Category: Crankypantsing

Crankypantsing

Customer Service

Shelly

I got an e-mail notification that my W-2s were available on-line. The only problem is, I signed up for e-W-2s two years ago, and it’s a service you’re supposed to re-up on a yearly basis. Because I had such a terrible experience last year getting my W-2s (as in, I was unable to retrieve them electronically, and did not receive the requested paper copy through the post), I declined to enroll in it again this year. I just didn’t want to go through that mess again. So I was mightily surprised to find out that my enrollment had been carried over without my permission. Damn!

I decided to try to make lemonade with lemons, and tried to download them. Only, A) in place of user ID, they want my SSN. I suppose that’s somewhat logical, but in every other place, when they want SSNs, they explicitly ask for SSNs. They do not call them “User ID” numbers. So, I got that figured out, only to find that my PIN is not working properly. I used their web form to reset it, and got the new PIN via e-mail. And, it was the same damned PIN I’d already tried using. And, it still didn’t work.

I called their customer service number, only to have their auto response system request, yes, you guessed it, my SSN and PIN. The same PIN that did not, has not, and as far as I can tell, will never actually work. You have got to be fucking kidding me! So, I tried the handy trick of calling back, but not responding to any of the auto response prompts. If you do that, most computer systems will assume you’re on a rotary phone, and will put you through to a real, live human being. Not that that did me much good, because the real, live human being gave me the same damned PIN. I tried to explain to her that it’s never worked, and that I went through this exact same song and dance last year, but she was totally unhelpful.

Crankypantsing, Meta

Flickr Weirdness

Shelly

Here’s a strange thing. The images from the previous post were uploaded to Flickr, so I figured I’d just link to those files, instead of uploading duplicates to my website. But, I noticed something odd. Apparently, some of the “medium” size images that Flickr provides have a larger file size than the original images. WTF? How can they shrink a file, but make it larger? I’ve done a spot check, and it doesn’t happen with all images. Why it would happen with any of them is a mystery to me.

Crankypantsing, Meta

Friday the 13th

Shelly

I’ve apparently gone through an entire black ink cartridge in my Epson printer. Or, rather, my cat has. She walks over the printer on her way to nap on top of my monitor. Every time she steps on the printer, she turns it on, which means it goes through it’s start-up, head-cleaning routine, which uses up ink. If I were smart, I would’ve unplugged the stupid thing when I realized she kept turning it on. But, noooo. I’m a dork. So now I have to go buy another black cartridge if I want to print anything.

I’ve been going through old posts, fixing problems with image locations and adding categories to them. It’s time consuming because my connection is crap. I’m working backwards, and have gotten almost half-way through May. Good grief! I had no idea I’d used Blogger’s image hosting so much. What a pain in the ass! Literally.

Also, I set comments so that you don’t need register. If anyone was bothered by that, it’s gone. I still have to approve everyone’s first comment, but after that, everyone is unmoderated. That should take care of any errant spam. I don’t tend to attract much of it, but when it happens, it’s a pain to track down and delete.

Crankypantsing, Meta

Template Tweaking

Shelly

I really didn’t like the way the sanserif font looked, so I spent some more time hunting for a basic template that was more to my liking. There must be twelfty million templates out there, but not one of them was even approaching what I had in mind. I finally decided to use the Cub Reporter template, and substitute my own graphics. It’s not exactly what I’d been visualizing, but I think I can live with it. The only thing I still need to fine tune is moving the WordPress link to the footer.

Now, the only thing that’s still wonky is that Sitemeter is pulling stats from both my old blog and the new one. Very odd. I’m assuming it’s just a latency issue, and that it’ll clear itself up in the next day or so.

So, guess who was born on this date?

A) Howard Stearn
B) Rush Limbaugh
C) The Maharishi
D) John Singer Sargent
E) Me
F) All of the above

Do you suppose this is a sign that the End Times are nigh?

Crankypantsing

TeeVee Commercials

Shelly

I’m home sick again today[1], so I thought I’d share a few thoughts on daytime television commercials. First, Wilfred Brimley needs to learn how to say diabetes. The word has four syllables, not two, and the last one is long, not short. It gives me flashbacks to when Kate Jackson was the spokesperson for Mercury cars. She used to pronounce it Mer-cree, which annoyed the shit out of me. What the hell did she think that u was for, decoration?

Another commercial that makes me cranky is the laundry product (dunno if it’s for detergent or fabric softener) that features the song Baby Boy. The mother (it’s always a mother) picks up her son’s clothing while the song plays in the background. She sniffs it and wallows in it, in a manner that screams “Innappropriate!” and “Bad Touch!” Squick!

And, speaking of all things squicky, the new Hardee’s taco salad commercial is bad, bad, bad. No one eats their food like that unless they’re being paid to do so, IYKWIM AITYD[2]. I’m sorry, but if that’s your kink, it is Not Okay. Please get help and God bless.

In totally unrelated news, a couple of dump trucks of gravel were delivered this morning, so it looks like our alleged driveway will soon be mended. Again. It could be fixed for real, but that would take time, money, and an ass load of work, so I’m not holding my breath. In lieu of actually fixing it, Ralph occasionally throws gravel at it as a stop-gap cure.

Anyway, I’ve been meaning to get out there and take pictures of just how spectacularly messed up it is, so I figured I’d best hop to it before it was covered up with a new strata of rock[3]. While I was out, I also took some photos of the surrounding landscape that I haven’t photographed before (I really hope they turned out, because they’re quite pretty in a barren, wintery sort of way). I’ll resize and upload them as soon as I finish brunch and I’ve cleaned the kitchen.

_______________________________
[1] It never fails that I get some sort of respiratory plague after I’ve been around the barbarian hordes. I don’t know whether it was going to the ISM on Monday, or that I was in a car for three hours with someone who was sick, or if I caught it from someone at work, and it really doesn’t matter. All I know is that I may never leave my house again. It’s just not safe out there!

[2] If you know what I mean, and I think you do.

[3] Ahh, yes, here comes Load o’ Gravel #3.

Art, Collage, Crankypantsing, Journals, Ladybusiness, Poetry

Hemp Bound Journal

Shelly

Hemp Bound Journal: PWT
PWT

This page was an off-shoot of the discussion about the phrase “poor white trash.” I finally spoke up, and called the original poster on her demeaning comments. After having gone to great lengths to describe what she meant by “poor white trash,” and her qualifying how she is supperior to “them,” she had the nerve to reply that she hadn’t really meant it as a slur, because, hey, it’s all a matter of semantics. Um, no, it’s not semantics, not when you’ve precisely qualified and quantified your position. She made a lame attempt at claiming that there were all sorts of meanings for the word “trash” and that “poor” is a state of mind. Neither of those points, even if they were true in this context, addresses the fact that she’d spent umpty words describing a certain group of people, and how they are inferior to her. I had to laugh at her parting shot, though, that she’d suffered discrimination, too, when she was younger, because she had been called a poor, little rich girl. Now, that takes brass ovaries!

Because I thought the “it’s just semantics” defense was a laughable cop-out, I decided to consult Mr. Roget for alternate suggestions. The column spacing sucks, which is one of those things that unreasonably vexes me. I’ll probably add something else to the far right margin of the left-hand page at a later date, just for visual balance

I’d totally forgotten that the phrenology model was on that page, because the coat of gesso makes it blend into the background. It used to be thought that you could judge a person’s character by the structure of their skull. This theory was used as the basis for racial discrimination, as well as for the theory that you could tell just by looking at some people that they were wrong ‘uns. I guess some prejudices die hard, eh?

Hemp Bound Journal: Backbone & The Direction of Last Things
Backbone & The Direction of Last Things

Hemp Bound Journal: Letter from a Muse
Letter from a Muse

Hemp Bound Journal: Vessels
Vessels

No matter how much I think it’s wrong to kill another living being–and I do–I cannot get past the fact that we do not legally require one person to save another’s life. It makes no more sense to mandate that a woman must carry a baby to term than it does to force people to give over their kidneys or bone marrow or livers for transplants. I can certainly choose to be an organ donor, but I cannot be forced into it. But, some people think it’s okay to force a woman to carry a child to term against her will.

Crankypantsing

In Other News…

Shelly

I somehow managed to slice the tip of my left, middle finger last night. I haven’t a clue how, which, being as it hurts like bloody hell, is something you’d think I might have noticed doing. Hrmph. I keep whacking it on things, and it makes typing exasperating.

After sitting in a car for three hours with someone who was hacking up her last lung, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before I’m stricken with the plague, as well. I’d probably be more cranky about it, but it’ll give me an excuse to sit on my ass and watch all three Lord of the Rings movies back-to-back–something I haven’t done yet. Of course, that only means that this will be the first time in my life that I don’t get sick.

I’m having trouble wrapping my mind around the fact that it’s 2006. That just doesn’t seem possible. Friday will be my one-year blog-a-versary. That, too, does not seem possible. If the rain doesn’t let up (the monsoon season in Indiana seems to encompass 11 months of the year), we’ll also have floods, as we did last year at this time. I noticed, while driving past Cook Urological this morning, that the river is creeping onto their lawn, and that there is standing water in many of the fields along the highway.

After a semester of having Wednesdays off, I’m going back to my previous work schedule. It was nice to have a change, but I found that having a day off in the middle of the week is disruptive. I also missed having three-day weekends. I found that I get much more done when I have a larger block of time.

And, to prove there’s more than corn in Indiana, I shall leave you with the world’s largest ball of paint. It is truly something to be, um, proud of.

Crankypantsing, Ladybusiness

A Pig in a Poke

Shelly

Have you ever had someone you respect open her mouth and thoroughly disappoint you?

In a recent discussion in one of my arting fora, someone started casting asparagus upon what she called PWT. That would be, Poor White Trash. She described a picture I’m sure most of us, in the US at least, would find familiar: a mobile home on small plot of land, rusted car/bed springs/refrigerator, dog tied out back, tatty American flag flying 24/7, etc. Now, I live in the epicenter of red-neckedness, so I can understand why those who were not native-born into the fold might look askance at those who were. That’s all well and good. It’s perfectly acceptable to look something over and say, “That’s not for me.” It’s a whole ‘nother kettle of fishes to stare down your nose at people who are poor, or uneducated, or who simply have a different value system than yours, and call them Trash. People are not trash, no matter what color they come in. Trash is expendable; people are not. Don’t delude yourself into thinking that, because you value your life or lifestyle more greatly than you do someone else’s, yours automatically has the higher intrinsic value. I can guarantee you that the Trash you’re disparaging value their lives every bit as much as you do yours.

The sad part is that the comment was made by someone I generally have a lot of respect for. I hate it when people disappoint me. I had a similar experience during a conversation with a friend, who is heavily involved in sex and sensuality education. There are certain things that go logically hand-in-hand, so when she made the comment–during a serious discussion–that “some people” shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce, it shocked me so seriously that I couldn’t even formulate a response. What do you say to someone who voices a belief that is in direct opposition to one of the basic tenets of her vocation? How can a rational person champion choice and respect and autonomy out of one side of her mouth and preach eugenics out of the other? The mind wobbles.

Crankypantsing, News & Politics, Pets

A Gallimaufry

Shelly
  • The good news is that drilling in ANWR is on hold, at least for the time being. The bad news is that senators who supported Arctic drilling are pissed off about it, and decided to vent their spleens at the folks who can literally least afford it. What kind of mental disconnect are they suffering from, that allows them to cut US$2 billion in home heating relief for low-income families, all onna counta they didn’t get what they wanted? Waaah!
  • From the Things That Make You Go Wha…? File: If you have early stage Parkinson’s, are having trouble walking, and you live alone, you probably shouldn’t consider getting a high octane dog, like a Husky x German Shepherd Dog. I’m just sayin’. Also, just because a dog sits quietly in its pen at the animal shelter does not, not, not mean that it’ll be mellow at home. Worse, just because it’s mellow at home for the first few days, or even weeks, does not mean that it’ll continue that way. There’s a honeymoon period, in which dogs settle into their new homes. After that period of acclimation, the dog’s behavior can change pretty significantly. Your perfectly behaved dog may suddenly decide that she really needs to investigate what’s on top of the fridge. (No, I am not making this up.)
  • Also, why anyone would find it remarkable that the new King Kong is found battling dinosaurs is beyond me. I mean, does King Kong vs. Godzilla not ring any bells?
  • I’ve developed an odd sleep pattern lately, wherein I go to sleep fairly early, have lots of peculiar dreams, wake up for a couple of hours, then fall back asleep. It’s useful, though, because some of the mind-wandering that occurs after waking up from those weird dreams is artistically productive. Last night, for example, I woke up and realized that I had the image of a new painting in my head. I guess that late-night programming can be good?
Crankypantsing

Guilt By Association

Shelly

Concerning last night’s rant, I think I’ve figured out the vague feeling of discomfort. It’s the same feeling I got as a child, when the kid next to me behaved badly. The possibility that I would be assumed to be complicit in the behavior was upsetting. On the one hand, I didn’t want to be associated with what had happened, but on the other, I felt powerless to stop it, because of some stupid unspoken kids’ code. It’s a matter of peer pressure. “Don’t rock the boat, or your life will get even more difficult.” As I learned yesterday, that sort of bullying is not just child’s play; adults do it, too.

And, to be clear, I don’t have a problem with Christmas itself. I was raised nominally Catholic, and my family still celebrates the holiday. However, I don’t take that as a license to smack other people upside the head with my personal holiday fetish. It bothers me when others do it, because it seems manipulative and unsportsmanlike. Or maybe it’s just ignorance. I dunno, but it seems to be born of the same urge as the chipper “Happy Yom Kippur!” blessings that obviously non-Jews wish to Jewish folks. Nice try, but it’s so close, and yet so far. I assume the effort is appreciated, but the end result only underscores the lack of any serious interest in understanding another point of view.

I have a similar problem with films like Memoirs of a Geisha. It’s a thoroughly western movie about a non-western subject. In it’s way, it’s repackaged Orientalism: it’s objectifying, exploitative, and fetishistic. And, I can’t get past the fact that the actors are Chinese. Because, apparently, all Asians do look alike.