. Very, very wrong.