I am sincerely just so incensed with this nutty dude right now that every word out of his mouth is making me want to punch babies.

Also, I feel better than I did the last time I posted, btw.

Incredibly bad mood for the past … weekish. Not really sure why. Well, that’s a lie, I know perfectly well why I’m in a bad mood but it’s one of those things you simply don’t blog about. Only I just did. Rules: I break ‘em.

Just petty bullshit from petty people, things that should be beneath me, but aren’t. Nothing major, nothing worth discussing.

I guess my message here is that I’m still thinking of this blog and both its readers. Hi, me. Hi, you.

“You know what I thought when I first saw this commerical? ‘You had to fuck this up, too? Really?’ I mean look at it. ‘You needed money so bad you had to fuck Tinkerbell, really?’”

It ain’t all angst and introspection, folks.

“It’s all percentages of percentages, it’s fucking crazy. The whole thing is based on that. Everyone’s cut of someone else’s cut.”

“Where’s the money coming from?”

He shrugged. “These poor bastards who are signing their fucking lives away on interest-only sixty-year loans for drywall boxes four exits from the mall.” He paused and stirred his coffee, looked out along the interstate at the SUVs flowing past like dark, gas hungry photons in waves and clumps. “You know the etymology of mortgage? It means ‘death pledge.’” He shrugged again, and laughed. “Word was in the English language before there really was an English language and it still makes perfect fucking sense.”

Sam pushed his hamburger around his plate with a fork and knife. Tim drained his beer and looked around for their waiter, moving back to his coffee in the interim. “How’s your food?”

Sam shrugged. “You remember hamburgers from school?”

“Hamburger Thursday.”

“Fuck yeah. Tater tots and chocolate milk.”

“And those boiled horsemeat hamburgers.”

“About like that.”

They laughed. Sam watched the highway. “I still don’t understand where the money’s coming from.”

Tim put his coffee down and sighed, nodding. “I don’t know if anyone does. Like this coupon thing I’m working on. There are 300 billion dollars in coupons out there, supposedly. One percent of that will get redeemed, something like that. So three billion dollars in shitty coupons, right? Fifty cents at a time, a box of frozen factory fish with fake grill marks and French cut green beans per transaction, right? Something like that. Three billion dollars of lonely dinners and cat food.”

Sam nodded. “Right … but three billion dollars? Christ.”

Tim nodded back, eyes wide. “Right? Three billion. I can’t think that high.”

“And these companies pay for … what?”

“Data, mostly. Like Coke will say, ‘Ok, everyone who buys a bag of potato chips over Labor Day Weekend with a Discover card, spit out a coupon for a twelve pack of Coke. Everyone who buys Black Cherry Pepsi, spit out a coupon for a two-liter bottle of Cherry Coke.’ They pay to be able to dictate the exact circumstances different combinations of offers will be made.”

“So there are people somewhere who—”

“Atlanta.”

“What?”

“Atlanta, all Coke’s shit is in Atlanta. Mostly.”

“Ok, so people in Atlanta somewhere, in some shitty little office, working out promotions for different combinations of coupons. Someone buys three pounds of steak and a bag of frozen broccoli, give that man a coupon for some Diet Coke.”

“Give that man fifty cents towards the purchase of some Diet Coke.”

“Good point. What’s Diet Coke now, like two something?”

“Something, yeah. Two-fifty? Depends, I guess. Gas keeps going up, it’ll be more. But it’s still cheaper than gas.”

“Good thing we don’t drink gas.”

They both watched the interstate for a minute, and laughed when they caught each other doing it.

“Ok, so … fifty cents towards Diet Coke. And there’s a one percent chance Mr. Steak and Broccoli will cash it.”

“Right.”

“Three billion dollars of one percent chances of possible promotions.”

“It’s fucking crazy.”

“It gets so abstract so fast.”

“And that’s just this one fucking client, dude. Last month it was something else, some direct marketing DVD thing. The month before that it was a corporation that runs hospitals.”

“Next month it will be morgues.”

“Yeah, funeral homes, right? Seriously, Dave’s working on a client that’s trying to set up ‘memorial stone’ franchises all over the South and Mid-Atlantic.”

“Christ.”

“Yeah. And it’s all percentages, the shit I’m concerned with. One percent of fifty cents off of someone’s five-dollar meal. Three percent of everyone who watches last year’s Academy Award winner. Two-and-a-half percent of everyone who needs to take some kind of medication to stimulate red blood cell production.”

“And if they red cell production thing doesn’t work out so well …”

“Percentage of their survivors buying marble over … fuck, I don’t know, quartz? Whatever cheap head stones are made out of.”

“And our economy runs on this shit.”

“Dude, my life runs on this shit. I’m one guy in one weird little industry which exists like some kind of … helper beetle, showing people how to move different pieces of data around different pieces of data and somehow this knocks off little pieces of money and they sort of cascade down like sawdust and people are buying million dollar homes with this … shit. And I’m one guy. And I’m making OK money.”

“TV dinners, hospitals, headstones. Got all the bases covered.”

They each sat, arms over the back of their booths, comfortable and serene on the edge of the interstate. Sam sighed.

“Weren’t we talking about finding some kind of greater meaning?”

]]> http://blog.kriskane.com/2009/10/08/writing-excerpt-oak-island-working-title/feed/ 1 http://blog.kriskane.com/2009/10/03/mr-sunshine-here-with-more-awesome-news/ http://blog.kriskane.com/2009/10/03/mr-sunshine-here-with-more-awesome-news/#comments Sat, 03 Oct 2009 18:17:27 +0000 Kris Kane http://blog.kriskane.com/?p=153 Ok, remember (you probably didn’t read it) that post I did on Wednesday about omg end of word swine flu shit? Specifically the part about how the CDC’s flu prediction methods were pretty much pin the tail on the number bullshit, and probably bullshit in the “wow is that a lowball” direction?

Well, even those bullshit low ass estimates are fun:

Based on the CDC’s model and expert predictions of a relatively mild H1N1 strain that could sicken up to 35 percent of Americans, the study found that 15 states would be at or exceed hospital bed capacity.  These include Arizona (117%), California (125%), Connecticut (148%), Delaware (203%), Hawaii (143%), Maryland (143%), Massachusetts (110%), Nevada (137%), New Jersey (101%), New York (108%), Oregon (107%), Rhode Island (143%), Vermont (108%), Virginia (100%) and Washington (107%).

Twelve more states would be between 75-99% of capacity (and seriously, 99%? That’s pretty much the same fucking thing as 100% in this case, isn’t it?).

My plans have changed from buying a coffin if I get sick to just not getting sick. I’m tougher than this fucking thing, but be forewarned: cough in my presence and I’ll shoot you in self defense.

Full article here with more scary numbers.

A homeowner says a Phoenix police officer shot him six times in the back during a 911 home-invasion call, and the 911 tape recorded the officer’s partner saying, “That’s all right. Don’t worry about it. I got your back. … We clear?” The family says the officers were not aware that the 911 call was still recording as they spoke about covering up the shooting.

Full article here.

H1N1 (to be an overly accurate horse’s ass, 2009 A (H1N1)) is on my mind. I have asthma. My father has COPD (like emphysema, only doctors can make you feel stupid by speaking alphabet soup to you). If either of us catches this swine flu shit, odds are not good. Probably slightly better for me (I’m 45 years younger), but you know? Not really great for either of us. Well, depending on who you believe. The WHO and the CDC have contradicted themselves on the issue, and the data sets they’re using are pretty flawed anyway.

More data out there than I care to go into, but the CDC, for instance, is tracking “confirmed and probable” cases. No distinction made between the two. That’s like the difference between Jim Bob saw a possum and Jim Bob thinks he saw a possum.

In July, the CDC said 40% of all Americans were likely to be infected with swine flu. That’s a big fucking number. How does the CDC determine these numbers? As it turns out, they might as well be guessing how many jelly beans are in a jar.

Quoting from Pundita (way back in May of this year):

The CDC has no idea how many deaths there are each year from the flu because the number is a computer-generated guess based on mathematical modeling — a model that’s been used for more than 40 years, and which needs serious updating.

As the CDC’s spokesman, Curtis Allen admitted a few years ago to medical journalist Kelly O’Meara, it’s not a “real” number. He told her, “There are a couple problems with determining the number of deaths related to the flu because most people don’t die from the influenza…We don’t know exactly how many people get the flu each year because it’s not a reportable disease and most physicians don’t do the test [nasal swab] to indicate whether it’s influenza.”

However, using the CDC’s own data, O’Meara managed to turn up that, “The greatest number of actual influenza deaths recorded since 1979 were 3,006 in 1981.”

That’s recorded deaths, not actual deaths, so who fucking knows. The number is bound to be higher, especially among infants, the elderly, and the “immuno-compromised” which is a hell of a word. Most flu deaths are probably attributed to pneumonia.

From Deirdre Imus writing for The Huffington Post in July:

Influenza is notoriously hard to predict, and some experts have shied away from a forecast. At a CDC swine flu briefing Friday, one official declined to answer repeated questions about her agency’s own estimate.

(That article I link to is worth reading as it makes you realize the CDC might be working just about as well as FEMA, and swine flu just might become that agency’s Katrina Event).

Internationally, the WHO really isn’t offering much in the way of comfort, either. The WHO declared swine flu as a phase 4 pandemic on 27 April of this year (a Monday). By Wednesday of that week, it was a phase 5 on WHO’s hit parade. It reached maturity at phase 6 (there is no phase 7) on 11 June. Based on what? Country-by-country reporting of the number of cases.

We’ve already seen how reliable that is in the US. Maybe other (smaller) European countries have better data collection and reporting systems (Jean Pierre definitely saw a possum), but I can’t imagine most of the second and third world countries providing much useful data (not a condemnation—they’re beleaguered, that’s all I’m saying).

In July, the WHO stated that “as many as two billion people could become infected.” Could? Awesome. I could shit myself if that’s wrong in a bad direction. That number would be a global analog to the influenza epidemic of 1918, which killed a third of the population of Europe (two bil’s about a third of the planet). In our much more crowded, connected, New York-to-Tokyo-to-Rome, world, this fucking thing could spread like … the common cold.

However, in August, the WHO said the symptoms of swine flu were usually no more severe than “regular” flu, and that most people who contracted it would recover. Cool! Crisis over!

Well uh maybe not. Before announcing swine flu was like regular flu, only bacon flavored, the WHO announced they intended to stop publishing data on the course of the pandemic, but would keep everyone informed when another country caught it.

WHO will no longer issue the global tables showing the numbers of confirmed cases for all countries. However, as part of continued efforts to document the global spread of the H1N1 pandemic, regular updates will be provided describing the situation in the newly affected countries. WHO will continue to request that these countries report the first confirmed cases and, as far as feasible, provide weekly aggregated case numbers and descriptive epidemiology of the early cases.

That doesn’t make a whole lot of fucking sense to me, but it could be consistent with a  “this data is useless and we’re not even sure what it means” situation. It’s a little troubling that they’re basically saying “let us know when you get it and how the early cases go, but other than that, we’ll call you.” Troubling because the latest research I’ve read on it (which may not be the latest research) indicates swine flu may have a mortality rate comparable to avian flu, because the two behave the same way (except for the whole swine flu being a fuck of a lot easier to catch thing). And what is the WHO basing the statement “most people who contract it will recover” on? Positive thinking? If they don’t track the later stages of the disease, we might be looking back on a world depopulated by “pneumonia.”

There’s a lot of other information out there, a lot of it goofy, but there’s enough credible material and second-hand “this is a weird thing I heard from my doctor” rumors floating around (here’s a good one: people in the UK are apparently being told, by NHS, not to go to their doctor if they think they may have swine flu. WAT?) to make me really wonder if we’re looking down the barrel of something that may be a hell of a lot more serious than we’re being told. And just maybe we’re not being told because it’s a hell of a lot worse than the WHO, CDC, etc. can deal with.

It’s got me worried. Especially since, you know … I have asthma (if you read that last link, you’d know why I’m basically writing my will if I catch this shit).

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/24/swine-flu-could-hit-up-to_n_244760.html

Hide The Bong Organic Baby Bodysuit – CafePress.

Obligatory Content In Otherwise Junk Post:

Richard Hayne, the founder (and now president) of Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, and Free People is a politically conservative member of the Republican party. How conservative? He made some pretty heavy campaign contributions to Rick Santorum.

You know, Santorum. Former senator from Pennsylvania who said “In every society, the definition of marriage has not ever to my knowledge included homosexuality. That’s not to pick on homosexuality. It’s not, you know, man on child, man on dog, or whatever the case may be. It is one thing. And when you destroy that you have a dramatic impact on the quality.” That guy.

Now, while I don’t give a fuck that either Richard or Rick are Republicans, I do think that anyone who essentially states that same-sex marriage is bestiality and/or lower quality hasn’t spent a lot of time around straight married people (straight, gay, into dogs: there are assholes at every party). I also think Santorum is the kind of dickhead who makes Republicans look bad, and Hayes, as someone who gave him money, may be as well.

I also think most of the hipper than thou crowd who shop at any of the above named stores ought to know where the “I Grew Hemp” dollars they’re spending on ridiculously overpriced shit are going.

Obligatory Political “Don’t Care” Statement:

I don’t like any politicians or political parties. I have friends from all over the spectrum who I agree with on a lot of shit (Less government? Good thing. Gay marriage? Good thing. Legalized weed? Good thing. Shooting motherfuckers who get in the way of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? AWESOME thing). I usually take it to more of an extreme than they do (no government, marriage as a legal contract between any number of adults of any gender, legalized everything (just don’t come bitching when you’re reduced to sucking dick for rock and if you steal my shit see:), shooting motherfuckers who infringe on the basic liberties of anyone else), but politically I’m all over the damn place, which is to say nowhere you can stick a flag or party logo. I’m not picking on Haynes any more than I’m picking on the shitheads who buy the trash he sells. And vice versa.

Christ, and this all started as a jokey post about some ridiculous baby garment.

I’m just usually so grumpy and foul-tempered I can’t imagine anyone would want to read me ranting about what dickheads county government are, how some of the freshmen at A.U. are dumb as a sock full of dog shit, how much I’d like to shoot that dude using his car horn as a doorbell in my parking lot IN THE FACE every Thursday night at around one AM.

Or the weepy melancholy “writerly” shit that I also write. It’s like the literary equivalent of John Mayer’s early stuff or Damien Rice or something, only probably not that good. Who gives a fuck, seriously?

No need to comment. I was just moved to post this for the sake of Tortouse_Q_Penis.

I almost never remember my dreams. When I do, I almost never like them. Even though last night’s (a blur already fading) weren’t unpleasant, they leave me feeling unsettled and anxious this morning, like I’m leaving something undone, like I need to call and offer an explanation for why I’m not there, but I don’t have anyone’s phone number.

It’s a curious and unpleasantly guilty feeling. A condemnation.

“Wit all þou sal bi halden vile, Quar-sa þou wendes in exile.” — Cursor Mundi