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Got a Kid Going to College? Read This

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If your kids attend a college or university — or if you do — you need to read this book.

IMG_3006College students or their parents face endless tuition increases. Do you know what their tuition is buying — and not buying?

Sixty to eighty percent of college instructors are not professors at all. They’re underpaid, often marginally qualified part-time adjuncts. In the brave new world of academe, few American students get what they pay for when they arrive at college. Meanwhile, graduate programs churn out thousands of would-be college faculty with master’s and doctoral degrees, few of whom ever land full-time jobs in higher ed.

Full-time faculty are systematically being replaced by part-timers with no office, no computer, no phone, no insurance, no retirement, no representation, and sub-minimum wage pay.

This book explains the consequences, short- and long-term, of replacing professors with part-timers and chronicles one adjunct’s semester in America’s largest community college district.

For a handsome print copy, inquire in the comments section below — be sure to leave a real email address so we can get in touch (will not be shared!).

Check out all the offerings at Plain & Simple Press here!

Gender Pay Gaps: A$k and ye shall re¢eive?

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Goood morning! Comes a particularly stupid  article from the Chicago Daily Herald:  jobs with the highest gender gaps. Videography, it develops, is right up there at the top. Surprise! Pay in media companies tends to be 6.6% lower for women. Start low and get lower?

Hilariously, some expert on the topic remarks, “Establishing fair pay is going to be one of the big challenges tech and media companies are going to face.”

Where’s the “challenge” here? How hard is it to simply pay the same rate to everyone who holds a given job with a given seniority? And that does NOT mean lowering men’s pay so as to get away with paying everyone a lower rate.

This article suggests that women make a point of learning what their colleagues earn and then asking pointedly for raises to reach that rate.

At a large university I got a higher rate than my male counterpart who came on at the same rate I did, by repeatedly asking for raises. After about eight years, I was earning exactly $2 a year more than he did.

But  yes. In some industries nagging the boss for a raise works. SDXB discovered, at the time reporters tried to unionize Phoenix Newspapers, Inc., that he was highest earner among his colleagues, including guys who had been there for many more years than he had. That, he said, was because once or twice a year he went in to the boss and asked for a raise. And he was good at his job…he was a multi-award-winning investigative reporter.

The phenomenon I mention above, in which raises across the board are lowered to what employers imagine women are worth,  is called “the pinking of the newsroom” in our parts. When The Arizona Republic started hiring women, salaries across the board dropped. They paid women less, and they used that as an excuse to pay men less. Overall, pay dropped drastically.

One could argue that’s just a function of de-unionization, off-shoring of jobs, and repression of the US middle class, all of which indeed are real phenomena. But IMHO it’s not a coincidence that dropping pay across the board occurred at about the time women gained access to jobs that used to pay a living wage. Pay for a workforce doesn’t come up. It goes down whenever possible. When women are paid less, eventually men are paid less, too.

Happy Easter! And may you, too, beat GERD

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Hallelujah, brothers and sisters! It’s a new day in America. And everywhere else. Happy Easter to one and all.

Feeling particularly bright this morning because for the first time since last June’s miserable surgery, I woke up without a bellyache and without a lump in the throat. And though the 3 a.m. alarm clock went off as usual, it was not to wake me up to enjoy another wee-hours bout of heartburn. 🙂

To what do I attribute this miraculous turn of events? To a little help from my friends…

Not those friends, but their prescription cousins.

I’ve been gulping horsepills of omeprazole in double the OTC dose. That seemed not to be working, but apparently because I was knocking off them too soon.

As you know, I have a moral objection to being put on prescription drugs for the rest of my life, which of course is what every doctor you run into has in mind. So as soon as the symptoms would fade, I would fade off the omeprazole.

The other day, Young Dr. Kildare explained why this doesn’t work: The symptoms of gastric reflux stem from something like a burn to your esophagus, resulting from acid bubbling up where it’s not supposed to be. If you burned your hand, you could apply a topical treatment and it would feel better, but it wouldn’t be healed. You’d have to wait until it actually was healed to stop using the painkiller and before you could bang around again. Ditto, your innards.

He said you need to take prescription-strength omeprazole (or something like it) for about three months, even after the discomfort abates, and then, once you think the damage is healed, taper off it by going to the OTC pills for a week or two.

The new quacklet at the Mayo (oh, these young things! How can you have acquired an MD, gone through an internship and a residency, and look like you’re 19 years old???) agreed, although her time frame was shorter: eight weeks.

YDK has GERD himself, and also he’s not a kid (even though he looks mighty young to the aged eye), so I figure he’s probably the one to listen to. He having been around the block a time or two…

So I’ve been swallowing omeprazole religiously for about a week or ten days.

Then I discovered Zantac, OTC. This stuff, which in the past has done nothing for me, seems to work to beat back an acute attack, but only when used in combination with omeprazole. It dawned on me that if it worked during the day, it probably would work at three in the morning. So I put a pill and a glass of water by the bed, and night before last when I woke up with the familiar tingling/burning sensation that results from rolling over on my right side in my sleep, dropped the Zantac.

Took about 20 minutes to work, but it did work. And the next morning I wasn’t very sick. Somewhat so, but not to the usual extent.

I haven’t had a cup of coffee, a cup of tea, a glass of wine, a bourbon and water, a salad, a still-crisp vegetable, or so much as a whiff of chili pepper in weeks. So I can assure you, depriving yourself of the things you love doesn’t help. Neither do the various folks and quack remedies. No, swallowing organic apple cider vinegar does not help. Neither does ginger. Neither do Gaviscon, Rolaids, Mylanta, or Maalox.

In the nondrug department, only one thing seems to calm the symptoms of GERD: vanilla ice cream.

Yes. I don’t even LIKE ice cream, but I’ve been living on it for weeks.

The other day I reflected on the reason for this, ad it occurred to me it’s probably because ice cream is essentially a liquid. Effectively I’ve put myself on a liquid diet.

So I decided to branch out to other fluids.

Those soups that come in boxes all taste terrible to me: they taste like their cardboard containers. However, they’re less oversalted than the Campbell’s varieties. And no, I do not feel like making soup just now. Ugh. So I bought some chicken broth, some lamb broth, some mushroom soup, and some pumpkin soup. They all taste the same: cardboard. But they don’t seem to cause direct pain. Probably today I should go over to Trader’s on the way home from the churchly frenzy and pick up some chicken that I can make into real soup. Chicken à blanc…hold the onions. {sigh} Onion: that’s another beloved food item I haven’t had in weeks.

I’m wondering if a puréed lentil or bean soup might work…again, I can’t imagine how these would taste without onion. But WTF? It’s probably better than living on ice cream.

Yesterday I baked an Idaho potato. Served it up with some yogurt, figuring that would add some protein. A whole potato was too much to eat, but it seems to have worked to fill the belly without causing undue discomfort. Dined on this around 2:30 in the afternoon and wasn’t hungry till I got back from last night’s Great Vigil frenzy, along about 9:30 at night.

And this morning, trying to imagine what is essentially liquid and also edible, I recalled that my mother used to eat apple sauce when she didn’t feel well. I personally am not crazy about the apple sauce that comes in jars. However…quite a few apples are laying around the kitchen, waiting to spoil because I can’t eat them. Why not bake an apple?

That worked pretty well. I’m now not hungry and not in pain. Interesting.

So what am I gonna do this evening, when I have to go out for an Easter feast with friends? I certainly can’t eat any feasty foods. It’s going to look mighty funny when I ask for a bowl of soup for dinner. No clue how to cope with that. Guess I’ll have to play it as it lays.

How to Bake an Apple

You need:

• 1 apple, variety seems inconsequential
• butter
• brown sugar, turbinado sugar, or whatever sugar you have in the house
• cinnamon, if you have some
• pecans or walnuts, if desired
• hot water

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

With a paring knife, cut off the stem and a cone of apple around the it. Loosen the apple flesh by carefully slicing around the outside of the core. Take the handle of a metal spoon and scoop out the core and seeds.

Fill the hole with butter. Push in some pecans or walnuts, if you like. Top with sugar. Sprinkle a little cinnamon over it, if you wish.

Place the apple in a shallow baking dish. Pour in a little hot water, about a half-inch up the side of the pan.

Bake for 30 minutes to an hour, depending on how soft you like your apple. If you like it a little firm, take it out of the oven after about a half-hour. If you want apple sauce, baking for an hour will do the trick.

Very tasty! A heckuva lot better than canned apple sauce!

What? No Terrorized Students at Emory?

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It gets better.

Yesterday, in comes a report from reader Roguewrld that, contrary to Funny’s report, students at Emory University did NOT fall into a terrified faint at the mere glimpse pro-Trump graffiti scribbled on sidewalks and stair risers. Hilariously, Roguewrld found confirmation of this claim at Snopes.com, the bottomless well of de-hoaxification.

Pretty amazing: that tale was found in the good gray pages of the Washington Post, a national publication of record whose seriousness verges on the staid.

Nice catch, Roguewrld!

Traveling deeper into Monty Python territory, we explore the current state of Snopes.com. As it develops, Alabama legislators have NOT proposed to bar people who own cars from receiving public assistance. FALSE. But that one actually was floated, with a straight face, in my august state.

The image of the four Trump-loving women displaying T-shirts that spelled out, a word at a time, MAKE AMERICA WHITE AGAIN turns out to have been Photoshopped. Drat! It was so believable!

Walnuts are not drugs. Even the FDA has not declared walnuts to be drugs.

Mason Wells, the young Mormon missionary injured in the recent Brussels attacks, is not a “survivor” of two prior attacks. He was among 500,000 other people present at the Boston Marathon, nowhere near the bombings, and was two hours out of Paris at the time of the Bataclan attacks.

Even in Mississippi, you can’t drown in a carwash.

Nutella, with sugar its lead ingredient, is probably not very good for you. On the other hand, it’s not immediately toxic.

Cadbury has not, in a superfluity of political correctness, banned the word “Easter” from its packaging for chocolate eggs.

Well, darn. You just can’t have any fun anymore…

VOTE! Monty Python Show or Kurt Vonnegut Novel?

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Lordy! Which do you think it is? Do we live in a Monty Python Show or a Kurt Vonnegut Novel?

Here’s the evidence:

Dateline Emory University: College students “scared” and “no longer feel safe” after exposure to chalk sidewalk graffiti supporting Donald Trump. People who in any other century, in many other cultures today would be grown men and women express their terror at scribbling on the sidewalk saying “Vote Trump!” None of them seems to realize that their chalk works on sidewalks, too.

Dateline Phoenix Arizona: Maricopa County Recorder (the person in charge of the bureaucracy that cut the number of  polling places by 70% in a city the size of Los Angeles County) blames four-hour-long waits to vote on the voters. “Well, the voters (are to blame) for getting in line….”

Dateline Seattle: Internet trolls take all of one day to subvert Microsoft’s chatbot, “Tay,” posting nasty Tweets in gay abandon. Digital fanboys don’t even register the question of why no one at Microsoft saw that one coming…

Dateline North Carolina: Perp arrested for failing to return videotape borrowed 15 years ago from a long-defunct video store. Apparently life is so quiet in NC the cops have nothing better to do with their time. Either that or North Carolina has no concept of “statute of limitations.”

Dateline Georgia: Man packs lawnmower with explosives and then shoots at it; blows his leg off.

Soo…which is it: Are we living in a Monty Python Show? a Kurt Vonnegut novel? Or are we trapped inside a country-western video?

Thank You, Amazon Reviewers! $$$$$

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Reading the comments by reviewers on Amazon can save you a bundle. I’ve learned to look up products that I intend to buy locally just to see what Amazon’s reviewers have to say about them.

Case in point: I took it into my fuzzy little head to purchase a slow cooker with a nonstick surface. Whenever I cook the dogs’ chicken or pork, which I do in a crockpot because it can sit in the garage (keeping the smell out of the house) and because I don’t have to tend to it, some residue always sticks on the ceramic container. No amount of soaking will loosen the baked-on gunk. I always end up standing over the garage utility sink, scrubbing with scouring powder. And scrubbing. And scrubbing. And scrubbing. Getting it clean is an unpleasant nuisance of a job.

So I figure to order this contraption from Amazon, the path of least resistance. And here’s what I learn from the reviewers:

  • Nonstick coating bubbles up and peels off
  • Contrary to advertised claims, can’t brown foods in it first: nonstick coating will bubble up and peel off
  • Contrary to advertised claims, can’t be put in dishwasher
  • Lightweight, cheaply made, flimsy
  • Cover doesn’t fit
  • Cover doesn’t fit
  • Cover doesn’t fit, dammit!
  • Ew! Nonstick gunk flakes off and ends up in the food!

In amongst all this commentary, up pops a message from a woman who says she also found the new products unsatisfactory and so decided to fend for herself. She had a large Le Creuset doufeu. Le Creuset pans are enameled, and that surface is effectively “nonstick.” They’re very easy to clean. Thought she, Why not? She loaded the thing with the same stuff she’d put in a slow cooker, set it in a 200-degree oven, and went away. A few hours later: voilà! A slow-cooked  meal!

doufeuAhem. A 7¼-quart Le Creuset doufeu will set you back $420. Plus shipping, which you can bet will be hefty for a 7-quart cast-iron pot. A 4½-quart number only costs $300.

That of course doesn’t count the cost of the crane you’ll need to move it in and out of the oven, once it’s fully loaded with food. (You’re supposed to put ice or cold water in the strangely shaped lid, to enhance condensation inside the pot. Alternatively, you can cook other foods, such as potatoes or cornbread, in the lid.)

A crock pot typically holds about 6 quarts. And I need that much volume to cook a giant package of Costco chicken or pork.

Plus a friend who’s a truck driver recently gave me 20 pounds of ground turkey, because the packages were “damaged.” The dispatcher told her to throw it out, but she couldn’t stand that. We took most of it over to the local food bank, but I held back two 10-pound rolls of the stuff for the dogs.

As I thought about the commenter’s idea, it occurred to me that I must have something like that, somewhere in the house or the garage.

And yea verily! What should I find but two huge stainless-steel, copper-bottomed stew pots! Vast! The one I pulled out of the back of a cabinet holds 6 quarts.

Loaded 5 pounds of meat into the thing and set the oven for 300 degrees. I normally set the slow-cooker on “high,” which will cook most potsful of meat in three or four hours. So I figured 300 would be better than 200.

Actually, if anything it was too fast: in three hours, I’d say the meat was a little overcooked. Next time I’ll set it on 200, which should slow the process into the crockpot realm.

Once the ground turkey was cooked, there was plenty of room to add some oatmeal, which cooked in 20 minutes atop a burner, and then the food-processed mixed veggies. Let it cool, packed it into containers, and a week’s worth of fresh dog food was in the fridge and freezer.

Yes, stuff stuck to the sides, same as it does in the crockpot. But this was easy to clean off. You can put a stainless-steel pan on a stove burner. So all I had to do was fill it with water, toss in a handful of banking soda, and let it simmer for awhile. After that, any leftover gunk washed right off in a minute or two: no overnight soaking, no pan in the way when I want to run the clothes washer, and no endless scouring!

I wouldn’t have thought of this (rather obvious!) solution if I hadn’t taken time to read Amazon’s customer comments.

If I had read the reviews of the Samsung clothes washer that drives me nuts, I wouldn’t have bought it. That was when I learned to read Amazon reviews before buying anything, locally or online.

It’s a good idea to start with the three-star reviews, because those are the ones that are most likely to be objective. Five-star raves are likely to have at least some paid posts among them. And, as it develops, one-star rants are often posted by competitors who are trying to tear down the seller’s product. Most people who post three-star reviews will give the product’s pro’s and cons, and some will allude to problems described in worse reviews, either agreeing that they exist or explaining what the complainer did wrong to get a negative outcome.

I’ll usually read three-star reviews first, then go to the one-star reviews. If I’m not put off the product after that, then I’ll look at five- and four-star reviews. If there’s a “Questions Answered” section, be sure to read those, too.

These days, I read them for things I intend to buy here in town as well as things I order online. It’s almost as good as Consumer Reports!