The Corporate Cyborg

People is all confused about whether corporations are people. They have the rights of people but they do not have the body parts, which is why I prefer to call them cyborgs - a person with parts that are both human (your workers) and artificial or mechanical (all the rest including and especially the part where the heart has been removed as a vestigial organ like the appendix). It wouldn't be so bad, but the cyborg corps whose only ethics is money also control all the money. This is why I am firmly on the side of whoever is trying to take your money from corporate hands and put it into human hands. A girl's gotta live. And even I cannot seduce a cyborg if it has no sexual equipment. A cyborg is never gonna give a girl a diamond ring just for going out to dinner and dancing a few times. No. We need to get the cyborgs out of politics, otherwise life will become bleak and sad, like those science fiction stories where the machines made by people revolt against their creators and reduce human life to misery. Oh wait. That already happened for most people. And the poor saps, they is judging themselves by the standards of corporate life instead of messy-but-wonderful human life, and so they is unable to even see how they has been had. As an antidote, here is a link to the latest Stephen Colbert Super Pac video to cheer you up and give you some perspective. Then go get your nails done. Male or female, a manicure reminds you how good it is to be human.

Sweater Vest As Sexual Signal

Sweater vests on a male are your essential "neuter" signal. Not your gay signal, though yours truly has know many of the asexual type of male for whom breasts do not brighten the world and who really just can't let himself know he's attracted to other males. So he is attracted to nobody. No. The sweater vest, in swaddling the penis analogue called a tie in a kind of cocoon, works as a sort of male chastity belt. I have talked about the tie before and youse can watch a video where I answer a question about it below. Suffice to say that this is also the kind of person made nervous by the naked body in art, and might want to cover up the generous breasts of Justice like your US Attorney General John Ashcroft did when he was in office. Now Ashcroft, he was not a sweater vest guy, but a three-piece suit guy, which is a whole different can of worms. Your suit vest is not warm and fuzzy, but tight and tailored. It also speaks of controlled sexual urges, but they are more often kinda kinky and need the vest to keep that bad boy down. So with Ashcroft, he prolly had to put the clothing on the giant marble Justice statue to keep himself from getting an erection on his way to the office. A sweater-vester like Santorum would just tsk as he walked by and want to cover the twins up so they didn't leak all over his nice clean shirt.

Claire Live Video: Past Lives Q&A

Three days into January and resolutions are vanishing like they never was. You can always blame it on Karma... you can blame everything on Karma. Plus, if you had past lives that you get to improve on in this life, then it goes to show you can put off to the next one all that stuff you resolved to work on in 2012. Karma is certainly a handy thing to believe in for some folks. Here's the thoughts of yours truly on past lives in a clip from one of the InsomniActs Cabaret shows...

CHRISTMAS PAST

I'm back. A girl needs to get away every now and then and Christmas is a great time to do it. People is so busy shopping, they don't notice that suddenly you ain't returning their phone calls because who has time to call in the first place? And what with family gatherings that simultaneously turn you into a child again and add gray hairs to your beehive, you can't disappear too completely if you ask me.

Some of you may be surprised that a girl like I who loves getting presents would vanish at the gift apex of the year. But this is the time of year for exchanging gifts, not simply opening up yours and giving the giver the gift of gratitude in the form of squeals of delight and swoons of admiration. Christmas you have to reciprocate, so instead I go to the beach.

FOUR RULES TO LIVE BY

ONLY THE COOK GETS TO COMPLAIN ABOUT THE FOOD.

For most of the history of your human race, the big question for most of the aforementioned humans themselves was not what but whether they was going to eat today. Today now being 2009, the problem is not starvation but obesity. Not eating much because you don't really like eggs or burnt edges on the toast won't kill you. It'd prob'ly be good for you to cut back a bit. Whereas always complaining leads to a host of illnesses and a shorter life. Shorter and less fun. So stop it. Stop it right now. Just smile, thank whoever cooked it for you so's you could play computer games until food was on the table, say it's just terrific, and eat. With your mouth closed.

ONE SLICES, THE OTHER CHOOSES.

Mothers invented this basic rule to insure fairness in dealings between siblings. And since we is all descended from the same village of 1200 people according to the latest DNA research, we all of us is just a family of kids squabbling over the chocolate cake. So, whether we're talking the office workload or contracts in Iraq, the surest way to keep it fair is to let one party divide it, and the other decide who gets which half.

NOT EVERYBODY LIKES GRAVY.

I'm sure you're a very nice person, but you have no place to think outside your own head. Nobody does. No matter how smart you are, the world is not really the way you see it. Other people have a different idea of what is good, and while you may be tempted to say they are nuts for picketing a)Wall Street b)Planned Parenthood c)the local grocery, that temptation is being held out to you by the little guy in the red suit and horns hovering over your left shoulder and whispering in your ear. As the old saying goes, there's a right way and a wrong way to do everything, and the wrong way is to try to get everybody to do things the 'right' way.

A LITTLE DESSERT NOW AND THEN CAN'T HURT.

Guilt is good but not always appropriate. Most people who feel guilty about how they live their life are not the ones eating a Meat Lovers Pizza with a six-pack of Bud followed by a bag of Oreos buried under a quart of Rocky Road while watching porn and gambling on the internet. Sadly, many do not even begin to indulge their sweet tooth or fantasy life, so afraid they are of sinking into the hedonic swamp. This desert of worst-case-worrying that keeps you from healthy pleasures is just as sick as the opposite overindulgence to the point of diabetes of the soul. If guilt is keeping you from fun, sometimes you gotta lock guilt in the bathroom with the litter box and enjoy a little Cherries Jubilee, if you catch my drift.

SPARKLY THINGS

I love shopping malls. Malls is America, don'cha know, especially now that they got not only the big stores, but those little booths outside. Very democratic. Big enterprise and small trying to catch the eye of women and their purses.

I feel so connected to the whole of humanity in a mall. It's every marketplace throughout the history of civilization, said history really being just the history of shopping made to look like the males was doing something more than making pretty things and places to attract women.

Anyway, I was outside Bloomingdales at the Century City mall, sitting in the sun and sipping a cup of coffee with a friend. The little booth across from us was twinkling with sparkly accessories: hair clips, pins, earrings, buttons, purses. You name it - it had rhinestones all over it. Many people say your flashy is trashy, but those people is just repressed, or worse, trying to prove we humans ain't animals when you scratch the surface of your cerebral cortex.

Descartes, he only got it half right when he said "I think therefore I am." He shoulda said, "I think therefore I am not doing anything important right now." The thinking part is pretty new, and while your higher human brain activities like compassion, using the subjunctive tense, and conceptualizing quantum entanglement are nifty, they are resting on the older mammal brain with its mysteries of your mommy love and your sense of humor, which anybody who has played with a dog knows is pretty well developed in your four-legged friends.

This Mammal Brain in turn is sitting on top of the Reptile Brain that really runs the show. Marketers know this, which explains the success of campaigns offering more food as in Super Sizing and implied sex as in girls as naked as TV will allow sucking beer right from the bottle. So long as Reptile Brain is active, Human Brain is dissolved into that great pool on being that your zen masters spend a lifetime trying to find with only the poor cortex, them not wanting to ride their mental crocodile to bliss 'cuz it has a habit of turning on you and then you'd never be able to come up for air and think like Descartes again.

Which brings us back to sparkles. Your human eye has both rods and cones. Cones is where we see color. They need a lot of light to work and are grouped more in the middle of the eye. Rod only tell black from white, but they are much more sensitive to light and motion, and are more concentrated around the edges. Not only that, your rods are hooked right into your Reptile Brain.

So a movement out the corner of your eye grabs your attention no matter what the Descartes part of the brain is thinking. And every girl in rhinestones knows (as well as some boys who want to appeal to boys and so wear, say, a set of keys hooked to flash and dangle outside their pocket...) that motion and flash are the way to make a man's reptile self turn his head and look with his reptile eyes.

And while he's looking with his reptile eyes, he might just notice how sexy she is and fall in love. He don't know what made him turn his head at the exact moment She was walking by. He figures Kismet, Fate, Destiny. But she knows the real cause. Rhinestones.

HOLIDAYS AND THE MALE

As we gear up for the holiday season, I figured to give you all a little heads up about what's coming in the way of your male behavior and why you should start shopping now.

Psychiatrists have noticed that men mostly get irritable and depressed this time of year, and like most of you having your Thanksgiving traumas with your family, they blame it on The Holidays. They are, of course, wrong. I just tell you this so you know you are not the only smart person to make this mistake.

If you remember what I said back on September 30 , you know that October is the annual high for testosterone and other such prostaglandins in men. These hormones give them a wonderful zest just as the leaves start turning, and romance lurks on every corner, especially around 2 in the afternoon, which is the daily high level of that horny hormone. Think of it as the high tide with the new moon.

Anyway, October, like all good things, passes and suddenly his feel-good chemicals start to go away. We girls can empathize because, what with the ebb and flow of hormones that is the glory of every female, we experience a similar sudden drop every month. The result is called PMS. We have only a teeny bit of that hair-on-your-chest stuff, so our bodies can go cold-turkey. Forty-eight hours later, we're back to our sweet, agreeable selves..

Your poor guys, their withdrawal drags out for weeks. So think of November and December as the male PMS -equivalent, only instead of three days a month, they get their whole five weeks at once. Gals, treat them as you expect to be treated on your three days, twelve times a year.

Howsomever, five or six weeks is still a long time to put up with moodiness, so The Hoidays was invented to lighten things up. Fortunately, your male is not an abstract thinker and can be distracted by beautiful packaging.

For those who doubt this, just look at the basic male visual response. A bit of blonde hair catches the light, or a ponytail goes swaying down the street, and a man forgets his name and life history in the eternal now of Her. This is why he carries identification with his name and address on it.

Or take what I call the 'Baywatch phenomenon.' No man cares if the contours he sees on the screen are biologically 'real.' They are in front of his eyes and that is enough for him. But turn off the TV, and any man worth the name knows to the depths of his objective, manly self that the pair of breasts in the bed next to him are the most beautiful in the world.

So, not being an abstract thinker, we can distract him from his misery by stringing bright, preferably blinking lights, singing perky, hopeful songs, wearing clothes with sparkles, dabbing perfume, serving tasty treats, and encouraging shopping, which dulls feelings with the frenzy of finding. That, some extra sports on the TV, a few craft projects requiring assembly, and the crisis will have passed. Soon, the testosterone will be climbing again, and he[base ']ll rise to the challenge of paying all those holiday bills like a man.

EVERY WOMAN'S PURSE

My sister was visiting Lost Angeles, so naturally, we went shopping. She was looking for a purse. We went to a half dozen stores. We saw cute purses with rhinestones and puppy dogs, classy purses in leather and linen, hip purses in bright translucent floppy plastic, tote bags, shoulder bags, hand bags. A cornucopia of choices and my sister, while appreciating the style of many, had to find the perfect purse.

There are many fabulous things a girl can buy when she just wants to shop, but shoes and purses are the ne plus ultra shopping experience because they are the most personal. I already explained about women's inner-shoeness, so I don't need to go into it again. Suffice to say that inner-shoeness, like outer-toolness in a male, is about sexual play and so there's loads of fantasy involved and thusly there are many choices. A girl like I might wear three or four different pair in the course of the day. You can't have too many shoes.

Not so with purses, because a purse is a representation of how a woman feels about herself in her womb. And that don't change from one day to the next. Changes womb-wise take much longer and require much more care.

My mother's generation, the women all had those big sturdy bags that could carry a family of four and never show signs of wear. At night they'd go out with only a tiny little clutch, 'cuz dancing at the club a woman wanted to appear young and fresh, like her purse ain't never had to do no heavy lifting yet.

Today, gals is carrying those little purses all the time. And notice, a lot of 'em ain't having no kids neither. A big family now is three, maybe even four kids. And college girls, notice they don't carry no purse at all. But before you worry that we're going the way of the Shakers, notice what they are carrying - backpacks. These new backpacks are soft and rounded, kinda like a womb when it's full. Only they are carried on the back, trailing behind like an unconcsious thought, "I know I'm going to have kids some day, but I don't want to think about it right now."

This is why a man ain't never gonna carry a purse. Designers tried to sell the idea in the seventies. No such luck. Men do carry briefcases, but a briefcase is not a purse. It is a box. And most men suffer from what I like to call 'box envy."

This goes back to Freud. He thought about what a cigar represented and he didn't think about where he keeps his cigar - in a humidor, which is a box that is temperature and moisture controlled to keep it plump. And if you've ever known a man who smokes a cigar, think about the time he lavishes on his humidor, and you will see that I am right.

Cars is boxes you can get into, start the engine by sticking in a teeny-tiny little key and jiggling it, and then drive wherever you want to go, beating the other guys in their boxes. This is why most of your channel surfers are men. They take a tool, which represents their personal apertenance, that they can finger, point it at a box, and make it jump.

HALLOWEEN

Everybody keeps asking what I'm going to be for Halloween. I keep trying to come up with something. But the only person I can think of that I want to be is me. So you can come over dressed up as your fantasy self. Me, I already am.

Some people say you should dress up all ugly and scary so the ghouls and goblins will run away and go after someone else. I don't worry about that. If I can handle men who have gotten rich hoping money can buy them out of their 2nd class status in Mother Nature's plan and make them masters of the universe who don't have to pay for dinner, I can handle a measly gremlin

BIBLE-THUMPING LIARS

Anybody who says the Bible defines marriage as something only between a man and a woman is either ignorant or a liar.

I may not be the world's greatest expert on the Bible, but I can read as good as the next girl. And sometimes I do. So let me tell all of you that the Bible don't say nowhere that marriage is between a man and a woman. Check out your King James if you don't believe me. Now, there's lots of references about marriage in the index, but they're just about divorce and adultery, not defining which marriage partners are permissible and which aren't. And some of that stuff about divorce and adultery makes me doubt that the Bible is really the word of an Almighty God and not a translation by a mean-spirited husband. But whichever way you read it, the Bible says not one place that marriage can only be between a man and a woman. No place, no where, no how. Zilch.

Me, if I was gonna bother with a law to keep people I didn't approve of from getting married, I'd put in anybody who abused a child, anybody who poisoned the environment knowingly, and everybody who drives on the shoulder because they don't like waiting in traffic with the rest of us.

OCTOBER ZEST

October is the month when the testosterone levels in your males is at its yearly high. Two o'clock in the afternoon is the daily peak - kinda like a high tide at the full moon. Basically, girls, we're talking free lunches in the fall. Just smile at a guy, and he'll be panting to pick up the tab. After all, accepting food from a male is the first step in Mother Nature's mating cha-cha for most of your Animal Kingdom. Why should your human males be treated any different?

Not that after the mousse au chocolat you have to join him in some afternoon delight. No. A simple thank you will suffice. You see, by allowing him to buy you a meal, you actually are performing an act of altruism, allowing him an outlet for his natural, testosterone-driven provider urges and giving him hope, however faint, that someday he may be Waltzing Matilda with the best of the birds and the bees.

MORE ABOUT SHOES

My philosophy of shoes is not just an abstract theory about female sexual self-expression. It has very practical applications in life.

Say, for example, there is some sexual activity a guy wants to try and he's not sure his gal will go for it. He figures he'll just mention it in the middle of sex and maybe she'll agree. Mistake. Unlike your male when aroused, before she can agree, she will have to think about it. And thinking will take her out of the sexual moment. End of session.

Asking a woman out ot the blue to experiment sexually is kind of like a woman who wants to be closer to her mate asking him out of the blue to share his feelings. Suddenly he's wary, not a condition that encourages sharing. A woman would do better to suddenly sniff the air and say, "Honey, I smell gas."

Even if you have an electric stove, he will get up and investigate. When he returns he will be able to assure you that all is well. He will feel closer to you and his feelings will find expression.

Likewise, an indirect approach with a woman's shoe-ness as your point of reference will help you get what you want more easily than a frontal attack. Go to her closet. You will see amazing pairs of shoes in there that she has never worn. They are all aspects of her sexual person, just some are less confident and don't get to go out in public. Pick a pair of shoes that looks like what you want to try. Take them to Nordstroms or Saks and ask for the shopper lady. (Your upper-scale stores will have people whose job it is to help the shopping impaired.) Tell her you need a dress that goes with the shoes, price is no object.

Go home and slip the shoes back. Hand the dress in a wrapped box to your lady and say innocently, "I saw this and I thought of you."

When she opens the box, her first thought will be, "I wonder if I have the shoes for this dress." When she goes to her closet and finds the perfect match, she will feel understood to the depths of her soul.

Take her someplace that goes with the dress and shoes. When you come home, the dress will come off, but the shoes won't.

THINKING MALE

I was sitting in the doctor's office reading an old Psychology Today. It was that or the fishing magazine. The article talked about this guy, he's a Cambridge researcher named Simon Baron-Cohen. He studies autism and his theory says autism is just an extreme version of your basic male brain. Your male brain, he explains, is all about making systems, while your female brain is about using empathy.

Now a systemizing brain is making abstractions, and some of you might think this disproves my position that males are not abstract thinkers. And you might add that empathy is not even thinking, that it's naturally muddled because you can't really separate your feelings from the other person's. 'Separating,' you big lug, is not the point.

Empathy is purely abstract, being about something a person can never know. Your feelings as you feel them can never be felt or counted or seen by me. I must make a gestalt of compassion to even come close, but I will never ever have an objective measure to tell me if I succeeded. The fruits of empathy cannot be counted. Plotting love on a graph misses the point.

Systematizing is all about you reducing a thing or things to a size you are comfortable with and into pieces you can know. In other words, it is about making everything about you and giving you the sense that everything out there is known and possibly controlled by you. You spill a bag of M&Ms on the table and sort them into colors. Eventually, when the number of reds, yellows, and blues is predictable, you feel good because you know what to expect from your bag of candy. But even your Schroedinger figured out, with the help of his cat I might add, that you can't really know how many blues or reds you got, if any, until you open the bag.

One of the 20th Century's biggest brains, famous in the world of science and this is his Big Idea. See what I mean? I do not wish to dissuade men from trying to understand science even though they are constitutionally unfit for it. I know, I know. Men invented what they call the scientific method, but that was just to impress girls by showing that the universe is objectively knowable and therefore concrete like men are concrete and who wouldn't fall in love with a guy who was mentally, like, Mr. Universe? Aristotelian Logic to Newtonian Mechanics was the golden age, creating a basically male model of how things work.

Unfortunately, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle has revealed a definitely female bent to creation. You can't get your subatomic particles to tell you where they are and how fast they're moving at the same time, and why should they? Just asking could change the answer. At the core, creation is such a girl that no man who is stymied by such a simple question like, "What do women really want?" could possibly figure out what the universe is doing here.

INNER-SHOE-NESS

So I bought a new pair of shoes. I took a man with me to buy them. It's a test . If he rolls his eyes and asks that question, I know he'll need a lot of training before he's an adequate sexual partner.

For what is a shoe, I ask you? You live a post-Freudian world. You know what Cinderella's slipper really was. Why should a girl at Starbucks be any different? Men have their outer-tool-ness. Girls have their inner-shoe-ness.

A girl tries out sexual ideas on her feet before she explores them more completely on her back. No one denies the tie-me-up appeal of four-inch spike heels. But every shoe on a girl is a form of sexual self-expression. If she only wears comfy shoes, she ain't going to be doing nothing kinky, though your Birkenstock crowd will engage in some earthy-squishy activities. But no costumes, please. Others, you can tell from their shoes, feel like Mae West did that "sure sex is natural, but not if you're doing it right." And it's all right there on her closet floor.

THE SAFENESS OF SAMENESS

I know, I know. You missed me. I been right here, but there was a glitch with my personal software and I couldn't post nothing for a while. So I took a trip.

I visited my niece in Washington, DC, which you'd think would be so different from Lost Angeles that a girl might not want to go. I mean, here is just about perfect, so why leave the best of all possible cities for a place full of politicians and government contractors? Just look at Iraq if you want to know what they can do to a neighborhood.

Imagine my surprise when I couldn't hardly tell the difference between being here and being there. I mean, you get on an airplane and when you get off, everything is exactly like it was when you got on. The Starbucks is right across from the McDonalds. The highway is called the 95 instead of the 5, but that only means the ocean is on the opposite side from where it oughta be which you can't tell because it is too far away to actually see. They have a Westfield mall just like here with the same stores and movies. It's comforting to know a girl can travel without having to try anything new.

This is what makes America great - the safeness of sameness. Nothing bad is ever going to happen to you at the mall. You can have anything you want, and there are lots of people there to help you get it. And anybody who acts unpleasant is asked to leave.

GRAY SKIES

So it's overcast here in Lost Angeles and no one is moving. The streets are empty. The pools are quiet. The early matinees might as well go back to bed. Nobody's gonna show up for anything before 3, and then only if they have friends visiting from out of town.

Your people from other cities with more conventional climates - you know, rain, snow, hail, hurricane - they laugh at us. But think about it. Bad weather is all low pressure systems, right? Imagine your human is like a barometer and when the mercury drops, so does the circulation. See what I'm getting at? Less blood to the brain, and more sluggish. Low pressure, low spirits. High pressure, high spirits.

This is why people who want to feel good go to the beach. Down at sea level, the pressure is heavier and the blood zips around and you feel younger than springtime and clearer about everything. Opposite-wise, your people seeking the oxygen-deprived illusion of enlightenment go to the mountains to get away from it all, "it all" being the functioning of their brains.

This has ramifications beyond mere mood. Just look at the stores. Shopping is the greatest expression of optimism and satisfaction with life that I know. Compare how many shops and boutiques and stands and stalls and malls there are at the beach compared with the mountaintops, and you get my point.

So LA, with its normally blue sky high, is just about as optimistic and rich a town as you could hope for. Bad stuff don't seem real, even when it's happening to you. This is why people here pull the covers around their ears on gray days. Not because they're afraid of the clouds of rain, but because they're afraid of the clouds of doubt.

Next time some politician wants to get some work done, don't gather people at a 'summit.' Get them together at a 'beach.' In bathing suits, sandals and big sun hats, against the relentless obliviousness of the ocean, the zippy state of their blood racing to the brain with extra oxygen will guarantee something lovely happening.

HAIR SIGNALS

So I got my hair cut today - a trim and a poof. Hair on your female is an important indicator of her femininity quotient, the size of hair correlating directly with how important she thinks femininity is in being female.

Now there are two ways to measure feminine hair: how long and how big. Your long-hair-type girl places her value on her innocence and/or Mother-Naturalness. Don't bother her with finance and don't interfere with the raising of the children. She's not too worried about how successful you are just so long as you talk to her at least once a day. Oh, and lay off the cologne. You wearing cologne is like you driving a Hummer: major character flaw.

Your big hair shows a girl who wants all the social niceties observed and piled high on her head according to the rules as she understands them. She puts in countless hours on her personal appearance in exchange for you picking her up, picking a suitable restaurant and then, of course, picking up the tab. She labors hard and long to help her man get ahead in the world, so you better pick up your ambition and get somewhere, because her happiness depends on your providing her with the social status to which she aspires.

CHEAP CHINA

If you are like most Americans and want to know who to blame for the price of gas, you don't have to look any farther than your own back yard furniture.

Your Average American, like maybe you, is not rich. I hate to tell you this, but there is a reason for that. Your Average American picks Cheap over Quality every day. He and she figure that less money for stuff means more money for both of them. And they are right, in the short-sight term. But in the long-sight term, they are ruining their own standard of living even as they spend.

For examply, shopping at Wal-Mart, the world's biggest retailer, prices are lower than your corner store almost every time. Wal-Mart don't buy from places that pay union wages. Heck, Wal-Mart itself don't pay union wages. No, Wal-Mart has like 80% of its stuff coming from China. In China, workers don't need to be treated so nice or paid so well in other countries, so prices is really, REALLY cheap. So you buy dishes and lawn chairs for a steal. There's more money in your pocket. You really saved.

Then you go fill up the gas tank and gasp. The price of gas has, like, doubled. The world price for crude oil has gone higher than even the oil-company CEO's themselves want. And the experts say it ain't coming down any time soon, because China can use whatever the Saudis can pump out.

China is supplying Sam Walton's retail juggernaut, and as money gets tighter, more American people figure to save a few bucks at Wal-Mart meaning China needs more energy, which means the price of oil goes up. Never mind the question about what happens when the well-paid workers have really vanished and there's nobody to buy what China makes any more.

Your dollar when you spend it is not just about you getting the cheapest deal at this particular store. My mom taught me to shop local, even if the little shops was more expensive. She lived in a community that she helped make by keeping it alive. Not all small store owners are good and not all big chains are bad, so pay attention to the whole story. And start taking responsibility for the world you live in by putting your money where it improves that world instead of saving a dollar at the register only to pay five more at the pump and not having any choice of where to shop but Wal-Mart.

MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO POTATO

I do not like the 'club' cards at the grocery store. For one thing, I do not like to join. I like to be joined.

Secondly, they ask for something from me, namely my personal information which they will use to collect information on my buying habits which they can then sell, in exchange for nothin'. I do not give nothin' away for nothin'.

You say, Wait! They give you discounts if you sign up for the card.

I say, Pooh! All stores give discounts. This is how they lure you in when you would otherwise frequent the grocer down the street. The discounts are no better now after the club cards than they was before. Only now they're collecting my shopping data and selling it to people who in turn put together all my other shopping data and sell that back to the stores. I do not appreciate being bought and sold, and then on top of that being told it's such a swell deal for me.

So what to do? Used to be you could just ask the clerk to run a blank club card thru the machine and you did not have to give nothin' but the money in your purse to pay for what you bought. Now they won't do that, and they get shirty if you ask your neighbor in line to run her card for you. They say you're not supposed to do that. Like I cared.

So here's what I do. I say I forgot my card, and they ask my phone number. I give the phone numbers of one of my friends who has a card. I switch it around just to be fair. I'm thinking of getting a card just so's my friends can do likewise.

Now the store's marketing data about me and my friends is all messed up. If enough people do this, it will perhaps remind stores of what they should aready know: you get what you pay for.

The Fox and the White House

Everybody's talking like the President is attacking Fox News, when all the White House spokeslady said was that until Fox starts acting like grownup news professionals the Pres is not going to treat them like it just because they own a lot of stations. My nine-year-old nephew is a pro at computer race car driving, but I ain't giving him the keys to the Caddy.

The other networks, they're not really worried about Fox . What the White House said was the plain truth. And that's the problem right there: it was the truth. From the White House no less. What's gonna happen in American politics if your elected officials start telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Reporters won't have anything to do but report. Where's the ratings in that?

To me, honesty is a great moral issue that has guided my life. I don't think you should have to pretend somebody else is what they're not unless you're getting a diamond bracelet or a new car out of it. If there's no incentive, or you do it out of fear, it's creepy. Oh, you're so smart to a boss who's a stupid jerk just so's you won't get fired. Yuck. Oh, you're so considerate to a co-worker who spreads lies about people she don't like. Icky yuck. I don't want my President doing that. I don't mind him flattering a little to get Russia to sell Iran non-bomb nuclear stuff so the ayatollahs got no excuse to keep enriching uranium. Keeping nuclear bombs out of Iran is worth a little ick in the truth department.

But the idea that everybody deserves to be treated like a real newscaster just cuz they say so is how Bush ended up with a male prostitute being a key member of the previous White House Press Corps. Gannon had no press credentials. How do you think he got in? The other news networks are more up in arms about the statements about Fox than they were about a prostitute newsman. Is it because they're too much the same thing?