The Next James Bond Plot

You know how in the really good James Bond movies you sort of feel for the bad guy?  Or maybe not the bad guy in general, but sympathize with his idea?  For instance, in Moonraker you had Hugo Drax who want to right all the environmental wrongs the human species has done to the world.  Pollution, war, killing off species, etc.  He just figured it was going to get worse and worse (he was right) and tried to put a stop to it by killing off humanity and then saving a select few who would return to Earth in time and live harmoniously with nature.

You can’t really blame the guy, eh?

Well I came up with a silly plot yesterday when I was considering my unemployment status.  Here goes:

An unemployed guy figures the best way to save the economy and give everyone jobs again is to kill off a large portion of the population.  He develops a virus which will only kill off 50% of the world, leaving enough people to all have jobs, rebuild, and start a new world that is economically and environmentally conscious.

When you consider how weird some of the James Bond plots are, it’s not that far-fetched.  Creating an earthquake to destroy Silicon Valley for real estate gain?  Monopolizing the news of the world and causing it to happen?  Playing poker with a guy who cries blood?  Hollywood, send me my paycheck.

I Hate San Francisco (not really)

There are so many things in the Bay Area that I feel drives divides into our happy little community.  For instance, the subway system (BART) doesn’t run past midnight/midnight-thirty.  This means if you live in Oakland or Berkeley, you either need to leave the bar around 11:30 or so, or scamper to find a bed to sleep in until service resumes at 5am (maybe that ugly lady at the end of the bar might not be too ugly when there’s nowhere to sleep).

Another is the cost of living.  San Francisco may be pretty cool and have a ton of stuff to do, but it all costs an arm and a leg.  Go out to a bar and you might end up aith a $60 bar tab, $100 if you add the sushi you thought was going to be a good idea.  In the East Bay your bar tab will run you about $30 all said and done, and that’s a wild night.  Rent is also about $1,000 cheaper to a comparable place in SF unless you go down to Colma which is full of dead people.

The fact that SF has massive hills also is a knock against it.  I can bike just about anywhere in the East Bay with my single-speed and not hit a hill higher that a few feet.  In SF you’ll need calve muscles that resemble either a grapefruit or a gnarly tumor.  Great workout yeah, but who really wants to do that?  Chances are a cab ride will suffice.  Face it, you have to have a pretty good bankroll in SF.

The reason this is all coming up is because of the fireworks show last night.  I went with some friends up to a hill in the Berkeley Marina to watch the Berkeley fireworks show and as a bonus we could see Oakland’s show at Jack London, SF’s show at Crissy Field, and some of Richmond and Marin off in the distance (there was some low cloud cover which illuminated everything pretty awesomely I have to admit).

The Oakland show was cool, and I’m sure the Berkeley show would have been just as great except that right behind it across the bay was the SF fireworks show.  My god did it look impressive.  From 8 miles away it looked amazing.  They had so many great fireworks, but the kicker was that they had it doubled so that if one firework went off, there was a mirror image of it going off in the other direction.  At first I thought it was the beer I drank or a trick with the distance, but everyone was blown away by it, envious that we didn’t go to SF for the show.

It just made me dislike SF even more, despite having tons of cool stuff.  Other things piss me off too, like how no one in SF knows anything about BART, but us here in the East Bay know it like the back of our hands.

We might not be rich, but the East Bay kicks SF ass.

What I Learned Working 6.5 Days At A Construction Site

1)  No matter what Eli tells you, there is no such thing as a ‘Beam Stretcher’ in the truck.  It’s a snipe hunt.

2)  You can drink two gallons of water welding in hot weather in a leather jacket and never have to pee once.

3)  You can sweat through a leather jacket.

4)  Polyester is incredibly flammable.

5)  Every white guy on site has had jail time, a few DUI’s, or unplanned children (or all of the above).

6)  No one will stop to teach you anything, and if you ask they get pissy and wonder why you’re not working.

7)  Don’t weld in a t-shirt even on hot days, you’ll get crazy UV burns from the light.

8)  My welds suck so bad I was ‘let go.’

So I’m unemployed again.  The lead guy told me all my welds were ‘ugly’ and will have to be redone by someone else.  To be honest, I got the feeling yesterday that I was going to be fired.  I had worked out in my head how much work I had done (W), minused work I created from bad work (B) and equipment I had broken (E) and the totals were not looking good.  So, this morning at 8am, I was fired.  Back to surfing Craigslist!

One other thing I noticed on site.  There is a huge division between the white workers and the migrant workers.  They don’t aknowledge each other, the white guys talk sometimes about the ‘fucking wetbacks’ (I still don’t know where the term ‘wetback’ comes from) and about how cool it is to cut them in line at the Roach Coach, or how one of them tried to cut them off and he about beat the crap out of the guy.

I noticed this thing right away when I tried smiling or waving to the other workers and they just ignored me.  I could see how after being yelled at by all the white guys on site you wouldn’t want to be nice to one since he might just be using it as an opening to bitch you out.

Anyways, hope your weekend is great!

Swing And A Miss

I’m taking this Intro to Business night class at a local community college here in Oakland and for three nights a week for 2.5 hours we talk business.  Well, it would be cool if we did, but it’s more of like a rambling lecture.  I’m being harsh.  I hate to be the asshole, but college courses are WAY different than community college ones.  I kinda feel like I’m in high school again.

One of my major peeves about the course is the textbook.  If it was a regular textbook things would be fine, but this one seems specifically geared towards community colleges.  Every single example in the book involves either a minority or a woman.  Hey, what about us white males?  To be fair I’m the only one in my class.  Ah well.

Secondly, the book is depressingly upbeat.  Because I think it’s directed towards community colleges, the upbeat nature of the book makes it depressing.  I’ve only read three chapters so far and I feel like each one mentions Bill Gates.  In fact, the whole book is filled with success stories about people like the Waltons or Jeff Bezos from Amazon.com.  It’s like the book is luring community college kids into a false sense of security that they too can make it big.  Makes me sad.  I wish it was more realistic.  It also doesn’t help that the instructor uses small business examples where the company makes $1,000,000.00 a year in revenue.  Seriously?  I think most of the people in the class, like myself, either are not going to start a business or it’ll be the variety that makes maybe $25,000.00 a year if they’re lucky.

As far as the title of the post, I totally bombed in class today.  The humor of the college crowd is way different than the community college  crowd.  Here’s the scenario:

The instructor had just bitched us out for ten minutes because he bet us $20 that none of us could come up with three names and numbers of people in the class with them and of course we all failed.  The lesson being we need to be networking.  So after making fun of us and using Bill Gates in an example about a fellow classmate who could unknowingly be a billionaire one day, he says that you need to make friends.

Well, in my experience, no one in class really talks to each other, even in college, much less exchange numbers.  Sure, you may have had a class with someone famous, but chances are that’s it.  So when he snickered away about how poor at networking we were, I raised my hand and decided to give him the old one-two.  “So basically what you’re saying is that we need to network in class so that instead of saying ‘I had a class with Bill Gates’ we could say ‘I had a class with Bill Gates and he was a jackass.’”

The silence was deafening.

I had expected at least one chuckle, but all I got was a blank stare from the teacher and the rest of the class who decided to find out what the asshole in their class looked like.  I guess no one jokes in community college much less talks in class.

Going to be a a great month.

My God It Itches

My ink is starting to peel off which sucks for a few reasons.  The first is that I want to peel it off but it might cause scarring or whatever.  The second is that it itches like a mother fucker!

The weird thing about this tattoo is that it didn’t feel like such a big deal.  I mean, while I was getting it, every time the needle got near my armpit of that lower arm fat I felt like grimacing.  You know, that little lower part of your arm that if someone pinched it would hurt like a mother fucker?  I am not really looking forward to getting it colored in and the compass rose on that sickly white soft skin on the inside of my arm, but goddamn do I want to do it!

In fact, I am really considering doing my other arm, and maybe getting full sleeves when my job situation levels out.  Who knows though, this might be enough.

In other news, my mom just about cried when I told her I was getting her dad’s (my grandpa Hotch) name on my ship.  And when I told her I finally did it, she said her heart skipped a beat.  That makes me feel awesome.  My dad might not like tattoos too much, but I like to think that this artwork on my arm is going to be a fitting tribute to Hotch.

Any-hoo, back to homework for my night classes in Business.  I’m trying to start my own brewing company.

I Am An Amateur

After two days working on site, I feel like I am way over my head.  Evidenced by the fact that I’ve already done about $500 worth of damage to equipment and repairing a few of the welds I did.  I’m certified and everything, but I’m doing stuff that I’ve never done before (bridging a one-inch gap by laying down weld after weld) and using flux-core MIG wire.

To protect the wire you’re laying down onto the surface of the metal it needs to be protected from the outside elements so no impurities get welded into it and ten years later it starts breaking or whatever.  In class we used a mixture of Argon and C02 to shield the wire from oxygenation.  On the job site there’s this material called flux which is built into the wire and protects the weld while you’re laying it down.  This means after you’re done you have this hard casing of flux you need to chip off the original weld in case you want to weld on top of the other weld.

It is because of this much pain-in-the-ass that I took up the gas-shielding type of welding.  If I wanted to chip away flux all day I would have taken up stick welding.  Sadly, I’m working at a snails pace and keep waiting for them to just fire me.  But, it hasn’t happened… yet.  Only two more weeks!

As for the broken equipment, the thick copper cable that powers the welding machine I accidentally ran over with a scissor-lift (it raises up a few stories and the joints look like scissors) which is no problem, but the tire was resting on top of the cable.  Lo and behold, when I extended the lift up, the cable stretched and then broke.  My god those things are SO full of copper.  Anyways, there goes a $500 cable.  I am such an idiot.

I kinda hope everyone was this clueless the first time they were working on a site.  Like a Greenhorn from ‘Deadliest Catch’ you know?

Ah well, two more weeks.

I Am So Fucking Tired

The good news is I have a job. The better news is that it’s welding. Basically, I’m putting together the roof of a new Lowe’s. They want me to work 12 hour days which is fine with me, I could use the overtime and cash. Sadly, for the next two weeks, I may be strugglin’ to make posts often.

Wish me well!

That Kinda Tickled

Oh man, that kinda hurt.  I just got back from the first session of my tattoo and yowza.  I am SO not looking forward to completing the rest of it on the inside of my arm.  Every time the needle got a little close to that soft-arm area goodness I had to forcefully meditate to stop me from wincing too much.  The coloring and the underarm will be done on July 29th, a little over a month from now, which sucks but well worth the wait.  Jason over at FTW Tattoo is a huge bad-ass.

Anyways, I’m off to get a bite to eat and weep big man tears as I remove the bandage.

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Having Powers Would Be Awkward

I really don’t feel like super-hero stories get it right.  Sure, Heroes and the X-Men have stories about mutant persecution and running from the law/imprisonment.  But imagine if you yourself had a super power and how hard it would be to hide.

For instance, let’s say you had the power to see through clothes.  At first you’d be ecstatic.  Yes!  I can see anyone I want naked!  But you wouldn’t be able to turn it off.  Everyone is naked but you it seems (for the sake of this argument you can see clothes, just not when worn by people).  How many Seinfeld-like scenarios could you come up with because of that kind of super-power?

Someone would ask you what you think of their new t-shirt that has a super-funny slogan on it, but you can’t read it.  “Hahahaaaa, yeah, that is pretty clever.”  “Clever?  It’s a picture of Einstein.”  “Hrm, well clever in a intelligent way.”

Or maybe you noticed something like a chick has a clit piercing (come on, you know you’d look) and you’re with a group of people and she mentions that she just got a new piercing that hurt like hell.  “Yeah, piercing your clit must have hurt like fuck.”  Her face goes sheet white and everyone looks at you all shocked.  “I didn’t get my clit pierced, I got my eyebrow pierced.  How did you know I have a clit piercing?”  If you looked up backtrack in the dictionary, it doesn’t even begin to describe the shit you’d be in.  Are you spying on her in her home?  Ask an ex?  How do you know that?

Or what about looking at people naked all the time?  I’m convinced the only reason we here in the US freak out over boobs is because they’re so taboo.  Can you imagine how unappealing boobs would be if women always walked around topless?  Now imagine everyone naked.  You’d see every contour of their body, every blemish, shadow, crack, poo-stain, whatever.  Yoga class would make you want to puke.  Hell, you might even stop finding the human body attractive to the point where sex is meaningless and you’d get off on photos of Amish women or chicks in Burkas.

All sorts of awkward.  That kind of super-power would suck.  Kinda reminds me of a previous rant I wrote about how having the power of invisibility would be horrible.