Moving on from the Great Desert University to ever so much more important topics, check out this recipe for homemade deodorant. Came across the link at Over the Cubicle Wall, a site whose proprietor seems to be a person after my own heart, via Frugal Scholar‘s blogroll.
Like the whole DIY destinker idea. I’m allergic to most commercial deodorants. Have been known to use plain baking soda, but it’s messy and gritty. A friend has tried one of those crystals; they’re said to work pretty well, but they also are messy: you have to get it wet and then it gets you wet.
Right now I’m using Tom’s, a reasonably benign brand you can get at Sprouts and Whole Foods. Sometimes other items in the Tom’s line appear in mainline stores (spotted the toothpaste in Target the other day!), but more often you have to seek them at New-Agey and health-foodish retailers. And the deodorant is really hard to find.
OMG! Cassie the Corgi just threw a rope toy, spinning end-over-end, about four feet over her head and caught it on the down-sweep. Now she’s throwing the thing at me. I guess she wants me to get up, eh?
This dog is bar none the smartest animal I’ve ever had around me. She actually has learned to pitch a ball into my waiting hands.
And so, off to the playing fields. Happy Easter Egg to everyone!
😀
Our Beloved Leader has circulated a memo about the Obama snubbing. It contains this wording:
Since my appointment [as president of the Great Desert University] we have not awarded honorary degrees to sitting politicians, a practice based on the very practical realities of operating a public university in our political environment. We have not offered degrees to our sitting Senators or our sitting Governors as many universities do. We have not invited them as university commencement speakers either.
In this case, the historic election of Barack Obama, we invited him as our university commencement speaker, the first in recent memory. We did that out of recognition of his unique achievements and his deep connection to our mission as a university committed to excellence and access.
If that’s the reasoning, why didn’t we say so instead of emanating the PR double-talk that went out to the Associated Press Friday?
LOL! You have to be here to appreciate how ludicrously typical this is. Colleagues are still hooting with ecstatic hilarity (heaven knows we have little enough to laugh at around that place) over columnist Gail Collins’s choice words:
Obama’s round of spring events will culminate in appearances at graduation ceremonies in Notre Dame (where the local bishop is ticked off about the abortion thing) and Arizona State University, where he is not going to receive an honorary degree. A spokeswoman for the university explained that it was withholding that honor from the president because “his body of work is yet to come.”
Tough standards, A.S.U.!
Snark! Gasp…catch your breath, pick yourself up off the floor, and tool on over to CNN, where Our Beloved Employer’s p.r. staff can be seen digging us in even deeper:
The university says that the president’s achievements have yet to rate the honor, and is directing reporters to use a statement given to the Associated Press. “His body of work is yet to come. That’s why we’re not recognizing him with a degree at the beginning of his presidency,” Media Relations Director Sharon Keller told the AP Thursday.
The university’s guidelines say the degree is merited by “significant contributions to education and society over the course of a person’s career,” though Sandra Day O’Connor and Barry Goldwater — both Arizonans — received the honor after the latter had served just over one term in the Senate, and the former was roughly three years into her Supreme Court tenure. Also honored: activist Cesar Chavez, legendary Arizona senator and former presidential candidate Mo Udall, and broadcaster Walter Cronkite.
Here in the blogosphere, one wit notes that the Great Desert University adjudges Erma Bombeck’s opus sufficient to merit an honorary degree, to say nothing of Jerry Colangelo’s and Steve Allen’s. Backs against the wall, administrators personfully stick with their decision to withhold an honorary degree from the President of the United States but instead will name a scholarship after him.
Mighty white of ’em, eh?
Meanwhile, the highly educated products of our elite institution, patriotic young entrepreneurs steeped in the significance of their nation’s history and place in the world, have made themselves busy peddling their tickets to the graduation ceremony. Entrée to hear the first African American President of the United States in person comes cheap at the Great Desert University: $60 to $100 a seat.
God, what an embarrassment to be associated with that outfit! How can I count the ways I love the prospect of exiting, pursued by…whatever? MORE!
So yesterday as a lark SDXB and I rode the city’s new light rail train from uptown Phoenix to the end of the line in Mesa; thenon the return legdropped off in Tempe for lunch at the Great Desert University’s new “local foods” café. What a hoot! The trains, being brand-new, are clean and shiny. The ride is smooth and surprisingly fast: from Tempe to our stop was about 40 minutes, no longer than it takes me to make the drive in moderate traffic. And it was great fun. Check it out:
Starting Monday, I am going to park my car near AJ’s (my favorite purveyor of overpriced foods) at Central and Camelback and ride the train to campus. That will save about 30 miles of wear & tear on my car plus almost a quarter-tank of gas per trip!
Buying tickets
As an old folk, I can get a round-trip ticket for $1.25, somewhat less than the cost of gasoline for a round-trip drive. They have various packages that save a little, but unfortunately the tickets are for consecutive days, and I don’t necessarily go to Tempe five consecutive days a week. Ditto the university’s cut-rate package: you have to buy a full year’s worth; they take it away from you when you’re canned; and it covers consecutive days. So any day that you don’t ride represents wasted money. With the senior-citizen fare, the best deal seems to be to purchase a ticket from a vending machine for each ride.
But it gets better!
Presently, the end of the line on our side of town is in a shopping center with a Costco and a Target, within walking distance of M’hijito’s house. On days when I need to do make a significant shopping trip, I could leave my car in the Park’n’ride there and, on the way home, hit Costco and Target. This would save an extra trip for supply runs.
Also along the way are a Safeway, a Walgreen’s (both in reasonably safe areas), and the wonted AJ’s. In other words, I could combine about 98% of routine shopping with light-rail trips!
It would cut the use of my car by a good 75 to 80 percent. And once The Hartford hears about this, it will cut the cost of auto insurance: they specifically ask whether you commute on public transport.
In about 18 months or two years, this train is going to run right up the main drag just to the west of my neighborhood. I will be able to walk to the station—or ride Xoot the Xooter, or, as I get more decrepit, ride an electric scooter.
So! In retirement, I will barely need a car.
Good thing, since the amount of savings I’d earmarked to buy the new car was incinerated in the Bonfire of the Bush Vanities, and so I’ll have to make do with my ten-year-old van. Chuck the Mechanic Par Excellence informed me that its next scheduled service, at 90,000 miles, will set me back $1,200. Great timing, eh? I really need a twelve-hundred-dollar bill just as I’m about to lose my job. Well, it’s a lot cheaper than a new car.
And if this light rail system actually works to cut mileage by, say, 60 to 75 percent, the old clunk may survive another ten years. Frugaland green! 🙂
Once again, we’re brought back to a raw fact: economy is politics, politics economy.
The Arizona state legislature’s response to the state budget crisis engendered by the collapse of the Bush economy has been pigheaded beyond belief. Elected leaders here, brought into office before the recent national changeover in leadership and set free to work mischief by the loss of Democratic governor Janet Napolitano, cling to the failed Republican doctrine that government borrowing is bad and taxes are worse. The wretches fail to grasp that government is different from private corporations and different from their own little household economies.
As a result, they have engaged in an extended bloodbath that continues to this day, with K through 12 schools forced to fire thousands of teachers statewide, universities closing down entire colleges and canning or furloughing thousands of employees, libraries and parks shutting down, basic services curtailed or eliminated. The kindest term for their strategy might be “draconian”; a more accurate one, “stupid.”
Now, many days late and vast billions of dollars short, it’s beginning to dawn on our august leaders that they’re going to have to borrow some money to keep the government functioning. Local television station KPHO’s online news quotes Sen. Pat Gorman as saying, “We don’t like to borrow. We don’t think that’s a good idea. . . . But right now, we’re looking at what’s a bad idea and what’s a really bad idea.” The station also reports “a spokesman for the Republican governor” as saying that “the governor was reluctant to borrow money as a way to reduce the deficit. She supports the tax increase as a better option.”
News reporters often get quotations wrong, but the strange pin-headed thinking of this state’s elected leaders has been reported so often and its consequences have become so obvious that it’s hard to figure anything but that the reporters are getting the general gist right.
Borrowing now is a day late and a dollar short. The state needed to do that before its workforce and its private industries were devastated by vast layoffs.
And as for raising taxes, let me tell you: I would have voted in favor of a tax increase to rescue the state’s economy while I still had a job. Now it’s too late. A larger percentage of nothing is nothing. How will raising taxes on workers who no longer have jobs raise money to help the state’s economy?
The loss of my job at the Great Desert University and of the wages of thousands of my coworkers is directly attributable the majority Republican legislators’ bizarre short-sightedness and stubbornness. At my age I will not get another job. Social Security plus what shreds of my life savings remain after the collapse of the Bush economy will not support me without my working part-time for the rest of my life. Arizona can raise my taxes and be damned. The tax collectors can visit me at the Seventh Avenue Overpass, under which I will soon be living, in a tent nursing home.
There oughta be a law against electing damn fools to public office.
Some time ago, I reported the discovery that olive oil can be used in place of expensive facial cleanser. Not only does it clean one’s face without leaving an oily film or making the user smell like salad dressing, for me it relieved an itchy spot that defied all the training and genius of two Mayo Clinic dermatologists. Five months later, here’s an update.
Since last November, I’ve been cleaning my face once or, more usually, twice a day by massaging in a little of Costco’s extra-virgin olive oil, laying a warm washcloth over my face to gently “steam” the skin, and then wiping the oil off well with the warm cloth. Then I apply a little Cetaphil as a conditioning cream. Before starting this beauty regimen, I had always washed my face with a mild soap such as Ivory and conditioned with Cetaphil or a similar drugstore-style moisturizer.
Lately I’ve noticed that my complexion is a lot more supple, soft, and healthy-looking that it used to be. Apparently regular, long-term use of olive oil to clean and condition your skin works to good effect. Over the past few years, I’ve watched my cheeks turn into something that looked like an old, dried-out leather purse, no doubt the result of spending all my life in the subtropics and growing up in an era when a deep tan was admired as a sign of good health. Although my skin is certainly not wrinkle-free now—nor, at my age, should it be—those fine networks of sun damage are almost unnoticeable, and I can go out in public makeup-free without frightening small children.
Now, here’s the weird part: despite all the stress I’ve been under, my appearance has not gone to Hell. Normally, chronic insomnia makes me look like the Wrath of God. But…
The night after I was told our office would be closed and my entire staff canned, I did not sleep at all. Not one wink. Didn’t go to bed until 4:30; lay awake until 5:30; got up and went back to work. Since then, most nights I’ve had about three or four hours of sleep. Last night and the night before, after my financial advisor demonstrated that my savings will come fairly close to supporting me despite the devastation of the Bush economy, were the first decent nights’ sleep I’ve had since March 26, when this episode started—over two weeks ago.
Even during the worst of this period, my face has looked hydrated, reasonably fresh, and well toned. No dark circles lurked under the eyes, and the color looked pretty normal, not the fish-belly gray one would expect. Don’t know what the explanation for this really is. All I know is the only thing I’m doing differently from what I’ve done during other high-stress periods is using olive oil on my face.
Yeah, I know: anecdotal evidence! Worse yet, post hoc, ergo propter hoc! But something’s working. In the absence of any other change, the olive oil treatment is a likely cause.
