Bad Actors

Brought To You By The Law Firm Of Dewey Cheatham & Howe

I think my favorite television commercial right now, and that is a relative thing, is the one for a brand of motor oil in which a series of guys, apparently weekend warriors planning some do-it-yourself maintenance, are shopping in an auto parts store. Just as each is about to purchase what is presumably the wrong brand of motor oil, he is beaten down by a little Scotsman who appears on the scene, bearded and wearing a kilt, and wielding an oil pan dipstick. As he dipstick-whips the poor guy, the Scot proclaims, “Think with your dipstick, Jimmy!! You got to think with your dipstick!!”

A commercial like this appeals the quirky side of my sense of humor, and I appreciate it. But even I know this sort of thing has the potential to get old, really quick. Everyone from me to the homeless guy down on the corner already has or is working on their own variation of the Scotsman. “Think with your dipstick, Jimmy!! You’ve got to think with your dipstick!!”

See what I mean? My co-workers are already growing weary of it, I believe.

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As far as which commercial is currently the most annoying, that is hard to say, now that Valentine’s Day has finally passed. It seems to me there were more Valentine’s Day commercials on television this year than ever before, for flowers and candy and the like; of them all, by far the most annoying was the one for Vermont™ Teddy Bears. By the end those were being shown every 15 minutes or so, and I would literally either change the channel or at the least mute the television each time one came on.

If we are talking about an irritating class of commercials, I suppose whatever is being pimped by Billy Mays this week would have to be on the list. Currently it is some kind of super bonding agent, Mighty Putty™ I believe it is called. According to Billy Mays, Mighty Putty™ can mend anything from a torn T-shirt to the Hubble Space Telescope. It is strong enough to pull a fully loaded tractor-trailer rig!! Tough enough to withstand hurricane force winds!! The over-the-top hyperbole in these ads could potentially be humorously appealing, except Billy Mays has the most irritating voice in the history of Western civilization. So, naturally enough, he went into advertising.

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Another class of commercials I find consistently irritating is ads for personal injury attorneys. These are usually local and self-made, which is not a good thing, right off. And the only guys who rival plaintiff’s attorneys for being over-emoting hams is car dealers. Neither should be allowed to participate in their own advertising.

For some reason it has become de rigueur in these parts for PI lawyers to have some kind of handle, boasting of their courtroom prowess. We have The Strong-arm. We have The Texas Hammer. Ridiculous. There is even a guy now locally who overtly plays against this trend. “Arm and Hammer are for cleaning suits, I’m for winning them.” Of course, in the process he has developed his own silly, distinguishing shtick. “Remember, that’s Juhan, with a 'J'”.

I come from attorneys, I guess you could say. I realize that is something like saying I was raised by wolves, or circus people. But back then, at least those guys had a code of honor, and never advertised, ever. I don’t suppose there is any way we can go back to that now, is there? No, and not so much because it would hurt anyone’s business so terribly to do so; no, it is because these guys have got a taste of the spotlight now. No way they are going to go back to well-paid anonymity, not willingly.

A friend of mine, who takes some personal injury cases as a part of his practice, has come up with what I think would be a brilliant commercial idea, for himself.

First, he would re-style himself as The King Of Ka-Ching®. In the opening scene of his television commercial we would see a crowded courtroom not come to order yet. There would be a general murmur as the defense attorneys at their table and the spectators in the seats converse. Suddenly, the lights would go down and the room would go quiet. Then my friend would burst through the back doors of the courtroom and, as spotlights played on him and tons of confetti dropped from the ceiling, loud music would come up – the Rocky theme, perhaps – and my friend would go dancing and sashaying up the center aisle, fists pumping in the air, in the manner of a famous heavyweight boxer entering the ring. He would be wearing a suit like Elvis, with a long cape bedecked with a large, sequined dollar sign on the back. As he headed to the plaintiff’s table, there would be inter-cut shots of a past client standing in front of a mansion, another by a fancy car, another on the captain's deck of a yacht, each beaming ear to ear, maybe a gleaming gold tooth showing here and there. And after each a large logo of a golden cash register, with the trademark sound effect. Ka-Ching!!

There is more, but you get the idea. Now, this is the sort of attorney I would want to have. Not one of these preening, posturing nitwits I see on television these days.

The Texas Hammer, what a buffoon. He’d have his ass handed to him if he ever went inside a real courtroom. But like a lot of these guys, TH only takes “sure thing” cases, and heads straight for a settlement. Gotta collect that contingency fee, and as soon as possible; before all the other slam-dunk cases start backing up in the system. And while there is still a small percentage left in it for the client.

Is that how you want to be represented? No, sir. If you want to get the bling-bling, you gotta call The King Of Ka-Ching!!

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Money For Nothing

Looking Sideways For An Angle

You can bullshit the baker
And get the buns
You can back out of every deal
Except one

Tonio K., "The Funky Western Civilization"

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I’ll tell you how screwed up I am. After being inundated for months by commercials and public service spots telling me about the imminent changeover to digital television and what it means to me, I dutifully went on-line and reserved two tickets for converter boxes for my household, even though every television in my home is hooked to cable – yeah, yeah, I know Time Warner Cable is a monopoly and sucks, but it is better than nothing (though not by a whole lot.) The point is, I have no need for the converter boxes but, hey, they were giving them away so. . . I took my tickets to H.E.B. and picked up my two boxes, at no charge. They are now stacked on a shelf in my workshop, unopened.

I got the boxes even though I do not need them because I am constitutionally unable to pass up a free deal on just about anything, yes; but also because I figure at some point they will stop giving these boxes away, and will start charging for them. Which will immediately create a market for them on the side, at a discount. I could then sell my boxes at a reduced price, for cash, and still make a tidy profit. And doing so, tax free, would put me squarely into the shadow economy, the one that operates outside the parameters of the IRS and SEC and FTC and ICC and any other number of governmental acronyms you want to throw out there.

Most normal people who do not live in the tree-shaded, speed-bump festooned, manicured lawn-ed West End of Beaumont know there is a parallel economy out there that is always running alongside the official one. The 'official' economy being the one that is in the tank now, run into the ground by a bunch of well-dressed and –coiffed banking boobs who granted millions in home loans and whatnot to borrowers with the shakiest credentials imaginable, loans that Joe Blow down on the street corner would never have made. So now we have to give quadrillions of dollars to these fuckers to keep them from going under and dragging the world economy down with them, for good. The official world economy, that is.

Oddly, and Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes could explain it all better than I, when the official economy screws the pooch, so to speak, the shadow economy, the one economists and politicians call, with much disdain, the “Black Market”, actually thrives. This is the economy of the pawn broker, the loan shark, and the bookie; but also of the guy who mows your lawn, or sells you his vehicle but insists on cash only, or who shines your shoes at his stand in the bank lobby. Billions of dollars are exchanged this way every day, untaxed and unaccounted for by any government agency.

I know most of this sort of economic activity is at least mildly illegal, and it probably costs me money is some way, but I have always looked upon it with some favor. I think I am as attracted to the quasi-rebel spirit of it as much as the practical advantages; the attitude that, hey, we will participate in your capitalist economic system, okay, but we are going to make some of our own rules.

To be honest, I led a fairly sheltered life growing up, at least early on, and I really knew very little about this alternate economic system, one that operates every day more or less in plain sight. It wasn’t until I met up with my father-in-law that I got a real inkling of it.

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My father-in-law was a great guy. He didn’t think I was, at first. We had been dating a month or so when my wife decided we were serious enough that I needed to get to know her parents, and vice-versa. So we would go over to their house and she and I and her mom and dad would sit in the living room and make small talk. My mother-in-law was great, but it was all kind of awkward anyway, especially when my father-in-law, after saying maybe two words, would sit back in his easy chair and lift the Auto Trader or whatever it was he was reading up in front of his eyes. And that was it; no more participation out of him, or even another word. Afterward, my wife would say, “I think my dad likes you,” and I’d be thinking, “What?”

Eventually, though -- and I have no idea what it was that brought him around – he decided I was all right. We were pretty tight after that. He had a really nice shop in his backyard -- a second two-car garage, actually -- where he had all his tools and maybe a car he was working on and a stereo and an antique Coke® machine that dispensed Michelob Light™ beer. He would get home from work and head out there, come in for dinner then head out there again, until it was time to come in for good, to take a shower and go to bed. When my wife and I would visit, especially after we were engaged and every single conversation between her and her mother involved some aspect of wedding planning, he and I would escape to his workshop, where our mutual aversion to girl talk and fondness for tools and beer caused us to bond, I guess you could call it.

My father-in-law had a regular job, as a tradesman in a local refinery, and he made decent money. I gathered most of that he turned over to my mother-in-law, for household expenses and such. For his own money, he had a whole other thing going on, on the side.

He bought and sold used vehicles continually. He had everyone in the family trained to look for cars and trucks on sale. It was really weird to be driving along the freeway and suddenly have my wife whip a notebook out of her purse and start writing something down. It was the phone number in the back window of the pickup truck ahead of us, right there at the bottom of the “For Sale” sign. My mother- and brothers-in-law did this, too. It did not matter what the vehicle was; if my father-in-law thought it was a good deal, he’d buy it.

He never drove the same car for more than a couple of months. If someone made him a good offer, he’d sell. Three or four times, after I was married, he called and asked me to come pick him up; he had been somewhere and someone offered him $1500 for the Ford Ranger he was driving that week, cash. And so he sold it right out from under himself. Happened all the time.

He also bought and sold guns, and auto parts. He restored muscle cars, and he would buy and sell or trade for just about anything else one could imagine. All for cash only, none of it on anyone’s books except his own. He wore Red Wing™ boots everywhere, and it sounds like a cliché, but he always had a fat roll of hundreds in his left boot. And often some kind of pistol in the back pocket of his jeans, for protection or, if you offered him a fair price, for sale. Hanging around with him educated me in the ways of the parallel economy, and taught me how one could come out ahead on a deal if the price was right and one was willing to buy and/or sell just about anything, if so.

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I suppose I learned the lessons of my father-in-law well. I am not nearly as resourceful as he was, but I am not averse to jumping into a deal every once in awhile, if it looks like the real thing.

Like the day a few years back a friend of a friend approached me with a truckload of brand new HP laptops, in unopened boxes, and offered to sell them to me for $100 apiece. I think he or someone he new had jacked a container at the Port of Houston; but I don’t know that. I did know it was all illegal as hell, but I also knew if I bought the laptops, I wouldn’t have them for very long, so. . . I got him down to $75 and bought ten, which was all the cash I had on me at the time. Kept two of them for my kids, and sold the other eight at work the next day, for $175 each. I believe the statute of limitations has run out on that deal, by the way. Another thing I did was make quite a bit of cash right after Hurricane Ike, just driving around Beaumont after work with a couple of chainsaws and a mower and weed eater and blower and a pressure washer and generator in the back of my truck. I was charging a lot less than the price-gouging out-of-town a-holes were, to clean up yards and the like. And just so I don’t come off as totally rapacious, I was doing the same things for my immediate neighbors, only for free.

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I don’t know what the market will be, if there even is one, for digital converter boxes in the future. Everybody who wanted already has two of 'em, after all. However, it is not hard for me to envision people like myself getting so fed up at some point with Time Warner’s bullshit that they rip the cable out of the wall, and from the back of every TV set in their home.

When they do, they will need some converter boxes, for sure. And I will know one place they can buy them, cheap. Cash only, of course.

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Drinking It All In

Making Hay In The New Age

In case you had not heard, former Saturday Night Live cast member and comedic actor Dan Ackroyd has developed and released a new spirit on the market, Crystal Head Vodka. This promotional ad, chock full of new age nonsense and quasi-spiritual mumbo-jumbo, explains (sort of) Ackroyd’s philosophy behind making a new vodka and putting it on the market, in specially made bottles which supposedly resemble the thirteen legendary and mystical crystal skulls dug up in Mexico, the American Southwest, and elsewhere over the years. These skulls were buried here by aliens sometime back, and possess mystical powers and knowledge. I believe I have that right.

Dan Ackroyd has clearly lost his mind, by the way.

One of the claims Ackroyd makes for the uniqueness of his vodka, aside from it being made from the purest Newfoundland water, and then “quadruple distilled”, and then filtered through Herkimer diamonds for the utmost “neutrality” and purity, is that it is derived from a mash made of fermented creamed corn. Yep, creamed corn. Apparently they took all the creamed corn left over from lunch trays all over the world because nobody eats that nasty crap and why do they serve it anyway? And they dumped it and a bunch of cans of Del Monte™ into a big vat and then let it sit out for awhile. Hence, Crystal Head Vodka, possessing a “unique, sweet and creamy taste.” Lovely.

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I doubt I will be purchasing and/or consuming any Crystal Head Vodka anytime soon, or anything else having to do with creamed corn, which is right up there with cauliflower and toxic waste as some of the nastiest shit ever invented by man. But I think Ackroyd, crazy as he is, may be onto something. I am thinking of developing and marketing my own line of distilled spirits, based on various paranormal and mystical-spiritual ooga-booga New Age icons.

•Alien Ale™. Brewed in the Nevada desert, glowing reviews attribute this fine ale with an out of this world taste.

•Bermuda Triangle Rum™ Produced on Walker’s Cay in the Abacos Islands, Bahamas, this tasteful rum possesses a kick that will cause your interior navigational instruments to malfunction; drink enough of it, and you might even disappear entirely, at least for awhile.

•Bigfoot Beer™. Brewed in the American Northwest, the heart of Bigfoot country, and filtered through. . . well, you don’t want to know what it is filtered through.

•Chupacabra Tequila™. A cheap mescal made from surplus maguey cactus plants, and distilled at a refinery outside of El Paso, Texas; drink enough of this “tequila”, and you will believe in the legendary Mexican goat-sucker, and just about anything else anyone tells you.

•Mothman Moonshine™. A rough tasting “white lightning”, 190 proof and distilled in a hollow somewhere in the Appalachian Mountains (we cannot divulge the exact location, for legal reasons), this stuff may not be the smoothest to cross the palate, but it does the trick. . . in addition to causing visions of a giant moth with red eyes, it will assuage the pain of living in a crappy house trailer in West Virginia somewhere, sans teeth.

•Tunguska Vodka™. Distilled in the legendary Tunguska region of Siberia, where the alien spaceship crashed in 1908; this vodka will not only give you an inner glow, but will also set off any Geiger counter in the vicinity, a sure indicator of a quality spirit.

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I am excited about my new line of distilled spirits. I think I can get rich off of this idea. Thank you, Dan Ackroyd. All I need to do is persuade some bank to lend me the start-up capital for this venture. That should not be any problem at all right now, should it?

(Special thanks to Gizzmonic and JackAstro)

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