WHERE'S MY PHONE -- I DON'T WANNA TALK TO HIM

HELL-O!  YEAH, SPEAKING.  WHO'SE CALLING?

OH, SO YOU CALLED ME FOUR TIMES BEFORE GETTING HOLD OF ME THIS TIME.  

YOU'RE RIGHT.  I CALLED YOU BACK FOUR TIMES AND ALL I GOT WAS YOUR COMPUTER.  IF YOU WANT TO TALK TO ME, ANSWER YOUR PHONE.

AH, YOUR COMPUTER IS VERY EFFICIENT, YOU SAY.  IF THAT'S THE CASE, GO ACCUSE IT FOR NOT REACHING ME.  

SO TELL ME, WHADDYA WANT?

Ah, you're wondering if I would like to make some extra money working 3 to 5 hours a week at home.  If that were possible, I might want to give it a try.  For whom, by the way.  Oh, for you, the Bozos with the computers.  Ah, I see.  That's what it is.  You work three hours a week and the computer works the rest of the time swallowing all the calls that I make to you when I don't answer my phone on the second ring.   Well, Sweetie-pie, go talk to your computer, I don't want to take too much of your precious three hour work week.

To all you lovely human friends of mine, I divulge that this is a composite paraphrase of at least five telephone calls that I have received over the last five days.  I am not exagerating the tone of the interchange.  It's my favorite pass time these days.  Here's my favorite.

Billy Boilerroom from Manila wants to talk to Mrs. Isabel Dion.  I say, "I'm her husband and she doesn't want to talk to you, especially not at 10:30 PM, Idiot.  I'm hanging up now and don't ever call this number again."   Billy calls back about two days later.  I have to be honest, he got his GMT time zones in line this time.  "Hello," he says, of course, "I want to talk to Isabel Dion."  I tell this beast of burden that I told him not to ever call this number again.  Furthermore, says I, "I Know that you're calling to make us change our cell phone carrier, and the answer is no."

This guy is getting tough and he insists that he has to talk to Isabel Dion.  I'm having fun, so there's no way I'm caving.   I TOLD YOU NEVER TO CALL THIS NUMBER AGAIN.  ONE MORE TIME AND I WILL REACH THOUGH THE WIRES AND CHOKE YOU.  GOOD BYE.  I like this, it's good therapy.  I decide to tell Belle what is going on.   I get the usual five hundred word sermon about being nice to everyone.  I then say, OK, you wanna talk to him, you're on.  The next time he calls, it's your turn.

Sure as shootin', Billy calls again and I say, "You're an animal.  I told you never to call this phone number again, and yet here you are. "  

"I have to talk to Isabel Dion."

"You know what, Billy boy, she is not going to change the wireless phone carrier because I pay the bill."

Billy, the Boilerroom Parrot says, "I have to talk to Isabel Dion."

"OK.  Is your boss around?  Are you recording this call?"

"I don't know to you, sirrr."

"Here's Isabel."

The conversation lasts about 90 seconds.  She says an emphatic "no" because the guy won't divulge who gave him the contact information to begin with.  He begs and he begs in great Pinoy form.  She gives me the phone and the line is still open and he's telling someone in the background in tear-soaked Tagalog that Isabel Dion just said "no."  I say into the telephone, and in Tagalog,  "See, I told you so, Animal."  The phone did not click, it fairly exploded.

Yesterday I got a call wondering if I would consider working at home for excellent money.  I said, "Yeah, I've only been looking for that for five or six months now."  The guy says, "Would you consider making a small investment of $200.00 to get started?"

"Yeah, Socrates, I'm out of work and I'm going to give you 2 C's to try out your scheme.  Go get it from the neighborhood dog."  Click.

Sweet Pea of a young thing calls and asks if I would consider going to school to train for the latest "Hot field of enterprise endeavors...Blah, blah, blah."  I ask, politely of course, "Do you call-center people use computers in your work?" 

"Oh, yes, sir, we do."

"Good.  Do me a favor and go check how many times I have answered your calls and declared my distaste for talking to you people."  Click.

With that, all youse lovely hearts are just going to have to imagine me pulling the garbage can cover over my tired body as I have decided to strengthen my resolve to be nice to everyone, without exception.  Just as soon as the telephone stops ringing.

SOCIALIST CONGRESS LOVES FRANKING PRIVILEGE

http://www.wltx.com/news/story.aspx?storyid=86886

Have any of you ever had the chance to ask the members of congress who rale against socialism why they don't mind having franking privileges?  Do they know or care that what they did last year was to redistribute wealth to the tune of $50,000,000.00?  Do they know or care that if they had paid their own postage costs they could have contributed to the paying of 500 post office employees?
Mary Bono Mack sent a mailer out [paid by me and you, of course] asking what it is that her constituents wanted changed.  Here's what I said.  Forgive all student loans and start over again; institute a fair flat tax system; decree that no CEO can make more than 100 times the annual wages of the lowest paid employee in the company, salary and bonuses together;  remove the franking privilege.  Then, I had to put a stamp on the mail that I sent back to her.  You bet, the same mail for which I had paid for HER to send to ME in the first place.
Now, you perhaps think that this is bad.  Wait, wait, let me tell you one more.  Remember the Series E war bond?  You don't?  That's too bad.  No, wait, maybe it is good.  Know why?  Here's why.  If you still have a $25.00 or $50.00 Series E War Bond from 1944, let's say, and let's say that it is worth $100.00 now.  [This but a hypothetical example.]  When you go to cash it, you will be charged income tax on the gain.  I kid you not.  You help your country by lending it your money.  The country uses your money for its own ends.  It then turns around and takes more of your money on the interest that IT paid you for the privilege of using YOUR money for its own welfare.  Excuse me!  If there ever was an institutionalized insult, that is it.  When this happened to me, I decided right then and there that I would NEVER lend another penny to the USA again.  NEVER.
So, not only do we have to destroy the franking privilege and let the congress people pay for their own mailers, but we have to stop buying "savings bonds."  Let the Chinese buy them.  Let the government run after the Chinese for the tax owed on the gain.
There are some things that governments do that are the zenith of immorality.  These are two of them.

HOLY STATE OF MATRIMONY UNDER ATTACK? STERCUS TAURORUM

The holy state of matrimony is also now under vicious attack by secularism and evil forces both within and without our Church.  How is the holy state of matrimony being attacked?  These are not attacks.  They are denigration, insults, blasphemes and perhaps a few other things, but attacks? No.  My marriage is not being attacked.  The marriages of my children are not being attacked.  The one who is married is not being attacked.;  The one who is not yet married is certainly not being attacked.  So what is all this "attack" business.  Is marriage going to disappear?  Of course not.  Is marriage going to go crumbling into total desuetude because someone is going to insult it so badly that we are all going to quit?  No.  It is total intellectual short-circuiting to think that marriage is going to be destroyed because the state of marriage is being insulted.  It is the apex of idiocy to think that an institution as closely related to the nature of humans is ever going to fall under the weight of the insults and disparagement and completely crumble.  

Do I agree with homosexual marriage?  No.

Do I think that it attacks the state of my marriage?  No.

Do I think that divorce attacks the state of my marriage?  No

Do I think that institutionalized co-habitation without marriage attacks the state of my marriage?  No.

Do I think that the state has the power and the authority to legalize homosexual marriage?  Yes.

Do I think that the state has the power and the authority to coerce religious groups to perform and legalize homosexual marriages?  No.

People have to open up their ears and listen to what they are saying when they talk about these things.  People have to realize that marriage is a covenant between two people which is ratified by the state.  If the state doesn't want to ratify marriage as a valid object of legislation at certain, or all levels, then the union between two people depends on the consent of the two people involved.   It is not the state (nor the Church) that creates marriage and then is able to dissolve it.

Never!  It is the two human beings involved with each other and with the consent that they proffer to one other for their mutual welfare who create a marriage...no matter of what sex they are.  It is up to the state to accept the covenant as valid according to the state's outline of who qualifies and who doesn't.  That's it.  Marriage is what it is and no church or government can change its essence.  All they can do is to validate the union or not validate the union.  Churches and governments are nothing but ratifiers of a personal covenant that creates a stable union between two human beings who freely and mutually consent to the union.  Period.

JUSTIN BIEBER AND SANTA CLAUS

Justin Bieber: My Mom Never Let Me Believe in Santa Claus!

By Billy Johnson, Jr. | Stop The Presses! – 14 hours ago

·        

    Article taken from:http://music.yahoo.com/blogs/stop-the-presses/justin-bieber-mom-never-let-believe-santa-claus-004850534.html

·        

Justin Bieber

"Bah humbug!

"With Christmas just one week away, Justin Bieber isn't planning to head to bed early Dec. 24 to await the arrival of Santa Claus. In fact, the teen pop phenom says he's never believed in the man in the big red suit!

"My mom always told me there wasn't a Santa,' Bieber says in a new interview with AOL Music. 'This was her logic: She thought if I grew up knowing about Santa then finding out he wasn't real, that it would be like she was lying to me. And then when she told me about God, I maybe wouldn't believe her'."

Oh gosh!  What a miserable mother!  

As I write this there are 4,111 comments on this article.  This is the vilest desecration of Christmas that has come under my gaze for quite some time.  The idiocy of the world is totally unfathomable.  The Philippine Trench has been plumbed.  The invincible ignorance of the denizens that populate the planet defies all human methods of metering.  We have gone from Christmas to "holidays", from Thanksgiving to "turkey day" and it defies the imagination where we are headed with Mothers' Day and Fathers' Day what with the disappearance of SEX in favor of "gender" I'm sure that the concept of Mother and Father will degenerate down to "lessor" and "lessee."

I was about 8 years old when I discovered that Santa Claus is a fraud.  I told my parents and they swore me to "caution" although not to secrecy in relation to my younger siblings [4].  You are not shaking your head and saying, "Yeah, he's crazy because he didn't believe in Santa.  Now look at him, writing on the Internet in anonymity, hiding his mental perversity from the world all the while foisting his acrimony on it."  Let me tell you, there's more.  I have two children and I forbade them to fall for the "Santa claptrap."  In my warped concept of the world, I was not going to allow my boys to give credit to a phantasmagorical, omniscient en-slaver of elves, leprechauns, ansisit, etc when I was someone's else's "elf" constructing their lives.  No sireee, not meee.

Will the world give us back our SEX? Our Thanksgiving?  Our Christmas?  It's up to us.

There are a couple of things that I have written about this subject in a more polite tone.  If you click here and then click here you be able to enjoy them...maybe.

Now that they know how I feel about this Santa business, the way I treated my children and all that anyone will write about me?  

We know the answer to that one.  

On top of it all, I know that there will not be 4,111 comments to this screed.

Happy Jesus' birthday to you all, and to all a big smile...and don't forget that my favorite cookies are Oatmeal / Raisin.  

Also, I'm a neat freak, so clean the chimney flume, you've get less than a week.  And don't forget the fresh mistletoe and a nice new nightgown for the Missus.  Oh, BTW, lock the upstairs bedroom for crying out loud.  The low-hanging limbs over your roof are a hazard for Rudolph.  Do I have to call OSHA on you, for Pete's sake?  You'd think that you would have more respect for an old guy who has to circumnavigate the planet in all directions in one night.  If you can sell this crock of cockamamie hash, why aren't you a millionaire?  Then you could give me a pass.

Santa Claus! Sheeesh!  Why do parents perpetuate this LIE?

Yes, that means YOU.

SO CALLED HUMILITY = ARROGANCE >> LOOK IT UP

so-called (sōˈkôldˈ)

adjective

1. Commonly called: “new buildings … in so-called modern style” (Graham Greene).
2. Incorrectly or falsely termed: My so-called friends were gossiping about me again.

Usage Note: Quotation marks are not used to set off descriptions that follow expressions such as so-called and self-styled, which themselves relieve the writer of responsibility for the attribution: his so-called foolproof method (not “foolproof method”).

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th edition Copyright © 2010 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

So, you think you've heard it all?  Try again.  There's always more.  This morning I went to inform a certain cleric that his indiscriminate use of the phrasal adjective "so-called" qualifying a doctrinal reality is an unacceptable oxymoron.  It is a speech pattern that he has developed over the years, thinking that by qualifying impressive truths with the adjective so-called he made them more beautiful and more poetic.  I told him that it is just the opposite.  In English usage when a reality is qualified by the adjective so-called it is diminished, not enhanced.  His response was that he meant to enhance the reality and not diminish it and that if people would only talk to him about it he would explain his intention.  After all, he persisted, English isn't his mother tongue and so he speaks it the way he feels is within his capability.  He doesn't mean to mislead anybody, it's just not his first language.  He really got cranked up when I told him that language means what it means and there comes a time when you have to make yourself a slave to it.  BOOM!  "I don't make myself a slave to anything."  
Oh well, he wasn't listening to me anyway, so now that I've really lost him, this session is over.
I suggested that he didn't have to trust me alone, that he should ask around and satisfy himself that what I was saying is, in fact, correct.  I told him that he should look into changing his speech pattern.  It won't be easy, but the result will be gratifying.  He just insisted that it is very hard.
Besides the invincible ignorance of his position, what really got to me was that he denied remembering that I had made this very point to him in front of his superior two years ago.  Just goes to show that this guy is tuned out from reality.  The arrogance of it all is that he imposes his view of reality on the world without expecting that the world is going to push back.  This part of the world pushes back.  
I grew up bi-lingual.  I am accustomed to being told, "That's not how you say this in English [or in ... xxx].  Some 51+ years ago I was put into a situation where I began to live in a country away from my two major languages.  So, I often heard, "That's not how we say it."  Along the way I have picked up four more languages besides that first extra one and I NEVER had the reaction, "If they want to ask me what I mean, let them ask me." HUH?  
It is time for this "missionary" to go back to where he can speak a language that he knows.  He has overstayed his welcome.  If he doesn't want to speak the language of this country, then he doesn't deserve to participate in the offering plate that is fed by the very people who have to ask him to clarify his intentions when he arrogantly persists in using anti-idiomatic expressions.
BTW, I sent him a copy of the definition that appears at the beginning of this article.

TAXES AND THE TEA PARTY, 2010 EDITION

You, dear hearts are WRONG.  These people from Massachusetts were rebelling against "taxation without representation."  Besides, the taxation was coming from a government from which they had escaped because of its religious intolerance.  Where do you Bozos fall on this graph?  You have taxation WITH representation and you have taxation that respects your religious convictions.  You also have taxation that gives you benefits at the time of retirement and irreversible malady.  Are you forgetting that without taxation the country of your dreams will fail and fall into decrepitude and finally, be colonialized by another power who will tax you again, without representation?  China is right there, stage left.  Ready.
So, Tea Party, Norquist Disciples, Obama Democrats, Reaganites, Bushites, lovers of Bill Clinton, et al, make up your mind.  Do you want to remain sovereign or do you want to be forced to pay Communist Chinese taxes?
To remain sovereign here is what you must do, in my opinion.
Starting with the debt ceiling, just to be current in our thinking.
1. The debt ceiling must, by law, never exceed 30% of revenue.
2. Institute in the next 15 years a Value Added Tax system
    12% to the Feds on all goods and services except for houses (1st one) and the 1st vehicle and        monthly utilities
    8% to the state on all goods and services with the same exceptions as above
3. No tax exemptions to anyone, for any reason
4. 7% income tax to individuals for Social Security
5. 4% income tax to individuals for Medicare
6. 7% matching funds tax on employers for employee social security
7. 4% matching funds tax on employers for employee medicare
8. 12% Fed.Capital gains tax annually for corporations and privately held and closely held companies
9. 8% State Capital gains tax yearly for corporations and private and closely held companies
10. Income derived from Federal and State bonds is exempt from capital gains tax
11. 12% Federal Inheritance tax
12. 8% State Inheritance tax
13. 12% Federal Income tax on "windfall", bonus income.  Lottery winnings included. Giver not taxed
14. 8% State Income tax on "windfall", bonus income.  Includes Lottery winnings.  Giver not taxed
15. No Federal or State subsidies for established industries, eg Oil, Pharm, Comm, Finance, Insure, Trans, Electric, Agri, Auto
16. Abolish pre-emptive warfare.  Stop non productive actual and contemporary wars
17. Diminish IRS personnel to accommodate above changes
18. Abolish all government employee unions, federal and state
19. Limit executive corporate salary to 50 times wages of lowest paid employee
20. Limit elected government seat holder salary & benes to 35 times fed min wage (Now NTE 550K)
21. Raise reduced benefit social security age to 66
22. Raise full social security retirement benefit age to 70
23. Include all government employees (Federal and State) on social security/medicare system
24. Zero tolerance on pork barrel insertions

For the present.  Accept the sunset of the "Bush" tax rates while you work at changing the tax environment of the United States.  Wake up and be realistic.  We here in the hinterland don't give a damn about you all and your beyond the Milky Way ideologies.  We elected you to govern.  Not to accept bribes from special interests, sign meaningless, non binding ideological "pledges" and certainly not to drive the country into the ground.  Step by step, talk to one another to solve the problem within a realistic period of time.  You had all better wake up or start to learn Chinese.  Take your pick.

NO, I'M NOT MAKING THIS UP

This has got be the highlight of my week.  I, and you, get a lot of stuff over the Internet that makes us shake our heads and wonder whether or not is is true.  Somehow we just know that some creative genius sat down and made it up.  Just in the past couple or three days I got a list of church announcement boo-boos.  This very morning when I picked up the church bulletin.  You've seen those things, so I won't bore you.  Instead, This is what I saw--
I will say this, I am not a habitual reader of the bulletin.  It never really contains anything that I want to see, unless it is the announcement for an event that I personally have been working on for a year.  You get my point.  Anyway, I picked up the bulletin and began to read it in pure Hebrew style, from right to left, back to front for you who are inveterate left to right readers.  
Yup, right there in the Catholic Church was this blaring ad for a wedding chapel that offers 24 hour service for the eloping couple to seal the deed while escaping to Canada or Mexico or thereabouts while the parents are hypnotized by the Sunday afternoon football foolishness.  Ya gotta admit, this is a great one!
After the Mass when I caught up to the Priest Moderator of Temporalities and Service Commissions and showed it to him, he acted amused as he took it in and made the remark that this is the result of a regional effort to solicit advertising and that this ad must have been submitted to the publishing company (Paluch) directly by the salesperson without checking out (or caring about) the copy.  I told him as he was fixing to walk away that he had better call Paluch and get it taken down.
Well, I guess that now I am committed to picking up the bulletin next Sunday too.  Maybe I ought to renew my State of California "marrying Sam" license.  I could then take out an ad in the parish bulletins of Southern California's churches.  Might be a chance for some added income.

HERE IT IS IN ALL IT'S UNEXPURGATED, RIPPED-FROM-ITS-ROOTS GLORY