Starburst = HA

That starburst commercial with the mariachi band rocks.

"El diente!!!!"

"POR QUUUUEEEE...?????"

Today's Prophecy of Doom

Clip your credit cards now and get into a credit card management program before October (if you need to). Destroy those cards before the holidays so you don't bury yourself in debt before 2006; get off the card habit and get used to using cash again. Don't even use a debit card tied to your back account... or if you really want that flexibility, create a separate account with a debit card tied to it and set up direct deposit, bill paying, and savings in other accounts. When the BAPCPA takes effect this Fall and Greenspan steps down at the end of 2005, there will be no turning back.

The economy is going to experience a bad recession next year - the housing bubble will pop, and all the poor suckers who have homes with all interest mortgages, maxed out credit cards, and new gas-guzzling SUVs with variable rate loans are going to get seriously hosed, and they won't be able to get debt relief from Chapter 7. Inflation will skyrocket and gasoline will be five dollars a gallon next Summer (boy it'll suck to pay over $100.00 to fill up an SUV's gas tank).

This message brought to you by cynicism and faith in the incompetence of the Bush administration.

True Story

There once was a young man in Idaho named J.R. Simplot. In the 1920s, he left home at the age of fifteen and took a job sorting potatoes by hand, ten hours a day, for $0.30 an hour. With the $3.00 a day he earned, he made enough to live on, and used the rest of his money to buy "IOU" scrip from teachers he lived with - paying them $0.50 on the dollar for it. He turned around and sold the scrip to a local bank for $0.90 on the dollar.

With the money he earned from this little operation, he eventually bought a rifle, an old truck, and 600 pigs for somewhere around $700 - $800. He would then spend his nights out on the plains shooting wild horses, skinning them, and cooking the meat with a stove he built and stoked with sagebrush. He sold tanned horse hides for $2 each, and fed the cooked meat to his pigs. When he was sixteen, he sold the pigs for $7500. At the end of one year, he earned enough to lease land for his own potato farm. The next year, he and his landlord bought an electric potato sorting machine together - and J.R. figured out that people wanted to pay him for the service of using the machine. They fought over the machine, and decided that whichever of them won a coin toss would keep the machine. J.R. won, sold all his farm interests, and took his sorter on the road - he became a potato broker and got richer and richer.

The story continues for the rest of this man's life, as he goes on to use public resources to build his private enterprises (like taking down trees in Yellowstone to make timber to build warehouses) and creates an empire of processed foods... the foundation of which primarily consists of selling frozen, cut potatoes.

You eat McDonald's french fries today because of this one man, and because he won a coin toss.

[text paraphrased from Eric Schlosser's "Fast Food Nation"]