Various plaints

In a Page 1A Vicad story today, written by one Rubi Reyes, we have some of the most egregious mispunctuation you are likely ever to see:

"In the story printed in the newspaper you stated that the DA had approached you and in the interview online you said just the opposite, which time were you lying," Watts asked Hagan?

First, there is the matter of the comma splice, always painful. Then there is that lonely little interrogation point, hung out on the end of the sentence for want of understanding where it properly went.
My second plaint about the front page today is that bogus gathering at the plaza of people complaining about taxes and the Congress. The supposedly spontaneous and nonpartisan gatherings are suspiciously thick with Rs named prominently and quoted frequently. I, too, worry about debts generated by borrowing to finance dubious enterprises. I started worrying about it when that bipedal pus pocket GWB began financing off the books his treasonous invasion and occupation of a country that had offered us no real provocation.
I wish there were a genuine Independent party growing in this country; I would attach myself to it in a minute. I loathe the Republicans and have little use for the Dems. They seem hellbent on an immigration amnesty this year, disregarding high unemployment and the sentiment of the American people. The big media are hammering away on the topic in ways that assure us that the fix is in. You frequentlyread and hear maudlin stories about how disruptive and inconvenient illegal aliens find it to be removed from a place they have no right to be in the first place.

Nature in her modest manifestations

The natural world impinges on our putative civilization here in **Adrift, sometimes in small ways. Often in the morning when I step out the front door to take a reading on the new day, I will see vultures cruising around my sky. I always wonder if they know something I should know. A nice piece from Slate muses on vultures:

As they ride the wind, vultures seek dead things, not dying things, using a sense of smell far more highly developed than any other bird's. They can detect a dead mouse under leaves from 200 feet up. They are discriminating, preferring corpses between two and four days dead. (The turkey vulture entry in the definitive Birds of North America Online does note, "Takes live prey occasionally in unnatural situations.")

Read the whole thing here. The story discusses puking as a defensive move by beset vultures. Owing to an traumatic incident when she was a child returning from church with her grandparents, my wife has an exaggerated wariness of vultures dining on roadkill and starts braking and swerving a hundred yards away when she spots them in the road. She says I would not be so sneeringly dismissive of her fears if I had ever experienced vulture vomit up close.

Sat night miscellany

An ittybitty two- or three-paragraph story on the Vicad business page Thursday indicated that the paper was laying off employees and cutting wages for survivors. Newspapers are surprisingly reluctant to cover their own affairs unless it is to trumpet the little bogus awards that their associations deal out to themselves so everybody can claim to be a prizewinning newspaper. The observant reader will have noticed that the paper barely has enough heft to make it all the way to the driveway these days. Maybe the circulation dept will require carriers to put stones or oyster shells in the little plastic sleeve to add weight. (No extra pay for the work, of course, as everyone is expected to pitch in during tough times like these.)
The newsroom employees have been making sacrifices for years. most of the reporters when I was working up there were earning well below the salary for a first-year schoolteacher, and some bailed to become teachers, immediately raising their wages by 30% or 40%.
While I am making my appointed rounds as a Census employee, I knock on doors and engage residents. A lady I spoke to on Friday came doddering to the door and insisted she needed to sit down immediately. She said she was just out of the hospital, having suffered a stroke. She was also smoking away on a cigarette. You almost have to admire so profound a devotion to self-destruction.

&c

Been censusing all week over in Port Lavaca. At some places in my first block of houses, there was a want of clarity about the house numbers. I ran into a guy from the city utilities, and he told me there were three sets of addresses working on some houses out there, something like emergency responder numbers, appraisal district numbers, and some other thing. Just amazing.
Vicad embarrassments for Wed: ’What drink do you pair with with (sic) Latino food?’
The repeated ’with’ is incidental … my cavil is with the introduction of ’Latino’ as the PC term of the month. The discussion is clearly about Mexican food and the drinks discussed were clearly intended for matching with Mexican food.
And then, from the farm and ranch page: ’And cattle isn’t selling for what it once did.’ And writing aren’t what it were.

Ooopsie for today

Vicad headline on page E3:

Woman wants ex to / walk her down the isle

Is that long walks on the beach or the inability to distinguish aisle/isle?

**Adrift health insurance

Went to a benefit this noon and picked up two plates of fried fish. Down here there is a benefit pretty near every week for someone with overwhelming medical bills. This one was for a friend of mine. She and her husband run a nice little seafood business; they are my principal shrimp source. They work hard, open seven days, the whole deal that the big dogs tell us everybody should be doing. Trouble is, how can they possibly afford health insurance and finance a business and live from one day to the next? Answer is, of course, that there is no way that any ordinary person can afford health insurance adequate to take care of something major, so people go along hoping against hope that nothing major comes up. The lack of a civilized single-payer national health insurance makes us a second-rate outfit compared to other major countries … plus we pay more for medical expenses than anywhere else and do not get superior care for all those bucks we shovel out for insurance.

Close enough (to poverty) for gummint work

A falling stock market and a failing computer have driven us into temp jobs with the Census Bureau. There is a reason they call it a work force; nobody sane would do it voluntarily … no naps, no reading time,no time to cook decent meals. We are now sworn agents of the bureau, small-fry drones. We took a genuine, hand-in-the-air oath and promised not to tell any secrets we might learn. We even have to wear a badge of servitude around the neck. Our job will be to make sure addresses are correct for the big push next year. We go armed with nifty little computers that have GPS systems built in; they will provide precise locations of residences so that enumerators can go right to the door on April 1, 2010.