Cap’n Ken’s Homespun Wisdom

I”ve been working on a piece I was going to publish today about my father. But the piece I wrote, while engaging and beautifully-written, just ended up being too personal of a thing to publish here.

Still, I wanted to use this Father”s Day to free the story of my dad from the ambiguous half-truth I”ve been using for the past 13 years whenever I was asked about him:

“My dad died when I was 15.”

Technically that”s true, even if it”s the smallest detail of a much more involved story. I”ve always hated using that seven-word answer, because I”d rather tell people the whole story. It”s an amazing story, and while it sucked to be the kid living through it, it”s all ancient history now.

The whole story is:

“My father skipped town when I was 14. He was missing for almost a year, then turned up dead. But we didn”t think it was him in the casket, and we heard from several people that he was in the witness protection program, so I can”t say that I really believe he died back then.”

Ask me about it sometime.

I just finished watching the premiere episode of Morgan Spurlock”s 30 Days. and feel compelled to spew some Wisdom.

If you don”t know, 30 Days is Spurlock”s TV follow-up to Super Size Me. The concept is for someone to spend a month in an unfamiliar situation. The debut episode followed Morgan and his girlfriend - the geeky but oddly attractive Alex - as they lived on “minimum wage” for 30 Days.

Note that I put “minimum wage” in quotes. That”s because Morgan and Alex didn”t actually live on minimum wage. They never said what Alex was making washing dishes at a coffee shop, but Morgan walked right in to an unskilled temp labor job paying $7 an hour. As he makes a big point to mention all through the show, the federal minimum wage is $5.15 an hour.

This is a significant point. For if the government says you only have to pay somebody $5.15 an hour, why would the temp labor place pay a guy walking in off the street any more than that? It”s a little thing called the market economy, a force Morgan poo-poos when he casts off The Heritage Foundation”s position that higher minimum wages will actually have a negative effect on real wages and job growth.

And while Morgan does a good job of mixing entertainment and information, the program falls apart on logic and reality. Consider:

• Morgan and Alex seeded themselves with $356 (a week”s net pay each at minimum wage) to begin their experiment. No car, no furniture and just the clothes on their back. But in reality, nobody who”s a hard-working, responsible person steps into low-wage life like this. Young people have usually lived at home, shared apartments with roommates, managed to buy a crappy used car, etc., before they”re out in the world trying to make an adult living.

• After getting his first daily after-taxes check for $44, Morgan says “I”m actually working for less than minimum wage”. Um, everybody has to pay FICA, dude. If you”re so in love with government taking care of people, don”t complain about the social welfare taxes.

• In reviewing the history of the minimum wage, Morgan says “When the minimum wage was first established in 1938, it was meant to help workers maintain the bare minimum standard of living. But since the minimum wage hasn”t been raised since 1997 - while the cost of living has gone up - the law no longer does precisely what it was meant to do.”

In 1938, the minimum wage was 25 cents an hour. In 2003 dollars, that”s $3.26 based on the CPI. And the minimum wage is $5.15. So minimum-wage workers today make 58% more relative to the cost of living as they did in 1938.

• Morgan and Alex find a “free store” run by a church where they get clothes and furniture for nothing. They are touched and surprised at the generosity of their fellow humans. What, you mean something other than the government can be used to provide support to the working poor? Amazing.

• Morgan and Alex get into a financial bind when he busts his wrist and she gets a urinary tract infection. He”s outraged when he sees his bill - which included $40 for an Ace bandage. This is the reality of a health-care system where most people (on insurance) don”t know or care what their actual medical services cost. So imagine if everybody got “free” healthcare paid for by the government. How about two Ace bandages? What the hell - doesn”t cost you anything.

• In the middle of the episode, Morgan decides to make his challenge harder by pretending to have kids (by inviting his brother”s kids up). His point is you can”t afford to raise kids on minimum wage. And he”s right. If you”re just making minimum wage, don”t have kids. How hard is that to figure out?

• Morgan sums up his experience and the trials of minimum wage earners thusly: “We”re both educated, we”re both articulate - we”re white - we”re still just getting by.” This is an appropriate wrapup to the show - his biggest load of bullshit of all.

If you”re educated and articulate, you”re not going to have to work for minimum wage. That education buys you earning power. If you”re on minimum wage, it”s because you”re not educated and articulate.

Or just because you”re pushing an agenda.

The wife and I have a healthy dose of beach-house fever. We know where we”d like to buy; we know the kind of place we”re looking for - and if we shed some of our Atlanta properties, we might just be able to swing it.

So yesterday the wife sent me a listing she found. It”s right where we want to buy, just what we”re looking for and in our price range. Thus I set to work on the due diligence - crunching expenses and likely rental income - to come up with a prospectus for this highly-theoretical purchase.

And along the way, I came across the county tax assessor”s website and was surprised to find that this backwater little Florida county has all its property records online. So I know how much taxes are, what the place sold for two years ago, etc.

Also on the site are plat maps and a nice little aerial photography overlay. Clicking around, I noticed something strange - and more than a little scary.

Witness the plat map (I”ve marked the unit that”s for sale - but take note of the building I”ve put the purple box around. That one is closest to the beach on the plat map):

Now notice what the street looks like when the aerial photography is overlaid:

Holy Jesus! What the hell happened to the two buildings that used to be beachfront? They”re freaking GONE.

This, of course, begs the question of the future fate of the unit that”s for sale.

I wrote the listing agent to ask what happened to the buildings that used to be the beachfront ones, and got this answer:

To answer your questions in regard to the other buildings, yes they went into the ocean. It was about 15-20 years ago the buildings were washed out into the ocean due to a hurricane.

The duplex now located at the end is Gulf front until the next hurricane takes it off. These were built too close to the gulf.

Apparently they were built just a tad close. But the kicker was what the agent told me about the house there that”s currently for sale:

This is actually one of my listings and is under-contract with a back up offer as of now.

It seems folks are standing in line to drop $310,000 for a place that”s a stiff breeze away from being driftwood.

That”s not nearly as good of a deal as the guy who paid $147,000 in 1984 for that purple square got.

Katie Holmes embracing Scientology

Are you itching to get on the Botox Bandwagon, but are just so naturally wrinkle-free that you don”t see the point in injecting your face with Botulinum Toxin?

Well, things are looking up. The Botox people are now peddling their nerve-killer as a treatment for severe underarm sweating. If your pits are moist enough to “affect your daily activities”, your salvation may rest in killing those nasty nerves that dare allow your body”s perspiration to come out under your arms.

This miracle treatment comes with just a 3% - 10% chance of injection-site pain and bleeding, non-underarm sweating, infection, inflammation of the throat, flu syndrome, headache, fever, neck or back pain, itching, and anxiety.

There”s no word on whether you can direct your “non-underarm sweating” to a specific other part of your body - say your ears - but I suppose it”s possible if you shoot up your entire body except for the parts you want sweat to come out of.

It”s interesting to me that once again I”m out in L.A. with an XM-equipped rental car (another Pontiac G6 - again, not bad for an American sedan, but why would anybody buy an American sedan?), but once again I chose to listen to local L.A. talk instead of tuning in to XM.

Of course, I”m a huge proponent of satellite radio, and I hate commercial music radio. But XM”s programming just sucks. How many ways can you slice “popular” music? XM”s damned determined to find out.

From what I can tell, there”s very little on XM that”s ever going to surprise you. The brilliance of Sirius is that they really explore formats (a very loose term there). Underground Garage has a focus - “garage rock” - but it”s not like all you hear are the icons (The Stooges, Mitch Ryder, The Ramones, etc.). UG”s mission is to bring you the new artists and the obscure artists that are part of the genre, are influenced by it and have reimagined it.

It”s exploration, not recitation. As I”ve said before, about 60% of what I hear on UG is stuff I”ve never heard before, and I like about 90% of this new stuff. The net result is that I not only hear music that I know and like, but I hear music that I don”t know - but because it”s a niche I like - that I also like.

It”s the same over at Outlaw Country. Very clear mission, great exploration of the genre.

But on XM, it seems they just slice the known (i.e. popular) tracks into more specific genres, but I”ve never been surprised by anything I”ve heard on XM.

This all means, of course, that XM will win and Sirius will ultimately go away. People are sheep, after all.