List Tuesday: Why is the World in Love Again?

Things I Would Like to Do and Even Imagine Myself Doing But Probably Will Not Do On My Last Day Of Work In DC Tomorrow

1. Moo like a cow as we all move like cows off the train and onto the escalator to our untimely demise


2. Meet the Press


3. Sing songs from the Rocky Horror soundtrack out loud on the train


4. Dress like Dr. Frank N. Furter on the train*


5. Spend all day reading the whole internet


6. Hire a barbershop quartet to sing a goodbye song to my office


7. Talk to Charles one more time


8. Do some serious shreddin'


9. Eat some pie


10. Not miss anybody here in DC


11. Write a Goodbye, You Stupid City post on Why.I.Hate.DC (you there Rusty?)

*After telling this joke I always like to clarify that I'm only kidding. I believe tomorrow will result in the average amount of desire to dress up in fishnet stockings etc. If you were to do a "dressing up in fishnet stockings etc desire test" tomorrow, my name would be right in the middle.

Always Hungry For Something

Well, here we are.
Here we are where we soon shall not be.
We are now officially in our last week living and working in DC. A week from right now (assuming I'm not just waking up from a wicked, last-day-of-work-in-a-soul-crushing-office-building hangover) we'll be somewhere on the road between here and the great city of Detroit. And by "great city" I mean "abandoned hellhole," but whatever.

So I guess I thought I would take the last few days here to recollect a little about the good and the bad of living here in DC.

Today's Sappy Post!

The Good: Obviously, the best thing ever about our time here in the Nation's Crapital (get it? I changed the word to make the meaning something different! LOL) is that I met so many wonderful people that populate my link field over there ---->
I will fucking miss the shit out them. And I'm angry about that. But it's a good anger, right?


The Bad: Actually, this just happened yesterday. I found out that over the weekend my friend Charles (the homeless(?) Street Sense vendor) was jumped, beaten up, and robbed by a gang of five "young'uns." Now he doesn't have money for rent and may have to move into a shelter again. He told me that it's a good thing he doesn't have a gun because now he'd be serving life in prison. What a world.

Street Nonsense

Yesterday, as I am wont to do from time to time, I purchased a copy of Street Sense (the DC Homeless newspaper if you don't already know) from Charles Nelson, my friendly Metro Center vendor. Amazingly, this was the first copy of the current issue that I had purchased. Well, maybe it's not that amazing since I was in Japan for two weeks. I meant to buy one last week, but all I had was a twenty. I meant to give him the twenty but I wussed out. Money, she's really got a hold on me dang it.

Anyway, one of the feature articles in this edition has to be one of the stupidest things I have ever read. The whole thing is one big long lament about the puny salaries of local homeless non-profit's CEOs. In the article they provided a list of local NPs, their budgets and their CEOs' salaries. It is ridiculous. Some of the CEOs have salaries that take up more than 30% of the total budget! On average their salary takes up nearly 5%. This is outrageous. All I ever hear about are the "exorbitant" salaries paid to the heads of big corporations. I never hear about how non-profit CEOs are fleecing the public. Let's just look at some numbers here.



Just look at that. It boggles the mind! Non-profit CEOs get paid, on average, more than 100 times the amount that CEOs of big companies (I used the top 28 from the Fortune 500) relative to the organizations' budgets. How is that fair? Okay, we're just looking at averages, that's true. Let's look at the medians then. For nonprofits, the median salary as a percentage of organizational budget is 7.5%, that's MORE than the average. For major corp. the median is 0.0162%, LESS than the average. Now are you happy? We looked at median, and it just got worse! Okay, I will grant you that there is one non-profit that pays the CEO $0.00. There is also one that pays the CEO $39,000 on a budget of $121,000; that's more than 30%. Sickening. The most that ANY CEO of a major corporation gets paid, as a percent of revenue, is 0.18% (Valero Energy). And that takes into account all the long term benefits. If we just looked at salary it would be much much lower.


Just for the heck of it, Let's throw out most of the Fortune 28's revenue. Let's only look at salaries vs. profit. Check out the chart.

I think I just threw up in my mouth a little. As a percent of profits, the CEOs of nonprofits get paid INFINITY PERCENT! That is so incomprehensible, that, well, I can't comprehend it. INFINITY PERCENT! Even the major corporations only pay, on average, about 0.7%.

So all of you out there complaining that Oil Co. CEOs get paid to much and what not. Change your target. It is the non-profit CEOs that are getting paid at levels that are completely out of whack.

Stupid non-profits.

Every day at lunch....Scratch that. Every day that I go out for lunch (more often than strictly necessary) I sometimes take the metro. Actually, I really only do that if I'm going to meet the Brickfam somewhere for lunch (usually CalTort which runs tasty, messy circles around Chipataplay if you want my opinion (and why else would you be here? (are you ready for this: triple parenthesis!))). But every time I do ride the Metro, I walk by a guy selling Street Sense. I almost never carry cash, which means I almost never buy Street Sense, which can lead to the vendor looking at me and saying things that I just have to ignore. Like, once, he said "Oh, you graduate from college and you go all Wall Street on us?" I think he was trying to say that I should give something back. I know I should, but can he take credit cards? No? Shoot. And then, every time I'm at lunch with the brickwife, I intend to ask her for a dollar so I can buy a copy on my way back, but I always forget.

All this to say that last Friday I did have some cash on me so I bought a copy. And since I was in a good mood, I chatted with the vendor a little. He introduced himself (I don't remember his name) and said he was the house photographer and asked if he could take a picture of me for their Cheerful Givers piece. I said sure, and then a reasonable facsimile of the following conversation took place.

Me: That's a nice camera you've got there! (Speaking of his Nikon D-SLR)

Street Sense Guy: Yep, digital, cost two grand.

Me: Wow, pretty pricey. Out of my price range at least.

SSG: But now I don't have to pay for a whole roll of prints, just twenty-nine cents each! I been takin' pictures since about '70, but I just went digital last year. I was all used to cropping and dodging and that s---, but now I don't got to do none of that.

[aside: if you don't know, "dodging is the practice of, well, dodging your hand in and out of the projector/print maker thing in order to lessen the exposure on certain parts of the print. Just goes to show, I've learned more of practical use from one High School photography course than from all of my high school science classes. Oh, wait. That's not true. In physics I learned about audible beats in slightly different frequency sounds which is very useful when it comes to tuning a guitar.]

Me: It must be pretty convenient for you since you take so many pictures for the paper.

SSG: Yep, now I don't have to worry about getting 36 pictures that are all no good. But it's bad news for the little mom-and-pop developers. They aren't gettin' much bidness any more.

Me: Yeah, too bad. Do you like the camera though?

SSG: It's great man. Cost about two grand.

Me: (thinking that I'm pretty sure he already said this) Wow!

SSG: About two years ago I was crossing the street when this woman waiting for me to cross yells at me "Move it you slow motherf****r!" So I looked at her and said "You dumb black b****, I got the right of way, so you just better wait." (ed. just so you know the vendor was African-American, so he wasn't racist, just a little crude) And then she yells back at me that she doesn't care and she'll run over my a**. So I said "Kiss my sphincter!" She didn't know what I was talking about, so I look at her and say "You dumb black b****! The sphincter is the muscle that controls your a******!" You should have seen the look on her face! And then she steps on the gas and runs me over! Felony hit-and-run! Then this other woman who saw the whole thing says to me "I can't believe she cussed you out and then ran over you!" I made sure to get her license plate number. I ended up getting a three thousand dollar settlement, and I spent two on this camera!

Me: Um, I gotta go meet my wife for lunch, okay?

So we shook hands, I walked down into Metro Center, and that was that. Just goes to show: if you want an interesting conversation, talk to the Street Sense guys.

By the way, does every city have a homeless newspaper? I know that Seattle does. Here's a shout out to anyone who shopped at the Roosevelt Ave Safeway in the U-District back in the day (so, basically just me and the brickwife among all those who read this)...

"Real Change? Have a great day ma'am. Have a great day, sir."

List Tuesday (part 1)

10 Activities You Will Never See Listed in a "Fun Things to Do With Toddlers" Book

1. Have scissor races! Make sure the scissors are open as you run around outside.


2. Play Garbage-bag Head family. Your toddler will be the baby bag-head, so use a plastic shopping bag so they can still walk around!


3. Re-enact the biblical story of Joshua! "...Come near, put your feet upon the necks of these kings. And they came near, and put their feet upon the necks of them....And afterward Joshua smote them, and slew them, and hanged them on five trees: and they were hanging upon the trees until the evening."


4. Play Go down to the corner and give this money to Shawn and bring back some of mommy's "special Candy."
   


5. Go downtown, find a homeless bum and beat the crap out of him. And then empty his change cup, because he doens't need it now.
   


6. Read illustrated erotic novels together.


7. Teach your children how to use a bottle of hairspray and a match to make a wicked awesome flamethrower.
   


8. Snape Kills Dumbledore.


9. Teach your toddler to bartend! Tequila shooters are a good place to start.
   


10. You never know what kind of cool stuff other people might throw out. Go around the neighborhood checking everybody's trash cans for neat treasures. If you find anything tasty, go ahead and eat it!