Category: California

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Another EDD #FAIL

Ok so I get this thing from EDD in the mail yesterday.

It said “Additional Instructions”

Please follow the instructions below. Failure to do so may result in denial of your benefits. Please include your name and Social Security number on any additional forms you mail to the EDD.

1) You are potentially eligible to file a new claim effective 07/01/12. We need your correct last employer informant and tast date worked before the claim can be filed and any payments can be issued. You may apply on-line at WWW.EDD.CA.GOV or cal the 1-800 telephone numbers above for assistance to complete the filing of your claim.

The problem is that I to the best of my knowledge ALREADY have an open claim which begs the question why does this look like a new claim is being filed?

I think whoa! what’s going on here?

I’ve just spent the last 4 hours continuously calling the EDD numbers that they reference. Mind you this is 4 hours I have not spent looking for a new job.

I can get to the EDD, I can get all the way to the point where they’re “Transferring my call” Then I get a message saying that due to the number of callers they cannot take my call at this time. CLICK! Then I get to dial all over again.

I’ve got a slight problem with these so-called instructions. Namely… THESE ARE NOT INSTRUCTIONS! There is NO and I repeat NO directive.

A directive would say something like;

1) Go to the EDD web site

2) navigate to xyz page

3) input the information we need.

OR 

1) navigate to the EDD web site and submit a new claim.

The problem is that I already have a claim that was as of last week being paid, so why suddenly do we have this form with nebulous “Instructions” on it?

This is why I really want to take to a human being. It looks like this confusion has already resulted in my unemployment transfer being stopped. 

Taking a break… then back to dialing! I have no fucking idea what I’m supposed to do.

Gotta love how well Kalifornia takes care of it’s citizens… 

Seems like the more you try to do the right thing… the more you get screwed

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Nice to know that I’m not the only one…

Norcalreflection

Was at the Car Dealership yesterday and overheard a couple of conversations that had me nodding in agreement.

California isn’t just hated by me… 

I heard two separate conversations between four different men all of whom are in their mid 40s to mid 50s. In their conversation they were all talking about packing up their shit a leaving the state.

One guy was waiting for his 2 sons to get out of the house. One of them is going to be a sheriff, the other one is 23 and still at home, fighting for a job in an ever decreasing job market.

In this guys case he wasn’t too upset at having a 23 year old living with him. He rightly observed that with things as expensive as they are here, his sons really couldn’t afford to be out on their own. His strategy is to leave for Arizona when his boys have settled.

One of the other guys had just packed up his company and was having his car serviced as the last step before moving to Reno. The money his company was going to save in taxes and fees over the next year PAID for him to be able to pay for the relocation of his entire staff.

In yet another conversation, a guy was counting the days to retirement (90) then he & his wife were heading to New Mexico. They’d already sold their house and had packed up most everything which was sitting in a storage facility in NM. They were doing the minimalist thing until he retired.

His wife had been nice enough to her employer to let them know that she’d be leaving in 90 days… Of course the fuckers she worked for fired her because after all she wouldn’t be working as hard knowing that she’d be leaving… (To This I say WTF??? She could have trained her replacement and she wasn’t under any obligation to let her employer know shit! But courtesy is truly a thing from another age.)

The last guy was funny as hell because he too was heading to Arizona. He said it was as simple as the gas prices dropped 60 to 70 cents per gallon when he crossed the border out of California… He said that alone was enough to sell him on relocating. But then his wife got laid off and after searching for a job in her field for 9 months she’s decided to leave the kids & grandkids in CA and accepted a job in her field in Flagstaff. 

If the kids want to visit it’s not too crazy a drive for them, and It’s an easy drive for the guy and his wife too. When asked why drive? He replied; “Who wants to fly anymore? I know I don’t want the TSA feeling me or my wife up she might trade men in…”

The common thread is that all of these guys are middle aged, Middle to late career and they’ve had enough of the B.S. that is California.

Of course what this means is that if the trend continues… California will have a tourist industry ONLY and the dream that was once the Golden State will be just another tourist trap. 

Even the technology companies are leaving. Many of them are reducing their presence here to nothing more than small offices. They’re not even maintaining corporate headquarters here. It’s just too damn expensive…

All of this is to say, 

It’s nice to know I’m not insane or over-reacting as some people close to me have implied. 

I think I can move to another state following work in my field. After 15 years of patiently driving obscene distances I can finally and with a clear conscience put the Golden State in my Rear View Mirror

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Bad Dreams

Usually, I sleep the sleep of the dead.

If I have dreams, they’re most often of a highly erotic nature or if I’ve been playing a little too much Xbox then my dreams are… shall we say all about the violence.

Sometimes the sex and violence combine into a disturbingly satisfying, purely visceral fantasy that satisfies my inner primitives blood lust.

These dreams can’t be considered by any stretch of the imagination to be bad. They’re my own private world and while some of the scenes and imagery may appear in the pages of a story or book that I may be writing… They’re not likely to ever become reality.

The dream last night… In fact the one that woke me at 5AM was of a completely different kind.

Images 1

In this nightmare I was being forced out of my home so that a Locust kind of person could move in. I was still going to have to pay the mortgage and I wasn’t being allowed to take any of my really good stuff.

This person and their family were standing at the door to the house with a cop and pointing at objects like my computer, watch, furniture, etc and keeping all the best stuff. But they and the cop were making me take other stuff. Many of the things I was being allowed to take weren’t even things that were in my house (Nor would they be).

All the items I could take were broken in some way.

The cop was pointing his gun at me the whole time.

In the dream I considered taking the gun from him and making he & these other people leave my home. But when I looked outside, there were police cars and police 100 deep on my lawn. There was no way to win, and I couldn’t see going out in a blaze of glory over stuff.

Toward the end of the dream the Locust was screaming at me in broken English that I couldn’t leave the broken stuff in the trash cans. I had to take it all with me or be arrested. Problem was that these people wouldn’t let me have my car, motorcycle or my truck. They grudgingly let me have my bicycle only after one really fat member of the Locust family sat on it, bending the frame and the front rim.

When I made it clear it was impossible for me to carry everything in one trip. All the police put their coffee down and aimed their guns at me.

That’s when I woke up…

That’s why I’ve been up since 5, and why you’re reading this insanity.

My Brother will no doubt have a field day with this one. He’d say something like this is a reflection of my thoughts on California (Kalifornia, the way he spells it). He may be correct. I think this may be a reflection of my thoughts on where this country as a whole is headed.

This nightmare may have been triggered by an article my Brother sent me.

In the article, a 13 year old boy and a 43 year old adult were arrested. Believe me, In Southern California this is nothing new. What was interesting is what they were arrested for…

The 13 year old was supposedly sitting on a roof with a rifle. As it turns out the “Rifle” was a BB gun. Other “Weapons” recovered were a replica 9mm pistol and an inert M136 AT4 “LAW” anti-tank weapon.

So lets step through this again.

A 13 year old with a BB gun

Living in a house where theres a REPLICA 9MM pistol

And an INERT anti-tank weapon.

Hummmm….

replica

noun

1.reproduction, model, copy, imitation, facsimile, carbon copy (informal)It was a replica, for display only.

inert

adjective

1. inactive, still, motionless, dead, passive, slack, static, dormant,
lifeless, leaden, immobile,inanimate, unresponsive, unmoving,
quiescent, torpid, unreactive, slumberous 
Nope… The definitions of these words hasn’t changed…. I figured I’d check god knows I miss memos all the time…

So what laws were broken? What justified the arrest of the 43 year old adult and sending the 13 year old to juvenile hall?

Hell, when I was growing up I had an INERT artillery shell from the ship my Father served on, I used it as a door stop…

I suppose that NOW I’d be arrested for having something that had no powder in it, no primer, and which I had NO capacity to fire since the gun that fired this shell was mounted on the deck of a ship.

The article says “suspicion of possession of a stolen weapon and possession of illegal weapons.” The BB gun isn’t illegal, nor is a replica 9mm.

Which leaves the inert anti-tank weapon and begs the following question;

If you have no ammunition, and no capacity to obtain ammunition for a weapon, is it still a weapon?

 

 


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LA City Council Socialist Resolution

The LA City Council has recently demonstrated just how little they understand the freedoms insured by The Constitution and Bill of Rights.

This time they’ve decided not only what hate or sexist speech is but that somehow they can implement socialist controls on the local public airwaves. Unfortunately this dumbass resolution was voted on, and approved.

In One “Man on the street” interview a young lady said that this resolution is to “HELP” the radio station be “better”. I found her characterization interesting because of its similarity to dictators “Helping” people understand by placing them in re-education camps.

616 1305831266

This resolution is in reality targeted at a specific radio station in the Los Angeles region. KFI 640 AM.

Further, this resolution is aimed at Radio Hosts Jon and Ken. These guys are controversial and in the past month or two have drawn criticism for expressing their opinions about current events in particular about Whitney Houston. (Based on the coroner’s report saying that Ms. Houston had Cocaine in her system It appears they were actually right.)

Personally I think John & Ken are idiots. Some of the stuff they’ve said offended me on a number of subjects and as a result I don’t listen to their moronic show or their opinions. That being said, I have to defend their right to free speech and their rights to be idiots for entertainment purposes.

The LA City Councils response is a direct threat to the right to free speech.

Instead of seeking to squelch opinions that they disagree with, the LA City Council should be protecting the right to free speech.

The concerned council members should be appearing on radio shows to present the opposing view. After all they have the right to be heard too.

The Council members sponsoring this resolution are all African American. They are Bernard Parks, Jan Perry, and Herb Wesson Jr.

It could be argued that they are pushing their agenda because of an offensive comment that John and Ken made about Whitney Houston. (Yes I believe that the comment was offensive and disrespectful to the deceased and her family)

Bernardparks

Herbwesson

I think Rush Limbaugh got named as part of the resolution in a poorly veiled attempt to legitimize what would otherwise have been seen as simply African Americans in power leaping to “St. Whitneys” defense.

It was well known Whitney Houston had a very long history battling substance abuse.

Sadly this is often the price performers pay for their fame. This is an unfortunate reality and Ms. Houston had been addicted to crack, among other things for many years.

John & Ken characterized her as a crack “HO” on-air after her death. In my opinion the “HO” remark was uncalled for, unnecessary, and certainly unkind to Ms. Houstons family and friends.

However the other comments attributed to John & Ken aren’t necessarily out of line. They referred to Ms Houston as “cracked out for 20 years.” One of the pair then said, “Then you find out she’s dead and it’s like, really, it took this long?‘” Yes their comments are insensitive but not untrue.

I doubt seriously that anyone would be upset if something similar is said about Keith Richards when he dies.

It is interesting to note that John & Ken had characterized Lindsey Lohan, Britney Spears, & Paris Hilton in far more graphic terms and the good people in the LA City Council said nothing. Rush Limbaugh said seriously nasty things about Sandra Fluke and the LA City Council still said nothing.

It wasn’t until Whitney Houston was called a bad name, that the LA City Council became indignant.

New 2011 head shot

People vote with their wallets. This has been made abundantly clear by advertisers withdrawing their support from Rush Limbaugh.

Using legal mechanisms and maneuvering as the City Council has done is dangerous.

This misuse of legal force represents the continued erosion of the basic freedoms we are supposed to hold sacred.

 

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I’m smoking hot. (Updated)

Smoking MfTD6 28802

Got Pissed off the other day (I know what else is new?)

In this case I was first annoyed, then irritated, then flat out pissed off and I really wasn’t sure why.

Part of it was that I was watching Television. (Almost always assured to make me mad)

Then it hit me… it’s the never-ending series of anti smoking commercials that play hourly in Los Angeles.

The first series of commercials were annoying…

They almost always showed a White person smoking. The first one showed a White man smoking in his apartment dressed in a wife beater reading the sports page. Then they follow the cigarette smoke through the vents in the building to another apartment where like an ominous demonic fog it surrounds a child of indeterminate (but clearly not white) ethnicity.

This commercial is an attempt to demonize cigarette smoking but it also does a wonderful job of re-enforcing the image of  a stereotypical White man. The subtext is that the White man is evil, he doesn’t care about who he hurts and he’s in cahoots with the demonic cigarette companies to kill all minorities.

This one annoyed me on a couple of levels.

A) The portrayal of the White man. If a similar stereotypical portrayal of a Black man, or Mexican man were to be shown on TV, there would be screams of racism from the ALCU, NAACP, LA RAZA, Jesse Jackson, Lou Sharpton, and god only knows who else. But for some reason White stereotypes are allowed. Just as gay stereotypes and gay people are still allowed to be denigrated on stage in comedy routines or in your local bar as a matter of common conversation. (You can’t have a person of Polish origin as the butt of a joke anymore but change Pollack to Fag and all the sudden it’s ok.)

B) Typically vents aren’t directly connected between apartments so it’s unrealistic to portray that smoke is going to move so easily between dwellings. You’d have the smoke cycled into a furnace or A/C unit so while I’m sure there would still be some particulates identifiable from the cigarette, I’m equally sure that you’d have far more pollutants from cars and busses driving by on the street outside the apartments. Those pollutants actually being sucked in by the A/C or Furnace air intakes.

The second commercial in the series shows a white woman, (although in later iterations of the commercial she is less white. It looks like her skin tone was changed digitally)  standing on her balcony smoking a cigarette. In this one we’re treated to the same demonic smoke effect. This time the smoke is  flowing down into the adjacent apartment where we see it pause over an ethnic baby in a crib. Once over the baby the smoke takes on a claw like menacing appearance. The tag line was something like “there are some people that can’t escape cigarette smoke”

This second commercial was as annoying as the first because anyone who smokes knows that smoke typically rises and dissipates.

Yeah… I used to smoke. I finally quit smoking in about 2000. It was tough, but the combination of beginning a workout routine and drinking water like a fiend really helped me make it permanent. I’d quit before for a couple of years but then I was in a bar, with a friend and one of his Benson & Hedges looked really good. That was when I found out the true meaning of “Slippery Slope“.

I still miss one aspect of smoking…

Images

It’s that post fuck cigarette. I miss laying in the dark an ashtray perched on my sweaty chest and the rush of the first drag from a cigarette. I miss the glow of the end of the cigarette and knowing that my partner & I are going to fuck some more and I’m going to get off a couple more times before we crash for the night.

But I don’t miss it enough to start smoking again,  while I can write about it fondly I like breathing easily better.

The most recent set of commercials from LAQuits (Los Angeles Department of Health) are the commercials that really got me fired up and took me from annoyed… to PISSED off.

These commercials show people with emphysema. They’re on oxygen and they’re wheezing and clearly in a great deal of distress. I don’t know if these are real people or actors and I don’t care.

I find these commercials offensive in so many ways I can’t see straight. If I had to pick the top reason for my annoyance it’s this…

Lucky strike usa

I visited my Father in the hospital when he was very much like the people being portrayed. I loved my Father, but I don’t appreciate watching TV and being taken back 20 years to my Fathers death, every 16 minutes.

I watch local TV for the News, and some entertainment (4 shows)… The rest of the time I’m watching DVDs or Netflix. So it’s surprising that a commercial like this would rise above my annoyance threshold.

The other night it seemed like every other commercial was of these people suffering for their next breath. All I could see was my Dad, lying in that hospital bed and knowing that he was going to  die soon.

Oh I’m not asking for pity. Nor would my Father. He smoked and he drank, and most importantly… My Father accepted responsibility for his own actions and the consequences of those actions. My father smoked pretty much every day of his adult life, and possibly well before he became an adult. He smoked Lucky Strikes, to this day I can’t see a package of Luckies without thinking of my Dad.

Yeah, I agree Smoking is bad. I say that as an ex-smoker myself, But… and this is a very important but. I believe that each and every one of us should be allowed to choose to smoke or not to. Moreover all of us must accept responsibility for our choices.

I think putting offensive ads like this on TV doesn’t put people off smoking… I think these shock tactic ads serve no purpose other than to offend some of us, and add to the desensitization of the rest of the population.
If, as it’s been postulated seeing violence on TV makes us more violent then doesn’t it follow seeing suffering on TV makes us less compassionate?

For those of you outside the Los Angeles area…

The small cities that make up LA have become little gestapo headquarters.  You can’t smoke in a bar, on the beach, within 1000 feet of a public entrance or exit to a building. There have been moves to prohibit smoking in apartments, and even within the confines of YOUR OWN HOME in certain cities.

Is this freedom? NO… This is a socialist state.

This is a small group of people deciding “For the greater good… we appoint ourselves messiah and will enact laws to protect you poor ignorant savages from yourselves.”

This kind of thinking is offensive for a whole bunch of reasons. The biggest deals with my belief in minor things like the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Bill of Rights. I know these are foreign and archaic concepts to a lot of people, but they’re important to me.

I went to the LAQuits website. I was going to post a simple little message asking them to stop airing the latest commercials and explain why… That was when I found that their web site didn’t even have a way to contact them.

And then… I GOT REALLY MAD! Which led to my writing this blog. I needed to get it out of my system before I tracked down the numbers for the LA County Department of Health. Where I plan to express my concerns without being emotional about it…

Hopefully!

—– UPDATE —–

After writing a polite letter explaining that I was offended and why… The Los Angeles County Health Department hasn’t responded (4 weeks now) . Not that I’m at all surprised. After all I’m just another evil White Man trying to oppress someone, somewhere, right?

Apparently I’m not alone in being offended. When I tweeted about my annoyance over these adds There were a few responses expressing the same feelings. These were folks that like me didn’t want to relive their loved ones passing.

Of course these anti smoking commercials are “For the Greater Good” So it doesn’t matter that people like me just aren’t watching TV anymore. I’ve seriously been considering discontinuing my satellite service for a variety of other reasons anyway. Being terrorized every fucking time I sit down to watch TV is just another reason.

Those of you in the rest of the country, are soon going to know exactly what I’m talking about. Apparently, the Federal Government is going to spend 54 million on a nationwide campaign. I figure that should help KILL the rest of public television in this country.