The fictitious American family. That's the branding strategy behind DisneyWorld. It was today in history (1933?) that the US brought in the first "wealth tax" which applied to corporations as separate identities and started the ball rolling with the whole "corporations are people" nonsense. In reality, there are dozens of major crimes that apply to persons, but cannot be applied to corporations. To this day, when a corporation does wrong, the law is reluctant to charge the people who work there--except the company officials who receive trivial punishments compared to their net worths.
Surveys reveal that 80% of family trips to DisneyWorld com about as children nag parents. DisneyWorld, as a different entity than old Walt, have created a fictitious "family ideal" and targeted their ads at children. From here on, their advertising, while geared to children, will emphasize family discounts and family passes. Of course, if I was in charge, such advertising would be immediately outlawed. Every ad is brimming with "family", the twenty-something parents with one toddler riding on daddy's shoulders.
Was it Seinfeld who said there is no such thing as an activity that is fun for the whole family? Later, nope, that was actually George Carlin, according to some Internet sources.
More famous that corporate crime are the individuals who finally get caught. Today in 1989, Leona Helmsley (Lena Rosenthol) got 16 years for tax fraud. In other words, they never got her for the wrong she did to her employees and the system, but like Capone, taxes. The US will never give up income tax for a fairer system because it gives them supreme power. Helmsley denies saying the quip that will follow her forever that, "Only the little people pay taxes". Nobody has proved her wrong on that.
[Author's note 2014-08-30: It was not known at the time, but Leona became the first of a long line of "celebrity busts" that police departments have come to know and love. The preferred tactic would become the roadside pullover, where the police have the greatest power to make whimsical arrests and fill in the blanks afterward. By 2005, almost every roadside stop is accompanied by a police threat to arrest someone. This is blackmail, as the police know with the advent of the Internet, an arrest record is a career-killer. Leona Helmsley? Predictably, she was out in 18 months (21 months after her actual arrest whence charges were "dropped"). She was later caught having her staff do some of her community service hours. The Queen of Mean died in 2007, leaving her dog $12,000,000.]
August 30, 2004 Monday
[Author’s note 2017: these are journal entries any do not necessarily follow any familiar pattern. There are also confusing grammatical segments, to be expected. ]
A little tight timing, I have to move the (parked) Taurus today, and the Sunbird is not ready. Julie needs a ride to work tomorrow so maybe we can work something out. I am going to try to get $2200 for the Sunbird with that practically new motor. The whole project was an interesting proof of concept, so if I make extra good money I may reconsider and do it again. Can I, the one who has always said you don’t have to screw people to get rich, use my money and their labor, and still make a profit? Yes, and a good profit would be even nicer. The challenge was really how to price things I put in, since I have no life experience at it. But I do know that everyone except me kept running out of money, and would therefore have lost money at this game. If it had taken two months instead of four, I’d be all the happier.
Rhonda wasn’t feeling well today. She stayed home. Yesterday, JZ and I talked health issues, something I thought I’d never do. Now, I meant I would never do it when I was young, so in a way I’m excused. Myself, I think men get sick or they don’t, but they never have public “health issues”. Hey, when I was 25, I was going to live forever. I figure I’ve drank about 85,000 cups of coffee in my life. Let’s see, I’ve also drank about 70 glasses of wine, 5 glasses of rum and coke, and maybe one ounce of tequila. That’s correct, in my life. I’ve been in 29 states and three provinces, always missing the northeast areas which hold no attraction to me whatsoever, along with [the] people who would live there. Pardon me, four provinces, I was in Manitova one time when I was four years old. Manitola. Manitowan. Dammit, can’t even get the spell checker to find the name of that place.
[Author’s note 2017: it turns out I was in Saskatchewan, so I’ve only been in three provinces.]
I’m tackling the VBA programming for the payroll input plan I’ve cooked up. It is so strange, that language, with different and inconsistent rules for each layer, and it has so many layers. I’m certain a lot of its features are the result of getting themselves in a jam. When you try to patch up too many things, you even start running out of keyboard shortcuts. I recall one of the first things I did not like about IBM computers when I first saw them in 1983 was that it was possible to re-program key functions. I know, some people think it is a fantastic idea, but I don’t. The F1 key should always to the same thing, and so on. Add more keys if you have to, but don’t start screwing around with what is already there.
Recalling my first database, a subset of dBase, for some reason you had to push F10 to accept every record. And I had to enter 76,000 of them. Took me a year. ‘Enter’ simply moved you to the next field, something I tab or program (except for memo fields, of course). Right now, I am trying to figure out how to check a date to see if it is a Friday. There are long and short dates, octothorpe-based date fields, and vbDate constants to deal with before you get to properties, masks and table date fields. Oh, and that sample code I entered over the last week, well I was right. There is no mention in the manual on how to run this code. I could attach it to a command button, or name it Main so it starts on open, but to actually just run the code as I entered it to test it? None of my manuals, my seven manuals, says how this is done in plain English. I recall having this same problem before in the early 80s, and nobody could give me the answer. You cannot click the run button, it just sits there. How do you run individual procedures on an IBM computer? Is it some kind of secret, because if it is and I find out, I will tell everyone for free.
Later, about 4:30 AM Tuesday morning, it hit me. I know how to run the code, and it should have hit me before, considering all I’ve said about the idiots that do most of today’s programming. It is plain that in my life, I have experienced something most programmers will never know – complicated code that ran right the first time. (Well, make that two things, because I also got laid in college.) Thus, bad code is something that idiots absolutely expect every time, and therefore, to them, running their own code is synonymous with “debugging”. Ergo, in VBA, even after your code is all correct and working, you are still “debugging” it. So, why do I find it hard to think like an idiot, when for most people it comes natural?
While I’m at it, another instance of a rip-off I haven’t named yet. This is where the examples given in the manual contain either logic or typographical errors. Such are a strong indicator that the author has not reviewed his own work, and that they never expect you to actually get that far. The first interactive code example in the MicroSoft Excel manual itself, that’s right from the top, folks, contains four undeclared variables right in the same chapter that explains Option Explicit. It is a routine that calculates the net profit on a stock transaction, and also a beautifully rare example of unpaired parentheses. True to form, the formatting controls work perfectly, so it looks nice at all times. MicroSoft programmers suffer dreadfully sudden urges to change background colors at the strangest opportunities and are always extremely self-conscious about screen color. Every MS manual must contain a chapter on changing colors.
Ponder this, since so many discoveries actually happen by accident. I know that ants follow scent trails, and that ants stopped evolving about 150 million years ago. That must mean all of their reflexes are instinct only. It is useless to fight the ants in Florida, the best you can do is encourage them to locate elsewhere. My neighbor loves to spray potent chemicals twice a week, so the ants are actually the ones killing him. I have a persistent colony in my kitchen light switch, or at least emerging from there whenever I’m not looking. In Florida, the actual hive could be many yards away because Florida ants travel further than any I have ever seen, including in Thailand.
I use a mild bleach solution to clean my cutting board and I’ll wipe around the outlet to destroy the scent trails. These ants, instinct or not, know their stuff. Normally slow moving, they poke around into everything they can but tend to do it when the kitchen light is out. So you only see the stragglers once in a while. The bleach confuses them for a few days, but they eventually learn to ignore it. Well, the other day I dropped my vapo-rub. This is the cold remedy, hang on, let me get the jar. It is similar to Vick’s, but this is an under-advertised brand containing Menthol, Camphor and Eucalyptus in a mixture of Petrolatum (whatever that is), Mineral Oil, nutmeg oil, Spirits of Turpentine, Cedar-leaf Oil and Thymol. I noted the cracked lid was the same size lid as en empty vitamin case I was about to throw out. I momentarily placed the cracked lid on the counter.
It drives the ants crazy. I thought what the heck is going on here? The ants just go spastic. They can’t even retreat in a straight line from the fumes. I’m not an entymologist, but I would say it is affecting their nervous systems. The ants are not crawling away, but go into seizures or seizure-like behavior. They eventually get away, so I cannot say if they die. But they definitely cannot live or feed in such a plight. If anything comes of this, remember to send me some money. Oh, on that note, JZ’s brother has hinted our reward would be a hundred bucks each for finding his lost money.
[Author’s note 2017: Live and learn. The ants were acting normally, they are called crazy ants. I was scaring them into the frenzy, not the spray.]
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