finally healed enough for some new tattoo pics!! I’m in love, I want to get another one already.
More art of a minor character from an obscure novel! Everyone please. please. read this book.
over seven hours today using microsoft excel, and I’m ready to chew my own arm off to escape
latest dispatch from the farm: my parents’ dog Koko killed yet another groundhog (this is confirmed kill number 31, although there are likely countless others), but instead of eating it or burying it, as usual, this time she lost interest and left its sad groundhog corpse on the lawn.
My mother discovered this when she went out to feed the chickens this morning and found “a ton” of turkey vultures competing for the remains of the late groundhog. Koko took exception to this infringing on her kill, and went, in my mother’s words, “bowling for vultures,” which was reportedly very exciting for all involved (Koko is a only medium-sized dog, and vultures are… large), and resulted in many ruffled feathers, but fortunately no casualties on either side, despite Koko’s best attempts.
Unionized UPS Teamsters – 260,000 of them – are set to strike in the
biggest American strike since UPS’s unionized drivers walked out in
1997.
Superficially, the issue is about the company moving to seven-day
delivery, but the issue that’s forcing the strike is the sizable cohort
of union members who are unwilling to accept a two-tier workplace where
established workers get the full protection of the union and younger
hires are given a worse deal. This has been a traditional way that
employers have split, weakened and ultimately killed their workers’
unions – by buying off the long-established employees with better deals
that make the workers who’ll replace them feel that unions have nothing
to offer them, which establishes divisions that can be exploited later
to lay off those higher-paid workers, leaving only the lowest-paid
employees and no union they can use to press for better pay.
It seems like some of UPS’s Teamsters have figured out that solidarity pays.
Yo, if they do strike, don’t listen to the media bitching about those workers being uppity or what the fuck ever. Transit and shipping is a increasingly huge industry in the US, and the Teamsters should be cheered on and congratulated for demanding solidarity and support for junior workers–formal union members or not.
If you’re waiting longer on Amazon packages or whatever, of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t complain–but frame your complaints to aim at UPS management for failing to treat its workers well and negotiate, not at the workers themselves. In this Second Gilded Age, that’s the only way we’re ever going to see any kind of improvement from the exploitation of the nation by the uber-wealthy–and UPS certainly qualifies.
the pain of being tattooed becomes almost meditative after the first few minutes, and I ended up kind of enjoying being forced to just exist and count breaths for three and a half hours
that said, when the artist did the bit of the tattoo that encroached on an area with lots of nerve endings, I had to focus all my mental energy on recalling the words to the Major General’s Song from Pirates of Penzance so I didn’t do something horribly embarrassing, like start crying or beg her to stop
I think I was even moving my lips at one point when it was very painful, which the artist probably thought was either praying or swearing, but was actually “I can write a washing bill in Babylonic cuneiform and tell you every detail of Caractucus’ uniform”
the pain of being tattooed becomes almost meditative after the first few minutes, and I ended up kind of enjoying being forced to just exist and count breaths for three and a half hours
that said, when the artist did the bit of the tattoo that encroached on an area with lots of nerve endings, I had to focus all my mental energy on recalling the words to the Major General’s Song from Pirates of Penzance so I didn’t do something horribly embarrassing, like start crying or beg her to stop
A Pretty Taste for Paradox 