Sure I can take a rest today. Sure I can go out and have fun and enjoy myself. (Well, I actually can’t since my husband left for Canada this morning… So I am single-parenting for the next ten days…) But really, if things are not taken care of at home TODAY, I know I have to do it TOMORROW.
I am having a hard time with this post: I cannot decide which WTF moment to lead with. Too many blazing instances of human stupidity, greed and bigotry circulating the Interweb and I am at a loss. But forge on I must since if I don’t write a WTF Wednesday post this week, it would be like Tiger Woods missing the opportunity to play his 18 holes after being appointed the chaperon for the Miss America Pageant.
WTF Moment #0: BP Oil Spill. ‘Nuff said.
WTF Moment #1: BP’s liability is, as of now, limited to $75 million due to a law passed 20 years ago.
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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk4n0SvG0-Y
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WTF Moment #2: BP made $5 billion in profits in the last quarter. That’s PROFITS, peeps, not REVENUE. And it is last QUARTER, not last YEAR.
WTF Moment #3: BP CEO said they will take responsibility for the RESPONSE but NOT the Accident. Since the drilling platform was outsourced to another, much smaller company, BP is, as implied by Tony Hayward, not at fault. In the same vein, DOD is not responsible for what happened in Iraq since much of that has been outsourced to Blackwater, and I am not responsible for my children since much of their education has been outsourced to the public school education system.
WTF Moment #4: Soon after the explosion and the resulting spill, BP reps went around coastal communities, offering residents, including fishermen whose livelihood depends sorely on the ocean, Wait for it! A whopping $5000 if they agreed to not sue. Please see #2.
WTF Moment #5: Is it just me? Was anybody else disgusted by BP’s move to create an environmental friendly, greener, image with their new green sunburst logo? They spent millions of dollars on that rebranding campaign. It would be tragically ironical if they end up paying LESS in liability for the largest environmental disaster to ever happen to this country than what they have paid in that marketing campaign.
Earth to Rush: Hey! This is Glenn Beck. I don’t believe that Obama blew up the oil rig!
WTF Moment #7: If you are shocked by #6, you are going to love this… According to Rush, “The ocean will take care of this on its own if it was left alone and was left out there.” And, there’s more!
“It’s natural. It’s as natural as the ocean water is.”
My favorite comeback came from Keith Olbermann: “You know what else is natural, according to Rush? Hemorrhoids.” GOLD!
WTF Moment #8: (This is personal whining…) We have planned a mini vacation to St. Pete Beach, Florida, this week specifically just so we could revisit Fort De Soto Park, one of the best beaches, and most under-hyped, in the US. It’s not just me saying it, it was selected as America’s Best Beach in 2005 by Dr. Beach. From what I have read so far, there is a chance that these beaches will luck out and escape the tragic fate of being affected by the oil spill. At least for now. But some scientists are not as optimistic and have predicted a not-so-sunny future for the Florida coasts, and ergo, economy. Upon learning this, I am becoming grateful that, by coincidence, this may be the last time we have a chance to see the beaches in their pristine, gorgeous state before the looming disaster hits.
WTF Moment #9: Another disaster was not receiving the deserved attention due to the oil spill and other shenanigans (that will be reported later in this post): the flooding in Tennessee and Kentucky which has reportedly claimed 29 lives and put more than 1,000 people in emergency shelters.
WTF Moment #10: The bomb used in the Time Square Bomb Scare was made with no more than items found in random hardware stores or beauty supply shops based on instructions found easily on the Internet. New York Times published a lengthy article describing the contraption, complete with a shopping list for any wannabe copycat out there. But of course, nobody in this country would be crazy enough to want to copy this. So we are good.
WTF Moment #11: The Time Square Bomber “suspect” Faisal Shahzad had been put on the “Do Not Fly” list but still managed to board the Emirates flight. Authorities are blaming Emirates Airlines for working with an outdated Do-Not-Fly list.
WTF Moment #12: Arizona. Where should I begin? Ugh.
On April 23, 2010, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed a bill that enacted the toughest and most stringent immigration law this country has ever seen in modern days. You know, after the Immigration Act of 1924 which included the National Origins Act and Asian Exclusion Act and most of what’s covered in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 were abolished by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. So yeah, we effectively walked backwards 45 years…
This law would make it a crime for immigrants to fail to carry immigration documents on them and give the police the authority to detain anyone they suspect to be in the country illegally.
Note to Self: When in Arizona, remember to NOT dressed like an FOB. And of course, to remember to carry my U.S. passport with me at all times.
WTF Moment #13: Arizona. I cannot even make this shit up. According to The Wall Street Journal, “The Arizona Department of Education recently began telling school districts that teachers whose spoken English it deems to be heavily accented or ungrammatical must be removed from classes for students still learning English.”
Ok. I agree that teachers without a command of correct grammars should not be teaching English. But how many people you know that are native English speakers ignore grammars when they speak? How often do you see native English speakers with higher education commit the “sudden death” (imo) mistake of using IT’S when they meant ITS?
And how about those accents sported by other native “English” speakers from the other parts of the world? The Irish. The Scottish. The Australian. Hack, I have a hard time understanding the British accent.
Here’s my proposal: Anybody that does not speak AMERICAN should not be allowed to teach in our schools. Period.
Oh. You say you don’t know how to define “the American accent”? You say you cannot understand the Bayou accent even though it is technically VERY AMERICAN?
Well. Fuck me.
I wish Arizona have simply come clean from the beginning and said what they have had on their mind all along, “Whose spoken English it deems to be heavily accented or ungrammatical and WHO HAPPENED TO BE BROWN.”
You know what? I am pretty darn sure they have no problem with Elin nee Nordegren Woods’ accent even if she sounded like the Swedish Chef.
WTF Moment #14: Arizone. Again. Triple win. Seriously. Give the other states a chance. South Carolina called. They are not too happy with the spotlight you have been getting lately. They want their hard-earned “Worst State” title awarded by Jon Stewart back!
Have you read the Classic English Literature Canon used in English 101? Leaf through it and let me know when you come across an author whose works have been included in Classic Lit that is was (well, according to the DEAD White male rule, they are all dead so the past tense is a given) NOT white. Go on. I’ll wait.
Oh. What? You cannot find any. So one could argue that Classic English Lit canon can be construed as “designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group”?
I guess I shouldn’t have behaved like an ungrateful immigrant. We really should be grateful that within the proposed bill, the teaching of the Holocaust or other cases of genocide will still be allowed. Oh my god. This is huge. Thank you so much! Until some closeted Holocaust denier becomes the next superintendent, that is. So teach them while you still can, teachers!
I suspect that some of you are tired of me criticizing myself for not being a good mother. Self-deprecating humor can only go this far when you are not a stand-up comedian. I admit that it does sound like I am fishing for compliments. Or at least, some sort of desperate reach for affirmation. If these were true, or at least intentional, I would not have even brought this up to the light of day. It is easy to keep a perfect facade on the Internet; I could have simply NOT talked about my fear and insecurities.
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"I feel happy when my mom is in a good mood" Oh boy...
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Is it just me? On some days, I get so aggravated by blog posts where the parents seem so perfect: patient, wise, kind, steadfast, consistent, and… Now where is my fucking thesaurus?!… always in a good mood, with “a cheery disposition…. never be cross or cruel”, never raising their voices… Who took my BLEEP thesaurus and didn’t put it away?!
Mr. Monk once told me in amidst of sobs, after a shouting match, “I want Mary Poppins to be my mom!”
*sigh* We all do. Baby. We all do.
“Why can’t you be like the other moms?” He has said that more than once.
The other day he joked, “You don’t have enough patience and you should go buy more patience in the Patience Store!”
I hope this post helps some of you that are reading because like me, you have feared that somehow you have traumatized your child because you are not patient enough and you do raise your voice, nay, you actually do YELL. Unlike “the other” mothers…
Now that healthcare reform bill has been signed into law, and we are NOT holding our breath to see when changes can really be carried out, probably years, and by then, I’d probably be dead from holding my breath especially since I can in all honesty hold my breath for only 10 seconds under normal circumstances… It’s amazing I know for someone with such a loud mouth and loud voice, my lung capacity is pathetically puny… what with the lawsuits filed by several states, the continual protests from the GOP and the Tea Don’t-Call-Me-Baggers Party members, something else on the horizon for the Republicans to wage a new battle:
The proposed VAT.
Actually, it was not even proposed in the congress. People started ASKING QUESTIONS about VAT because economist, former Federal Reserve Chairman, current White House advisor, Paul Volcker on April 6 answered a question at a New York Historical Society event, saying that VAT is not as toxic an idea as people may think. Oh, he also said, “If at the end of the day we need to raise taxes, we should raise taxes.”
Ooops. They (The Dems) did it again! Sound the alarm!
I have been trying to read upon various opinion pieces to draw my own conclusion. But the fact is: NOBODY has officially proposed it yet except John McCain, the Maverick. He alone proposed an anti-VAT amendment preemptively. Like anybody else I would like to be able to keep as much of my hard-earned money as possible. I was surprised therefore by my annoyance when I received an email from my Congressman, taking a survey, with a simple question: “Should Congress impose a new VAT tax?”
With NO information whatsoever on the background and origin of the recent brouhaha over VAT.
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Most likely I simply needed a good dose of rage to distract me from life itself. Nothing, NOTHING, gives a good slap to wake me up from my self-pitying stupor like a good invitation for raging psychotic foaming. I immediately saw this email, perhaps wrongly, as an incendiary, biased missive disguised as an innocent, neutral survey. A fear monger. So I fired off this email, perhaps a bit pigheadedly. It felt good, I have to admit. I don’t really care that he will not read it.
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Dear Congressman Kirk,
I feel the email survey on the proposed VAT you have sent out via email is misleading, if not disingenuous. When you send out an email with a brief question “The Congress decided to add more tax. Do you think they should levy more tax?” I am going to take a wild guess that most of the respondents will say “H to the ELL NO WAY!” I am going to take another wild guess that you and your staff will then show the survey results, perhaps even call a news conference, with the “stunning” result of the majority surveyed having chosen “NO”.
If a doctor goes to a patient and says, “Would you like to have toxic chemicals injected into your body, with the potential risk of killing the cells in your bone marrow, losing all your hair, and in general feeling weak and like cr*p all the time?” I am going to take a wild guess that the patient is going to say, “NO.” But if the doctor provides the patient with the facts and the reasons behind his/her recommendation, the patient will be empowered to make an informed decision.
Yes. You can argue that people who want more information can always go online. After all, google is just one click away. But let’s be honest with ourselves: The topic of TAXES has always been extremely personal to people especially those who are blessed enough to be in the high-income bracket, and lately it has been turned into an emotional subject as well. in your wildest guess, what will be the % of the people who after receiving this email wondered about the facts behind the VAT proposal instead of getting some gut / visceral reactions to the short question you posted?
Frankly I am disappointed. For the very least you could have included a link in your email to a fact-based, neutral information page. Granted very low % of the recipients are expected to bother to click on that link, but to those who care to learn more and to make their decisions based on facts and not based on a base human desire for self-preservation and an all-too-human “They can eat cake” mentality, such a skin-deep effort on your part would have helped prevent this bad taste in my mouth I am experiencing.
Sincerely,
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I only bring up my degree when I write complain letters...
I know that the Catholic Church, and many other Christian churches, has a complicated relationship with Science. So I appreciated the fact that they DO indeed include Science in the curriculum for Catholic schools. In the public schools that my kids have been to, Science has always been taken as a given. There was never an attempt to try and define “Science” before the kids started taking science classes. This was why when I chanced upon the display of children’s works in the hallway of this Parochial school, I was absolutely intrigued. However, I still don’t quite understand what was going through the teacher’s mind when s/he decided to ask the children in a parochial school to make posters on what they think “Science is…”
Was it done with a sense of self-awareness and irony? Most likely not. How many other people that passed by this hallway actually noticed the irony in these innocent words of children with alarm and fascination the way that I did?
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No wiser words have been spoken in this hallway...
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Science is... What?
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The other day as I was driving by the same school and church, my oldest pointed out this sign to me. We thought it was hilarious. But of course, I have an out-of-whack sense of humor which alarmingly is being passed down to my children. As I am heading to hell in a handbasket, please heed my plea that my children however are innocent victims of nurture and nature.
Srly. I thought you are supposed to teach people to be nice, at least when you are right outside the church...
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This brings me to several of my favorite warning signs:
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From our beloved The Bloggess
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I srly want to post this in my house. Like I said, I am hell bound...
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Warning: Facetiousness Ahead
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Update: I believe someone at Huffington Post is spying on me… Two days after I published this post, they came out with “The Craziest Prohibition Signs: Who Would Try These Things?”Really, when you post a question such as this in your title, you are just daring people. Here’s looking at you, kid…
This post should be filed under “Random pictures I took with my phone because I could” and “I am swamped at work but I need to feed my Tamagotchi aka blog so I am taking the easy, FINE, lazy!, way out” and “I am taking 6:30 am flight out, again, which sucks ass, and I just did grocery shopping because there are only three things in the world that my kids would eat, cleaned up the whole house, did the dishes and the laundry, packed their lunchboxes, left notes all over the house to remind them of trash day, so my kids will NOT grow up to become serial killers, and I needed to go pack for my trip wondering what I could wear that would not make me look pregnant” …
Mr. Monk, my 7 year-old boy, told me to come over so he could give me a very important lesson.
He was very proud of himself. I, like a good mother, was very proud as well.
Mr. Monk gave me "a very important lesson" the other day...
Mr. Monk decided to write a newsletter when he first overheard about what happened in Haiti. Only that he did not know at that time it was an earthquake and not a tsunami that destroyed Haiti. (He was probably also thinking of what happened in Indonesia in 2009…) He also did not know how to spell Haiti then.
Mr. Monk decided to be a Newspaper man...
The 21st Century Phone Booth - What would Super Man do?
Yes, I took this picture in a bathroom stall...
Velcro makes it so much easier to change the price on the fly
I have all these wonderful posts ideas for posts lined up for before the end of the year. Alas, I am in turbo-boost Catch Up mode: In less than 10 days, I had the wonderful experience of flying on 6 different airplanes. Not accustomed to being a road warrior, to rapidly adjusting to different time zones, or to packing/unpacking in quick succession, I feel like I am walking through a mist, on unstable ground. Or it could simply be I am walking through crap collected from my trips strewn on the floor in my house since I soon gave up on unpacking. Nevertheless, I do not want to miss my once-a-week WTF Wednesday feature.
(Naturally I am cheating by Backdating this post. Good thing Sarbanes–Oxley Act does not apply to blog posting…)
So here is a composition of random pictures taken at my random WTF moments:
Considering how you call yours a Chinese restaurant, I surely hope one of you are, or at least, the food is...
A question we will still be asking next year, and the next, and the next...
"The Dog and Bentley"
This picture may deserve some explanation: I was enjoying a nice bowl of frozen desert with large dark tapiocas aka “pearls” (which I am completely obsessed with and would gladly tell anybody that I had 6 bowls/cups of those in 2 days when I was in Taipei, on top of everything else I ate) at a sidewalk stand/shop. The shop owner during the day keeps his dog on the sidewalk, as you can see, with a makeshift cardboard-box doghouse. Just as I was admiring the very well-behaved dog, I saw that across the street is a Bentley dealership with a fancy showcase room. I found this an interesting juxtaposition. It says so much about Taipei.
Serisouly. How much do you want to discuss your menstrual cycle?
This is the “Menstrual Care” section at a drug store. I have not “lived” in Taiwan since 1993 and I am intrigued by the resurgence, modernization, and popularity of herbal medicinal health culinary supplement drinks dedicated to menstrual care. This belief has been around for thousands of years, that beauty (read: SLENDER FIGURE, YOUNG-LOOKING, GOOD and PALE SKIN) needs to be cultivated from inside. Not the “inner beauty” crap, y’all. You need to take the herbs. And you need to take care of your menstrual cycles. THAT is what I have been missing for living abroad. Seriously. Mine is all out of whack. Only I did not realize that until I was confronted with shelves of herbal drinks. Nowadays it seems to be OK to openly talk about the “condition”, and though I am far from being a prude, the “openness” caught me off-guard. The WTF yet heart-warming moment came when my nephew, who is only 9 years younger than I am, brought me a case of these drinks, telling me, “These are very effective! My girlfriend takes these. They taste really good, she said, and she does not suffer from menstrual cramps any more. Her skin has also improved a lot. You need to start taking these yourself!”
Your pending divorce. Or the future bildungsroman written by your children. Courtesy of CVS.
While you are at it, get one of those cards strategically positioned by the cash register at any liquor store to go with an item you carefully selected from this section.
Yeah. You know the lyrics. And seriously? This song is wrong on so many different levels…
The innocent explanation of course is that DADDY is dressed up as Santa Claus. So mommy is actually kissing daddy, only that the poor kid has no idea and is probably going to grow up with this terrible secret weighing him down and become… well, you guessed it: either a great writer or a serial killer…
As a matter of fact, my tongue was tied since my youngest is determined to still believe in Santa. That leaves me no choice but to listen, while pressing my lips hard so I wouldn’t burst out laughing, to their reactions to the lyrics…
“Is his mommy single?”
“Why is she seeing Santa Claus?”
“Is she dating Santa? He is so much older than she is. Yew…”
“Is she cheating on his daddy? Yew…”
Yew… aside, they found the video hilarious and fascinating. My youngest asked me to play this version several times this weekend. Right before bed on Sunday night, I heard both boys humming, actually trying to sing, the first few bars of the song. On Monday, when we were in the car listening to the “All Christmas Music All the Time” Channel (which is, indeed, the epitome of “Season Treason” perpetrator since they start playing Christmas music right after Halloween every year), the kids complained about the songs being played and decided to substitute with their own rendition of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”, which went like this,
“I saw mommy kissing Santa Claus underneath the mistletoe last night. La la la la la (off key off key off key)…”
Then my husband chimed in, “I saw daddy kissing Santa… OOOOOPS!” Ugh. Boys.
Is it the bizarre contrast between Santa Claus, one of the most benign, trustworthy, persona and something naughty even though they are too young (and for one of them, too immature) to put their fingers on it that makes this song so fascinating?
“When you are married, you are supposed to stick together.” Back on Sunday evening, my youngest ruminated on the only lesson one could possibly get out of this.
Then finally, he declared,
“I am going to go tell daddy!”
You do that, buddy.
Later my husband told me that my youngest offered this explanation without any prompting:
Mommy is on a break from daddy, and Santa Claus is on a break from Mrs. Claus.
Can I get an Oy Vey here? Oy vey indeedy.
* This URL links to the Jackson 5 version. Remember the times? When M.J. was a normal kid? In hind sight, if I had shown the kids this version, instead of the weird animated version with the slutty-looking mom and the perv-look-alike Santa, it would probably not have caused such an alarming, albeit hilarious, brouhaha…
I was thinking since I am all over the map going from warm fuzzy pictures of my kids smiling like angels to crazy ass inappropriate jokes and cursing to crazy ass all-out ranting on people/events/things that piss me off. I either have ADHD or Bi-Polar, I realized, or as my husband would gladly tell you, “Insane in the Membrane”. I was thinking, perhaps I should create a Warning System for my blog.
Don't you wish there is such a system for everything in life?
I really like how Homeland Security did the color coded chart because, as we all know, homo sapiens (“Not that there’s anything wrong with it.”) are visual animals. Really, when I see the ORANGE color at the airport, I become appreciative and understanding of the 1-hour wait at the security line. When disaster strikes, nothing is going to get my fat ass moving faster than seeing a RED flag waving in the air.
Won’t it be cool if I have a Warning System for this blog, before you start reading a post, you would know what to expect:
Blog Advisory System: Don't say I didn't warn you!
Of course, after an hour of working on my Blog Advisory system, I realized that no Advisory System is going to reach the goal of MECE: Mutually Exclusive and Collectively Exhaustive. Mock ye not. This is something the McKinsey & Co. consultants live and die by. And they get paid big bucks for being anal retentive. No shit. For instance, it worries me that the heartless dicks and grouchiest bitches amongst you will need a special warning such as this one:
Well, like I said, don’t say that I didn’t warn you…
