And on The Seventh Day, You Will Get Your Ass Up and Work

Under the job title of "Federal Emergency Relief Contractors / Special Project in South Florida," I found an intriguing call for "Cooks, Dishwashers, Food service workers, Shower operators (sanitizing showers and refilling supplies), Laundry workers, General maintenance people, Administrative assistants, Machine Operators, Project Managers (this is a higher skilled position), Janitors, Laborer, Grounds Maintenance, Washer, Machine Appliance Mechanic, General Maintenance Worker, Laborer, Driver Courier, Parking and Lot Attendant, Shuttle Bus Driver, Truck driver, Light, Truck driver, Medium, Truck driver, Heavy and Truck driver, Tractor-Trailer."

The best part of the ad was this paragraph:

Workers are expected to do any tasks assigned and work 7 days/week, 12 hour/ day – 40 hours regular time pay and 44 hours overtime pay. They must provide their own transportation to and from the work-site, and will be provided shelter, and all meals. This commitment could be up to 6 weeks or more. Workers will be paid the prevailing wage designated for each area.

So this thing is like bootcamp, or prison, except you get paid. It could also double as a sort of in-patient weight-loss or detox program and stop-smoking clinic, I'd bet.

If I was a Fox Newser, I'd cry out against the socialist nature of this Nazi Work Camp. If I was an MSNBCer, I'd glory in the Peace Corps/New Deal aspect of it all. As an unemployed writer, I see it as a story and two paychecks. Six weeeks of 84-hour weeks and free meals? Maybe a bunch of stories. I'd embed on this one.

I'm gonna apply for Laborer, Grounds Maintenance.

Rolling Stone? The Atlantic?

The Best Decade Ever

The lists are being created with wanton abandon. Give it a rest, already. Rolling Stone wants me to know what songs and albums were "The Best" in the last ten years. Hey, Rolling Stone, fuck you, OK? Every month you create a list, from the 100 Best Guitarists of All Time to the Top Ten Best Eddie Vedder Impersonators. (Scott Stapp, please Stopp.) When Rolling Stone isn't on their knees fellating Bruce Springsteen or praying to John Lennon, they're busy at the List Machine, making lists.

Time magazine has a whole bunch of "Top Tens." Top 10 Heisman Trophy Winners, Top 10 Beauty Pageant Scandals, Top 10 Things You Didn't Know About Hanukkah, even the Top 10 Disney Controversies. Those are real lists at a real news magazine's website. Maybe we should blame "Countdown" with Keith Olbermann. "Which of these top stories will you be talking about tomorrow?" he smugly demands at the beginning of each broadcast, with that stupid animation of a steel ball rolling around a track in a desert landscape. Hey, Keith, when I start looking to you to tell me what I should talk about tomorrow, I will start wearing ridiculous 1930s era gangster suits and pinstriping my hair.

Movies, food trends, notable deaths, vacation destinations, shoes, cars, purses, toys, Xbox games, hairstyles - you name it - we can find a list for it at year's end. A Top Ten list. A Top 100 list. A "Best" list. And it's all based on the musings of a panel of assholes emailing their suggestions to a bored editor, who compiles the submissions into a neat little list and then tells the readers what they should like or what they should've liked. It happens every December, but it's always worse at the end of a decade. I don't mind reading lists, just don't present them as the authority. It's a list of your favorites in a category.

I can't wait for January, when they start doing their Top Ten Predictions for the Year lists.

UPDATE: A commenter says I sound like Andy Rooney. Shit. I blame last night's tequila for making me a temporary curmudgeon today. And the beer. And the wine.

Can Your Yahoo! Do That?

When I used to visit my grandfather when I was a kid, I'd usually make my way to what we called "the way, way back yard" where he had a couple of sheds. One housed his model trains, the other his tools and projects. In the latter were also old boxes of magazines, mostly LIFE magazine, and I could sit in the musty heat for hours and skim through them, reading articles and looking at pictures. It was fun to find out what a reviewer thought of an old movie when it was new, or how some old music I currently liked was being discussed as some sort of cultural sea-change upon its release twenty years earlier. Wars long over were being reported on in the now, and it was like time travel for me. Advertisements were great fun to look at as well, the styles, designs and fashions once cutting edge now laughable, viewed from the future.

Grandpa died and I was always sorry I didn't make it out to California for the funeral. I would've liked to have visited the old house on Del Mar Avenue one more time, with its brick driveway and deep lot, the odd yet pleasant smell when you walked in the front door, the furniture, like those magazine ads, passed by time and now somehow retro-chic. And I probably would've requested of my aunt, who was managing his affairs after he passed, that I be able to lug those boxes of LIFE magazines back home, to sit in my garage or attic, waiting to be pored over again from time to time, an archeological treasure for an amateur historian.

I haven't been back to Chula Vista in years, but I've seen Grandpa's old house on Google Street Views. The brick driveway has been replaced by concrete, the ivy that made up his front yard replaced by grass. The big swinging gate he made at the end of the driveway, leading to the first part of his three-sectioned back yard, is gone. Someone replaced the louvre windows in the front of the house. The roof, once peppered with white rocks in some 1960s architect's idea of stylish cool, is now just a regular roof. From the aerial view, it's obvious that someone didn't like the idea of three small back yards divided by banana trees and lattice work, and has turned it into a deep lot of grass. I think they even cut down the weeping willow that stood near the two sheds in the way, way back.

But the LIFE magazines are now in my hands again, thanks to Google. The only thing missing is the musty smell of California dirt and dust in the late afternoon of a dimly lit shed. And the sound of Grandpa yelling my name from the first or second back yard to come wash up for dinner.

Rolling Stone Goes for Tween Girl Audience

Thanks a lot, RS. I needed this thing in my home.













You can't be all things to all people. Don't tween girls have their own magazines? This is some serious Seventeen or Tiger Beat material. Have you found your core audience dwindling, Rolling Stone? I can tell you why!